What goes through my my mind when I read the news with my morning coffee. …Or for the Simon's Rockers in the group, this is my response journal.
The Attorney General of Maryland is now investigating Jared Kushner’s family business for a number of serious alleged violations in the real estate field That doesn’t mean that Kushner or anyone in his family is guilty. Nor does it mean that charges will be brought. But these investigations tend to lead to charges more often than not. If Kushner is hypothetically charged with state level crimes, Donald Trump can’t pardon those.
hmmmm
If you’ve ever wondered whether black people fixate about racial discrimination too much, the reporting surrounding the study of African Americans’ attitudes toward race in America is a horribly revealing example of how white privilege reshapes, refocuses and recalibrates African American concerns to a subordinate place, elevating fake-news reactions of white people to pinnacle of the national conversation. Indeed, even when there’s supporting evidence, as in the case of this study, to demonstrate just what black people are shouting about, their opinions are easily and routinely drowned out by cries of nonsensical white fears.
sigh…
An estimated 126 million Americans were exposed to Russian-backed content on Facebook during the 2016 campaign, the company tells a Senate committee.
Facebook Says Russian-Backed Election Content Reached 126 Million Americans – NBC News
sigh…
Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, …[said] that the Civil War was caused by “a lack of an ability to compromise.” During a Monday appearance on Fox News, Kelly described Confederate General Robert E. Lee as “good” and “not so good.”
Well said, Pierce.
Thousands of Americans attended a march last November organized by a Russian group that used social media to interfere in the 2016 election.
…The BlackMatters organizing group was connected to the Internet Research Agency, a Russian “troll farm” with ties to the Kremlin, according to a recent investigation by the Russian Magazine RBC. Facebook has identified the Internet Research Agency as the group responsible for purchasing 3,000 political ads on Facebook’s platform and operating 470 accounts that appear to have attempted to influence the perspectives of Americans during the 2016 elections.
…According to numbers in Facebook’s general counsel’s leaked congressional testimony, the number of people potentially touched by organic content eclipses the potential number reached by ads by hundreds of millions.
BlackMatters had organized other protests, but none revealed so far reached the level of support that the Nov. 12 protest did — in many cases, the organization’s events fizzled out and didn’t come to fruition. Others that actually did take place had a limited and isolated reach.
Other events that appear to be organized by the group tended to focus on rallies around race flash points, including the deaths of black men killed by law enforcement, The Hill found after reviewing 15 events by the organization. Others claimed to offer free legal education for immigrants.
One event was shared with 1,300 users on Facebook, of which 240 ultimately said that they would attend the “One Person One Vote One March,” on Dec. 3 in New York City, a protest against the electoral college. But it’s unclear if the event actually occurred and, if it did, how many people attended.
Thousands attended protest organized by Russians on Facebook | TheHill
hmmmm
Facebook, Twitter and Google played a far deeper role in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign than has previously been disclosed, with company employees taking on the kind of political strategizing that campaigns typically entrust to their own staff or paid consultants, according to a new study released Thursday.
…While the companies call it standard practice to work hand-in-hand with high-spending advertisers like political campaigns, the new research details how the staffers assigned to the 2016 candidates frequently acted more like political operatives, doing things like suggesting methods to target difficult-to-reach voters online, helping to tee up responses to likely lines of attack during debates, and scanning candidate calendars to recommend ad pushes around upcoming speeches.
Such support was critical for the Trump campaign, which didn’t invest heavily in its own digital operations during the primary season and made extensive use of Facebook, Twitter and Google “embeds” for the general election.
…One constant in the dynamic: The companies break down their political outreach teams along party lines. Facebook’s point of contact to Clinton’s 2016 White House run, Crystal Patterson, was a veteran of Democratic politics, and Henke — Google’s liaison to the Trump operation and other 2016 Republican bids — was once the director of operations for the Western Republican Leadership Conference.
How Facebook, Google and Twitter ’embeds’ helped Trump in 2016 – POLITICO
hmmmm
The “Greater Jerusalem” legislation would put some settlements in the occupied West Bank, built on land Palestinians seek for a future state and viewed as illegal by most countries, under the jurisdiction of Jerusalem’s municipality.
U.S. pressure delays Israel’s ‘Greater Jerusalem’ bill: legislator
sigh….
PREPA’s executive director announced the decision Sunday, hours after the U.S. territory’s governor called for the contract’s termination.
Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority Cancels Whitefish Energy Deal | HuffPost
hmmm
Two NYPD cops have been indicted on first-degree rape charges for allegedly having sex with a handcuffed 18-year-old woman inside their police van in Brooklyn,
NYPD cops charged with raping woman in police van | New York Post
Jeezus….
1. Trump’s continued global business ventures, despite vows of “no new foreign deals”
2. Business is booming at Mar-a-Lago
3. Trump’s new hotel in Washington raked in $20 million in its first few months
4. The first family profits from visits to Trump-branded properties and golf courses
5. Trump-branded book royalties are soaring
Five Ways the Trumps Have Gotten Richer Since the Election
Sigh….
The move is the latest attempt by Spain’s government to crush the region’s independence drive.
Spanish prosecutors charge Catalonia’s separatist leaders with sedition – The Washington Post
hmmm
Protests erupted in opposition strongholds after Uhuru Kenyatta declared the winner in Kenya’s contentious re-run presidential election
Kenya’s electoral commission calls President Kenyatta the winner in disputed repeat vote – LA Times
hmmm
A federal judge on Monday partially blocked enforcement of key provisions of President Donald Trump’s memorandum banning transgender people serving in the military.
Judge blocks enforcement of transgender military ban – CNNPolitics
hmmm
Pro Tip: Lying to the FBI is never a good idea.
Pro Tip II: It would seem to be a very good bet that Papadopoulous already has flipped. (The plea deal’s sentence recommendation begins at “zero” months, which is a tell.)
Releasing the Papadopolous plea deal was a remarkably deft play by Mueller, whose political savvy is mysteriously under-discussed. The initial White House reaction to the news about Paul Manafort was that everything happened years ago, and what the hell is Mueller doing? Now, we have a completed legal proceeding containing the words “Trump campaign,” “Russia,” and “disparaging information on Hillary Clinton.” Alibis are dropping like the autumn leaves.
Trump Campaign Staffer George Papadopoulos Pled Guilty to Lying to FBI
hmmmm
The biggest revelation in the plea agreement concerns an April 26 meeting in London. Papadopoulos met with the Professor, who told him that the Russians had “dirt” on Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton. The government filing says the Professor said that “the Russians had emails of Clinton,” and in fact “thousands of emails.”
…The FBI first interviewed Papadopoulos in late January, before Mueller was appointed special counsel. Papadopoulos made multiple false statements during that meeting, claiming for example that his conversation with the Professor about the emails preceded his work for the Trump campaign. He also downplayed his contacts with the female Russian national and claimed they’d taken place before he joined the Trump campaign. After meeting with the FBI again in February, Papadopoulos deleted his Facebook account and got a new cellphone number. Then, on July 27, 2017, Papadopoulos was arrested upon arriving at Dulles International Airport near Washington, D.C.
…Papadopoulos’s plea is notable because it represents a guilty plea by a Trump campaign official related to ties with Russia. The fact that he was arrested in July, but that Mueller managed to keep his case against him secret until Monday morning, is a reminder of how tight-lipped the special counsel’s team has proven, and that Mueller may know things that have not yet been publicly reported or disclosed. The plea deal indicates that Papadopoulos is now cooperating with the probe.
George Papadopoulos: The Mueller Probe’s First Guilty Plea – The Atlantic
hmmmm
“While on federal property in a federal rehab program, [veterans] can be allowed to use a federally illegal substance,” Fruchter told Task & Purpose by phone. “On a patient-doctor level, if this is what you want, it’s doable.” Through a combination of persistence, vague regulations, and an open-minded medical team, Fruchter had stumbled upon an unusual loophole in the VA’s approach to medical marijuana — one that is putting individual VA clinics at odds with the department’s publicly stated policy.
How Vets And Doctors Get Around The VA’s Medical Marijuana Policy
hmmmm
Manafort turned himself in on Monday morning after being indicted on Friday along with his former business partner Rick Gates, according to CNN. The indictment against Manafort and Gates contains 12 counts, ranging from conspiracy against the United States and conspiracy to launder money to making false and misleading statements to the U.S. Foreign Agents Registration Act (FARA).
In response to this development, which many Washington insiders are speculating could be a ploy to get Manafort to flip on members of the Trump administration or even Trump himself, the White House has been playing it cool.
: Trump’s spin on Manafort indictment just raises more questions – Salon.com
hmmm
Deaths rose by more than 500 percent among Native Americans and native Alaskans.
Jeezus
From a thrown shoe to “You lie!,” a brief history of confronting a sitting president
lol!
Hearings this week will increase the pressure for the company to explain how bots and fake news exploited its network — beyond a narrow focus on political ads.
Facebook struggles to contain Russia narrative – POLITICO
hmmm
Six Palestinian militants were killed on Monday when Israel blew up what it said was a tunnel being dug across the Gaza Strip border.
Six killed as Israel destroys Gaza tunnel
hmmm
The verses in question concern the passage in which Joshua leads the Israelites into Canaan. “Sun, stand still at Gibeon, and moon, in the Valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still, and the moon stopped,” the text reads.
The meaning had been lost in English renderings, but recent translations by Professor Sir Colin Humphreys suggest they reference an eclipse. “Going back to the original Hebrew text, we determined that an alternative meaning could be that the sun and moon just stopped doing what they normally do: They stopped shining. In this context, the Hebrew words could be referring to a solar eclipse,” Humphreys explained.
By reading the hieroglyphs carved in the granite Merneptah Stele, an Egyptian text dating from the reigns of Pharaoh Merneptah and his son Ramesses the Great, historians were able to date the Israelites’ presence in Canaan to between 1500 B.C. and 1050 B.C.
The breakthrough in comparing the two texts was made by backdating not only total solar eclipses using astronomical patterns but also annual eclipses in which the sun does not completely cover the moon but creates a distinctive ring of fire. From the calculations, which took into account the fluctuations in Earth’s orbit and rotation, Humphreys and his team posited that the only annual eclipse that could have taken place while the Israelites were in Canaan occurred in 1207 B.C.
Wild!
Ocean plastic is an indiscriminate hazard. It harms fish and kills seabirds, which wash up with bellies full of trash. Turtles swallow it because, the thinking goes, they mistake the floating waste for jellyfish. Less well known are the ways plastic damages the ocean’s smaller inhabitants, plankton and corals, which sometimes are found with particles wedged in their teeny guts.
…Savoca also didn’t expect corals to prefer plastic. In 2016, he and his colleagues reported that seabirds were attracted to smelly, bacteria-covered plastic, and he recently demonstrated that anchovy fish swarm around the odor of fouled plastic.
“We need to be thinking about the taste of plastic as a paradigm,” Seymour said, “not just a problem for corals.”
…Yet there is no question that plastic has penetrated the ocean, and even its remotest corner is not beyond human influence. Robot submersibles have spotted plastic bags on slopes leading to the Mariana Trench, the deepest part of the Pacific. Where no explorer will ever plant a flag or footprint, there is already plastic.
Corals eat plastic because we’ve made it tasty, study suggests – New Haven Register
Sigh….
The military judge hearing U.S. Army Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl’s desertion case said on Monday he would not rule out a prison sentence due to the possible influence of President Donald Trump’s criticism of the soldier.
Army Colonel Jeffery Nance said he would consider the president’s remarks as a mitigating factor at sentencing, however, raising the possibility of a lighter punishment.
During last year’s presidential campaign, Republican Trump called Bergdahl “a no-good traitor who should have been executed.” The defense said the president’s more recent remarks about the case showed his opinion of Bergdahl had not changed and unfairly influenced the proceedings.
Nance ruled in court at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, where Bergdahl’s sentencing hearing is underway, that no reasonable person would harbor doubt about the integrity of the proceedings due to Trump’s comments.
Judge Says Trump Comments Do Not Taint Bergdahl Desertion Case | Top News | US News
hmmmm
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