January 19, 2018

Trump's strategy, explained in a toon

January 19, 2018

Toon - The Dreamer

January 18, 2018

Air Force expelled her in 1955 for being a lesbian. Now, at 90, she's getting an honorable discharge

A California woman kicked out of the military 60 years ago for being a lesbian has finally had her rights restored.

In 1955, Airman Second Class Helen Grace James was targeted and investigated by Air Force officials for her sexuality, part of a massive effort to remove gay and lesbian service members known as the "Lavender Scare."

Now, at 90, and living in California, James filed a federal lawsuit earlier this month against the U.S. Air Force seeking to upgrade her "undesirable" discharge to "honorable."

This week, James's attorney received word the Air Force Board for Correction of Military Records has agreed to change her status. "The Board has decided to upgrade Helen's discharge status to Honorable," James's attorney, J. Cacilia Kim, told The Washington Post.


more

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Air-Force-expelled-her-in-1955-for-being-a-12506770.php

January 18, 2018

Right-Wing Email Scammers Want You to Invest in Cryptocurrencies

LACHLAN MARKAY
01.18.18 5:17 AM ET

If you’re a regular reader of Breitbart News, you may have noticed a relatively new genre of advertisements in your inbox. They are hopeful, even promising messages, offering recipients exclusive financial advice that will massively boost their retirement savings.

The trick comes down to a simple investment: Bitcoin.

“Turn a single $100 bill into a retirement fortune,” one ad reads, “in a matter of months.”

Putting one’s money in bitcoin is—most financial experts would insist—not the safest investment for someone to make, let alone a person nearing or in retirement. But those very people happen to be the primary readers of conservative websites. And advertisers have long viewed conservative newsletters and email marketing campaigns as an effective way to hawk their products.


more
https://www.thedailybeast.com/right-wing-email-scammers-want-you-to-invest-in-cryptocurrencies?ref=home

Hey if they will believe Trump, they will believe anything.

January 18, 2018

Trump is driving young Republicans away from the GOP

BY KATIE GLUECK


When President Donald Trump refused to explicitly blame white supremacists for violence in Charlottesville, Republican Emmanuel Wilder couldn’t help but take it personally.

“I try not to let my feelings get ahead of the facts, but in this circumstance, it hurts,” the 30-year-old Wilder, a North Carolina-based African American involved in GOP outreach efforts, told McClatchy at the time.

Five months later, it’s Trump’s Republican Party that is hurting – with young voters, and significantly, with young Republicans like Wilder, who may like Trump’s tax plan but are deeply bothered by his routinely divisive tone.

As the Trump presidency hits the one-year mark, the Republican Party confronts a yawning generational gap that has been exacerbated in recent months by Trump’s incendiary comments on race-related issues and the party’s official support for an accused child molester in Alabama’s Senate race.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/news/politics-government/article195129494.html

January 18, 2018

Thursday Toon Roundup 2 - The Rest

Sycophants




Fox


Fake!



Bannon





KKK




Dream



CHIP



Environment




Weed



WOD



Bitcoin




Gymnastics






Comparison

January 18, 2018

Thursday Toon Roundup 1 - The Liar and his Helpers

January 17, 2018

Most of National Park board quits

Nine members of the 12-person National Park System Advisory Board quit Monday night, citing the fact that U.S. Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke did not convene a meeting last year and has refused to meet with the panel.

Writing to Zinke, advisory board chairman Tony Knowles, a former Democratic governor of Alaska, said he and fellow members "have stood by waiting for the chance to meet and continue the partnership . . . as prescribed by law.

"We understand the complexity of transition but our requests to engage have been ignored and the matters on which we wanted to brief the new Department team are clearly not part of its agenda. I wish the National Park System and Service well and will always be dedicated to their success."

Gretchen Long, a board member from Wyoming, told the Washington Post in an email that the nine board members quit given the Trump administration's attitude that the board's work "could be so summarily dismissed . . . And we worry greatly that the new initiatives incorporated in the (Park System) are now being rescinded."

more
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/Most-of-National-Park-Service-Advisory-board-quits-12502879.php

Hey if it doesn't involve killing, pillaging or polluting, it isn't important to these crooks.

January 17, 2018

Tom the Dancing Bug Toon- Trump to sweep his own Dishonesty and Corruption in the Media Awards

January 17, 2018

Philip K. Dick and the Fake Humans

HENRY FARRELL



This is not the dystopia we were promised. We are not learning to love Big Brother, who lives, if he lives at all, on a cluster of server farms, cooled by environmentally friendly technologies. Nor have we been lulled by Soma and subliminal brain programming into a hazy acquiescence to pervasive social hierarchies.

Dystopias tend toward fantasies of absolute control, in which the system sees all, knows all, and controls all. And our world is indeed one of ubiquitous surveillance. Phones and household devices produce trails of data, like particles in a cloud chamber, indicating our wants and behaviors to companies such as Facebook, Amazon, and Google. Yet the information thus produced is imperfect and classified by machine-learning algorithms that themselves make mistakes. The efforts of these businesses to manipulate our wants leads to further complexity. It is becoming ever harder for companies to distinguish the behavior which they want to analyze from their own and others’ manipulations.

This does not look like totalitarianism unless you squint very hard indeed. As the sociologist Kieran Healy has suggested, sweeping political critiques of new technology often bear a strong family resemblance to the arguments of Silicon Valley boosters. Both assume that the technology works as advertised, which is not necessarily true at all.

Standard utopias and standard dystopias are each perfect after their own particular fashion. We live somewhere queasier—a world in which technology is developing in ways that make it increasingly hard to distinguish human beings from artificial things. The world that the Internet and social media have created is less a system than an ecology, a proliferation of unexpected niches, and entities created and adapted to exploit them in deceptive ways. Vast commercial architectures are being colonized by quasi-autonomous parasites. Scammers have built algorithms to write fake books from scratch to sell on Amazon, compiling and modifying text from other books and online sources such as Wikipedia, to fool buyers or to take advantage of loopholes in Amazon’s compensation structure. Much of the world’s financial system is made out of bots—automated systems designed to continually probe markets for fleeting arbitrage opportunities. Less sophisticated programs plague online commerce systems such as eBay and Amazon, occasionally with extraordinary consequences, as when two warring bots bid the price of a biology book up to $23,698,655.93 (plus $3.99 shipping).

more
https://bostonreview.net/literature-culture/henry-farrell-philip-k-dick-and-fake-humans