Hermit-The-Prog
Hermit-The-Prog's JournalWhat Does Donald Trump Have to Say to the Parkland Parent Lori Alhadeff?
By John Cassidy
On Thursday evening, the people of Parkland, Florida, held a candlelight vigil for the victims of Wednesdays gun massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. Before the vigil began, one of the bereaved parents, Lori Alhadeff, the mother of Alyssa Alhadeff, a vibrant, soccer-playing ninth grader who was one of the seventeen people shot dead by Nikolas Cruz, made a remarkable and impassioned plea on CNN.
If you havent yet seen the video of the networks on-the-spot interview with Alhadeff, brace yourself. It is very harrowing. But for anybody who gives a damn about this country it should be required viewing.
How, how do we allow a gunman to come into our childrens school? Alhadeff began, clutching a microphone in one hand and looking directly into the camera. What security is there? Theres no metal detectors. The gunmana crazy personjust walks right into the school, knocks down the window of my childs door and starts shooting. Shooting her. And killing her.
[...]
If I were the head of a major media organization, I would ask my staff to put a simple question to every member of Congress, and to Donald Trump, too. How do you respond to Lori Alhadeff?
[...]
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/what-does-donald-trump-have-to-say-to-the-parkland-parent-lori-alhadeff
The #MeToo Movement Is Coming to the Ballot Box This Month
There are eight upcoming special elections to replace disgraced men. Many of the candidates are women.
Tim Murphy
Feb. 12, 2018
On Monday, Minnesota voters will go to the polls for the 16th and 17th special elections of 2018. One district is suburban and leans Democratic; the other is rural and heavily Republican. But both races have one big thing in common: They were triggered by male lawmakers stepping down after allegations of sexual misconduct.
Over the past seven months, at least 14 state and national lawmakers have resigned or announced they will soon retire in the wake of sexual misconduct scandals that are roiling legislatures from California to Maine to Washington, DC. The result is a frenzy of special electionsand a mini-wave of women running to fill those seats. Of the eight impending special elections to replace disgraced male state legislators, Democrats are fielding women candidates in seven of them. (The lone exception: next weeks state house race in Mississippi, where all four candidates in the non-partisan primary are men.)
[...]
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/02/the-metoo-movement-is-coming-to-the-ballot-box-this-month/
Crisis of Misinformation
He Predicted The 2016 Fake News Crisis. Now He's Worried About An Information Apocalypse.What happens when anyone can make it appear as if anything has happened, regardless of whether or not it did?" technologist Aviv Ovadya warns.
In mid-2016, Aviv Ovadya realized there was something fundamentally wrong with the internet so wrong that he abandoned his work and sounded an alarm. A few weeks before the 2016 election, he presented his concerns to technologists in San Franciscos Bay Area and warned of an impending crisis of misinformation in a presentation he titled Infocalypse.
[...]
And much in the way that foreign-sponsored, targeted misinformation campaigns didn't feel like a plausible near-term threat until we realized that it was already happening, Ovadya cautions that fast-developing tools powered by artificial intelligence, machine learning, and augmented reality tech could be hijacked and used by bad actors to imitate humans and wage an information war.
And were closer than one might think to a potential Infocalypse. Already available tools for audio and video manipulation have begun to look like a potential fake news Manhattan Project. In the murky corners of the internet, people have begun using machine learning algorithms and open-source software to easily create pornographic videos that realistically superimpose the faces of celebrities or anyone for that matter on the adult actors bodies. At institutions like Stanford, technologists have built programs that that combine and mix recorded video footage with real-time face tracking to manipulate video. Similarly, at the University of Washington computer scientists successfully built a program capable of turning audio clips into a realistic, lip-synced video of the person speaking those words. As proof of concept, both the teams manipulated broadcast video to make world leaders appear to say things they never actually said.
[...]
You don't need to create the fake video for this tech to have a serious impact. You just point to the fact that the tech exists and you can impugn the integrity of the stuff thats real.
[...]
Charlie Warzel
https://www.buzzfeed.com/charliewarzel/the-terrifying-future-of-fake-news?utm_term=.lswbzwD6Mg#.gfLa65edNg
If
There's a thread -- https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210216281 -- that has provided me with some much needed laughter amid so much teeth-gritting news. It made me think of the following (posted here so as not to clutter that other thread):
If
If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, dont deal in lies,
Or being hated, dont give way to hating,
And yet dont look too good, nor talk too wise:
If you can dreamand not make dreams your master;
If you can thinkand not make thoughts your aim;
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same;
If you can bear to hear the truth youve spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build em up with worn-out tools:
If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings
And never breathe a word about your loss;
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: Hold on!
If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kingsnor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything thats in it,
Andwhich is moreyoull be a Man, my son!
-- Rudyard Kipling
Russian Trolls Stoked Anger Over Black Lives Matter More Than Was Previously Known
Source: Mother Jones
As Twitter shares more about the actions of thousands of known Russian accounts including the companys recent revelation to Congress that in the two months before the election, Russian-linked bots retweeted @realdonaldtrump 470,000 times vs. retweeting Hillary Clintons account fewer than 50,000 times the UW research sheds further light on a deliberate strategy the Russian government used to play both sides of an emotional American debate.
In data collected over a nine-month period ending in October 2016, the UW team found clearly defined left-leaning and right-leaning clustersabout 10,000 accounts in each spheretweeting about police shootings and including the three hashtags related to #BlackLivesMatter. Two of the Russian accounts found were among the top 12 most-retweeted accounts overall across all 20,000 accounts. This suggests that troll content was relatively widely broadcasted in the contexts of this network, the research team wrote in their findings. On both sides, we see troll accounts gaining traction in polarized, audience-driven discourse.
Read more: https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2018/01/russian-trolls-hyped-anger-over-black-lives-matter-more-than-previously-known/
From the Czech Republic, a warning for our midterms: The Russians are still meddling
Source: Washington Post
The outcome of the Czech election is a setback for the West and its supporters in the country, but as important, it is evidence that the Putin regime has not restrained its efforts to subvert Western democracies through disinformation and corruption, despite increasing exposure of the operations and sanctions imposed following the 2016 U.S. election. The Czech case is one more warning that Moscow can be expected to target the upcoming U.S. midterms and that, to date, the Trump administration has done next to nothing to defend the American electoral system.
Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/global-opinions/from-the-czech-republic-a-warning-for-our-midterms-the-russians-are-still-meddling/2018/01/29/4498a748-0517-11e8-b48c-b07fea957bd5_story.html?hpid=hp_no-name_opinion-card-f%3Ahomepage%2Fstory
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