1/ This is one of the most sobering, chilling stories yet out of the past year's events. It says the Brexit vote, and Trump's success [both of which were decided by thin margins] were manipulated by big data and masterminded by Robert Mercer, the billionaire behind Trump and Steve Bannon. Meticulously researched by the British Observer newspaper it spans the atlantic and tells us how military style pay-ops are being used to manipulate elections around the world.
Oh boy.....
“The connectivity that is the heart of globalisation can be exploited by states with hostile intent to further their aims.[…] The risks at stake are profound and represent a fundamental threat to our sovereignty.”
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016
Alex Younger, head of MI6, December, 2016
“It’s not MI6’s job to warn of internal threats. It was a very strange speech. Was it one branch of the intelligence services sending a shot across the bows of another? Or was it pointed at Theresa May’s government? Does she know something she’s not telling us?”
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017
Senior intelligence analyst, April 2017
In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she called up the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come. London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.
“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”
Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change.
2/ Spicy was on SNL last night, with Melissa McCarthy nailing him as only she can.....and it's hysterically funny.....eight minutes....
Melissa McCarthy is hosting tonight’s episode of Saturday Night Live, and as promised, the show had her bring back her beloved impersonation of Press Secretary Sean Spicer.
The sketch begins with Sarah Huckabee Sanders filling in for Spicer while he was hiding among the White House bushes, I mean, fulfilling his naval reserve duties. When the White House press corps asked if Sanders could be press secretary forever, Spicer blasted the room with a fire extinguisher before forcing Sanders off his podium.
McCarthy-Spicer promptly had at it as he took questions from reporters about James Comey‘s firing and whether the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. This led to multiple combative exchanges, and Spicer ended up throwing one of the press room’s columns at reporters when he was asked if he was surprised that he kept his his job longer than Comey did.
3/ One of the most powerful and hopeful videos I have seen for a while.....a man in a New Jersey town hall meeting lectures Congressman Tom Macarthur, who co-authored the horrible Republican Health care Bill.....
You absolutely have to watch this......four minutes.
4/ "Lester Holt" interviews Alec Baldwin's Trump on SNL......a wonderful, very funny five minutes....
Saturday Night Live kicked off tonight’s show by bringing back Alec Baldwin‘s impression of Donald Trump, and he lampooned the president’s interview with Lester Holt after the firing of James Comey.
“Holt” grilled “Trump” on everything from his decision to fire the FBI director, to the shifting stories put forth by the White House staff. “Trump” ends up admitting that he fired Comey over the Russia investigation, which leaves “Holt” wondering if he actually caught Trump’s confession to obstruction of justice.
The answer was no, because as Holt’s producers tell him, “absolutely nothing matters.”
5/ When you read the first story [#1] you realize we need a strong, organized Democratic Party to take on these bastards.....but what we have is nowhere near up to the job....
The DNC’s elephant in the room: Dems have a
problem — it’s not Donald Trump
It’s time for the DNC to stop blaming Trump and the GOP for their own credibility issues
Bernie Sanders (Credit: AP/Jae C. Hong)
The election of Donald Trump offered the Democratic Party a huge gift. Coming off of a highly contentious election and a series of party scandals, the public came together in a massive effort to protest and thwart everything GOP. Anti-Trump activism and political mobilization has been extraordinary, with record levels of people attending protests, making calls, organizing events and supporting DNC initiatives on a daily basis.
Each day the Trump team conjures up another opportunity for the DNC. From the unconstitutional Muslim ban to a cruel healthcare bill to the firing of FBI Director James Comey, the Trump administration keeps offering Democrats an endless opportunity to gather more public support.
But all signs suggest that the DNC is poised to blow this unique moment and potentially guarantee the GOP increasing success over the next four years. This is so because the DNC has become immensely tone-deaf to its own internal problems.
6/ Ivanka has written a book that has been universally panned, but Samantha Bee finishes the job....a most amusing five minutes.....
Samantha Bee has a book club, but rest assured she won't be reading Ivanka Trump's new book, Women Who Work: Redefining the Rules for Success anytime soon.
The Full Frontal host shredded the assistant to the President and her new book during her recurring segment, "The Great Feminists in Feminism Herstory Hall of Lady Fame," where she proposed starting a book club titled "Ladies Who Book" to discuss Women Who Work.
Bee referenced a New York Times review of the book that called it "a strawberry milkshake of inspirational quotes" before saying that Trump used no less than 208 sources and quoted The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People 30 times.
"True to her family’s brand and empire, Ivanka wrote this book largely by taking other people’s work and stamping her name on it," Bee quipped before saying that Trump misattributed a quote from little-known pastor Dave Willis to voice actor Dave Willis, a voice actor perhaps best known for his work as Meatwad on Aqua Teen Hunger Force.
7/ As we know Stephen Colbert has been mercilessly skewering Trump, so when Trump complained about Colbert in an interview, hilarity ensues....
Stephen Colbert literally couldn’t have been happier that President Trump went out of his way to slam him and his “filthy” mouth over his controversial joke from earlier this month.
The Late Show host opened his show last night by going over an extensive profile that Trump did with Time Magazine. Trump blasted multiple political and media figures during the interview, and he referred to Colbert as a “no-talent guy” whose show is failing in the ratings.
For Colbert, there was only one way for him to react to this: with euphoric and complete joy. As he blew kisses and basked in the cheering from the audience, Colbert claimed victory over the dust-up since he successfully managed to get under the president’s skin
8/ Just remember - when the Antarctic seriously starts to melt, civilization as we know it is gone.......this is the Thwaites Glacier that is stirring and warming.....another story on how I am happy I'm the age I am [over 60!]....
In the farthest reaches of Antarctica, a nightmare scenario of crumbling ice – and rapidly rising seas – could spell disaster for a warming planet.
Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica is so remote that only 28 human beings have ever set foot on it.
Knut Christianson, a 33-year-old glaciologist at the University of Washington, has been there twice. A few years ago, Christianson and a team of seven scientists traveled more than 1,000 miles from McMurdo Station, the main research base in Antarctica, to spend six weeks on Thwaites, traversing along the flat, featureless prairie of snow and ice in six snowmobiles and two Tucker Sno-Cats. "You feel very alone out there," Christianson says. He and his colleagues set up camp at a new spot every few days and drilled holes 300 feet or so into the ice. Then they dropped tubes of nitroglycerin dynamite into these holes and triggered a blast. Sensors tracked vibrations as they shot through the ice and ricocheted off the ground below. By measuring the shape and frequency of these vibrations, Christianson could see the lumps and ridges and even the texture of a crushed continent deeply buried beneath the ice.
9/ The Times tells you what to do about robocalls to your cellphone....
An unfamiliar number appears on your cellphone. It’s from your area code, so you answer it, thinking it might be important.
There is an unnatural pause after you say hello, and what follows is a recording telling you how you can reduce your credit card interest rates or electric bill or prescription drug costs or any of a number of other sales pitches.
Another day, another irritating robocall. If it feels as if your cellphone has increasingly been flooded with them, you’re right.
Ryan Kalember, senior vice president of cybersecurity strategy at Proofpoint, a cybersecurity company in Sunnyvale, Calif., said the volume of robocalls has seen a “particularly big uptick” since the fall.
10/ How the Mexican drug smugglers feel about Trump's wall....they love it....
NOGALES, Mexico — Crouched in the spiky terrain near this border city, a veteran smuggler known as Flaco points to the steel border fence and describes how he has taken drugs and people into the United States for more than three decades. His smuggling techniques include everything from throwing drugs over in gigantic catapults to hiding them in the engine cars of freight trains to making side tunnels off the cross-border sewage system.
When asked whether the border wall promised by President Trump will stop smugglers, he smiles. “This is never going to stop, neither the narco trafficking nor the illegals,” he says. “There will be more tunnels. More holes. If it doesn’t go over, it will go under.”
What will change? The fees that criminal networks charge to transport people and contraband across the border. Every time the wall goes up, so do smuggling profits.
11/ The "Blade Runner 2049" trailer is out....and it's a stunner.......
"I want to ask you some questions," Ryan Gosling's Officer K tells Harrison Ford's Rick Deckard in the first trailer for Blade Runner 2049. Nearly 35 years after Ridley Scott's neo-noir classic debut, Blade Runner fans are still faced with the same inquiries: What is real, and what does it mean to be human?
The sequel, directed by Denis Villenueve and penned by Blade Runner co-writer Hampton Fancher, takes place three decades after the original, with Gosling's "blade runner," a bounty hunter of biorobotic androids dubbed "replicants," patrolling the same smoky, neon-laced landscape that Deckard navigated in 2019.
The first trailer implants the viewer back in that futuristic, cluttered Los Angeles – sumptuously captured by master cinematographer Roger Deakins – as Officer K seeks to unlock a mystery that could catalyze a war between humans and the lookalike beings.
Todays police joke
Police work can be entertaining as well as dangerous.Recently, a female Sheriff's Deputy arrested Patrick Lawrence, a 22 year old white male, who was fornicating with a pumpkin in the middle of a field at night.The next day, at the Gwinnett County (GA) courthouse, Lawrence was charged with lewd and lascivious behavior, public indecency and public intoxication. The suspect explained that he was passing a pumpkin patch on his way home from a drinking session when he decided to stop.
'You know how a pumpkin is soft and squishy inside, and there was no one around for miles, or at least I thought there was no one around,' he stated.Lawrence went on to say that he pulled over to the side of the road, picked out a pumpkin that he felt was appropriate to his purpose, cut a hole in it and proceeded to satisfy his pressing need. 'Guess I was really into it, y'know?' he commented with evident embarrassment.In the process of doing the deed, Lawrence failed to notice an approaching sheriff's car and was unaware of his audience until Deputy Brenda Taylor approached him.'It was an unusual situation, that's for sure,' said Deputy Taylor. 'I walked up to Lawrence and he's just humping away at this pumpkin.'Deputy Taylor went on to describe what happened when she approached Lawrence ... 'I said excuse me sir, but do you realize that you're having sex with a pumpkin?’He froze and was clearly very surprised that I was there, and then he looked me straight in the face and said, 'A pumpkin? Shit ... Is it midnight already?'”The court (and the judge) could not contain their laughter. Lawrence was found guilty only of public intoxication, fined $10.00 and sent on his way.The Washington Post wrote an article describing this as "The best come-back line ever."
Todays married guy joke
After being married for thirty years, a wife asked her husband to describe her.
He looked at her for a while, then said,
"You're an alphabet wife..... A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K."
"You're an alphabet wife..... A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K."
She asks ..."What the hell does that mean?"
He said, "Adorable, Beautiful, Cute, Delightful, Elegant, Fabulous, Gorgeous, and Hot".
She smiled happily and said ...
"Oh, that's so lovely, but what about I, J, K?"
He said, "Adorable, Beautiful, Cute, Delightful, Elegant, Fabulous, Gorgeous, and Hot".
She smiled happily and said ...
"Oh, that's so lovely, but what about I, J, K?"
He said, "I'm Just Kidding!"
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