One in four troops sees white nationalism in the ranks →

Military service members join the FBI in acknowledging domestic white supremacy as a larger threat to the U.S. than foreign conflicts.

Nearly one in four troops polled say they have seen examples of white nationalism among their fellow service members, and troops rate it as a larger national security threat than Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, according to a new Military Times poll.
The troops were surveyed about one month after white supremacist groups and counter-protesters clashed in Charlottesville, Virginia.
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In the wake of the Charlottesville riot, senior military leaders repeatedly emphasized that threats or discrimination against minorities is against service values. The Military Times poll findings show that the armed forces aren’t exempt from the debate.
Concerns about white nationalist groups were more pronounced among minorities in the ranks. Nearly 42 percent of non-white troops who responded to the survey said they have personally experienced examples of white nationalism in the military, versus about 18 percent of white service members.
When asked whether white nationalists pose a threat to national security, 30 percent of respondents labeled it a significant danger, more than many international hot spots, like Syria (27 percent), Pakistan (25 percent), Afghanistan (22 percent) and Iraq (17 percent).

$300m Puerto Rico Recovery Contract Awarded to Tiny Utility Company Linked to Major Trump Donor →

Your daily dose of corruption out of the Trump regime. Crony capitalism/kleptocracy have been increasing for decades, but Trump and his people are really testing the limits of acceptability among our self-absorbed elite. Watch to see if anyone goes to jail for this.

Puerto Rico has agreed to pay a reported $300 million for the restoration of its power grid to a tiny utility company that is primarily financed by a private-equity firm founded and run by a man who contributed large sums of money to President Trump, an investigation conducted by The Daily Beast has found.
Whitefish Energy Holdings, which had a reported staff of only two full-time employees when Hurricane Maria touched down, appears ill-equipped to handle the daunting task of restoring electricity to Puerto Rico’s more than 3 million residents.
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Joe Colonnetta is not the only Republican connection to the controversial Whitefish contract. On Monday, The Washington Post reported that Whitefish Chief Executive Officer Andy Techmanski is friends with Trump administration Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke. Moreover, Whitefish is located in Zinke’s hometown of Whitefish, Monatana.

IoT Cybersecurity: What's Plan B?

In August, four US Senators introduced a bill designed to improve Internet of Things (IoT) security. The IoT Cybersecurity Improvement Act of 2017 is a modest piece of legislation. It doesn't regulate the IoT market. It doesn't single out any industries for particular attention, or force any companies to do anything. It doesn't even modify the liability laws for embedded software. Companies can continue to sell IoT devices with whatever lousy security they want.
What the bill does do is leverage the government's buying power to nudge the market: any IoT product that the government buys must meet minimum security standards...
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But the situation is critical. The Internet is dangerous -- and the IoT gives it not just eyes and ears, but also hands and feet. Security vulnerabilities, exploits, and attacks that once affected only bits and bytes now affect flesh and blood.
Markets, as we've repeatedly learned over the past century, are terrible mechanisms for improving the safety of products and services. It was true for automobile, food, restaurant, airplane, fire, and financial-instrument safety. The reasons are complicated, but basically, sellers don't compete on safety features because buyers can't efficiently differentiate products based on safety considerations. The race-to-the-bottom mechanism that markets use to minimize prices also minimizes quality. Without government intervention, the IoT remains dangerously insecure.
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Sometimes we can opt out of the IoT, but that option is becoming increasingly rare. Last year, I tried and failed to purchase a new car without an Internet connection. In a few years, it's going to be nearly impossible to not be multiply connected to the IoT. And our biggest IoT security risks will stem not from devices we have a market relationship with, but from everyone else's cars, cameras, routers, drones, and so on.

A giant insect ecosystem is collapsing due to humans. It's a catastrophe →

The astonishing report highlighted in the Guardian, that the biomass of flying insects in Germany has dropped by three quarters since 1989, threatening an “ecological Armageddon”, is the starkest warning yet; but it is only the latest in a series of studies which in the last five years have finally brought to public attention the real scale of the problem.
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It has taken us a lot of time to understand this for two reasons: one cultural, one scientific. Firstly, we generally do not care for insects (bees and butterflies excepted). Even wildlife lovers are fixed on vertebrates, on creatures of fur and feather and especially the “charismatic megafauna”, and in the population as a whole there is even less sympathy for the fate of the chitin-skeletoned little things that creep and crawl; our default reaction is a shudder. Fewer bugs in the world? Many would cheer.
Secondly, for the overwhelming majority of insect species, there is no monitoring or measurement of numbers taking place. It is a practical impossibility: in the UK alone there are about 24,500 insect species – about 1,800 species of bugs, 4,000 species of beetles, 7,000 species of flies and another 7,000 species of bees, wasps and ants – and most are unknown to all but a few specialists. So their vast and catastrophic decline, at last perceptible, has crept up on us; and when first we began to perceive it, it was not through statistics, but through anecdote...

Luck and virtue →

Following WWII, between the New Deal and Great Compromise, our society suddenly became the most meritocratic, possibly that had ever been. However, racism and sexism had their way, so this meritocracy was only ever extended to white men. ...And it only lasted about 15-20 years.

As soon as the wealthy and powerful had made a pact to subsidize the [white] middle class (to avoid future World Wars), others set about undoing it, to again grab as much as possible, damn the consequences. Things have been unravelling ever since. But the marketing effort stayed, so a lot of people are still convinced we live in the 1950s:

...Studies of social mobility in the United States suggest there are millions like me, comfortable by fortune, not merit. Williamson knows poverty because he grew up poor, so let me let him in on something about the well-to-do:
Their decisions are no better, even if they are more lucrative. Their vices may be different than those of the poor, but they’re no less vicious. Their morals are just as weak, their perversions just as abhorrent, their waste appalling, their greed all-consuming, their covetousness and anxiety and decadence just as crippling. I did not “get to where I am” because I am a special person full of merit; nor have I often met someone accorded much wealth and prestige by society of whom I think, now this person did it all on their own. I got to where I am through a sequence of lucky breaks, any of which could’ve broken another way. Anybody could do it. But few are given the opportunity. That is part of what makes me feel so strongly about programs that reduce poverty and inequality.
The “basic human failure” Williamson attributes to poor people is rife in rich people, as well. Society does not, and never has, rewarded saintliness with vast estates and untold treasures. For every low-rent sleaze, there is a Harvey Weinstein; for every meth-head, a coke-head; for every petty con-man, a banker selling bundles of rotten mortgages. We’ve come to a sorry state in society where we equate the decisions that land one money and prestige with virtuous decisions, but the fact is that the two are not the same. There are morally unacceptable ways to get poor, and morally unacceptable ways to stay rich.

What Facebook Did to American Democracy: And why it was so hard to see it coming

This is a good article to mull over, thinking about the power that's very recently concentrated in the tech industry. Facebook and a few other big tech companies control information flows to an extent perhaps no other private company has before. Very few people understand just how much these platforms could change society, or how much they already have. Mark Zuckerberg downplays Facebook's influence, yet Facebook's own researchers publish papers on how many (generally younger, more liberal) people their voting button turned out in the last few years, or how much influence small changes to the computer algorithm which powers the "News Feed" has seemingly made to "happiness" in people's lives. The latter is particularly worrisome: part of how they've accomplished that is by hiding posts from the "other side" of the political spectrum, which may increase happiness/reduce stress when we're browsing Facebook, but it's also increasing partisanship, and may be locking us into extremist bubbles.

The big question is: "When is a company so big that society must regulate its behavior?"

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/arc...

The FBI’s Hunt for Two Missing Piglets Reveals the Federal Cover-Up of Barbaric Factory Farms →

Animals are being tortured until they die, and our legislators have caved to the big food lobby, creating laws that (in some states) make it a felony to expose animal cruelty on industrial farms. Meanwhile the FBI is spending its limited resources tracking down journalists and animal rights activists who break these laws.

This single Smithfield Foods farm breeds and then slaughters more than 1 million pigs each year. One of the odd aspects of animal mistreatment in the U.S. is that species regarded as more intelligent and emotionally complex — dogs, dolphins, cats, primates — generally receive more public concern and more legal protection. Yet pigs – among the planet’s most intelligent, social, and emotionally complicated species, capable of great joy, play, love, connection, suffering and pain, at least on a par with dogs — receive almost no protections, and are subject to savage systematic abuse by U.S. factory farms.
...One of the most heinous industry-wide practices is one that DxE activists encountered in abundance at Circle Four: gestational crating.
Where that technique is used, pigs are placed in a crate made of iron bars that is the exact length and width of their bodies, so they can do nothing for their entire lives but stand on a concrete floor, never turn around, never see any outdoors, never even see their tails, never move more than an inch...
Female pigs give birth in this condition. They are put in so-called farrowing crates when they give birth, and their piglets run underneath them to suckle and are often trampled to death. The sows are bred repeatedly this way until their fertility declines, at which point they are slaughtered and turned into meat.
The pigs are so desperate to get out of their crates that they often spend weeks trying to bite through the iron bars until their gums gush blood, bash their heads against the walls, and suffer a disease in which their organs end up mangled in the wrong places, from the sheer physical trauma of trying to escape from a tiny space or from acute anxiety (called “organ torsion”).

The Worst Gun Control Arguments →

The concepts of "nudging" people toward certain behavior, and/or injecting "friction" to dissuade them from doing things, is key to understanding why we have laws and how they work. This is a good read on the narrow issue of firearm homicides:

I’m pro-gun, but mostly for selfish reasons. Some people (such as celebrities) are probably safer with defensive weapons nearby. But I acknowledge the reality that guns make people less safe in other situations. No two situations are alike. That’s partly why the issue can never be fully resolved. Both sides pretend they are arguing on principle, but neither side is. Both sides are arguing from their personal risk profiles, and those are simply different. Our risk profiles will never be the same across the entire population, so we will never agree on gun control.
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Many pro-gun people in the debate seem to be confused about the purpose of laws in general. Laws are not designed to eliminate crime. Laws are designed to reduce crime. The most motivated criminals will always find a way, and law-abiding citizens will avoid causing trouble in the first place. Laws are only for the people in the middle who might – under certain situations – commit a crime. Any friction you introduce to that crowd has a statistical chance of making a difference. 
Humans are lazy and stupid, on average. If you make something 20% harder to do, a lot of humans will pass. It doesn’t matter what topic you are discussing; if you introduce friction, fewer people do it. With that in mind, let’s look at the least-rational gun control arguments I am seeing lately...