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Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Completely Futile Stormy Nights

“Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.”
~ VH
We all need to be exposed to fake and faceless characterless Trump-like officers of the Czech army of the crown and latitude ...


Nearly Half of Corporate Giants Escape IRS Audit in 2017

“The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reports that nationally there are now 616 corporate giants. These are companies that reported $20 billion or more in assets. As recently as FY 2010 virtually every (96%) corporate giant received an IRS audit. By FY 2016, this had fallen to only three out of four (76%). And last year, during FY 2017, the audit rate tumbled to a mere two out of every four – or roughly half (54%). This means that nearly half of these corporate behemoths escaped any IRS audit.  To read the full report, go to: http://trac.syr.edu/tracirs/latest/507/.”



PROFILE OF A 'FAKE NEWS' CREATOR: He makes his living telling lies on the Internet. He targets: 1) People over 50. 2) People who like Sean Hannity. 3) People who like Trump. They're gullible to his "fake news," he tells reporter Billy Baker, because it backs their prejudiced beliefs.



First, the Facebook CEO apologized. He held a warmup Monday with leaders of Congress, including one who said that Mark Zuckerberg is “serious” this time.
Author Zeynep Tufekci says Congress shouldn’t waste its time with Zuckerberg in what promises to be a media circus today. Zuckerberg has a history of apologies, she writes, and Congress already knows what kind of laws to pass “that would protect us from what Facebook has unleashed.”
When an apology isn't enough: Non-government organizations point to Facebook's role in ethnic cleansing in Myanmar and the flight of 650,000 people.
Here's the Washington Post's annotated version of Zuckerberg's opening statement before Congress on Wednesday, already released.
Related: Who runs the biggest Black Lives Matter Facebook page? An Australian-based scammer who may have taken some of the $100,000 in donations, CNN reports.


For 20 years, PBS FRONTLINE has published transcripts of completed interviews for each of its documentaries.

For “Trump’s Takeover,” its documentary tonight at 10 (Eastern), FRONTLINE is giving its digital viewers the chance to go deeper in the video to find the context of key quotes.

"How do you reverse-engineer a documentary?” FRONTLINE executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath asks. In this case, she says, “the expansion is text.”

For example, here’s what happens when Corey Lewandowski says the Trump campaign had little interest in 2016 in seeking endorsements from politicians in Washington because “they’re the ones who have had Washington broken for the past 30 years.” A digital viewer will see a  “Read this quote in context” highlight that comes on the left part of the screen.


'Trump,' in context

For 20 years, PBS FRONTLINE has published transcripts of completed interviews for each of its documentaries.
For “Trump’s Takeover,” its documentary tonight at 10 (Eastern), FRONTLINE is giving its digital viewers the chance to go deeper in the video to find the context of key quotes.
"How do you reverse-engineer a documentary?” FRONTLINE executive producer Raney Aronson-Rath asks. In this case, she says, “the expansion is text.”
For example, here’s what happens when Corey Lewandowski says the Trump campaign had little interest in 2016 in seeking endorsements from politicians in Washington because “they’re the ones who have had Washington broken for the past 30 years.” A digital viewer will see a  “Read this quote in context” highlight that comes on the left part of the screen.
Corey
When it’s clicked, a viewer goes directly to the transcript to see how this quote came about and where the conversation went from there, says Aronson-Rath.
Transcript
The digital experimentation in “Trump’s Takeover” represents the second stage of Aronson-Rath’s effort at radical transparency for the venerated documentary series. In “Putin’s Revenge,” aired just before the elections last fall, FRONTLINE posted 70 hours of video from its 56 interviews on the Russian leader and the Trump-Clinton election.
Aronson-Rath’s audience, balanced between conservative and liberal, digital and broadcast, wants to go deeper, she says. “How do we bring an audience underneath the hood of how we practice journalism” to build trust? Aronson asks. “We're open to being challenged."

Stormy night

The FBI raid on the office, home and hotel room of Michael Cohen, the Trump lawyer who paid off a porn star just before the 2016 elections, set a number of wheels in motion late Monday:
  • The Washington Post reported that Cohen is under federal investigation for possible bank fraud, wire fraud and campaign finance violations, according to three people with knowledge of the case.
  • Trump had a late-night tirade before reporters, saying that the raid was "an attack on our country" and musing that he might fire special prosecutor Robert S. Mueller III, who has obtained guilty pleas and cooperation from Trump officials for testimony in his inquiry. The tirade, annotated.
  • A specialist on white collar criminal law said that getting the sign-off for such a raid indicated that prosecutors demonstrated "not only the gravity of the potential case but also the risk that evidence might be destroyed or otherwise go missing if they pursued a less aggressive option."
 

Trump lashes out again over FBI raids

 What happens to anthropology when its fundamental divisions are undone — when magic and reason, and “primitive” and “modern,” no longer organize the field? 

True bohemians believe in kindness. Also in mischief. Also in singing, especially when singing is not necessarily prescribed...

 “There is a lesson in [Terezín] for those who conduct inspections in our day, whether in prisons, sweatshops, refugee camps, polling places, or nuclear facilities: do not trust––push; control your own schedule; do your homework. Remember the adage that a little knowledge can be dangerous. The truth is more likely to be served by a canceled or aborted inspection than by a whitewash.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948

“The Nazis' entrance upon the European stage did not, at first, alarm the British. After all, under the Versailles treaty, the size of the German army and navy was limited and the defeated country was forbidden to maintain air force. The wake-up bell began sounding only when, in March 1935, Hitler renounced the treaty and declared that his country would indeed rebuild its military. The following year, when Germany reoccupied the Rhineland, Britons were unsettled to learn that his army was already three times the legal size and that his air force, or Luftwaffe, would surpass their own.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948


 “When, in May, tensions reached a high point, London warned Berlin that if it attacked Czechoslovakia and the French were embroiled as well, "His Majesty's Government could not guarantee that they would not be forced by circumstances to become involved also". At the same time, English officials were telling their counterparts in Paris that they were "not disinterested" in Czechoslovakia's fate. I learned in the course of my own career that British diplomats are trained to write in with precision; so when a double negative is employed, the intent, usually, is not to clarify an issue but to surround it with fog.”
― Madeleine K. Albright, Prague Winter: A Personal Story of Remembrance and War, 1937-1948



This Monday, an investigation into how money meant for Mexican disaster relief – through catastrophe bonds – had instead ended up in the pockets of private investors.
 As Mexican reporter, Mathieu Tourliere said: “as always, the poorest and most vulnerable are cheated.” 


Sergei Skripal's cat and guinea pigs die after police seal house



The Diet That Might Cure Depression Atlantic

 Amazon customers take to social media after mysterious account closures Ars Technica
Weird Habits of Famous Writers: If you have writer's block, maybe try wearing a hat like Dr. Seuss, or sharpening two dozen pencils like John Steinbeck.

 Fire and Fury' Show Gets Its Director: 'Game Change' director Jay Roach has been tapped to direct and executive produce the TV adaptation of Michael Wolff’s book

Image detail for -... sar race nia flava seed pod this one con tained almost 500 seeds you
 The blueprint for the total overhaul of government you’ve never heard of.
VERONA BURGESS: With tentacles that reach far across jurisdiction and sector lines, the Prime Minister has been given a blueprint for government reform that could be interpreted as ‘enough rope’. Is this too much innovation?
Mark Zuckerberg just laid out Facebook’s role in reported ‘ethnic cleansing’ in Myanmar Business Insider. Ahem, Zuckerberg’s version of Facebook’s role….

Stocks Tumble on Tech Selloff Wall Street Journal





GM Scraps a Standard in Sales Reporting Wall Street Journal. Wowsers, other retail sales reported monthly…





 Using AI to make NZ the best place in the world to be a child.
Jacinda Ardern’s ambitious goals to cut child poverty by half and significantly improve child wellbeing offer a powerful opportunity to apply new data-led and intelligent computer system thinking

The original promise of the Web was “small pieces loosely joined” but has over time became “walled gardens fighting each other”, an approach that’s been under increasing scrutiny lately. In The Missing Building Blocks of the Web, Anil Dash argues that some neglected precepts of hypertext and the web could help steer us back towards a place that’s more oriented towards people, to “rebuild the web into something that has the potential, excitement, and openness that got so many of us excited about it in the first place”. One of the concepts he highlights is authoring:

When Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web, he assumed that, just like in earlier hypertext systems, every web browser would be able to write web pages just as easily as it read them. In fact, that early belief led many who pioneered the web to assume that the format of HTML itself didn’t matter that much, as many different browsing tools would be able to create it.
In some ways, that’s true — billions of people make things on the web all the time. Only they don’t know they’re making HTML, because Facebook (or Instagram, or whatever other app they’re using) generates it for them.
Interestingly, it’s one of Facebook’s board members that helped cause this schism between reading and writing on the web. Marc Andreessen pioneered the early Mosaic web browser, and then famously went on to spearhead Netscape, the first broadly-available commercial web browser. But Netscape wasn’t made as a publicly-funded research project at a state university — it was a hot startup company backed by a lot of venture capital investment.
It’s no surprise, then, that the ability to create web pages was reserved for Netscape Gold, the paid version of that first broadly consumer-oriented web browser. Reading things on the web would be free, sure. But creating things on the web? We’d pay venture-backed startup tech companies for the ability to do that, and they’d mediate it for us.

Dash also argues for more embedding — not just YouTube videos but “a little functional part of one website embedded in another”. I know this isn’t what he’s referring to, but embedding is anything but neglected: the entire online advertising and tracking industry (Google, Facebook, etc.) is built on embedding little bits of their sites on billions of other web pages. Maybe a little bit less of that sort of embedding?
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