Sections
Introduction
1. Summary
2. Crisis
Files
A. Selections
from August 5, 2018
Introduction:
This is a
Nederlog of Sunday,
August 5,
2018.
1. Summary
This is a crisis
log but it is a bit different from how it was until 2013:
I have been
writing about the crisis since September
1, 2008 (in Dutch, but
since 2010 in English) and about
the enormous dangers of surveillance (by secret services and
by many rich commercial entities) since June 10, 2013, and I will
continue with it.
On
the
moment and since more than two years
(!!!!)
I have
problems with the company that is
supposed to take care that my site is visible [1]
and with my health, but I am still writing a Nederlog every day and
I shall continue.
2. Crisis Files
These are
five crisis files
that are mostly well worth reading:
A. Selections from August 5, 2018:
1. Lawmakers Pressure Google Over “Deeply Troubling” China
Censorship
Project
2. The Resurgence of Political Authoritarianism: An Interview
With Noam
Chomsky
3. We Will Have to Face the Consequences of Donald Trump
Getting His
Hands on the Economy
4. Did left-wing Hillary hate put Trump in the White House?
5. Medical Applications Expose Current Limits of AI
The items 1 - 5 are today's
selections from the 35 sites that I look at
every morning. The indented text under each link is quoted from the
link that starts the item. Unindented text is by me:
1. Lawmakers
Pressure Google Over “Deeply Troubling” China Censorship Project
This article is by
Ryan Gallagher on The Intercept, and concerns Google´s - explicit,
conscious - decision to become wholly and massively totalitarian,
in
China, where Google intends to surveil over a billion Chinese, to watch
whether they say anything on line that might displease the
Chinese
government.
There is more in previous Nederlogs (see e.g. here) and the article starts as follows:
A bipartisan group of six
U.S. senators is demanding that Google CEO Sundar Pichai explain the
company’s plan to launch a censored version of its search engine in
China.
Since spring 2017, the
internet giant has been developing a censored Android search app to
launch in the country as part of a secretive project code-named
Dragonfly, The Intercept revealed
on Wednesday. The app would manipulate search results in accordance
with strict censorship rules in China that are mandated by the ruling
Communist Party regime, which restricts people’s access to information
about political opponents, free speech, democracy, human rights, and
peaceful protest. The censored Google search has been designed to
“blacklist sensitive queries” so that “no results will be shown” at all
when people enter certain words or phrases, according to internal
Google documents.
Yes indeed - and while
nothing is being said here about whether the Chinese
who enter these
¨blacklist sensitive queries¨ thereby run the risk of being arrested by
Chinese (secret) police and - for example - getting tortured, and
while
it is logically possible Google left that bit to the Chinese
totalitarian authorities, this will happen in China, indeed
also if
Google withdraws, which I think is highly unlikely.
In any case, if Google
does the police work for the totalitarian Chinese government, I will
style it ¨the neofascistic,
sadistic
Google¨ and insist that (i) they make their enormous profits in
China by helping to lock up and torture the Chinese who
question or object to their totalitarian
government, and (ii) they do
it because they have given up all morality and all ethics, and only
follow their own profits, also if these profits are based on
totalitarian
tortures.
Here is some more:
In a
letter sent to Pichai on Friday, the six lawmakers called the
Google plan “deeply troubling” and said that it “risks making Google
complicit in human rights abuses related to China’s rigorous censorship
regime.” The letter was led by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and also
signed by Sens Mark Warner, D-Va., Tom Cotton, R-Ark., Ron Wyden,
D-Ore., Cory Gardner, R-Colo., and Robert Menendez, D-N.J.
The senators write: “It is
a coup for the Chinese government and Communist Party to force
Google—the biggest search engine in the world—to comply with their
onerous censorship requirements, and sets a worrying precedent for
other companies seeking to do business in China without compromising
their core values.”
Well... yes and no. I
like it that some Senators protested the deal Google
desires to make
with the totalitarian Chinese government, but I insist Google was not
forced ¨to comply with
[the Chinese government´s] onerous censorship requirements¨ but wants
to comply with
these totaliarian demands because they promise to be hugely
profitable
to the owners of Google.
Here is a bit more:
They are asking Google to
provide answers to multiple questions, such as: “which ‘blacklist’ of
censored searches and websites are you using? Are there any phrases or
words that Google is refusing to censor?” The senators want to know why
Google has reversed its policy on China. In 2006, the company launched
a censored search engine in the country, but ceased operating the
service in March 2010, citing Chinese government efforts to limit free
speech, block websites, and hack Google’s computer systems. “What has
changed since 2010 to make Google comfortable cooperating with the
rigorous censorship regime in China?” the senators ask.
I think some of these questions
indeed are worth asking, but I think I can answer the Senators on what
has changed: Google has eight years after 2010 gathered enormous
powers
and enormous profits as a search engine, and now wants to
extend both
its powers and its profits by cooperating with the totalitarian
Chinese
government and help them implement its totalitarian values and schemes.
And here is a bit from the ending, that shows a typical
statement of
Google (and Facebook and Microsoft and Apple):
Google has so far
declined to address the revelations. The company has issued a
boilerplate statement asserting that it does “not comment on
speculation about future plans.”
Well... I take it that
pretty soon Google will be explicitly totalitarian, which it will be
because it is a neofascist corporation that is being led by
neofascists. I strongly hope I am mistaken, but I fear I am not.
2. The
Resurgence of Political Authoritarianism: An Interview With Noam Chomsky
This
article is by C.J. Polychroniou on Truthout. It starts as follows:
Following the end of
World War II, liberal democracy began to flourish in most countries in
the Western world, and its institutions and values were aspired to by
movements and individuals under authoritarian and oppressive regimes.
However, with the rise of neoliberalism, both the institutions and the
values of modern democracy came rapidly and continuously under attack
in an effort to extend the profit-maximizing logic and practices of
capitalism throughout all aspects of economic and social life.
Sketched out in broad outlines, this story explains the resurgence of
authoritarian political trends in today’s Western societies (..)
Yes, I basically agree.
But I want to add two items on ¨neoliberalism¨.
First, here is a fine
site that contains a great amount of mostly correct criticisms
of
neoliberalism: Critiques
Of Libertarianism by Mike Huben, which starts with saying:
The subject of this site is
libertarianism: in the broad, poorly defined colloquial sense which
includes Objectivism, neoliberalism, classical liberalism and a host of
other ill-defined variants. All are united by a rhetoric of liberty, bad philosophy and fallacious "free market" claims of various sorts. The
Koch brothers and their ilk have been pushing this harmful
political theory for around 60 years with vast amounts of money, and have
captured the Republican party.
This wiki has roughly 2000
content pages; more are added very frequently.
So indeed this is a
large site. I have not read all of it, but I did read a
good part of
it, and it is a very fine site.
Also, in case you are
interested in Huben: Scourge
of the Libertarians: Interview with Mike Huben
is a good and fairy long interview with him, from 2015.
Back to the article. I
shall only quote Chomsky and delete the questions, but the
interview is
quite good and quite long and is recommended:
Noam Chomsky: The
“political landscape” is indeed ominous. While today’s political and
social circumstances are much less dire, still they do call to mind
Antonio Gramsci’s warning from Mussolini’s prison cells about the
severe crisis of his day, which “consists precisely in the fact that
the old is dying and the new cannot be born [and] in this interregnum a
great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
One morbid symptom is the
resurgence of political authoritarianism, a highly important matter
that is properly receiving a great deal of attention in public debate.
But “a great deal of public attention” should always be a warning sign:
Does the shaping of the issues reflect power interests, which are
diverting attention from what may be more significant factors behind
the general concerns? In the present case, I think that is so
(..)
It’s entirely true that “the
institutions and values of liberal democracy are under attack” to an
unusual extent, but not only by authoritarian leaders, and not for the
first time. I presume all would agree that primary among the values of
liberal democracy is that governments should be responsive to voters.
If that is not the case, “liberal democracy” is a farce.
Which logically
entails -
I think - that ¨“liberal
democracy” is a farce¨, at
least in the present USA. I agree.
Here is more:
It has been well
established that it is not the case. Ample work in mainstream political
science shows that a majority of voters are not represented by their
own elected representatives, who listen to different voices — the
voices of the donor class, great wealth and the corporate sector
(...)
Furthermore, the penetrating
work of Thomas
Ferguson reveals that for a long time, elections have been
substantially bought, including Congress, continuing right to the
present, 2016.
These facts alone show that
the furor about alleged Russian interference with our pristine
democratic process reveals profound indoctrination — in capitalist, not
democratic, values.
Yes, I agree - and you
find considerably more references in the original. Here is more:
Putting aside these
secondary matters, the major attack on the institutions and values of
liberal democracy is by the powerful business classes, intensifying
since Reagan as both political parties have drifted toward greater
subordination to their interests — the Republicans to such an extreme
that by now they barely can be considered a political party. Anyone who
finds this surprising must be uninformed about American society and how
it functions. By now, as business power has been unleashed by its
servants in the Republican Party, the traditional business attack on
“the institutions and values of liberal democracy” has reached levels
not seen since the Gilded Age, if even then.
Yes, I entirely
agree
(and in case you need a link to the Gilden Age, that
was it). Here is more:
Toward the conservative
end, at the same time, the influential “Powell memorandum,” directed to
the Chamber of Commerce by corporate lawyer Lewis Powell (later
appointed to the Supreme Court by Richard Nixon), called for open war
by the business world to defend itself from the virtual takeover of the
country by radical forces that were destroying “free enterprise” under
the leadership of Ralph Nader, Herbert Marcuse and other “dangerous
extremists.”
The messages are pretty
much the same, but the rhetoric is quite different. The liberal
rhetoric is largely reserved, while the business rhetoric reaches the
frenzied pitch of a 3-year-old who has all the toys and laments that
one might be taken away.
I think this is also
correct, and here is a link to Lewis
F. Powell Jr. (whom I have treated many times in Nederlog).
Here is more:
The other side of the coin
is the Reagan-Thatcher assault on unions, now advanced by the
authorization of right-to-scrounge laws (in Orwellian terminology,
“right-to-work” laws) by the most reactionary Supreme Court in over a
century. The guiding doctrine is to create a world of isolated
individuals at the mercy of concentrated private power in accord with
the Thatcherite doctrine that “there is no society,” (..)
Yes indeed, and
entirely correct (by my information).
In Europe, the attack on
democracy is amplified by the strongly undemocratic institutions of the
European Union. Major decisions over policy are made by the unelected
Troika — European Commission, International Monetary Fund (IMF),
European Central Bank — with the northern banks right at their
shoulders. The population has little to say, and knows it — a large
reason for the general collapse of the centrist parties that have
governed the countries since World War II.
And this seems also
quite true (and I have never liked or wanted a European Union,
although
I strongly dislike Wilders, who happens to agree).
In fact, there is a lot
more in the interview. Here is the ending:
What do you think
will take to halt the spread of political authoritarianism across the
globe?
The familiar advice, easy
to state, hard to follow, but if there’s another way, it’s been kept a
dark secret: honest, dedicated, courageous and persistent engagement,
ranging from education and organization to direct activism, carefully
honed for effectiveness under prevailing circumstances. Hard work,
necessary work, the kind that has succeeded in the past and can again.
I have to agree,
although I have to add that I am not optimistic, especially in
view of
the fact that everyone with an internet computer is surveilled to
the
limit by many secret services and by Facebook, Google, Apple and
Microsoft. And this is a strongly recommended article.
3. We
Will Have to Face the Consequences of Donald Trump Getting His Hands on
the Economy
This
article is by Nomi
Prins on Common Dreams and originally on TomDispatch. It starts as
follows:
Here we are in the middle
of the second year of Donald Trump’s presidency and if there’s one
thing we know by now, it’s that the leader of the free world can create
an instant reality-TV show on geopolitical steroids at will. True, he’s
not polished in his demeanor, but he has an unerring way of instilling
the most uncertainty in any situation in the least amount of time.
Whether through executive
orders, tweets, cable-news interviews, or rallies, he regularly leaves
diplomacy in the dust, while allegedly delivering for a faithful base
of supporters who voted for him as the ultimate anti-diplomat. And
while he’s at it, he continues to take a wrecking ball to the countless
political institutions that litter the Acela Corridor. Amid all the
tweeted sound and fury, however, the rest of us are going to have to
face the consequences of Donald Trump getting his hands on the economy.
According to the
Merriam-Webster dictionary, entropy
is “a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder.”
With that in mind, perhaps the best way to predict President Trump’s
next action is just to focus on the path of greatest entropy and take
it from there.
Let me do just that, while
exploring five key economic sallies of the Trump White House since he
took office and the bleakness and chaos that may lie ahead as the
damage to the economy and our financial future comes into greater focus.
In fact, this is
another fine article that is difficult to excerpt. It has five
sections, and I give the titles of each and some brief quotations from
three of them, but you are recommended to read all of it.
Here is the first
section (in small part):
1. Continuous Banking
Deregulation
(...) In this fashion, such still-evolving
deregulatory actions reflect the way Trump’s anti-establishment
election campaign has turned into a full-scale program aimed at
increasing the wealth and power of the financial elites, while
decreasing their responsibility to us. Don’t expect a financial future
along such lines to look pretty. Think entropy.
Well... I agree giving
trillions
to the few rich and hardly anything to the rest will spell disorder in
the lives of the non-rich, but I do think this was and is a firm plan
of Trump.
Here is more:
2. Tensions Rise in the
Auto Wars
(...) Though President Trump’s threat to slap high
tariffs on imported autos and auto parts from the European Union is now
in
limbo due to a recent announcement of ongoing negotiations, he
retains the right if he gets annoyed by... well, anything... to do so.
The German auto industry alone employs more than 118,000
people in the U.S. and, if invoked, such taxes would increase its
car prices and put domestic jobs instantly at risk.
Yes. And here is more:
3. The Populist Tyranny of
the Trump Tax Cuts
President Trump has been
particularly happy about his marquee corporate tax
“reform” bill, assuring his base that it will provide
jobs and growth to American workers, while putting lots of money in
their pockets. What it’s actually done, however, is cut the corporate
tax rate from 35% to 21%, providing corporations with tons of extra
cash. Their predictable reaction has not been to create jobs and raise
wages, but to divert that bonanza to their own coffers via share
buybacks in which they purchase their own stock. That provides
shareholders with bigger, more valuable pieces of a company, while
boosting earnings and CEO
bonuses.
(..)
As it is, large American
companies only pay an average effective tax rate of 18% (a figure that
will undoubtedly soon drop further). Last year, they only contributed 9
percent of the tax receipts of the government and that’s likely to
drop further to a record low this year, sending the deficit soaring.
Precisely. I just give the
titles to the next two sections:
4. Trade Wars, Currency
Wars, and the Conflicts to Come
5. Fighting the Fed
And this is the ending of the
article:
What we are
witnessing is the start of the entropy wars, which will, in turn,
hasten the unwinding of the American global experiment. Each arbitrary
bit of presidential pique, each tweet and insult, is a predecessor to
yet more possible economic upheavals and displacements, ever messier
and harder to clean up. Trump’s America could easily morph into a
worldwide catch-22. The more trust is destabilized, the greater the
economic distress. The weaker the economy, the more disruptable it
becomes by the Great Disrupter himself. And so the Trump spiral spins
onward, circling down an economic drain of his own making.
Yes, I think this diagnosis is
correct. There is a lot more in the article than I
quoted, and it is
strongly recommended.
4. Did
left-wing Hillary hate put Trump in the White House?
This article
is by Andrew O´Hehir on Salon. It starts as follows:
If we ask whether hatred of
Hillary Clinton, much of it irrational and fueled by decades’ worth of
outlandish conspiracy theory, played a role in the outcome of the 2016
presidential election — I mean, that’s not even a question, right?
Many interlocking factors
were implicated in the most bizarre and unlikely election result in
modern political history: James Comey’s fateful letter to Congress; the
disruption caused by fake news and social-media manipulation, some of
it apparently by the Russians; the Clinton campaign’s overconfidence
and complacency. But the orgiastic, “1984”-style outpouring of
lock-her-up Clinton hate, weaponized brilliantly by Donald Trump and
his campaign, was surely one of the biggest. To some degree it made all
the others possible.
Well... yes and no. I
more or less agree with O´Hehir, but he forgets
one thing (probably
because he is not a European): A mere two effective parties in the
USA
- in which those elected in Congress and the Senate also for the most
part are interested in increasing their own riches rather than in doing
what their voters want - is not democratic to start with, in my
view
(though I agree it may be made worse).
Here is more by O´Hehir:
So Republican voters
overwhelmingly showed up to pull the lever for Trump, whatever
misgivings they may have felt. Democratic voters didn’t quite do the
same for Clinton. That much is beyond dispute. But why did that happen,
exactly?
That’s where we come to the
chewy, poisoned-nougat underside of the question we started with: It
wasn’t just conservatives who despised Hillary Clinton. Did left-wing
Clinton hate tip the balance of the 2016 election and put Trump in the
White House?
Well... for one thing,
nobody knows, for there were some 100 million
non-voters. And for
another thing, I do not much care, for I think that the
whole set-up of having to choose from just two effective parties comes
close to engineered non-democracy, and especially in the
last 40 years.
Here is some more:
To state the question about
Trump and the left in its most extreme form — which is not, alas, an
invented form — did Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, Julian Assange, Chelsea
Manning, Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, working as the agents or
useful idiots of Vladimir Putin, join forces to torpedo our First Woman
President out of some misogynistic, nihilistic, puritanical and
America-hating spite?
Put that way, which
is only slightly more grandiose than the framing of ardent
Democratic loyalists like Neera Tanden, Malcolm Nance and Daily Kos, the proposition sounds deranged, if not
full-on Trumpian.
In fact, I agree, though
probably not for O´Hehir´s reasons. Here is the ending of the
article:
But the true legacy
of the non-anti-Trump left is more complicated than that. Its existence
reflects a larger sense of existential doubt that stretches clear
across the American political spectrum and to some extent has infected
us all. It may also offer the Democratic Party leadership yet another
opportunity to blame the left for its extraordinary record of political
failure and postpone its day of reckoning
I don´t know
about the
second statement quoted above, but I guess the third statement may be
correct: Because Hillary Clinton is so much paid by the Wall Street
banks (both Clintons now own more than $120 million, it seems) and
because the Wall Street bankers and others invest a whole lot of money
in the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton may yet again be a
presidential candidate in 2020.
5. Medical
Applications Expose Current Limits of AI
This article is by
Martin Müller on Spiegel International. It is mostly not about
the crisis but about health, but I put it here because my ex
and myself are almost forty (40) years ill with the disease ME/CFS, that we only now -
¨after a mere forty years¨ are ¨allowed¨ by Dutch medics to call a
¨serious chronic disease¨.
Before that we were insane according to 9 out of
10
Dutch doctors, though they usually prettified this to ¨it is
psychosomatic¨ (which is unmedical bullshit)
but in fact the vast majority of all Dutch doctors thought we
were either hallucinating or cheating - for forty years, in
which we
both got an excellent M.A. in psychology but were to ill to make any
money with that. (And I am sorry, but the last 40
years of constant
medical discrimination by Dutch doctors have made me extremely
skeptical of any and of all Dutch medical doctors.)
Here is the start of the article:
You're in bad shape, very
bad shape. And when you arrive at the office, you are faced with a
choice: You can be treated by a senior physician who speaks soothingly,
is the senior expert in his field and seems to have years of
experience. "I've been working as a doctor for 35 years," he says.
"We'll find out what's wrong with you."
Do you trust him?
Or would you go with the
resident, who has been licensed for three months and has virtually no
experience on the job? The young doctor holds a tablet computer under
his arm. "It provides me with access to 600 years of experience from
chief physicians," he says. "Don't worry, we'll find out what's wrong
with you."
In fact, that's not an
unrealistic scenario. According to an estimate made by German statutory
health insurer AOK, nearly 20,000 people die every year in Germany
alone as a result of malpractice. It can take up to half a decade for
the correct diagnosis of rare diseases to be found, and in the
best-case scenario, the average doctor has only studied around 1,000
out of 30,000 known diseases by the time of his or her final
examinations.
This could all change with
the help of data and artificial intelligence -- at least that's the
promise currently being made in the global health-care industry.
Machine medicine, the data-assisted diagnosis and treatment of
diseases, is on the verge of revolutionizing medicine more deeply than
stethoscopes did in 1816, X-rays in 1895 or cranial MRIs in 1978. It's
even fueling a kind of euphoria in speeches, at conferences and in the
media. Hopes are high, and so are the financial stakes.
I say! First, I am glad
to read that ¨the average doctor
has only studied around 1,000 out of 30,000 known diseases by the time
of his or her final examinations¨.
This is about Germany,
but in Holland education is worse, so this is the upper limit of what
doctors know of medicine:
They know 1/30th part of the
diseases people may get, and do not know
the rest.
This is one major reason
why at least 9 out of 10 (probably in fact 999/1000) Dutch doctors were
so insistent that my (very intelligent) ex and my (very intelligent)
self were lying
to them (if we were not hallucinating), even
though we both fell ill three months into the first year of our
university studies.
So to answer the question: I
would certainly not believe the first doctor, for he knows (at
best)
1/30th of the diseases I may suffer from, and consulting him (with a
rare and undiagnosed disease) is more like gambllng
than anything else.
Also, I certainly would not
go to the second doctor (and in the case of my ex and myself it took at
least 40 years - not ¨half
a
decade¨ - to arrive at any
minimally correct diagnosis), and my reason there is
that I know 6
computer languages; have a PC since 1987; and know that virtually any
claim I have heard about computing in the last 30+ years of computing
was vastly exaggerated.
Here is some more on
diagnosing-by-computer:
With its miraculous new
weapon, the software giant also wants to revolutionize medicine, a
global market worth trillions of dollars, an industry in which hope and
disappointment are closely linked. The prospects for the technology are
considerable. The product aims to tackle much bigger conditions than
colds, aches or pains -- like cancer or ailments with mysterious,
unexplainable symptoms.
The approach used by Watson
sounds logical: Given that medical knowledge is doubling every three
years, no doctor out can keep up with all the research, and each
patient can provide an extremely large amount of individual health
data. Watson searches these data and findings for relevance to an
individual case in ways that no doctor could.
At least in theory.
In fact, it was mostly
a vast
deception by IBM. At least, that is what the article indicates, and I
agree for reasons explained above.
And while I also think that diagnosing-by-computer may be the future (if
Trump does not blow up the world), that future has not arrived
yet, and
will very probably never arrive for me or my ex, since I am 68 and she
is 64.
Thank you, Dutch medical
doctors: You ruined our lives, you ruined our chances, you ruined
our incomes - and all because nearly every Dutch doctor was
constititionally incapable of saying ¨I don´t know¨.
Note
[1]
I have
now been
saying since
the
end of 2015 that
xs4all.nl is systematically
ruining my site by NOT updating it within a few seconds,
as it did between 1996 and 2015, but by updating it between
two to seven days later, that is, if I am lucky.
They
have
claimed that my site was wrongly named in html: A lie.
They have claimed that my operating system was out of date: A lie.
And
they
just don't care for my site, my interests, my values or my
ideas. They have behaved now for 2 years
as if they are the
eagerly willing instruments of the US's secret services, which I
will
from now on suppose they are (for truth is dead in Holland).
The only
two reasons I remain with xs4all is that my site has been
there since 1996, and I have no reasons whatsoever to suppose that any
other Dutch provider is any better (!!).
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