You should read this for 3/24/2018:
Art and Film
Easter Egg Art: Hatched From An Ancient Tradition To Celebrate Rebirth
Books, Writing, and Language
The art of the big lie: the history of fake news From the Reichstag fire to Stalin’s show trials, the craft of disinformation is nothing new.
This Woman Wrote Her Novel At A Tire Store And Now They Are Her Biggest Fans
Food and Drink
Pizza Rustica or Easter Pie “A deep-dish cousin to quiche that’s packed with Italian deli meats and cheeses like prosciutto, pepperoni, soppressata, mozzarella and provolone, this rich pie, also called Easter pie, is traditionally made on Good Friday and served on the holiday to celebrate the end of Lent. ”
History and Archaeology
Big Cats and ‘Ritual’ Dogs Lived in Maya Captivity “The ancient Maya were keeping big cats in captivity and transporting dogs long distances as early as 400 B.C., according to a new analysis of animal bones from the central Guatemala site of Ceibal. ”
Pay It Forward and Make It Better
I posted a huge note for the thief who stole my bike. Then my doorbell rang. “My bike was stolen a week ago Saturday. It was half my fault, half my husband’s fault, and 100 percent the fault of the person who stole it. Left with a lock, a front wheel and a heavy heart, I did the only thing I could think of: I decided to leave the thief a little note.”
Andrew McCabe was just offered a job by a congressman so he can get his full retirement. And it just might work.
Women Are Offering Their Prom Dresses To Strangers Online For Free In Hopes Of Making A Teen’s Day This a great idea; I bet lots of people have a dress that they’ll never wear after their own prom but that someone in need would be delighted to wear to a prom. I know there were girls at my high school who couldn’t afford a prom dress—and so stayed at home.
Science and Nature
Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has operated for 40 years, 6 months and 16 days as of March 21, 2018. And it’s just had its lifespan extended (again!).
NASA receives response from Voyager 1 spacecraft 13 billion miles away after 37 years of inactivity
Society
HHS strips lesbian, bisexual health content from women’s health website Oh look! The New Lesbian Invisibility is now Federally integrated.
HHS said the pages and links, some of which were first posted in 2012, were taken down as part of a routine update. “The outdated lesbian and bisexual health pages were removed and the health content was integrated into the relevant health topics pages across the website,” an HHS spokesperson said.
However, the Sunlight Foundation determined that existing health topic pages do not appear to have been updated with new material and the now-missing lesbian and bisexual health content was not integrated elsewhere.
Ageism is real. Cutting ‘Old Heads’ At IBM æAs it scrambled to compete in the internet world, the once-dominant tech company cut tens of thousands of U.S. workers, hitting its most senior employees hardest and flouting rules against age bias.”
Technology
The data analytics firm that worked with [#45’s] election team and the winning Brexit campaign harvested millions of Facebook profiles of US voters, in the tech giant’s biggest ever data breach, and used them to build a powerful software program to predict and influence choices at the ballot box.
A whistleblower has revealed to the Observer how Cambridge Analytica – a company owned by the hedge fund billionaire Robert Mercer, and headed at the time by Trump’s key adviser Steve Bannon – used personal information taken without authorisation in early 2014 to build a system that could profile individual US voters, in order to target them with personalised political advertisements.
Following the Cambridge Analytica dots means the trail is getting closer and closer to #45 and Russia.
Cambridge Analytica: links to Moscow oil firm and St Petersburg university Data company gave briefing to Moscow firm Lukoil, and the lecturer who developed the crucial algorithm worked for St Petersburg university
And now this:
Facebook may have violated FTC privacy deal, say former federal officials, triggering risk of massive fines “Two former federal officials who crafted the landmark consent decree governing how Facebook handles user privacy say the company may have violated that decree when it shared information from tens of millions of users with a data analysis firm that later worked for President Trump’s 2016 campaign.”
Also check out this February 2016 NPR piece by Scott Detrow on how Ted Cruz campaign staff used Cambridge Analytica’s data services . See this from CEO Alexander Nix:
Yes, demographics and geographics are important,” he says. “But really what’s important is to start clustering people by personality.
Your decision-making is based on your personality,” he says. “And not on your gender. Nor is it based on your age or your wealth or any other demographic or geographic factor.
It’s no wonder that Analytica has suspended CEL Alexander Nix who has made the following statements:
An investigation from UK broadcaster Channel 4 recorded Nix discussing a supposedly hypothetical plan to entrap politicians. Nix also discussed Cambridge Analytica’s role in the Trump Campaign. He claimed the company started the “Crooked Hilary,” meme and that “our data informed all the strategy.” He also discussed his company’s use of a self-destructing email service and disguising social media ads.
Oh, and they’ve changed their company name to Emerdata Limited, but the board of directors, including the Mercers, Jenneir and Rebekah Mercer, etc. are all the same.
‘Lone DNC Hacker’ Guccifer 2.0 Slipped Up and Revealed He Was a Russian Intelligence Officer
Guccifer 2.0, the “lone hacker” who took credit for providing WikiLeaks with stolen emails from the Democratic National Committee, was in fact an officer of Russia’s military intelligence directorate (GRU), The Daily Beast has learned. It’s an attribution that resulted from a fleeting but critical slip-up in GRU tradecraft.
Women’s Work
Who Maps the World?Too often, men. And money. But a team of OpenStreetMap users is working to draw new cartographic lines, making maps that more accurately—and equitably—reflect our space.
Starbucks eliminates gender pay gap in U.S. workforce, aims to do the same worldwide Starbucks announced that it has reached “100 percent pay equity among all genders and minority groups for its U.S. workforce.”
In the U.S., the average pay gap between women and men doing the same or similar work is about 20 percent. That means the average woman makes 80 cents for every dollar a man makes doing the same job. The gap for women of color is even larger.
Via Smithsonian: The Tragedy of Cattle Kate
Kate was merely a woman looking to set out a life for herself on the frontier. Even though some local papers put out more accurate accounts soon after her lynching, the mythical version—wild woman meets her just end—is what stuck. Today, experts agree that Watson’s greatest crime was probably her willingness to cross boundaries.
In effect, she was murdered for being different.
💩🔥💰 Trumpery 💩🔥💰
Could getting Andrew McCabe fired come back to bite Trump? 💩🔥💰 is losing it; this is vindictive in the extreme, and entirely inappropriate. I don’t believe the veiled hints that McCabe was fired as a disciplinary action after his action regarding the last-minute FBI re-interest in Hilary Clinton’s emails. This is 💩🔥💰 worried about his Russian entanglements.
Former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe’s statement on his firingHere is the reality: I am being singled out and treated this way because of the role I played, the actions I took, and the events I witnessed in the aftermath of the firing of James Comey. The release of this report was accelerated only after my testimony to the House Intelligence Committee revealed that I would corroborate former Director Comey’s accounts of his discussions with the President. The OIG’s focus on me and this report became a part of an unprecedented effort by the Administration, driven by the President himself, to remove me from my position, destroy my reputation, and possibly strip me of a pension that I worked 21 years to earn. The accelerated release of the report, and the punitive actions taken in response, make sense only when viewed through this lens. Thursday’s comments from the White House are just the latest example of this.
This new report on Trump’s state of mind should alarm you
From The New YorkerWhat Went Wrong in the Stormy Daniels Case Of course the first thing that wnet wrong was 💩🔥💰 can’t keep it in his pants. Note that he was married then, and also apparently sleeping with Karen McDougal
Playboy model who told of Trump affair shows more bravery than he does
