Commie Comey
Episode 1071
Wed 31 Dec 2025

1071: Commie Comey

2h 56m
Duration

Transcript

0s - 2h56m17s

It's as phony as it comes. Bangin' home base and broadcasting live from the capital of the drone star state here in downtown Austin, Tejas, in the Cluedio. In the morning everybody, I'm Adam Curry. And from Northern Silicon Valley where I'm fresh back from a great meetup in Oakland, I'm John C. DeVore. It's Crackpot and Buzzkill. In the morning. Fresh back. Fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh, fresh back. You mean yesterday? And guess what? What?

Just as we're just as we're finished finishing the opening here it comes Yes, I got nine car train with no attachments I don't I don't know why we're doing this but we're doing it I'm quite sure why we're trying to beat this effort to the punch This is the best podcast in the universe. You're no agenda show we do the show twice a week on Thursdays and today is the Thursday Sunday and for some reason we try to beat the The Zephyr. We try to beat the Zephyr and every day is a Thursday apparently. At least it's working for me. It's working for me. I honestly sometimes really don't know what day of the week it is. I get confused. Well, this is kind of a screwball thing because you don't have the same, it's very unro, you know, it's not rotational. It's just like your two days and you got three days off and then two days and then you get it. Yeah. I also have a little bit of an aversion against the date because I live by these dates.

All the show notes, every folder with clips, every show notes, the mp3 itself is all in the format of na-episode number-year-month-day. And I literally see my life passing before my eyes when I do the show. And the older I get, the more annoying it becomes. The older I get, it's like every time, no, it's September, what? We're almost in October? What? I went to visit Christina before I left. 28, man, she's hanging out with her friends. Like, what am I even doing here? What are you gonna do, hang out with a bunch of 28-year-olds? Is that what you're angling for? Yeah, I did. It was fun. I was hanging out with the 28. I learned a lot. I learned a lot. What do you think you're gonna, what's this old man doing here? I learned about the Pluto in Scorpio kids, hmm?

Bet you haven't heard of that, huh? Alright, so you got your millennials, right? And after that, you know, like from 95 you got your Generation Z. But there's this apparent, and it's a thing, you can bing it, there's the Pluto and Scorpio kids born between 85 and 95, it's just one decade, and they are the ones who are supposed to be the leaders who show the path for these other generations who are so Misguided and ill yeah, I don't know what they call him. I mean, I guess you'd call it that would be JC Buzzkill Jr. Exactly it's it's but it's apparently he acts like that Like he's hey. I'm here to save y'all damn it Yeah, like your buddy Beto down there

Oh, Beto, is it Beto? Beto. I don't know, Beto, Beto, you say tomato, I say Beto. I saw a little bit of the debate and I noticed you had clips. I'm very pleased you do because you having clips of a Republican debate in Texas means it must have been pretty funny or worthwhile listening to at minimum. No. No? No! This Beto guy. It was interesting because he's well if we want to start with that or we want to start with your report from Europe, I think yeah, yeah, we can get into this but I do have a lot of opinions about this little Texas thing going on down there. Okay, I don't have much of a report but just a couple things that I picked up on there. There is such a problem and I'll just call it a Moroccan problem in the Netherlands.

And when I tell people about what's happening with the Moroccans, they're like, wow, the immigration really messed up the Netherlands. And I had to think about it and say, no, hold on. They had specific Moroccan immigration from 96 or 97, because I'll recall moving back to the Netherlands and Pim Fortuyn was just coming up. And I was like, holy crap, something's happened here. The Netherlands are really more like a beta program for all other EU countries for this type of immigration. But I really noticed it when I was staying with my buddy after the show on Thursday. He said, well, you're hungry, want to get something? Yeah, I want some shawarma because I can't be in Holland without having some shawarma. Which is made by... Explain. Shawarma is a pita bread and it's very old. It's been around in the Netherlands for 40 or 50 years. Originally Ben Cohen, my buddy in Amsterdam, he was one of the first to set it up. So you got a big hunk of lamb's meat and it's on the rotating spit vertically.

And it's all about the special... It's different than a gyro? It's very different from a gyro. And it's all in the herbs and then you eat that with a red kind of salsa sauce and on top of that a white garlic sauce. It's a very Dutch thing, particularly later at night if you've gone out... It's not Middle Eastern. It is, but it's very Dutch. I don't want to condemn the Dutch cuisine, but it's all stolen. Oh yeah, the Dutch, their cuisine is potatoes. It's potatoes. Potatoes and some, a little bit of meat and fish on Friday. Yeah, that's the Dutch. The Dutch have no cuisine. Yeah, of course it's all stolen, but so we were in Laaren, which is one town over from Hilversum. Hilversum is... Cultural appropriation. Oh yeah, the Dutch are filled with that.

But the mosque, the mosque have been blasting at 110 decibels for decades in Holland. And people, you know, the Dutch people are very willing and you know they kind of got suckered into it but now they're realizing it's the beta program. My buddy said well it's in Hilversum, we'll have to go over the highway. I'm like it's the next town over. No, no, he was driving a Mercedes which he borrowed. And he said, I can't drive this car through there on a Thursday night. It's too... we could get carjacked. Are you kidding me in Hilversum? Where I used to work, where I did television and radio from, you know, for years in my younger days? He says, yep, that's how bad it's gotten. And it's... so it's this very odd, you know, situation that you don't recognize the country.

Then in the news, a lot of talk and it's kind of filtering through to M5M about how the Dutch and paperwork is now coming up and there's, you know, the Dutch equivalency of Freedom of Information Act being filed and responded to. It appears the Dutch finance not just a lot of the White Helmets activity in Syria, but also a lot of the, let's just call it, the coup in Kiev. that there was a lot of Dutch money financing the shenanigans that went on there and now people are speaking about... What? Yes! Speaking about... You think that could account for the shoot-down? You know, would you think? Would you think? And so people are now saying, hey, you know, what are we? Are we part of, you know, the American regime toppling network? Well, yes, indeed. The Dutch...

The toppling network. ATN, the American Toppling Network. That's a network you can monetize if you're in the right camp. Wait, so now the US apparently are in a deal with the Netherlands for US intelligence and military to access sovereign Dutch ground sovereign territory at any time including Curacao which is important because if you look at the map Curacao is down there you know above Venezuela and you know northern Africa not that far from Libya so you know there's a lot of different reasons why they could be strategically interesting. Venezuela, Libya there's no nowhere near each other what are you saying here? Did I say Libya? I meant Venezuela not Libya. Venezuela

Yeah, okay. It's right underneath Curacao. Hold on, let me look at the map for a sec. What else is near there? Hold on. I don't think I'm that far. Let me see what else is near there. Let's see. Well, Colombia's next to it. I don't know where Curacao is. Yeah, Colombia's next to it. Curacao's a little bitty operation up north. It's right off of... Yeah, it's right above... kind of northeast, I guess. No, northwest. You got Aruba, Curacao. Yeah, you got Colombia. You got a lot of important stuff there. Anyway, now it turns out that the Dutch may be joining the Five Eyes. What? Yeah. I don't know if it'll be Six Eyes or Five Eyes and a toenail. Six Eyes would be Cross Eyes. Five Eyes and a broken toenail. I'm not quite sure what they're going to call it.

But yeah, oh, this is like an international network of intrigue. Uh-huh. Well, we always knew the Dutch were kind of less of this not more but the Kiev thing you nailed it It's like hold on a second what got shot down a flight full of Dutch people You gotta think something's weird. Something weird is happening somebody on that flight. We have never really have we ever looked at the manifest? Oh Yes, there were the only thing that really popped up at the time if I recall was about five doctors who were on the way to an alternative medical summit where they were they cured AIDS. Yeah, I don't know. I just always wonder about this. You know, they did the opportunity for these these spooks to kill a plane full of passengers to get to get to one. Yeah, to get to one has happened. Mm hmm.

I have to call my friend King Lex ask him what's going on. Hey King I'm sure he knows all about it. Let me see what else did I learn? Oh, I learned that the children Do you think that maybe you know you to talk about this being a the Dutch? Being the beta test for this. Let's bring a bunch of Africans in from the north areas and some other Middle Easterners, you think that maybe the entire diversity movement which began about 20 years ago was a pretext just to get people kind of just like to saw it, you know, like their body punches, the diversity body punches to get people to get them, soften them up and get them ready for it. Move these guys in there. Sure.

But the sad thing is that just it's so over accepted now that you know now that people are kind of on to it like wait a minute this isn't quite working out very well for us. It's way too late. Yes, too late. You've got you've got you know the immigrant Moroccans now the second or third generation they're in parliament. They are part of the political system now. Well, as well they should be if they're running the place. Yeah, yes, but some of the dare I say old white Dutch people are going what happened? Well, it's the old white Dutch people that let it happen. Yeah. Well, so what are you gonna do? Let me see what oh I learned The kids these days love the theremin however They showed me their instrument of choice when it comes to the theremin something you will have to bing to go look at some YouTube videos and

The Badgerman. The Badgerman? Yes. B-A-D-G-E-R-M-I-N. You should probably Bing that and you'll see what the Badgerman is and I think I need one. I don't know if you can buy them off the shelf. You probably do need one. I don't know if you can buy them off the shelf or if you have to construct it yourself but I really like the idea. Do you have it yet? Did you find it? No. Well, if I tell you then it's not as funny. I'm not sitting here with a keyboard and a hand-raised. Here's one. It's a little movie, The Badgerman. Yes, Badgerman. Badgerman played properly. It looks like a theremin. It's got the two hands. Yeah, but... The guy's dicking around. Instead of a theremin, it's a badger. Instead of a thera, it's a badger? Yeah, instead of a theremin, so instead of a board, they took a dead badger and mounted a theremin on it. Oh, there's a badger there.

They stuck a thing in his head. They created... This is not for sale. I don't know. I want one though. It's listed on the Classic FM website as one of the 13 weirdest musical instruments ever. What, the Badgerman or the Theremin? The Badgerman. I just liked it. Like, okay. Anyway, so we had it, you know, of course Tina had already gone off to be with her sisters and family. And so I got home, when I tried, Saturday morning I flew back.

And, uh, pretty uneventful. I'm tired though. It was groggy this morning getting... Oh, by the way, when you're boarding, they always have the pre-boarding stuff. Yeah. And, you know, it's people with kids, it's been expanded now to... Well, you always have, no matter what airline it seems to be... But it depends on the carrier. But the kids always go first. Young children go first on almost every carrier. No, not on Southwest. Yes, on Southwest. No, on Southwest they go after the A group. Between the a and the real group the kids go on yes, okay? Well you know who always also on Southwest gets to go on first is active military

I've always wondered what is active military? Do you have to like be in combat fatigues? Do you have to have your weapon with you? What is active? You have to be ready to gun down people right there. They say active. You have to be active. You have to be hauling some artillery onto the plane. I don't know what, matrial. Here I am with my carry-on matrial. What is this active military bullcrap? It's either military or not active. That just hit me all of a sudden. What is going on with this? Well, what it's a misnomer. What it means is that you're currently serving and you're going from place to place, but you're in the military. I mean, that is your current job. Yes. OK, well, that's my guess. It just sounds a little strange. It does. It sounds like you're going to be shooting up to place. Yeah, it does. The only other thing I'd like to mention off the top, just as a quick dip into the OTG world,

Something I noticed with the Kyocera, and I think I have a theory as to why it was happening, the battery would not last as long as it does here in the States. I'm talking like really losing 5% an hour. Okay, not even using it just it being stationary. Yeah, somebody's tapping into it No, that was my first inclination. That'd be mine I believe they use different frequencies in the EU for their 4g lt or 4g I don't think you think you should choose a more juice Yeah, I think maybe because of maybe some interpretation of the radio or I don't know how it's built but that is a problem because it's It's not gonna fly to have it, you know

Basically work a couple hours and then have need to be charged. Well, you flop the battery out Can you you can but you know, so then yeah, I got an extra battery, but still it's going too fast It's going too fast and that's what I didn't using it. You should look into it. Yeah Well, I thought I want to say something now that you mentioned it that the fact that you can't flop the battery out swap. Oh From you know like take three or four batteries with you and the thing goes dead you put a new one in the fact that you can't do that on most phones today is a is an Abomination it's a communist plot. It's an abomination it is I'm in total agreement

So but someone one of our producers did find another phone which you know this damn Kai OS which I really liked so you have the cat b35 mobile phone, which is they are now selling as You know a feature phone with some smartphone capability ie you know you have a modern browser but now Google bought them I think we may have discussed this Google bottom and Here it is. Get ready for Cat B35. Perfect for those who need a reliable and tough phone, but also some of the functionality of a smartphone. And so now they've put in Google Assistant. I don't think you can get that out of it if they've put it in at the operating system level.

You don't want that. No, it's an atrocity. It was a good operating system. I had a lot of hope for those guys and then they sold out to Google. Bastards. You know the money is there and it's like what would you do? I do the same. It's like the Borg. We'd both do the same thing. Yeah, screw it, sell it to Google. Let's go eat oysters. Let's go to Paris. Let's go see Pierre. Let's have our hair done. It's like the podcast network that got sold to, wait for it, iHeartRadio. Aren't they broke? Yeah, they're about to go completely belly up as far as I can tell. I mean, I don't know how they're still holding on. But yeah, there's $55 million. They probably put that much into it.

Yeah, some of these deals are just pretty much plain poker. Yeah. Anyway, none of that is really important. What hit me on the flight home is learning of your unceremonious dismissal by email from some winky wonk from your 35, 36 year vocation as writer. Have you been writing for PCMag for 36 years? No. Actually, I started in August 1986 and I was continuous ever since. I was going for the record. So how many years is that? 30? About 32. Over 30. And so I'm going for the record because I know these other guys have been, you know, they've faded out. They couldn't handle it. Which other guys? Which other guys? Oh, I mean all the other guys died.

Back up and explain what happened just so people have some context. Yes, I got fired out of the blue or actually technically I got put on a hiatus which we all know. We all know what that means. Half a brain knows what that means. Although it's not it we do have a contract my wife of course is gonna give him grief because there was a contractual Obligation to send us our thing in writing and all they're screwed. Oh the divorce Oh, yeah, I don't know Mimi's And there's no such thing as hiatus in the contracts, it's bullcrap. But they got some new, became a social justice warrior. If you looked at the newsletter, I have a few of her many tweets about Trump's a dumb.

And she said, you know, he's a moron and it's all the same. It's just might as well put the name Rob Reiner on there. You got the same kind of. So I realize that everybody in New York is like this. Well, but not only that, you wrote something. In the newsletter about this which I did not realize and I don't think we've ever even discussed that you had tried to Get PC magazine to at least mention the no agenda show whenever they did one of those lists of great podcasts to listen to and I'd which I did not yet know you had attempted to do but they Refused apparently or just would never never put us on anywhere. They're only gonna put us on it. I

And they get a lot of lame podcasts on that list. It's a very poorly done list, but it's done by one of the... The problem is, this stuff is all... I know how these magazines work. So you give it to a couple of people, they make a list and put it in the next issue. Yeah, we've done that. And they put their favorite things on the list and they got, you know, what about Dvorak? You know, he works for us. You know, he's got a podcast. He's got two of them actually. When you listen to him, that guy's like a lunatic. Oh, right. Loony. It's right, right, right-winger Trump apologist. But there's none of that in the DHM plug show. They could have put that in there. That's a pretty well-recognized… Well, considering, you know, PCMag often links to stock quotations, I would say it would be… was that MarketWatch more? I guess MarketWatch is that… That was MarketWatch. PCMag never did that.

Anyway, the whole point is, look, it feels a bit like me at MTV at a certain point, seven and a half, eight years, and MTV is dog years, and my stay was kind of getting there, and that's why I eventually wound up leaving myself. Well, I would have loved myself. But I had the record to set. I was going for 40 years. At least 35. Well, besides that, it would have been nice if someone had, I don't know, called you? Yeah, nobody called to this day. In fact, I still haven't gotten a note from anybody. All I got was that first note from this woman, this SJW.

And, uh, and you sent the same note to everybody else too, by the way. There's two other, I know that, well, one for sure, Tim Baharan, who's also a columnist at PC Man. Is he also an old white man? He's an old, no, he's not white. He's kind of a mixed race guy. Oh, racism! But he's old and he's, he's a male. Well, hold on. Wait a minute. I feel a lawsuit. Well, it's hard to show over this sort of contract work. Anyway, so he got the exact same terse note and found it to be very offensive. And he never heard from anybody. So they just, I don't know what happened, but they've gone off the rails. I do have an email from someone that I thought was interesting. I think I have it here, hang on. This is actually quite a fascinating note this guy wrote in.

Yeah, this is from this I'm probably gonna print this on one of the websites this is from We'll call him Peter I. It's a disgrace what PCMag did to you. Someone has spent such a long time in that place and with such a professional caliber as the one you hold should be treated with a whole lot more respect than that. Blatantly dismissive email. It talks volumes about the new editorial management staff and their values, but they don't care about their audience either. They disrespect them as much as they did you. I ditched my digital subscription to PCMag after

the turn to consumerism brought upon by an editorial change over a decade ago. Not long after, I also ditched the PCMag webpage over their incredible turn towards a Mac magazine done with barely any PC content whatsoever. The only thing that kept me visiting from time to time was your column and as you described in the newsletter, it was being hidden on purpose and had become a feat to find. To get more conversation topics with my son, I turned to a Ziff Davis sister online publication, IGN. At the time of that switch several years ago, I was aghast at how much PC related information I could find on that council and PC gaming site than on PCMag. Nowadays, IGN seems to have

given an amazing leap forward in the SJW arena and has surpassed PC Mag's cultural Marxists, leading at least by a year or two, going as far as baiting its readers with columns, articles, and opinion pieces that have absolutely nothing to do with gaming and everything to do with post-modernism to the point that I barely visit their place. Just yesterday, IGN was pushing Michael Moore's latest anti-Trump movie. What does that have to do with gaming? I have no idea. I gotta be honest with you I also kind of like all the hate comments about this particular story He doesn't been revelant for 20 years. He was wrong about everything It just keeps on going The same guys well

It sucks. It's not like we don't know that all things come to an end. Like, this show will eventually come to an end, by death more likely than anything, but... And it juries out on who's gonna die first. But you know, it's like... You start hanging out with those 28-year-olds. It'll happen quick. But you know, it's like, you know there's an end to everything, but just the... Just a call, you know, that's the part that I don't understand. Just like, hey, you know... I haven't been fired from too many jobs, but when I got, I do get fired. But I mean recently because of the magazine pullbacks. When I was writing for Forbes, and it's typical the way you do it is like, hey, it's like, it's like the office space, the Lumber guy.

Um, can you give us a call? Yeah, give us a call. I got a great talk. Yeah, that'd be great. And then they talked to you and they tell you, you know, you know, you can't do too expensive. And we're gonna go in another direction. I think I've even fired you once. Kind of didn't I had to fire you kind of at Mevio or something? You never fired me. You cut me back. I cut your salary. I cut your salary Hey old white man, guess what? We're going to deal because I was getting this ridiculous health insurance that apparently was costing the company $4,000 a month or something. Yeah, the health insurance was well worth I remember that Oh keep me on man for health insurance. Okay, well take care of it

Yeah, but that's how it goes. It's unfortunately, but at least I called you. I called you and said, hey, here's what's going down. And I told you what the story was. And you're like, oh crap, but okay. Because you're smart. You understand how things work. I was unceremonious of PC Mag. Yeah, I love you. I've canceled my subscription. A lot of people are writing notes to this Wendy woman. Oh gosh. And what's she gonna do? She's not gonna even read. We have to write notes to the CEO if you want to get any action. So I'll just tell people if you're gonna do anything. It's like it's meaningless. So yeah, the thing that is to me also entertaining is people say, well, do a value for value column like you guys don't know John. This is not gonna happen. There will be no value for value column. There will be no agenda magazine.

I have a good idea for a website. I'm probably going to do so and get to keep my the real loss for me is not like the PC Magazine. It's the moniker so I can get, you know, review products. Yeah, chicks. He had chicks man. They're flocking to the house. There's one outside now PC mag groupies, baby Anyway, so I'm gonna you can look for that in some time in the future Well since you brought up Michael Moore then let me kick it off with today's program up Pedro did what? You're right. All right. He was on Bill Maher this weekend. Promoting his new product. Apparently the movie is a complete, according to Hollywood Reporter and Variety, the movie is a complete tank. It's in the tank. Interesting. You know, when I was listening, because I have not seen it of course, when I was listening to this interview, I thought to myself, you know, this could be a shark jump moment for this guy.

And, well, I have a couple clips. I was fortunate enough to be able to catch the whole interview. He was the opening interview, which is usually about 10 minutes. The little bitty one in the front. Yeah, about 10 minutes. So I broke it down. And let's start off with an intro. And, you know, the movie is 11-9 instead of 9-11. I guess... Bad idea. Yeah, I don't think that was the best title choice either, but let's listen to the intro and they set this up a little bit and I can no spoiler here where the movie and everything this whole interview in fact is all about getting people to vote for Democrats in the midterms. And you have done it again, Maestro. I don't know how you keep doing it. You know, you do what journalism should do, which is you make what's important interesting. I like how first he's going to say you're like a journalist, but then later it's going to be to get people to vote Democrat.

Yeah, and compelling and you can't take your eyes off it and this movie first of all the title fell right in your lap there didn't it yeah he was appointed president right to 29 in the morning on 11 9 that's spooky 16 yeah, yeah, whoa spooky Is it are they like 11 nine truthers now is that a now a thing instead of a 9-11 truther? It's an 11-9 truther. It's so spooky. It fell in your lap. Yes. It was a prophecy It was the elders of Zion up there didn't it? Yeah, he was appointed president right to 29 in the morning on 11 9. It's spooky 16 The movie coming out right before the election obviously

You want that? Yeah, because he's a journalist. You know, he does what journalists don't do. You don't make any bones about it. You're a polemicist like I am. We want people to agree with our point of view. Yes. And vote. Like all journalists. And vote. And vote. Is that the main message you want to... What's the main thing you want people to come away knowing from this? It's not a democracy if you're sitting on the bench. Everybody has to get off the bench. Everyone has to participate. It's not a spectator sport. It's a republic. Right. And, and but what the movie shows and tries to explain as to why sometimes people stay on the bench. And, and I get into talking about this about the Democratic Party and, and it's a, it's a, it's a bit of a balancing act in this film because it's, you know, when I heard him say it's a bit of a balancing act in this film,

That to me was already a flag that said hmm this may not work out so well this I don't know why but to hear you say that Hollywood reporter says it's a dud Doesn't surprise me. ...in this film because, um, it's, you know, it's listed as Michael Moore's Trump film, but nobody wants to go to the theater and look at Trump for two hours. Yeah, I think that's exactly what your fans want to see. So I do a favor for the audience. I don't think you see him more than 20 minutes in the film. But it is about the Trumpian time in which we live. Okay, the Trumpian time. I think that's a mistake right there. We know Trump has ratings. We know it doesn't matter who's watching, they want to watch him. Isn't that what we've learned?

Yes, we've learned that we've learned a lot and I don't think this guy's learned anything in fact except I mean he was had a clue early on when he thought that Trump would win if you remember Mm-hmm. He said I think Trump's gonna win because I don't think they know anybody else is talking to the right people I don't think Hillary's got a chance he went on about this as you recall we played him his clips on the show and then Within a few weeks he backed off on it because I guess he got nothing but grief from all his Hollywood friends What are you saying this for Hillary's gonna win? She's gotta win this idiot wins. We're screwed so then they go he Changes his mind and went back into the wrong he went. I think he non-commercial direction right there now well

So he does talk about the Democrats as well, and he knocks Obama, which I didn't clip any of that, but he does some good Obama bashing. but also regarding the superdelegates situation and he's very clear about that and then you just when you kind of like okay he's got something good there then it's back to racist rhetoric. The DNC a few weeks ago they had a meeting and they said they got rid of the superdelegates but they didn't. People need to understand this. All they did was say the superdelegates cannot vote on the first ballot at the convention. After that, they can vote on every ballot and everything else. So they did not get rid of the superdelegates. And to the Republicans' credit, they actually don't have superdelegates. Whoever's at that convention is, you know, whoever is there to represent the white people that voted for them. Oh, there we go! There you go. I mean, isn't it? That's racist!

Those white people who voted for Trump. Does he ever look in the mirror and note that he's a white guy, an old white man? Not in this context. He's honorary black guy I guess. White people that voted for them. The white people deserve a party Bill. They're Americans too. That's how Trump won. He made his people feel like a minority. the American public, which is self-identified as white, 77% of the American public self-identifies. Including a lot of Hispanics. A lot of Hispanics, because of their Spanish descent, they consider themselves white. They don't consider themselves anything else. And for the Democrats to continuously insult this group of people,

over and over and over. What kind of a strategy is this? Well, if you want people to go to your movies, not a good one apparently. Trump won. He made his people feel like a minority. Right. They still think that. I mean, they think reverse racism is a bigger problem than racism. Wow! They think reverse racism is a bigger problem than racism. How about just racism, Bill? How about all racism? I'm flabbergasted by this guy. And let me ask you another question when it comes to elections. What is one of the big talking points of all parties, but specifically the Democratic Party? What is their issue with Republicans? It'll come up again. Campaign finance reform. Oh, there's money. Oh, it's too much money. Rich people putting money. Oh, we have to get rid of... Am I right or wrong on that?

It's one of their big issues that they never do anything about and in most instances the Democrats outspend the Republicans. They did so with Hillary versus Trump. Hillary outspent Trump by two, almost two to one, I think. I know it's more than that. Wait, wait, forget the spending. Forget the spending. Wait, but also Obama's a big, you know, huge... Forget that. How about just rich people? It's, oh, Koch brothers this, Koch brothers... They don't even put into... Oh yeah, no, the most rich people... Yeah, but they're complaining about the money. About people putting money into elections. That is the main beef. I've got to get rid of the money out of elections. Unless you're Bill Maher and put in a million dollars, then you're a hero. In this small little example, you see how sometimes the Democrats really screw it up. They're the party of the people. They should be there for the people. They should fight for the people. But the good news about this election in November is that people like myself and others, you've contributed to the DSCC. I'm still failing.

Where do you get this money? Because I... no divorces, no alimonies. Really. People ask me this all the time. No divorces, no alimonies, no kids. Right. Oh yeah, no kids, those horrible resources. No stupid hobbies like celebrities have. I don't collect fucking cars or motorcycles or paintings. I don't do coke or hookers. Oh really? No coke, Bill? Okay. No. All of the crazy shit that people do, I don't do. So I'm the Mets. So there's a lot of money that yeah, I'm Matt, but that's what I spend it on right

Which is okay, because if you're Bill Maher, then it's okay to spend a million dollars into politics. It's fine then. Right. That's what, because... Thank you for doing that. Thank you. And what I and others have done, have gone out and... Woo! Yeah! Yes! And let's go to more. And let's go to run for office. And by the way, that million looked sillier five weeks ago when I did it, because the Senate didn't look like it's in play. It is in play. It is very much in play. Yes, it is. It's in play! Thank goodness money changes elections. Remember he tried to recruit, uh... Steve Ballmer on the last episode of his show. More money, more money that we want into elections. Last clip, and this, I think this is borderline defamatory, maybe even, what's the word?

Maybe, maybe. Maybe libelous, yeah. I thought this went pretty far. And there's a smear campaign on the internet. So we're talking about, we're on to the Supreme Court nomination with Kavanaugh and Professor Ford. Yes, yes, for sure. And things go viral. And you know, we've become this death threat society. And you know, people say to me sometimes, oh, you know, do you think this could get violent? I think it is violent. But I also think that's Trump's next card to play. I've already seen him talking about it. If he's, if the Democrats take over, he says they're very violent people.

We're the violent people. You're the puppet. He turns it around. But that's what he has when the Mueller report comes out or when some other thing crashes down on him. He's the violent person. He's the sexual predator. Oh, totally. He is an admitted sexual predator. And I don't mean just Hillary Bush, Bob. You're the only person on TV who will state exactly what, you know, if you, if anybody is a public high school teacher in here, a public school teacher, if you, there's a law in the state of California and in most states that if, let's say, your 13 year old girl student comes to you and says, my dad keeps saying that if I weren't his daughter he'd be dating me. My dad said the other day that the thing that we have most in common is sex. This picture my dad wanted me to take with me sitting on his lap and kissing him. If you were a teacher and were given that, you were required by the law

to turn him in. Because he's a pedophile apparently, John. That's what I hear Michael Moore saying, he's a pedophile and he probably boffed Ivanka. I mean, he might as well just say that. But you've shown this on your show. He has done, he did this when she was a tween, when she was a teen. And he bragged about how voluptuous my daughter is and she's... Where did the ugly orange man... Show me on the doll where he touched you. Teenager... The thing is that we let him get away with this. The media let him get away with it. All his friends in the media. Let him get away with it? Les Moonvis. He was getting away with it? With what? Well, with pedophilia. With who? With his daughter!

What proof of there is this? He's just one of these loving, you've seen these guys in the past, you see a lot more than you do today. You look at some of these old TV shows, you can see that people are a little less reluctant to like hug a kid. What Michael Moore is saying is if you were a school teacher and Trump said these things... Yeah, he should have turned him in. Trump should have been turned in by now. And his friends let him get away with it and then he goes straight to Moonves who was far as I know was not Donald Trump's friend. Quite the opposite. Just because Moonves got kicked out for harassment and abuse doesn't necessarily make him a pedophile too. Tween when she was a teen and he bragged about how voluptuous my daughter is and she's a teenager. The thing is that we let him get away with it. The media let him get away with it. All his friends in the media, Les Moonves, Roger Ailes,

All the Bill O'Reilly's, the Matt Lauer's. I show this all in the film. The Matt Lauer's, oh yeah, was a big Trump fan. Bill Shine, who was the guy at Fox News when Roger Ailes was there covering Bill O'Reilly, now he's the advisor to Trump in the White House prepping Brett Kavanaugh, the Republican party. They're only six degrees from sexual harassment at that party. I don't know, if we were to count, it looks like a lot more left-leaning dudes have been locked up or kicked out for hashtag Me Too. Could just be me.

and they want to go after her now and they've given her until tonight or something like that. Well, right now I think when we're on the air. Because women love ultimatums. Especially those who have been victimized by men. Nothing like saying to a potential rape victim, you got until 10 o'clock to tell us about the rape. That's pretty much what the Democrats are asking for. Tell us about the rape, tell us about the death, the death threats that Kavanaugh bestowed upon you. And you know, both these guys are childless, so what would they know about calling someone a pedophile? What would they know about the love you might have for a child? How you can be proud for a child? Look, look, I love my kids, my kid's beautiful.

I wouldn't be dating her, but you know, I, okay, it's a TV show, you say something funky, but it wasn't a pedophilia, you know, pedophile remark. It's stupid. No, no, you guys are out of control, but you know, the more I listen to this stuff, I keep thinking to myself, is this going to cause a backlash at the polls? Well, how about the box office? It starts there. Well the box office he killed the box office. Oh, he did it the whole idea of the movie is nothing. It's just you killed the box office I thought it was a dud yeah, well he killed the box office But it was the do the movie have any legs to begin with as anybody is this anything that hasn't been rehashed a million times It's just a bunch of Trump hate you can go on Twitter and get it for free You don't have to pay the ten bucks to go see the movie Get it for free Free let me see Hollywood Reporter

Anyway, I'll look for it. It's been it came out a couple days ago. There was a headline I got them on their mailing list and they had Put it out and then it just got so 10 10 million opening week. No 10 million opening weekend. That's probably gonna be about it total. Yeah, I don't think it'll be much more no no no no shoot I is it confusing story anyway, I I don't think it's going to do... it just won't... it's like what I was telling you about Tina, you know, she... regardless of politics, she doesn't want to hear what Julia Louis-Dreyfus, the billionaire, has to say about Trump. She wants her to be funny on TV and she will purposely not read her opinion because she doesn't want to ruin it when she's watching, you know, whatever the... The acting, yeah. Yeah, the acting. Whatever the show is called. Veep, Veep. Yeah, which is a great show.

I understand this, like, ugh, you ruin it for me. Yeah, these people are ruining their brand. Yeah. Well, that'll clean up. It's really stupid. It'll clean up a lot. So that was kind of a lead-in to Supreme Court related stuff, which I do have a few clips for. I don't know what you have, if anything, on the topic. Well, I have a couple of things. I got the woman's, which I refer to as CBF. You know, before you do that, would you mind if I just played a compilage? No, play, do your thing. The compilage, although this is, would have worked on the previous episode of No Agenda as well as one of those super cuts. It's, you know, this is when we were really talking about the issue of a panel of white men who are going to make the decision.

And just the vitriol... What panel of white men might this be? This would be the Judiciary Committee. Really? Which is funny, because there's a bunch of women on that committee. Ted Cruz is a Cuban. I guess maybe he probably self-identifies as white. Well, what's the 11 men then? And what's his name? The character from Massachusetts, the black guy who's gone off to Booker, Kamala Harris is black. Hold on, hold on, no, no, no, hold on. Let me see what the 11 men... Who are these 11 men? I'm looking it up now. Let me see. The 11 men. Isn't it a subset of the committee? No, it is the committee. The committee is a subset of the Senate. Well, maybe they're talking just about...

Republican men on the on the it says how will the image old what is this 11 now and I feel stupid bull crap thing This is typical. It's not even true. It's not even a panel of 11 dudes There's no 11. No, not 11 what white guys where'd they come up with this then? Well, what are you talking? What's everywhere everywhere all male lineup? Oh GOP senators might get female aides to question. Okay, so the I understand now What they're saying is the Republican senators who are on the panel are all old white men and there's 11 of them and it's because they By definition have a majority that it's just the 11 white men who will make the decision the Democratic votes don't matter I think that's what's being implied. Are we on board with that?

for the purposes of this debate. Judiciary Committee. You've got all white men on the Republican side here. On the Republican side, all 11 are white men. The Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee, it's 11 white men. And the Republicans, it is 11 white men. The Republicans, it happens to be 11 white men. Are these white Republican men essentially going to ask her if she's telling the truth? 25 years since the Anita Hill hearings, what hasn't changed is the number of white men. I know

have covered lots of these white men. And so at the end of the day, if they have a bunch of white men once again defending another white man. You have 70-something year old white men, no offense to them. No offense! We don't like the process being disrupted. On the Senate Judiciary Committee is all white men. Almost worst case scenario for a bunch of white men on the Senate Judiciary Committee. If you're white, you're a racist. Do they want me to watch their station I Am over 50 I am white they should have thrown in straight just for good measure Come on

I love those compilages. They're my favorite. Who did that one? Supercuts, supercuts on that. It's always in the show notes. NASHowNotes.com. They always do fun stuff, but they didn't do... I like it when they don't put music under it. So you can cut out one. Yes, I prefer that too. I don't like the guys who try to, hey, let's get artistic and put some crappy music under that maybe people won't like. It's a very bad idea. The stuff stands alone too. It does. It's nice when it's clean. Yeah, you don't have to prove that you're Steven Spielberg. It's fine. We're very happy. Yeah. Let me see, do I have anything else as background? No, I have some other clips, but let's see what you've got. Let's go to the real rundown, this CBF real rundown stalling, and this is actually

The little punchline at the end of this goes on from here, but this is what it's really all about. While the details of when and how are still being finalized, the possibility of hearing directly from Christine Blasey Ford promises political fireworks that could derail President Trump's Supreme Court nomination. Kelly O'Donnell is with the president in New Jersey tonight and has the latest. Tonight, the answer looks like yes for an extraordinary public hearing to happen next week with a lifetime Supreme Court appointment on the line. Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's lawyers informed the Senate Judiciary Committee today that she has accepted an invitation to provide what they called first-hand knowledge of Brett Kavanaugh's sexual misconduct

But the time, place and details are still in dispute. A senior White House official reacted, this seems like another delay tactic. Yes Yeah, it seems like another delay tactic is a delay tactic. Yeah, I have a clip about that Well, we'll play part two of this and then you can play yours tense negotiations remain underway to determine specifics including whether Ford or Cavanaugh testifies first about her claim that when they were teens in the 1980s at a party with underage drinking Cavanaugh groped her and tried to remove her clothes

Kavanaugh categorically denies that allegation. Today the judge was spotted leaving his Maryland home and has said he will go back to Capitol Hill to defend his integrity. At a conservative conference today, the vice president said Kavanaugh will be confirmed. The president and I are confident. that Senate Republicans will manage this confirmation properly with the utmost respect for all concerned. The president expressed similar enthusiasm last night in Missouri. He was born for the US Supreme Court. He was born for it. And it's going to happen. And Ford's lawyers said in their letter to the committee that they are disappointed in the leaks and the bullying. The White House also tells me that they are frustrated by the process, saying delays are unfair to the nominee who wants to clear his name and testify. Yeah, so this next clip that I have will kind of show and refers to your previous one.

that all of this is really meant to delay and there's rules in the Senate and it's really kind of plays into our, my original thesis that Trump doesn't want him confirmed. He's given him lots of outs to quit, you know, ahead of the game, you know, just get out to save his family. But I don't think he's going to get confirmed at all and here's why. Politically. This is from MSNBC which was surprising to hear this clarity on their so-called news channel. Politically, Matthew, this seems like a no-brainer for the White House to just say, you know what, I got other people that I can get, I got other people that might excite the base more. I think about Judge Amy Comey Barrett.

That's her. Why are they putting their, they've got their own reputational issues on the ballot. Why add this? Well I think the big reason is the calendar. I think the democratic strategy, it was apparent on day one of the confirmation hearings, is to delay the nomination past the election. To delay the nomination is to defeat the nomination. And if you're able to defeat the nomination, then the question becomes, well, who next? And what is the time frame for confirming that judge to the Supreme Court? So they're sort of trapped by the calendar. If that time frame goes beyond the election, an election in which it's very possible that the Democrats win both the House and the Senate, then what you're looking at is an empty seat on the Supreme Court for two years. Mazie Hirono basically raised this possibility in a news conference just this week. So that's why the White House and Republicans nationally are behind this nomination, at least want to see both sides tell their story next week. Right, but next week is going to be Thursday, and if it's Thursday, then there is some rule in the Senate that pushes the actual vote back and it won't be until after the midterms, is my understanding.

Which would kind of make sense on a long bet from Trump to say to use this as oh my goodness We have to we have to keep the Senate at minimum. Yeah, get out and vote get out and vote And otherwise, it'll just be two years without without any confirmation because it just it won't happen probably But I think he's you know, it's a it's a hedge on his part. Here is Senator Mazie Hirono Confronted with some again. This is from left left favorite. Yeah, she's pretty funny This is Jake Tapper on CNN confronting her with the facts about all four witnesses that the judge or that the professor has presented to be on you know to be Interrogated as witnesses

So four people said to be at the party Ford described have denied knowledge of the incident. Brett Kavanaugh, obviously, Mark Judge, who she says was in the room, PJ Smith, and even Ford's longtime friend Leland Kaiser. So there hasn't been a law enforcement investigation, but there are these statements from the four people she remembers being there who don't remember the incident or don't even remember being at the party in question, according to her friend Leland Kaiser, who says she believes her, but doesn't have any memory of it. Doesn't Kavanaugh have the same presumption of innocence as anyone else in America? I put his denial in the context of everything that I know about him in terms of how he approaches his cases. As I said, his credibility is already very questionable in my mind and in the minds of a lot of my fellow Judiciary Committee members, the Democrats.

So, he comes and you know, when I say that he's very outcome driven, he has an ideological agenda, very outcome driven and I notice she's not addressing the question. I can sit here and talk to you about some of the cases that exemplifies his, in my view, inability to be fair in the cases that come before him. This is a person that is going to be sitting on our Supreme Court making decisions that will impact women's reproductive choice. He very much is against women's reproductive choice. And I can tell you two very important cases in which he applied the same standard but came to totally different results. There's a difference between applying the law, as she says here, and saying he's against

women's reproductive choice. I don't know why you have to, why can't you just say pro-choice? Is that not foreboding too? That's a way of, yeah, you want to present it. She presents it, I think there's like talking points or some way of doing it. Yeah, you present it as a message. You get scolded by your parties. You can't just say it this way. And Schumer's the guy behind all this. Oh yeah. There's two very important cases in which he applied the same standard but came to totally different results to make it much harder for women to get this kind of coverage. So there's There are... There's just no evidence for what she said. ...many indications of his own lack of credibility. It sounds to me like you're saying because you don't trust him on policy and because you don't believe him when he says, for instance, that he does not have an opinion on Roe v. Wade, you don't believe him about this allegation about what happened.

at this party in 1982. Is that fair? This is why it is so important that there be at least an investigation so that there's some effort and collaboration. We think that there was a lot of drinking going on as far as a friend, his friend Mark Judge, not even testify. That is astounding to me. He was right there in that room. He refuses to testify. Oh geez, he was right there in that room. Well, let's talk about that for a second. I want to mention something by the way, Mimi brought this up. She says there's not a girl in the world, especially at that age, who doesn't have a friend or two that she would, if this had happened, she would have been bitching and moaning about it to at least three women. Yeah.

Because women talk to women. They do. That's what she says, simply. Women talk to women. Where are the women that would back her up that she'd ever mentioned this to anybody? She didn't, this never happened. That's a good lesson by the way. Women talk to women. Yes, all men should pay attention to that commentary. All old cis white guys pay attention. Old cis white guys know what we're talking about. Women talk to women. Well, I was... About everything. I was again astounded by CNN who brought together a panel, a diverse panel, across what I could see was income

levels in white cis female society, Republicans, and asked them about Kavanaugh and asked them about what they thought if this was true or what it meant for old allegations to come back up. I don't know if the producer of this segment is still working for CNN but the results were kind of predictable and they didn't even really edit it that much. As far as I can tell, maybe people sit at home and get really upset. It's like, oh my God, these Republican women, they should not even be called women anymore. They're just horrible. How many of you believe Judge Kavanaugh when he says this didn't happen? I believe him. I do believe him. How can we believe the word of a woman or something that happened 36 years ago when this guy has an impeccable reputation?

It was nobody, nobody that has spoken ill will about him. Everyone that speaks about him, this guy's an altar boy, you know, a scout. He's, you know, because one woman made an allegation. Sorry, I don't buy it. But in the grand scheme of things, my goodness, you, there was no intercourse. There was maybe a touch. Can we really? 36 years later, she's still stuck on that? Had it happened? I mean, we're talking about a 15 year old girl, which I respect. You know, I'm a woman, I respect. We're talking about a 17 year old boy in high school with testosterone running high. Tell me what boy hasn't done this in high school. Please, I would like to know. Why would she come forward if this wasn't true? Because it has basically destroyed her family. She's had to move, she's gone undercover, she's gone...

death threats. We don't know any of this to be true. So if she's lying, why come forward? She's also destroying his life, his wife's life, his children's lives, his career. I mean, why did she come out sooner if she's telling the truth? Why didn't she come out when he was going into the Bush White House? Why didn't she come out when he's been a federal judge for over a decade? Why not have a thorough investigation instead of just the two of them he said she said? It doesn't matter. It does not matter what everyone else has to say. This is what happened though with Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill. The FBI investigated it took three days, done. Why not now?

Well, this is not the same. This is a high school kid. I mean, it's not a Anita Hill story. Does something that allegedly happened some 30 plus years ago matter today? You can't judge the character of a man based on what he did at 17. And I would hate to think that 30, 40 years later, somebody is going to destroy your life because somewhere at some party you It's not right, but maybe you're not supposed to. And who brought the alcohol for these kids? As women though, do you have some sympathy for her? For what she's going through? No, I have no sympathy. And perhaps maybe at that moment she liked him and maybe he didn't pay attention to her afterwards and he went out with another girl and she got bitter or whatever the situation is. They're kids. So this was a great example. Women talk to women and I don't, I think that

This was borderline suitable because there's a lot of things they were saying that I don't agree with. Like, oh, that's what 17-year-old boys do. No, I've never really done that. I don't think you've done that. No, I've never jumped on some girl and tried to take her top off. No, but so where you have... You know, women talking to women like this, you'd expect women to be talking to women like, you know, another way on the other side. And the information just doesn't seem to be there. The only thing that was valuable that I caught again on CNN was the effect of alcohol on long-term memory brought to you by Sanjay Gupta.

And I believe she was also consuming alcohol at this party. Was she or was she not? Yeah, it was a drunken brawl. It was a drunk fest from the sounds of it, at least the way it's been described. And that one woman does bring up a funny point which would get somebody in trouble, I'll bet you, depending on the statute of limitations. Who bought the alcohol for these kids? Yeah, I like that one too. Back to the new developments in the Supreme Court confirmation battle. Christine Blasey Ford says she is willing to speak with the Judiciary Committee about her accusations of sexual assault against Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh. Topic likely to come up, how reliable is someone's memory when alcohol is involved? CNN's chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, breaks it down.

Well, Ana, I think there's a lot of assumptions when it comes to memory and alcohol, and oftentimes those assumptions are wrong. Let me start off by telling you this, that a lot of the research comes from witnesses to crimes. They took people who were intoxicated witnesses to crimes. and sober witnesses to crimes, and they basically found that in the short term, if people were questioned right after a crime had occurred, there was not a lot of difference in terms of recalling details between someone who was mild to moderately intoxicated and someone who was sober. that was in the short term. So that surprised a lot of people. Now there is something known as blackout drunk, which is not the same as passed out. Blackout drunk is when you can be talking, you can be walking, you can be interacting with people. But essentially, you're totally amnestic to it, meaning you'll have no memory of it. There's also something known as gray out, which is essentially islands of memory. But basically, I think that's what I

Really not remembering gray out there's also the component of time how much time has passed Since the event and this is really important here because I think when you look at how memory is actually encoded You realize that alcohol can have a real impact on a certain aspect of memory so when we remember things we look we see we hear we feel and And those sensory inputs are immediately transferred into short-term memory. That happens pretty quickly. And that's why people, again, who are intoxicated can remember things pretty well. But it's that next phase, going from short-term to long-term, where alcohol sort of acts like a sledgehammer.

And it's why people can remember things so vividly one day and then a few days later really have no recollection of it at all because the memories were never in those long-term stores. So that's just a little bit of an idea of how alcohol does impact memory, both in the short term and in the long term. Anna? Interesting. Thank you, Dr. Sanjay Gupta. it being authentic or real, which is that supposedly she took a lie detector test and passed it. And he should take one too, which is the meme. But what lie detector test did she take? Who gave it? When was it? I don't remember this. I mean, it wasn't covered very well. I think it's bull crap.

There's a lot of this, just as well, let's stop and back up and we can just stop these clips and just say this whole thing is a charade. It's just a it's a scam. It is. And the scam is obvious. The scam is to delay until the calendar kicks in and they can't confirm. So we get our you get Beto in so we can move to that. God, you know, just just one last thing here. Let me see if I get this whole debate, this Kavanaugh with the women and the Fords and the and the Chrysler and everybody in there. This has become the Twitter convo du jour and it's it's it's destroying Twitter. Well Twitter is really getting out of control. People will leave the platform. They're going to leave the platform. People are leaving the platform. They are de-platforming themselves. Self de-platformization. Yes, I'm thinking about it. Self de-platforming. Yes!

Well, you need to self-deplatform out of California first. That would be my first order of business. We'll get to Beto in a second. Beto, Beto. You say Beto, I say Beto. Because first I have to thank you for your courage and say, in the morning to you John C! Yes, the man who put the C in PC Magazine, Dvorak! Well, in the morning to you, Mr. Adam Curry. In the morning, in the morning to all the ships at the sea and the boots in the air. And the subs in the water! And all the dames and knights out there. Yes, and in the morning to our troll room. Our troll room at noagenderstream.com. Very good to have everybody there. It's nice to have the back room chat up as well. And you'll have some screen real estate. Nice back here in the drone star state.

That's where you can always find all of our trolls during the live show twice a week on Thursdays. Also in the morning to Mike Riley who brought us the artwork for episode 1070. The title of the episode was Alexa in Alexis and we had a tough time choosing the art. As predicted a lot of people did the they live robot face on Joe Biden. And Nick the rat had the best it the best version of the face, but man was Mike Riley's artwork complete with You know he had to obey in the background. He had the note you know no agenda I like a topic of conversation on Twitter. Yeah, cuz I had no really no really yeah, well because O'Neill and

Nick and some others they like to talk about sometimes and I chimed in say well the reason you know we pick what we did is because it was a little busier and when you have a choice of being Busy artwork in terms of having a lot of junk on that on the piece as opposed to being super clean unless it's incredibly elegantly funny I mean there has been moments where like for example I think it was Martin JJ or whoever one of the regular guys from the past who did the simple Jeb Bush with the big bottle glasses just these simple big eyeball glasses. It was nothing more to it than this simple. I mean it was just it was the choice at the moment and

We love what people are doing with the new headers and stuff. That looks very cool. We're gonna ban a couple things. Yes. We're gonna talk about something. Yeah, go ahead. Yeah, we're banning... anybody who uses FOMR... And what was your that what was the one that you see I don't have any problem I mean they put me down I'd crash jerk off or something. No no no no no no not pert no they would that would be banned No, there's not podcast jerk off longtime podcast personality, which I'm okay with it's a little lengthy Oh You know, I think you're a little tired of being called a foamer even though you brought the whole topic up yourself. Yes. So if a ban is in place apparently, a ban... You cannot use foamer on your artwork if you want it to be picked.

No agenda art generator dot com. Thank you very much. Mike Riley. It's highly appreciated We love all the art that comes in and you can take a look at all of it It's very useful for all kinds of fun things and projects. There's over 12,000 pieces of album art 12,000 pieces of album art and there's probably at least a thousand outstanding pieces. Yes Oh more than that We've had a thousand and sixty, a thousand and seventy episodes. So there's more than a thousand outstanding pieces. There's more. There's the ones that didn't quite make the cut. Now it's a fantastic archive. I hope there's a backup of it.

Yes, I've been trying to get our guy to do a backup. I always get very worried about stuff like this. I lost my copy of WebCopier Pro, which is my favorite spider. John, our producers need to do this. We're not good at this. Yeah, somebody can do it. Well, we can do it, but we can't do it. No, we'll do it and then it'll be on a drive. Don't know where the drive is. It's a nightmare. It's lost. It's a nightmare. I know I made a copy somewhere. This is not what we do. I'm just being honest. I have stacks of hard disks that I have to go through once in a while. Literally. I have a stack of hard disks. So when I put a machine out of service, I've been doing this long enough, over 30 years at PC Magazine, I have a,

stack of hard disks cuz I take the old hard disk and I I have a thing you can take the hard disk and plug it into this device and it'll Think it's like a real drive and it is and you can look at your old hard disks And it's like you can't go through all this crap. I'm just drill them all by the way I did want to mention that I didn't realize it but Christina and her girlfriend and the roommate had not seen they live yet. Oh Yeah, but boy did they love it Oh yeah, they loved it. Yeah, they loved it. It's corny, but great. So, noagendaartgenerator.com, again, it's a great resource and also you can go to noagendashop.com. Those guys put on t-shirts, make sure the artists get paid. I mean, it's a beautiful ecosystem. It's a part of our value network, Value for Value. And this is the donation portion of it, the first one for each show where we thank our executive producers and associate executive producers. You know, I have to say something about They Live.

Because it's a movie that once in a while you think about these things. The way the they live concept works is that the reason you can't see the signage and all the brainwashing and these ugly people that are roaming around, and there's lots of ugly people roaming around, is because of this transmitter, which is actually symbolic of the media. That John Carpenter, always thinking in metaphors. That transmitter is a transmitter that's transmitting these waves to make you not see these horrible looking people and brainwashing. And that transmitter is the mainstream media. It's a transmitter. That's right. Anyway, so that's what that's all about. And we are your vision. We are the glasses. Yeah, where are those sunglasses? That's right. You put them on twice a week. They work on Thursdays.

It's gonna get old I know you're gonna get tired. It's already old. Okay. I'll stop move along All right, so we do have a few people to thank and I want to incorporate a couple of people that were at the Oakland meetup, which was a great little event it was very unusual how many people showed up Sorry, how many people attended? 53 no nice number. That's a pretty big meetup. That's not a small little diddy I'm I left it unfortunate getting a sore neck and wait a minute you bailed I bailed at 730 it was gonna go to 8 so I left a little early and I missed Def a ball who showed up late Oh and the blind Dame which is I felt really bad about luckily Mimi took you know Demis Mimi pretended to be you sure to introduce them to every old me meal never Mimi pretended to be you and she didn't know the difference is that what you're telling me about the blind they knew the difference they're very disappointed to make it up to him yes you should it's horrible and

And then I was kind of disappointed that some of our regulars from the area weren't there. I mean Dame Tanya could have been there. Bean, Sir Bean, he never shows up to anything. So okay. Anyway, so we have two executive producers that came out of this group. Including, of course, Sir JD, the baron of Silicon Valley was there with $300 and something to match anybody's $100 donation. Wow, great. He just gave the whole money. I mean, he only matched a couple. But he actually ended up collecting $533 and we'll credit him with the $333.33.

And then the other, and he'll be executive producer, and so also Luke and Beatrice Hatcher from Oakland came in with 333.33 in a check with a note too. Now I wanna, this is what I wanna talk about about the meetup. This was the most disorganized, not in terms of the meetup actually happening, but in terms of the people that showed up at the meetup. It's as if they showed up and then they said, I don't know, it's the Dvorak's there, well, we didn't bring the envelope with the money and a note, so let's go to the ATM. This is according to Jay. She says, everybody went to the ATM and they came out. Wait, you're like a hooker in Vegas. You're like a hooker in Vegas. You're like a hooker in Vegas. You can always go to the ATM, darling.

They all donate 60 bucks and according to Jay it's like yeah, they went to the ATM took a hundred out kept 40 put 60 in it It wasn't half the time. It even wasn't an envelope It was like a piece of paper made to look like an envelope some scratching right? Let's be honest the style. Here's the note. This was this was a check style points count. Oh It was very funny, but Luke and Beatrice, they came up with a check, which one of them had, I think. And then there's this piece of torn paper. It's like torn. Hey, John, long time no see. What an outrage! Well, I mean, it's just, one of the notes was on the back of this guy, I'm not gonna embarrass him or anything. It was on the back of his wife's shit to get some free cafeteria meal.

He had his wife's name on the back and he's like scribbled something on it. This was so, so last minute. Classic Silicon Valley area. I love it. Let's do this at the last second. Of course I'm reflective of that too. Long time, first time. Please clarify. You said chit, not shit, right? Chit. Chit. Yeah. C-H-I-T. No one knows what a chit is. No, not everybody knows. This is an international program. Look it up. Thanks for all the work you guys do to keep us informed and entertained. Love and light. No nothing else. There's no jingles. You can throw in a jingle one. Just give both JD and these folks a... JD also had a...

He had his money in his envelope, it was a Betty U Fong, it was a state envelope that was torn open and he stuffed his stuff in there. Then he had some notes scribbled all over it. It was unreadable, unreadable. It's an outrage, here's some karma, thank you. You've got karma. Oh man. But he may be organizing what he's calling a peerage dinner. Oh, that's an interesting idea. We'll talk about that more in the future. I also want to mention one of the other nights that were, I think it was a night, he came up with this great, two great ideas. One, he's getting a lot of little stickers made, but he's getting a, it turns out that most homeless people living in tents

will let you stencil a message on their tent. Whoa! Give them money. Advertising opportunity. He says it's the advertising opportunity of the century and he's getting a no agenda stencil made and he's gonna go from homeless encampment to homeless encampment and dole out some cash and stencil a no agenda show on these tents. This is big, John, this is big money. This is big money. Hey, so hold on a second. We need to get some publicity for this at some point. Do we want to do it on noagendashow.com or do you want to have one of our crazy URLs that forwards to No Agenda Show?

I don't know. Yeah, because otherwise it's formative stages. Let's let us develop. There's a bunch of homeless people in all these tents. I've got this stencil on him and I'm talking, I've got a couple of home, oh, the guy left. Well anyway, he told me before he left that these guys came along with 10 bucks and they would, they would spray on their tent. They said no problem and they ended up spraying on everybody's tents. This podcast has an innovative idea for helping people out of poverty. It's called the No Agenda Show. No agenda, done by former VJ and former PC Magazine writer, John C. Dvorak.

John C. Dvorak was just recently fired from his job at PC Magazine, which he notes was before the lucrative tent action. I love it. It's a great idea. I'm all for it. It's a great idea. Yeah. Fabulous. Hey, we paid him, man. Nine out of ten homeless people prefer the No Agenda podcast. We're sick bastards. Sick, I tell you. That is one of the better ideas. It's one of the best ideas I've heard. Can we tie it into blockchain somehow and do a cryptocurrency with these people? Blockchain stenciling! Do a crypto with these people and help them out of poverty? As we laugh and laugh at the plight of the homeless. Very good. Yeah. Very classy. No, we're horrible. We are horrible. It's terrible. But hey, ten bucks is ten bucks. Right? Yeah. I'm all in. All right. And what else from the meetup?

Uh, no, there wasn't much else. Are you gonna thank some other people later? Oh, Briony showed up. Oh, how's Jen doing? She was in dimension B and she's kind of snapped out of it for a while. She's doing fine and uh... Does she still like me or does she... I introduced her to Mimi immediately and the two of them hit it off. Oh, perfect. Yeah. They're both, you know, tall. She's gonna be living up there before you know it. Well, there's an element of this. I don't know if I can even discuss it. Yeah, I think so. Which I'll discuss in the future. Oh, come on! Well, Briony apparently thinks that or likes the idea and she's... I think she might have the chops because I tried to explain why I was helping Briony to mentoring her and her model. Because she's got talent, that's why. She's a natural.

She's a natural podcaster, she's got a good voice, she knows how to use her voice. Yeah, she's talented. She wants to try doing some stand-up. Oh, interesting. I bet she could do it too. So Mimi, of course, produces comedy. She knows everybody in the business. She already has a date at Giggles or what is it called? Giggles and Yuck Yucks. She's got a gig? So Mimi can coach her a little bit, mentor her in the stand-up business enough so that she could actually do something, practice, see if she likes it. And then I said, hey, good, she's yours now. Oh, handoff. Oh, very good.

Very good. Does she still like me or she pissed about our Twitter back and forth according to Mimi? Yeah, and Jay I guess it was listening on some of this She is grousing about you. Yeah, I knew it's damn it Yeah, but I'm only saying to help her. She's just grousing. You're too harsh on her. You're harsh. Love baby. It's tough. Love tough love I don't say because I got I have lots of other things I can do in my world So we're gonna do more of these meetups a here and there. We do mere more of this mentoring Yeah, we do more this mentoring. We wind up hating me. You wind up hating me and doing stand-up. Welcome to podcasting Hey worked out for me

Right. So anyway, but that will do we should do more of these. I'm gonna do another one in Seattle. I'm gonna do another one in the S. Oh, you're just cranking them out. We got to get our Austin meetup done now. Damn it. Yeah, you can. We should do at least we should do one a month, but we can't. We'll do one every couple months, maybe. Alright, so let's go on. Well, it sounds like you had a good time and I'm very happy and I'm glad people showed up. We didn't like the place, the Drake's place. Surly Waitresses and they didn't like the fact that we had so many people crowding around. It was a huge, huge place but they wouldn't give us the kind of tables we wanted. It was a bunch of... You know, this seems to be a bit of a thing. These places

Don't want to, you know, give you an area because, well, you know, we can make more money the other way around. Stuff like that. Very dickish. Dickish, yeah. That's the word. Dickish. I want to thank everybody who came to the meetup. That's fantastic. Sounds like you had a good time. Yes. You and Curry, a couple more things, items. Are you and Curry ever going to like do a meetup together? No. I said no, probably not. We don't actually like each other. We don't. We're not really... The other one is, I have a great idea. Oh yeah. Do the show live together during the meetup. Hello? Exactly. Did I tell you this already? No, I get that all the time.

All the time, yeah. You have a great idea. On stage, on stage, on stage. They want to see you on the Shays and me with my Tourettes. We're a great show. So I told the guy, I said, here's the problem. I finally, I had to kind of discuss this with this guy, because he was adamant. I said, here's the problem. It involves an audience. And both of us are kind of have a performance gene. And so we start playing to the audiences, me especially. You know, I won't even be talking about these items that we try to discuss in the show. I'll be doing jokes and making funny comments, see if I can get a rise out of the audience. It would be a disastrous show.

It would totally suck. And I'd be really confident conscious of my of my tics and stuff. You'd be all nervous about your tic. The tic? No, no, tics. Plural. What are you talking about? Yeah, they're jerking around. Spitting. It's unbelievable. Okay, let's start thanking some people. They were done. I think I covered it. All right. But anyway, thanks for everyone who did show up. That was great. Where's Alan Bean? That's what I'd like to know. Brian Barrow, 34567, sir? Brian? I'm not sure, I don't remember. I think so. Really sorry to hear about your PCMag partying ways situation. Take this donation as a sign you still have the support of the No Agenda audience.

Without meaning to be funny, please give yourself some jobs karma. Yeah, I was thinking about that too. What kind of jobs karma would you prefer? We have the Nancy and Trump, we got the Trump and we got the just Nancy. Oh no, don't give me the Trump. Just what? The Nancy job. Just the regular Nancy. Regular Nancy. Jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs. Let's vote for jobs! Henceforth, henceforth to be known as a regular Nancy. Yes, a regular. Give me the regular Nancy. I want a regular Nancy. Yeah, sounds right. Steve Fisher, 33333. RIP, PC Mag, I bet they don't last another year. I remember when PC had spawned out of Popular Electronics. Oh, is that true? Well, it kind of was true. PC Magazine was actually started by David Bunnell and then it was bought by a guy named Tony Gold and Bill Ziff bought the company out from under. Oh, right.

Right, but now and but now started PC world pissed off which was an opera and and Ziff did have popular electronics, which they folded Because this is the reason I just have nobody very few people know this but popular electronics Folded because the circulation was too high Wait a minute, come back at me with that. Let me just let me check the bong for a second. It folded because the circulation was too high. Yeah, it's too high and growing. Were they losing money on every edition? Not that anyone can tell, but Schiff has this very unique theory of, and he is the specialist in this, and likely I got to sit and chat with him a lot about special interest publishing, and I got a lot of insight that I still discuss occasionally.

The way he always saw special interest publishing it was really has to be super targeted and you could get so you had a you created a world right and so PC magazine was a world into itself and that's why all Advertising had to be about the stuff that you talked about in the magazine. You could not have an ad from Ford, right? anything and and apparently this Popular trust was getting so big that it was losing this this the to focus on a small enough group that you could sell to the advertisers. It was all about creating an audience for the advertisers. And they were branching out too much. That audience was not being defined specifically enough and he decided to hell with it. Boom. Binga-bonga-bong. Anyway, he goes on Book Report, Thomas Sowell's Black Rednecks and White Liberals, 2005. He explains the race problem in a way that you will never hear anywhere else.

Remember, he's a successful black man. His other books are highly recommended to you. He's a very interesting guy, yes. He's at the Hoover Institute. Have you read this book? No, I have not. Okay, it's on the list then. He's a very easy to read writer. He's a very good writer. Sir American Carnage. He's also, you never see him in a review or anything because he's a black conservative. Sir American Carnage, 33333. Aka, sore American carnage when I saw on Twitter that John had been unceremoniously fired from PCMag. I had to donate since it has been a little while since my last contribution. Firstly, the show has been excellent lately. You two provide incredible information and analysis value. Second,

I'm always listening through the archives between current shows. Recently I came across a complete gem. When James Comey was first clipped and analyzed on the show, episode 656, Adam referred to him as a nut job. Which is the exact term Trump used after firing him. Coincidence? Read the book. This further confirms the long time suspicion that Adam is from the future. I have attached the clip in question. Thank you both for your courage. Very strange. He, I guess he was forced to do, he's coming into his own now.

And now he's, you know, now it's a couple months, he's been in his department, and this guy is a great, like a nut job operator. And he is a frightening individual. I can't even remember me saying that. I don't remember it either. You know why? Because of the alcohol. There's no long-term memory. Huh. Maybe. Good catch. You know what? Thank you. It is sometimes astounding what we've discussed on the program. Yeah, yeah, it's pretty. There was a book that came out and I'm gonna discuss it soon about the how the the we coddled our American children into morons that they are and I went to search.na show notes sure enough it was the same guys and Atlantic article from six years ago. I mean it's crazy what we discuss on this show.

I'm not gonna argue. It's almost like we're being guided from a cosmic source. Yes, from the number three six and nine. Yeah. Eight should be in there somewhere too. All right now we have one I'm just looking it up to see if there's a note from him because there's no note on this Jonathan Wall August 29th is that right? What? No, no, that's 2014 never mind. Are you looking through Squirrelman? So we have a donation from Norman Walls Uh, from Kyle, Kyle, Lua, Kona, Hawaii, three 33. Unless that was from the last show. I'm not sure. No, I don't remember this one. Okay. Well anyway, if he has something to tell us, he'll let us know. Mark Jasper, $300. I have never been fired by a front hole. Man, that's a comment there for you. Thank you for your courage. Mark Jasper. Yeah. Darn.

Onward to the associate executive producers, Sir Chad Biederman, the Baron of Guam, 250 bucks. Bless me, John and Adam, I spent one year since my last donation. I've been working on bringing down my credit card debt and had planned on mailing a check in the next few months. However, the news of JCD's departure from PCMag drove me to act early. John is one of the few voices in the world of so-called tech punditry that actually moves past the gee whiz Excuse me, gee whiz sophistry of great innovations that aren't great, revolutionary, useful, or benign. Let me stop you right there for a second.

I have learned, and as I'm sure you have as well, we were talking about some great tech on the previous show, the new Apple Watch, which some people found a very humorous analysis. But the term complication, a complication on a watch face, comes from the traditional watchmaking world. Neither of us knew this. Because we know we're not we're not fancy watches But back in the old days if it was more than just a watch with hands Like a moon or date or anything else besides just the time is known as a complication Thanks, and that's why Apple uses that a great opportunity to rebrand, but okay. It's good I'm sure the Baron of Guam appreciates that interruption. I'm sorry I

I'm tired of people telling me how, but it's a good piece of information, I think. Now I know. And why would Apple use that term? The Baron of Guam is growing old. I mean, come on. I know. I'm tired of people because I think it confuses people. I'm tired of it. Go back. Baron is back. Chad, here we go. I'm tired of people telling me how great a network voice activated microwave oven is when it only takes two to three minutes to make a bag of popcorn in the damn thing. That's Amazon. Didn't they just release a new microwave with Alexa in it? It's dumb. Did you see it? I haven't seen it. Who wants it?

I think that's peak Alexa. Put your cat in the microwave immediately. It's peak Alexa right there. You still have to get out of your chair to take the bag of popcorn in and out of the microwave, you nitwits. What's the benefit? Pretending you're on Star Trek? Who thinks crap like this has any utility at all? See, we've... Chad can be writing some columns here. Yes, indeed. This is someone who has been influenced by your magazine. I think, no, he's always... I believe guys like this are always this way. They just need someone to confirm their already existing opinions. Okay, well that's still important. That's my belief. I think that's what the show does too.

kind of know this is going on but they need somebody to kind of outline it for them because they got other things to do they have jobs. And someone they can always blame later. Will Dvorak said it? Yeah well that's good too. As you no doubt have noticed I really appreciated John's pieces in PCMag because they seem to be the only place where common sense would kick in with regard to Silicon Valley inventions and personalities. Luckily we still have such insight at the No Agenda show but only if my fellow listeners donate. Related congratulations to Adam and Tina on their upcoming nuptials. She sounded like a keeper to me for the first time Adam mentioned her. No, she is total jingle request

Star Wars from L Sharpton. I don't know why but that cracks me up every single time Chad Baron of Guam we can give him some karma to is a good guy everyone's going nuts about it Yeah, I don't know why either but it is it's no reason for it to be funny It's just funny Scott Floyd in Clayton, California to $200 and 30 cents. I I wanted to donate 200 to finally become a knight and help the slacks. 30 cents on the back to tie it to the many years of Dvorak has been sharing his insights in PCMag with many other sources. I'm hoping to be Sir Scott of Diablo. Can you de-douche me? You've been de-douched. Can you play the Obama mariachi no no no and resist me much?

Thank you both and sorry about PC Mag John, unbelievable note they sent to the next Bay Area meetup. I was watching my kids Friday and letting my wife have the weekend off so I couldn't make it yesterday. Okay, you know what? No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, Be committed. You've got karma.

And he says, it's his birthday. Hope I get this in on time. I'm on vacation in New Orleans having my rent boys and Chardonnay. Here's the money. There's plenty of it down there. Here's the money I will, although you can get some muscadine wine back in Louisiana too. Oh, I thought there was plenty of rent boys down there. I didn't know you were talking about the Chardonnay. Yeah, rent boys. They're available. Here's the money I would have spent on one. I'm taking one for the team today. Is that all it costs? Rent boys are too high. Is that the market? Is that the going market now? Gerald might or might not know. It's from Durham nearby. Now, I want to talk a little bit when we get out of this segment about North Carolina and the storm. Because there's something that no one has covered. I don't know why. Maybe Gerald can send us a note later about it. Okay. That concludes it. Those are our producers, associate producers and executive producers for show.

1071 I want to thank you should everyone ever be for supporting this operation. Yeah this operation Thanks you and we'll be thanking more people in the second donation segment for people who came in with $50 and above and As always another show is coming up this time for reals on Thursday I look forward to it as as does my partner in crime John C. Dvorak you can remember to support us at a vorac org So, you're gonna do that, I just wanted to mention I have this, uh...

Let me see. I finally got one. Where is it here? Before you go to that, I do want to mention there was one more associate executive producer at the meetup. Came in, it was like another scrunched envelope. 200 bucks inside. Another last minute job. NJNK Anonymous. Oh, okay. I don't know who it was. I got a boing. It's kind of a weird one. You got your boing! I got a boing. You got your boing. I got my boing, man. All right, we're going to talk about North Carolina. Oh yes, North Carolina. Now, there's been coverage and coverage. There's been a couple of stories about this, but if you remember a number of years back, and this has been going on, it's still an ongoing problem. North Carolina is one of the biggest producers of pork.

in this country. And I would say you might have an investment opportunity because a lot of it gets exported to China. But there have, and there were tons of stories, 60 Minutes and the Nightlines, all these things about the huge piles of pork or pig crap all over the place. And it was like stinking up coal counties of North Carolina. stink because of the pig crap that was everywhere and all these pigs, shit all over everywhere. And apparently a million or more pigs were killed by this storm, these floods and these storms. What happened to all the pig poop? Does anybody write a story about it? The whole state has to be inundated with pig poop. It's like a sewage mess and no one has discussed this.

Now I know that everything went from North Carolina to South Carolina. But where there to yeah, but where does it ultimately flow? I mean this stuff is managed I mean, but Tina was telling me that she looked at the Lady Bird Lake Which is really part of the Colorado River, which is managed by the lower Colorado River Water Authority It's all connected and she said there was sludge coming through the other day I mean you got to wonder who to where you're right. Where does it go? Who takes care of it? Where did you just roll off down to? This is the Gulf? Nobody's writing about it. Are these guys... Was that picture of Cooper sitting and standing in the water? Was he actually standing in pig poop? I don't know. I think he was. It must have been. Do you have a clip? I don't have a clip. It may be an outtake. I'm going, boy, it stinks here for some. What is this stink? What is this smell? I just think it's very poor reporting. Well, zero reporting.

Anyway, just it just bothers me and I really realized how poor the reporting is when you when you When you're over in Europe and even you know certainly from our side as well We're not getting enough information and cool tidbits from our producers I mean you look at what had did you know about the big brexit breakup? They were all in Austria and and the EU said I Screw you, Theresa May. We're not taking your deal. And then she went back and they're all yelling back and forth and apparently it's all about Northern Ireland. I mean we don't know any of this in the United States of give my nation. None of it. None of it. Did you see it on Democracy Now? Did you see it on PBS NewsHour? These are not unimportant events. No. No, that's because it's got nothing to do with Trump.

Although, it did remind me that Trump had told her, look you gotta approach the negotiations this way and he said, no she didn't want to take my advice so she'll do her own thing, it's gonna be very tough. And it looks like she went into a negotiation and didn't do it right. And I can, you know, it's the, now it's the EU guys who are all sitting there all high and mighty and they're gonna show their big swinging dicks like, oh we're the EU, we're not gonna take your damn deal, do a no deal Brexit. And I think, of course I think there is a real conversation, but it's about Northern Ireland and it's called the backstop. Which means if they're not able to get a deal by 2020, then Northern Ireland would remain under the economic control of the European Union and not under the United Kingdom. Now I'm not sure why Northern Ireland itself is so important.

I mean it's industrial, is that where all the Google, no they have it in Ireland, not in Northern Ireland right? The Apple and Google. I don't know, we'd have to look into it but nobody seems to be covering it. I tried to look around a little bit and I really couldn't find like a specific reason. Well, somebody came up with this thesis that if you could do a no deal Brexit and then base everything on WTO rules, which are really more of a meta, that would screw the EU over. In other words, you have to trade. If you're in the WTO,

which they are, both groups. You can't do any of this kind of stuff you want to do. You have to follow the rules of the WTO. And you've already signed on to the WTO. We've done it. A lot of our laws in the United States are null and void because of the signing on to the WTO. And for some reason, they take precedent, which screws over a lot of small businesses in particular. But that's what they should do. Just say okay, we just could you WTO rules. That's that's it. We're just going by that that stuff. Well, so this of course is Once again raised the talk of another vote a do-over on break on the Brexit vote. It's a lot more of that and Yeah, who knows what's gonna happen? I don't I just think the EU's it's gonna sit there They're not gonna they're not gonna give him a deal. Yeah, go ahead and figure it out. Theresa May No, I don't think you're gonna give him a deal either. Oh

But then you've got to doubt the brexit at all is it a break is it a brexit if it didn't happen? Falls in the woods. Yeah, it's all just it's all just imaginary anyway, so we have a piece of paper somewhere, and we do some stuff yeah, um I Don't you see what else do I have here? There's a number of different directions. We can go there is an important bill That is coming up for a vote very soon now, which is not getting a lot of coverage. I think it's interesting. This is a federal bill. Mr. President, the Agriculture Committee has put together an excellent piece of legislation. For the first time in 80 years, this bill legalizes hemp.

We forget, but hemp was widely grown in the United States throughout the mid-1800s. Americans used hemp in fabrics, wine, and paper. Our government treated industrial hemp like any other farm commodity until the early 20th century when a 1937 law defined it as a narcotic drug, dramatically limiting its growth. This became even worse in 1970 when hemp became a Schedule 1 controlled substance. In Colorado, as is true across the country, I've talked to a lot of colleagues here about this, we see hemp as a great opportunity to diversify our farms and manufacture high margin products for the American people. Yeah baby, good products. Now apparently, this is the farm bill?

And let's mention something here. Sure. Industrial hemp. not the same as marijuana plants. That's correct, however an important part of this farm bill is that is the extract rule for CBD. That will be legalized. That will be a part of it. So you can create marijuana where marijuana hemp advertising whatever you want to call it where you can extract CBD for some groovy products. Yeah, anti-convulsants mostly. Well, there's lots of stuff. Anyway, yes, this needs to go through. Oh, and I think it will. And of course, this could be a pretty big little economic sector. And we're good at it. We're farmers. We could be very, very good at this. They're talking about CBD portion of it alone. Well, no, legalization of hemp and CBD could grow consumer market to $22 billion. That's not bad. It's a nice little cottage industry.

And I will say this, the hemp is very useful. We're talking again, not marijuana, not CBD, not THC. The plant has a fibrous content that can be used to make cloth, rope, almost all ropes were made from hemp cars. Hello, what are you laughing about? What cars are made from hemp? Go being a hemp car, it's right there, hemp car that also ran on hemp. It's there. And Cheech and Chong, hello. But yes, there's a hemp car. The usefulness of hemp in industry is quite high. Now, the one thing left out of this report is that when it was made illegal, it was made illegal by... This is... Now, people can check this out and call me on it because I'm not looking at the research as we speak. The Hursts. Yes, it was the Hursts. William Randolph Hurst supposedly had a bunch of

tree farms and hemp could be used to make newsprint and apparently early newspapers were had a high composition of hemp. I don't have this information in front of me. I'm just pulling it out. I've heard this as well. I've heard that this was the beginning. I've heard it but I'm not sure it's true. And that's when they started printing stories about Mexicans who were high on the marijuana weed and were freaking out and were coming here to rape our women. Now, that was the reefer madness era. And so they made, they illegally made the whole hemp plant, which is not in our... These industrial hemp plants, which are huge, can be used to make ethanol. I know that probably more efficiently than corn. And they can be used to make paper and all these other products that come from this plant.

Supposedly Hearst was behind the abolition movement, or one of the guys, and it worked out for him. Yeah, well it's going to work out for us because that's another sector that we can enter into and tax the hell out of. Which is just like, oh man, I love this story. What a statistic. This is from CNBC. New research on teen vaping shows that about 20% of high school students have used e-cigarettes in the last 30 days. The number has soared 75% from a year ago. 75%. Great.

That is according to a Wall Street Journal story citing unpublished federal data. By the way, they're saying this the whole read here is with... Oh, geez, it's horrible. These children are vaping. I mean, is he a doctor? Does he have a medical opinion on this? I mean, he certainly has an agenda. Like, oh God, so fuck the children. FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb is considering a fast-track review process for e-cigarettes that include features that discourage use by kids. The FDA announced a historic crackdown on e-cigs last week, threatening to ban some products like flavored nicotine that appeals more to kids. Like cucumber? I saw peach, I saw mango, cherry. There is something to be said about the oral...

She sounds hungry. I just want to point out that you create regulations for one reason and one reason only. Right after regulation comes taxation. This is so obvious, but they're like, oh save the children or some crap like that from your financial news station by the way. fixation, Freudian... Yeah, but if you're selling, I mean it's one thing, if you're selling it to try and help smokers kick an addiction, you don't need all these... Generating new nicotine addictions. A delivery system to generate new nicotine addictions is just... And you don't know what it does to their lungs, as FDA commissioners constantly said, delivery system through the drugs, drugs, or through the lungs is not a way that he would ever suggest you... No, through the nose, that's how we should do it. You get your intake of anything.

You're right, Liesman. Now I want to outlaw vaping. I'm turning into a big government regulation person. We're switching... That and the tariffs and all that stuff. I know, it's upside down. Become a hardcore big-time government guy. Like me and Elizabeth Warren. I am. Exactly. Two ends, they bend. They meet. Space-time. Space-time continuum. Stephen Hawkins. Are they high? What are they talking about? I mean, this is the weirdest segment. It's like they can't make up their mind if it's good or bad or it's like the tariffs or do we need this now and children shouldn't, you know, it's good if you're trying to wean people off smoking. How about a whole new category of drug? I mean, this is...

This is another taxable moment here. This is fantastic. Get on board, people. near schools Because that's where the kids are doing all the vaping. This is fantastic You get the kids hooked on the vape and of course We're gonna legalize the nicotine part because that's and that's the way it works now We've cut out all the young guys like Dexter, you know Dexter at his own they still has his vapors e-liquid company doing really well but it's gonna get cut out eventually because you'd have to pay a million dollars per flavor to get it approved and

You get all the kids jacked up on it, they're going to school, you got Bluetooth controlled so it's like, uh, slave in seat number five, if you have the answer right I'll turn on your vape. And they go, thank you teacher. This is a setup for these children. Yes, it's all part of it. I mean that's that's the beauty of it is you couldn't you can be vaping You could be dabbing and no one will really know Exactly. I know but 75% increase in vape and believe me. It's not just kids vaping Cucumber nicotine all right well. Thank you for that report a little report for you. Can we go to Beto? Oh?

Yeah, Beto, Beto, Beto, Beto, Beto, Beto, Beto. A couple of things about this guy. Now I don't know, I've heard him talk enough that I think he's trying to sound like Obama. He's kind of doing... Yes, yes, yes, yes. And he's even being compared to Obama. We had that in our last report. Because he's using Obama's cadence. Yes. Now, there's a very short clip. I don't have the whole thing. I had the whole thing. It's boring. So I got just a piece of it. This is him in a black church and he's using as one of his items is that woman that I don't even know if she was...

She wasn't a white girl, but she's the one who went into the black guy's apartment below hers and shot the guy to death. Yeah, she's a white cop. She's white. I thought she was. She looks Hispanic to me. Oh. It's beside the point. She's a cop and she went and shot this guy to death. And you know, this is a sketchy story. Everybody knows what is this? Maybe it was a jilted lover. We don't know. The story has never been fully realized, so we don't care. But this guy's in a black church getting everybody all riled up. And tell me, just listen to his cadence. He's not trying to be Obama in a black church.

in this very year, in this community, that a young man, African American, in his own apartment, is shot and killed by a police officer. And when we all want justice and the facts and the information to make an informed decision, Yeah, totally totally what was wrong in him son of midnight man, you know if we can find that grace Anything is possible. Yeah If we can tap that grace Everything can change

Yeah, it's a little bit, it's taking a little bit from Martin Luther King. Yes, yeah, Martin Luther King. Martin Luther King, the narrators. Yeah. And also, this guy's playing this. Also, I saw him, a video of him at the drive-thru, the Whataburger drive-thru, which is big in Texas, or Whataburgers, and he was doing air drums in the car. You know, all hip and stuff. There's nothing more pathetic than a white guy doing air drums at a Whataburger drive-thru. Yeah, it's like the scene in the couple scenes in Office Space where the guys... Yeah, it was bad. ...listening to rap. Very, very, very... Yes, exactly.

Now, so we have the Beto Cruz debate that went on. Yes, yes, yes. And a couple of things that my take on this. For one thing, Cruz has always been kind of a snot looking guy that I don't think has a lot of personal appeal in terms of his appearance. Beto's worse. Beto looks like the kind of kid that was in school, you'd want to punch him or pull his pants up or do something. You want to be mean to a guy like this. If you're in high school, I'm talking about in the olden days. Nowadays, no. Can't do anything. Were you like that? Were you mean to the nerds? Because I was that guy.

I was better with a nerd that was the Beto. Yeah. Yeah. Well you'd have been somebody would have you know tripped you or And I had Tourette's Oh yeah, you'd be screwed. So nowadays you're safe because everybody's all into the, oh, the poor kid. Let's treat, let's put this, make an example out of him without doing anything to him. Let's just give him a diploma just because he's sick. So this is this Beto guy. He's a very, Beto is, the problem that Cruz has is Beto is a lot taller than Cruz and much more stately.

Until you actually look at him. He's a Ichabod Crane guy, he's got a bunch of veins in his neck. His neck is like he might be a lizard. It's possible that he's a lizard. I don't know for sure, but he might be and that's why he's got this, he's got the cadence now, this Obama cadence. Yeah, lizard, lizard talk. Lizard talk. I've got three debate clips. All right. I got the clip that I picked up early, which is the two of them bickering, and then I have three others, but Here's what you have to remember a couple of things Cruz was a borderline professional debater. He was a master debater Master debater master debater and he Should be able to kick anyone's ass in a debate. I think this guy Somebody took him aside and said hey you want to beat Cruz here? I

You want to just point out what he's trying to pull with his discussions because he's pulling stunts. Cruz is pulling stunts and this guy, this Beto guy brings up, but in a number of points during the debate, Cruz would shake him up. He would say something to get him all shook up and he'd be nervous. So he's not as good as Cruz in debating, but he's pretty good at doing retorts. Here's the bickering clip. And we are moving on here. Sorry? Yeah, play that clip. Oh, no, I thought you were talking in between. I'm sorry. And we are moving on here. Of course I support the Second Amendment.

In what way, in what respect, and name one judge you've ever supported who would actually uphold Hillary. You may not understand how the House and the Senate work, but it's your job in the Senate to decide if you're going to support or not support a given nominee. Did you endorse Hillary Clinton? Not in the House. Did you endorse Hillary Clinton? That has nothing to do with the support of the Second Amendment. It does because Hillary promised every justice she would appoint would vote to overturn Hillary. I fully support the Second Amendment. You're both past your time, gentlemen. Let's move on. here. Oh yeah. After that little back and forth, and the guy got a good one in there. If you understood the House and the Senate, you know. By the way, he actually even stutters like Obama when he shook up.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Good. Good catch. All right. So here we go with the Beto Cruz. Beto is talking about all the blacks in prison. He's trying to appeal to the black vote in Texas. But he's kind of one of those guys. I don't know if the black voter would. I mean, they like to hear him going on and on. But He's got this really smarmy quality that I don't know if blacks really, I don't think they like Cruz either. I just don't think they're gonna come out and vote for either one of them. But let's play, this is the way it would, this is clip one and this is kind of the way it goes. That is disproportionately comprised of people of color. Too many unarmed African American men losing their lives in this country. Too peacefully

protest that injustice non-violently and to call attention to that to prick the conscience of this country so that those in positions of public trust and power will finally do something. Standing up not just for your rights but everyone's rights in this country there's nothing more American than that. That's your time Congressman. I'm gonna have to ask again for the audience to please please refrain from reacting and applause okay we need to get through a lot of questions here. Senator Cruz. You know, Congressman O'Rourke gave a long soliloquy on the civil rights movement. And I'll tell you, one of the reasons that I'm a Republican is because civil rights legislation was passed with the overwhelming support of Republicans and indeed

The Dixiecrats who were imposing Jim Crow, the Dixiecrats who were beating those protesters were Democrats. And that's one of the reasons I'm proud to be a member of the party of Lincoln, a member that stands for equal rights for everyone, regardless of what race, what ethnicity. Every human being is a creation of God that our Constitution protects. But nowhere in his answer did he address the fact that when you have people during the national anthem taking a knee, refusing to stand for the national anthem, that you're disrespecting. the millions of veterans, the millions of soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines that risk and fight and die to protect that flag and to protect our liberty. And to be clear, everyone has a right to protest. You have a right to speak. But you could speak in a way that doesn't disrespect the flag, that doesn't disrespect the national anthem. And I'll tell you, those civil rights protesters would be astonished

if the protests were manifesting and burning the flag. Dr. King, that's not something Dr. King stood for. He stood for justice without disrespecting the men and women who fight for this country. I just have to say something about that. I'm so tired of hearing this bullcrap. I mean, Trump aside, I'll get to him in a second. The kneeling for the flag during the anthem issue The problem is not the kneeling and all, the problem is not that the flag is for the men and women who died. No. The problem is it's a militaristic reality television show.

and the military pays for their militaristic part of it. It's war games, it's jets flying over, it's a part of the package, it's a entertainment package that you are ruining. And Trump is very street savvy in this regard by framing it as un-American, unpatriotic and causing a big stir about that and being able to point to unpatriotic behavior as uncapitalist because you're losing ratings and losing advertising money. Yeah, there's all those elements. Putting this aside. Yes, this thought of yours, which we've discussed a lot. I just wanted to make sure people remember Yeah, well you could the problem is I have a thing that relates really what to what I'm shutting I'm shutting up what Cruz did he went through it he did his debate thing and he went after the guy and he did this and he that and

Now I'm gonna play Beto's retort to what Cruz said specifically, not to the issue at all because he doesn't address the issue. He addresses, this is why I think Beto's good, unfortunately he's easily shooken, but I think he's good at this. What he does is he deconstructs what Cruz does instead of discussing the arguing with Cruz because you can't beat Cruz he'll just beat you up because he's a kind of a semi-professional. Do we want to rewind a lot? Do we want to read the last 10 seconds of Cruz just so we're back in there? Yeah, we'll do the last 10 seconds and then cut to... We'll go to the master debater and then we'll go to Bader's retort. I'm sorry for interrupting the flow I didn't realize that's what you were doing. ...constitution protects but nowhere in his answer

Did he address the fact that when you have people during the national anthem taking a knee, refusing to stand for the national anthem, that you're disrespecting the millions of veterans, the millions of soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines that risk and fight and die to protect that flag and to protect our liberty. And to be clear, everyone has a right to protest. You have a right to speak. But you could speak in a way that doesn't disrespect the flag, that doesn't disrespect the national anthem. And I'll tell you, those civil rights protesters would be astonished if the protests were manifesting and burning the flag. Dr. King, that's not something Dr. King stood for. He stood for justice without disrespecting the men and women who fight for this country. Okay, now we go to Beto's retort. You heard Cruz's answer. First of all, he again tried to mislead you by taking a peaceful protest during the national anthem to burning a flag. No one here, myself included, has suggested that anyone should be doing that. He also grounded his answer in partisanship, talking about

the GOP being better than the Democrats. Listen, I could care less about either party at this moment. At this deeply divided, highly polarized time in our history, this moment calls for all of us, regardless of party or any other difference of race or sexual orientation, how many generations you've been here or whether you just got here yesterday. We need to come together for this country that we love so much. Yeah. Beto Butz. And on here, the next question for Senator Cruz. Nice Beto Butz. I thought he handled that perfectly. Instead of addressing any of Cruz's things, he deconstructed it. Yeah, it was very good. Very good. Now, overall though, I would say that Beto is taller, he might be more imposing, he might be... But he's no master debater.

There is no master debater that we know of and he's got the he's got the lizardy thing going on Which is kind of bothersome. He might be a lizard now We can play the Beto Cruz rundown which I believe is somebody else's analysis of the whole situation It was an incredible debate. I have to say really watching it's online if you haven't seen it But I do want to you know, this this is closer than expected this race. They really thought Ted Cruz wouldn't have any competition. What were your main takeaways from the debate? You know, I would have three takeaways. First and foremost, from a technical standpoint, Senator Cruz has debated countless times. He was even a debate debater back in his college days, and I think that really showed last night from a technical standpoint. But the second point is just what a cultural, political moment. I mean, anyone who watched that debate, that is the most perfect illustration of where we're at in our political climate in 2018 that I've ever seen.

on made this close. And I think it was interesting to hear him talk about the issue of immigration through an economic lens. That's something that many Democrats in other parts of the country haven't done. But Congressman O'Rourke sought to really make the case that the president's immigration policies aren't just—he made less of a personal appeal and more of an economic policy pitch. And I thought that was interesting, given the demographics of the state and the geographic location.

Now with that in mind, I do have to play an offbeat clip. This is not talking about, you know, Beto didn't go on with the, oh, there's, they're separating the moms from the kids and all this thing. That, which is a very, apparently such a big issue that even shows up in Ireland. And I have a Nigel Farage clip. Okay. where he's on his LBC show and his radio show and he's got this hysteric Irish woman who's going on and on about this situation with the immigrants which really began, as you pointed out, with a judicial

I guess an edict in the 90s that required the separation of the parents from the children at the border for this, whatever, for some particular reasons. It's been going on throughout the entire Obama administration, but everyone makes a scene about it. So it's all Trump's fault. But listen to this is the problem that the Democrats have is the hysteria. This is Nigel versus the hysteric Irish woman. And Donald Trump, he's a dirty rat putting those little children in cages. What kind of human being does that? Someone who's related to Hitler does that.

May, what he's doing is sending a message, don't try to come to America illegally. And it does look extremely tough, I agree with you. But May... They're doos, they're doos. But don't do that to little children. God forgive them. That is a terrible, terrible thing he's doing, getting children from their mothers and putting them in cages. What kind of... I mean, what kind of people do that? Well the alternative, May... The alternative, May, is to do what... May, the alternative is to do what Mrs May, to do what Mrs Merkel has done and to say anyone can come that wants to come. I mean, do you see this is the great issue May, that is dividing politics right across the West. It's how we deal with our borders, it's how we deal with refugee seekers, it's how we deal with illegal immigration and his message... Don't treat Nigel, you don't treat people like that. For God's sake, you don't treat people like that.

That was sad in so many ways I mean this woman believes the reporting and thinks that Donald Trump personally is ripping children away from their mothers standing there doing it jamming them into a cage oh my goodness well all right then I had a beato clip but forget that I'm gonna play my My clip from a black woman in Pasadena at a city council meeting who is very happy with ICE and what they are doing and her plight is just

It's it's something that you don't hear. Well, I didn't get off a mainstream media. You won't see it on television Prior to that we don't know we know that we originate from Africa but we've never been there. Okay, that's the first thing. The other thing I want you to know is that I grew up in Pasadena area and many of my best friends were Latino. Okay, there's a huge population, but they were Chicanos and they loved blacks. There was no problem. The reason I say this to you and the reason why it's so important right now is because I left to go to Texas and came back and was being harassed

by illegal immigrants. Not Chicanos, Mexicans. They were following me, they were looking at me like, what are you doing in Pasadena? That's how much that border had opened up. What I want to say to you is that we have been forgotten. Blacks and Africans, African Americans. And the reason why I can tell you that is because they call me EEOC. There was a paragraph for Latinos. There was a paragraph for Asians. Nothing for blacks. And I just about hit the roof. What I want to say is everyone has a right to be here. You do what you need to come legally. Can you actually hear this? Because it seems a little hard to hear for me at the moment. It's barely audible. But it's good enough. I mean, I can hear that she's irked about the fact

I'm hearing this message from more than one person. Yeah, like one of many blacks saying hey What about us you yeah, and and this EEOC Democrats you haven't done anything for us You didn't even trying to do something for us. You're making it worse. Yeah, and the EEOC thing is is also, you know, I didn't realize African Americans no longer a part of the equal opportunity movement in in California and I didn't know that either. Yeah, yeah. Well the clip is in the show and I think people should go and listen to it there. Cuz we have to move on with more things! I'm gonna show my support by donating to No Agenda. Imagine all the people who could do that. Oh yeah, that'd be fab. Yeah, on No Agenda!

Yeah, moving right along. So let's go over, I'm going to do the first, I'm going to start off with this separate listing or mention of the people at the Oakland meetup. Oh nice. That gave $100 or $50 or more, which is a lot of people, especially the $60 from the ATM. I want to appreciate that, it's great. Brian Mickey in San Francisco, $100. who had it doubled, Eri Kayuragi, I think had 100 and so did Brian Mickey, which is, I'm sorry I didn't mention him a minute ago. Argentinonymous,

The Argentinian guy that was there, 50. Nice. James Lesko from Alameda, 52, 80. And with a note from, he says we should reinstitute the Mile High Club and that's why he gave 52, 80. Ah, I'd forgotten about that, yeah. 5,200 feet. And then I'm talking, I'm going through this at the table and then Jay is sitting there. She says, so we should rethink this. Mal Heiklim says, yeah, yeah, yeah. Be really douchey on the show. She's actually a listener. I love that. I love that she listens. That's so cool. And she thinks it's douchey. Pluto and Scorpio, baby. Cordelia Mellor.

Anisa de-douching? No, we can do that. You've been de-douched. Ikee Katagawa, 60. Sir... and she... no jingles, none of that, yeah. Sandy Block, 60. She has a cute little note. Edward Hulsey in Oakland, 150. Eden Anderson. Oh, Edward and Eden. Stuart Long and Lafayette, 55.50. Nick Goes West, 80. Luke and Beatrice Hatcher, we put them in the beginning, sorry. Justin Kane, 50. Anonymous, 60. Jason, no name, 60. And got a few things, please accept this donation by a faithful listener. Nick Goes West, here's a little note, a card from Sandy. Thank you for the work you guys do.

And then I got this note from, I guess it's from Terra Avion subscription service from Stuart Long. He says, thank you for your courage, travel karma for Robert Conti who is propagating the formula in Brazil. Okay, we'll put that at the end for sure. I think Stuart contributed something too, I don't know what. Anyway, Def a ball showed up late and I missed him and wow that's I think that summarizes that group I think I got most. Thank you group. Do we have any more meetups plan? Let me look at them not I don't have anything I don't have anything on the list But the locals are gonna do their own thing so they'll be local number two I think by the time that they get it together. Yeah, they got enough people Robert Hausner in Marmora Ontario one two five four dot four seven

Patrick Maley, these are people that contributed to the show 1071. Patrick Maley in Bounteville, Utah, 12345. It's a contribution to John Severance Package. Yeah, that turns out to be the Severance Package. Caleb Kniffin, $110. Pete Federici, $110. He needs a Jobs Karma for him and his partner. We got that coming up. Stefano Sertoria Alta, baronet of the Glen Ellen and Slanoma, $101. Ian Field, $100. Matthew Anderson, $100.

from West Roxbury, Massachusetts, 100. Sir John Knowles, the Baron of Murfreesboro. The 99.99, David Fugazotto, 81. So wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, stop at Fugazotto for a second because you made a call for a donation amount for PC Mag, so he took the F, the U, the C, and the K, and the PC, and the MAG, and he did 6 plus 21 plus 3 plus 11 plus 16 plus 3 plus 13 plus 1 plus 7 is 81. Yeah, that's a pretty good one. I had another guy they sent, they said this should be 86, 32, because you got 86ed. And I thought that was good too. Maybe the Fugazotto one works. He's a Sir Fugazotto as far as I remember. Sir Craig Porter and Council Bluffs, here's a boob donation for you. John, best of luck.

Sir Marcellus, 8008. Tim Kiesel, 80. I'm not going to read that. Forget it. No, no, not happening. Nice try. Good work, Tim. Sir Brian Kaufman, Scottsdale, Arizona, 7575. Daniel Hevner in Noblesville, Indiana, 6130. Anonymous 58, Sean David from Slovenia. That's cool. Hey, Slovenia. I love Slovenia. Why is he anonymous? All they have to do is track the one IP address that listens to Noah Jenter from Slovenia and they gotcha.

Slovenia is a great place, great wine growing area, very nice little capital city, beautiful. Capital of what? John David Carlson, Fresno, California, 55 double nickels on the dime. Sir Dave Pugh, 55.10. Gabriel Olinger in Manchester, New Hampshire, 55.10. Sir Stephen, 55.10 from Bern, Texas. Where's all these 55.10s coming from? He says, I admire this. This is a Eric Scholes in Dallas, but in Texas section, I admire JCD's ability to burn bridges. Keep going with the NYC lib joes.

Fuck them. Will they ever pull their heads out of their collective arse? I doubt it. Who cares? Throw on some rare Rihanna outtakes, slunk a bowl and just, you know, peace. Texan. He's from Dallas. You might talk like this. We know how to roll here, baby. David Alston, 5510. Michael Sigenthaler, 5005. Alexa Delgado, 50, in Aptos, and these are all following are 50 donations, name and location if applicable. Dave Bozeman, he goes on about, he says,

Yeah, he's never gonna read PC Magazine again. That's what, you know. No, of course not. I'm never reading them again either. Screw those guys. You don't read them now. No, I barely read your column. Barely. Oh, that might be interesting. I'll try looking it up. No, only if I caught a tweet. If I caught a tweet, I'd read it. Zachary Hanslik. Ryan William Bryant, who in Spartanburg, I think he may be a Sir, South Carolina. Uh, he doesn't negative comments about PC Meg Daniel, the boy in Bath, Michigan, Patrick may calm Sir Patrick in New York City. Uh, Sir Chris, Sir Chris of the vortex ring state. Ah, yes. Island, Washington. You don't want to be in a vortex ring with your helicopter. He's there and he's saving the day. Uh, he's 50 years or last guy. And that'll be the producers for show 10 71. I want to thank each and every one of them for helping us out.

Yes, and of course thank you to everybody who came in under $50 which is anonymous. Sometimes someone who lives in, I don't know, Slovenia would want to give their name, but they want to be anonymous anyway, so they'll give under $50. We had a guy, Ben Anonymous, who I think he gave $50 or $60, but he says he's the only guy... Now I think this is wrong. I think this is a mistake. I don't think this is true. He says he's the only dude named Ben named Ben. No, oh no. I'm sure we have more. I think most people named Ben are dudes named Ben. Yes. Because if your name is Ben, you really don't have a lot of choices in life. And if you're a man, because that you never know. You end up being a guy working on machines and computers. Yeah. Ben. Dude named Ben.

So we thank everybody who came in under 50. You're on our layaway programs and our subscriptions to sustaining donations. They are very important. We appreciate it. And thank you very much and keep the checks coming. We need to make sure we have a good check flow. In case PayPal pulls the plug like they apparently did on Alex Jones. I'm looking into it to see why they did that because we've had nothing but good luck with PayPal. So they've actually been pretty good except for the Unibyte encoded stuff everything else have been pretty decent with and that is a problem, but yeah It's not much of a problem You've got it, but you know they also remember they cut it didn't they was it MasterCard or PayPal as well? Then they cut off wiki leaks. I think was PayPal wasn't it. I don't know yeah I'm pretty sure so yeah, but that's crazy What would you do if you run the company and the government comes in you know CIA? Support support InfoWars free speech man

I don't think it was the Infowars. Well, maybe, but I know that WikiLeaks was the government that was going after him and they probably went from door to door to tell people to cut off their funding. Yeah, but that was also, what's his face, from the 250 million dollar website. The door Oh Madara. Yeah, PR drama car. I'm a dog. Yeah that guy he was in charge of it that at PayPal back in the day Yeah, yeah, you can't on one hand say the social justice warrior fired me from PC Mag and not see the obvious connection between Omidyar and PayPal and we can use that there now nobody was then He's not there. Yeah

I have a very nice note to share. This is from John Overall, and you may remember him. His dad passed away earlier this month, and he's in Candinavia where he died, and he wanted to see if he could get a color guard since he was a highly decorated naval man. And so I got a very nice note from John. He says, hi Adam, please read this on the show or whatever you want to. I've got an official word from the US Navy this morning that an official honor guard will be at my dad's funeral to present colors, fold the flag and play taps. Without no agenda and the help of this community, I am not sure this would have happened. It seems the Navy doesn't need provide for out of country honors, but they sure don't make it easy to locate the correct office that you need to contact.

A big thank you to the No Agenda community is in order. Thank you, Adam, for taking my request and moving it along to Agent Orange. Thanks to Agent Orange for moving it along to his contact, a Brigadier General. And thank you to the General who gave me his personal number and a number to call and a person to talk to so I could make this happen. And thank you to the U.S. Navy for sending the team to honor my dad, CWO Ford Gerald W. Overall, for his service to the United States. You have no idea how much this means to my mom and the rest of the family to have the honors. Karma works, cheers from John overall. Hey, we pulled it off. I'm proud of the community. As expected. Yeah, it went fast though. This is very good.

I'm very very pleased congratulations to all then I did get a a night karma request from sir sir bill hudak You know we like to do those things so we have a number of karmas to hand out including some jobs karma and travel karma So here we go jobs jobs jobs and jobs. Let's vote for jobs You've got karma And here's our list for today. It is the 23rd of September, 2018. Gerald Parker celebrated on the 20th. Buzzkill Jr. celebrated on the 22nd. Definitely one of those Pluto and Scorpio kids. And we also say happy birthday to our very own Sir Bemrose who manages so much of the back office and makes sure everything runs in the data center. And we say congratulations to him. He turns 41. Happy birthday from everybody here at the Best Podcast.

in the universe. It's so nice for Sir Ben Rose. Is Buzzkill Jr. in there? You didn't hear me say it? Yeah, he celebrated yesterday. I said the kid, the Pluto from Scorpio kid. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. I was looking through the... No, the correct answer is you were looking for your blade. Looking for your blade. I was looking for my blade and I found it. Scott Floyd, step right up to the podium here. Scott, you have supported the best podcast in the universe, The Noah Agenda, showing the amount of $1,000 or more. That means you get to join our elusive and exclusive Luke's Roundtable of the Noah Agenda Knights and Dames. And I hereby am very proud to pronounce the K, the

Sir Scott of Diablo for you my friend. We have Hookers and Blow, Rent Boys and Chardonnay. We've got Bourbon and Bong Rips, Cold Brew Coffee and Cannabis, Dr. Pepper and a Quick Handy, Rabbit Meat and Goat Milk, De Milices, Limoncello and Salmon, Pog and Poi, Steel Reserve and Black Miles. We've got Breast Milk and Pavlum, Ginger Ale and Gerbil, Sparkling Cider and Escorts, Bong Hits and Bourbon, Bock and the Vanilla, Geishas and Sake, Rubiness, Women and Rose and of course Mutton and Mead. All of that for you here at the roundtable and make sure you collect your ring by going to noagendanation.com slash rings and have good old Eric the shill get your ring size and we'll take care of all of the rest and thank you for supporting your no agenda show. I have a couple of notes and also a very interesting bill that popped up in California, your neck of the woods regarding the

The scooters, the electric scooters, the dockless motorized scooters. There should be some pictures floating around. I hope somebody sends it to me of the scooter that we had at the meet up. Somebody stole it off the street and brought it into the bar and got me to pose with it. I haven't seen that one yet. Well, line bikes. who I believe has an investment from... and this is not a bicycle, it's the scooters, the little... Yeah, this was too, this is a bird. Oh, it's a bird? Well, I think Lime has an investment from Alphabet. So there was a lot of lobbying going on for a new law for motorized scooters.

and it was signed into law on the 19th by Jerry Moonbeam, Jerry Brown, and they did something very interesting. See, one of the issues with this program Is they want a couple of things to be law and a couple of things not to be law. And I have to give props for all these companies and their uber ramrod approach. You know, jam every, just flood the cities with these things without asking any permission, without doing any real legwork. Then, or at least not a parent, then get everyone hooked on it. The kids love it. Of course, older people like me, white sis. Males we don't have smartphones, so we can't participate in this revolution this mobility revolution

Yeah, yeah, it's a revolution. It's a revolution. I think we had these when I was a kid. I'm surprised they don't have me put a bunch of these where you have like a two by four with two roller skate heads at either end and a wooden box and there's some... A soapbox. Yeah, it's like a box. Yeah. Well, so, you know, so now regulation is starting to come in, but there's a lot of lobbying. And there's a number of things that you don't want as a mobility company. There's some laws you do want and some you don't want. Now the good news is that across the board, but even in this new bill in California which is Assembly Bill 2989, there it does say you may not operate a motorized scooter upon a sidewalk except as may be necessary to enter or leave an adjacent property. So I like that.

You may not leave a motorized scooter lying on its side on any sidewalk or park a motorized scooter on a sidewalk in any other position so that there is not an adequate path for pedestrian traffic. So those are all good. But what you do not want at any time is a law that forces people to wear a helmet. I would say that's the number one problem because, you know, your usage will go down immediately. Oh yeah, because who's going to walk around with a helmet all day? Exactly. So we needed that. Which kind of goes contra to the news reports of people being hit and dying with their heads splitting open. Another two people died this week. And you also don't want speed to be limited. So here it is in California, this new law, this bill would permit a local authority to authorize the operation of a motorized scooter on a highway with a speed limit of up to 35 miles an hour. Oh my god!

Yes, and then this is the tricky one. The bill does require the operator of a motorized scooter to wear a helmet only if the operator is under 18 years of age. So this is beautiful because you also need to have a valid driver's license. or instruction permit. They lowered that, I didn't even notice that, they lowered that to instruction permit. So if you're over 18, you don't need a helmet and you know, you'll be able to drive up to 35 miles an hour on these things. Go for it! Take yourself out of the gene pool, because that's what's going to happen. That's what you're going to be doing with a little, with a product that has those little wheels and it has inadequate braking at that speed. Oh, they have a braking requirement.

Yeah, well, you'll break. You want to hear it? It's gonna stop on a dime. Oh, no, no. You want, you need to hear the definition of the braking requirement. Okay. The motorized scooter, you may not operate a motorized scooter unless it is equipped with a brake that will enable the operator to make a braked wheel skid on dry level clean pavement. That's the brake requirement. The brake requirement Means you have to be able to skid? Yes, on dry level clean pavement. So it just locks the wheel? I've never heard of something so bizarre. That's pretty weird. That's your braking requirement. So it just locks the wheel? Yeah. But that's not gonna stop ya. If you're doing 35 with those little wheels, you're gonna skid about, I don't know how many feet you're gonna go, but it's not gonna be... Blow a tire. If I were you, I'd jump off.

I'm just saying that's just the that's the law. Well good work Alphabet. You've made the world a little bit safer. So when I went to the meetup there was a bunch of these scooters flying around Oakland. Unbelievable. Well while we're on the topic, because of course this is happening in Austin, I am boots on the ground in the middle of this and I have to say Tina picked me up at the airport and we were driving back into downtown I thought there were more. I thought I think it looks like there's more of these five. It's a damn things It's just just zipping all over the place. I said I can see it I can feel it in two weeks, so I have to go out and investigate I'll find out by tomorrow. I'll know if they've dropped more in here, but got a note from Bill. He says a quick perspective I thought you might find interesting. He's from California from Silicon Valley

I believe. I was back visiting Austin this past weekend. I'm an Austin native and have been living away for the past several years and started chatting with several of the tech workers that have flooded the city while I was out one night. They remarked to me that while they're living and paying taxes in Austin, they don't see Austin as their city or as home. Instead, they see themselves as long-term tourists just there to have some fun for a few years then back home to California. To me, that's summed up how things have changed over the last few years. The city has been flooded by a group of people who refuse to invest themselves into it and just see themselves as tourists. This is the same that this is the so the effect will be the same as you see in a big concert on the grassy area and it's one of the big parks and when the concert's over you look back and it's filled with

garbage and litter and half-eaten hamburgers and the place is an outrageous mess. There's Austin coming up. Yeah, that's it. If you don't care, you're in the city, ah, this is great. Throw the stuff, just throw stuff over your shoulder. You know, and you're right. They don't have respect for the city. That's a good point. That's why they don't care about throwing the dockless scooters around and riding over the streets. Screw you, you locals. Ah, you dumb Texas hick. Yeah, you're a dumb Texas hick. Yeah, yeah. That's the way Californians are. Wow. Take it from me.

Wow. That's a good point. That's a good observation. Yeah, it's a good one. Yeah. I got a note from Nathan. He's a teacher and he was listening to Thursday's show about the climate conversation. Yeah. He says, ah man, the climate conversation had me rolling. I'm a teacher at a new high school in Washington, the Vashon High School. and he said it was okay for me to mention this, which is a very small politically left town. The science curriculum I was told to teach is only about carbon. Remember they were talking about carbon instead of carbon dioxide? Yeah. So this is so the actual science curriculum talks about carbon

and how it builds up in our systems. I teach biology, he says. Teaching kids that carbon is some kind of evil particle that we must eradicate from the atmosphere. Well, I'm not an idiot or a pussy, so I decided not to teach this away. Instead I found the article that is below and will build an entire unit off of it. I just want you to know and that you and John know that there are good people working hard in the systems that exist. I always push students to question everything and explain to them the simple truths of this country and planet. The students come alive when we have real conversation and counter ideas that are presented to them. They are not combative or angry. As my years in high school grow, it's very, very clear to me the issue we have in education is about 20% high schools and 80% universities. The kids are open and interested here but completely turn once they leave us. Love the show, always will.

But it sounds like he's gonna get killed. Thanks to show up always will man. This is my my swan song Thank you for what you do and helping all of us stay a little more sane. Yeah Oh, by the way, he says co2 only makes up 0.03 of our breathable air. Yeah. Thanks teach It's way down there. Yeah, exactly that does bring me to another agenda 2030 clip of global global warming. This is Something odd is going on here three A hot and fiery start for a mission that will study the coldest places on Earth. The new NASA satellite was launched safely onto a path that takes it almost directly over the poles. Its quest? To determine precisely how global warming is affecting the planet's ice.

ICESat-2, as it's known, is equipped with a green laser that'll fire down on glaciers and sea ice. The faster the beamed pulses of light bounce back to the satellite, the thicker the ice must be. And if the heights are seen to drop over time, it'll indicate the ice is melting. Previous observations have shown that both Antarctica and Greenland are losing mass as warm ocean water erodes their edges. And in the Arctic, the floating sea ice has lost two-thirds of its volume since the 1980s. But the changes that are occurring are often quite subtle, and scientists say only the most exacting measurement tools can tell us what's really happening.

It'll be a few weeks before ICESat is ready to start work. NASA is reassuring everyone that the laser cannot itself melt the ice it's monitoring. But look up on a dark night and you might just catch a green dot passing across the sky. I'm blind! I mean, come on! You're telling me! that it was what is this to once and all prove that the ice is melting or is this green laser for some other purposes perhaps not just measuring the ice and how will you be able to see the green dot unless you're you know over Greenland or wherever it's measuring

Come on. I don't believe this is for submarine tracking or slave zapping. Somebody who knows about green lasers can probably tell us. I mean, come on. This is a very flimsy cover they've built up on this one. Looking at the ice. I have a couple of clips I want to get out of here. One is I want this just a kind of a media clip. I want to recommend to people to be a little more cautious if they ever do interviews with the media, especially if you're a male. You don't want to sound like some sort of a lunatic, a wimp, or some sort of a screwball. Apparently there was a tornado that touched down somewhere in Canada and there's this guy that they found the interview who was very upset by this tornado because it almost took his daughter into the tornado and he was very upset about this. But I found this to be one of the

One of the worst displays of masculinity ever heard on television. When it ripped her roof, my daughter, she went flying off and I'm holding her hand. I almost let go because she was slipping and I said if she's gonna die, I'm gonna die with her. Oh man. Wow. That's just like the Wizard of Oz.

He's flying off into the tornado, really? Yeah, sure. Yeah, but no one was... nothing happened. Nobody died in the tornado. It sounds a bit like, leave Britney alone, okay? It made me fake. It sounded a bit fake. Yes. I also have a... you know how... I don't know why this has not caught on, but this John Brennan thing. Oh, did you see the note from Dudenay Muhammad? Yes, Dudenay Muhammad told us he thinks that the guy, yeah, I know, we got to find some... I have his note here. The snippet you had about Brennan had some interesting factoids that gives it some weight as these guys may have some reliable sources. Example, the use of the term shahada, which is a declination of faith that takes place when someone converts.

He says if anyone else has more info, he says let him know. Dude named Mohammed's all over it. And he's our resident Muslim, boots on the Muslim ground. So let's play this. This is a very interesting clip. It's not about Muslims in any way, but it makes me think that maybe they're doing a, I don't know what they're up to, what everyone's up to, but this is Lou Dobbs, second stringer over there at Fox. Lou Dobbs on the communist Comey and Brennan. Last night, Congressman Gohmert was with us here and he put the spotlight on something that a lot of people didn't recall or even know about James Comey's political past. Here he is.

I did not know until last week I saw an article from 2003 where Comey was bragging that yeah I was a communist until I became whatever I am now. I'd never heard that. Comey the communist. How about, who knew that? It was amazing. Well, we know that now. That 2003 article the congressman referred to from New York Magazine in which Comey says this, quote, I voted for Reagan. I'd move from communist to whatever I am now. I'm not even sure how to characterize myself politically. He's not the only member of the deep state to have an ideological turn. Leftward of Karl Marx, former CIA director John Brennan also revealing he was once a communist sympathizer during the Cold War, for crying out loud.

Are you kidding me? Joining us tonight, James Callstrom, former assistant director of the FBI. He served almost three decades in the FBI and the captain of the United States Marine Corps. Great to see you, sir. I never thought when I came back from Vietnam that there'd be a communist that was the head of the CIA. Exactly. Wow! Well, we didn't we know that Brennan had been member of the party of this maybe the Socialist Party wasn't there something that there was some other news story I recall about that doesn't surprise me. How does this guy get the clearances and now he's bitching and moaning he doesn't have clearance anymore? You know what John? How did he get one in the first place? All will be revealed in the book will be dead sadly but it will be in a book in the future. There's someone listening to this show who'll be like, hey I remember John and Adam talking about that. They were from the future.

You want to play the second half of this? Sure, I like this. I never thought when I came back from Vietnam that there'd be a communist that was the head of the CIA. You know, this boggles my mind. I grew up on the FBI television show in which they were pursuing communists. It was like, stop FBI! The guy would shoot boom boom and then the FBI would go poof, dead. Or down, not dead. Oh, he got him immediately. That was the FBI show. And there's one at the head of the CIA and one... Hold on a second. Don't you remember during the Obama years, who was, of course, was, you know, unlike Trump was run by defense intelligence, Obama being run by CIA. Don't you remember there was a whole period where they started to make the Feds look like goofy losers? The FBI, I remember us talking about it. The FBI was made into goofballs.

Yeah, it was on all the TV sitcoms that your guys and all the rest of them were putting these storylines in there where the FBI is a bunch of boneheads. In fact, they got to the point where they have to do a new whole series they somehow solicited or coerced. I'm guessing coerced, well probably with money, which is easy enough. Coerced Dick Wolf into creating a whole new series and he's the law and order guy on all these shows, he's a famous producer. I'm surprised they haven't brought him up on sexual harassment charges because he obviously doesn't like women. Oh, he's still in the program, you know, he's still delivering the goods. So he's doing a whole series on the FBI and if you watch the trailers, it's coming out in a few weeks, you watch the trailers it's like, what are you kidding me? It's like these guys are saving the world, who are really a lot different than the goofball era. Yeah.

Exactly, but they were pursuing communists and there is there's one at the head of the CIA And one I wonder if only I'm calling in Brennan were in the same like you know the same den you know like the Cub Scout den the copy in the same communist den somewhere up in the Bronx or some well It's I don't want to say that I convinced of it, but it could be possible that they would share a cell and Now that was a pun. Yeah, you can see him sharing a cell get it communist cell cell jail cell And the other guy loved this idea of a Cub Scout den of communists We have a pretty cool domain name mockingbirdlist.com which I've now and someone made a list of

all of the journalists who are suspected, I'm very clear, suspected of maybe being part of a revamped CIA Mockingbird program and that should be right now it forwards to no agenda show but I think it's gonna forward to the list. Good. Soon. Yeah it is good. I'm gonna play one last clip we'll get out of here. This is from the OTG files. This is the bin, no what's it called, the stir shaken program. Okay, I have one more clip after this and then we're good. We can leave. A virtual explosion in annoying robocalls. Estimated by next year, half the cell phone calls you receive will come from scammers. Do you trust your phone? Not at all. I don't

I don't ever answer it. Telephone industry programmer Alec Finischel shows us how easy it is with the right software for robocallers to swoop in. You can call anyone in the world, pretending to be anyone else in the world. Jim Dalton of TransNexus says the industry has found a solution. Stir or shaken, it's called. There'll be some work, but it's not a major change of the telephone network. Phone companies can use StirShaken to authenticate the number for every call with a digital fingerprint. Calls without that special ID may be flagged or even blocked. Problem is, StirShaken appears to be on hold.

The FCC tells NBC News, we believe that this industry-led effort is the fastest way and hope some companies will implement it within the year. Today an industry spokesperson tells NBC News, users should see improvements by late next year. But consumer advocate Maury Mahoney wants to know who will pay for it. We want the FCC to ensure that it's free for consumers. With consumers scammed out of more than 9 billion dollars last year alone, returning trust to the phone network is critical. Yeah, so I think the key here is, you know, you get a verified token, which I'm not too crazy about having. Some verified thing, so you know that it's really me calling.

And what happened to Pocahontas? Wasn't she supposed to stop this? Pocahontas has done nothing. She's a big phony. The amount of calls I get, and they do now, is they call from 512 area code. Yes, I have to say I've seen the same phenomena You don't get so much because I have a landline through Sonic and they have one of these systems implemented which blocks Probably more than 75% of these point fake. Oh, that's and my cell phone is always off. So I never write anything on that Now I just wanted to play this one last clip. All right, and this is the one and people have seen this This is the woman is pink lady. That's Marina. What's her name? She's from being hauled off code pink. Oh

She's a code pink woman, she's being hauled off, and I'm watching this thing and they're looking at the Twitters, oh, she said the right thing, she gave a nice speech. Where was this? I didn't see it. It was one of these think tank meetings. She jumped onto like the CFR stage or something? Yeah, pretty much. And then they dragged her off. She was yelling at this group. The problem I have with it is she was obviously miked. Oh, really? Oh my goodness. Because if you've ever heard anybody hauled off one of these things, you hear him as an echoey, hey, stop it. You're killing me. You know, it's not she was miked and I don't think it was a shotgun mic. It didn't have the characteristics of a shotgun mic. It had the characteristics of a lab. And I have the beginning of this clip where you can hear it where they'd Mike where she's Mike and then they bring her up.

You can hear in the background, and she's very clear. And they're bringing her up, and I don't see anybody following her with a mic. I don't see any way that they could have this so crystal clear the whole time. She's miked, and they have it going through the board, and it goes right on the C-span. It's as phony as it comes. The most ridiculous thing I have seen. The world community wants to keep the Iran nuclear deal. Our allies are the Germans, the French, the British. They want to keep in this deal. The world community wants to keep the deal. Let's talk about

The guy's dragging her off for less audible than she is presumably they're right on top of her I want to ask Do you think these sanctions are hurting the regime or are they hurting the Iranian people? They're hurting the Iranian people. Okay, what's the source of the video? You said C-SPAN? Yeah. Huh. Now it goes, she's being dragged off and it's a, and she's being dragged off and she's being, she's not at the podium, her decibels stay the same the whole time. And she says, you're actually hurting me, because it wasn't in the script for it to hurt.

Ah, good catch and I think you're right. She said you're actually hurting me. Yeah, troll room catch. So they're holding her off, they're moving her out and this entire 90 seconds is very clear as if it's... but who's sending this message? I think she's a sincere Code Pink person but I... I wonder, this whole thing is so scamish that it really bugs me. Did you play the whole thing? No, I got another 30 seconds. It has a nice little ending to it. We're making a case for war with Iran. How did the war with Iraq turn out? You're doing exactly the same thing we did in the case of Iraq. We don't want another war in the Middle East. Let's see. How does Iraq turn out? How does Libya turn out?

people of Syria suffering. And how dare you bring up the issue of Yemen? It's the Saudi bombing that is killing most people in Yemen. So let's get real. No more war. Peace with Iran. I tend to agree with you. It doesn't sound extremely direct as I would like it for a let's say a not a lav microphone But I presume that it's underneath her clothing so that it was it would stay on so the sound is consistent and that's really the thing her voice level is consistent throughout this whole ordeal while the people who are trying to drag her off are not. So I agree and this means that C-SPAN or the producers of this event which may very well have been an in-house event or you don't know, someone is complicit and said oh Code Pink's gonna jump up here let's mic them.

And let's give her some hair and makeup. She's probably outside waiting to jump in and say, hey, do you mind if we mic you? That way your message can get through. Yeah, and they get hair and makeup and they had the floor director ready to cue her. Yeah, sounds like, yeah, good catch. Very good catch. Yeah, this is a complete setup. It's a fake. And it's just like who, why, where, we don't know any reason because nobody else would even catch this fake except this show. Because we have some chops That is the phoniest thing I've ever seen I got the biggest kick out all these people on Twitter going all worked up about oh look at this What a great job is you to get her message wardrobe had the pink t-shirt ready and everything was great All right, everybody. That is our show for today and we return on Thursday Excuse me with another episode of the best podcast in the universe. We deconstruct the news you come for that and you stay for the stories and

I think or something like that. Yeah, who cares? I care because they stay. Yeah, stay people seem to like it We appreciate that if you're listening to knowage in the stream calm we have rock and roll geek show coming up next with Zell Clemson And I am coming to you from downtown Austin, Texas, capital of the drone star state, FEMA Region 6 on the governmental maps in the 5x9 Cluedio in the common law condo for now. In the morning everybody, I'm Adam Currie. And from northern Silicon Valley, a call out by the way to the Antioch Waterworks. I'm John C. Dvorak. We return on Thursday with another episode of No Agenda. Until then, remember us at dvorak.org slash NA and as always, adios mofos!

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Didn't have a choice to do anyway Rising intonation Obstetrics Someone makes a statement but it sounds like I'm asking a question Non-renormalizing pitch Establations Under mounting scrutiny I have no reason to dispute these numbers I was in Puerto Rico I don't know something you cannot blogging A Republican representative, Ileana Littman, said only a warped mind blogging Still with treason I'll be his main source But an independent study by George Washington University commissioned by the Puerto Rican government. 3,000 people did not die in the two hurricanes that hit Puerto Rico a long time later. Commissioned by the Puerto Rican government. You're a business man. Commissioned by the Puerto Rican government. George Washington University. Commissioned by the Puerto Rican government. George Washington University.

Commissioned by the Puerto Rican government to stick into fake news. With a stint by the Puerto Rican government, his drowning and injury were estimated at... A warped mind with a wreaking government... in the fake news. The president has turned to conspiracy founding and injury rousing. At 64, Obama wasn't born in the U.S. by George Washington University. The average age at which people die The perfect destination for my rescue. The financial door in the US. Commissioned by the private private government, Washington, she's a she-who-who, Obama.

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Show Notes

OTG two weeks without smartphone

Wed 31 Dec 2025
Note
OTG two weeks without smartphone People don't care if you respond late. It looks Luxe :-)

Complications

Wed 31 Dec 2025
Note
Complications “Complication” is traditional mechanical watch terminology for a display of something beyond the basic hours, minutes and seconds hands on a watch. A date and day display are basic complications. More advanced complications would be a stopwatch (chronograph), month, moon phase, etc. the term has been in use for probably 100 years, not something Apple made up.

Cat B35 Mobile Phone

Wed 31 Dec 2025
Note
Cat B35 Mobile Phone Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:10 Get ready for the Cat® B35The Cat B35 is perfect for those who need a reliable and tough phone, but also some of the functionality of a smartphone. Email, social media, maps, Google Search and the Google Assistant, are all available on this 4G enabled rugged phone. This phone runs on 4G LTE networks. This gives you faster internet access, whether you are sending messages, browsing the internet, or watching YouTube videos. You can also create your own Wi-Fi hotspot to share your internet connection. Its battery will last up to 12 hours, and physical buttons make it easy to use with wet hands or when wearing gloves. With the Cat B35 you can really #BeUnstoppable. Sign up below to be the first to hear about the Cat B35 and other Cat phones.

Austin tourists

Wed 31 Dec 2025
Note
Austin tourists Just a quick perspective I thought you might find interesting: I was back visiting Austin this past weekend (I’m an Austin native but have been living away for the last several years) and started chatting with several of the tech workers that have flooded the city in while out one night. They remarked to me that while they’re living and paying taxes there, they don’t see Austin as “their” city or as home – instead they see themselves as long term tourists, just there to have some fun for a few years and then go back home to California. To me, that summed up how things have changed over the last few years – the city has been flooded by a group of people who refuse to invest themselves into it and just see themselves as tourists. Just my two cents. Cheers, Bill

Bombshell: PayPal Bans Infowars After Lobbying by Soros-Funded Group

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Bombshell: PayPal Bans Infowars After Lobbying by Soros-Funded Group Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:49 Payment processor PayPal has banned Infowars in what represents nothing less than a political ploy designed to financially sabotage an influential media outlet just weeks before the mid-term elections. Company representatives called Infowars yesterday to confirm that PayPal was terminating its agreement after ''a comprehensive review of the Infowars site.'' The company claimed that Infowars violated PayPal's ''acceptable use policy'' because it ''promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions.'' No specific examples whatsoever were officially provided to back up this claim, which relies on a nebulous definition of ''hate'' which is so vague that virtually anything could qualify. Off record, Infowars was told that criticism of Islam and opposition to transgenderism being taught to children in schools were two of the examples of ''hate''. The ban was instituted despite InfowarsStore.com containing no political content whatsoever, emphasizing how the decision was a broader attack on the Infowars platform. PayPal representatives said they were giving Infowars 10 days to switch payment processors, after which all services would be terminated. The ban was handed down just weeks after George Soros-funded group Right Wing Watch published an article demanding that PayPal terminate its agreement with Infowars for ''egregious violations of the platform's own terms of service.'' Right Wing Watch routinely violates copyright by uploading entire sections of other people's videos to YouTube without any pretense of fair use, yet the group's channel has not been deleted. Right Wing Watch is owned by People For the American Way, which is funded by George Soros' Open Society Initiative. In addition, the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post published an article less than two weeks ago that served as a dog whistle for PayPal to ban Infowars. Entitled As Alex Jones rails against 'Big Tech,' his Infowars stores still thrive online, the article bemoaned the fact that despite Alex Jones being banned by every other Big Tech platform, the censorship had, ''left intact key elements of his moneymaking machinery '-- digital storefronts.'' The article then specifically mentions how Infowars uses PayPal to generate a ''high rate of sales''. This is yet another example of a competing media outlet abusing its dominant position to lobby to shut down a smaller media outlet. PayPal banning Infowars is the ultimate culmination of what represents a de facto Communist Chinese-style social credit score, where first you are demonized, then censored, before your basic ability to operate freely in the marketplace is withdrawn. The decision is also blatantly political given the fact that the mid-terms are now just weeks away. The crusade to ban Alex Jones and Infowars from a myriad of other platforms was amplified by Democratic Congressman Ted Deutch (D-FL), who demanded to know why Facebook and YouTube hadn't banned Jones. Both companies complied with Deutch's demand within weeks. As Breitbart reported, the mass deplatforming of Jones occurred, ''One week after Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, led a charge threatening new regulation of social media companies who cannot stop bad actors from using their platforms.'' This illustrates how lawmakers are colluding with Big Tech to silence conservative voices. The argument that PayPal, like the plethora of other Silicon Valley giants that banned Infowars and Alex Jones, is ''just a private company'' is wearing increasingly thin. To what degree will conservatives allow themselves to be punished for their political opinions? Will it get to the stage where conservatives are banned from having bank accounts or making credit purchases because of their personal beliefs? This is absolutely chilling. People like David Horowitz and Robert Spencer have already had their access to the marketplace restricted because of their criticism of Islam. Are we now to understand that questioning an often violent and intolerant belief system is all it takes to have your basic right to engage in commerce withdrawn? PayPal is akin to the public square of transactional commerce. It could be legally argued that their decision represents tortious interference, interference in interstate commerce and racketeering. The ban represents nothing less than politically motivated financial discrimination by a giant corporation abusing its monopolistic status to attack the basic right to engage in commerce. PayPal still offers its services to all kinds of unsavory groups and organizations, including groups linked to Palestinian terrorists and extremists like Louis Farrakhan. Why aren't they banned? Who decides what constitutes ''hate''? Infowars was also tipped off by sources in DC that payment processors would be the next target, with Infowars being the first victim, after which leftists would attempt to bring down the NRA and more mainstream conservative groups. Just as Wikileaks' ability to process payments was sabotaged after it angered the deep state, the financial attack on Infowars is being orchestrated by 'resistance' holdovers who are still in government positions. Other prominent conservatives and political groups must realize that while this is happening to Infowars today, they are next. This is election meddling writ large. This is giant corporations taking their orders from the deep state and mobs of leftists and then destroying people's livelihoods by restricting their access to the marketplace. This is an echo of how authoritarian regimes throughout history eviscerated either political adversaries or minority groups by removing their right to engage in commerce. Now instead of the government taking that role, it's giant monopolistic corporations who are able to get away with it because conservatives have their heads buried in the sand. This is why it is imperative that President Trump pass an executive order that offers protection for conservatives whose rights are being violated on a regular basis by Big Tech monopolies. With PayPal now buying up global credit card payment processors, Trump must surely look at blocking such activity under anti-trust laws. This sets off a horrific domino effect and an awful precedent for free speech and freedom of commerce. PayPal must reconsider this atrocious decision. Infowars is currently considering all legal options in response to PayPal's announcement. Please support Infowars by purchasing the products while you still can. Subscribe to the podcast or donate directly. SUBSCRIBE on YouTube: Follow on Twitter: Follow @PrisonPlanet Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71 ********************* Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com. All Conservatives To Be Purged From The Internet After PayPal Ban Of Alex Jones

Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, predicts internet bifurcation with China

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Eric Schmidt, ex-Google CEO, predicts internet bifurcation with China Archived Version Fri, 21 Sep 2018 04:39 Village Global VC Eric Schmidt at Village Global VC in San Francisco. Eric Schmidt, who has been the CEO of Google and executive chairman of its parent company, Alphabet, predicts that within the next decade there will be two distinct internets: one led by the U.S. and the other by China. Schmidt shared his thoughts at a private event in San Francisco on Wednesday night convened by investment firm Village Global VC. The firm enlists tech luminaries '-- including Schmidt, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates and Diane Green '-- as limited partners, then invests their money into early-stage tech ventures. At the event, economist Tyler Cowen asked, "What are the chances that the internet fragments over the years?" Schmidt said: "I think the most likely scenario now is not a splintering, but rather a bifurcation into a Chinese-led internet and a non-Chinese internet led by America. If you look at China, and I was just there, the scale of the companies that are being built, the services being built, the wealth that is being created is phenomenal. Chinese Internet is a greater percentage of the GDP of China, which is a big number, than the same percentage of the US, which is also a big number. If you think of China as like 'Oh yeah, they're good with the Internet,' you're missing the point. Globalization means that they get to play too. I think you're going to see fantastic leadership in products and services from China. There's a real danger that along with those products and services comes a different leadership regime from government, with censorship, controls, etc. Look at the way BRI works '' their Belt and Road Initiative, which involves 60-ish countries '' it's perfectly possible those countries will begin to take on the infrastructure that China has with some loss of freedom." The Belt and Road is a massive initiative by Beijing to increase China's political and economic influence by connecting and facilitating all kinds of trade, including digital trade, between China and countries in Europe, Africa, the Middle East and Asia. Schmidt's predictions come at a time when his successor at Google, CEO Sundar Pichai, has stirred up controversy around the company's strategy in China. Reportedly, Google has been developing "Project Dragonfly," a censored version of its search engine that could appease authorities in China. The project allegedly included a means to suppress some search results, booting them off the first page, and a means to fully block results for sensitive queries, for example, around "peaceful protests." In recent weeks, hundreds of Google employees lobbied Pichai for more transparency and signed a letter saying that the reported plans raised "urgent moral and ethical issues." Pichai has said that Google has been "very open about our desire to do more in China," and that the team "has been in an exploration stage for quite a while now," and considering "many options," but is nowhere near launching in China. In a separate discussion last night between Schmidt and several start-up founders, he lauded Chinese tech products, services and adoption, especially in mobile payments. He noted that Starbucks in China don't feature a register. Customers order ahead online and pay with their phones before picking up their lattes. A business development leader with Facebook, Ime Archebong, asked Schmidt if large tech companies are doing enough good in the world. Schmidt replied: "The judge of this is others, not us. Self-referential conversations about 'Do I feel good about what I'm doing?' are not very helpful. The judge is outside." At several points in the private discussion, Schmidt urged entrepreneurs to build products and services that are not merely addictive, but valuable. He also said not enough companies "measure the right things." Too many focus on short-term revenue growth and satisfying shareholders, rather than what's best for their users, society and the long-term health of their companies. Schmidt was the CEO of Google from 2001, when he took over from co-founder Larry Page, through 2011, when Page reclaimed the reins. He remained as executive chairman of Google and then Alphabet until earlier this year.

Google asked employees to delete memo about China search plan: report

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Google asked employees to delete memo about China search plan: report Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:56 Stephen Lam | Reuters Google CEO Sundar Pichai speaks on stage during the annual Google I/O developers conference in Mountain View, California, May 8, 2018. Google scrambled to delete an internal memo circulating among employees with details about its proposed censored search app for China that showed that plans were farther along than company executives had previously indicated, The Intercept reports. The memo, written by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the product, started circulating earlier this month, before human resources contacted employees believed to have read or saved it, and told them to immediately delete any copies. The document reportedly highlighted that information about the project on internal company networks seemed to contradict recent comments from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. "We are not close to launching a search product in China and whether we would do so or could so so is all very unclear," Pichai said at an internal all-hands meeting in mid-August, according to a transcript obtained by CNBC. "But the team has been in an exploration stage for quite a while now, and I think they are exploring many options." However, the memo indicated that employees working on the project were told in late July to prepare to get it in "launch-ready state" to roll out upon approval from Beijing officials, according to The Intercept. Google initially withdrew its search service from China in 2010 due to increased concerns about censorship and cyber attacks, subsequently losing access to the enormous market of 772 million internet users there. The new censored search app, first revealed by The Intercept, would remove content that the Chinese government ruled sensitive and would link users' searches to their personal phone numbers. Since news about the app first broke in early August, people inside and outside the company have expressed concern. Human rights groups have called on Google to cancel its plans and hundreds of Google employees signed a letter saying that the reported plans raised "urgent moral and ethical issues" and calling for more transparency. The author of the reported made a similar rebuke about how few employees knew about the project before the press leaks: "more than the project itself, I hate the culture of secrecy that has been built around it," they wrote. In the mid-August all-hands meeting, Pichai defended how Google kept the project confidential, because "being fully transparent at that [exploratory] stage can cause issues." He added that around censored search in China, the team would "definitely be transparent as we get closer to actually having a plan of record here." A Google spokesperson added that Google brings upcoming product launches to employees as early as possible, but that there are some projects that require early confidentially to avoid scrutiny before they're ready for prime time. In regards to the company's China plans, a Google spokesperson reiterated Pichai's comments: We've been investing for many years to help Chinese users, from developing Android, through mobile apps such as Google Translate and Files Go, and our developer tools. But our work on search has been exploratory, and we are not close to launching a search product in China. Read the rest of The Intercept report here.

A Lime scooter rider died this morning in Washington, D.C., marking the second fatality this month | TechCrunch

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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A Lime scooter rider died this morning in Washington, D.C., marking the second fatality this month | TechCrunch Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:26 Lime, the 18-month-old, San Francisco-based company whose bright green bicycles and scooters now dot cities throughout the U.S., launched a pilot program in Tacoma, Washington, today, but that tiny victory might have felt short-lived. The reason: on the opposite side of the country, a Lime rider was killed today by an SUV while tooling around Washington D.C.'s DuPont neighborhood. The local fire department shared video of the rescue, which shows that the victim, an adult male, had to be pulled from the undercarriage of the vehicle. It's the second known fatality for the company following a death earlier this month in Dallas, when a 24-year-old Texas man fell off the scooter he was riding and died from blunt force injuries to his head. On the one hand, the developments, while unfortunate, can hardly come as a surprise to anyone given how vulnerable riders or e-scooters are. E-scooter use is on the rise, with both Lime and its L.A.-based rival Bird, announcing this week that their customers have now taken north of 10 million rides. At the same time, city after city has deemed their use on sidewalks illegal out of fear that fast-moving riders will collide with and injure pedestrians. That leaves riders sharing city streets with the same types of giant, exhaust-spewing machines that they hope to increasingly displace. In fact, sales of traditional SUVs has continued to surge, thanks in part to low unemployment, high consumer confidence, and Americans' enduring love with gigantic vehicles. One solution to the issue, and one for which the e-scooter companies and their investors have been advocating, are protected lanes that would allow e-scooters to be operated more safely. Bird has even publicly offered to help fund new infrastructure that keeps cyclists and scooter riders safer. Another possible answer would appear to be mandating the use of helmets with e-scooters, though California evidently disagrees. On Wednesday, Governor Jerry Brown signed a bill into a law that states Californians riding electric scooters will no longer be required to wear helmets as of January 1. The bill was reportedly sponsored by Bird.

Bird goes after helmet laws for electric scooters - CNET

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Bird goes after helmet laws for electric scooters - CNET Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:25 In California, it's illegal to ride an electric scooter without a helmet and to ride one on the sidewalk. James Martin/CNET Electric scooters operated by Bird, the largest e-scooter rental company in California, come with a little sticker that says, "helmet required, license required, no riding on sidewalks, no double riding, 18+ years old." This isn't just a list of best practices from Bird. They're California state laws for the motorized vehicles, which can travel up to 15 miles per hour. But if you look at the people zipping around city streets on these things, you'll see them breaking at least one rule nine times out of 10. So Bird decided to do something about it. In February, the company sponsored a bill in the California State Legislature that's aimed at getting rid of most of these safety rules. The bill proposed doing away with the helmet and driver's license requirements and raising the maximum speed of the motorized scooters to 20 mph. It also said riders should be allowed to cruise on sidewalks. This bill has quietly made its way through the state assembly and is now up for the senate vote. And it's looking likely to pass. In the months since it was introduced, however, AB-2989 has been watered down by about 10 amendments. As it now stands, all current regulations remain except for the helmet provision. If passed, the bill would permit people 18 and over to legally ride the electric scooters without a helmet, just like a bike. That may be convenient, but it's not exactly safe. "If you hit a pothole on a bicycle with a big wheel, you could have a problem. You hit a pothole on this little thing, you're going to go down," said forensic kinesiologist James Kent, who runs a consultation practice in Southern California. "If I fall over sideways and I can't break that fall and don't have a helmet on, I can potentially kill myself." Bird puts stickers on its scooters that outline California's laws for the vehicles. Dara Kerr/CNET Dockless, rentable, electric scooters are the latest Silicon Valley trend to upset the regulatory world . Over the past six months, the two biggest VC-backed scooter companies, Bird and Lime, have dropped their electric vehicles on the sidewalks of unsuspecting cities across the US. From San Francisco to Denver and Austin to Atlanta, city officials have been trying to figure out how to deal with the law-breaking scooter riders and grievances from hundreds of residents. Santa Monica, California, which last September became the first city to get the scooters, filed a complaint against Bird in December on nine criminal counts. Bird signed a $300,000 plea deal with that city two months later. In San Diego, police started issuing tickets of up to $250 to riders who weren't wearing helmets. And San Francisco cracked down on the number of the vehicles allowed on city streets with its own scooter law in April. Bird said that's why legislation like AB-2989 is necessary: to have consistent laws across the state. "Our goal in supporting this legislation continues to be providing riders of shared scooters and e-bikes with more consistent ridership rules so that people can embrace sustainable shared mobility," a Bird spokeswoman said. The company also said it sends free helmets to all active riders if they pay for shipping costs. Assemblyman Heath Flora, a Republican who represents part of the Central Valley, introduced AB-2989. No city in his district currently has rentable scooters. Flora didn't return requests for comment. When first introduced, the city of San Francisco opposed AB-2989 and issued a resolution against the legislation. The Board of Supervisors said the bill "directly contradicts San Francisco's current efforts to responsibly regulate standup electric scooters in order to enhance public benefit while mitigating risk of harm to the public realm." Both the city of Santa Monica and California Walks, a coalition of nonprofits geared toward pedestrian safety, were also against the legislation as it was originally proposed. Now, as amended, California Walks no longer has a position on the bill. Constance Farrell, public information officer for the City Manager of Santa Monica, said the city is pleased the bill has been amended -- especially since local officials have responded to more than a dozen accidents since the scooters rolled out. "We fiercely advocated to maintain vital safety linchpins that would have been stripped in AB 2989's original form, including the driver's license requirement and prohibition on sidewalk riding," said Farrell. "We continue to believe it's safest when helmets are used by riders of all ages, whether on a scooter or a bike." First published July 14, 5 a.m. PT. Update, July 16 at 3:15 p.m.: Adds information on the city of San Francisco's position on AB-2989. The Smartest Stuff: Innovators are thinking up new ways to make you -- and the world around you -- smarter. CNET Magazine: Check out a sampling of the stories you'll find in CNET's newsstand edition.

Bill Text - AB-2989 Motorized scooter: use of helmet: maximum speed.

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Bill Text - AB-2989 Motorized scooter: use of helmet: maximum speed. Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:24 AB2989:v89#DOCUMENT Bill Start Assembly BillNo. 2989 CHAPTER 552 An act to amend Section 21235 of the Vehicle Code, relating to vehicles. [ Approved by Governor September 19, 2018. Filed with Secretary of State September 19, 2018. ] LEGISLATIVE COUNSEL'S DIGEST AB 2989, Flora. Motorized scooter: use of helmet: maximum speed. Existing law generally prescribes the operation of a motorized scooter, defined as 2-wheeled device that has handlebars, has a floorboard that is designed to be stood upon when riding, and is powered by an electric motor or by a source other than electric power. Existing law requires a driver's license or permit to operate a motorized scooter. Existing law prohibits the operation of a motorized scooter on a highway with a speed limit in excess of 25 miles per hour unless the motorized scooter is operated within a Class II bike lane. Existing law prohibits an operator of a motorized scooter from operating the motorized scooter without wearing a properly fitted and fastened helmet meeting specified standards. Existing law prohibits a person from operating a motorized scooter at a speed in excess of 15 miles per hour. A violation of prescriptions or prohibitions regarding motorized scootersis a crime. This bill would permit a local authority to authorize the operation of a motorized scooter on a highway with a speed limit of up to 35 miles per hour and would additionally allow for operation of a motorized scooter on a highway with a higher speed limit if the motorized scooter is operated within a Class IV bikeway. The bill would specify that the existing maximum 15 mile per hour speed limit for the operation of a motorized scooter applies regardless of a higher speed limit applicable to the highway. The bill would require the operator of a motorized scooter to wear a helmet only if the operator is under 18 years of age. Digest Key Vote: MAJORITY Appropriation: NO Fiscal Committee: NO Local Program: NO Bill TextThe people of the State of California do enact as follows: 21235. The operator of a motorized scooter shall not do any of the following: (a) Operate a motorized scooter unless it is equipped with a brake that will enable the operator to make a braked wheel skid on dry, level, clean pavement. (b) Operate a motorized scooter on a highway with a speed limit in excess of 25 miles per hour unless the motorized scooter is operated within a Class II or Class IV bikeway, except that a local authority may, by ordinance or resolution, authorize the operation of a motorized scooter outside of a Class II or Class IV bikeway on a highway with a speed limit of up to 35 miles per hour. The 15 mile per hour maximum speed limit for the operation of a motorized scooter specified in Section 22411 applies to the operation of a motorized scooter on all highways, including bikeways, regardless of a higher speed limit applicable to the highway. (c) Operate a motorized scooter without wearing a properly fitted and fastened bicycle helmet that meets the standards described in Section 21212, if the operator is under 18 years of age. (d) Operate a motorized scooter without a valid driver's license or instruction permit. (e) Operate a motorized scooter with any passengers in addition to the operator. (f) Operate a motorized scooter carrying any package, bundle, or article that prevents the operator from keeping at least one hand upon the handlebars. (g) Operate a motorized scooter upon a sidewalk, except as may be necessary to enter or leave adjacent property. (h) Operate a motorized scooter on the highway with the handlebars raised so that the operator must elevate his or her hands above the level of his or her shoulders in order to grasp the normal steering grip area. (i) Leave a motorized scooter lying on its side on any sidewalk, or park a motorized scooter on a sidewalk in any other position, so that there is not an adequate path for pedestrian traffic. (j) Attach the motorized scooter or himself or herself while on the roadway, by any means, to any other vehicle on the roadway.

Marine Le Pen ordered to undergo psychiatric testing - BBC News

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Marine Le Pen ordered to undergo psychiatric testing - BBC News Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:22 Image copyright Reuters Image caption Marine Le Pen has been battling to revive her party after she lost presidential elections last year A French court has ordered far-right leader Marine Le Pen to undergo psychiatric tests as part of an inquiry into her sharing images of Islamic State group atrocities. Ms Le Pen tweeted pictures of the court order, calling the move "crazy". She posted the images back in 2015, including one showing the decapitated body of IS victim James Foley. She has been stripped of her immunity as a parliamentarian and she could still face a fine or even jail. As leader of what was then the National Front, Ms Le Pen was comfortably beaten by Emmanuel Macron in the second round of presidential elections last year. Since then she has been attempting to rebuild, and the party has been rebranded as National Rally in part to try to distance it from the taint of racism. According to the document posted by Ms Le Pen, the judge wants the tests to determine if she suffers mental illness or is "capable of understanding remarks and answering questions". "It's crazy," Ms Le Pen tweeted. "This regime is really starting to be frightening." She later told reporters she had no intention of submitting to the assessment. Prosecutors told Le Parisien newspaper the request was standard procedure. Ms Le Pen sparked an outcry when she posted the images, which she shared in response to a journalist who drew a comparison between IS and her party The other images showed a tank running over a man in an orange jumpsuit, while another jumpsuit-clad man was shown in a cage being burned alive. The case against her stems from French laws against circulating "violent messages that incite terrorism or pornography or seriously harm human dignity" and that can be viewed by a minor.

U.S. Senate Votes To Legalize Hemp After Decades-Long Ban Under Marijuana Prohibition

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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U.S. Senate Votes To Legalize Hemp After Decades-Long Ban Under Marijuana Prohibition Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:28 The non-psychoactive cannabis cousin of marijuana would finally become legal to grow in the United States under a bill overwhelmingly approved by the Senate. Photo by Chris Wallis // Side Pocket Images The wide-ranging agriculture and food policy legislation known as the Farm Bill, passed by a vote of 86 - 11 on Thursday, contains provisions to legalize the cultivation, processing and sale of industrial hemp. The move, championed by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), would also make hemp plants eligible for crop insurance. "Consumers across America buy hundreds of millions in retail products every year that contain hemp," McConnell said in a floor speech on Thursday. "But due to outdated federal regulations that do not sufficiently distinguish this industrial crop from its illicit cousin, American farmers have been mostly unable to meet that demand themselves. It's left consumers with little choice but to buy imported hemp products from foreign-produced hemp." McConnell also took to the Senate floor on Tuesday and Wednesday to tout the bill's hemp legalization provisions in separate speeches. In April, the GOP leader introduced standalone legislation to legalize hemp, the Hemp Farming Act, the provisions of which were included in the larger Farm Bill when it was unveiled earlier this month. The Senate Committee on Agriculture, Nutrition and Forestry approved the bill by a vote of 20-1 two weeks ago. During that committee markup, Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA), one of Congress's most ardent opponents of marijuana law reform, threatened to pursue serious changes to the bill's hemp provisions on the floor. Namely, he wanted to remove the legalization of derivatives of the cannabis plant, such as cannabidiol (CBD), which is used by many people for medical purposes. But Grassley never ended up filing a floor amendment, allowing hemp supporters to avoid a contentious debate and potentially devastating changes to the bill. Hemp legalization enjoys broad bipartisan support. ''Legalizing hemp nationwide ends decades of bad policymaking and opens up untold economic opportunity for farmers in Oregon and across the country,'' Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) said upon passage of the Farm Bill on Thursday. ''Our bipartisan legislation will spur economic growth in rural communities by creating much-needed red, white and blue jobs that pay well. I'm proud to have worked with my colleagues to get the bipartisan Hemp Farming Act through the Senate. Today marks a long-overdue, huge step forward for American-grown hemp.'' BIG news for industrial hemp farming! Today, the Senate passed my bipartisan #HempFarmingAct, legislation that would lift a decades-old ban on growing industrial hemp on American soil. #RonReport pic.twitter.com/r0fBzseRIh '-- Ron Wyden (@RonWyden) June 28, 2018 Earlier this month, the Senate approved a nonbinding resolution recognizing hemp's "growing economic potential." "For the first time in 80 years, this bill legalizes hemp. We forget, but hemp was widely grown in the United States throughout the mid-1800s," Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO) said in a floor speech on Wednesday. "Americans used hemp in fabrics, wine, and paper. Our government treated industrial hemp like any other farm commodity until the early 20th century, when a 1937 law defined it as a narcotic drug, dramatically limiting its growth. This became even worse in 1970 when hemp became a schedule I controlled substance. In Colorado, as is true across the country--I have talked to a lot of colleagues about this--we see hemp as a great opportunity to diversify our farms and manufacture high-margin products for the American people." McConnell's standalone hemp bill currently has 29 cosponsors signed on'--17 Democrats, nine Republicans and two independents. A Congressional Research Service report released last week says that the "global market for hemp consists of more than 25,000 products." House Republican leaders blocked a vote to make hemp legalization part of that chamber's version of the Farm Bill. But now that the language is included in the version approved by the Senate, it will be part of discussions by the bicameral conference committee that will merge both chambers' bills into a single piece of legislation to be send to President Trump's desk. All indications are that McConnell, as the most powerful senator, will fight hard for the survival of his hemp proposal. A White House statement of administration policy released this week outlining concerns with the Farm Bill does not mention its hemp legalization provisions. In 2014, McConnell included provisions to allow limited state-authorized hemp research programs in that year's version of the Farm Bill. Kentucky's agriculture commissioner cheered the passage of the new hemp provisions on Thursday. For farmers across KY, there is no piece of legislation more important than the #FarmBill. I am excited that @SenateMajLdr's #HempFarmingAct made it into this measure, which will allow states to unleash the full economic potential of our industrial hemp pilot programs. #KyAg365 pic.twitter.com/HjU6OGKNjZ '-- Commissioner Quarles (@KYAgCommish) June 28, 2018

DEA Clarifies Marijuana Extract Rule and CBD Legality | Kight on Cannabis

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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DEA Clarifies Marijuana Extract Rule and CBD Legality | Kight on Cannabis Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:27 Credit: http://marijuanastocks.com/dea-being-asked-to-remove-hemp-from-list-of-controlled-substances/As many of you are aware, on December 14, 2016 the DEA implemented a rule regarding CBD and marijuana extract called the ''Final Rule establishing a new Controlled Substance Code Number (drug code) for marijuana extract'' (the Rule). Among other things, the Rule claimed that cannabidiol (CBD) and other cannabinoids were part of the newly established drug code and, consequently, were Schedule 1 substances under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). Schedule 1 is the most restrictive class of drugs and is reserved for drugs that have ''no currently accepted medical treatment use'' and a ''high potential for abuse.'' I wrote about the wrongheadedness of the Rule here and focused my attention on the fact that the DEA purported to make illegal something (ie, CBD) that was never illegal in the first place. CBD has never been listed as a controlled substance on the CSA. Importantly, CBD can be sourced from legal plants. I argued that the DEA had overstepped its authority. For this very reason, the DEA is currently a defendant in a lawsuit filed in the 9th Circuit. We expect that suit to go well. Today, the DEA backed off of its position somewhat. Importantly, it acknowledged that CBD is legal if it comes from a part of the cannabis plant that is itself legal, such as the mature stalk of the cannabis plant, which is excluded from the CSA's definition of marijuana. In other words, the DEA finally admitted that CBD is not illegal in and of itself; rather, it is legal (or not) based on its source. I've been preaching this for a long time, but I have to admit that it's strange to be validated in the form of an an official DEA clarification! Here's what the DEA said: ''The new drug code (7350) established in [the Rule] does not include materials or products that are excluded from the definition of marijuana set forth in the Controlled Substances Act (CSA). The new drug code includes only those extracts that fall within the CSA definition of marijuana. If a product consisted solely of parts of the cannabis plant excluded from the CSA definition of marijuana, such product would not be included in the new drug code (7350) or in the drug code for marijuana (7360).'' This is important. It is the first time that the Federal government has explicitly stated that cannabinoids (aside from THC which is separately scheduled) are not in and of themselves illegal substances. Most importantly, the DEA tacitly acknowledged that CBD sourced from industrial hemp cultivated lawfully pursuant to a State's industrial hemp laws enacted under the 2014 US Farm Bill is legal. This is because ''industrial hemp'' is itself specifically excluded from the CSA's definition of marijuana in Section 7606 of the Farm Bill. Since industrial hemp is excluded from the definition of the CSA, and a ''product consist[ing] solely of parts of the cannabis plant excluded from the CSA definition of marijuana'' is not included in the new drug code, then such product (in our case, CBD) is also excluded from the definition of marijuana under the CSA and is thus legal, at least at the Federal level. (Whether or not CBD can be made illegal at the individual state level is another question altogether which I'll address in an upcoming post.) None of this is new. But it is good to get some clarification from the DEA. Rod Kight is a lawyer based in Asheville, NC. He is licensed in North Carolina and Oregon and represents legal cannabis businesses. You can contact him by clicking here. Posted 3-14-2017.

BREAKING NEWS: 2018 Farm Bill About to Pass '' Legalization of Hemp and CBD could grow consumer market to $22 Billion - NASDAQ.com

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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BREAKING NEWS: 2018 Farm Bill About to Pass '' Legalization of Hemp and CBD could grow consumer market to $22 Billion - NASDAQ.com Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:27 NEW YORK, Sept. 17, 2018 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Cannagreed.com News Commentary The 2018 Farm Bill, if passed, includes the Hemp Farming Act of 2018, which will remove hemp as a designated as controlled substance, legalizing the crop under federal law, which will allow CBD to be legally sold in all 50 states. The Bill, which has the support of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, is awaiting congressional approval, which would replace the 2017 Farm Bill, which expires on September 30th. The full legalization of hemp would open the floodgates for investment, providing the hemp industry with access to a full range of financial, market development and advisory services that were previously unavailable because of its classification as a controlled substance. These services include access to small business loans (SBA's), federal crop insurance, access to banking & traditional capital markets, and unfettered USDA research. Institutional investors and private equity firms will be also be able to enter the space, as federal restrictions have restricted the ability of funds to participate in this sector. The expected passage of the 2018 Farm Bill will be beneficial for publicly traded companies in the CBD space such as Sugarmade, Inc. (OTC: SGMD) and American Premium Water Corp. (OTC:HIPH). Both SGMD and HIPH recently had coverage initiated by SeeThruEquity analysts, whom placed a price target of a $0.30 price target on SGMD and $0.15 on HIPH, and. It should be noted that these reports were done before the latest iteration of the 2018 Farm Bill included the legalization of hemp, so it's possible with the passage of the bill that those targets might be revised upwards. For the full research reports readers should visit www.seethruequity.com. With the launch of their LALPINA Hydro CBD beverage, HIPH is looking to expand into other product categories in the CBD space. HIPH has commenced R&D with its new supplier on developing a hydro CBD beverage formulated specifically for the pets. The pet market is currently estimated to be a $26 Billion industry according to the market research firm Packaged Facts. HIPH CEO Ryan Fishoff commented, "The pet food industry is huge. Being a pet owner myself, I know what pet owners will do (and spend) for their pets. I recently learned that Chrissy Teigen tried CBD to ease her bulldog's pain, and I think hydro-nano can be an effective CBD delivery system for pets as well. If my bulldog had the same issues, I would do and spend whatever I had to alleviate its pain." Cannabidiol, also known as CBD, is one of the 60 naturally occurring compounds found in Cannabis and unlike THC (tetrahydrocannabinol), CBD is non-psychoactive and does not cause any feelings of getting high if consumed. C'ŽBD is derived from Hemp, which will be legal in all 50 states upon passage of the 2018 Farm Bill. Brightfield Group recently raised its projections for the CBD industry, as they are projecting it could reach $22 billion in market size by 2022. These projections come in anticipation of the passing of the 2018 U.S. Farm Bill, which would fully and unambiguously legalize hemp and its extracts across the country. "We believe that blowing market sizes and growth figures out of proportion would do our customers and market a great disservice," said Brightfield's Senior Analyst Jamie Schau, "This year's hemp CBD forecasts might seem like a departure from that view, but I assure you they are not. These numbers reflect the substantial changes we anticipate will follow full federal legalization of hemp-derived CBD." SGMD is covering the other side of the CBD market, as their business is concentrated in hydroponics and indoor gardening supply stores, which have been one of the few booming retail sectors of the last five years, with nearly 8% growth per year. Revenue for the Hydroponic Growing Equipment Retail industry has grown aggressively, with no signs of slowdown anytime soon. The boom has been attributable to the growth of the Hemp and Medical Marijuana industries, which has fueled the interest in hydroponic growing methods, encouraging consumers and businesses with the proper accreditations to enter this nascent market, which is is expected to continue through 2025. SGMD recently announced to its intention to become the largest publicly traded hydroponics supply company. SGMD has completed a master market agreement with industry leader BizRight Hydroponics, Inc., a leading marketer and manufacturer of cannabis and hydroponic growth supplies, which offers a range of hydroponics-related products including: HPS grow lights, electronic ballasts, HPS bulbs, nutrient mixes, environmental control products, pH measurement and calibration solutions and other cannabis-related grow and storage products. BizRight is expected to produce in excess of $30 million in revenues during 2017, with substantial growth expected for 2018. CannaGreed offers up-to-date news commentary on investments in the growing cannabis industry in the publicly traded markets. DISCLAIMER: Cannagreed (CG) is a third party publisher and news dissemination service provider, which disseminates electronic information through multiple online media channels. CG is NOT affiliated in any manner with any company mentioned herein. CG and its affiliated companies are a news dissemination solutions provider and are NOT a registered broker/dealer/analyst/adviser, holds no investment licenses and may NOT sell, offer to sell or offer to buy any security. CG's market updates, news alerts and corporate profiles are NOT a solicitation or recommendation to buy, sell or hold securities. The material in this release is intended to be strictly informational and is NEVER to be construed or interpreted as research material. All readers are strongly urged to perform research and due diligence on their own and consult a licensed financial professional before considering any level of investing in stocks. All material included herein is republished content and details which were previously disseminated by the companies mentioned in this release. CG is not liable for any investment decisions by its readers or subscribers. Investors are cautioned that they may lose all or a portion of their investment when investing in stocks. CG has not been compensated for news coverage of this current press release issued by American Premium Water Corporation, Sugarmade, Inc., or any third party. CG HOLDS NO SHARES OF ANY COMPANY NAMED IN THIS RELEASE. This release contains "forward-looking statements" within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, and Section 21E the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended and such forward-looking statements are made pursuant to the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. "Forward-looking statements" describe future expectations, plans, results, or strategies and are generally preceded by words such as "may", "future", "plan" or "planned", "will" or "should", "expected," "anticipates", "draft", "eventually" or "projected". You are cautioned that such statements are subject to a multitude of risks and uncertainties that could cause future circumstances, events, or results to differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements, including the risks that actual results may differ materially from those projected in the forward-looking statements as a result of various factors, and other risks identified in a company's annual report on Form 10-K or 10-KSB and other filings made by such company with the Securities and Exchange Commission. You should consider these factors in evaluating the forward-looking statements included herein, and not place undue reliance on such statements. The forward-looking statements in this release are made as of the date hereof and CG undertakes no obligation to update such statements. Contact Information: Media Contact email: info@cannagreed.com +1 (888) 983-0054 SOURCE cannagreed.com Source: American Premium Water Corporation

Trump Says DOJ Warned Him of Pitfalls in Releasing Russia Papers - Bloomberg

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Trump Says DOJ Warned Him of Pitfalls in Releasing Russia Papers - Bloomberg Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:59 Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service. For inquiries related to this message please contact support. For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot by clicking "I'm not a robot" below. Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review the Terms of Service and Cookie Policy. Block reference ID:
Christine Blasey Ford, accuser of Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, agrees to testify Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:15 Drew Angerer | Getty Images Judge Brett Kavanaugh pauses while delivering his opening statement during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee in the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill, September 4, 2018 in Washington, DC. Christine Blasey Ford, a California professor at the center of a sexual assault accusation against U.S. Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh, has agreed to testify to representatives of the Senate Judiciary Committee sometime next week, her lawyers said on Saturday. Multiple outlets reported that both sides tentatively agreed to testify Thursday, although several details remained unclear, and an agreement may yet fall apart. Just as news was breaking about the potential hearing date, the White House released a statement saying "today we appear no closer to a fair hearing" after the back-and-forth between Ford's lawyers and the Senate Judiciary Committee. "But one thing has remained consistent: Brett Kavanaugh remains ready, willing and eager to testify as soon as possible," White House spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said in the statement. Ford's appearance would put an end to a stalemate that's lasted for several days, and engulfed Kavanaugh's nomination in a firestorm of controversy. This week, the Senate Judiciary Committee's ranking lawmaker threatened to advance a vote as early as Monday, in an ultimatum meant to compel Ford to tell her side of the story. In a letter, Ford's lawyers suggested several sticking points remained before their client would appear. The letter blasted the committee's proposals for Ford's testimony as "fundamentally inconsistent with the committee's promise of a fair, impartial investigation into her allegations, and we are disappointed with the leaks and the bullying that have tainted the process," wrote Debra Katz and Lisa Banks. However, "we are hopeful that we can reach agreement on details," they added. The Senate's oversight body and Ford's representatives have been in a protracted negotiations for her to appear in person, but failed to agree to terms. Meanwhile, Democrats have made numerous attempts to stall Kavanaugh's selection, with the GOP still holding a slim majority in the Senate. Ford's accusation has ricocheted through Washington, costing Kavanaugh public support and stalling his march to confirmation ahead of the hotly contested midterm elections. Democrats are seen holding an advantage, with Ford's defenders and critics trading accusations of political motivations. Sen. Charles Grassley, an Iowa Republican who chairs the Judiciary Committee, had been negotiating with Ford's legal team about whether she would appear, and under what conditions. The sparring between the two camps has been bitter, with Democrats accusing the GOP of rushing Kavanaugh's nomination, while Republicans have walked a delicate line between giving Ford a fair hearing, and trying to get the seat filled ahead of midterms. In a lengthy post on Twitter, Utah Republican Senator Orrin Hatch sought to rebut several claims raised by Ford's defenders who have argued committee members have not been sympathetic to her plight. In response to conditions set by Ford's legal team earlier this week, Hatch said that the Judiciary Committee staffers were willing to travel to California to hear her testimony, and have been willing to extend the deadline repeatedly. Hatch Thread"We are absolutely sympathetic to limitations with regard to travel, which is why Chairman Grassley has repeatedly offered to send staff directly to Dr. Ford in California, so that travel would not be necessary," Hatch tweeted. After the release of the latest letter from Ford's attorneys, Hatch pointed out that the Senate committee members "are no closer to hearing from Dr Ford then we were when her lawyers said Dr. Ford was willing to testify during their media tour six days ago." Meanwhile, actions by key political players on both sides of the aisle have upped the stakes, and curdled the debate. California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Judiciary Committee's top Democrat, was the first to receive Ford's initial letter but withheld it for months. Feinstein has come under withering scrutiny for being secretive about disclosing the letter's contents, after she referred it to federal investigators in a dramatic 11th hour bid to stall the nomination process. Separately, President Donald Trump has gone on the offensive to defend Kavanaugh, and on Friday launched into a heated attack on Ford herself. Below is the full text of the letter Ford's legal team sent to Senate staffers: Dr. Ford accepts the Committee's request to provide her first-hand knowledge of Brett Kavanaugh's sexual misconduct next week. Although many aspects of the proposal you provided via email, on September 21, 2018, at 2:33 pm, are fundamentally inconsistent with the Committee's promise of a fair, impartial investigation into her allegations, and we are disappointed with the leaks and the bullying that have tainted the process, we are hopeful that we can reach agreement on details. Can we set up a time for later this afternoon to continue our negotiations? Sincerely, Debra S. Katz Lisa Banks

Linus Torvalds Subtext

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Linus Torvalds Subtext You glossed over the subtext of this, and it's right in line with your me-2 thesis...the New York Times article implies he jumped after they (NYT) sent him questions about his insensitivity to women kernel developers. Get this tricky bit that you have to read three times to get... By their own math he said "crap" in 4% of 21,000 public emails, and used slut bitch and bastard *much less frequently* than that!!!! Then this right afterwards: Wuuuaaaa? Women get their feelings hurt in anonymous public forums, no kidding?

Linux adopts conflict resolution code | ZDNet

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Linux adopts conflict resolution code | ZDNet Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:25 "If you can't take the heat, get out of the kitchen" could be the unofficial motto of the Linux kernel community. Over the years, there has been one conflict after another in the heart of the the Linux development community, the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Now, in order to make the LKML more peaceful, the group has adopted a Code of Conduct. This title isn't quite accurate; it's not a code of conduct. Rather, it describes a method to resolve conflicts. It says: The Linux kernel development effort is a very personal process compared to "traditional" ways of developing software. Your code and ideas behind it will be carefully reviewed, often resulting in critique and criticism. The review will almost always require improvements to the code before it can be included in the kernel. Know that this happens because everyone involved wants to see the best possible solution for the overall success of Linux. This development process has been proven to create the most robust operating system kernel ever, and we do not want to do anything to cause the quality of submission and eventual result to ever decrease. Linus Torvalds and the Linux kernel leadership listened and will be trying a new way to resolve developer conflict. There's no question that Linux is the most successful operating system and open-system project. But it's also true that if you watch it closely, you'll see a lot of conflict within the community. In particular, Linus Torvalds, Linux's founder, doesn't suffer fools gladly, and he's never afraid to let other developers know when he thinks they're wrong. There's nothing new about this, but recently, Lennart Poettering, a Red Hat engineer and one of the creators of the controversial systemd system and service replacement for Unix and Linux's sysvinit daemon, called out Torvalds publicly. Poettering accused Torvalds of encouraging hate speech and attacks on him. While Poettering's reputation suffered more from this episode than anyone else's, it sparked a discussion on how better to address conflicts within the Linux kernel development community. The new code, which was made as (what else) a Linux patch, continues: "If, however, anyone feels personally abused, threatened, or otherwise uncomfortable due to this process, that is not acceptable. If so, please contact the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board or the individual members, and they will work to resolve the issue to the best of their ability. "As a reviewer of code, please strive to keep things civil and focused on the technical issues involved. We are all humans, and frustrations can be high on both sides of the process. Try to keep in mind the immortal words of Bill and Ted: 'Be excellent to each other'." Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's executive director, added in a blog post, "We believe the guidelines are grounded in the unique culture and process that makes Linux so successful. Conflict over code will and should happen. But the code is very clear that personal insults or abuse are not welcome." This patch, which was written by leading Linux developer Greg Kroah-Hartman, was signed off by 60 developers and accepted into the kernel by Torvalds. Related stories: No reboot patching comes to Linux 4.0 Linux kernel turns over release odometer to 4.0 Who's writing Linux today? Capitalist Lennart Poettering's Linus Torvalds rant Linux Kernel Panel: What's what with Linux today

Proud of stealing

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Proud of stealing I lived in China for 4 years and have a Chinese wife and you're dead on in saying the Chinese take pride in stealing. Every one knows that China is full of cheap knock offs but most Chinese are relatively poor and are happy with it. The Gov. knows this and thats why there is very little enforcement of copyright laws among clothing and other luxury goods. My wife herself was a master at forgery. She forged me a degree and my college I worked at later forged me another. On the show Silicon Valley a Chinese character steals the groups software and all the Chinese people I knew commented "how clever of him." The Chinese are A-OK with being the worlds best copiers in the world.

Teacher doing right!

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Teacher doing right! I'm listening to yesterday's show and the climate conversation had me rolling. I'm teaching at a new high school in WA (Vashon HS) and its a small very politically left town. The science curriculum I was told to teach is ONLY about carbon and how it builds up in our systems (I teach Biology). Teaching kids that carbon is some kind of evil particle that we must eradicate from the atmosphere. Well I'm not an idiot or a pussy so I decided not to teach it. Instead I found the article that is below and will build an entire unit off of it. I just want you and John to know there are good people working hard in the systems that exist. I always push students to "questions everything" and explain to them the simple truths of this country/planet. The students come alive when we have real conversation and counter ideas are presented to them. They are not combative or angry. As my years in HS grow its very very clear to me that the issue we have in education is about 20% high schools and 80% universities. The kids are open and interested here but completely turn once they leave us. I love the show and always will. Thank you for what you do and helping all of us stay a little more sane. Happy Friday! https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/carbon-dioxide-fertilization-greening-earth Oh and by the way CO2 only makes up 0.03% of our breathable air. -- Nathan

VIDEO - Michael Moore: Fahrenheit 11/9 | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Michael Moore: Fahrenheit 11/9 | Real Time with Bill Maher (HBO) - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 15:03

VIDEO - Dr Sanjay Gupta Explains The Effect Alcohol Has On Memory - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Dr Sanjay Gupta Explains The Effect Alcohol Has On Memory - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:58

VIDEO - MSNBC, CNN Fixate on Republican 'White Men' Asking Kavanaugh Accuser Questions | SUPERcuts! #615 - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - MSNBC, CNN Fixate on Republican 'White Men' Asking Kavanaugh Accuser Questions | SUPERcuts! #615 - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:54

VIDEO - Continetti: It Was 'Apparent' Democrats Wanted to Delay Confirmation Hearings Past Election - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Continetti: It Was 'Apparent' Democrats Wanted to Delay Confirmation Hearings Past Election - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:49

VIDEO - O'Rourke denies trying to flee scene of DWI in 1998 - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - O'Rourke denies trying to flee scene of DWI in 1998 - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:47

VIDEO - Hirono Dodges Question About Four People Denying Knowledge of Kavanaugh Allegation - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Hirono Dodges Question About Four People Denying Knowledge of Kavanaugh Allegation - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:42

VIDEO - Fighting the Sandy Hook lies - CBS News

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Fighting the Sandy Hook lies - CBS News Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:35 A battle currently pits parents still mourning the loss of their children in the Sandy Hook school shooting against purveyors of the most mean-spirited and outlandish of myths. Our Cover Story is reported by Tony Dokoupil: Six-year-old Jesse Heslin was looking forward to Christmas. "Every holiday was a special event for Jesse," said his dad, Neil Heslin. David Wheeler's son, Benny, was also only six years old. Wheeler said, "Benny had a bit of a cold that morning, he woke up with the sniffles." But he went to school anyway. In December 2012, a young man walked into Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut, and opened fire. "They were just little babies," said Heslin. "They were no more than babies. They had no self-defense, or knew what self-defense was." Neil Heslin, who lost his son Jesse in the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012, with correspondent Tony Dokoupil. CBS News Those are the facts of the story, and every day since then, the entire community of Newtown '' and all 26 families who lost a child or a loved one '' have slowly tried to move forward. But Heslin and Wheeler are part of a small band of Sandy Hook families that feel they have no choice but to look back, to stare down an outlandish myth and the people who spread it. For years the online provocateur Alex Jones and others have suggested that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary never actually happened '... that it was staged, with paid "actors" including Heslin and Wheeler themselves, as well as dozens of other people. Residents, law enforcement and journalists '... all actors. And as for the children who died, the fiction argues they never lived in the first place. Wheeler said, "For me personally, it has, in my more vulnerable moments, felt like a complete denial of my life. In my more vulnerable moments, it has felt like salt in the wounds. And it can take a big chunk out of your faith in humanity, if you let it." Which is why, earlier this year, both fathers, along with other Sandy Hook families, filed lawsuits against Alex Jones , whom they feel is mainly responsible for spreading all these bogus stories. "As Daniel Patrick Moynihan famously said 30 years ago, many times, repeatedly, 'You're entitled to your own opinions but not to your own facts,'" said Kurt Andersen. "He was kind of joking back then. And we've come to this place where many, many, many millions of people feel absolutely entitled to their own facts." For years, Alex Jones, America's premier peddler of conspiracy theories, has suggested that the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School never actually happened. Infowars Andersen, the author of "Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire" (Random House), a history of delusional thinking in our country, says all sorts of unusual ideas took hold after the free-wheeling Sixties, such as "I can think what I want," or "What you say is true isn't my truth." It then exploded with the rise of the internet. "Suddenly, those hundreds and then thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands of people could find each other, recruit more people, set up websites, put out legitimate-looking arguments for these things," Andersen said. But he says the "Sandy Hook deniers," as they're called, are a special breed, motivated, he thinks, by their own fears that a mass shooting of young children might result in stricter gun laws. "If you had to point to a single reason why Sandy Hook in particular has become a focus of conspiracy theorists, what's the reason?" asked Dokoupil. Random House "It's guns," Andersen said. "If 26 people had been killed by a guy running them down with a car, it wouldn't have taken off the way this one did." David Wheeler believes Andersen may be right. He said, "I don't remember exactly when this particular piece of mail came, but it was a simple envelope with a piece of ruled notebook paper in it. All they had done on this piece of paper was to transcribe the text of the Second Amendment. That's all they did." Still, at first both fathers say they tried to laugh off the fake claims, even one suggesting Wheeler had not one but two roles in the massacre, playing both an aggrieved father and an FBI agent. Images showing two men, allegedly both Wheeler, were circulated online. Dokoupil asked, "Have you seen the picture of you, split screen, with the FBI [guy]? "Yes," he said. "Congratulations, you found two middle-aged, jowly, white guys in Fairfield County, Connecticut. Remarkable!" Then last year, Neil Heslin went on television, he says, to directly address the Sandy Hook deniers. "I lost my son. I buried my son. I held my son with a bullet hole through his head," he said. After which, the harassment only got worse. To hear Heslin tell it, that's because Alex Jones' falsehoods, shared with an audience estimated to be in the millions, got even more personal, and that became dangerous. "I've had many death threats," Heslin said. "People say, 'You should be the ones with a bullet hole in your head.'" Heslin said the lawsuit emphasizes his interest in putting an end to what has now become years of despair, made worse by the deniers labeling him a liar and his son a fake. But when asked if he regrets giving the interview that led to the most recent round of denials by Jones, Heslin said, "No, I don't. I don't regret it. It's part of my story. It's part of Jesse's legacy, or his story, or his history. And it's a fact." David Wheeler says his lawsuit was prompted by his belief that Alex Jones is profiting by his lies and fabrications. "That's when I thought, 'I have to do, we have to do something. As a society, collectively, we have to do something,'" he said. "What about people like him? There's always another," said Dokoupil. "Well, if there's another like him that tries to do the same thing using the same tactics, then he'll have to go away, too. We need to make sure that everyone understands that this is not okay. There are limits." Floyd Abrams is a respected First Amendment lawyer, famed for defending The New York Times' publication of the Pentagon Papers. "This is a very tough case for Alex Jones to win," he said, "because what he has said is so appalling." He says Jones may have gone beyond the protections of free speech, and the consequences may be severe. Dokoupil asked, "If the fathers win, if the families win, how much money could somebody walk away with in a libel suit like this?" "This is the sort of case in which a jury could say, 'We have to award vast amounts of money to punish him, and to tell other people that saying such things is simply unacceptable,'" Abrams replied. "Do you think the outcome of these cases could put Alex Jones and Infowars out of business?" "Whatever money they have and whatever the level of insurance they have, this is a deeply threatening case to persisting in their business," he said. "Sunday Morning" asked Alex Jones' legal team to comment on this story. We got no response. But since these lawsuits were filed, Jones seems to have changed his views on Sandy Hook. Still, his rhetoric has gotten him kicked off every major social media platform. Apple has stopped offering his show, and most recently PayPal, which handles transactions for Jones' online store, has said, no more. Alex Jones accused in court filings of destroying evidence in defamation case (CBS News, 08/18/18)As for the Sandy Hook families, they're still trying to heal and go forward, guided by the memory of those they have lost, and something else, says David Wheeler: "The lasting lesson in all of this is that we are really only here for one reason," he said. "We are here to take care of each other. And that is the legacy of this town." For more info: Ben's Lighthouse"Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire '' A 500-Year History" by Kurt Anderson (Random House), available via AmazonFloyd Abrams, Cahill Gordon & Reindel LLPComplete CBSNews.com Coverage: Sandy Hook shooting Story produced by Mary Raffalli. (C) 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

VIDEO - Pocket Spy: Israeli surveillance software 'Pegasus' tracked in 45 countries - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Pocket Spy: Israeli surveillance software 'Pegasus' tracked in 45 countries - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 14:05

VIDEO - Teen e-cigarette use is surging, threatening Juul and others

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Teen e-cigarette use is surging, threatening Juul and others Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:52 Teen use of e-cigarettes is surging so much that it's now threatening the future viability of its $6.6 billion in annual U.S. sales. Over the past year, the number of high school students who have used e-cigarettes in the past 30 days has skyrocketed by about 75 percent, preliminary data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's annual National Youth Tobacco Survey show, according to people familiar with the data. They asked not to be identified because the report isn't yet public. That means roughly 3 million, or about 20 percent of high school kids, are using e-cigarettes, up from 1.73 million, or 11.7 percent in last year's National Youth Tobacco Survey. The complete data set is expected to be published later this year. The e-cigarette craze has driven what's arguably the largest uptick of teen nicotine use in decades. That follows years of cigarette smoking among teens dropping to to record lows. Teachers and parents across the country have reported more young people using e-cigarettes, particularly one brand, Juul. But the new federal data show just how pervasive these devices have become. Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Scott Gottlieb said the numbers are so staggering he's labeling youth use of e-cigarettes an "epidemic." The FDA last week ordered five brands '-- Juul, British American Tobacco's Vuse, Altria's MarkTen, Imperial Brands' Blu E-cigs and Japan Tobacco's Logic '-- to submit plans within 60 days detailing how they will prevent teens from using their products. Gottlieb is threatening to pull flavored e-cigarettes off the market and possibly even requiring manufacturers to submit them to the agency for review. The market for e-cigarettes started to flourish before the FDA expanded its authority to oversee the market in August 2016. The agency retroactively required companies to apply for approval to sell e-cigarettes starting this year, but then extended the deadline last year to 2022. The growing popularity among teens has Gottlieb thinking about speeding up the application deadline instead. Gottlieb believes in e-cigarettes' potential to assist the 37.8 million adult smokers to quit cigarettes. That includes a role for flavors. "I think people should interpret the fact that I and others have made such a dramatic shift from our prior position with respect to these products as representing the fact that we have seen information that is deeply disturbing and startling in terms of the rapid rise of youth use over a short period of time," Gottlieb told CNBC in an interview Thursday. Juul's dollar sales have surged 769 percent over the past year, according to the latest Nielsen data compiled by Wells Fargo analyst Bonnie Herzog. The San Francisco company sold $1.48 billion in vape kits and nicotine pods over the 12 months ended Sept. 8 '-- nearly 60 percent of the $2.5 billion for the entire category, according to Herzog. Juul's sales have boosted the entire e-cigarette market enough for Herzog to recently up her full-year sales forecast to $6.6 billion from her previous estimate of $5.5 billion. Juul has been valued at about $16 billion after raising $1.25 billion in its latest round, according to a person familiar with the matter. While these Big Tobacco companies own e-cigarettes, they might not be as much at risk since the bulk of their sales still come from cigarettes. The other four companies the FDA is targeting have sold $940.3 million of products over the past year in the U.S., according to Nielsen data. With a £80.76 billion market cap British American Tobacco's e-cigarette sales rose 7.8 percent over the past year, reaching $402.5 million. Altria, with a $117.4 billion market cap, has seen e-cig sales rise 37.5 percent to $234.2 million. Imperial Tobacco's dollar sales have gained 16.2 percent over the past year to $195.4 million. The company has a £24.73 billion market cap. Logic, owned by Japan Tobacco, saw sales decline 10.3 percent over the past year to $108.2 million. Japan Tobacco's market cap is 5.24 billion yen. Still, a regulatory crackdown could threaten the industry's growth. However, Gottlieb told CNBC his door is 'very open' to companies who want to introduce e-cigarettes with new features that prove to make kids less likely from using them. Flavors, including creme and mint, accounted for about 90 percent of Juul's sales in recent data. That leaves Juul vulnerable to regulators' warnings of pulling flavored products from the market. Yet Juul is already looking overseas for growth. It's already launched in Israel, England, Scotland and Canada. It's also eyeing other international markets, including Asia. WATCH: How Juul made vaping cool and became a $15 billion e-cigarette giant

Why did Tesla say that 3, 6, and 9 was the key to the universe? - Quora

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Why did Tesla say that 3, 6, and 9 was the key to the universe? - Quora Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 19:48 If it was a real quote, then let me first try to convince you why anyone could believe this from an evolutionary perspective and then ill speculate more on Tesla. The number 3 is the most important number after 1 and 2, or perhaps just as important. Because when your born, you normally see two parents. And you see single entities in instants of time. But you mainly act on impulse until you grow abit older.You see humans giving you nourishment with symmetric body parts.Two eyes, two arms, two legs, two breasts. Once you realise there is such thing as your self, then there are three important people - your self, and your mum and dad (assuming dad hasn't been killed fighting sabre tooth tigers, even if he has, maybe your uncle is now helping out, or maybe somehow mum was killed and your aunt is helping out, or maybe somehow you end up with two'...). Even before you have invented a calendar or electricity or a counting system that uses the number of fingers on your hand you clearly have an idea of the importance of three. But for sake of argument, let's suppose that all the people in your tribe are born of only 4 fingers on each hand and they haven't invented counting yet and when they do it wont be base 10. (the designer had a bad day, you cant win them all right?) Anyway, you also have learnt an idea of circles because they're found in nature.Your parents eyes are circular. Flowers are circular. Your mothers tit is circular. The sun is circular. The unborn child in womb is circular. The head is circular. You also learn a method of basic enclosure to keep safe from the rain and cold.Its a natural extension of the mothers womb so maybe its a cave, an approximation of what you know enclosures/circles/safety should look like. Innately you know at least has three dimensions thought you dont understand that concept yet. You just understand it encloses you and you and your parents and tribe can fit inside. Ate some point you discover bashing rocks together or rubbing sticks together can create heat and even fire. Perhaps you conjectured this after seeing lightning strike a tree. In any event, you've just as innately picked up the concept of long thin things, like trees and branches and sticks, of the shape resembling what we call straight lines. Our limbs are approximately straight. Our eyelashes. Diffraction of light rays, we don't have these words, but we see the idea of line around. You use spears and sticks. Your first drawings are stick figures. You make use of this idea to make weapons like spears. You workout you can even shape other materials to be even sharper and pointier to help with hunting animals and protecting yourself from other tribes. They kinda look like little mountains. You also discover to help in cooking you can hold food aloft by making a minimally three dimensional hold-aloft device. And you can make your own little mountain houses. The point is you know what sharp at top but wide at base shapes are and a few ideas of what they're good for. We've basically succeeded in holding something up using the strong yet efficient concept of three. The sacred three line constructed mountain and spearhead like enclosure model is easier to build than full round cave like enclosures. But we do settle on the round ones that are more durable in windy conditions and we want durable housing when we've more permanently settled on somewhere we like. Some genius might have put two triangles base to base and invented the square or perhaps just used two perpendicular sets of parallel straight things. But there is no real precedent to do that yet. Squares don't occur regularly in nature, but parallel lines sort of do, like on trees. But you do find square shaped rocks due to erosion. But it probably didn't come till the evolution of more lasting housing. So from the basic idea of a square, projected into a volume with another square at each side, we had developed bricks and the idea of cubes and cuboids. We used them when we decided to make our own square-triangle mountains as a gift to the gods. At some point a really smart guy tried to understand all the basic solid things and make sense of it all. Another smart guy tried to expand on using these solids to study planets. But physics went on to disband these models, because we can describe spheres with more accurate mathematics (based on revolutions) now. But who knows, maybe there is more to the Pyramids? Anyway, back to our story.We can sorta see why 3 and 6 have become important, but not 9.(3+6=9 but thats not particularly universally interesting). At some point when we began making basic communities and trading with each other, before the pyramids were built, very smart people developed counting systems. The number of digits on our hands are important in what base we decide on, but in this hypothetical case, because we only have four fingers, we might have chose to use base 4 or 8. But as it turned out, we did have 10 fingers and so we decided on more appropriate base. And so 9 was important in the first counting systems because they only went to 9 and there was no concept of 10. But in others there was (base 60, of which 3, 6 and 9 come up as important). But these base choices are quite arbitrary. We need to introduce the concept of multiplication for 9 to become un-arbitrarily (universally) important, which is a very important operation in the development of counting and later more complex mathematics and physics. We were lucky that we actually did have 5 fingers on each hand and 10 in total resulting in us choosing to use base 10 counting. Because as it turns out counting in 3's in base 4 or base 8 is pretty difficult. Base 10 is a lot easier in small multiples.But if we had've chosen base 3 we would've been even better off if it were important to count in 3's. But it wasn't particularly so. But at least now we can count: one three = 3two three = 6three three = 9 If it were important to trade in 3's and we still chose base 10 because of our fingers, 3,6,9 would still all fit on our two hands. So for small counts it still would've been alright. Also, the base 60 number system shown above may've influenced our choice of a perfect calendar based on 30 natural days each 12 lunar cycle solar year, which is where the degrees in a revolution comes from (12x30=360). As others have pointed out, 9 perhaps could be seen as mathematically relevant to this amount of degrees, but it actually turned out to be the wrong amount of days in a solar year (now 365.25). So the importance of 9 is just coincidence (and not naturally emergent to reality). However, some have speculated that before some natural event, the 360 day perfect calendar may have actually been correct. ( 360 days Ancient Calendar ). In which case it could be seen to been as an efficient calendar that naturally emerged for an efficiently evolved human being with an efficient number of fingers to choose a particular base to use for counting. And so there is perhaps a relation between the natural efficiency of ''3'' and the importance of 6 and 9 in the calendar system as well, which is actually describing the revolution system, which also links up to the idea of AC electricity which can be described in terms of revolutions that define waveforms. So, starting off with 1 and then 2 and then 3 and then a good counting system for 3's, perhaps governed by our fingers which evolved in a system with a naturalness of maths from with sacred constants of growth (phi, e, pi), we get an emergent description of waveform electricity, and energy waveform in general. Of course there are some loose ends in describing the whole universe in terms of wave energy, but hopefully it's just a matter of time before they're worked out. This is why Tesla said the secrets of the universe are in energy, frequency and vibration. (Its "Not A Dream" ). It's been abit of a stretch, but perhaps this argument has sufficiently convinced you that 3, 6, 9 are important naturally emergent numbers because they contain: a basic family: mom, dad and childsharpness, strong base and efficient enclosurethe concepts of counting, multiplication, and perfect squares.perhaps the emergence of a perfect calendar (which is at least a decent approximation of current reality)from the emergence of the near accurate revolutionary perfect calendar an emergence of the waveform description of electricity and energy which governs all matter in the universe and perhaps the fabric of spacetime itselfAre these the secrets of the universe?At least they've been quite important to the three dimensional humanity and math and electricity. Not really an answer as exciting as free energy, and many unanswered questions, but perhaps those answers are still emerging? Speculating more specifically on Teslas life, his invention of 3 phase AC electricity is most notable. But perhaps another reason why 3,6,9 was important to Tesla is just that they are simply factors of 3. Tesla was known for being very religious for Christianity.There is the trinity theme in Christianity.The father, the son, and the holy ghost.He was also known to be basically OCD.The top of the crucifix is also representative of 3.However Christians also traditionally like the 10 commandments and the 12 apostles too, so maybe not. Contrastingly, the Christian mythology doesn't place much importance on the mother, which might say volumes about feminism, atheism and that capitalism that is blind to it's environment, mother earth . OR perhaps if he lived to see computers he might've said 0, 1 and 2 are the three most important numbers. Feel free to correct me if any of this is more pseudo history/physics than actual history/physics, its been a long day, and actually history is not my strong suit and i haven't done physical maths for a while, I spend my time in front of ones and zeros these days.

VIDEO - Google staffers wanted to manipulate search results to combat Trump's travel ban, emails show | Fox News

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Google staffers wanted to manipulate search results to combat Trump's travel ban, emails show | Fox News Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:12 New evidence of political bias at Google?Internal Google emails reveal employees discussing manipulating search results after Trump's travel ban; insight from Peter Schweizer, producer of 'The Creepy Line.' Google is in the spotlight after internal emails show conversations between employees highlighting a desire to manipulate search results on the heels of President Trump's controversial travel ban in order to mute conservative viewpoints and push ways to combat the ban. Like many Silicon Valley titans, Google has drawn the ire of conservatives who feel right-leaning views are condemned from within. But internal company emails made public by Fox News' ''Tucker Carlson Tonight'' on Thursday appear to show employees wanted to curate Google's algorithm to boost left-leaning political views on immigration. The emails were written on Jan. 29, 2017 -- two days after Trump signed the initial travel order that resulted in protests across the country. The emails indicate that Google employees suggested ways to ''leverage'' the search engine to combat what the tech giant staffers considered anti-immigration rhetoric and news. The email chain, which was first obtained by ''Tucker Carlson Tonight'' and quickly matched by the Wall Street Journal, shows Google staffers admitting to colleagues that action must be taken immediately to rally against the travel ban. ''Overall idea: Leverage search to highlight important organizations to donate to, current news, etc. to keep people abreast of how they can help as well as the resources available for immigrations [sic] or people traveling,'' an email sent by a marketing employee said. GOOGLE: APPS CAN SCAN AND SHARE YOUR GMAIL DATA, WITH CONSENT ''I know this would require a full on sprint to make happen, but I think this is the sort of super timely and imperative information that we need as we know that this country and Google, would not exist without immigration,'' a product manager responded. According to ''Tucker Carlson Tonight,'' responses from other Google employees included comments such as, ''we're absolutely in,'' and ''excellent initiative.'' Other emails reveal an employee called the situation a ''highly political issue,'' while a separate email detailed a ''large brainstorm'' that was apparently taking place throughout the company. "These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented." - Google spokesperson The emails show Google staffers chatting about methods to alter the company's algorithm to point users to pro-immigration organizations, lawmakers and agencies that fit the staffers' political beliefs. Google didn't deny the validity of the emails and provided the same response to both ''Tucker Carlson Tonight'' and the Wall Street Journal. "These emails were just a brainstorm of ideas, none of which were ever implemented. Google has never manipulated its search results or modified any of its products to promote a particular political ideology -- not in the current campaign season, not during the 2016 election, and not in the aftermath of President Trump's executive order on immigration. Our processes and policies would not have allowed for any manipulation of search results to promote political ideologies,'' a Google spokesperson said. EU COPYRIGHT LAW MAY FORCE GOOGLE, FACEBOOK TO PAY BILLIONS TO MUSIC COMPANIES, PUBLISHERS A Google insider echoed the company spokesperson and said the ideas mentioned in the emails weren't even close to being put into action. "It is scary that manipulating the search to push a liberal agenda was even discussed.'' - Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor Media Research Center Vice President Dan Gainor told Fox News that the scandal would be more significant if there was evidence that the Google staffers had ''actually taken action on this left-wing insanity,'' but ''it is scary that manipulating the search to push a liberal agenda was even discussed.'' Google declined to answer a series of questions asked by Fox News, including whether or not employees involved in the email chain were disciplined in any way. ''It is our policy to not comment on individual employees,'' a spokesperson said. GOOGLE DRAGONFLY LINKS PHONE NUMBERS TO SEARCH RESULTS Trump's initial travel ban temporarily stopped immigration from seven majority-Muslim countries. According to the email chain, Google staffers suggested actively countering ''islamophobic, algorithmically biased results from search terms 'Islam,' 'Muslim,' 'Iran,' etc.'' and countering 'prejudiced, algorithmically biased search results'' regarding the words ''Mexico,'' ''Hispanic'' and ''Latino.'' One message featured a staffer asking if they can make it easier for users to donate to the ACLU. As the Journal pointed out, Google co-founder Sergey Brin is a Soviet Union immigrant who once appeared at a rally to protest Trump's travel ban. His company now controls the majority of internet searches and the word ''google'' has emerged as a verb, in addition to a company name. ''Google is the most powerful company in the history of the world. Virtually all human information flows through its software and for that reason Google shapes how much of the world understands reality. At the heart of Google's business is its search engine, which has a virtual monopoly on search in this country,'' Carlson said on Thursday. ''But what if Google was lying to you?'' GOOGLE EMPLOYEES QUIT OVER CONTROVERSIAL CHINA SEARCH ENGINE PROJECT, REPORT SAYS Trump, whose travel ban was later upheld by the Supreme Court, has long considered Google as biased against conservatives and recently accused the company of rigging search results in the past. ''Google search results for 'Trump News' shows only the viewing/reporting of Fake News Media. In other words, they have it RIGGED, for me & others, so that almost all stories & news is BAD. Fake CNN is prominent. Republican/Conservative & Fair Media is shut out. Illegal? 96% of results on 'Trump News' are from National Left-Wing Media, very dangerous. Google & others are suppressing voices of Conservatives and hiding information and news that is good,'' Trump tweeted last month. ''They are controlling what we can & cannot see. This is a very serious situation-will be addressed!'' The latest bombshell that indicates a liberal bias among the tech industry comes as Attorney General Jeff Sessions is scheduled to meet with state attorneys next week about the alleged conservative censorship. ''Tucker Carlson Tonight'' producer Alex Pfeiffer contributed to this report. Brian Flood covers the media for Fox News. Follow him on Twitter at @briansflood.

VIDEO - BLACK AMERICAN: I'M IN MY OWN COUNTRY AND BEING HARASSED BY PEOPLE WHO SHOULDN'T EVEN BE HERE - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - BLACK AMERICAN: I'M IN MY OWN COUNTRY AND BEING HARASSED BY PEOPLE WHO SHOULDN'T EVEN BE HERE - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:58

VIDEO - U S Sen Michael Bennet (D-CO) Praises Farm Bill's Hemp RE-Legalization provisions on Senate floor - YouTube

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - U S Sen Michael Bennet (D-CO) Praises Farm Bill's Hemp RE-Legalization provisions on Senate floor - YouTube Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:39

VIDEO - CNN's Jim Acosta Uses Misleading Video to Claim Kavanaugh Is Hiding Something

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - CNN's Jim Acosta Uses Misleading Video to Claim Kavanaugh Is Hiding Something Archived Version Fri, 21 Sep 2018 05:13 AP/Susan WalshCNN's Jim Acosta took a 2015 Brett Kavanaugh joke out of context to claim Kavanaugh is hiding something from his high school days.Far-left MSNBC has also aired the ''deceptively edited'' video and used it in this way, as has the far-left Politico. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) tweeted the video out and asked, ''Is this really what American wants in its next Supreme Court Justice?'' As far as CNN is concerned, there are actually two falsehoods in the segment embedded below. The first is the CNN chyron that claims the GOP is ''pushing'' Kavanaugh's accuser, Christine Blasey Ford, to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee. This is simply not true. Through her attorney, Ford had said she wanted to tell her story and the GOP is simply asking her to do so under oath. If she chooses not to, which now appears to be the case, she chooses not to. What's more, the GOP is obviously trying to accommodate her, and has even offered to hold the hearing in a private session. The truth is that Ford has now aligned herself with Democrats in calling for a FBI investigation into her allegations, even after the FBI said local crimes are not in its jurisdiction. Many see this as a stalling tactic as Democrats hope to run out the clock until the midterms. Acosta is even more dishonest than the chyron. Acosta airs video of Kavanaugh giving a speech in 2015 where he jokes about ''What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.'' think'' After the clip, Acosta gravely informs CNN viewers that this video ''is not a conclusive piece of video that says that he did anything, but it does speak to '... this notion that perhaps there are portions of his childhood that he would rather not come to light.'' Jim Acosta on the 2015 Kavanaugh clip (which CNN edits so it begins after the reference to his three male friends): ''There are portions of his childhood he'd rather not come to light." Note how even Susan Hennessy thinks he's reaching. pic.twitter.com/swDqI2YcHh '-- Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) September 18, 2018 In other words, here's a smoking gun proving Kavanaugh is covering up things he did during his high school days. But here is what Acosta and the far-left CNN do not want you to know '-- that Kavanaugh was specifically referring to three of his former classmates, with whom he has remained friends. It was a laugh line (referring to the famous Las Vegas slogan) and was not in any way a ''moral code.'' Moreover, the friends he names are not involved in Ford's allegations. Here is the FULL context of Kavanaugh's remarks to the Columbus School of Law: By coincidence, three classmates of mine at Georgetown Prep were graduates of this law school in 1990, and are really, really good friends of mine '-- [names his friends], and they were good friends of mine then and are still good friends of mine as recently as this weekend when we were all on email together. But fortunately we had a good saying that we've held firm to this day as the Dean was reminding me before the talk, which is, 'What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep.' That's been a good thing for all of us, I think. In the past, Acosta has been caught being wildly dishonest in his attacks on Trump. Acosta regularly lies in matters both small and large. Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here. BREITBART CONNECT

VIDEO - Undercover bij Facebook

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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VIDEO - Undercover bij Facebook Archived Version Thu, 20 Sep 2018 22:42 Facebook-baas Mark Zuckerberg heeft beterschap beloofd na schandalen over de handel in persoonsgegevens en gebrek aan actie tegen nepnieuws. Maar een Britse onderzoeksjournalist ontdekt alw(C)(C)r een misstand. In ZEMBLA INTERNATIONAAL gaat hij undercover als Facebook-moderator bij (C)(C)n van de speciaal daarvoor ingehuurde bedrijven in Engeland. ''Als je te veel censureert verliezen mensen hun interesse. Uiteindelijk draait het allemaal om geld,'' zegt een medewerker op de beelden van de geheime camera. Uit de opnames blijkt dat aanstootgevende beelden bewust niet zijn verwijderd van Facebook. Ook al gaat het om kindermisbruik, mishandeling, ernstige zelfbeschadiging en vreemdelingenhaat. Het leidt tot een spannende confrontatie met een vicepresident van het sociale platform. In ZEMBLA INTERNATIONAAL een Engels onderzoek naar extreme beelden en teksten op Facebook. ZEMBLA INTERNATIONAAL '' 19 september 2018 '' 21:15 op NPO2 Nederlandse bewerking: Marieke van Santen Eindredactie: Manon Blaas

Cody Wilson arrested: 3D-printed gun company owner accused of sex with girl is detained in Taiwan - CBS News

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Cody Wilson arrested: 3D-printed gun company owner accused of sex with girl is detained in Taiwan - CBS News Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:36 Last Updated Sep 21, 2018 1:32 PM EDT TAIPEI, Taiwan -- The owner of a Texas company that sells blueprints to make untraceable 3-D printed guns has been arrested in Taiwan, CBS News confirmed. Cody Wilson has been accused of having sex with an underage girl and paying her $500 afterward in Texas. Taiwan's National Immigration Agency and Criminal Investigation Bureau confirmed to CBS News Friday that Wilson was arrested. The bureau confirmed earlier that Wilson was in Taiwan after arriving on the island earlier this month. The bureau also said Wilson's passport has been nullified, which means he's staying in Taiwan illegally, CBS News has confirmed. Taiwan's Central News Agency said the island's immigration department would make arrangements for Wilson to return to the U.S. as soon as possible. A U.S. Marshals wanted poster shows Cody Wilson, the Texas man at the center of the 3-D printed guns debate, who is wanted for alleged sex crimes involving a teen girl. handout Austin police Cmdr. Troy Officer said Wednesday that before Wilson flew to Taiwan, a friend of the 16-year-old girl had told him that police were investigating the accusation that he had sex with the youth. In a court filing this week, Wilson was accused of having sex with the girl at an Austin hotel last month. A counselor for the teenager reported the accusation to Austin police a week later, according to the affidavit. Wilson met the girl through the website SugarDaddyMeet.com, where she had created an online profile, according to the document. The girl, according to the affidavit, said they met in the parking lot of an Austin coffee shop before they drove to the hotel. The girl told investigators that Wilson paid her $500 after they had sex and then dropped her off at a Whataburger restaurant. Wilson is identified in the affidavit as the owner of Austin-based Defense Distributed. After a federal court barred Wilson from posting the printable gun blueprints online for free last month, he announced he had begun selling them for any amount of money to U.S. customers through his website. Nineteen states and the District of Columbia sued to stop an agreement that the government reached with Defense Distributed, arguing that the blueprints for how to print plastic guns could be obtained by felons or terrorists. Law enforcement officials worry the guns are easy to conceal and are untraceable since there's no requirement for the firearms to have serial numbers. Gun industry experts have said the printed guns are a modern method of legally assembling a firearm a home without serial numbers. (C) 2018 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed. The Associated Press contributed to this report.

'I'm getting ripped off': A look inside Ticketmaster's price-hiking bag of tricks | CBC News

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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'I'm getting ripped off': A look inside Ticketmaster's price-hiking bag of tricks | CBC News Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:31 Buying a ticket for Saturday's Bruno Mars concert in Toronto was probably never going to be cheap, but what many of the star's 17,000 fans who scored a seat might not realize is it wasn't just scalpers driving up prices. A CBC News and Toronto Star investigation reveals how box-office behemoth Ticketmaster uses its own bag of tricks '-- which includes partnering with scalpers '-- to boost its profits at the expense of music fans. Data journalists monitored Ticketmaster's website for seven months leading up to this weekend's show at Scotiabank Arena, closely tracking seats and prices to find out exactly how the box-office system works. Here are the key findings: Ticketmaster doesn't list every seat when a sale begins.Hikes prices mid-sale.Collects fees twice on tickets scalped on its site. "I definitely feel like I'm getting ripped off," said Ajay Saulnier, 31, a Bruno Mars superfan and impersonator from Hamilton who was dismayed by CBC's findings '-- particularly since he says he can't afford a ticket to his idol's show. "It's definitely unfair for the public. They're only caring about padding their own pocket." Trick 1: Prices can change any time The most common criticism of scalpers is that they hike the price of tickets way beyond their so-called face value '-- the price set in advance by the box office. But scalpers aren't alone in increasing prices mid-sale. Within five minutes of tickets going on sale at noon on Feb. 16, it appeared the arena was nearly sold out. Most of what remained were tickets priced at $500 or up to $2,500 for a spot in the front row. As fans scrambled, Ticketmaster ripped a page from the proverbial scalper handbook and began increasing prices for some seats. Thirty-two of the seats were part of Ticketmaster's "platinum tickets" program. A pop-up window on the website notifies buyers that " Platinum Tickets are tickets that are dynamically priced up and down based on demand." What the pop-up doesn't mention is the original price, or face value, so the buyer is missing information to determine if they're getting a good price. And CBC also found 120 non-platinum tickets that increased from $191.75 to $ 209.50 after the sale began. "That's absolutely terrible. They should not be doing that," Saulnier said. "They don't need to be making this much money off a ticket just for us to see an hour show." Ajay Saulnier of Hamilton works as a Bruno Mars impersonator but says he can't afford tickets for Saturday's show in Toronto. (Oliver Walters/CBC) Ticketmaster declined CBC's requests for an interview. In a statement, the company said it does not own the tickets and that "prices are set by the seller," pointing to Bruno Mars's management team and the venue. "Ticketmaster is a technology platform that helps artists and teams connect with their fans," the company said. "We do not own the tickets sold on our platform nor do we have any control over ticket pricing '-- either in the initial sale or the resale." Read Ticketmaster's full statement Bruno Mars's team did not respond to multiple requests for comment. Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, which owns the Scotiabank Arena, referred comment to the concert's promoters. The 24K Magic World Tour is promoted by Live Nation, which owns Ticketmaster. According to recent reports to shareholders, Ticketmaster hopes to boost profits with its "market-based pricing," which changes according to supply and demand "to price tickets closer to their true value." In 2017, the company made $2.1 billion from ticket sales, up from $1.8 billion the year before. Trick 2: Not all tickets go on sale initially Initial prices for tickets ranged from $56 to $2,500, but there were fewer than 150 seats available at $56, all in the back rows of the upper levels farthest from the stage. Ninety minutes into the sale, Ticketmaster started releasing hundreds more tickets for between $99 and $159, including a slow dribble of seats from eight additional sections to the side and behind the stage that weren't initially available to fans. Hundreds more tickets were added in June, July and August. Lawyer Tony Merchant, who launched a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster earlier this year, says the box-office giant tries to artificially drive up demand. (Yanjun Li/CBC) " They're artificially driving the price up. They're artificially giving the impression of high demand," said Tony Merchant, a class-action lawyer who launched a fan lawsuit against Ticketmaster in February after Canada's Competition Bureau accused the company of price-gouging. Competition Bureau sues Ticketmaster, Live Nation over allegations of inflated ticket prices As with setting prices, Ticketmaster told CBC News it is not responsible for deciding how seats get released for sale. "We also do not determine when tickets are available for purchase or how they are allocated '-- those decisions are communicated to us by our client, the venue, after consultation with the event presenter." But as the next trick shows, Ticketmaster has an incentive for trying to drive up those prices '-- for its platinum seats, as well as for those scooped up by scalpers. Trick 3: Double-dip fees on scalped tickets Ticketmaster charged $350,000 in service fees for the Bruno Mars concert '-- and then nearly doubled that revenue with resales. The company, which for years publicly denounced scalpers, now runs a "verified resale" program that lets scalpers sell directly on Ticketmaster's site '-- and lets the company collect fees a second time for the same ticket. For example, Ticketmaster collected $25.75 on a $209.50 ticket on the initial sale. When the owner posted it for resale for $400 on Ticketmaster, the company stood to collect an additional $76 on the same ticket. CBC counted more than 4,500 Bruno Mars resale tickets on Ticketmaster, meaning that if Ticketmaster sells every seat in the arena for Saturday's show, it would collect an initial $350,000 in service fees, plus $308,000 in fees on scalped tickets, for a double-dipped total of $658,000. Ticketmaster's statement to CBC News didn't address questions about its fees. '-- With files from the Toronto Star's Marco Chown Oved and Robert Cribb

Company that runs immigration detention centers is top donor for three Texas congressmen | Politics | Dallas News

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Company that runs immigration detention centers is top donor for three Texas congressmen | Politics | Dallas News Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 13:05 Updated at 2 p.m. June 21 to include contributions to U.S. Rep. John Carter, R-Round Rock. The headline was updated to reflect that GEO is the top donor for three Texas congress members. WASHINGTON -- One of the country's largest operators of private immigration detention facilities has made significant contributions to several Texas members of Congress. The GEO Group's PAC and executives have given $32,900 to Houston Republican Rep. John Culberson's campaign this election cycle, according to Federal Election Commission documents and OpenSecrets.org. GEO is Culberson's largest donor. In Texas, GEO operates detention centers for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Karnes City, Laredo, Pearsall and Conroe. Culberson is facing a tough re-election race against Democrat Lizzie Fletcher. The race has been rated a 'toss up' by nonpartisan analyst Cook Political Report. Culberson received the most funding from GEO out of Texas members of Congress, but GEO is also the top donor this cycle for U.S. Rep. Henry Cuellar, D-Laredo, who received $32,400, and Round Rock Republican Rep. John Carter, who received $31,600. Both Culberson and Cuellar serve on the House Appropriations Homeland Security Subcommittee, which funds private immigration detention centers. Culberson is also the chairman of and Carter serves on the House Appropriations subcommittee on commerce, justice and science, which oversees funding for private prisons. Cuellar's campaign manager Colin Strother said that GEO is one of the largest employers in Cuellar's district, and that Cuellar has not allowed campaign contributions to influence his decisions. ''If you live in a district in the state of Washington, you get boating money. If you live in a district in Nebraska, you get agriculture money. We have a district with lots of jail facilities that employ lots of people,'' Strother said. Culberson's campaign did not respond to requests for comment. GEO has also donated to other Texas lawmakers, including Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who received $10,000; House Committee on Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Michael McCaul, R-Austin, who received $2,500; Rep. Vicente Gonzalez, D-McAllen, who received $2,500; Rep. Kenny Marchant, R-Coppell, who received $1,000; and Rep. John Ratcliffe, R-Heath, who received $1,000. Republican Sen. Ted Cruz received $150. GEO has come under scrutiny by immigrant rights organizations for alleged mismanagement and abuse in detention facilities. GEO faced class-action lawsuits in which detainees alleged that they were forced to work. In a GEO facility in California, three detainees died in custody. The American Civil Liberties Union accused GEO of denying detainees food, water and bathroom access. "We strongly dispute these allegations. On a daily basis, our dedicated employees deliver high quality services, including around-the-clock medical care, that comply with performance-based standards set by the Federal government and adhere to guidelines set by leading third-party accreditation agencies," GEO said in a statement. Another one of the largest groups that runs private immigration detention centers in the United States is CoreCivic. The company runs facilities in Houston, Laredo, Dilley and Taylor. CoreCivic PACs have given less money to candidates than GEO, but still contributed to three Texans, according to OpenSecrets.org: Culberson with $11,000, McCaul with $3,500 and Cuellar with $1,500. Washington correspondent Camille Caldera contributed to this report.

EEOC Home Page

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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EEOC Home Page Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:58 Pay Data Collection and the EEO-1 SurveyActing Chair Victoria A. Lipnic has issued a statement about the OMB Decision on EEO-1 Pay Data Collection. Instructions for filing the 2017 EEO-1 Survey, which will not include the collection of pay and hours worked data, are now available. Final Rules on Employer Wellness ProgramsFinal rules were issued in May 2016 that describe how Title I of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and Title II of the Genetic InformationNondiscrimination Act (GINA) apply to wellness programs. In October 2016, EEOC held a webinar to discuss the new rules. A recordingof that session is now available. Are You Affected by an EEOC Lawsuit or Settlement?The EEOC currently has a number of on-going lawsuits and settlements of lawsuits. We are looking for people who may have been affected by the unlawful discrimination alleged in these suits. Please read the list below for the name ofthe company, the type of discrimination, and the basis of the action, and follow the link for each case to learn more. United Parcel Service - litigationDiscriminating against current and former applicants and employees whose religious beliefs or practices conflict with UPS's Appearance Policy.Bass Pro - settlementFailure to hire African-Americans and Hispanics/Latinos.Texas Roadhouse - settlementFailure to hire people age 40 and older for front of house positions.EEOC v. Lowe's Home Centers, Inc., or Lowe's HIW - settlementTermination for exceeding the maximum amount of leave available.Federal Express Ground Package System, Inc. - litigationDiscrimination against current and former deaf and hard-of-hearing Package Handlers and applicants for the Package Handler position. (ASL video available.)Performance Food Group - litigationFailure to hire women at their Broadline distribution facilities.USPS - settlement, federal sector employees onlyDisability discrimination against employees in permanent rehabilitation positions.

Opinion | Is This Man the Antidote to Donald Trump? - The New York Times

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Opinion | Is This Man the Antidote to Donald Trump? - The New York Times Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:53 Maybe one superrich old white guy from New York can save us from another superrich old white guy from New York. Sept. 22, 2018 Image Credit Credit Illustration by Ben Wiseman; Photographs by Eric Thayer for The New York Times, and Ozier Muhammad, via The New York Times It takes a billionaire to know a billionaire. What if it also takes a billionaire to take down a billionaire? That was the theory behind giving Michael Bloomberg a prime speaking spot at the Democratic National Convention, where his mockery of Donald Trump carried extra zing and sting. And that's the idea '-- well, one of the ideas '-- behind Bloomberg's possible bid for the presidency in 2020. You didn't hear? It was a morsel of news easily missed amid the ceaseless slop from the White House and Capitol Hill. Bloomberg is again thinking about running, and if he forges ahead, he'll compete for the Democratic Party's nomination. To the extent that people I know reacted to this, it was with a chuckle or an eye roll vigorous enough for corneal abrasion. What most of them said was some version of: ''Oh, great, that's just what voters want and America needs '-- another superrich old white guy from New York.'' But no two superrich old white guys from New York are exactly alike, and these two have little in common, including financially. Trump's net worth '-- as mysterious as the yeti '-- is estimated to be about $3 billion, while Bloomberg's supposedly tops $50 billion. To those of us who make do with fewer zeros and commas, that gap may seem meaningless, but you can fit the annual gross domestic product of North Korea in it. Bloomberg, 76, probably doesn't stand a chance. He has all the va-va-voom of a ficus tree, all the populism of a Bermuda golf course. And he's hardly the perfect suitor for a party whose loudest voices are on the left. But if we're going to start putting Democrats' diverse options for 2020 on magazine covers, falling in and out of love with them and floating scenarios sublime and ridiculous, he warrants an iota of oxygen, a small pocket of the breathlessly speculative space that Cory and Kamala and Elizabeth and Beto are taking up. And that's not just because he's a serious person of stratospheric accomplishment (''His name is synonymous with excellence,'' Nancy Pelosi recently said). He's also, from a certain angle, the Trump deplorer's dream come true, an answer to prayers for the president's opposite. If there's a Michael in the mix with a few too many of Trump's qualities and the wrong temperature for the job, it's Avenatti, not Bloomberg. Bloomberg is as insistent on order as Trump is on disorder, as steady as Trump is spastic. Trump won't give us a moment's peace. Bloomberg could lull us to sleep. Politically speaking, we need the R.E.M.s. Bloomberg is as prepared as Trump was unready. The presidency for him wouldn't be a first whirl at governance, some gee-whiz, why-not, how-hard-can-this-be lark. He spent 12 years, from 2002 through 2013, as New York's mayor, in charge of a complicated city of more than 8 million people. Trump operates by gut. Bloomberg demands data and more data. Trump doesn't really have his hand on the wheel '-- he just wants to be the shiny hood ornament. Bloomberg is all pinpoint GPS navigation. He didn't always steer New York in the right direction. But there was never any question that he'd keep us out of the ditch. Trump is playing midwife to ever more extreme, debilitating partisanship. It's hard to envision Bloomberg doing the same. How could he demonize Republicans, independents or Democrats when he has been a Republican, an independent and a Democrat? And while that may make him appear as ideologically rudderless as Trump, he's not. Many of his core positions and principles '-- pro-immigration, pro-choice, in favor of free trade, in support of clean air '-- have been intact for a long while. He's pro-transparency, too. When he was in government, he routinely released his tax returns, though his station was well below the presidency and there weren't rampant suspicions about untoward influences on him and sinister conflicts of interest. He has had complaints about journalists but never sought to delegitimize journalism itself. He never would. He owns a media company. He built that company from scratch, without noteworthy melodrama. Trump got into real estate courtesy of his father, who gave and lent him large amounts of money, and as he sought to grow that fortune, he sprouted lawsuits and bankruptcies like weeds. Bloomberg is fanatical about recruiting top-notch talent and empowering it. Trump picks a mix of standouts and stooges and disempowers them '-- if they're lucky. If they're not, he disembowels them. Ask Jeff Sessions, who probably considers Mel Gibson's end in ''Braveheart'' preferable to his endless mortification. Bloomberg's top aides say that with him, loyalty is a two-way street. With Trump it goes in only one direction. Bloomberg's mayoral administration was light on ethical scandals. Trump's presidential administration '... why even waste the keystrokes? Trump is a Potemkin philanthropist, so much so that a Washington Post reporter, David Fahrenthold, won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing all the fakery in the Trump Foundation, and the attorney general of New York opened an investigation into it. Bloomberg is the real deal, supporting a carefully chosen array of causes genuinely dear to him. Eight years ago he signed the Giving Pledge, by which nearly 200 billionaires around the world have agreed to donate more than half of their wealth. In the last two years alone, he gave away more than $1 billion. He has gaping blind spots, which were described well in a recent story about his potential candidacy by my Times colleagues Alexander Burns and Sydney Ember. I was floored that he digressed in an interview with Burns to wonder about the accusations against Charlie Rose, the news anchor who was dismissed from the shows that he hosted on CBS, PBS and Bloomberg's own cable network after numerous women accused him of sexual harassment. The reporting on Rose was thorough and persuasive. And though Bloomberg, during his mayoralty, famously rode the subways, he never managed to seem of the subways. But then, the 2016 election has left me confused about who should, could and does have the ability to connect with middle-class and blue-collar Americans. Many of them saw a champion in Trump. It's funny: Republican voters came to embrace Trump '-- and then Republican lawmakers meekly followed suit '-- though he hadn't done all that much for the party before. Democratic voters are probably less inclined to embrace Bloomberg, but he has pumped substantial sums of money into initiatives '-- regarding gun control, L.G.B.T. rights, climate change and more '-- that matter to them. That doesn't make him their best choice. It certainly doesn't make him their likely one. But I hope it elicits their respect and, if he pursues this thing, an open-minded assessment. So many of the virtues lost on Trump are found in him. Let's celebrate that, as a way of making sure that the party's eventual nominee possesses them in robust measure. I invite you to sign up for my free weekly email newsletter. You can follow me on Twitter (@FrankBruni). Correction:An earlier version of this column misspelled the surname of a Times reporter. She is Sydney Ember, not Embers. Frank Bruni has been with The Times since 1995 and held a variety of jobs '-- including White House reporter, Rome bureau chief and chief restaurant critic '-- before becoming a columnist in 2011. He is the author of three best-selling books. @ FrankBruni ' Facebook A version of this article appears in print on , on Page SR 3 of the New York edition with the headline: Is This Man the Antidote to Donald Trump? . Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

The Many Mysteries of Brett Kavanaugh's Finances '' Mother Jones

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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The Many Mysteries of Brett Kavanaugh's Finances '' Mother Jones Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:50 President Donald Trump's Supreme Court nominee, Brett Kavanaugh, listens to a question during the third round of questioning on the third day of his Senate Judiciary Committee confirmation hearing. Jacquelyn Martin/AP Photo Looking for news you can trust?Subscribe to our free newsletters. Before President Donald Trump nominated Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court, he had a lot of debt. In May 2017, he reported owing between $60,004 and $200,000 on three credit cards and a loan against his retirement account. By the time Trump nominated him to the high court in July 2018, those debts had vanished. Overall, his reported income and assets didn't seem sufficient to pay off all that debt while maintaining his upper-class lifestyle: an expensive house in an exclusive suburban neighborhood, two kids in a $10,500-a-year private school, and a membership in a posh country club reported to charge $92,000 in initiation fees. His financial disclosure forms have raised more questions than they've answered, leading to speculation about whether he's had a private benefactor and what sorts of conflicts that relationship might entail. No other recent Supreme Court nominee has come before the Senate with so many unanswered questions regarding finances. That's partly because many of Kavanaugh's predecessors were a lot richer than he is. Chief Justice John Roberts, for instance, had been making $1 million a year in private practice before joining the DC Circuit as a judge. The poorer nominees had debts, but explainable ones, such as the $15,000 Sonia Sotomayor owed to her dentist. Neil Gorsuch came the closest to financial scandal when he disclosed that he owned a mountain fishing lodge in Colorado with two men who are top deputies to the billionaire Philip F. Anschutz, who had championed Gorsuch's nomination. Kavanaugh's finances are far more mysterious. During his confirmation hearing last week, he escaped a public discussion of his spending habits because no senator asked about it. But on Tuesday, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, sent Kavanaugh 14 pages of post-hearing follow-up questions, many of which involved his finances. On Thursday, Kavanaugh supplied answers, but he dodged some of the questions and left much of his financial situation unexplained. A number of the questions Whitehouse sent Kavanaugh dealt with the house he bought in tony Chevy Chase, Maryland, in 2006 for $1.225 million. Kavanaugh would have needed $245,000 in cash for the traditional 20 percent down payment on the house. But in 2005, when his nomination to the DC Circuit was pending, Kavanaugh reported a total net worth to the Senate of about $91,000, which reflected a mere $10,000 in the bank and $25,000 in credit card debt. According to his financial disclosure forms before and after the purchase of his house in 2006, Kavanaugh's liquid assets and bank balances never totaled more than $65,000, and those balances didn't decline after the purchase of the house. Whitehouse wanted to know why. He wrote, ''The value of assets reportedly maintained in your 'Bank of America Accounts' in the years before, during, and after this purchase never decreased, indicating that funds used to pay the down payment and secure this home did not come from these accounts. Did you receive financial assistance in order to purchase this home?'' No other recent Supreme Court nominee has come before the Senate with so many unanswered questions about his or her finances.In his responses, Kavanaugh didn't answer the question directly. He indicated that he took out a loan against his retirement fund to help make the down payment. But the year before he bought the house, he indicated on his financial disclosure form that the total value of that account was only $70,000. Loans through the Thrift Savings Program, the federal government retirement plan against which Kavanaugh borrowed money, are capped at the value of the account or 50 percent of the vested balance. For Kavanaugh, that wouldn't have been nearly enough to cover the down payment on his house, even if he'd put down only 10 percent. (He also noted that he paid back the loan with paycheck deductions.) Other questions from Whitehouse addressed Kavanaugh's unusual debt history. Not long after Trump nominated him, the Washington Post reported that since joining the DC Circuit Court of Appeals as a judge in 2006, Kavanaugh had run up a significant amount of debt that often appeared to exceed the value of his cash and investment assets. His debts on three credit cards, as well as a loan against his retirement account, totaled between $60,000 and $200,000 in 2016, according to his financial disclosure forms. The next year, his debts vanished. When he appeared before the Senate Judiciary Committee last week for his confirmation hearing, his financial disclosure form listed no liabilities aside from his $815,000 mortgage. His disclosures don't show any large financial gifts, outside income, or even a gambling windfall, as Sotomayor's had when she hit the jackpot at a Florida casino in 2008 and won $8,283. The White House didn't fully address how Kavanaugh managed to incur all that debt and pay it off in a matter of months on his federal judge's salary of $220,600 a year. (His wife left the workforce in 2010 and returned in 2015, when she took a part-time, $66,000-a-year job as the town manager in their village of 225 homes.) A spokesman told the Post in July that Kavanaugh had used his credit cards to purchase Washington Nationals season tickets and playoff game tickets for himself and friends, who later paid him back. The White House also said some of the debt came from home improvements. Sen. Whitehouse was looking for a better answer as to how a man who has spent most of his professional life working in public service managed to pay off so much debt so quickly without draining his other savings accounts. (Kavanaugh worked in private practice for only about three years, in between stints at the office of the independent counsel during the Clinton administration.) In his written questions to Kavanaugh, Whitehouse asked how many seasons' worth of Nationals tickets he'd purchased, which friends he'd bought them for, what sort of home improvements he'd made, and where the debt repayment money came from. Kavanaugh elaborated on some of those answers in his response to Whitehouse this week. Of the large credit-card debts, he explained: I am a huge sports fan. When the Nationals came to D.C. in 2005, I purchased four season tickets in my name every season from 2005 through 2017. I also purchased playoff packages for the four years that the Nationals made the playoffs (2012, 2014, 2016 and 2017.) I have attended all 11 Nationals' home playoff games in their history. (We are 3-8 in those games.) I have attended a couple of hundred regular season games. As is typical with baseball season tickets, I had a group of old friends who would split games with me. We would usually divide the tickets in a ''ticket draft'' at my house. Everyone in the group paid me for their tickets based on the cost of the tickets, to the dollar. No one overpaid or underpaid me for tickets. No loans were given in either direction. He also told Whitehouse that the $1.225 million house he'd bought in 2006 was basically a fixer-upper. He included a long list of repairs he'd made on it'--everything from replacing the HVAC system to mold removal'--that accounted for the bulk of the rest of his debt. ''Maintaining a house, especially an old house like ours, can be expensive,'' he wrote. Whitehouse also asked about Kavanaugh's membership in the Chevy Chase Club, which he joined in 2016. In his responses to a Senate questionnaire before his confirmation hearing, Kavanaugh made the club sound like a basic rec center, writing, ''The Chevy Chase Club is a recreational club. We joined because the club has an outdoor hockey rink and a girls ice hockey program, and because of its gym and sports facilities.'' But the Chevy Chase Club is a lot more than a gym. Whitehouse noted in his questions that the club's initiation fee is reportedly $92,000, plus more than $9,000 in annual dues. The private country club founded in 1892 is so elite that a neighborhood realtor once told the Guardian that ''you can be a CEO, a billionaire, but you can't get in.'' Its website offers no insight as to how someone might go about joining'--it's by invitation only. But the website does outline the dress code: no jeans, no collarless shirts, and hats must be worn ''visor forward.'' Any guest hoping to play tennis with a member must appear on the court dressed only in white. As recently as 1976, the club refused to admit Jewish and African American members. In 2011, a reporter from the Telegraph wrote of the club, ''Order a cocktail at the Chevy Chase country-club and you'll step back into ante-bellum Savannah. The blacks wait on Wasps, showing all the deference expected of them. You won't find many Cohens either, lounging on the well-kept lawn.'' Whitehouse wanted to know how someone with less than $65,000 in the bank came up with the initiation fee to join the club. Did someone help him? And if so, who? Kavanaugh wrote in his response that he paid the full price to join the club, as well as the annual dues, with no discounts. Befitting a club member, he declined to say exactly how much that initiation fee was. Kavanaugh's country club's initiation fee is reportedly $92,000. As recently as 1976, the club refused to admit Jewish and African American members.As part of the document dump leading up to Kavanaugh's confirmation hearing, a lawyer for the Bush administration released an email from Kavanaugh's time working in the White House. It appeared to be part of a conversation with some school buddies discussing a weekend reunion in Annapolis. Kavanaugh wrote, ''Apologies to all for missing Friday (good excuse), arriving late Saturday (weak excuse), and growing aggressive after blowing still another game of dice (don't recall). Reminders to everyone to be very, very vigilant w/r/t confidentiality on all issues and all fronts, including with spouses.'' The email prompted Whitehouse to ask Kavanaugh whether some of his debts might relate to a gambling addiction. He asked whether Kavanaugh participates in a regular poker or dice game, and even whether he ever ran up any gambling debts in the state of New Jersey, former home to casinos owned by Trump. ''Have you ever sought treatment for a gambling addiction?'' he also asked. Aside from a few low-stakes blackjack hands played in his twenties, Kavanaugh responded that he's not a gambler and never has been. His answers leave many questions as to where the nominee found the cash to buy his house and to pay off his debts last year. He acknowledged that in 2014, he received a lump-sum payment'--which Whitehouse estimated at $150,000'--as part of a settlement in a class action filed by federal judges seeking back pay for cost-of-living increases denied by Congress. The payment wasn't included on his financial disclosure form because, he wrote, the instructions exempt reporting pay from the federal government. Kavanaugh also indicated that his income had increased from teaching gigs at Harvard, his wife's return to the workforce after many years at home, and a pay raise. But reading between the lines of his answers to Whitehouse, it's clear that Kavanaugh has gotten a substantial amount of financial help from his parents, in-laws, or other family members. (Kavanaugh had a privileged, private-school upbringing as the son of a Washington lobbyist for the cosmetics industry and a state prosecutor.) ''We have not received financial gifts other than from our family which are excluded from disclosure in judicial financial disclosure reports,'' he wrote. Kavanaugh wouldn't be the first Supreme Court nominee or justice to receive a windfall from his parents. Both Justice Samuel Alito and Justice Elena Kagan inherited money from parents who had died, but unlike Kavanaugh, they disclosed the estate transfer on their federal forms. The White House has worked hard to frame Kavanaugh as a mainstream fellow who, just like ordinary American dads, loves sports and drives the carpool. Publicly disclosing the extent to which his parents or in-laws may be subsidizing his high-end lifestyle could probably undermine that portrayal. The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on Kavanaugh's nomination on September 20.

The Lawyer Who Took On Uber Is Suing IBM for Age Discrimination - Bloomberg

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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The Lawyer Who Took On Uber Is Suing IBM for Age Discrimination - Bloomberg Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 12:14 Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service. For inquiries related to this message please contact support. For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot by clicking "I'm not a robot" below. Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review the Terms of Service and Cookie Policy. Block reference ID:
Iran summons some European envoys over attack on military parade: IRNA Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 08:50 LONDON (Reuters) - Iran summoned the envoys of the Netherlands, Denmark and Great Britain on Saturday night over the shooting at a military parade in which 25 people were killed, accusing them of harboring Iranian opposition groups in their countries, IRNA reported. Iranian President Hassan Rouhani delivers a speech during the annual military parade marking in Tehran, Iran September 22, 2018. Tasnim News Agency/via REUTERS ''It is not acceptable that these groups are not listed as terrorist organizations by the European Union as long as they have not carried out a terrorist attack in Europe,'' foreign ministry spokesman Bahram Qasemi was quoted as saying by IRNA. Reporting by Bozorgmehr Sharafedin; Editing by Hugh Lawson

Theresa May tells EU to seriously engage on Brexit | Euronews

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Theresa May tells EU to seriously engage on Brexit | Euronews Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 08:43 Britain said on Saturday it would not ''capitulate'' to EU demands in Brexit talks and again urged its partners to engage with its proposals, as French and German ministers suggested the next move in the negotiations should come from London. British Prime Minister Theresa May on Friday demanded new proposals and respect from European Union leaders, saying after a summit in Austria that talks had hit an impasse - a position her foreign minister reinforced on Saturday, even if that meant leaving the bloc next March without a deal. ''If the EU's view is that just by saying no to every proposal made by the United Kingdom, we will eventually capitulate and end up either with a Norway option or indeed staying in the EU... then they've profoundly misjudged he British people,'' Jeremy Hunt told BBC radio. ''We may be polite, but we have a bottom line. And so they need to engage with us now in seriousness.'' May's defiant statement was welcomed on Saturday by many in the British press that had seen the Salzburg summit as a failure for her. The strongly eurosceptic Daily Express said it was ''May's finest hour''. Digging in But initial reactions from across the English Channel suggested France and Germany were digging in too. EU leaders and May have said they want to get a deal agreed in October, to be finalised in November. In Paris, Minister for European Affairs Nathalie Loiseau said that, while France still believed a good Brexit deal was possible, it must also prepare for a 'no deal' outcome. Britain's vote to leave ''cannot lead to the EU going bust,'' she said on France Info radio. ''That's the message we have tried to send for several months now to our British counterparts, who may have thought we were going to say 'yes' to whatever deal they came up with.'' In Berlin, German Deputy Foreign Minister Michael Roth said the other 27 EU states were striving to achieve reasonable solutions. ''The blame game against the EU is, therefore, more than unfair. We can't solve the problems that are arising on the island (Britain) due to Brexit,'' he said on Twitter. In London, the pro-Brexit Daily Telegraph reported that May faced the prospect of ministerial resignations next week if she failed to come up with an alternative to the ''Chequers'' Brexit plan that she presented in Austria. But domestically, even some critics of May's plan backed the prime minister in her standoff against the EU. ''I have a serious difference of opinion with our prime minister. But, even so, I have to tell you that I view the behaviour of the European Union leaders in Salzburg with contempt,'' David Davis, the former Brexit minister who resigned in protest at Chequers, said in a speech at a ''Leave Means Leave'' rally in the northern English town of Bolton. ''Disrespect our prime minister, and you disrespect our country.'' After May's Friday statement, European Council President Donald Tusk said that the results of the EU's analysis of that plan had been known to Britain for many weeks. But Hunt said there was a difference between rhetoric and substance. ''On the substance of the Chequers proposals, we have not had a detailed response,'' he said, adding that EU proposals for the Irish border would mean that it was impossible ''to leave the EU intact as one country''. May has accepted the need for a ''backstop'' insurance policy on the Irish border, but says the EU's version of the proposal would see Northern Ireland carved off from the United Kingdom. The EU says May's proposal, keeping the province and mainland Britain in the same regulatory space, undermines the single market. This wasn't a happy week for Brexit negotiators Despite the differences, Ireland's Foreign Minister Simon Coveney told RTE radio an Irish backstop was ''doable'' by an October summit. Bumpy and Difficult Hunt said Britain wanted a deal but would be able to withstand a no-deal Brexit. ''Even in a situation where we aren't able to come to an agreement, we would be trading on World Trade Organisation terms. It would be bumpy, it would be difficult, but we would find a way to survive and prosper as a country,'' Hunt said. ''We've had far bigger challenges in our history.'' British opposition Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said on Saturday his party would challenge May on any Brexit deal. "We will challenge this government on whatever deal it brings back it brings back on our six tests, on jobs, on living standards, on environmental protections, Corbyn told a rally in Liverpool, on the eve of the party's annual conference. Bank of England Governor Mark Carney had told May's ministers that no Brexit deal could mean a fall of GDP in the rest of the EU of between 1 and 1.25 percent, without citing sources. The BoE declined to comment.

Blint's extended musings | Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Blint's extended musings | Chrome is a Google Service that happens to include a Browser Engine Archived Version Sun, 23 Sep 2018 08:19 Starting with Chrome 69, logging into a Google Site is tied to logging into Chrome. This is typically the topic where things are complex enough that tweets or 500 character Mastodon toots don't do it justice. I'd also mention that I prefer to avoid directly linking people's posts on this, because I dislike the practice of taking discussions out of their original audience and treating them as official or semi-official communications from a given company. So what changed with Chrome 69? From that version, any time someone using Chrome logs into a Google service or site, they are also logged into Chrome-as-a-browser with that user account. Any time someone logs out of a Google service, they are also logged out of the browser. Before Chrome 69, Chrome users could decline to be logged into Chrome entirely, skipping the use of Sync and other features that are tied to the login and they could use Chrome in a logged-out state while still making use of GMail for example. Just to spell it out: this means Google logins for Chrome are now de-facto mandatory if you ever login to a Google site. When someone in the security community raised this, it turned out that apparently this is intended behaviour from Google's side as confirmed by multiple googlers and they were wondering why the new behaviour might feel abusive to some people. Some folks working on Chrome pointed out that most people can't differentiate between logging into a Google Site and logging into Chrome and this has lead to problems with shared computers, where person A logs into GMail, but person B is logged into Chrome. This prompted Chrome developers to come up with the change that erases the distinction entirely. It is at this point that I should note that I don't personally use Chrome, as I felt it was too closely corporate Google even before this change. This is also not a post arguing that ''some users can tell the difference, therefor'...'', I do believe software should be written with the common users in mind. Interestingly, the common user belief that strongly equates Chrome with a Google Service (and not an application or tool) is probably the more accurate view of Chrome, post release 69. It's worth wondering from where users got that impression and why. So if this change is just about bringing Chrome in line with what most users believe anyway, what's the fuss? Perhaps it's not about what people believe, but what is right. Perhaps Google doesn't want Chrome, currently having majority browser market share, to be a neutral platform. A lot of people, developers especially, believe that Chrome is a Google-influenced but more or less neutral tool and then this widespread belief has to be reconciled with the Chrome-as-a-service thinking. Violating the content vs browser separation layer doesn't just conform to what a lot of users believe, it also ties what's happening inside the browser to Google on an unprecedented level, throwing the neutrality of Chrome as a platform into question. What's the next thing that Google and only Google can make Chrome do? Concerned about shared computers but you're not Google? There is no neutral API to log someone out from Chrome and prevent data from being synced if it's about person A logging into Facebook in person B's Chrome profile. Sidenote: Most Google services have for me this in common with Facebook: these services are too deeply integrated and impossible to use in part or isolation. It's either the entire system or nothing, based on how the question of consent is approached. You would like to use GMail (logged in obviously) but Google search, Youtube, Chrome etc without a login? No can do. You selected strict settings in Facebook for your profile data? You're just an API/permission redesign away from having your choices nullified. Part of me feels that this Chrome shared computer issue that Googlers mentioned is real, but it's also just too convenient to solve this by tieing Chrome closer to Google, you know? update: - Compare the basic (local) and signed-in mode in Google Chrome's privacy policy. Silently upgrading from basic mode to signed-in mode makes quite a large difference. - Chromium is apparently also affected by this. - There is a workaround to disable this behaviour. I deliberately don't include it here, as that relies on internal flags and the point of this post wasn't to try to revert this change, but rather to think about Chrome's direction in general.

The calm voice of podcasts risks being lost in a crowd of noise | Financial Times

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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The calm voice of podcasts risks being lost in a crowd of noise | Financial Times Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 18:40 The night air above Manhattan was ''filled with wireless messages'' in 1909, Modern Electrics magazine wrote about the early radio boom, when anyone who bought wireless equipment could broadcast. In 1912, the US government grew tired of the chaos and limited amateur radio to a range of 200 yards. Wireless mania is back, revived by the internet. If asked a few years ago to imagine a medium that would flourish in the age of digital communications, few would have predicted podcasts. But voice '-- not just the spoken word, but individual personality and tone '-- is filling the ether. Two recent deals say more about the future of media than the sale of Time magazine this week to Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce.com, for $190m. The biggest US radio chain, iHeartMedia, has acquired the podcasting group Stuff Media for $55m, and Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker magazine writer, is forming a podcasting company with Jacob Weisberg, editor-in-chief of Slate Group. Voice is not just the province of upstarts. Audible, Amazon's audiobook subsidiary, is signing writers including Michael Lewis, author of Moneyball and Liar's Poker, to put voice first in creating new narratives. Audio is the fastest increasing revenue stream in publishing, and a fresh cause of tension between Amazon and book publishers over who controls rights. The question is how much of this will last, and how much will be swallowed up like the early days of radio and of blogging. Some of the new wave of podcasting feels as much for the gratification of author and podcaster as listener. It is fun to be declaiming highbrow essays in a small studio, away from the click-chasing trap into which much of the media '-- including Time '-- have fallen. Like blogging or blockchain, podcasting holds out the vague hope of returning to a peer-to-peer nirvana rather than mass media and blanket control by technology platforms. History shows that such episodes last for a while before the usual intermediaries move in with contracts for a few, while the long tail grows ever longer and more frustrating for the others. You already need a strong hook, or personal fame as an author or speaker, to cut through the babble. It is too easy to get lost amid the thousands of quirky, amiably hesitant, yet confidently educated hosts speaking in what the author Teddy Wayne dubbed ''NPR Voice'', after US public radio, the closest equivalent to the UK's BBC radio. Consolidation is approaching, as the recent deals indicate. Most traditional media brands, including the FT, host podcasts (one attraction is that they are cheap compared with video). Endeavor, the Hollywood agency, last week started an audio division, led by Dick Wolf, the television producer, with the promise to ''take podcasts mainstream'', which sounds menacing. RecommendedHollywood agents may be crass, but they are not fools. Looming in the background are voice-activated assistants such as Amazon's Alexa and Google Home, which can play music, radio and podcasts on command. The ease with which intelligent speakers can summon audio entertainment on phones, in cars and in living rooms promises to open up a new market. That market is needed, not only by authors and studios, but by big technology groups. Voice search is a liberating technology but threatens Google, which gains most of its revenues from web search. It is more disturbing to insert ads in voice answers to search queries than on web pages. Other sources of revenue will be needed and listeners are used to ads on audio shows. Podcasting's audience remains narrow '-- 57 per cent of US podcast listeners have a bachelor's or graduate degree, and 77 per cent are millennials or from Generation X. They also tend to be fans, listening to an average of seven per week, according to one study. That leaves plenty of room for growth among the 56 per cent of Americans who have not listened to a single one. Narrowness is one of the appeals of podcasts. They often cover specialist topics and listening to them or to audio books on earphones is an intimate experience compared with watching films or television, or navigating the anger of social networks. Often, there is only one voice talking in the listener's head in a calm, unhurried tone. Whisper it quietly, but this defies one of the founding tenets of the internet '-- that the voice of authority was dead and audiences would in future interact on equal terms and in real time with authors. Podcasting is a one-to-many medium in which the listener lacks the means to answer back. Podcasts need not be elitist; there is no reason why more people should not enjoy them. But as investment rises, the stakes become higher, and as the audience has to be widened to obtain a return, the incentive to talk more loudly and court controversy increases. It would be easy to lose something rare in the transition, like the development of radio left behind the innocence of early pioneers broadcasting to a few fans over the airwaves. Many companies are eager to shape the future of the new medium, but they should not sacrifice its tone of voice. john.gapper@ft.com
There's no perfect minimalist phone '-- yet - The Verge Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 18:29 I went searching for the perfect minimalist phone, but I ended up back with my iPhoneI have no love for my phone. And yet, it's the first thing I reach for in the morning and often the last thing I look at before going to sleep. I reach for it obsessively, reflexively, often for no reason at all. Sometimes I'll look away from Twitter on my laptop so I can look at Twitter on my phone. Simply put, our phones do too much. The services they give us easy access to '-- Facebook, Instagram, Twitter '-- leave us distracted, overwhelmed, and maybe even depressed. To break their habits, people are scrubbing their phones of notifications, grayscaling screens to make them less enticing, imprisoning their phones in nefarious-looking lockboxes, and attending over-the-top digital detox retreats. But changing our habits is hard. These are products methodically designed by behavioral scientists employed by the richest companies in the world, working to keep us endlessly engaged, forever thirsting for our next like. But if we can't change our behaviors, maybe we can change our devices. Enter the minimalist phone: a phone that does less. Over the course of a few weeks, I tried out four different phones '-- the Unihertz Jelly, the Nokia 3310 3G, the Punkt MP01, and the Light Phone '-- in an effort to curb how much time I spend needlessly scrolling and refreshing. Not every one of these phones is intentionally minimalist, but each came with unique limitations, built-in throttles that would effectively discourage anyone from wallowing in the stupor of infinite feeds. I was looking for a change. I was looking for salvation. But when it was all over, I came crawling back to my iPhone. Unihertz, the makers of the Jelly, call the phone ''Impossibly small. Amazingly cute. Totally functional.'' Two of those claims are true, and I'll let you guess which ones. The first thing you'll notice about the Jelly, which retails for $125, is just how small it is. At just over three and a half inches in length, it fits in the palm of your hand. Despite that, it's a real, honest-to-god smartphone: it runs Android 7.0, has a Quad Core 1.1GHz processor, and features both rear and front-facing cameras '-- though at 8 and 2 megapixels, you might not like what you see. The phone runs on 4G networks and supports dual SIM cards. Because of how thick it is, most people I showed it to thought it had a slide-out, Sidekick-style keyboard. It doesn't, no matter how hard you push. Instead, it has a 2.5-inch fully functional touchscreen. Admittedly, the Jelly is ''impossibly cute'' and ''amazingly small.'' It's toy-like, and there's something remarkable about watching a live Instagram video on a miniaturized screen. For those looking to disconnect, that size serves a purpose: though you can still scroll through feeds, chances are you'll spend less time doing so. The size of the touchscreen adds a considerable layer of friction, so even if I had just as much functionality as I did on my iPhone, I found myself using it less. It was just too annoying to decipher the content of an Instagram post '-- or, god forbid, try to type out a comment. Ultimately, the phone's keyboard is what undermines its claim as ''totally functional.'' I have normal-sized hands '-- I think '-- but the Jelly's minuscule keyboard left me feeling like I had sledgehammers for fingers. Just my thumb covered half the keys. My texts were full of so many typos I started texting less out of shame. ''Okay'' turned into ''k.'' Anything longer than a few words was best conveyed in a call. And maybe that's not such a bad thing. The Jelly's other big drawback is battery life: there is none. The phone lost almost 20 percent of its juice within 15 minutes as I downloaded four apps. At an 83 percent charge, the phone told me that I had just over four hours of life left, and even that turned out to be overly optimistic. Eventually, I learned to carry around an external battery pack with me just to make it through the day. I'd never felt less minimalist. Still, there was too much functionality. If I wanted to disconnect, I'd have to ditch smartphones altogether. The original Nokia 3310 is one of the most iconic and commercially successful phones of all time. So in 2017, as part of the company's nostalgia-focused marketing push, it brought the 3310 back to life. Design-wise, the new Nokia 3310 is pretty close to the original, though it does benefit from a significantly larger color screen and feels more bubbly than its brick-like predecessor. The phone retails for $60, has a 2-megapixel camera in the back, runs Nokia's proprietary OS, and comes with a predictable skeleton crew of 2002-era features: a calculator, an MP3 player, and, most importantly, all the Snake you can handle. Unlike the Jelly, it has a respectable battery life '-- an estimated 6.5 hours of talk time, and about 650 hours of standby life. Those looking for a minimalist experience might be disappointed to find two new additions to the phone's navigation screen: Facebook and Twitter icons. Rest assured, these aren't actual apps, but instead shortcuts to Nokia's web client. Open these up, and you'll be banished to the mid-2000s, moving a clunky mouse cursor up and down with an old-school directional pad. It took me 10 minutes to pull up Twitter and complete my two-factor authentication, only to accidentally leave the web client and be faced with embarking on the process all over again. I gave up. The apps are so hard to use they may as well be nonexistent, which suited my purposes just fine. But the Nokia 3310 comes with one step back in history that I ultimately couldn't stomach: T9, a texting system so slow and miserable that it should've been left to die in the 2000s. I refuse to memorize how many times I have to hit ''1'' in order to land on a question mark. If you're looking for an intentional minimalist phone experience, you might want to consider the MP01, created by a Swiss company called Punkt. Punkt promises that the MPO1 has ''no app icons, animations, or special effects vying for your attention.'' It is, they assure, ''everything you need, nothing you don't,'' and ''timeless.'' It also looks like a calculator. Despite that, the MP01 feels nicely designed to the touch. The phone comes in three colors '-- black, brown, and white '-- and is about four and a half inches tall. It has a sturdy fiberglass-reinforced body, Gorilla Glass, and feels solid in your hand. Unlike the Nokia, the MP01 really and truly only does two things: it makes calls and texts, and the face of the phone has easy access buttons to both functions. That limited functionality gives the MP01 good battery life '-- almost five hours of talk time, and an optimal standby time of over 20 days. But '-- and there's always a but with minimalist phones '-- the MP01 costs $230. That's a lot to pay for a device that only does two things. And one of them, not so well. Texting is clunky, and the phone has trouble with the basic task of capitalizing just the first letter of a sentence. In a seeming nod to an earlier '-- and worse '-- era of email, the MP01 does not thread text conversations. Instead, messages are divided into Inbox and Outbox folders, and nary the two shall meet. For a minimalist phone, it feels maximally confusing. The MP01 also only currently works on a 2G network. That's a problem because if they haven't already, most of the major carriers will be phasing out 2G coverage over the next few years. So much for timeless. If there's one phone that represents the epitome of the minimalist phone trend, it's the Light Phone. It's a business card-sized device that you can use independently on a 2G network or tether to your smartphone. It does one thing and one thing only: make phone calls. It costs $150 and comes with six months of a free SIM card from the company. The Light Phone only comes in two colors: white and black. It weighs a featherlight 38.5 grams and has a muted OLED display. It can display your call logs, but not much more than that, and it has a three-day standby time. It's a beautiful gadget that, despite its limited functionality, actually feels like it's from the future. But that limited functionality needs to be addressed. The problem with having a phone that only makes calls is that it takes two to talk. And in 2018, whoever you call probably won't pick up '-- maybe their phone is on silent, maybe they don't have time to talk, or maybe they just don't like you. (And if they do pick up, you're sure to cause alarm since, these days, it seems out-of-the-blue phone calls are almost exclusively reserved for life-and-death scenarios.) If no one's picking up on the other end, what's the point of even having a phone? Instead of buying the Light Phone, I suggest you just toss your current phone over a cliff. It may be just as useful. Its extremely limited functionality makes the Light Phone feel more like an experiment than a viable product '-- an attempt to gauge whether there's enough consumer appetite for a phone dedicated to the minimalist experience. Apparently, there is: according to the company, the Light Phone has shipped to 10,000 customers. In fact, at the time of this review, the Light Phone was totally sold out and no longer available for purchase. In early 2018, the creators behind the Light Phone announced the development of the Light Phone 2, a 4G version of the original that will feature ''E Ink, messaging & other essential tools,'' and even a full keyboard. The Indiegogo campaign to finance the project has met and exceeded its fundraising goal of $400,000 by over $1.1 million. It's slated for release in spring 2019. Ultimately, none of the phones I tried hit the minimalist sweet spot: either the battery life sucked, or I was left frustrated with a texting interface that was shabby or nonexistent. But the experiment did clarify what a viable alternative to a smartphone should look like. First, and foremost, even a minimalist phone should have a full-sized keyboard. Texting is a fact of life in 2018, and there's nothing inherently wrong with that. Forcing users to make phone calls to relay every message is unrealistic, and asking them to relearn T9 is cruel. But aside from that, everything else can go '-- the social networks, the cameras, the dual cameras, and the big color screen. My phone could be one large bezel for all I care, as long as I can text effectively when I need to and have enough battery life to make it through the day. As far as I can tell, that phone doesn't exist yet '-- though the Light Phone 2 sounds like it may come close. For now, it'll just be me and my iPhone. And until a good minimalist phone arrives, I'll do my best to resist Instagram Discover's endless feed of rescued dog videos, stale memes, and sports clips, but I'm not making any promises. Vox Media has affiliate partnerships. These do not influence editorial content, though Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased via affiliate links. For more information, see our ethics policy.

White House Drafts Order To Probe Google, Facebook Practices

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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White House Drafts Order To Probe Google, Facebook Practices Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 17:45 Sep 22 2018, 4:02 AMSep 22 2018, 3:44 PMSeptember 22 2018, 4:02 AMSeptember 22 2018, 3:44 PM (Bloomberg) -- The White House has drafted an executive order for President Donald Trump's signature that would instruct federal antitrust and law enforcement agencies to open probes into the practices of Alphabet Inc.'s Google, Facebook Inc., and other social media companies. The order is in its preliminary stages and hasn't yet been run past other government agencies, said a White House official. Bloomberg News obtained a draft of the order. The document instructs U.S. antitrust authorities to ''thoroughly investigate whether any online platform has acted in violation of the antitrust laws.'' It instructs other government agencies to recommend within a month after it's signed, actions that could potentially ''protect competition among online platforms and address online platform bias.'' Read the Executive Order draft on bias in online platforms The document doesn't name any companies. If signed, the order would represent a significant escalation of Trump's aversion to Google, Facebook, Twitter and other social media companies, whom he's publicly accused of silencing conservative voices and news sources online. The press offices of Google, Facebook and Twitter didn't respond Saturday to emails and telephone calls requesting comment outside of normal office hours. ''Social Media is totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices,'' Trump said on Twitter in August. ''Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won't let that happen. They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.'' Social media companies have acknowledged in congressional hearings that their efforts to enforce prohibitions against online harassment have sometimes led to erroneous punishment of political figures on both the left and the right, and that once discovered, those mistakes have been corrected. They say there's no systematic effort to silence conservative voices. Stiglitz Calls for Tougher Antitrust Stand to Fight Market Power The draft order directs that any actions federal agencies take should be ''consistent with other laws'' -- an apparent nod to concerns that it could threaten the traditional independence of U.S. law enforcement or conflict with the First Amendment, which protects political views from government regulation. ''Because of their critical role in American society, it is essential that American citizens are protected from anticompetitive acts by dominant online platforms,'' the order says. It adds that consumer harm -- a key measure in antitrust investigations-- could come ''through the exercise of bias.'' The order's preliminary status is reflected in the text of the draft, which includes a note in red that the first section could be expanded ''if necessary, to provide more detail on role of platforms and the importance of competition.'' The possibility of an executive order emerged as Attorney General Jeff Sessions prepares for a Sept. 25 briefing by state attorneys general who are already investigating the tech firms' practices. The meeting, which will include a representative of the Justice Department's antitrust division, is intended to help Sessions decide if there's a federal case to be made against the companies, two people familiar with the matter have said. At least one of the attorneys general participating in the meeting has indicated he seeks to break up the companies. Growing movements on the right and the left argue that companies including Google and Facebook engage in anti-competitive behavior. The companies reject the accusation, arguing they face robust competition and that many of their products are free. Bias has not typically figured in antitrust examinations. In July, for instance, Twitter algorithms limited the visibility of some Republicans in profile searches. Jack Dorsey, the company's chief executive officer, testified before Congress in September that the limits also affected some Democrats as the site tried to enforce policies against threats, hate, harassment or other forms of abusive speech. The moves were reversed. A Pew Research Center survey earlier this year found that 72 percent of Americans, and 85 percent of Republicans, think it's likely that social media companies intentionally censor political viewpoints that those companies find objectionable. Even on the right, however, there are misgivings about a Trump administration crackdown on the companies. On Friday, libertarian-leaning groups including FreedomWorks and the American Legislative Exchange Council sent a letter to Sessions expressing ''fear'' that his ''inquiry will be to accomplish through intimidation what the First Amendment bars: interference with editorial judgment.''
Inside a Failed Silicon Valley Attempt to Reinvent Politics Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 06:29 Your usage has been flagged as a violation of our terms of service. For inquiries related to this message please contact support. For sales inquiries, please visit http://www.bloomberg.com/professional/request-demo If you believe this to be in error, please confirm below that you are not a robot by clicking "I'm not a robot" below. Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review the Terms of Service and Cookie Policy. Block reference ID:

New York Times Just Handed Trump Rod Rosenstein's Head On A Stick, So It Can Fuck Right Out Of Here

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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New York Times Just Handed Trump Rod Rosenstein's Head On A Stick, So It Can Fuck Right Out Of Here Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 06:22 If it's a day, the New York Times is fucking shit up, but today, it fucked up BIGLY. Fresh-faced access journalists Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt have just published what we can only describe as a drive-by shooting against Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, which reads as some bullshit planted by the White House to give Donald Trump the pretext for his Saturday Night Massacre, if he wants it. (He does.) Maybe the White House is tired of talking about the flailing nomination of Judge Maybe Rapey and how Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen are cooperating with special counsel Robert Mueller, and the New York Times was more than happy to help! Or maybe it was planted by former deputy director of the FBI Andrew McCabe, who was fired by Attorney General Jeff Sessions just hours before his pension was set to kick in, and may have a serious axe to grind with DoJ officials and leaked a copy of his own memos. (His lawyer says that's not true, but he would say that, wouldn't he?) Or maybe it's both, somehow! Or one of many other things! Regardless, the news is that -- according to NYT's sources who are obviously telling the truth and giving all the important context that's fit to print -- Rosenstein talked about getting a group together to invoke the 25th Amendment against Trump last year after Trump fired James Comey. Also, Rosenstein VERY SERIOUSLY talked about how he should secretly record his conversations with Trump like a common Omarosa, to document how crazy Trump was, and that the dudes interviewing for the FBI job should do the same, because Trump was "failing to take the candidate interviews seriously." Hey, Donald Trump! The New York Times is talking to you! Bet you don't think it's so "failing" right now, and we can't imagine you're upset about these anonymous sources! The sources for the NYT piece appear to be McCabe's leaked memos, and also a combination of people (probably close to the White House) who heard it from a friend who heard it from a friend who heard it from another Rod Rosenstein's been messin' around. Mr. Rosenstein was just two weeks into his job. He had begun overseeing the Russia investigation and played a key role in the president's dismissal of Mr. Comey by writing a memo critical of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But Mr. Rosenstein was caught off guard when Mr. Trump cited the memo in the firing, and he began telling people that he feared he had been used.Mr. Rosenstein made the remarks about secretly recording Mr. Trump and about the 25th Amendment in meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Several people described the episodes, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The people were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by F.B.I. officials, including Andrew G. McCabe, then the acting bureau director, that documented Mr. Rosenstein's actions and comments. So in other words, "several people" heard some third-hand information by the water cooler from people who play Strip Jenga with people who have seen McCabe's memos, and all of them say Rosenstein is a very bad man who tried to 25A Donald Trump by the pussy and threatened to Omarosa the president with wire tapps. OH NO, IS ROD ROSENSTEIN THE RESISTANCE INSIDE THE TRUMP ADMINISTRATION WHO WROTE THAT ANONYMOUS LETTER THAT ALSO APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK TIMES? Adam Goldman and Michael Schmidt aren't saying he's not. Rosenstein has issued a statement that vehemently denies this account -- without actually denying the specific details -- and confidently asserts that "Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment." (LOL factcheck bullshit.) Regarding those purported 25th Amendment conversations, Rosenstein isn't the only one getting thrown under this bus right now: [Rosenstein told] Mr. McCabe that he might be able to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security and now the White House chief of staff, to mount an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment.MORE ENEMIES TO MAKE DONALD TRUMP A WHOLE BUNCH MORE MAD! Regarding what Rosenstein supposedly said about doing wire tapps to Trump, the Justice Department released a statement that essentially says, "Guys, he was fucking around," according to somebody who actually heard him say it. The Washington Post also talked to somebody who was in the meeting in question, who confirms Rosenstein was being sarcastic, and adds that they didn't even talk about the 25th Amendment. In fact, let us read some reporting from the Post, which is a real newspaper: That person said the wire comment came in response to McCabe's own pushing for the Justice Department to open an investigation into the president. To that, Rosenstein responded with what this person described as a sarcastic comment along the lines of, "What do you want to do, Andy, wire the president?"THAT'S SOME HELPFUL CONTEXT THE NEW YORK TIMES FAILED TO PROVIDE. But according to NYT's sources, he wasn't kidding even a little bit! He was very serious! NYT gonna editorialize right now about what a wild and crazy man Rosenstein is: The suggestion itself was remarkable. While informants or undercover agents regularly use concealed listening devices to surreptitiously gather evidence for federal investigators, they are typically targeting drug kingpins and Mafia bosses in criminal investigations, not a president viewed as ineffectively conducting his duties.That's NUTS! According to NYT's sources, this just shows everybody how "erratically [Rosenstein] was behaving" when he decided to go off and appoint a special counsel. The New York Times is JUST SAYING. They are also JUST SAYING that Rod Rosenstein was very emotional at the time: The extreme suggestions show Mr. Rosenstein's state of mind in the disorienting days that followed Mr. Comey's dismissal. Sitting in on Mr. Trump's interviews with prospective F.B.I. directors and facing attacks for his own role in Mr. Comey's firing, Mr. Rosenstein had an up-close view of the tumult. Mr. Rosenstein appeared conflicted, regretful and emotional, according to people who spoke with him at the time.Good God, NYT, why don't you just say Rod Rosenstein had his period? Weirdly, this was all happening around the time Rosenstein appointed special counsel Robert Mueller. Did Rosenstein do that because of his EMOTIONS or because the president obviously was trying to obstruct the investigation and appointing a special counsel was the only way to protect the investigation? The New York Times is JUST ASKING. Also, as Josh Marshall points out, Rosenstein comes off as REAL DUMB in the section about how he was just so shocked that maybe Trump used him to write that memo about Hillary Clinton's emails to give him a pretext for obstruction of justice: The president's reliance on his memo caught Mr. Rosenstein by surprise, and he became angry at Mr. Trump, according to people who spoke to Mr. Rosenstein at the time. He grew concerned that his reputation had suffered harm and wondered whether Mr. Trump had motives beyond Mr. Comey's treatment of Mrs. Clinton for ousting him, the people said.Really? Is Rod Rosenstein that much of a dipshit? We are skeptical. Also, people who know Rosenstein are skeptical: Oh fuck you, Maggie Haberman, we don't have time or space in this post for your defensive horseshit about this steaming pile of shit your BFFs wrote. So how will this land at the White House? Will Trump use it as a pretext to fire Rosenstein, as we expect might happen, either after work today or just after the midterms? Maybe yes of course no shit Sherlock! Glad to know the White House is getting what it wants from the newspaper the president verbally abuses on a regular basis. Rod Rosenstein, of course, is the only one protecting the Robert Mueller investigation. If he is fired, or if Mueller is fired, what do we do? Do we take to the streets? No, dears: we TAKE the streets. Swear to God if he does it after work today, we are filing a fucking complaint against GOD. Also, it's your open thread we guess, but you should probably mostly talk about THIS JESUS UGH FUCK! [New York Fucking Times / Washington Post] Follow Evan Hurst on Twitter RIGHT NOW, DO IT RIGHT NOW! Wonkette is the ONLY NEWS ON THE INTERNET. Click if you want us to live FOREVER.

Rod Rosenstein Suggested Secretly Recording Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment - The New York Times

Wed 31 Dec 2025
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Rod Rosenstein Suggested Secretly Recording Trump and Discussed 25th Amendment - The New York Times Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 06:22 Image Two weeks into his job as deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein was confronted with a crisis: the president's firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director. Credit Credit T.J. Kirkpatrick for The New York Times WASHINGTON '-- The deputy attorney general, Rod J. Rosenstein, suggested last year that he secretly record President Trump in the White House to expose the chaos consuming the administration, and he discussed recruiting cabinet members to invoke the 25th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from office for being unfit. Mr. Rosenstein made these suggestions in the spring of 2017 when Mr. Trump's firing of James B. Comey as F.B.I. director plunged the White House into turmoil. Over the ensuing days, the president divulged classified intelligence to Russians in the Oval Office, and revelations emerged that Mr. Trump had asked Mr. Comey to pledge loyalty and end an investigation into a senior aide. Mr. Rosenstein was just two weeks into his job. He had begun overseeing the Russia investigation and played a key role in the president's dismissal of Mr. Comey by writing a memo critical of his handling of the Hillary Clinton email investigation. But Mr. Rosenstein was caught off guard when Mr. Trump cited the memo in the firing, and he began telling people that he feared he had been used. Mr. Rosenstein made the remarks about secretly recording Mr. Trump and about the 25th Amendment in meetings and conversations with other Justice Department and F.B.I. officials. Several people described the episodes in interviews over the past several months, insisting on anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. The people were briefed either on the events themselves or on memos written by F.B.I. officials, including Andrew G. McCabe, then the acting bureau director, that documented Mr. Rosenstein's actions and comments. None of Mr. Rosenstein's proposals apparently came to fruition. It is not clear how determined he was about seeing them through, though he did tell Mr. McCabe that he might be able to persuade Attorney General Jeff Sessions and John F. Kelly, then the secretary of homeland security and now the White House chief of staff, to mount an effort to invoke the 25th Amendment. The extreme suggestions show Mr. Rosenstein's state of mind in the disorienting days that followed Mr. Comey's dismissal. Sitting in on Mr. Trump's interviews with prospective F.B.I. directors and facing attacks for his own role in Mr. Comey's firing, Mr. Rosenstein had an up-close view of the tumult. Mr. Rosenstein appeared conflicted, regretful and emotional, according to people who spoke with him at the time. Mr. Rosenstein disputed this account. ''The New York Times's story is inaccurate and factually incorrect,'' he said in a statement. ''I will not further comment on a story based on anonymous sources who are obviously biased against the department and are advancing their own personal agenda. But let me be clear about this: Based on my personal dealings with the president, there is no basis to invoke the 25th Amendment.'' A Justice Department spokeswoman also provided a statement from a person who was present when Mr. Rosenstein proposed wearing a wire. The person, who would not be named, acknowledged the remark but said Mr. Rosenstein made it sarcastically. But according to the others who described his comments, Mr. Rosenstein not only confirmed that he was serious about the idea but also followed up by suggesting that other F.B.I. officials who were interviewing to be the bureau's director could also secretly record Mr. Trump. Image Andrew G. McCabe, who became acting director of the F.B.I. after Mr. Comey was fired, memorialized his interactions with Mr. Rosenstein in memos. Credit Alex Wong/Getty Images Mr. McCabe, who was later fired from the F.B.I., declined to comment. His memos have been turned over to the special counsel, Robert S. Mueller III, in the investigation into whether Trump associates conspired with Russia's election interference, according to a lawyer for Mr. McCabe. ''A set of those memos remained at the F.B.I. at the time of his departure in late January 2018,'' the lawyer, Michael R. Bromwich, said of his client. ''He has no knowledge of how any member of the media obtained those memos.'' The revelations about Mr. Rosenstein come as Mr. Trump has unleashed another round of attacks in recent days on federal law enforcement, saying in an interview with the newspaper The Hill that he hopes his assaults on the F.B.I. turn out to be ''one of my crowning achievements,'' and that he only wished he had terminated Mr. Comey sooner. ''If I did one mistake with Comey, I should have fired him before I got here. I should have fired him the day I won the primaries,'' Mr. Trump said. ''I should have fired him right after the convention. Say, 'I don't want that guy.' Or at least fired him the first day on the job.'' Days after ascending to the role of the nation's No. 2 law enforcement officer, Mr. Rosenstein was thrust into a crisis. On a brisk May day, Mr. Rosenstein and his boss, Mr. Sessions, who had recused himself from the Russia investigation because of his role as a prominent Trump campaign supporter, joined Mr. Trump in the Oval Office. The president informed them of his plan to oust Mr. Comey. To the surprise of White House aides who were trying to talk the president out of it, Mr. Rosenstein embraced the idea, even offering to write the memo about the Clinton email inquiry. He turned it in shortly after. A day later, Mr. Trump announced the firing, and White House aides released Mr. Rosenstein's memo, labeling it the basis for Mr. Comey's dismissal. Democrats sharply criticized Mr. Rosenstein, accusing him of helping to create a cover story for the president to rationalize the termination. ''You wrote a memo you knew would be used to perpetuate a lie,'' Senator Christopher Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, wrote on Twitter. "You own this debacle.'' The president's reliance on his memo caught Mr. Rosenstein by surprise, and he became angry at Mr. Trump, according to people who spoke to Mr. Rosenstein at the time. He grew concerned that his reputation had suffered harm. A determined Mr. Rosenstein began telling associates that he would ultimately be ''vindicated'' for his role in the matter. One week after the firing, Mr. Rosenstein met with Mr. McCabe and at least four other senior Justice Department officials, in part to explain his role in the situation. During their discussion, Mr. Rosenstein expressed frustration at how Mr. Trump had conducted the search for a new F.B.I. director, saying the president was failing to take the candidate interviews seriously. A handful of politicians and law enforcement officials, including Mr. McCabe, were under consideration. To Mr. Rosenstein, the hiring process was emblematic of broader dysfunction stemming from the White House. He said both the process and the administration itself were in disarray, according to two people familiar with the discussion. Mr. Rosenstein then raised the idea of wearing a recording device, or ''wire,'' as he put it, to secretly tape the president when he visited the White House. One participant asked whether Mr. Rosenstein was serious, and he replied animatedly that he was. If not him, then Mr. McCabe or other F.B.I. officials interviewing with Mr. Trump for the job could perhaps wear a wire or otherwise record the president, Mr. Rosenstein offered. White House officials never checked his phone when he arrived for meetings there, Mr. Rosenstein added, implying it would be easy to secretly record Mr. Trump. Mr. Rosenstein mentioned the possibility of wearing a wire on at least one other occasion, the people said, though they did not provide details. The suggestion itself was remarkable. While informants or undercover agents regularly use concealed listening devices to surreptitiously gather evidence for federal investigators, they are typically targeting drug kingpins and Mafia bosses in criminal investigations, not a president viewed as ineffectively conducting his duties. In the end, the idea went nowhere, the officials said. But they called Mr. Rosenstein's comments an example of how erratically he was behaving while he was taking part in the interviews for a replacement F.B.I. director, considering the appointment of a special counsel and otherwise running the day-to-day operations of the more than 100,000 people at the Justice Department. At least two meetings took place on May 16 involving both Mr. McCabe and Mr. Rosenstein, the people familiar with the events of the day said. Mr. Rosenstein brought up the 25th Amendment during the first meeting of Justice Department officials, they said. A memo about the second meeting written by one participant, Lisa Page, a lawyer who worked for Mr. McCabe at the time, did not mention the topic. Mr. Rosenstein's suggestion about the 25th Amendment was similarly a sensitive topic. The amendment allows for the vice president and a majority of cabinet officials to declare the president is ''unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.'' Image Mr. Rosenstein acknowledged that Mr. Comey was a role model but said he thought it was appropriate to seek a new leader for the F.B.I. Credit Doug Mills/The New York Times Merely conducting a straw poll, even if Mr. Kelly and Mr. Sessions were on board, would be risky if another administration official were to tell the president, who could fire everyone involved to end the effort. Mr. McCabe told other F.B.I. officials of his conversation with Mr. Rosenstein. None of the people interviewed said that they knew of him ever consulting Mr. Kelly or Mr. Sessions. The episode is the first known instance of a named senior administration official weighing the 25th Amendment. Unidentified others have been said to discuss it, including an unnamed senior administration official who wrote an Op-Ed for The New York Times. That person's identity is unknown to journalists in the Times news department. Some of the details in Mr. McCabe's memos suggested that Mr. Rosenstein had regrets about the firing of Mr. Comey. During a May 12 meeting with Mr. McCabe, Mr. Rosenstein was upset and emotional, Mr. McCabe wrote, and said that he wished Mr. Comey were still at the F.B.I. so he could bounce ideas off him. Mr. Rosenstein also asked F.B.I. officials on May 14, five days after Mr. Comey's firing, about calling him for advice about a special counsel. The officials responded that such a call was a bad idea because Mr. Comey was no longer in the government. And they were surprised, believing that the idea contradicted Mr. Rosenstein's stated reason for backing Mr. Comey's dismissal '-- that he had shown bad judgment in the Clinton email inquiry. Mr. Rosenstein, 53, is a lifelong public servant. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School, he clerked for a federal judge before joining the Justice Department in 1990 and was appointed United States attorney for Maryland. Mr. Rosenstein also considered appointing as special counsel James M. Cole, himself a former deputy attorney general, three of the people said. Mr. Cole would have made an even richer target for Mr. Trump's ire than has Mr. Mueller, a lifelong Republican: Mr. Cole served four years as the No. 2 in the Justice Department during the Obama administration and worked as a private lawyer representing one of Mrs. Clinton's longtime confidants, Sidney Blumenthal. Mr. Cole and Mr. Rosenstein have known each other for years. Mr. Cole, who declined to comment, was Mr. Rosenstein's supervisor early in his Justice Department career when he was prosecuting public corruption cases. Mr. Trump and his allies have repeatedly attacked Mr. Rosenstein and have also targeted Mr. McCabe, who was fired in March for failing to be forthcoming when he was interviewed in an inspector general investigation around the time of Mr. Comey's dismissal. The inspector general later referred the matter to federal prosecutors in Washington. The president's allies have seized on Mr. McCabe's lack of candor to paint a damning picture of the F.B.I. under Mr. Comey and assert that the Russia investigation is tainted. The Justice Department denied a request in late July from Mr. Trump's congressional allies to release Mr. McCabe's memos, citing a continuing investigation that the lawmakers believed to be Mr. Mueller's. Mr. Rosenstein not only supervises that investigation but is also considered by the president's lawyers as a witness for their defense because he sought the dismissal of Mr. Comey, which is being investigated as possible obstruction of justice. Matt Apuzzo and Nicholas Fandos contributed reporting. Follow Adam Goldman and Michael S. Schmidt on Twitter: @adamgoldmanNYT and @nytmike. A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A 1 of the New York edition with the headline: Rosenstein Raised Idea of Recording Talks With Trump . Order Reprints | Today's Paper | Subscribe

PayPal bans Infowars for promoting hate - The Verge

Wed 31 Dec 2025
Note
PayPal bans Infowars for promoting hate - The Verge Archived Version Sat, 22 Sep 2018 05:28 PayPal will no longer do business with Infowars, according to a post on the conspiracy theory site this morning. PayPal broke the news in an email to Infowars yesterday, saying the company had conducted a comprehensive review of the Infowars site and found that it ''promoted hate and discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions,'' a violation of PayPal's acceptable use policy. Infowars had used PayPal to process transactions for its on-site store; the site will have ten days to find new payment processors. The move comes after a string of bans, which have effectively barred Infowars from distributing content on the internet's major platforms. Facebook banned a number of Infowars pages in August after public pressure. YouTube, Twitter, the iOS App Store, and others followed Facebook's lead in the weeks that followed. Infowars and its founder Alex Jones have drawn increasing criticism for harassment of the parents of Sandy Hook victims (whom Jones described as ''crisis actors'') and persistent conspiracy theories surrounding the death of Clinton staffer Seth Rich. PayPal's partnership with the site was highlighted in August by Right Wing Watch's Jared Holt, who described ''highly publicized and egregious violations of the platform's own terms of service.'' Reached by The Verge, Holt said today's move had been a long time coming. ''Removing PayPal from the Infowars platform inhibits Jones' ability to make money from his malice,'' Holt said, ''but it's a bit odd it took so long given how egregiously Infowars violated the platform's terms of service.'' Reached by The Verge, PayPal confirmed the ban, and said it extended to all Infowars-related sites. ''Our values are the foundation for the decision we made this week,'' a PayPal spokesperson said in a statement. ''We undertook an extensive review of the Infowars sites, and found instances that promoted hate or discriminatory intolerance against certain communities and religions, which run counter to our core value of inclusion.''

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