*Trump's Attack on the Postal Service Now Endangers Democracy.*

The post office is not supposed to be a business. It is ok to subsidize it.

(satire) *"We get that unmarked federal vehicles taking people off the street seems disturbing to people right now, but within a few months, this will just seem like an everyday occurrence that isn’t worth a second thought."*

Sad to say, that could really happen. The way they make that happen is by doing something else even worse.

The wrecker made noises about possibly pardoning Edward Snowden.

Although his main job is destroying democracy, he does other things on the side, and occasionally one of them is good. Snowden is a great hero, and I hope the wrecker does pardon him. However, when weighed against the horrible things the wrecker continues to do, this would not go far in earning my overall good opinion.

I urge all Americans, including elected officials, to support Snowden's cause. I would hesitate to urge them to push hard for it, because doing that might move the wrecker to drop the idea.

An important annual college entrance exam was cancelled this year, and the company that runs it issued "predicted" scores determined by an algorithm from whatever personal academic data was available. Some students feel they got unfairly low scores.

I have no way of judging how close the "predicted" scores are to what those students would have got — and neither do they, nor universities, nor anyone else. Some teachers say that all their students got surprisingly low grades this year, which is reason to think the predictions were off. I don't see a proof that the prediction algorithm was broken (though it might be), but this way of handling the exam was bad, because students cannot tell they were not cheated.

I presume that applicants send universities all the other data that the algorithm used. If this exam provides something useful to universities, that is because it gives some independent information about each applicant, information not redundant with the other data. A substitute that is in fact redundant with the other data provides no independent information, it only gives the impression of doing so. It is phony.

Edward Snowden has reportedly earned $1.2 million from 5 years of speaking engagements. The US government is trying to seize that.

His income works out to 240k per year — an amount that is comfortable but won't make him rich. He probably has a lot of expenses for security and bodyguards.

I wonder how the US expects to seize the money. Surely Snowden is not leaving it in a place where the US could take it.