sense of doubt

Though the current project started as a series of posts charting my grief journey after the death of my mother, I am no longer actively grieving. Now, the blog charts a conversation in living, mainly whatever I want it to be. This is an activity that goes well with the theme of this blog (updated 2018). The Sense of Doubt blog is dedicated to my motto: EMBRACE UNCERTAINTY. I promote questioning everything because just when I think I know something is concrete, I find out that it’s not.

Saturday, July 10, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2335 - CITIZEN'S ARREST - We Need More DARNELLA - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2107.10

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2335 - CITIZEN'S ARREST - We Need More DARNELLA - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2107.10

We need more DARNELLA FRAZIER.

So much more arresting to do.

Citizens take charge.

This HODGE PODGE will launch with just the cobbled together content as I am in a hurry and a day late.

ENJOY!

GET ARRESTING!

Start with these assholes...

Allen Weisselberg And Trump Org Are Pretty Dumb Criminals, ALLEGEDLY

Evan Hurst

July 02, 2021 08:55 AM

Weisselberg is the one in the handcuffs who is old balls.

HOO-RAH, they're here, some indictments of Trump people are here!

First of all, though, you get a perp walk.

There goes 73-year-old Allen Weisselberg, Trump Organization CFO, handcuffed, on his way into court on Thursday in Manhattan. Watch it and think about America! (That perp walk reportedly made Donald Trump sooooo mad.)

OK, so the indictments. We're gonna cut the shit and just give you the facts you want. Got it? Cutting shit, giving facts.

No shit just facts

There are 15 counts, 10 of which name both Weisselberg and the Trump Organization. Five are just for Allen. They charged them with a 15-year "SCHEME TO DEFRAUD IN THE FIRST DEGREE" the US government and New York state and city authorities. They charged them with tax fraud. They charged Allen with grand larceny. They charged them with some other shit. The victims in this indictment are listed as the IRS, the New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, and the New York City Department of Finance.

And the prosecutors seem pretty sure those fuckers knew exactly what they were doing.

Here's the gist, or as the indictment calls it:

THE SCHEME

The indictment says starting in 2005, "the defendants and others" created a SCHEME to defraud the local, state, and federal governments. "The purpose," it says, was to pay Weisselberg and others a good chunk of their income through "indirect and disguised means," AKA "off the books." It says the Trump Corporation and/or the Trump Payroll Corp. (subsidiaries named in the indictment) either didn't report or misreported said compensation. That way, "certain employees" got to pay taxes on far less than they actually made. It says Trump Corporation and Trump Payroll Corp. thereby didn't withhold taxes on a lot of income, because of how that money was part of the SCHEME. They also allegedly skated on payroll taxes they were supposed to be paying.

And it names Weisselberg as "one of the largest individual beneficiaries" of the SCHEME, involving indirect compensation to the tune of about $1.76 million, which he allegedly hid. (Note it doesn't say he's the largest beneficiary.) What else did he allegedly hide? That he lived in New York City, and therefore should've been paying taxes there.

During the period of the scheme, Weisselberg thereby evaded approximately $556,385 in federal taxes, approximately $106,568 in state taxes, and approximately $238,159 in New York City taxes, and he falsely claimed and received approximately $94,902 in federal tax refunds and approximately $38,222 in state tax refunds, to which he was not entitled.

As for that New York City stuff, the indictment alleges that the Trump Corporation had a lease on a place on the west side of Manhattan, which has been Allen Weisselberg's primary place ever since 2005. But he didn't own it and the Trump Corporation didn't own it, so SHHHHHH. Weisselberg allegedly signed the checks from the Trump Corporation for the rent and the utilities and the internet and the Netflix 'n' Chill. This was all income for Weisselberg, his free apartment and his free Netflix 'n' Chill. Reported as compensation to Weisselberg? No way! It was just "rent expense."

This arrangement allegedly made it easier for Weisselberg to pretend he lived in Not New York City, to avoid city taxes. It says, "He was a New York City resident, and he knew that he was a New York City resident." (It'd be bad if he didn't even know where he lived!) It says he stopped pulling this shit in 2013, when he sold a house he had in Wantagh, New York.

The Trump Organization allegedly kept track of those receipts, though. Know how our headline gently suggests that these people are idiots?

[F]or certain years, the Trump Organization maintained internal spreadsheets that tracked the amounts it paid for Weisselberg's rent, utility, and garage expenses. Simultaneously, the Trump Organization reduced the amount of direct compensation that Weisselberg received in the form of checks or direct deposits to account for the indirect compensation that he received in the form of payments of rent, utility bills and garage expenses. The indirect compensation was not included on Weisselberg's W-2 forms or otherwise reported to federal, state, or local tax authorities, and no income taxes were withheld by the corporate defendants in connection with the indirect compensation.

LOL fuck.

The indictment goes to great pains to paint how Weisselberg, as the CFO, was not only orchestrating and directing the SCHEME, but also benefiting from it greatly. Just move these numbers here, move those numbers there, carry the two, et VOILA! Prétendument!

Then there are the parts about tuition, where Weisselberg and the Trump Corporation had tuition for Weisselberg kids paid from accounts in the names of Donald Trump and his revocable trust. And again, they didn't report it. It's totally normal for corporate compensation packages to have goodies in them, even including things like tuition and the like. (Eric Trump correctly noted this on Fox News last night.) They have to be declared as income. (Eric Trump forgot that part on Fox News last night!) But according to prosecutors, Weisselberg and other Trump Corporation people just, you know, didn't.

Leases on Mercedes-Benzes for Weisselberg and his wife? Check.

Cash money given to Weisselberg, from Trump Corporation checks made out to another "Trump Organization employee," which that person cashed and handed over to Weisselberg, after which the Trump Corporation recorded those expenses as "Holiday Entertainment"? Check. We don't know how entertaining Allen Weisselberg is around the holidays, but ...

Maybe he does a real sexxxy "Santa Baby" or something!

All the while, the Trump Corporation was allegedly keeping track of all this on its internal spreadsheets — the secret ones that said how much to quietly deduct from Allen's official paycheck — but not reporting any of it as Allen's income.

Sometimes Weisselberg would allegedly hit up the Trump Corporation for money for other shit:

"These requests included such items as new beds, flat-screen televisions, the installation of carpeting, and furniture for Weisselberg's home in Florida."

Don't want to get ahead of our skis here but it sounds like Donald Trump took Allen Weisselberg furniture-shopping.

After all the parts about how Weisselberg benefited personally, the indictment moves on to "The Failure To Report or To Withhold Income Taxes on Payments Made to Certain Other Executives and Employees." Which other executives and employees? This current indictment here does not say, aside from how one of them was a family member of Weisselberg's, and then there were two others. Folks got apartments and auto leases and the like, which weren't reported by the Trump business.

The indictment repeatedly says Weisselberg and the Trump Organization intentionally did these things. Which ... you know, one or two mistakes, we might believe, but it does seem like prosecutors are establishing a pattern here.

Did we mention there was hinky shit with bonuses, allegedly? There was hinky shit with bonuses, allegedly. And so much more.

As you can imagine, the SCHEME allegedly required a lot of falsifying documents, and the indictment explains how. (Journalist Kurt Eichenwald has a Twitter thread y'all should read about how this may be the biggest fuckin' deal of them all, not just for Weisselberg, but for the entire Trump Criminal Enterprise.)

Let's tally this shit up!

So in all, there's the SCHEME TO DEFRAUD IN THE FIRST DEGREE. Then there's:

CONSPIRACY IN THE FOURTH DEGREE, which is the first time we hear about some character named "Unindicted Co-Conspirator #1." Shall be interesting to find out who that is! (Maddow noted last night that it's not likely that it's Trump, since they spell his name out a bunch of other times in the indictment.)
GRAND LARCENY IN THE SECOND DEGREE. (This one is just for Allen.)
CRIMINAL TAX FRAUD IN THE THIRD DEGREE. (Three counts!)
CRIMINAL TAX FRAUD IN THE FOURTH DEGREE.
OFFERING A FALSE INSTRUMENT FOR FILING IN THE FIRST DEGREE. (Four counts! These are the other indictments in the batch that only name Weisselberg, and not also all the Trump entities.)
FALSIFYING BUSINESS RECORDS IN THE FIRST DEGREE. (Four counts!)

And that makes 15!

Let's say some final thoughts, and then end this post!

Guys? We got to read an indictment involving Trump people that came out after Donald Trump lost the protections of the presidency. We got to see a perp walk! Hallelujah!

And if we haven't said this already, we feel from reading this like there's more comin'. This is all about Weisselberg. This all reads very FLIP, MOTHERFUCKER, FLIP to us. This isn't anything about weird screwball valuations on Trump properties, it's not about Trump's porn peener payoffs. And it certainly ain't about Trump's taxes.

Here's what Carey Dunne from the DA's office said in court:

"To put it bluntly, this was a sweeping and audacious illegal payment scheme," Dunne said. He rejected an allegation from the Trump Organization that the charges were part of a politically motivated effort to hurt Trump: "It's not about politics," Dunne said.

And here's what Trump Org lawyer Alan Futerfas whined:

"We're all aware, all of you and all of us, are aware of the very significant financial crimes that have occurred by large financial institutions where this office did not take them on, did not prosecute, going back to the 2008 financial collapse of the United States," he said.

Yeah, we've talked about that, haven't we? How Trump is half-right when he whines that none of this would probably be happening if Trump hadn't waddled down that escalator and taken a wet shit on the world?

But he did. He opened himself up to that scrutiny from the second he announced his run, promised to release his financials, and then studiously refused to for the next five years of his presidential campaign and failed presidency.

Weisselberg is of course innocent until proven so guilty. Weisselberg pleaded not guilty. (So did the Trump Organization.) Weisselberg had to give the mean authorities his passport.

Guess we'll see what happens next.

[indictment / Washington Post]

Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter.

Wonkette is funded ENTIRELY by a few thousand people like you. If you're not already, would you pls consider being the few thousandth and one?

This seems heckin' big: Attorney General Merrick Garland has suspended all executions in the federal prison system, citing serious concerns about the arbitrariness of how capital punishment is used, racial disparities in death sentences, and "the troubling number of exonerations" in capital cases. Damn well about time. (NBC News)

Earlier this week, the tiny Canadian town of Lytton, British Columbia, set new all-time high temperature records for Canada three days in a row, including an ungodly high of 121.3 degrees F (49.6 degrees C). Then on Wednesday, wildfires forced the roughly 1000 residents of the town to evacuate, and much of the town burned to the ground in minutes. There are still people unaccounted for. The BBC reports that the heat wave in western Canada has caused 486 deaths in BC alone over the last five days.

The Washington Post reports that, with global warming making forests drier and weather hotter, the annual wildfire season has ceased to be a "season" at all, and the nation is facing a shortage of wildland firefighters. President Biden has announced he will issue bonuses to increase firefighters' wages, and will train members of the National Guard to help fight fires. The bipartisan infrastructure bill also includes funding for hiring, retention, and pay raises for federal firefighters. (Washington Post)

David Roberts lays it out pretty simply: There's no longer any such thing as a "moderate" position on the climate crisis. Doing nothing, or doing very little? THOSE are now extreme positions, in terms of what they'll mean for life on the planet. (Dr. Volts)

After months of fuckery resulting from the rightwing backlash to the 1619 Project, the Board of Trustees for the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill voted Wednesday to grant tenure to Nikole Hannah-Jones. Hannah-Jones was hired earlier this year by the Hussman School of Journalism for a prestigious Knight Chair in Race and Investigative Journalism. She passed the tenure review with the full support of the university and the J school, but the Trustees refused to take action on her tenure application for political reasons, because how dare she suggest slavery and its legacy of systemic racism are a lens through which all American history be viewed? So now that's finally settled, to the benefit of the students Hannah-Jones will be working with. (NPR)

Nancy Pelosi has named eight members to the House Select Committee to investigate the January 6 attack on the Capitol. As expected, the committee will be chaired by Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson (D-Mississippi). And Pelosi followed through on her promise to name a Republican as one of her eight picks, choosing Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyoming), one of just two Republicans to vote to authorize the committee. The committee is supposed to have five more Republican members, chosen in consultation with Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, who may simply choose to be a pissy little fucker and not name anyone, because that's where America is now. (CBS News)

If Sha'Carri Richardson Can Get High and Still Outrun Everybody, She Should Be Allowed To Do It

Banning the American sprinter from the Olympics for using marijuana is completely ridiculous.
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After Billionaire Abuse of Retirement Accounts, US Considers New Regulations
U.S. Senate Finance Committee Chairman Ron Wyden said last week "he is revisiting proposed legislation that would crack down on the giant tax-free retirement accounts amassed by the ultrawealthy," reports ProPublica, "after a ProPublica story exposed that ...

Meat Grown in Israeli Bioreactors May Be Coming to American Diners
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Removing Confederate Statues Unfair To Southern Heroes Who Did Other, Later Racism, Says Idiot

Doktor Zoom

July 02, 2021 10:02 AM

Culture warrior Matt Walsh has come up with a unique rationale for keeping statues of dead Confederates in the US Capitol: Removing the monuments would be a grave insult to southern states, because even if the men depicted fought against the USA to preserve slavery, many of them went on to serve their states in Congress later, and isn't it mean just to cancel them for a little light treason in their youth?

In his daily video blog for Ben Shapiro's Internet Whining Concern, Walsh argued for the "cancellation" of House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy and the other 66 Rs who voted to remove statues of Confederates from Statuary Hall.

You see, kids, by excluding people simply because they happened to take up arms against the United States in a treasonous rebellion, the bill, which passed the House and is pending in the Senate, would remove statues of "men who served in Congress after the war was over," and how is that even fair? Walsh doesn't even like calling these "Confederate Statues," because that obscures these fine men's "distinguished careers" following the end of the war.

Here's the video, cued up to the start of the segment, although if you want to see his earlier rant about the Washington Post allegedly pushing kinky gay stuff on children, you can do so for extra credit.

Walsh named two former Confederates whose post-Civil War service to their states would be cancelled by the bill. For starters, there's South Carolina's Wade Hampton III, who Walsh says

opposed secession but remained loyal to his state when it seceded and became a brigadier general of the cavalry for the Confederates. In the three decades that he lived after the war, he served as governor, US Senator, and railroad commissioner.

In addition, Walsh singled out the career of Alabama's Joseph Wheeler, who, yes, was a cavalry general in the Confederate army, but also entered politics following the war.

He served in the House from 1881 all the way until 1900. These are not all people who are known to history solely as members of the Confederacy. Many of them had distinguished careers after the fact.

So you see, Walsh explained, removing their statues simply because of their Confederate ties is in fact a kind of anti-Southern bigotry, you Yankee monsters.

That they were members of the Confederacy is a reflection of the fact that they lived in the South. So what Congress is saying today is that Southern states simply are not allowed to honor anyone who lived in or served their state from the middle part of the 19th century up until the beginning of the 20th. Congress has decreed ... that these states must look elsewhere to find people to memorialize.

Huh. So Walsh is saying that nobody in the South did anything worth memorializing since 1900? Kind of a weird take.

Walsh went on to decry McCarthy and the other 66 Republicans who had "[joined] hands with the mindless statue-toppling hordes," because even though the legislation actually will return most statues to the states that provided them, it's more fun to pretend this'll be a festival of anarchy directed at a lot of Very Fine People who served their states honorably after the Civil War.

Or at least you might think that if the only thing you knew about them was what Walsh tells you. Strangely, it only takes a quick visit to the Source of All Knowledge to find out more about the postbellum careers of Wade Hampton III and Joseph Wheeler.

So how did they "serve" their respective states in the post-Reconstruction era? Oh look, it was mostly by doing all they could to undo Reconstruction and reestablish white supremacy! Who could possibly have guessed unless they read the headline up top?

The second goddamn paragraph of Hampton's Wikipedia entry gives you a pretty good sense of his brand of public service:

At the end of Reconstruction, with the withdrawal of federal troops from the state, Hampton was leader of the Redeemers who restored white rule. His campaign for governor was marked by extensive violence by the Red Shirts, a paramilitary group that served the Democratic Party by disrupting elections and suppressing black and Republican voting in the state. He was elected Governor, serving 1876 to 1879. After that, he served two terms as U.S. Senator, from 1879 to 1891.

Read a little further, and you'll see that during the 1876 election that put Hampton in office, some 150 Black South Carolinians were murdered by the Red Shirts and other white supremacist terrorists, although a biographer argued there's "no evidence that Hampton himself supported or encouraged that violence." He only benefited from it, OK?

Oh yes, and before the Civil War? He grew up on a plantation and got rich off the labor of enslaved people. Weird how Walsh left that out, too. In the Wonkette Sekrit ChatCave, Stephen pointed out yesterday that

Wade Hampton's name is everywhere in Greenville, SC, and in mundane things like roads, etc, so you don't think about the history. It's weird that Black people (who mostly live in the South) are conditioned to use the names of white supremacists this way.

There's a reason there's no Goebbels Blvd in Berlin.

So maybe there could be more than one reason not to keep Hampton in a place of honor, gosh, history is complex.

But what about that Joseph Wheeler guy? We bet he had a perfectly unobjectionable career serving Alabama, huh? His Wikipedia entry mostly focuses on his dashing military career, but the "see also" bit links to a discussion of Wheeler's 1894 speech "Slavery and States' Rights," which downplayed the significance of slavery as a cause of the Civil War, justified slavery as a constitutional right — and insisted that enslaved human beings were no more than property.

In essence, like plenty of Lost Cause revisionists to follow, Wheeler blamed the North for causing the war, by infringing on white Southerners' God-given constitutional rights to hold human beings in bondage. Wheeler was particularly incensed by the North's refusal to enforce fugitive slave laws, quoting Daniel Webster as an authority. In fact, by failing to return people who escaped slavery, it was actually Northern states that had committed "treason," leaving the South little choice but to secede.

And then that damn traitor Abraham Lincoln got elected. Wheeler offered these thoughts on the Republican Party's second-favorite president:

Then followed the election of Abraham Lincoln upon a platform which clearly informed the southern people that the guaranties of the Constitution, which they revered, and the doctrines of State rights and other principles of government, which they cherished, were to be ignored, and that they were to be deprived of the greater part of their property, and all possibility of continued prosperity.

The South was of necessity alarmed. They were seized with the fear that the extreme leaders of the Republican party would not stop at any excess, that they would not be satisfied with depriving them of their property, but that, so far as possible, they would place the ignorant slave not only upon equality with, but even above his former master.

It was but natural that such an impending fate horrified the people, and that measures to avert it were contemplated and discussed.

So that's the guy whose good and honest public service to Alabama deserves to be honored in the nation's Capitol, according to Matt Walsh, who would just hate to see such a nice fellow dishonored.

After all, there was so much more to these fine people than just their time in the Confederate Army. There was all the hard work they did to reimpose white supremacy after the end of Reconstruction, but hey, at least they were no longer Confederates then, so it all works out.

[Matt Walsh Show on YouTube via Jason Campbell on Twitter / National Endowment for the Humanities / History.com / "Slavery and States' Rights"]

Yr Wonkette is funded entirely by reader donations. If you can, please give $5 to $10 a month so we can keep doing history facts at you.

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Why Your Ritualistic June Lottery Can Bring July Sorrows. Tabs, Wed., June 30, 2021

Stephen Robinson

June 30, 2021 08:01 AM

Tabs gif from your bestie Martini Ambassador!

Maricopa County, Arizona, won't reuse the voting machines that the Cyber Ninjas confiscated for their so-called “audit." The cost to Arizona taxpayers is as yet unknown. (Arizona Central)

The Big Lie's lost cause audit in Arizona has backfired for Republicans. A majority of Arizona voters oppose the audit, according to a poll that also shows President Joe Biden thumping Donald Trump by seven points in a 2024 rematch. Not that poll numbers and even “votes" will matter much with Republican-controlled legislature. (Politico)

Charles Pierce explains why only silly people ever thought Republicans would cooperate with an actual investigation into the January 6 Capitol attack. (Esquire)

A far-right super PAC has taken a break from viciously smearing the Squad and is now attacking any Republican who can't identify Donald Trump's colon in a lineup. Activate obvious gif! (The Daily Beast)

Giphy

From an article about the Portland, Oregon, heatwave:

The city opened cooling centers to provide relief for people without air conditioning, roads buckled as asphalt cooked under three days of triple-digit temperatures, and reporters were left scrambling to find synonyms for "unprecedented" as record after record was met and then broken.

Yeah, that last one is a true tragedy. Don't worry, guys, it's OK to use “unprecedented" multiple times. There's also no need to look up synonyms for “said." This ain't The New Yorker. (Oregonian)

Lina Hidalgo, the chief executive of Harris County, Texas, is a rising Democratic star in a state that has unfortunately elected Ted Cruz twice. Check out this profile and imagine a better world where Hidalgo could win statewide office. (The New Yorker)

Professional fact checkers pulled a few all-nighters and determined that Senator Cruz was lying when he claimed Joe Biden ran on an “abolish the police" platform. (Washington Post)

President Biden will travel to Surfside, Florida, where a residential building collapsed, killing at least 12 people. He's not expect to hurl paper towels at anyone, just offer some empathy. (CNN)

Arizona Rep. Paul Gosar really likes to hang out with white supremacists. It's as if he is one. (New York Magazine)

Joan Walsh on Nina Turner's campaign to replace Marcia Fudge in the House of Representatives. Please be kind in the comments. (The Nation)

New York City landlords are so desperate for office tenants post-pandemic that they're offering lower rents, snazzy layouts, and fancy new technology, like computers that crash only half as often. One Manhattan office building has a hidden speakeasy! I'd need a few stiff drinks before I'd consider working in a New York office again. I left the city 10 years ago but still have traumatic flashbacks to the morning elevator ride. (New York Times)

Here's some July book recommendations for you. (AV Club)

A new tap room and beer garden is moving into my neighborhood! If you're fancy, you can call it a “biergarten." (Eater)

Derek Chauvin Literally Can’t Say How Sorry He Is He Murdered George Floyd

Stephen Robinson

June 28, 2021 09:00 AM

Former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin was sentenced Friday to 22 and a half years in prison for George Floyd's brutal murder. This was less than the 30 years the prosecution requested but significantly more than the insulting slap on the wrist Chauvin's defense requested — probation and the time Chauvin had served since his conviction on April 20. That's not even the bare minimum precedent set when former Minneapolis cop Mohamed Noor shot and killed Justine Ruszczyk Damond in 2017. Noor is serving 12 and a half years, and his reckless disregard for human life was more believably an “accident" because he didn't shoot Damond for nine minutes and 29 seconds while she begged for her life. Yes, it's true Floyd wasn't a white yoga instructor, but his life still mattered.

Noor was also capable of expressing the human emotion known as “remorse" during his sentencing:

"I caused this tragedy and it is my burden," [Noor] told the court. "I wish though that I could relieve that burden others feel from the loss that I caused. I cannot, and that is a troubling reality for me."

Chauvin, however, claimed that “additional legal matters" prevented him from making a “full, formal statement" like someone in possession of a human soul.

"But briefly, I do want to give my condolences to the Floyd family," Chauvin said.

Yes, this monster offered Floyd's family his “condolences," as if Hallmark sells cards that state, “Sorry, I murdered your loved one." That's almost like the gimmick of a serial killer on "Criminal Minds." The murderer sends a sympathy card to his victims' families, maybe with a riddle that offers clues to his next crime.

Chauvin is facing federal charges for violating Floyd's civil rights. Saying he's sorry he murdered Floyd wouldn't necessarily put him in greater legal jeopardy. A jury's already convicted him. But I'm not an expert law talking guy or a psychologist who specializes in heartless killers.

He added he's hopeful other information will emerge that'll give Floyd's family “some peace of mind." He was sketchy on the details. Was Floyd going to walk into the courtroom, alive and healthy, carrying children's letters to Santa Claus? No, George Floyd is dead and the best “peace of mind" for his family is the state holding Chauvin accountable.

Chauvin's mother, Carolyn Pawlenty, demanded leniency for her son, who she believed the media and prosecutors unfairly painted as a racist. That wasn't actually the prosecution's case, and it's not why Chauvin was convicted. Pawlenty insisted prison "will not serve Derek well," as though prison is a pleasure cruise. Prison doesn't serve anyone well. It's prison. All it takes for "Blue Lives Matter" white ladies like Pawlenty to jump on the Angela Davis prison abolition train is the realization that their own kids might end up behind bars.

"I want this court to know that none of these things are true and that my son is a good man," Ms. Pawlenty said. "He has a big heart and he always has put others before his own. The public will never know the loving and caring man he is. But his family does."

Maybe Chauvin is a delight at family gatherings, but if he always put the lives of others before his own, Floyd would still be alive. Floyd cried out for his late mother while Chauvin kept his knee pressed into his neck. Pawlenty can still visit Chauvin in prison.

While delivering Chauvin's sentence, Judge Peter A. Cahill referred to the “particular cruelty" of Floyd's murder, and prosecutor Matthew Frank said that "torture is the right word" to describe how Floyd died.

"And it's a real simple mantra, easy thing to remember," Frank said. "You're going to take custody of somebody, you have to provide care. You have to do it in a caring way. You can't simply disregard their care. Mr. Chauvin abused his position of trust and authority as a police officer by doing just that, just disregarding all his training."

That's the point too many police officers don't understand. They have a greater obligation to civilians they encounter than random people on the street. Enforcing the law doesn't mean cops are inherently above the law.

We should never forget that Chauvin would likely still be free and patrolling the streets if a brave young woman, Darnella Frazier, hadn't recorded Floyd's murder. The stark, undeniable visuals eviscerated the Minneapolis PD's initial lies.

Thursday, not so far from Minnesota, the Ohio GOP advanced a bill that would criminalize heroism like Frazier's. Ohio House Bill 22 would reportedly bring the hammer down on anyone who fails to "follow a lawful order from a law enforcement officer" or “diverts a law enforcement officer's attention." The Chauvin defense grossly tried to blame the crowd of horrified onlookers for Floyd's death. The Ohio police union loves this new law, of course.

Derek Chauvin's conviction is a lot like President Joe Biden's election. Republicans are already hard at work making sure something like this never happens again.

[Law and Crime / New York Times]

Follow Stephen Robinson on Twitter.

TAKE 'EM ALL DOWN!!!

House To Confederate Statues: GTFO

Doktor Zoom

June 30, 2021 01:00 PM

2015 DC protest against 'Southern Heritage Confederate Flag Rally.' Photo: Elvert Barnes, Creative Commons license 2.0

The House of Representatives voted yesterday to remove all Confederate statues from display in the US Capitol's Statuary Hall, what with those guys being traitors and all. In addition, the measure calls for the removal of a bust of Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger B. Taney that's in the Old Supreme Court Chamber in the Capitol. Taney wrote the infamous 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision that declared African Americans weren't US citizens, and therefore had "no rights which the white man was bound to respect."

If the bill passes the Senate and is signed into law by President Biden, Taney's bust will be replaced with a bust depicting Justice Thurgood Marshall, who actually deserves admiration.

Roger B. Taney? More like Roger B. Tainty, amiright?

The measure passed in the House by 285 votes to 120. All votes against it came from Republicans, who should be ashamed of themselves. No Democrats voted against it, which makes House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy's comments about the bill pretty fucking craven:

Repeating the bullshit line that's been such a money-maker for history distortionists like Dinesh D'Souza, McCarthy said, "Let me state a simple fact: All of the statues being removed by this bill are statues of Democrats." As Roll Call puts it with more than a bit of understatement, McCarthy's comments left out "the context that the modern two-party system does not compare neatly to the political dynamics of the antebellum period and late 19th century."

Odd that the Republicans didn't unanimously vote to remove those supposed "Democratic" heroes, to really stick it to the Dems.

McCarthy then tried to draw a parallel between the vicious racists who supported the enslavement of Black Americans and the latest rightwing outrage hobbyhorse, critical race theory, which contends that anti-Black racism pervades US law and institutions.

Today the Democratic Party had doubled down on what I consider this shameful history by replacing the racism of the past with the racism of the critical race theory.

How true this is. What could be more precisely like slavery than saying that slavery and Jim Crow have left a deep stain on US history? Saying so makes white people feel bad, so it's exactly like chattel slavery.

Nonetheless, McCarthy did at least support the legislation, if only so he could condemn Joe Biden and Hillary Clinton for attending the funeral of Robert C. Byrd, who once belonged to the KKK, bet you didn't know. Funny, McCarthy also forgot the part where Byrd thoroughly repudiated racism and embraced the cause of civil rights. The NAACP issued a statement mourning his death, saying Byrd's career "reflects the transformative power of this nation."

Gee, McCarthy left out a whole LOT of things. If nothing else, it's pretty persuasive evidence against the idea that we need to keep Confederates statues around to help us remember history.

As Roll Call notes,

Congress authorized the National Statuary Hall Collection in 1864 to allow each state to donate two statues of notable citizens "illustrious for their historic renown or for distinguished civic or military services" for display in the Capitol.

Not surprisingly, a lot of southern states chose to honor Confederates. In 1931, for instance, Mississippi donated statues of Confederate President Jefferson Davis and a Confederate colonel, James Z. George. Neither was a native Mississippian, but both represented the state in the Senate, and honoring them in the Capitol sent the important message that white supremacy was what mattered most.

We should add that the placement of Confederate statues in the Capitol was opposed by some, even in Olden Times, particularly by northerners who for some reason thought the South had lost the Civil War. Historian Kevin Levin noted on Twitter that in 1910, at the height of Lost Cause revisionism, Republican Senator Weldon B. Heyburn objected to having a statue of Robert E. Lee in the Capitol:

I have not changed my mind about that Lee statue. You would not want to place Benedict Arnold's statue there and you want to put Lee's. It's the same thing.

Still Lost Causes die hard, and Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Alabama) offered — what else? — a statement making a goddamned states' rights argument for preserving the heroes of enslaving human beings.

I support federalism and a state's right to decide for itself who it should honor. As such, I will proudly vote "No" on H.R. 3005. Alabama, not New Yorkers, Californians, or anyone else, should decide who we wish to honor in Alabama's contribution to the National Statuary Collection

Under the legislation, Confederate statues that are owned by a state, like South Carolina's contribution, a statue of slavery and white supremacy advocate John C. Calhoun, would be returned to the state by the Architect of the Capitol. Others that don't belong to a state will be left up to the Architect to deal with.

Maybe they could be incorporated into a nice tasteful landfill, or crushed and used to protect DC from sea level rise, doing some good for their country for once.

[NPR / Roll Call / USA Today / WNYC / Photo: Elvert Barnes, Creative Commons license 2.0]

When Far-Right PACs Attack Republicans, Who Wins? The American Public, That’s Who.

Stephen Robinson

June 30, 2021 08:55 AM

Drain the DC Swamp PAC

The Squad has served as reliable brown bogeyman for Republicans. Entire campaigns and fundraising appeals are centered around electing candidates who will stop (wink, wink) these all-powerful congresswomen of color. But now a far-right super PAC is devoting its significant resources to an even greater threat — Republicans who aren't 100 percent loyal to Donald Trump.

According to the Daily Beast, the Drain the DC Swamp PAC has spent $300,000 on a recent spate of ads smearing certain Republicans as "turncoats" and "RINO communist traitors." These aren't even the “good" Republicans (Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger) who voted for Trump's second annual impeachment. No, the commie traitors are the ones who voted for the failed bipartisan January 6 commission.

Thirty-five House Republicans supported an investigation into the Trump-inspired insurrection. It's not an impressive number, considering there are 211 Republicans in the House and 139 of them had already voted to overturn the 2020 election results. This is still a staunchly pro-sedition party. The Drain the DC Swamp PAC should've saved its money for some other evil purpose. (The PAC already helped elect Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.)

Stephanie Bice from Oklahoma and Chris Jacobs from New York both objected to the Electoral College results (without any good reason) but also voted for the January 6 commission. They might not appreciate riots any more than they do democracy.

The Democratic-controlled House was going to approve the commission regardless, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell made it clear that Republicans would filibuster the commission to death. House Republicans could've just voted like they cared that a violent mob attacked the Capitol, but there's no room for savvy political maneuvering in the GOP House that Trump wrecked. The mad MAGA king immediately singled out the “35 wayward Republicans" who defied him.

During the weeks since the vote, the PAC has exclusively targeted Trump's wayward 35, plus the few GOP senators who stood up to the pro-riot lobby. They've called them “traitors," “gun grabbers," and “communists." The January 6 commission didn't include any gun control or Green New Deal legislation, but maybe those riders were added at the last minute.

The Drain the DC Swamp PAC has also set its sights on Rep. Nancy Mace from South Carolina. This is hilarious because while Mace didn't object to the Electoral College results, she didn't vote to impeach Trump for BS reasons that involved abusing the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, and she didn't vote for the January 6 commission because she was pretty sure someone else is looking into the attack on Congress. Why get Congress involved? Sure, she condemned that spontaneous violence event that probably has no direct connection to anything a former sitting president might've said or done, but she also grossly claimed Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez lied about fearing for her life from a deranged mob.

Nancy Mace is terrible, but apparently not terrible enough. She reportedly “drew the wrath of conservatives" in March when she expressed mild support for inclusiveness. The sentiment was meaningless because she later voted against the Equality Act, but she did it old school where she claimed to support LGBTQ rights but not as much as religious bigots' inalienable right to discriminate against them. That's not how the MAGA GOP rolls these days. Expressing even superficial respect for minorities means you're some RINO social justice warrior. When Mace told the Washington Examiner that “no one should be discriminated against," the website Big League Politics said “the Trump-led GOP should consider putting her scalp on the wall so-to-speak during next year's primary elections."

Drain the DC Swamp even put Mace in an ad with Kinzinger and Mitt Romney, which described her as one of the "Never Trumpers who betrayed the America First movement and President Trump!" Maybe they're thinking of some other, more interesting Nancy Mace. The one we’re stuck with will probably shine Trump's shoes if it means she gets to keep her seat next year.

Anyway, we certainly prefer if Trump's toadies waste their money hitting Republicans and not the Squad. Keep up the good work, you horrible rightwing zealots.

[The Daily Beast]

Gov. Ron DeSantis Signs Florida Mandate to Survey College Students' Views...Because He's Worried About 'Indoctrination'

If conservatives like DeSantis have nothing else, they have the nerve. Florida's new 'viewpoint diversity' mandate is pure hypocrisy.

Zack Linly

Friday 6/25/21 6:30PM

Listen: You can either complain about student “indoctrination,” or you can monitor the thoughts and views of students through government decree—unless you’re Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, in which case, your own hypocrisy is your greatest weapon and you can do both.

DeSantis hates Critical Race Theory—but that’s not what this is about because what DeSantis actually hates is leftist “indoctrination” in general—but that’s also not what this is about because what DeSantis and right-wingers across the nation really hate is the thought that conservatism is dying with current and future generations, and they believe their ~~oppressive~~ precious ideology deserves to thrive. This is why two weeks after banning public schools from teaching CRT, DeSantis is taking his progressive paranoia-infused power play to a new level by forcing public universities to assess “viewpoint diversity” on campus through an annual survey developed by the State Board of Education to monitor whether or not schools are pushing students towards the devil’s liberalism, which, in the Republican mind, is determined by the number of students who love Fox News and MAGA apparel more than they love porn and frat parties (I’m guessing).

From the Washington Post:

Although the Florida law does not address penalties for schools where the survey finds low levels of “intellectual freedom” and “viewpoint diversity,” DeSantis has hinted at the potential for budget cuts at universities that do not pass muster.
The bill defines those two terms as the exposure to — and encouragement or exploration of — “a variety of ideological and political perspectives.”
“We want our universities to be focused on critical thinking and academic rigor. We do not want them as basically hotbeds for stale ideology,” DeSantis said at a news conference Tuesday. “That’s not worth tax dollars and not something we’re going to be supporting moving forward.”
DeSantis’s office reiterated Thursday that the bill does not address funding and the governor’s comment was “an expression of his firmly-held opinion that taxpayer-funded schools, colleges and universities should be places for education — not indoctrination.”

A few things:

First of all—bullshit.

Let’s not pretend that if conservatism represented the dominant ideology on college campuses, DeSantis would give a shit about “viewpoint diversity.” If there was a Trump poster and a “build that wall” banner across the door frames of every dorm room in the state, Florida Republicans would be satisfied that the youth are headed in the right direction and the only survey students would be asked to take is one that determines how many Kid Rock homecoming invitations is too many.

Secondly—bullshit.

I’m to believe that DeSantis wants schools to be “focused on critical thinking” like he didn’t just go to war with an academic study that focuses on critical exploration of social dynamics in law and other institutions? If only there existed some critical component to studying a subject like—oh, I don’t know—race, which could be properly assessed in theory.

Third—bull-fucking-shit!

So you’re telling me DeSantis—the guy who chose the first day of Pride month to sign a transgender sports ban, proposed legislation that would make it open season on shooting unruly protesters and, of course, stays trying to make it harder for Black people to vote—isn’t planning to defund schools based on the survey, he just kind of hinted around defunding for shits and giggles?

Anyway, I’m not the only person who sees this white nonsense for what it is.

Wikimedia Bans Admin of Wikipedia Croatia For Pushing Radical Agenda (therecord.media)

Posted by EditorDavid on Saturday June 26, 2021 @11:34PM from the socked-puppet dept.

The Record reports:The Wikimedia Foundation has banned the administrator of the Croatian version of Wikipedia after an investigation revealed that together with other admins, they edited and distorted content on the site with radical right views. This group had de-facto control of the website between 2011 and 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said in a report published earlier this month... This included:

- Claiming that Hitler attacked Poland and started World War II after the Poles committed genocide against Germans.
- Redefining a World War II concentration camp as a labor camp...
- Pushing opinions that EU decision-making endangers Croatia's sovereignty.
- Claiming that the EU had used propaganda to trick Croatian citizens into joining the European Union...
Since 2013 the dubious edits had been spotted by users and the Croatian press, according to the article — but other Croatian Wikipedia editors failed, multiple times, to wrest away control of the site's moderation.

"The Wikimedia Foundation got involved last year after it was discovered that the administrator of Croatian Wikipedia had been using sockpuppet accounts to manipulate discussions and staff elections on the site..."The Wikimedia Foundation's report on the abuses of this team also points to possibly similar far-right-based editing on Wikipedia's Serbian version as well. This is the second major Wikipedia scandal in the past year. In September 2020, the Wikimedia Foundation said it found and banned a public relations firm that had created and used a network of sockpuppet accounts to edit the site on behalf of some of its customers.

https://boingboing.net/2021/06/26/green-mans-tunnel-is-a-legendary-site-among-seekers-of-haunted-places.html

Green Man's Tunnel is a legendary site among seekers of haunted places

POPKIN 7:00 AM SAT JUN 26, 2021

The abandoned railroad tunnel in Pittsburgh known as "Green Man's Tunnel" is a legendary site among seekers of haunted places. This tunnel in South Park Township is said to be haunted by the spirit of Raymond Robinson, nicknamed the "Green Man" or "Charlie No-Face." Whether or not this tunnel is truly haunted by his spirit is up to you to decide, but the backstory behind this urban legend is true.

When Raymond Robinson (October 29, 1910 – June 11, 1985) was 8 years old, he climbed a pole to reach for a bird's nest on the Morado Bridge, outside of Beaver Falls. He touched an electrical line and was left severely disfigured by the shock. Robinson lost his eyes, nose, and right arm.

From Wikipedia:

Because of his appearance, he rarely ventured out during the day. However, at night, he went for long walks on a quiet stretch of State Route 351, feeling his way along with a walking stick. Groups of locals regularly gathered to search for him walking along the road. Robinson usually hid from his curious neighbors, but would sometimes exchange a short conversation or a photograph for beer or cigarettes. Some were friendly, others cruel, but none of his encounters deterred Robinson from his nightly walks

Robinson was struck by cars multiple times during his walks, but this didn't stop him. The night was the only time that he could find some peace from the judgment of others. It saddens me to think about how people were cruel to Robinson, and how the only time he felt comfortable enough to leave his house was after dark. Robinson died at the age of 74, and ever since he has been the center of the "Green Man's Tunnel" urban legend.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/06/27/0351237/french-engineer-claims-hes-solved-the-zodiac-killers-final-code

French Engineer Claims He's Solved the Zodiac Killer's Final Code (msn.com)

Posted by EditorDavid on Sunday June 27, 2021 @03:34AM from the xyzzy dept.

The New York Times tells the story of Fayçal Ziraoui, a 38-year-old French-Moroccan business consultant who "caused an online uproar" after saying he'd cracked the last two unsolved ciphers of the four attributed to the Zodiac killer in California "and identified him, potentially ending a 50-year-old quest." Maybe because he said he cracked them in just two weeks.Many Zodiac enthusiasts consider the remaining ciphers — Z32 and Z13 — unsolvable because they are too short to determine the encryption key. An untold number of solutions could work, they say, rendering verification nearly impossible.

But Mr. Ziraoui said he had a sudden thought. The code-crackers who had solved the [earlier] 340-character cipher in December had been able to do so by identifying the encryption key, which they had put into the public domain when announcing their breakthrough. What if the killer used that same encryption key for the two remaining ciphers? So he said he applied it to the 32-character cipher, which the killer had included in a letter as the key to the location of a bomb set to go off at a school in the fall of 1970. (It never did, even though police failed to crack the code.) That produced a sequence of random letters from the alphabet. Mr. Ziraoui said he then worked through a half-dozen steps including letter-to-number substitutions, identifying coordinates in numbers and using a code-breaking program he created to crunch jumbles of letters into coherent words...

After two weeks of intense code-cracking, he deciphered the sentence, "LABOR DAY FIND 45.069 NORT 58.719 WEST." The message referred to coordinates based on the earth's magnetic field, not the more familiar geographic coordinates. The sequence zeroed in on a location near a school in South Lake Tahoe, a city in California referred to in another postcard believed to have been sent by the Zodiac killer in 1971.

An excited Mr. Ziraoui said he immediately turned to Z13, which supposedly revealed the killer's name, using the same encryption key and various cipher-cracking techniques. [The mostly un-coded letter includes a sentence which says "My name is _____," followed by a 13-character cipher.] After about an hour, Mr. Ziraoui said he came up with "KAYR," which he realized resembled the last name of Lawrence Kaye, a salesman and career criminal living in South Lake Tahoe who had been a suspect in the case. Mr. Kaye, who also used the pseudonym Kane, died in 2010.

The typo was similar to ones found in previous ciphers, he noticed, likely errors made by the killer when encoding the message. The result that was so close to Mr. Kaye's name and the South Lake Tahoe location were too much to be a coincidence, he thought. Mr. Kaye had been the subject of a report by Harvey Hines, a now-deceased police detective, who was convinced he was the Zodiac killer but was unable to convince his superiors. Around 2 a.m. on Jan. 3, an exhausted but elated Mr. Ziraoui posted a message entitled "Z13 — My Name is KAYE" on a 50,000-member Reddit forum dedicated to the Zodiac Killer.

The message was deleted within 30 minutes.

"Sorry, I've removed this one as part of a sort of general policy against Z13 solution posts," the forum's moderator wrote, arguing that the cipher was too short to be solvable.

Credit...Diwang Valdez for The New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/25/style/black-tiktok-strike.html

Are Black Creators Really on ‘Strike’ From TikTok?

A viral campaign aims to draw attention to the ways social platforms compensate users

By Taylor Lorenz and Laura Zornosa

June 25, 2021

In a TikTok video from June 18, Erick Louis, a 21-year-old content creator and dancer in Orlando, Fla., nods and bounces along to Megan Thee Stallion’s latest single. “If y’all do the dance pls tag me 🙄,” he captioned the video. “It’s my first dance on Tik tok and I don’t need nobody stealing/not crediting.”

But the joke is, there is no dance. Seconds later, with his lips pursed, Mr. Louis flips two middle fingers at the camera and walks away. “SIKE,” the caption reads. “THIS APP WOULD BE NOTHIN WITHOUT BLK PEOPLE.”

By Thursday, the video had racked up 127,700 likes on TikTok and had spread rapidly on Twitter. “Yt people have no idea what to do with this sound because a black person hasn’t made a dance to it yet,” read one viral tweet.

Megan Thee Stallion’s song lays out dance instructions plainly in the lyrics: Place your hands on your knees and twerk. But compilations of TikTok users fumbling — holding hands, moving their hips from side to side, waving their arms above their heads — have gone viral over the past week.

Some tweets suggested that Black creators on TikTok had seemingly agreed not to choreograph a dance to the song, which would force non-Black users to come up with dances on their own and prove how essential Black creators are to the platform. Many Black creators have created videos to the song and there is a popular non-dance trend related to the audio, but the message was clear.

“Black people carry the app,” Mr. Louis said. He posted his video to articulate sentiments he has seen circulating in the Black online creator community. The strike itself is not a true strike or boycott. Black users, including Mr. Louis, are still posting to the app. It’s more of a symbolic awareness campaign that consists of an agreement not to dance to Megan Thee Stallion’s song.

“Similar to the ways off the app Black folks have always had to galvanize and riot and protest to get their voices heard, that same dynamic is displayed on TikTok,” he said. “We’re being forced to collectively protest.”

The music video for Megan Thee Stallion’s single makes a similar point. It begins with the rapper calling a politician, alluding to the outrage spurred by “WAP,” her flamboyant single with Cardi B, released last summer. “The women that you accidentally trying to step on, are everybody that you depend on,” Megan Thee Stallion says. “They treat your diseases, they cook your meals, they haul your trash, they drive your ambulances, they guard you while you sleep.”

Essential workers are portrayed by Black women in the music video — as garbage collectors, grocery store workers, office staff, waitresses, police officers, surgeons and nurses — underlining the idea that the labor of women of color supports the economy.

Black creators’ concerns run deeper than simply obtaining dance credits or more brand deals. “We are being exploited, and that’s the core issue Black folks have always had in terms of labor,” Mr. Louis said. “These millions of likes, that should all translate to something. How do we get real money, power and proper compensation we deserve?”

According to Li Jin, the founder of Atelier, a venture firm that invests in the creator economy, these tensions stem from systemic inequalities in the online creator industry. “The issue here is ownership,” she said. “The worker class is disenfranchised and does not have ownership over the means of creation and distribution.”

More creators, especially those from marginalized groups, are looking at the skyrocketing valuations of technology companies and reconsidering their relationships with certain platforms.

“People realize these tech companies are worth so much, they’re valued so highly, and the tech C.E.O.s and employees are gaining so much wealth,” Ms. Jin said. “But the platform participants, the creators, have been left out of this equation. There’s an undertone of economic inequality, which broadly is the issue of our time.”

“My hope is that we realize this is an entire class of work that didn’t previously exist,” she added. “If we don’t offer this class of workers protections and rights, they’re going to become increasingly disenfranchised.”

Kaelyn Kastle, 24, a Black content creator and member of the Collab Crib, said she wasn’t participating in the strike, but supports what it represents. “The strike is to send a message. The business models of these apps, they have us out here overworking and being underpaid,” she said. “We’re working long hours but at the end of the day we’re still making little to nothing, and we Black creators are making even less.”

Ms. Kastle said that many of her peers who want to participate in a strike can’t because of the dip in engagement it may generate. “When you’re working on these apps, they’re funding most of your life, so your back is against the wall,” she said. “If you don’t post for a day or two, you’ll open your Creator Fund like, ‘Wow, I haven’t made any money.’”

A spokesperson from TikTok said in a statement: “We care deeply about the experience of Black creators on our platform and we continue to work every day to create a supportive environment for our community while also instilling a culture where honoring and crediting creators for their creative contributions is the norm.” The statement cited a recent blog post outlining the company’s work with the Black creator community.

Even before the strike, dance trends on TikTok were declining, and the trends associated with many top audios have not included dances. The trend most popularly associated with Megan Thee Stallion’s song, for instance, is not dance related.

Top creators like Charli D’Amelio and Michael Le have transitioned away from dancing toward more vlogging and YouTube-style content. As the pandemic wanes, average users are also spending more time outside their homes creating a more diverse range of content.

“The shift away from dance takes even more of the megaphone away from these Black creators,” said Kwasi Ohene-Adu, the founder of Groovetime, a platform for creators to own and monetize their dances. “Those big people on TikTok have gained the popularity from Black creators’ dances, now they’re transitioning away and Black creators are left high and dry.”

Many people who work with Black content creators hope that the strike can open a conversation about equity and payment.

“There has to be a broader conversation about creators having equity in these start-ups,” said Isaac Hayes III, the founder and C.E.O. of Fanbase, a subscription-based social media platform. “Instagram and Facebook make billions. How much of that is being passed on to the creators, especially those who drive millions and millions of views?”

Did NSA Put Secret Wire Tapps In Tucker Carlson's Underpants, Or Is He Just Babbling?

Evan Hurst

June 30, 2021 03:17 PM

Tucker's TELLLLLLLLLING!

Tucker Carlson has spent all week whining that he has for sure knowledge that the National Security Agency (NSA) is spying on him, in order to personally destroy him. You know, in case you're wondering what your rightwing idiot uncle will be mad about this Fourth of July.

It started Monday:

"Yesterday," he said, "we heard from a whistleblower within the U.S. government who reached out to warn us that the NSA, the National Security Agency, is monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air."

Sounds totally legit. Love it when whistleblowers tell Tucker Carlson that the NSA is spying on him, and not just that, but they're going to leak his secrets, in order to take Tucker Carlson off the air. Because that's a thing the NSA cares about. Tucker Carlson.

You betcha.

[T]he person who had contacted him "repeated back to us information about a story that we are working on that could have only come directly from my texts and emails."

"There's no other possible source for that information," Carlson claimed. "Period."

"The NSA captured that information without our knowledge and did it for political reasons," he then said. "The Biden administration is spying on us. We have confirmed that."

As Erik Wemple reports, Tucker said he did a FOIA request for "all information that the NSA and other agencies have gathered about this show." That's definitely how you find out if the NSA is spying on you.

And somehow or another, Tucker claims to have CONFIRMED this. That is some very speedy confirming! On Sunday, the whistleblower told Tucker the NSA was spying on him, and Tucker and his journalism team got it confirmed by Monday's broadcast. Great work, Tuckerteam! Must be some real big Deep Throatin' goin' on in Tuckertown!

We should all take this at face value because why would Tucker just make shit up? More on that in a second.

As Philip Bump notes at the Washington Post, the NSA doesn't even do what Tucker is claiming it does. It doesn't operate domestically. If it's monitoring an international terrorist threat or a hostile foreign nation trying to steal an American election, and if in that surveillance it picks up comms with an American, that person's name is hidden. If there's some reason it should be un-hidden, there is a process for proving why it should be. This process is called UNMASKING!11!1!!!! and it involves a FISA court.

And if — BIG IF — someone in the Biden administration did order the UNMASKING!1!11!! of an American citizen communicating with foreign actors and found that it was Tucker Carlson, then that says more about Tucker Carlson than it says about the NSA or the Biden administration.

As Bump reports, Tucker continued his malcontent bellyaching Tuesday night:

On Tuesday night, Carlson told his viewers that he had called the office of NSA Director Paul Nakasone — a "highly political left-wing four-star general" — and spoken with NSA officials who had "refused to say" if they had read his emails, "and then they refused even to explain why they couldn't answer that simple question."

Hate it when the NSA won't just tell you what they're working on. NSA parents are fucking TERRIBLE at Career Day.

More transcript from Tuesday:

"Some faceless hack in a powerful government spy agency decides he doesn't like what you think, so he is going to hurt you and there's nothing you can do about it. That could happen to you," Carlson said. "Now that the Biden administration has classified tens of millions of patriotic Americans," he later added, "the kind who served in the military and fly flags in front of their homes as potential domestic terrorists, white supremacist saboteurs, we're going to see a whole lot more of this kind of thing, a whole lot more."

IF THEY CAN DO IT TO TUCKER — and why wouldn't you think they're doing it to Tucker, Tucker just said for a fact they're doing it to Tucker — THEY WILL DO IT TO YOUUUUUUUUUUUU! ("You" here of course refers to the Nazi-adjacent white nationalists who watch Tucker's show, which brings this in line with Tucker's months-long campaign to convince his viewers that the government going after the terrorists who attacked America on January 6 is tantamount to them going after average Fox News fans.)

The NSA actually responded to this crap for some reason:

On June 28, 2021, Tucker Carlson alleged that the National Security Agency has been 'monitoring our electronic communications and is planning to leak them in an attempt to take this show off the air.' This allegation is untrue. Tucker Carlson has never been an intelligence target of the Agency and the NSA has never had any plans to try to take his program off the air.

NSA has a foreign intelligence mission. We target foreign powers to generate insights on foreign activities that could harm the United States. With limited exceptions (e.g. an emergency), NSA may not target a US citizen without a court order that explicitly authorizes the targeting.

That leaves a bit of wiggle room, we think! As Bump notes, the fact NSA said he's never been a "target" decidedly does not say they've never picked up Tucker Carlson's yelpy falsetto giggles in routine surveillance of bad foreign actors. However, they are pretty explicit about saying they have no want, need, or desire to interfere with Tucker's nightly White Power Hour on Fox News.

Now, should we take what the NSA says at face value? Not historically! The NSA has fucked up, bigly hugely massively, and it has said some real fibs. In fact, Bump spends a lot of time on the NSA's credibility issues as an agency, in order to put in context how bugfuck it is that the freaking NSA comes off more credible with that statement than Tucker does.

But alas, such is Tucker.

Of course, Tucker believes his audience is just pant-shitting stupid — and he's not wrong about that — so he knows their wee brains won't flicker on and off to alert them that what Tucker is describing is not even what the NSA does. They don't know what the NSA does. All they know is it is Deep State. They won't stop to think, "Wait, why would the NSA want Tucker Carlson off the air? And how would leaking information about whatever White Supremacist Of The Day story Tucker is working on accomplish any of that?"

They won't notice that when Tucker claims the NSA is spying on him "for political reasons," he hasn't actually proven that. They won't notice any of it. His viewers are his idiots, and he is their golden boy.

But fuck all that noise, because no sentient person should believe a word Tucker says. No less than Fox News lawyers have made this same general argument, albeit in much kindlier terms.

Hey, remember that time Tucker spent a week whining about how antifa did a vandalism to his house, and the Beltway media was like TUT TUT ANTIFA CROSSED THE LINE! but it turned out Tucker was pretty much full of shit?

Remember when Tucker spent a week scaremongering about covert plots to intercept secret Hunter Biden packages sent to Tucker through the UPS, but then UPS found it and everything was fine again?

Lotta grains of salt needed here. In fact, we'll take a whole bag of salt.

Wemple notes that press freedom groups don't seem to give a shit about Tucker's babbling, and neither does Fox News brass. Same goes for Fox News's on-air talent. In fact, the only person who seems to actually believe Tucker is Florida Man GOP Rep. Matt Gaetz, who's currently under investigation for alleged sex trafficking of a minor.

Wemple offers another possibility, though, for why Tucker might be caterwauling about something about to leak and trying to pin it on the NSA:

In charging that the government was planning to "leak" communications to attack "Tucker Carlson Tonight," the host was perhaps attempting to get ahead of an embarrassing news cycle or two.

Hey, remember that time Tucker started attacking Erik Wemple as a "mentally unbalanced middle aged man" who had allegedly found dirty dirties in Tucker's college yearbook, which led us to all learn about Tucker's membership in the so-called "Dan White Society," apparently named after the guy who murdered Harvey Milk, which would be on-brand for Tucker since he's always had weird hysterical reactions to gay stuff?

Point is, if a real bad story about Tucker comes out in the next couple days, everybody be sure to get mad at the NSA. That's what Tucker needs you to do, OK?

You know, allegedly.

[Washington Post]

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/21/07/02/1447203/the-internet-is-rotting

The Internet Is Rotting (theatlantic.com)

Posted by msmash on Friday July 02, 2021 @10:46AM from the closer-look dept.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity's knowledge together is coming undone. From a report:It turns out that link rot and content drift are endemic to the web, which is both unsurprising and shockingly risky for a library that has "billions of books and no central filing system." Imagine if libraries didn't exist and there was only a "sharing economy" for physical books: People could register what books they happened to have at home, and then others who wanted them could visit and peruse them. It's no surprise that such a system could fall out of date, with books no longer where they were advertised to be -- especially if someone reported a book being in someone else's home in 2015, and then an interested reader saw that 2015 report in 2021 and tried to visit the original home mentioned as holding it. That's what we have right now on the web.

[...] People tend to overlook the decay of the modern web, when in fact these numbers are extraordinary -- they represent a comprehensive breakdown in the chain of custody for facts. Libraries exist, and they still have books in them, but they aren't stewarding a huge percentage of the information that people are linking to, including within formal, legal documents. No one is. The flexibility of the web -- the very feature that makes it work, that had it eclipse CompuServe and other centrally organized networks -- diffuses responsibility for this core societal function.

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/21/07/05/144234/why-email-providers-scan-your-emails

Why Email Providers Scan Your Emails (consumerreports.org)

Posted by msmash on Monday July 05, 2021 @10:05AM from the closer-look dept.

An anonymous reader shares a report:If you receive emails flagged as spam or see a warning that a message might be a phishing attempt, it's a sign that your email provider is scanning your emails. The company may do that just to protect you from danger, but in some situations it can delve into your communications for other purposes, as well. Google announced that it would stop scanning Gmail users' email messages for ad targeting in 2017 -- but that doesn't mean it stopped scanning them altogether. Verizon didn't respond to requests for comments about Yahoo and AOL's current practices, but in 2018 the Wall Street Journal reported that both email providers were scanning emails for advertising. And Microsoft scans its Outlook users' emails for malicious content. Here's what major email providers say about why they currently scan users' messages.

Email providers can scan for spam and malicious links and attachments, often looking for patterns. [...] You may see lots of ads in your email inbox, but that doesn't necessarily mean your email provider is using the content of your messages to target you with marketing messages. For instance, like Google, Microsoft says that it refrains from using your email content for ad targeting. But it does target ads to consumers in Outlook, along with MSN, and other websites and apps. The data to do that come from partnering with third-party providers, plus your browsing activity and search history on Bing and Microsoft Edge, as well as information you've given the company, such as your gender, country, and date of birth.

[...] If you're using an email account provided by your employer, an administrator with qualifying credentials can typically access all your incoming and outgoing emails on that account, as well as any documents you create using your work account or that you receive in your work account. This allows companies to review emails as part of internal investigations and access their materials after an employee leaves the company. [...] Law enforcement can request access to emails, though warrants, court orders, or subpoenas may be required. Email providers may reject requests that don't satisfy applicable laws, and may narrow requests that ask for too much information. They may also object to producing information altogether.

Can Heat Pumps Change Demand for Air Conditioners Into a Climate-Change Win?
The New York Times reports: As global warming fuels deadly heat waves across the country, more Americans in places like the Pacific Northwest are rushing out to buy air-conditioners for the first time. One common concern is that a surge in air...

Speaking of Entrenched Tech Companies, Why Didn't Microsoft Die?
"Why didn't Microsoft die?" And what does that mean for other entrenched tech companies today? That's the question being asked by the New York Times' On Tech newsletter: For a decade or so, Microsoft botched so many significant technology tre...

CNN Reports 'Unprecedented Heat, Hundreds Dead' as Climate Change Hits the Northern Hemisphere
Canada's highest temperature ever recorded happened Tuesday, in the small British Columbia town of Lytton, reports CNN. But it's just part of "an unprecedented heat wave that has over a week killed hundreds of people and triggered more than 240 wildfires...

Will a Pandemic Wave of Automation Be Bad News for Workers?
The New York Times reports: When Kroger customers in Cincinnati shop online these days, their groceries may be picked out not by a worker in their local supermarket but by a robot in a nearby warehouse... And in the drive-through lane at Check...

YouTube Criticized For Removing Videos Documenting China's Persecution of Uighur Muslims
"A human rights group that attracted millions of views on YouTube to testimonies from people who say their families have disappeared in China's Xinjiang region is moving its videos to little-known service Odysee after some were taken down by the Google-own...

Bitcoin.org Loses in Court, Owes $48,600 to Self-Proclaimed Bitcoin Creator Craig Wright
"A U.K. high court told Bitcoin.org it can no longer share the 2008 white paper that outlines what bitcoin is on its website," reports Business Insider, "delivering a victory to Craig Wright, a computer scientist who claimed he wrote the original document....

California Tests Off-the-Grid Solutions to Climate-Related Power Outages
California's energy commission has funded dozens of projects "serving as test beds for policies that might lead to commercialization of microgrids," reports the Associated Press: When a wildfire tore through Briceburg nearly two years ago, the tiny com...

Apple is 'Decentralizing Out of Silicon Valley'
9to5Mac writes: Amid pushback regarding Apple's plans to return to in-person work this fall, Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reports that Apple is "ramping up efforts to decentralize out of Silicon Valley." In the latest edition of his Power On newsletter, Gur...

New Instant Water Disinfectant 'Millions of Times More Effective' Than Commercial Methods
Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares news from UPI: The creators of a new instant water disinfectant, made using only hydrogen and the surrounding air, claim their invention is "millions of times more effective" at ridding water of viruses and bact...

San Francisco Startup Hopes to Open Sushi Bar Serving Lab-Grown Salmon
The San Francisco Chronicle reports on a startup named Wildtype that hopes to open a unique sushi bar this fall serving salmon grown in a lab: Like other alternative meat companies, Wildtype hopes it can eventually produce enough fish to be sold at gr...

THERE'S STILL A WHOLE LOTTA

PANDEMIC GOING ON

PANDEMIC

THE WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT

Photo of flu patients during the First World War

If you prefer your data in a visual format, here's the current map from COVID Exit Strategy, using data from the CDC and the COVID Tracking Project.

I want to add this link to the weekly report. It's important to remember:

A Sense of Doubt blog post #1983 - Is Coronavirus more contagious and more deadly than the flu? YES.

ALSO... I am seeing a big discrepancy between the Johns Hopkins data in death totals and WORLDOMETER data, which aggregates data from many more sources. Could this be the slow down due to the change in how the CDC obtains the data, having it filter first through Health and Human Services department.

WEEKLY PANDEMIC REPORT - JOHNS HOPKINS

Anyway, as usual, here's the weekly links to the data about cases (lower than reality) and deaths (lower than reality, also) due to COVID-19.

Data can be found here, as always:

COVID-19 Dashboard by the Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins University (JHU)

This is also a good data site:

Worldometer - Coronavirus info

Last updated: July 12, 2021, 00:59 GMT

United States

Coronavirus Cases:

34,732,753

Deaths:

622,845

Recovered:

29,244,103

Daily Cases Graph - Daily Deaths Graph

Projections

About Worldometer

Worldometer manually analyzes, validates, and aggregates data from thousands of sources in real time and provides global COVID-19 live statistics for a wide audience of caring people around the world.

Our data is also trusted and used by the UK Government, Johns Hopkins CSSE, the Government of Thailand, the Government of Vietnam, the Government of Pakistan, Financial Times, The New York Times, Business Insider, BBC, and many others.

Over the past 15 years, our statistics have been requested by, and provided to Oxford University Press, Wiley, Pearson, CERN, World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), The Atlantic, BBC, Milton J. Rubenstein Museum of Science & Technology, Science Museum of Virginia, Morgan Stanley, IBM, Hewlett Packard, Dell, Kaspersky, PricewaterhouseCoopers, Amazon Alexa, Google Translate, the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development (Rio+20), the U2 concert, and many others.

Worldometer is cited as a source in over 10,000 published books and in more than 6,000 professional journal articles and was voted as one of the best free reference websites by the American Library Association (ALA), the oldest and largest library association in the world.

THE CORONAVIRUS IS MUTATING NOW WHAT?

Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic - The Atlantic

A Red Cross worker in the United States, 1918

https://www.historyextra.com/period/20th-century/spanish-flu-the-virus-that-changed-the-world/

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- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 2107.10 - 10:10

- Days ago = 2199 days ago

- New note - On 1807.06, I ceased daily transmission of my Hey Mom feature after three years of daily conversations. I plan to continue Hey Mom posts at least twice per week but will continue to post the days since ("Days Ago") count on my blog each day. The blog entry numbering in the title has changed to reflect total Sense of Doubt posts since I began the blog on 0705.04, which include Hey Mom posts, Daily Bowie posts, and Sense of Doubt posts. Hey Mom posts will still be numbered sequentially. New Hey Mom posts will use the same format as all the other Hey Mom posts; all other posts will feature this format seen here.

No comments:

I am Christopher Tower the gmr

I am Christopher Tower (or Chris), and I am a writer of stuff. I grew up in Michigan; I now live in the Portland, OR metro area. I play Ultimate, ride a bike, and supposedly educate college persons while myself being educated in college. I am married with two kids, a beagle, a curly lab, and a fiesty pug/frenche mix. I like sushi. I love all SF, fantasy, comic books, D&D, board games, and Gnosticism. I am a Jungian. I am currently studying Clinical Mental Health Counseling at Walden University.

SENSE OF DOUBT STATUS AS OF 0705.04 - 16:45

Sense of Doubt is not currently dedicated to any themes or special interest. The subject matter is mine and may range from comic books to ultimate or from Baseball to feminist-centered media criticism. Until I feel I have enough content for multiple blogs, or until I am seized with a desire to create multiple blogs, this is it, and appropriately so. "Sense of Doubt" came about in Bowie’s Berlin period and the dark, ambient collaborations with Brian Eno. Like the Bowie of 1978, I have my own darkness that steals over me and through me, infecting everything. At the risk of sounding far too melodramatically obsessed with my own self-flagellations, this blog dedicates itself to that darkness, that infection. But it’s fun, too. Hey, I can be amusing? Or not. It’s the way of the [w]rench. Neurosis compelling action in insecure double-checking and misunderstanding evasions. It is my way.

More from the original description text that needed editing in 2015: Furthermore, Sense of Doubt is dedicated to the random. The theme is no theme. Just questions, doubt, and uncertainty. Feel the power of not knowing the answer. So dedicated on the last day of July 2006 by the Galactic Monkey Wrench.

The Galactic Monkey Wrench

This is the logo of the Galactic Monkey Wrench. I was given the nickname Galactic Monkey Wrench in college by a friend of mine who felt that I threw the monkey wrench into the cosmos at every available opportunity. Later, in discussions with my best friend, who is the Lord of Chaos (the Loc), he asked for my title and when I told him, without thinking, he blurted out "the gmr!" Since this was random and we appreciate randomness, I became the gmr, even though technically I should be the gmw. But gmw sounds like a car or some industrial manufacturing firm that makes a strange widget of which one has never heard. This acronym fetish may make no sense to anyone else, but my friend and I are quite driven to provide acronyms for many things. At the very least, it allows us to keep our conversations obscure and often private as no one knows about what we're talking.

Monkey Wrench Books

Chris's books

A Feast for Crows

by George R.R. Martin

This book is a little slower than the others. But if you become invested in this series, it provides key information about the history of Westeros and the lands across the Narrow Sea. It may not contain chapters with my favorite characters ...

A Game of Thrones

by George R.R. Martin

Do I really need to review this book? It's one of the best books I have ever read. Martin is a great writer. All the books are great, and I am loving my time rereading them. If you have not checked out these books, start here and get ready ...

The Golden City

by John Twelve Hawks

These books are immensely entertaining. Treat yourself to some strong writing, great action, compelling characters, and a mix of metaphysics and theology. The ending of this third book, which is presumably the last, is anti-climactic and so...

Pathfinder

by Orson Scott Card

This was a fun book. Not OSC's best but very good OSC nonetheless. The best thing about is the time travel, slowing, and speeding powers of the characters and how OSC engages the reader in discussion of causality and time paradox. For fans ...

Swamplandia!

by Karen Russell

This book came to me via my wife Liesel who discovered it and urged me to read it. Beautifully written with compelling characters and a sense of the magical (yet realistic, somewhat). Funny yet full of the pathos that marks a good if not gr...

sense of doubt

Hey, Mom! The Explanation.

Saturday, July 10, 2021

A Sense of Doubt blog post #2335 - CITIZEN'S ARREST - We Need More DARNELLA - Weekly Hodge Podge for 2107.10

Allen Weisselberg And Trump Org Are Pretty Dumb Criminals, ALLEGEDLY

No shit just facts

THE SCHEME

Let's tally this shit up!

Let's say some final thoughts, and then end this post!

What’s behind the renewed conflict in Ethiopia’s Tigray region?

In Jill Biden’s Vogue cover, there’s optimism and rebuke

Republicans have a new strategy: Blue Lies Matter

LGBTQ country singers still face ‘roadblocks’ in Nashville. But this Pride Month felt like a new era.

Why Your Ritualistic June Lottery Can Bring July Sorrows. Tabs, Wed., June 30, 2021

Derek Chauvin Literally Can’t Say How Sorry He Is He Murdered George Floyd

When Far-Right PACs Attack Republicans, Who Wins? The American Public, That’s Who.

Gov. Ron DeSantis Signs Florida Mandate to Survey College Students' Views...Because He's Worried About 'Indoctrination'

If conservatives like DeSantis have nothing else, they have the nerve. Florida's new 'viewpoint diversity' mandate is pure hypocrisy.

Wikimedia Bans Admin of Wikipedia Croatia For Pushing Radical Agenda (therecord.media)

Green Man's Tunnel is a legendary site among seekers of haunted places

French Engineer Claims He's Solved the Zodiac Killer's Final Code (msn.com)

Are Black Creators Really on ‘Strike’ From TikTok?

MORE FROM THE POST

America forgot how to make proper pie. Can we remember before it’s too late?

130 countries sign on to global minimum tax plan, creating momentum for Biden push

Supreme Court upholds Arizona voting laws that lower court found were unfair to minorities

A 7-year-old judo student was slammed to the ground 27 times. He died months later.

I have known hot places. The Northwest heat wave feels apocalyptic.

Did NSA Put Secret Wire Tapps In Tucker Carlson's Underpants, Or Is He Just Babbling?

The Internet Is Rotting (theatlantic.com)

Why Email Providers Scan Your Emails (consumerreports.org)

United States

Coronavirus Cases:

Deaths:

Recovered:

No comments: