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It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

by GiuseppPereira Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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This happened yesterday while I was away from my desk:

The FBI has recovered personal and work-related e-mails from the private computer server used by Hillary Clinton during her time as secretary of state, according to a person familiar with the investigation.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation’s success at salvaging personal e-mails that Clinton said had been deleted raises the possibility that the Democratic presidential candidate’s correspondence eventually could become public. The disclosure of such e-mails would likely fan the controversy over Clinton’s use of a private e-mail system for official business.

Nobody seems to have made the most obvious observation about this: It pretty strongly suggests that Hillary Clinton was not trying to hide anything when she deleted personal emails from her server.

At the risk of boring my technically-minded readers, files on a computer work sort of like an old-fashioned card catalog in a library. If you “delete” a book by tearing up the index card, the book is still there. It might be harder to find, but with a little detective work you can still dig it up. Eventually, though, the book will truly disappear. Maybe someone steals it and no one cares. Or the library needs more space and gets rid of all the books with no index cards. Etc.

This is how computers work. When you delete a file, you’re just deleting the index card. The file is still there on the hard drive. Eventually, though, the file will truly disappear. Maybe another program writes over the file. Or you run a disk defrag program and whole sections of the disk get written over. Etc. Some files will get permanently deleted within days. Others might stick around for years. It’s just random chance.

Needless to say, things don’t have to happen this way. If you want to make sure that a file is well and truly deleted, it’s easy to do. Anyone with even a smidgen of computer experience either knows how or knows how to find out. Here’s one way, which took me ten seconds to Google. If I were really serious, I’d take the time to read a bit more, and also make inquiries about backups. This is IT 101.

But apparently Hillary didn’t ask about any of this stuff. No one on her staff brought it up. They just pushed the Delete key and the emails disappeared. The IT folks were never involved.

These are not the actions of a staff trying to stonewall FOIA requests or foil a congressional committee. Any bright teenager could have done better on that score. By all the evidence, Hillary is telling the truth. She just told her staff to delete personal emails and turn over the rest to the State Department. There was nothing more to it.

But no one’s reporting it that way. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Originally posted here – 

It Sure Looks Like Hillary Clinton Didn’t Have a Cunning Plan to Foil Congressional Investigators

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For Blue-Collar Men, Life Looks Increasingly Dismal

by AugustuHague Posted on September 23, 2015

Mother Jones

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Here’s a merger of two charts that have made the rounds recently. The first, from Brookings, shows a familiar pattern: the median pay of a man employed full-time has dropped substantially since 2010. The second, from the Kaiser Family Foundation, shows that health care deductibles have risen substantially since 2010.

Put them together and you get the chart on the right. The light red line is bad enough: blue-collar men earn about $3,000 less than they did five years ago. The dark red line is even worse: if you factor in rising deductibles, they’re earning $3,500 less than they did five years ago.

This explains a lot of the discontent of the past five years, especially among working and middle-class white workers. In theory, health care is getting better every year, and if you take that into account then wages start to look a little better. Technically, this is true. But think about it from the average worker’s point of view:

His cash wages have gone down.
Health care may be getting better, but that’s mostly invisible. It doesn’t seem any different than usual.
But high deductibles provide an incentive not to see the doctor when something minor is bothering you. So, in practice, health care actually seems not merely the same as always, but actually a bit worse and a bit more of a hassle. Either you ignore the minor stuff or else you go in and, thanks to higher deductibles, end up paying an infuriatingly high bill.

For your average blue-collar man, here’s what life seems like: wages are down, health care is more expensive, and you have to spend a lot more time worrying about whether it’s worth it to see your doctor. There’s not much to like in this picture.

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For Blue-Collar Men, Life Looks Increasingly Dismal

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Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

by KendallTrego824 Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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James Pethokoukis says that economist Deirdre McCloskey has written “the most powerful defense of market capitalism you will ever read.” It’s based on the chart on the right, which shows the fantastic growth of the world economy since about 1800:

Now, McCloskey does not like the word “capitalism.” She would prefer our economic system be called “technological and institutional betterment at a frenetic pace, tested by unforced exchange among all the parties involved.”

Or perhaps “fantastically successful liberalism, in the old European sense, applied to trade and politics, as it was applied also to science and music and painting and literature.”

Or simply “trade-tested progress.”

I am a considerable fan of capitalism by nearly any standard (aside from the current Republican Party one, which essentially holds that you’re a socialist if you believe in any regulation of large corporations at all). So sure: capitalism or free market exchange or whatever you want to call it certainly deserves plenty of credit here.

But was it the main driving force of the post-1800 economy? McCloskey says the Great Expansion wasn’t the result of “coal, thrift, transport, high male wages, low female and child wages, surplus value, human capital, geography, railways, institutions, infrastructure, nationalism, the quickening of commerce, the late medieval run-up, Renaissance individualism, the First Divergence, the Black Death, American silver, the original accumulation of capital, piracy, empire, eugenic improvement, the mathematization of celestial mechanics, technical education, or a perfection of property rights.” Those had existed for a long time. Rather, it’s the fact that European elites “came to accept or even admire the values of trade and betterment.”

But does that seem right? I don’t know much about China or India—and I might be wrong about Europe too—but I’ve always thought that trade and commerce were also relatively free during, say, the height of the Roman Empire. The landed elites made a lot of money in trade, and if merchants weren’t quite pillars of society, they were hardly social lepers either. The legions were routinely used to protect trade routes. Corruption was endemic, but tariffs and regulations on trade were fairly mild. The pursuit of wealth was respectable, and accounting practices were sophisticated.

Is that right? Maybe I’m woefully misinformed. But it seems like the big difference between AD 0 and AD 1800 wasn’t so much attitudes toward trade as it was the obvious thing that McCloskey left off her list: machines. As long as humans and animals were the only source of power, there was a limit to how much wealth could be generated. But if the Romans had invented steam engines and electrification, we’d all be speaking Latin today and arguing about what made Roman culture so special.

This is something that’s been a subject of academic study for a long time, and I hardly expect to break any new ground here. But while a respect for fairly free trade might be a prerequisite for exponential economic growth, the example of Rome suggests that more than that is needed. The truly interesting question, then, is: why did 18th century Europeans invent machine power but 1st century Europeans didn’t?

Excerpt from: 

Capitalism and Machines Go Together Like Peanut Butter and Jelly

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VW Loses About $20 Billion in Value in 2 Hours

by BryanGraziani Posted on September 21, 2015

Mother Jones

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Guess what happens when you concoct a contemptible scheme to secretly blow off emission rules on your cars—and then it suddenly becomes not so secret? Answer: your respected multinational corporation loses about $20 billion of value over the course of a few minutes. Your stock gets downgraded by pretty much every analyst on the planet. And the folks who put together the Dow Jones Sustainability Index start suggesting that maybe VW isn’t exactly a poster child for sustainability anymore.

By the way, it turns out that VW’s deception was actually discovered a year ago, but they doggedly denied any wrongdoing:

For nearly a year, Volkswagen officials told the Environmental Protection Agency that discrepancies between the formal air-quality tests on its diesel cars and the much higher pollution levels out on the road were the result of technical errors, not a deliberate attempt to deceive Washington officials.

….The company was evidently concerned that actually meeting the federal emissions standards would degrade the power of the engines, which it marketed as comparable in performance to gasoline engines. Meeting the standard would also undercut the fuel efficiency that is one of the main selling points of diesels.

Volkswagen finally fessed up only after the EPA said it planned to withhold approval for the carmaker’s new 2016 models. Until then, it was just deny, deny, deny.

Link:  

VW Loses About $20 Billion in Value in 2 Hours

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54% of Republicans Think Obama Is a Muslim

by MagaretRusso Posted on September 1, 2015

Mother Jones

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You know, I thought this nonsense had stopped. I don’t know why I thought it had stopped—out of sight, out of mind?—but apparently it hasn’t. Crikey.

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54% of Republicans Think Obama Is a Muslim

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It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. The Spanish Language Is the Ur-Motive of Anti-Immigration Sentiment.

by AbbeyAGWvozn Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Ed Kilgore on the conservative hostility toward illegal immigration:

This very weekend I was reading an advance copy of an upcoming book that includes the results of some intensive focus group work with what might be called the “angry wing” of the GOP base. The author notes that one thing that simply enrages grass-roots conservatives is the use of non-English languages by immigrants.

Yep. You can read all about it from one of Kilgore’s predecessors, who wrote about it during our last big try at immigration reform in 2006. It’s based on an excellent piece by Chris Hayes, written before he sold out to the bright lights and big paychecks of cable television.

I agree that language is probably the key original driver of anti-immigrant sentiment, though it’s long since inspired further animus based around crime, gangs, social services, and other culture-related issues. The odd thing is that this is one of the few areas where I think the anti-immigrationists have a bit of a point. It’s not a very big point, since (a) Spanish occupies no official role in the United States, and (b) Latin American immigrants all end up speaking English by the second and third generations anyway. Hell, the third-generation Latino who speaks lousy Spanish is practically a cliche.

That said, I’ve long believed that having multiple official languages makes it very hard to sustain a united polity. The Swiss manage, but the whole reason they’re famous for it is because it’s so unusual. Even the Belgians and Canadians have trouble with it, and they’re pretty tolerant people.

Would a congressional declaration that English is the official language of the United States do anything to calm anti-immigrant fervor? At this point, probably not. But if it were written narrowly and carefully, I’d probably support it. I figure that if God considered a single common language such a boon that it threatened his dominion, it must be pretty powerful stuff.

This article – 

It’s Not the Economy, Stupid. The Spanish Language Is the Ur-Motive of Anti-Immigration Sentiment.

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This Week’s Great Showdown: Denali vs. McKinley

by c7u433n Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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So the big news this weekend was President Obama’s decision to change the name of Mt. McKinley back to Denali. As near as I can tell, the only people who truly care about this are:

Alaskans
Ohioans
Mountain climbers
Trivia buffs

Of these, Alaskans are pro-Denali; Ohioans are proudly pro-McKinley; mountain climbers have been calling it Denali for years already; and trivia buffs are almost certainly pro-Denali since they love it whenever something changes that allows them to pedantically correct other people.

So far—to my pleasant surprise, I admit—there’s been very little complaining about how Obama is—again!—bending to the forces of political correctness and identity politics by kowtowing to the icy cold branch of the native American community. But the week is young and the easily outraged are probably still rubbing the sleep out of their eyes. Give them time.

For the time being, though, the pro-McKinley side has only the Ohioans, who have been battling Alaskans over this for decades. Ohioans are mighty defenders of William McKinley, proud son of Niles, Ohio. So proud, in fact, that one of their own renamed Denali to Mt. McKinley in 1896 merely because McKinley had just been nominated for president. Alaskans probably had no idea this was even happening, and in any case they weren’t yet a state and could do little about it. They finally tried to officially reverse this power grab in the 70s, but sneaky Ohioans took advantage of a loophole to prevent the US Board on Geographic Names from acting. That ended yesterday when Obama decided to rename America’s highest peak himself.

The obvious solution to all this is to rename Ohio’s tallest mountain. Unfortunately, Ohio is flat and has no mountains at all. Its highest point is Campbell Hill, topping out at a pedestrian 1,550 feet. They could rename it McKinley Hill—unless, of course, that would outrage the descendants of Charles D. Campbell—but that’s quite a comedown from the majesty of Denali, as the pictures on the right show.

What to do? Nothing much, I suppose, except for Ohio’s congressional delegation to rant and rave about Obama’s unilateral power grab etc. That’s fine. Hometown pride demands no less. Even at that, though, I have to give props to Rep. Bob Gibbs for this masterpiece of outrage:

I hope my colleagues will join with me in stopping this constitutional overreach. President Obama has decided to ignore an act of Congress in unilaterally renaming Mt. McKinley in order to promote his job-killing war on energy.

Constitutional overreach? Sure, whatever. That’s garden variety stuff by now. But how does removing the name of America’s 25th president advance Obama’s job-killing war on energy? Inquiring minds want to know.

As for the political implications, all you need to know is this: Alaska has three electoral votes. Ohio has 18 and is routinely a critical swing state. You may draw your own conclusions from this.

Original source:  

This Week’s Great Showdown: Denali vs. McKinley

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Apple Hates Me. I Hate Them Right Back.

by WillDriggers Posted on August 31, 2015

Mother Jones

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Apple has never allowed ad-blocking software on the iPhone or iPad. This is one among many reasons that I ditched both. Not because I hate ads all that passionately, but because it’s an example of the obsessive corporate control Apple maintains over its environment. But it’s my iPad, dammit. If I want a different virtual keyboard, why can’t I get one? If I want access to a file, why does Apple forbid it? If I want ad-blocking software, why should Apple be allowed to stop me?

Apple is still a serial offender on this front, but apparently they’ve decided to relent on ad-blocking software. As usual, though, there appears to be a deeper story here:

The next version of Apple’s mobile-operating system, due out as early as next month, will let users install apps that prevent ads from appearing in its Safari browser.

….Apple says it won’t allow ad blocking within apps, because ads inside apps don’t compromise performance as they do on the browser. That distinction serves Apple’s interests. It takes a 30% cut on money generated from apps, and has a business serving ads inside apps. What’s more, iOS 9 will include an Apple News app, which will host articles from major news publishers. Apple may receive a share of the revenue from ads that accompany those articles.

The basic lay of the land here—assuming the Wall Street Journal has this right—is that Apple’s move is aimed at Google, which makes most of its revenue from browser ads. Conversely, it doesn’t hurt companies like Facebook much, since they have dedicated apps. In the big picture, this motivates more and more companies to build Apple-specific apps, since those will become more lucrative over time. And it helps Apple’s bottom line since it gets a cut of the revenue. Plus it annoys Google.

So here’s the lesson: Apple is happy to allow users more control over their devices as long as it also happens to benefit Apple. If it doesn’t, then tough.

This is why I generally loathe Apple. Obviously all companies are run in their own self-interest, but Apple carries this to absurd lengths. Say what you will about Microsoft, but they’ve never pulled this kind of crap on their customers. If I buy a Windows machine, I can do pretty much anything I want to it.

Needless to say, lots and lots of people couldn’t care less about this, and Apple has made a ton of money catering to them. But I care. Whether it’s because Steve Jobs insisted on the one perfect way of using a computer, or because Apple’s accountants want to limit customers’ choices in order to maximize corporate revenue, Apple has never cared much about allowing me to choose how I prefer to use a computer. That’s not thinking different. It’s how IBM operated half a century ago. And it sucks.

Continue reading here: 

Apple Hates Me. I Hate Them Right Back.

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The Internet Is Making Us Sicker

by ShaunLadprsnu Posted on August 30, 2015

Mother Jones

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The placebo effect, as we all know, is the mechanism by which we sometimes feel better even when we’re given meds that later turn out to be sugar pills. The mere expectation that we will get better somehow helps us actually get better. The most eye-popping example of the placebo effect is probably this one here.

But there’s also a dark side to this. I don’t know if it has an official name, so let’s call it the anti-placebo effect.1 Basically, it means that your mind can invent miserable side effects from taking medication merely because you know that certain side effects are possible. Take cholesterol-lowering statins, for example:

At the Mayo Clinic here, Dr. Stephen L. Kopecky, who directs a program for statin-intolerant patients, says he is well aware that middle-age and older adults who typically need statins may blame the drugs for aches, pains and memory losses that have other causes. He also knows his patients peruse the Internet, which is replete with horror stories about the dangers of statins.

Yet he, like other doctors, also thinks some statin intolerance is real despite what clinical trials have shown. The problem: In the vast majority of cases, there is no objective test to tell real from imagined statin intolerance.

So there you have it: the internet is making us sicker. Does it make up for this by also making us healthier? I have my doubts. It is a spawn of evil.

And no, you still can’t take mine away. However, this is one of the reasons why I’ve avoided reading about multiple myeloma on the internet. I figure it’s unlikely to help, and might very well hurt.

1Turns out it’s called the nocebo effect. How about that?

Original post – 

The Internet Is Making Us Sicker

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Question of the Day: With Friends Like This….

by LazaroWorley Posted on August 29, 2015

Mother Jones

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Last month, Donald Trump said he didn’t consider John McCain a war hero because “I like people who weren’t captured.” Who said this afterward?

Mr. Trump’s remarks were insulting to me as a veteran and as a person whose family sacrificed for 25 years as I missed anniversaries, birthdays, holidays, Christmases and Easters….I was offended by a man who sought and gained four student deferments to avoid the draft and who has never served this nation a day — not a day — in any fashion or way.

….Why should I not be suspicious of an individual who was pro-choice until he decided to run for president? Why should I not be suspicious of a person who advocates for universal healthcare? Why should I not be suspicious of someone who says he hates lobbyists and yet has spread millions of dollars around to Republicans and Democrats to enrich himself? Why should I not be suspicious of someone who cannot come to say that he believes in God, that he has never asked for forgiveness and that communion is simply wine and a cracker.

….Trump left me with questions about his moral center and his foundational beliefs….His comments reveal no foundation in Christ, which is a big deal.

If you answered Sam Clovis, the conservative Iowan who is now Trump’s national campaign co-chair, give yourself a gold star! The Des Moines Register says dryly that this raises questions about whether Clovis was motivated to join Trump’s campaign “less by ideology and more by the promise of a big paycheck from a business mogul who has said he is willing to spend as much as a billion dollars to get elected.”

Huh. I guess it does. You really think that might have been in the back of Clovis’s mind?

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Question of the Day: With Friends Like This….

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