I feel this may well be a turning point. It’s one thing to lose a 12-minute version of “Sherry Darling,” or the first-round of the 2072 NCAA Men’s Division I basketball tournament. But when the state legislature finds itself besieged by hundreds of angry, blue-balled, hairy-palmed, half-blind preachers, that’s when you’ll really see things move. Venceremos, my comrades!
—Charlier Pierce on XHamster blocking porn viewers from North Carolina from viewing their pr0n in response to the state’s anti-gay laws.
For “Star Trek” fans it was like finding a lost Shakespeare play — only to have it snatched away by the playwright’s heirs. Last fall an unused script for the cult 1960s television show turned up after being forgotten for years. Its author, the science-fiction writer Norman Spinrad, announced that it would become an episode of a popular Web series, “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II,” which features amateur actors in the classic roles of Capt. James T. Kirk, Mr. Spock and other crew members of the starship Enterprise. But then another player stepped in: CBS, which said it owned the script and blocked a planned Web production of it. Trekkies were appalled. “These executives should be phasered on heavy stun,” said Harmon Fields of Manhattan, who called himself “a ‘Star Trek’ fan of galactic proportions.” ……… The story begins in 1967, after Mr. Spinrad wrote an acclaimed episode of the original series, “The Doomsday Machine.” “I did ‘The Doomsday Machine’ fast,” Mr. Spinrad, 71, said by phone from his home in Greenwich Village, “and then they said: ‘We’re in a hole. Can you write something in four days?’ ” The result was “He Walked Among Us,” which the producers envisioned as a dramatic vehicle for the comedian Milton Berle. His character is a well-meaning but messianic sociologist whose conduct threatens to destroy the planet Jugal. The crew of the Enterprise must remove him without disrupting the normal development of the culture. ……… Mr. Spinrad soon donated his sole copy of “He Walked Among Us” and other papers to California State University, Fullerton. With several other drafts of the script, it lay in the archives for decades. Sharon Perry, the university’s archivist and special collections librarian, said she had received only one inquiry about “He Walked Among Us” in her 27 years there. But in October, at the annual New York City Collectible Paperback and Pulp Fiction Expo, a man seeking Mr. Spinrad’s autograph showed up with a copy of the script, which he said he found at another convention. A few months later Mr. Spinrad began selling the script on Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com, and the producers of “Star Trek New Voyages: Phase II” learned of it. Based in Ticonderoga, N.Y., “Phase II” is one of numerous fan-generated “Star Trek” Internet series, this one named for “Star Trek Phase II,” Mr. Roddenberry’s failed 1977 attempt to revive his creation for television. This Web series is distinguished by its fidelity to the original’s sets, costumes, props, music and other elements, as well as appearances by some original cast members and new stories by writers like Ms. Fontana. Over the years CBS gained the television, online and merchandising rights to “Star Trek.” But because the “Phase II” cast and crew make no money from their work, the network usually allows them to indulge their hobby. Around the time Mr. Spinrad offered “He Walked Among Us” online (confusingly he published an unrelated novel with the same title in 2010) he arranged with the “Phase II” senior executive producer, James Cawley, who also portrays Captain Kirk, to film it. The writer said he was “blown away” by the series and planned to direct the episode himself next fall. But this month, Mr. Cawley said, CBS asked him in an e-mail to cease and desist. CBS also contacted Mr. Spinrad, who withdrew “He Walked Among Us” from the Internet. The network said it was now “considering opportunities to offer licensed copies of the work.”
Responding to the 11.5 million documents leaked this week showing how a Panama law firm helped some of the world’s wealthiest people establish offshore tax havens on the Central American country — the so-called Panama Papers — Bernie Sanders on Tuesday vowed to end the Panama Free Trade Agreement, tying Hillary Clinton to the same policies that he claimed fostered the practice. “The Panama Free Trade Agreement put a stamp of approval on Panama, a world leader when it comes to allowing the wealthy and the powerful to avoid taxes,” the Vermont senator said in a statement released through his campaign, adding that he has been opposed to it “from day one.” Vowing to use his authority as president to “terminate the Panama Free Trade Agreement within six months,” Sanders said his administration would “conduct an immediate investigation into U.S. banks, corporations and wealthy individuals who have been stashing their cash in Panama to avoid taxes.” “If any of them have violated U.S. law, my administration will prosecute them to the fullest extent of the law,” he said. Sanders also said that he had correctly predicted that the passage of the trade deal “would make it easier, not harder, for the wealthy and large corporations to evade taxes by sheltering billions of dollars offshore.” “I wish I had been proven wrong about this, but it has now come to light that the extent of Panama’s tax avoidance scams is even worse than I had feared,” he said, before pivoting to Clinton. “My opponent, on the other hand, opposed this trade agreement when she was running against Barack Obama for president in 2008. But when it really mattered she quickly reversed course and helped push the Panama Free Trade Agreement through Congress as Secretary of State. The results have been a disaster.”
It is not an unreasonable indictment of Hillary Clinton’s and Barack Obama’s record on so called free trade agreements.
The Wyoming arm of the law firm at the heart of the Panama Papers global scandal is under investigation by Wyoming state officials for failing to maintain required statutory information about companies registering there, Secretary of State Ed Murray said Wednesday. Upon learning of the Panama Papers, a massive leak of secret offshore company data reported on by McClatchy and more than 100 other media partners around the globe, Wyoming initiated an audit of 24 companies registered in the state by the law firm Mossack Fonseca and its partners, he said. “The audit concluded around noon on Monday, April 4th, and determined that M.F. Corporate Services Wyoming LLC failed to maintain the required statutory information for performing the duties of a registered agent under Wyoming law,” Murray said in a statement. The state followed immediately with administrative action, demanding that required information be provided. “Subsequently, M.F. Corporate Services did provide the information,” the secretary of state’s office said, adding that Murray also briefed law enforcement that day. “This investigation of this matter is ongoing.”
This is near toxic levels of hypocrisy.
In an interesting twist of fate, Ken Silverstien, then a reporter at The Intercept was all over the story of Mossack Fonseca 14 months ago, though his employer refused to publish it, so he published on Vice.com.
And then Pierre Omidyar, the publisher of The Intercept, got in his face.
Almost all the reporting thus far, with the exception of Icelands now former PM, has been directed primarily at regimes hostile to the west, with most of the coverage being screaming about Vladimir Putin.
Also note that Suddeutsche Zeitung brought in International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) Not also the picture in the tweet.
A real leak of data from a law firm in Panama would be very interesting. Many rich people and/or politicians hide money in shell companies that such firms in Panama provide. But the current heavily promoted “leak” of such data to several NATO supporting news organization and a US government financed “Non Government Organization” is just a lame attempt to smear some people the U.S. empire dislikes. It also creates a huge blackmail opportunity by NOT publishing certain data in return for this or that desired favor.
Both Murray and MoA are implying that the US/NATO state security apparatus are somehow involved in the release of this data.
I have not made up my mind, but if we don’t see some prominent western names in the releases in the next few weeks, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson doesn’t count, then I will be much more inclined to take their view.
Editor’s Note: In our report Tuesday night on a North Carolina family that’s supporting Donald Trump, we were continuing a long NewsHour tradition of talking directly to voters.
We want to hear from them, in their own voices, speaking about what motivates their political preferences.
Regrettably, none of us at the NewsHour recognized the questions that could arise from Grace Tilly’s tattoos, and we didn’t raise them with her until after the report aired. At that point, our producer contacted Ms. Tilly and she insisted the tattoos are religious in nature and have nothing to do with a neo-Nazi theme or white supremacy.
We referenced her comments in an editor’s note, posted on our website.
Many of our online commenters have since let us know they reject that explanation. We’re now posting this note as a follow up.
We at the NewsHour remain committed to being as transparent as possible in covering this election.
She had a code for Heil Hitler (88) tattooed on the back of her hand.
You got taken in by a Neo Nazi, and you need to acknowledge this.
Remember this screw up, and more importantly their unwillingness to man up, at pledge time, folks.
Jewish control of the media is preventing an open discussion of the Holocaust, prominent Hollywood director Oliver Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that the U.S. Jewish lobby was controlling Washington’s foreign policy for years. In the Sunday interview, Stone reportedly said U.S. public opinion was focused on the Holocaust as a result of the “Jewish domination of the media,” adding that an upcoming film of him aims to put Adolf Hitler and Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin “in context.” “There’s a major lobby in the United States,” Stone said, adding that “they are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in Washington.” The famed Hollywood director of such films as “Platoon” and “JFK,” also said that while “Hitler was a Frankenstein,” there was also a “Dr Frankenstein.” “German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support,” Stone told the Sunday Times, adding that “Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, 25 or 30 [million killed].” Referring to the alleged influence of the powerful Jewish lobby on U.S. foreign policy, Stone said that Israel had distorted “United States foreign policy for years,” adding he felt U.S. policy toward Iran was “horrible.”
A financial transaction tax — a per-trade charge on the buying and selling of stocks, bonds and derivatives — is an idea whose time has finally come. It has begun percolating in the Democratic presidential campaign, with all three candidates offering proposals. Hillary Clinton and Martin O’Malley have proposed a worthy but narrow tax on certain high-frequency trades, which generate windfall profits on small and fleeting differences in prices at the expense of ordinary investors and market stability. Bernie Sanders supports a hefty tax on a broader range of transactions to raise revenue from Wall Street, also a worthy goal, but his proposal would be likely to squeeze investors too hard. Republicans have not engaged the debate, except to say no to taxes no matter what. A well-designed financial transaction tax — one that applies a tiny tax rate to an array of transactions and is split between buyers and sellers — would be a progressive way to raise substantial revenue without damaging the markets. A new study by researchers at the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has found that a 0.1 percent tax rate could bring in $66 billion a year, with 40 percent coming from the top 1 percent of income earners and 75 percent from the top 20 percent. As the rate rises, however, traders would most likely curtail their activity. The tax could bring in $76 billion a year if it was set at 0.3 percent, but above that rate, trading would probably decrease and the total revenue raised would start to fall. The burden of this tax would be concentrated at the top, because that’s where the ownership of financial assets is concentrated. However, individuals who buy and hold investments, including those who invest in index funds that trade infrequently, would be largely unaffected. Pension funds that devote a portion of their portfolios to speculative trading, often through hedge funds, would be hit, but some pension funds have already stopped using hedge funds because the returns do not justify the costs. A financial transaction tax that encouraged other pension funds to follow suit could actually benefit pension participants in the long run. Such a tax would also bring the United States more in line with other countries. There are already financial transaction taxes in Britain, Switzerland and South Korea as well as in Hong Kong and other developed markets and emerging nations, generally at rates of 0.1 percent to 0.5 percent on stock transfers. In addition, 10 countries in the European Union, including Germany and France, have agreed to apply a common financial transaction tax starting in 2017, though relentless lobbying by investment banks and hedge funds threatens to delay and even derail the effort.
There are a number of arguments against this.
The strongest one is that it will collect less revenue than expected, because it would disincentivize speculation.
He is clearly would be the one on stage with the most to lose, and by standing up to Fox, he reinforces the image that he wishes to cultivate: That he is beholden to no one, because he is dissing what is arguably the kingmaker of Republican Presidential politics:
Instead of attending the debate, “We’ll have an event here in Iowa, with potentially another network, to raise money for wounded warriors,” campaign manager Corey Lewandowski said. “And Fox will go from probably having 24 million viewers to about 2 million.” The fracas escalated quickly on Tuesday, but was the culmination of months of tension between the GOP frontrunner and the Fox News host Megyn Kelly. ……… Trump’s apparent decision changes the dynamic for Thursday’s event, which is the last GOP debate before the all-important Iowa caucuses. Without Trump, Ted Cruz will take center stage. Cruz also challenged Trump to go mano a mano. ……… The disagreement came to a head on Tuesday afternoon. Around 1 p.m. Trump polled his fans on Twitter, asking, “Should I do the GOP debate?” The poll suggested a real reluctance to attend, perhaps because Trump, as the frontrunner, arguably has the most to lose on Thursday night. The respondents were evenly split, with about half saying he should skip it. In an Instagram video that coincided with his poll, Trump said, “Megyn Kelly’s really biased against me. She knows that, I know that, everybody knows that. Do you really think she can be fair at a debate?”
The other winner here is Ms. Kelly, a phony journalist who can use this incident to better pretend that she is a real journalist.
My prediction* is that Trump wins Iowa and New Hampshire, and the then runs the table to become the Republican nominee.
I need to update my f%$#ing passport.
*With the obvious caveat that Saroff electoral predictions have frequently been very, very wrong.
“Stochastic” is a word for an event that seemingly occurs randomly, but actually follows statistical patterns, which means that one can look there is some sort of cause and effect relationship involved.
Elisabeth Parker uses the term Stochastic Terrorism to describe the right wing’s use of language and mass communications to inspire the occasional “Lone Wolf” mass shooter:
I recently argued for treating all mass shooters and bombers as terroristic threats. Now I’ll explain how the GOP ratchets up the threat level through a process called stochastic terrorism. As we mourn the victims of the latest mass shooting, we can also clearly see a pattern: The shooters (or sometimes bombers) nearly always turn out to be white males with right-wing political leanings, and the media nearly always describes them as “insane” or as “disturbed loners.” Philly Mayor Michael Nutter and others view these attacks as looming terroristic threats, but — because the killers often lack formal ties with extremist groups — we often don’t want to call them “terrorists” because we’re still struggling to describe what has grown more and more obvious. Luckily for us, someone has already coined the term we’re looking for: “stochastic terrorism.” G2Geek came up with it on Daily Kos back in 2011 in response to the Tucson shooting that left Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) with a severe brain injury that cut her term short.
Stochastic terrorism is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
To further clarify, G2Geek later updated his post to explain that the stochastic terrorists aren’t the ones who pose the actual terroristic threats. No, they’re the ones who use their access to the media to broadcast extreme views that inspire “disturbed loners” like Dylann Roof and Robert Lewis Dear to attack. In his post, G2Geek specifically calls out hate-mongering people on Fox “News” like Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly. Now, GOP officials, lawmakers and 2016 presidential candidates have likewise come under fire for their over-the-top, insane and hateful rantings about immigrants, gays, Planned Parenthood, blacks, and Muslims.
The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official is not the stochastic terrorist, they are the “missile” set in motion by the stochastic terrorist. The stochastic terrorist is the person who uses mass media as their means of setting those “missiles” in motion.
Ms. Parker asserts, and I agree that this is a part of a deliberate strategy, and I agree.
In, fact, I would argue that this strategy is already bearing fruit, as the fear of another Oklahoma City bombing, a classic example of Stochastic Terrorism, is keeping law enforcement officials from enforcing the law at the Malheur reserve in Oregon.
The Spanish-language media giant Univision Communications announced Tuesday that it had acquired a large stake in The Onion, the comedy and satirical digital media group, as part of the company’s efforts to extend its digital reach and strengthen its portfolio of comedy outlets. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the transaction was said to be for a 40 percent stake, valued at less than $200 million, according to one person briefed on the deal. “Comedy is playing an expanding role in our culture as a vehicle for audiences to explore, debate and understand the important ideas of our time,” said Isaac Lee, chief news and digital officer of Univision. “It has also proven to be an incredibly engaging format for millennial audiences and is expected to play a key part in the 2016 presidential election process via our robust content offerings in Spanish and English.” Univision’s digital portfolio is undergoing a flurry of changes, part of an effort to build its footprint and reach as diverse a group of millennials as possible. News emerged last month that Univision was in talks with the Walt Disney Company to take full control of their joint venture Fusion, the English-language digital news service and cable channel. In November, Univision named Mr. Lee to a new position with responsibility for overseeing digital functions, leading multicultural efforts and creating a music strategy. He also is chief executive of Fusion.
I have no f%$#ing clue how Univision plans to make a coherent business plan out of this.
My guess is that they don’t have a plan, and notwithstanding promises to have a light touch, management will eventually feel compelled to bring it under the corporate wing, when they don’t experience the requisite “Synergies”, and then they will ruin it.
He further goes on to state that he believes that Obama shirked his duty to address these issues, which I also agree with:
Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera was Tuesday’s “One Lucky Guy” on the network’s “Outnumbered” midday hit and shared his unpopular opinion with the conservative female co-hosts ahead of President Obama’s seventh and final State of the Union address Tuesday evening.
……… But Rivera argued that despite substantive policy disagreements, the real divisions made clear during the Obama presidency fall along racial lines:
When you strip away all of the gun rights and the, you know, terror all rest of it, what you have essentially is a nation divided between white people and everybody else in broad strokes. When you look at the groups that overwhelmingly favor the Democrats right now, the Asians, the Hispanics, the African-Americans, the Muslims, you see a nation where people have largely chosen up sides and if you strip away everything else, what you are going to find is a racial divide. It’s biggest, unaddressed issue.
……… Rivera finally relented and charged that Obama had failed to confront race relations head-on as the first African-American president. “If I was this president,” the Fox News personality offered, “I would have said ‘I’m going to deal with this race. I’m going to deal with the legacy of the Civil War. The Civil War is over. The North/South divide — I would have made that the central focus of my president were I him.”
“He failed utterly,” Rivera concluded, and by “benign neglect made it worse.”
As I have noted many times before, Barack Obama’s public personae is all about avoiding to appear the “Angry Black Man”, and as such he has studiously attempted to avoid facing racial issues.
Rather unsurprisingly, it’s the not-for-profit news organization ProPublica:
The so-called dark web, for all its notoriety as a haven for criminals and drug dealers, is slowly starting to look more and more like a more privacy-preserving mirror of the web as a whole. Now it’s gained one more upstanding member: the non-profit news organization ProPublica. On Wednesday, ProPublica became the first known major media outlet to launch a version of its site that runs as a “hidden service” on the Tor network, the anonymity system that powers the thousands of untraceable websites that are sometimes known as the darknet or dark web. The move, ProPublica says, is designed to offer the best possible privacy protections for its visitors seeking to read the site’s news with their anonymity fully intact. Unlike mere SSL encryption, which hides the content of the site a web visitor is accessing, the Tor hidden service would ensure that even the fact that the reader visited ProPublica’s website would be hidden from an eavesdropper or Internet service provider. “Everyone should have the ability to decide what types of metadata they leave behind,” says Mike Tigas, ProPublica’s developer who worked on the Tor hidden service. “We don’t want anyone to know that you came to us or what you read.” Of course, any privacy-conscious user can achieve a very similar level of anonymity by simply visiting ProPublica’s regular site through their Tor Browser. But as Tigas points out, that approach does leave the reader open to the risk of a malicious “exit node,” the computer in Tor’s network of volunteer proxies that makes the final connection to the destination site. If the anonymous user connects to a part of ProPublica that isn’t SSL-encrypted—most of the site runs SSL, but not yet every page—then the malicious relay could read what the user is viewing. Or even on SSL-encrypted pages, the exit node could simply see that the user was visiting ProPublica. When a Tor user visits ProPublica’s Tor hidden service, by contrast—and the hidden service can only be accessed when the visitor runs Tor—the traffic stays under the cloak of Tor’s anonymity all the way to ProPublica’s server.
I don’t think that this is the start of a trend, as near as I can figure out, there is no way to monetize a Tor node through advertising, though I imagine that the classified ad section would be ……… different ……… and I am sure that the FBI would find this very interesting.
New York’s state government has committed millions of dollars in taxpayer support to News Corporation for a real estate deal — less than three years after a subsidiary of that company gave New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo a book deal worth up to $700,000. The commitment was disclosed in documents released by the Port Authority — an agency jointly controlled by Cuomo and New Jersey Republican Gov. Chris Christie.
The documents say the Port Authority, News Corporation and 21st Century Fox “have received commitments from New York State” for a “one-time payment of $15 million in 2016 and the utilization of a $15 million” state tax credit as part of the agency’s push to make the companies “anchor tenants” for 2 World Trade Center. The documents say the transactions are part of an initiative to reduce News Corporation’s and 21st Century Fox’s rent payments at the new building by $155 million.
The Cuomo-appointed executive director of the Port Authority, Patrick Foye, told International Business Times Wednesday night that he is recommending that the Port Authority’s board approve the package because, he said, the agency will get significant bang for its buck. “That is objectively a good deal, a good transaction for the Port Authority and the region,” he said.
This is not a surprise.
Murdoch has a long history of using political connections for business advantage, and Andrew Cuomo swims in the sea of corruption that is Albany like a fish.
Jimmy McMillan, the whiskered political showman who became a viral Internet star when he ran for governor of New York in 2010 as a candidate of the Rent Is Too Damn High Party, has announced his retirement from the political arena, citing a lack of public support for his agenda. In a news release infused with misspellings and other errors that was dated Tuesday, Mr. McMillan said voters had been “totally brainwashed” and criticized Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio, both Democrats, for not securing “a rent reduction for the people in the cities of Brooklyn, Bronx, Staten Island, Manhattan and Queens.” “Rent is too damn high is an international crisis,” he wrote. “There are many questions the people should ask themselves. I which them the best — I’m out.” The news release said the Rent Is Too Damn High Party was “for sale, trademark and all,” and listed a Manhattan lawyer, Vincent Imbesi, as a point of contact.
Harry Potter author JK Rowling has rejected the comparison of US presidential candidate Donald Trump to the villain in her seven-part book series, saying on Twitter that “Voldemort was nowhere near as bad”.
The author was tweeting in response to a BBC report on the number of tweets comparing the Republican politician with the Dark Lord. Trump made headlines on Tuesday when he called for a “total and complete shutdown” of US borders to Muslims, in the wake of the San Bernardino terrorist attack. Trump has targeted Muslims in previous speeches, calling for surveillance of mosques across America and claiming Muslims in New Jersey cheered the 9/11 terrorist attacks, a claim he refused to retract despite fact-checkers debunking it.
Fox News has suspended two contributors, Ralph Peters and Stacey Dash, who described President Obama as a “p**sy” who doesn’t “give a s**t” on air today, reports CNN. Peters’ and Dash’s comments “were completely inappropriate and unacceptable for our air,” Fox News senior executive vice president Bill Shine said in a statement announcing the suspensions this afternoon. Peters, who Fox describes as its “strategic analyst,” called the president a “total pu—” who “doesn’t want to hurt our enemies” during an apperance on Fox Business Channel on Monday. “This guy, [he] is such a total p**sy, it’s stunning,” Peters told host Stuart Varney, reacting to the president’s recent address on terrorism. On her regular turn on the “Outnumbered” couch on Fox News Monday afternoon, former Clueless star Stacey Dash just couldn’t contain her anger at President Obama’s Sunday evening Oval Office address on terror, saying that “I felt like he could give a shit — excuse me, like he could care less.” “Fox Business Network and Fox News Channel do not condone the use of such language, and have suspended both Peters and Dash for two weeks,” Shine said. Both Peters and Dash have been suspended for two weeks.
It’s only 2 weeks, but I wouldn’t have expected 2 minutes from Emperor Ailes.
