Tuesday, October 23, 2018

The Overwhelming Hypocrisy of Republicans

While the question is rhetorical this does offer an opportunity to really address one of the biggest frustrations all thinking humans should have with the Republican party: Hypocrisy.
Every single day we watch as Donald Trump rubs his adultery and unchristlike behavior in the "party of family values" pussy, and they let him! In fact they actually like it, Trump has an 88% approval rating among Republicans (Oddly fitting.) This is the same Republican party that overwhelmingly voted for Roy Moore, their candidate being a pedophile didn't even decline turnout. He lost 3% with evangelicals though, and only 80% of self described born-again Christians gave him their vote. Good for them.
You might not be surprised to find out that the "party of life" is racking up record numbers of civilian casualties in the war on terror, or whatever we're calling it these days. (Who's the terrorist when we're the ones killing theirfamilies?)
Oh, and Saudi Arabia is using our weapons to kill civilians in Yemen, too! A 164% increase since President Trump was elected.
Party of life.
Of course I don't need to tell anybody about how the party of personal responsibility has a habit of blaming everyone else for their problems. Is it the gay agenda? Political correctness? Immigrants? Millennials? Liberals. Women? Transexuals?
My life sucks because of...
/draws card
...postmodernism.
Let's leave room for the "party of fiscal responsibility" just added a trillion dollars to the federal deficit. What are Mitch McConnell's feelings on the matter?
It's.

Your.

FUCKING.

JOB!

Mitch.
Here's a headline worth reading:
Under Ryan’s tenure as speaker, the deficit will have more than doubled. If we extend that idea backward, though, it’s worse: Since he joined Congress in 1999, the budget will have gone from a $125 billion surplus to a $1.1 trillion deficit — a swing of $1.2 trillion to the red.
Have you ever seen a trillion written out?
1,200,000,000,000.00
,
2
0
0
,
0
0
0
,
0
0
0
,
0
0
0
.
0
0
1.2 e12 dollars.
Twelve zeros, not including the coins.
I know that's a big number. It's so big that I have no way of really conceptualizing it in my head, y' know? Once I held $15,000 in assorted bills in my hand, and even though I had just counted every dollar of it twice now I still couldn't quite grasp it. Almost, but not quite.
To help put a trillion dollars into perspective let's think about it in a different way: Weight.
A trillion dollars in single dollar bills would weigh one million, one hundred and two thousand, three hundred and eleven tons.
A trillion dollars in single dollar bills would weigh one hundred and fifty seven million, four hundred and seventy three thousand stone.
A trillion dollars in single dollar bills would weigh nine hundred and ninety nine million, nine hundred and ninety nine thousand, seven hundred and seventeen kilograms.
A trillion dollars in single dollar bills would weigh two billion, two hundred and four million, six hundred and twenty two thousand pounds.
157,473,000 stone.
999,999,717 kilograms.
2,204,622,000 pounds.
Just two billion pounds, that's way easier to understand!
-_-
Family values
Christian values
Value of human life
Fiscal responsibility
Personal responsibility
To do:
  • Patriotism
  • National security
Actually I guess those two come down to the same thing. They definitely don't give a shit about national security, their obstruction of the Russia investigation proves that.
Republicans didn't just withhold evidence from Democrats, didn't just share classified and sensitive information with the subject of the investigation (not including the leaks), didn't just close the case on the House Intelligence Agency's Russia probe, they [even campaigned for President Trump by declaring him innocent of all suspicion.
How can one say they care about national security, they care about law and order, then willfully ignore facts and evidence?
That's the ultimate hypocrisy of the Republican party, isn't it? The refusal to address or acknowledge reality.
"My grandfather was vaccinated as a child and he died of cancer eighty years later, that's no coincidence."
"Climate change is a hoax and I've got the snowball to prove it!"
"The body has ways of shutting that whole thing down."
One could write a book on Republican hypocrisy.
And it's all because Republicans fall in line.

 SOURCE
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Thursday, October 18, 2018

How to get Started as a Computer Programmer

Start with Harvard's CS50 on edx, it's the best course you'll find anywhere bar none. The instructor, Dave Malan is world class. Check out CS50, and the Reddit sub r/cs50 has a lot of like minded people like you. (Note: this course is free)

Stackoverflow is your friend where you can ask any question you have or bounce ideas off of others.

Learn Java OOP (here is an excellent course): Java MOOC

Free Code Camp for web development

Build your own operating system: NAND2TETRIS

Cave of Programming: All kinds of programming

Open Source Society University: This is a solid path for those of you who want to complete a Computer Science course on your own time, for free, with courses from the best universities in the World.

r/arduino for some embedded programming fun!

.....and of course for anything under the sun: https://www.edx.org/ and https://www.coursera.org/

For BSD: https://www.freebsd.org/

For Linux: https://www.archlinux.org/

For x86 assembly: http://opensecuritytraining.info/IntroX86.html [How far down the rabbit hole do you want to go?]

Edit: Colt Steele has a good web dev course and is highly recommended to do in parallel with freecodecamp

Edit: The MIT Challenge is Scott Young's blog on how he completed the entire 4 year MIT Computer Science curriculum in 12 months

Edit: The Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl is the Bible for learning Ruby on Rails

Edit: For deeper knowledge of OOP check out Sandi Metz’s POODR

Edit: The Bible for C Programming: K&R

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Monday, October 15, 2018

The Myth of Male Privilege

A list of "Male Privileges".
Men working longer hours
Gender sentencing disparity
Gender wage-gap myth
Men have shorter life expectancy
75% of chronically homeless are men
More deaths from prostate cancer than breast cancer, breast cancer recieves 4 times more funding
Teaching bias against boys
"Forced-to-Penetrate" as being unique from rape
3% of alimony awarded to men in the USA
41.3% of custodial fathers did not receive child support from non-custodial mother. 28.8% of custodial mothers.
Only 17.5% of all fathers that apply for are awarded primary custody
Mothers were more likely than fathers to be physically abusive towards their children (49% of incidents compared to 40%)
Mothers more likely to kill their children than fathers
Men and boys experience higher rates of domestic violence, are less likely to report it, and have far fewer resources at their disposal:
Bonus: "For every 100 girls..."

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AccuWeather and Barry Meyers

I just read the Fifth Risk by Michale Lewis. Part of the book is about Accuweather and Barry Meyers' attempt to make sure The National Weather Service can't use the data it has collected, paid by the taxpayers, to publicly communicate weather forecasts. Barry Meyers thinks that taxpayers should pay his company to get the forecasts instead. Fuck this guy.

Excerpts from The Fifth Risk:

Then there was AccuWeather. It had started out making its money by repackaging and selling National Weather Service information to gas companies and ski resorts. It claimed to be better than the National Weather Service at forecasting the weather, but what set it apart from everyone else was not so much its ability to predict the weather as to market it. As the private weather industry grew, AccuWeather’s attempts to distinguish itself from its competitors became more outlandish. In 2013, for instance, it began to issue a forty-five-day weather forecast.

In 2016 that became a ninety-day weather forecast. “We are in the realm of palm reading and horoscopes here, not science,” Dan Satterfield, a meteorologist on CBS’s Maryland affiliate, wrote. “This kind of thing should be condemned, and if you have an AccuWeather app on your smartphone, my advice is to stand up for science and replace it.”

Alone in the private weather industry, AccuWeather made a point of claiming that it had “called” storms missed by the National Weather Service. Here was a typical press release: “On the evening of Feb. 24, 2018, several tornadoes swept across northern portions of the Lower Mississippi Valley causing widespread damage, injuries and unfortunately some fatalities. . . . AccuWeather clients received pinpointed SkyGuard® Warnings, providing them actionable information and more“lead time than what was given by the government’s weather service in issuing public warnings and other weather providers who rely on government warnings . . .

All AccuWeather’s press releases shared a couple of problems: 1) there was no easy way to confirm them, as the forecasts were private, and the clients unnamed; and 2) even if true they didn’t mean very much. A company selling private tornado warnings can choose the predictions on which it is judged. When it outperforms the National Weather Service, it issues a press release bragging about its prowess. When it is outperformed by the National Weather Service it can lay low. But it is bound to be better at least every now and again: the dumb blackjack player is sometimes going to beat the card counter. “You have these anecdotes [from AccuWeather], but there is no data that says they are fundamentally improving on the National Weather Service tornado forecasts,” says David Kenny, chief executive of the Weather Company, a subsidiary of IBM, which, among other things, forecasts turbulence for most of the U.S. commercial airline industry.

By the 1990s, Barry Myers was arguing with a straight face that the National Weather Service should be, with one exception, entirely forbidden from delivering any weather-related knowledge to any American who might otherwise wind up a paying customer of AccuWeather. The exception was when human life and property was at stake. Even here Myers hedged. “The National Weather Service does not need to have the final say on warnings,” he told the consulting firm McKinsey, which made a study of the strangely fraught relationship between the private weather sector and the government. “The customer and the private sector should be able to sort that out. The government should get out of the forecasting business.

Pause a moment to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.

Later, AccuWeather’s strategy appeared, to those inside the Weather Service, to change. Myers spent more time interacting directly with the Weather Service. He got himself appointed to various NOAA advisory boards. He gave an AccuWeather board seat to Conrad Lautenbacher, who had run NOAA in the second Bush administration. He became an insistent presence in the lives of the people who ran the Weather Service. And wherever he saw them doing something that might threaten his profits, he jumped in to stop it. After the Joplin tornado, the Weather Service set out to build an app, to better disseminate warnings to the public. AccuWeather already had a weather app, Myers barked, and the government should not compete with it. (“Barry Myers is the reason we don’t have the app,” says a senior National Weather Service official.) In 2015, the Weather Company offered to help NOAA put its satellite data in the cloud, on servers owned by Google and Amazon. Virtually all the satellite data that came into NOAA wound up in places where no one could ever see it again. The Weather Company simply sought to render it accessible to the public. “Myers threatened to sue the Weather Service if they did it. “He stopped it,” said David Kenny. “We were willing to donate the technology to NOAA for free. We just wanted to do a science project to prove that we could.

Myers claimed that, by donating its time and technology to the U.S. government, the Weather Company might somehow gain a commercial advantage. The real threat to AccuWeather here was that many more people would have access to weather data. “It would have been a leap forward for all the people who had the computing power to do forecasts,” said Kenny. One senior official at the Department of Commerce at the time was struck by how far this one company in the private sector had intruded into what was, in the end, a matter of public safety. “You’re essentially taking a public good that’s been paid for with taxpayer dollars and restricting it to the privileged few who want to make money off it,” he said.”

One version of the future revealed itself in March 2015. The National Weather Service had failed to spot a tornado before it struck Moore, Oklahoma. It had spun up and vanished very quickly, but, still, the people in the Weather Service should have spotted it. AccuWeather quickly issued a press release bragging that it had sent a tornado alert to its paying corporate customers in Moore twelve minutes before the tornado hit. The big point is that AccuWeather never broadcast its tornado warning. The only people who received it were the people who had paid for it—and God help those who hadn’t. While the tornado was touching down in Moore, AccuWeather’s network channel was broadcasting videos of . . . hippos, swimming.

SOURCE
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Headphones Buying Guide

I wrote this below, here is my guide as someone who listened to way too many headphones:
Poor Tier: Around $100
  • Buy the HD598 since it goes for sale at this price often. I got the 598CS (the closed version) for jut $80 on Amazon when it was on sale. The open back version is more spacious and neutral, while the 598CS is more bassy and better for modern music.
  • Another one that goes on sale for under $100 regularly is the Beyerdynamic Custom One Pro, another great option that has customizable bass ports. On the side it has an adjustable bass port with 4 positions. If you set it at the 4th Bass position, the bass quantity is stronger than Beats if you like that type of sound signature. I prefer the 3rd position.
  • If you want to go new and MSRP price, the ATH-M40x is your best bet but I would honestly just move up to the $150+ tier since so many better options exist there. Koss Portapro also has surprisingly good sound for so damn cheap, but it looks terrible and I find the band uncomfortable.
Mainstream Tier: $150-200
  • The Beyerdynamics DT 770 generally goes for around $150 and is a great option for a bass heavy signature. For those seeking something more neutral the DT 880 is at a similar price point. I would avoid the DT990 unless you like a heavily treble focused signature.
  • The Massdrop Sennheiser HD 6XX, which are $199 and are basically a rebranded HD 650. They completely annihilate the $300 Beats in terms of sound quality, comfort and durability. Its like day and night, its not even close. They would probably be a end-game headphone to your average person paired with a decent amp.
  • Philips Fidelio X2 is now discontinued, but a good option for around $150 if you can find it. Nice open back headphone with decent bass and great soundstage. These are awesome for gaming, wonderful directional cues. Put at attachable mic like the VModa Boom pro and you have something that beats any gaming headset. Another great discontinued option is the Phillips SHP9500, also open back and fantastic for its price. Amazing for gaming as well.
The ATH-M50x was often recommended back in the day as the $150 headphone, but I would avoid it. Its really been surpassed by superior options and is too narrow sounding. I would recommend moving up to the $200 ATH-M60x and skipping the M50, as its much more resolving across the spectrum and not so congested.
Upper Mainstream Tier: $250-350
  • The Fostex TR-X00 is the best option for your average consumer, its extremely well defined in the bass region and goes extremely deep into the subbass while also having low distortion. They are biocellulose drivers so they sound much more "tight", the notes don't bleed into each other like with more conventional driers. They are also drop dead gorgeous.
  • The Sennheiser Momentum 2.0 HD also tend to go for around $250 and I recommend them highly. The 1.0 have smaller earcups which were a problem for me, but the 2.0 are spacious and very comfortable. I've heard it described as a Beats for adults and I would agree, its a fun sounding headphone that doesn't have the hollow mids or absent highs.
  • The Monolith M1060 is a planar headphone, and really the lowest priced planar I can recommend. Planar headphones are different than dynamic headphones (most mainstream headphones use dynamic drivers), and are generally more difficult to make. They do have some build issues with the hinge, but they sound absolutely wonderful at this price. I also recommend changing up the pads to the ZMF Eikon Suede pads, with this mod and a bit of midbass EQ (+2db) it becomes scarily similar to the high end Audeze LCD2C planars.
  • The Meze 99 Classics is also another great option, it looks very adult and high end while offering a smooth, warm sound. Enjoyable for long term listening.
  • This is also where the go-to wireless headphone is, the Sony 1000XM3 for $350. Its better than Bose in everything, including finally surpassing them in noise cancellation. I had the 1000XM2 and sold them because they weren't that comfortable for long term flights, but the new 1000XM3 are more comfortable to me than even the Bose flagship QC35. Wireless doesn't sound as good as wired generally, but the 1000XM3 with LDAC enabled are actually as good sounding as most decent $200 headphones.
"Upper Tier" $500
  • The Beyerdynamic DT 1990 are a great option here, they are stupidly detailed and can be very easily EQ'd to any sound signature. This is a sound engineers headphone, and is open ended, but its so comfortable and has such great drivers that I comfortably recommend it here.
  • The Fostex TR-X00 Ebony is another fantastic option here. I have these and absolutely love them for EDM and Rap, they're so pleasurable to listen to. They have a much more reference sound signature with a bit of an emphasis on the bass, but they're semi open and have surprisingly good sound stage. Plus they look really beautiful, the exotic Ebony wood grain looks really nice.
  • For those seeking a reference signature, I highly recommend the Mr. Speakers Aeon Flow Closed. They are extremely resolving and they have extremely quick decay, being planar headphones. Some find them a bit sterile, but they are surprisingly dynamic when the music calls for it. They are also insanely comfortable and offer excellent isolation, they're almost as quiet as noise isolating headphones but with vastly superior sound quality.
  • The Audeze LCD2C is also an excellent headphone and can be bought for around $650 used (I got mine for $550), and its such a comfortable listening experience. Awesome bass, smooth midrange and excellent transparency. Extremely nice planar sound with very good imaging. And unlike other Audeze headphones, they're actually no a pain to listen to in terms of comfort. If you can afford it, its worth to upgrade to an LCD X in terms of sound but I find that they are uncomfortable for long periods of listening.
  • The ZMF Atticus ($1100) and Eikon ($1300) are absolutely wonderful and for my money are the best bang-for-buck option if you go high end. The Eikon is the technically superior headphone with its biocelullose drivers, but I personally find the ZMF Atticus to be my favorite headphone to listen to music period. It's got an absolutely glorious midrange, it so smooth it so crystal clear. The overall sound signature is warm and midbassy, with a slight 3db bump at around 150hz and a nice gentle rolloff to a flat deep 20hz region. The highs are nonfatiguing and its the widest sounding closed back I've ever heard. They are also absolutely beautiful in African Zebrawood (yes, I'm a sucker for exotic wood headphones)
If you're a sound engineer or serious content creator, the Sennheiser HD800 are the go to reference, but I wouldn't listen for enjoyment. They're unrealistically wide and too sterile. Yes you can EQ them, yes you can buy something like the Cavalli Liquid Carbon amp to give them some color, but even then they lack that weight to the lower spectrum that adds dynamism.
I forgot to add, get an amp. For most a Fiio E10K ($75), Objective2 ($100) or Topping A30 ($125) all will be more than enough power for anything up to $500. You really don't need anything more unless you're looking for a specific sound signature. If you'd like to spend a bit more to power hungry planar headphones, I recommend the Aune 7XS ($300) and Schitt Jotunheim ($399).

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Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Motivated Reasoning and Judge Brett Kavanaugh

The Kavanaugh situation is probably the greatest object lesson in motivated reasoning that we’ve encountered since Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman. Scott Adams calls it watching two different movies on the same screen. But Jonathan Haidt brought to my attention another way of thinking about this is a talk at UVA last year.

Motivated reasoning involves applying different standards of evidence to a proposition depending on whether or not you want the proposition to be true. If you want something to be true, you ask “CAN I believe it?” If you DON’T want something to be true, you ask “MUST I believe it?”

This is universal behavior. In the absence of extreme intention and self-discipline, we are all guilty of motivated reasoning, in areas both big and small. Think about how you watch sports. If you’re rooting for the Cowboys (as all right-thinking Americans do) and the ref rules that Dez didn’t catch the ball, you are absolutely convinced that he did. The evidence is so obvious that only a moron could claim otherwise, or possibly someone with an ulterior motive. If however, you’re rooting for the Packers, it’s as clear as day that it wasn’t a catch. The way you apply the rule, and interpret the facts in light of it, is entirely dependent on what you WANT to be true. As long as the evidence falls in the grey area between “can” and “must,” you see exactly what you want to see.

So how does this play out in L’Affaire Kavanaugh? If you went into that hearing wanting to believe that Kavanaugh was guilty, you certainly came out of it believing that he was. Looking at the evidence that was presented, CAN you believe he’s guilty? Of course. Dr. Ford apparently came across as a very credible witness, told a compelling story, and was completely convinced of its veracity. Judge Kavanaugh’s angry display was exactly what you’d expect from a rich, spoiled, jock who is having the thing he’s felt entitled to his whole life ripped away from him over what, to him, was a harmless romp. Of course, in the current environment, he can’t say that, so he tried to downplay his drinking and came up with strained explanations for obviously sinister yearbook quotes. He probably perjured himself multiple times, and hid the one person whose testimony would have been potentially most damning (Mark Judge) from the committee and behind a lame “rehab” excuse. What you saw in that hearing was exactly what you expected to see.

Now, if you went into it NOT wanting to believe him to be guilty, did anything in the hearing COMPEL you to believe that he was? Nope. As he pointed out, it’s an accusation from 35 years ago, about which no details are offered except the few that serve to implicate him (and nothing that could be proven false). Every person Dr. Ford said was at the party has no recollection of it, or outright denied that it happened – in sworn statements under penalty of perjury. Her lifelong friend – the person with the most incentive to back up her story – said she never knew Kavanaugh. High school yearbook quotes are essentially like YouTube comments now – where you say edgy things to make your friends think you’re cool. They often bear no resemblance to the actual person. Judge Kavanaugh’s anger was exactly what you’d expect from a man who had lived his entire life in a circumspect manner, carefully following the rules (a few brewskis aside) and building a stellar career and reputation, and was now being accused of something horrific – something he would never do – for pure partisan gain. He had watched his name and his family’s life ripped apart because some Senators thought he would rule in a way they didn't like on certain cases. And Dr. Ford, however sympathetic she may have appeared, had multiple holes in her story. There are contradictions between her therapist notes (or what was reported from them – she apparently refused to turn them over to the committee) and her later testimony. What you saw in that hearing was exactly what you expected to see.

The odds are that one of those last two paragraphs made you very mad. One of them was much harder for me to write than the other, because I’m as guilty of motivated reasoning as everyone else.

I’m certainly not telling you what to believe. How we FEEL about this case is based on a whole host of ideas and experiences that we’re often powerless to overcome. If you’re a woman who has been subject to sexual assault, and has watched men exactly like Kavanaugh get away with it time after time over the years, you’re probably traumatized by the very sight of him. If the rulings he might tilt toward reversal are ones that protect the freedoms that you cherish, his appointment is an existential threat to be defeated at all costs. If you’re a man who has been falsely accused of a crime by a vindictive ex, and been unable to prove your innocence, you’re furious at everyone involved in this process. And if the ruling he might tilt toward reversal are those that protect barbarisms that you find morally repugnant, anything that interferes with his appointment is a tool of evil.

What I am trying to do is help you understand that when we throw facts back and forth at each other, on this and a whole host of other issues, we’re not accomplishing anything. Ben Shapiro often says “Facts don’t care about your feelings.” He’s right, but the reverse is also true. Your feelings don’t care about the facts. Dr. Haidt’s solution to this seeming intractable problem is moral humility. Don’t be so sure that your perspective on an issue represents Good and any other represents Evil. Don’t talk about these issues in ways that preclude the possibility that someone else’s perspective might have merit. And empathize with the people who disagree with you. They’re no more in control of their feelings than you are. But we can all control how we express those feelings, and how we try to find common ground.
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How the Koch Brothers Destroyed America

The Koch/Republican network is taking over state legislatures, closing voting stations in minority areas and purging voters and extreme gerrymandering of districts and disenfranchising voters and imposing onerous Voter ID laws written by Koch front ALEC and changing the rules of governance to make their control permanent and legal. 

All of this is being carried out by state legislatures the Kochs have funded and directed their network to campaign for who introduce legislation written by Koch front ALEC.

Then they begin passing legislation, written by ALEC, benefiting the Kochs, industrial and environmental deregulation, and tax cuts which coupled with supermajority laws is the cause of the drop in rural health care and education funding, stacking the judiciary, and gerrymandering Congress.

Now they're doing the same thing nationally. Trumps Vice President, cabinet members, and many administration positions are staffed with Koch cronies, more are taking on jobs in various regulatory agencies. And stackingthe federal judiciary.

While the Koch network continues apace lobbying for 'right to work' laws, opposing Public Transit ballots, and spending 400 million on this years midterms.

They're not done by a long shot. The Kochs want a Constitutional Convention. They have three items on the agenda for it already:
  • Repealing the income tax and estate tax.
  • A balanced budget amendment - ensuring all Federal regulatory agencies, the SEC and FDA and EPA and FEC and so on, Department of Education, Social Security and Medicare, and everything else the right have had a bee in their bonnet about since the 1930s is dismantled and shut down or privatised.
  • Repealing the 17th Amendment - the right to vote for Senators. It will revert to state appointment. 32 Republican states, that's 64 Republican Senators. Just three shy of a 2/3 majority. In addition to taking over states and gerrymandering Congress and stacking federal courts.
What else would they wanted added at the convention? With the control they will wield the sky is the limit, I think the "locks and bolts" against popular organizing, reversing the changes, the democratic process and enshrining above all else the rights of the propertarian class that James McGill Buchanan, the key inspiration of the Kochs, advised the Pinochet regime on installing in Chiles constitution give a good idea.

In any other country you'd call this a soft coup.

How do you stop this?

You can't vote them out, the gerrymandering and disenfranchisement ensure their minority has a majority of power.

You fight this in the court and either they've stacked them or the judges rule in your favor and they just try again and replace the judges for the next round. If it goes to the federal courts (that they stacked remember) either they rule in their favor or its litigated for so long the courts declare its too late to change.

And what a surprise, Michigan AG Bill Schutte opposed to the ballot initiative to create an independent body to draw districts, and is running for Governor, is another Koch Brothers crony.

Where is the Democratic Party while this goes on? Their biggest concern is avoiding scary words and creating the... BoomerCorps.

So what the hell do you do?

They are extreme ideologues. Its not enough for them to have a 100 billion dollars. They believe they are right and they know best. That taxation is wrong, that public education is wrong, that public transportation is wrong, that climate change is not happening, and doing anything about these things is contrary to the free market.

There might also be a darker motivation.

The Koch Brothers father Fred Koch was a Nazi war profiteer. When he concluded business in Germany in 1938 building oil and aviation fuel refineries for the Luftwaffe he wrote in his diary that he thought only Germany, Italy, and Japan were on the right path. He brought back with him a Nanny who was a member of the Nazi Party to help raise his boys correctly.

In the 1950s he co-founded the John Birch Society. The Birchers believed that School Integration and the Civil Rights Movement were Communist Plots.

Charles Koch worked for the Birchers as a young man, he later worked with Robert LaFevre in founding the Freedom School and Ramparts College. Both had Holocaust Deniers and Neo-Confederates on their faculty.

He later founded Reason Magazine. In its early years it featured Holocaust Deniers and Neo-Confederates as merely historical revisionists challenging the stuffy orthodoxy of academias ivory tower.

By the 1980s he teamed up with James McGill Buchanan. A free market economist considered so extreme people aren't introduced to him until they've read and adhering to Ayn Rand. Together they turned George Mason University into what it is today to produce economists and policy makers that would extol their shared beliefs and carry them out in academia, industry, and government. Many graduates find positions in Koch Industries or the Koch network or sponsored into positions at other colleges.

Buchanan got his start in Virginia in the 1950s in the fight against School Integration, he conceived of Charter Schools as a means of forming an opposition that would be stripped of racist jargon. He was an advisor to the Pinochet regime, helping them construct a Constitution that would be stuffed with "locks and bolts" against democracy and popular participation ensuring an elite minority would be serviced alone.

Now remember the Kochs are ardently opposed to public education, believe in privatization and charter schools as an alternative, and their actions with state legislatures are instituting the exact same kind of "locks and bolts".

The Kochs fund the American Enterprise Institute, David sits on its board of directors. Charles Murray the author of the Bell Curve is one of its fellows.

Also teaching at GMU is economist Garrett Jones. His work draws upon that of white supremacist and eugenicist Richard Lynn, and his work has been favorably reviewed by VDARE. Jones has delivered lectures arguing less democracy in the US would lead to better governance.

The Kochs 'prisoner outreach' program is overseen by Florida Atlantic University professor Marshall DeRosa, a member of the League of the South.

Assistant Professor Jonathan Anomaly at the Department of Political Economy and Moral Science at the University of Arizona, which has received 1.8 million from the Kochs and 2.6 million from their associates, published an article Public Goods and Education. In it Anomaly discussed the value of exploring links between genetics and IQ of different racial groups, and the value of eugenics. He has also written about the need to replace public education.

They provide funding to Young America's Foundation that funds those lecture tours featuring Murray, David Horowitz, Ann Coulter, Ted Nugent, Robert Spencer, Milo Yiannopoulos. Ben Shapiro is a new addition. Its board member James B. Taylor is the former president of the National Policy Institute, now run by alt right icon Richard Spencer.

Rebel Media in Canada was founded by Ezra Levant - who has previously worked for the Fraser Institute the Kochs main Canadian think tank and before that did his internship at the Charles G. Koch Foundation. Rebel Media is hive of altright activism.

Jordan Peterson started at Rebel Media, and often promotes Koch linked groups.

Stefan Molyneux has associated with Jones, Murray, and the League of the South.

So when you start to really dig into them you find a lot of connections to racism, from the Birchers in the 1950s to 'racial realists' and the alt right today. All with a consistent narrative that 'they' are undermining 'our' society.

Which might then lead one to question why it is so many of the policies they advocate for target, marginalize, and limit the rights of minorities.
They won’t be around much longer
I saw an interview with Rupert Murdoch years ago where he spoke about his desire to live to 100. He works out every day with a physical trainer, has his meals catered by a nutritionist, and both are overseen by a doctor. I don't doubt many others in his class and with his wealth feel the same way.
I also don’t understand why the Republicans’ response upon realizing that they are unelectable in an ethically run democracy opt for unethical
They're not going to admit their policy ideas are wrong. So the cynical will go for the money, and the true believers will concoct the elaborate fantasies about how liberals and Democrats are funded by George Soros to bus in illegal immigrants.

They work for rich and powerful people who demand their policies be adopted and feel extremely entitled and don't take no for an answer.
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