The Michael Cohen saga has been quite the roller coaster the past few weeks. For about a month, his testimony in front of Congress has been highly anticipated. A few days ago, however, Michael Cohen postponed his testimony indefinitely:

Mr. Cohen’s lawyer Lanny J. Davis cited verbal attacks from Mr. Trump, who had begun suggesting after Mr. Cohen agreed to testify that one of his relatives be investigated for unspecified crimes.

After he attempted to pull out, however, the Senate Intelligence Committee subpoenaed him to testify: 

Unlike the Oversight session, Mr. Cohen’s return to the Senate Intelligence Committee will almost certainly be behind closed doors. The panel has conducted a wide-ranging investigation of Russia’s election interference campaign, and possible ties to the Trump campaign, for roughly two years now largely out of the public eye.

Citing a Harvard Law professor’s tweet, Rolling Stone argues that Trump should be worried about Cohen’s testimony:

The president doesn’t quite see it that way. “I would say he’s been threatened by the truth,” Trump told reporters when asked about Cohen’s decision to postpone his testimony. “He’s only been threatened by the truth. He doesn’t want to do that probably for me or other of his clients. He has other clients also, I assume. He doesn’t want to tell the truth for me or other of his clients.”

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Brace yourselves, savvy Chrome users. Google Chrome might soon release an update that spells the end of ad blockers:

The row has blown up over Google’s plan to stop extensions changing data they receive from the sites that users visit. This ability to block, modify or redirect incoming data is key to the extensions’ ability to stop ads and pop-ups, as well as to thwart attempts to track users or seize their data.

One adblock company said in a statement to Gizmodo:

“This would basically mean that Google is destroying ad blocking and privacy protection as we know it,” Ghostery said in a statement. “They pretend to do this for the sake of privacy and browser performance, however in reality, users would be left with only very limited ways to prevent third parties from intercepting their surfing behavior or to get rid of unwanted content.”

According to Fortune, 

Google says the proposed changes were made to increase “security, privacy, and performance for extensions.” As more and more developers object to the changes, though, the company is slowly walking back from the proposal.

If the update happens and you want to jump ship, you should know that Firefox is pretty good. 

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As the government shutdown continues, the nation is beginning to feel the hurt. Of course, before now, tens of thousands of individuals have been effected by the shutdown in one way or another. Now, however, the effects are spreading. It’s beginning with the airline industry. 

In Hawaii, TSA agents are beginning to resign: 

Earlier in the week, U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono was in Hawaii meeting with some of the affected workers.

“When I met with the TSA people the other day they told us their stories and they’re crying because it’s so traumatic,” said Hirono, D-Hawaii. “They’re facing eviction, moving back with their parents, having to take out personal loans.”

It’s unsurprising that TSA agents in Hawaii should be first to collapse under the pressure: Hawaii has an extremely high cost of living.

Flights into New York have also been canceled:

“In our risk averse industry, we cannot even calculate the level of risk currently at play, nor predict the point at which the entire system will break,” Air traffic, pilot and flight attendant union leaders said in a statement.

In total about 800,000 employees have been working without pay, or have been temporarily laid off, since areas of the federal government shut down due to lack of funding 35 days ago.

The president of the Flight Attendants Union has suggested a sympathy strike:

Federal sector unions have their hands full caring for the 800,000 federal workers who are at the tip of the spear. Some would say the answer is for them to walk off the job. I say, “what are you willing to do? Their destiny IS tied up with our destiny – and they don’t even have time to ask us for help. Don’t wait for an invitation. Get engaged, join or plan a rally, get on a picket line, organize sit-ins at lawmakers’ offices.

Almost a million workers are locked out or being forced to work without pay. Others are going to work when our workspace is increasingly unsafe. What is the Labor Movement waiting for?

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Roger Stone had a rude awakening in the wee hours of Friday morning: FBI agents pounding on his door. They had come to arrest him: “FBI. Open the door.” Watch exclusive CNN footage of the FBI arresting longtime Trump associate Roger Stone. Stone has been indicted by a grand jury on charges brought by special …

Two months ago, a Chinese scientist revealed that he had created the world’s first genetically engineered babies. With that announcement, The Brave New World became reality––Gattaca became reality. While the dystopian futures depicted in these fictional stories have not yet come to fruition in the world, and they may never, Dr. He Jiankui’s announcement suggests that we’ve crossed a point of no return, and from now on we will have to actively avoid such realities from coming to pass. 

Such genetic tinkering is not only worrisome to paranoid types like me. The Chinese government has threatened to deal with Dr. He “seriously:”

The behavior of He Jiankui volated “scientific research integrity and relevant state regulations causing adverse effects at home and abroad,” the state-run Xinhua News Agency reported on Monday.

The Southern University of Science and Technology also announced on Monday the cancellation of He’s teaching contract and research. He had been on unpaid leave at the school since February 2018.

Despite government threats, scientists will continue their Faustian endeavors. But scientists themselves want to regulate genetic engineering––the only problem is, they can’t agree how to do so:
Some scientists want a yearslong moratorium on creating pregnancies with gene-edited human embryos. Others say a moratorium would be too restrictive, or unenforceable. Some think scientific journals should agree not to publish embryo-editing research. Others consider that misguided or ineffective.

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Last week, Nancy Pelosi told Trump that, unless he ended the shutdown, he would have to reschedule the State of the Union––or turn it in as simply a written document. Trump parried back by canceling a trip that Pelosi had planned. In the interim, some wondered whether Pelosi would actually not invite Trump to deliver the State of the Union at the House.

Wonder no longer––Pelosi has told Trump he may not speak in the House chambers:

Trump sent a letter early in the afternoon declaring he would show up to deliver his State of the Union address in the House chamber next week, regardless of Pelosi’s shutdown-related objections. “I will be honoring your invitation, and fulfilling my Constitutional duty, to deliver important information to the people and Congress of the United States of America regarding the State of our Union,” Trump wrote. “I look forward to seeing you on the evening on January 29th in the Chamber of the House of Representatives.”

It was unambiguous: Trump said he was coming, and he was challenging Pelosi to stop him.

So she stopped him. And he backed down almost immediately.

Trump, as a result, is looking for a new venue (this is what the Washington Post meant by “he backed down”):

President Trump said Wednesday that he would look for another venue for his State of the Union address after an afternoon of brinkmanship with Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who told the president that he was not welcome to deliver the speech in the House chamber while the government is partly closed.

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A few months ago, I made the claim that, while dangerous, the anti-vaccination movement is too small to be a real threat:

You might even start to worry that measles is going to make a comeback because of people like this. The news coverage fans those flames Once again, Washington Post is guilty of using clickbait titles to drum up clicks. Note this hair-raising line:

“In Camas County in southern Idaho, nearly 27 percent of the kindergarten population opted out of childhood vaccinations in the 2016-2017 school year, according to the study. Generally, the 10 counties with the highest exemption rates have fewer than 50,000 people and are in rural areas.”

What WaPo didn’t make clear was just how tiny the population of Camas County is. As of 2010, there were 326 families. So if every single family had a kindergarten aged child, that would mean 88 kids weren’t vaccinated––that’s extremely unlikely, though. The census reveals that in 2010 there were only 63 kids under five years old, so only a small fraction of those kids would actually be kindergarten aged. Let’s assume there are 30 kids that fit the bill. That means there are about eight kids who are unvaccinated when the survey was conducted. Keeping in mind that this is a rural county, it’s also possible that vaccines simply had not happened yet, and when the kids advanced in grade school they would be required to get vaccinated. Twenty-seven percent seems a lot scarier than eight kids with some qualifications, though.

Well, I was wrong. Perhaps even spectacularly wrong:

Public Health officials in Clark County announced Monday the measles outbreak grew to 22 confirmed cases, with three more suspected, and they revealed three more possible exposures locations.

The World Health Organization has even called lapsing vaccination numbers a global threat. So the moral of the story is pretty simple: the anti-vaccination movement is an issue.

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Unless you have been paying close attention, the incident in Washington D.C. involving students from Covington Catholic High School and a Native American man is very confusing. 

It started when a video went viral. The video appeared to show (as this Reddit post reads): “Guy with a MAGA hat mocking a elder Native American protestor.” 

The video went off like a bomb. Internet denizens went bananas, calling the kid, in essence, a racist punk. Journalists jumped on the bandwagon, reporting the event as though the kid had been intentionally harassing the Native American man. One journalist was eventually fired for wishing death on the Convington students. Things got so bad that the school had to close for fear of its students’ safety amidst protests and demonstrations. 

A few days later, another video emerged showing a fuller encounter. It turns out that a racist hate-group called the Hebrew Israelites started shouting at the high school students, and the Native American man attempted to calm the situation by marching into the middle and beating a drum. Because, of course, nothing says “calm down” like staring a kid in the face while beating a drum. 

By now, most media outlets realized they screwed up. The best admission is from this New York Times opinion piece. Vox, unsurprisingly, refuses to back down entirely and still blames the boys.

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Facebook has big plans for the future. Recently, Facebook filed patents for a future-predicting feature that makes highly accurate guesses about where you’ll go based on past behavior. Despite its plans, however, Facebook’s end may be near––at least according to one expert. Between admitting to giving other companies access to user data and massive internal troubles, the company certainly is in trouble. In fact, all of social media is in some kind of trouble, evidenced by the increasing number of people taking “social media fasts” and the recent paranoia about the 10-year challenge being a data-mining scheme. In light of all this, some people have decided to delete their Facebook––or all social media––entirely. But is it enough?

This New York Times opinion piece suggests it’s not. Deleting Facebook does not keep the company accountable for its privacy violations, no matter how many people quit. All it does is punish users.

And it’s possible that #DeleteFacebook might actually play into Facebook’s hands, by recasting a political issue as a willpower issue….If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I might actually relish seeing my users agonize over the question of “to delete or not to delete.” Every moment they are talking about whether to walk away from the content they’ve created and the network they’ve built is a moment they aren’t talking about Facebook executives being brought to justice and the company brought under proper regulation.

Naturally, this piece suggests that legislation is the only way to move forward. There is, in fact, some legal action underway. According to the Washington Post:

U.S. regulators have met to discuss imposing a record-setting fine against Facebook for violating a legally binding agreement with the government to protect the privacy of its users’ personal data, according to three people familiar with the deliberations but not authorized to speak on the record.

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The gap between the world’s richest people and the world’s poorest people is widening at an alarming rate. According to Oxfam International, last year billionaires’ wealth increased by a jaw-dropping $2.5 billion––per day. That represents an overall wealth increase of 12%. Meanwhile, the 3.8 billion people who make up poorest half of the world’s population saw their wealth decline by 11%.

The study, also summarized in “Public good or private wealth?”, “shows the growing gap between rich and poor is undermining the fight against poverty, damaging our economies and fuelling [sic]public anger across the globe.”

In addition, “The report reveals that the number of billionaires has almost doubled since the financial crisis, with a new billionaire created every two days between 2017 and 2018, yet wealthy individuals and corporations are paying lower rates of tax than they have in decades.”

In a statement, Paul O’Brien, Oxfam America’s vice president of policy and advocacy, said, “There is going to be a broader and increasingly energized public conversation in the US and globally on what a fair and effective tax system looks like that will be very different from today.”

This year’s data is part of a trend. According to last year’s report:

Eighty two percent of the wealth generated last year went to the richest one percent of the global population, while the 3.7 billion people who make up the poorest half of the world saw no increase in their wealth, according to a new Oxfam report released today.  The report is being launched as political and business elites gather for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

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The question of toxic masculinity resurfaced recently with Gillette’s “#MeToo” ad. Apparently, that commercial “proved” that toxic masculinity is real an still around.

It’s one thing to hear or read about toxic masculinity from quite liberal sources, but it’s another when the American Psychological Association rails against so-called toxic masculinity:

Western culture defines specific characteristics to fit the patriarchal ideal masculine construct. The socialization of masculine ideals starts at a young age and defines ideal masculinity as related to toughness, stoicism, heterosexism, self-sufficient attitudes and lack of emotional sensitivity (Wall & Kristjanson, 2005), and of connectedness. Boys learn to be men from the men in their lives, from their own experiences navigating our social norms, and from the large social and cultural context. Boys live under intensified pressure to display gender-appropriate behaviors according to the ideal male code.

But there are several problem with the “toxic masculinity” thing. As the New York Times points out, it’s entirely ahistorical to assume that we’ve “discovered” problems with masculinity. It’s also absurd to think that there is one overarching view of masculinity. And finally, as this satirical publication points out, our culture is not particularly masculine.

So this begs the question: is toxic masculinity the problem its made out to be, or is an intrusive ideology making a mountain out of a molehill?

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If you’re on any social media whatsoever, you’ve probably seen the “10-Year Challenge.” It’s pretty straightforward––you post a picture of yourself now next to a picture of yourself ten years ago. The purpose is to…I don’t know? It’s just something to do for fun. 

Or is it?

One tech writer suggests that the challenge is, or could be, more malicious. It began with a tweet:

But she went on to write an op-ed for Wired:

Imagine that you wanted to train a facial recognition algorithm on age-related characteristics and, more specifically, on age progression (e.g., how people are likely to look as they get older). Ideally, you’d want a broad and rigorous dataset with lots of people’s pictures. It would help if you knew they were taken a fixed number of years apart—say, 10 years.

Sure, you could mine Facebook for profile pictures and look at posting dates or EXIF data. But that whole set of profile pictures could end up generating a lot of useless noise. People don’t reliably upload pictures in chronological order, and it’s not uncommon for users to post pictures of something other than themselves as a profile picture. A quick glance through my Facebook friends’ profile pictures shows a friend’s dog who just died, several cartoons, word images, abstract patterns, and more.

The moral of the story is clear: delete your social media, burn your computer, and go live off the grid.

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