The guy is freaking evil,” Special Operator Miller told investigators. “The guy was toxic,” Special Operator First Class Joshua Vriens, a sniper, said in a separate interview.

A certain stable genius pardoned the man, and also reversed his demotion. Gallagher was allowed to retire from the service as a Seal, retaining an additional $200,000 pension he would have forfeited had his demotion stood.

The reporter told Giuliani he sounded crazy, but he “insisted he wasn’t,” in his “navy-blue suit, the fly of the pants unzipped.”

Giuliani also claimed that former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch was “controlled” by Soros.

On other zany Rudy news, “Rudy Giuliani raises eyebrows after calling himself ‘Former Attorney General of the United States’ on Facebook page”

“Measured in terms of views and subscribers, it had the third-largest reach of any group of entertainment channels on YouTube in November—outranked only by Disney and WarnerMedia.”

“This is all especially impressive because I have been unable to identify any YouTube channels associated with TheSoul Publishing that were created before 2016.”

The strategy of their sites is fundamentally this:

1. Gain a lot of eyeballs with typical internet click bait.

2. Once you have those eyeballs, use your reach to
(a) spread political disinformation.
(b) make money (YouTube videos gain advertising dollars which are split between the creators and YouTube)

Some of the snake oil they are selling is truly bizarre.

“By 1960, the Soviet Union succeeded, in 1957 the rent of Alaska was over and the country’s leader at the time, Nikita Khrushchev, gifted Alaska to the USA. That’s when Alaska became the 49th state of the US.”

(Alaska became a U.S. territory in the 1860s when the USA purchased it from the Czar.)

It would take an exceptionally ignorant and intellectually incurious person to believe this claim, but the same is true of the claim that Crowdstrike is owned by a rich Ukrainian, and yet millions of people seem to believe that.

H.L. Mencken wrote in 1926:

“No one in this world, so far as I know … has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.”

Adolph Hitler wrote one year earlier:

“The broad masses of a nation, in the primitive simplicity of their minds, more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.”

The wisest philosopher in human history wrote in the 1990s:

“There is neither an idea too far-fetched, nor a snake oil cure too improbable, to gain some believers, but the snake oil salesmen of the previous centuries have typically succeeded on a small scale because their reach was limited to the number of people who could hear them orate from a buckboard or hilltop. The modern world has changed that. Mass media extended the reach of their sales pitch. The internet made it infinite.”

Well, then, it must be true. Case closed!

We have wondered where exactly Trump got the utterly ridiculous idea that a company called Crowdstrike, owned by a rich Ukrainian, shipped the tell-tale DNC server to Ukraine. (Previous notes on this: 1, 2). Now we are certain.

“One former senior White House official said Trump even stated so explicitly at one point, saying he knew Ukraine was the real culprit because ‘Putin told me.’”

Short answer no, but Fahrenheit’s convoluted explanation of his scale is fascinating.

Did you know that Celsius was almost as loony? Today’s centigrade scale makes sense in that 0 is the freezing point of water and 100 is the boiling point, but that was decided after the death of Celsius. “The original Celsius scale had 100 for freezing, 0 for boiling. In other words, it was upside down.”

It’s only December, the beginning of Aussie summer, and temperatures are reaching all-time highs. “Several locations are forecast to reach 48C during the next few days

48 centigrade is almost 120 in god-fearin’ non-commie degrees.

To make matters worse, the massive natural bushfire problem is being exacerbated by arsonists. (Their crazies don’t have as many guns as America’s, but they still have matches.)

Various public figures came up with some real whoppers.

Related to this point, my biggest disappointments of the year are these:

(1) Russia’s disinformation agencies don’t even make the slightest attempt to construct plausible scenarios. It’s not like a Ludlum novel where one must strip away multiple levels of brilliantly constructed propaganda to discover the truth. The Russians simply assume that we have not even the slightest bit of brainpower.

(2) Worse yet, they are right.

Continue reading “The biggest Pinocchios of 2019”

President Donald Trump’s border wall is facing a surprising new legal hurdle down in Texas: an obscure legislative provision crafted by House Republicans in 2014 when the GOP was targeting then-President Barack Obama’s budget powers.

The amendment, carried forward into current law, has resurfaced with a vengeance in El Paso, Texas. U.S District Court Judge David Briones has been quoting back its words in a series of rulings against Trump’s decision to take $3.6 billion from military construction projects to expedite his wall.

As first adopted, the Republican language specifically prohibited Obama from taking any step to “eliminate or reduce funding for any program, project, or activity as proposed in the President’s budget request” until it’s cleared with Congress.

The triggering event was a relatively narrow dispute in 2013 over funding for space exploration. But when they were enacted in Jan. 2014, the restrictions applied government-wide. And a year later, under full Republican control, Congress added the word “increase” alongside “eliminate or reduce” funding.

What goes around, in other words, comes around.

“Researchers at ETH Zurich have now collaborated with an Israeli scientist to develop a means of storing extensive information in almost any object. ‘With this method, we can integrate 3D-​printing instructions into an object, so that after decades or even centuries, it will be possible to obtain those instructions directly from the object itself,’ explains Robert Grass, Professor at the Department of Chemistry and Applied Biosciences. The way of storing this information is the same as for living things: in DNA molecules. ”

“DNA of Things”

The complete “list includes a man convicted of reckless homicide, a convicted child rapist, a man who murdered his parents at age 16 and a woman who threw her newborn in the trash after giving birth in a flea market outhouse.”

One (particularly egregious and obviously corrupt) example:

Patrick Brian “Baker was convicted in 2017 of reckless homicide, robbery, impersonating a peace officer and tampering with evidence for his role in a 2014 home invasion that resulted in the death of Donald Mills. Baker had served just two years of his 19-year sentence when Bevin pardoned him to time served on Dec. 6.”

I’m guessing that the people who testified against him may not be happy to see him on the streets again.

Why would anyone free such a man so soon after such major crimes? I dunno. I guess it’s just a coincidence that Baker’s brother hosted a fundraiser for the lame-duck governor and donated to him over the years.