Yesterday, as much time as I spent trying to get organized, all I really accomplished was putting together my pills for the next tao weeks – and was happy to do that.
Cartoon –
Short Takes –
Lwtters from an American – February 12, 2022
Quote – Lincoln figured out the logic of a world that permitted the law to sort people into different places…. “It is color, then; the lighter, having the right to enslave the darker? Take care. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with a fairer skin than your own. You do not mean color exactly?—You mean the whites are intellectually the superiors of the blacks, and, therefore have the right to enslave them? Take care again. By this rule, you are to be slave to the first man you meet, with an intellect superior to your own.” Click through for the complete essay. The way Lincoln put this huge moral and ethical leap inot words strikes me as very similar to Freya’s method of demolishing the individualism myth.
The Hill – A retired Russian general’s criticism may signal a larger problem for Putin
Quote – Retired Russian Colonel-General Leonid Ivashov, the head of the All-Russian Officers Assembly, has gone public with a statement that calls for Russian President Vladimir Putin to resign over the confrontation involving Ukraine. To remove any doubt as to his message, Ivashov, 78, followed the public statement with an interview on a liberal Russian media outlet, Echo Moskvy, insisting that he was speaking in the name of the assembly of retired and reservist Russian officers which he heads. Click through for story. I know what you’re thinking, because it stunned me too – “What? There’s a liberal media outlet in Russia?” But seriously, Putin may just have triggered his country’s equivalent of our Smedley D. Butler. And with that at his back, he may very well reconsider marching forward into Ukraine. We can certainly hope so.
Black History – Wikipedia – Gwendolyn Elizabeth Brooks
Quote (from Brooks, not from Wiki. Probably her best known.) –
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon. Click through for full bio. She is better known than most of the people I am featuring, but I’m including her today because I once had the privilege of meeting her. And that is a sweet memory.
Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”
We have through this column looked at facial recognition before, and, while it can certainly have some positive uses, I personally prefer to be identified by what’s inside my head rather than what’s outside it. (Then there’s the little issue that I do not own, nor do I plan to own, a phone which is capable of downloadding an app or anything else. Nor do I own or plan to own a webcam …even assuming the technology could be downloaded to a desktop.) If the IRS wants to identify me by a body part, I’d be amenable to a fingerprint … provided it hadn’t been taken from a hand which was subsequently amputated. But that’s the problem. Body parts are not set in stone. So I was very happy to read that the IRS had backed off on making this mandatory.
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Government agencies are tapping a facial recognition company to prove you’re you – here’s why that raises concerns about privacy, accuracy and fairness
Beginning this summer, you might need to upload a selfie and a photo ID to a private company, ID.me, if you want to file your taxes online. Oscar Wong/Moment via Getty Images
The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is planning to require citizens to create accounts with a private facial recognition company in order to file taxes online. The IRS is joining a growing number of federal and state agencies that have contracted with ID.me to authenticate the identities of people accessing services.
The IRS’s move is aimed at cutting down on identity theft, a crime that affects millions of Americans. The IRS, in particular, has reported a number of tax filings from people claiming to be others, and fraud in many of the programs that were administered as part of the American Relief Plan has been a major concern to the government.
The IRS decision has prompted a backlash, in part over concerns about requiring citizens to use facial recognition technology and in part over difficulties some people have had in using the system, particularly with some state agencies that provide unemployment benefits. The reaction has prompted the IRS to revisit its decision.
Here’s what greets you when you click the link to sign into your IRS account. If current plans remain in place, the blue button will go away in the summer of 2022. Screenshot, IRS sign-in webpage
ID.me is a private company that formed as TroopSwap, a site that offered retail discounts to members of the armed forces. As part of that effort, the company created an ID service so that military staff who qualified for discounts at various companies could prove they were, indeed, service members. In 2013, the company renamed itself ID.me and started to market its ID service more broadly. The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs began using the technology in 2016, the company’s first government use.
To use ID.me, a user loads a mobile phone app and takes a selfie – a photo of their own face. ID.me then compares that image to various IDs that it obtains either through open records or through information that applicants provide through the app. If it finds a match, it creates an account and uses image recognition for ID. If it cannot perform a match, users can contact a “trusted referee” and have a video call to fix the problem.
A number of companies and states have been using ID.me for several years. News reports have documented problems people have had with ID.me failing to authenticate them, and with the company’s customer support in resolving those problems. Also, the system’s technology requirements could widen the digital divide, making it harder for many of the people who need government services the most to access them.
But much of the concern about the IRS and other federal agencies using ID.me revolves around its use of facial recognition technology and collection of biometric data.
Accuracy and bias
To start with, there are a number of general concerns about the accuracy of facial recognition technologies and whether there are discriminatory biases in their accuracy. These have led the Association for Computing Machinery, among other organizations, to call for a moratorium on government use of facial recognition technology.
A study of commercial and academic facial recognition algorithms by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that U.S. facial-matching algorithms generally have higher false positive rates for Asian and Black faces than for white faces, although recent results have improved. ID.me claims that there is no racial bias in its face-matching verification process.
There are many other conditions that can also cause inaccuracy – physical changes caused by illness or an accident, hair loss due to chemotherapy, color change due to aging, gender conversions and others. How any company, including ID.me, handles such situations is unclear, and this is one issue that has raised concerns. Imagine having a disfiguring accident and not being able to log into your medical insurance company’s website because of damage to your face.
Facial recognition technology is spreading fast. Is the technology – and society – ready?
Data privacy
There are other issues that go beyond the question of just how well the algorithm works. As part of its process, ID.me collects a very large amount of personal information. It has a very long and difficult-to-read privacy policy, but essentially while ID.me doesn’t share most of the personal information, it does share various information about internet use and website visits with other partners. The nature of these exchanges is not immediately apparent.
So one question that arises is what level of information the company shares with the government, and whether the information can be used in tracking U.S. citizens between regulated boundaries that apply to government agencies. Privacy advocates on both the left and right have long opposed any form of a mandatory uniform government identification card. Does handing off the identification to a private company allow the government to essentially achieve this through subterfuge? It’s not difficult to imagine that some states – and maybe eventually the federal government – could insist on an identification from ID.me or one of its competitors to access government services, get medical coverage and even to vote.
As Joy Buolamwini, an MIT AI researcher and founder of the Algorithmic Justice League, argued, beyond accuracy and bias issues is the question of the right not to use biometric technology. “Government pressure on citizens to share their biometric data with the government affects all of us — no matter your race, gender, or political affiliations,” she wrote.
Too many unknowns for comfort
Another issue is who audits ID.me for the security of its applications? While no one is accusing ID.me of bad practices, security researchers are worried about how the company may protect the incredible level of personal information it will end up with. Imagine a security breach that released the IRS information for millions of taxpayers. In the fast-changing world of cybersecurity, with threats ranging from individual hacking to international criminal activities, experts would like assurance that a company provided with so much personal information is using state-of-the-art security and keeping it up to date.
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Much of the questioning of the IRS decision comes because these are early days for government use of private companies to provide biometric security, and some of the details are still not fully explained. Even if you grant that the IRS use of the technology is appropriately limited, this is potentially the start of what could quickly snowball to many government agencies using commercial facial recognition companies to get around regulations that were put in place specifically to rein in government powers.
The U.S. stands at the edge of a slippery slope, and while that doesn’t mean facial recognition technology shouldn’t be used at all, I believe it does mean that the government should put a lot more care and due diligence into exploring the terrain ahead before taking those critical first steps.
============================================================== Alecto, Megaera, and Tisiphone, I think I am even more nervous about the possibilities of false negatives than false positives. I do not take kindly to being told I am not who I am. I realize the government has a legitimate interest in being able to verify people’s identity, and I also realize that people as a whole are pretty stupid about passwords. That’s why there is a trend toward two-step verification (after inputting your password the site gives you an option of getting a one-time code by text or voice phone to a number which is already on record with them, and you input it when you receive it.) I assume we have all done that at one point or another. One of my banks has always had a two-step process where you had to have both a password and a PIN to get in (and now also has the phone/text option.) My credit union has for over a decade has a system where, upon opening an account, you select a picture from a library and then enter a pass phrase to go with it, and each time I log in they show both to me, and if either one is not right, then I don’t even enter my password (not that that has ever happened. In fact, it seems to be working.)
Yesterday, The opera broadcast was not an opera, but the “Requiem” by Giuseppe Verdi. It was a special presenation on last fall’s opening night to recognize and memorialize the losses of the pandemic, and to commemorate the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Verdi was criticized at the time for making it “too operatic.” As if the Day of Judgment were not a subject worthy of opera. (Not to mention there are some pretty dramatic passagesin Mozart’s Requiem – and even in Brahms’s “German Requiem,: which was intended to be kinder and gentler than the usual requiem.) The soloists were all fine singing actors, but it was Eric Owens singing bass who choked me up with his vocal depiction of shock and awe – and that (along with the FFT) is the Black History tidbit for today. There was other stuff which needed to be said.
Cartoon – 13 Galileo Loaded
Short Takes –
The 19th – More states want to restrict how LGBTQ+ people, issues are discussed in schools
Quote – None have become law, although some — like Florida’s bill on classroom discussion, called the “Don’t Say Gay” bill by advocates — are advancing in state legislatures, and more could be introduced as the year continues. These bills focused on schools are at the nexus of two movements: adding restrictions to LGBTQ+ youth and limiting what can be taught in schools. The fights over sex and gender are happening alongside those over teaching about bias and systemic racism. Click through for article. At the rate we are going, the next edition of “Lies My Teacher Told Me” is going to look like the Oxford English Dictionary.
Mother Jones – Let This Sweet Man Keep His Damn Pig
Quote – However, the Disney villains on the Canajoharie village board are threatening him with jail time unless he gets rid of her. Flatt currently faces a criminal trial and a potential sentence of up to six months in jail. On top of that, a civil case could fine him $20 for every day he’s had Ellie at his house—about $18,000 in total. Click through – it isn’t long. This is what fascism is like. No common sense. No flexibility Conform or be run over. I am not a pig person, but those who are form bonds with them as strong as anyone;s bond with a dog or a cat – or sometimes even another human. Haven’t they ever heard of a variance, for heaven’s sake?
Letters fron an American – February 11, 2022
Quote – Sullivan told reporters that the administration believes that the world has entered the window of time in which IF Russian president Vladimir Putin is going to attack Ukraine, he will do so. The U.S., he said, is “ready either way.” It will continue its hefty diplomatic push, or it and key allies will respond to an invasion with severe economic sanctions, reinforce the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and continue to support Ukraine and its well-trained and equipped army. (emphasis mine) Click through for the whole thing. All the media are saying “Putin is going to attack.” But that is not the same thing as what President Biden and his staff are saying. Fortunately for us, we have a President who can hold two ideas in his mind at the same time.
A lot of Americans have in their heads the concept of the “self-made man,” somebody who built his entire life with his own hands. (Or self-made woman, for that matter.) They speak of the settler or mountain man who wrested a living from the wilderness. They talk about self-sufficiency even in these times. Those who harp on this idea fail to realize that “self-made” people in fact rely on hundreds of others, if not thousands.
The essay “I Am A Pencil” points out that even an object as simple as a pencil has a lot of effort behind it. The loggers who selected and felled the tree providing the wood, then removed it from the forest. The workers in the pencil factory. The people who mined and refined the metal that attaches the erasers to the pencils. The ones involved in providing and processing the rubber for the erasers. The people who collected and mixed the chemicals for the paint. All those involved in getting the wood, metal, rubber and paint to the pencil factory, as well as the cardboard and maybe plastic packaging for the pencils and the ink for the packages. The people who convey the pencils to the stores, who stock them in the appropriate places, and who work at the cash registers to sell them. And this is to say nothing of those who designed the factory, who provided the materials to erect the building, who actually erected the building; as well as those who designed, assembled, tested and installed the machinery in the pencil factory, let alone all those involved in assembling the machinery, as well as acquiring the materials to build it. Even a simple pencil involves a great deal of effort.
So, Mr. Totally Self-Sufficient, you really think you can do everything for yourself? You’ll have to start way out in the wilderness – with nothing. Nothing, but your wits. You want to bring tools? Somebody else made those tools. Other people mined, refined and shaped the metal; other people harvested the wood in the handles. Other people transported the materials to the factory, and then the finished tools to the hardware store. Sorry, you’ll have to start from scratch. Completely.
I could write a long article on what goes into all those clothes you’re wearing, as well as your shoes, your belt, your wristwatch. Those gotta go. So there you are, naked, in the middle of nowhere. Whatcha gonna do?
Do you yet appreciate just how intertwined you are with thousands of other lives?
Even the pioneer who turned a wild prairie into a productive farm relied on hundreds of others for his tools, farm implements, clothes, boots, wagon, horses, and so on. The settlers who moved in after the Native Americans were extirpated could never have established their farms and towns without an extensive support network. The Native Americans may have lived off the land, foraging and hunting, but they relied on each other and worked together.
So, Mr. 100% Self-Reliant, where are you gonna start? OK, maybe you think you can make some crude stone tools. Whoops, you just learned that’s not nearly as easy as you think. You need the right kind of rock to do that.
OK, now you have a primitive hand axe. But how are you going to get dinner with that? You think the woods are teeming with deer? You could wander around for hours and never see anything larger than a squirrel. And how are you going to avoid freezing to death without any togs or shelter? Do you know how to skin an animal and prepare its hide to be worn? Do you know even how to make a knife from rock? Do you know what sorts of rocks are best for making stone implements?
Do you know how to set traps for animals so you don’t have to spend all day hunting? And what are you going to hunt with? Bet you don’t know how to make even a spear, let alone throw it. If you decide to fish, what will you use for fishing line, for hooks, for bait? Sure, you can dig up some worms – but how do you make a fish hook from what’s just lying around in the wilderness? You’re probably getting mighty peckish by now.
Even if you know what plants are edible, you’ll have to spend a lot of time foraging before you have enough for a decent meal. And you’ll have to do that tomorrow, and the next day, and the next day, and the next day. There’s no guarantee you’ll find enough every day – provided, of course, you survive the night. Making fire by rubbing two sticks together is a LOT harder than you think. Gives new meaning to “Naked and Afraid,” doesn’t it?
What if you get sick, or are hurt? How much medicine do you know? Think of all the people involved in making bandages – collecting the materials, designing and assembling the manufacturing equipment, gathering the material to make that equipment, and so on. Ponder the example of the pencil. And what about treatment? Can you self-medicate? Do you know which plants will help you fight off infection and illness? Uh-oh – you’re too sick and/or hurt to forage. So you’ll just have to lie there and suffer until you recover – and hope that you do recover. How will you manage if you need to forage for chow every day?
So, how are you feeling now, Mr. Self-Sufficient?
As the old saw goes, no man is an island. Nobody, however skilled and clever, can survive on his (or her, or whatever) own. We are social animals whose society is an extremely complex web of dependency.
Yesterday, my back pain was mild enough that I had time to use my TENS on one of my shoulders after finishing woth the back.That helped a lot – except now I need to do the other one. Hopefully, that will work out sometime this weekend.
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Short Takes –
NBC News – Boy, 16, charged after predominantly Black D.C. schools receive bomb threats
Quote – A 16-year-old boy has been arrested and charged with making terroristic threats after several predominantly Black schools in Washington, D.C., were targeted with bomb threats Wednesday, authorities have said. Among the schools targeted was one that had already received a threat just a day earlier during a visit from second gentleman Doug Emhoff. In a statement Thursday, the Metropolitan Police Department announced that the 16-year-old had been arrested. The agency said it continued to investigate the bomb threats with federal partners. Click Through for details. One would expect that his parents had started on “You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught” early and aggressively.
(Hanky Alert) Mother Jones – Her Boyfriend Killed Her Baby While She Was at Work. Oklahoma Might Lock Her Up for Life.
Quote – In November, Hogue was convicted of first-degree murder, even though she never laid a hand on the boy. At a sentencing hearing on Friday, a judge will decide whether to send her to prison for life, as the jury recommended. How is that possible? Hogue was convicted under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law, which requires parents to shield their kid from physical harm if they’re aware, or should have been aware, that another adult is abusing the child. Click through for full article (notice I don’t say the full story). This case reallymakes me wonder, notso much about thelaw or even the prosecutors, as about thejury. Because if there ever were a case where jury nullification would have been appropriate, it seems to me like this is it.
Black History Month – Wikipedia: Jane Bolin
Quote – On July 22, 1939, at the New York World’s Fair, Mayor of New York City Fiorello La Guardia appointed 31-year-old Bolin as a judge of the Domestic Relations Court. For twenty years, she was the only black female judge in the country. She remained a judge of the court, renamed the Family Court in 1962, for 40 years, with her appointment being renewed three times, until she was required to retire aged 70. She worked to encourage racially integrated child services, ensuring that probation officers were assigned without regard to race or religion, and publicly funded childcare agencies accepted children without regard to ethnic background. Click through for full bio. As the first black woman Supreme court justice is undergoing cofirmation hearing, I though it would be good to memprialize the first black woman judge in the United States.
By now, most of you have seen Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (MTG) claim on the right-wing network OAN (without an iota of evidence) that Speaker Pelosi is in charge of the “Gazpacho Police” in order to secretly spy on Congress critters. But if not:
Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup Gestapo: Nazi Germany's secret police pic.twitter.com/T9q76r706G
— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) February 9, 2022
Transcript of MTG
“Not only do we have a D.C. jail — which is a D.C. gulag [MTG probably meant to say “goulash”] — but now we have Nancy Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police spying on members of Congress, spying on the legislative work that we do, spying on our staff, and spying on American citizens that want to come talk to their representatives.”
Just to clear things up, @RepMTG
Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup
Gestapo: Nazi Germany’s secret police
It’s not the first time that MTG has served up some haute quisling. With this malaprop she’s doing her best Seinfeld’s Soup Nazi imitation by declaring: “No Democracy for you!!”
And if you thought the Twitterverse was going to pass up a golden opportunity to mock MTG’s confusing “Gestapo” with “Gazpacho”, you’d be wrong! So, let’s enjoy a few …
With the Gazpacho Police, every crime is a cold case
It’s easy to agree that MTG makes Sarah Palin look smart in the same way that Trump makes Dubya look presidential. And I realize that half the entire population has an IQ below 100. But do republicans have to keep electing them all to Congress?
As you all know, olive doing puns – and I think here and now is the thyme and place for a few. So, playing off her ignorance of history and lack of culinary knowledge (why, some mean-spirited folks have even called her a stupid bisque) let’s see what we can come up with.
First, my disclaimer: Having personally met a few members of Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police, I have to say they are consommé professionals.
With MTG’s endless invectives and lies, it’s obvious she’s constantly pandering to her bouillabaisse.
Next, she’ll be claiming that back on 1/6/21 Pelosi’s Gazpacho Police were searching those “patriotic tourists” for mazel tovcocktails. And it won’t be long before she starts demanding all those foreign prisoners down in Guacamole be locked up forever.
When a reporter confronted her about the “Gazpacho Police” gaffe, she asked MTG if she happened to have ever even seen a Thesaurus. MTG replied: “You mean one of those computer-generated dinosaurs in Jurassic Park”?
I guess we can all try to romaine calm, but record-shattering ignorance like that makes me want to drink an entire giraffe of wine.
Given her long history of unhinged shenanigans, I really think she has a lentil disability. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if she just admitted it and confessed: “Miso stupid.”
The truly sad thing is that besides MTG, all her buddies – Boebert, Gaetz, Cawthorn, the list goes on and on – are also all crepes.
We cannoli hope they all lose in the next election.
