FCC unveils plan to repeal net neutrality rules – The Washington Post
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Category: Domestic Affairs,
What makes someone a white nationalist?
Hatred of outsiders has been a cyclical thing in America, and we seem to be in such a cycle now. Economic and social insecurity fuels bigotry, and new forms of communication — the internet, especially — helps it spread. But psychologists and sociologists over the last few decades have begun to understand the qualities that make a person susceptible to what was once called “xenophobia,” meaning fear of outsiders — a useful term that perhaps deserves to be resurrected in Trump-era America. And understanding how people are recruited into hate is a first step in combating it.
What makes someone a white nationalist?
hmmm
Tillerson Turns a Blind Eye to Countries Using Child Soldiers – Flagrantly Violating Federal Law
Secretary of State Rex Tillerson has been accused by about a dozen members of his department of breaching a federal law aimed at preventing foreign militaries from enlisting child soldiers. The bizarre move by government employees highlights the apparent disarray Tillerson has brought to the department, and is emblematic of the tensions [between] the former Exxon Mobil CEO [and the] more experienced diplomats under his direction.
Tillerson allegedly violated the Child Soldiers Prevention Act (CSPA) in June, when he decided to exclude Iraq, Myanmar and Afghanistan from a U.S. list of offenders regarding the use of child soldiers, according to a confidential “dissent” memo from July 28 obtained by Reuters.
Does Rex Tillerson Support Using Child Soldiers? Secretary of State Accused of Violating Federal Law
Useless asshat.
Drug Labs Used By The Taliban In Afghanistan Are Now A U.S. Target
The United Nations found in a survey released last week that opium production has nearly doubled since 2016. Poppy cultivation has increased by 63 percent. Afghanistan is the world’s main cultivator of the poppy, from which heroin and opium are made.
Drug Labs Used By The Taliban In Afghanistan Are Now A U.S. Target After Trump Authorizes Strikes
hmmmm
Yellen, denied second term as Fed chair, announces resignation
Yellen, denied second term as Fed chair, announces resignation – POLITICO
Keep the economy afloat? As long his master Putin is happy the Cheeto don’t care….
Trump Family Business Is Way Smaller Than The President Has Touted
The Trump Organization’s Inflated revenue figures are “flagrantly untrue,” said a Crain’s reporter.
Trump Family Business Is Way Smaller Than The President Has Touted | HuffPost
hmmm
Director of Puerto Rico power company resigns amid blackouts, controversial contract
Earlier this week, Ramos testified before a U.S. Senate committee about a $300 million contract awarded to Whitefish Energy Holdings that has since been canceled. The contract is undergoing a local and federal audit.
Prior to the announcement of Ramos’ resignation, local newspaper El Vocero had reported on Friday that Ramos had awarded a nearly $100,000 contract to an attorney for consulting work just days after Hurricane Irma brushed past Puerto Rico. It was the same attorney Ramos previously had tried to appoint as sub-director of the power company. Rossello said that contract also will be reviewed.
hmmmm
U.S. Nuclear General Says Would Resist ‘Illegal’ Trump Strike Order
Hyten said running through scenarios of how to react in the event of an illegal order was standard practice, and added: “If you execute an unlawful order, you will go to jail. You could go to jail for the rest of your life.
U.S. Nuclear General Says Would Resist ‘Illegal’ Trump Strike Order: CBS | U.S. News | US News
hmmm
What Facebook Did to American Democracy
In late 2014, The Daily Dot called attention to an obscure Facebook-produced case study on how strategists defeated a statewide measure in Florida by relentlessly focusing Facebook ads on Broward and Dade counties, Democratic strongholds. Working with a tiny budget that would have allowed them to send a single mailer to just 150,000 households, the digital-advertising firm Chong and Koster was able to obtain remarkable results. “Where the Facebook ads appeared, we did almost 20 percentage points better than where they didn’t,” testified a leader of the firm. “Within that area, the people who saw the ads were 17 percent more likely to vote our way than the people who didn’t. Within that group, the people who voted the way we wanted them to, when asked why, often cited the messages they learned from the Facebook ads.”
…That this could be a problem was apparent to many. Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, which came out in the summer of 2011, became the most widely cited distillation of the effects Facebook and other internet platforms could have on public discourse.
Pariser began the book research when he noticed conservative people, whom he’d befriended on the platform despite his left-leaning politics, had disappeared from his News Feed. “I was still clicking my progressive friends’ links more than my conservative friends’— and links to the latest Lady Gaga videos more than either,” he wrote. “So no conservative links for me.”
…Most germane to this discussion, he raised the point that if every one of the billion News Feeds is different, how can anyone understand what other people are seeing and responding to?
…Targeting made tracking the actual messaging that the campaigns were paying for impossible to track. On Facebook, the campaigns could show ads only to the people they targeted. We couldn’t actually see the messages that were actually reaching people in battleground areas. From the outside, it was a technical impossibility to know what ads were running on Facebook.
…“in the final three months of the U.S. presidential campaign, the top-performing fake election-news stories on Facebook generated more engagement than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, NBC News, and others.”
…What made the election cycle different was that all of these changes to the information ecosystem had made it possible to develop weird businesses around fake news. Some random website posting aggregated news about the election could not drive a lot of traffic. But some random website announcing that the Pope had endorsed Donald Trump definitely could. The fake news generated a ton of engagement, which meant that it spread far and wide.
A few days before the election Silverman and fellow BuzzFeed contributor Lawrence Alexander traced 100 pro–Donald Trump sites to a town of 45,000 in Macedonia. Some teens there realized they could make money off the election, and just like that, became a node in the information network that helped Trump beat Clinton.
…There were reports that Russian trolls were commenting on American news sites. There were many, many reports of Russia’s propaganda offensive in Ukraine.
…A Guardian reporter who looked into Russian military doctrine around information war found a handbook that described how it might work. “The deployment of information weapons, [the book] suggests, ‘acts like an invisible radiation’ upon its targets: ‘The population doesn’t even feel it is being acted upon. So the state doesn’t switch on its self-defense mechanisms,’” wrote Peter Pomerantsev.
…As many people have noted, the 3,000 ads that have been linked to Russia are a drop in the bucket, even if they did reach millions of people. The real game is simply that Russian operatives created pages that reached people “organically,” as the saying goes. Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, pulled data on the six publicly known Russia-linked Facebook pages. He found that their posts had been shared 340 million times. And those were six of 470 pages that Facebook has linked to Russian operatives. You’re probably talking billions of shares, with who knows how many views, and with what kind of specific targeting.
…But the point isn’t that a Republican beat a Democrat. The point is that the very roots of the electoral system—the news people see, the events they think happened, the information they digest—had been destabilized.
What Facebook Did to American Democracy – The Atlantic
hmmmm
Homeland Security Official Resigns Over Remarks on African-Americans and Muslims
The Department of Homeland Security’s head of outreach to religious and community organizations resigned on Thursday after audio recordings revealed that he had previously made incendiary remarks about African-Americans and Muslims while speaking on radio shows.
…John F. Kelly, the White House chief of staff, had appointed Mr. Johnson to the department in April during his brief tenure as secretary of Homeland Security.
…[Johnson said on a radio show] that the black community had “turned America’s major cities into slums because of laziness, drug use and sexual promiscuity.” He also said black people were anti-Semitic because they were jealous of Jewish people..
…Mr. Johnson attacked Islam, …“Muslims want to cut our heads off,” that Islam is “an ideology posing as a religion” and that President George W. Bush made a mistake by calling it a religion of peace.
…Mr. Johnson also said he agreed with the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza that “all that Islam has ever given us is oil and dead bodies over the last millennia and a half.”
…“The DHS Center for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships is driven by one simple, enduring, inspirational principle,” Mr. Johnson wrote on his account’s inaugural post eight months ago. “LOVE THY NEIGHBOR.”
Kelly appointed a bigot to an office in charge of outreach to minority groups. Sadly, this isn’t a surprise. At least he was outed and pushed out.
The incredible shrinking Democratic ground game
Research shows little evidence that appearances can change election outcomes, and to the extent that appearances matter, it is because they lead to volunteer sign-ups and contributions. The reason to visit Wisconsin, therefore, would be to excite the base and motivate those supporters to volunteer for the campaign.
Getting out the vote relies on more than excitement, however. Translating enthusiasm into action may require establishing a “ground game.” Campaigns open field offices that serve as points of coordination for volunteer activities, where the data possessed by national campaigns is translated into walk packets and call lists for local volunteers, who in turn talk to voters and collect more data at the doors and on the phones. Offices can increase candidate vote share and turnout in an area, but perhaps more importantly, they indicate to volunteers and local activists that the national campaign cares about their area.
…Better field operations lead to better data, which improves targeting and persuasion, starting the cycle anew.
…The data [in Clinton’s 2016 campaign] may not have indicated that something was wrong, but with fewer volunteers in the field, that data was incomplete. Data and field are not competing resource centers; they should work together seamlessly, each benefiting from the insights of the other.
The incredible shrinking Democratic ground game – Vox
hmmmm
A Republican ‘Family Values’ State Legislator Quits After Having Sex With a Man in His Office
This comes as a surprise to many constituents, because Goodman has consistently spoken about “natural marriage” being between a man and a woman. His campaign website, which is now offline, outlined his views on family: “Healthy, vibrant, thriving, values-driven families are the source of Ohio’s proud history and the key to Ohio’s future greatness. The ideals of a loving father and mother, a committed natural marriage, and a caring community are well worth pursuing and protecting.”
A Republican ‘Family Values’ State Legislator Quits After Having Sex With a Man in His Office
Gotta love it when a hater is exposed a hypocrite.
Trump’s bizarre claim that Obama ‘never got to land’ in the Philippines
Trump obviously earns Four Pinocchios. But the bigger question is: Doesn’t the president have staff who can point out to him that he keeps making a very foolish mistake?
Trump’s bizarre claim that Obama ‘never got to land’ in the Philippines – The Washington Post
right???
Kaspersky’s role in NSA breach
Russian hackers had used Kaspersky software to identify classified files on the NSA contractor’s home computer, which they then stole, it said.
It later emerged Kaspersky had also copied files off the PC itself.
…On 11 September 2014, the company said, one of its products deployed on a home computer with an internet protocol (IP) address in Baltimore, Maryland – close to where the NSA is based – had reported what appeared to be variants of the malware used by the Equation Group.
…Soon after, the user had disabled the Kaspersky Lab anti-virus tool and downloaded and installed pirated software infected with another, separate form of malware.
…Kaspersky denies creating “signatures” specifically designed to search for top secret or classified material.
…And during this period the command-and-control servers of this malware were registered to what appeared to be a Chinese entity.
“Given that system owner’s potential clearance level, the user could have been a prime target of nation states,” the Kaspersky spokesman said.
US federal agencies have now been told to remove all Kaspersky software from their computers.
Kaspersky defends its role in NSA breach – BBC News
hmmmm
Ginsburg Slaps Gorsuch in Gerrymandering Case
Gorsuch’s statement that the Court should spare “a second” for the “arcane” subject of the document was thus a slap at his ideological adversaries; of course, they, too, believe that they are interpreting the Constitution, but, in Gorsuch’s view, only he cares about the document itself.
…Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who is bent with age, can sometimes look disengaged or even sleepy during arguments, and she had that droopy look today as well. But, in this moment, she heard Gorsuch very clearly, and she didn’t even raise her head before offering a brisk and convincing dismissal. In her still Brooklyn-flecked drawl, she grumbled, “Where did ‘one person, one vote’ come from?” There might have been an audible woo that echoed through the courtroom. (Ginsburg’s comment seemed to silence Gorsuch for the rest of the arguments.)
Ginsburg Slaps Gorsuch in Gerrymandering Case | The New Yorker
heh
Saad Hariri plans France trip after resigning as Lebanon’s prime minister in Saudi Arabia
His resignation — which he blamed on pressure from Iran and its Lebanese Shiite proxy, Hezbollah — stunned Lebanon and the wider region and raised fears the country would plunge again into factional turmoil.
But Lebanese officials had said Hariri, who is a dual Lebanese-Saudi citizen, had been forced to resign by Saudi authorities and was unable to move or speak freely from Riyadh. Lebanon’s president, Michel Aoun, said Wednesday that Hariri was a “hostage,” and that his government would not accept such an “attack on Lebanese sovereignty.”
…But as Shiite Iran and Saudi Arabia, which is Sunni, have competed for influence in the region, the threat of upheaval in Lebanon intensified. Iran has long backed Hezbollah, Lebanon’s most powerful political and military movement, and which is key to Iranian regional reach.
…For its part, Riyadh has sought to bolster Hariri and his Sunni bloc in Lebanon, and have fought what Saudi officials claim are Iranian proxy forces in Yemen. Iran denies having direct links to the Houthi forces in Yemen that drove out the Saudi-backed president in 2015.
hmmmm
FBI Investigates: 60 Russian Payments “To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016”
After discovering the $30,000 transfer to the embassy in Washington, Citibank launched a review of other transfers by the Russian foreign ministry. It unearthed dozens of other transactions with similar memo lines. Compliance officers in Citibank’s Global Intelligence Unit flagged them as suspicious, noting that it was unable to determine the financial, business, or legal purpose of the transactions.
Much as checks include a memo line, wire transfers often include a note that states what the money is for. The note on this set of transfers does not indicate what election the money was to be used for, or even the country. Seven nations had federal elections during the span when the funds were sent — including the Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, on Sept. 18, 2016. Russian embassies and diplomatic compounds opened polling stations for voters living abroad.
…Following the congressional requests, Citibank turned over a range of financial documents. The material includes more than 650 suspicious transactions between November 2013 and March 2017 totaling about $2.9 million. That money was sent to four Russian accounts operating in the US: the embassy; the Office of Defense, Military, Air and Naval Attaches; and Russian cultural centers in Washington and New York City.
Most of these wire transfers were not related to the election, sources say, but are the subject of FBI scrutiny for their possible ties to Russian corruption and money laundering.
Secret Finding: 60 Russian Payments “To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016”
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