Last time I looked Starbucks former CEO Howard Schultz was threatening a massive radical centrist attack. Independent, even Bernie signed the oath.

The Geography of Partisan Prejudice
Amanda Ripley, Rekha Tenjarla. and Angela Y. He, The Atlantic
Mar 4, 2019

Americans now routinely guess one another’s partisan leanings based on what they eat, drive, and drink (Dunkin’ Donuts? Republican; Starbucks? Democrat), according to a working paper by the University of Pennsylvania Ph.D. candidate Hye-Yon Lee. And based on these unreliable cues, they say they’d be more or less likely to want to live, work, or hang out with one another.

We are now judging one another’s fundamental decency based on whether we eat at Chipotle or Chick-fil-A. This may seem silly-harmless, even. But it is uncomfortably reminiscent of stories from conflict zones abroad. In Northern Ireland, for example, an outsider visiting during the Troubles had no way to tell unionists and nationalists apart. They were pretty much all white Christians, after all. But the locals themselves routinely guessed one another’s identity based on their names, the spacing of their eyes, their sports jerseys, the color of their hair, their neighborhood, or even how much jewelry they wore­. This process came to be known as “telling.” If a reliable cue didn’t exist, people would make one up. It was a way to move about in the world in a time of profound tribalism, during which 3,600 people were killed.

In parts of America, it is markedly more uncomfortable to be perceived as a Democrat right now. In other places, it is very isolating to be outed as a Republican. To get a sense of these differences, we asked PredictWise to do two other rankings-this time reflecting the directional flow of partisan prejudice. The resulting maps reveal places where Democrats are the most dismissive of Republicans and vice versa.

In general, Republicans seem to dislike Democrats more than Democrats dislike Republicans, PredictWise found. We don’t know why this is, but this is not the only study to have detected an imbalance. For example, in a 2014 survey by the Pew Research Center, half of consistently conservative respondents said it was important for them to live in a place where most people share their political views-compared with just 35 percent of consistent liberals. But a more recent survey, conducted in December by The Atlantic and the Public Religion Research Institute, found that Democrats were the ones showing more ill will-with 45 percent saying they’d be unhappy if their child married a Republican (versus 35 percent of Republicans saying they’d be unhappy if their child married a Democrat). So it’s hard to know exactly what’s going on, but what’s clear is that both sides are becoming more hostile toward one another.

Conflict and protest are vital to democracy. But whenever people begin to caricature one another, anywhere in the world, predictable tragedies occur. Fixable problems do not get fixed. Neighbors become estranged, embittered, and sometimes violent. Everyone ends up worse off, sooner or later. “This is the great danger America faces,” Representative Barbara Jordan of Texas said in 1976. “That we will cease to be one nation and become instead a collection of interest groups: city against suburb, region against region, individual against individual. Each seeking to satisfy private wants.”

And other Bothsiderism. Still it is true that we ae increasingly targeted by our tastes.

At the bottom of my hill just before you hit the highway (well, depending how you go I always say to drivers who miss the turns) I have a directly competing Dunkin’ Donuts with a Starbucks just across the street.

Look, if I can’t have home drip-brewed 100% Colombian I’m not that interested in coffee because I drink mine black and unsweetened. I don’t mind looking at the different types of beans out there, like the ones you can get from Iron and Fire, that may make my black coffee better in the mornings, I guess I’m just a stickler for my way. If I’m particularly caffeine needy I’ll add a shot or two of Espresso, for ordinary consumption I’m partial to strong Green Tea but it’s hard to road manage as they usually toss you a teabag or two and a cup of hot water.

Mine brews 45 minutes (boiling) and what I do to cheat is cold brew a gallon at a time for 24 hours and nuke it to temp. Works surprisingly well. Why that? Takes a while to develop the taste, longer brew == more caffeine (by more we mean coffee levels), doesn’t increase bitterness the way over brewing coffee does, it just tastes like tea, at least if you use good tea.

Starbucks on the other hand is a nightmare of over roasted burnt mitigated only by syrups and sugar and cream. Hardly deserves to be called coffee, I’ve had better in a lumberyard.

Plus DD has the Bacon/Egg Croissantwich and Burger King is out of the way.

Life is creepy and getting more so by the minute.

Ok, you’re not particularly familiar with this 1997 video game and there’s no reason you should be because it’s disgustingly violent with most points being awarded on the quantity and artistic impression of the pedestrians you mow down.

C’mon, fun photons.

In meatspace-

A new study finds a potential risk with self-driving cars: failure to detect dark-skinned pedestrians
By Sigal Samuel, VOX
Mar 6, 2019

The list of concerns about self-driving cars just got longer.

In addition to worrying about how safe they are, how they’d handle tricky moral trade-offs on the road, and how they might make traffic worse, we also need to worry about how they could harm people of color.

If you’re a person with dark skin, you may be more likely than your white friends to get hit by a self-driving car, according to a new study out of the Georgia Institute of Technology. That’s because automated vehicles may be better at detecting pedestrians with lighter skin tones.

The authors of the study started out with a simple question: How accurately do state-of-the-art object-detection models, like those used by self-driving cars, detect people from different demographic groups? To find out, they looked at a large dataset of images that contain pedestrians. They divided up the people using the Fitzpatrick scale, a system for classifying human skin tones from light to dark.

The researchers then analyzed how often the models correctly detected the presence of people in the light-skinned group versus how often they got it right with people in the dark-skinned group.

The result? Detection was five percentage points less accurate, on average, for the dark-skinned group. That disparity persisted even when researchers controlled for variables like the time of day in images or the occasionally obstructed view of pedestrians.

“The main takeaway from our work is that vision systems that share common structures to the ones we tested should be looked at more closely,” Jamie Morgenstern, one of the authors of the study, told me.

The report, “Predictive Inequity in Object Detection,” should be taken with a grain of salt. It hasn’t yet been peer-reviewed. It didn’t test any object-detection models actually being used by self-driving cars, nor did it leverage any training datasets actually being used by autonomous vehicle manufacturers. Instead, it tested several models used by academic researchers, trained on publicly available datasets. The researchers had to do it this way because companies don’t make their data available for scrutiny — a serious issue given that this a matter of public interest.
…
Kartik Hosanagar, the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence, was not surprised when I told him the results of the self-driving car study, noting that “there have been so many stories” like this. Looking toward future solutions, he said, “I think an explicit test for bias is a more useful thing to do. To mandate that every team needs to have enough diversity is going to be hard because diversity can be many things: race, gender, nationality. But to say there are certain key things a company has to do — you have to test for race bias — I think that’s going to be more effective.”

These fixes aren’t mutually exclusive. And arguably, it’s in companies’ best interest to do everything they can to root out racial bias, before people of color are forced to take the brunt of it, literally.

A Brave New World.

Newbridge, New Jersey

Every inch as facinating as you would expect it to be.

Actually a pretty good flick, “Written by Charlie Kaufman and directed by Michel Gondry. It follows an estranged couple who have erased each other from their memories, then re-met and started dating again.”

Starring Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst, Mark Ruffalo, Elijah Wood, and Tom Wilkinson!

My secret.? I’m always angry.

An otherwise blameless life?

The ‘Otherwise Blameless Life’ of Paul Manafort
Franklin Foer, The Atlantic
3/12/19

“He has lived an otherwise blameless life,” said Judge T.S. Ellis, as he sentenced Paul Manafort to just 47 months in prison on Thursday.

In an otherwise blameless life, Paul Manafort lobbied on behalf of the tobacco industry and wangled millions in tax breaks for corporations.

In an otherwise blameless life, he helped the Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos bolster his image in Washington after he assassinated his primary political opponent.

In an otherwise blameless life, he worked to keep arms flowing to the Angolan generalissimo Jonas Savimbi, a monstrous leader bankrolled by the apartheid government in South Africa. While Manafort helped portray his client as an anti-communist “freedom fighter,” Savimbi’s army planted millions of landmines in peasant fields, resulting in 15,000 amputees.

In an otherwise blameless life, Manafort was kicked out of the lobbying firm he co-founded, accused of inflating his expenses and cutting his partners out of deals.

In an otherwise blameless life, he spent a decade as the chief political adviser to a clique of former gangsters in Ukraine. This clique hoped to capture control of the state, so that it could enrich itself with government contracts and privatization agreements. This was a group closely allied with the Kremlin, and Manafort masterminded its rise to power—thereby enabling Ukraine’s slide into Vladimir Putin’s orbit.

In otherwise blameless life, Manafort came to adopt the lifestyle and corrupt practices of his Ukrainian clients as his own.

In otherwise blameless life, he produced a public-relations campaign to convince Washington that Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych was acting within his democratic rights and duties when he imprisoned his most compelling rival for power.

In an otherwise blameless life, he stood mute as Yanukovych’s police killed 130 protesters in the Maidan.

In an otherwise blameless life, he found himself nearly $20 million in debt to a Russian oligarch, Instead of honestly accounting for the money, he simply stopped responding to the oligarch messages.

In an otherwise blameless life, he tried to use his perch atop the Trump campaign to help salvage his sorry financial situation. He installed one of his proteges as the head of the pro-Trump super-PAC, Rebuilding America. His friend allegedly funnelled $125,000 from the super-PAC to pay off one of Manafort’s nagging debts.

In an otherwise blameless life, Manafort was found guilty of tax evasion on an industrial scale. Rather than paying his fair share to help fund national defense and public health, he kept his cash in Cyprus and wired it home to buy over $1 million in bespoke clothing.

In an otherwise blameless life, he disguised his income as loans, so that he could bamboozle banks into lending him money.

In an otherwise blameless life, he attempted to phone a potential witness in his trial, so that they could align their stories.

In an otherwise blameless life, he systematically lied to Robert Mueller’s prosecutors, after he promised them his full cooperation.

In an otherwise blameless life, he acted with impunity, as if the laws never applied to him. When presented with a chance to show remorse to the court, he couldn’t find that sentiment within his being. And with Ellis’s featherweight punishment, which deviated sharply downward from the sentencing guidelines, Manafort managed to bring his life’s project to a strange completion. He had devoted his career to normalizing corruption in Washington. By the time he was caught, his extraordinary avarice had become so commonplace, that not even a federal judge could blame him for it.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

The first American combat troops arrive in South Vietnam; The Russian Revolution begins; U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry makes his second landing in Japan; Baseball hall-of-famer Joe DiMaggio dies.

Certitude is not the test of certainty. We have been cocksure of many things that were not so.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

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In Physics it’s the force exerted by Mass over a distance and so powerful that it can in certain instances stop Light itself.

It also has a more common meaning, something that is weighty and ponderous and important.

Wellspings of Vapid Versailles Villager consensus, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen of Axios (formerly of Tiger Beat on the Potomac) have attempted to capture the “gravity” of the Russian Treason Plot carried out by Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio and his RICO Ring of Criminals and have failed miserably.

Marcy Wheeler (or as we affectionately call her, emptywheel) explains-

The Ineffable Boiling Frog of Trump Scandal
by emptywheel
March 7, 2019

In the last several days, two outlets have tried — but (in my opinion) failed — to communicate the sheer scale of the President’s corruption. Today, that bastion of warmed over conventional wisdom, Axios, deemed Trump’s Russian conspiracy “the biggest political scandal in American history.”

They miss most of the key details (and treat Trump’s contacts with Russian officials as the crime, when that’s not by itself one). Even in a piece invoking the Teapot Dome Scandal, they don’t seem to see the outlines of a quid pro quo bribe, Tower and dirt for sanctions relief. There’s no mention of Paul Manafort at all, much less one describing how he shared polling data in a meeting where he also discussed sanctions relief.

And I don’t think the Mueller investigation really has delivered one of the biggest counterintelligence cases in history (which may be a mis-citation of this Garrett Graff article).

More remarkably, the Axios founders don’t seem to be able to get their arms around where this scandal ends, in part because some of the other stuff Trump has done — monetizing the Presidency via other foreign powers or various properties — are separate from the Russian part of Trump’s scandals.

Tuesday, Greg Sargent attempted a different approach, cataloging all the things that Republicans in Congress think should not be investigated by Congress. He came up with this list:

• Materials relating to any foreign government payments to Trump’s businesses, which might constitute violations of the Constitution’s emoluments clause.
• Materials that might shed light on Trump’s negotiations over the duration of a real estate project in Moscow, which Trump concealed from the voters even as the GOP primaries were underway.
• Materials that might show whether Trump’s lawyers had a hand in rewriting former lawyer Michael Cohen’s testimony to Congress falsifying the timeline of those negotiations.
• Materials that might illuminate more detail about Trump’s numerous efforts to obstruct the FBI/Mueller investigation.
• Materials that would shed more light on the criminal hush-money scheme that Cohen carried out, allegedly at Trump’s direction, and on Trump’s reimbursement of those payments.

This list is based on the HJC list of document requests, and so is limited to people who’ve already (publicly) been asked for documents. But even there, it doesn’t capture why some of these things matter — again, including the appearance of a quid quo pro bribe trading the Trump Tower for sanctions relief. Nor does it incorporate the full scope of kinds of crimes listed here. This list doesn’t include the range of lies told, not just by Cohen but by Roger Stone and Don Jr and others, nor does it consider the import of Cambridge Analytica and Manafort sharing polling data with the Russians.

And, of course, because Sargent works backwards from the HJC list, he doesn’t include issues already being investigated by other committees, such as how Trump’s ICE keeps losing immigrant children, or why he forced aides to give his daughter and her husband security clearances that they clearly weren’t suited for.

I raise this not to criticize, but instead to observe that we’re at a point where journalists are struggling to communicate the full scale of Trump’s corruption, even just that corruption tied exclusively to the Russian investigation. That’s partly been a result of his media approach, treating each day as a new opportunity to replace yesterday’s spectacle with a new one. It’s partly because of the boiling frog effect: we’ve had piecemeal disclosures over two years, and few journalists have taken stock along the way to see what the actual court evidentiary record amounts to. And even there, we often forget to add in the truly breathtaking corruption of Administration aides like Scott Pruitt or Ryan Zinke, or of current Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot of late — I don’t pretend to be able to get my brain around anything beyond the Russian investigation, to the extent even that is doable. It seems that we need to start trying to quantify this not in terms of names or actions but instead in terms of harm to the nation.

Just as one example, even the judges in the Russian investigation have — across the board — seen Trump’s flunkies to be selling out the interest of the United States, perhaps for Trump personally, perhaps for self-dealing, perhaps for foreign associates. Whatever crimes (or not) Trump committed, because he and his flunkies refuse to put the interest of the country first, it has consequences for Americans, including the constituents of members of Congress who want to ignore all this corruption.

We’ve been boiling frogs for several years here. But it’s time to take stock on the bottom line effect that Trump’s corruption has had on the country, and holding Republican enablers accountable for that damage.

Embezzling from the Inauguration, Charity Fraud, Insurance, Tax, and Investor Fraud, Money Laundering, Marcy is correct that the full breadth, depth, and density of the Black Hole of Corruption at the heart of Unidicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio has not yet been summarized and captured and that, more than anything, is what people are looking for from any Mueller Report.

They may be disappointed, as a Prosecutor his mindset is entirely different, go for the low hanging, easily provable crimes and lock them up. Problem solved.

I don’t think that’s sufficient in this case. I think the full narrative must be told so the Republican (and some Democrats) Accessories After The Fact are politically punished.

Bigger than Iran-Contra? It probably should be, Russia is certainly a larger threat, but it isn’t yet and remember how few people realize that St. Ronald Reagan torpedoed an agreement by Jimmy Carter to extract our hostages and instead sold state of the art weapons to an avowed enemy in order to generate money for an illegal War Congress expressly forbade him from supporting.

That was a pretty big deal actually.

In film and television production, B-roll, B roll, B-reel or B reel is supplemental or alternative footage intercut with the main shot.

Sam Bee: Fashion Consultant

No Debate? Good!

My accent isn’t a party trick

American Standard here. I sound like a newscaster from Ohio except when I’m exposed long enough to my liguistic roots. Pop/Soda/Coke, Davenport/Sofa/Couch. After a fair number of years I can do a passable New Hampshire or Maine (they’re entirely different, New Hampshire people talk that way to deliberately piss you off, Mainers just don’t give a damn what you think) and it’s alarming how quickly I can slip into Dixie (it’s more than knowing the difference between y’all and all y’all, it’s also knowing how to swear, bless your heart which translates to “person with an Oedipal conflict”) despite never having done anything except visit, though sometimes for months.

There are some people who claim there is a Connecticut accent, though what they mostly mean is that we talk like we drive, fast and rude.

Julia Child

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Civil rights marchers attacked in Selma, Alabama; Nazi Germany’s dictator Adolf Hitler sends troops into the demilitarized Rhineland; Movie director Stanley Kubrick dies.

If you’re passionate about your work, it makes the people around you want to be involved too.

Wanda Sykes

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