Saturday, April 14, 2018 11:29:53 PM
[no, umm, 'presidential' Weakly Address on March 17, 2018]
--
Trump lawyer: Shutter Mueller Russia probe
AM Joy
3/17/18
Donald Trump attorney John Dowd has called for the Russia probe to be brought to a close according to a breaking news report from The Daily Beast. Joy Reid and her panel discuss this unprecedented statement, plus Dowd seeking to clarify that he did not call for Robert Mueller’s firing.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-lawyer-shutter-mueller-russia-probe-1188493891518 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-rEcEmpOww [with comments]
*
More: Donald Trump lawyer: Shutter Mueller Russia probe
AM Joy
3/17/18
Donald Trump’s lawyer John Dowd has called for the Robert Mueller probe to be brought to a close according to a breaking news report from The Daily Beast by reporter Betsy Woodruff, who tells Joy Reid that Dowd is an unusual figure in the field of law who has been ‘sending emails in purple Comic Sans font’ for many years.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/donald-trump-lawyer-shutter-mueller-russia-probe-1188497987698 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWpxxioN1to [with comments]
*
Stormy Daniels’ attorney on Trump and 60 Minutes interview
AM Joy
3/17/18
Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti discusses his client, Donald Trump, and Daniels’ coming 60 Minutes interview, which Avenatti says will lead the American people to ‘conclude that she is absolutely credible.’
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/stormy-daniels-attorney-on-trump-and-60-minutes-interview-1188505667779 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUkAKID_-SI [with comments]
*
Trump legal team demands $20 million from Stormy Daniels
AM Joy
3/17/18
Donald Trump’s legal team is demanding $20 million from Stormy Daniels claiming she violated a nondisclosure agreement. Joy Reid and her panel discuss her attorney’s response to statements by the president’s lawyers, the firing of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and Trump’s personal attorney John Dowd calling for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to end the Mueller probe.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-legal-team-demands-20-million-from-stormy-daniels-1188513859614 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5eu6fzHuDc [with comments]
*
Russian Roulette Book: Putin, Trump and the 2016 election
AM Joy
3/17/18
Why did Putin want to influence the 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump become president? Reporters David Corn and Michael Isikoff join Joy Reid on their new book, which offers possible answers, ‘Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.’
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/russian-roulette-book-putin-trump-and-the-2016-election-1188517955628
--
Readout of the Vice President’s Call with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi
Issued on: March 17, 2018
Vice President Mike Pence met with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan on Friday, March 16, to discuss the Administration’s South Asia strategy. Vice President Pence reiterated President Trump’s request that the Government of Pakistan must do more to address the continued presence of the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and other terrorist groups operating in their country. The Vice President stated that U.S. efforts to eliminate terrorist groups who threaten U.S. security and the stability of the region will continue and noted that Pakistan could and should work closer with the United States.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/readout-vice-presidents-call-pakistani-prime-minister-shahid-khaqan-abbasi/
--
The Useless Rock Worth Dying Over
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Rare Earth [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtGG8ucQgEJPeUPhJZ4M4jA / https://www.youtube.com/user/ColChrisHadfield , https://www.youtube.com/user/ColChrisHadfield/videos ]
My hair is fabulous. I should model.
Today's episode is about value. This is the story of a rock. It was once worth fighting wars over. Now it's just a rock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUKQm8lVUCE [with comments]
--
Ballet Is Giving Boys In Kenya's Slums A Chance to Get Out (HBO)
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by VICE News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZaT_X_mc0BI-djXOlfhqWQ / https://www.youtube.com/user/vicenews , https://www.youtube.com/user/vicenews/videos ]
Thirteen-year-old Shamick Otieno left behind a one-room house in Africa's largest slum to start taking an intense 10 ballet classes per week at the Dance Center Kenya in Nairobi.
Otieno is from Kibera, a sprawling and densely populated slum in Nairobi and the largest in Africa. Four years ago, he was taking dance classes with Annos Africa, a nonprofit that brings arts to kids living in poverty when his instructor noticed Otieno's talent. He was offered a scholarship that now covers his housing, school fees, and dance training.
Living away from family has been hard for Otieno.
“The family was very poor. It was not easy,” his mother, Joyce Tawa, said. Even though she had her initial doubts about Otieno dancing, she now hopes his classes will be a ticket to a brighter future.
And there’s reason to believe that could happen. Otieno's mentor, Joel Kioko, is also from the slums. He trained through the same program and now has a full scholarship at the English National Ballet in London.
Kioko and Otieno inspire each other and both hope to return to the slums as professional dancers to give other kids the same opportunities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esYwzln5fdM [with comments]
--
Great Moments in Irish History with Denis Leary
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Funny Or Die [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzS3-65Y91JhOxFiM7j6grg / https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie , https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie/videos ]
Denis Leary on the invention of Shepherd's Pie. Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Originally published: March 16, 2009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfyyX-UDAjM [with comments]
--
Creationist Attempts to Humiliate Me
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Professor Stick [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbjw7dE_hxJT-VGLTqCjlJA , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbjw7dE_hxJT-VGLTqCjlJA/videos ]
Today we are peeling some orange, by responding to A Bit of Orange, who has recently made a video response to me.
Original Video:
Professor Stick gets Stuck in the GAPS! | Rent-A-Friend Radio ep 12
Professor Stick (Not his real name) gets stuck in the gaps as he tries to debunk our Evolution 101 series. But in doing so he tries to argue that new proteins are genetic information, things that happened MILLIONS of years ago can be considered "Observations" and I AM right, but not in the way I think I am. Whatever that means.
His best moments come when he- not once, but TWICE- explains that he is an Evolution of the Gaps believer! What do you do when there is no evidence? Use evolution to FILL IN The GAPS! FAITH!
But please, give it a watch and take HIS word for it.
thanks for liking and subscribing, and remember, #JesusLovesYou
https://abitoforangeacademy.wordpress.com/
https://abitoforange.com/
To read about ancient monkey proteins, check out the link below. It says things like, "Here, we describe an ancient primate TRIMCyp gene (that we call TRIMCypA3) which evolved in the common ancestor of simian primates 43 Mya."
That's right. Stick Boy is referring to an "observation" which apparently happened as long ago as 43 million years. Does 43 million count as EPIC, as in EPIC FAIL? But of course, even thought they couldn't have OBSERVED anything, they are using their FAITH in evolution to FILL IN SOME GAPS...
Birth, decay, and reconstruction of an ancient TRIMCyp gene fusion in primate genomes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574956/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRQLdT2HVKU [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg-dJvtJJHg [with comments]
--
Trump Preparing To Indict Clinton Crime Network
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by The Alex Jones Channel [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
Alex Jones reports on how McCabe altered 302 reports to frame Trump.
https://www.infowars.com/breaking-trump-preparing-mass-indictments-of-clinton-crime-network/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBcQ_CC93B8 [with comments]
*
Hillary About To Be Indicted Following McCabe Firing
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by The Alex Jones Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-1BSZ5kRDc [with comments] [a must-watch] [and see also in particular e.g. (linked in) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040902 and preceding and following]
--
Talking with Aron Ra
Streamed live on Mar 17, 2018 by Godless Cranium [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewUkuIHNuwuMNWMa96q9ZQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewUkuIHNuwuMNWMa96q9ZQ/videos ]
Aron Ra channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AronRa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShlIIZseCws [with comments]
--
Shafted: Marion Donovan's Trailblazing Diapers | The Daily Show
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA/videos ]
In honor of Women's History Month, Desi Lydic and Dulce Sloan highlight Marion Donovan, the criminally unsung hero who invented the first disposable diapers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-fUg-jhzjM [with comments]
--
Anderson Cooper White House Turmoil Cold Open - SNL
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Saturday Night Live [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqFzWxSCi39LnW1JKFR3efg / https://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayNightLive , https://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayNightLive/videos ]
Anderson Cooper (Alex Moffat) interviews Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon), Rex Tillerson (John Goodman), Michael Wolff (Fred Armisen) and Anthony Scaramucci (Bill Hader).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48t_A5fPVw [with comments]
*
The Californians: Replacing Rosa - SNL
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Saturday Night Live
Devin (Bill Hader), Stuart (Fred Armisen) and more (Kate McKinnon, Kenan Thompson, Alex Moffat, Cecily Strong, Pete Davidson) contend with the loss of Rosa.
LA Official Is Starting to Get Fed Up With Waze's Habit of Directing Drivers Down a Death Slalom
4/14/18
https://gizmodo.com/la-official-is-starting-to-get-fed-up-with-wazes-habit-1825266195 [with comment]
Google refuses to fix Waze so it won’t route people on 32%-grade road
LA city councilman: “That’s not good corporate citizenship.“
4/14/2018
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/waze-seems-to-suggest-route-over-32-grade-road-is-fine/ [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jIBZjL8G5s [with comments]
*
Weekend Update on Andrew McCabe's Firing - SNL
Published on Mar 18, 2018 by Saturday Night Live
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week's biggest news, including deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe being fired a day before he was set to retire. Betsy DeVos (Kate McKinnon) stops by to address her 60 Minutes interview.
[originally aired March 17, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa8-lElti1E [with comments]
*
Weekend Update on IHOP's Apology - SNL
Published on Mar 18, 2018 by Saturday Night Live
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week's biggest news, including a waitress at a Maine IHOP asking black teens to pay upfront. Pete Davidson and Stefon (Bill Hader) stop by.
[originally aired March 17, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0o6alqvTDY [with comments]
--
stashed March 17, 2018:
We're All Watching the Donald Trump Show
And that’s just how he likes it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/were-all-watching-the-donald-trump-show/555833/
White House weighs rehiring fired Trump aide McEntee
Senior White House officials are mulling bringing President Donald Trump’s personal aide and body man John McEntee back into the administration just days after he was abruptly escorted out of the West Wing.
White House chief of staff John Kelly told aides during a Friday morning senior staff meeting that there are tentative discussions about finding a role for McEntee in the administration, according to a person familiar with the meeting. The person added that Kelly and others in the West Wing believe McEntee has been unfairly maligned in the media.
[...]
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/john-mcentee-white-house-return-trump-468674
The ‘chaos president’ threatens severe damage to the GOP — and the country
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/03/16/the-chaos-president-threatens-severe-damage-to-the-gop-and-the-country/
6 signs you're going to lose your White House job
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/16/politics/signs-lose-your-job-in-trump-white-house/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/drZVVuBeh4BcPmMlFtVl1w9pgE78M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
McCabe wrote memos detailing his interactions with Trump: report
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/fbi/378937-mccabe-wrote-memos-detailing-his-interactions-with-trump-report
citing http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/latest-ap-learns-mccabe-memos-trump-53820039
Andrew McCabe Gave Memos On Trump Conversations To Robert Mueller
Former FBI Director James Comey wrote similar memos on his interactions with Trump.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mccabe-memos-robert-mueller_us_5aad5d38e4b0c33361b0e6bc
Read Andrew McCabe’s Response To Being Fired Two Days Before His Retirement
Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired the former deputy director of the FBI on Friday.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/andrew-mccabe-firing-response_us_5aac79dae4b0337adf83e00a
Ex-CIA Boss John Brennan Tears Into Donald Trump Over Andrew McCabe Firing
“America will triumph over you.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-brennan-donald-trump-andrew-mccabe_us_5aad0cf7e4b05b2217ff0e53
Trump's attorney John Dowd calls for end to Mueller probe, cites firing of McCabe
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-s-attorney-john-dowd-calls-end-mueller-probe-cites-n857571
Trump’s Lawyer: It’s Time to End the Mueller Probe
The president’s personal attorney hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein follows ‘the brilliant and courageous example’ of Sessions, who just fired Andrew McCabe.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-lawyer-its-time-to-fire-robert-mueller
Trump lawyer’s call to end the Russia probe is all about the investigation’s aftermath — or firing Mueller
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/17/trump-lawyers-call-to-end-the-russia-probe-is-all-about-the-investigations-aftermath-or-firing-mueller/
McCabe’s Firing Chips Away at the Justice Department’s Independence
Shortly after he was dismissed Friday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the former FBI deputy director pinned the blame directly on President Trump.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/presidential-target-andrew-mccabe-was-just-fired-from-the-fbi/555857/
Trump Lauds Firing Of Ex-Top FBI Official As ‘Great Day’
"Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!"
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/974859881827258369 ]
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2018/03/17/trump-mccabe-firing-fbi/
Trump defenders’ efforts to cast Mueller as tainted are gaining urgency
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/17/trump-defenders-efforts-to-cast-mueller-as-tainted-are-gaining-urgency/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3VcK-UPKJzezUMoXS296ejOReJNM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions - this and following further to https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=139366659
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html
Cambridge Analytica and the Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/cambridge-analytica-facebook-quiz.html
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool
The algorithm used in the Facebook data breach trawled though personal data for information on sexual orientation, race, gender – and even intelligence and childhood trauma
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm?CMP=share_btn_tw
Report: Trump-linked firm exploited data on 50 million Facebook users
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/facebook-trump-campaign-data-cambridge-analytica-423599
Here are the New York Times [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html ] and Observer [ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election ] stories that pushed Facebook to suspend Trump’s data analytics company
Cambridge Analytica had profile information for some 50 million Facebook users, according to reports.
https://www.recode.net/2018/3/17/17133668/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-new-york-times-observer
Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dsjcybPe6Y88ULMb1OyVJsihRTDMM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Trump is making one thing clear: He likes surrounding himself with people who like him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/16/trump-is-making-one-thing-clear-he-likes-surrounding-himself-with-people-who-like-him/
Burn It Down, Rex
By Michelle Goldberg
Since the beginning of this nightmare administration, we’ve been assured — via well-placed anonymous sources — that a few sober, trustworthy people in the White House were checking Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most erratic whims. A collection of generals, New York finance types and institution-minded Republicans were said to be nobly sacrificing their reputations and serving a disgraceful president for the good of the country. Through strategic leaks they presented themselves as guardians of American democracy rather than collaborators in its undoing.
The success of this informal alliance is hard to gauge. Last August, after the president said there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., senior officials rationalized their continued role in the administration to Mike Allen of Axios. “If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall,” Allen wrote. Since then, we’ve had a government shutdown over immigration, albeit a brief one. A trade war appears imminent. Arrests of undocumented immigrants — particularly those without criminal records — have continued to surge.
Over the past 14 months we’ve also seen monstrous levels of corruption and chaos, a plummeting of America’s standing in the world and the obliteration of a host of democratic norms. Yet things could always be worse; the economy is doing well and Trump has not yet started any real wars.
Increasingly, however, the people who were supposed to be the adults in the room aren’t in the room anymore. The former Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell left in January. Gary Cohn, head of the National Economic Council, announced his resignation on March 6. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was terminated by tweet on Tuesday. National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster will reportedly be among the next to go, and Trump may soon fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, possibly as a prelude to shutting down the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Adding to the tumult, a parade of lesser officials have either quit or been fired, including the White House communications director Hope Hicks, staff secretary Rob Porter and Trump’s personal aide John McEntee.
The self-styled grown-ups are, for the most part, being replaced by lackeys and ideologues. Larry Kudlow, the CNBC pundit Trump has appointed to succeed Cohn, is known for the consistent wrongness of his predictions. Tillerson was a terrible secretary of state, but unlike his chosen successor, the director of the C.I.A., Mike Pompeo, he never trafficked in nut-job Benghazi conspiracy theories or anti-Muslim invective. John Roberts of Fox News reported that McMaster could be replaced by uberhawk John Bolton, who last month wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.” (Bolton has described proposed talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea as an opportunity to deliver a harsh ultimatum.)
This new stage of unbound Trumpism might make the administration’s first year look stable in comparison. That would partly vindicate the adults’ claims that things would be even messier without them. But it would also mean that by protecting the country from the consequences of an unhinged president, they helped Trump consolidate his power while he learned how to transcend restraints.
Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly.
This month, Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, published a scathing open letter to Powell, the former security adviser. During her time in the administration, he wrote, she assured appalled onlookers that the adults were playing a stabilizing role: “You reached out to tell those of us on the outside you were saving us from a lot. You don’t understand, friends of yours conveyed to all of us, how bad it is.” Lovett wrote that he was skeptical of this argument but unable to dismiss it. The real test, he thought, would come when she and Cohn and others like them were no longer in the White House: “If you couldn’t speak out because you had to stay, when you left, you had to speak out.”
Of course, unlike Omarosa Manigault Newman, who confessed horror at her former boss’s presidency on “Celebrity Big Brother,” they haven’t. Their defenders among anti-Trump Republicans say it’s because some of them still have a role to play in staving off potential disaster. One Republican in regular contact with people in the White House told me that Powell and Cohn “need to protect their capacity to reach in and help manage in the event of any national crisis.”
I don’t find this entirely convincing. If these people see the administration as unequipped to handle an emergency, they owe the country a firsthand account of our vulnerability. But there is, at least, a certain logic to the argument made in their defense. That logic, however, only holds for those who remain on decent terms with Trump. Which means that if there’s one person who has no excuse for not speaking out, it’s Tillerson, once one of the most powerful private citizens in America, now humbled and defiled by his time in Trump’s orbit.
There’s little doubt that Tillerson holds Trump in contempt and disagrees with large parts of his agenda. After Charlottesville, Tillerson refused to say that the president’s words represented American values. (“The president speaks for himself,” he told Fox News.) In office, he struggled to save the Iran nuclear deal and opposed Trump’s — and Jared Kushner’s — support for a blockade of Qatar by other Arab states. After his ignominious firing, he gave a live address in which he didn’t even mention the president’s name.
“Rex is never going to be back in a position where he can have any degree of influence or respect from this president,” my Republican source said. Because of that, the source continued, “Rex is under a moral mandate to do his best to burn it down.” That would mean telling the truth “about how concerned he is about the leadership in the Oval Office, and what underpins those concerns and what he’s seen.”
In this case, patriotism and self-interest point in the same direction. Before entering this administration, Tillerson was a vastly more respected businessman than Trump; as chief executive of Exxon Mobil, he presided over what The Times described as a “state within a state.” Now the first line of his obituary will be about a year of abject failure as the country’s lead diplomat, culminating in a humiliation fit for reality TV.
The only way he will ever change that is by joining those who would bring this despicable presidency down. If Tillerson came out and said that the president is unfit, and perhaps even that venal concerns for private gain have influenced his foreign policy, impeachment wouldn’t begin tomorrow, but Trump’s already narrow public support would shrink further. Republican members of Congress like Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, might be induced to rediscover their spines and perform proper oversight.
Last year, Axios’s Allen and Jim VandeHei half-jokingly called the insiders trying to circumscribe Trump the “Committee to Save America.” Now the committee, having failed, is disbanding. The least they could do is be frank with the rest of us about what we’re up against.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/opinion/burn-it-down-rex.html
Not Every Woman In A Position Of Power Is A Feminist Hero
Gina Haspel’s dark past makes her a complicated figure for feminists to support.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gina-haspel-women-power_us_5aabf693e4b0337adf837a81
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d7XOXAmaUTshSLMY84QklTWlSuyoM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Donald Trump Lied About His Apprentice Ratings Since People Were So Gullible, Says Billy Bush ( https://youtu.be/J4uABj30AWs [included in the post to which this is a reply]) - on Maher 3-16-18
http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/donald-trump-always-lied-about-apprentice-ratings-says-bush.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d_BKZDqaL2lAZxMhvmTFYp9u_QkZM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
China says resolutely opposed to new U.S. law on ties with Taiwan
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday expressed its “resolute opposition” after U.S. President Donald Trump signed legislation that encourages the United States to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa.
The bill, which is non-binding, would have gone into effect on Saturday morning, even if Trump had not signed it.
[...]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-china/china-says-resolutely-opposed-to-new-u-s-law-on-ties-with-taiwan-idUSKCN1GT0I9
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d9eqKy4IIBF75dMlRuqfb_TbvjuTM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
In California's rural, conservative north, there are big dreams for cleaving the state
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-state-of-jefferson-activists-20180317-htmlstory.html
alsp at http://ktla.com/2018/03/17/in-californias-rural-conservative-north-there-are-big-dreams-for-cleaving-state/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dE4J2gke8y2rp1M_njVh0zReeMezM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
A student was suspended after staying in class during walkouts. Here’s what actually happened.
An Ohio high school student has found himself at the center of political controversy after an online post about his suspension for staying in class during the national student school walkout went viral.
But that story isn’t exactly true.
Jacob Shoemaker, a senior at Hilliard Davidson High School in Hilliard, Ohio, was in fact suspended. But not because he chose not to join his classmates and the hundreds of thousands of students across the country who walked out of their classrooms to protest gun violence in the wake of a Florida school shooting that left 17 people dead. It was because he didn’t go to a designated area of the school where the non-protesters were supposed to be, and instead stayed by himself in a classroom.
He stayed in the classroom, his father said, because he didn’t want to choose a side.
“He was uncomfortable going to either location as he thought that going outside would most likely be politicizing a horrific event which he wanted no part of,” his father, Scott Shoemaker, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. “But staying inside would make him look disrespectful or insensitive to 17 innocent victims if it turned out to be more of a memorial service.”
On social media, however, Shoemaker’s now-viral suspension slip has been spun into a tale about how a liberal school system impeded the rights of a student who supported the Second Amendment, and misleading headlines painted a picture of Shoemaker being suspended solely on the grounds that he did not participate in the walkout.
This comes at a time when the push for greater gun control has gained momentum, with the Florida shooting survivors set to lead a gun-control march on Washington on March 24. The response to these efforts have at times fallen along partisan lines.
On Twitter, users shared Shoemaker’s photos of the suspension slip with hashtags such as #GunControlNever and #LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder. One person tweeted, “To paraphrase George Orwell, some speech is more equal than others.”
Shoemaker’s father said he has been inundated with so many supportive messages and threats from strangers who saw the viral posts that he is considering changing his number, he told the Independent in Massillon, Ohio. One of Shoemaker’s father’s old phone numbers, as well as the numbers of school district officials, have been circulating on social media. One Twitter user singled out Hilliard Davidson Principal Aaron Cookson for being a “#BadEducator” and “#BadDad.”
Shoemaker’s father said he has been inundated with so many supportive messages and threats from strangers who saw the viral posts that he is considering changing his number, he told the Independent in Massillon, Ohio. One of Shoemaker’s father’s old phone numbers, as well as the numbers of school district officials, have been circulating on social media. One Twitter user singled out Hilliard Davidson Principal Aaron Cookson for being a “#BadEducator” and “#BadDad.”
While the walkouts were for the most part peaceful, some conservatives pointed at a violent protest at Antioch High School in Nashville, where a group of students ripped the flag down from its pole and stomped on it, according to a video posted by Fox17. Police said students also jumped onto a patrol car, according to WZTV.
On the night before his school’s walkout, Shoemaker told his father that he wasn’t sure about participating in the walkout, and that school officials were, in some respects, pressuring the students to pick a side.
“The biggest problem, Dad, is that there shouldn’t be politics in the classroom … I may just sit in my seat. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the least intrusive of the choices I’ve been given,” he told his father, according to the Independent.
Shoemaker added that he wasn’t the only student who felt this way. School district officials said that “well under” half of the student population participated in the walkout — but that the majority of students were “comfortable and confident” in their decision not to participate.
On Wednesday, Jacob Shoemaker stayed sitting in his classroom, by himself, for about an hour. A scribbled note on the suspension slip he was handed read: “Student refused to follow instructions after being warned repeatedly by several administrators. Student not permitted on property 24 hours.”
“He stayed in the classroom, where he was supposed to be in the first place,” Shoemaker’s father told the Independent. “It’s kind of ironic.”
Shoemaker and his father could not be immediately reached by The Post.
While school officials could not confirm whether Shoemaker was suspended for privacy reasons, Hilliard district spokeswoman Stacie Raterman confirmed to the Independent that the suspension slip in the photos circulating online was real.
A statement on the district’s website Friday said the walkout was not designed to be political and was not carried out that way. It was instead meant to memorialize the victims of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Students had the option not to participate, but had to be supervised, as the walkout took place during school hours, district officials said.
“We do not leave students unattended in classrooms. This is the same practice our district implements when students opt out of other school programs or activities. We provide an alternative, supervised location,” district officials said.
“There is inaccurate and false information being circulated regarding both the intent of these gatherings and the events that took place during a specific activity at Davidson High School,” district officials said. “These gatherings were not political events; they were respectful gatherings remembering the senseless loss of young people.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/03/16/a-student-was-suspended-after-staying-in-class-and-not-walking-out-heres-what-actually-happened/
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joins NY student walkout to protest gun violence
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/378354-cuomo-joins-students-in-new-york-walkout-to-protest-gun-violence
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dHJtvsTSWpzXgiMIpeWzXwtxR4NaM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Video shows man, woman and child kicked off Southwest flight
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/southwest-airlines/2018/03/17/video-shows-man-woman-child-kicked-southwest-flight
Southwest faces outrage after a father and toddler were kicked off a flight when the child threw a tantrum
A man and his young daughter were kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight Wednesday evening after the toddler became upset and threw a fit as other passengers were boarding.
But a Facebook video taken by another passenger shows the toddler being calm and quiet as Southwest employees remove her and her father from the aircraft.
The video shows other passengers coming to the man's defense before an airline employee threatens to put them on the next flight.
http://www.businessinsider.com/father-and-toddler-kicked-off-southwest-flight-video-2018-3
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dNlIUGwOAquyLJMIW7lFACf73srnM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Police launch murder inquiry over death of Nikolai Glushkov
Met announces move after pathologist’s report on death of Russian exile in London this week
Police have launched a murder investigation into the death of the Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov after a pathologist concluded he died from compression to the neck, suggesting he may have been strangled by hand or ligature.
The Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command is retaining its lead role in the investigation “because of the associations Mr Glushkov is believed to have had” but has cautioned that there was no suggestion of a link with the attempted murders of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury almost two weeks ago.
The political row between Britain and Russia was mounting after the Russian foreign ministry said it was summoning the UK ambassador, Laurie Bristow, for a meeting on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported.
At the time of his death, Glushkov was about to defend a claim against him by the Russian airline Aeroflot at the commercial court in London, where he was accused of fraud.
In 2017, during a trial in absentia in Russia, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing $123m from the airline, which then pursued the case in London. Glushkov failed to show up at court in central London on Monday and his body was discovered in south-west London that evening.
The Met said: “Detectives are retaining an open mind and are appealing for any information that will assist the investigation.” Officers want to hear from anyone who may have seen or heard anything suspicious at or near his home in Clarence Avenue in New Malden between Sunday 11 March and Monday 12 March
The police’s belief that Glushkov was killed will increase scrutiny over the safety of Russians in the UK and is likely to stoke tensions in an escalating diplomatic dispute over whether the Kremlin played a role in the Skripal attack, which involved the nerve agent novichok.
On Friday, the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, blamed the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for the attack, telling an audience at the Battle of Britain museum in Uxbridge: “We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his [Putin’s] decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the second world war.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dimitry Peskov, denounced the comment as “a shocking and unforgivable breach of diplomatic rules of decent behaviour”. The two nations have already announced tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, including 23 embassy staff in London.
At a meeting of European foreign ministers on Monday. Johnson is expected to urge allies to clamp down on Russian espionage and money laundering, but will not table a barrage of new EU-wide economic measures against Russia.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, played down the possibility of her country boycotting the football World Cup in Russia in June, saying: “Right now it’s important that there’s an investigation.”
A Russian chemist who worked for 30 years inside the secret military installation where novichok was developed told the Guardian it was impossible that a non-state actor could have been behind the poisoning.
Vil Mirzayanov, 83, said the agent was too dangerous for anyone but a “high-level senior scientist” to handle and he did not see how a criminal organisation or other non-state group could pull off such an attack. “It’s very, very tough stuff,” he said from exile in New Jersey. “I don’t believe it.”
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is now formally involved in the process of investigating the nerve agent that has left the Skripals fighting for their lives and a police officer, Nick Bailey, seriously ill in a Salisbury hospital.
Downing Street confirmed that a team of scientists from the OPCW would come to the UK early next week. The process is to be agreed between the OPCW scientists and the lab at Porton Down which originally identified the agent.
Under article 8 of the chemical weapons convention, the OPCW team is expected to take its own samples. That could be either environmental evidence from the Skripal home, their car, or possibly the pub or restaurant that the pair visited, or biomedical samples from the Skripals themselves. Earlier, the OPCW said Russia had not declared information about the existence of the novichok group of nerve agents possibly because stockpiles were thought to have been destroyed in a post-Soviet clampdown on old chemical weapons.
“There is no record of the novichok group of nerve agents having been declared by a state party,” the OPCW said.
In a sign that the Glushkov case is also becoming politicised, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Friday that it had opened a murder investigation into the death.
In a statement released just hours before the Scotland Yard announcement, the committee, which handles high-profile cases, said it would manage the investigation “in accordance with the requirements of Russian law”. It said investigators were ready to cooperate with British law enforcement.
The Met stressed that “at this stage there is nothing to suggest any link to the attempted murders in Salisbury, nor any evidence that [Glushkov] was poisoned”.
Police were called by the London ambulance service at 10.46pm on Monday after the 68-year-old was found dead at his home in New Malden. A special postmortem began on Thursday.
In the 1990s Glushkov was a director of the state airline and of Boris Berezovsky’s LogoVaz car company. In 1999, as Berezovsky fell out with Putin and fled to the UK, Glushkov was charged with money laundering and fraud. He spent five years in jail and was freed in 2004. Fearing further arrest, he fled to the UK and was granted political asylum.
In 2011, he gave evidence in a court case brought by Berezovsky against his fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, who remained on good terms with the Kremlin. Glushkov told the court he had effectively been taken hostage by Putin’s administration, which wanted to put pressure on Berezovsky to sell his stake in the TV station ORT.
In March 2013, Berezovsky was found dead at his ex-wife’s home in Berkshire. Police said they believed he had killed himself but a coroner recorded an open verdict.
The former world chess champion and Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov said he was “not surprised” Glushkov was murdered.
“I think this is a message addressed to Russians with significant interests abroad who are thinking of cooperating with Robert Mueller [the special counsel investigating alleged collusion with the Trump administration]. It’s a preemptive strike. Tragically it’s not even about Glushkov. They pick someone who is expendable and recognisable,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, Glushkov said he did not believe Berezovsky took his own life. “I’m definite Boris was killed. I have quite different information from what is being published in the media,” he said.
He noted that a large number of Russian exiles, including Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, had died under mysterious circumstances. “Boris was strangled. Either he did it himself or with the help of someone. [But] I don’t believe it was suicide,” Glushkov said. “Too many deaths [of Russian émigrés] have been happening.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/16/police-launch-inquiry-over-death-of-nikolai-glushkov
Trump's Economy Is Still Waiting for the Tax-Cut Boost
Goldman, JPMorgan cut quarter’s GDP forecasts to 2% or less
Culprits include delays in tax refunds, big finish to 2017
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-16/trump-s-economy-still-awaits-tax-cut-boost-as-growth-downshifts
Stormy Daniels’ Attorney: Something Among Our Accusations About Trump Has Occurred During His Presidency
But he won’t say what.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stromy-daniels-incidents-during-trump-presidency_us_5aaca879e4b0337adf83eb6a
ICE Is Distorting The Truth To Keep Up With Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-escalante-ice-lies-trump_us_5aac2e50e4b0c33361b070f4
Doctors Accused Of ‘Politicizing Psychiatry’ Are Actually Doing The Opposite
Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency is an urgent question, widely discussed among pundits and politicians. When psychiatrists and other psychological professionals address the matter, as I have, we are sometimes accused of “politicizing psychiatry.”
The charge tends to be applied loosely and inappropriately, meant more to silence than to reveal what it actually means to put psychiatry to political use. A brief look at history is helpful here.
It is true that psychiatry is more vulnerable than other medical specialties to exploitation for political purposes. My work on Nazi doctors was focused precisely on that issue, and I have since looked at the use of the psychiatric profession to suppress dissidents in other totalitarian societies, including Soviet Russia and Communist China.
Medicine in Nazi Germany was subjected, as were all professions, to what was known as Gleichschaltung, meaning “coordination” or “synchronization” ? in effect, the nazification of the profession. Potential critics were suppressed and leadership roles were given to those considered politically and ideologically reliable.
Those reliable psychiatrists played a central part in eliminating “life unworthy of life,” as carried out in the killing centers of the Nazis’ “euthanasia” project. The murderous act was often performed by a doctor, often a psychiatrist, in keeping with the slogan, “The syringe belongs in the hand of the physician” ? the syringe in this case being a gas cock. It is estimated that something on the order of 250,000 people, among them large numbers of psychiatric and neurological patients, were killed in the “euthanasia” project.
The doctors involved in these medical killings, like those selecting Jews for the gas chambers in Auschwitz, were expected to do what they did. That is, they were carrying out the “malignant normality” imposed by the Nazi regime. While doctors had differing attitudes and emotional struggles, the medical profession in general succumbed to nazification and gave a certain legitimacy to what I have called the reversal of healing and killing.
In the Soviet and Chinese cases too, psychiatrists were co-opted by repressive regimes. The goal was not Nazi-style biological purification but the stigmatizing of political heretics as mentally ill and their incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. In the Soviet Union, they were often given the vague but encompassing diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia,” an invented disorder that psychiatrists received training on. Many psychiatrists came to believe in the disorder and to think that defying the regime really was pathological. Others became “bureaucrat-psychiatrists,” who, as one of them put it, “expected to do what they [the KGB] asked us to do, and we knew what they expected.”
The Chinese Communists were influenced by Soviet psychiatry but added an important element of their own. They subjected millions of intellectuals, students and associates of the former regime to a coercive program of “thought reform.” Sometimes confusingly referred to as “brainwashing,” it consisted of relentless criticism, self-criticism and continuous confession. In my study of this process, I found that it was run not by psychiatrists or psychologists but by Communist cadres, who imposed the party’s version of political reality in ways that aligned with the efforts of the state-controlled psychiatric profession.
America is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or Communist China. We do not have state-controlled psychiatry or medicine, and whatever you think of Trump, he is surely no Hitler. What we have in our country is a large number of psychological professionals bearing witness to the malignant normality that Trump and his followers seek to impose.
Trump does this in at least two extremely dysfunctional ways: his profoundly compromised relationship with reality and his attack mode in response to crisis or criticism.
I speak of Trump’s solipsistic reality, meaning his need to take in the world solely in relation to the outlandish psychological requirements of his own self, with a rejection of accepted standards of evidence and no sense of having responsibility to what the rest of us call reality. I relate that tendency to his sense of feeling beleaguered by malevolent forces, which include institutions necessary to our democracy such as the press, the intelligence services and the judiciary. That attack mode becomes particularly dangerous when he is confronted with an actual nuclear threat, as in relation to North Korea.
I make no diagnosis of psychiatric illness, in fact no diagnosis at all, but rather point to a psychological pattern of presidential unfitness that endangers our democracy and could have the gravest of consequences for the entire world.
To become a witnessing professional in this way is to reject politicized psychiatry, and to reject as well the role of the obedient bureaucrat, psychiatric or otherwise, who supports the lies of solipsistic reality. To speak out is a hopeful act, an expression of a free professional in an open society and a statement that voices must be heard in our democracy to sustain it.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton is author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and Psychology of Genocide, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China, and Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Columbia University, and his most recent book is The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-lifton-trump-mental-illness_us_5aa96dbce4b0600b82ff8a81
The Oversight Storm That Could Paralyze The Trump Presidency
By Kurt Bardella
Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election may be the greatest imminent threat to Donald Trump’s presidency, but there’s another storm coming for President Trump that he likely hasn’t even considered.
This storm will touch every person who works in the West Wing, every member of the Trump cabinet, every department and agency within the federal government. It could effectively paralyze the entire Trump administration.
And we don’t have to go back to Watergate for historical precedent.
During the Obama administration, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took center stage as Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.) wielded the committee’s unique oversight authority to relentlessly investigate the Obama White House. I spent four years working as a spokesperson and advisor for the committee, working to create an environment that made our weekly hearings must-see TV.
This committee is one of the only bodies in all of government that has the legal authority to induce cooperation from the executive branch. Whether it’s a deposition from a White House official, testimony from a cabinet secretary or production of documents and emails, the chair of the Oversight committee has unilateral subpoena authority to compel cooperation.
During Issa’s four years as chairman, the Oversight committee subpoenaed the Obama administration more than 100 times for wide-ranging investigations into the State Department, the IRS, the General Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department, to name a few. Issa’s use of subpoenas was on par with his predecessors ? for the two years Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) chaired it while President George W. Bush was in office, the committee issued 46 subpoenas.
When Donald Trump became president, the Republicans’ appetite for vigorous and visible oversight seemingly disappeared overnight. They have deliberately abandoned their responsibility to serve as the people’s check on the executive branch. By ignoring the avalanche of waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement occurring daily in the Trump administration, Oversight Republicans have betrayed the American taxpayers whom they are sworn to protect. In the wake of their silence, a litany of questions about government operations have gone unanswered.
Now, in the wake of Conor Lamb’s upset victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, it seems almost inevitable that House Republicans will lose their majority to Democrats in November. Should Democrats claim control of the House, and with it the Oversight committee’s gavel, the American people may finally get the answers they deserve.
While the Republican majority has been content to turn a blind eye to the Trump administration’s flagrant conduct, the panel’s Democrats, led by ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), have been keeping track.
Recently, Cummings sent Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) a list of 13 motions of subpoenas he’d like the majority to act on. The list, which Oversight Republicans predictably ignored, is a blueprint for the type of investigations we can expect should Cummings and his Democratic colleagues take control of the committee. In totality, these investigations could have a crippling effect on the functionality of the Trump administration.
Oversight Democrats are targeting documents that touch every part of the Trump presidency, including: the Trump Organization’s foreign payments, Trump’s Muslim ban, Jared Kushner’s emails, the White House and FBI’s security clearance process, Michael Flynn’s business dealings in the Middle East, the Justice Department’s role in opposing the AT&T-Time Warner merger, joint business deals between the Trump Organization and Kushner Companies, the use of private email accounts, private travel by administration officials like White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 dining set, the Custom and Border Protection’s response to sexual assault allegations and attempts to discredit the FBI.
To this point, the Trump administration has been protected by House Republicans willing to look the other way in the face of unethical conduct that under President Obama they would have investigated relentlessly.
What will happen to Donald Trump if he loses that protection this November? He may be preoccupied with defending himself against the Mueller probe, but make no mistake about it: A Democratic House majority, and specifically the Oversight committee, will be capable of generating a storm that threatens the future of the Trump presidency.
Kurt Bardella is a HuffPost columnist. He is a former spokesperson for and senior adviser to the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-bardella-house-oversight_us_5aabfdb2e4b05b2217fe85cb
FEMA Decides To Stop Taking Climate Change Into Account As It Plans For Future
The U.S. spent a record $306 billion on weather and climate-related disasters in 2017.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fema-climate-change-strategic-plan_us_5aac2484e4b0c33361b06283
Donald Trump Exposed On New Yorker Cover
“I wanted to address President Trump’s stormy relationship with the press,” says artist Barry Blitt.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-exposed-new-yorker_us_5aac53ace4b05b2217fed6fb
Sean Hannity Slams Shepard Smith For Calling His Kind Of Fox Show Strictly Entertainment
But even Hannity has said: “I never claimed to be a journalist.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-shepard-smith-opinion-journalist_us_5aac369be4b0c33361b076b8
GOP Candidate Drops Out After Calling Parkland Survivor A ‘Skinhead Lesbian’
The now-former candidate for a Maine state House seat called another Parkland teen “a moron.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/leslie-gibson-gop-maine-parkland-survivor-twitter-attack_us_5aa8c26be4b001c8bf151517
The Real Drama In Russia’s Election Comes After The Vote
As Putin heads for reelection, Russia’s elites are ready to turn on one another.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/putin-russia-election-inner-circle-successor_us_5aa805cee4b0e872b4bf6380
What Woke America And Great America Can Learn From Each Other
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-giridharadas-outrage-america_us_5aaa93b6e4b073bd82929695
Engineer’s Voicemail Warned State Of Bridge Cracks 2 Days Before Collapse
The state employee didn’t hear the voicemail until one day after the deadly accident.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-engineer-warned-state-about-bridge-collapse_us_5aac7167e4b05b2217fedd3a
Driver Tries To Pass Homer Simpson License Off As Real To Cops - unidentified driver in Milton Keynes, southern England
D’oh!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fake-homer-simpson-driver-license_us_5aaceecae4b0c33361b0b256
Kevin Hart And Conan O’Brien Carbo Load And Then Try Sumo Wrestling
This is not going to go well.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/conan-and-kevin-hart-carbo-load-and-then-try-sumo-wrestling_us_5aad37b3e4b05b2217ff1bef
You Can Now Ride A Bona Fide Sex Machine In A Museum
The exhibit, in the basement of New York’s Museum of Sex, is stimulating, to say the least.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/museum-of-sex-cowgirl_us_5a9470c2e4b02cb368c4ac39
Democrats Want to Subpoena Apple to Find Out When Key Administration Officials Downloaded Encrypted Messaging Apps
On Wednesday, House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee released a memo laying out the steps they would have taken had they been in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation — and steps they may take if and when they gain subpoena power by taking over the House of Representatives in November.
The possibility became much more likely on Tuesday night, as Democrats pulled off an upset victory in a Pennsylvania special election for a congressional seat that President Donald Trump had carried by nearly 20 points, and that Democrats hadn’t even bothered to contest in the last two cycles. If the pattern holds, Democrats have a strong chance of picking up the nearly two-dozen seats they need to win the House — and the subpoena power that comes with it.
Down on Page 20 of the memo is a pair of ideas that could put Congress on a collision course with privacy advocates in Silicon Valley. “Apple: The Committee should seek records reflecting downloaded encrypted messaging apps for certain key individuals,” the memo suggests. “The Committee should likewise issue a subpoena to WhatsApp for messages exchanged between key witnesses of interest.”
The committee said that it would also seek to find out “all messaging applications that Mr. [Jared] Kushner used during the campaign as well as the presidential transition, including but not limited to SMS, iMessage, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Slack, Instagram, and Snapchat.”
The committee may also consider adding ProtonMail, the encrypted email service, to that list. One White House staffer, Ryan P. McAvoy, jotted his ProtonMail passwords and his address on a piece of White House stationery and left it at a bus stop near the White House. A source found it there and provided it to The Intercept, which confirmed its authenticity. (McAvoy did not respond to requests for comment.)
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told The Intercept that Kushner had nothing left to add. “In two different appearances before congressional committees, Mr. Kushner answered all relevant questions involving these matters,” he said.
The Democrats’ memo comes after Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee announced Monday that they found no evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. Trump heralded the halting of the investigation as vindication, celebrating the news on Twitter. Still, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion appears to be accelerating, with Mueller subpoenaing Trump Organization records on Thursday.
In their memo, the Democrats on the committee said the Republicans were “prematurely shutting down the Russia investigation,” and that the committee’s conclusions are “at odds with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.”
If investigators decide to follow through on the suggestion for the records request, they would put both Apple and WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, in a difficult spot. In recent years, both Apple and WhatsApp have increasingly marketed themselves in terms of pro-user privacy, including their inability to divulge the contents of users’ conversations. But in Apple’s case, the memo floats the idea not of gaining access to anyone’s conversations, but of simply obtaining records of what chat apps were downloaded by “certain key individuals.”
An Apple spokesperson told The Intercept that the company declines to comment on specific law enforcement matters, and referred instead to the company’s published law enforcement guidelines. These guidelines make clear that Apple retains download and purchase records and will provide them under court order. The App Store is like any other store: If you’re using it, you’re probably leaving behind very detailed receipts.
Getting messages from WhatsApp is trickier. Apple and WhatsApp both make heavy use of data encryption; in the case of both Apple iMessage and WhatsApp chats, sent and received messages are protected by so-called end-to-end encryption, meaning text is protected against anyone outside of those communicating, making it theoretically indecipherable to eavesdropping. Apple and WhatsApp both claim that they themselves are unable to access or furnish the decryption keys necessary to read the messages, meaning that even if they were to turn over chat data straight from their servers, it would remain uselessly scrambled.
The memo’s recommendation to subpoena WhatsApp for chat logs is probably fruitless, barring some revelation about how the company processes and retains user data. WhatsApp promises users that the company “doesn’t store your messages on our servers once we deliver them, and end-to-end encryption means that WhatsApp and third parties can’t read them anyway.” The company’s law enforcement guidelines state that although WhatsApp complies with all legal orders, even undelivered messages “are deleted from our servers after 30 days” after being sent. However, the app does warn users that WhatsApp chat backups stored in the cloud are not protected by the company’s end-to-end encryption.
Under court order, WhatsApp could provide other user data that could be of interest to the committee. The same guidelines describe account metadata that the company could be compelled to turn over: “A search warrant issued under the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or equivalent state warrant procedures upon a showing of probable cause is required to compel the disclosure of the stored contents of any account, which may include ‘about’ information, profile photos, group information, and address book, if available.” Photos and address book data would be of obvious interest.
Questions remain as to whether WhatsApp could or would furnish other types of metadata not covered in the guidelines, such as locational information. A company spokesperson declined to comment beyond reiterating that they “do not store messages at WhatsApp.” The digital right nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation gave WhatsApp a two out of five star rating in its most recent roundup of data handover policies, noting that “WhatsApp does not explicitly state that it prohibits third-party access to its user data, nor does it say that third parties are prohibited from allowing WhatsApp user data to be used for surveillance purposes.”
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/17/trump-russia-apple-whatsapp/
Report: Democrats outline plans to ask Apple & WhatsApp for help in the Trump-Russia investigation
https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/17/apple-trump-russia-investigation/
Democrats aim to subpoena Apple, Twitter over private chats
They seek more info about downloads and chats from WikiLeaks and others.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/17/democrats-aim-to-subpoena-apple-twitter-over-private-chats/
Democrats ask Apple and Whatsapp for a helping hand in Trump-Russia investigation
https://www.theibulletin.com/democrats-ask-apple-whatsapp-helping-hand-trump-russia-investigation-11664/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dxulB7obzX_heDMCBl0INxCJc-FtM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Whistleblower reveals to Channel 4 News data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles by Cambridge Analytica – data firm linked to Trump win
The British data firm described as “pivotal” in Donald Trump’s presidential victory was behind a ‘data grab’ of more than 50 million Facebook profiles, a whistleblower has revealed to Channel 4 News.
In an exclusive television interview, Chris Wylie, former Research Director at Cambridge Analytica tells all.
https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-facebook-profiles-whistleblower-chris-wylie-election
Cambridge Analytica: how big data shaped the US election
Oct 24, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgYvf3Ckdso
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles'
Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon. Its CEO is Alexander Nix
How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool
View the video at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-we-spent-1m-harvesting-millions-of-facebook-profiles-video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M
more: https://www.google.com/search?q=channel+4+whistleblower+facebook
Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians
Mr. Nix is a director of SCL Group, a British political and defense contractor, and chief executive of its American offshoot, Cambridge Analytica, which advised the Trump campaign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-russia.html
Trump-linked data firm met with Russian executives: report
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/378970-trump-linked-data-firm-met-with-russian-executives
A voter profiling firm hired by Trump likely grabbed data for tens of millions of Facebook users
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/17/a-voter-profiling-firm-hired-by-trump-likely-grabbed-data-for-tens-of-millions-of-facebook-users/
Trump campaign data firm accused of harvesting Facebook data
The attorney general for the US state of Massachusetts is launching an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by a firm employed by Donald Trump's election campaign.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43444791
Cambridge Analytica Took 50M Facebook Users' Data—And Both Companies Owe Answers
https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-50m-facebook-users-data/
Facebook is again having to account for its role in 2016 election
Trump campaign had access to user data
http://www.kyma.com/news/national-world/facebook-is-again-having-to-account-for-its-role-in-2016-election/717673322
Cambridge Analytica: links to Moscow oil firm and St Petersburg university
Data company gave briefing to Moscow firm Lukoil, and the lecturer who developed the crucial algorithm worked for St Petersburg university
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-academic-trawling-facebook-had-links-to-russian-university
Russia
The Cambridge Analytica Files
https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files
The Cambridge Analytica Debacle is not a Facebook “Data Breach.” Maybe It Should Be.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/17/the-cambridge-analytica-debacle-is-not-a-facebook-data-breach-maybe-it-should-be/
Facebook knew Cambridge Analytica was misusing users’ data three years ago and only banned the company this week
https://qz.com/1231643/cambridge-analytica-illegally-obtained-data-from-50-million-facebook-users-to-run-trump-ads/
Facebook suspends Trump campaign's data analysis firm
https://www.axios.com/facebook-suspends-data-firm-1ed2bb1e-8dfd-42a6-8ded-1c1670c7ecde.html
Facebook vastly downplayed scope of data leak involving info on 50 million users
https://www.fastcompany.com/40546002/facebook-vastly-downplayed-scope-of-data-leak-involving-info-on-more-than-50-million-users
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/daZ6CsD889nkiaMAOYh0CE7eVd5WM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Former CIA chief to Trump on McCabe firing: 'America will triumph over you'
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/17/politics/john-brennan-donald-trump-mccabe-firing/index.html
When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you.
https://twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/974978856997224448
replying to:
Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/974859881827258369
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Getting Taller as It Shrinks, NASA Team Finds
It's becoming the Lanky Red Spot
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/jupiters-great-red-spot-getting-taller-as-it-shrinks
https://www.inverse.com/article/42453-nasa-jupiter-great-red-spot-taller
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Getting Taller While It Is Shrinking, It Is Also Changing Colors To Orange
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/223159/20180316/jupiters-great-red-spot-getting-taller-shrinking-changing-colors-orange.htm
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking in length, but growing in height
The storm’s upward expansion is just as unexplained as its retreating base.
http://astronomy.com/news/2018/03/jupiters-great-red-spot-is-shrinking-in-length-but-growing-in-height
Jupiter's 'Great Red Spot' is changing colour: Earth-sized storm that could disappear completely in 20 years is glowing an intense orange
Jupiter's 'Great Red Spot' megastorm is shrivelling at a rate of 140 miles (230km) per year, Nasa study shows
Since the rapid shrinking began in the 19th century the megastorm's cloud top has gradually grown taller
This could be lifting the chemicals that give the oval-shaped storm its reddish hue to higher altitudes
Nasa believes the shifting shape is the result of a change to the winds that propel the spot's crimson clouds
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5509181/Jupiters-Great-Red-Spot-megastorm-SHRINKING.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dYO7L-h4HIN2VzMtdYfbClJcFbzpM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Stephen Hawking Was a Living Metaphor for the Scientific Endeavor
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/stephen-hawking-was-a-living-metaphor-for-the-scientific-endeavor
For Hawking, atheism was not a theory - tie https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63306014 , https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97287110 - and (Einstein) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=30820541
The British theoretical physicist who died this week believed that there was no need for a creator.
British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking schmoozed with popes during his lifetime, even though he was an avowed atheist. The famous scientist, who died Wednesday in England at 76, was often asked to explain his views on faith and God. During interviews, he explained his belief that there was no need for a creator.
He said during an interview with El Mundo in 2014: “Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.”
That followed comments made to Reuters in 2007 in which Hawking, who had lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS – since 1963, described himself as “not religious in the normal sense.”
“I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science,” he said. “The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.”
Because of his involvement in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which fosters “interaction between faith and reason and encouraging dialogue between science and spiritual, cultural, philosophical and religious values,” he visited the Vatican over the years. Hawking gave a talk on “The Origin of the Universe” during the group’s 2016 conference at the Vatican.
During those visits, he met with religious leaders, including Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI. In his comments to the Academy in 2010, Benedict seemed to refer to Hawking, saying, “Scientists do not create the world; they learn about it and attempt to imitate it.”
In Hawking’s writings about the universe’s origin, he and co-author Leonard Mlodinow posited in the 2010 book “The Grand Design” that the Big Bang was inevitable.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” the book says. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
In discussing the book, he told ABC News: “One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But science makes God unnecessary … The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator.”
Hawking’s earlier best-selling cosmology book, “A Brief History of Time,” also discussed black holes and the Big Bang. The 1988 book offered his “theory of everything” that understanding the universe offers a glimpse of “the mind of God.”
He also explained throughout his life his thoughts on a possible afterlife, saying, “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife, either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
In 2011, his comments to the Guardian explained his stance further: “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Hawking, who was born on Jan. 8, 1942, and lived with his disease for much longer than expected, also said during the interview: “I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.”
https://www.pressherald.com/2018/03/16/for-hawking-atheism-was-not-a-theory/
Don't forget: Stephen Hawking strongly denounced Trump's climate policies
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-stephen-hawking-climate-change-mailbag-20180317-story.html
Stephen Hawking Lived Beyond His Body
For all of us, the act of being and thinking requires a network of complex support. The late physicist’s disability made it visible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/stephen-hawkings-extended-bodies/555848/
Stephen Hawking Remembered: Science Luminaries Reflect on Physics Legend
http://www.newsweek.com/stephen-hawking-remembered-science-luminaries-reflect-physics-legend-849543
The Soulshake Of Stephen Hawking
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2018/03/17/the-soulshake-of-stephen-hawking/
Books and Black Holes: Stephen Hawking's Language Helps Us Grasp the Cosmos
https://www.space.com/40005-stephen-hawking-black-holes-books.html
Science’s brightest star
What made Stephen Hawking a cultural phenomenon
https://www.theweek.in/theweek/specials/2018/03/16/stephen-hawking-sciences-brightest-star.html
KERRY HUBARTT: Tweet deemed insensitive may just be correct
A Texas state representative rankled many people, including fellow Republicans, with his Twitter comment following the death of world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.
“Stephen Hawking now knows the truth about how the universe was actually made,” Texas Rep. Briscoe Cain tweeted. “My condolences to his family.”
While the critics thought the comment mocked the famous mastermind, it nevertheless reflected Hawking’s scientific search for the truth about the origin of the universe prior to his death early Wednesday. His ultimate conclusions were that whatever caused our existence, it wasn’t any God.
For those of us who happen to believe that God is real and created this universe and our lives along with it, death, indeed, holds the ultimate answer to our questions about life.
Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist confined to a wheelchair due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, died at his home in Cambridge, England, at age 76.
“I am sympathetic for his family’s loss,” Cain said in addressing the disapproval of the critics of his tweet. “Losing a loved one is difficult for everyone. My prayers are with them.”
But, he told the Austin American-Statesman, “While many see him (Hawking) as one of the greatest public intellectuals of the last century, and no one disputes that he was brilliant, the fact remains that God exists. My tweet was to show the gravity of the Gospel and what happens when we die, namely, that we all will one day meet the creator of the universe face to face.”
In his 1988 book, “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking wrote that achieving a “theory of everything” would be “the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
But by the time he wrote his 2010 book, “The Great Design,” he believed the idea of God was “not necessary” because the laws of physics are enough to explain the origin of the universe.
In a 2011 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Hawking said, “I regard the brain as a computer, which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Three years later, Hawking told the Spanish newspaper, El Mundo, there are no Gods. “I am an atheist,” he said. “Religion believes in miracles, but these are not compatible with science.” He insisted, “Nothing was around before the Big, Big Bang.”
Hawking and others run into real trouble with their “nothing” theory, according to astrophysicist Hugh Ross, founder of the creationist group, “Reasons to Believe.” He told OneNewsNow.com, “They basically say not only is there a real-time dimension associated with the universe, but there’s imaginary time. And with two dimensions of time, you wouldn’t have a boundary for the universe. So they say there’s no boundary, therefore they say there is no need for God.”
If there is no God, then, contrary to the Texas state representative’s tweet, Hawking does not now know the truth about how the universe was made because he would no longer exist.
If God is who he says he is, then, indeed, Cain is correct.
Kerry Hubartt is the former editor of The News-Sentinel.
http://www.news-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/2018/03/17/kerry-hubartt-tweet-deemed-insensitive-may-just-be-correct/
Stephen Hawking had pinned his hopes on 'M-theory' to fully explain the universe—here's what it is
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-stephen-hawking-pinned-m-theory-fully.html
Black holes aren't totally black, and other insights from Stephen Hawking's groundbreaking work
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-black-holes-totally-insights-stephen.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dAgaN_NPNYXQ9QMb88qbC9EVSc_wM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
--
in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009502 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009578 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009597 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009610 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140020843 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036629 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009573 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140016476 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009587 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140016609 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140010033 and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140012618 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037032 and preceding (and any future following)
elsewhere this string, https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140011998 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140017960 and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140020296 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140029262 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140035771 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140035915 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036268 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036740 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036795 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140041347 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140041621 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140041810 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140043977 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140044693 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140044904 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140047510 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048301 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048642 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140024755 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140029850 and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140035958 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140033646 and following
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036893 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036915 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037594 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037713 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037850 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040902 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140045045 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140047851 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140038187 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040281 and following
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040770 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040837 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140047942 (and any future following)
elsewhere this string, https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048065 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048150 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048596 and preceding (and any future following)
--
Trump lawyer: Shutter Mueller Russia probe
AM Joy
3/17/18
Donald Trump attorney John Dowd has called for the Russia probe to be brought to a close according to a breaking news report from The Daily Beast. Joy Reid and her panel discuss this unprecedented statement, plus Dowd seeking to clarify that he did not call for Robert Mueller’s firing.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-lawyer-shutter-mueller-russia-probe-1188493891518 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-rEcEmpOww [with comments]
*
More: Donald Trump lawyer: Shutter Mueller Russia probe
AM Joy
3/17/18
Donald Trump’s lawyer John Dowd has called for the Robert Mueller probe to be brought to a close according to a breaking news report from The Daily Beast by reporter Betsy Woodruff, who tells Joy Reid that Dowd is an unusual figure in the field of law who has been ‘sending emails in purple Comic Sans font’ for many years.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/donald-trump-lawyer-shutter-mueller-russia-probe-1188497987698 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CWpxxioN1to [with comments]
*
Stormy Daniels’ attorney on Trump and 60 Minutes interview
AM Joy
3/17/18
Stormy Daniels’ attorney Michael Avenatti discusses his client, Donald Trump, and Daniels’ coming 60 Minutes interview, which Avenatti says will lead the American people to ‘conclude that she is absolutely credible.’
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/stormy-daniels-attorney-on-trump-and-60-minutes-interview-1188505667779 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUkAKID_-SI [with comments]
*
Trump legal team demands $20 million from Stormy Daniels
AM Joy
3/17/18
Donald Trump’s legal team is demanding $20 million from Stormy Daniels claiming she violated a nondisclosure agreement. Joy Reid and her panel discuss her attorney’s response to statements by the president’s lawyers, the firing of former deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe, and Trump’s personal attorney John Dowd calling for Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein to end the Mueller probe.
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/trump-legal-team-demands-20-million-from-stormy-daniels-1188513859614 , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5eu6fzHuDc [with comments]
*
Russian Roulette Book: Putin, Trump and the 2016 election
AM Joy
3/17/18
Why did Putin want to influence the 2016 election in order to help Donald Trump become president? Reporters David Corn and Michael Isikoff join Joy Reid on their new book, which offers possible answers, ‘Russian Roulette: The Inside Story of Putin's War on America and the Election of Donald Trump.’
©2018 NBCNews.com
http://www.msnbc.com/am-joy/watch/russian-roulette-book-putin-trump-and-the-2016-election-1188517955628
--
Readout of the Vice President’s Call with Pakistani Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi
Issued on: March 17, 2018
Vice President Mike Pence met with Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi of Pakistan on Friday, March 16, to discuss the Administration’s South Asia strategy. Vice President Pence reiterated President Trump’s request that the Government of Pakistan must do more to address the continued presence of the Taliban, Haqqani Network, and other terrorist groups operating in their country. The Vice President stated that U.S. efforts to eliminate terrorist groups who threaten U.S. security and the stability of the region will continue and noted that Pakistan could and should work closer with the United States.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/readout-vice-presidents-call-pakistani-prime-minister-shahid-khaqan-abbasi/
--
The Useless Rock Worth Dying Over
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Rare Earth [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCtGG8ucQgEJPeUPhJZ4M4jA / https://www.youtube.com/user/ColChrisHadfield , https://www.youtube.com/user/ColChrisHadfield/videos ]
My hair is fabulous. I should model.
Today's episode is about value. This is the story of a rock. It was once worth fighting wars over. Now it's just a rock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUKQm8lVUCE [with comments]
--
Ballet Is Giving Boys In Kenya's Slums A Chance to Get Out (HBO)
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by VICE News [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZaT_X_mc0BI-djXOlfhqWQ / https://www.youtube.com/user/vicenews , https://www.youtube.com/user/vicenews/videos ]
Thirteen-year-old Shamick Otieno left behind a one-room house in Africa's largest slum to start taking an intense 10 ballet classes per week at the Dance Center Kenya in Nairobi.
Otieno is from Kibera, a sprawling and densely populated slum in Nairobi and the largest in Africa. Four years ago, he was taking dance classes with Annos Africa, a nonprofit that brings arts to kids living in poverty when his instructor noticed Otieno's talent. He was offered a scholarship that now covers his housing, school fees, and dance training.
Living away from family has been hard for Otieno.
“The family was very poor. It was not easy,” his mother, Joyce Tawa, said. Even though she had her initial doubts about Otieno dancing, she now hopes his classes will be a ticket to a brighter future.
And there’s reason to believe that could happen. Otieno's mentor, Joel Kioko, is also from the slums. He trained through the same program and now has a full scholarship at the English National Ballet in London.
Kioko and Otieno inspire each other and both hope to return to the slums as professional dancers to give other kids the same opportunities.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esYwzln5fdM [with comments]
--
Great Moments in Irish History with Denis Leary
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Funny Or Die [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCzS3-65Y91JhOxFiM7j6grg / https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie , https://www.youtube.com/user/FunnyorDie/videos ]
Denis Leary on the invention of Shepherd's Pie. Happy St. Patrick's Day!
Originally published: March 16, 2009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfyyX-UDAjM [with comments]
--
Creationist Attempts to Humiliate Me
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Professor Stick [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbjw7dE_hxJT-VGLTqCjlJA , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCbjw7dE_hxJT-VGLTqCjlJA/videos ]
Today we are peeling some orange, by responding to A Bit of Orange, who has recently made a video response to me.
Original Video:
Professor Stick gets Stuck in the GAPS! | Rent-A-Friend Radio ep 12
Published on Feb 24, 2018 by A Bit of Orange [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKZAjSREfiGw_jQNDkayR4A , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCKZAjSREfiGw_jQNDkayR4A/videos ]
Professor Stick (Not his real name) gets stuck in the gaps as he tries to debunk our Evolution 101 series. But in doing so he tries to argue that new proteins are genetic information, things that happened MILLIONS of years ago can be considered "Observations" and I AM right, but not in the way I think I am. Whatever that means.
His best moments come when he- not once, but TWICE- explains that he is an Evolution of the Gaps believer! What do you do when there is no evidence? Use evolution to FILL IN The GAPS! FAITH!
But please, give it a watch and take HIS word for it.
thanks for liking and subscribing, and remember, #JesusLovesYou
https://abitoforangeacademy.wordpress.com/
https://abitoforange.com/
To read about ancient monkey proteins, check out the link below. It says things like, "Here, we describe an ancient primate TRIMCyp gene (that we call TRIMCypA3) which evolved in the common ancestor of simian primates 43 Mya."
That's right. Stick Boy is referring to an "observation" which apparently happened as long ago as 43 million years. Does 43 million count as EPIC, as in EPIC FAIL? But of course, even thought they couldn't have OBSERVED anything, they are using their FAITH in evolution to FILL IN SOME GAPS...
Birth, decay, and reconstruction of an ancient TRIMCyp gene fusion in primate genomes:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3574956/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRQLdT2HVKU [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kg-dJvtJJHg [with comments]
--
Trump Preparing To Indict Clinton Crime Network
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by The Alex Jones Channel [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCvsye7V9psc-APX6wV1twLg / https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel , https://www.youtube.com/user/TheAlexJonesChannel/videos ]
Alex Jones reports on how McCabe altered 302 reports to frame Trump.
https://www.infowars.com/breaking-trump-preparing-mass-indictments-of-clinton-crime-network/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBcQ_CC93B8 [with comments]
*
Hillary About To Be Indicted Following McCabe Firing
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by The Alex Jones Channel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s-1BSZ5kRDc [with comments] [a must-watch] [and see also in particular e.g. (linked in) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040902 and preceding and following]
--
Talking with Aron Ra
Streamed live on Mar 17, 2018 by Godless Cranium [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewUkuIHNuwuMNWMa96q9ZQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCewUkuIHNuwuMNWMa96q9ZQ/videos ]
Aron Ra channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/AronRa
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShlIIZseCws [with comments]
--
Shafted: Marion Donovan's Trailblazing Diapers | The Daily Show
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCwWhs_6x42TyRM4Wstoq8HA/videos ]
In honor of Women's History Month, Desi Lydic and Dulce Sloan highlight Marion Donovan, the criminally unsung hero who invented the first disposable diapers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-fUg-jhzjM [with comments]
--
Anderson Cooper White House Turmoil Cold Open - SNL
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Saturday Night Live [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqFzWxSCi39LnW1JKFR3efg / https://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayNightLive , https://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayNightLive/videos ]
Anderson Cooper (Alex Moffat) interviews Jeff Sessions (Kate McKinnon), Rex Tillerson (John Goodman), Michael Wolff (Fred Armisen) and Anthony Scaramucci (Bill Hader).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V48t_A5fPVw [with comments]
*
The Californians: Replacing Rosa - SNL
Published on Mar 17, 2018 by Saturday Night Live
Devin (Bill Hader), Stuart (Fred Armisen) and more (Kate McKinnon, Kenan Thompson, Alex Moffat, Cecily Strong, Pete Davidson) contend with the loss of Rosa.
LA Official Is Starting to Get Fed Up With Waze's Habit of Directing Drivers Down a Death Slalom
4/14/18
https://gizmodo.com/la-official-is-starting-to-get-fed-up-with-wazes-habit-1825266195 [with comment]
Google refuses to fix Waze so it won’t route people on 32%-grade road
LA city councilman: “That’s not good corporate citizenship.“
4/14/2018
https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/04/waze-seems-to-suggest-route-over-32-grade-road-is-fine/ [with comments]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jIBZjL8G5s [with comments]
*
Weekend Update on Andrew McCabe's Firing - SNL
Published on Mar 18, 2018 by Saturday Night Live
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week's biggest news, including deputy FBI director Andrew McCabe being fired a day before he was set to retire. Betsy DeVos (Kate McKinnon) stops by to address her 60 Minutes interview.
[originally aired March 17, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wa8-lElti1E [with comments]
*
Weekend Update on IHOP's Apology - SNL
Published on Mar 18, 2018 by Saturday Night Live
Weekend Update anchors Colin Jost and Michael Che tackle the week's biggest news, including a waitress at a Maine IHOP asking black teens to pay upfront. Pete Davidson and Stefon (Bill Hader) stop by.
[originally aired March 17, 2018]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u0o6alqvTDY [with comments]
--
stashed March 17, 2018:
We're All Watching the Donald Trump Show
And that’s just how he likes it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/were-all-watching-the-donald-trump-show/555833/
White House weighs rehiring fired Trump aide McEntee
Senior White House officials are mulling bringing President Donald Trump’s personal aide and body man John McEntee back into the administration just days after he was abruptly escorted out of the West Wing.
White House chief of staff John Kelly told aides during a Friday morning senior staff meeting that there are tentative discussions about finding a role for McEntee in the administration, according to a person familiar with the meeting. The person added that Kelly and others in the West Wing believe McEntee has been unfairly maligned in the media.
[...]
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/john-mcentee-white-house-return-trump-468674
The ‘chaos president’ threatens severe damage to the GOP — and the country
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2018/03/16/the-chaos-president-threatens-severe-damage-to-the-gop-and-the-country/
6 signs you're going to lose your White House job
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/16/politics/signs-lose-your-job-in-trump-white-house/index.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/drZVVuBeh4BcPmMlFtVl1w9pgE78M?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
McCabe wrote memos detailing his interactions with Trump: report
http://thehill.com/policy/national-security/fbi/378937-mccabe-wrote-memos-detailing-his-interactions-with-trump-report
citing http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory/latest-ap-learns-mccabe-memos-trump-53820039
Andrew McCabe Gave Memos On Trump Conversations To Robert Mueller
Former FBI Director James Comey wrote similar memos on his interactions with Trump.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/mccabe-memos-robert-mueller_us_5aad5d38e4b0c33361b0e6bc
Read Andrew McCabe’s Response To Being Fired Two Days Before His Retirement
Attorney General Jeff Sessions fired the former deputy director of the FBI on Friday.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/andrew-mccabe-firing-response_us_5aac79dae4b0337adf83e00a
Ex-CIA Boss John Brennan Tears Into Donald Trump Over Andrew McCabe Firing
“America will triumph over you.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/john-brennan-donald-trump-andrew-mccabe_us_5aad0cf7e4b05b2217ff0e53
Trump's attorney John Dowd calls for end to Mueller probe, cites firing of McCabe
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/trump-s-attorney-john-dowd-calls-end-mueller-probe-cites-n857571
Trump’s Lawyer: It’s Time to End the Mueller Probe
The president’s personal attorney hopes Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein follows ‘the brilliant and courageous example’ of Sessions, who just fired Andrew McCabe.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-lawyer-its-time-to-fire-robert-mueller
Trump lawyer’s call to end the Russia probe is all about the investigation’s aftermath — or firing Mueller
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/17/trump-lawyers-call-to-end-the-russia-probe-is-all-about-the-investigations-aftermath-or-firing-mueller/
McCabe’s Firing Chips Away at the Justice Department’s Independence
Shortly after he was dismissed Friday by Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the former FBI deputy director pinned the blame directly on President Trump.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/03/presidential-target-andrew-mccabe-was-just-fired-from-the-fbi/555857/
Trump Lauds Firing Of Ex-Top FBI Official As ‘Great Day’
"Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!"
[ https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/974859881827258369 ]
http://denver.cbslocal.com/2018/03/17/trump-mccabe-firing-fbi/
Trump defenders’ efforts to cast Mueller as tainted are gaining urgency
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/politics/wp/2018/03/17/trump-defenders-efforts-to-cast-mueller-as-tainted-are-gaining-urgency/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d3VcK-UPKJzezUMoXS296ejOReJNM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
How Trump Consultants Exploited the Facebook Data of Millions - this and following further to https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=139366659
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html
Cambridge Analytica and the Secret Agenda of a Facebook Quiz
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/cambridge-analytica-facebook-quiz.html
Revealed: 50 million Facebook profiles harvested for Cambridge Analytica in major data breach
Whistleblower describes how firm linked to former Trump adviser Steve Bannon compiled user data to target American voters
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool
The algorithm used in the Facebook data breach trawled though personal data for information on sexual orientation, race, gender – and even intelligence and childhood trauma
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/17/facebook-cambridge-analytica-kogan-data-algorithm?CMP=share_btn_tw
Report: Trump-linked firm exploited data on 50 million Facebook users
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/03/17/facebook-trump-campaign-data-cambridge-analytica-423599
Here are the New York Times [ https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-trump-campaign.html ] and Observer [ https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election ] stories that pushed Facebook to suspend Trump’s data analytics company
Cambridge Analytica had profile information for some 50 million Facebook users, according to reports.
https://www.recode.net/2018/3/17/17133668/facebook-cambridge-analytica-trump-new-york-times-observer
Suspending Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group from Facebook
https://newsroom.fb.com/news/2018/03/suspending-cambridge-analytica/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dsjcybPe6Y88ULMb1OyVJsihRTDMM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Trump is making one thing clear: He likes surrounding himself with people who like him
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2018/03/16/trump-is-making-one-thing-clear-he-likes-surrounding-himself-with-people-who-like-him/
Burn It Down, Rex
By Michelle Goldberg
Since the beginning of this nightmare administration, we’ve been assured — via well-placed anonymous sources — that a few sober, trustworthy people in the White House were checking Donald Trump’s worst instincts and most erratic whims. A collection of generals, New York finance types and institution-minded Republicans were said to be nobly sacrificing their reputations and serving a disgraceful president for the good of the country. Through strategic leaks they presented themselves as guardians of American democracy rather than collaborators in its undoing.
The success of this informal alliance is hard to gauge. Last August, after the president said there were “very fine people” among the white supremacist marchers in Charlottesville, Va., senior officials rationalized their continued role in the administration to Mike Allen of Axios. “If they weren’t there, they say, we would have a trade war with China, massive deportations, and a government shutdown to force construction of a Southern wall,” Allen wrote. Since then, we’ve had a government shutdown over immigration, albeit a brief one. A trade war appears imminent. Arrests of undocumented immigrants — particularly those without criminal records — have continued to surge.
Over the past 14 months we’ve also seen monstrous levels of corruption and chaos, a plummeting of America’s standing in the world and the obliteration of a host of democratic norms. Yet things could always be worse; the economy is doing well and Trump has not yet started any real wars.
Increasingly, however, the people who were supposed to be the adults in the room aren’t in the room anymore. The former Deputy National Security Adviser Dina Powell left in January. Gary Cohn, head of the National Economic Council, announced his resignation on March 6. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson was terminated by tweet on Tuesday. National Security Adviser H. R. McMaster will reportedly be among the next to go, and Trump may soon fire Attorney General Jeff Sessions, possibly as a prelude to shutting down the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. Adding to the tumult, a parade of lesser officials have either quit or been fired, including the White House communications director Hope Hicks, staff secretary Rob Porter and Trump’s personal aide John McEntee.
The self-styled grown-ups are, for the most part, being replaced by lackeys and ideologues. Larry Kudlow, the CNBC pundit Trump has appointed to succeed Cohn, is known for the consistent wrongness of his predictions. Tillerson was a terrible secretary of state, but unlike his chosen successor, the director of the C.I.A., Mike Pompeo, he never trafficked in nut-job Benghazi conspiracy theories or anti-Muslim invective. John Roberts of Fox News reported that McMaster could be replaced by uberhawk John Bolton, who last month wrote a Wall Street Journal op-ed titled “The Legal Case for Striking North Korea First.” (Bolton has described proposed talks between Trump and Kim Jong-un of North Korea as an opportunity to deliver a harsh ultimatum.)
This new stage of unbound Trumpism might make the administration’s first year look stable in comparison. That would partly vindicate the adults’ claims that things would be even messier without them. But it would also mean that by protecting the country from the consequences of an unhinged president, they helped Trump consolidate his power while he learned how to transcend restraints.
Whatever their accomplishments, if from their privileged perches these people saw the president as a dangerous fool in need of babysitting, it’s now time for some of them to say so publicly.
This month, Jon Lovett, a former speechwriter for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, published a scathing open letter to Powell, the former security adviser. During her time in the administration, he wrote, she assured appalled onlookers that the adults were playing a stabilizing role: “You reached out to tell those of us on the outside you were saving us from a lot. You don’t understand, friends of yours conveyed to all of us, how bad it is.” Lovett wrote that he was skeptical of this argument but unable to dismiss it. The real test, he thought, would come when she and Cohn and others like them were no longer in the White House: “If you couldn’t speak out because you had to stay, when you left, you had to speak out.”
Of course, unlike Omarosa Manigault Newman, who confessed horror at her former boss’s presidency on “Celebrity Big Brother,” they haven’t. Their defenders among anti-Trump Republicans say it’s because some of them still have a role to play in staving off potential disaster. One Republican in regular contact with people in the White House told me that Powell and Cohn “need to protect their capacity to reach in and help manage in the event of any national crisis.”
I don’t find this entirely convincing. If these people see the administration as unequipped to handle an emergency, they owe the country a firsthand account of our vulnerability. But there is, at least, a certain logic to the argument made in their defense. That logic, however, only holds for those who remain on decent terms with Trump. Which means that if there’s one person who has no excuse for not speaking out, it’s Tillerson, once one of the most powerful private citizens in America, now humbled and defiled by his time in Trump’s orbit.
There’s little doubt that Tillerson holds Trump in contempt and disagrees with large parts of his agenda. After Charlottesville, Tillerson refused to say that the president’s words represented American values. (“The president speaks for himself,” he told Fox News.) In office, he struggled to save the Iran nuclear deal and opposed Trump’s — and Jared Kushner’s — support for a blockade of Qatar by other Arab states. After his ignominious firing, he gave a live address in which he didn’t even mention the president’s name.
“Rex is never going to be back in a position where he can have any degree of influence or respect from this president,” my Republican source said. Because of that, the source continued, “Rex is under a moral mandate to do his best to burn it down.” That would mean telling the truth “about how concerned he is about the leadership in the Oval Office, and what underpins those concerns and what he’s seen.”
In this case, patriotism and self-interest point in the same direction. Before entering this administration, Tillerson was a vastly more respected businessman than Trump; as chief executive of Exxon Mobil, he presided over what The Times described as a “state within a state.” Now the first line of his obituary will be about a year of abject failure as the country’s lead diplomat, culminating in a humiliation fit for reality TV.
The only way he will ever change that is by joining those who would bring this despicable presidency down. If Tillerson came out and said that the president is unfit, and perhaps even that venal concerns for private gain have influenced his foreign policy, impeachment wouldn’t begin tomorrow, but Trump’s already narrow public support would shrink further. Republican members of Congress like Bob Corker, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, might be induced to rediscover their spines and perform proper oversight.
Last year, Axios’s Allen and Jim VandeHei half-jokingly called the insiders trying to circumscribe Trump the “Committee to Save America.” Now the committee, having failed, is disbanding. The least they could do is be frank with the rest of us about what we’re up against.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/16/opinion/burn-it-down-rex.html
Not Every Woman In A Position Of Power Is A Feminist Hero
Gina Haspel’s dark past makes her a complicated figure for feminists to support.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/gina-haspel-women-power_us_5aabf693e4b0337adf837a81
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d7XOXAmaUTshSLMY84QklTWlSuyoM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Donald Trump Lied About His Apprentice Ratings Since People Were So Gullible, Says Billy Bush ( https://youtu.be/J4uABj30AWs [included in the post to which this is a reply]) - on Maher 3-16-18
http://www.vulture.com/2018/03/donald-trump-always-lied-about-apprentice-ratings-says-bush.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d_BKZDqaL2lAZxMhvmTFYp9u_QkZM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
China says resolutely opposed to new U.S. law on ties with Taiwan
BEIJING (Reuters) - China’s Foreign Ministry on Saturday expressed its “resolute opposition” after U.S. President Donald Trump signed legislation that encourages the United States to send senior officials to Taiwan to meet Taiwanese counterparts and vice versa.
The bill, which is non-binding, would have gone into effect on Saturday morning, even if Trump had not signed it.
[...]
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-taiwan-china/china-says-resolutely-opposed-to-new-u-s-law-on-ties-with-taiwan-idUSKCN1GT0I9
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/d9eqKy4IIBF75dMlRuqfb_TbvjuTM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
In California's rural, conservative north, there are big dreams for cleaving the state
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-state-of-jefferson-activists-20180317-htmlstory.html
alsp at http://ktla.com/2018/03/17/in-californias-rural-conservative-north-there-are-big-dreams-for-cleaving-state/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dE4J2gke8y2rp1M_njVh0zReeMezM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
A student was suspended after staying in class during walkouts. Here’s what actually happened.
An Ohio high school student has found himself at the center of political controversy after an online post about his suspension for staying in class during the national student school walkout went viral.
But that story isn’t exactly true.
Jacob Shoemaker, a senior at Hilliard Davidson High School in Hilliard, Ohio, was in fact suspended. But not because he chose not to join his classmates and the hundreds of thousands of students across the country who walked out of their classrooms to protest gun violence in the wake of a Florida school shooting that left 17 people dead. It was because he didn’t go to a designated area of the school where the non-protesters were supposed to be, and instead stayed by himself in a classroom.
He stayed in the classroom, his father said, because he didn’t want to choose a side.
“He was uncomfortable going to either location as he thought that going outside would most likely be politicizing a horrific event which he wanted no part of,” his father, Scott Shoemaker, wrote in a Facebook post on Friday. “But staying inside would make him look disrespectful or insensitive to 17 innocent victims if it turned out to be more of a memorial service.”
On social media, however, Shoemaker’s now-viral suspension slip has been spun into a tale about how a liberal school system impeded the rights of a student who supported the Second Amendment, and misleading headlines painted a picture of Shoemaker being suspended solely on the grounds that he did not participate in the walkout.
This comes at a time when the push for greater gun control has gained momentum, with the Florida shooting survivors set to lead a gun-control march on Washington on March 24. The response to these efforts have at times fallen along partisan lines.
On Twitter, users shared Shoemaker’s photos of the suspension slip with hashtags such as #GunControlNever and #LiberalismIsAMentalDisorder. One person tweeted, “To paraphrase George Orwell, some speech is more equal than others.”
Shoemaker’s father said he has been inundated with so many supportive messages and threats from strangers who saw the viral posts that he is considering changing his number, he told the Independent in Massillon, Ohio. One of Shoemaker’s father’s old phone numbers, as well as the numbers of school district officials, have been circulating on social media. One Twitter user singled out Hilliard Davidson Principal Aaron Cookson for being a “#BadEducator” and “#BadDad.”
Shoemaker’s father said he has been inundated with so many supportive messages and threats from strangers who saw the viral posts that he is considering changing his number, he told the Independent in Massillon, Ohio. One of Shoemaker’s father’s old phone numbers, as well as the numbers of school district officials, have been circulating on social media. One Twitter user singled out Hilliard Davidson Principal Aaron Cookson for being a “#BadEducator” and “#BadDad.”
While the walkouts were for the most part peaceful, some conservatives pointed at a violent protest at Antioch High School in Nashville, where a group of students ripped the flag down from its pole and stomped on it, according to a video posted by Fox17. Police said students also jumped onto a patrol car, according to WZTV.
On the night before his school’s walkout, Shoemaker told his father that he wasn’t sure about participating in the walkout, and that school officials were, in some respects, pressuring the students to pick a side.
“The biggest problem, Dad, is that there shouldn’t be politics in the classroom … I may just sit in my seat. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the least intrusive of the choices I’ve been given,” he told his father, according to the Independent.
Shoemaker added that he wasn’t the only student who felt this way. School district officials said that “well under” half of the student population participated in the walkout — but that the majority of students were “comfortable and confident” in their decision not to participate.
On Wednesday, Jacob Shoemaker stayed sitting in his classroom, by himself, for about an hour. A scribbled note on the suspension slip he was handed read: “Student refused to follow instructions after being warned repeatedly by several administrators. Student not permitted on property 24 hours.”
“He stayed in the classroom, where he was supposed to be in the first place,” Shoemaker’s father told the Independent. “It’s kind of ironic.”
Shoemaker and his father could not be immediately reached by The Post.
While school officials could not confirm whether Shoemaker was suspended for privacy reasons, Hilliard district spokeswoman Stacie Raterman confirmed to the Independent that the suspension slip in the photos circulating online was real.
A statement on the district’s website Friday said the walkout was not designed to be political and was not carried out that way. It was instead meant to memorialize the victims of the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla.
Students had the option not to participate, but had to be supervised, as the walkout took place during school hours, district officials said.
“We do not leave students unattended in classrooms. This is the same practice our district implements when students opt out of other school programs or activities. We provide an alternative, supervised location,” district officials said.
“There is inaccurate and false information being circulated regarding both the intent of these gatherings and the events that took place during a specific activity at Davidson High School,” district officials said. “These gatherings were not political events; they were respectful gatherings remembering the senseless loss of young people.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/education/wp/2018/03/16/a-student-was-suspended-after-staying-in-class-and-not-walking-out-heres-what-actually-happened/
New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo joins NY student walkout to protest gun violence
http://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/378354-cuomo-joins-students-in-new-york-walkout-to-protest-gun-violence
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dHJtvsTSWpzXgiMIpeWzXwtxR4NaM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Video shows man, woman and child kicked off Southwest flight
( https://youtu.be/DPg_GPdhuq8 )
https://www.dallasnews.com/business/southwest-airlines/2018/03/17/video-shows-man-woman-child-kicked-southwest-flight
Southwest faces outrage after a father and toddler were kicked off a flight when the child threw a tantrum
A man and his young daughter were kicked off a Southwest Airlines flight Wednesday evening after the toddler became upset and threw a fit as other passengers were boarding.
But a Facebook video taken by another passenger shows the toddler being calm and quiet as Southwest employees remove her and her father from the aircraft.
The video shows other passengers coming to the man's defense before an airline employee threatens to put them on the next flight.
http://www.businessinsider.com/father-and-toddler-kicked-off-southwest-flight-video-2018-3
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dNlIUGwOAquyLJMIW7lFACf73srnM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Police launch murder inquiry over death of Nikolai Glushkov
Met announces move after pathologist’s report on death of Russian exile in London this week
Police have launched a murder investigation into the death of the Russian businessman Nikolai Glushkov after a pathologist concluded he died from compression to the neck, suggesting he may have been strangled by hand or ligature.
The Metropolitan police’s counter-terrorism command is retaining its lead role in the investigation “because of the associations Mr Glushkov is believed to have had” but has cautioned that there was no suggestion of a link with the attempted murders of the Russian former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter, Yulia, in Salisbury almost two weeks ago.
The political row between Britain and Russia was mounting after the Russian foreign ministry said it was summoning the UK ambassador, Laurie Bristow, for a meeting on Saturday, Russian news agencies reported.
At the time of his death, Glushkov was about to defend a claim against him by the Russian airline Aeroflot at the commercial court in London, where he was accused of fraud.
In 2017, during a trial in absentia in Russia, he was sentenced to eight years in prison for stealing $123m from the airline, which then pursued the case in London. Glushkov failed to show up at court in central London on Monday and his body was discovered in south-west London that evening.
The Met said: “Detectives are retaining an open mind and are appealing for any information that will assist the investigation.” Officers want to hear from anyone who may have seen or heard anything suspicious at or near his home in Clarence Avenue in New Malden between Sunday 11 March and Monday 12 March
The police’s belief that Glushkov was killed will increase scrutiny over the safety of Russians in the UK and is likely to stoke tensions in an escalating diplomatic dispute over whether the Kremlin played a role in the Skripal attack, which involved the nerve agent novichok.
On Friday, the foreign secretary, Boris Johnson, blamed the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, for the attack, telling an audience at the Battle of Britain museum in Uxbridge: “We think it overwhelmingly likely that it was his [Putin’s] decision to direct the use of a nerve agent on the streets of the UK, on the streets of Europe, for the first time since the second world war.”
Putin’s spokesman, Dimitry Peskov, denounced the comment as “a shocking and unforgivable breach of diplomatic rules of decent behaviour”. The two nations have already announced tit-for-tat expulsions of diplomats, including 23 embassy staff in London.
At a meeting of European foreign ministers on Monday. Johnson is expected to urge allies to clamp down on Russian espionage and money laundering, but will not table a barrage of new EU-wide economic measures against Russia.
The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, played down the possibility of her country boycotting the football World Cup in Russia in June, saying: “Right now it’s important that there’s an investigation.”
A Russian chemist who worked for 30 years inside the secret military installation where novichok was developed told the Guardian it was impossible that a non-state actor could have been behind the poisoning.
Vil Mirzayanov, 83, said the agent was too dangerous for anyone but a “high-level senior scientist” to handle and he did not see how a criminal organisation or other non-state group could pull off such an attack. “It’s very, very tough stuff,” he said from exile in New Jersey. “I don’t believe it.”
The Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) is now formally involved in the process of investigating the nerve agent that has left the Skripals fighting for their lives and a police officer, Nick Bailey, seriously ill in a Salisbury hospital.
Downing Street confirmed that a team of scientists from the OPCW would come to the UK early next week. The process is to be agreed between the OPCW scientists and the lab at Porton Down which originally identified the agent.
Under article 8 of the chemical weapons convention, the OPCW team is expected to take its own samples. That could be either environmental evidence from the Skripal home, their car, or possibly the pub or restaurant that the pair visited, or biomedical samples from the Skripals themselves. Earlier, the OPCW said Russia had not declared information about the existence of the novichok group of nerve agents possibly because stockpiles were thought to have been destroyed in a post-Soviet clampdown on old chemical weapons.
“There is no record of the novichok group of nerve agents having been declared by a state party,” the OPCW said.
In a sign that the Glushkov case is also becoming politicised, Russia’s Investigative Committee announced on Friday that it had opened a murder investigation into the death.
In a statement released just hours before the Scotland Yard announcement, the committee, which handles high-profile cases, said it would manage the investigation “in accordance with the requirements of Russian law”. It said investigators were ready to cooperate with British law enforcement.
The Met stressed that “at this stage there is nothing to suggest any link to the attempted murders in Salisbury, nor any evidence that [Glushkov] was poisoned”.
Police were called by the London ambulance service at 10.46pm on Monday after the 68-year-old was found dead at his home in New Malden. A special postmortem began on Thursday.
In the 1990s Glushkov was a director of the state airline and of Boris Berezovsky’s LogoVaz car company. In 1999, as Berezovsky fell out with Putin and fled to the UK, Glushkov was charged with money laundering and fraud. He spent five years in jail and was freed in 2004. Fearing further arrest, he fled to the UK and was granted political asylum.
In 2011, he gave evidence in a court case brought by Berezovsky against his fellow oligarch Roman Abramovich, who remained on good terms with the Kremlin. Glushkov told the court he had effectively been taken hostage by Putin’s administration, which wanted to put pressure on Berezovsky to sell his stake in the TV station ORT.
In March 2013, Berezovsky was found dead at his ex-wife’s home in Berkshire. Police said they believed he had killed himself but a coroner recorded an open verdict.
The former world chess champion and Russian opposition leader Garry Kasparov said he was “not surprised” Glushkov was murdered.
“I think this is a message addressed to Russians with significant interests abroad who are thinking of cooperating with Robert Mueller [the special counsel investigating alleged collusion with the Trump administration]. It’s a preemptive strike. Tragically it’s not even about Glushkov. They pick someone who is expendable and recognisable,” he said.
Speaking to the Guardian in 2013, Glushkov said he did not believe Berezovsky took his own life. “I’m definite Boris was killed. I have quite different information from what is being published in the media,” he said.
He noted that a large number of Russian exiles, including Berezovsky and Alexander Litvinenko, had died under mysterious circumstances. “Boris was strangled. Either he did it himself or with the help of someone. [But] I don’t believe it was suicide,” Glushkov said. “Too many deaths [of Russian émigrés] have been happening.”
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/16/police-launch-inquiry-over-death-of-nikolai-glushkov
Trump's Economy Is Still Waiting for the Tax-Cut Boost
Goldman, JPMorgan cut quarter’s GDP forecasts to 2% or less
Culprits include delays in tax refunds, big finish to 2017
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-16/trump-s-economy-still-awaits-tax-cut-boost-as-growth-downshifts
Stormy Daniels’ Attorney: Something Among Our Accusations About Trump Has Occurred During His Presidency
But he won’t say what.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/stromy-daniels-incidents-during-trump-presidency_us_5aaca879e4b0337adf83eb6a
ICE Is Distorting The Truth To Keep Up With Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Agenda
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-escalante-ice-lies-trump_us_5aac2e50e4b0c33361b070f4
Doctors Accused Of ‘Politicizing Psychiatry’ Are Actually Doing The Opposite
Donald Trump’s unfitness for the presidency is an urgent question, widely discussed among pundits and politicians. When psychiatrists and other psychological professionals address the matter, as I have, we are sometimes accused of “politicizing psychiatry.”
The charge tends to be applied loosely and inappropriately, meant more to silence than to reveal what it actually means to put psychiatry to political use. A brief look at history is helpful here.
It is true that psychiatry is more vulnerable than other medical specialties to exploitation for political purposes. My work on Nazi doctors was focused precisely on that issue, and I have since looked at the use of the psychiatric profession to suppress dissidents in other totalitarian societies, including Soviet Russia and Communist China.
Medicine in Nazi Germany was subjected, as were all professions, to what was known as Gleichschaltung, meaning “coordination” or “synchronization” ? in effect, the nazification of the profession. Potential critics were suppressed and leadership roles were given to those considered politically and ideologically reliable.
Those reliable psychiatrists played a central part in eliminating “life unworthy of life,” as carried out in the killing centers of the Nazis’ “euthanasia” project. The murderous act was often performed by a doctor, often a psychiatrist, in keeping with the slogan, “The syringe belongs in the hand of the physician” ? the syringe in this case being a gas cock. It is estimated that something on the order of 250,000 people, among them large numbers of psychiatric and neurological patients, were killed in the “euthanasia” project.
The doctors involved in these medical killings, like those selecting Jews for the gas chambers in Auschwitz, were expected to do what they did. That is, they were carrying out the “malignant normality” imposed by the Nazi regime. While doctors had differing attitudes and emotional struggles, the medical profession in general succumbed to nazification and gave a certain legitimacy to what I have called the reversal of healing and killing.
In the Soviet and Chinese cases too, psychiatrists were co-opted by repressive regimes. The goal was not Nazi-style biological purification but the stigmatizing of political heretics as mentally ill and their incarceration in psychiatric hospitals. In the Soviet Union, they were often given the vague but encompassing diagnosis of “sluggish schizophrenia,” an invented disorder that psychiatrists received training on. Many psychiatrists came to believe in the disorder and to think that defying the regime really was pathological. Others became “bureaucrat-psychiatrists,” who, as one of them put it, “expected to do what they [the KGB] asked us to do, and we knew what they expected.”
The Chinese Communists were influenced by Soviet psychiatry but added an important element of their own. They subjected millions of intellectuals, students and associates of the former regime to a coercive program of “thought reform.” Sometimes confusingly referred to as “brainwashing,” it consisted of relentless criticism, self-criticism and continuous confession. In my study of this process, I found that it was run not by psychiatrists or psychologists but by Communist cadres, who imposed the party’s version of political reality in ways that aligned with the efforts of the state-controlled psychiatric profession.
America is not Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia or Communist China. We do not have state-controlled psychiatry or medicine, and whatever you think of Trump, he is surely no Hitler. What we have in our country is a large number of psychological professionals bearing witness to the malignant normality that Trump and his followers seek to impose.
Trump does this in at least two extremely dysfunctional ways: his profoundly compromised relationship with reality and his attack mode in response to crisis or criticism.
I speak of Trump’s solipsistic reality, meaning his need to take in the world solely in relation to the outlandish psychological requirements of his own self, with a rejection of accepted standards of evidence and no sense of having responsibility to what the rest of us call reality. I relate that tendency to his sense of feeling beleaguered by malevolent forces, which include institutions necessary to our democracy such as the press, the intelligence services and the judiciary. That attack mode becomes particularly dangerous when he is confronted with an actual nuclear threat, as in relation to North Korea.
I make no diagnosis of psychiatric illness, in fact no diagnosis at all, but rather point to a psychological pattern of presidential unfitness that endangers our democracy and could have the gravest of consequences for the entire world.
To become a witnessing professional in this way is to reject politicized psychiatry, and to reject as well the role of the obedient bureaucrat, psychiatric or otherwise, who supports the lies of solipsistic reality. To speak out is a hopeful act, an expression of a free professional in an open society and a statement that voices must be heard in our democracy to sustain it.
Dr. Robert Jay Lifton is author of The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing and Psychology of Genocide, Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism: A Study of ‘Brainwashing’ in China, and Witness to an Extreme Century: A Memoir. He is a lecturer in psychiatry at Columbia University, and his most recent book is The Climate Swerve: Reflections on Mind, Hope, and Survival.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-lifton-trump-mental-illness_us_5aa96dbce4b0600b82ff8a81
The Oversight Storm That Could Paralyze The Trump Presidency
By Kurt Bardella
Robert Mueller’s ongoing investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election may be the greatest imminent threat to Donald Trump’s presidency, but there’s another storm coming for President Trump that he likely hasn’t even considered.
This storm will touch every person who works in the West Wing, every member of the Trump cabinet, every department and agency within the federal government. It could effectively paralyze the entire Trump administration.
And we don’t have to go back to Watergate for historical precedent.
During the Obama administration, the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform took center stage as Republican Chairman Darrell Issa (Calif.) wielded the committee’s unique oversight authority to relentlessly investigate the Obama White House. I spent four years working as a spokesperson and advisor for the committee, working to create an environment that made our weekly hearings must-see TV.
This committee is one of the only bodies in all of government that has the legal authority to induce cooperation from the executive branch. Whether it’s a deposition from a White House official, testimony from a cabinet secretary or production of documents and emails, the chair of the Oversight committee has unilateral subpoena authority to compel cooperation.
During Issa’s four years as chairman, the Oversight committee subpoenaed the Obama administration more than 100 times for wide-ranging investigations into the State Department, the IRS, the General Services Administration, the Department of Health and Human Services and the Justice Department, to name a few. Issa’s use of subpoenas was on par with his predecessors ? for the two years Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) chaired it while President George W. Bush was in office, the committee issued 46 subpoenas.
When Donald Trump became president, the Republicans’ appetite for vigorous and visible oversight seemingly disappeared overnight. They have deliberately abandoned their responsibility to serve as the people’s check on the executive branch. By ignoring the avalanche of waste, fraud, abuse and mismanagement occurring daily in the Trump administration, Oversight Republicans have betrayed the American taxpayers whom they are sworn to protect. In the wake of their silence, a litany of questions about government operations have gone unanswered.
Now, in the wake of Conor Lamb’s upset victory in Pennsylvania’s 18th Congressional District, it seems almost inevitable that House Republicans will lose their majority to Democrats in November. Should Democrats claim control of the House, and with it the Oversight committee’s gavel, the American people may finally get the answers they deserve.
While the Republican majority has been content to turn a blind eye to the Trump administration’s flagrant conduct, the panel’s Democrats, led by ranking member Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), have been keeping track.
Recently, Cummings sent Chairman Trey Gowdy (R-S.C.) a list of 13 motions of subpoenas he’d like the majority to act on. The list, which Oversight Republicans predictably ignored, is a blueprint for the type of investigations we can expect should Cummings and his Democratic colleagues take control of the committee. In totality, these investigations could have a crippling effect on the functionality of the Trump administration.
Oversight Democrats are targeting documents that touch every part of the Trump presidency, including: the Trump Organization’s foreign payments, Trump’s Muslim ban, Jared Kushner’s emails, the White House and FBI’s security clearance process, Michael Flynn’s business dealings in the Middle East, the Justice Department’s role in opposing the AT&T-Time Warner merger, joint business deals between the Trump Organization and Kushner Companies, the use of private email accounts, private travel by administration officials like White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, HUD Secretary Ben Carson’s $31,000 dining set, the Custom and Border Protection’s response to sexual assault allegations and attempts to discredit the FBI.
To this point, the Trump administration has been protected by House Republicans willing to look the other way in the face of unethical conduct that under President Obama they would have investigated relentlessly.
What will happen to Donald Trump if he loses that protection this November? He may be preoccupied with defending himself against the Mueller probe, but make no mistake about it: A Democratic House majority, and specifically the Oversight committee, will be capable of generating a storm that threatens the future of the Trump presidency.
Kurt Bardella is a HuffPost columnist. He is a former spokesperson for and senior adviser to the Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.).
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-bardella-house-oversight_us_5aabfdb2e4b05b2217fe85cb
FEMA Decides To Stop Taking Climate Change Into Account As It Plans For Future
The U.S. spent a record $306 billion on weather and climate-related disasters in 2017.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fema-climate-change-strategic-plan_us_5aac2484e4b0c33361b06283
Donald Trump Exposed On New Yorker Cover
“I wanted to address President Trump’s stormy relationship with the press,” says artist Barry Blitt.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-exposed-new-yorker_us_5aac53ace4b05b2217fed6fb
Sean Hannity Slams Shepard Smith For Calling His Kind Of Fox Show Strictly Entertainment
But even Hannity has said: “I never claimed to be a journalist.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sean-hannity-shepard-smith-opinion-journalist_us_5aac369be4b0c33361b076b8
GOP Candidate Drops Out After Calling Parkland Survivor A ‘Skinhead Lesbian’
The now-former candidate for a Maine state House seat called another Parkland teen “a moron.”
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/leslie-gibson-gop-maine-parkland-survivor-twitter-attack_us_5aa8c26be4b001c8bf151517
The Real Drama In Russia’s Election Comes After The Vote
As Putin heads for reelection, Russia’s elites are ready to turn on one another.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/putin-russia-election-inner-circle-successor_us_5aa805cee4b0e872b4bf6380
What Woke America And Great America Can Learn From Each Other
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-giridharadas-outrage-america_us_5aaa93b6e4b073bd82929695
Engineer’s Voicemail Warned State Of Bridge Cracks 2 Days Before Collapse
The state employee didn’t hear the voicemail until one day after the deadly accident.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/florida-engineer-warned-state-about-bridge-collapse_us_5aac7167e4b05b2217fedd3a
Driver Tries To Pass Homer Simpson License Off As Real To Cops - unidentified driver in Milton Keynes, southern England
D’oh!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fake-homer-simpson-driver-license_us_5aaceecae4b0c33361b0b256
Kevin Hart And Conan O’Brien Carbo Load And Then Try Sumo Wrestling
( https://youtu.be/Sb_hCbZ80aQ )
This is not going to go well.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/conan-and-kevin-hart-carbo-load-and-then-try-sumo-wrestling_us_5aad37b3e4b05b2217ff1bef
You Can Now Ride A Bona Fide Sex Machine In A Museum
The exhibit, in the basement of New York’s Museum of Sex, is stimulating, to say the least.
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/museum-of-sex-cowgirl_us_5a9470c2e4b02cb368c4ac39
Democrats Want to Subpoena Apple to Find Out When Key Administration Officials Downloaded Encrypted Messaging Apps
On Wednesday, House Democrats on the Intelligence Committee released a memo laying out the steps they would have taken had they been in charge of the Trump-Russia investigation — and steps they may take if and when they gain subpoena power by taking over the House of Representatives in November.
The possibility became much more likely on Tuesday night, as Democrats pulled off an upset victory in a Pennsylvania special election for a congressional seat that President Donald Trump had carried by nearly 20 points, and that Democrats hadn’t even bothered to contest in the last two cycles. If the pattern holds, Democrats have a strong chance of picking up the nearly two-dozen seats they need to win the House — and the subpoena power that comes with it.
Down on Page 20 of the memo is a pair of ideas that could put Congress on a collision course with privacy advocates in Silicon Valley. “Apple: The Committee should seek records reflecting downloaded encrypted messaging apps for certain key individuals,” the memo suggests. “The Committee should likewise issue a subpoena to WhatsApp for messages exchanged between key witnesses of interest.”
The committee said that it would also seek to find out “all messaging applications that Mr. [Jared] Kushner used during the campaign as well as the presidential transition, including but not limited to SMS, iMessage, Whatsapp, Facebook Messenger, Signal, Slack, Instagram, and Snapchat.”
The committee may also consider adding ProtonMail, the encrypted email service, to that list. One White House staffer, Ryan P. McAvoy, jotted his ProtonMail passwords and his address on a piece of White House stationery and left it at a bus stop near the White House. A source found it there and provided it to The Intercept, which confirmed its authenticity. (McAvoy did not respond to requests for comment.)
Peter Mirijanian, a spokesperson for Kushner’s attorney, Abbe Lowell, told The Intercept that Kushner had nothing left to add. “In two different appearances before congressional committees, Mr. Kushner answered all relevant questions involving these matters,” he said.
The Democrats’ memo comes after Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee announced Monday that they found no evidence that Trump’s campaign colluded with Russian President Vladimir Putin to win the 2016 election. Trump heralded the halting of the investigation as vindication, celebrating the news on Twitter. Still, Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Trump-Russia collusion appears to be accelerating, with Mueller subpoenaing Trump Organization records on Thursday.
In their memo, the Democrats on the committee said the Republicans were “prematurely shutting down the Russia investigation,” and that the committee’s conclusions are “at odds with the consensus of the Intelligence Community.”
If investigators decide to follow through on the suggestion for the records request, they would put both Apple and WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook, in a difficult spot. In recent years, both Apple and WhatsApp have increasingly marketed themselves in terms of pro-user privacy, including their inability to divulge the contents of users’ conversations. But in Apple’s case, the memo floats the idea not of gaining access to anyone’s conversations, but of simply obtaining records of what chat apps were downloaded by “certain key individuals.”
An Apple spokesperson told The Intercept that the company declines to comment on specific law enforcement matters, and referred instead to the company’s published law enforcement guidelines. These guidelines make clear that Apple retains download and purchase records and will provide them under court order. The App Store is like any other store: If you’re using it, you’re probably leaving behind very detailed receipts.
Getting messages from WhatsApp is trickier. Apple and WhatsApp both make heavy use of data encryption; in the case of both Apple iMessage and WhatsApp chats, sent and received messages are protected by so-called end-to-end encryption, meaning text is protected against anyone outside of those communicating, making it theoretically indecipherable to eavesdropping. Apple and WhatsApp both claim that they themselves are unable to access or furnish the decryption keys necessary to read the messages, meaning that even if they were to turn over chat data straight from their servers, it would remain uselessly scrambled.
The memo’s recommendation to subpoena WhatsApp for chat logs is probably fruitless, barring some revelation about how the company processes and retains user data. WhatsApp promises users that the company “doesn’t store your messages on our servers once we deliver them, and end-to-end encryption means that WhatsApp and third parties can’t read them anyway.” The company’s law enforcement guidelines state that although WhatsApp complies with all legal orders, even undelivered messages “are deleted from our servers after 30 days” after being sent. However, the app does warn users that WhatsApp chat backups stored in the cloud are not protected by the company’s end-to-end encryption.
Under court order, WhatsApp could provide other user data that could be of interest to the committee. The same guidelines describe account metadata that the company could be compelled to turn over: “A search warrant issued under the procedures described in the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure or equivalent state warrant procedures upon a showing of probable cause is required to compel the disclosure of the stored contents of any account, which may include ‘about’ information, profile photos, group information, and address book, if available.” Photos and address book data would be of obvious interest.
Questions remain as to whether WhatsApp could or would furnish other types of metadata not covered in the guidelines, such as locational information. A company spokesperson declined to comment beyond reiterating that they “do not store messages at WhatsApp.” The digital right nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation gave WhatsApp a two out of five star rating in its most recent roundup of data handover policies, noting that “WhatsApp does not explicitly state that it prohibits third-party access to its user data, nor does it say that third parties are prohibited from allowing WhatsApp user data to be used for surveillance purposes.”
https://theintercept.com/2018/03/17/trump-russia-apple-whatsapp/
Report: Democrats outline plans to ask Apple & WhatsApp for help in the Trump-Russia investigation
https://9to5mac.com/2018/03/17/apple-trump-russia-investigation/
Democrats aim to subpoena Apple, Twitter over private chats
They seek more info about downloads and chats from WikiLeaks and others.
https://www.engadget.com/2018/03/17/democrats-aim-to-subpoena-apple-twitter-over-private-chats/
Democrats ask Apple and Whatsapp for a helping hand in Trump-Russia investigation
https://www.theibulletin.com/democrats-ask-apple-whatsapp-helping-hand-trump-russia-investigation-11664/
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dxulB7obzX_heDMCBl0INxCJc-FtM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Whistleblower reveals to Channel 4 News data grab of 50 million Facebook profiles by Cambridge Analytica – data firm linked to Trump win
( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6-xz-geH4 )
The British data firm described as “pivotal” in Donald Trump’s presidential victory was behind a ‘data grab’ of more than 50 million Facebook profiles, a whistleblower has revealed to Channel 4 News.
In an exclusive television interview, Chris Wylie, former Research Director at Cambridge Analytica tells all.
https://www.channel4.com/news/cambridge-analytica-facebook-profiles-whistleblower-chris-wylie-election
Cambridge Analytica: how big data shaped the US election
Channel 4 News
Oct 24, 2016
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CgYvf3Ckdso
Cambridge Analytica whistleblower: 'We spent $1m harvesting millions of Facebook profiles'
The Guardian
Christopher Wylie, who worked for data firm Cambridge Analytica, reveals how personal information was taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters in order to target them with personalised political advertisements. At the time the company was owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Donald Trump’s key adviser, Steve Bannon. Its CEO is Alexander Nix
How Cambridge Analytica turned Facebook ‘likes’ into a lucrative political tool
View the video at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/video/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-whistleblower-we-spent-1m-harvesting-millions-of-facebook-profiles-video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FXdYSQ6nu-M
more: https://www.google.com/search?q=channel+4+whistleblower+facebook
Data Firm Tied to Trump Campaign Talked Business With Russians
Mr. Nix is a director of SCL Group, a British political and defense contractor, and chief executive of its American offshoot, Cambridge Analytica, which advised the Trump campaign.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/17/us/politics/cambridge-analytica-russia.html
Trump-linked data firm met with Russian executives: report
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/378970-trump-linked-data-firm-met-with-russian-executives
A voter profiling firm hired by Trump likely grabbed data for tens of millions of Facebook users
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/03/17/a-voter-profiling-firm-hired-by-trump-likely-grabbed-data-for-tens-of-millions-of-facebook-users/
Trump campaign data firm accused of harvesting Facebook data
The attorney general for the US state of Massachusetts is launching an investigation into alleged harvesting of Facebook profiles by a firm employed by Donald Trump's election campaign.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43444791
Cambridge Analytica Took 50M Facebook Users' Data—And Both Companies Owe Answers
https://www.wired.com/story/cambridge-analytica-50m-facebook-users-data/
Facebook is again having to account for its role in 2016 election
Trump campaign had access to user data
http://www.kyma.com/news/national-world/facebook-is-again-having-to-account-for-its-role-in-2016-election/717673322
Cambridge Analytica: links to Moscow oil firm and St Petersburg university
Data company gave briefing to Moscow firm Lukoil, and the lecturer who developed the crucial algorithm worked for St Petersburg university
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-academic-trawling-facebook-had-links-to-russian-university
Russia
The Cambridge Analytica Files
https://www.theguardian.com/news/series/cambridge-analytica-files
The Cambridge Analytica Debacle is not a Facebook “Data Breach.” Maybe It Should Be.
https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/17/the-cambridge-analytica-debacle-is-not-a-facebook-data-breach-maybe-it-should-be/
Facebook knew Cambridge Analytica was misusing users’ data three years ago and only banned the company this week
https://qz.com/1231643/cambridge-analytica-illegally-obtained-data-from-50-million-facebook-users-to-run-trump-ads/
Facebook suspends Trump campaign's data analysis firm
https://www.axios.com/facebook-suspends-data-firm-1ed2bb1e-8dfd-42a6-8ded-1c1670c7ecde.html
Facebook vastly downplayed scope of data leak involving info on 50 million users
https://www.fastcompany.com/40546002/facebook-vastly-downplayed-scope-of-data-leak-involving-info-on-more-than-50-million-users
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/daZ6CsD889nkiaMAOYh0CE7eVd5WM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Former CIA chief to Trump on McCabe firing: 'America will triumph over you'
https://www.cnn.com/2018/03/17/politics/john-brennan-donald-trump-mccabe-firing/index.html
When the full extent of your venality, moral turpitude, and political corruption becomes known, you will take your rightful place as a disgraced demagogue in the dustbin of history. You may scapegoat Andy McCabe, but you will not destroy America...America will triumph over you.
https://twitter.com/JohnBrennan/status/974978856997224448
replying to:
Andrew McCabe FIRED, a great day for the hard working men and women of the FBI - A great day for Democracy. Sanctimonious James Comey was his boss and made McCabe look like a choirboy. He knew all about the lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/974859881827258369
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Getting Taller as It Shrinks, NASA Team Finds
It's becoming the Lanky Red Spot
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2018/jupiters-great-red-spot-getting-taller-as-it-shrinks
https://www.inverse.com/article/42453-nasa-jupiter-great-red-spot-taller
Jupiter's Great Red Spot Is Getting Taller While It Is Shrinking, It Is Also Changing Colors To Orange
http://www.techtimes.com/articles/223159/20180316/jupiters-great-red-spot-getting-taller-shrinking-changing-colors-orange.htm
Jupiter’s Great Red Spot is shrinking in length, but growing in height
The storm’s upward expansion is just as unexplained as its retreating base.
http://astronomy.com/news/2018/03/jupiters-great-red-spot-is-shrinking-in-length-but-growing-in-height
Jupiter's 'Great Red Spot' is changing colour: Earth-sized storm that could disappear completely in 20 years is glowing an intense orange
Jupiter's 'Great Red Spot' megastorm is shrivelling at a rate of 140 miles (230km) per year, Nasa study shows
Since the rapid shrinking began in the 19th century the megastorm's cloud top has gradually grown taller
This could be lifting the chemicals that give the oval-shaped storm its reddish hue to higher altitudes
Nasa believes the shifting shape is the result of a change to the winds that propel the spot's crimson clouds
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-5509181/Jupiters-Great-Red-Spot-megastorm-SHRINKING.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dYO7L-h4HIN2VzMtdYfbClJcFbzpM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
Stephen Hawking Was a Living Metaphor for the Scientific Endeavor
https://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/stephen-hawking-was-a-living-metaphor-for-the-scientific-endeavor
For Hawking, atheism was not a theory - tie https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=63306014 , https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=97287110 - and (Einstein) https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=30820541
The British theoretical physicist who died this week believed that there was no need for a creator.
British theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking schmoozed with popes during his lifetime, even though he was an avowed atheist. The famous scientist, who died Wednesday in England at 76, was often asked to explain his views on faith and God. During interviews, he explained his belief that there was no need for a creator.
He said during an interview with El Mundo in 2014: “Before we understand science, it is natural to believe that God created the universe. But now science offers a more convincing explanation. What I meant by ‘we would know the mind of God’ is, we would know everything that God would know, if there were a God, which there isn’t. I’m an atheist.”
That followed comments made to Reuters in 2007 in which Hawking, who had lived with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis – also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease or ALS – since 1963, described himself as “not religious in the normal sense.”
“I believe the universe is governed by the laws of science,” he said. “The laws may have been decreed by God, but God does not intervene to break the laws.”
Because of his involvement in the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, which fosters “interaction between faith and reason and encouraging dialogue between science and spiritual, cultural, philosophical and religious values,” he visited the Vatican over the years. Hawking gave a talk on “The Origin of the Universe” during the group’s 2016 conference at the Vatican.
During those visits, he met with religious leaders, including Pope Francis and Pope Benedict XVI. In his comments to the Academy in 2010, Benedict seemed to refer to Hawking, saying, “Scientists do not create the world; they learn about it and attempt to imitate it.”
In Hawking’s writings about the universe’s origin, he and co-author Leonard Mlodinow posited in the 2010 book “The Grand Design” that the Big Bang was inevitable.
“Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,” the book says. “Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.”
In discussing the book, he told ABC News: “One can’t prove that God doesn’t exist. But science makes God unnecessary … The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator.”
Hawking’s earlier best-selling cosmology book, “A Brief History of Time,” also discussed black holes and the Big Bang. The 1988 book offered his “theory of everything” that understanding the universe offers a glimpse of “the mind of God.”
He also explained throughout his life his thoughts on a possible afterlife, saying, “I believe the simplest explanation is, there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. This leads me to a profound realization that there probably is no heaven and no afterlife, either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe and for that, I am extremely grateful.”
In 2011, his comments to the Guardian explained his stance further: “There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Hawking, who was born on Jan. 8, 1942, and lived with his disease for much longer than expected, also said during the interview: “I’m not afraid of death, but I’m in no hurry to die. I have so much I want to do first.”
https://www.pressherald.com/2018/03/16/for-hawking-atheism-was-not-a-theory/
Don't forget: Stephen Hawking strongly denounced Trump's climate policies
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-stephen-hawking-climate-change-mailbag-20180317-story.html
Stephen Hawking Lived Beyond His Body
For all of us, the act of being and thinking requires a network of complex support. The late physicist’s disability made it visible.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/03/stephen-hawkings-extended-bodies/555848/
Stephen Hawking Remembered: Science Luminaries Reflect on Physics Legend
http://www.newsweek.com/stephen-hawking-remembered-science-luminaries-reflect-physics-legend-849543
The Soulshake Of Stephen Hawking
https://www.forbes.com/sites/christinecomaford/2018/03/17/the-soulshake-of-stephen-hawking/
Books and Black Holes: Stephen Hawking's Language Helps Us Grasp the Cosmos
https://www.space.com/40005-stephen-hawking-black-holes-books.html
Science’s brightest star
What made Stephen Hawking a cultural phenomenon
https://www.theweek.in/theweek/specials/2018/03/16/stephen-hawking-sciences-brightest-star.html
KERRY HUBARTT: Tweet deemed insensitive may just be correct
A Texas state representative rankled many people, including fellow Republicans, with his Twitter comment following the death of world-renowned physicist Stephen Hawking.
“Stephen Hawking now knows the truth about how the universe was actually made,” Texas Rep. Briscoe Cain tweeted. “My condolences to his family.”
While the critics thought the comment mocked the famous mastermind, it nevertheless reflected Hawking’s scientific search for the truth about the origin of the universe prior to his death early Wednesday. His ultimate conclusions were that whatever caused our existence, it wasn’t any God.
For those of us who happen to believe that God is real and created this universe and our lives along with it, death, indeed, holds the ultimate answer to our questions about life.
Hawking, the Cambridge University physicist confined to a wheelchair due to amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, died at his home in Cambridge, England, at age 76.
“I am sympathetic for his family’s loss,” Cain said in addressing the disapproval of the critics of his tweet. “Losing a loved one is difficult for everyone. My prayers are with them.”
But, he told the Austin American-Statesman, “While many see him (Hawking) as one of the greatest public intellectuals of the last century, and no one disputes that he was brilliant, the fact remains that God exists. My tweet was to show the gravity of the Gospel and what happens when we die, namely, that we all will one day meet the creator of the universe face to face.”
In his 1988 book, “A Brief History of Time,” Hawking wrote that achieving a “theory of everything” would be “the ultimate triumph of human reason — for then we should know the mind of God.”
But by the time he wrote his 2010 book, “The Great Design,” he believed the idea of God was “not necessary” because the laws of physics are enough to explain the origin of the universe.
In a 2011 interview with the British newspaper The Guardian, Hawking said, “I regard the brain as a computer, which will stop working when its components fail. There is no heaven or afterlife for broken-down computers; that is a fairy story for people afraid of the dark.”
Three years later, Hawking told the Spanish newspaper, El Mundo, there are no Gods. “I am an atheist,” he said. “Religion believes in miracles, but these are not compatible with science.” He insisted, “Nothing was around before the Big, Big Bang.”
Hawking and others run into real trouble with their “nothing” theory, according to astrophysicist Hugh Ross, founder of the creationist group, “Reasons to Believe.” He told OneNewsNow.com, “They basically say not only is there a real-time dimension associated with the universe, but there’s imaginary time. And with two dimensions of time, you wouldn’t have a boundary for the universe. So they say there’s no boundary, therefore they say there is no need for God.”
If there is no God, then, contrary to the Texas state representative’s tweet, Hawking does not now know the truth about how the universe was made because he would no longer exist.
If God is who he says he is, then, indeed, Cain is correct.
Kerry Hubartt is the former editor of The News-Sentinel.
http://www.news-sentinel.com/opinion/commentary/2018/03/17/kerry-hubartt-tweet-deemed-insensitive-may-just-be-correct/
Stephen Hawking had pinned his hopes on 'M-theory' to fully explain the universe—here's what it is
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-stephen-hawking-pinned-m-theory-fully.html
Black holes aren't totally black, and other insights from Stephen Hawking's groundbreaking work
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-black-holes-totally-insights-stephen.html
more: https://news.google.com/news/story/dAgaN_NPNYXQ9QMb88qbC9EVSc_wM?ned=us&gl=US&hl=en
--
in addition to (linked in) the post to which this is a reply and preceding and (any future other) following, see also (linked in):
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009502 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009578 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009597 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009610 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140020843 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036629 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009573 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140016476 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140009587 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140016609 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140010033 and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140012618 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037032 and preceding (and any future following)
elsewhere this string, https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140011998 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140017960 and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140020296 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140029262 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140035771 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140035915 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036268 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036740 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036795 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140041347 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140041621 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140041810 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140043977 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140044693 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140044904 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140047510 and preceding (and any future following),
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048301 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048642 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140024755 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140029850 and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140035958 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140033646 and following
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036893 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140036915 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037594 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037713 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140037850 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040902 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140045045 and preceding and following,
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140047851 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140038187 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040281 and following
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040770 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140040837 (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140047942 (and any future following)
elsewhere this string, https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048065 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048150 and preceding (and any future following)
https://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=140048596 and preceding (and any future following)
Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
F6
Join the InvestorsHub Community
Register for free to join our community of investors and share your ideas. You will also get access to streaming quotes, interactive charts, trades, portfolio, live options flow and more tools.
