Ilhan Omar being a typical congresscritter:
«Suspicion was deepened by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) — a backer of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) — who amplified a tweet early Tuesday suggesting that the app’s developer was tied to former South Bend, Ind., mayor Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.»
Role-playing? Ok, but that’s not anything like a real simulation.
«Iowa Democrats took great pains to prevent this very situation. A breakdown in reporting on the mobile app was among the scenarios used in a role-play run in Des Moines last fall by the Defending Digital Democracy Project at Harvard’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. The state party, along with its Republican counterpart, partnered with the project’s leaders for a simulation in November. They were joined by security experts as well as developers behind the website and mobile app used by the parties to publicize caucus details and report returns.
Details of a problem would arrive via email, bringing news, for example, of difficulty with the app or of false tweets claiming that the caucuses began at a different time. Democrats used the simulation to develop possible plans for caucus night, including contingencies such as bringing in the Department of Homeland Security and contacting executives at Twitter.»
At least they knew they needed a paper trail, so yay that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/03/us/politics/iowa-caucus-app.html
Queueing theory, anyone?
«there were concerns that the app would malfunction in areas with poor connectivity, or because of high bandwidth use, such as when many people tried to use it at the same time.
….
Jerry Depew, the Democratic county chairman from Pocahontas County, said that the report line and the help line were the same phone number.
“I had not expected it to be busy at 8 p.m.,” he said, when he tried to call in results from his precinct. “But if caucus chairs were calling for help at the same time that easy caucuses were trying to report results, the phones could have been overloaded.”»
«“The underlying data and paper trail is sound,” she continued, “and will simply take time to further report the results.”»
PAPER TRAIL!
Get rid of those all-electronic things and stop getting bedazzled by technology!
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/iowa-caucus-app-shadow_n_5e390191c5b687dacc722824
Hey, @robillard, @aterkel, @mtredden, @huffpostpol, “enterprise” software developer here. $60,000 sounds like chump change for a piece of software like this (and a system that will require flawless, peak performance on exactly one night). If that’s truly what was paid, you might want to consider how responsible the customer was for going with what might have been the lowest estimate and fastest-promised timeline.
«Iowa Democratic Party paid Shadow, a tech company that joined with ACRONYM last year, more than $60,000 for “website development” over two installments in November and December of last year.»
73° (normally 42°) F outside my office in central North Carolina today (Feb 3, 2020), but, sure, let’s fix the models. THEY must be wrong.
http://www.openculture.com/2014/11/mahatma-gandhis-list-of-the-7-social-sins.html
Probably worth pinning this.
Politics without principles.
Wealth without work.
Pleasure without conscience.
Knowledge without character.
Commerce without morality.
Science without humanity.
Worship without sacrifice.
A quick note that I might come back to later.
«“You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your being, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: You must love your neighbor as you love yourself. All the Law and the Prophets depend on these two commands.”»
It’s not enough to just live by the Golden Rule (“treat others as you would yourself”). For one, some of us treat ourselves pretty badly. But also, in general, there’s a problem with “Policy X seems to me to be good for society in general (although some people will be hurt, but, hey, greatest good for greatest number), so let’s do Policy X.”
We are called to justice and mercy, and we should do justice and mercy *for no other reason than that God called us to it*. Not because it’s “fair” (do we really want to use human judgments of fairness? If someone hurts me, is it fair to hurt them back an equal amount?) or because it’s “good for society” (gassing Jews and sterilizing “mental defectives” was seen to be good for society, not so long ago).
There’s also what happens at the end of the book of Judges (ch. 21), as an example (the whole story is really the last three chapters of Judges, 19-21). The other 11 tribes of Israel decide to go to war with the tribe of Benjamin because of something bad that happened in a Benjaminite city. At the beginning of this war and as it progresses, they consult God repeatedly about what to do, but at some point they stop consulting God and just decide what to do by themselves. In other words, they leave God out of it. Here’s their solution, at the end:
«And they instructed the Benjaminites, saying, “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards, and watch; when the young women of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come out of the vineyards and each of you carry off a wife for himself from the young women of Shiloh, and go to the land of Benjamin. Then if their fathers or their brothers come to complain to us, we will say to them, ‘Be generous and allow us to have them; because we did not capture in battle a wife for each man. But neither did you incur guilt by giving your daughters to them.’” The Benjaminites did so; they took wives for each of them from the dancers whom they abducted. Then they went and returned to their territory, and rebuilt the towns, and lived in them. So the Israelites departed from there at that time by tribes and families, and they went out from there to their own territories.
In those days there was no king in Israel; all the people did what was right in their own eyes.»
That last line is the very end of the book of Judges, and I see it as a bitterly sarcastic statement. This story ends with mass kidnapping and rape, sanctioned by the people who didn’t consult God about how to solve a problem, and that last line seems to carry a ton of weight.
To be fair, too much of either approach can be bad. We need both, and we need balance. (Duh, who hasn’t said that before?) But the God thing has to be present.
So go to worship, and pray. 🙂
I guess /The Banality of Evil/ is too much for those of us now accustomed to a steady diet of tweets, but here’s a nice thread (read: article):
«the principal American judge, Francis Biddle, and the Soviet Union’s judge, General Iona Nikitchenko, had voted to sentence Speer to death, but another American judge, John Parker, and a British judge, Norman Birkett, argued for clemency, apparently because he seemed to them too refined to be a mass murderer. Also taken into consideration was his cooperation with Allied intelligence. The [20-year] jail sentence was a compromise reached after a two-day argument among the judges.»
https://twitter.com/karaswisher/status/1223791920016756737?s=20
Worth remembering. Social media is garbage.
Kara Swisher (@karaswisher) Tweeted:
Lastly there are a lot of bots out there too spinning up the rage — this digital medium was designed for mass obfuscation. You are its victim.
This is the result of *decades* of cultivation of racists by Republican party operators. That’s political malpractice, *at best.*
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1223082122988134400.html
https://twitter.com/TimAlberta/status/1223086332987179009?s=20
Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) Tweeted:
And it’s not just about money. I’ve had numerous retiring Rs talk warily — sometimes fearfully — about the “cult” of Trump supporters back home. They worry about harassment of their families, loss of standing in local communities, estranged relationships, etc.
Here, Read This 