@Cassiodorus I think Clinton 2 gave us herself. She's got more power in the party than Obama does.

#2 #2 The Obama Presidency was sort of a moratorium on evolution -- nothing of any importance happened, and when the good folks from Occupy tried to make it happen they were shut down by a coterie of Democratic Party mayors working with the FBI and Barack Obama. Legalizing pot in CO was nice though. At any rate Obama gave us Clinton Two, and Clinton Two gave us Trump.

@Cassiodorus In regards to Taft-Hartley, a work stoppage/refusal, combined and supported with social media, would be an effective way to go.
If even 1/4 of the work force refused to show up for even two weeks, that would get their attention. Our only power right now is to refuse to play the game.
Protesting en mass only gives them a juicy target, as we have seen with increasing frequency and violence.

#2 #2 The Obama Presidency was sort of a moratorium on evolution -- nothing of any importance happened, and when the good folks from Occupy tried to make it happen they were shut down by a coterie of Democratic Party mayors working with the FBI and Barack Obama. Legalizing pot in CO was nice though. At any rate Obama gave us Clinton Two, and Clinton Two gave us Trump.

@The Voice In the Wilderness

From Slate:

Donnelly’s order held that Trump’s ban very likely violated the Due Process Clause of the Fifth Amendment. That bedrock constitutional principle forbids the government from depriving individuals of liberty arbitrarily and without a fair hearing.

There was another article in NYT claiming it was unconstitutional based on the part about discriminating against people based on their country of origin and/or their religion. My search for the article failed.

#3

@divineorder Hillary will most likely be dead by then. Vascular dementia, which she has due to her stairway spill, is fatal. Usually within a few years. Often within 2 to 4 years.

#4 #4 #4

eye contact during inauguration Alpha females recognizing one another? You can be sheet sure the DNC will try to run Zombie Hillary again. It's how they roll.

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal I do remember her name being floated around. I do not think she is interested. And I hope to dog I am correct.

#5 Not yet. Didn't you notice how they were marketing Michelle towards the end there?

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal

#5 Not yet. Didn't you notice how they were marketing Michelle towards the end there?

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal In need of a Carpetbagger Senator soon...

Watch for it!

Senator Michelle Obama D-?

#5 Not yet. Didn't you notice how they were marketing Michelle towards the end there?

@Cant Stop the Macedonian Signal like her husband said in 2004 that he would not run in 2008 and Hillary said she was not going to run again after 2008.

One thing I know for sure: Whenever a politician says he or she is not going to run, you can take it to the bank. /sarcasm

#5 Not yet. Didn't you notice how they were marketing Michelle towards the end there?

@thanatokephaloides @thanatokephaloides

Fey did to Palin (rightfully and skillfully).

Hollywood (even the east coast branch of Hollywood) could not have been more for Hillary. I've been binge watching some TV sitcoms recently and am amazed how many of them gave Hillary positive advertising. Parks and Recreation, The Ranch and New Girl come immediately to mind, but there were others. They were willing to lose viewers to boost her.

#5

I swear, I would prefer a solid hour of fingernails on chalk boards to listening to Hillary's voice.
Not to mention, I have zero interest in anything she says. I hope her viewer ratings would be so low that she would do a Palin.

Parodying Her Heinous is light-years below Tina Fey. Otherwise, I agree with you wholeheartedly!

@Timmethy2.0

http://thehill.com/policy/technology/284675-without-politics-obama-might...

Without politics, Obama might have been in Silicon Valley
By Mario Trujillo - 06/23/16

Without politics, Obama might have been in Silicon Valley

If Barack Obama had not become president, he says he might be working in Silicon Valley or the venture capital industry.

During an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek, Obama said if he hadn't gone into politics he would probably be starting a business, because the skills appear to translate well.

"Well, you know, it’s hard to say," Obama said, when asked what industry he would have gone into. "But what I will say is that — just to bring things full circle about innovation — the conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying."

Obama specifically expressed his interest in precision medicine, and work on the human genome. He said that is an example of something he could "sit and listen and talk to folks for hours about."

During Obama's tenure, the government has seen a lot of overlap with Silicon Valley talent. Some of his top tech aides were recently at companies like Google, and former White House employees have taken top jobs at companies like Amazon and Uber.

A recent report highlighted 55 times in which Google employees took jobs in the federal government, and 197 times when government employees went to work for Google. ...

https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationshi...

David Dayen

April 22 2016

The Android Administration

Google's Remarkably Close Relationship With The Obama White House, In Two Charts

... Over the past seven years, Google has created a remarkable partnership with the Obama White House, providing expertise, services, advice, and personnel for vital government projects.

Precisely how much influence this buys Google isn’t always clear. But consider that over in the European Union, Google is now facing two major antitrust charges for abusing its dominance in mobile operating systems and search. By contrast, in the U.S., a strong case to sanction Google was quashed by a presidentially appointed commission.

It’s a relationship that bears watching. “Americans know surprisingly little about what Google wants and gets from our government,” said Anne Weismann, executive director of Campaign for Accountability, a nonprofit watchdog organization. Seeking to change that, Weismann’s group is spearheading a data transparency project about Google’s interactions in Washington. ...

... As the interactive charts accompanying this article show, Google representatives attended White House meetings more than once a week, on average, from the beginning of Obama’s presidency through October 2015. Nearly 250 people have shuttled from government service to Google employment or vice versa over the course of his administration.

Photo: Paul Morigi/Getty Images

No other public company approaches this degree of intimacy with government. According to an analysis of White House data, the Google lobbyist with the most White House visits, Johanna Shelton, visited 128 times, far more often than lead representatives of the other top-lobbying companies — and more than twice as often, for instance, as Microsoft’s Fred Humphries or Comcast’s David Cohen. (The accompanying chart reflects 94 Shelton visits; it excludes large gatherings such as state dinners and White House tours.) ...

... Google’s dramatic rise as a lobbying force has not gone unnoticed. The company paid almost no attention to the Washington influence game prior to 2007, but ramped up steeply thereafter. It spent $16.7 million in lobbying in 2015, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, and has been at or near the top of public companies in lobbying expenses since 2012.

But direct expenditures on lobbying represent only one part of the larger influence-peddling game. Google’s lobbying strategy also includes throwing lavish D.C. parties; making grants to trade groups, advocacy organizations, and think tanks; offering free services and training to campaigns, congressional offices, and journalists; and using academics as validators for the company’s public policy positions. Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, was an enthusiastic supporter of both of Obama’s presidential campaigns and has been a major Democratic donor. ...

... Most notably, Google has faced questions for years about exercising its market power to squash rivals, infringing on its users’ privacy rights, favoring its own business affiliates in search results, and using patent law to create barriers to competition. Even Republican senators like Orrin Hatch have called out Google for its practices.

In 2012, staff at the Federal Trade Commission recommended filing antitrust charges after determining that Google was engaging in anti-competitive tactics and abusing its monopoly. A staff report that was later leaked said Google’s conduct “has resulted — and will result — in real harm to consumers and to innovation in the online search and advertising markets.”

The Wall Street Journal noted that Google’s White House visits increased right around that time. And in 2013, the presidentially appointed commissioners of the FTC overrode their staff, voting unanimously not to file any charges. ...

... The data includes individuals from Google appointed to government boards while maintaining their positions at the tech firm. Google board member John Doerr was appointed to the President’s Council on Jobs and Competitiveness in February 2011. Eric Schmidt has been part of the President’s Council of Advisers on Science and Technology since 2009. He was also more recently appointed to lead the Defense Innovation Advisory Board at the Pentagon, which occurred outside the time frame of the data.

But the bulk of the moves involved job changes. Google alums work in the departments of State, Defense, Commerce, Education, Justice, and Veterans Affairs. One works at the Federal Reserve, another at the U.S. Agency for International Development. The highest number — 29 — moved from Google into the White House. The State Department had the next highest with just five. The moves from Google to government got more frequent in the later Obama years; 11 occurred in 2014 and 16 in 2015, after only 18 in the entire first term.

On the other side, former staffers from 36 different areas across the government have found a willing employer at Google since 2009. Johanna Shelton was a senior counsel on the House Energy and Commerce Telecommunications Subcommittee. Joshua Wright, a former commissioner of the Federal Trade Commission, rotated into a top position at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati, one of the law firms that has represented Google.

Nineteen researchers and scientists at NASA, senior analysts at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, an “information assurance expert” at the National Security Agency, and 32 separate officials with the Obama for America campaign found their way to Google.

Former employees of 12 of the 15 cabinet agencies (Energy, Justice, Defense, Education, State, Treasury, Commerce, Agriculture, Labor, HHS, Homeland Security, and Veterans Affairs) now work at the tech company or its affiliates, led by 16 former Pentagon staffers. The exodus ramped up in the second term, hitting 41 in 2014, compared to just six in 2009.

Seven individuals made a full revolution through the revolving door, either going from Google to government and back again, or from government to Google and back again. ...

... The government and Google shared engineers, lawyers, scientists, communications specialists, executives, and even board members. Google has achieved a kind of vertical integration with the government: a true public-private partnership. ...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kur...

Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so…
Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth

Robot from The Terminator
The Terminator films envisage a future in which robots have become sentient and are at war with humankind. Ray Kurzweil thinks that machines could become ‘conscious’ by 2029 but is optimistic about the implications for humans. Photograph: Solent News/Rex

Carole Cadwalladr
Saturday 22 February 2014

... he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive "long enough" to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he's 66 and he believes that "some of the baby-boomers will make it through"). Or with the fact that he's predicted that in 15 years' time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better. ...

... Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google's director of engineering. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of "the singularity" – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.

But it's what came next that puts this into context. It's since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.

And those are just the big deals. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's. ...

... When Kurzweil first started talking about the "singularity", a conceit he borrowed from the science-fiction writer Vernor Vinge, he was dismissed as a fantasist. ...

... Except that Kurzweil's new home isn't some futuristic MegaCorp intent on world domination. It's not Skynet. Or, maybe it is, but we largely still think of it as that helpful search engine with the cool design. Kurzweil has worked with Google's co-founder Larry Page on special projects over several years. "And I'd been having ongoing conversations with him about artificial intelligence and what Google is doing and what I was trying to do. And basically he said, 'Do it here. We'll give you the independence you've had with your own company, but you'll have these Google-scale resources.'"

And it's the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google ever single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global "brain". Can it learn? Can it think? It's what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.

Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning. And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet. Of what machine learning might look like when the machines have learned to make their own decisions. Or gained, what we humans call, "consciousness".

I first saw Boston Dynamics' robots in action at a presentation at the Singularity University, the university that Ray Kurzweil co-founded and that Google helped fund and which is devoted to exploring exponential technologies. And it was the Singularity University's own robotics faculty member Dan Barry who sounded a note of alarm about what the technology might mean: "I don't see any end point here," he said when talking about the use of military robots. "At some point humans aren't going to be fast enough. So what you do is that you make them autonomous. And where does that end? Terminator?"
Advertisement

And the woman who headed the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the secretive US military agency that funded the development of BigDog? Regina Dugan. Guess where she works now? ...

... Language, he believes, is the key to everything. "And my project is ultimately to base search on really understanding what the language means. When you write an article you're not creating an interesting collection of words. You have something to say and Google is devoted to intelligently organising and processing the world's information. The message in your article is information, and the computers are not picking up on that. So we would like to actually have the computers read. We want them to read everything on the web and every page of every book, then be able to engage an intelligent dialogue with the user to be able to answer their questions."

Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you've ever written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself. ...

... And once the computers can read their own instructions, well… gaining domination over the rest of the universe will surely be easy pickings. Though Kurzweil, being a techno-optimist, doesn't worry about the prospect of being enslaved by a master race of newly liberated iPhones with ideas above their station. He believes technology will augment us. Make us better, smarter, fitter. That just as we've already outsourced our ability to remember telephone numbers to their electronic embrace, so we will welcome nanotechnologies that thin our blood and boost our brain cells. His mind-reading search engine will be a "cybernetic friend". He is unimpressed by Google Glass because he doesn't want any technological filter between us and reality. He just wants reality to be that much better. ...

... And what about her father's idea of living for ever? What did she make of that? "What I think is interesting is that all kids think they are going to live for ever so actually it wasn't that much of a disconnect for me. I think it made perfect sense. Now it makes less sense."

Well, yes. But there's not a scintilla of doubt in Kurzweil's mind about this. ...

... He does, at moments like these, have something of a mad glint in his eye. Or at least the profound certitude of a fundamentalist cleric. Newsweek, a few years back, quoted an anonymous colleague claiming that, "Ray is going through the single most public midlife crisis that any male has ever gone through." ...

... "We are talking about making ourselves millions of times more intelligent and being able to have virtually reality environments which are as fantastic as our imagination."

Although possibly this is what Kurzweil's critics, such as the biologist PZ Myers, mean when they say that the problem with Kurzweil's theories is that "it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." Or Jaron Lanier, who calls him "a genius" but "a product of a narcissistic age". ...

Oh, brave new world, that has such powerful plotters in it. Naturally, those planning to live forever within a virtual reality will in future no longer require the rest of the world and must do away with the little people and unnecessary life forms for which there will no longer be need or room, to be replaced by robotic servants and a better 'reality' only they can see.

And perhaps the new and improved humans who are billionaire enough to seek immortality in their very own virtual realities will no longer require the human things, like oxygen, safe, nourishing food or clean water, but be able to run on, say, processed industrial pollutants and nuclear radiation? But in their ideal programmed virtual reality, will this really seem like an eternal paradise, especially once they Blue Screen or otherwise glitch, forever?

When you read about the non-wealthiest (this rapidly working up to shutting out techies themselves, from the bottom pay upward) being priced out of living in areas of California - home of Silicon Valley, where the 'in' politicians go - and read about techies wishing for California to secede from the United States, have their own borders, (having made California free of 'the poors' by pricing housing far out of range, to make their own laws free of 'burdensome' life and right-protecting regulation, (with billionaires complaining about even having to see any 'poors' on the streets) and add this into such as the above, don't it make you wonder?

Was this potentially some of what the oft-quoted chappy from Bush the Shrub's Corporate/Political Club was raving about, when he spoke of, presumably, the Bush administration and TPTB creating their own realities while ignoring the real realities of the real reality they created a global disaster of, which all of us disposables in the bottom 99.99% were to stand by and watch happen quietly, as we did?

#5 #5 #5 It doesn't have to be a pay to play continuation of Clinton slimeballness just because people here say it does. Maybe it will be more along the lines of the Carter Center. We'll see. A lot of people around the World still like Obama, and I don't have nearly the disgust for him that I have for the Clintons. The system is what it is and it's on us to change it, and I think Obama supports that. But we have to deal with the present to change things. Obama and the Clintons are not the present reality, even if they acquiesce to it.

@dfarrah

only make it easier for those who brag about grabbing women's privates to grab?

How would women had reacted if, before this happened men, had worn hats depicting male genitalia?

#7 make this up? What a weird response to the apocalypse, to knit a representation of your own genitals and put them on your head.

Can I steal, please, please, please (I'll include your name)?

@CB

#10 to close.
It's dated March 2016 and is about the huge clusterfuck where CIA backed rebels were fighting Pentagon backed rebels and both of these weregetting the shit kicked out of them by ISIS who proceeded to steal their American and Saudi supplied weapons including TOW missiles and the whole operation turning into a shitpile.

It ends with, “You certainly have the potential for it becoming a larger problem as people fight for territory and control of the northern border area in Aleppo.” No shit, Sherlock. A high school student could've told you that wouldn't work.

@Lookout

#11

the Clinton news network or MSNBC more stuff national corporate bull?