Straggler

So Brexit means taking control over immigration, and having taken control of immigration we shall still allow the brightest and best from abroad in because we need the skills and we will allow the low paid because we still need them to do all the crappy jobs we won't do. We will however slam the door shut when it is in the national interest to do so, which I'm assuming means when it is proven that immigration is a net loss to the country, (which it isn't or to my knowledge has never been). It does make me wonder a little bit why immigration is the number one red line when even one of the main advocates of "taking back control" has very successfully articulated that immigration is a positive thing for the UK and that having taken back control the first thing he would do is to change nothing. So: no extra money for the NHS, no access to the single market and no reduction in migration. What's the point of Brexit?

I have been referencing the Brexit debate and the relevance of applying critical skills to the claims of both the main campaigns arguments. For example the claim from leave that £350 million would be saved to spend on the NHS by leaving, and on the remain side there were claims that leaving will result in the third world war. Neither argument stands up to even a cursory level of investigation. Also understanding why we were being asked the question in the first place, who is doing the asking, why is it worded the way it is, who is running what campaign, what do they have to gain or lose from either result and many other questions are worth considering before you put an x in a box. I agree that the question is itself can be described as empirical (although I am a little hazy as to the exact definition of an empirical question, I think of it as a question that can be answered with facts / science). The debate however did not use empirical evidence consistently on either side to inform the debate and it is the analytical skills that I think should be applied to the evidence presented so you can get to the facts. Also given that much of the debate around the Brexit issue was around what would happen in the future the politicians were certainly using theoretical arguments to influence the result. It may be that I have misunderstood your point, so please feel free to expand on it if I got the wrong end of the stick.

Biggest lesson I learned is to properly evaluate information that is presented to me. I have a history degree and even as I took it I thought I would never use it in real life. As a professional geek in the IT world as I am today you would be forgiven for thinking that I was right. However a history degree is not just about learning about what order kings came along in, a string of important dates or how many wives Henry VIII had. A history degree gives you the skills to to evaluate information as you receive it. You will all have heard the who, what, where, when and for whom analysis that is taught from early on in history lessons at school. I use that stuff every day. When my customer tells me they don't have any budget, or my boss says that everyone is getting a pay freeze there is always a subtext that these skills help me uncover. Even in dating and later in marriage it has helped me better understand what my partner needs/wants (I don't want to oversell this too much here, this is not a guidebook to the female mind and in the main they confuse me as much as the rest of you, but it does help me recognise that what I am seeing on the surface does not necessarily represent the thoughts that are going on underneath.) In uncertain times such as these where truth seems to matter less it seems to me these skills are needed even more. The Brexit debate was a classic example of this as I found both sides of the debate (at least the headline acts) to be as dishonest as each other. I really struggled to decide who to vote for because I could trust neither. It seems that the ability or indeed desire to critically assess our political class or indeed for our political class to actually apply this process is actively discouraged these days. I can't help but think that if we all applied even a single layer of critical assessment to our sources of information we would demand a higher standard from the people who provide said info and possibly have a better debate. Uncovering the objective truth to apply evidence based decision making. It seems a logical framework, I certainly value it, but it does seem to be going rather out of fashion at the moment.

I had never heard of him prior to this weekend. It really didn't take long to work out that he is not credible though. What worries me more than anything is that Trump seems to instinctively believe anything that he is told that he likes. Equally he classifies anything that he disagrees with or doesn't like as lies. This inability or unwillingness to apply any critical thinking to what he hears leads to "But Brawndo's got what plants crave. It's got electrolytes."

A bit more analysis on what Trump said about Sweden. It's not so much about how batshit crazy Trump is, but what the guys interviewed in the documentary said about the interview process. They are claiming that the docu maker has asked one set of questions to generate the answers they gave and then changed them to ones based on immigration as part of the edit. They have gone on to describe the journo as a madman. This work of "journalism" has gone on Fox with no critical analysis and then has been lapped up by Trump and formed part of a stump speech. The idea that I would ever have to write about the dangers of the POTUS taking Fox news as gospel blows my mind, but here we are. The lack of critical thinking or evaluation of source material is staggering. Just as a quick example on source evaluation. For this post on Villa Talk, I watched the video embedded below. I thought it was interesting, but I know the channel is a proud progressive channel and whilst spends a great deal of time trying to appear as neutral as possible it is without a doubt not unbiased. That said I have not found them lying, it is more of an editorial spin that would concern me. So off I went to try and corroborate what they have said from other sources. I have found the quotes from the Swedish policemen reported word for word in most of the worlds news and I have read the original article that is the source. It seems legit so, I'll roll with it. I have also seen that the Ami Horowitz (the documentary maker) has said that the policemen are under political pressure to change their story. So who do I believe, the cops or the journo. There is a reasonable chance that the cops didn't know the impact their words would have and would row back on them hard under pressure, so it is worth looking at who I believe. Source material on the two police is harder to find, they are not well known outside of this issue and all the evidence I have is contradictory. They appear to say one thing in one interview and another almost completely opposite thing in the next. I can evaluate the rest of what Horowitz has said. Rather than go on about it, I have found that the analysis of the statistics that is in the video below is reasonable and do not back up what Horowitz has said in the documentary (I even looked up the crime statistics from the Swedish govt to confirm that they were using a legitimate source). As such I can safely say that in respect to the statistics Horowitz has been found to not be credible and casts a serious doubt over anything else he may present. I could do a great deal more research, but I really can't be bothered, all I am really doing is demonstrating that with the 10/15 minutes I put into researching this Swedish documentary I have found enough evidence to conclude that I should not trust the source and should seek out a more complete view before presenting my understanding as the true picture of Swedish immigration as it relates to crime. It also shows that I put more care into my posts on Villa Talk that the POTUS does into his fricking job as leader of the Western world.

Don't worry, it is a real leak, but it's fake news. Whilst it has never been discussed, it may have been an option and Obama used to do the same thing so why are we complaining now, and it's a fake, but the people responsible for leaking this thing that isn't real should be arrested because it is a real crime and 306 electoral colleges, wow who new we had so many schools, Hilary Clinton, bad dudes hombre.

Looks like it is all about to kick off again https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/feb/17/trump-immigration-roundup-national-guard To add a little balance, Spicer has denied this is a White House document and if Spicer says it is so then who am I to call his word into question.

They may be catering to just me. I am obsessed with it and I consume media about Trump in a way that I have not really done before about anything (well since the No Mans Sky debacle anyway). But yeah, I am waking up in the morning and going straight to my phone to see what diabolical plot has been hatched whilst I slept. Oh there was the January transfer window, I obsessed over that too. There is a possibility that I am watching Trump so closely to avoid looking at Aston Villa at all. As depressed as I am about the state of the world, the alternative football players we have are possibly doing a worse job than Trump.

Honestly it breaks my heart. As a UK citizen I know I am giving way too much of my time to thinking about US politics, but I cannot look away. For me Obama was the most inspirational politician of my lifetime. In no way do I see his time in power as perfect (I have enormous issues with some of the stuff he did or didn't do) , but as a human being I like and respect the man and the example he and his family set. You know the question "if you could have dinner with one famous person who would it be?". I would never had an answer for that as I never wanted to meet my hero's for fear of bursting the image I had of them. Obama changed that, as I would have him and his family over for dinner and look forward to it. Then you get Trump. It's like breaking up with Kelly Gale and hooking up with Waynetta Slob. What really goes on to boggle my mind is that Trump has an approval rating of around 40%. Whilst that is setting a record for the worst approval rating for any president ever at this early a stage of the term, it still suggests that 40% of America thinks that what he has done so far is A ok with them. I guess some people never reach a tipping point, 25% of Americans still approved of Nixon during and after the Watergate scandal.... How anyone can watch the Trump press call and not worry about his capacity to do the job is beyond me.

If you are purchasing at the cheap and nasty end of the market you are going to feel sick afterwards.

I don't believe I have oversold it. The NSA and GCHQ have specifically designed software that can turn on your phone without you knowing about it. Yes they have to hack your phone first, but it does not rely on Angry Birds exploits, as with all hacks/viruses the exploits they use change over time dependent on what vulnerabilities there are in apps or indeed in the OS. The bit about ignoring permissions that the apps ask for is a massive red herring. GCHQ designed hacks do not require user permission to run, they are very separate issues. The leaky angry birds app sends insecure data that GCHQ can intercept and reveals personal info - this relies on you giving the appropriate permissions to said application Nosey Smurf and Dreamy Smurf don't rely on any permissions given by you. It arrives by a text that you won't know that you have received and it's activities don't show up to you because of paranoid smurf which hides the activity of the other Smurfs even from someone skilled enough to do phone repairs. More info here: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2015/10/06/gchqs_smurf_army_can_hack_smartphones_says_ed_snowden/ I have highlighted some of the exploits that have made it into the public domain, there are plenty of others, I'll add some more here as examples. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/06/surveillance-camera-laptop-smartphone-cover-tape Yes that is the FBI director who is not sure that his own laptop cannot be compromised. It is easy to secure your webcam as he did, with some sticky tape, but if you think that you have a software solution that is preventing GCHQ from spying on you, then you are sitting on a fortune. later in that same article So yes they backdoored Yahoo, but that is not the only exploit they have, it is just one example of how they can do it. Also the semantics around "apparently turned off". I think the point of that is that to you the phone appears to be turned off. You have pressed the off button and the phone has shut down as usual. However GCHQ can still remotely turn on the mike the camera and track where you are and all they have to do is send you a text that you won't know you got. I can keep on going.....

Isn't it wonderful. All the infrastructure to make the Orwellian nightmare come true is already installed in all of our homes. Not only that we paid for it ourselves and spend huge chunks of disposable income to improve the quality of the picture and the sound. We are even buying stuff that can see in the dark and measure our heart rate (xbox one). All we need now is an autocratic ruler with the will to take advantage of it. Can't see that happening in a modern democracy though.... Bigly

Here you go https://tinyurl.com/jh8jhj4 https://tinyurl.com/hdf6mcu Given that they can destroy a centrifuge in an Iranian nuclear facility, the ability to take a recording from your camera on your phone / laptop is relatively childs play. Hackers have been doing this for years: https://tinyurl.com/z58z4yy

The problem with this is that the case for the effectiveness of mass surveillance has never been made. I have put an article from the New Statesman below to save me typing out the main arguments, but there is plenty more like this out there. You can look at almost any terrorist attack that you can think of and in the reporting you will hear that the perpetrators were known to the authorities before the attack. The problem is normally that the threat level was incorrectly calculated or that there simply wasn't the resource to keep a close watch on those particular bad guys. There is also the misconception that mass surveillance is the only option. The secret service and the police already have the ability to snoop around potential bad guys, they just have to get a warrant to do so. It is the targeted surveillance that is shown to have results and actually stop threats from happening. Mass snooping does not help targeted surveillance, in fact it seems that it may hinder it by taking resources away to sift through the impossibly huge amount of data. Please also bear in mind the capabilities that are available right now to snoop on us. They are able to turn on the phone in your pocket to listen through the microphone and peer through the camera, the same with the laptop in-front of you. They can read every email and every blog post, GCHQ can even tell if your son is going to be gay before he knows it himself. https://tinyurl.com/gw9b8du I would also like to make a case for the risk of giving up your right to not be spied on and compare that to the risk of terrorists. In the USA right now they have a president that is busily making targets out of individual groups within his own society, who has one of his main aids (Stephen Miller) come on TV in the last 2 days saying: "The whole world will soon see as we begin to take further actions that the powers of the president to protect our country are very substantial and will not be questioned." Just imagine if that thought right there became a law. It's not as implausible now as it was before Trump came to power. The USA may only be one decent size terrorist attack away from something approaching it. Then combine that law with the ability of the government to listen to the conversations that happen over the dinner table in your own home. You can in theory become a criminal overnight for having an opinion that differs from the government. If you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear only works until they decide what you think is no longer ok. For me the potential misuse of mass surveillance far outweighs the positive benefits it brings to our safety. I'd go as far as to say that the case has been better made that there is a negative impact on our safety through the use of mass surveillance. The cynic in me says that regardless of the laws, whilst they have the capability to do so the powers that be will do what they want anyway, but they will do so without my permission. https://tinyurl.com/znoeeyn

Great work thank you. I have also come to the realisation that my last post has probably got me on the radar of the very people that I have just been bitching about. I must have a dozen key words in there that will trigger on the guys in Cheltenham, or the NSA. Oh crap, I just wrote the word trigger too. that isn't going to help matters. Thank god I didn't write the word terrorist or I'll have completed secret service watch list word bingo. oh bugger.

It's almost sweet to think that this is anything other than a sticking plaster and at it's worst it is disingenuous to start pointing the finger at Russia moving the goal posts after what the USA and their allies (yes us too in the UK) have been getting up to. Anyone else watch that BBC documentary on the Stuxnet virus? I worked for one of the larger IT security vendors at the time of Stuxnet and watched in fascination as the show unfolded. For anyone that didn't watch, Stuxnet is the first well known state sponsored attack on another nations infrastructure through cyber warfare. That is not to say it is the first such attack, it is just the first to make it into the public domain and generally accepted as a US/Israeli secret service weapon (although not officially admitted by either the US or the Israeli's). The point I really want to make about Stuxnet is that the target was an underground nuclear facility in a desert in the middle of Iran, guarded by a massive military presence and with no network connection to the outside world (an airgap). Despite this the US managed to get a virus onto the centrifuge's (the ones creating the nuclear material) that caused them to malfunction and for want of a better word, explode. The virus was clever and very aggressive in how it spread and from my perspective at the time trying to clean up clients that had been infected bloomin difficult to deal with. This all happened 7 years ago and since then the people writing the attacks are getting better and thanks to the growing number of "things" that are networked (the internet of things) with little or no thought to security baked, in the number of vectors they can attack from is growing. As the documentary alluded to (do watch it, whilst a dry subject it is compelling viewing) imagine that capability turned against the infrastructure of a nation. Shut down the power grid and our ability to produce clean water and think what happens next... I think the anecdotal figure is that we are 9 missed meals away from anarchy, you don't have to shut the power grid down for much more than a week to make that a very real possibility. It is possible today for a state to launch an attack from their nice comfy desk and then watch the recipient effectively eat itself. The capability is to all intents and purposes a weapon of mass destruction.

10/10 for optimism 2/10 for believability.

Pop that one in the dictionary next to the word hubris.

If you don't watch it already I would recommend that you take a look at Jim sterling's YouTube channel. He does a section called f*** Konami news. For all the news that makes you want to say "f#$* Konami". He really sticks the boot in, but I will warn that he is not in any way safe for work.

So you are saying he is never going to run around? Hogan out!

And a little further research suggests that the account has been compromised. Rule 1 of the internet if it seems too good to be true....

A woman that has a mixed race family that voted for Trump. She had a million reasons to not vote for him, I'm struggling to think of the reason she did. WTF was she expecting him to do?

Because you are pure of mind

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/24/media/trump-tweets-cable/ He is watching Fox News and taking the stats as gospel. From the Fox News studio to the president's tweets in minutes. There are other correlations reported too. It just boggles my mind that he does this with no critical thought about what he is watching.

What I don't get is that it was reported at some length last year that Trump has shares in the pipeline companies that he just signed executive orders to help out. It isn't even a subtle conflict of interest, it is direct and blatant, yet no one seems to be reporting on it.