Tag: win

Cheer the Orioles

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The Baltimore Orioles posted a rather innocuous Tweet wishing everyone a happy Kwanzaa.

The flying monkey crowd proceeded to have a butt-hurt hissy fit.

The team’s response was to tell the racist Neanderthals to go Cheney themselves:

A common love of the Orioles is what brings everyone together on this page. We’re happy to have a diverse fan base of the best fans in the world. If you cannot show respect for others, kindly unfollow us. There is no room for hate or bigotry on our social media or in our ballpark

— Baltimore Orioles (@Orioles) December 26, 2017

As a Red Sox fan, I cheer the Orioles today.

Thanksgiving Party Poopers

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This is Brilliant

It appears that members of her family are not fond of her HR Giger inspired food sculptures:

Fancy scaring the hell out of your family this Thanksgiving? Try serving up this Alien inspired Facehugger, a seriously mean looking fusion of whole roast chicken, snow crab legs and a chicken sausage tail.

The Facehugger is the work of Hellen Die, researcher, chef, food stylist, photographer, writer and dishwasher of The Necro-Nom-Nom-Nomicon, a horror-inspired collection of recipes that go beyond your standard Halloween novelty fare into a more gourmet, grown-up ghoulishness for foodies.

………

Clearly a fan of the Alien films, last year she went with the Chestburster emerging hideously out of the centerpiece turkey, a move that got her removed from cooking duties this time around by her family. You gotta admit it looks pretty awesome though doesn’t it?

She has a whole website of recipes.

Happy Thanksgiving everyone.

More of This

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In Pittsburgh, the Democratic Socialist Alliance (DSA) just defeated two incumbents, one a Republican city councilman and the other a longtime Democratic machine politician judge, and in so doing flipped the city council from Republican to Democratic:

The party inside of the MixTape bar in the historically lefty neighborhood of Garfield was absolutely jubilant. Hipster dance music blared over speakers as young hipster members of the Pittsburgh chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) embraced long-time neighborhood activists, who had been involved in organizing in the community for decades.

………

[Pittsburgh DSA Co-Chair Adam] Shuck and his comrades had reasons to be ecstatic. In their first major electoral test, the 385 dues-paying members strong Pittsburgh DSA proved that they weren’t just a group of hipsters, but a serious political force that could shake up stagnant Pittsburgh political machine.

Not only did a DSA member flip a county council seat back to Democrats, but the DSA toppled District Justice Ron Costa, one of the longtime bosses of the Costa political family. In addition to these wins, reform oriented candidates in the industrial, inner-city suburbs also defeated long-time incumbents in key races.

The campaigns were noted for their innovativeness and creativity in a Pittsburgh political scene long ossified by political legacy candidates.

Running under the slogan of “I don’t sell out, I sell auto parts”, 54-year-old DSA member Anita Prizio, filmed TV ads promising “Bad Puns, Good Policy”. Her campaign focused on the need for more transparency in local government, tackling the opioid crisis, and combatting lead poisoning affecting Pittsburgh area residents. Her quirky outsider campaign garnered the support of DSA and Our Revolution.

Despite running in some of the richest suburbs of Pittsburgh as well as some inner-city neighborhoods, Prizio was able to knock off incumbent Republican county councilman Ed Kress by a margin of 50.8% to 49.1%.

However, the most stunning victory was the defeat of 24-year incumbent District Justice Ron Costa by independent candidate Mike Pappas. A civil rights lawyer and former staffer to legendary progressive State Senator Jim Ferlo, the lifelong Pittsburgh resident Pappas ran under the slogan of “Addiction is not a crime”.

As a District Justice, Pappas pledged to reduce mass incarceration and implement principles of restorative justice. This radical platform garnered the attention of progressives nationally and earned him the first-ever endorsement issued in a judicial race by the Bernie Sanders backed group Our Revolution.

Pappas’s DSA endorsement prompted Judge Costa, an old-school machine Democrat, to send a letter to thousands of his constituents warning them that “You need to know that the DSA is a splinter group that has called for the elimination of prisons and police as well as drastic changes to our law”.

Despite the red-baiting and lacking a position on the ballot as a Democrat, Pappas trounced the 24-year incumbent Costa by an 11 point margin. Pappas mobilized over a hundred volunteers throughout the district and increased the voter turnout from 5,800 votes in the District Justice election in 2011 to 8,900 votes in 2017.

There is a saying that all politics is local, and many state and local elections are timed to avoid the Presidential campaign years (Maryland Legislature and Governor, for example) or to completely avoid federal elections (VA state house & governor, and the aforementioned Pittsburgh elections, for example).

It serves to tilt the playing field toward machine politicians, since they typically have the operatives on the ground to get the smaller numbers of voters to the polls required for victory.

The DSA, is acting, organizing, and running locally, and they are winning.

This is in stark contrast to a some other left wing political movements who seem to limit themselves to pious political posturing in the off years, and kamikaze Presidential campaigns every 4 years. **cough** Green Party **cough**

But What if it Gets Used for Evil ……… Oh ………Wait ……… It Already Has

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Computer boffins in the land of Hobbits are using AI based chat bots to screw with scammers.

It’s a nice to see someone turning chat bots against the scammers:

Thousands of online scammers around the globe are being fooled by artificial intelligence bots posing as New Zealanders and created by the country’s internet watchdog to protect it from “phishing” scams.

Chatbots that use distinct New Zealand slang such as “aye” have been deployed by Netsafe in a bid to engage scammers in protracted email exchanges that waste their time, gather intelligence and lure them away from actual victims.

yber crime costs New Zealanders around NZ$250m annually. Computer programmers at Netsafe spent more than a year designing the bots as part of their Re:scam initiative, which went live on Wednesday.

Within 24 hours 6,000 scam emails had been sent to the Re:scam email address and there were 1000 active conversations taking place between scammers and chatbots.

So far, the longest exchange between a scammer and a chatbot pretending to be a New Zealander was 20 emails long.

The bots use humour, grammatical errors and local slang to make their “personas” believable, said Netsafe CEO Martin Cocker. As the programme engages in more fake conversations with scammers overseas, its vocabulary, intelligence and personality traits will grow.

Here’s hoping that the AIs will spend their time battling each other, and ,leave the rest of us alone.

Tweet of the Day

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A socialist beat the House whip with no support from the party and is singing Solidarity Forever at his victory party, we can do this everywhere https://t.co/BVW9wOmW5b

— Will Bloom 🍞🌹 (@WillWBloom) November 8, 2017

Here is a low quality video of him singing:

🌹When a marine veteran socialist beats the GOP majority whip in Virginia 🌹 pic.twitter.com/QxUCCY9TRG

— Metro DC DSA (@dc_dsa) November 8, 2017

Tweet(s) of the Day

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They both have to do with Russia, and the current hysteria that posits that $100,000 in ads on Facebook somehow trumped the $1,000,000,000 that the Clinton campaign spent.

The first is about bus kiosk ads from RT:

While everyone freaks out about Russian ads, RT takes out more Russian ads pic.twitter.com/Z5eW8GS6pg

— Jane Lytvynenko (@JaneLytv) October 10, 2017

The second one, from the Russian ambassador to the UK, hits the British where it hurts, their 52 year drought in the World Cup:

A football team would be a better option pic.twitter.com/4Psj4ZkGy5

— Russian Embassy, UK (@RussianEmbassy) October 10, 2017

Dayyymmmm! That one is going to leave a mark.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Catalan Farmers PWn Police

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Catalan farmers announced plans to block roads with their tractors at the French border.

Police raced to the border so that they could, as is their wont, break some Catalan heads.

They found no one.

The farmers had decoyed the police and established the blocked further south, effectively marooning the police and national guard. (Google translate link)

Even if I were not inclined to support the Catalans, (Rajoy and his PP party are Franco’s heirs, and the King of Spain is, well, the King of Spain, the heir of Ferdinand and Isabella, who I am even less inclined to suppor) I would admire the sheer level of protest craft in this deception.

Well played.

H/T Anti-Fascist News on Facebook, the source of the picture.

More of This

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The best way to protect your credit is to initiate a cred freeze with the cred bureaus.

They make this difficult, and charge for doing this.

Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) has introduced a bill requiring the credit bureaus to offer a credit freeze for free:

In the wake of the the massive Equifax customer data breach, many consumers are wondering: Why, exactly, should we be paying the credit bureaus for credit freezes or monitoring when it was one of them that just lost all our personal data? Two U.S. Senators are wondering that, too, and have now introduced a bill to fix it.

Senators Elizabeth Warren (MA) and Brian Schatz (HI) today introduced a bill that would prevent credit bureaus from charging people for freezing their records. In the grand tradition of government backronyms, the bill [PDF] is called the FREE Act, or Freedom from Equifax Exploitation Act. (Yes, that would actually be the FFEE Act. Maybe you’re supposed to squint a little.)

The bill’s purpose is simple: If passed, it would stop credit bureaus from charging consumers to place a freeze on their credit records to prevent identity theft.

Good policy and good politics.

Needless to say, Democratic “moderates” will find a way to oppose this.

Jimmy Kimmel Wins

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During his monologue, he noted that Senator Ted Cruz had liked some MILF porn in Twitter.

He made the following observation:

I honestly don’t think it was Ted Cruz.

I don’t think Ted Cruz looks at porn. Ted Cruz masturbates to pictures of poor people without health care.

Kimmel didn’t just win the late night monologue Tuesday night, he won the world Tuesday night.

Video below:

How Utterly Proper

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There goes the browsing history… Many thanks to @steamfair. Soon to be on display at @SalisburyMuseum in September https://t.co/Di8tvTO4Hi pic.twitter.com/onGGWLDYL4

— Terry Pratchett (@terryandrob) August 25, 2017

Terry Pratchett died in 2015, and he left the most Terry Pratchett of instructions regarding his unfinished works:

A hard drive containing the unfinished books of Terry Pratchett has been destroyed by a steamroller, in fulfilment of the late author’s last wishes.

The works were crushed by a vintage John Fowler & Co steamroller at the Great Dorset Steam Fair, ahead of the opening of a new exhibition about the author’s life and work. It is thought up to 10 incomplete novels were flattened.

Friend Neil Gaiman, with whom Pratchett cowrote Good Omens, had revealed in 2015 that Pratchett had instructed that he wanted “whatever he was working on at the time of his death to be taken out along with his computers, to be put in the middle of a road and for a steamroller to steamroll over them all”.

Pratchett’s former assistant Rob Wilkins tweeted that he was “about to fulfil [his] obligation to Terry”.

The hard drive will go on display as part of a major exhibition about the author’s life and work, Terry Pratchett: HisWorld, which opens at the Salisbury Museum in September.

Pratchett died in March 2015 after a long battle with Alzheimer’s disease aged 66.

Epic.

Paging Paul T. Riddell!!!*

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It appears that dog lovers of San Francisco have decided to to let their dogs’ colons express their distaste for the latest white supremacist theater:

When a group of far-right activists come to San Francisco to hold a rally this Saturday, they will be met by peace activists offering them flowers to wear in their hair.

Also, dog sh%$. Lots and lots of dog sh%$.

Hundreds of San Franciscans plan to prepare Crissy Field, the picturesque beach in the shadow of the Golden Gate Bridge where rightwing protest group Patriot Prayer will gather, with a generous carpeting of excrement.

“I just had this image of alt-right people stomping around in the poop,” Tuffy Tuffington said of the epiphany he had while walking Bob and Chuck, his two Patterdale terriers, and trying to think of the best way to respond to rightwing extremists in the wake of Charlottesville. “It seemed like a little bit of civil disobedience where we didn’t have to engage with them face to face.”

Just a word of note:  Don’t exclude all those folks who keep Vietnamese Potbellied Pigs.  Pig sh%$ is even worse.

*He is an author who related what might be the ultimate fecal sabotage tale.

The Swedes are the Greatest People on the Face of the Earth

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Swedish passenger operator MTR Express opened up a new line between Stockholm and Gothenburg, and they held an online contest to name it, the obvious happened, but unlike the killjoys at the Natural Environment Research Council, they decided to name the line Trainy McTrainface:

A Swedish rail operator has vowed to name one of its trains Trainy McTrainface after a public vote, saying it would bring joy to people disappointed when Britain rejected the name Boaty McBoatface for a polar research ship following a similar poll.

Trainy McTrainface won 49% of the votes in the naming competition, conducted online by train operator MTR Express and Swedish newspaper Metro, beating choices such as Hakan, Miriam and Poseidon.

“[This is] news that will be received with joy by many, not just in Sweden,” MTR wrote in a statement.

The train will run between the Swedish capital Stockholm and Gothenburg, the country’s second-biggest city.
………

MTR said another train had been voted to be named “Glenn”, an apparent tribute to an IFK Gothenburg soccer team of the 1980s that featured four players of that name – uncommon in Sweden – including Glenn Hysen, who later captained Liverpool.

This is so cool.

Yeah, Throw This Guy Some Coin

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Someone got sick and tired of the Indian phone banks that are making thousands of calls in an attempt to scam us, and someone calling himself “Project Mayhem” has written software to call the phone banks hundreds of times a minute to prevent them from reaching real people:

It’s likely you’ve gotten calls from criminals who pose as IRS employees and threaten to imprison you if you don’t pay them thousands of dollars. These crooks work in teams based in Indian call centers. They are scumbags of the lowest order, preying on seniors and immigrants through fear and intimidation. Here’s a security developer who decided to fight back. He wrote a script that called one of these IRS scammers’ phone banks 28 times a second, flooding their phone lines and making it impossible for them to ply their vile trade. It’s fun to listen to the scammers curse at the programmer’s recorded message. According to Twisted Sifter, he has launched something called Project Mayhem to continue his fight against these unscrupulous scammers.” He is seeking Patreon donations to go after IRS scammers, tech support scammers, loan scammers, “you have won” scammers, and “family member in trouble” scammers. ………

You can donate money to this anonymous hero via Patreon.

Unfortunately, he has not released the code, though a number of sources have said that it is a rather trivial programming operation.

Personally, I’ll just lobby my Congresscritter to put a penny a minute tax on all overseas calls in both directions.

For ordinary people the costs are minimal, but for the scammers, it would make their business model, such as it is, untenable.

As to those who would argue that this would cripple the technical support and customer service operations currently operated in India, I will simply quote Randall Munroe, and say:

My experience with Indian technical support and customer service has been less than salutary.