Wangdoodle

It is impossible to secure 1,900 miles of real estate without a barrier. I don’t care what you call it. Call it a wall, infrastructure or even a wangdoodle! No matter what you call it we have to have some kind of physical barrier to secure our border. pic.twitter.com/vQHWUmmv10

— John Kennedy (@SenJohnKennedy) January 31, 2019

Roll Tape!

We now have a name for the wall, courtesy of Senator John Kennedy (R-LA), who suggested “Wangdoodle”.

One of these days, I want to see the Great Wangdoodle of China.

Why Letting Republicans Run as Democrats is a Bad Idea

Case in point, Ralph Northam, who voted for Bush in 2000 AND 2004, is now known to have not only had a fucking Klan picture in his medical school yearbook, but had the nickname “Coonman” in his VMI yearbook:

It was no easy feat. But on Saturday, Ralph Northam staked a claim in the annals of most surreal political news conferences, presiding over a 40-minute extravaganza that would do Mark Sanford and Jim McGreevey proud. Or something like that.

In a bid to salvage his job, the Democratic governor of Virginia denied he was one of the men dressed up as a Klansman or in blackface in a picture on his medical school yearbook page — after admitting the night before he was, in fact, in the photo.

But that was just the start. Here are six of the strangest moments of the presser.

BEAT IT

Northam said he “vividly” remembers dressing up in blackface to imitate Michael Jackson at a talent show in 1984 and that this memory solidified his belief that he wasn’t photographed in his yearbook dressed in blackface or in a Klan outfit. But when asked by reporter, he couldn’t remember the artist’s name and relied on his wife, Pam, to whisper his name.

  ………

 In a different yearbook at Virginia Military Institute, Northam was nicknamed “Coonman.” Why? He wasn’t quite sure, he said.

 “My main nickname in high school and in college was ‘Goose’ because when my voice was changing, I would change an octave. There were two individuals, as best as I can recollect, at VMI — they were a year ahead of me. They called me ‘Coonman’. I don’t know their motives or intent. I know who they are. That was the extent of that. And it ended up in the yearbook. And I regret that.”

This guy was a college age Republican at the height of the Reagan administration.

He voted for George W. Bush in 2004.

Of course he was doing racist sh%$ like this, it’s what college Republican pukes did back then.

Modern Extortion, YouTube Style

Extortionists are targeting YouTube channels with copyright “strikes” to extort money:

In a terrible abuse of YouTube’s copyright system, a YouTuber is reporting that scammers are using the platform’s “three strike” system for extortion. After filing two false claims against ObbyRaidz, the scammers contacted him demanding cash to avoid a third – and the termination of his channel. Every week, millions of YouTubers upload content for pleasure and indeed profit, hoping to reach a wide audience with their topics of choice.

On occasion, these users run into trouble by using content to which they don’t own the copyrights, such as a music track or similar.

While these complaints can often be dealt with quickly and relatively amicably using YouTube’s Content ID system, allegedly-infringing users can also get a so-called ‘strike’ against their account. Get three of these and a carefully maintained channel, with countless hours of work behind it, can be rendered dead by YouTube.

As reported on many occasions, this system is open to all kinds of abuse but a situation highlighted by a YouTuber called ‘ObbyRaidz’ takes things to a horrible new level.

The YouTuber, who concentrates on Minecraft-related videos, reports that he’s received two bogus strikes on his account. While this is nothing new, it appears the strikes were deliberately malicious with longer-term plan to extort money from him.

………

While people should be protected from this kind of abuse, both from a copyright perspective and the crime of extortion, ObbyRaidz says he’s had zero luck in getting assistance from YouTube.

“It’s very unfortunate and YouTube has not done very much for me. I can’t get in contact with them. One of the appeals got denied,” he explains.

It’s the nature of Google that no matter what happens, you never ever get to contact a human being, so if they take you down, you are basically completely f%$#ed.

Tech support literally does not exist, and this is a core policy of Google, which means that any

As is noted at Naked Capitalism, “If your business depends on a platform, you don’t have a business.”

So Not a Surprise………

Facebook sells advertisers on its access to real people — 2.32 billion of them, a network that exceeds the populations of North America, South America and Africa combined.

But do that many people really use Facebook?

The answer lies partly in how many of the accounts are fake. The Silicon Valley company defines fake accounts as profiles that are either designed to break its rules, for example by spammers or scammers impersonating others, or that are misclassified, such as someone setting up a Facebook profile instead of a Facebook page for a business.

Yet the number of Facebook accounts that fit those descriptions is less clear. While the company discloses its estimates of fake accounts, its figures have fluctuated and are confusing. Even Facebook admits its understanding of the numbers is tenuous.

“Duplicate and false accounts are very difficult to measure at our scale,” it said in a securities filing in October, and the actual numbers “may vary significantly from our estimates.”

………

For years, investors, analysts and journalists had only Facebook’s estimates to judge fake accounts. Last year, Facebook introduced a transparency page, which discloses how many fake accounts it has taken down each quarter. Those figures revealed that the scope was far larger than the estimates in securities filings had suggested.

Let’s run through the math on this in more detail. Facebook’s new numbers added up to more than 2.8 billion fake accounts taken down in the 12 months that ended Sept. 30, or about 7.7 million a day.

Facebook had previously reported that about 3 percent to 4 percent of its active users were fake. According to the new figures, the accounts taken down each quarter were equivalent to 25 percent to 35 percent of its active users (though those accounts were not counted in Facebook’s active-user tallies because they had been removed).

I am shocked and stunned by this.

Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg are the kindest, warmest, bravest, most wonderful human beings I’ve ever known in my life.

They would never do anything to violate the trust of their customers, and their users.

Please understand that the above is sarcasm.

Our Broken Military-Industrial Complex

The Navy’s costliest warship, the $13 billion Gerald R. Ford, had 20 failures of its aircraft launch-and-landing systems during operations at sea, according to the Pentagon’s testing office.

The previously undisclosed failures with the electromagnetic systems made by General Atomics occurred during more than 740 at-sea trials since the aircraft carrier’s delivery in May 2017 despite praise from Navy officials of its growing combat capabilities. The Navy must pay to fix such flaws under a “cost-plus” development contract.

The new reliability issues add to doubts the carrier, designated as CVN-78, will meet its planned rate of combat sorties per 24 hours — the prime metric for any aircraft carrier — according to the annual report on major weapons from the Defense Department’s operational test office.

………

The launch-and-landing issue is separate from the ship’s lack of 11 functioning elevators to lift munitions from below deck, an issue that’s drawn scrutiny from Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman James Inhofe, an Oklahoma Republican.

The Ford “will probably not achieve” its sortie rate requirement because of “unrealistic assumptions” that “ignore the effects of weather, aircraft emergencies, ship maneuvers and current air-wing composition on flight operations,” Robert Behler, the Pentagon’s director of operational testing, said in his assessment of the carrier, obtained by Bloomberg News.

………

Ten “critical failures” occurred during 747 at-sea catapults of jets; another 10 “operational mission failures” occurred during 763 shipboard landing attempts, according to the testing office’s report.

So, we are talking about a 1.5% failure rate for the technology.

This is not human error, this is a failure of the underlying technology, the catapult is performing about 6x worse than what is specified under contract, and the arrester gear is performing about 100x worse than is called for.

This is a hell of a way to run a f%$#ing railroad.

Daym!!! I’m Not Paranoid Enough!!!!

I knew that the FCC was flooded with bogus comments about their repeal of net neutrality, but I never would have imagined in my wildest dreams would have imagined that Roger Stone and his Evil Minions™ would be at the bottom of this:

An organization run by a former Trump campaign statewide director is being investigated by the New York attorney general’s office for its role in the submission of potentially hundreds of thousands of fraudulent comments to the Federal Communications Commission during the agency’s 2017 efforts to rollback Obama-era net neutrality rules.

Research by Gizmodo reveals the group’s deep ties to prominent GOP firms, including one paid more than $31 million by the Republican National Committee (RNC) to provide email lists of potential voters during the 2016 campaign. Americans whose names were attached to fraudulent FCC comments linked to the ex-Trump campaign staffer confirmed during a series of interviews that their identities had been stolen.

Asked how their names wound up on the FCC’s website next comments slamming “wealthy leftist billionaires and powerful Silicon Valley monopolies,” the residents of Sharpsburg, Georgia, were reasonably confused. Like two retirees in their 80s whom Gizmodo spoke with on Wednesday, many residents say they’ve never even heard of net neutrality.

But in Sharpsburg, a town of less than 400, roughly a quarter of the population seemingly filed comments with the FCC about net neutrality—at least according to its website. Of those comments, 37 are perfectly identical: “It took only two years and a green light from Obama for companies like Google and Facebook and their liberal allies like George Soros to take total control of the dominant information and communications platform in the world today,” they read. “The future of a free and open Internet is at stake.”

………

“Whoever did this is stupid,” said another man, after learning his name and address had been used without his consent. “They won’t find my IP address anywhere near this. And I’d be happy to talk to police about it.” A total of five Sharpsburg residents, whose names had been used to send identical comments to the FCC, told Gizmodo this week that their identities must have been stolen.

………

What’s remained unreported until now is the source of the 37 identical Sharpsburg comments, which match those submitted on behalf of more than 300,000 Americans nationwide. That comment, which rails against Google, its former chairman Eric Schmidt, and “global billionaires like George Soros,” was authored by a group known as Free Our Internet, according to a page on its website, which has since been deleted.

Free Our Internet’s campaign against net neutrality, which it presents as a conspiracy by “liberal globalists to take over our Internet,” was first announced in a now-deleted press release on the website of Raven Strategies, a political consultancy whose client list includes, among others, Donald Trump for President.

………

By comparison, Free Our Internet has a small online footprint—this despite being the apparent source of upwards of 800,000 gathered comments. The organization’s submission page, meant to be the online portal through which all those comments were collected, has been tweeted no more than two dozen times. Free Our Internet’s website was boosted on occasion, however, by a few well-known characters on the far-right, such as longtime Trump adviser and self-described “dirty trickster” Roger Stone and his one-time friend, conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi.

Roger, you have been a very busy boy.

Well, Performance Issues, It’s Not Uncommon. One out of Five Daleks………

One thing I won’t ever do again is build a snow dalek. I did that when we lived at our old house as the kids were into Dr Who. I learnt that when snowdaleks start to melt they upset the neighbours #snowman #snowdalek #drwho pic.twitter.com/YrK8vJqAJr

— Oeufelia (@oeufelia) February 1, 2019

Someone made a snow Dalek, but they neglected to consider what would happen when it warmed up.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

Family Tree DNA, one of the largest private genetic testing companies whose home-testing kits enable people to trace their ancestry and locate relatives, is working with the FBI and allowing agents to search its vast genealogy database in an effort to solve violent crime cases, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Federal and local law enforcement have used public genealogy databases for more than two years to solve cold cases, including the landmark capture of the suspected Golden State Killer, but the cooperation with Family Tree DNA and the FBI marks the first time a private firm has agreed to voluntarily allow law enforcement access to its database.

While the FBI does not have the ability to freely browse genetic profiles in the library, the move is sure to raise privacy concerns about law enforcement gaining the ability to look for DNA matches, or more likely, relatives linked by uploaded user data.

For law enforcement officials, the access could be the key to unlocking murders and rapes that have gone cold for years, opening up what many argue is the greatest investigative tactic since the advent of DNA identification. For privacy advocates, the FBI’s new ability to match the genetic profiles from a private company could set a dangerous precedent in a world where DNA test kits have become as common as a Christmas stocking stuffer.

………

Until now, investigators have limited their searches to public and free databases, where genealogy enthusiasts had willingly uploaded the data knowing it could be accessible to anyone.

Now, under the previously undisclosed cooperation with Family Tree, the FBI has gained access to more than a million DNA profiles from the company, most of which were uploaded before the company’s customers had any knowledge of its relationship with the FBI.

………

“We are nearing a de-facto national DNA database,” Natalie Ram, an assistant law professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in bioethics and criminal justice, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t choose our genetic relatives, and I cannot sever my genetic relation to them. There’s nothing voluntary about that.” 

Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is looking increasingly prophetic.

Given the FBI’s anti-abortion biases, this is particularly chilling in the area of reproductive freedom.

F%$# Me. I Agree with Joe F%$#ing Liebarman

For most of the nation’s history, the most common way to read court filings was to travel to the courthouse itself, pull up a desk in the clerk’s office, and leaf through them by hand. This was hardly a convenient system, especially if you lived in a far-flung rural area or lacked the resources to travel to a nearby courthouse for the task. But it was still an impressive one. Public access was a core principle of the American federal judiciary, which absorbed both the Founders’ disdain for secretive British courts and their belief in the democratic virtue of open legal proceedings.

Then came the Public Access to Court Electronic Records system in the 1990s. In theory, the federal courts’ electronic docket system—known universally as PACER—allows anyone with an internet connection to call up the motions, briefs, orders, and appendices for virtually any federal court case. The interface has not evolved with the times. In an age of sleek, minimalist web design, PACER is a clunky and nonintuitive portal into the courts’ inner workings. What’s more, it’s overcharging its users.

Now a medley of legal advocacy groups, media outlets, and former politicians and judges are asking the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to rein in excessive PACER fees. Some of the organizations argue that the current payment structure violates federal e-government laws that prohibit unnecessary fees. Others see the fees as a threat to judicial transparency and openness. What’s ultimately at stake is the ability for Americans—including journalists and defendants—to fully participate in the nation’s legal system.

Three legal nonprofit groups—the National Veterans Legal Services Program, the National Consumer Law Center, and Alliance for Justice—filed a class action lawsuit against the federal government in 2016 to challenge PACER’s fee structure. They argued that by charging more than the marginal costs to keep the system functional, the judiciary had run afoul of a federal law dedicating PACER’s fees solely to that purpose. “Instead of complying with the law, the [federal judiciary] has used excess PACER fees to cover the costs of unrelated projects—ranging from audio systems to flat screens for jurors—at the expense of public access,” they told the district court in 2016.

“Anyone who wants to be able to access the documents that are essential to understanding the way our court system works has to pay these fees,” Brianne Gorod, the chief counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, told me. The organization filed a friend-of-the-court brief on behalf of former Senator Joe Lieberman, the 2002 law’s original sponsor. “What that means is that one’s ability to access these documents—to read the briefs that the courts use when making decisions, to understand why courts are doing what they do—is going to turn on one’s financial situation.”

F%$# me.

I am on the same side as Joe Lieberman.

I feel so dirty.

The Mistake Jet Just Gets Better and Better

It now appears the first F-35s delivered will have only ¼ the life originally promised:

Structural defects mean the earliest F-35Bs delivered by Lockheed Martin could reach a service life limit by 2026 after 2,100 flight hours, according to the Pentagon’s director for weapons testing.

The design specification of the F-35B called for a service life of 8,000 flight hours, but early production models fall “well under” the durability requirement, Robert Behler, director of operational test and evaluation (DOT&E,) wrote in his latest annual report to Congress.

The new DOT&E assessment comes after several years of durability testing that exposed multiple structural cracks. Lockheed completed two service lifetime cycles of durability testing on a static F-35B airframe called BH-1, but canceled a plan in February 2017 to perform a third series.

Structural redesigns, including a new approach for the wing-carry-through, had made BH-1 unrepresentative of the final production standard, the DOT&E report states. The F-35 program has obtained funding to acquire a new structural test article, but it was not yet on contract, the report adds. Bloomberg first reported the DOT&E’s findings on the F-35 program.

Yeah, the new test article is, “Not yet on contract.”

The B model is the STOVL version, and any weight increase would have potentially catastrophic effects on performance, but they have not let a contract for a test article yet.

I’m SO reassured.

I Would Have Figured That the Number Was Larger………

A study is now rep[ortint that Americans got 26.3 billion robocalls last year, a nearly 50% increase from the prior year.

If I do a quick back of the envelope calculation, that is about 100 robocalls per phone per year, or about 1 every 3-½ days.

I typically get 2-3 a day on weekdays, so I think that the number is way too small.

In any case, it is getting to the point that people are no longer answering their phones at all, so something that needs to be done.

I have a 7 word suggestion:

The Most Popular Drone Strike Program Ever!

You Call This a Line?

It appears that is quite a queue forming to deface the soon to be erected statue of Margaret Thatcher in Grantham:

A statue of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher in her home town of Grantham will require a high plinth to curb the threat of vandalism, according to police.

Plans to install the £300,000 statue on a 10ft-high platform will be voted on next week amid fears it could become a “likely target for politically-motivated vandals”.

However, the police added that despite a “motivated far-left movement… who may be committed to public activism” who are against Mrs Thatcher “the passage of time does seem to have diminished that feeling”.

Which is why you are mounting it on a. “10ft-high platform,” because, “The passage of time,” has diminished the (well deserved) ire towards her.

“A threat assessment has been carried out by Lincolnshire Police who consider there is a possibility any public statue of Baroness Thatcher could be a target for politically motivated vandals.

“Lincolnshire Police’s Crime Prevention Officer has not objected to the proposal but they have recommended the statue is placed on a sufficiently high plinth and is sited in a location that benefits from good natural surveillance as well as lighting and CCTV.”

I actually have a compromise suggestion that might solv things, Put up the statue, but do so behind bars.

The mindful human beings can then look at her as she should have been, while the Tories can be secure in the fact that the hoi polloi will be kept from her.

Quote of the Day

Congress long ago abdicated its constitutional authority to declare war, but demands veto over withdrawals: column https://t.co/MgdwxejWMW

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 1, 2019

We truly live in Bizarro world

Matt Taibbi takes a very jaundiced view toward the permanent war party in Washington.

I wholeheartedly agree:

On the surface, it was a truly bipartisan defeat of Trump. A full 22 of those 68 yeas were Democrats.

But every Senate Democrat who’s even rumored to be running for president voted nay. The list included Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Amy Klobuchar and Jeff Merkley. Sherrod Brown did not vote.

Was it possible that their reluctance was connected to the fact that survey after survey shows the public has lost appetite for our Middle East wars, especially in Afghanistan?

The “stinging rebuke” in the Senate that has Washington buzzing was a graphic example of how out of touch the capital is with the rest of the country, which would like more of a say in when, where and why we go to war.

………

Having been told off by the Trump team, the Senate meekly got together to craft a new AUMF. The proposal among other things would trigger a 60-day review period by lawmakers, in the highly probable event a president decided to make war against a new country.

But nobody on the Senate Foreign Relations committee believed they could get the measure passed. “I think it’s going to be very difficult to get to the finish line on this,” predicted Sen. Ben Cardin (D-MD). So even that pathetic ask for a fig leaf of congressional authority for future wars went nowhere.

………

Yet when Trump decided he was going to withdraw forces from Syria and Afghanistan, suddenly it was We Are The World time on the Hill. Republicans and the non-presidential candidates on the Democrat side joined hands to renounce the executive branch for daring to withdraw troops from somewhere without permission.
………

The constitutional idea that Congress does the declaring of wars, while presidents only command them, is designed to give voters extra input on this most crucial of decisions, i.e. when we’re going to risk American lives (to say nothing of foreign ones).

But Congress has been abdicating that responsibility for a while now. Two successive presidents made a joke of it, expanding limited authorization to go after 9/11 terrorists into nearly two decades of open-ended Middle East missions. We were bombing seven countries when Trump took office, and probably 99 percent of voters couldn’t have named them.

When Trump tried to withdraw troops from two countries, what happened? Congress, snoring on this issue since at least 2001, threw a fit that the president was acting unilaterally.

Seriously, if we were to replace every member of Congress with Big Mouth Billy Bass plaques, we would probably have a more meaningful discussion regarding war and peace.

Clearly, The FBI Will Save Us From Putin

A domestic terrorism briefing the FBI gave to law enforcement agencies in 2017 warned them about the threat of “pro-abortion extremists.” That would be fine, except—as the FBI’s own briefing materials subsequently admit—violent pro-abortion extremists barely exist, and in no universe do they constitute an organized domestic terror movement. The existence of this briefing was uncovered by Property of the People, a government transparency group that uses Freedom of Information Act requests to shed light on the workings of the government.

To make the extent of the non-problem clear: Only one person could be fairly described as a “pro-choice terrorist” (he indeed described himself that way), and that is Theodore Shulman, who went to prison in 2012 for harrassing and threatening to kill two leading figures in the anti-abortion movement. (Shulman served 41 months in prison, followed by three years of supervised release.) The only known death of an anti-abortion protester is Jim Pouillon, who was shot and killed in September 2009 while holding a gory sign and protesting outside a Michigan clinic. Harlan James Drake, who was sentenced to life in prison for the murder, was severely mentally ill, according to his lawyers. He also killed a gravel pit owner the same day, reportedly believing both men had wronged his mother. According to evidence presented at trial, Drake shot Pouillon not because he was a radical pro-choice activist, but because he was offended that Pouillon was holding a disturbing sign in view of school children.

Anti-abortion groups, meanwhile, have harassed doctors and clinics who provide abortions for decades, leading to arson, constant death threats, a wave of bombings throughout the 1990s, and the murders of some 12 people between 1993 and 2012, all either clinic staffers or physicians. The nature of these constant threats, combined with consistent state and federal-level legislative efforts to curtail abortion or ban it outright, has changed the nature of abortion access in America.

And yet the FBI’s briefing to law enforcement agencies appears to be based on the idea that there are threats, particularly dangerous lone wolf-type extremists, on both sides.

Gunita Singh, the staff attorney at Property of the People, told us, “It should strike any reasonable person as astounding, irrational, and even offensive to see the words ‘pro-choice extremist’ strung together. Yet, in this FBI document we see this configuration appear in an Abortion Extremism Reference Guide, juxtaposed alongside ‘pro-life extremists,’ as if they’re somehow two sides of the same coin.”

The FBI is still the misbegotten child of J. Edgar Hoover, and if you view them with anything other than suspicion, you are a fool.

Linkage

I want to see someone selling beer in a Klein Bottle: