Words
An Expert's View on Trump's Lies
I study liars. I’ve never seen one like President Trump.
In research beginning in the mid-1990s, when I was a professor at the University of Virginia, my colleagues and I asked 77 college students and 70 people from the nearby community to keep diaries of all the lies they told every day for a week. … One category of lies was so small that when we reported the results, we just tucked them into a footnote. Those were cruel lies, told to hurt or disparage others. … An astonishing 50 percent of Trump’s lies were hurtful or disparaging.
Setting up my personal site for IndieWeb…
Twitter Harasses Ed Sheeran into Deleting His Account
Ed Sheeran Deletes His Twitter Account After ‘Game of Thrones’ Cameo Gets Mixed Reaction
While some people were delighted to spot music star Ed Sheeran in Sunday night’s Game of Thrones season seven premiere, others were less enthusiastic, arguing that the singer’s cameo struck a jarring note in the show’s fantasy world.
I’m a big Game of Thrones fan, but never heard of Ed Sheeran, much less knew his face or voice. The thing that stuck out at me was not the extraneous singing, but the excessive niceness of the Lannister soldiers. There is no precedent for a crew of such squeaky-clean soldiers. That was outrageous. But the Ed Sheeran cameo? That fit right in.
Movie: Funeral Parade of Roses
If you saw David Lynch’s Mullholland Falls and thought, “too conventional,” then Funeral Parade of Roses is a film for you. Describing it as a transsexual love triange set in 60’s Japan makes it appear more conventional than it is. It pulls just about every cinematic trick in the book and runs them through a narrative blender. The nonlinear narrative removes any orientation the viewer might hope for at the beginning of each scene. Some scenes seem to fit the narrative, only to be revealed as movie sets by a crew of young film radicals making a movie about transsexuals. An argument between two characters is shown in on-screen speech bubbles. Fights are sped up, Benny-Hill style, complete with organ circus music. It ends with a revalation of incest and gory visuals of a transsexual blinding herself with a knife.
After the Fox
Last night’s move at the Austin Film Society: After the Fox. Peter Sellers plays a master criminal who stages a bogus movie production to smuggle a load of stolen gold into Italy. Directed by an Italian, set and filmed in Italy, partially dubbed in English, starring Peter Sellers as an Italian, speaking English with an Italian accent. Oh, and a script by a budding Neil Simon. It’s kind of a weird mish-mash that probably couldn’t exist today, but somehow seems natural coming from the 60’s.
All this manages to fit perfectly with the ridiculous tone of Sellers hoodwinking an entire Italian village that he is a famous Italian director. It’s a movie-making-fun-of-movies movie, with an aging Hollywood has-been and Italian movie industry serving as the butt of the jokes.
Newt vs. Newt
Via David Wright:
Robert Mueller is superb choice to be special counsel. His reputation is impeccable for honesty and integrity. Media should now calm down
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) May 18, 2017
Republicans are delusional if they think the special counsel is going to be fair. Look who he is hiring.check fec reports. Time to rethink.
— Newt Gingrich (@newtgingrich) June 12, 2017
I don’t want to go back to Xcode 8.
Trump v Trump: Sources
Remember, don't believe "sources said" by the VERY dishonest media. If they don't name the sources, the sources don't exist.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) September 30, 2016
A 'confidential source' has called my office and told me that @BarackObama has added over $6T to the new national debt & ruined US credit.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 7, 2012
Lots of fertile source material in the reddit TrumpCriticizesTrump
VPN
In light of how the Republican Congress sold the citizens privacy to the ISPs, here are a couple of reviews of VPN service.
The Wirecutter: VPNs Are for Most People–Including You
Macworld: Protect against potential ISP snooping by using https and a VPN
Via Ken White I found two projects that provide Ansible scripts to roll your own: Algo and Streisand.
Bannon's Anticipated War
David Kaiser in Time:
During the 1990s, two amateur historians, Neil Howe and the late William Strauss, developed a new theory of American history in two books, Generations: the History of America’s Future (1991), and The Fourth Turning: An American Prophecy (1997). They identified an 80-year cycle in American history, punctuated by great crises that destroyed an old order and created a new one.
The great crises identified by Strauss and Howe included the era of the American Revolution and the Constitution (1774-1794); the Civil War and its immediate aftermath (1860-68); and the Depression and the Second World War (1929-45). Doing the math, they predicted another great crisis sometime in the first 15 years of the 21st century.
On discussing the Howe and Strauss theory with Stephen Bannon:
More than once during our interview, [Bannon] pointed out that each of the three preceding crises had involved a great war, and those conflicts had increased in scope from the American Revolution through the Civil War to the Second World War. He expected a new and even bigger war as part of the current crisis, and he did not seem at all fazed by the prospect.
Travel Memories
Trump Hotels tried to have a Twitter conversation about favorite travel memories. Twitter rose to the occasion. Here are a few of my favorite.
At 18 my father fled the Nazis. 2 strangers from a youth hostel put up £200 for his UK visa. They saved his life. https://t.co/kg3IlYXp0C
— Adam Ganz (@harbinger) January 29, 2017
@TrumpHotels Visiting San Francisco – the American city my grandparents settled in after leaving the Philippines after WWII.
— Cate Sevilla (@CateSevilla) January 29, 2017
@TrumpHotels They escaped concentration camps and a country devastated by war. They weren't turned away and I'm here today because of it.
— Cate Sevilla (@CateSevilla) January 29, 2017
@TrumpHotels That time my parents fled apartheid South Africa and immigrated to America where my father became an advocate for abused children.
— Joshua Hale Fialkov (@JoshFialkov) January 29, 2017
.@TrumpHotels My father as a baby, with his brother and mother, aboard the SS Statendam, fleeing Nazi Germany. #NoBanNoWall pic.twitter.com/VUsWPOQl52
— Laura Brahm (@laclabra) January 29, 2017
@TrumpHotels I traveled to LA last weekend, and it was so much fun. pic.twitter.com/sZigl4in40
— Melissa Wantz (@mwantz) January 29, 2017
.@TrumpHotels It was probably this moment yesterday at SFO when Niloufar revealed her father was just released from illegal detention. pic.twitter.com/E3CHp3lGwb
— Peter Corless (@PeterCorless) January 29, 2017
History Calling
Remember sitting in history, thinking “If I was alive then, I would’ve…”
— David Slack (@slack2thefuture) January 28, 2017
You’re alive now. Whatever you’re doing is what you would’ve done.
For better or worse, history is giving us an opportunity to answer this question for ourselves. Think carefully. Make sure you make decisions that you’ll be proud to explain to your grand kids. To St. Peter, if you like. To your future self in the mirror. And remember: silence is consent.
Helping ISIS Recruiters
From a September, 2016 NY Times article on Anwar al-Awlaki, Al Qaeda recruiter:
Today, with the war between Muslims and the West escalating,” Anwar al-Awlaki said in the video, “you cannot count on the message of solidarity you may get from a civic group or a political party, or the word of support you hear from a kind neighbor or a nice co-worker. The West will eventually turn against its Muslim citizens.
It was an audacious pitch. No matter what you may think, the American-born Mr. Awlaki told Western Muslims, sooner or later your governments and fellow citizens will come after you. So you must join our violent cause.
Now, Donald Trump does his best to prove him right. I’m sure ISIS recruiters everywhere are celebrating. Luckily, it appears they are receiving substantial support from their fellow citizens.
Fake News Rundown
Today an item scrolled by on my Facebook feed that alleges evidence of 800,000 illegal votes in the 2016 election. The source of the article was the highly partisan Sean Hannity, quoting a Washington Times piece:
Political scientist Jesse Richman of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia, has worked with colleagues to produce groundbreaking research on noncitizen voting, and this week he posted a blog in response to Mr. Trump’s assertion. Based on national polling by a consortium of universities, a report by Mr. Richman said 6.4 percent of the estimated 20 million adult noncitizens in the U.S. voted in November. He extrapolated that that percentage would have added 834,381 net votes for Mrs. Clinton, who received about 2.8 million more votes than Mr. Trump.
I decided chase down this study. Here was what I found with just a little bit of effort searching Google for Jesse Richman
As a primary author cited in this piece, I need to say that I think the Washington Times article is deceptive. It makes it sound like I have done a study concerning the 2016 election. I have not.
He has more explanation of his method, and a link to the original article quoted in the Times piece. As a bounus, his original study has serious methodological shortcoming.
Perhaps a bigger problem with utilizing CCES data to make claims about the non-citizen voting in the United States is that some respondents might have mistakenly misreported their citizenship status on this survey (e.g. response error)… In fact, any response error in self-reported citizenship status could have substantially altered the authors’ conclusions because they were only able to validate the votes of five respondents who claimed to be non-citizen voters in the 2008 CCES.
Just a reminder to use your build-in BS detector, or at least try a little Googling.
Texas Women's March Round-up
Texas Monthly round-up of Texas Women’s Marches:
50,000 marchers packed the streets in Austin; 22,000 gathered in Houston; as many as 9,000 in Fort Worth and 8,000 in Dallas; more than a thousand in San Antonio; 2,500 in Denton; at least 1,000 in El Paso; 500 in Amarillo; 350 in Lubbock; more than 300 in Brownsville; hundreds in Beaumont and Nacogdoches; 200 in Abilene; more than 150 in Wichita Falls; about 100 in Corpus Christi; about fifty people marched in Midland, and another fifty in College Station; and even in cold, rainy Alpine, nearly 100 marchers trekked about 1.5 miles up a hill.
Smart Quotes
Via Daring Fireball, Glenn Fleishman’s Atlantic article on curly quotes:
The trouble with being a former typesetter is that every day online is a new adventure in torture. Take the shape of quotation marks. These humble symbols are a dagger in my eye when a straight, or typewriter-style, pair appears in the midst of what is often otherwise typographic beauty. It’s a small, infuriating difference: "this" versus “this.”
I write my content in Markdown, render it to HTML, and post raw HTML into WordPress. It’s a couple extra steps, but I get to write in a proper text application, and the output is reliable and well-formed. During that process the quotes are “educated” to transfrom plain ASCII inch marks to proper double quotes.
Ironically, the quote above is the biggest problem I’ve encountered in a while: the plain quotes are automatically educated, so I have to update the HTML output and change it back. Then I discovered that WordPress automatically educates my quotes, so I couldn’t display straight quotes even though I wanted to. I would have to update WordPress to remove the wptexture filter. I started this post explaining how easy this was for me, but only proved the point that it is a pain purposely using both proper quotes and dumb straight quotes. Using one or the other is easy.
To Repeat: Medicare Isn’t Going “Bankrupt”
From the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities:
Medicare’s Hospital Insurance (HI) trust fund will remain solvent – that is, able to pay 100 percent of the costs of the hospital insurance coverage it provides – through 2028, the program’s trustees wrote in their latest report. Even after 2028, when the HI trust fund is projected for depletion, incoming payroll taxes and other revenue will still cover 87 percent of Medicare hospital insurance costs.
Paul Ryan is dishonest when we charactarized Medicare as going “bankrupt.”