Immaterial, Irrelevant, and Incompetent

• Innocents Abroad?

  Can you imagine how the media would cover any other president if they exhibited the temperament and behavior that Trump has shown? If a slide show had been made for foreign dignitaries, telling them to keep it simple and blow up Obama's ego, how denigrating would the entire right wing noise machine have been?
  
  They attacked President Obama for actually being too smart.
  
  The bar is set so low for our "King baby" that the media is already saying if he doesn't cause an international incident on this trip it'll be a success!

  (John Amato, Crooks and Liars)
  
• Past performance not a guarantee of future earnings.

  So don’t count on some moderate Republican or some high-minded career prosecutor or some unimpeachable judge or some FBI leader or some administration whistle-blower or the Supreme Court or the Constitution or even Rube Goldberg to save us from Trump. We got lucky once — very, very lucky. We aren’t likely to be that lucky again.

  (Neil Gabler, AlterNet)
  
• How the field of medicine debunks fake "facts."

  We don’t yet know whether this method will work because the results haven’t been published — but whether or not the trial fails, it’ll bring us closer to answering an important question about information right now: How do you prevent dubious claims from catching on in the first place?
  
  Stanford University professor John Ioannidis also sees the most hope in early childhood education, and agrees children should be empowered with basic skills on critical thinking. He told me that waiting to teach clinicians the standards of evidence-based medicine late in their training doesn’t always work.

  (Julia Belluz, Vox)
  
• Article on tech feudalism.

  Tech companies are run by a feckless leadership accountable to no one, creating a toolkit for authoritarianism while hypnotized by science-fiction fantasy.
  
  There are two things we have to do immediately. The first is to stop the accelerating process of tracking and surveillance before it can do any more harm to our institutions.
  
  The danger facing us is not Orwell, but Huxley. The combo of data collection and machine learning is too good at catering to human nature, seducing us and appealing to our worst instincts. We have to put controls on it. The algorithms are amoral; to make them behave morally will require active intervention.
  
  The second thing we need is accountability. I don’t mean that I want Mark Zuckerberg’s head on a pike, though I certainly wouldn’t throw it out of my hotel room if I found it there. I mean some mechanism for people whose lives are being brought online to have a say in that process, and an honest debate about its tradeoffs.

  (Maciej Ceglowski, Idle Words, posted at naked capitalism)
• Some of these games go way back...

  He didn’t vote for Goldwater because he supports racism, but because he supports conservatism. Sound familiar? Then, as now, if he had taken the time to understand perspectives other than his own, he might have realized that this was only a roundabout way of saying that the rights and safety of others are expendable in pursuit of one’s ideological goals.

  (Jesse Curtis, Colorblind Christians)