Quote of the Day

The Saudis are going to fight Tehran to the last dead American

—Larry Wilkerson

The House of Saud is not an ally.

Well, Good Luck with That

It turns out that refusing to do a postmortem of last year's electoral catastrophe, remaining arm in arm with the incompetent political consultant class, and stacking the process to favor the failed establishment has resulted in the people not wanting to donate to the Democratic National Committee (DNC):

The Democratic National Committee's fundraising woes continued last month, when the party posted its lowest total for the month of October in at least 15 years.

The DNC raised $3.9 million in October -- far short of the $9.2 million raised during the month by the Republican National Committee. 

The RNC has now raised $113.2 million over the 2017 calendar year and has $42.5 million in the bank and no debt. The DNC, meanwhile, has raised $55 million this year. It has $5 million cash on hand and owes $3.2 million in debts.

t was the worst October for Democrats dating back to 2003 -- the first year the national parties were required to file monthly finance reports. The low totals reflect the difficulty the DNC has had raising money since former President Barack Obama left office.

This is not a surprise.

While many donors, particularly the big money donors, don't have a problem with the corporate tool DNC, they do object to a process which preserves the jobs, authority, and privilege of a cadre of party officials who are venal, self-serving, and incompetent.

Worst Bit of Journalism of the Year

The New York Times commissioned a profile of a Neo-Nazi white supremacist leader in Ohio, and it made Jimmy Fallon's softball interview of Trump on the Tonite Show, look like hard hitting journalism.

We discover that he worried about his wedding, that he goes shopping, that they eat at Applebee’s, that he loves the TV shows Twin Peaks and Seinfeld, etc.

Any number of people have excoriated the Times over this, and the author wrote a rather self-serving response to the criticism where he basically threw up his hands and said, "Sometimes a soul, and its shape, remain obscure to both writer and reader."

Basically, he said that there was no story there.

If there was no story, then he should have told his editor, and his editor should seen that there was no story, and should have spiked the story, because the alternative was a story that presented no insight, no information, and no news.

Absolute crap journalism.

Journalists and editors need to know when to cut their losses and walk away from a story.

I See Nothing!

There is now A nude photograph of Congressman Joe Barton (R-Exxon) somewhere out on Twitter.

I really want to stop living in Bizarro World:

U.S. Rep. Joe Barton, R-Ennis, released a statement on Wednesday apologizing for a graphic nude photo of him that circulated on social media earlier this week.

"While separated from my second wife, prior to the divorce, I had sexual relationships with other mature adult women," he said. "Each was consensual. Those relationships have ended. I am sorry I did not use better judgment during those days. I am sorry that I let my constituents down."

It is still unclear how the photo got onto social media, who put it there, or whether its posting would constitute revenge porn, which is illegal under Texas law.

Barton, who announced his re-election bid earlier this month, is navigating in a political environment charged with emerging stories of sexual misbehavior in politics, in business and in the media. The photo, which appeared on an anonymous Twitter account, set off speculation within Texas GOP circles about his political future.

Seriously.  Don't.  Just don't.  Ever.

Well, You Could Talk with Die Linke

Angela Merkel's negotiations to form a government have collapsed:

German Chancellor Angela Merkel pledged early Monday to maintain stability after the Free Democratic Party pulled out of talks on forming a new government with her conservative bloc and the left-leaning Greens, raising the possibility of new elections.

Merkel told reporters that the parties had been close to reaching a consensus on how to proceed with formal coalition talks but that the Free Democrats decided abruptly to pull out just before midnight Sunday — a move she said she respected, but found “regrettable.”

She said she would consult with Germany’s president later in the day to brief him on the negotiations and discuss what comes next.

Without bringing the Free Democrats back to the table, Merkel will be forced to try to continue her current governing coalition with the Social Democrats, although that center-left party has said it will not do so, or she could try to form a minority government, which was seen as unlikely. Otherwise Germany will have to hold new elections.

“It is at least a day of deep reflection on how to go forward in Germany,” Merkel said. “But I will do everything possible to ensure that this country will be well led through these difficult weeks.”

Merkel’s conservative Christian Democrats and sister Bavaria-only Christian Social Union, the pro-business Free Democrats and the left-leaning Greens had already blown past Merkel’s own deadline of Thursday to agree on a basis for opening formal negotiations on a coalition of all four parties, a configuration that has never been tried at a national level in Germany.

Key sticking points were the issues of migration and climate change.

Among other things the Greens were pushing for Germany to end its use of coal and combustion engines by 2030, though they had signaled they were open to some compromise.

Assuming that the SDP is true to its word when it says that it won't join the coalition, and the fact that no one wants to make a coalition with the 3^rd place AfD is a group of fascist bigots, there are not a whole bunch of options for Merkel.

One option is to enter into negotiations with Die Linke (The Left) party as well as the Greens.

That would put them over the critical 50%.

Of course, the many of the policies of Die Linke are an anathema to Merkel and the CDU, and the fact that it is technically the successor party of the East German Communists from East Germany presents an optics problem.

Still, opening up a dialogue with Die Linke would also put a lot of pressure on the FDP to return to the table.

So, it's not going to happen, even though it might make sense, because it's simply inconceivable given the norms of German political orthodoxy.

People Are Beginning to Come to My Point of View

For some time now, I have said that offensive cyber operations are a bad idea, because in order to hack someone, you are sending them a copy of your payload, and they can then use it themselves.

Ryan Cooper has come to this position as well:

Since August 2016, the National Security Agency has suffered a continual stream of devastating failures. Their internal hacking group, known as Tailored Access Operations (TAO), was breached 15 months ago by hackers calling themselves the "Shadow Brokers," which has been dribbling out the contents of the NSA's most prized hacking tools. The result has been a wave of internet crime — ransomware, lost files, and network attacks that disrupted businesses and cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

And as this New York Times story illustrates, the agency has been completely incapable of figuring out how the breach happened. Their computer networks could have been penetrated, or they could have someone on the inside leaking the tools. But after more than a year, they have not been able to plug the leak. It's long past time the NSA was forced to stop hacking, and to start protecting the American people from the sort of tools they create.

At the time of the leak last year, I speculated that the NSA was exposing the American people to online attack, but I was not prepared for how bad it would be. Several huge ransomware attacks (in which a computer is infiltrated, its hard drive encrypted, and the de-encrypt key held for a bitcoin ransom) using NSA hacking tools have swept the globe, hitting companies like FedEx, Merck, and Mondelez International, as well as hospitals and telecoms in 99 countries.

Cyber weapons are different, because they are implicitly revealed, and available for manufacture and deployment, by the target once they are years.

Would it make sense to send drones after ISIS/ISIL/Daesh/Whatever if in so doing, they would be able to deploy drones against targets in the US?

This is how cyber works.

But of Course

There has been a major leak of the Keystone Pipeline:

About 5,000 barrels of oil, or about 210,000 gallons, gushed out of the Keystone Pipeline on Thursday in South Dakota, blackening a grassy field in the remote northeast part of the state and sending cleanup crews and emergency workers scrambling to the site.

“This is not a little spill from any perspective,” said Kim McIntosh, an environmental scientist with the South Dakota Department of Environment and Natural Resources. No livestock or drinking water sources appeared to be threatened, Ms. McIntosh said, and no farm buildings or houses are within a mile.

The spill, near Amherst, S.D., comes just days before regulators in neighboring Nebraska decide whether to grant the final permit needed to begin construction on a different pipeline proposal, the Keystone XL, which would be operated by the same company. An announcement in Nebraska is expected on Monday.

This is not a surprise.  TransCanada's safety record sucks.

Good Day for Journalistic Malpractice

Buzz Feed just published a story claiming that Russia wired to thousands dollars to its embassy in Washington, DC to influence the 2016 election.

Their evidence is a leak from someone in the FBI saying that they surveilled transfers to the embassy with "2016 election" in the memo field.

It turns out that if you ignore the headline, and the over the top tweets, and make it down 7 paragraphs, (Well, not any more, they rewrote the article) you discover that the money was to cover the expenses of setting up polling places for the 2016 Russian parliamentary elections: (Wapo link because I don't want to raise their Google rank, and because of the rewrite)

There is a persistent belief among many Americans that there exists a piece of evidence that will, once and for all, prove that President Trump was aware that the Russian government hoped that he would win the presidency and, further, that he or his campaign encouraged and aided that Russian effort. That belief is informed by two things: the ongoing investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III into Russian meddling in the election and the surfeit of revelations that, looked at through the proper lens, indicate an awful lot of smoke masking an as-yet-unseen fire.

The result is that a lot of people are eager for any new bread crumbs that seem as though they might lead to clear proof of Trump’s collusion. And that, in turn, means stories that might serve as those bread crumbs tend to see a lot of traffic for the news outlets that write them.

On Tuesday afternoon, a new story at BuzzFeed seemed like it might find a place in the picture of Russian meddling. “Secret Finding,” the headline proclaimed, “60 Russian Payments ‘To Finance Election Campaign Of 2016.’ ” The quoted section of the headline referred to the memo fields of a wire transfer sent by the Russian government to the embassy in Washington. It was Aug. 3, and the embassy was being sent $30,000 earmarked for the “election campaign of 2016.”

………

There was just one detail that didn’t warrant mentioning in the blurb or the alert . . . or even the story until the seventh paragraph: Russia, too, had an election last year, for its own legislative body. That election was held in mid-September, six weeks or so after the payment to the embassy in Washington.

BuzzFeed noted that it wasn’t only the U.S. Embassy that had received money. So, too, did embassies in countries as widespread as Afghanistan and Nigeria, with the last payments being sent two days after the election. After the Russian election, that is.

 Someone got their journalism degree out of a Cracker Jack box.

This Is America, of Course He Can't Keep His Mass Shootings Straight

There are simply too many mass shootings to keep track of them all:

It’s not uncommon for presidents to express condolences after a mass shooting in America, but it’s certainly unusual for them to forget the city in which it occurred.

President Donald Trump took to Twitter Tuesday night after the shooting at the Rancho Tehema Elementary School in northern California. But instead of acknowledging the tragedy there, he name-checked the one in Sutherland Springs, Texas, which took place Nov. 5.

But of Course

Remember the company Whitefish?

It had only two employees, and then it got a $300 million contract to repair Puerto Rico's electrical grid following the damage from hurricane Maria.

They had ties to the Trump campaign and Interior Secretary Zinke.

Well, one of their first jobs, a high power transmission line, just failed, cutting power coverage from 40% to 18%.

So not a surprise.

Quote of the Day

Bill Clinton Was A Horrible President

He really was. 20 years later I am tired of people defending him. Impeachment was bullsh%$ but he was a bad man and a bad Democrat and a bad president.

—Atrios

(%$# mine)

Mass incarceration, destroying welfare, repealing Glass-Steagall, privatizing core government functions, DADT, DOMA, etc.

He's right.

Mark Zuckerberg Wants Me to Send Him What?!?!?!?!?

Facebook is testing a new feature in Australia.

Here is how it workssend Facebook your nude picture, and they promise to try to prevent revenge porn posts on their platform.

Seriously? Send a nude picture of myself to Mark Zuckerberg and his Evil Minions^™?

Facebook is asking users to send the company their nude photos in an effort to tackle revenge porn, in an attempt to give some control back to victims of this type of abuse.

Individuals who have shared intimate, nude or sexual images with partners and are worried that the partner (or ex-partner) might distribute them without their consent can use Messenger to send the images to be “hashed”. This means that the company converts the image into a unique digital fingerprint that can be used to identify and block any attempts to re-upload that same image.

Facebook is piloting the technology in Australia in partnership with a government agency headed up by the e-safety commissioner, Julia Inman Grant, who told ABC it would allow victims of “image-based abuse” to take action before pictures were posted to Facebook, Instagram or Messenger.

“We see many scenarios where maybe photos or videos were taken consensually at one point, but there was not any sort of consent to send the images or videos more broadly,” she told the Australian broadcaster.

It makes me want to go all. "Jules in Pulp Fiction."

I gotta figure that if you send Facebook your nude pix, you will shortly be seeing a lot of ads for penis enlargement, boob jobs, body hair removal, or anal bleaching.

Tweet of the Day

So many members of the Cabinet ought to resign that none of them can. It's like the Three Stooges trying to get through a door.

— Hugo Rifkind (@hugorifkind) November 7, 2017

Yeah, pretty much.

Some Perspective………

Alleged Russian government Facebook ads were marginally more than one-two thousandth of Clinton and Trump ads during the election.

Obviously, we can talk about how a butterfly flapping its wings in Malawi can create a hurricane, but the effects of this "massive" Russian interference

Russian information troll farm the Internet Research Agency spent just 0.05 percent as much on Facebook ads as Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s campaigns combined in the run-up to the 2016 U.S. presidential election, yet still reached a massive audience. While there might have been other Russian disinformation groups, the IRA spent $46,000 on pre-election day Facebook ads compared to $81 million spent by Clinton and Trump together, discluding political action committees who could have spent even more than that on the campaigns’ behalf.

Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch revealed these figures today during the Senate Intelligence Committee’s hearing with Facebook, Twitter and Google about Russian election interference.

Without counting PACs, the top campaigns spent 1,760X more on election ads than one group of Russian meddlers puts the situation into context. The IRA ad buy was small by comparison. This aligns with Stretch’s main talking point that Russian propaganda content was a tiny fraction of the content and ads seen on Facebook. This revelation could put more focus on organically posted propaganda.

The Democratic Party is focusing on this stuff, and avoiding a meaningful examination of how it failed and why.

I can understand why they are doing this:  Any search for incompetence will lead to a lot of folks working for the Democratic establishment getting VERY well deserved pink slips.

Absent a meaningful autopsy of the 2016 debacle though, the party will continue to pull defeat from the jaws of victory.

Google News Fail

What Is Wrong with This Picture?


Here is a hint.

I was looking at Google News, and the front page had a story about Corey Feldman and sexual abuse of child actors.

It's not normally not something that I would read, or even expand the item, but the picture next to the story seemed to be an odd juxtaposition.

Someone or something, likely a computer algorithm, screwed up.

I'm pretty sure that Paul Ryan did not touch Corey Feldman in his "uncomfortable place".

Paul Ryan is far to busy pimping for the top 1% and f%$#ing the rest of America to do anything to the former child actor.

Why Not to Trust the Cloud, Again

Google docs is amazing, except when it refuses to all you your own data:

A number of Google Docs users have reported being locked out of their documents today for, according to the message that pops up when they try to access the affected document, violating Google's terms of service. Users that have tweeted about the issue have said their locked-out pieces were about a range of topics including wildfire crimes, post-socialist eastern Europe and a response to reviewers of an academic journal submission.

………

A Google spokesperson told us, "We're investigating reports of an issue with Google Docs. We will provide more information when appropriate." The range of subject matters and number of reports suggest it's probably just a glitch, but the problem is a reminder of what we give up for the convenience and ease offered by cloud-based programs like Docs. Google Docs and others like it allow users to store their work offline, making it easily accessible wherever they happen to be. They also make it easy to share documents between a number of different people. But giving up control over your work comes with risks, as today's issues make clear. And though they're fairly rare, they can cause huge problems.

For example, Twitter user @widdowquinn said that while they had been encouraging others to use Google Docs for collaborative work on grants and academic papers, today's glitch is a deal breaker.

"A dealbreaker?"

Gee, you think?  Google can shut you out from your own documents, because it violates their, "Terms of service," and because it's Google, which means that you will never, ever get even remotely close to a human being.

Seriously.

Resurgent Germany, Revolt in Spain, Right Wing Populists Taking Power, What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

I don't think that Catalonian independence would happen if the Madrid had even the vaguest concept of deconfliction strategies.

Unfortunately for Spain, and for Catalonia, Spanish PM Mariano Rajoy has based his entire career on n*****baiting the Catalans and the Basques, so everything is going pear shaped:

The Spanish government has taken control of Catalonia, dissolved its parliament and announced new elections after secessionist Catalan MPs voted to establish an independent republic, pushing the country’s worst political crisis in 40 years to new and dangerous heights.

Speaking on Friday evening, the Spanish prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, said his cabinet had fired the regional president, Carles Puigdemont, and ordered regional elections to be held on 21 December.

Rajoy said the Catalan government had been removed along with the head of the regional police force, the Mossos d’Esquadra. The Catalan government’s international “embassies” are also to be shut down.

………

The actions came hours after Spain’s national unity suffered a decisive blow when Catalan MPs in the 135-seat regional parliament voted for independence by a margin of 70 votes to 10.

 If Madrid's response had been a bit more measured, this would not be racing toward disaster.

And the Mistake Jet Cluster F%$# Continues

The F-35 was intended to be a major technical leap, not just in performance (it isn't), and not just in stealth (it isn't), but also in terms of its availability and maintenance overhead.

It turns put that it has failed the last bit as well:

The Pentagon is accelerating production of Lockheed Martin Corp.’s F-35 jet even though the planes already delivered are facing “significantly longer repair times” than planned because maintenance facilities are six years behind schedule, according to a draft audit.

The time to repair a part has averaged 172 days -- “twice the program’s objective” -- the Government Accountability Office, Congress’s watchdog agency, found. The shortages are “degrading readiness” because the fighter jets “were unable to fly about 22 percent of the time” from January through August for lack of needed parts.

The Pentagon has said soaring costs to develop and produce the F-35, the costliest U.S. weapons system, have been brought under control, with the price tag now projected at $406.5 billion. But the GAO report raises new doubts about the official estimate that maintaining and operating them will cost an additional $1.12 trillion over their 60-year lifetime.

Already, the agency said in the draft obtained by Bloomberg News, the Defense Department “must stretch its resources to meet the needs of continued system development and production while at the same time sustain the more than 250 aircraft it has already fielded.”

In addition to this, it has been revealed that the first 108 F-35s produced will never be combat capable, so something around $40 billion has been flushed down the toilet:

The new F-35 program executive officer, U.S. Navy vice admiral Mat Winter, said his office is exploring the option of leaving 108 aircraft in their current state because the funds to upgrade them to the fully combat-capable configuration would threaten the Air Force’s plans to ramp up production in the coming years.

These are most likely the same 108 aircraft the Air Force reportedly needed to upgrade earlier in 2017. Without being retrofitted, these aircraft would become “concurrency orphans” — airplanes left behind in the acquisition cycle after the services purchased them in haste before finishing the development process.

Left unsaid so far is what will become of the 81 F-35s purchased by the Marine Corps and Navy during that same period. If they are left in their current state, nearly 200 F-35s might permanently remain unready for combat because the Pentagon would rather buy new aircraft than upgrade the ones the American people have already paid for.

 What makes this particularly galling is the aircraft that would be left behind by such a scheme were the most expensive F-35s purchased so far. When the tab for all the aircraft purchased in an immature state is added up, the total comes to nearly $40 billion.

If you run the numbers, that is about $370 million for each of these hangar queens.

Imagine what could have done with that money.

Headline of the Day

The DNC Picked a Bunch of Sleazy Lobbyists as Superdelegates, Can't Figure out Why No One Is Donating.

It's an on-point analysis of a rather anodyne story at Politico on DNC fund raising panic, but there is a few gems of unvarnished truth out there:

Party officials involved in fundraising say donors repeatedly turn them away with a "try again next year," especially since it became clear there won't be an official party autopsy from 2016. Democrat Jon Ossoff's loss in his much-hyped special congressional election in Atlanta's suburbs in June has also depressed donor enthusiasm.

………

DNC members themselves have now been asked to give or raise $1,000 each, some said — a request people who've been around the committee for decades say they can't remember being made before.

Not only the party base, but the big donors are demanding reforms.

I don't think that the moneybags wing of the Party are looking to implement a socialist agenda, but I do think that they realize that they spent a huge amount of money on a hapless candidate and a hapless party establishment, and they want to see changes.

I do not expect to see meaningful changes until dissatisfaction reaches a crescendo, because there are simply too many people who earn a living by mismanaging Democratic party operations.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong?

It appears that tech companies are looking to running portions of towns.

Why do I NOT find this reassuring?

It sounds almost dystopian: One of North America's largest cities handing over a key neighborhood to a tech giant so it can be rebuilt from scratch. That, however, may be exactly what is about to happen. Recently, it was announced that Sidewalk Labs, a division of Google-parent Alphabet, will (pending approval) lead the creation of about a 12-acre district called Quayside in a prime area of Toronto's newly revitalized waterfront area.

But if the plan immediately sounds like the beginning of a sci-fi movie in which things are about to go very wrong, Sidewalk Labs' vision at least is distinctly utopian. Simply put, Google's urban spinoff wants to build a laboratory for how a city should be run, a smart city predicated on tech, data, and everything from self-driving shuttles to garbage sorted by robots — all while shifting its Canadian headquarters to the new district.

This has fail written all over it.

After all, these are the folks who can't write a calculator app that adds 1+2+3.