[Breitbart] Monday on MSNBC’s "Live," RealClearPolitics columnist and associate editor A.B. Stoddard said the public did not know what special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has uncovered.
Partial transcript as follows:
Nipple sized A.B., possibly much less. Very played out, and suffering from chronic atopic dermatitis. Wish I had better news.
#7
Given the utter failure of predictions made by sundance, qanon, Rex & Wictor to materialize I no pay attention or give credence to their gibbering and scribbling. Trump damn well better do something and soon. We’re two years into his term and none of the bad actors are in jail. Declassify the whole mess and let things fall where they will.
[Guardian] Operatives used social media to suppress votes for Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, new research finds
Russian online propagandists aggressively targeted African Americans during the 2016 US election campaign to suppress votes for Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, according to new research.
Analysts found that Russian operatives used social media to "confuse, distract, and ultimately discourage" black people and other pro-Clinton blocs from voting, using bogus claims such as Clinton receiving money from the Ku Klux Klan.
Black turnout declined in 2016 for the first presidential election in 20 years, according to the US census bureau, falling to less than 60% from a record high of 66.6% in 2012. Exit polls indicated that black voters strongly favoured Clinton over Trump.
The new findings on the secret activities of the Internet Research Agency (IRA), known as the Russian government’s "troll factory", were revealed on Monday in a pair of reports to the US Senate’s intelligence committee. One was led by experts from Oxford University and the other by New Knowledge, an American cybersecurity firm.
New Knowledge said Russia had waged a five-year "propaganda war" against the US public. The Oxford researchers said that while the propaganda was meant to "push and pull" Americans in different directions, "what is clear is that all of the messaging clearly sought to benefit the Republican party ‐ and specifically, Donald Trump".
Both reports faulted the major social media companies ‐ Facebook, Twitter and Google ‐ for what they said were ongoing failures to turn over exhaustive data to US authorities investigating the Russian campaign. They said some executives had "misrepresented or evaded" and "dissembled" in statements to Congress.
#5
The Oxford researchers said that while the propaganda was meant to "push and pull" Americans in different directions
Buggering Oxford researchers was it? More than simply "push and pull", has been for a very long time.
Colonel Theodore Lyman, one of Meade's aides, recorded a postcript of to the visit of two British officers. Left unsaid by Meade was the common knowledge that it had been the output of British factories and mills that had supplied the weaspons, munitions, and supplies, without which the Confederacy would have collapsed in the first year of the war if left to it's own resourses. Mead's aide, Colonel Rosenkrantz - a Swedish immigrant - was the escort for these two officers and less reticent. When asked by them what was the opinion of Americans of the British, he said , "Vell, I can tell you that, so far as I have observed, some Americans do just care nothing about you, and many other say that, when this war is over, they will immediately and very soon kick you out of Canada." The increulous British asked why "Rosie" replied. "Because they had say you have made the Rebs very many bullets." More to the point, in March of the next year Grant forwarded to Stanton a captured ammunition box stamped, "Royal Arsenal Woolwich, " Whether Sharpe had anything to do with this is unknown.
Peter C. Tsouras, Major General George H. Sharpe, and the Creation of American Military Intelligence in the Civil War. Page 333
The Steele dossier, a more contemporary example of "push and pull."
#6
One was led by experts from Oxford University and the other by New Knowledge, an American cybersecurity firm.
‘Junk News’: Russia Report Done By Anti-Conservative Academics
The Oxford University Computational Propaganda Project had attacked several conservative outlets as “junk news” in previous studies. Those targeted outlets include Drudge Report, NewsBusters, CNSNews, MRCTV, Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Free Beacon, LifeNews, National Review, the Federalist, and the Red State. (Three of those are operated by the Media Research Center, which runs NewsBusters.)
The study on “junk news” drew on “a list of sources that consistently publish political news and information that is extremist, sensationalist, conspiratorial, masked commentary, fake news, and other forms of junk news.”
That study was also produced by Oxford and Graphika. Two of the people behind that study, “Junk News Consumption,” were involved in this latest study, “The IRA, Social Media and Political Polarization in the United States 2012-2018.” Philip N. Howard and John Kelly worked on both projects. On Twitter, Howard has posted that he is against the Second Amendment, and repeatedly pushed that Trump supporters and the Trump campaign work primarily through “fake news.”
Another member of the group that produced the study, Camille Francois, was a former employee of Google, working at Jigsaw as a Principal Researcher.
[Townhall] Incoming Congressional Black Caucus Chairwoman Karen Bass (D-CA) sat down with The Hill on Monday for an interview. That's when she talked about the potential for impeachment proceedings.
"Whether or not articles of impeachment get introduced and followed up on, I think time will tell," Bass told Jamal Simmons. "We could very easily be in a place where we have no choice because if it keeps coming out of evidence of criminal behavior from this White House, it's going to be hard for us not to do that."
Bass, however, did remind Simmons of one thing: Republicans hold a majority in the Senate. Even if the House decided to impeach Trump and it passed, it wouldn't hold up in the Senate.
"Realistically speaking, you know, you know we can impeach in this House, but it can't be followed through because there's not a supermajority over in the Senate," Bass explained. "So I think impeachment might come up, but I guarantee you it is not the first item on anybody's agenda that would be chairing these committees."
#6
Typical CBC Corrupt Pol: The Curious Case of Karen Bass But after hitting the campaign trail this spring as the Democratic Party's heir apparent to outgoing Congresswoman Diane Watson, Bass, who was President Obama's state campaign co-chair in 2008, ran into the kinds of troubles that normally dog the fat-cat insiders and Sacramento political hacks.
The Los Angeles Times reported in early June that Bass had missed 60 percent of Assembly sessions during her campaign, yet she was collecting the generous $141.80 in per diem payments that taxpayers provide legislators so they can afford to work far from home, in Sacramento.
Bass had collected per diem for 29 days, getting more than $4,000, yet for much of that time she was skipping out of legislative duties in Sacramento.
Just months before her per diem practices came to light, she had touted her "Joint Select Committee on Reform" to increase legislative transparency and revamp the old ways of doing business in politics.
"That's why it's upsetting that we find her having compromised in some of those areas," says Doug Heller, executive director of Consumer Watchdog, a Santa Monica–based good-government group.
More recently, Bass' staff made the news for taking from oil giant BP lots of free tickets to major sporting and other events in Sacramento. Though it was legal, it left an uneasy feeling that Bass had morphed into just another pol, and more quickly than most.
"At the very least," says Heller of her per diem take, "it's a major loss of perspective over what should have been a natural and obvious bright line for someone like Karen Bass. When you go to Sacramento and live in that insular world for five or six years, clear rules become fuzzy."
Posted by: Frank G ||
12/18/2018 9:18 Comments ||
Top||
#7
We may have no choice but a civil war.
Everything I see indicates that it is baked into the cake at this point. Whether we get 1 or 2 terms with President Trump, CW-II is unavoidable. Use whatever time we have wisely to get ready.
#8
If the Dems spend the next two years investigating all things Trumpy, it will be noisy, but will keep them from other mischief, like passing stupid laws and messing with things they think they understand.
Prediction: their Trump obsession, while tiresome, will eventually provoke a backlash that leads to a thousand year TrumpReich.
#9
As the stock market keeps crashing the Dims stay stuck on stupid. Which is why the market began crashing when voters gave the House back to the Dims a few weeks ago which is the final nail in the coffin with the debt at bankrupt leveĺs.
The US is no more. The whole world knows it except for US voters.
[NYT] There are stirrings of discussion these days in philosophical circles about the prospect of human extinction. This should not be surprising, given the increasingly threatening predations of climate change. In reflecting on this question, I want to suggest an answer to a single question, one that hardly covers the whole philosophical territory but is an important aspect of it. Would human extinction be a tragedy?
To get a bead on this question, let me distinguish it from a couple of other related questions. I’m not asking whether the experience of humans coming to an end would be a bad thing. (In these pages, Samuel Scheffler has given us an important reason to think that it would be.) I am also not asking whether human beings as a species deserve to die out. That is an important question, but would involve different considerations. Those questions, and others like them, need to be addressed if we are to come to a full moral assessment of the prospect of our demise. Yet what I am asking here is simply whether it would be a tragedy if the planet no longer contained human beings. And the answer I am going to give might seem puzzling at first. I want to suggest, at least tentatively, both that it would be a tragedy and that it might just be a good thing.
[Never be uninteresting. Read the most thought-provoking, delightful and raw stories from The New York Times Opinion section.]
To make that claim less puzzling, let me say a word about tragedy. In theater, the tragic character is often someone who commits a wrong, usually a significant one, but with whom we feel sympathy in their descent. Here Sophocles’s Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Lear, and Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman might stand as examples. In this case, the tragic character is humanity. It is humanity that is committing a wrong, a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species, but with whom we might be sympathetic nonetheless for reasons I discuss in a moment.
To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.
Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.
#5
So, Jonestown was really a good thing? Should we have "Suicide Encouragement Hotlines"?
Posted by: Matt ||
12/18/2018 12:42 Comments ||
Top||
#6
He’s not totally wrong. OTOH, “nature, red in tooth and claw”. There are many things the human race could do better. And I believe it will do much better.
The word “unimaginable” is grossly overused. I have no trouble imagining the suffering.
#7
For the clueless "climate change" is an ongoing process that is uncontrollable by whatever puny efforts we humans may want to do. It is not brought about by human energy consumption and generation. It is powered by the Sun effecting the atmosphere and oceans and land masses. The land masses direct the flow of the oceans ... blah blah blah ...
Now a philosophy prof is telling us we're bad. La-Di-Da!
So, long as he's protected within the safety of our society, he'll never have to worry about the whole predator-prey game that is normal to the animal kingdom. Get a life loser. Or show us how to save the planet and end yours.
#9
rid us of the CSPC, polarized electrical outlets and reintroduce the original Lawn Dart (game , not aircraft) and that will be a good self weeding start. follow up with non safety auto glass and removeseat belts airbags and collapsible steering columns and that accelerates the process.
[American Greatness] Against what or whom is the contemporary Western public pushing back?
The French non-Parisians against new green taxes on already unaffordable gasoline? Broke southern European Union nations against the financial demands of German bankers? The Eastern Europeans against French and German open-border mandates?
The British masses against both the EU and their own government that either cannot or will not follow the will of the people and implement Brexit? The American populists against outsourcing, offshoring, and illegal immigration?
The common target of all these populist pushbacks is an administrative and cultural elite that shares a set of transnational and globalist values and harbors mostly contempt for the majority of their own Neanderthal citizens who are deemed hopelessly unwoken to environmental, racial, gender, and cultural inevitabilities.
In a word, the Ivy League, Oxbridge, and the Sorbonne masters of the universe assume that the world is on a predetermined trajectory. We are to follow an arc of history bending toward state-managed social justice if you will‐to end up as a sort of global Menlo Park, Malibu, Upper West Side, Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Schwabing, or Kensington. No wonder, it is their ethical duty of transnationals to goad the fated, but sometimes stalled, process along.
Like Aristocrats of Old
Voters in consensual societies are often assumed too ignorant of the world beyond their borders, too encumbered with traditional racial, ethnic, gender, religious, and nationalist prejudices, and too ill-informed to know what is good for them. No wonder that sometimes hoi polloi must either vote repeatedly until they get it right, or follow executive and judicial fiats issued from their betters on high. In the globalist mindset, Brexit passed not because it was felt to be good by a majority or even advantageous for the United Kingdom, but because racists, xenophobes, nativists, protectionists, and chauvinists deluded the clueless public into thinking a pre-EU, and more racist and sexist Britain was somehow superior.
#1
And they won't pay attention till their heads are literally on the chopping block. Lots of blood has shown to be a 'wake up call' in too many human records. Oops they did it again.
#4
"A useful idea, the human,"
Asserted a broody ichneumon,
"Which practically begs
To be blessed with my eggs,
Though each human shows no such acumen!"
[Guardian] The New York Times Book Review and Alice Walker have come under criticism for comments the celebrated writer made in an interview with the publication in which she recommended a work by someone accused of antisemitism.
Asked what books were currently on her nightstand, Walker, the author of The Color Purple, mentioned among others And the Truth Shall Set You Free, by the controversial British figure David Icke. Icke, an author and public speaker in his own right, has long propounded a series of conspiracy theories in his work that many see as antisemitic.
"The book is an unhinged antisemitic conspiracy tract written by one of Britain’s most notorious antisemites," wrote Tablet magazine’s Yair Rosenberg, among the most strident critics of Walker’s comment. Rosenberg also faulted the Times for failing to react to or qualify the contents of the book to its readers.
Icke has long claimed that a shadowy cabal controls the world, a familiar antisemitic trope.
#1
Thank you for your learned cultural and literary insights Alice. We knew we could count on you. I so wish we could hear from Assata Olugbala Shakur on the topic. Cuba is long distance. She never calls, she never writes.
[SignsOfTheTimes] OK, so, that was a close one. For a moment there, I was starting to worry that the Democrats weren't going to take back the House and rescue us from "the brink of fascism." Which, if that had happened, in addition to having to attend all those horrible stadium rallies and help the government mass murder the Jews, we would have been denied the next two years of Donald Trump-related congressional hearings and investigations that we can now look forward to ... I'm going to go ahead and call them the Hitlergate Hearings.
Staging these hearings has always been a crucial part of the Resistance's strategy. As history has proved, time and time again, when literal fascists take over your democracy, outlaw opposing political parties, and start shipping people off to concentration camps and revoking journalists' White House access, the only effective way to defeat them is to form a whole buttload of congressional committees and investigate the living Hitler out of them. This is especially the case when the literal fascists who have commandeered your democracy are conspiring with a shifty-eyed Slavic dictator whose country you have essentially surrounded with your full-spectrum dominant military forces, and who your media have thoroughly demonized, but who is nevertheless able to brainwash your citizens into electing his fascist puppet president with a few thousand dollars worth of Facebook ads.
#2
Do they really think two more yeas of rage-athon daily on CNN/MSNBC and the other propaganda organs will keep advertisers paying? I think the public is about over rageTV 24/7. God, I hope so. But 1/2 of our fellow citizens and recently imported colonists are totally driven by emotions in their decision-making, so maybe not. AS one famous showman allegedly said, "...you never go broke counting on the stupidity of the American people!"
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.
[Breitbart] Monday on MSNBC’s "Live," RealClearPolitics columnist and associate editor A.B. Stoddard said the public did not know what special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has uncovered.
Meanwhile, the Hildebeest quietly slips out the back door. 
[Guardian] Operatives used social media to suppress votes for Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump, new research finds
