NBC News has the article How Russian trolls use Facebook to influence Americans.

Russian trolls are creating false personas on social media who accumulate followings of real people in order to stage protests and create chaos. Watch more of Richard Engel’s reporting when “On Assignment” airs tonight at 9pm ET on MSNBC.

So, I have to ask myself after all the Russia hysteria that NBC and MSNBC has foisted on us, and after how the unmasking of their propaganda has hurt their ratings, would they go this far out on a limb to double down on their bet?

Originally, I doubted whether tactics like those reported in this story could possibly work. Then I thought about the fact that the Koch brothers actually founded the Tea Party movement, but I doubt than many members of that movement had any idea who founded it. Then I thought about what seems like successes by the CIA to use tactics like this in their latest incarnation of dirty tricks in Syria and Venezuela. Which makes me think of how the USA bragged in private about doing this stuff in the Ukraine. Which reminds me of the Contras in Nicaragua we created. Or the overthrow of Allende in Chile. Or the overthrow of Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in Iran in 1953.

Not only could the Russians have done this to us in 2016, but it is also possible that our own CIA with their own knowledge of such techniques could make up a story like this about the Russians. Our CIA could also make up the evidence to prove the case. With the willingness of NBC and MSNBC to go along with this fake story for so long, the CIA wouldn’t even have to work very hard to make up stuff that NBC could “report”.

It is so hard to know if anyone is telling the truth. That is why a very healthy dose of skepticism is warranted for everything you think you know.

April 15, 2019

I have had a few thoughts about this over the last few days.

There are frequent reports of how police efforts to stop attacks involve setting up fake personas to lure would be perpetrators into a trap. It must work, if there are so many reports of its success. All those news stories can’t all be lies.

Then there is the story of the organization that claimed to expose Russian bots creating their own bots that pretended to be Russian.

Even The Dreaded New York Times took notice in this article Fake News as ‘Moral Imperative’? Democrats’ Alabama Move Hints at Ugly 2020

The Jimmy Dore Show has the episode Obama Rips Progressives As Purists – Here’s Why.

Obama rips progressives and takes a trip down memory lane, our memory’s a little bit different

Watch Obama destroy what little political legacy he has left.

TYT has the video Tulsi Gabbard On Net Neutrality, Julian Assange, And Party Unity.

Tulsi Gabbard is back on The Young Turks! Cenk Uygur and Tulsi Gabbard, hosts of The Conversation, break it down.

Hosts: Cenk Uygur, Tulsi Gabbard

Cast: Cenk Uygur, Tulsi Gabbard

This is a very issue oriented discussion that people need to hear. It saddens me to know that there are people who have closed their ears to Tulsi for one reason or another, Despite whatever she may have said that you don’t like, she has so much to say that is important. If we refuse to listen to serious people who have serious things to say to us, we really are in trouble as a nation.

Chris Horton is the major organizer of the Worcester For Bernie group. He wrote an excellent email to the group about classism. He has give me permission to publish his email here. The addressee, Bobbie, is not the issue, but I didn’t want to edit out any of Chris’s words.

Bobbie, if you experience the Clark neighborhood as dangerous, I won’t try to deny your reality, although I believe that our campaign must not be afraid to go wherever the people are. I’ll walk you to your car when I get the chance. But I want to say something about “classism”, because I think understanding it is essential to our success.

Rebecca Solnit, in her book “Hope in the Dark” p 25, wrote “imagine the world as a theater. The acts of the powerful and the official occupy center stage. … The limelights there are so bright they blind you to the shadowy spaces around you … from the places that you have been instructed to ignore or rendered unable to see come the stories that change the world …”

Those of us who grew up with class privilege, with the help, expectations and pressure that pushed us into success in school, the good first jobs that go to those with a degree as a Certified Public Gentleman or Lady, and indoctrination in a whole raft of beliefs, ideas, stories and selected facts meant to support the system of privilege and power, are often blind to the reality of the regular working people around us. Blind to the urgency of their lives and the insanity of the positions they find themselves in, and most of all blind to the pain of being a working person in America, what one author called the “hidden injuries of class”. The pain of being looked down on, of having your ideas and perceptions discounted and undervalued, of having your intelligence doubted and having doors closed in your face, of being mistreated and disrespected by officials and police, of working too long and hard, living in fear of job loss and unemployment, unable to take off when our families need us and having to swallow our feelings and jump when the boss says jump. If this sounds a lot like the experience of racism, it is. For Black working people, women, immigrants there’s overlays of discrimination that can be devastating. For white working folk there’s the bitterness of the judgment that because of their skin color they should have done better, that their condition must be due somehow to their own failure.

If you want to understand how so many working people stayed home when their votes could have stopped Trump, how some basically decent people could even vote for him, the answer is I believe in their experience of politicians telling us pretty lies but not even seeing the agonizing economic and social reality of our lives, politicians who won’t take on the fight for – in Bernie’s words – anything that will cost the billionaire class serious money. This manipulation and blindness triggers a lifetime of the pain of being overlooked and thought a lesser person.

These are the people – of all races, colors and nationalities, urban and rural, men and women of all gender identities – who most hunger for Bernie’s message, and those of us with a background of class privilege, with our skill and inclination to take charge, need to include them in our leadership and meet them where they are, with open hearts and minds and the humility of accepting that they may see the reality of our world far more clearly than we do.

I hope that helps.

Sharon and I attended the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee 2019 Fundraiser.

The Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee held its annual fundraiser for scholarship and political action on April 12th. The well=attended event brought in local Democrats, politicians and Sturbridge residents to enjoy the food, drink and lively conversation. Generous contributions helped refuel our scholarship account which is used each year to provide scholarship monies to deserving Tantasqua seniors. Awards will be made on Class Night on May 30th

BuzzFeed News has the article What Happened When Pete Buttigieg Tore Down Houses In Black And Latino South Bend.

Regina Williams-Preston got into politics so that the city wouldn’t do to anyone else what the mayor’s big redevelopment plan did to her.

His program to knock down hundreds of homes in black and Latino neighborhoods like hers smacked of gentrification and ultimately cost her family several investment properties they hoped to repair but couldn’t after Williams-Preston’s husband suffered a serious illness.

This is the kind of report I wanted to see when I heard about the “1,000 homes in 1,000 days” program. The article is not a hit piece, but it does show what can happen with well meaning, but inexperienced people get aggressive. There have been plenty of experienced people who did things like this, but I am not sure they were well meaning.

I would not be surprised if what Pete Buttigieg thought when he took on this project is some of what goes into vulture capitalists thinking when they take over a company and strip it of its assets, leaving the company’s debt holders and employees with nothing. This is what they may teach in business schools as just maximizing shareholder values. That sounds like a laudable goal until you think about the collateral damage.

Here is how CNN handled the story. Their article is Pete Buttigieg pushed an aggressive plan to revitalize South Bend. Not everyone felt its benefits.

Ars Technica has the article Hello world: Shining a light onto the culture of computer programmers.

Thompson: One of the things that really leapt out is the almost aesthetic delight in efficiency and optimization that you find among software developers. They really like taking something that’s being done ponderously, or that’s repetitive, and optimizing it. Almost all engineering has focused on making things run more efficiently. Saving labor, consolidating steps, making something easier to do, amplifying human abilities. But it also can be almost impossible to turn off. Scott Hanselman talks about coding all day long and coming down to dinner. The rest of the family is cooking dinner and he immediately starts critiquing the inefficient ways they’re doing it: “I’ve moved into code review of dinner.”

Here is an article that does a good job of describing the life of a software engineer. As long time ago, we stopped calling ourselves programmers. Calling us coders is even more demeaning. Other than that, it is a good article.

In the 1970’s there was a lot of research going on about how to do quality software engineering. Most of management never seemed to get the idea, but what happened is that you have to spend more time engineering and less time coding. For the next 30 years or so, it was a lesson I continually had to teach, sometimes successfully, and sometimes not.

YouTube has the video How to travel faster than light.

Traveling faster than light is one of humanity’s dreams. Sadly, modern physics doesn’t cooperate. However there are examples where it really is possible to travel faster than light. In this video, Fermilab’s Dr. Don Lincoln tells us of these ways in which the universe breaks the ultimate speed limit.

When I start to think about astrophysical measurements, I come up with some questions that just do not make any sense. Thinking about the lessons, particularly at the end of this video, it helps me put those questions into some perspective better than my intutions give me.

I’ll leave some hint of the conundrum here in case I ever forget what the question was.

When you are talking about the farthest away object that we can see, it is about 13 billion light years away. That supposedly means that the light beam we see on our telescopes started to travel toward our telescope 13 billion years ago. So where is the object now, that was where we see it 13 billion years ago? 13 billion years ago was about the time of the big-bank that started our universe. At that time everything was contained in a little dot of space. So the object couldn’t have been 13 billion light years away from us. So how did the light leave this object that was right next to us, but taken 13 billion years to arrive here? The video above gives some hints as to what is going on.

The hint from the video is to imagine that far away object being on the skin of an inflating balloon centered around us. If the balloon is inflating so that the skin of the balloon is moving away from us faster than the speed of light at first, then the light beam from the object won’t be able to reach us until the inflation slows down.

YouTube has the video The Sanders Institute Talks: A National Job Guarantee published on Mar 20, 2018.

Dr. Jane O’Meara Sanders (Founder, Fellow of The Sanders Institute) talks with Dr. Stephanie Kelton (Founding Fellow of The Sanders Institute, Professor at Stonybrook University) about the results of a new report on creating a national jobs guarantee program. Dr. Kelton co-authored the report with L. Randall Wray, Flavia Dantas, Scott Fullwiler, and Pavlina R. Tcherneva. The full report will be released through the Levy Institute in April, 2018.

I noticed a while ago that Bernie Sanders had added the idea of a jobs guarantee to his speeches. He never says anything about what he means. I have wondered why he has started talking about this. I know the idea is part of Modern Money Theory (MMT), and I know he hired MMT proponent Stephanie Kelton to be the Senate Budget Committee’s economist for the minority. Well, I think I have finally found the explanation.

YouTube has the video A Social Service Job Guarantee Proposal.

Fadhel Kaboub, Associate Professor of Economics at Denison University, on with Steve Grumbine of Real Progressives, discussing a specific proposal that could be used to implement a Job Guarantee. This flavor of JG would use existing local non-profits and service organizations to employ workers applying for JG jobs.

This is the most detailed description that I have heard about how the Job Guarantee would be implemented. I had no idea that this is the way it would be done.