It gave Trump the ability to stoke his base, and wave his dick around and pretend to be brave.

It now turns out that fraudulent accounts on social media played a large role in instigating the caravan, and applying the old saw of cui bono, the most likely suspects are people tied to Trump and the Republican party:

Just days before the migrant caravan set out from Honduras, an imposter stole the identity of a prominent early supporter on Facebook, using a fake account to try to boost the caravan’s numbers.

Bartolo Fuentes, a Honduran activist, journalist, and former lawmaker told BuzzFeed News that someone used the phony account to send Facebook messages falsely claiming that established migrant groups were organizing the effort. News like that — coming from a well-known public figure in Honduras, such as Fuentes — could go a long way to convincing people to join the group of migrants traveling to the US.

The caravan, which threaded north through Guatemala and Mexico, eventually ballooned in size to more than 7,000 people. It also became a political flashpoint in the lead-up to last month’s US midterm elections.In response to a query from BuzzFeed News, a Facebook spokesperson said the phony account “was removed for violating [the company’s] misrepresentation policy,” but declined to share any further information, such as what country it originated from, what email address was used to open it, or any other details that might reveal who was behind it. Facebook added that, barring a subpoena or request from law enforcement, it does not share such information out of respect for the privacy of its users.

Actually Facebook does share such information (Cambridge Analytica), but only with people who won’t advertise the fact.

As far as Fuentes can tell, the fake account, which primarily used Facebook Messenger to spread disinformation, was created less than a week before the caravan was scheduled to depart.

On his real account, Fuentes did post a few times about the caravan, which he said he’d heard about in mid-September after being invited to join a small private WhatsApp group of would-be migrants. One of his posts, from Oct. 4, showed a stylized image of a bedraggled migrant and indicated the caravan “spontaneously convened” without any formal organizer.

But the messages being sent by the imposter, which also had Fuentes’s photo, had a very different flavor, the former lawmaker learned. They claimed that the prominent and influential migrant rights organization Pueblo Sin Fronteras was organizing the caravan and would be leading it on the arduous journey.

But the news was fake. Although Pueblo Sin Fronteras had organized several previous caravans, including a big one in the spring that attracted 1,500 people, it staunchly opposed the latest effort based on well-founded fears it would stoke anti-immigrant sentiment ahead of the elections.

The bogus Fuentes account stands out for its sophistication and timing. It was created before the caravan departed, when the event had not yet attracted news coverage. It operated entirely in Spanish and precisely targeted influencers within the migrant rights community. And rather than criticize or undermine the caravan — as other online campaigns would later attempt to do — it was used to legitimize the event, making a loosely structured grassroots event appear to be a well-organized effort by an established migrant group with a proven track record of successfully bringing Central American people to the US border.

Fuentes has been unable to get any information from Facebook about the account, but one small detail stood out. Whoever created it listed the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa as Fuentes’s hometown, rather than the San Pedro Sula suburb of El Progreso. That might seem like a minor error, but it’s the sort of mistake a foreigner — not a Honduran — [also, in my personal opinion, not a member of the FSB or GRU] would make about the well-known former lawmaker, whose left-wing party stands in opposition to the current president’s administration.

………

The largest caravan organized by Pueblo Sin Fronteras numbered 1,500 people. To this day, Mujica said he is mystified by how the latest caravan could have grown so large.

“Nobody wanted this to take place so close to the elections,” he added. “Somebody was clearly trying to mislead people to generate more interest in the caravan.”

This is precisely the sort of Karl Rove style rat-f%$#ery that we see from the Republicans.   (Rove once planted bugs in his own office to create the impression that his opponents were spying on him)

There is Republican stink all over this.

The Texas Rangers investigated and charged her with manslaughter.

Dallas County District Attorney Faith Johnson convened a grand jury, and Guyger has been indicted for murder:

A former Dallas police officer who walked into an unarmed man’s apartment on Sept. 6 and shot him while wearing her police uniform has been indicted on a charge of murder.

The Dallas County grand jury began hearing the case against Amber Guyger, 30, on Monday. Guyger was originally charged with manslaughter in the shooting death of 26-year-old Botham Shem Jean. She was released from jail on a $300,000 bond about an hour after turning herself in.

District Attorney Faith Johnson said that by 3 p.m., Guyger had turned herself back in on the murder charge. Her bond was transferred and she has been released.

Asked why the grand jury indicted Guyger on a murder charge, Johnson said, “We presented the evidence and explained the law.” She added that the law prohibits her from talking about the evidence presented to the grand jury.

She said her office had a “very spirited conversation” with the Texas Rangers, the lead investigators in the case, back in September.

“They chose to file this case as manslaughter,” she said. “We did our own investigation.”

A district attorney who doesn’t spend their time covering up for the police is remarkable.

The fact that she is a Republican makes it it even more remarkable.

She was turfed out in recent elections, but her replacement, Democrat John Creuzot ran on criminal justice reform, so my guess is that he will continue to pursue this case with vigor.

The @whca are cowards. The media is complicit. And I couldn't be prouder. https://t.co/OOIFGuZ731

— Michelle Wolf (@michelleisawolf) November 19, 2018

I have to agree.

This is one of the greatest call signs for a pilot ever:

What a call sign. pic.twitter.com/mPcbi9v9Co

— Steve Trimble (@TheDEWLine) November 19, 2018

Needless to say, I’m sure that his wingmen are sick and tired of being called, “The Pips.”

I alway wondered how Albert Shanker ended up being the man who destroyed the 20^th century world.

Well, this New York Times Op/Ed provides context for both that joke, as well as a for the war on teachers and unions that some among liberal “education reformers” have engaged in for years.

The short version is that in 1968, there was a majority black school district set up in Ocean Hill-Brownsville (Brooklyn), and one of their first actions wqas to fire some white teachers for being white, and the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), Shanker’s union, went on strike, arguing, IMNSHO correctly, that arbitrary hiring and firing makes unionization is meaningless or impossible.

Shanker won, and the Ocean Hill-Brownsville school board lost, and teachers’ unions became the bête noire of the liberal education reform community. (Conservatives and Republicans have always been opposed to labor unions generally, and teacher unions specifically)

On Nov. 17, 1968, Albert Shanker, a tough Queens-bred union president, stood next to New York City’s patrician mayor, John Lindsay, to announce a settlement to a crippling teacher strike that had thrown a million students out of New York City public schools for weeks on end. The divisive strike laid bare long simmering tensions within American liberalism over unions, education and race. Almost a half-century later, the evolution in liberal attitudes that the strike symbolized created vulnerabilities that a very different son of Queens, Donald Trump, exploited in his rise to the presidency.

By the late 1960s, after years of frustration with vicious white resistance to school integration, many African-American leaders supported the creation of a black-controlled local school district in the low-income Ocean Hill-Brownsville section of Brooklyn. The idea was that the district would hire more minority schoolteachers in order to provide role models for students and adopt a curriculum that was culturally affirming.

A firestorm erupted, however, when the local school board (then known as the governing board) sent a telegram to 19 unionized educators indicating that the board “voted to end your employment in the schools of this district.” The list included 18 white educators and one black teacher, mistakenly included, who was immediately reinstated once the error was discovered. A hearing by a retired African-American judge hired by the board, Francis Rivers, found that there were no credible charges against the teachers. But Rhody McCoy, the Ocean Hill-Brownsville local superintendent, told The New York Times, “Not one of these teachers will be allowed to teach anywhere in the city. The black community will see to that.” To protest the terminations, teachers throughout the city began a series of strikes shutting down the nation’s largest school system from early September through mid-November.

………

To begin with, Shanker believed he had no choice but to call a strike to protect his members from arbitrary dismissal. If an employer — of whatever race — had the right to dismiss unionized employees without due process, why have a union? Shanker understood that conservatives didn’t believe in collective bargaining rights and due process. But wasn’t it a bedrock liberal principle, he asked, for workers to have a right to organize and protect themselves from arbitrary actions by their employers?

Shanker and Rustin also thought it was important to fight for integrated schools and noted that “community control” was originally the slogan adopted by white parents in Queens who opposed desegregation. Shanker supported the creation of the nation’s first nonselective magnet schools to foster integration and cited the 1966 Coleman Report, which found that low-income students achieved at much higher levels in socioeconomically integrated schools than in those with concentrated poverty. Settling for community control of segregated schools was wrong, Rustin argued. The idea was, as he put it, “the spiritual descendant of states’ rights.”

………

Instead, to improve teacher diversity, Shanker worked hard to unionize teacher aides and to negotiate a stipend for them to go back to school, get their college degrees and become teachers themselves. Over time, more than 8,000 paraprofessionals became teachers, providing the largest single source of minority teachers in New York City.

When the third and final strike was settled, the community control effort was gutted. Shanker won among broader public opinion, but lost among liberals. Many progressives dismissed Shanker, a cerebral former graduate student in philosophy, as a madman, as a well-known joke from the era suggests. In Woody Allen’s 1973 science fiction comedy, “Sleeper,” Mr. Allen’s character wakes up two centuries in the future to find that that civilization was destroyed when “a man by the name of Albert Shanker got hold of a nuclear warhead.”

More generally, over the subsequent 50 years, the Lindsay/Bundy/Carmichael worldview would largely prevail over the Shanker/Rustin/Harrington approach among progressives. In the years since Ocean Hill-Brownsville, many upper-middle class liberals have demonstrated a lukewarm attitude toward unions. When Democrats held majorities in Congress under presidents Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, the progressive coalition failed to prioritize labor law reforms to give unions a fair shot at surviving. Likewise, those same Democratic administrations largely avoided the fight to support school integration, favoring instead spending more money for high-poverty schools. And at the federal level, Democrats have largely adopted the view articulated by Bundy and others involved in the Ocean Hill-Brownsville conflict that race could be an explicit factor in hiring decisions.

The shifts on unions, school integration and race-conscious decision-making that the 1968 teachers strikes symbolized are not unrelated to the disastrous election in 2016, a calamity from which progressives only partially recovered in 2018. A strong labor movement, an integrated public school system and a legal commitment to equal treatment of individuals by race all help make authoritarian white nationalism less appealing. But the reduced progressive commitment to these critical bulwarks helped clear the way for a demagogue.

This does provide at least a partial explanation of the moral vacuity of the modern education reform, as well as the disastrous abandonment of the labor movement by the modern Democratic Party.

He was 95, and had been in ill health for the past year or so.

Before you ask, I know that Batman is DC and not Marvel, and that he was created by Bob Kane (Eli Katz) and Bill (Milton) Finger.

I’m just doing a bit of light hearted trolling, as Lee did at the wedding of Reed Richards and Sue Storm, when, at the end of the comic, Lee and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) wrote themselves in as gate crashers given the heave-ho by Nick Fury.

It’s Lee and Kirby doing what every reader of that issue wanted to do: Get thrown out of the superhero wedding of the year.

Batman crying is a sort of an homage to Lee’s sometimes mischievous sense of humor.

In case you are wondering, Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber), Kane, Kirby and Finger were all Jewish.

In a quick perusal of comic book artists of that era, it appears that the only one who wasn’t Jewish was Steve Ditko, whose religion was unclear, but given his Czech origins, he was probably born Catholic.

I still have pretzels, but no beer tonight.

In terms of the Senate, the Democratic incumbents who lost, Donnelly, McKaskill, and Heitkamp, were profoundly weak tea.

I wish that Manchin was included in that list, because while I understand that the dynamics of the Democratic Party tends to promote narcissistic preeners who are basically useless (the aforementioned Donnelly, McKaskill, and Heitkamp), they should never promote Disloyal Democrats.

Also Bob Menendez, because he’s corrupt as hell and would be in jail but for the Supreme Court making it impossible to prosecute politicians for corruption.

The only bright side in terms of incumbents being turfed out was Dean Heller of Nevada.

On the House side, there is a bright side, Dwems retaking the house, David Brat being defeated in VA, as did Dana Rohrabacher in California, and Pete “The Stupidest Motherf%$#er in Texas” Sessions.

On the not so bright side, you have Duncan Hunter, Jr., who won even though he is under indictment for embezzling campaign funds, and virulent racist Steven King (R-IA) won narrowly.

In governor’s races, the Democrats picked up 7 seats nationwide, but none pleased me more than the loss of Scott Walker.

Florida and Georgia are still technically in play, but I won’t hold my breath

The AFL-CIO put it best on their statement, “Scott Walker was a national disgrace.”

In state houses, about 300 seats were picked up by Dems, erasing about 1/3 of the seats they lost under Obama.

Also, 7 state houses flipped, most notably the New York State Senate, whose Republican Senate was decisively flipped, much to the chagrin of Andrew “Rat Faced Andy” Cuomo, who has tried to ensure Republican control so that he won’t have to veto progressive legislation. (See Democrats, disloyal)

We also had a fair number of initiatives.

Anti-abortion initiatives in West Virginia and Alabama passed, and failed in Oregon.

Three initiates in California were defeated under a deluge of Wall Street money, price controls in response to profiteering by dialysis clinics, and a public bank for Los Angeles were deleted.

Redistricting reform passed everywhere it was on the ballot, Colorado, Michigan, Missouri and Utah, along with a sort-of redistricting reform in Ohio.

Weed also did well, with victories in Michigan, Missouri, Utah, and North Dakota.

Medicaid expansion was on the ballot in 4 states, with it passing in 3 states. ( Idaho, Nebraska, and Utah, and a loss in Montana)

There are also three new Democratic governors who will likely implement the policy.

On criminal justice reform, there were some significant ballot measures passed, most notably restoring voting rights to 1½ million felons in the Florida, which should make a difference in future elections.

Louisiana repealed a Jim Crow law that allowed for 10-2 guilty verdicts for most felonies.

Washington passed changes to standards for police shootings, so prosecutors no longer have to show actual malice.

All in all, last night was not good as I had hoped, but not as bad as I had feared.

My only question now is, “How will Nancy Pelosi f%$# this up?”

Is that a circular slide rule?

Yep, that’s a circular slide rule

Also known as an E6B flight computer

I came across the 2nd image online, and thought, “Is that Mr. Spock using a circular slide rule in the 23^rd century?”

Why yes, yes it is.

Given Gene Roddenberry’s background, he flew aircraft in WWII and was an airline pilot for TWA after the war, I’m thinking that at least one of these probably came from him.

Spock and slide rules:  This is like a total geek-gasm.

For most of us, the actions by, “Betsy Riot, a neo-suffragette, punk-patriot resistance movement,” would be a source of amusement, (it involved googly eyes) but for Nebraska Congressman, and humorless wanker, Jeff Fortenberry (NE-1), it’s a sign of just how dangerous and violent our political discourse has become.

Has anyone else noticed just what delicate snowflakes Republicans are?

Yes, he actually tweeted his outrage, and the responses to it are epic.

H/t DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

The closed-door “training academy” was aimed at a select group: recent law school graduates who had secured prestigious clerkships with federal judges. It was organized by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative group that has played a leading role in moving the courts to the right, and it had some unusual requirements.

“Generous donors,” the application materials said, were making “a significant financial investment in each and every attendee.” In exchange, the future law clerks would be required to promise to keep the program’s teaching materials secret and pledge not to use what they learned “for any purpose contrary to the mission or interest of the Heritage Foundation.”

………

“Law clerks are not supposed to be part of a cohort of secretly financed and trained partisans of an organization that describes itself on its own web page as ‘the bastion of the American conservative movement,’” said Pamela S. Karlan, a law professor at Stanford. “The idea that clerks will be trained to elevate the Heritage Foundation’s views, or the views of judges handpicked by the foundation, perverts the very idea of a clerkship.”

On Thursday afternoon, a few hours after The New York Times published an online article about the training, Heritage announced that it was suspending the program.

………

According to the application materials, Heritage’s unnamed donors were to pay for travel expenses to Washington, hotel rooms and meals during the three-day program. The curriculum would cover, the materials said, “originalism, textualism, habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights and other substantive legal and practical subject matter.” Originalism and textualism are modes of interpreting the Constitution and statutes that are generally but not exclusively associated with conservatives.

The application called for several short essays. One prompt said, “Please describe your understanding of originalism.” Another said, “Please identify the United States Supreme Court justice (past or present) whose jurisprudential philosophy and approach to judging you agree with most, and explain why.”

This is as disturbing as it is completely expected.

It appears that murdering their columnists is a bridge too far for the Washington Post editorial board:

The Washington Post told a prominent Republican lobbyist he’d lose his gig as a contributing opinion writer unless he stopped lobbying for Saudi Arabia, a spokesperson for the newspaper confirmed Tuesday.

The ultimatum came after the disappearance of Jamal Khashoggi, a U.S. permanent resident who was a columnist for the Post and wrote critically of the Saudi government. Khashoggi was last seen entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul earlier this month, and allegations that he was killed by Saudi authorities have strained the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.

The lobbyist, Ed Rogers, the chairman of the BGR Group, writes for the newspaper’s PostPartisan blog.

Kristine Coratti Kelly, a spokeswoman for the Post, confirmed that the newspaper told Rogers he’d no longer be able to contribute if he continued to lobby for Saudi Arabia. She declined to comment further.

Lobbying for the slaughter and starvation of hundreds of thousands of Yemenis, that’s fine, but murder one Post columnist, that is simply beyond the pals.

As Ian Walsh so pithily notes:

It’s not that Kashoggi’s death isn’t a crime, but that any number of nameless people can be killed, raped, and tortured, and elites don’t care. It’s only when it’s one of them that they care.

Normal people are nothing–less than nothing–to our elites.

But they take care of their own.

But still, we’re going to help the House of Saud starve, bomb, and burn civilians throughout Yemen.

This is a relationship that is not in the long term interest of the United States.

OIt looks likely that Democrat Bob Menendez is in a tight race with Republican Bob Hugin for his New Jersey US Senate Seat.

Note that New Jersey has not voted for a Republican Presidential Candidate since 1988, and hasn’t elected a Republican Senator since 1978. (There have been some ‘Phant appointments)

But Hugins is in the margin of error, because he was tried for corruption and the jury hung, and because the Supreme Court made it next to impossible to prosecute corrupt politicians with the Bob “Governor Ultrasound” McDonnell decision.

The Democrats are not running against Wall Street, because they want the campaign cash, they are in hock up to their eyeballs to big pharma, (Jim Manchin’s kid is behind price gouging on the Epi-Pen), and now they are putting forward corrupt candidates.

This is the stupidest Democratic Party campaign strategy since ……… Well, 2016, but you get my point.

I was in a restaurant, and there it was, right next to the cash register.

Discretion being the only part of valor here, I did not try to check out how it worked.

Made me think of my dad, and a family story.

Let’s just say that this 14 year old had some serious egg on his face.

A former schoolmate of Brett Kavanaugh’s accuser wrote a Facebook post saying she recalls hearing about the alleged assault involving Kavanaugh, though she says she has no first-hand information to corroborate the accuser’s claims.

“Christine Blasey Ford was a year or so behind me,” wrote the woman, Cristina Miranda King, who now works as a performing arts curator in Mexico City. “I did not know her personally but I remember her. This incident did happen.”

She added, “Many of us heard a buzz about it indirectly with few specific details. However Christine’s vivid recollection should be more than enough for us to truly, deeply know that the accusation is true.”

She has since deleted her tweet, but there is still a Google Cache copy:

Additionally, we have a report that people who have worked with him in the court want to come forward, but they are concerned about retaliations:

The top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee were both approached in July by an attorney claiming to have information relevant to the confirmation of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. The attorney claimed in his letter that multiple employees of the federal judiciary would be willing to speak to investigators, but received no reply to multiple attempts to make contact, he told The Intercept.

Cyrus Sanai made his first attempt to reach out to Sens. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., in a letter dated July 24.

Sanai told the committee leadership that “there are persons who work for, or who have worked for, the federal judiciary who have important stories to tell about disgraced former Chief Judge Alex Kozinski, and his mentee, current United States Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. I know that there are people who wish to speak out but fear retaliation because I have been contacted by more than a half-dozen such persons since Judge Kozinski resigned in disgrace.”

Sanai is the California attorney who blew the whistle on Kozinski years before a series of articles in the Washington Post in December finally brought about the resignation of the former chief judge of the 9th Circuit Court over sexual harassment revelations. Sanai has long challenged the judiciary and was deemed a “vexatious litigant” by one trial court, an attempted designation that was overturned on appeal.

It appears that Feinstein^* was a willing participant in efforts to brush this under the carpet, which is yet another reason to vote for her Democratic^† opponent in November.

It also appears that Trump’s claim that the FBI can’t probe Kavanaugh because the statute of limitations have expired is complete bollocks.

So says John Yoo, who appears to be making a statement against his own interest, which makes his analysis more credible.

Yoo is a former a lawyer from the Bush-the-younger administration, who among other things argued for an unlimited Presidential power to torture:

The White House could order the FBI to investigate the sexual assault allegation against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, several former senior White House and Justice Department officials from both parties said Wednesday, contradicting President Donald Trump’s claims that doing so would exceed the FBI’s mandate.

………

But several officials who have had direct roles in the nomination and background check process said it’s common, as part of the FBI’s vetting of presidential nominees for judicial posts and executive branch jobs, to investigate matters that do not qualify as federal crimes. Some noted that the Trump White House itself enlisted the FBI last winter to explore spousal abuse claims against former White House Staff Secretary Rob Porter.

“What happened here is actually not unusual,” said John Yoo, a senior Justice Department official under President George W. Bush. 

“The Judiciary Committee will often say to the Justice Department: ‘Can you send the agents back out and find out if this is true, find out what happened with this? … The normal procedure for this would have been to send the FBI out,” Yoo added.

A former Obama administration lawyer also said the FBI would look into the matter if the White House relayed such a request.

“If the FBI was asked to do it, it would do it,” said the attorney, who asked not to be named. “It doesn’t have to be a federal crime. They’ve investigating someone’s suitability for the position. … It has nothing to do with it being a federal crime.”

There is a very heavy smell of desperation here.

^*Full disclosure, my great grandfather, Harry Goldman, and her grandfather, Sam Goldman were brothers, though we have never met, either in person or electronically.
^†California jungle primary, don’t you know. 

Success of an asymmetric (“terror”) attack is measured by the extent of reactive self-injury it ultimately induces on the more powerful side of the asymmetry.

— William Gibson (@GreatDismal) September 11, 2018

Once again, I would suggest that anyone who hasn’t read Eric Frank Russell’s magnum opus Wasp, in which a man is sent to be an agent provocateur on the planet of an empire at war with Earth, and his mission is not to collect intelligence or do damage, but rather to provoke an overreaction by the authorities:

“Phew!” Mowry raised his eyebrows.

“Finally, let’s consider this auto smash. We know the cause; the survivor was able to tell us before he died. He said the driver lost control at high speed while swiping at a wasp which had flown in through a window and started buzzing around his face.”

“It nearly happened to me once.”

Ignoring that, Wolf went on, “The weight of a wasp is under half an ounce. Compared with a human being its size is minute, its strength negligible. Its sole armament is a tiny syringe holding a drop of irritant, formic acid, and in this case it didn’t even use it. Nevertheless it killed four big men and converted a large, powerful car into a heap of scrap.”

………

“However,” Wolf went on, “the problem becomes less formidable than it looks if we bear in mind that one man can shake a government, two men temporarily can put down an army twenty-seven thousands strong, or one small wasp can slay four comparative giants and destroy their huge machine into the bargain.” He paused, watching the other for effect, continued, “Which means that by scrawling suitable words upon a wall, the right man in the right place at the right time might immobilize an armoured division with the aid of nothing more than a piece of chalk.”

Terrorism is not about winning, it’s about making us destroy ourselves, or as DC at the Stellar Parthenon BBS says, “Chaos is Job Won.”

Theranos has told its investors that the company will wrap up, paying “unsecured creditors its remaining cash,” according to The Wall Street Journal.

The company’s dissolution comes months after its top two executives, ex-CEO Elizabeth Holmes and former President Ramesh “Sunny” Balwani, were federally prosecuted for criminal wire fraud.

Theranos, with Holmes at the helm, had claimed that it could run a slew of physiological tests with a simple pin-prick of blood. That assertion turned out to be false.

As Ars reported previously, in March 2018, the Securities and Exchange Commission filed civil charges against Holmes, Balwani, and Theranos, alleging that they had committed “massive fraud.” The SEC accused them of obtaining $700 million in investments by orchestrating an “elaborate, years-long fraud in which they exaggerated or made false statements about the company’s technology, business, and financial performance.”

This is not a surprise.

I recalled that she came from money, she does, the  Fleischmann’s yeast fortune, as I confirmed on Wikipedia, but I found something else that was surprising:

Holmes was born in Washington, D.C. Holmes’ father, Christian Rasmus Holmes IV, was a vice president at Enron

That’s right, Enron.

Maybe that should have been a hint to the people who were so fascinated by her story.

I need to make it clear that her father was not involved in any of the accounting irregularities that brought down Enron, but one would have thought that it would have rung a bell among the clueless investors who showered her with millions billions.

Still, I do not expect her to see any jail time, she’s from money, and she’s white, so I expect a slap on the wrist, and maybe some probation and community service.

August 24th, Ukrainian Independence Day, will see a ceremony introducing the country’s new official army salute, as prescribed by Ukraine’s Presidential decree: Glory to Ukraine! – Glory to the Heroes!

“We have consulted with the Minister of Defense, National Security and Defense Council, Government and I have decided that starting from August 24 these words will be heard for the first time as part of the official military parade ceremony on the Independence Day of Ukraine,” Petro Poroshenko was quoted saying on the Ukraine President’s official site.

Glory to Ukraine! – Glory to the Heroes! is a slogan of the UPA, the Ukraine Rebel Army who fought on the side of the Nazis. The slogans, their origin, and history are well known in Ukraine, although the President’s website does not make mention of these. Present neo-Nazi Ukrainian military formations established by order of the Ukrainian authorities appropriated the slogan from the end of 2013 onward. Now, the Ukrainian Nazi collaborator’s greeting will become the official salute in that country’s army.

………

“If a country adopts pro-Nazi slogans of criminal forces, murderers who committed numerous crimes of genocide, that country is doomed,” said co-founder and President of the Rogatchi Foundation Dr. Inna Rogatchi. “But the world shouldn’t turn a blind eye to this, as it repeatedly does with regard to Ukraine.”

This is not a surprise, particularly given the nature of the coup that put the current government in power.

The US State Department actively supported and cultivated right wing nationalists, and this is the foreseeable result.

Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer, isn’t the only one with secretly recorded audio of the president.

Multiple sources with direct knowledge of the situation tell The Daily Beast that Omarosa Manigault-Newman, the infamous former Apprentice star who followed Trump to the White House, secretly recorded conversations with the president—conversations she has since leveraged while shopping her forthcoming “tell-all” book, bluntly titled UNHINGED.

For months, it has been rumored that Manigault had clandestinely recorded on her smartphone “tapes” of unspecified private discussions she had in the West Wing. Audio actually does exist, and even stars Manigault’s former boss.

One person confirmed to The Daily Beast they had heard at least one of her recordings featuring President Trump. Multiple sources familiar with the “Omarosa tapes” described the recorded conversations between Trump and Manigault as anodyne, everyday chatter, but said they did appear to feature Trump’s voice, either over the phone or in-person.

The mere existence of such recordings represents a dramatic betrayal of trust by a onetime confidante who has since abandoned years of professed loyalty to the president and has apparently decided to profit off her years of closeness to Trump.

I am way more amused by this than I should be by this.

Rule number 2 is see rule 1:

An investigation carried out by Federal Communication Commission’s own inspector general officially refutes controversial claims that a cyberattack was responsible for disrupting the FCC’s comment system in May 2017, at the height of the agency’s efforts to kill off net neutrality.

The investigation also uncovered that the FCC provided false information to member of Congress regarding advice provided by FBI to the FCC (or not provided) after the incident.

A report from the inspector general’s office (OIG) released Tuesday finds that the comment system issues were not caused by a cyberattack, as the FCC has alleged for over a year, but more likely by a combination of “system design issues” and a massive surge in traffic, which came after Last Week Tonight host John Oliver told millions of TV viewers to flood the FCC’s website with pro-net neutrality comments.

Investigators were unable to “substantiate the allegations of multiple DDoS attacks” alleged by then-FCC Chief Information Officer David Bray, the report says. “At best, the published reports were the result of a rush to judgment and the failure to conduct analyses needed to identify the true cause of the disruption to system availability.”

It continues:

“While we identified a small amount of anomalous activity and could not entirely rule out the possibility of individual DoS attempts during the period from May 7 through May 9, 2017, we do not believe this activity resulted in any measurable degradation of system availability given the minuscule scale of the anomalous activity relative to the contemporaneous voluminous viral traffic.”

………

The focus of the OIG investigation was initially centered on the allegations that the FCC was targeted by DDoS attacks, the report states. But it eventually shifted after OIG became concerned that three FCC officials may have broken the law by lying to members of Congress.

………

The OIG report also describes an interview with two FBI employees, one a special agent and another working with the FBI cyber task force in Washington. Both appear to implicate the FCC in providing false information to members of Congress, specifically when describing what the FBI agents and FCC officials discussed following the incident.

………

FCC Chairman Ajit Pai sought to distance himself from any of the institutional failings described by the inspector general’s report ahead of its release on Monday, placing full blame at the feet of his former chief information officer and his subordinates. In a statement on Monday, Pai accused Bray of providing him with “inaccurate information” about the May 2017 incident, which Pai then personally relayed to members of Congress.

In a June 2017 letter, for example, Pai informed Wyden and Schatz that the FCC’s comment system had been disrupted by a “cyber-based attack.”

………

“This report shows that the American people were deceived by the FCC and Chairman Pai as they went about doing the bidding of Big Cable,” Sen. Wyden said in a statement late Tuesday. “It appears that maintaining a bogus story about a cyberattack was convenient cover to ignore the voices of millions of people who were fighting to protect a free and open internet.”

Unfortunately, prosecutors have decided not to prosecute, which is a shame, because I’d love to see CIO Bray cop a plea and flip on Pai.

During a speech in Caracas, Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro was the target of an apparent assassination attempt involving explosive laden drones:

Chaos has struck Venezuela following an apparent foiled assassination attempt against the country’s embattled president, Nicolás Maduro.

Several drones armed with explosives were flown towards Maduro as he addressed a military parade in the capital Caracas on Saturday afternoon.

The drones did not reach Maduro, though it is not clear if they were shot down or exploded prematurely. The president survived unharmed while seven people were injured in the attack, the country’s information minister said.

Maduro, speaking from the presidential palace two hours after the attack, announced that those behind the attempt on his life had been captured.

“I am alive and victorious,” the socialist president said in a bellicose televised address, before blaming the attack on the government of neighbouring Colombia.

“Everything points to the Venezuelan ultra-right in alliance with the Colombian ultra-right, and that the name of [Colombian president] Juan Manuel Santos is behind this attack.”

I wonder if someone in the US state security apparatus had some advance knowledge of this going down.