Nearly half of Americans have a tough time paying their bills, and over one-third have faced hardships such as running out of food, not being able to afford a place to live, or not having enough money to pay for medical treatment.
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The numbers parallel MarketWatch’s own State of the American Wallet dashboard, which tracks how Americans are faring financially with data that updates in real time...
Paper, paper, paper.
Elections serve two purposes. The first, and obvious, purpose is to accurately choose the winner. But the second is equally important: to convince the loser. To the extent that an election system is not transparently and auditably accurate, it fails in that second purpose. Our election systems are failing, and we need to fix them.
Today, we conduct our elections on computers. Our registration lists are in computer databases. We vote on computerized voting machines. And our tabulation and reporting is done on computers. We do this for a lot of good reasons, but a side effect is that elections now have all the insecurities inherent in computers. The only way to reliably protect elections from both malice and accident is to use something that is not hackable or unreliable at scale; the best way to do that is to back up as much of the system as possible with paper.
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Last year, the Defcon hackers' conference sponsored a Voting Village. Organizers collected 25 pieces of voting equipment, including voting machines and electronic poll books. By the end of the weekend, conference attendees had found ways to compromise every piece of test equipment: to load malicious software, compromise vote tallies and audit logs, or cause equipment to fail.
It's important to understand that these were not well-funded nation-state attackers. These were not even academics who had been studying the problem for weeks. These were bored hackers, with no experience with voting machines, playing around between parties one weekend.
This is the week we know, with increasing certainty, that we are entering the last phase of the Trump Presidency. This doesn’t feel like a prophecy; it feels like a simple statement of the apparent truth. I know dozens of reporters and other investigators who have studied Donald Trump and his business and political ties. Some have been skeptical of the idea that President Trump himself knowingly colluded with Russian officials. It seems not at all Trumpian to participate in a complex plan with a long-term, uncertain payoff. Collusion is an imprecise word, but it does seem close to certain that his son Donald, Jr., and several people who worked for him colluded with people close to the Kremlin; it is up to prosecutors and then the courts to figure out if this was illegal or merely deceitful. We may have a hard time finding out what President Trump himself knew and approved.
However, I am unaware of anybody who has taken a serious look at Trump’s business who doesn’t believe that there is a high likelihood of rampant criminality. In Azerbaijan, he did business with a likely money launderer for Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. In the Republic of Georgia, he partnered with a group that was being investigated for a possible role in the largest known bank-fraud and money-laundering case in history. In Indonesia, his development partner is “knee-deep in dirty politics”; there are criminal investigations of his deals in Brazil; the F.B.I. is reportedly looking into his daughter Ivanka’s role in the Trump hotel in Vancouver, for which she worked with a Malaysian family that has admitted to financial fraud. Back home, Donald, Jr., and Ivanka were investigated for financial crimes associated with the Trump hotel in SoHo—an investigation that was halted suspiciously. His Taj Mahal casino received what was then the largest fine in history for money-laundering violations.
Listing all the financial misconduct can be overwhelming and tedious. I have limited myself to some of the deals over the past decade, thus ignoring Trump’s long history of links to New York Mafia figures and other financial irregularities...
...many people have a vague sense of Trump’s shadiness, but once the full details are better known and digested, a fundamentally different narrative about Trump will become commonplace. Remember: we knew a lot about problems in Iraq in May, 2003. Americans saw TV footage of looting and heard reports of U.S. forces struggling to gain control of the entire country. We had plenty of reporting, throughout 2007, about various minor financial problems. Somehow, though, these specific details failed to impress upon most Americans the over-all picture. It took a long time for the nation to accept that these were not minor aberrations but, rather, signs of fundamental crisis...
At each step of the way, the actions that have angered Trump have been steps taken by senior officials specifically following the law. In a shocking turn of phrase, even by his standards, Trump said, “So I just heard they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys.” Of course, “they” didn’t “break in”—they obtained a search warrant: sought by the U.S. Attorney, with the sign-off of the deputy attorney general, and approved by a magistrate judge. “They” means the FBI, part of Trump’s own executive branch, acting according to the law.
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This idea, that there is a regimented process for charging people and that it ought not to be determined by political vendettas or the whims of the head of government, is central to the American project, even if the nation has at times fallen short of it. Trump has long struggled to understand and accept the idea of the rule of law. On the campaign trail, he promised to lock Hillary Clinton up and questioned the right of a federal judge to oversee a case involving Trump University. Monday’s comments, including his stunning equation of a legal warrant with a burglary, are the clearest demonstration that Trump is engaged not just in a political attack, but in a campaign against the rule of law, and the U.S. approach to justice, itself.
Nifty detail: Mueller's team did not do this. SDNY did.
— emptywheel (@emptywheel) April 9, 2018
Presumably meaning unconfirmed Trump interim US Attorney Geoffrey Berman approved it.
The greatest threat from terrorism (potential, and actual, based on number of attacks and deaths) we face in this country is from white supremacists (which the White House ordered the FBI to stop tracking last year, instead shifting to tracking "black identity extremist" groups).
The man who died in an explosion in his Beaver Dam apartment last month had white supremacist material along with an array of explosive chemicals, guns and ammunition, according to search warrants unsealed in Dodge County.
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In search warrants released Thursday, investigators found that Morrow had a "homemade explosives laboratory" in the apartment...
We should all know what we're getting into, when we sign up for online services:
There is no other way to interpret Facebook’s privacy invading moves over the years—even if it’s time to simplify! finally!―as anything other than decisions driven by a combination of self-serving impulses: namely, profit motives, the structural incentives inherent to the company’s business model, and the one-sided ideology of its founders and some executives. All these are forces over which the users themselves have little input, aside from the regular opportunity to grouse through repeated scandals. And even the ideology—a vague philosophy that purports to prize openness and connectivity with little to say about privacy and other values—is one that does not seem to apply to people who run Facebook or work for it. Zuckerberg buys houses surrounding his and tapes over his computer’s camera to preserve his own privacy, and company employees went up in arms when a controversial internal memo that made an argument for growth at all costs was recently leaked to the press—a nonconsensual, surprising, and uncomfortable disclosure of the kind that Facebook has routinely imposed upon its billions of users over the years.
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By now, it ought to be plain to them, and to everyone, that Facebook’s 2 billion-plus users are surveilled and profiled, that their attention is then sold to advertisers and, it seems, practically anyone else who will pay Facebook—including unsavory dictators like the Philippines’ Rodrigo Duterte. That is Facebook’s business model. That is why the company has an almost half-a-trillion-dollar market capitalization, along with billions in spare cash to buy competitors.
These are such readily apparent facts that any denial of them is quite astounding.
And yet, it appears that nobody around Facebook’s sovereign and singular ruler has managed to convince their leader that these are blindingly obvious truths whose acceptance may well provide us with some hints of a healthier way forward. That the repeated word of the use “community” to refer Facebook’s users is not appropriate and is, in fact, misleading. That the constant repetition of “sorry” and “we meant well” and “we will fix it this time!” to refer to what is basically the same betrayal over 14 years should no longer be accepted as a promise to do better, but should instead be seen as but one symptom of a profound crisis of accountability. When a large chorus of people outside the company raises alarms on a regular basis, it’s not a sufficient explanation to say, “Oh we were blindsided (again).”
Tens of thousands of Palestinians living under a suffocating Israeli blockade in Gaza organized a massive peaceful march on the border with Israel. And they were met with a sea of bullets.
Israel crushed the historic protest with extreme violence, mowing down the unarmed protesters. More than 1,400 Palestinians were injured. The Israeli military deployed more than 100 snipers, who shot 773 protesters with live ammunition. At least 16 Gazans were killed in the massacre.
Israel's military later openly admitted that the massacre had been intentional and pre-planned. The IDF wrote on Twitter, "everything was accurate and measured, and we know where every bullet landed." Soon after, it deleted these tweets.
The demonstration, which was dubbed the "Great Return March," had been organized for months, in order to demand the right Palestinian refugees have under international law to return to their homes, which Israel ethnically cleansed in 1948.
The past week has offered a case study in how race shapes empathy and blame.
Take Mark Anthony Conditt, the 23-year-old who terrorized Austin, Texas, with a series of bombings. After listening to his confession tape, local police have ruled out hate as a motive in a set of attacks that took two lives and injured several others. Conditt’s message, police chief Brian Manley explained, was “the outcry of a very challenged young man talking about challenges in his personal life.” Conditt wasn’t a terrorist—the term we usually affix to people who organize bombings—he was simply lashing out...
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Now compare this to the now-infamous New York Times story on Michael Brown, described as “no angel” for his occasional delinquency and dabbling in drugs and alcohol. Brown was killed in a confrontation with police. He was unarmed.
To be white, male, and suspected of a serious crime is, in the eyes of police and much of the media, to still be a full individual entitled to respect and dignity. Your actions are treated as an isolated incident, not indicative of a larger pathology shared by others who occupy your social position or hold your religious beliefs. To be black (or to be Muslim or undocumented) is to lose that nuance, even if you’re the victim. After Trayvon Martin’s shooting death at the hands of George Zimmerman in 2012, NBC News ran a story announcing one fact: that Martin had been suspended three times from school...
A 2017 study commissioned by the advocacy organization Color of Change found that news media consistently portrayed black families and individuals as criminal, with that criminality flowing from the “internal disposition of Black people” versus an “external problem with historic roots.” This is racism, but it’s not the crude hatred of the white supremacist. It’s rather a “broad sympathy toward some and broader skepticism toward others,” as the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates has put it. The only way to understand that skepticism is to grasp the ways racism has shaped definitions of personhood and citizenship over the course of 400 years...