Michael1942's Blog

	It is apparent the the GOP has continued to push for re civil war and 50’s and 60’s policies that benefit their agenda while keeping a foot on the necks of anyone of color and more directly now women and their health. These so called religious rightists have emerged and reemerged several times with the backing of political types whose sole objective is control of the government at any cost. MA
	September 3, 2021Heather Cox RichardsonSep 4The new anti-abortion law in Texas is not just about abortion; it is about undermining civil rights decisions made by the Supreme Court during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court declined to stop a state law that violates a constitutional right.Since World War II, the Supreme Court has defended civil rights from state laws that threaten them. During the Great Depression, Democrats under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt began to use the government to regulate business, provide a basic social safety net—this is when we got Social Security—and promote infrastructure. But racist Democrats from the South balked at racial equality under this new government.After World War II, under Chief Justice Earl Warren, a Republican appointed by President Dwight Eisenhower, and Chief Justice Warren Burger, a Republican appointed by Richard Nixon, the Supreme Court set out to make all Americans equal before the law. They tried to end segregation through the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, decision prohibiting racial segregation in public schools. They protected the right of married couples to use contraception in 1965. They legalized interracial marriage in 1967. In 1973, with the Roe v. Wade decision, they tried to give women control over their own reproduction by legalizing abortion.They based their decisions on the due process and the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, passed by Congress in 1866 and ratified in 1868 in the wake of the Civil War. Congress developed this amendment after legislatures in former Confederate states passed “Black Codes” that severely limited the rights and protections for formerly enslaved people. Congress intended for the powers in the Fourteenth to enable the federal government to guarantee that African Americans had the same rights as white Americans, even in states whose legislatures intended to keep them in a form of quasi-slavery.Justices in the Warren and Burger courts argued that the Fourteenth Amendment required that the Bill of Rights apply to state governments as well as to the federal government. This is known as the “incorporation doctrine,” but the name matters less than the concept: states cannot abridge an individual’s rights, any more than the federal government can. This doctrine dramatically expanded civil rights.From the beginning, there was a backlash against the New Deal government by businessmen who objected to the idea of federal regulation and the bureaucracy it would require. As early as 1937, they were demanding an end to the active government and a return to the world of the 1920s, where businessmen could do as they wished, families and churches managed social welfare, and private interests profited from infrastructure projects. They gained little traction. The vast majority of Americans liked the new system.But the expansion of civil rights under the Warren Court was a whole new kettle of fish. Opponents of the new decisions insisted that the court was engaging in “judicial activism,” taking away from voters the right to make their own decisions about how society should work. That said that justices were “legislating from the bench.” They insisted that the Constitution is limited by the views of its framers and that the government can do nothing that is not explicitly written in that 1787 document.This is the foundation for today’s “originalists” on the court. They are trying to erase the era of legislation and legal decisions that constructed our modern nation. If the government is as limited as they say, it cannot regulate business. It cannot provide a social safety net or promote infrastructure, both things that cost tax dollars and, in the case of infrastructure, take lucrative opportunities from private businesses.It cannot protect the rights of minorities or women.Their doctrine would send authority for civil rights back to the states to wither or thrive as different legislatures see fit. But it has, in the past, run into the problem that Supreme Court precedent has led the court to overturn unconstitutional state laws that deprive people of their rights (although the recent conservative courts have chipped away at those precedents).The new Texas law gets around this problem with a trick. It does not put state officers in charge of enforcing it. Instead, it turns enforcement over to individual citizens. So, when opponents sued to stop the measure from going into effect, state officials argued that they could not be stopped from enforcing the law because they don’t enforce it in the first place. With this workaround, Texas lawmakers have, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted in his dissent, “delegate[d] to private individuals the power to prevent a woman from…[exercising]…a federal constitutional right.”Justice Sonia Sotomayor was more forceful, calling the measure “a flagrantly unconstitutional law engineered to prohibit women from exercising their constitutional rights and evade judicial scrutiny.” And yet, the Supreme Court permitted that state law to stand simply by refusing to do anything to stop it. As Sotomayor wrote in her dissent: “Last night, the Court silently acquiesced in a State’s enactment of a law that flouts nearly 50 years of federal precedents.”A state has undermined the power of the federal government to protect civil rights. It has given individuals who disagree with one particular right the power to take it away from their neighbors. But make no mistake: there is no reason that this mechanism couldn’t be used to undermine much of the civil rights legislation of the post–World War II years.On September 4, 1957, three years after the Brown v. Board of Education decision, a crowd of angry white people barred nine Black students from entering Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The white protesters chanted: “Two, four, six, eight, we ain’t gonna integrate.”In 1957, Republican President Dwight Eisenhower used the federal government to protect the constitutional rights of the Little Rock Nine from the white vigilantes who wanted to keep them second-class citizens. In 2021, the Supreme Court has handed power back to the vigilantes.—-

Reed Albergotti  6 hrs ago

Prophets are never believed until the truth slaps us in the face-Remember climate change warnings? MA

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In 1994 — before most Americans had an email address or Internet access or even a personal computer — Philip Agre foresaw that computers would one day facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society.

That process would change and simplify human behavior, wrote the then UCLA humanities professor. And because that data would be collected not by a single, powerful “big brother” government but by lots of entities for lots of different purposes, he predicted that people would willingly part with massive amounts of information about their most personal fears and desires.

“Genuinely worrisome developments can seem ‘not so bad‘ simply for lacking the overt horrors of Orwell’s dystopia,” wrote Agre, who has a doctorate in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in an academic paper.

Nearly 30 years later, Agre’s paper seems eerily prescient, a startling vision of a future that has come to pass in the form of a data industrial complex that knows no borders and few laws. Data collected by disparate ad networks and mobile apps for myriad purposes is being used to sway elections or, in at least one case, to out a gay priest. But Agre didn’t stop there. He foresaw the authoritarian misuse of facial recognition technology, he predicted our inability to resist well-crafted disinformation and he foretold that artificial intelligence would be put to dark uses if not subjected to moral and philosophical inquiry.

Then, no one listened. Now, many of Agre’s former colleagues and friends say they’ve been thinking about him more in recent years, and rereading his work, as pitfalls of the Internet’s explosive and unchecked growth have come into relief, eroding democracy and helping to facilitate a violent uprising on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in January.

“We’re living in the aftermath of ignoring people like Phil,” said Marc Rotenberg, who edited a book with Agre in 1998 on technology and privacy, and is now founder and executive director for the Center for AI and Digital Policy.

Charlotte Lee, who studied under Agre as a graduate student at UCLA, and is now a professor of human-centered design and engineering at the University of Washington, said she is still studying his work and learning from it today. She said she wishes he were around to help her understand it even better.

But Agre isn’t available. In 2009, he simply dropped off the face of the earth, abandoning his position at UCLA. When friends reported Agre missing, police located him and confirmed that he was OK, but Agre never returned to the public debate. His closest friends declined to further discuss details of his disappearance, citing respect for Agre’s privacy.

Instead, many of the ideas and conclusions that Agre explored in his academic research and his writing are only recently cropping up at think tanks and nonprofits focused on holding technology companies accountable.

“I’m seeing things Phil wrote about in the 90s being said today as though they’re new ideas,” said Christine Borgman, a professor of information studies at UCLA who helped recruit Agre for his professorship at the school.

The Washington Post sent a message to Agre’s last known email address. It bounced back. Attempts to contact his sister and other family members were unsuccessful. A dozen former colleagues and friends had no idea where Agre is living today. Some said that, as of a few years ago, he was living somewhere around Los Angeles.

Agre was a child math prodigy who became a popular blogger and contributor to Wired. Now he has been all but forgotten in mainstream technology circles. But his work is still regularly cited by technology researchers in academia and is considered foundational reading in the field of social informatics, or the study of the effects of computers on society.

Agre earned his doctorate at MIT in 1989, the same year the World Wide Web was invented. At that time, even among Silicon Valley venture capitalists betting on the rise of computers, few people foresaw just how deeply and quickly the computerization of everything would change life, economics or even politics.

A small group of academics, Agre included, observed that computer scientists viewed their work in a vacuum largely disconnected from the world around it. At the same time, people outside that world lacked a deep enough understanding of technology or how it was about to change their lives.

By the early 1990s, Agre came to believe the field of artificial intelligence had gone astray, and that a lack of criticism of the profession was one of the main reasons. In those early days of artificial intelligence, most people in AI were focused on complex math problems aimed at automating human tasks, with limited success. Yet the industry described the code they were writing as “intelligent,” giving it human attributes that didn’t actually exist.

His landmark 1997 paper called “Lessons Learned in Trying to Reform AI” is still largely considered a classic, said Geoffrey Bowker, professor emeritus of informatics at University of California, Irvine. Agre noticed that those building artificial intelligence ignored critiques of the technology from outsiders. But Agre argued criticism should be part of the process of building AI. “The conclusion is quite brilliant and has taken us as a field many years to understand. One foot planted in the craftwork in design and the other foot planted in a critique,” Bowker said.

Nevertheless, AI has barreled ahead unencumbered, weaving itself into even “low tech” industries and affecting the lives of most people who use the Internet. It guides people on what to watch and read on YouTube and Facebook, it determines sentences for convicted criminals, allows companies to automate and eliminate jobs, and allows authoritarian regimes to monitor citizens with greater efficiency and thwart attempts at democracy.

Today’s AI, which has largely abandoned the type of work Agre and others were doing in the ’80s and ’90s, is focused on ingesting massive sums of data and analyzing it with the world’s most powerful computers. But as the new form of AI has progressed, it has created problems — ranging from discrimination to filter bubbles to the spread of disinformation — and some academics say that is in part because it suffers from the same lack of self-criticism that Agre identified 30 years ago.

In December, Google’s firing of AI research scientist Timnit Gebru after she wrote a paper on the ethical issues facing Google’s AI efforts, highlighted the continued tension over the ethics of artificial intelligence and the industry’s aversion to criticism.

“It’s such a homogenous field and people in that field don’t see that maybe what they’re doing could be criticized,” said Sofian Audrey, a professor of computational media at University of Quebec who began as an artificial intelligence researcher. “What Agre says is that it is worthwhile and necessary that the people who develop these technologies are critical,” Audrey said.

Agre grew up in Maryland, where he said he was “constructed to be a math prodigy” by a psychologist in the region. He said in his 1997 paper that school integration led to a search for gifted and talented students. Agre later became angry at his parents for sending him off to college early and his relationship with them suffered as a result, according to a friend, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because Agre did not give him permission to speak about his personal life.

Agre wrote that when he entered college, he wasn’t required to learn about much else other than math and “arrived in graduate school at MIT with little genuine knowledge beyond math and computers.” He took a year off graduate school to travel and read, “Trying in an indiscriminate way, and on my own resources, to become an educated person,” he wrote.

Agre began to rebel, in a sense, from his profession, seeking out critics of artificial intelligence, studying philosophy and other academic disciplines. At first, he found the texts “impenetrable,” he wrote, because he had trained his mind to dissect everything he read as he would a technical paper on math or computer science. “It finally occurred to me to stop translating these strange disciplinary languages into technical schemata, and instead simply to learn them on their own terms,” he wrote.

Agre’s blossoming intellectual interest took him away from computer science and transformed him into something unusual at that time: A brilliant mathematician with a deep understanding of the most advanced theories in artificial intelligence, who could also step outside of that realm and look at it critically from the perspective of an outsider.

or this reason, Agre became a sought-after academic. Several former colleagues told stories about Agre’s insatiable appetite on books from across the academic and popular landscape, piled high in his office or in the library. He became known for his original thinking that was buoyed by his widespread curiosity.

“He was a very enlightening person to think with — someone you would want to have a meal with at every opportunity,” Borgman said.

Agre combined his understanding of the humanities and technology to dissect the impact technology would have on society as it progressed. Today, many of his analyses read like predictions come true.

In a 1994 paper, published a year before the launches of Yahoo, Amazon and eBay, Agre foresaw that computers could facilitate the mass collection of data on everything in society, and that people would overlook the privacy concerns because, rather than “big brother” collecting data to surveil citizens, it would be many different entities collecting the data for lots of purposes, some good and some problematic.

More profoundly, though, Agre wrote in the paper that the mass collection of data would change and simplify human behavior to make it easier to quantify. That has happened on a scale few people could have imagined, as social media and other online networks have corralled human interactions into easily quantifiable metrics, such as being friends or not, liking or not, a follower or someone who is followed. And the data generated by those interactions has been used to further shape behavior, by targeting messages meant to manipulate people psychologically.

In 2001, he wrote that “your face is not a bar code,” arguing against the use of facial recognition in public places. In the article, he predicted that, if the technology continues to develop in the West, it would eventually be adopted elsewhere, allowing, for instance, the Chinese government to track everyone inside its country within 20 years.

Twenty years later, a debate is raging in the U.S. over the use of facial recognition technology by law enforcement and immigration officials and some states have begun to ban the technology in public places. Despite outcry, it may be too late to curtail the proliferation of the technology. China, as Agre predicted, has already begun employing it on a mass scale, allowing an unprecedented level of surveillance by the Communist Party.

Agre brought his work into the mainstream with an Internet mailing list called the Red Rock Eater News Service, named after a joke in Bennett Cerf’s Book of Riddles. It’s considered an early example of what would eventually become blogs.

Agre was also, at times, deeply frustrated with the limitations of his work, which was so far ahead of its time that it went unheeded until 25 years later. “He felt that people didn’t get what he was saying. He was writing for an audience of the benighted and the benighted were unable to understand what he was saying,” Bowker said.

“He was certainly frustrated that there wasn’t more uptake. But people who are a generation ahead of themselves, they’re always a generation ahead of themselves,” Borgman said.

Agre’s final project was what friends and colleagues colloquially called “The Bible of the Internet,” a definitive book that would dissect the foundations of the Internet from the ground up. But he never finished it.

From time to time, Agre resurfaces, according to a former colleague, but has not been seen in years.

“Why do certain kinds of insightful scholars or even people with such an insightful understanding of some field essentially throw their arms in the air and go I’m done with this?” asked Simon Penny, a professor of fine arts at University of California, Irvine who has studied Agre’s work extensively. “Psychologically people have these breaks. It’s a big question. Who goes on and why? Who continues to be engaged in some sort of battle, some sort of intellectual project and at what point do they go I’m done? Or, say ‘this is not relevant to me anymore and I’ve see the error of my ways.’”

Several years ago, former colleagues at UCLA attempted to put together a collection of his work, but Agre resurfaced, telling them to stop.

Agre’s life’s work was left uncompleted, questions posed but unanswered. John Seberger, a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Informatics at Indiana University who has studied Agre’s work extensively, said that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Seberger said Agre’s work offers a way of thinking about the problems that face an increasingly digital society. But today, more than a decade after Agre’s disappearance, the problems are more clearly understood and there are more people studying them.

“Especially right now when we are dealing with profound social unrest, the possibility to involve more diverse groups of scholars in answering these questions that he left unanswered can only benefit us,” he said.

	It appears that the information or misinformation about tax cuts have finally shown how “tax” reforms have failed the public in general while benefitting the high earners including many of our current and former legislators. MA
	August 10, 2021Heather Cox Richardson Aug 11 The shocking revelations from former acting attorney general Jeffrey A. Rosen about former president Trump’s direct efforts to use the Department of Justice to overturn the 2020 election, along with the horrors of spiking Covid among the unvaccinated, drove out of the news cycle a revelatory piece of news. Last Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the Department of Labor released the jobs report for August 2021. It was stronger than economists had predicted, and even stronger than the administration had hoped. In July, employers added 943,000 jobs, and unemployment fell to 5.4%. Average hourly wages increased, as well. They are 4% higher than they were a year ago. Harvard Professor Jason Furman, former chair of President Barack Obama’s Council of Economic Advisors, tweeted: “I have yet to find a blemish in this jobs report. I’ve never before seen such a wonderful set of economic data.” He noted the report showed “Job gains in most sectors… Big decline in unemployment rate, even bigger for Black & Hispanic/Latino… Reduction in long-term unemployment]… Solid (nominal) wage gains. ”Still a long way to go,” he wrote. “We’re about 7.5 million jobs short of where we should have been right now absent the pandemic. But we’ve made a lot of progress. “Michael Gapen, chief U.S. economist at Barclays, told New York Times reporter Nelson D. Schwartz: “It’s an unambiguously positive report…. Labor market conditions are strong. Unemployment benefits, infection risks and child care constraints are not preventing robust hiring. “The jobs report is an important political marker because it appears to validate the Democrats’ approach to the economy, the system the president calls the “Biden Plan.” That plan started in January, as soon as Biden took office, using the federal government to combat the coronavirus pandemic as aggressively as the administration could and, at the same time, using federal support to restart the economy. In March 2021, the Democrats passed the American Rescue Plan, a $1.9 trillion economic stimulus package. In addition to strengthening healthcare systems to combat the coronavirus, it provides economic relief primarily to low- and middle-income Americans by extending unemployment benefits and the child tax credit; funding schools, housing, and local governments; providing help for small businesses; and so on. Polls indicated that the measure was enormously popular. A Morning Consult poll from February showed that 3 out of 4 voters liked it, and local governments and state governors, including a number of Republicans, backed the bill.But every single Republican lawmaker in the House of Representatives voted against the measure, saying it was too expensive and that it was unnecessary. Since 1980, Republican lawmakers have opposed government intervention to stimulate the economy, insisting that private investment is more efficient. Rather than use the government as presidents of both parties from Franklin Delano Roosevelt through Jimmy Carter did to keep the playing field level and promote growth, modern-day Republicans have argued that the government should simply cut taxes in order to free up capital for wealthier Americans to invest. This, they said, would create enough growth to make up for lost tax revenues. President Ronald Reagan began this trend with major tax cuts in 1981 and 1986. President George H.W. Bush promised not to raise taxes—remember “Read my lips: No new taxes”—but found he had to increase revenues to address the skyrocketing deficits the Reagan cuts created. When he did agree to higher taxes, his own party leaders turned against him. Then President George W. Bush cut taxes again in 2001 and 2003, despite the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and in 2017, Republicans under President Donald Trump cut taxes still further. In 2017, Trump claimed the cut would be “rocket fuel for the economy.” Then–Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin echoed almost 40 years of Republican ideology when he said: “The tax plan will pay for itself with economic growth.” And then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said: “After eight straight years of slow growth and underperformance, America is ready to take off.” (In fact, while Trump’s tax cuts meant tax revenues dropped 31%, they yielded only 2.9% growth, the exact same as the economy enjoyed in 2015, before the cuts.)Laws like the American Rescue Plan should, in the Republicans’ view, destroy the economy. But Friday’s booming jobs report, along with the reality that the Biden administration has created an average of 832,000 new jobs per month, knocks a serious hole in that argument. It may be that the pendulum is swinging away from the Republican conviction that tax cuts and private investment are the only key to economic growth. Today, the Senate passed a $1 trillion bipartisan infrastructure bill by a vote of 69 to 30. The bill repairs roads and bridges, invests in transit and railroads, replaces lead pipes, and provides broadband across the country, among other things. In the next ten years, it is expected to create nearly 3 million jobs. Nineteen Republicans voted in favor of the bill. There were many reasons to do so. The measure is popular with voters, and Republicans were embarrassed by their unanimous opposition to the American Rescue Plan. Indicating a willingness to work with Democrats might also undercut the Republicans’ image as obstructionists and help to protect the filibuster (a factor I’m guessing was behind McConnell’s yes vote).But that Republicans felt they needed to abandon their position and vote yes for any reason is a big deal. “For the Republicans who supported this bill, you showed a lot of courage,” Biden told them. “And I want to personally thank you for that. “The bill now goes to the House, which will take it up after the Senate passes a $3.5 trillion infrastructure measure through the reconciliation process, which Democrats can do with a simple majority and without Republican support. The larger package addresses climate change, child care, elder care, housing, and so on. Moody Analytics, which provides economic research and modeling, says that, if it is combined with the bipartisan bill, it will add close to 2 million jobs a year over the next ten years. Yet, Republicans say it is a “reckless tax and spending spree. In contrast, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen said: “My largest concern is not: What are the risks if we make these big investments? It is: What is the cost if we don’t?”—-