A possibly useful computer tip and two social notes

Since the computer was down last week, no science to report, but here’s a possibly useful computer tip and two social notes.

If you’ve been using computers as long as we have (30+ years), you were probably told that it was better to leave the computer on all the time rather than turning the power off and on.   Not so any more — the Apple tech who fixed it told me it should be shut down then rebooted once a week.

Two narratives beloved by the mainstream press since the loss by their candidate  suffered major body blows the past week.

Narrative #1. Trump is a Nazi.  Surely you remember the way a far-Right rally was reported shortly after the election.  Read all about it as reported in the Atlantic — https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/richard-spencer-speech-npi/508379/.  It got a lot of press, here and elsewhere.  There may have been all of 300 people there.  Then there were his unfortunate comments after Charlottesville.

Unfortunately for the meme — the following appeared this week in the New York Times  —

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration announced on Thursday that it would withdraw from Unesco, the United Nations cultural organization, after years of the United States distancing itself because of what it called the group’s “anti-Israel bias.”

Here’s the link — https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/12/us/politics/trump-unesco-withdrawal.html —

Narrative #2:  The Russians did everything they could to swing the election to Trump.  Well we finally are finding out just what the Russians actually did — this from Facebook and Cheryl Sandberg (hardly friends of Trump).

The following is from a Wall Street Journal article appearing 13 October 2017.  Here is the link — https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-users-were-unwitting-targets-of-russia-backed-scheme-1507918659

“Two accounts that Facebook Inc. FB 0.69% said appear to have ties to Russian operatives amassed more than half a million followers in the past couple of years with posts, ads and events that stoked strong emotions over issues including race and immigration.

Most followers never suspected that people with possible Russian ties were behind the accounts—except for a few users who interacted in real life with the people running the sites.

Some users said the content from these accounts seemed like something their peers would share. “Blacktivist,” an account that supported causes in the black community and used hashtags such as #BlackLivesMatter, frequently posted videos of police allegedly shooting unarmed black men. ”

If the Russians were trying to elect Trump, do you think they would have thought inflaming a group that votes overwhelmingly Democratic was a good idea?.

Basically they were trying to inflame the body politic with divisive material.

The Voice of America had a similar effect behind the Iron Curtain.  The difference, of course, is that our source was quite undisguised.

The Russian government is not our friend.  I’m glad my grandparents got out of the Baltics and Poland in the late 19th century.