Category: Uncategorized

To keep things in perspective that things are not so terrible

  • “EPA retained its current funding level of $8.1 billion, while the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, which Trump had vowed to chop by a staggering 70 percent, actually saw a funding boost of 12.5 percent. The riders, which would have blocked implementation of the Interior Department’s methane venting and flaring rule, among other things, were mostly dropped. And many of the clean-energy policies pushed by President Obama in his 2009 stimulus bill were generously funded, like TIGER, a grant program for transportation  projects, and ARPA-E, an energy research agency.”
  • National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities got $3M more each than last year, and PBS kept its budget. Trump wanted to kill them all.
  • Center for Disease Control and NIH got their budgets increased, with the latter’s 8.8% increase the biggest one in 15 years! Trump wanted to cut them all. And CDC even got funding to research gun safety. 
  • NASA kept its Earth science programs, expanded its science missions, and kept WFIRST !
  • No funding for trump’s wall (Trump now wants Pentagon to pay for it – most of what Pentagon gets is a waste, but at least the wall will just sit there and won’t kill anyone, so it’s fine by me )

sources: 1 and 2 

…the critic David Orr deemed Frost’s work “the most misread poem in America,” writing in The Paris Review: “This is the kind of claim we make when we want to comfort or blame ourselves by assuming that our current position is the product of our own choices… The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism. It’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives.” In the final stanza, we can’t know whether the speaker is sighing with contentedness or regret as he justifies the choices he’s made and shapes the narrative of his life.

(Source: https://www.youtube.com/)

Tumblr Is, Almost by Accident, Our Best Glimpse of How Russian Trolls Work

What Tumblr did, unlike FB and Twitter (which have vastly more people working there), is that the way they released their data allows us to see exactly what these accounts were doing even though the accounts themselves are gone. 

Browse enough of these posts and what is made plain is that the Russian influence campaign is indistinguishable from American left-wing and right-wing activity.

The strategy wasn’t to be the loudest people in the room, it was to be one of millions chattering in the crowd. This sort of activity is appealing because it’s not difficult to imitate and — more importantly — because online life is based around the activity of sharing things others made. “I saw this posted somewhere and had to share.” “Some neat points here.” Without the full context of a user’s identity, all you have is the one thing they said at one point in time, single units of sentiment that can be spread and shared without worry. It’s easy to meddle with politics abroad when you just have to download and re-upload a few things, or click reblog or retweet a few times, rather than come up with propaganda from scratch.

As I always said, the goal has always been to stoke anger, uncertainty and cynicism about liberal democracy and push us into our tribes (and to get the troll-in-chief into the White House who would work to the same goal). 

Social media that has an easy reblog function is perfect for that goal – and we are all complicit in this, too, if we don’t use it responsibly.

Tumblr Is, Almost by Accident, Our Best Glimpse of How Russian Trolls Work

They were talking about Kemerovo fire on the radio this morning – just heartbreaking and completely wrong on so many levels, and I thought of a parallels with the gun violence here: just like random mass shootings are endemic here, the “nobody-gives-a-f.ck” culture in Russia (with unhealthy dose of corruption at every level mixed in) is just as intractable.

We can only hope that something maybe will change – if enough people start caring.