Sunday Facepalm.

Shutterstock.

Shutterstock.

Pendejo-elect Trump, who at one point said hacking may have been the work of someone sitting on their bed weighing 400 pounds, and more recently said it was time to let it go and move on, has now declared himself an expert in hacking, and in a move already seen too many times to have become boring, promised a secret which will be revealed on Tuesday or Wednesday. If there’s one thing we know already, it’s that Trump doesn’t know jack shit about computers, and there’s no juicy secret with special sauce waiting in the wings to be revealed.

He added: “And I know a lot about hacking. And hacking is a very hard thing to prove. So it could be somebody else. And I also know things that other people don’t know, and so they cannot be sure of the situation.”

Sigh. No, you don’t know anything about hacking, Donny, not one teeny, tiny thing. No, hacking is not hard to prove. Also, proving hacking and proving exactly who did the hacking, not the same thing, your dipshittedness. Of course, clarity isn’t exactly Donny’s middle name. As for this whole “I know things other people don’t know”, oh, grow the fuck up already. This childish isht is already beyond annoying, I cannot cope with the thought of years of this “I know something you don’t know, na na na!” garbage, especially when it isn’t so. Donny keeps saying this, and every time, it turns out there’s no there there. In the earlier post, linked above, he didn’t know about the imposed sanctions, because he never knows about anything.

Mr. Trump, who does not use email, also advised people to avoid computers when dealing with delicate material. “It’s very important, if you have something really important, write it out and have it delivered by courier, the old-fashioned way, because I’ll tell you what, no computer is safe,” Mr. Trump said.

“I don’t care what they say, no computer is safe,” he added. “I have a boy who’s 10 years old; he can do anything with a computer. You want something to really go without detection, write it out and have it sent by courier.”

:Laughs: Oh, I just can’t wait to see how that one is going to turn out after Jan. 20th. This fucking idiot is going to be in charge of some very complex systems indeed, and doesn’t know one thing about them, but hey, he can tweet! The idiot knows more than all the intelligence agencies (not that there’s much boasting to be done there, but still), and doesn’t understand that hacking isn’t something done solely by the so-called bad guys. Hacking is not dependent on someone using email, either. There is every possibility that in the coming years, an eyeroll will actually prove fatal.

Trump also said “I just want them to be sure because it’s a pretty serious charge,” which is beyond laughable, given his penchant for spreading baseless bullshit and lies all over the place, insisting they are true, such as insisting President Obama’s birth certificate was a fake, and that thousands of American Muslim people in NJ celebrated the 9/11 attack. Pretty much everything Donny says is unsubstantiated at the least, and an outright lie at the worst.

Via The NY Times.

Sean Spicer is also sprinkling his stupidity all over:

“Why aren’t we talking about the other influences on the election? Why aren’t we talking about Hillary Clinton getting debate questions ahead of time?” Spicer said in response.

Y’know, just because someone is intelligent enough to perform well in a debate, and did things like prepare, doesn’t mean it was cheating.

“No one is asking those questions. The fact is that everyone wants to make Donald Trump admit to certain things. When do we talk about the other side, which is what did Hillary Clinton do to influence the election? Is she being punished?”

Yes, Donny does need to admit to things, people tend to hold presidents accountable, so best get used to it. So, Clinton tried to influence the election, but Donny didn’t do that at all, no. FFS, couldn’t they at least get someone with a modicum of intelligence in their team? This level of stupid is too close to fatal.

Via Think Progress.

A New Year’s Eve Message…

Pendejo-elect Trump’s NY Eve tweet. So inspiring, graceful, inclusive, and mature, ennit? I think the eyeroll I just had was sufficient to wake me up and make me want to go clean.

Via Raw Story.

Taking the Day.

day

I don’t want to, but I’m taking the day to try and somewhat banish dirt and disorder from my house. I tend to ignore dirt and disorder for great lengths of time, so I have a lot of work to do. I’d much rather be painting, all those new supplies…aarrgh. Cleaning first. See you all on Sunday, everyone party safely please.

More Jobs? No, More Lies.

President-elect Donald Trump speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

President-elect Donald Trump speaking to reporters at Mar-a-Lago on Wednesday. CREDIT: AP Photo/Evan Vucci.

On Wednesday, President-elect Donald Trump made a huge announcement: because of his presidency, Sprint has decided to bring back or create 5,000 jobs in the United States, while satellite startup OneWeb will create another 3,000.

The claim, however, was false. Those jobs are part of a $50 billion investment from SoftBank, which owns 80 percent of Sprint and has made a large investment in OneWeb, that was previously announced as part of a deal with a Saudi investment fund before Trump won the presidency. Meanwhile, not all of the jobs promised by Sprint will be at the company itself, but instead at contractors.

But it’s in both the company’s interests and Trump’s to create glowing, if misleading, headlines about cooperation between the administration and the corporation.

For Sprint, cozying up to Trump is almost certainly related to the hope that it can get approval of its previously failed attempt to merge with T-Mobile. Sprint was in the process of making a bid to buy T-Mobile in 2014, and thus combining the third and fourth largest wireless carriers in the country, but ended up abandoning the plan in the face of regulatory opposition from the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). Both agencies have stated an intent to keep four major carriers in the country, rather than let them combine, under current leadership.

While Sprint has been able to remain solvent since then, it hasn’t turned an annual profit since 2006 and has more than $30 billion in total debt. SoftBank’s CEO Masayoshi Son, who personally met with Trump after the election and re-announced his company’s intents to invest in the United States from Trump Tower, has made it clear that he sees consolidation as a must for getting the company to profitability. “We need scale,” he told Bloomberg in 2014. And he still reportedly has his eyes on T-Mobile.

If the FCC and DOJ become more friendly to mega-mergers under Trump, that would be an enormous win for the company. And even before Sprint started currying favor with Trump, his administration has been shaping up to be just what the company is looking for. One of the president-elect’s top policy advisers on technology has suggested abolishing the FCC altogether and is a proponent of industry mergers, writing, “Telecommunications network providers and ISPs are rarely, if ever, monopolies.” Other advisers are staunchly against net neutrality regulations that aim to keep the internet a level playing field but have been opposed by giants like AT&T and Verizon.

Rarely monopolies. Right. In what fucking universe? Have people forgotten Ma Bell already? It wasn’t that bloody long ago.  Living rural, I already get screwed royally when it comes to net access, and I’m capped, too. No streaming for me, I can’t afford it. Whether or not I’ll be able to afford net access at all once the incoming administration guts everything, who knows? I really hate interesting times.

There’s much more at Think Progress.

Aw Hell.

bookdates

I have months worth of release dates for books in one of my calendars, and now I find out that Simon & Schuster have made a $250,000 book deal with Milo Yiannopoulos. I won’t punish an author (or myself) by refusing to buy a book I had planned to purchase if published by them, but that will also have to be an end to any more books put out by them. I hope that authors flee them in droves for doing this. Not only is Yiannopoulos a person singularly without talent, he’s a known hack and plagiarist, which are yet more black marks against Simon & Schuster.

Not only is Yiannopoulos a well-known member of white supremacist circles, but he’s also a renowned plagiarist. As the Houston Press reported last year, his 2007 self-published book of poetry is actually composed of plagiarized Tori Amos lyrics. Earlier this year, BuzzFeed reported that most of Yiannopoulos’ work is written by interns. While denying the accusations, Yiannopoulos confirmed with BuzzFeed that he had 44 interns helping him with writing and research.

If Yiannopoulos wants to pretend to write a book, he could always peddle it to Sad Puppy Beale, who started his own publishing house. I rather doubt the money would be quite so staggering though.

The full story, along with a host of reactions, is at Think Progress.