February 9, 2020

Apropos to nothing in particular, can you explain this?

What’s going on in the lower left and lower right sides of this movie poster?

February 5, 2020

Cayman legislator blames coronavirus, earthquakes on "gay lifestyle"

You have a choice where to spend your vacations...

https://www.caymancompass.com/2020/02/04/mla-eden-calls-earthquake-coronavirus-warnings-over-gay-lifestyle/

Legislator Anthony Eden moved a motion in the Legislative Assembly on Friday to affirm Christian values, an action he described as a direct response to debate over same-sex partnerships.

He advised that natural disasters and disease could be viewed as “warnings” against expanded rights for same-sex couples.

“Mr. Speaker, once the flood gates are opened, what will happen in Cayman? How are we going to stop it? A little population of less than 70,000 built on Christian values. We have been warned over the years,” Eden said on Friday.

February 2, 2020

Today's adventure in customer service...

http://twitter.com/Berryhillj/status/1224081615116283905

January 28, 2020

My Corona...

Ooh, my little sweaty one, sweaty one
Don’t you get your spit in my eye, corona!
Ooh, you got my nose to run, my nose to run
Fever going over the line, corona!
Now I’m gonna sneeze, gonna weeze, gimme lots of wipes,
Always got my shot for the germs of the other types
My, my, my, ay, ay, woah!
M-m-m-my Corona!

January 27, 2020

Remember when Sibel Edmonds was big here at DU?

The DU "Whistleblowers" group remains as a vestigial remnant of the popularity of Sibel Edmonds here at DU. She was so important that she actually had her own discussion group:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topics&forum=344

After that group was quietly deep-sixed, the name was shortened, so that Sibel Edmonds fans could keep up with her, Snowden, Assange, Manning, and other hero-prophets.

I'm surprised that none of the people who used to sell her on DU as the greatest thing since sliced bread have kept up with her more recent writings in which, it appears, the mask has finally fallen off:

https://www.newsbud.com/2018/11/24/breaking-news-khashoggi-case-a-massive-psyop-concocted-by-cia-mi6-mossad/

Khashoggi is/was Not who the mainstream media has been portraying. Right from day one the media published and marketed a false portrayal of this so-called victim, and did so intentionally. Jamal Khashoggi was not a journalist. He contributed less than a handful of fluff opinion pieces for the Washington Post (Of course a newspaper with a long history of CIA partnership). He was Osama Bin Laden’s partner and confidante throughout the 80s. He’s been on the CIA team since 1982. In the 90s he worked as a liaison Intel officer for Saudi-CIA cooperation. Starting in the mid-2000s he was an active Arab Spring operative for several NGOs, many of them funded by George Soros and the CIA. Pretty much everything fed by the media giving Khashoggi and his background almost a saint-like status has been false. Intentionally.

Who would have guessed that Sibel Edmonds would finally be reduced to selling outright bullshit?

January 26, 2020

Hunger will kill more people than coronavirus this year

If you weren’t on DU for Ebola, you might want to do some looking through Ebola threads in 2014.

If you do, you’ll find out we’re all dead by now.

Hunger directly kills between 2 and 3 million people a year. Hunger related illnesses kill millions more. One of the other biggest killers is diarrhea and other illnesses related to lack of access to clean water.

I will guarantee you that hunger and diarrhea are going to kill many millions - millions - more people this year than coronavirus.

But we don’t fear hunger or lack of access to clean water. These things are effectively prevented by the simple step of “having money”.

And that’s why we flip out over things like this. Ebola and coronavirus can’t be prevented with money.

Yes, a coordinated and intelligent response is required to deal with an emerging viral disease with relatively high communicability and lethality. But even with the estimated 4% mortality rate, your odds of surviving Ebola are a whole lot better than the odds of surviving without food, which doesn’t bother us as much because the millions to whom that is going to happen without our attention or concern are already effectively quarantined.

January 24, 2020

New Details Found In Bayeaux Tapestry...

January 20, 2020

Lev Parnas' Attorney Responds To Trump Troll Twitter Disinfo

I'll start with the tweet from Joseph Bondy, Lev Parnas' attorney, and then drill down:

https://twitter.com/josephabondy/status/1219360433108328448

One of the classic disinfo techniques used by internet trolls is to use a select piece of fake information, when there is a body of perfectly good information, in order to use the one fake to discredit the truth.

A typical deployment of this technique was the Texas Air National Guard Memo. Did W shirk his duties in the TANG? You bet he did. But by spiking the information-sphere with the fake memo, the story could be discredited by reference to "the fake memo".

Ivana Trump's book "Raising Trump" contained this picture, which Ivana Trump has stated is Eric Trump's sixth birthday party at the Plaza Hotel in New York:



The photo was also run in a cropped version in this ABC News piece a while back, with the caption:

https://abcnews.go.com/US/ivana-trump-opens-surprising-facts-life-donald-trump/story?id=50330454

"Ivana Trump shares a family photo from Eric Trump's sixth birthday party at the Plaza Hotel in New York City in 1990."

One thing to note is that even Ivana's memory that it was a "sixth" birthday party might be off. The picture quality is not the best, but it looks like there might be seven candles on that cake.

However, the Trumps divorced in 1991, but Eric's birthday is in January. To be precise, Eric's birthday is January 6, 1984.

Now, Lev Parnas, in a recent New Yorker piece, talked about getting a job at Kings Highway Realty in Brooklyn when he was 16. The characterization of that job is a little odd, since it is highly unlikely that a 16 year old was dealing in real estate, since NY does not issue licenses to 16 year olds to do so, and contracting with minors is generally a difficult affair. Be that as it may, in the SAME New Yorker piece, Parnas states that Trump didn't get to know who he was until 2016.

In any event, Parnas' age matters because he was born in February 1972. So, if that picture was taken in 1990, the person who was initially fingered by a curious Twitter account, sure looks a lot older than 17 (and doesn't have Parnas' cleft chin).

One of the things that is interesting with "I just found out on Twitter" is to track down the original source of a piece of information. The original Twitter account that posed this as Lev Parnas has been suspended, and seemed to come out of nowhere.

But, despite that happening, the picture took on a life of its own. The party was said to be for one of Lev's kids, to obscure the date problem, or was said to be for Ivanka Trump, despite the football theme which would have been an odd choice for the Trumps to make for a girl's birthday party. The interesting thing is that, starting from a "patient zero" red-marker notation, the identical image took on more aspects than Vishnu - in terms of the factual details - in a matter of well under a few hours.

In order for that to happen, people along the way have to make stuff up. Given that tweets can be easily re-tweeted, it makes no sense for different persons to re-package the facts as "25 years ago", or "Ivanka's party" or "Lev's kid's party" absent an intent to simply confuse what is the photo and when it was taken.

Eventually Snopes picked it up, of course:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/lev-parnas-eric-trump-birthday/


The claim that the man in this photograph is Lev Parnas is not based on any credible information. This claim is based solely on the notion that the man in the photograph bears a passing resemblance to Parnas. However, Parnas’ name was not attached to this picture until close to three decades after it was taken. And from what we can tell, Parnas is too young to be the man pictured here.

...

Some social media users have pointed to a report in the New Yorker to bolster the claim that Parnas is indeed the man in this photograph. While the The New Yorker reported that Parnas started selling Trump Organization co-ops for Kings Highway Realty when he was 16, there’s no indication that Parnas had a familiar relationship with the Trump family at that time. In fact, Parnas said that while he bumped into Trump occasionally at events in New York over the years, he didn’t get to know the president until the 2016 presidential campaign

The amazing thing about the will to believe is that people were willing to believe that the clearly older man in that photograph was somehow a 17 year old Lev Parnas (or 18 year old, depending on whether that is Eric's sixth or seventh birthday).

There is an active effort to get people to bite on these kinds of things. When you see something on Twitter that might be interesting, it may be a good idea to indicate whether you have bothered to look into it, and consider that what you are re-posting, re-distributing and giving a wider audience may or may not be true.

Also, just because someone is not sure that it is true, does not make that person a troll. The truth can usually stand up to questioning. In fact, that's a typical method for getting at the truth.

Plus, everyone missed the real surprise in the picture anyway.

That kid on the far left? Had a cameo in Airplane:

January 20, 2020

Meanwhile, in Norway...

http://www.mastermusic.no/album/barn/107-borud-gjengen-i-farta

January 16, 2020

Michael Avenatti Jailed, Held Without Bond

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/michael-avenatti-arrest-financial-crimes-bond-938415/



Avenatti was arrested and indicted in separate federal cases in New York and Los Angeles back in March 2019, and eventually released on bond. According to The Washington Post, however, he allegedly spent the next few months, between April and October, committing mail fraud, wire fraud and money laundering. He allegedly defrauded an ex-law partner he owed $5 million, an ex-client he owed $2.2 million and an ex-wife he owed $2.5 million in child and spousal support.

Avenatti’s alleged schemes included having an ex-wife buy a Mercedes-Benz for him to use so that he could avoid paying debts; draining and refilling his bank accounts with cashier’s checks to allegedly throw off creditors; and withdrawing money from banks in increments less than $10,000 to avoid drawing the attention of the government (a process known as “structuring”).