Daniel Kahneman: ”No one ever made a decision because of a number. They need a story.”
CISA – Rumor vs. Reality is designed to address common disinformation narratives by providing accurate information related to elections.
“Where the hell does Eric Adams live?” We Staked Out Eric Adams’s House in Brooklyn
Adams Charged With Bribery, Wire Fraud
Don’t ever hand your phone to the cops The Verge
DoJ Notified of Suspected Faulty Welds on Subs, Aircraft Carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding US Naval Institute
How Easy Is It To Become Middle Class Now?Charles Hugh Smith, Of Two Minds
JIM GERAGHTY: Eric Adams Indictment a Window into Pernicious Foreign Bribery Operations
The name “Samuel Dickstein” really ought to be more widely remembered and loathed:
Dickstein, a Democrat from New York City who served in the House of Representatives from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s, conducted himself in public life with none of the refined elegance that his self-presentation suggested. . . .
So over-the-top as to be ineffectual — he had the poor taste to call for Noel Coward to be barred from the country because the English wit made a quip about the manliness of Brooklyn soldiers — Dickstein left Congress in 1946, and served as a state Supreme Court justice until his death in 1954. In 1963, a portion of the street grid close to where he used to live on East Broadway was christened “Samuel Dickstein Plaza.” No controversy attended the occasion. He then went about the time-honored practice of being forgotten.
That is, until 1999, when Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev published The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America — the Stalin Era, which through the use of previously unavailable KGB records went a long way toward convincing those who could be convinced that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were in fact working for the Soviet Union. The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. His codename was Crook. . . .
According to Weinstein and Vassiliev, Dickstein had earned a total of $12,000 during his time on the Soviet payroll, about $200,000 when adjusted for inflation. [Emphasis added.]
(I just want to point out that if I had a corrupt representative working for the Russians with the codename “Crook” in one of my novels, readers would complain it was a little too on the nose.)
At a recent speech while accepting an award from the Competitive Enterprise Institute, the legendary George Will observed, “The way you lower the temperature of politics is to lower the stakes of politics.” Similarly, if you want fewer opportunities for foreign corruption, reduce the size, power, and personnel in government. A big, sprawling government, whether it’s federal, state, or local, with Byzantine regulations and lots of staffers who can do favors or ensure paperwork gets approved, creates lots of motive, means, and opportunity for bribery and illicit favors.
The Department of Everything
Te Hedgehog Review. Dispatches from the telephone reference desk. Stephen Akey: “How do you find the life expectancy of a California condor? Google it. Or the gross national product of Morocco? Google it. Or the final resting place of Tom Paine?
Google it. There was a time, however—not all that long ago—when you couldn’t Google it or ask Siri or whatever cyber equivalent comes next. You had to do it the hard way—by consulting reference books, indexes, catalogs, almanacs, statistical abstracts, and myriad other printed sources.
Or you could save yourself all that time and trouble by taking the easiest available shortcut: You could call me. From 1984 to 1988, I worked in the Telephone Reference Division of the Brooklyn Public Library. My seven or eight colleagues and I spent the days (and nights) answering exactly such questions.
Our callers were as various as New York City itself: copyeditors, fact checkers, game show aspirants, journalists, bill collectors, bet settlers, police detectives, students and teachers, the idly curious, the lonely and loquacious, the park bench crazies, the nervously apprehensive. (This last category comprised many anxious patients about to undergo surgery who called us for background checks on their doctors.) There were telephone reference divisions in libraries all over the country, but this being New York City, we were an unusually large one with an unusually heavy volume of calls.
And if I may say so, we were one of the best. More than one caller told me that we were a legend in the world of New York magazine publishing. “How do you people know all this stuff?” a caller once asked me. “What are you, some kind of scholars or wordsmiths or something?” “No,” I replied. “Just us libarians.”
Actually, we didn’t know all that stuff; we just knew how to find it. I myself rarely remembered any of the facts I divulged to our callers, but I remembered the reference sources where I found the facts. Personal knowledge was inadmissible.
I could reel off by heart the names of the four Dead Boys (Cheetah Chrome, Stiv Bators, Jimmy Zero, and Johnny Blitz—but didn’t everyone know that?), but unless I could track them down and—rule number one—cite the source (in this case, probably the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock and Roll), I had no information to impart and no answer to give to anyone who might need that information for whatever reason. But we almost always found the right source…”
Museo del Prado offers free online access to more than 11,500 publications from late 15th century to early 20th century
“The new Digital Library of the Museo del Prado, developed with funds from the Recovery, Transformation and Resilience Plan (PRTR), offers free access to 5600 magazine issues and 6,000 books specializing in artistic literature and published between the end of the 15th and early 20th centuries.
More than 1,700,000 pages have been digitized, the cataloguing of 1,400 ancient books has been reviewed and 220 other rare books and 2,000 prints contained in the drawing booklets have been catalogued. In many cases, these rare books have been written or illustrated with prints by painters such as Durero, Rubens, Giordano, Anibale Carracci, José de Madrazo, Goya, Paret, Federico de Madrazo, Fortuny, Hogarth, Doré or Toulouse-Lautrec.
This virtual space, in addition to promoting the preservation of bibliographical backgrounds by reducing their use and manipulation, becomes an essential tool for historical artistic research and has been incorporated into Worldcat, the largest collective catalogue of art libraries and museums worldwide managed by OCLC, and Art Discovery Group Catalogue.
The report lays out how social media and video streaming companies harvest an enormous amount of Americans’ personal data and monetize it to the tune of billions of dollars a year,” said FTC Chair Lina M. Khan. “While lucrative for the companies, these surveillance practices can endanger people’s privacy, threaten their freedoms, and expose them to a host of harms, from identify theft to stalking. Several firms’ failure to adequately protect kids and teens online is especially troubling. The Report’s findings are timely, particularly as state and federal policymakers consider legislation to protect people from abusive data practices.