The more things change, the more they stay the same.

"Teachers wrote in, as did farmers, doctors, shopkeepers, even soldiers. An astonishing number of disillusioned children also put pen to paper.
We're being educated in lies. I can't tell truth and lies apart any more. The whole world is dishonest. Politics is just a lying contest. What's the point of life?"

Jailed for writing to the BBC

Powerful.

---

Capitalize on this good fortune, one word can bring you round ... changes.

http://www.foxnews.com/entertainment/2017/09/25/sunday-night-football-ratings-down-amid-national-anthem-protests.html

Viewership for the primetime game between the Washington Redskins and the Oakland Raiders was down on NBC by 11 percent from the same night one year ago and 9 percent from the previous week, according to The Hollywood Reporter.

Nope, no consideration that is might be because the game is between Redskins who are a controversy themselves and being boycotted and the Raiders who represent criminal gangs and don't have enough fans to keep them in their home stadium.
Nope it has to be the predetermined pet conclusion of faux opinion!
You know how bad it is when they don't even tell you who the opponents are in the games they are comparing or what the normal variation in ratings is.
Nope it has to be the predetermined pet conclusion of faux opinion!

They are lies, damn lies, statistics and faux opinion!

---

Guerrilla war?

Satire or hate?

Can you guess the Word of 2017

You would think a Coup d'état would rate better than 3/4 of the way down a very very long front page of FAUX, but all the news that is fit to tRump is much more important.

You would think a Coup d'état would rate better than 3/4 of the way down a very very long front page of FAUX, but all the news that is fit to tRump is much more important.

Lest there be any doubt a couple hours on and the Coup is gone, replaced by the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show!

Well at least we know why Moore has a chance in Alabama.

Fake news? http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/11/dubai-security-chief-calls-bombing-al-jazeera-171125143439231.html Bomb them!

Hmm.
Dhahi Khalfan, the often-outspoken head of security in Dubai seems to have lost his mind.
He even blames the Qatari news network for Friday's terror attack in Egypt's Sinai peninsula.
https://www.dailysabah.com/mideast/2017/11/25/top-uae-security-official-calls-for-bombing-of-al-jazeera

It appears the millennium long civil war in the Islamic Religion is again 'ramping up'.

Yes. No wonder why so many muslims migrate from the mess.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-11-24/muslims-are-often-the-first-victims-of-muslim-terrorists

It does help if you just stick to the truth.
'Fake news' blunder from US envoy to the Netherlands

The new US ambassador to the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra, has denied he had ever said there were "no-go zones" in the Netherlands, calling it "fake news".

He was being quizzed about comments he had made about Islamic extremism in the country.

But Dutch journalist Wouter Zwart showed him a clip of the comments from 2015.

Trump's Dutch ambassador apologizes after calling recorded quotes 'fake news'.

The U.S. ambassador to the Netherlands on Saturday apologized after he made two denials to a Dutch news station.

Pete Hoekstra denied past statements that he made calling parts of the country "no-go zones" and the news outlet's report of that recorded quote "fake news."

"I made certain remarks in 2015 and regret the exchange during the Nieuwsuur interview. Please accept my apology," Hoekstra said on Twitter.

Another Twitter twit, but I bet that hurt. LOL

Cheers.

https://apnews.com/c5b7f6e5b5f94f848500b148e3271dcc/College-students-come-up-with-plug-in-to-combat-fake-news

NEW HAVEN, Conn. (AP) — A team of college students is getting attention from internet companies and Congress after developing a browser extension that alerts users to fake and biased news stories and helps guide them to more balanced coverage.

The plug-in, “Open Mind ,” was developed earlier this month during a 36-hour problem-solving competition known as a hackathon at Yale University.

The winning team was comprised of four students: Michael Lopez-Brau and Stefan Uddenberg, both doctoral students in Yale’s psychology department; Alex Cui, an undergraduate who studies machine learning at the California Institute of Technology; and Jeff An, who studies computer science at the University of Waterloo and business at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario.

That team competed against others to win a challenge from Yale’s Poynter Fellowship in Journalism, which asked students to find a way to counter fake news.

The team’s software, designed as an extension for Google’s Chrome browser, will display a warning screen when someone enters a site known to disseminate fake news. It also will alert a reader if a story shared on social media is fake or biased.

But it does much more than just warn.

The plug-in uses existing sentiment analysis technology to analyze any story that might appear in a newsfeed, identifying the major players and any political slant. It then can suggest to the reader other stories on the same topic that have an alternate viewpoint.

Facebook to reconsider claims of Russian interference in Brexit vote and Facebook opens probe into Russian involvement in Brexit

Facebook to reconsider claims of Russian interference in Brexit vote and Facebook opens probe into Russian involvement in Brexit

How many votes do they believe Putin changed?

That we will probably never know, but there has to be quite a few if this para from the WaPo article is correct.

Facebook found that the Internet Research Agency had engaged in an aggressive influence campaign ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. The group spent roughly $100,000 on thousands of ads that reached over 10 million Facebook users. The operatives also pumped out a huge amount of free content that was seen by up to 126 million Facebook users, the company has said.

When the losing side could not accept the results.

Should they accept the result?

It is accepted that there was Russian interference, official or not.
The results in three states were tipped into Trumps hands by only about 100,000 votes.
They won the popular vote.

The US may like the electoral college, but can you see any other country that would consider the American model after this last fiasco.

Facebook to reconsider claims of Russian interference in Brexit vote and Facebook opens probe into Russian involvement in Brexit

How many votes do they believe Putin changed?

That we will probably never know, but there has to be quite a few if this para from the WaPo article is correct.

Facebook found that the Internet Research Agency had engaged in an aggressive influence campaign ahead of the 2016 presidential election in the United States. The group spent roughly $100,000 on thousands of ads that reached over 10 million Facebook users. The operatives also pumped out a huge amount of free content that was seen by up to 126 million Facebook users, the company has said.

Kremlin's hacking and interference in American elections is to make voters doubtful so that confidence in the political institutions is reduced.
Russia does not care who wins the election.

How Russia could try to influence the 2018 election.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/video/politics/how-russia-could-try-to-influence-the-2018-election/2018/01/17/950a0e28-fb9f-11e7-9b5d-bbf0da31214d_video.html

Russia does not care who wins the election.

That might be true, but Putin did not want Clinton to win.

Russia does not care who wins the election.

That might be true, but Putin did not want Clinton to win.

That is also true.
But Russia will also interfere in the upcoming US midterm election.
As he will for the upcoming Swedish election this autumn.
And other western countries as well for that matter.

Seems to me like that the US have forgot to how to preserve a democracy.
Americans have become paranoid about foreign cyberattacks on their political system, but they have nobody but themselves to blame.

American Democracy Was Asking for It
http://foreignpolicy.com/2018/01/17/american-democracy-was-asking-for-it/

If you had a Parliamentary system similar to other countries, you could have one of two systems, depending on whether the President a political position.

If a political Presidential election would be separate, and popular vote winner would be President. If political the President would lead the country.

You would vote for the all the House seats in the same year, and the majority party in the house would elect their leader, a Prime Minister. If there was no overall majority party, then the major parties would try to form coalitions, the largest coalition would form the government. If the President is a non-political position, the Prime Minister would lead the country.

The Senate would be your upper house and would provide the checks and balance function. i.e. make sure the "small" states are not trampled into the dirt by those big bad states on the coasts.

The other prom that the US has, IMHO, is that if the government makes a total hash of it, you cannot throw them all out at the same time, because of the time periods they sit for and the mid-term elections.