From the Last Week or So

Tech

• The very first post on hacking an election with a computer? 

• Identity Portability

Politics

• Red vs Blue States

• Rs vs Ds - R's always get a pass on national security issues. D's compensate by trying to be R's when in power.

• Cults - i have to agree with No More Mister Nice.

"The Republican Party has been a rage cult for years. Now it's a rage personality cult."

• Trump and the Economy

"Confusing politics with corporate profits and the state of the economy is not the ideal way to invest. The noise created by the president has been a constant backdrop to the expansion of the U.S. economy that began before Trump was elected and has continued ever since. Until that changes, most of what Trump does will mean little to financial markets."

Maybe, but I lean to the "just wait'. If Trump keeps blowing up long held conventions, something has to give.

• Trump and Charity 

"Trump is an outlier, then, more in degree than in kind. He’s what happens when transactional philanthropy is taken to its logical conclusion, divorced entirely from any kind of genuine generosity. But the broader phenomenon is much bigger than Trump and has long infected almost every cranny of the philanthropic world."

Hopefully, the Trump administration is "Peak American Corrupitalism"

• Unions Did Great Things for the Working Class.  Unions gave the working class power. The decline of Union membership, leaving the working class feeling powerless, explains a lot of why they voted for Trump.

• The Real Takeaway: The FBI Influenced the Election of a President

"There is no longer a way to claim America’s internal intelligence agency, the FBI, did not play a role in the 2016 election. There is only to argue which side they favored and whether they meddled via clumsiness, as a coordinated action, or as a chaotic cluster of competing pro- and anti- Clinton/Trump factions inside the Bureau. And that’s the tally before anyone brings up the FBI’s use of a human informant inside the Trump campaign, the FBI’s use of both FISA warrants and pseudo-legal warrantless surveillance against key members of the Trump team, the FBI’s use of opposition research from the Steele Dossier, and so on. 

The good news is the Deep State seems less competent than we originally feared. But even if one fully accepts the IG report’s conclusion that all this— and there’s a lot — was not intentional, at a minimum it makes clear to those watching ahead of 2020 what tools are available and the impact they can have. While we continue to look for the bad guy abroad, we have already met the enemy and he is us."

• Things we've done. When I was a kid in the 60s I thought we were "The Good Guys", now I'm not so sure.