Today's Tweet

Knowledgebase Update

I can rest easy now that I've learned camels can swim.

Camels Crossing the Sea 🌊 pic.twitter.com/LMuKRnd7FG

— Nature is Scary (@TheScaryNature) April 21, 2018

hat tip = Charlie Pierce @CharlesPPierce

A Quick Reminder

1. Get together
2. Get busy
3. Get shit done

AKA: Canadian Hippo

But just as we might expect, cuz it's Canada - and everything's nicer in Canada - this hippo isn't known to attack people in the water. 

They wait for a chance encounter out in the woods - then they stomp your ass.

Today's Tweet

As long as guys like Malcolm Nance are on our side, we've got a chance.

#Sucker. https://t.co/Z098vVzdMc

— Malcolm Nance (@MalcolmNance) April 22, 2018

 

Today's Pix

Click a pic to start the show

They're Not All Assholes

Good to remind myself once in a while that there are people in positions of power who get it - people who understand that this month's numbers mean diddly-shit if there's nothing left to work with in order to get next month's numbers. And that if you just leave it to the next guy to worry about that, then you're setting us all up for the kind of disaster we're starting to experience now.

Fortune Magazine's list of 50 great leaders for 2018:

16. Isabelle Kocher, CEO, Engie

In just two years, Kocher has pulled Engie, the energy giant formerly known as GDF Suez, into the future. The legacy oil and gas company now focuses on renewables and decarbonization; it has sold $15 billion worth of “dirty” assets and reinvested in cleaner ones. Kocher, the only woman CEO among France’s CAC 40 companies, recently boosted Engie’s dividend and reported its return to profitability after a two-year absence.


Eating your seed crop and fouling the nest are really bad ideas - even when you do it inadvertently, or for reasons you think are currently justifiable.

24. Mukesh Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries

In less than two years, India’s richest man has brought mobile data to the masses—and completely upended the country’s telecom market. Since Ambani, chief of the $47 billion conglomerate Reliance Industries, launched Jio—the first mobile network in the world to be entirely IP-based—in September 2016, the company has signed up a staggering 168 million subscribers. The secret? Offering dirt-cheap data and free calls (and plowing billions of dollars into the infrastructure that transmits them). The effect, dubbed “Jio-fication,” has driven India’s higher-price carriers to drop costs (if not run them out of business), and it fueled a 1,100% rise in India’s monthly data

Combining a disrupting innovation with a socially conscientious plan for implementation is what we used to do here in USAmerica Inc - before we put the bean-counters in charge and started insisting we could smash-fit everything into a 12-column ledger.

25. Mick CornettFormer mayor, Oklahoma City

If you’re a fiscally conservative mayor in a fiscally conservative city, how do you persuade voters to pay more for public works? Cornett proposed tying new spending to small sales taxes—and requiring that the taxes expire once the projects were paid for. During his 14-year tenure, his so-called MAPS plans helped Oklahoma City pay for school revitalization, public transit, and downtown improvements. Cornett left office in April on a high note and is seeking the GOP nod for governor.

Pay-as-you-go without the punishing Calvinist bullshit, which is always just the thinly-disguised Kick-'Em-When-They're-Down approach that the GOP normally takes.

BTW - it has escaped no one's notice that Donald Trump is not on this list.

Up Your Ante

Investigating Russia:

Michael Cohen has dropped his libel lawsuits against BuzzFeed News and Fusion GPS which he filed in January claiming the Christopher Steele dossier defamed him. The move comes less than a week after McClatchy DC revealed Special Counsel Robert Mueller has proof Cohen did travel to Prague as described in Steele's memos.

Politico:
"The decision to voluntarily discontinue these cases was a difficult one," Cohen's attorney David Schwartz said. "We believe the defendants defamed my client, and vindicating Mr. Cohen’s rights was — and still remains — important. But given the events that have unfolded, and the time, attention, and resources needed to prosecute these matters, we have dismissed the matters, despite their merits."

Cohen is in court fighting to exclude potential evidence FBI agents seized in a raid on his office, home, and hotel room on April 9th.

Bloomberg Politics:
The case against Fusion GPS, which compiled the dossier, and its co-founder Glenn Simpson was filed in federal court in New York. Cohen had sued BuzzFeed, which published the dossier in its entirety, in state court in New York.

Politico:
In statements, both BuzzFeed and Fusion GPS said the suit was without merit.

"If there's one thing Democrats and Republicans agree on today, it's that the dossier was an important part of the government's investigation into potential collusion between the Trump Campaign and Russia," BuzzFeed News said in a statement.

In a separate statement, Fusion GPS said: "With his decision, it appears that Mr. Cohen can now focus on his many other legal travails.”

Dropping the suits could help Cohen avoid being questioned by lawyers from Fusion GPS or having to turn over evidence related to the case — both steps that could undercut his defense in the criminal probe.
It also means one or both of at least these two things:

1. they're getting great mileage out of bashing the dossier itself - and that ties in with their story of how the Dems (ie: Hillary) "financed it as just another bit of Oppo Research" which continues to get traction, so they need to keep what they think is a great issue
2. they can't afford to be shown up as having lied about the whole thing all along - especially the bit about Cohen and the meeting(s) in Prague. 

If they press the thing, then the Steele Dossier will be more or less argued in open court, which is the one thing they know must never be allowed to happen - essentially it calls their bluff and exposes the defamation suit as a dodge.

They can't afford to have anybody look too closely at anything.

Incentive

The big question regarding the women who hook up with 45* - how the fuck does that guy get those women into bed? 

Yeah - that guy.

The Author Of The Universe explains:

Today's Tweet

Never forget: If they let us all vote, they lose.

Kobach blocked 35,000 from registering in Kansas. Nearly half were under 30. He's country's worst vote suppressor, as I explain in new @MotherJones video pic.twitter.com/VqyfgPNZeW

— Ari Berman (@AriBerman) April 19, 2018

Farther Down The Rabbit Hole

To have any shot at sorting thru everything that went into the American election in 2016, we'll have to make a real attempt to separate the means from the ends.

And we have to figure out who the players are - 

• the people who vote
• the people those people vote for or against
• the people who manipulate both the vote-casters and the vote-getters.

And we have to make more of an effort to figure out what the objectives really are. 

I've been going on about The Daddy State for quite a while, but I think it's more than that - actually, more than that and a lot less than that at the same time.

The short version of my hypothesis boils it down to:

This is not government - this is a fucking robbery.

And the way the thing was set up is the key to understanding how ideology is co-opted; used as a decoy; and becomes the proverbial License To Steal, all under the guise of Rugged Individualism and Patriotic Zeal, or whatever turns the crank of the voter you're trying to motivate.

There's also the little wrinkle of having to separate the shit that's actually illegal from the shit that's just run-of-the-mill Rat-Fucking.

Nothing particularly new about any of that, but there is definitely a lot that's new about the way the bad actors have been going about all that bad acting.

The chief executive of SCL U.S. (the U.S. branch of the parent company of Cambridge Analytica) worked for Michael Flynn for 6 years. SCL got a Pentagon contract because of that relationship, Nigel Oakes told @EmmaLBriant https://t.co/MAAB8VuUss pic.twitter.com/308FdKwOGa

— Natasha Bertrand (@NatashaBertrand) April 18, 2018

Three Explanatory Essays Giving Context and Analysis to Submitted Evidence

Part 1: Cambridge Analytica, the Artificial Enemy, and Trump's 'Big Lie'

by Emma L. Briant, University of Essex:

Due to my expertise on this topic, I was compelled by the UK Electoral Commission,
Information Commissioners Office and the Chair of the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport
Committee's Fake News Inquiry Damian Collins MP to submit information and research
relating to campaigns by SCL, Cambridge Analytica and other actors. Statements from
my research interviews with staff at Cambridge Analytica (CA), SCL personnel or
otherwise related to their campaigns were submitted in evidence to the Inquiry. It is
essential therefore that I comment on and contextualize what are academic research
interviews. I discuss the evidence I submitted here in three accessible explanatory texts.

The interviews submitted in evidence address key questions and illustrate the unethical
nature of this company’s practices. Cambridge Analytica promotes itself as a “data-
driven” company and there has been much debate over how data was obtained and
used in the US election, including use of personality tests and ‘psychographic targeting’.

Regarding this, the Director of Business Development Brittany Kaiser said, “What they used on certain campaigns and what they didn't, it's hard to say, but all of our data, you know, that [...] was used for everything, whether or not we actually did psychographic groupings or not, it doesn't change the fact that we undertook to those quant surveys and that was put into our data set. And then some of those, some of those, uh, variables were used in our models. So in general you would say everything was used in everything but [...] not to the extent that I think some people had prophesized.” (Interview: Kaiser/Briant, 4th March 2018). 

We now know from Chris Wylie that data they used was harvested in unethical ways and hoarded to analyse, ‘microtarget’, and change audience behaviour, all enabled by Facebook’s business model. CA Chief data officer Alex Tayler has explained that psychological analysis is used for not just dividing up an audience along the lines of gender or what you’ve bought, but along the lines of the disposition – the psychological profile of those audiences.”

Regulation is failing to keep up with the rapid progression of coordinated data-driven propaganda powered by AI and augmented with insights from neuroscience and psychology, this should raise alarm for us all.

We have an awful lot more shit to shovel thru before we find the pony.

The Greater Fool

The MAGA Rubes have the right idea, but as usual, they've been sold a counterfeit product.

We should Make America Great Again - absolutely, we should.  But the greatness we're talking about has nothing to do with the bullshit being peddled by Cult45 and the GOP.

I think about everything that's supposed to be great about the USA, which makes me think about great art and the innovation that goes with it.

I think about great curiosity that drives great education, which in turn makes us more curious and drives us to explore further.

I think about a great sense of humanity that keeps us in touch with the needs of our neighbors.

I think about a greater understanding that if one of us is kept down, the rest of us will find it that much harder to rise. 

Funny how all of that is what "conservatives" have spent at least 40 years telling us is wrong.

What A Concept

We can be certain of the future by making the past unpredictable.

The Daddy State never stops throwing shit up in the air. They count on the numbing effect when we feel overwhelmed by it all.

We're finally starting to see a little progress towards turning the tables, as Mueller & Co continue to pile up the subpoenas and the indictments and the plea deals, giving 45* a little taste of his own shit.

Today's Tweet

Poppy Bush had it right 38 years ago - Voodoo Economics

Trickle Down Economics
Trickle Down Economic
Trickle Down Economi
Trickle Down Econom
Trickle Down Econo
Trickle Down Econ
Trickle Down Eco
Trickle Down Ec
Trickle Down E
Trickle Down
Trickle Dow
Trickle Do
Trickle D
Trickle
Trickl
Trick

— Angry American 😡 (@TrueBlue2018) April 17, 2018

 

Overheard Online

Twitter was down today so I spent some time chatting with my wife - she seems nice.

Today's Tweet

What's really scary is that when policy starts to make sense, we usually stop supporting it.

So, let me get this straight...

We're bombing Syria, because Syria bombed Syria, to show Syria that Syria shouldn't bomb Syria.

Then, after we've bombed Syria for bombing Syria, we still won't accept Syrian refugees that are seeking refuge from the bombing.

Got it.

— Adam Sweeney (@AdamWSweeney) April 14, 2018