BLUF:
[PJ] What makes this so interesting is that Palantir was founded by Peter Thiel, who is also a board member and early investor in Facebook. What does this mean? A Facebook board member was possibly connected to the harvesting of Facebook data that created a huge privacy breach.
On Tuesday, Christopher Wylie, a data expert and Cambridge Analytica co-founder, testified to British lawmakers that "there were senior Palantir employees that were also working on the Facebook data."
According to an article in Mashable, "Thiel donated $1,000,000 in October of 2016 to the Super PAC Make America Number 1 ‐ an organization that paid Cambridge Analytica $231,352 toward the end of the same year, an FEC filing shows."
"In other words, a portion of Thiel's wealth ‐ some of which was derived from his early investment in Facebook ‐ likely made its way into the coffers of Cambridge Analytica via Make America Number 1. "
Do you see the connection here? A Facebook board member appears to be involved in the data loss scandal that’s created Facebook’s biggest crisis yet, but Zuckerberg claims he’s unaware of the connection. He’s either not telling all he knows or he’s terribly naïve and being taken advantage of by his board member.
#1
Campaign contributions are the sitting squirrel. The issue to make note of here is Palantir, a highly effective intelligence community social network tool.
Forget the political contribs, it's the end user we should be concerned about. Yes of course, Zuck made his tens of billions via advertising. 'My Pillow' teevee adds, that sort of thing. A farthing here, a farthing there. Took him several decades but it all adds up.
#3
Peter Thiel is a silicon valley venture cap that invests in everything. Tesla, SpaceX, Google, Facebook .... on and on.
It's like saying GE has a lot of biz arms they are an arm of Satan. They might be losing stock value but they are still the biggest firm on the planet because that's what they grew into.
#7
Remember next time you use PayPal that Peter was one of the founders.
So he knows when I contribute to Rantburg.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/13/2018 11:48 Comments ||
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#8
It is a big stretch to say an early investor in a company, one that became rich from that company, is connected with day to day operations years later.
[GatestoneInstitute] ...Last week it was reported in the Catholic Herald that a nun who was driven out of the town of Qaraqosh, on the Nineveh plains in Iraq, has been forbidden to visit her ill sister in the United Kingdom. Sister Ban Madleen was among those Christians who were forced to flee the largest Christian town in the area when ISIS entered it in 2014. She was among the thousands of Christians who fled the approaching jihadists and found refuge in Iraqi Kurdistan. There, she set up kindergartens to look after the children of other refugees who had also sought sanctuary in the Kurdish areas. A letter, seen by the Catholic Herald, from the UK Visa and Immigration division at the UK Home Office, stated that Sister Ban had not given evidence of her earnings as a kindergarten principal or shown enough evidence that her order of nuns would fund her visit.
...Perhaps Sister Ban made an elementary mistake. Instead of the nun telling the UK authorities that she had fled ISIS and been looking after refugees since her last visit to Britain she should have told the UK authorities that she had spent the interim period joining ISIS, being trained by them to kill, and that she had also learned how to hate Britain. If she had done this, then perhaps she would now be settling into life in the UK.
After all that is what Ahmed Hassan told the UK authorities after he entered the country illegally in 2015. When the same Home Office that forbade Sister Ban even to enter the country discovered that the young male Iraqi was in the UK, he explained clearly that he had been trained by ISIS. He told the Home Office officials that the group had trained him to kill. The Home Office promptly found him a place to live and study, and treated him as the minor he said he was but most likely was not. He subsequently told a teacher that he had "a duty to hate Britain". Last September, he stepped onto the District line and planted a bomb that failed to detonate fully, but which -- if it had gone off -- would have killed many dozens of commuters (including children) on the London Underground.
I haven't been around for the past week due to my first heart attack. I went to my barber and immediately went into cardiac arrest. Fortunately there's a fire station a few hundred feet away and the EMT's were there in a few minutes. According to them I was dead for three minutes. Spent a week at the South Shore Hospital (Mass. has great hospitals) where the staff and my roomie in the hospital room could not have been nicer and very professional. The only bad thing - I now have a defibrillator in my upper chest. I'll take that over being dead at 53.
Lessons to be learned - it's all about diet and not smoking cigs all the time, which was interesting because I stopped four months ago, and I've so far resisted the usual tax season pack of smokes a day.
Fortunately, news of my death was greatly exaggerated!
Posted by: Mullah Richard ||
04/13/2018 8:59 Comments ||
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#2
Thanks for the update. Been wondering if you were on holiday.
....could not have been nicer
Strange isn't it, as we approach the long journey, people decide to... 'be nice?' Tell me they're not concerned about what we'll say of them when we reach the other side, just tell me.
#5
Glad to hear you are not pining for the fijords, Raj. I lived in Woburn for 2 years and found the people to be very nice. Loved my stay working for Badger Engineers.
Posted by: Deacon Blues ||
04/13/2018 9:44 Comments ||
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#6
According to them I was dead for three minutes
And voted Democrat twice in those three minutes? Welcome back, Raj
Posted by: Frank G ||
04/13/2018 10:21 Comments ||
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#7
Raj, glad you are O.K. and not dead. Your insightful and pithy comments are enlightening. Tax season puts many people in their grave. Keep on keepin on.
#8
Keep on living, bro. Good to have you back.
By the way, don't let the Dims find out you were dead or they'll be sending write in votes in your name![sarc off]
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
04/13/2018 15:29 Comments ||
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#13
Raj, we are beings of habits. If you drop the smokes replace them with a nearby 25 pound bar bell sometimes and a walk around the block the next time. Just dropping something doesn't work. You have to replace a bad habit with a good habit, a bad item on the menu with a good item on the menu. Theres a thousand better options to replace a bad habit with.
#2
In my ideal world the nations would use assassins to take out each others leaders and stop having their people fight on their behalf.
Such a scenario has two advantages: (1) Democracies have a big advantage as they have a system for replacing leaders peacefully while authoritarian nations often fall into infighting (2) Democracies would see less opportunists moving into positions of power and if they did they'd avoid wars like the plague.
[Federalist] President Trump nominated Wendy Vitter for a lifetime appointed position as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Her Senate confirmation hearings included questioning about statements she made in 2013 at a pro-life rally. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) repeatedly asked whether she still believes that Planned Parenthood kills more than 150,000 females a year.
According to the Clarion Herald, a New Orleans-based newspaper, her original words were: "Planned Parenthood says they promote women’s health. It is the saddest of ironies that they kill over 150,000 females a year. The first step in promoting women’s health is to let them live."
Outlets such as HuffPo called these "pretty strong comments" and implied they should therefore cast doubt on her nomination. But they’re accurate. If anything, in fact, Vitter underestimated Planned Parenthood’s annual female death toll.
Planned Parenthood’s 2016-2017 report lists 321,384 abortions performed in 2016. Slightly more boys are born than girls (51.2 percent), although it’s impossible to tell if that ratio matches conception ratios of boys and girls, given miscarriages and sex-selective abortions, where women have an abortion (or are pushed into one) solely or largely because of the child’s sex.
Planned Parenthood either doesn’t track or release sex-selective abortion numbers, but polls and abortion rates from other countries indicate that people tend to prefer boys over girls. In countries with high sex-selective abortions, such as China and India, girls are much more likely to be aborted than boys. When Americans were polled about sex-selective abortion and preferences for sexes of their babies, 40 percent preferred boys and 28 percent preferred girls.
#1
When Americans were polled about sex-selective abortion and preferences for sexes of their babies, 40 percent preferred boys and 28 percent preferred girls.
#2
Wendy Vitter is the wife of former Louisiana Senator David Vitter - we rebelled against royalty yet never seem to get beyond a few family dynasties.
The Clarion Herald is the New Orleans Diocese Catholic newspaper.
[DAVID WARRENonline] A journalist hiding behind a "Premium" pay wall, one Margi Murphy of the London Telegraph, noticed something I did, too, during my brief video reconnoitre of yesterday’s congressional hearings. It was about this Zuckerberg fellow who, with friends who have since been suing him, launched the appalling Facebook social media site, from his Harvard dorm room in 2004.
Did I mention that the whole idea of the thing is appalling? Or that it should be eliminated for reasons of good taste? Or that the "softball" questions the lad is being asked by the Merican Senators should be supplemented with spinballs, knuckleballs, spitballs, rocks, and the occasional guided missile? No? Well, sometimes I run over my self-imposed space allowance, in my tireless efforts to be "fair and balanced."
What this Murphy lady noticed, with the help of some "body-language expert" ‐ and I could spot without ‐ was that young Zuckerberg is a computer animation. My words, not theirs, but they flagged the robotic delivery of prepared answers to prepared questions, and the facial gestures corresponding to the keystrokes in an emoji chart.
Now that we have seen him in action, an inquiry should be called to establish whether Zuckerberg actually exists. In his Wicked Paedia entry, for instance, his pre-college claim to know French, Hebrew, Latin, and ancient Greek is stated. Surely that is a giveaway. Many questions need answering, for instance: Was his height-enhancing seat-cushion real? Or was it part of the holographic projection? How many of the Senators were real? And how do we know the camera slips were genuine?
...The human mind seeks order. Even hallucinations serve this quest. Placed in an environment where nothing is intelligible, quite wonderful things will be imagined. Notwithstanding, I am struck by a horrible thought. What if Zuckerberg is real?
[Conversations About the Obvious] The Big Gay Lie that leftists and the media have been pushing for decades is that people who suffer from same sex attraction and act on that are just like heterosexuals.
The reality is that the gay lifestyle is massively promiscuous and is based on the total objectification of people. Gays have far more sexual partners than the vast majority of heterosexuals.
Gay "marriage" in Europe has been anything but marriage. They tend to last about 2 years and in each month of that time each "spouse" has sex with, on average, on person other than their spouse.
Gays have a wide spectrum of diseases; it's safer to smoke than to live the gay lifestyle.
Pro-gay researchers have established over and over that there are no long term gay monogamous relationships. In fact the less faithful two gays are to each other the longer their relationship lasts.
God loves gays and we should too. But enabling a horribly exploitive lifestyle with monstrous health implications is not love.
It's time that we start exposing the truth about the gay lifestyle rather than pretending that they're just like everyone else. To continue to lie about them does them a great disservice.
#2
I had a namesake in high school who's now married to another man. I asked him - 'given the high divorce rates with hetero married couples, why would you want to be part of that mess?' I can't remember exactly what he said but it was along the lines of 'we want to be treated like everybody else'.. Me - 'who's the husband and who's the spouse in this situation?' He hasn't talked to me since.
#4
...or who's the pitcher, who's the catcher? - The Ren & Stimpy Show
For those too young to remember or know, back during the big AIDS epidemic in the 80s, those 'big' mags like Time and Newsweak touted the coming Hetro AIDS Pan-epidemic that was about to be upon us. Never developed. Seems the mass of deplorables didn't actually practice the behaviors other groups did in sharing precious bodily fluids.
#5
Raj,
There's a big difference in status between "tops" and "bottoms" in the gay world. No one wants to admit being a "bottom."
P.S. Back in the 80's San Francisco steam baths were considered the main transmitters of AIDS. A study revealed the average visitor had sex 6 times with 4 different partners. That's a level of promiscuity that's hard to match.
Posted by: Frozen Al ||
04/13/2018 12:57 Comments ||
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#6
Frozen Al, in the show Shameless that issue came up but both characters were bottoms. I think that stigma might have gone away with a lot of others.
h/t Instapundit
[BearingArms] Imagine, if you will, what the news would have looked like if all the authorities who had seen the red flags had acted prior to the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. What would the political landscape look like today?
Well, we don’t have to imagine. We don’t have to imagine because we have a real-life example.
Gardena police found several guns and a cache of ammunition at the home of a high school student who threatened campus violence in two social media posts this week, authorities said.
The investigation began Thursday when police received a call regarding a threat to Serra High School, according to the Gardena Police Department. Investigators identified a student who posted a threatening message earlier this week.
The teen posted a more specific threat Thursday, saying that violence would take place on campus. Detectives arrested the teen, who was not named, on suspicion of making criminal threats and possessing a firearm as a juvenile.
In other words, the teen made a threat, the police acted, and no one is dead.
That’s what should have happened in Parkland, but didn’t. In Gardena ‐ a mass shooting no one will ever hear about because it was prevented ‐ the efficiency of the local authorities saved countless lives. Why? Because they acted.
h/t instapundit
There are currently two worlds: one for the rich, leftists, and the Deep State actors, and one for the average American. Here are some of the differences:
A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
[Federalist] President Trump nominated Wendy Vitter for a lifetime appointed position as a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Louisiana. Her Senate confirmation hearings included questioning about statements she made in 2013 at a pro-life rally. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) repeatedly asked whether she still believes that Planned Parenthood kills more than 150,000 females a year.
[Conversations About the Obvious] The Big Gay Lie that leftists and the media have been pushing for decades is that people who suffer from same sex attraction and act on that are just like heterosexuals.
