Link Roundup December 2017

Senate Republicans Pass Sweeping Tax Bill

Senators voted 51-49, as Republicans approved the nearly 500-page bill in the early morning hours after lawmakers received a rewritten version, which contained significant changes from the original bill that passed two Senate panels last month along party lines. The last-minute revisions prompted an outcry from Democrats, who said it was impossible — and irresponsible — for lawmakers to read and digest a significant piece of legislation in such a short period of time.

HOW DOLLAR GENERAL BECAME RURAL AMERICA’S STORE OF CHOICE

The more the rural U.S. struggles, company officials said, the more places Dollar General has found to prosper. “The economy is continuing to create more of our core customer,” Chief Executive Todd Vasos said in an interview at the company’s Goodlettsville, Tenn., headquarters. “We are putting stores today [in areas] that perhaps five years ago were just on the cusp of probably not being our demographic,” he said, “and it has now turned to being our demographic.”

Trump’s “100 Percent-Pro America” Tax Plan Is Actually a Huge Gift to Offshorers

Today, the United States has what’s known as a worldwide tax system in which all profits—foreign and domestic—are subject to a 35 percent corporate income tax. If a US company wants to return foreign profits to the United States, it pays the 35 percent rate minus what it’s paid to foreign governments. The House and Senate tax bills replace this with a “territorial” system that drops the tax rate to 20 percent for domestic profits and nothing for foreign profits.

A Food Fight Has Broken Out Between The USDA And FDA

The fight relates to the Codex Alimentarius Commission, an international consortium of more than 180 countries that, collectively, writes international food safety standards. These standards serve various purposes, including acting as a policy handbook for countries that lack expertise in food safety, and encouraging trade by setting universal rules and helping to settle trade disputes. The U.S. Codex Office has long answered to the USDA’s food safety division, but in September, agency Secretary Sonny Perdue decided to move the group into the USDA’s trade office.

In the 1960s, One Man Took Washington D.C.’s Rat Problem Into His Own Hands, Literally

Frustrated with the local government’s lack of action, Hobson began capturing rats in the streets. He reportedly strapped the cages to his station wagon and dropped them off in Georgetown — home to politicians and businessmen. At the time (and to some degree still today), the neighborhoods of Northwest D.C., like Georgetown, were almost exclusively white and wealthy, while working class African Americans inhabited the rest of the city. Hobson was vocal about his rat toting threats and demanded city action on the rat problem.

The Silence Breakers

It wasn't so long ago that the boss chasing his secretary around the desk was a comic trope, a staple from vaudeville to prime-time sitcoms. There wasn't even a name for sexual harassment until just over 40 years ago; the term was coined in 1975 by a group of women at Cornell University after an employee there, Carmita Wood, filed for unemployment benefits after she had resigned because a supervisor touched her. The university denied her claim, arguing that she left the job for "personal reasons."

Why Christian nationalists love Trump

When modern science and scholarship challenged Creationist historical narratives, dominionists and their allies published a constellation of alternative history and science textbooks that insisted the earth was only a few thousand years old (these books, Goldberg notes, often cited each other). When the Air Force Academy was beleaguered by accusations that students and professors pushed a Christian nationalist outlook on non-Christians, James Dobson, former Republican congressman from Indiana John Hostettler, and others rushed to recast the evangelicals as the victims. And when Alabama judge Roy Moore was told to remove a plaque of the Ten Commandments from his office, right-wing Christian demonstrators descended on the state capitol to protest (he was ultimately removed from his position in November 2003 by the Alabama Court of the Judiciary for refusing to remove the monument, but subsequently returned to the bench in 2013).

Historians of Christian nationalism are alarmed by its appearance in American pulpits

“The novelist William Gass once said if America ever has a dictator, he’ll be a football coach. I think Trump makes as much sense in that authoritarian context as in one of Christian anointment,” Haselby said. He later added: “Especially in business and sports, two vibrant American undertakings, leaders are often seen as driving history … Anointment is mostly just a theological idiom for recognizing an idea of how history and the world move, behind individual leadership, that is more familiar in sports and business.”

How Trump’s presidency reveals the true nature of Christian nationalism

In other words, the more a person agreed with Christian nationalism, the more likely they were to vote for Trump. In fact, the correlation between Christian nationalism and Trump support was stronger than almost every other factor Whitehead and his colleagues accounted for, such as anti-immigrant sentiment, sexism, or economic anxiety.

Historians of Christian Nationalism see disturbing parallels to today’s tax cut battle

In fact, according to Princeton historian Kevin Kruse’s 2015 book, One Nation Under God: How Corporate American Invented Christian America, the fervent declaration that citizens of the United States live in a “Christian America” is a relatively new concept, emerging out of an alliance between fundamentalist Christians and corporate tycoons who wanted to preach a pro-capitalist message—a message that continues to resonate with contemporary Republicans, conservative Christians, and Trump himself.

Roy Moore Gets Trump Endorsement and R.N.C. Funding for Senate Race

President Trump on Monday strongly endorsed Roy S. Moore, the Republican nominee for a United States Senate seat here, prompting the Republican National Committee to restore its support for a candidate accused of sexual misconduct against teenage girls. Mr. Trump’s endorsement strengthened what had been his subdued, if symbolically significant, embrace of Mr. Moore’s campaign. At Mr. Trump’s direct urging, and to the surprise of some Republican Party officials, the national committee, which severed ties to Mr. Moore weeks ago, opened a financial spigot that could help Mr. Moore with voter turnout in the contest’s closing days.

That was no typo: The median net worth of black Bostonians really is $8

The household median net worth was $247,500 for whites; $8 for US blacks (the lowest of all five cities); $12,000 for Caribbean blacks; $3,020 for Puerto Ricans; and $0 for Dominicans (that’s not a typo either.) The sample size for Cape Verdeans was too small to calculate net worth, the report said.

Shot By Cops And Forgotten

VICE News sought records on officer-involved shootings from the country’s 50 largest local police departments; 47 responded with data sufficient for analysis. Many fought hard to keep the information secret, and some responded to our requests only under threat of legal action. One department sent a CD-ROM containing a single spreadsheet file through the mail. Another wanted to charge us thousands of dollars unless the records were inspected in person.

This Is The Daily Stormer’s Playbook

The redundancies are obvious to anyone who gives the site as much as a passing glance. After all, there are only so many ways to say “all misery is the work of a secret cabal of globalist Jewish bankers” before you start repeating yourself. Still, it is jarring to read Anglin explain — in such clear-eyed terms, no less — how he actively uses “curiosity or the naughty humor” to draw people in. It’s easy to think they are probably being deliberately manipulative. But it’s also easy to think that a white supremacist recruiting conspiracy is insane and you’re being too paranoid.

You’re not being too paranoid.

HOW A DORM ROOM MINECRAFT SCAM BROUGHT DOWN THE INTERNET

Days after OVH, Mirai struck again, this time against a high-profile technology target: security reporter Brian Krebs. The botnot blasted Krebs’ website, Krebs on Security, knocking it offline for more than four days with an attack that peaked at 623 Gbps. The assault was so effective—and sustained—that Krebs’ longtime DDoS mitigation service, Akamai, one of the largest bandwidth providers on the internet, announced it was dropping Krebs’ site because it couldn’t bear the cost of defending against such a massive barrage.

CDC gets list of forbidden words: fetus, transgender, diversity

Policy analysts at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta were told of the list of forbidden words at a meeting Thursday with senior CDC officials who oversee the budget, according to an analyst who took part in the 90-minute briefing. The forbidden words are “vulnerable,” “entitlement,” “diversity,” “transgender,” “fetus,” “evidence-based” and “science-based.”

San Francisco activists see irony in Yass, a queer startup backed by tech wealth

A venture capital firm co-founded by Thiel, a gay conservative who donated $1.25m to Donald Trump and joined the president’s transition team, is the sole investor behind Yass, described as a “headquarters and hangout for a new generation of queer people”. Yass, announced last month and set to open in the spring, will provide LGBTQ people who pay membership dues access to events and a co-working space and social club, according to founder and CEO Brian Tran.

A PATIENT GETS THE NEW TRANSGENDER SURGERY SHE HELPED INVENT

With only about a dozen doctors in the US who specialize in gender affirmation surgery, it’s nearly impossible to keep up with demand, let alone innovate new ways of doing things.

Supreme Court lets Trump fully impose latest travel ban

The justices’ stay order came just hours after lawyers in the 4th Circuit cases sent the Supreme Court a letter that they plan to include in the official records of those cases three anti-Muslim videos retweeted by Trump last week. Trump faced criticism for sharing the tweets, originally posted by a British ultranationalist political leader.

Egypt attack: Gunmen kill 235 in Sinai mosque

The al-Rawda mosque in the town of Bir al-Abed was targeted during Friday prayers. It is the deadliest attack of its kind since an Islamist insurgency in the peninsula was stepped up in 2013.

India declares freedom of sexual orientation a fundamental right

The Indian government had argued that the constitution included no right to privacy – an issue that has arisen as ministers defended India’s biometric identification programme, called Aadhaar. The programme, which gives Indians a 12-digit number that matches their retina scans and fingerprints, has been criticised by civil rights activists.

Hide Nazis With This Twitter Setting

Twitter, a social media site that verifies Nazis, is legally required to hide Nazi content and symbols in Germany and France. You can take advantage of this without moving to Germany.

The Attack on Net Neutrality Is Just One Small Part of a Much Bigger, Dumber Plan

O’Rielly and Pai have long argued that it’s OK for ISPs to quite-literally write protectionist state laws that prevent competition from taking root in underserved markets, and that any attempt to prevent these legislative handouts is an assault on “states rights.” When states actually try to protect consumers, you’ll note that this breathless concern for states rights disappears.

GOD IS A BOT, AND ANTHONY LEVANDOWSKI IS HIS MESSENGER

But there were downsides to his manic energy, too. “He had this very weird motivation about robots taking over the world—like actually taking over, in a military sense,” said the same engineer. “It was like [he wanted] to be able to control the world, and robots were the way to do that. He talked about starting a new country on an island. Pretty wild and creepy stuff. And the biggest thing is that he’s always got a secret plan, and you’re not going to know about it.”

INSIDE THE FIRST CHURCH OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Enter Way of the Future. The church’s role is to smooth the inevitable ascension of our machine deity, both technologically and culturally. In its bylaws, WOTF states that it will undertake programs of research, including the study of how machines perceive their environment and exhibit cognitive functions such as learning and problem solving...His ideas include feeding the nascent intelligence large, labeled data sets; generating simulations in which it could train itself to improve; and giving it access to church members’ social media accounts.