Wednesday, November 30, 2016
Anderson Cooper Has The Perfect Response To Trump’s Latest Freakout
CNN host Anderson Cooper said Donald Trump wants to violate two parts of the Constitution with his tweet urging loss of citizenship and jail time for burning the American flag.
But Cooper finds it even more baffling that Trump appears to spend his time watching cable news and firing off controversial tweets instead of getting ready for his upcoming job as president of the United States.
Speaking Tuesday night on “Anderson Cooper 360,” Cooper said:
“We are in uncharted waters with a president-elect who is continuing to tweet just as he did, maybe a little less, but as he did during the campaign. I mean, when I first heard that he was tweeting about something that was on this broadcast, a number of tweets again, factually incorrect tweets last night I kept thinking, ‘doesn’t he have, like, a briefing book on ISIS to be reading last night?’”
“I appreciate he’s watching the show,” Cooper said. “But what is he doing?”
See the full conversation above.
(h/t Mediaite)
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North Dakota Threatens $1000 Penalty To Quash Standing Rock Protests
CANNON BALL, N.D. – North Dakota officials on Tuesday moved to block supplies from reaching oil pipeline protesters at a camp near the construction site, threatening to use hefty fines to keep demonstrators from receiving food, building materials and even portable bathrooms.
Activists have spent months protesting plans to route the $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline beneath a lake near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation, saying the project poses a threat to water resources and sacred Native American sites.
State officials said on Tuesday they would fine anyone bringing prohibited items into the main protest camp following Governor Jack Dalrymple’s “emergency evacuation” order on Monday. Earlier, officials had warned of a physical blockade, but the governor’s office backed away from that.
Law enforcement would take a more “passive role” than enforcing a blockade, said Maxine Herr, a spokeswoman for the Morton County Sheriff’s Department.
“The governor is more interested in public safety than setting up a road block and turning people away,” Herr said by telephone.
Officers will stop vehicles they believe are headed to the camp and inform drivers they are committing an infraction and could be fined $1,000.
These penalties should serve as a hindrance, according to Cecily Fong, a spokeswoman for the North Dakota Department of Emergency Services.
“So that effectively is going to block that stuff (supplies), but there is not going to be a hard road block,” Fong said by telephone.
A spokeswoman from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe was not immediately available for comment.
North Dakota Governor-elect Doug Burgum, a Republican, declined to comment.
The 1,172-mile (1,885 km) pipeline project, owned by Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners LP, is mostly complete except for a segment planned to run under Lake Oahe, a reservoir formed by a dam on the Missouri River.
Thousands of people are protesting at camps located on U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land, north of the Cannonball River in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The main protest camp near Cannon Ball is called Oceti Sakowin, the original name of the Sioux, meaning Seven Council Fires.
Protest leaders said state officials and local law enforcement officers were “bullying” demonstrators with the threat of fines.
“It’s bogus and I don’t know about the legality of it,” said Kandi Mossett, an organizer with Indigenous Environmental Network. “We’re not afraid. We’re moving in and out of the camp at will. So people shouldn’t be afraid of coming and supporting the water protectors. They’ve been bullying us since day one.”
‘HARSH WINTER CONDITIONS’
Dalrymple’s evacuation order was issued on Monday due to the “harsh winter conditions.” Snow and wind gusts up to 45 mph (73 kph) were forecast for Tuesday, according to the National Weather Service.
Despite the sub-freezing temperatures, law enforcement on Nov. 21 used water cannons to disperse protesters who had blockaded a highway.
Demonstrators and law enforcement have clashed over the months since protests began, with demonstrators claiming excessive use of force by law enforcement.
On Tuesday, the National Lawyers Guild filed a class action in U.S. District Court in North Dakota on behalf of injured protesters, claiming local authorities in Morton and Stutsman counties used excessive force.
The civil rights complaint said there were no orders to disperse or warnings issued before local police turned water cannons and tear gas on the protest. The lawsuit seeks compensatory damages.
Stutsman County Auditor Casey Bradley said the county sheriff’s office was unaware of the lawsuit and unable to comment on the allegations.
Officers were justified in using water cannons because of the threat posed by demonstrators, Fong and Herr said. Law enforcement gave numerous warnings for protesters to disperse, they said.
North Dakota officials have issued several requests for additional help from federal law enforcement in light of the demonstrators. However, the Army Corps said Monday its order to evacuate the primary protest camp by Dec. 5 would not include forcibly removing people from the land.
The Obama administration in September postponed final approval of a Army Corps’ permit required to allow tunneling beneath the lake, a move intended to give federal officials more time to consult tribal leaders.
White House spokesman Josh Earnest said in a Tuesday news briefing that Obama believes law enforcement has “an obligation” to show restraint and protesters have a “responsibility” to protest peacefully.
In a related protest, prosecutors suspended charges against Deia Schlosberg, a documentary maker arrested while filming as environmental protesters attempted to shut down the flow of oil through pipelines carrying crude from Canada to the United States in October.
(Writing by Timothy Mclaughlin in Chicago; Additional reporting by David Gaffen and Mica Rosenberg in New York, Ernest Scheyder in Houston, Dan Whitcomb in Los Angeles, Roberta Rampton and Doina Chiacu in Washington.; Editing by Ben Klayman, Matthew Lewis and Andrew Hay)
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Environmentalists Ready For Battle After Trudeau Backs Pipelines
OTTAWA, Nov 29 – Canada on Tuesday approved Kinder Morgan Inc’s hotly contested plan to build a pipeline from the Alberta oil sands to the Pacific coast, setting up a battle with environmentalists who helped elect Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The Liberal government, under pressure from both green groups and the energy industry, said allowing Kinder Morgan to construct a second pipeline next to its existing Trans Mountain line would help ensure oil exports reach Asia and reduce reliance on the U.S. market.
“We are under no illusions that the decision we made today will be bitterly disputed by a number of people across the country,” Trudeau told reporters.
Ottawa imposed 157 binding conditions on the C$6.8 billion ($5.06 billion) project, which would nearly triple capacity on the artery to 890,000 barrels a day. Opponents say the risks of a spill are too large.
“As long as Kinder Morgan respects the stringent conditions …this project will get built because it’s in the national interest of Canadians,” said Trudeau.
The government also blocked Enbridge Inc’s Northern Gateway pipeline from Alberta to the Pacific province of British Columbia, as expected. Trudeau had long opposed the project, which would run through the Great Bear Rainforest.
Enbridge, however, will be allowed to replace the Canadian segments of its aging Line 3 from Alberta to Wisconsin, a proposed upgrade that had been less controversial than Northern Gateway. Enbridge said it expected the pipeline to enter service in 2019, pending U.S. regulatory approval.
Canada’s energy sector, hit hard by a two-year slump in oil prices, wants more pipelines to help ease bottlenecks in moving crude out of Alberta.
“It has been a long dark night for the people of Alberta … today we are finally seeing some morning light,” Alberta Premier Rachel Notley told reporters in Ottawa after talks with Trudeau.
“We’re getting a chance to sell to China and other new markets at better prices.”
Kinder Morgan said it planned to start work in September 2017 and should be finished by late 2019.
Environmental groups were quick to promise resistance.
“You will see the movement continue to escalate in the streets as the number of protests and actions continue to grow, in the courts, and at the ballot box here in (British Columbia) and beyond,” said Seven Biggs of climate group Stand.earth.
Trudeau, keen to show environmentalists he is not selling out to the energy industry, also said the government would ban tanker traffic along the northern coast of British Columbia.
Earlier this month he said Ottawa would toughen its response to oil spills at sea, which some saw as a signal Trans Mountain would be approved.
The Tsleil-Waututh aboriginal band in British Columbia, which says its land would be devastated by a spill, promised to oppose the pipeline by all legal means.
“We will file a judicial review … This is not the end of this pipeline issue for (us), this is the beginning of a long road,” said band member Charlene Aleck.
(With additional reporting by Nia Williams and Ethan Lou in Calgary and Nicole Mordant in Vancouver; Editing by Chris Reese, Meredith Mazzilli and Andrew Hay)
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GOP Quietly Tanks Effort To Include Women In The Draft
WASHINGTON A surprisingly strong and bipartisan effort to require women to register for the draft failed Tuesday, as negotiators on a defense bill indicated the provision would not be included in the final legislation.
The language had been tucked into the Senate version of the National Defense Authorization Act, which overwhelmingly passed that chamber in June. The provision also cleared a House committee, but GOP leaders later scrambled to remove it from their version of the NDAA before it reached the floor, as some in their party protested. That left its fate up in the air for months as negotiators worked behind closed doors to hammer out a final bill.
Top aides from armed services committees told reporters in a Tuesday briefing that the proposal was ultimately axed and, in its place, there will be the legislative equivalent of sending a policy idea to its grave: commissioning a study.
“We still require the study,” said one senior aide. “There’s a study and a commission to look at selective service and look at the structure and what it does and everything like that.”
Lawmakers who had been pushing for months to include women in the draft acknowledged it would have little practice impact, at least anytime soon; the United States has relied on an all-volunteer military force for decades. But many felt it was important to do anyway, to reflect the growing consensus that women are as capable of serving and leading in the military as men.
“There should not be one standard of what you have to be capable of to do certain jobs in the military one for men and one for women,” Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-Mo.) told The Huffington Post earlier this year. “But as long as we’re vigilant about that, women are just going to make us better.”
“I don’t think you want to take half your population off the sidelines in case of a national emergency,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who served in the Air Force for years, also said at the time.
The Obama administration already lifted the ban on women in serving combat units in 2015. Since then, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff endorsed expanding the draft to women, and the Congressional Budget Office found that doing so would actually reduce federal spending.
In the end, though, conservatives in Congress won this round, with their complaints about having to see women sent into combat.
“I cannot in good conscience vote to draft our daughters into the military, sending them off to war and forcing them into combat,” Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) said earlier this year. “I will continue my efforts to speak out against the effort to force America’s daughters into combat.”
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Tuesday, November 29, 2016
Gitmo prisoner claims Saudi ‘de-radicalization’ program praised by White House is a sham
FILE – In this June 27, 2006 file photo, reviewed by a U.S. Department of Defense official, U.S. military guards walk within Camp Delta military-run prison, at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba. (AP Photo/Brennan Linsley, File)
Counterterrorism experts have long suspected Saudi Arabias rehabilitation center for terrorists does a poor job of de-radicalizing jihadists. But a Saudi detainee at Guantanamo Bay now reveals its actually a recruiting and training factory for jihad.
According to recently declassified documents, senior Al Qaeda operative Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi told a Gitmo parole board that the Saudi government has been encouraging previously released prisoners to rejoin the jihad at its terrorist reform school, officially known as the Prince Mohammed bin Naif Counseling and Care Center.
The Obama administration has praised the effectiveness of the Saudi rehab program which uses art therapy, swimming, ping-pong, PlayStation and soccer to de-radicalize terrorists and conditioned the release of dozens of Gitmo prisoners, including former Usama bin Laden bodyguards, on their entry in the controversial program.
Al-Sharbi dropped a bombshell on the Gitmo parole board at his hearing earlier this year, when he informed members that the Saudi kingdom was playing them for suckers.
You guys want to send me back to Saudi Arabia because you believe there is a de-radicalization program on the surface. True. You are 100 percent right, there is a strong externally, a strong de-radicalization program, al-Sharbi testified. But make no mistake, underneath there is a hidden radicalization program, he added. There is a very hidden strong way stronger in magnitude broader in financing, in all that.
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How Big Will the Average American’s Social Security Check Be in 2017?
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Three dead, five others sickened after church’s Thanksgiving dinner
This undated photo shows an American Legion hall in Antioch, Calif. Three people died and five others were sickened after eating a Thanksgiving dinner served here by a local church. (KTVU)
Three people have died and five more were sickened after eating Thanksgiving dinner at an event organized by a church in the San Francisco Bay Area, health officials said Monday.
Sutter Delta Medical Center in Antioch, Calif. said it received eight patients with probable symptoms of foodborne illness Friday and Saturday. Three of the patients died, four patients were treated and released and one remains hospitalized.
All eight lived at the same assisted living facility and ate the feast at the American Legion Hall in Antioch along with other residents and staff members who did not get sick, Contra Costa County Deputy Health Officer Dr. Louise McNitt said.
It remains unclear exactly what caused the illness, McNitt said, later adding, “we do not believe there is any risk to the general public.”
KTVU reported that the Friday dinner at the local American Legion hall was hosted by Golden Hills Community Church and was meant to serve senior citizens, homeless people, and others who would have been alone on Thanksgiving.
Volunteers prepared mashed potatoes, green beans and stuffing on site, at a commercial-grade facility. The rest of the meal, including turkey, bread and pies, was donated by other food facilities, Contra Costa County Environmental Health Director Dr. Marilyn Underwood told the Associated Press.
McNitt said that no other reports of illness related to the dinner have been received and that officials were trying to determine if there were other people who got sick but didn’t seek medical care.
McNitt and Underwood declined to provide the name of the living facility or any details about the eight patients citing patient privacy concerns.
Contra Costa County coroner’s officials said they could not release the names of those who died pending notification of next of kin.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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Watters’ World: History of Christmas edition
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Patagonia Had $10 Million In Sales On Black Friday And Is Donating Every Cent To Save The Planet
Patagonia saw an astounding $10 million in Black Friday sales five times its own expectations and, as promised, will donate every cent toward helping save the environment.
The high-end outdoor apparel and gear retailer announced the record-breaking haul Monday, saying the “enormous love” its customers showed to the planet will benefit hundreds of grassroots environmental organizations around the world.
Company spokeswoman Corley Kenna told The Huffington Post that the idea which customers reportedly took to calling a “fundraiser for the earth” surfaced during an internal brainstorming meeting following the U.S. presidential election. Patagonia, she said, was looking for something to showcase the importance of the environment and climate change.
“We felt that these were issues that united us and I think this is a demonstration that people agree,” Kenna told HuffPost. “Our customers agree.”
Patagonia gear will no doubt be a common sight this winter season. But it’s possible we won’t see President-elect Donald Trump sporting one of the company’s fleece jackets anytime soon.
Trump has repeatedly called climate change a “hoax” and is surrounding himself with like-minded deniers. He has promised to pull the U.S. out of the historic Paris climate deal, cut all federal spending on the issue, increase America’s production of coal, oil and natural gas, and do away with Obama administration regulations aimed at cutting emissions.
The Republican, who prides himself on his business savvy, has received backlash from hundreds of big businesses, including Patagonia, which say failure to keep the U.S. in the Paris pact “puts American prosperity at risk.”
Patagonia said in a release that the money generated from its Black Friday initiative will go to grassroots environmental groups many of which are small, underfunded and under the radar that are “working on the front lines to protect our air, water and soil for future generations.”
“The science is telling us loud and clear: We have a problem,” the company said. “By getting active in communities, we can raise our voices to defend policies and regulations that will protect wild places and wildlife, reduce carbon emissions, build a modern energy economy based on investment in renewables, and, most crucially, ensure the United States remains fully committed to the vital goals set forth in the Paris Agreement on climate change.”
Patagonia has been a longtime steward of protecting the environment, donating 1 percent of its daily global sales to green causes and urging its customers to buy fewer jackets to combat the fashion industry’s wasteful culture. Earlier this month, it announced itsre\\\collection line of jackets and other gear, which are made of “as many recycled materials as possible.”
Kenna told HuffPost the company’s Black Friday initiative didn’t include discounted items, but still drew thousands of first-time Patagonia customers.
“We’re just really humbled and grateful to our customers for coming out,” Kenna said.
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Justifying Torture: CIA Psychologist’s Book Defends His Role
WASHINGTON A former CIA contractor who is being sued for his role in the spy agency’s torture program argues in a forthcoming book that his actions were legal, morally justified and necessary to protect Americans from terrorist attacks.
In “Enhanced Interrogation: Inside the Minds and Motives of the Islamic Terrorists Trying to Destroy America,” James Mitchell and his coauthor, Bill Harlow, deliver a firsthand account of how he joined the CIA’s interrogation program in 2002 as an adviser and eventually became one of the agency’s top interrogators, using techniques now widely recognized as torture against suspected al Qaeda members imprisoned at secret torture locations, known as black sites.
In his book, Mitchell is dismissive of former interrogators who say that building rapport with prisoners is more effective than violent coercion. The CIA’s “enhanced interrogation techniques,” Mitchell says, saved lives.
Mitchell was one of two psychologists hired by the CIA in 2002 to help develop ways to break down detainees’ ability to resist interrogations. He and his colleague John “Bruce” Jessen worked at the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) school, where they taught U.S. troops how to endure brutal treatment if they were taken captive by a country that does not adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Under Mitchell and Jessen’s guidance, the CIA used modified SERE techniques against suspected terrorists between 2002 and 2008.
President Barack Obama banned enhanced interrogation techniques in 2009, and the Senate Intelligence Committee released a scathing report on the CIA program, using code names for Mitchell and Jessen, in 2014. Mitchell admitted his role in the program to Vice News in 2014, but his book, which will be released Tuesday, is his comprehensive defense of his work with the CIA and the methods they used.
Mitchell, one of the few public faces of the CIA’s torture program, may appear in court next year in a civil case brought by former CIA black site prisoners. He has a vested interest in convincing readers that he was motivated by a sense of patriotic duty and that the interrogation techniques used by the CIA were less horrifying than described in a 500-page report by its Senate overseers.
Here are the top takeaways:
Mitchell admits to crafting the torture program and personally interrogating prisoners.
Two survivors of the CIA’s torture program and the family of one man who died in CIA custody are suing Mitchell and Jessen for damages for their role in the torture program. The psychologists’ lawyers argued earlier this year that the pair “did not create or establish the CIA enhanced interrogation program; they did not make decisions about Plaintiffs’ capture, treatment, confinement conditions, and interrogations; and they did not perform, supervise or control Plaintiffs’ interrogations.”
The case is scheduled to go to trial next year, and it will be hard for the lawyers to continue making this argument. In his book, Mitchell admits to almost the exact opposite.
“Jose [Rodriguez] not only wanted me to help them craft the program, he wanted me to conduct the interrogations using [enhanced interrogation techniques] myself,” Mitchell writes, referring to the then-head of the CIA’s counterterrorism center.
Throughout the book, Mitchell provides thorough descriptions of how he and Jessen personally interrogated CIA prisoners using techniques such as slamming them into a wall and waterboarding them. Mitchell interrogated “fourteen of the most senior so-called high-value detainees in U.S. custody,” according to his biography in the back of the book.
Mitchell tried to get the Navy to stop using waterboarding in SERE training because it was too brutal.
Defendants of the CIA’s torture program point to the fact that U.S. troops are exposed to the interrogation techniques in SERE training as evidence that the methods aren’t that bad. But before they signed on to work with the CIA, Mitchell and Jessen “spent years trying to get the Navy SERE School to abandon its use of waterboarding not because it didn’t work, but because we thought it was too effective,” Mitchell wrote. “One hundred percent of the warfighters exposed to it in training capitulated even if it cost them their jobs.”
Mitchell and Jessen personally waterboarded Abu Zubaydah, the first prisoner to enter the CIA’s torture program. One waterboarding session caused Zubaydah to throw up his food. Mitchell responded by shortening the period of time of the simulated drowning but made sure to expose him to “one or two more short pours so that he didn’t get the idea that a dramatic display would stop the procedures.”
Mitchell says Zubaydah lost his eye because of a botched plastic surgery.
Even after the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, which detailed torture techniques the CIA used against Zubaydah, there is no public record of how he lost his left eye.
Mitchell claims that Zubaydah told him during an interrogation that he had plastic surgery so he could avoid capture while traveling. “The Pakistani doctor who did it was, in his words, a ‘quack,’” Mitchell says, and the procedure made him go blind in one eye.
The CIA, which reviewed Mitchell’s book to make sure it didn’t disclose classified information, would not confirm Mitchell’s account of how Zubaydah lost his eye. Joseph Margulies, Zubaydah’s lawyer, also declined to comment.
There were rogue interrogators who used torture techniques they weren’t authorized to use.
Mitchell portrays himself as a cautious interrogator who followed the CIA’s rules. He is extremely critical of another interrogator whom he describes as a rogue operator who used interrogation techniques that went outside of the CIA’s mandate. “I wondered how much adolescent dick checking I’d have to put up with from this guy,” Mitchell writes of their first encounter at the end of 2002.
That interrogator forced Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged plotter of the USS Cole bombing, into positions that caused the prisoner to scream and risked dislocating his shoulders, Mitchell says. He writes that he was surprised when the on-site medical staff failed to intervene.
Mitchell says he later watched the interrogator splash Nashiri with cold water “while using a stiff-bristled brush to scrub his ass and balls and then his mouth.” He says he saw the interrogator blow cigar smoke into Nashiri’s face until he became nauseated.
When Mitchell reported the incident to the chief and deputy chief of the CIA’s Rendition, Detention, and Interrogation Group, the deputy chief called Mitchell a “pussy” and a “bleeding heart liberal who cared more about the feelings of a ‘fucking terrorist’ than about the safety of the American people,” Mitchell writes.
Mitchell believes the media and the Democrats are out to get him.
In his book, Mitchell recalls a conversation he claims to have had with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged planner of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. “He prophetically predicted that the press and some members of my own government would turn on me and Bruce and others like us who took aggressive action to prevent the next 9/11 attack and save American lives,” Mitchell writes.
One of the last chapters of Mitchell’s book, “KSM’s Prophecy Comes True,” refers to that prediction. It details the Obama administration’s investigation into the CIA torture program (which concluded with no charges against anyone involved in the program), the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report, which was shunned by the committee’s Republicans, and the media’s coverage of the events when they “get the torture bug” and “lose all reason.”
Mitchell claims that Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who spearheaded the Senate report on the agency’s torture program, “cherry-picked” documents that made him and other CIA personnel look bad and declined to interview them because it would challenge her narrative.
“There was no cherry-picking of facts,” Feinstein spokesman Tom Mentzer wrote in an email. “Intelligence Committee staff reviewed more than 6.3 million pages of CIA records. The final study is 6,700 pages long and backed up by 38,000 footnotes. It’s an exhaustive chronicle of the detention and interrogation program, and the 500-page executive summary is a broad overview of what is covered in the longer, still-classified study.”
The one good thing about the Senate report, Mitchell acknowledges, is that it allowed him to tell his side of the story for the first time. Ironically, the declassification of the report’s executive summary led the Obama administration to declassify some information about techniques used in the CIA’s interrogation program, making it possible for Mitchell to respond publicly to years’ worth of material that has been written about him.
He doesn’t think the CIA will torture again.
President-elect Donald Trump, who promised on the campaign trail to bring back waterboarding, has since flip-flopped on his support for reinstating torture. Mitchell believes that with the rise of ISIS, the U.S. is in more danger than it was before the Sept. 11 attacks.
Mitchell is still haunted by some of the techniques he used against detainees, he writes, but he doesn’t regret it. He maintains that “enhanced interrogation techniques” produced intelligence that non-coercive forms of interrogation could not and believes that bringing back these techniques could save lives.
Even so, he writes, “I have a hard time imagining responsible individuals in the intelligence community queuing up to employ EITs after seeing how those of us who did so after 9/11 were treated.
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Mike Pence Supporter Angry Over ‘Hamilton’ Protest Charged In Racist Attack On Asian Diner Patrons
A supporter of Vice President-elect Mike Pence faces a court hearing next month after police said he called two women in a New York City diner racist names and pepper-sprayed a bystander who defended them.
Frank Camino, 56, is scheduled to appear in court on Dec. 19 on charges of assault with intent to cause physical injury, attempted assault, recklessly causing injury and harassment in the second degree, local news website Gothamist reported.
Police arrested him early Nov. 20 at a diner after he reportedly called two Chinese-American women “c**ts” and “whores” and said they should “go back to Tokyo,” the website reported. Then he pepper-sprayed a man who stepped up to defend the women and said he doesn’t “tolerate racism,” according to a witness. Gothamist couldn’t reach Camino for comment.
One of the women, Sally Wen Mao, said the “loud, angry” man tore into her and a friend after she asked him to lower his voice. He had been griping how “disgusting” and “racist” the cast of the hit Broadway musical “Hamilton” was to issue an appeal to Vice President-elect Mike Pence, according to Mao, a 29-year-old Chinese-American poet.
Mao wrote about the experience on Twitter and Facebook.
Camino reportedly entered the Lower East Side Coffee Shop alone after midnight and sat behind Mao and her friend, who had just come from an event celebrating Asian-American culture, Gothamist reported.
“When I was at the diner with my friend, we were talking directly about xenophobia in America and white male rage and how much it impacts us, our sense of humanity,” Mao, an Asian-American Studies educator for The City University of New York, told The Huffington Post.
Camino began talking loudly to a diner employee about the “Hamilton” cast’s address to Pence the previous weekend and “how disgusting and ‘racist’ they were,” Mao wrote in a Facebook post. She said Camino also complained about “so-called minorities.”
Mao said the man turned his aggression toward her and her friend when she asked him to lower his voice. Even after the women switched tables, the man continued ranting, telling them to “go Back to Tokyo” and calling them misogynistic slurs, Mao said.
Mao said she stood and splashed water from her cup into his face.
“His spite and his malice and his loudness reinforced how we were feeling,” Mao said. “I had no patience for that kind of tirade. In that moment, I really needed to take a stand.”
Camino threatened to have the women arrested, called the police and blocked the diner entrance so no one could leave, according to Marie Solis, a Mic.com staff writer who witnessed the confrontation and wrote an essay about it.
“My friends and I asked Mao and [her friend] to sit with us because we had all been genuinely fearful that this man, who was clearly angry and dangerous, would hurt them,” Solis wrote.
As Camino continued his racist rant, Mao threw a second cup of water at him.
Police soon arrived and took statements from those involved. Officers told Mao she wouldn’t be charged and allowed her and her friend to leave. After the officers walked outside, another customer approached Camino and told him, “I don’t tolerate racism,” according to Solis.
Solis described Camino’s response in her essay:
The man didn’t take well to this comment. “I wasn’t being racist,” he insisted. “I just told them to go back to Tokyo.”
I could sense things were going to escalate…
At that moment, though, a lot of things happened very quickly: I heard shouts and then turned to see the man stand up, reach into his pocket and pull out pepper spray, which he sprayed directly into the eyes of the patron who had called him out on his racism.
Solis ran outside to alert the police officers. Mao said she later learned the man hit with pepper spray was treated at a hospital.
“The rage and venom of these men know no limit now that this regime has been voted into place,” Mao wrote on Facebook, referring to the Trump administration.
“It was always there,” Mao added, “but now many like this man feel the need to inflict their rage over everyone around them, even in public spaces.”
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North Carolina State Board Of Elections Dismisses Some Of Pat McCrorys Election Protests
North Carolina’s State Board of Elections ordered local election boards Monday night to dismiss any election protest from Gov. Pat McCrory (R) that “merely disputes the eligibility of a voter.”
The dismissal follows election protests filed in 52 counties by the McCrory campaign alleging that ballots were cast by dead people, felons or voters who cast ballots in multiple states (even though it’s unlikely voter fraud is the reason behind any irregularities).
McCrory officially filed for a statewide recount on Nov. 22, after hinting that he would do so earlier this month. His opponent, North Carolina Attorney General Roy Cooper (D), declared victory over McCrory on Nov. 9.
“This is a devastating blow to the McCrory campaign and further evidence that there is no path to victory for Governor McCrory,” said Trey Nix, the campaign manager for Cooper for NC, in a statement. “Roy Cooper’s lead has grown to over 9,000 votes as Republican claims of voter fraud have been routinely rejected by members of their own party. It’s time for Governor McCrory to respect the will of the voters.”
County boards must continue to investigate claims surrounding possible violations of election law and allegations that would affect enough votes to alter the outcome of the race. Cooper is ahead by 9,700 votes as of Monday night, according to state election counts.
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Here’s A Look Inside Election Protection Efforts In North Carolina
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Monday, November 28, 2016
Some clever jokester renamed Trump Tower on Google Maps
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Want an Election Escape? The Internet Doesnt Work Like That
After the election, my Boston online moms group melted down. Not exactly surprising, right? Boston is a city so blue its practically navy—and that blue resembled nothing quite so much as a deep bruise the night Donald Trump was elected president. But after this particular electionan election, it’s fair to say, unlike any other the US has seen in modern historythe Garden Moms faced a different kind of crisis. People who thought they were in a space where they could talk freely about the election found they couldn’t talk to each other.
The cracks started to show on Election Night. A mom started a thread asking how everyone was going to explain the results to their children—to their daughters—when they woke up on Wednesday. But posters to the thread were writing as if everyone in the group was equally horrified about what had happened.
When a nation experiences upheaval, barriers of discourse can break down.
A day later, the thread vanished without explanation. And, since this is the internet, a new thread sprang up, outraged. “I was dismayed to realize that the entire very thoughtful and I thought very respectful thread about how to explain the election results to our children, has been removed, and is no longer available online,” a mom wrote. Another said shed been a member for 10 years but was now considering leaving the group.
When a nation experiences upheaval, barriers of discourse can break down. The Real World generation might put it like this: people stop being polite and start getting real. “Unexpected and history-transforming events move to the center stage of both what is on everyone’s mind and also what people seek to comprehend,” says University of Chicago anthropologist Michael Silverstein, who studies how language functions in society. People are seeking to reassure one another that there is “still a future,” he says, “still something ‘normal’ in the environment of their lives.
In that process, such conversations start to invade “social areas that are usually sheltered from heated political discussions,” says Angle Christin, professor of communication at Stanford. She says social media, including seemingly anodyne environments like a parenting forum, actually accentuate the problem because they blend the private and public.
“This ambiguity makes discussions particularly volatile and fraught with polarization and conflict,” she says. “It’s one thing to read a furious op-ed on a news website, another to see strong political position-taking from someone with whom you mostly interacted about private or intimate topics until then.”
That volatility was on clear display on Garden Moms. Cara, a co-moderator who asked not to be identified by her full name, jumped in to say that she and another moderator had deleted the thread because the topic was essentially unanswerable. Anyway, they said the answers had grown redundant. Cara told me that she was disturbed by the condescending tone she thought the thread was taking. She didn’t think it was the right place for Hillary voters to express how much better they were than Donald Trump supporters, which is what she thought was happening.
But the explanation did not mollify the forum. After two more days of outraged comments, Cara came back in anguish. She referenced vague threats that some members may have received or felt. She apologized but stood by her decision. Everything had gotten out of control. She resigned her leadership post.
A parenting forum actually accentuates the problem because it blends the private and public.
It’s unclear if anyone other than Cara felt the thread was threatening, and two days later, the remaining leadership republished the old thread. They apologized and appealed to the community to remember that they were trying their best. They didnt want to censor. They didnt want to hurt. And they gave a warning about the threats Cara had mentioned, though they played them down: maybe dont include your private email or phone number in posts going forward, Garden Moms. Some rejoiced. Others were appalled that the thread had been restored when it may have caused some people heartache. But mostly, no one said anything. People were trying to move on.
Edward Schiappa, a professor of communication and rhetoric at MIT, hopes they won’t. He remembers his wife’s own online forum for moms getting heated over the Bush-Gore election in 2000. “Even a discussion board devoted to American Girl Dolls gets political from time to time!” he says. But Schiappa believes this election is different and that the response to it is justifiably amplified. “This really is an extraordinary time, and Trump really should not be normalized by people just shrugging and going back to business as usual,” he says. “It is good that people are paying attention.”
In the days since the thread went back up, moms have shied away from politics. Perhaps they want to return to a more compartmentalized world, to find a safe space politics won’t violate. But it’s not. It’s just like the rest of America, full of different kinds of people with different kinds of beliefs, a hive of anxiety and rage and worry and fear. Just with a lot of potty training advice thrown in.
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Facebooks Stumbles Expose Flaws in Its Plan to Rule Advertising
The internet was supposed to mean a whole new world for the business of advertising. Gobs of data let advertisers become wildly efficient in who they target and how they measure results. Consumers also ostensibly win: If you’re in the market want a quality winter coat, the thinking goes, you’re not going to be annoyed if you see an ad for one.
In this new world, Facebook is on top. It knows so much about its users that it can deliver ads precisely calibrated for virtually any demographic you can dream of, from suburban grandmothers to millennials living abroad. But lately, Facebook has faltered, exposing cracks in the basic assumptions about the superiority of digital advertisingthe business model on which so much of the internet has run for the past 20 years.
Last week, Facebook said it found flaws in the metrics it reported to advertisersthe measurements by which those advertisers judge the success of their ad campaigns on the platform. The company said it overstated the reach of Facebook Pages and Instant Articles, as well as its count of referrals to apps from ads. This admission of miscounting came just a few months after Facebook said it had inflated how much time on average viewers spent watching video ads for two years.
Facebook has promised more transparency. But in media and advertising circles, some critics are starting to ask whether they’ve been spending their money wisely on Facebook. Were they duped into making costly business decisions based on wrong information? Yes, Facebook is still an enormously powerful platform. Close to a fifth of the worlds population checks the social network every day, and all those eyeballs are incredibly valuable to advertisers and publishers. But the revelation that it exaggerated its own reach points to real flaws in the narrative about what Facebookand indeed, digital advertising on the wholecan accomplish.
Miscounting Metrics
Facebook says it has an incredibly robust system that offers up to 220 different ways to measure how well advertisers’ ads do. But Facebook’s sterling reputation has left advertisers all the more confounded by how Facebook’s miscounts could have happened in the first place. Facebook is supposed to be the best of the best, the cream of the crop, with advertisers spending good money with them, says Brian Wieser, a media industry analyst at Pivotal Research. Theres an expectation that you dont get this thing wrong.
‘Facebook is supposed to be the best of the best. Theres an expectation that you dont get this thing wrong.’
And yet Facebook did. It overstated app referrals by 6 percent on average by counting not only posts that directed traffic back to the app makers website or app but also clicks to view photos or video that kept a user inside of Facebook. Facebook Pagesthe pages brands maintain as their home bases on the sitedouble-counted repeat visitors, leading to greatly exaggerated estimates of the size of their audiences. (The company said page owners should be prepared to see their “28-day reach” fall by 55 percent.) Facebook also said that, due to a math error, it estimated audiences were spending 7 to 8 percent more time reading fast-loading Instant Articles than they really were.
The company doesnt say exactly how it came to discover these new discrepancies, pointing to bugs in the system. But Wieser says its likely that Facebook looked into the issue more deeply after finding the mistake in counting that video metric back in October. Pick your analogy or theory, Wieser says. The cockroach theory, where you see one somewhere, then you see more, and say, geez, this must be something systemic. Or the Comey analogy: the problem was brought up then seemed to be settled, but then it comes up again. Whatever the case, he says, the mistakes definitely amount to a sackable offense. (Facebook says it has established what it’s calling a measurement council to respond to advertisers’ concerns.)
But this still doesn’t get atwhat Wieser sees as the biggerproblem: Facebook “grading its own homework.” You cant get a report on Facebook metrics from anywhere elseonly from Facebook.And Facebook defines what those metrics are. In the wake of its most recent debacle, the company did pledge to work with third-party industry reviewers, something Rob Norman, chief digital officer of powerhouse media buyer GroupM, applauds. But these reviewers can only retroactively verify Facebook’s metrics. They can’t get an independent view into the data themselves.
Normanwants to be able to analyze the activity of advertisers and their competitors on Facebook as italready can on most other media, including TV and print. On Facebook, advertisers can see whether a video has been watched andhow long it’s been viewed for. But they still can’t get any information on, say, how often a brands rival runs video ads on Facebook.In Norman’s view, the information most useful to ad buyers is still not the information Facebook is choosing to release. “I genuinely dont know whether, if we had the information we wanted, we would be spending more, the same, or less money on Facebook,” Norman says. “But what I do know is that I would be able to look at Facebook advertising in the broader context of all advertising.”
The data digital platforms provide to advertisers is the medium’s key selling point. To be fair, Norman says he never thought Facebook was being intentionally misleading by misreporting its metrics.But when Facebook as agatekeeper doesn’t seem to beoffering the right data in the first place, the pitch for digital advertising becomes less convincing.
Data, Data, Data
Still, its impossible to imagine running a digital ad campaign today without running some part of it on Facebook. Trying to get elected? You can target ads for specific congressional districts. Selling mattresses? Facebook knows which users just moved. You can target people for their tastes, too: restaurant ads for Italian food connoisseurs, or furniture ads for fans of mid-century modern. Because your history, preferences, location, and network of friends are all part of Facebooks data set, how could ad targeting not work? The numbers make the company look infallible: in 2015, Facebook pulled in $17 billion in ad revenue, a 49 percent increase compared to one year ago. It boasts 1.8 billion monthly usersmore than the population of China.
Targeting is at the core of what Facebook advertising offers. And the narrower the targeting gets, the more expensive Facebook charges for an ad.
‘The pendulum has swung about as far as it can where you can lose your job for not buying ads on Facebook.’
But what if the problem isn’t the technology but the way Facebook conceives of consumers themselves?
“Facebook somehow contemplates a world where, if I owned a skateboard company, I only show a skateboard ad to men aged 18 to 25,” says Benjamin Edelman, a Harvard Business School associate professor who studies online advertising. “So all the other customersthe grandma who wants to buy a skateboard for her grandson, the 40-year-old who wants to relive his childhoodId totally miss them. Whats the point?”
Its “a shock” that so many advertisers buy into Facebook when it only seems to play to peoples worst preconceptions of who customers are and whos interested in what, Edelman says. Those preconceptionsmight lead to unsophisticated and inflexible targeting that fails to address other markets advertisers hope to reach. They might even, as a recent ProPublica investigation found, promote racial bias. Targeting does make sense for some—say, alocal businessownerwho wants to let her neighbors know shejustopened a new shop in town. But what about the multinational consumer goods companies of the world? Youll buy Johnson and Johnsons household products if the store across the street from where you live carries them, Edelman argues—whether or not J&J decided to take out ads on Facebook.
Despite all the uncertainty, ad buyers are hardly ready to abandon Facebook.
Facebook may or may not be the best place for advertisers to spend their dollars. Either way, many in the ad industry say it’s time to retire the idea that digital advertising is closer to perfect than other kinds of advertising. “The idea that digital was this perfect nirvana was a view that was never reflected in reality,” says Wieser. If some advertisers were surprised that Facebook’s metrics weren’t perfect, he says, they weren’t paying close enough attention. After all, the very idea of what counts as success in digital advertising is still in flux. Just look at how different tech companies disagree on what to call a video view. Does a partially obstructed video view count? How long does a user need to watch it? Should they get to the end of the clip? And what about ad fraud caused by software like ad blockers?
“Ad-supported digital media covers an almost countless number of variations, many of which bear no resemblance to anything that came before,” says Randall Rothenberg, president and CEO of the Interactive Advertising Bureau, an industry trade group.
Despite all that uncertainty, ad buyers are hardly ready to abandon Facebook. No matter how unclear the metrics of success on the platform really are, whether through miscounting or simply lack of a long enough track record, advertisers don’t feel they can afford to wait to figure it out before committing their dollars. “The pendulum has swung about as far as it can where you can lose your job for not buying ads on Facebook, but you keep your job for not buying ad space in The New York Times,” Edelman says. If it does start to swing back, he says, it may be due to incidents like reporting bad numbers to advertisersthe real customers who keep the social network in business. Facebook may be powerful. But as these cracks show, it’s not foolproof.
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Cyber Monday 2016: The Best Online Shopping Deals
Back at work and still a little sleepy? Wake up with these hot deals. We’ve rounded up the best of the bargains for the unofficial holiday known as Cyber Monday. For the past few years, online retailers have been saving their best deals and deepest cuts for the Monday after the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s great news for people who didn’t want to brave the stores, or who were just too busy playing VR games to do their shopping during their downtime. Now blow off that morning meeting and get shopping.
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Flee Your Family Aboard This Flying Saucer Concept
If you’re in lockdown mode with the family this weekend, one good way to escape is to hop in the car and cruise around town for an hour. But why restrict your needed liberty to the ground, when you could zoom around the air in a flying saucer?
I based this concept on the vehicles from The Jetsons TV show, but this way of getting around isn’t so fictional: In May, Franky Zapata took his jet-powered “Flyboard” 90 feet in the air, at 55 miles an hour. If he’s right in saying it could hit 100 mph and reach 10,000 feet, then a practical application of this technology can’t be too far off.
My take on the idea, the Jexet, would be the size of a small car, with room for one person. Five jet thrusters sitting under the fuselage, with fuel tanks built into the frame on opposing sides, would provide the power for vertical takeoffs and landings, plus horizontal flight.
An onboard system would help control and stabilize the Jexet in flight, but the human inside would need some training to fly the thing and understand aerodynamics and aviation regulations.
LED landing lights, built-in navigation, and an easy-to-read dashboard would make it easier to zip around. Backup thrusters, interior and exterior airbags, and a parachute could combine to keep everybody safe in case of problems.
Uber says it wants to help create a world of flying cars, but needs other players to make the technology happen. So maybe the Jexet has a place in the sky after all.
I’d like to thank Adolfo Esquivel, the Montreal-based freelance industrial designer who created the renderings of the Jexet.
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The Evolution of Airline Cooking Tech, From Quicklime to Sous Vide
Think about airplane food and you may sigh with longing or groan with dread. But whatever class you sit in, you should know that filling that traytook a lot of effort. Not just prep work in the galley or the cooking down on land, but decades of technological innovation.
Because if you think sitting in a metal tube at 30,000 feet is hard, try cooking a steak up there. Severe safety regulations, eviscerating weight and space considerations, and the logistics of air travel transform simple tasks into feats of engineering.
So before you hit the sky this travel season, check out this history of gadgets and food hacks that made inflight feasting easier, cheaper, safer, and—yes—tastier.
Controlled Kaboom: 1836
Beforethe age of commercial airliners, giant hotair balloonscarriedEurope’s one percenters aloft. Lighting a match, let alone a stove, wasverboten in these cramped balloons, but that didn’t stop crews fromcooking up a mess of fancy foods. In his history of airline food, Richard Foss writes that engineers made nifty ovens by combining quicklime andwater, producing a chemical reaction that cranks out heat as a byproduct. If the cooks handled thehighly explosive process just right, they could sear a steak with nary a flame.
1937: The Kitchen Takes Off
In the early days of American air service,the go-to meal was cold fried chicken. Thankfully, United Airlines eventually switched over to the new DC-3, which came withkitchengalleys that offered countertop prep spaces and interlocking thermoses for coffee and tea, according toFoss. They still didn’t have a way to reheat food in the air, but they could at least offer warm drinks and packdifferent sortsof sandwiches and snacks in insulated compartments. Today, most galleys follow a similar format of latched drawer compartments and modules, while the fanciest jets carry theregalia of a Michelin-starred prep kitchen.
1958: Five Minutes of Fame
Pan-Am was an early leader in airline luxury, knownfor its impeccable food service. The secretto its culinarysuccesswas the five-minute oven. The airline made longwindedTV adstrumpeting the wonders of newer, faster commercial jets equipped with glorified toaster ovens that could reheat pre-made meals in just 300 seconds. Simple enough by today’s standards, but it ushered in an era whereflying meant eating piping hot comfort food—not just cold sandwiches.
1960s: A Trip Down the Aisle
Asairlines started the unloveable tradition of cramming seats closer and closer together,flight attendants needed an efficient way to serve food and drink throughout the plane. The first iterations of the insulated trolley cart let them push narrow trays full of hot and cold food down the aisles, keeping things at the ideal temperature without endless darting between the galley and the cabin. Today’s trollies may not seem high tech, but internal cooling and heating systems, interlocking compartments, and locking wheels have made them safer and more capableyear after year.
2009: The Water Bath
Before you can reheat food in the air, you must cook it to just the right temperature on the ground. Not the easiest thing to do for huge amounts and varieties of meats and veggies.The advent of sous vide—submerging vacuum-sealed foodin a temperature-controlled water bath—gavecooks more control over the amount of doneness. As themachinesbecame widely available and affordable around2009, everyone from United Airlines to JetBlue adopted the method.
Someday: Mr Robot (Waiter)
In the not-so-far-off future, you may be able to fetch your food on demand from robots orconveyor belts that pop out from the floor to serve you. Engineers at Zodiac Aerospace have been working on an automatic serving contraption for years now, though it’s not entirely clear if their patented versionwill ever make its way into passenger planes. Others have been trying to invent the same kind ofrobotic serving system since the 1960s,without luck.But hey, we can dream!
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Delta apologizes for not kicking belligerent pro-Trump passenger off plane
Aug. 8, 2015: Delta Airlines are parked at gates at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport in Washington, D.C. (REUTERS/Joshua Roberts)
ALLENTOWN, Pa. – Delta Air Lines is apologizing for not removing a passenger from a flight to Pennsylvania who rudely professed his support for President-elect Donald Trump and insulted those who didn’t.
The (Allentown) Morning Call first reported on a video posted on Facebook by a fellow passenger on the Tuesday flight from Atlanta to Allentown. The video shows the man standing in the aisle, yelling and insulting Hillary Clinton supporters.
In the video, the man asks loudly: “We got some Hillary bitches on here?”
Referring to Trump’s victory, he says: “If you don’t like it, too bad.”
Delta said on its website Saturday that it is “sorry this disruption happened” and says the airline is responsible for “ensuring all customers feel safe and comfortable.”
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Bernie Sanders Has A Plan To Back Up A Major Trump Campaign Promise
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt) said he will pursue new laws to ensure that President-elect Donald Trump’s lofty campaign trail promises to keep U.S. factory jobs in the country come to pass.
“I will soon be introducing legislation to make sure that Donald Trump keeps his promise to prevent the outsourcing of American jobs,” Sanders said in a statement Saturday. “For the sake of American workers, this is a promise that cannot and must not be broken.”
In his announcement for the forthcoming Outsourcing Prevention Act, Sanders seized on Trump’s oft-repeated campaign pledge to stop Fortune 500 company United Technologies from shipping 2,100 jobs to Mexico.
In February, the company’s announcement of forthcoming layoffs went viral. A secretly made recording of the meeting shows workers for Carrier, United Technologies’ rooftop air conditioning division, jeering as they learn their operations in Indianapolis and Huntington, Indiana, are headed to Mexico.
Carrier’s unionized workers and earn between $15 to $26 an hour; workers in the company’s new plant in Monterrey, Mexico, would earn that much in a day, the New York Times reports.
Trump invoked Carrier’s story throughout his campaign, both to show his commitment to the interests of working-class voters and to blast trade deals like NAFTA. He promised that, as president, he would convince United Technology bosses to remain in the U.S. or else slap the company with a 35 percent tax.
Sanders on Saturday said that Trump should use defense contracts held by United Technologies which has security system and aerospace divisions as leverage.
“I call on Mr. Trump to make it clear to the CEO of United Technologies that if his firm wants to receive another defense contract from the taxpayers of this country, it must not move these plants to Mexico,” Sanders said.
In an outline of the Outsourcing Prevention Act, Sanders said the law would bar companies that ship jobs overseas from enjoying federal contracts, tax breaks, grants or loans; require clawbacks of federal perks; levy a tax that “would be equal to the amount of savings achieved by outsourcing jobs or 35 percent of its profits, whichever is higher” and prevent executives of companies that offshore jobs from drawing bonuses, stock options or “golden parachutes.”
“We need to send a very loud and very clear message to corporate America: The era of outsourcing is over,” Sanders said in his statement. “Instead of offshoring jobs, the time has come for you to start bringing good-paying jobs back to the United States of America.”
Carrier’s move is set to start in mid-2017.
Two days before Sanders’ announcement, Trump said he was “making progress” with a deal to get Carrier to stay put. In response, Carrier said it had talked to Trump’s team but had “nothing to announce at this time.”
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Sunday, November 27, 2016
Alpha, Legendarys nerd-friendly subscription service, has arrived
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