Saturday, August 13, 2016

Friday, August 12, 2016

North Korea Continues to Dominate Olympic Gold

via the Tweeter


The Punch and Judy of Global Plantation Slavery




Found within the WikiLeaks’ Hillary Clinton email archive is an email with the subject ‘Unrest in Albania,’ in which Soros makes clear to Clinton that “two things need to be done urgently.” He then directs the Secretary of State to “bring the full weight of the international community to bear on Prime Minister Berisha” and “appoint a senior European official as mediator.” Revealing the influence he wields within the corridors of power, Soros then provides Secretary of State Clinton with three names from which to choose. Unsurprisingly, Clinton acquiesced and chose one of the officials recommended by Soros — Miroslav Lajcak.
 

Tellingly, Soros has committed $25 million dollars to the 2016 presidential campaign of Hillary Clinton, which, per standard Clinton operating procedure, is indicative of the symbiotic relationship of favors between the billionaire and his political puppets.

With Clinton’s relationship with Soros on full display – taking donations and orders – Americans can be virtually certain that big money donations to the Clintons and their Clinton Foundation equate to official political favors from the U.S. government.

Fishnet Friday

Thursday, August 11, 2016

Who’s Behind This Mysterious Website?


The website LongRoom hosts a polling page that purports to “remove the bias in the polls,” which mostly has the effect of showing Donald Trump up in the presidential race, though most polls show Hillary Clinton leading him by a single-digit margin. The site just popped up with polls out of nowhere and the site’s “staff” has all the appearance of being fictitious. 

Websites with excellent records of forecasting everything from sports to politics like "FiveThirtyEight" polls-only forecast, which consolidates hundreds of polls, show Clinton winning the popular vote 48.9 percent to 41.5 percent if the election was held today. The forecast gives her an 86.3 percent chance of winning the election right now. According to the most recent check-in with LongRoom, Trump is leading Clinton by 0.6 percentage points. The site’s methodology page assures readers that “it is a mathematical certainty, that as the election approaches, all of the polls will begin to match the polls here on LongRoom.”

That's comforting and good to know. But there are questions.

Here's 538's take on all this:

“LongRoom claims to “unbias” the polls using “actual state voter registration data from the Secretary of State or Election Division of each state.” The website contends that almost every public poll is biased in favor of Clinton. Think about what that means: The website is saying that a large number of honest professional pollsters who make their living trying to provide accurate information — and have a good record of doing so — are all deliberately biasing the polls and aren’t correcting for it.  
I’d also point out that election offices from different states collect different data. Some states don’t have party registration; other states don’t collect data on a person’s race; some states collect data on neither. There are some companies that try to fill in missing data for each state, though it costs a lot to get that data. Isn’t it more plausible the people who get paid to know what they are doing are right, while some anonymous website on the internet with unclear methodology is wrong?”
In 2012, Dean Chambers did much the same thing, “unskewing” the polls that correctly showed Mitt Romney losing, only to admit after the election that he’d been misguided in his efforts — Chambers’s name was out in the press and to his credit, he publicly took stock of his mistakes after the fact. But LongRoom and whoever runs it has gone out of its way to obfuscate its identity. The site has an “about us” page which lists four people associated with the site, but they each seem to be without any semblance of an online paper trail, an odd thing in the age of the internet.
“Michael Ellis,” the man listed as LongRoom’s managing editor, is described in only the vaguest of terms as “an Internet Executive with over 23 years of experience, including general management of mid to large sized publications. He has been involved with internet community management his entire career.” The three other staff members have similarly indistinct bios, and rather than photographed headshots, the staff is depicted in sketches. None of the staff appears to have Twitter accounts, let alone follow the @LongRoomNews account. Searches for the staff on other social networking sites did not lead anywhere and there is no listed point of contact for any of the LongRoom staff members anywhere on the site. FiveThirtyEight reached out to the site’s only point of contact for comment — a support email address — and did not hear back. A public records search for LongRoom yielded no results for the business. 
But an analysis of the site’s IP address showed that in April 2015, LongRoom switched its registration to a domain that for a fee, allows registrants to keep their names private — Domains By Proxy, LLC. The last name associated with the website, as recently as January 2015, is Fred Waid, who listed the site’s associated organization as “American Separatist” based out of New Mexico.
My first thought when I saw the site a couple of days ago was that it was a college project, like one used as research for a dissertation. Now I'm not so sure.

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

New: From Heavy D Industries


Is Your Brain Republican or Democrat? Test It.

Note: if you are using Safari on iOS, you may need to scroll to see all options.
There are 5 responses for each scenario.

90 Days Out, It's Time To Get Back on Message

by DAVID CATRON
What did the political careers of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush have in common? Many observers would respond to this question by shouting, “Absolutely nothing!” These people would be wrong. In reality, the careers of Reagan and Bush shared at least three important characteristics. They were both viciously assaulted by the “news” media on a daily basis. Neither allowed these transparently partisan attacks to distract them from the core messages of their campaigns. And, not coincidentally, they are the only Republicans who have served two full terms as President since Dwight Eisenhower left office.
There’s a lesson here, if Donald Trump is able to absorb it. Media bias in favor of Democrats is a fact of life. This is blindingly obvious to most serious observers of American politics, and it has been repeatedly confirmed by serious studies of journalistic trends. It is also an utter waste of time for a GOP presidential nominee to whine about it. Complaining about the partisan press is like complaining about the weather. It accomplishes nothing. Yet, instead of emulating the successful strategies of Reagan and Bush, Donald Trump has allowed himself to be tricked into squandering increasingly valuable campaign time bellyaching about media bias.
At his rallies, where he should be contrasting his positive vision for America with the dystopian nightmare into which Hillary Clinton’s distorted worldview will transform the nation, he moans about the media. Jeffrey Lord, who highlights the disgraceful mendacity of the media at NewsBusters, quotes one of these rants. “CNN is like all Trump all the time. All Trump all the time. You walk out of an interview and you say, ‘that was a good interview’ and then you get killed for the rest of the weekend. So they are so biased toward Crooked Hillary. You know they call it: CNN, Clinton News Network.” OK, but the election is not about CNN.
Even more self-defeating than Trump’s time-consuming digressions about the partisan press during his rallies is the opportunity he is missing in social media. Neither Reagan nor Bush possessed anything like the direct access to voters that he enjoys on Facebook and Twitter. He should be using his enormous social media presence to highlight his strengths and Clinton’s weaknesses. Instead, he uses it to preach to the choir. Saturday evening, for example, he fired off this querulous tweet: “I am not just running against Crooked Hillary Clinton, I am running against the very dishonest and totally biased media — but I will win!”
In reality he is almost certainly going to lose if he doesn’t stop mumping about media bias and devote the next 90 days to convincing skeptical voters that he can be trusted with the keys to the White House. And, regardless of wishful thinking about an imaginary “monster vote” by pundits who admit that they aren’t polling experts, he is in real trouble.
What no Republican needs to do, however, is allow transparent media bias to distract him from the core message of his campaign. It is quite possible to beat the press at its own game.