I hope my generally dyspeptic nature doesn’t bleed through too much on the page because for me it’s policy, not personality or group identity. I thought Obama was a nice guy (except for the War Crimes stuff), just horribly wrong on the issues, same goes for Bill and Hill. Biden is a closeted Racist (Anita Hill? School Bussing? Crime Bill?) and also deeply misguided about most things in addition to being one of the sleeziest Pols around, so I like him less. Reminds me of LIEberman (a close friend of Joe’s, they share a name) because every time I see him I want to wash up after with Brillo and Bleach.

I can hardly think of a clearer example of the Crony Capitalist Neo Liberal Rot at the center of the Establishment Democratic Party than the Iowa App.

I’ll let our old friend dday explain.

Welcome to the Bullshit Economy
by David Dayen, American Prospect
February 4, 2020

The Iowa caucus disaster is a function of a broken economic structure that rewards con artistry over competence.

In one sense, the Iowa caucus debacle will last just a couple news cycles. We have the data on paper, tabulated in front of tens of thousands of witnesses, and it merely needs to be collated. Eventually it will, and though the damage to the news cycle is irreparable—Joe Biden’s disappointing outcome has been diluted in particular—the process will go on with an accurate count. Caucuses are horrible and probably a dead letter, but for different reasons than the delayed count; the real problems arise from the electoral college-style distortions between the initial percentages and the final delegates, and the tacit vote suppression from forcing people to attend a two-hour meeting on a weeknight when they might be working.

But the spectacle has highlighted a much more consequential problem in America, something I have coined the bullshit economy. We’ve seen elements of it all over the place. When MoviePass offered unlimited screenings for ten bucks a month, when Uber gets an $82 billion valuation for a low-margin taxi business it has never made a dime on, when WeWork implodes after the slightest scrutiny into its numbers, that’s the bullshit economy at work. We have seen the farcical bullshit of Juicero and the consequential bullshit of Theranos.
…
We have endured the more comprehensive bullshit of the financial industry marking corporate progress by manipulated stock prices and air rather than productive advances for society. We had a financial crisis based on bullshitters telling us housing prices would endlessly rise. We have the bullshit of the private equity industry extracting value from companies through the skillful use of debt and other financial engineering, without regard for whether the companies succeed or fail.

The story of Shadow, makers of the app that utterly failed to deliver in Iowa, is a perfect example of the bullshit economy. It starts by being a tech solution to a non-existent problem. Iowa counties are compact; the largest one has a landmass of 973 square miles, and it’s close to twice the size of the average county in the state. Even there, no major city is more than a 30-minute drive from the county seat, Algona. Even with that ancient technology of the car, you could have each of the 99 counties report final results within a couple hours of the end of the caucuses.

Somehow, the Iowa Democratic Party got sold that they needed to improve upon this, to “disrupt” the caucus reporting. Already, the party had to increase what they would keep track of and tabulate, reporting the first set of results before the 15 percent viability threshold, the second set afterwards, and how that translated into delegate counts. It wasn’t clear why anyone needed to adding another layer of complexity into this with the app. But the app’s backers must have been persistent, getting $60,000—really nothing for the purposes of app development—to design a tool to forward the results to a central repository.

I’ll highlight this because it’s important.

Shadow is a subsidiary of ACRONYM, a non-profit with lots of connections to the Democratic consultancy, including veterans of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign and David Plouffe, the Obama campaign manager who sits on the ACRONYM board. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes asked Plouffe on a late-night panel about his participation, and as he swiveled in his chair uncomfortably he disclaimed any knowledge of Shadow or the app.

Similarly, ACRONYM issued a statement positioning themselves as a mere investor in Shadow, without knowledge of their inner workings. But last year, ACRONYM announced they were “launching” Shadow, as part of an effort to help Democrats “win” the Internet and run better campaigns. The head of ACRONYM, Tara McGowan, is married to a Pete Buttigieg strategist.

Ok. Did you get that? And the funding for the Iowa App came from the Biden and Buttigieg campaigns.

I’m sure they had our best interests at heart and no intention of hacking the Primaries.

To continue-

All this doublespeak is a hallmark of the bullshit economy. Your mind doesn’t have to travel to the nether regions of conspiracy, but you can hardly blame people for doing so. This is reflective of the rolling incompetence covered by confidence within the modern economy, especially when you sprinkle on the labor-saving promise of techtopia. When the bullshit economy fails, it robs people’s belief in the basic bargain of commerce, the idea that you get what you pay for, that companies operate in good faith to provide quality service. But when placed in contact with politics, it just demolishes faith in the system. The bullshit economy spurs distrust.

So there we have it: an unnecessary app that narrows the supply chain of votes to the central tabulator, and when the supply chain fails it creates chaos. We see this all over our economy; useless services, narrow supply chains, magnified fiascos. As long as confidence men lie to the right people, they can gain entry and take on enormous responsibility, until it all falls apart. We live in a country where you can spout New Age consultant speak, charm a large foreign investor, and make off to your guitar-shaped living room with over a billion dollars, paid effectively to go away. That’s WeWork guru Adam Neumann’s story, and increasingly it’s our story.

The Iowa disaster is a sign that our economic structures are breaking down, that private enterprise has become a shell game, where who you know matters more than what you can do. The bullshit economy has bled over into politics, with the perfect president but also the perfect amount of grifting and consultant corruption and unbridled tech optimism. This has long been part of politics—anything with that much money sloshing around will invite a little corruption—but the combination of political grift, the ardor for public-private partnerships, and the triumph of ambition over talent has created a fetid stew.

There is no need to attribute sinister motives to actions that can be explained by Greed and Stupidity.

New Details Show How Deeply Iowa Caucus App Developer Was Embedded in Democratic Establishment
Lee Fang, The Intercept
February 4 2020

Throughout the caucus yesterday, Democratic officials reported widespread problems downloading the app and inconsistencies uploading caucus results, leading to the Iowa Democratic Party’s decision to take the unusual step of delaying the release of the results. This is the first year the app was used, and ahead of the caucuses, the Iowa Democratic Party asked that the app’s name be kept secret. The New York Times reported that “its creators had repeatedly questioned the need to keep it secret.”

Kyle Tharp, a spokesperson for Acronym, released a statement on Monday night downplaying his company’s affiliation with Shadow.

“ACRONYM is an investor in several for-profit companies across the progressive media and technology sectors,” Tharp said. “One of those independent, for-profit companies is Shadow, Inc, which also has other private investors.”

David Plouffe, a former campaign manager to Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential bid who joined Acronym’s board, also distanced himself from the company during an MSNBC panel last night. “I have no knowledge of Shadow,” said Plouffe. “It was news to me.”

But previous statements and internal Acronym documents suggest that the two companies, which share office space in Denver, Colorado, are deeply intertwined.

Last year, McGowan, a co-founder of Acronym, wrote on Twitter that she was “so excited to announce @anotheracronym has acquired Groundbase,” a firm that included “their incredible team led by [Gerard Niemira] + are launching Shadow, a new tech company to build smarter infrastructure for campaigns.” McGowan also noted that “With Shadow, we’re building a new model incentivized by adoption over growth.” The acquisition was announced in mid-January of last year.

In an interview on a related podcast last month, McGowan described Niemira as “the CEO of Shadow, which is the technology company that Acronym is the sole investor in now.”

What’s more, internal documents from Acronym show a close relationship with Shadow. An internal organizational chart shows digital strategy firm Lockwood Strategy, FWIW Media, and Shadow as part of a unified structure, with Acronym staff involved in the trio’s operations.

In an all-staff email sent last Friday, an official with Lockwood Strategy reminded team members about “COOL THINGS HAPPENING AROUND ACRONYM.” The list included bullets points such as, “The Iowa caucus is on Monday, and the Shadow team is hard at work,” and “Shadow is working on scaling up VAN integration with Shadow Messaging for some Iowa caucus clients.” (VAN refers to the widely used Democratic voter file technology firm.) Acronym staffers also attended the Shadow staff retreat.
…
Federal campaign finance records show that the Iowa Democratic Party and the Nevada Democratic Party retained Shadow to develop its caucus app. Shadow has also been retained for digital services by Buttigieg’s campaign, which paid the company $42,500 for software-related services last July, and by Joe Biden’s campaign, which paid Shadow $1,225 for text messaging services, last July as well.

Shadow was launched by former staffers to Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, including Niemira, Krista Davis, Ahna Rao, and James Hickey, according to professional biographies listed on LinkedIn. Shadow did not respond to a request for comment.

Acronym, which includes a hybrid model of a 501(c)4 entity that does not disclose donors and a Super PAC that does, has been a favorite for deep-pocketed Democratic donors. Donald Sussman, the founder of Paloma Partners, and Michael Moritz, a partner at Sequoia Capital, each donated $1 million to Acronym last year. Filmmaker Steven Spielberg gave $500,000. Investor Seth Klarman, once a major donor to Republican causes, gave $1.5 million to Acronym.

Acronym appears to have deleted portions of its website showcasing its involvement in Shadow. “ACRONYM is thrilled to announce the launch of Shadow, a new technology company that will exist under the ACRONYM umbrella and build accessible technological infrastructure and tools to enable campaigns to better harness, integrate and manage data across the platforms and technologies they all use,” wrote Niemira in a now-deleted blog post.

This morning, William McCurdy II, the chair of the Nevada Democratic Party, released a statement announcing that the party will not be using the Shadow app for its February caucus.

“NV Dems can confidently say that what happened in the Iowa caucus last night will not happen in Nevada on February 22nd. We will not be employing the same app or vendor used in the Iowa caucus,” said McCurdy. “We had already developed a series of backups and redundant reporting systems, and are currently evaluating the best path forward.”

Nothing to see here.

If you’re like me (and I’m afraid most of you are me but that’s ok, I write for myself) there’s an almost unavoidable phenomenon happening that may provoke you to damage expensive items in frustration, anger, incredulity, and outrage.

And, you might injure yourself in the process which is something most people would wish to avoid (I dunno, they get tatoos).

While I personally am going to watch The Curse of Oak Island, not the least because I’m planning on visiting this Summer, I offer you 4 hours of a fascinating Frontline documentary on why you should hate Republicans (check) and desire that their Party join the Federalists, Anti-Masons, Know Nothings, and Whigs on the ash heap of History (also check).

Oh, and 11 hours of original uncuts because PBS.

Yes it’s disgustingly “Centrist”. Villagers have no moral values (well, except craven capitulation for it’s own sake) or sense of shame. Still it’s instructive.

I’m only giving links to the source material because of page length. You’ll note only 3 of the 11 are with Democrats, even nominal ones. I have sorted them into categories so you have some idea.

Democrats

• Robert Reich
• Ben Rhodes
• David Axelrod

Is David Axelrod a Democrat? I’m trying to be generous here.

Nevers

• Steve Schmidt

Faux Noise Mercenaries

• Megyn Kelly
• Frank Luntz
• Ann Coulter

True Believers

• Steve Bannon
• Steve Bannon Again
• Anthony Scaramucci
• Cliff Sims

America’s Great Divide, Part 1

America’s Great Divide, Part 2

Look, the very first rule when you implement a new system is don’t stop using the old one which works until you know the new one will too.

And at that you’re always wrong and it never quite does because Programming and I did it for 20 years so I know a little about it.

The Only Safe Election Is a Low-Tech Election
By Kevin Roose, The New York Times
Feb. 4, 2020

Basically, we should be begging for the most analog election technology possible. Because what happened on Monday night — a long and confusing delay in vote counting, due in part to a mobile app that was hastily designed and inadequately tested before being deployed in one of America’s most important elections — was an inexcusable failure. It caused distress and confusion, set off innumerable conspiracy theories, and started the 2020 election season by undermining trust in the democratic process.

And all because Iowa Democrats wanted a new app.

The app, whose name was kept secret by Democratic officials, was compared to a “fancy calculator” that was supposed to help Iowa caucus chairs send their results to the state Democratic Party. But as my colleagues reported, it posed problems for caucus precinct chairs all day.

Some chairs weren’t able to use it at all. Others had connectivity issues, or simply didn’t know how to work the app, and were forced to endure long hold times on a phone hotline instead.

There is no indication that any of these technical issues changed the results of the caucuses, or that any systems were hacked or compromised. And there were nontechnical issues that may have added to the chaos, such as new rules and work sheets that were designed to simplify the caucus process but seemed mostly to have sown confusion.

Regardless, the damage was done. The hours spent waiting for overdue results created an information vacuum, which was quickly filled by conspiracy theorists. By nightfall, liberals and conservatives alike were tossing around allegations of vote tampering and election rigging, and casting doubt over the legitimacy of the caucuses.

Democrats quickly began blaming Shadow, the tech start-up that built the app, and Acronym, a Democratic digital strategy operation that invested in Shadow. These firms do deserve scrutiny, not least because it appears that they neglected to quickly respond when reports of user issues began surfacing on Monday.

They stop here to point out Acronym’s denial, saying they were merely an investor. The fact is that they are both deeply embedded parts of the Democratic Establishment Electoral Grift Train. I’m not kidding, the DNC will order you to hire their consultants whether you like it or not. There is at least some evidence of considerable interference in the Caucus Process by the DNC which may have contributed to the confusion.

But Democrats should also blame their party’s leadership for entrusting such an important process to new technology in the first place — not just in Iowa but in places like Nevada, where Democrats are reportedly planning to use a similar mobile app to tally votes in that state’s caucuses this month.

It’s enough to make you wonder: Have these party officials ever been to a polling site or a caucus venue? They are not pristine WeWorks with blazing fast internet connections and an army of Geek Squad workers on call. They are mostly high school gyms, nursing homes and church basements with cinder-block walls and horrible cellphone service. The people who work at them are volunteers, and many are — how can I put this delicately? — members of the generation that still refers to the TV remote as “the clicker.”

Using a proprietary app to report vote totals is the kind of thing that sounds simple on a start-up’s whiteboard but utterly falls apart in a chaotic real-world environment, where connections drop, phones malfunction and poorly tested apps strain under a surge of traffic. Add an army of frenzied poll workers, impatient voters and twitchy news media, and you might as well have asked the caucus workers to whip up their own JavaScript.

I’m not opposed to technology in political campaigning. Want to use Facebook ads to drum up donors? Go for it. Want to put your voter database on the blockchain? Be my guest.

But when it comes to the actual business of registering and counting people’s votes, many of the smartest tech experts I know fiercely oppose high-tech solutions, like “paperless” digital voting machines and mobile voting apps. After all, every piece of technology involved in the voting process is a possible point of failure. And the larger and more interconnected the technical system, the more vulnerable it is to an attack.

“Many of the leading opponents of paperless voting machines were, and still are, computer scientists, because we understand the vulnerability of voting equipment in a way most election officials don’t,” said Barbara Simons, a computer scientist and board chair of Verified Voting, an election security nonprofit, in an interview with The Atlantic in 2017.

In Iowa, there is a silver lining: The caucus system doesn’t use voting machines at all, and its public, open-air nature means that it is less susceptible to tampering than a secret ballot. In addition, state officials this year required caucusgoers to fill out paper “presidential preference cards,” which could be used in case of a recount. So despite the delays, there is at least some certainty that the results will be accurate when they are finally announced.

The argument is always faster cheaper but it never works out. The amazing thing about Computers is that they work at all. It’s like a singing dog.

Once the results are announced I’ll probably update but my Elephant memory tells me that 24 or even 72 hours for an Iowa result is not untypical. The reason the Villagers are pissed off is it screws with their posturing (the Pols) and exposes their blank minded vapidity (the Media).

I’m sure Rush would agree.

Earlier you were saying about smoking, that people ought to be thankful that there are smokers, because the money gotten from smoking helps to fund all these child programs and everything? But that’s like saying I’m glad that there’s bumper accidents because then auto mechanics would still have jobs and it improves the economy.”

Well, now, wait. Hold it, hold it just a second. I’m sure the hospital industry would agree with you that they support knives, there wouldn’t be scalpels without knives.

Smokers aren’t killing anybody.

Except themselves.

Yeah, but how long does it take? There’s no even major sickness component associated with secondhand smoke. It may irritate you, and you may not like it, but it will not make you sick, and it will not kill you.

Firsthand smoke takes 50 years to kill people, if it does. Not everybody that smokes gets cancer. Now, it’s true that everybody who smokes dies, but so does everyone who eats carrots.

I’m telling you, there ought to be some measure of appreciation for people who buy tobacco products, despite the forces arrayed against them, It’s getting harder and harder to use tobacco products, unless you want to call marijuana tobacco, and you can do that anywhere, for the most part. But the fact of the matter is they have to endure a lot, the public hates them, they’re despised, they can’t smoke in places of comfort anymore, can’t even smoke outside in a park! And yet their actions and their taxes and their purchases are funding children’s health care programs. I’m just saying there ought to be a little appreciation shown for them, instead of having them hated and reviled. I would like a medal for smoking cigars, is what I’m saying.

Rush Limbaugh, 2015.