CatBus

Virginia prediction: Northam will beat Gillespie, but the Republicans will easily maintain a hold on the House of Delegates, probably losing only a few seats. Trump’s overt white supremacist campaign only got 44.4% there last year, and although Republicans should get a bump due to it being an off-year election, that only bumped their candidate for Governor to 45.2% in 2013. The somewhat academic question will be if Gillespie’s overt white supremacist campaign puts him over or under 45.2%. If over, that means racism still has a strong enough appeal to the Virginia electorate that people will keep trying the Trump/Gillespie formula there (maybe supplementing by adding secondary issues other than appeals to racism). If under, that means white supremacy may play well in other states, but it’s a losing issue in Virginia statewide elections. If under by enough, it may even be an indicator of the “Trump effect” – a national drag on statewide/local Republican performance – certainly for people like Gillespie or LePage who are branding themselves as mini-Trumps.

This shit is everywhere, and it doesn’t stop with Trump, Weinstein, O’Reilly, Ailes, Weiner, Thomas, etc. Looking forward to the day I read a story like that and it seems surprising.

Just got into this series (as usual for CatBus, long after the cool kids).

I cannot emphasize enough how much a disagree with people who dismiss the nostalgic/homage angle of this series as superficial or inconsequential next to the meat of the plot/writing/acting/etc. Atmosphere/tone can be everything, and this series (at least through Season 1, I haven’t hit 2 yet*) absolutely fucking nails it. The pacing isn’t eighties pacing, I’ll grant you (it’s not modern either, it’s more like nineties X-Files era pacing, so it still works), but everything else goes very far to recreate that eighties vibe. It just feels so right, and that must take a ton of effort, and I appreciate every bit of it.

Story, acting, plot. Yeah, okay, IMO in this regard it’s not always spectacular. But it’s certainly engaging enough, and it’s often still quite good. Maybe I travel in the wrong circles, but I didn’t have high expectations for this series, and it easily beat them all. We’ll see about Season 2.

* Because I still watch Game of Thrones via Netflix DVD mail-service and I like being a year behind the rest of the world, dammit!

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

Do you mind, Frink?  We’re trying to work here.  This thread’s not gonna derail itself, you know.

I think it would, actually.

Point conceded.

lol

This offtopic nonsense is clearly a recent development.

TV’s Frink said:

The White House forgot to falsify the data before the report was released.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2017/11/03/trump-administration-releases-report-finds-no-convincing-alternative-explanation-for-climate-change/?utm_term=.f5b469275368

The Trump administration has evolved so far past empiricism that their next press briefing will be about how the report found no indications human are a factor at all in the global warming that isn’t happening, just as Sanders went on at length recently about how Mueller’s indictments demonstrated that there was nothing shady at all in the non-existent dealings between the Trump campaign and Russian intelligence services.

TV’s Frink said:

https://www.rawstory.com/2017/11/the-right-wings-favorite-internet-personality-was-just-outed-as-a-russian-troll/

When reached for comment, Jenna responded “No sock, no sock. You’re the sock!”

I’ve never seen that at all, but I have seen the adhesive lose its adhesion inside a hot player and come off the disc, gumming up the player fairly hopelessly. Printable discs or sharpies.

SilverWook said:

Surely the post office or P.O. box type business can assist in figuring out who mailed them? I would think a mass mailing that large doesn’t go unnoticed. Those responsible might have even been dumb enough to get all that crap printed somewhere. The part about cricket fields is kind of random.
How can you even mail stuff anonymously in 2017?

I’d say it’s still pretty easy to mail anonymously. My family got mailed white supremacist literature via USPS, we handed it over to the cops, and… nada. It’s been years. I’d be more interested to know if any hidden copier or printer codes are buried in those images. We’d probably have a better chance uncovering where those were produced than where they were mailed. Also, I know a postal inspector. It’s all about people mailing drugs, so the resources are already committed elsewhere.

TV’s Frink said:

Well here’s a weird side-effect of everyone in our country owning a gun…

Actually fewer and fewer people own guns in the US, but those who own them own more and more of them. The increasing guns-per-capita statistics hide this.

https://twitter.com/HouseInSession/status/926191150259585024

Oh, Carter Page really should have had a lawyer present to prevent him from saying this.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Hubbell

So either he’s saying every single document in his possession incriminates him personally, or he’s just needlessly antagonized a bunch of US Reps and probably landed himself cause for an obstruction and conspiracy charge. Not that the House itself will do anything under current leadership, but they’ve all got phone numbers for the FBI.

There’s another sealed indictment.

Scroll down to the part where they’re talking about Indictment (A) and Indictment (B). The one we just saw was (B). (A) is still under seal. Nobody is sure why, but one reason for this would be if the person under Indictment (A) is still cooperating and providing useful information to the investigation.

chyron8472 said:

How do we know that he actually felt this way at all?

…That’s a serious question, not a rhetorical one.

It’s documented, I believe through personal letters, that he was one of the more conflicted Confederate figures. But this has been expanded/exploited by Confederate apologists to the point where people say the conflict proved he was actually honorable in spite of his actions (which is a commonplace stretch of the evidence), and then so were the other Confederates (which is the point where you need to start booking a room at Ye Loco Klansman Hotel)

Warbler said:

I am pretty sure it is that Lee himself was not pro secession, but he could either make war against the country or against his own home state.

There’s a gap between reluctant treason and honor.

SilverWook said:

dahmage said:

Warbler said:

SilverWook said:

moviefreakedmind said:

Warbler said:

SilverWook said:

So was marching him through a crowded parking garage where any idiot could take a shot at him.

They thought he had assassinated the President of the United States. They probably weren’t too worried about protecting him too much.

They would be the dumbest people on earth if they weren’t too worried about protecting him.

Dead men don’t talk.
https://youtu.be/L7e3RK_xSvc

What the hell is that‽

this is a clip from the 1977 Movie “Kentucky Fried Movie”. This skit is about a John F. Kennedy assassination board game.

Which covers all the conspiracy theories people believed in at the time and probably still do.

Naw, Ted Cruz’s dad never shows up.

But I can understand the urge to not even briefly glance in the direction of YouTube comments.

cranyx said:

Would it be at all realistic to expect ESB 2.5 to come out by the release of Eps VIII?

I expected it last autumn, and I thought I was being pretty realistic at the time. So… sure 😉

Mueller has convinced a judge to waive Manafort’s attorney-client privilege, so that his lawyer can testify before the grand jury.

“Essentially, the judge is saying that it is probable or likely that the clients had a criminal or fraudulent purpose in hiring the lawyer, even if (we would hope) the lawyer did not know it,” Gillers told POLITICO.

Further, once you can pierce the privilege, there’s no telling what information you can go on to discover. This decision will be useful in other contests to discover lawyer-client communications, even communications with different law firms, if any.

You don’t say.

CatBus said:

For the first time in over a decade, the American Bar Association has rated a federal judge nominee “not qualified”. I expect that slow pace should pick up over the next few years.

Wow, he didn’t even make it through the month before nominating another unqualified judge.

Bah! Shows what I know, modern Tagalog uses Latin characters. Nevertheless, we have some very plausible scenarios where we could end up with a subtitle in a new script (Tamil, just by transcribing the dubs, would be pretty quick work). So we’ll have an improved backup font in 10.1 to cover any eventuality. Over 60,000 characters at this point, covering nearly all of the language groups in the BMP, and a smattering in the SMP. And I’ll be incorporating ConScript Unicode Registry glyphs so people can do subtitles in Sindarin or Klingon, because why not?

Also, the term “active informant” comes up in the Papadopoulos documents. A lot of people have been saying this is law enforcement-speak for “he wore a wire”. If so, this investigation is truly Nixon-bound.

The real interesting story of the day seems to be George Papadopolous. He talked, he was charged, he pled guilty. His active part in this story is already over.

But the story he told indicates things are just getting started:
https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/4163402/Papadopoulos-Statement-Offense.pdf

TV’s Frink said:

First time I’ve ever heard “Rick” and “Gates” as consecutive words.

Rick “Olie” Gates?

What’s Monday going to throw us?

The mainstream pick: Manafort
The wishful thinking: Jarvanka
The obscure but important curveball: Sater
The nobody of consequence: Pence (hee hee)
The beginning: multiple persons, like Manafort/Stone/Kushner, etc

Just continuing to go down the line of absolutely everything in this project to see if it could be improved for the next release, and I hit upon the font resource called Droid Sans Fallback which has been included with this project since we went Unicode. It’s basically a Unicode fallback font I kept in my back pocket for new languages. I never actually used it, but upon testing, it actually does a pretty dreadful job, so it’s going away.

So I’ve chosen a new Unicode fallback font for the next version, a customized version of the Noto Sans font (which is actually Google’s successor to Droid Sans) merged into a single file. The CJK flavor I’ve chosen is traditional Chinese, simply because I’ve already got all the major CJK languages covered with their own fonts, and any future CJK language support would have to be some regional Chinese dialect, which tend to favor traditional Chinese characters. Will I actually use this font? Probably not – but we could get a chance with the Tagalog subtitles, assuming there’s not a preferred font for Tagalog. But those who are on the lookout for a font covering a really wide range of the Unicode spec could do a lot worse.

You have to be using a font that handles Egyptian hieroglyphs, but…

EDIT: Removed. Better safe than sorry. Unicode 130B8 for the curious.

Well, maybe it’s not technically punctuation, but I bet there are people out there who would try to stick this anywhere.