Nobody Cares: PRS

[Cristalle]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-the-clintons-should-be-investigated/2017/11/19/d88bb652-cb15-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html

The New York Times reported in 2015 that "shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, [former President Bill] Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock." In total, $145 million went to the Clinton Foundation from interests linked to Uranium One, which was acquired by the Russian government nuclear agency Rosatum.

Think that was just a coincidence? As former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy points out, the Uranium One deal is not a national security scandal, it is a corruption scandal involving "Clinton family self-dealing." Ask yourself: How many half-a-million-dollar speeches has Bill Clinton given to Kremlin-linked banks since Hillary Clinton was defeated? How much Russian money is flowing into the Clinton Foundation's coffers today? If Donald Trump had given a $500,000 speech paid for by a Kremlin bank, and his private foundation had accepted $145 million from Vladimir Putin-linked oligarchs and their Western business partners, do you think that his critics would be insisting there was nothing to see here?

Jimmy reads the news.

 

[Salome]

I often wonder if I fell into one of these conspiracy nutter rabbit holes how far down I’d get before my inherent sense of self-respect forced me to re-examine my line of thinking. I have to believe it would be before I started to parrot right-wing conspiracy theories that even Fox News wouldn't stand behind:

Fox News Anchor Destroys Uranium One Conspiracy Theory

Shep Smith calls statements others on the network have made about the conspiracy theory "inaccurate."

www.newsweek.com

The Uranium One stuff has been debunked so many times by so many people it takes a certain kind of agenda to continue promoting it. Combine that with the constant downplaying of actual Russian espionage and the desire to act like it’s no big deal and ... yeah.

Maybe for some it’s just too humiliating to admit to they’ve become the useful idiots of chaos agents.

 

[Cristalle]

You mean the Chaos Agent that's going on the radio to call other candidates Russian plants? Stop projecting.

 

[Salome]

JFC.

1. Clinton didn’t say Tulsi was a Russian plant and every news org that promoted that shit for HRC hate clickbait had to retract. It takes half a second of googling to prove that lie.

Turns out Hillary Clinton said Republicans — not Russians — were grooming Tulsi Gabbard

In a curious turn of events, a number of major news organizations ran corrections Wednesday night over week-old reports that sparked a testy war of words...

www.marketwatch.com

There’s zero chance you don’t already know this. But, please, tell me more about your personal ethics of never posting false information.

Also —

2. Even Bernie Sanders had to admit Russia aided him in 2016. He personally supports the findings of US intelligence community regarding foreign interference in our elections. He introduced legislation about it for fuck’s sake:

Sanders Introduces Resolution to Protect American Democracy from Russian Meddling

The Official U.S. Senate website of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

www.sanders.senate.gov

The only people maintaining that Russia is a fake or non-issue are conspiracy theorists, the GOP, and their operatives and useful idiots.

There are several legitimate reasons to take issue with HRC as a political figure. Some of them are why I did not vote for her in the 2016 primary. The fact that you and those like you choose instead to traffic in conspiracy and parrot propaganda to sustain your programmed hatred of her should make any intellectually honest person reflect.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

My god, there is a point where you just have to be real. I started to fall in the trap of trying to act like a kindergarten teacher explaining the facts of 2+2 =4.
Then I just backspaced it. The answer is literally in front of your face.

Actually if you are creating a suitable finite field 1 + 1 can also be 0. Just saying.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/yes-the-clintons-should-be-investigated/2017/11/19/d88bb652-cb15-11e7-b0cf-7689a9f2d84e_story.html

Jimmy reads the news.

The New York Times reported in 2015 that "shortly after the Russians announced their intention to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One, [former President Bill] Clinton received $500,000 for a Moscow speech from a Russian investment bank with links to the Kremlin that was promoting Uranium One stock." In total, $145 million went to the Clinton Foundation from interests linked to Uranium One, which was acquired by the Russian government nuclear agency Rosatum.

You must forgive me, but I'm used to an environment in which people who accuse other people of crimes are expected to produce evidence rather than speculation and conjecture, so I am inclined to probe the evidence a bit.

What exactly were the "links" with the Kremlin which this bank is said to have? Do they handle the payroll, or does the Kremlin's head chef keep a savings account there, or is the manager's brother employed at the Kremlin as a butler or what?

And also -- which is a point that's always bugged me about this sort of innuendo and insinuation -- since the decision about allowing Rosatum to acquire a majority stake in Uranium One was not Hillary Clinton's to take but, instead, required the consent of nine separate federal agencies, what sort of inducements do you say the other eight parties who agreed to the deal received from the Russians?

Or were they willing to consent to the deal for free, and only HRC needed financial inducements to encourage her to cooperate?

You might find this Snopes fact-check makes interesting, or at least instructive, reading: FACT CHECK: Hillary Clinton Gave 20 Percent of United States' Uranium to Russia in Exchange for Clinton Foundation Donations?

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

How artists on Twitter tricked t-shirt stores into admitting their automated art theft

Yesterday, an artist on Twitter named Nana ran an experiment to test a theory.


Their suspicion was that bots were actively looking on Twitter for phrases like “I want this on a shirt” or “This needs to be a t-shirt,” automatically scraping the quoted images, and instantly selling them without permission as print-on-demand t-shirts.

Dozens of Nana’s followers replied, and a few hours later, a Twitter bot replied with a link to the newly-created t-shirt listing on Moteefe, a print-on-demand t-shirt service.

Several other t-shirt listings followed shortly after, with listings on questionable sites like Toucan Style, CopThis, and many more.

Spinning up a print-on-demand stores is dead simple with platforms like GearBubble, Printly, Printful, GearLaunch (who power Toucan Style), and many more — creating a storefront with thousands of theoretical product listings, but with merchandise only manufactured on demand through third-party printers who handles shipping and fulfillment with no inventory.

Many of them integrate with other providers, allowing these non-existent products to immediately appear on eBay, Amazon, Etsy, and other stores, but only manufactured when someone actually buys them.

The ease of listing products without manufacturing them is how we end up with bizarre algorithmic t-shirts and entire stock photo libraries on phone cases. Even if they only generate one sale daily per 1,000 listings, that can still be a profitable business if you’re listing hundreds of thousands of items.

But whoever’s running these art theft bots found a much more profitable way of generating leads: by scanning Twitter for people specifically telling artists they’d buy a shirt with an illustration on it. The t-shirt scammers don’t have the rights to sell other people’s artwork, but they clearly don’t care.

The result of this experiment has been super-fun to watch, with protesters creating self-aware copyright-infringement images using the IPs of known-litigious corporations like Disney and Nintendo, and legions of Twitters replying that they want to see those images on T-shirts, which has subsequently filled the storefront pages of the automated t-shirt makers with designs effectively accusing themselves of art-theft and copyright infringement, some of the shirts explicitly begging the rightsholders to sue them. The idea being, individual internet artists have no practical way to fight this kind of theft, but these mega-corporations certainly do have the resources.

I love it so much. But, unfortunately, I have to say that for those that are genuinely hoping for lawsuits, it seems to me that the addition of a self-aware "THIS IS COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT, PLEASE SUE ME DISNEY" text to the character images changes them just enough and in just such a way that they might actually meet the qualifications of fair use, ironically enough.

But then there are those whose strategy is to simply reply to every tweet on Disney's offical twitter account that contains an image with "please put this on a t-shirt, I would buy it", which might actually do the job.

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

:lol:

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

I worked for Alex Jones. I regret it.

Holy smoke, read this, guys!

 

[Anya Ristow]

The Uranium One stuff...

The Uranium One deal was within the purview of the State Department. Get HRC on board and nobody else was going to think anything of it. That six other signatures were necessary is not convincing of anything. That deal was happening or not happening on HRC's say-so.

A speech by WJC was totally worth half a million bucks to the Russians. Ahuh.

1. Clinton didn’t say Tulsi was a Russian plant and every news org that promoted that shit for HRC hate clickbait had to retract.

Here's what she said...

“They’re also gonna do third party again. And I’m not making any predictions but I think they’ve got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She’s the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that’s assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, ‘cause she’s also a Russian asset.”

"every news org that promoted that shit" could be forgiven for thinking she was talking about Russians...because she was talking about Russians.

 

[Anya Ristow]

What exactly were the "links" with the Kremlin which this bank is said to have?

The bank was Renaissance Capital, and from memory, the American billionaire co-founder hired Russian government and FSB officials soon after Putin came into office, and used those connections to avoid scrutiny.

 

[Salome]

The Uranium One deal was within the purview of the State Department. Get HRC on board and nobody else was going to think anything of it. That six other signatures were necessary is not convincing of anything. That deal was happening or not happening on HRC's say-so.

A speech by WJC was totally worth half a million bucks to the Russians. Ahuh.

This is why dealing with you people is like playing whack-a-mole. You dont know what you’re talking about half the time and so you just repeat nonsense conspiracy garbage. When you’re corrected on your factual errors you don’t even pretend to care because the fantasy of the conspiracy means more to you than reality.

It wasn’t just a handful of signatures but multiple organizations and departments of which Clinton had influence over a small fraction. The supposed payoff doesn’t even work in the timetable the way you all pretend.

"every news org that promoted that shit" could be forgiven for thinking she was talking about Russians...because she was talking about Russians.

Wrong. Again. Actually she and the host were talking (at length) about the GOP and Trump and what strategies they would employ to try and suppress Dem turnout and discussing how third party candidates were likely to play into that as they did in 2000 and 2016. Russia was mentioned only as a side note of how they might interfere on behalf of the GOP and who their online trolls were already visibly acting on behalf of. Jill Stein was noted as a Russian asset, because she is. Tulsi was implied as merely a possible chaos agent being groomed and propped up by the GOP by online troll farms. I get that you guys hate context because it ruins your narratives, but the majority of the interview isn’t even Clinton doing more than offering one line responses while the host lays out his opinions, with her occasionally making more nuanced points.

Spoiler

Plouffe: "Right, and they’ll double down on this time. Trump had those advantages but he was not an incumbent. So as we know, whether it’s Ronald Regan, your husband, Barack Obama, those first 18 months of the election cycle were as important as the last six months. …

"You know, Donald Trump, as you know better than anyone in the world, only got 46.1% of the vote nationally. You know he got 47.2 in Wisconsin, 47.7 in Michigan, and if you had said those before the election you would have said he's going to lose in a landslide."

Clinton: "Right."

Plouffe: "But one of the reasons he was able to win is the third party vote."

Clinton: "Right."

Plouffe: "And what's clear to me, you mentioned, you know, he's going to just lie. ... He's going to say, whoever our nominee is, ‘will ban hamburgers and steaks and you can't fly and infanticide’ and people believe this. So, how concerned are you about that? For me, so much of this does come down to the win number. If he has to get 49 or even 49.5 in a bunch of…"

Clinton: "He can't do that."

Plouffe: "...which I don't think he can... So he's going to try and drive the people not to vote for him but just to say, ‘you know, you can't vote for them either.’ And that seems to be, I think, to the extent that I can define a strategy, their key strategy right now."

Clinton: "Well, I think there's going to be two parts and I think it's going to be the same as 2016: ‘Don't vote for the other guy. You don't like me? Don't vote for the other guy because the other guy is going to do X, Y and Z or the other guy did such terrible things and I'm going to show you in these, you know, flashing videos that appear and then disappear and they're on the dark web, and nobody can find them, but you're going to see them and you're going to see that person doing these horrible things.’"

"They're also going to do third party again. And I'm not making any predictions but I think they've got their eye on somebody who is currently in the Democratic primary and are grooming her to be the third party candidate. She's the favorite of the Russians. They have a bunch of sites and bots and other ways of supporting her so far, and that's assuming Jill Stein will give it up. Which she might not, 'cause she's also a Russian asset."

Plouffe: (Inaudible)

Clinton: "Yeah, she's a Russian asset, I mean, totally.

"And so, they know they can't win without a third party candidate and, so, I don't know who it's going to be it but I will guarantee you they'll have a vigorous third party challenge in the key states that they most need it."

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The bank was Renaissance Capital, and from memory, the American billionaire co-founder hired Russian government and FSB officials soon after Putin came into office, and used those connections to avoid scrutiny.

And this goes to suggest what? From what you say, it sounds as if he was trying to avoid Russian scrutiny rather than anyone else's. And, of course, it's hardly uncommon for all manner of bodies to pay vast fees for speeches by former heads of government all over the world -- you do the job, write your memoirs for some huge advance, and then set about lecturing bankers in return for several hundred thousand a time when you're not busy being on the boards of several companies in return for huge retainers.

I'm sure you'll find George W. collects a tidy income from similar gigs, and I know Tony Blair notoriously does. Even Gordon Brown does, for heaven's sake.

But, more to the point, what about the eight other officials (and President Obama, of course, who could have vetoed the sale)?

Did they get bungs too, or were they working for free and only HRC needed paying off? Why didn't they need paying?

ETA: Based on my memories of Russia in the 90s, when I had dealings in the Palermo of the North, as they used to call St Petersburg, and I don't think things have changed that much, hiring ex FSB and government officials means you're paying for bolshaya blatt , or serious clout. This bank is not going to have problems with Russian regulators or bank robbers, and its senior officials are not going to have problems with the tax police, either. Neither are their more wealthy customers.

 

[Beebo Brink]

As a direct result of debates on this forum, I now know more about Tulsi Gabbard than I ever wanted to know. It's useless knowledge, or at least I hope it is, but it's insured that Gabbard is probably the only "Democrat" that would not get my vote if she was running against Trump. I think I'd take my changes with him, because she's bright enough to do even more damage than he would.

 

[Anya Ristow]

As a direct result of debates on this forum, I now know more about Tulsi Gabbard than I ever wanted to know. It's useless knowledge, or at least I hope it is, but it's insured that Gabbard is probably the only "Democrat" that would not get my vote if she was running against Trump. I think I'd take my changes with him, because she's bright enough to do even more damage than he would.

Would this still be your position if she was polling a close third?

 

[Beebo Brink]

Would this still be your position if she was polling a close third?

I ain't voting for her. Period.

 

[Anya Ristow]

ETA: Based on my memories of Russia in the 90s, when I had dealings in the Palermo of the North, as they used to call St Petersburg, and I don't think things have changed that much, hiring ex FSB and government officials means you're paying for bolshaya blatt , or serious clout. This bank is not going to have problems with Russian regulators or bank robbers, and its senior officials are not going to have problems with the tax police, either. Neither are their more wealthy customers.

Interesting. Thanks for that.

 

[Isabeau]

US Soldiers Are Carrying the Hidden Trauma of Our Endless Wars

Mental health specialists have long recognized the deep emotional trauma of war. When will the US military?

www.thenation.com

For those not familiar with the tag, moral injury is related to but not the same as post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, which is a recognized clinical condition. Both involve some of the same symptoms, including depression, insomnia, nightmares, and self-medication via alcohol or drugs, but they arise from different circumstances. PTSD symptoms are a psychological reaction to an experience of life-threatening physical danger or harm. Moral injury is the lasting mental and emotional result of an assault on the conscience—a memory, as one early formulation put it, of “perpetrating, failing to prevent, or bearing witness to acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expectations.”

The idea remains controversial in the military world, but the wars that Americans have fought since 2001—involving a very different experience of warfighting from that of past generations—have made it increasingly difficult for military culture to cling to its old manhood and warrior myths. Many in that military have had to recognize the invisible wounds of moral conflict that soldiers have brought home with them from those battlefields.

...

Again and again, participants spoke about the great change in how soldiers experience war. In past generations, for the great majority of service members, war was a one-time event. In the 18 years since 9/11 and the invasion of Afghanistan, war has become a permanent part of soldiers’ lives in a continuing cycle of repeated deployments to battle zones. (And that’s not to mention the even more startling change for those who see combat remotely, sitting in front of screens and firing missiles or dropping bombs from unmanned aircraft flying over targets thousands of miles away.) As nearly all the symposium speakers pointed out, that change in the war-fighting experience has also changed the nature of combat trauma and the military culture’s understanding of and attitudes toward it.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

US Soldiers Are Carrying the Hidden Trauma of Our Endless Wars

Mental health specialists have long recognized the deep emotional trauma of war. When will the US military?

www.thenation.com

From the novella Thumbprint, by Joe Hill, about Mal, a (fictional) US veteran of Iraq who was an interrogator at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere:

When she enlisted, she had hoped for war. She did not see the point of joining if you weren’t going to get to fight. The risk to her life did not trouble her. It was an incentive. You received a two-hundred-dollar-a-month bonus for every month you spent in the combat zone, and a part of her had relished the fact that her own life was valued so cheap. Mal would not have expected more.

But it didn’t occur to her, when she first learned she was going to Iraq, that they paid you that money for more than just the risk to your own life. It wasn’t just a question of what could happen to you, but also a matter of what you might be asked to do to others. For her two-hundred-dollar bonus, she had left naked and bound men in stress positions for hours and told a nineteen-year-old girl that she would be gang-raped if she did not supply information about her boyfriend. Two hundred dollars a month was what it cost to make a torturer out of her. She felt now that she had been crazy there, that the Vivarin, the ephedra, the lack of sleep, the constant scream-and-thump of the mortars, had made her into someone who was mentally ill, a bad-dream version of herself.