The Republican Fausts – The New York Times

“Many Republican members of Congress have made a Faustian bargain with Donald Trump. They don’t particularly admire him as a man, they don’t trust him as an administrator, they don’t agree with him on major issues, but they respect the grip he has on their voters, they hope he’ll sign their legislation and they certainly don’t want to be seen siding with the inflamed progressives or the hyperventilating media.

Their position was at least comprehensible: How many times in a lifetime does your party control all levers of power? When that happens you’re willing to tolerate a little Trumpian circus behavior in order to get things done.”

Thank you David Brooks. Here is a comment I endorse:

Ami Portland Oregon 7 hours ago

“Thank you for this position. I know as a life long Republican this could not have been easy for you to write. The Republican party has a choice, they can put country before party and stand up to the bully who calls himself a Republican president or they can make excuses for him hoping he will throw them a bone and pass legislation they care about. The American people are watching closely.

Some things that the Republicans need to keep in mind as they make their decision. Trump lost by 3 million votes so he doesn’t have a mandate. Despite what fox news reports there were women’s marches in all 50 states. When people march in conservative states Republicans need to pay attention. Also, Trump will eventually turn on the Republican party. He’s not really a Republican, he just used their platform to get elected.

We’re a nation made up of people who are united in our differences. Each part of the country has different priorities and beliefs but the one thing we all agree on is that we are Americans first. As Americans we are proud of the fact that we are a nation of laws. We are not deliberately cruel.

If Americans feel that the only way to control Trump is to vote Republicans out of office in the mid terms we will do so. Republicans need to decide what they are going to do quickly. Trump will define the Republican party for a generation if they don’t act soon.”

1189 Recommended

Fred Korematsu – Wikipedia

“Fred Toyosaburo Korematsu (是松 豊三郎 Korematsu Toyosaburō?, January 30, 1919 – March 30, 2005) was an American civil rights activist who objected to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. Shortly after the Imperial Japanese Navy launched its attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, which authorized that individuals of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast were to be removed from their homes and forced to live in internment camps, but Korematsu instead challenged the orders and became a fugitive.The legality of the internment order was upheld by the Supreme Court of the United States in Korematsu v. United States; this ruling has never been explicitly overturned.

[1] Korematsu’s conviction for evading internment was overturned decades later after the disclosure of new evidence challenging the necessity of the internment, evidence which had been withheld from the courts by the U.S. government during the war.[2]To commemorate his journey as a civil rights activist, the “Fred Korematsu Day of Civil Liberties and the Constitution” was observed for the first time on January 30, 2011, by the state of California, the first such commemoration for an Asian American in the United States. In 2015, Virginia passed legislation to make it the second state and first commonwealth to permanently recognize each January 30 as Fred Korematsu Day.[3][4][5]

The Fred T. Korematsu Institute was founded in 2009 to carry on Korematsu’s legacy as a civil rights advocate by educating and advocating for civil liberties for….”

Source: Fred Korematsu – Wikipedia

‘Has Anybody Gone to Prison for Violating the F.C.C.’s Do Not Call List?’ – The New York Times

A reader asks: ““Has anybody ever gone to prison for (repeatedly) violating the F.C.C.’s Do Not Call list?”Cecilia Kang, a technology reporter for The Times, considers the question._____No, no one has ever gone to prison for violating the National Do Not Call Registry, and it’s unlikely anyone ever will. That’s because the two federal agencies that oversee the list largely hand out civil, not criminal, penalties.

Underlying the reader’s question may be a frustration shared by many readers: Unwanted marketing calls haven’t gone away and, in some cases, seem to be getting worse. Data on robocalls and complaints (and lots reader email I’ve received in recent years) confirm that unauthorized telemarketing calls are on the rise and are hard to control.”

David Lindsay

According to one commentator, one way the US could get rid of robocalls would be to upgrade the national phone system to VOIP, or IP based services,  and insist on SIP technology. A less costly solution would be to make the penalties crimininal, and more severe, and have the Feds crack down on the companies whose products are being sold, who contract with the untraceable, off shore marketers.

To the New York Times Comments:  Hamden, CT Pending Approval

Good article and useful comments. My home is deluged with these unwanted calls, and I wonder daily, when my government is going to do something about this small, but annoying scourge of life in America. I remain critical of the NY Times insisting on pushing the Times Insider, to get extra cash out of its subscriber base. This report on robocalls is not really a Times Insider story, this is one of the most important consumer protection scandal stories or our times. For the NY Times to try and harvest something extra, by taking big news, and making it, pay extra for big news, is not only questionable, its despicable. What a great way to ruin your once excellent brand. Meanwhile, the intensiveness of robo calls is big news. The NYT should be covering it every week, because their subscribers, and the American public, and this subscriber, want relief.

Here is a helpful comments, from an informed writers:

OSS Architect

California 1 hour ago

“Robo-callers have to connect from a VoIP/IP network (calling based on the internet) to the PSTN (public switched telephone network); also known as POTS (plain old telephone service).

To do that, they need the complicity of a US Public Telco with access to the PSTN. So we know where these junk calls are coming from. One typical scenario is a small local telco in a sparsely populated area, that is not
profitable; except for money they get from robo-call operations that dump millions of calls into the PSTN system through their “portal”.

These “bad operators” are telco’s that are Federally licensed, and given the right regulatory environment their license to operate could be taken away.

In some sense, robo-calls are an unintended consequence of US Telco de-regulation in the 90’s. The current PSTN technology (SS7) has no way to authenticate caller ID’s. The Bell System monopoly controlled the number assignments and constructed all the caller ID information. Now anyone can spoof any caller ID.

Ironically, we’ve had commercial telephony technology since the late 90’s called SIP (session initiation protocol) which authenticates both call endpoints, and can’t be spoofed. This would eliminate robo-calls, but it requires overhaul of the phone system, which is in critical need of overhaul (to IP based services) for many reasons.”

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Jfitz

Boston 21 hours ago

“Call blocking is ineffective because the robocalls can randomly pick a phone number that will appear on your caller ID. It can even be your own. They can even pick caller ID’s from your local area so you think it’s a local call. You block it and another number is used. Looked at the government websites and they say report it to your phone company. Tried that. No help.

I’m told that robo computers blast out the calls, almost starting with 000, then when it gets a hit (not necessarily answered), it picks a calling number that appears on the caller ID. If you answer, the computer then rings back to the company sponsoring the calls. You get some service person — or computer message advising you of some “deal”. It would seem easy for enforcement agencies to figure out the sponsoring company, e.g. cruise line, and then lower the hammer on them.”

• 6 Recommended

Bannon Is Given Security Role Usually Held for Generals – The New York Times

”  ……But the defining moment for Mr. Bannon came Saturday night in the form of an executive order giving the rumpled right-wing agitator a full seat on the “principals committee” of the National Security Council — while downgrading the roles of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the director of national intelligence, who will now attend only when the council is considering issues in their direct areas of responsibilities. It is a startling elevation of a political adviser, to a status alongside the secretaries of state and defense, and over the president’s top military and intelligence advisers.”

It appears as if Bannon has taken over the US government.

Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban Is Cowardly and Dangerous – The New York Times

“First, reflect on the cruelty of President Trump’s decision on Friday to indefinitely suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees and temporarily ban people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. It took just hours to begin witnessing the injury and suffering this ban inflicts on families that had every reason to believe they had outrun carnage and despotism in their homelands to arrive in a singularly hopeful nation.

The first casualties of this bigoted, cowardly, self-defeating policy were detained early Saturday at American airports just hours after the executive order, ludicrously titled “Protecting the Nation From Foreign Terrorist Entry Into the United States,” went into effect. A federal judge in Brooklyn on Saturday evening issued an emergency stay, ordering that those stuck at the airports not be returned to their home countries. But the future of all the others subject to the executive order is far from settled.”

The end of coal is near: China just scrapped 103 power plants – ScienceAlert

InconvenientNews.Net

“China has announced plans to cancel more than 100 coal plants currently in development, scrapping what would amount to a massive 120 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired electricity capacity if the plants were completed.For a bit of context, the entire US has approximately 305 GW gigawatts of coal capacity in total, and this massive adjustment leaves room for China to advance its development of clean, renewable energy.”

Source: The end of coal is near: China just scrapped 103 power plants – ScienceAlert

This is good news, but the title is a little over the top. The article explains that China has more coal plant production than they could possibly need. After they shut these projects down, they will still have a huge number of coal plants on line. Their massive investments in renewable energy will eventually allow them to shut down their massive current coal energy capacity.

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The end of coal is near: China just scrapped 103 power plants – ScienceAlert

“China has announced plans to cancel more than 100 coal plants currently in development, scrapping what would amount to a massive 120 gigawatts (GW) of coal-fired electricity capacity if the plants were completed.For a bit of context, the entire US has approximately 305 GW gigawatts of coal capacity in total, and this massive adjustment leaves room for China to advance its development of clean, renewable energy.”

Source: The end of coal is near: China just scrapped 103 power plants – ScienceAlert

This is good news, but the title is a little over the top. The article explains that China has more coal plant production than they could possibly need. After they shut these projects down, they will still have a huge number of coal plants on line. Their massive investments in renewable energy will eventually allow them to shut down their massive current coal energy capacity.

Rogue Scientists Race to Save Climate Data from Trump | WIRED

This came in the other day from Kathleen Schomaker, the director of Gray Is Green.

Rogue Scientists Race to Save Climate Data from Trump

“The incoming Trump administration’s EPA transition team intends to remove some climate data from the agency’s website. These researchers are swooping in to help.”

wired.com|By Zoë Schlanger

 

“At 10 AM the Saturday before inauguration day, on the sixth floor of the Van Pelt Library at the University of Pennsylvania, roughly 60 hackers, scientists, archivists, and librarians were hunched over laptops, drawing flow charts on whiteboards, and shouting opinions on computer scripts across the room. They had hundreds of government web pages and data sets to get through before the end of the day—all strategically chosen from the pages of the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—any of which, they felt, might be deleted, altered, or removed from the public domain by the incoming Trump administration.”

Source: Rogue Scientists Race to Save Climate Data from Trump | WIRED

The Road to Tet – by George Herring – The New York Times

“In popular memory, America’s war in Vietnam begins sometime in the Kennedy administration. But its roots go much deeper, to the end of World War II and the revolution of Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh against French colonial rule.

As part of its broader — in this case misguided — Cold War policy of containing communism, the United States supported France’s war against the Communist-led Viet Minh, paying close to 80 percent of the cost by 1953. The war ended in 1954, with Vietnam divided at the 17th parallel, pending elections to be held in two years.”

The Closing of Trump’s America – by Roger Cohen – The New York Times

“Donald Trump is an ahistorical man. He knows nothing of European history and cares less, as his cavalier trashing of the alliance and union that ushered the Continent from its darkest hours demonstrates.

He knows little enough of American history to have chosen as his rallying cry “America First,” a slogan with a past clouded by allies-be-damned isolationism at the start of World War II. (Or perhaps that’s why he embraced it.)

The president does not even know the history of the C.I.A., as his self-regarding speech before the hallowed Memorial Wall showed. This was desecration of patriotic sacrifice through advanced narcissistic disorder.

He called the speech a “home run.”Great. Terrific. Phenomenal. Tremendous. Fabulous. Beautiful. How Trump has hollowed out these words. How arid, even nauseating, he has made them. They mean nothing. They are space-fillers issuing with a thudding regularity from his uncurious mind, and in the end of course they are all about him. Emptying words of meaning is an essential step on the road to autocratic rule. People need to lose their bearings before they prostrate themselves.”