Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope. Nope.

New York’s 19th Congressional district is allegedly competitive, though it went for Trump in 2016, and John Faso defeated Zephyr Techout about 8 points, so my guess is that it is not as competitive as people would like to think.

Patrick Ryan is running for US Congress in the Democratic primary in ew York’s 19th congressional district.

Patrick Ryan has also made a living spying on progressives for the state security apparatus for about a decade:

Patrick Ryan, a congressional candidate from New York, is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.

Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions, hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid to discredit them.

The pitch, a joint venture with a now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it was exposed in a series of news reports.

Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.

Ryan is one of several Democrats hoping to challenge freshman Rep. John Faso, R-N.Y., for a seat that is expected to be among the most competitive in the country. The Hudson Valley district contains both staunchly conservative and liberal pockets. Donald Trump won the district by a seven-point margin in 2016, but even when Barack Obama took the district by six points in 2012, Democrats failed to win the congressional seat. Republicans have held the 19th District since it was formed eight years ago. This year, as Democrats anticipate a wave of victories in response to Trump and the GOP’s wildly unpopular agenda, they hope that the 19th District, will finally turn blue.

………

In July 2015, Ryan joined Dataminr, a startup that has worked closely with clients to make sense out of vast amounts of social media data. The company, as The Intercept first reported in 2016, was funded through an investment from In-Q-Tel, the venture capital arm of the CIA. The company, formed in consultation with Twitter, maintains access to Twitter’s proprietary “firehose” of user data, giving it an edge in social media data analysis.

The firm amassed law enforcement clients, including the FBI and Joint Regional Intelligence Center, a fusion center used by the government to alert multiple law enforcement departments in the Los Angeles region of potential threats. Documents, uncovered by the ACLU of California through a public records investigation of social media monitoring software, show that Dataminr monitored tweets mentioning Black Lives Matter on behalf of the JRIC. The emails show that Dataminr’s alerts vacuumed up tweets from now-Intercept columnist Shaun King, among other activists, in reports sent to law enforcement.

In another email obtained by the ACLU of California, Dataminr pitched the Los Angeles Police Department to use its tool to track protests, among other events of interest to law enforcement. Dataminr’s social media tracking tools are “highly valued by our clients at FBI CTD, NYPD, DoD and all ‘big five’ intel agencies,” the pitch continued.

In 2016, following a series of news reports on Dataminr’s relationship with law enforcement, Twitter announced Dataminr would no longer service fusion centers, and would restrict the use of its backend Twitter data for its law enforcement and intelligence agency clients.

Four years before he joined Dataminr, Ryan’s work with Berico Technologies was revealed in a hack of its partner firm, HBGary Federal. How his efforts to monitor activists on behalf of business interests were disclosed in an unusual story of spy versus spy.
 
In 2011, HBGary Federal boasted to the Financial Times that it was working on a plan to undermine WikiLeaks, which at the time was threatening to expose documents from Bank of America. In retaliation, a splinter group from the hacktivist collective LulzSec infiltrated network administrator from HBGary Federal, stealing thousands of emails from the firm and posting them onto the web.

The emails revealed that HBGary Federal had not only pitched a plan to Bank of America to track and discredit supporters of WikiLeaks, including The Intercept’s co-founder Glenn Greenwald, but had developed a larger business proposal to sell activist surveillance to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the largest pro-business lobbying organization in Washington, D.C.

Great.  Peter Thiel in drag.

No.  Just no.

Seriously no.

No.

File Under, “Dystopian”

It appears that the car of the future have all the respect for your privacy that Mark Zuckerberg does, so expect hemorrhoid ads on your multi-function display:

Picture this: You’re driving home from work, contemplating what to make for dinner, and as you idle at a red light near your neighborhood pizzeria, an ad offering $5 off a pepperoni pie pops up on your dashboard screen.

Are you annoyed that your car’s trying to sell you something, or pleasantly persuaded? Telenav Inc., a company developing in-car advertising software, is betting you won’t mind much. Car companies—looking to earn some extra money—hope so, too.

Automakers have been installing wireless connections in vehicles and collecting data for decades. But the sheer volume of software and sensors in new vehicles, combined with artificial intelligence that can sift through data at ever-quickening speeds, means new services and revenue streams are quickly emerging. The big question for automakers now is whether they can profit off all the driver data they’re capable of collecting without alienating consumers or risking backlash from Washington.

“Carmakers recognize they’re fighting a war over customer data,” said Roger Lanctot, who works with automakers on data monetization as a consultant for Strategy Analytics. “Your driving behavior, location, has monetary value, not unlike your search activity.”

I just want an off switch for the car’s connectivity features, because, in addition to eschewing the aforementioned advertisements, I don’t want some script kiddie turning off my anti-lock brakes.

Be Careful What You Wish for, You Might Get It

For years, the US has been demanding that European allies spend more on their military

Now that they are, they are also setting up European cooperation mechanisms, and so now the Pentagon is upset about baby steps toward European military autonomy:

For years, the US has been complaining that EU countries do not spend enough on their own military capabilities.

“Now we’re trying to do that, and it’s not right either,” Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, told delegates at the Munich Security Conference this weekend.

A high-level annual meeting of US and European politicians, generals and defence experts, the conference was this year dominated by calls from Germany and France for Europe to stand on its own two feet — and US qualms about what that might mean for the transatlantic alliance.

Indeed US misgivings about attempts to forge closer defence ties within the EU could become a significant irritant in relations with the US.

Why would Washington have a problem with this?

For the same reason that they expanded NATO to Russia’s border, because they want to ensure that Europe remains a market for US military hardware, and this development implies that Europe is moving toward become a competitor in this whole “Merchants of Death” business:

Washington’s attention is focused on permanent structured co-operation, or Pesco, which is shaping up to be the EU’s most serious attempt yet at forging closer defence ties. Of its 28 member states, 25 have signed up to the scheme that involves 17 projects ranging from improving military mobility to developing a new infantry fighting vehicle.

………

Some Europeans suspect that US reservations are focused less on concerns about Nato than on fears for the US defence industry. “If the EU develops its own fighter aircraft, it won’t need any more Lockheed Martin F-35s,” said one senior MP from Germany’s governing CDU party. “If we really consolidate the European arms industry then it’s that industry that will get the contracts from the EU and that means more competition for US arms exporters.”

(emphasis mine)

Not a surprise, seeing as how the US has basically turned the State Department into the sales arm of the Military Industrial complex.

How it Should Be Done

If you want to run for office as a real liberal, watch Jeremy Corbyn and take copious notes:

Jeremy Corbyn pledged that a Labour government would make it harder for asset strippers to take over U.K. companies while vowing to make finance the “servants of industry not the masters of us all.”

While his full-throttle attacks on bankers have been become familiar to the City of London, his prescription for blocking hostile takeovers is specific and likely to rattle the world of business.

In a speech to the EEF manufacturers’ organisation, he will evoke the case of Melrose Industries Plc’s bid for GKN Plc as an example where action to fend off the turnaround specialist is justified. If elected, Corbyn would broaden the scope of the “public interest test” to allow the government to act.

“Take GKN, one of the world’s oldest and most prestigious engineering firms, which employs 6,000 workers across the U.K.,” Corbyn will say on Tuesday. “And yet GKN is currently facing a hostile, allegedly debt-fuelled takeover bid by Melrose, a company with a history of opportunistic asset-stripping.”

“It’s an all too familiar story, like when Kraft took over Cadburys,” Corbyn will tell an audience of manufacturers at their annual conference in London. “A valuable company could be sacrificed so that a few can make a quick buck.”

Understand that it is important to actually have credibility to make such a claim, which means that things like paid speaking gigs at Wall Street or fundraising appeals to that same boulevard tend to eliminate this as a valid tactic.

If you want to talk the talk, you have to walk the walk, as Corbyn has done for decades.

Linkage

To my mind, this is the quintessential country music song: (Warning: kind of NSFW)

The New Pennsylvania Map is Out

Following the complete inability of the legislature and the governor to agree on come up with something that meets the requirements of the Pennsylvania constitution, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has drawn the new Congressional map, and it appears to be a far fairer map:

The Pennsylvania Supreme Court on Monday imposed a new congressional district map that upends previous boundaries, renumbers districts across the state and gives a potential boost to Democrats in the 2018 House elections.

Under the court’s redrawn map, districts more closely align with county lines and only 13 counties are split among two or three districts. By contrast, under the last map, enacted by the state legislature in 2011, more than twice as many counties were split among multiple districts.

In striking down that map last month as unconstitutional, the justices said the new districts should be as compact and contiguous as possible. Their new map, they wrote in an order, is “superior or comparable” to proposals submitted by the participants and interested groups during in the legal challenge that led to the historic ruling.

The reconfigured map prompted a sharp rebuke from top Republican legislators, who said honoring it would create a “constitutional crisis.” Extending a political clash that has roiled the state for months, they said they might challenge the map — or the justices’ authority to impose it — in federal court as early as Tuesday.

The US Supreme Court has already declined to review this, since the ruling is under the aegis of the Pennsylvania constitution, so I see it as somewhat unlikely that a Federal court overruling this.

The only way that I see an injunction is if the Supreme Court reverses itself and agrees to take the case directly.

They gave the legislature and governor an opportunity (albeit a short time) to come together on this, and they failed, so the court had to draw their own map.

Ex-CIA Director Tells the Truth

On Fox News, (where else) Former CIA director James Woolsey admitted that the US routinely meddles in foreign elections, but “Only for very good cause,” because, I guess it’s OK when we do it.

You see laundering money to politicians in foreign countries is MUCH better than trolling on Facebook and Twitter:

Following a federal indictment of Russians accused of meddling in the U.S election, a former CIA director on Friday said the U.S. “probably” meddles in other countries’ elections, as well.

The Russian embassy flagged his comments.

When asked whether the U.S. interferes in other countries’ elections, James Woolsey said, “Well, only for a very good cause in the interests of democracy.”

“Oh, probably, but it was for the good of the system in order to avoid communists taking over,” he told Laura Ingraham on her Fox News show on Friday night.

Woolsey served as CIA director under former President Clinton.

The New York Times has suddenly discovered this historical fact as well:

Bags of cash delivered to a Rome hotel for favored Italian candidates. Scandalous stories leaked to foreign newspapers to swing an election in Nicaragua. Millions of pamphlets, posters and stickers printed to defeat an incumbent in Serbia.

The long arm of Vladimir Putin? No, just a small sample of the United States’ history of intervention in foreign elections.

On Tuesday, American intelligence chiefs warned the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia appears to be preparing to repeat in the 2018 midterm elections the same full-on chicanery it unleashed in 2016: hacking, leaking, social media manipulation and possibly more. Then on Friday, Robert Mueller, the special counsel, announced the indictments of 13 Russians and three companies, run by a businessman with close Kremlin ties, laying out in astonishing detail a three-year scheme to use social media to attack Hillary Clinton, boost Donald Trump and sow discord.

Most Americans are understandably shocked by what they view as an unprecedented attack on our political system. But intelligence veterans, and scholars who have studied covert operations, have a different, and quite revealing, view.

“If you ask an intelligence officer, did the Russians break the rules or do something bizarre, the answer is no, not at all,” said Steven L. Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years at the C.I.A., where he was the chief of Russian operations. The United States “absolutely” has carried out such election influence operations historically, he said, “and I hope we keep doing it.”

Hypocrisy much?

This Has Gotta Hurt

Republican Kevin Nicholson is running in the primary for a chance to run against Tammy Baldwin’s for US Senate.

His parents have donated the maximum to the Baldwin campaign:

This is amusing. Apparently, Kevin Nicholson’s parents are staunch Democrats, so much so they’d rather give their money to Tammy Baldwin than a Republican, even if he’s their own son.

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth, neh?

Brazil Shows Us What We Need for Good Healthcare

It appears that all you need is a community minded hyper-violent drug lord:

Thomaz Vieira Gomes, also known as 2N, is considered one of the most dangerous criminals in Rio de Janeiro, but recently he actually did something decent, albeit still illegal, for once.

He and his gang kidnapped two male nurses and made them vaccinate the poor people of his favela against yellow fever.

For months, Brazil has been dealing with a yellow fever epidemic that has already left dozens dead. Despite the Health Ministry’s plans to vaccinate millions of people in the hopes of containing the outbreak, immunisation centres struggle to keep up with the high number of patients, and, as always, the poorest communities are usually ignored.

………

On January 27th, the young gang leader and a few of his cronies descended on a local state-run clinic in two black cars, took as many syringes and vaccine doses as they could find, and kidnapped two of the male nurses on duty that night.

They then drove to the Amarelinho bar in Salgueiro where the two nurses spent hours administering yellow fever vaccines to members of the local community.

………

After doing their job, the two victims were reportedly taken back to their workplace.

………

Even the country’s former Minister of Environment took to Twitter to comment on this bizarre story, saying that while 2N is still an “a-hole” his actions were a “public service”.

I’m not entirely sure WHAT the lesson to be learned here, but I am sure that there IS a lesson to be learned here.

He Needs to Be Updating Obituaries for the next 6 Months

According to a now-deleted tweet, New York Times reporter Eric Lipton, the real tragedy of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting was that its victims were well spoken whites:

No one is misreading this. pic.twitter.com/QO1UdNE7wn

— Tweak Softly (@r33lshimslady) February 16, 2018

I really cannot read these comments in any other way.

I can think of no other term to describe this than, “White privilege.”

Cowardly Pissant

Last year, Donald Trump signed an executive order repealing an Obama order limiting firearms access to people with psychological issues.

Now that someone has murdered 17 people at a high school, his administration is refusing to release a photo of his signing the order:

The White House has refused to release a photo of President Donald Trump signing a law making it easier for some people with mental illness to buy guns.

 Despite repeated requests from CBS News, the White House press office has issued only a one-line response.

 Mr Trump last year repealed an Obama-era rule allowing the names of certain people on mental health benefits to be entered into a criminal database.

 The controversy follows a shooting by a suspect who had mental health issues.

………

CBS News says it requested a copy of the image – which White House photographers confirm exists – 12 separate times by phone or email.

White House spokeswoman Sarah Sanders has only said in a note dated 19 April 2017: “We don’t plan to release the picture at this time.”

CBS News asked the White House again on Thursday to release the photo, but has not received a response.

He really is a chicken sh%$, isn’t he.

Ronan Farrow Has Found His Journalistic Niche

Specifically, Farrow completely owns the “Powerful men behaving badly toward women,” space:

In June, 2006, Donald Trump taped an episode of his reality-television show, “The Apprentice,” at the Playboy Mansion, in Los Angeles. Hugh Hefner, Playboy’s publisher, threw a pool party for the show’s contestants with dozens of current and former Playmates, including Karen McDougal, a slim brunette who had been named Playmate of the Year, eight years earlier. In 2001, the magazine’s readers voted her runner-up for “Playmate of the ’90s,” behind Pamela Anderson. At the time of the party, Trump had been married to the Slovenian model Melania Knauss for less than two years; their son, Barron, was a few months old. Trump seemed uninhibited by his new family obligations. McDougal later wrote that Trump “immediately took a liking to me, kept talking to me – telling me how beautiful I was, etc. It was so obvious that a Playmate Promotions exec said, ‘Wow, he was all over you – I think you could be his next wife.’ ”

Trump and McDougal began an affair, which McDougal later memorialized in an eight-page, handwritten document provided to The New Yorker by John Crawford, a friend of McDougal’s. When I showed McDougal the document, she expressed surprise that I had obtained it but confirmed that the handwriting was her own. 

I didn’t care about this crap when Bill Clinton did it, and I don’t care about it now.

The problem is not that Donald Trump f%$#ed Karen McDougal, it’s that he f%$#ed the rest of us.

I Am So Going to Jail

Bob Muller has just indicted 13 Russians for trolling the election.

I gotta figure that my blog is going to pop up on his radar soon, and I look awful in orange. Damn:

The special counsel investigating Russia’s interference in the 2016 presidential election charged 13 Russian nationals and three Russian organizations on Friday with illegally trying to disrupt the American political process, including efforts designed to boost the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump and hurt that of his opponent, Hillary Clinton.

 The indictment represents the first charges by the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, for meddling in the 2016 presidential election — the fundamental crime that he was assigned to investigate.

 In a 37-page indictment filed in United States District Court, Mr. Mueller said that the 13 individuals have conspired since 2014 to violate laws that prohibit foreigners from spending money to influence federal elections in the United States.

Obviously, I am never a non-US citizen, but occasionally,* I am a troll, so there is a concern about legal jeopardy for me.

As I understand this, Mueller’s interpretation of the law makes door to door canvassing, or volunteering in a campaign office by foreigners unlawful.

Of course, my standard caveat on such things, “I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!,” applies.†

*OK, maybe more than occasionally.
†I love it when I get to go all Dr. Mccoy!

Finally

The good folks at the Nation looked at a work of fiction by Matt Taibbi, and promptly concluded that it was an admission of actual wrongdoing, and wrote it up.

It appears that they have been disabused of this notion:

I have reached an amicable settlement with the Nation, an organization whose work I have held in high regard. I wish them success in their future endeavors. I am happy this matter could be resolved. pic.twitter.com/q9SGuG8CtC

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) February 14, 2018

About f%$#ing time.

Oh You Delicate Snowflake………

It appears that Peter Thiel is considering moving to Southern California, because people in Silicon Valley do not recognize the depth of his Randian genius.

For someone who has made his money on regulatory arbitrage (PayPal) and government money (Palantir Technologies), he sure has a thin skin.

I guess Peter is just a, “Beautiful Cinnamon Roll Too Good For This World, Too Pure.”

Thoughts and Prayers Motherf%$#er

17 dead, and as The Onion says, “Gorilla Sales Skyrocket After Latest Gorilla Attack.”

The new normal.

Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
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Thoughts and prayers
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Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers
Thoughts and prayers

And Locally………

The two officers from the Baltimore Gun Trace Task Force who did not plead out on the were convicted on corruption charges:

A federal jury convicted two Baltimore police detectives Monday for their roles in one of the biggest police corruption scandals in city history.

Detectives Daniel T. Hersl, 48, and Marcus R. Taylor, 31, were found guilty of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy and robbery. Prosecutors said they and their comrades on the Gun Trace Task Force had acted as “both cops and robbers,” using the power of their badges to steal large sums of money from residents under the guise of police work.

“Their business model was that the people that they were robbing had no recourse,” acting U.S. Attorney Stephen Schenning said after the verdict. “Who were they going to go to?”

Acting Police Commissioner Darryl De Sousa said the trial — in which several unindicted officers were also accused of wrongdoing — had uncovered “some of the most egregious and despicable acts ever perpetrated in law enforcement.”

Hersl and Taylor face up to 60 years in prison.

Of course, there were dozens, if not hundreds, of people in the department who had at least an inkling of what was going on, but the blue wall of silence held on for years.

Support your local police, huh?