Finding God in a Dog

• The most important thing to know today: ACA repeal is not over, not by a long shot. Andy Slavitt lays it out for us here.


• Facebook is blaming their AI for the fact that you can targets ads to "Jew Haters" on their platform.. On the one hand, between this and other betrayals of privacy, there is a good case for abandoning Facebook entirely. On the other, there is a case that Facebook's problems are just the tip of the iceberg. Remember Total Information Awareness? Do you think that's gone away? Or, on the other hand, do you think that maybe someone at Homeland Security is doing exactly the same analysis that Facebook is, but geared towards rooting out enemies of the state instead of selling advertising?


• Lots of people among my Facebook friends and anti-war buddies supported Trump on the grounds that he would be better for brown people overseas (even if worse for brown people in the United States)
  than Clinton. This proposition looks silly yet again as Trump tries to do away with Obama-era restrictions on drone strikes.


• Today's award for Best Troll goes to Slashdot user phantomfive for this piece about weakly vs. strongly typed languages, wherein he adds a parting shot, "Does this make you want to avoid Python?" Why is this trolling, you ask? Because the definition of strongly typed is ambiguous and often misunderstood. Python, for example, is considered a strongly typed language, albeit a dynamic one. The resulting thread would make my programming languages professors want to drink to forget.


• If you're going to the H. P. Lovecraft Film Festival in a few weeks, you should know that Liv Rainey-Smith will have screenprints of Shub-Niggurath, Cthulhu, and Krampus for sale. These are not woodblock print originals, but screen prints on wood veneer!

On Wednesday night, Burnett interviewed Tim Clemente, a former FBI counterterrorism agent, about whether the FBI would be able to discover the contents of past telephone conversations between the two. He quite clearly insisted that they could:

BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It's not a voice mail. It's just a conversation. There's no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?

CLEMENTE: "No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It's not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.

BURNETT: "So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.

CLEMENTE: "No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not."

"All of that stuff" - meaning every telephone conversation Americans have with one another on US soil, with or without a search warrant - "is being captured as we speak".