Gorka’s warrant on gun charges was in effect the entire time he was in the White House.
Hungarian Police Have A Warrant Out For Former Trump Adviser Sebastian Gorka
Of course it was. Sigh….
CVS bans photo manipulation in store beauty brands, pressures suppliers
CVS Pharmacy President Helena Foulkes, who made the official announcement at the National Retail Federation’s convention in New York, said the decision reflects an acknowledgment that “unrealistic body images” are “a significant driver of health issues,” especially among women. About 80% of the chain’s customers are women.
“We’re all consuming massive amounts of media every day and we’re not necessarily looking at imagery that is real and true,” Foulkes said in an interview. “To try to hold ourselves up to be like those women is impossible because even those women don’t look like how they appear in those photographs.”
CVS bans photo manipulation in store beauty brands, pressures suppliers
hmmmmm
Hawaii False Missile Alert: Emergency Worker Reassigned
The mistake occurred after 8 a.m. Saturday when the employee initiated an internal test of the emergency missile warning system — a drill performed regularly by the agency after it reinstated its Cold War-era nuclear warning system in response to North Korea’s ramped up ballistic missile tests. The Washington Post reports that the worker sent out a false warning after choosing “Missile alert” from the dropdown menu that initiated the internal test. He should have chosen the “Test missile alert” option instead.
Hawaii False Missile Alert: Emergency Worker Reassigned | Time
hmmmm
Aziz Ansari and Grace
[Media directed at young women in the middle of the 20th century] didn’t prepare teenage girls for sports or stem or huge careers; the kind of world-conquering, taking-numbers strength that is the common language of the most-middle-of-the road cultural products aimed at today’s girls was totally absent. But in one essential aspect they reminded us that we were strong in a way that so many modern girls are weak. They told us over and over again that if a man tried to push you into anything you didn’t want, even just a kiss, you told him flat out you weren’t doing it. If he kept going, you got away from him. You were always to have “mad money” with you: cab fare in case he got “fresh” and then refused to drive you home. They told you to slap him if you had to; they told you to get out of the car and start wailing if you had to. They told you to do whatever it took to stop him from using your body in any way you didn’t want, and under no circumstances to go down without a fight. In so many ways, compared with today’s young women, we were weak; we were being prepared for being wives and mothers, not occupants of the C-Suite. But as far as getting away from a man who was trying to pressure us into sex we didn’t want, we were strong.
Was Grace frozen, terrified, stuck? No. She tells us that she wanted something from Ansari and that she was trying to figure out how to get it. She wanted affection, kindness, attention. Perhaps she hoped to maybe even become the famous man’s girlfriend. He wasn’t interested. What she felt afterward—rejected yet another time, by yet another man—was regret. And what she and the writer who told her story created was 3,000 words of revenge porn. The clinical detail in which the story is told is intended not to validate her account as much as it is to hurt and humiliate Ansari.
…But we’re at warp speed now, and the revolution—in many ways so good and so important—is starting to sweep up all sorts of people into its conflagration: the monstrous, the cruel, and the simply unlucky. Apparently there is a whole country full of young women who don’t know how to call a cab, and who have spent a lot of time picking out pretty outfits for dates they hoped would be nights to remember. They’re angry and temporarily powerful…
The Humiliation of Aziz Ansari – The Atlantic
hmmmmmmmmmmm
Columbia Journalism Review: Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media.
We agree that fake news and misinformation are real problems that deserve serious attention. We also agree that social media and other online technologies have contributed to deep-seated problems in democratic discourse such as increasing polarization and erosion of support for traditional sources of authority. Nonetheless, we believe that the volume of reporting around fake news, and the role of tech companies in disseminating those falsehoods, is both disproportionate to its likely influence in the outcome of the election and diverts attention from the culpability of the mainstream media itself.
…“the average US adult read and remembered on the order of one or perhaps several fake news articles during the election period, with higher exposure to pro-Trump articles than pro-Clinton articles.” In turn, they estimate that “if one fake news article were about as persuasive as one TV campaign ad, the fake news in our database would have changed vote shares by an amount on the order of hundredths of a percentage point.”
…the sheer outrageousness of the most popular fake stories—Pope Francis endorsing Trump; Democrats planning to impose Islamic law in Florida; Trump supporters chanting “We hate Muslims, we hate blacks;” and so on—made them especially unlikely to have altered voters’ pre-existing opinions of the candidates.
…A potentially more serious threat is what a team of Harvard and MIT researchers refer to as “a network of mutually reinforcing hyper-partisan sites that revive what Richard Hofstadter called ‘the paranoid style in American politics,’ combining decontextualized truths, repeated falsehoods, and leaps of logic to create a fundamentally misleading view of the world.” Unlike the fake news numbers highlighted in much of the post-election coverage, engagement with sites like Breitbart News, InfoWars, and The Daily Caller are substantial—especially in the realm of social media.
… They found roughly four times as many Clinton-related sentences that described scandals as opposed to policies, whereas Trump-related sentences were one-and-a-half times as likely to be about policy as scandal. Given the sheer number of scandals in which Trump was implicated—sexual assault; the Trump Foundation; Trump University; redlining in his real-estate developments; insulting a Gold Star family; numerous instances of racist, misogynist, and otherwise offensive speech—it is striking that the media devoted more attention to his policies than to his personal failings. Even more striking, the various Clinton-related email scandals—her use of a private email server while secretary of state, as well as the DNC and John Podesta hacks—accounted for more sentences than all of Trump’s scandals combined (65,000 vs. 40,000) and more than twice as many as were devoted to all of her policy positions.
…The extent that voters mistrusted Hillary Clinton, or considered her conduct as secretary of state to have been negligent or even potentially criminal, or were generally unaware of what her policies contained or how they may have differed from Donald Trump’s, these numbers suggest their views were influenced more by mainstream news sources than by fake news.
…Of the 150 front-page [New York Times] articles that discussed the campaign in some way, we classified slightly over half (80) as Campaign Miscellaneous. Slightly over a third (54) were Personal/Scandal, with 29 focused on Trump and 25 on Clinton. Finally, just over 10 percent (16) of articles discussed Policy, of which six had no details, four provided details on Trump’s policy only, one on Clinton’s policy only, and five made some comparison between the two candidates’ policies. The results for the full corpus were similar: Of the 1,433 articles that mentioned Trump or Clinton, 291 were devoted to scandals or other personal matters while only 70 mentioned policy, and of these only 60 mentioned any details of either candidate’s positions. In other words, comparing the two datasets, the number of Personal/Scandalstories for every Policy story ranged from 3.4 (for front-page stories) to 4.2. Further restricting to Policy stories that contained some detail about at least one candidate’s positions, these ratios rise to 5.5 and 4.85, respectively.
…There were profound differences between the two candidates’ policies, and these differences are already proving enormously consequential to the American people. Under President Trump, the Affordable Care Act is being actively dismantled, environmental and consumer protections are being rolled back, international alliances and treaties are being threatened, and immigration policy has been thrown into turmoil, among other dramatic changes. In light of the stark policy choices facing voters in the 2016 election, it seems incredible that only five out of 150 front-page articles that The New York Times ran over the last, most critical months of the election, attempted to compare the candidate’s policies, while only 10 described the policies of either candidate in any detail.
…10 is an interesting figure because it is also the number of front-page stories the Times ran on the Hillary Clinton email scandal in just six days, from October 29 (the day after FBI Director James Comey announced his decision to reopen his investigation of possible wrongdoing by Clinton) through November 3, just five days before the election. When compared with the Times’s overall coverage of the campaign, the intensity of focus on this one issue is extraordinary. To reiterate, in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election (and that does not include the three additional articles on October 18, and November 6 and 7, or the two articles on the emails taken from John Podesta). This intense focus on the email scandal cannot be written off as inconsequential: The Comey incident and its subsequent impact on Clinton’s approval rating among undecided voters could very well have tipped the election.
…Some important misconceptions about Obamacare held by large percentages of the American public—for example, that almost 40 percent (and 47 percent of Republicans) did not know that repealing Obamacare would cause people to lose Medicaid coverage or subsidies for private insurance.
…Consistent with other studies of media coverage of the election, our analysis finds that The New York Times focused much more on “dramatic” issues like the horserace or personal scandals than on substantive policy issues. Moreover, when the paper did write about policy issues, it failed to mention important details, in some cases giving readers a misleading impression of the true state of affairs.
… In sheer numerical terms, the information to which voters were exposed during the election campaign was overwhelmingly produced not by fake news sites or even by alt-right media sources, but by household names like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and CNN. Without discounting the role played by malicious Russian hackers and naïve tech executives, we believe that fixing the information ecosystem is at least as much about improving the real news as it about stopping the fake stuff.
Don’t blame the election on fake news. Blame it on the media. – Columbia Journalism Review
hmmm
Louisiana teacher handcuffed, arrested after bringing up brass salary at school board meeting
Jeezus Kerrreyst…. Clearly some of the individuals involved need to be put in handcuffs and dropped into the swampy morass that is the Louisiana justice system but the teacher is not in that group….
Trump questioned why ‘pretty Korean lady’ analyst wasn’t working on North Korea
Meeting with the analyst as part of a briefing on a family being released by militants in Pakistan, [Trump asked] her where she was from.
“New York,” she replied.
Trump pressed on, asking her where “her people” are from.
When the analyst responded that her parents were from South Korea, the president reportedly responded by asking a nearby adviser why the “pretty Korean lady” was not negotiating with North Korea’s government on behalf of the Trump administration.
The analyst, whose name was not released, is reportedly trained in hostage negotiation, not diplomacy.
Trump questioned why ‘pretty Korean lady’ analyst wasn’t working on North Korea: report | TheHill
In the war between millennials and baby boomers we have forgotten about the work-hard, play-hard Generation X
Boomers live in the past and have ransomed the future. Millennials fear the future and are ignorant of the past. Generation X acknowledges what has gone before, learns from it, and resolves to shape the future into something better.
lol! …and spot on.
The #metoo Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex
What it’s really about is work, and women’s equality in the workplace, and more broadly, about the rot at the core of our power structures that makes it harder for women to do work because the whole thing is tipped toward men.
…One of the perils at hand — as we try to parse how butt-groping or unsolicited kissing can exist on the same scale as violent rape — is a reversion to attitudes about women as sexually infantilized victims.
…The thing that unites these varied revelations isn’t necessarily sexual harm, but professional harm and power abuse.
…Sexual harassment may entail behaviors that on their own would be criminal — assault or rape — but the legal definition of its harm is about the systemic disadvantaging of a gender in the public and professional sphere.
…To cross powerful men is to jeopardize not just an individual job in an individual office; it’s to risk far broader professional harm within whole professions where men hold sway, to cut yourself off from future opportunity.
…As hard as it is to stir concern over women’s sexual autonomy, we do have a long history of wanting to protect (some) women’s virtue. It is also true that we still rile ourselves up more about a woman’s sexual violability than we do about her professional autonomy or rights to public and economic equality.
…Glenn Thrush, who is accused of making unwanted advances outside of his workplace, against colleagues he did not directly supervise, would seem to give fodder to those worried about a sex panic: It raises the concern that bad passes, made between adults at a bar, might get condemned as sexual harassment in a way that assumes the women in question to be incapable of full sexual participation.
…A man telling a story about how a female colleague came on to him and he put a stop to it has the potential to do damage to the woman’s professional standing — rendering her as needy, undesirable, and showing professional bad judgment — while bolstering the man’s, by framing him as responsible, mature, professional, and ultimately desirable to the opposite sex.
…What makes women vulnerable is not their carnal violability, but rather the way that their worth has been understood as fundamentally erotic, ornamental; that they have not been taken seriously as equals; that they have been treated as some ancillary reward that comes with the kinds of power men are taught to reach for and are valued for achieving.
…A woman who is harassed, or who is in a workplace where other women are, might feel vividly the full weight of the system that’s not set up with her in mind, and see with clarity how much more difficult her professional path will be at every turn, how success might not be on her terms, but on terms set by powerful men. She might feel shame, or embarrassment that worms its way into her head, affects her confidence. She will likely spend time and energy focusing on how to maneuver around the harasser, time and energy that might otherwise be spent on her own advancement. Some women decide to play along; maybe their careers will benefit from it or maybe they will suffer, but they may long wonder whether their success or failure was determined not by their own talents or even by a lucky break, but rather by how they responded to a man. This is especially difficult for very young women, those with fewer economic or social resources, who lack professional networks and professional stability; it’s these women who are most likely to be targeted. The whole thing might begin to feel overwhelmingly difficult, hopeless, perhaps not worth the fight. It can mean a sapping of ambition.
…The frustrated conversations between some Democratic women in the Senate had gone on for a week, held sometimes, literally, in the Senate’s women’s restrooms: What should they do [in response ot he allegations about Sen. Franken?]
Those women surely knew that if they did not speak out against Franken, they would be tarred as self-interested hypocrites; they probably also understood that if they did speak out against him, they would be viewed as self-interested executioners.
…The shitty position women are so often put in: as the designated guardians, entrusted —whether as colleagues or wives — with policing men’s bad behaviors, they will get dinged for complicity if they don’t police it vigilantly enough, and risk being cast as castrating villainesses if they issue sentence.
This Moment Isn’t (Just) About Sex
hmmm
Former Facebook Exec: ‘You Don’t Realize It But You Are Being Programmed’
Parker has said that social media creates “a social-validation feedback loop” by giving people “a little dopamine hit every once in a while, because someone liked or commented on a photo or a post or whatever.”
Just days after Parker made those comments, Palihapitiya told the Stanford audience, “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” Palihapitiya said. “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem—this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
Former Facebook Exec: ‘You Don’t Realize It But You Are Being Programmed’
hmmmm
This Erik Prince Transcript Is Unbelievable
Prince got rich running Blackwater, a mercenary military contracting force that fell apart after going renegade in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq. Prince went on to a lucrative career as a gun-and-spook for hire and moved his operation to the friendlier climes of Abu Dhabi. He got involved with the Trump campaign, so, naturally, given his profession, he became entangled in that campaign’s prolonged slow dance with connected Russian oligarchs and other international grifters. Most recently, he has been in the news when it was reported that he proposed to develop a private military and intelligence force that would operate under the direct supervision of the White House.
(Of course, Prince’s sister, Betsy DeVos, is presently the Secretary of Education, where she has been tasked to do to the public schools what her brother did for the country’s image in Iraq.)
This Erik Prince Transcript Is Unbelievable
sigh…..
A Senior Republican Senator Admonishes Trump: ‘America Is an Idea, Not a Race’
It was just after President Trump had finished railing in the Oval Office against African immigrants he said came from “shithole countries” when a senior Republican senator, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who was there to negotiate a deal on immigration, spoke up.
“America is an idea, not a race,” Mr. Graham said, according to three people familiar with the exchange on Thursday. Diversity was a strength, he said, not a weakness. And by the way, the senator added, he himself was a descendant of immigrants who came to the United States from “shithole countries with no skills.”
A Senior Republican Senator Admonishes Trump: ‘America Is an Idea, Not a Race’ – The New York Times
hmmmm
New Hampshire police officers colluded with federal officers to circumvent state law.
The question: Can federal officers conduct a search that is prohibited under New Hampshire law, then turn over the evidence to state police so that state prosecutors can file charges in state court?
New Hampshire police officers colluded with federal officers to circumvent state law.
Answer: Not without spitting on the laws of the country and state they are operating in.
Chris Matthews Makes Bill Cosby Pill Joke at Hillary Clinton
Chris Matthews Makes Bill Cosby Pill Joke at Hillary Clinton
Matthews is a useless asshole. Long past time for the obnoxious dinosaur’s ass to hit the trash-heap.
Flake to denounce Trump media attacks as Stalinist in Senate speech
Sen. Jeff Flake is planning to slam President Donald Trump’s attacks on the press on the Senate floor this week in a speech that will compare the president’s use of the term “enemy of the people” to describe the media to Soviet dictator Josef Stalin.
“When a figure in power reflexively calls any press that doesn’t suit him ‘fake news,’ it is that person who should be the figure of suspicion, not the press,” Flake, R-Ariz., will say, according to excerpts of the speech provided to NBC News.
via Flake to denounce Trump media attacks as Stalinist in Senate speech – NBC News
hmmmmm
Margaret Atwood asks, “Am I a bad feminist?”
The #MeToo moment is a symptom of a broken legal system. All too frequently, women and other sexual-abuse complainants couldn’t get a fair hearing through institutions – including corporate structures – so they used a new tool: the internet. Stars fell from the skies. This has been very effective, and has been seen as a massive wake-up call. But what next? The legal system can be fixed, or our society could dispose of it. Institutions, corporations and workplaces can houseclean, or they can expect more stars to fall, and also a lot of asteroids.
If the legal system is bypassed because it is seen as ineffectual, what will take its place? Who will be the new power brokers? It won’t be the Bad Feminists like me. We are acceptable neither to Right nor to Left. In times of extremes, extremists win. Their ideology becomes a religion, anyone who doesn’t puppet their views is seen as an apostate, a heretic or a traitor, and moderates in the middle are annihilated.
…A war among women, as opposed to a war on women, is always pleasing to those who do not wish women well. This is a very important moment. I hope it will not be squandered.
Am I a bad feminist? – The Globe and Mail
I hope not but I wouldn’t hold your breath, Margaret.
Police can request your DNA from sites like Ancestry, 23andMe
Police can request your DNA from sites like Ancestry, 23andMe | Boston 25 News
Not sure why this would be surprising to anyone…
Comments From The Peanut Gallery 