Steve's Politics Blog

TED has the interesting video Where is cybercrime really coming from?.

Cybercrime netted a whopping $450 billion in profits last year, with 2 billion records lost or stolen worldwide. Security expert Caleb Barlow calls out the insufficiency of our current strategies to protect our data. His solution? We need to respond to cybercrime with the same collective effort as we apply to a health care crisis, sharing timely information on who is infected and how the disease is spreading. If we’re not sharing, he says, then we’re part of the problem.

IBM’s Caleb Barlow is focused on how we solve the cyber security problem by changing the economics for the bad guys.

Remember George Soros’ insight into the reflexivity of social science. The ebola virus does not read about how the world is trying to combat it, and then change its behavior accordingly. Cyber Criminals will read about how we are trying to defeat them and will adjust accordingly.

My statement is not meant to disparage ideas presented in this video for protecting us. It is meant to warn us about how much more sophisticated we are going to have to be in these efforts than when fighting a disease.

Townhall has the article Chuck Todd: Media Knew, But Downplayed, How Much Hillary Was Hated in Rural America.

“If we sort of were straight-up honest and blunt about hey do we understand the level of hatred that’s out there and you know, all the Hillary for Prison signs that are out there, we certainly would have at least made the viewer know, hey, you know, she’s not well-liked in some places in this country in ways that’s times 10 when it comes to Trump,” he said.

Gee, thanks a lot Chuck Todd. I kept trying to tell the members of the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee about how much Hillary was disliked, but they refused to believe me. Of course, they saw those Hillary for Prison signs as much as I did. I don’t know why they couldn’t see the truth for their own eyes.

I wonder how much my previous post The Data That Turned the World Upside Down explains the difference between what I knew and what some of the other members of the Sturbridge Democratic Town Committee knew. Perhaps someone was targeting me for that information, and that soemone was not targeting the others on the committee. The trouble is figuring out if you are being targeted with the truth or targeted with misinformation.

Motherboard a Vice channel has the article The Data That Turned the World Upside Down. This may be the most startling article you will read in a long time.

Trump’s striking inconsistencies, his much-criticized fickleness, and the resulting array of contradictory messages, suddenly turned out to be his great asset: a different message for every voter. The notion that Trump acted like a perfectly opportunistic algorithm following audience reactions is something the mathematician Cathy O’Neil observed in August 2016.

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“Pretty much every message that Trump put out was data-driven,” Alexander Nix remembers. On the day of the third presidential debate between Trump and Clinton, Trump’s team tested 175,000 different ad variations for his arguments, in order to find the right versions above all via Facebook. The messages differed for the most part only in microscopic details, in order to target the recipients in the optimal psychological way: different headings, colors, captions, with a photo or video. This fine-tuning reaches all the way down to the smallest groups, Nix explained in an interview with us. “We can address villages or apartment blocks in a targeted way. Even individuals.”

In the Miami district of Little Haiti, for instance, Trump’s campaign provided inhabitants with news about the failure of the Clinton Foundation following the earthquake in Haiti, in order to keep them from voting for Hillary Clinton. This was one of the goals: to keep potential Clinton voters (which include wavering left-wingers, African-Americans, and young women) away from the ballot box, to “suppress” their vote, as one senior campaign official told Bloomberg in the weeks before the election. These “dark posts”—sponsored news-feed-style ads in Facebook timelines that can only be seen by users with specific profiles—included videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators, for example.

The Real News Network has the video Do Corporate Democrats Like Charles Schumer Belong in a Progressive Movement Against Trump?.

HENRY GIROUX: I think that’s… I don’t disagree with that. My only concern about that argument is that it needs to be supplemented by another, it seems to me, narrative. And that is, while it might be useful to do everything in one can to make sure that split becomes even wider, and a candidate emerges that can mobilize people in ways that speak to a better… a more democratic future, there also has to be organizations being developed that are creating alternative ways of understanding politics where, you know, organizations that basically are both local, national and international, organizations that are imagining and making clear different ways for people to engage in social relationships, different understandings of how a university can be run, different understandings of what it means to have free healthcare, different ways to sort of empower communities, different ways to speak to communities, alternative media being developed. I mean, I think that there certainly has to be infrastructures that make that question about what an alternative society looks like concrete.

I think the above quote may be the point of the interview. However, I got this from the transcript in the article, not from watching the video.

At about half way into this video, I stopped watching. I had the following reaction:

I can’t stand it. Paul Jay does it again. He brings in an expert to interview, but Paul is more interested in convincing the expert to adopt Paul’s ideas that he won’t ask the expert what his ideas are. Paul should listen to himself. Whenever the words “But don’t you agree …” pass through his lips, he should realize he is going down the wrong track. He should change that sentence to “What do you suggest we do?”

The point should not be to bring on expert guests to use as a foil to interview yourself.

I then, scrolled to the bottom of the transcript and started to backtrack until I found a paragraph that seemed to express what Giroux was almost being prevented from saying.

ABC News has the story Protests Spread at Airports Nationwide Over Trump’s Executive Order.

On another post Trudeau says Canada will take refugees banned by U.S. I quoted and then remarked.

Trump signed a sweeping executive order Friday that he billed as a necessary step to stop “radical Islamic terrorists” from coming to the U.S.

Maybe if we didn’t pay and arm the terrorists they would be less likely to come here. We seem to think we can control what the terrorists do after we give them the resources to terrorize. Not only is it unethical to do what we do, but it predictably backfires on us.

Tulsi Gabbard knows how to stop the carnage. Why not listen to her message rather than trying to kill the messenger?

No wonder we have medicinal drug culture where we take one drug to prevent a symptom, and then we take a second drug to overcome the side-effects of the first one, go back to step one and repeat. This sort of thing seems to fit our mentality these days.

YouTube has the video The Ben Shapiro Show – Tulsi Gabbard Blasts the CIA for their Illegal and Unproductive Wars. The video starts off with an interview by Wolf Blitzer of Tulsi Gabbard. I couldn’t watch the whole thing because Wolf Blitzer just drives me up a wall.

This video confirms my reason for usually switching channels when Wolf Blitzer comes on. After Tulsi Gabbard spends a minute or more explaining why the U.S. effort to get rid of the Bashar El Assad’s regime is counterproductive, Wolf asks the brilliant follow-up question:

Why do you say the U.S. effort to get rid of the Bashar El Assad’s regime is counterproductive and illegal?

Isn’t an interviewer suppose to listen to the answers that the guest makes to his questions. I suspect that many interviewers come in with a list of questions they are going to ask, no matter what the guest has to say.

YouTube has the video Rep. Gabbard, Kucinich meet with Assad in Syria.

This is the first video I have seen that includes an interview with Dennis Kucinich.

One trouble I note with many of these videos, is the question that the interviewers almost always ask. They ask Tulsi and Dennis how they could possibly meet with Assad who has this long litany of charges against him. Both Tulsi and Dennis go on to explain why you have to talk to such people if there is a chance to stop a war. They rarely spend the time to point out that many of the charges made against Assad are likely fiction promulgated by our spy agencies. What is the point of not talking to someone because of accusations that might be completely false?

Dennis and Tulsi may have good reason to not want to get bogged down in a conversation about whether or not Assad is guilty of all the charges against him, but when they don’t mention their objections we get yet another repetition of the lie that goes unchallenged.

YouTube has the video B-Roll: Rep. Tulsi Gabbard Returns From Syria with Renewed Calls: End Regime Change War in Syria Now.

This is more of the videos taken on Tulsi Gabbard’s trip to Syria. If you let the video progress to follow ons, there is lots more to see.

YouTube has the video Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard Explains Why “We Have To Stop Spending TRILLIONS On Regime Change Wars!”.

Since I don’t watch much television, I had no idea of the rounds that Tulsi Gabbard has been making of news shows on diverse channels. Now that I started searching the internet for these videos, I am so pleased that she is being widely reported. Amazingly, some of the coverage is relatively unbiased.

Real Clear Politics has the article Tulsi Gabbard Discusses Meeting Bashar al-Assad: Syrians Beg U.S. Not To Support “So-Called Rebel Groups” And Terrorists.

I have been trying to find the videos that Tulsi Gabbard recorded on her trip. I found one attached to this article.

In case you didn’t notice, there is a link in the above video to other Tulsi videos on Facebook,