Propaganda-spewing Russian trolls act differently online from regular people
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Category: Media and Culture,
“OK Boomer” – Marginal REVOLUTION
“OK Boomer” – Marginal REVOLUTION
Psssst… All of you assholes are doing the work of a Russian Trollfarm.
National Enquirer Buried 60 Damaging Stories About Donald Trump Before Election
Farrow told Stephen Colbert that it’s “not clear if the underlying story is accurate” in these cases, but said the payments to sources “were news” because they may have violated election law if they were made in partnership with the Trump campaign.
National Enquirer Buried 60 Damaging Stories About Donald Trump Before Election, Ronan Farrow Claims
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Oklahoma mom imprisoned for 15 years for not reporting boyfriend’s abuse freed
Tondalao Hall was sentenced in 2006 to 30 years in prison under Oklahoma’s “failure to protect” law after her then-boyfriend, Robert Braxton Jr., abused two of their children so severely, at least one had multiple broken bones.
…Braxton, meanwhile, pleaded guilty to abusing the children, but was given no additional time behind bars: He received a 10-year suspended sentence and was released on probation after having served his two years in jail,
…Oklahoma’s law makes no exception for parents who stay silent out of fear for their own safety — which Lambert said was the case in Hall’s situation. In addition to choking and punching their young children, Lambert said, Braxton beat and psychologically abused Hall.
Oklahoma mom imprisoned for 15 years for not reporting boyfriend’s abuse freed
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Holocaust Survivor Is Swept Up in Italy’s Storm of Vitriol
Last month, to counteract what increasingly feels like a political time marked by ethnic scapegoating and nationalist invective, Ms. Segre called for the creation of a parliamentary commission to investigate hate, racism and social media.
But the League Party, led by Mr. Salvini, the post-fascist Brothers of Italy and the center-right Forza Italia led by former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi all opposed the commission.
They abstained from the vote, seeing it as a political trap by their enemies to make them look extremist and as a first step toward censorship.
…The motion passed without the conservative votes.
Ms. Segre expressed bewilderment at the abstentions, …“I thought a committee against hatred, as a matter of principle, should be accepted by everyone. I thought it was almost banal.”
Mr. Belli Paci said his mother had been taken back by the “barbarization” of the country. Nevertheless, he said, she planned to continue reaching out to students and telling the story of what happened here not so long ago.
Holocaust Survivor Is Swept Up in Italy’s Storm of Vitriol – The New York Times
ProPublica obtains Trump tax records that could signal financial fraud – Business Insider
Newly uncovered tax documents from …Donald Trump contain several discrepancies that real-estate experts said could point to financial fraud.
…Tax records for 40 Wall Street and the Trump International Hotel and Tower reportedly contained discrepancies that could raise some red flags — specifically, the numbers made the properties look more valuable to lenders and less valuable to tax authorities.
…Trump told a lender that he got twice as much rent from one building as he reported to tax authorities that year.
…Trump used a series of dubious tax schemes to shield a $400 million inheritance from the IRS.
…[apparently he] fabricated a loan to avoid paying $50 million in income taxes.
ProPublica obtains Trump tax records that could signal financial fraud – Business Insider
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Hillary Clinton on Medicare for All: ‘The Goal Is the Right Goal,’ but It Won’t Pass
Clinton was most blunt about [Senator] Warren’s proposal to replace private health insurance with a single-payer system funded largely by taxes on the wealthy and corporations. Asked if she thought that proposal could get passed into law, Mrs. Clinton answered in the negative.
“No, I don’t — I don’t,” she said. “But the goal is the right goal.”
…[Clinton suggested] that “the smarter approach is to build on what we have” by adding the option of a public health care plan to the offerings of the Affordable Care Act.
…[She] sounded a note of skepticism about the detail-rich policy debates that have helped shape the Democratic primary so far. Those disputes during primary season, she said, do not always translate into actual governance after the election.
Her 2008 primary battle with Barack Obama furnished an instructive case study, Mrs. Clinton said: During that campaign, Mr. Obama fiercely opposed her proposal for a government mandate that all individuals purchase health insurance, but he went on to include that very rule as president.
The clash over health care unfolding in the primary now, she said, represented “a very healthy debate.”
Less editorializing, more facts, Burns. And show some respect for the subject matter and use the proper titles!
Judge orders Trump to pay $2 million for misusing his foundation
President Donald Trump must pay a $2 million judgment for improperly using his Trump Foundation charity to further his 2016 presidential campaign, a New York state judge ruled Thursday.
…In her seven-page ruling, New York Supreme Court Justice Salliann Scarpulla wrote, “Mr. Trump’s fiduciary duty breaches included allowing his campaign to orchestrate the Fundraiser, allowing his campaign, instead of the Foundation, to direct distribution of the Funds, and using the Fundraiser and distribution of the Funds to further Mr. Trump’s political campaign.”
…The event wound up raising $2.8 million, according to the judge, some of which Trump distributed in the form of giant checks at campaign rallies before the Iowa caucuses.
Judge orders Trump to pay $2 million for misusing his foundation
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Pelosi cautions 2020 Dems over liberal proposals: “Remember November. You must win the Electoral College”
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) issued a stern warning to the 2020 Democratic primary field that progressive policies that might fire up the party’s liberal wing could prove damaging in the general election.
Pelosi said proposals such as “Medicare for All” and a wealth tax that have been touted by Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) and Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) could appeal to progressive pockets but fail to land in key swing states.
“What works in San Francisco does not necessarily work in Michigan,” Pelosi said in an interview with Bloomberg News published Saturday. “What works in Michigan works in San Francisco — talking about workers’ rights and sharing prosperity.”
“Remember November,” she added. “You must win the Electoral College.”
Pelosi cautions 2020 Dems over liberal proposals: ‘You must win the Electoral College’ | TheHill
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DNA Support the Idea That Viking Women Were Sometimes Powerful Warriors
Legends of ferocious female warriors appear in Scandinavian lore and poetry from the Middle Ages. Stories of similar warriors have been told in the modern era too, for example Lagertha on the HISTORY series Vikings, but the existence of warrior women in Viking culture has consistently been challenged in official histories, with women often relegated to non-combatant roles.
…This isn’t the first Viking grave to contain both weapons and female remains, the study explains. It is, however, the first to present overwhelming evidence that the weapons and paraphernalia found beside a skeleton belonged to the woman who occupied the grave.
DNA Proves Viking Women Were Powerful Warriors – HISTORY
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How the female Viking warrior was written out of history
Hedenstierna-Jonson et al. do not equivocate in their statements that, for over a century, this individual was mis-identified as male because archaeologists, acculturated in a western society with strictly defined gender roles, view men alone as warriors, or soldiers, or wielders of violence. A warrior, like warfare itself, is a cultural construct, practices and professions created by human societies to fulfill specific desires. To assume uncritically that men alone are warriors leads to a cascade of other assumptions about human behaviors that renders our attempt to understand those behaviors somewhat moot.
…Assumptions regarding gender roles dilute our understanding of past societies and the enormous complexity of human achievements and activities.
…The genomics is fairly certain- these are the remains of a woman who genetically was part of the Viking world, and who was interred in a Viking tomb with Viking material culture, specifically material culture associated with combat and warfare. It continues to be a challenge for some people to reconcile those variables. But those same people are missing the larger implications of the genomics study. The real questions, the interesting questions: what does it mean that Bj 581 was a female? What does this tell us about how Viking society was structured? Was Bj 581 unique, or did she represent a category of women that has been largely relegated to mythology? And what can this tell us about how violent conflict was viewed and experienced?
How the female Viking warrior was written out of history | Science | The Guardian
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Apple launches new privacy website, but policies unchanged
Apple’s privacy website is mostly a users’ guide with papers on how to prevent apps and other third-party services from unnecessarily tracking users’ location and behaviors.
The company’s actual privacy policy hasn’t changed.
Apple launches new privacy website, but policies unchanged
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Smartphone and speaker voice assistants can be hacked using lasers
these devices will also accept “signal injection” commands sent to them using pulses of laser light over distances of a hundred metres or more.
Hitherto, hacking such systems has been about sending them audible commands without their owner’s knowledge. Now the research confirms that it’s possible to achieve the same result over considerable distances in ways that might allow attackers to unlock “smartlock-protected front doors, open garage doors, shop on e-commerce websites at the target’s expense, or even locate, unlock and start various vehicles” that are connected to the victim’s Google account.
…Currently, the stock microphones that receive voice commands perform no authentication beyond checking wake phrases such as “OK Google” are in the owner’s voice and even this can be spoofed using voice synthesis.
The authentication problem could be mitigated in different ways – for example, by requiring that more than one microphone detect the same command simultaneously, something a laser attack would find difficult to overcome.
Smartphone and speaker voice assistants can be hacked using lasers – Naked Security
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T.I.’s Not the Only One — Virginity Testing Is a Worldwide Problem
Many pointed out the outrageous invasion of privacy of forcing your 18-year-old daughter — an adult, in the eyes of the law — to submit to hymen testing; others focused on the double standard of T.I. going to such degrees to ensure his daughter was not having sex, while simultaneously applauding his younger son for being sexually active.
…Virginity testing usually takes the form of a two-finger test, which involves a physician inserting two fingers into a woman’s vagina to check whether her hymen is intact. Although an intact hymen is by no means a reliable indicator of virginity, as T.I. himself pointed out, it is viewed as such in various cultures around the world, such as in India, Turkey, Egypt, and South Africa. Although the test is most frequently associated with determining a woman’s eligibility for marriage, it has been used for other purposes as well; in Indonesia, for instance, the test is used to determine female applicants’ suitability for the police force.
The penalty for “failing” a virginity test can be steep. In Afghanistan, for instance, where premarital sex is a crime, until 2018 the law stated that women and girls could be incarcerated for up to three months for failing virginity tests. In some extreme cases, young women who have failed virginity tests have taken their own lives or been murdered by their own family members for violating their family’s honor.
…In the United States it seems to happen fairly regularly behind closed doors: according to a 2016 survey of 288 physicians, 10% responded that they had been asked by a parent or a family member to perform the two-finger test on a patient, and 34% said they had performed it themselves (though many physicians interviewed by Marie Claire said they had lied to parents about the results, for fear of endangering the patient.)
…Because of the dubious science behind virginity testing, as well as the obvious ethical implications of forcing women to undergo such an invasive practice, [emphasis: peanut gallery] human rights organizations have called for a worldwide end to the practice.
T.I.’s Not the Only One — Virginity Testing Is a Worldwide Problem – Rolling Stone
sighhh
9 Sickest Burns We’ve Seen About T.I. Checking His Daughter’s Hymen
The whole thing reeks of an attitude about women that’s literally medieval.
…In fact, women who have had sex can have intact hymens and women who haven’t can have broken hymens. T.I. even said that the doctor told him that, but he didn’t seem to care, because he’s an idiot.
“She don’t ride no horses, she don’t ride no bike, she don’t play no sports,” he told the doctor. “Just check the hymen, please, and give me back my results expeditiously.’”
“My results” really sums it up; they’re quite literally not his.
9 Sickest Burns We’ve Seen About T.I. Checking His Daughter’s Hymen
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Comments From The Peanut Gallery 