Today’s podcast is Betty Cracker and mistermix discussing Florida politics, chickens, dogs and guns.
Balloon Juice Podcast Episode 2 – Betty Cracker Comes to TownPost + Comments (59)
by $8 blue check mistermix| 59 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Today’s podcast is Betty Cracker and mistermix discussing Florida politics, chickens, dogs and guns.
Balloon Juice Podcast Episode 2 – Betty Cracker Comes to TownPost + Comments (59)
by Adam L Silverman| 318 Comments
This post is in: America, Domestic Politics, Election 2016, Election 2018, Foreign Affairs, Open Threads, Politics, Popular Culture, Post-racial America, Silverman on Security, Not Normal
Wow. Britain's Information Officer announces she is seeking a warranting to raid Cambridge Analytica and seize servers
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
Facebook has been "co-operative" with ICO says Elizabeth Denham. Cambridge Analytica on the other hand has required them to seek to use their statutory powers to compel evidence….
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
Here’s the Channel 4 expose of Cambridge Analytica:
Senior executives at Cambridge Analytica – the data company that credits itself with Donald Trump’s presidential victory – have been secretly filmed saying they could entrap politicians in compromising situations with bribes and Ukrainian sex workers.
In an undercover investigation by Channel 4 News, the company’s chief executive Alexander Nix said the British firm secretly campaigns in elections across the world. This includes operating through a web of shadowy front companies, or by using sub-contractors.
In one exchange, when asked about digging up material on political opponents, Mr Nix said they could “send some girls around to the candidate’s house”, adding that Ukrainian girls “are very beautiful, I find that works very well”.
In another he said: “We’ll offer a large amount of money to the candidate, to finance his campaign in exchange for land for instance, we’ll have the whole thing recorded, we’ll blank out the face of our guy and we post it on the Internet.”
Offering bribes to public officials is an offence under both the UK Bribery Act and the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Cambridge Analytica operates in the UK and is registered in the United States.
The admissions were filmed at a series of meetings at London hotels over four months, between November 2017 and January 2018. An undercover reporter for Channel 4 News posed as a fixer for a wealthy client hoping to get candidates elected in Sri Lanka.
Here’s the actual video:
What Nix and Turnbull are caught describing as their standard operating practice is separate from whatever program Christopher Wylie built for Cambridge Analytica. Rather, they’re describing a hybrid of privatized human intelligence and what are sometimes referred to as black psychological operations (black PSYOP), which is a misuse of the term. Initially black PSYOP was used as short hand for the highly compartmented covert form of PSYOP necessary to support special operations. This is not surprising as Cambridge Analytica is subsidiary business development unit of SCL Group, which claims to provide these services to the British Ministry of Defense and the US DOD. Several boutique companies were created to do this type of work in support of coalition operations in Iraq and Afghanistan and people eventually left these companies and started their own boutique shops. All they’re really doing is creating propaganda and then trying to insert it into the news and social media space without it seeming to come from non-natives.
I’ve had dealings with some of these folks and to be perfectly honest I find them to be largely full of crap about what they actually can and cannot do. Usually they have a very limited understanding of both socio-cultural considerations in general and the specific socio-cultural dynamics of the people they’re trying to influence in specific. One of the most obnoxious of them, another Brit, has only the bare minimum idea of what this work, especially the descriptive statistical analyses, actually entail. But he’s memorized a bunch of jargon, talks a good game, sounds posh, and gets contracts. He gets away with this because there are really no institutionalized quality assurance/quality control programs in place to ascertain if this stuff actually is helpful, let alone if it works, and whether it actually is useful to the uniformed and civilian personnel at the pointy end. And because there are too few folks like me who actually know better, so it is hard to preemptively block these folks before they make there clients dumber and put people’s lives at risk.
Updated at 5:10 PM EDT:
Breaking: Channel 4 just announced they’re airing another undercover film tomorrow where Cambridge Analytica say they won the election for Donald Trump and describe how. This is a car crash airing live on TV. Journalism matters.
— Kevin Beaumont, Esquire (@GossiTheDog) March 19, 2018
Updated at 5:22 PM EDT:
The ICO is trying to get a warrant tonight to go in tonight. BUT no judge available…
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
And this is a very good question:
What is Facebook doing at Cambridge Analytica's offices tonight??? Good question from MP @DamianCollins. This should be a matter for the authorities, he says. Exactly. Also #WheresZuck?
— Carole Cadwalladr (@carolecadwalla) March 19, 2018
Delete your Facebook page!
Don’t take any online surveys!
Stay frosty!
Open thread.
Breaking: Britain’s Information Officer Moves Against Cambridge AnalyticaPost + Comments (318)
This post is in: Immigration, Open Threads, Politics, Republican Stupidity, The War on Your Neighbor, aka the War on Drugs, Assholes, General Stupidity
I hear Trump is snuffling publicly about the opioid crisis today. “Something-something let’s execute drug dealers like my state visit invitee Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines, who also hates Obama, and let’s put a pharma exec in charge of the new war on drugs because MAGA.” Or some such shit. In other news, there might be a DACA fix in the works:
NBC News confirms the WH reached out to Dems ystdy offering immigration deal to fund the border wall w/ $25b over three years with a 2.5 year DACA patch. Ds pushes backed asking for pathway to citizenship for all 1.8 million Dreamers who are eligible under DACA
— Alex Moe (@AlexNBCNews) March 19, 2018
It’ll likely come to naught, but perhaps it’s a promising sign that a) the White House is making proposals even though Trump has been meeping about the Democrats not crawling to him for a deal for a month or so, and b) if the above is an accurate description of the proposed deal, it doesn’t include any renewed attacks on LEGAL immigration.
We’ll see what happens. Open thread!
PS: The stock market is tanking for some reason, but not as badly as it tanked that last time.
This post is in: Meetups and social events, Readership Capture
Commentor Dog Mom, following up on Friday’s meet-up post:
In regards to Western NY meet ups, the suggestions are:
Rochester – Tap and Mallet (South Wedge) – Wednesday, March 28 – 5:30
Buffalo – Founding Fathers – Wednesday, April 4 – 5:30
Barring crazy weather or crazy life, I plan to go to both. Don’t feel limited by geography if you are able to make one or the other or even both.
It would be good to have a count of folks, so that we have an idea who to look for. I will confirm we are coming with the Pubs prior to those dates.
As always, lurkers, friends & significant or insignificant others welcome. Leave a comment below if you’re interested in one or both, or contact me — annelaurie (dot) bj (at) gmail (dot) com — and I’ll forward your message to Dog Mom. (Who promises to bring a green balloon.)
Western NY Meet-Ups — Rochester *and* BuffaloPost + Comments (15)
by David Anderson| 10 Comments
This post is in: Anderson On Health Insurance
This post is in: Excellent Links, Hail to the Hairpiece, Republicans in Disarray!, Decline and Fall
I just don't think if you work for a POTUS who has trouble condemning Nazis, loves ripping apart families and has no problem taking away healthcare you get to play the "I had affection for the man and I didn't tune in to the policies" card. https://t.co/Y5Troe0EFP
— Schooley (@Rschooley) March 19, 2018
Trump’s White House assistants are progressing to the “working on their best wide-eyed innocence” stage of self-defence. Perhaps because professional character assassin Olivia Nuzzi was the first reporter to notice the importance of Hicks to the inner circle, hers is the Big Get, for NYMag:
On the morning of Wednesday, February 28, Hope Hicks arrived at the White House just after 8 a.m. Within a week, it would be snowing in Washington, D.C., but she was dressed for spring in a bouquet of purple, yellow, and blue, as if willing the end of winter with her miniskirt. She held on to her iPhone in the West Wing, in violation of a rule that normally diverted it to a locker secured by a shiny silver key, then retreated to her office, a first-floor broom closet that in the past had been assigned to presidential secretaries.
When the administration began 13 months before, competition among some staffers had manifested as a struggle for real estate here; Omarosa Manigault, a perennial reality-TV contestant, had gone so far as to steal a room that had been designated for Anthony Scaramucci, “the Mooch,” a hedge-fund millionaire obsessed with astrology and the word fuck, because of its status-confirming glimpse of the Washington Monument. Both of them were eventually fired, along with a procession of others who failed to maneuver the chaotic status hierarchy President Trump seemed to cultivate out of boredom.
A view of duck-tour buses circling the mall wasn’t needed for Hicks to know her standing. What her office lacked in flair it made up for in proximity. While others were left wondering what the president was thinking, Hicks could often hear him shouting, even with her door closed. “Hope!” he’d scream. “Hopey!” “Hopester!” “Get in here!”
Many requests were mundane. “He doesn’t write anything down,” one source close to the White House told me. “He doesn’t type, he dictates. ‘Take this down, take this down: Trump: richest man on Earth.’” A second source who meets regularly with the president told me that Hicks acted almost as an embodiment of the faculties the Trump lacked — like memory. “He’ll be talking, and then right in the middle he’ll be like, ‘Hope, what was that … thing?’ ” When the name of a senator or congressman or journalist came up, Trump would prompt Hicks to provide a history of their interactions, asking, “Do we like him?” “And she fucking remembers!” (Trump has said his own memory is “one of the greatest memories of all time.”) “She’s the only person he trusts,” the second source continued. “He doesn’t trust any men and never has. He doesn’t like men, you see. He has no male friends. I was just with one of them the other day, someone who’s described as one of his closest friends, and he doesn’t know him very well. But a small number of women, including his longtime assistant back in New York, he really listens to them — especially if he’s not banging them. Because, like a lot of men but more so, Trump really does compartmentalize the sex and the emotional part.”…
Interesting Read: “What Hope Hicks Knows”Post + Comments (338)
by Alain Chamot (1971-2020)| 35 Comments
This post is in: On The Road, Open Threads, Readership Capture
Good Morning All,
This weekday feature is for Juicers who are are on the road, traveling, or just want to share a little bit of their world via stories and pictures. So many of us rise each morning, eager for something beautiful, inspiring, amazing, subtle, of note, and our community delivers – a view into their world, whether they’re far away or close to home – pictures with a story, with context, with meaning, sometimes just beauty. By concentrating travel updates and tips here, it’s easier for all of us to keep up or find them later.
So please, speak up and share some of your adventures and travel news here, and submit your pictures using our speedy, secure form. You can submit up to 7 pictures at a time, with an overall description and one for each picture.
You can, of course, send an email with pictures if the form gives you trouble, or if you are trying to submit something special, like a zipped archive or a movie. If your pictures are already hosted online, then please email the links with your descriptions.
For each picture, it’s best to provide your commenter screenname, description, where it was taken, and date. It’s tough to keep everyone’s email address and screenname straight, so don’t assume that I remember it “from last time”. More and more, the first photo before the fold will be from a commenter, so making it easy to locate the screenname when I’ve found a compelling photo is crucial.
Have a wonderful day, and enjoy the pictures!