New film satirizes FBI counter-terrorism stings

Al Qaeda, ISIS, and the attacks of 9/11 have been good for the FBI, the NSA, the CIA, and the entire counter-terrorism industry in the US that have used them to get increased funding and powers. In order to keep those dollars flowing, the FBI has had to repeatedly show success in fighting terrorism and one of the means of doing that is setting up sting operations. If they cannot find real threats, they will create ones.

Trevor Aronson writes about a new satirical film The Day Shall Come based on many of the real-life sting operations conducted by the FBI that recruits hapless people with absurd ideas and then coaxes them to take part in ridiculous plots that are then grandly ‘exposed’ by the agency.
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More information emerges about the Ukraine scandal

The beginning of the impeachment process seems to have sent Donald Trump into a rage, leading him to call six members of Congress ‘savages’. But it looks like things are only going to get worse for him because people are now looking back over the timeline of events on the Ukraine scandal and starting to connect the dots and it turns out that there are a lot of dots all over the place. One is the abrupt firing on July 28th of Dan Coats, the director of national intelligence (DNI), just three days after the infamous phone call with Ukrainian president Zelensky,, and the insistence by Donald Trump that the deputy director Sue Gordon, a career intelligence professional, not be given the job and that indeed she should resign, which she reluctantly did.
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Using big data to help ordinary people

I subscribe to a newsletter from Dick Tofel, the head of the investigate journalism outfit ProPublica, and the latest one featured how they have created easy-to-use databases for people researching or navigating the ghastly health care system in the US.

Last week, we updated our tool tracking the performance of more than 4,700 emergency rooms around the country, which we now call ER Inspector. This news app lets you look up emergency room wait times and problems each facility has encountered since 2015. The underlying data is collected by the federal government, but it’s very hard to find or to sift. You can use ER Inspector to show you results from the facilities nearest to you, sort the data by state and rank all of the emergency rooms included on each of these dimensions. It’s an extraordinary collection of information, and it required about six weeks of news apps developer Lena Groeger’s time to update and extend.
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Does Newton’s law of gravity work when gravity is very weak?

This video takes a look at Newton’s law of gravity that is written in the form F=GMm/r2 and points out that although the law is referred to as a ‘universal’ law of gravity, it does not hold for very strong gravitational forces involving very large masses (where the General Theory of Relativity needs to be used). He also points out that the law has not been tested very precisely in cases where the force is very weak, such as with small masses, but that we assume it holds true in that regime.


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The mind of an incel revealed

You may remember the case of a driver who used a van to plow into pedestrians on a busy street in Toronto on April 2018 and killed 10 and injured 16. A judge has lifted a publication ban on a four-hour interview that he gave after being arrested, where he says that he was inspired to start a revolution by online videos made by so-called ‘incels’, the term that involuntary celibates give themselves.

The attack traumatized Canada’s largest city, and cast a spotlight on the so-called “incel” online subculture of men united by sexual frustration and a hatred of women.
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In a nearly four-hour interview after his arrest, Minassian told police officers that he was virgin who had never had a girlfriend, admitted to using the van as a weapon and said he wanted to inspire more attacks.

Asked how he felt about the death of 10 people, he replied: “I feel like I accomplished my mission.”
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Wall Street fires a warning shot to the Democratic party

One of the things that happen when there is a chance of progressives achieving positions that have at least some significant power is that the curtain that hides oligarchic control of the political system gets pulled back a bit and we get to see how the system really works. While Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a spirited challenge in 2016, she was never in any real danger of not getting the nomination, especially since in that race the primary rules with its super-delegates weighted the result heavily in her favor. Hence the big money interests in the Democratic party had nothing to fear from either her or Donald Trump becoming president because they win either way. So many Wall Street executives could contribute to the Democrats because they tend to not be right-wing bigots on social issues.
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The whistleblower complaint is worse than I thought

I had the idea that the whistleblower complaint filed by the unidentified intelligence official who had concerns about the deal that Donald Trump was negotiating with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky was of a general nature, expressing misgivings about a single phone call. But the complaint itself that was filed with the inspector general has been released and it is very detailed and covers events over a period of time and involves multiple sources expressing concerns. It contains even more damaging information than the quasi-transcript of the phone call between Trump and Zelensky. It describes a concerted pattern of pressure applied to Zelensky even before he was sworn into office.
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Boris Johnson is definitely Trump’s kind of guy

The British prime minister Boris Johnson lost yet another major vote in parliament today when it voted 306-289 against a government motion to suspend parliament so that the Conservative party could hold their annual conference as scheduled from September 29 through October 3. This is the seventh consecutive vote he has lost and he has not won a single one, an astonishing record because in the British parliamentary system, the government almost never loses a vote. Add to that the strong rebuke that the UK Supreme Court handed to him two days ago and you can label him a major loser.
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