Arbitrary Enforcement Of Federal Law Roils Classified Documents Case

declassified  |  Jack Smith's Florida case. "[Judge Aileen] Cannon repeatedly asked both sides for examples of criminal prosecution for 'other officials who did the same.' She questioned the 'arbitrary enforcement' of the espionage statute, forcing the government to admit that no other former president or vice president has faced criminal prosecution for keeping similar documents and failing to return them.

'This speaks to the arbitrary enforcement...featuring in this case,' Cannon told Bratt. Cannon also pushed back on claims Trump should have expected to face prosecution for storing classified files. Once again noting no former president or vice president-Mike Pence also discovered classified records after Trump was indicted in 2023-has been charged, Cannon suggested it was fair for Trump to expect the same treatment since 'no historical precedent' is on the books. 'Given that landscape,' Cannon continued, Trump could argue he has been unfairly targeted. Which his team already has. 

In a motion emailed to the court and the government last month, Trump's attorneys asked to dismiss the case based on 'selective and vindictive prosecution.' Although the motion is not public, Jack Smith quickly responded to defend the Department of Justice's choice to pursue Trump and not Biden. 'Trump, unlike Biden, is alleged to have engaged in extensive and repeated efforts to obstruct justice and thwart the return of documents bearing classification markings, which provides particularly strong evidence of willfulness and is a paradigmatic aggravating factor that prosecutors routinely rely on when making charging decisions,' Smith wrote in a March 7 response. 'Second, the evidence concerning the two men's intent-whether they knowingly possessed and willfully retained such documents-is starkly different.' 

In an almost comical passage, Smith admits Biden unlawfully retained classified records-just not as many as Trump. 'Biden possessed 88 documents bearing classification markings, including 18 marked Top Secret. By contrast, Trump possessed 337 documents bearing classification markings, including 64 marked Top Secret.

Rupert Murdoch Launched The Hit On Russell Brand

CTH  |   The Sunday Times, a Rupert Murdoch publication in the U.K, published a hit piece against Russell Brand accusing him of rape and sexual assault 20-years ago.  It did not take long before the accusations triggered the cancel culture and YouTube demonetized the actor and pundit.  Russell Brand has vehemently denied the allegations.

However, in a remarkable escalation the U.K Parliament is now targeting Russell Brand.  The British government has sent a letter to U.S. social media companies, including video platform provider Rumble demanding they take action against Brand.  Not only is the British government targeting an individual and demanding action over an unproven allegation, but they are also sending a letter to the U.S. company demanding acquiescence to their censorship demand.

Standing solidly on the side of freedom, Rumble said no. However, now Rumble is the subject of a global smear campaign using a variety of media outlets and constructed controversies.  Today, Russell Brand responded to the overall effort by the British government.

When Russell Brand Was A Degenerate He Was "All Good", Now That He's All Good He's A "Degenerate"?

.@RobertKennedyJr talks to Russell Brand about how the NSA was in charge of Operation Warp Speed, the history of the United States bioweapons program, and why Anthony Fauci is the highest-paid government official in history:

"The weird thing about the pandemic was this constant… pic.twitter.com/qunw3Bn6pP

— KanekoaTheGreat (@KanekoaTheGreat) September 18, 2023

nydailynews  |  YouTube has demonetized Russell Brand’s channel, and the BBC pulled some of his shows from its online streaming service, after several women accused the comedian-turned-wellness guru of rape and sexual assault in an investigative report published over the weekend.

In a statement on Tuesday, YouTube said they took action against Brand’s account — which has 6.6 million subscribers — to “protect” users in light of “serious allegations against the creator.” It means 48-year-old Brand will no longer be able to profit from the ads that run within and alongside his videos, which have titles like “What REALLY Started the Hawaii Fires?” and “Covid Tsar Admits Lockdowns Were NEVER About Science.”

Other channels associated with the funnyman’s main YouTube page also include Awakening With Russell, which has 426,000 subscribers, Football Is Nice, which has some 20,000 subscribers, and Stay Free With Russell Brand, which has 22,200 subscribers.

“This decision applies to all channels that may be owned or operated by Russell Brand,” the Google-owned video service said.

While Brand has not been charged with any crimes, YouTube said he violated its “creator responsibility policy.”

“If a creator’s off-platform behavior harms our users, employees or ecosystem, we take action to protect the community,” the statement read.

BBC echoed the sentiment, saying Brand’s content “now falls below public expectations” of iPlayer and BBC Sounds.

Over the weekend, the Times of London, The Sunday Times and Channel 4 Dispatches published a joint investigation in which several women accused Brand of sexual assault and rape between 2006 and 2013 — a period during which Brand also became married to and subsequently divorced from pop star Katy Perry.

 

Speaking Of Toxic White Women...,

greenwald  |  Even when one marvels, as one must, at all these impressive displays of cynical elite emotional manipulation and self-victimization, there is absolutely nobody who exploits it better than Taylor Lorenz. Raised in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, educated at Greenwich High School and lovely private boarding schools in the Swiss Alps, then graduating from the leafy private liberal arts Hobart and William Smith Colleges in bucolic upstate New York, Lorenz developed an intense and unyielding obsession with TikTok teenagers and their TikTok houses. This interest in the lives of online teenage culture was cultivated as she approached middle age, and she parlayed this unique interest into stints as a star front-page reporter with the two most powerful newspapers in the U.S.: The New York Times, which she quit two months ago, and The Washington Post, where she is now a star columnist.

It is almost impossible to envision a single individual in whom power, privilege and elite prerogative reside more abundantly than Taylor Lorenz. Using the metrics of elite liberal culture, the word “privilege” was practically invented for her: a rich straight white woman from a wealthy family raised in Greenwich, Connecticut and educated in actual Swiss boarding schools who now writes about people's lives, often casually destroying those lives, on the front pages of the most powerful East Coast newspapers on the planet. And yet, in the eyes of her fellow media and political elites, there is virtually no person more victimized, more deserving of your sympathy and attention, more vulnerable, marginalized and abused than she.

That is because — like Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren and Labour MPs and columnists from The Independent and The Guardian and The New York Times who pioneered these paths of elite victimhood before her — Taylor Lorenz must sometimes hear criticisms of her work and her views. Virtually alone among journalists — who are famously universally beloved and never subjected to any form of real abuse: as Julian Assange will be happy to tell you if you can visit him in his high-security prison cell in the UK, or as these Sri Lankan journalists will explain from their hospital beds after being physically brutalized by the police for covering an anti-government protest on Thursday — Lorenz hears criticisms of her work, sometimes in the form of very angry and even profane or threatening tweets from anonymous people online. This not only means that she deserves your sympathy and concern but, more importantly, that you should heap scorn and recrimination on those who criticize her work because they are responsible for the trauma she endures. Most of all, you must never criticize her publicly for fear of what you might unleash against her.

In other words, Lorenz — like all employees of large media corporations or powerful establishment politicians in Washington and London — is and always should be completely free to continue to publish articles or social media posts that destroy the reputations of powerless people, often with outright lies. But you must never criticize her because she suffers from PTSD and other trauma as a result of the mean tweets that are unleashed by her critics. If you believe that is some sort of straw man exaggeration of what political and media elites are trying to do — create a shield of immunity around them while they retain the right to target, attack, insult, malign and destroy anyone they want — then it means you did not see the Emmy-worthy performances of Lorenz and various NBC News personalities on Friday afternoon during their five-minute segment on Chuck Todd's Meet the Press Daily designed to fortify this warped, inverted standard of morality and power.

The NBC segment was ostensibly designed to "cover” a “study” from January published by the Brookings Institutions and conducted by "NYU’s Center for Social Media and Politics and the International Women’s Media Foundation.” This study purported to forensically analyze — and I am not joking — the increase in criticisms of Taylor Lorenz as the result of a tweet I posted criticizing her (re-cast in elite parlance as “attacking” and "targeting” her), as well as a television segment that aired on Tucker Carlson's Fox program that also criticized the NYT reporter. You will never guess what the study revealed: namely, our criticism of her was responsible for a torrent of violent abuse, misogynistic rage, and traumatizing brutality against the corporate journalist:

Our analysis used large-scale quantitative data to assess how the public conversation surrounding these journalists changed in the aftermath of being targeted by prominent media personalities. The research findings showed sharp increases in harmful speech after the journalists were targeted by Carlson and Greenwald….After Carlson targeted Lorenz in a segment on his Fox News show, we found that one in two tweets mentioning Lorenz contained either toxic or insulting language….In Figure 2, we plot the 24-hour moving average of tweets before and after Greenwald targeted Lorenz. The figure shows that after Greenwald’s attack, the likelihood that tweets mentioning Lorenz would contain harmful speech increased by 144%, peaking on Aug. 15, 2021, two days after he targeted Lorenz.

Now, permit me to pause to acknowledge an important concession. The three academic scholars who are the authors of this groundbreaking study on online abuse of powerful elites are absolute experts in marginalization, victimhood and abuse. They have the lived experience of it. Indeed, nobody has suffered worse deprivations than they, so one should be extremely deferential in treating their pronouncements with the respect they deserve. Zeve Sanderson is a graduate of Brown University and the Masters’ Program of New York University and is now the Founding Executive Director at the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics. The other two have degrees from New York University and George Washington University and are also now employed studying “online extremism” at NYU, one of the country's most expensive private universities residing in the heart of Manhattan. So they clearly know marginalization and victimhood when they see it.

The on-screen title of the NBC segment was “1 in 3 Women Under 35 Experience Online Attacks.” This was an extremely odd title since they interviewed two journalists who recounted their online trauma, neither of whom fall into that category. Though Lorenz is often infantilized by her media supporters as some teenager or very young adult — a natural assumption, I suppose, given her obsession with teenaged TikTok houses and other adolescent online paraphernalia — in fact her age is expressed at anywhere in the range from 36 to 43 years old depending on her mood of the day.

The other featured journalist alongside her was Kate Sosin, who does not identify as a woman at all but rather “a proud trans person” who uses the pronouns “they/them"; by referring to Sosin repeatedly as a woman and using the pronouns “she” and “her” to reference their work, NBC repeatedly misgendered the journalist. Anyway, one would think, or at least hope, that if NBC is going to broadcast a report on “women under the age of 35 [who] have experienced harassment online,” they could find journalists who actually fall into that group and not misgender a journalist who is already complaining about abuse and trauma.

The NBC segment has to be watched in its entirety to be believed. Though the emotional performances are moving and spectacular — no denying that — it is important not to let your tears drown out the actual point they are making. It is a quite sinister and insidious lesson they are preaching. When powerful media elites receive mean and abusive tweets from anonymous and random people on Twitter, it is not the fault of those sending those tweets but rather the fault of anyone criticizing their work and their journalism. The only moral conclusion is clear: one should refrain from criticizing employees of media corporations lest one be responsible for unleashing traumatizing abuse at them. Marvel at this performative elite victimhood by all the actors involved:

Too Many Witches, No Honest Stitches - Guarantee A Culture Of Snitches...,

chronicle |   When I read about the downfall of the University of Michigan’s president, Mark Schlissel, fired after an anonymous complaint about his consensual though “inappropriate” relationship with a subordinate, my first thought was “What kind of idiot uses his work email for an affair?” Then I recalled that I myself am the kind of idiot who persists in using my university email account for everything, despite pledging at least once a year to tear myself away from this self-destructive habit. Schlissel, c’est moi. The next time I get in trouble, will my employer emulate the classy behavior of the Michigan Board of Regents and release troves of my own embarrassing emails for my enemies to savor and mock?

My next thought: Who was the snitch? I knew none of the players, but my inner Hercule Poirot went right to work, assembling likely suspects in the drawing room of my imagination (betrayed spouse, disappointed paramour, assorted foes and rivals, maligned underlings), cleverly disarming them with my continental charm until the culprit was exposed — most likely by the irrepressible look of creepy satisfaction playing across his or her face. To bring down an apparently much loathed and vastly overpaid university president, even for the stupidest of reasons: what ecstasy!

Among the questions prompted by Schlissel’s termination is whether higher education has, on the whole, become a hotbed of craven snitches. From everything I’ve heard and experienced, the answer is yes.

First let us pause to consider our terms: Was Schlissel’s narc a “snitch” or a “whistle-blower”? Whistle-blowers are generally attempting to topple or thwart the powerful, and Schlissel was certainly powerful. But the reported offense was, in the words of a lawyer I spoke with, “a nothingburger.” Let us provisionally define snitching as turning someone in anonymously, for either minor or nonexistent offenses, or pretextually. Also: using institutional mechanisms to kneecap rivals, harass enemies, settle scores and grudges, or advantage oneself. Not to mention squealing on someone for social-media posts and joining online mobs to protest exercises of academic and intellectual freedom.

This last is a variant of the “social-justice snitch,” a burgeoning category composed of those who want to defund the police and reform the criminal-justice system but are nevertheless happy to feed the maws of a frequently unprocedural and (many say) racist campus-justice system. There are, to be sure, right-wing students and organizations dedicated to harassing professors whose politics they object to, but that’s to be expected. What’s not is the so-called campus left failing to notice the degree to which the “carceral turn” in American higher ed — the prosecutorial ethos, the resources reallocated to regulation and punishment — shares a certain cultural logic with the rise of mass incarceration and over-policing in off-campus America. Or that the zeal for policing intellectual borders has certain resonances with the signature tactics of Trumpian America, for which unpoliced borders are equally intolerable. But what care social-justice types about fostering the carceral university if those with suspect politics can be flattened, even — fingers crossed! — expelled, or left unemployed and penurious?

Americans once famously disliked snitches. Witness the parade of Hollywood liberals who refused to stand or applaud when the director Elia Kazan, who’d named names to the House Committee on Un-American Activities in 1952, received an honorary Academy Award in 1999. According to Kazan’s autobiography, he named only those who’d already been named or were about to be, and he’d long since come to despise the cultural despotism of the American Communist Party. But he’ll still go down in history with “snitch” attached to his name. If only he’d labored in today’s academe! He’d be lionized for it.

The carceral campus provides a haven for that formerly reviled personality type, the jailhouse snitch, around whom so many classic prison dramas revolved. The Big House (1930) established the category and delivered a message for the ages: Snitches get stitches. When the privileged 24-year-old Kent (Robert Montgomery), in for carelessly killing someone while driving drunk, starts ratting out his fellow inmates, things don’t turn out well for him. In the film’s moral universe, only snivelers snitch. Or as the seen-it-all warden opines: “Prison does not give a man a yellow streak, but if he has one, it brings it out.”

Hen Houses With Long Incumbency Must Inevitably Become Toxic Environments

reason  |  Much of the information provided in this article, comes from the most extensive investigation into Jaeger, which can be read in full here. This piece also relies on additional investigations as well as interviews with Jaeger's colleagues and contemporaries, some of whom requested anonymity for fear of professional consequences.) 

The fundamental issue may have been that Jaeger refused, in some ways, to assimilate, to act his station in life. Part of this was probably his personality and part of it probably cultural. He dated or slept with several students in his early years as a professor at U.R., although none worked in his lab or were under his tutelage. This was, at the time, permitted under departmental policy, but this once-common practice is now taboo, perhaps guaranteed to cause problems for both the professor and for his or her students. Jaeger says he sees that now, but in his early 30s, to him, it seemed normal. 

All of this—his personality, his jokes, his flirting and boundary-pushing and sleeping around—made some people in his department uncomfortable enough to avoid him.

One of those was Keturah Bixby. In November 2013, Bixby, then a graduate student, wrote a letter to department head Greg DeAngelis. She then printed it out, brought it to his office, and sat there while he read it. (Bixby did not respond to a request for comment.)

"There's a professor here who's been doing unprofessional things that make me uncomfortable," the letter, which was provided to Reason, began. "It's never anything huge, but it's built up over the years I've been here and I don't feel safe around him. Although I'm generally really happy at Rochester, these situations have made me miserable at times. It's Florian."

Bixby went on to describe two incidents in which Jaeger made her uncomfortable.

In the first, she wrote that he walked into her shared office and, without asking, picked up a pen and Post-it notes off her office mate's desk and stood behind her writing a note. She said it was "creepy and unprofessional."

In the second incident, Bixby said that at a recruiting party that year, Jaeger asked if he could take a picture of her. She refused, and he later took a picture of her anyway.

"I was pretty angry," she wrote in her letter, "and the picture (if it still exists anywhere) is of me flipping him off. It makes me feel angry, sick, and my skin crawl to think of him having a picture of me anywhere."

Bixby added that she avoided both social and professional events for fear of seeing Jaeger, and asked that DeAngelis look into Jaeger's behavior and require "training on boundaries and respecting them." She also wrote that she never wanted to interact with Jaeger again.

"I never want him at a talk I give," she wrote. "Is that possible? If he ever tries to push for interaction, is it ok to tell him I prefer not to because of how uncomfortable his unprofessional behavior has made me?"

Toxic Pathologies In Liberal Discourse

greenwald |  While I used my social media platforms to denounce the false accusations voiced by Uygur and Kasparian against Maté, none of this would merit an article or stand-alone commentary if not for the fact that the two weapons they chose — false accusations that someone is a paid Russian agent and exploited sexual harassment accusations — have become extremely commonplace in Democratic Party politics, liberal circles and U.S. politics more broadly. It is long past time — way past time — that these tactics be rejected and scorned by everyone regardless of ideology or personality preferences.

I decided to analyze and dissect this conflict not in order to narrate everything that happened here or to arbitrate who is right and wrong with respect to every disagreement these parties are having. Instead, it is worth examining because the way this nasty exchange unfolded provides such a vivid and illuminating case study of two metastasizing cancers at the heart of liberal discourse. Both of these weapons are ethically repugnant and corrupt — obviously so — yet somehow have become as common and accepted among Democratic Party followers as they are toxic and reprehensible.

From Hillary Clinton and Howard Dean to Rachel Maddow and countless other liberal cable hosts, casually and falsely smearing people as paid Russian agents is now completely normalized behavior in liberal culture. And the list of people whose reputations have been destroyed from evidence-free and cynically deployed sexual harassment allegations or other vague accusations of sexual misconduct is too long to comprehensively chronicle. I examine these two issues in the format of video, which can be watched on the player below, because that is where so much of it has played out and because it seemed that is how the severity and magnitude of these abuses could be most effectively conveyed:

Step Up Bill Gates!!!

thesun |  BILL Gates has been urged to come forward and give evidence about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein - as it's revealed he bought homes near the disgraced financier and one of his billionaire pals.

Lawyer Spencer Kuvin, who represents nine Epstein victims, told The Sun that Gates should volunteer any information about the perv or his pals that could help in the Ghislaine Maxwell investigation.

Gates and the billionaire pedophile first met each other in 2011 - three years after Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting an underage girl in Florida - and met on numerous occasions

"The issue I have is a similar issue as with Prince Andrew," Kuvin told The Sun.

"Why are you taking business meetings with a person like that? I question anyone's moral character who chooses to take business meetings with someone who's exhibited that kind of behavior and admitted to that type of behavior.

"With Bill Gates, his wealth and investigatory powers, I find it incredibly hard to believe that he would not have known the full extent of the allegations that have been brought against Epstein here for that. 

"And yet he continued to take meetings with him. It just shows poor judgment."

Gates has always denied witnessing any wrongdoing during any of his meetings with Epstein. Prince Andrew has also denied any wrongdoing.

While records show Gates flew on Epstein's notorious Lolita Express in 2013, Gates claims he didn't know who the jet belonged to.

Melinda Gates was reportedly disturbed by her then husband's relationship with the wealthy Epstein way back in 2013, telling friends how uncomfortable she was in his company and that she wanted "nothing to do with him", the Daily Beast reported.

The business magnate announced last week he and Melinda would be parting ways after 27 years of marriage.

Kuvin added that the timing of the divorce, the process of which is believed to have started in 2019, by Melinda, around the time of Epstein's arrest on sex trafficking charges "does seem suspect".

 

 

 

I Can't Think Of Any "Hypersexualized" Asians, But Sonny Chiba Had A Baaaad White Woman

teenvogue |  Last Tuesday, a suspect entered three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area, killing 8 people. The next day, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long was charged with eight counts of murder. Most of the victims were Asian or Asian American women. Although the suspect’s motives are still under investigation, he claimed to have had a “sex addiction” that prompted the rampage, according to the New York Times. In a recent report by Stop AAPI Hate, there have been about 3,800 reports of hate incidents across the country since March 2020, with women reporting hate incidents 2.3 times more than men.

It’s no coincidence that Asian women are the most vulnerable when it comes to these attacks. This historic wave of anti-Asian racism is frightening and tragic, but its connection to Asian representation, especially Asian women, in America is disturbing.

Let’s start with the fact that there’s clearly a lack of Asian representation in Hollywood. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about 5.7 percent of people identify as Asian or Asian American. However, in 2016, they only made up 3.1 percent of film roles according to UCLA’s 2018 Hollywood Diversity Report. Because of this lack of representation, oftentimes portrayals of Asian women in Hollywood have been harmful.

The oversimplified depiction of Asian identity has a deep-rooted history of racism and violence. Often pop culture (films, musicals, TV, operas, etc) has portrayed Asian women as incompetent and fragile foreigners, exotic femme fatales, and subservient “mail-order” wives.

"Consider the heartbroken Cio-Cio San of Madame Butterfly (1904), a Japanese woman who commits suicide after she is abandoned by her white lover,” says Dr. Stephanie Young, an Associate Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Southern Indiana. “Madame Butterfly epitomizes the Lotus Blossom (sometimes called the China Doll) trope — feminine, shy, fragile, subservient, and sexually submissive. We see the Lotus Blossom trope in Miss Saigon (1989) and Memoirs of a Geisha (2005). Another popular trope is the Dragon Lady who is cunning and deceitful. She uses her sexuality as a powerful tool of manipulation, but often is emotionally and sexually cold and threatens masculinity. A contemporary example of the Dragon Lady is with the Japanese Yakuza leader O-Ren Ishii (played by Lucy Liu) in Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003).

Rev. Sen. Raphael Warnock's Ex-Wife Paid To Keep Quiet By The American Baptist Home Mission?

dailymail | 'I'm going to stay focused': Georgia Dem Senate candidate Raphael Warnock dodges questions about police bodycam showing ex-wife accuse him of running over her foot with his car

• Rev. Raphael Warnock, 51, declined to address police video of domestic dispute
• Warnock and his ex-wife Ouleye Ndoye, 35, divorced in May
• In March she called police to their Atlanta home after an incident in the drive
• She accused him of deliberately driving over her foot during an argument
• Warnock said he did not believe he ran over her and medics found no injuries 
• No charges were filed following the incident 
• Ndoye told officers that he was 'a very good actor' and obsessed with reputation
• She said she had 'tried to keep the way that he acts under wraps' for the election

ouleye |  Ouleye Ndoye is a global leader in human rights with over a decade of experience in government, non-profits, and academia. She advocates for the health, education, gender equality, and religious freedoms of people around the world and has dedicated her academic pursuits to these issues. Ndoye earned her bachelor's degree in international studies from Spelman College in Atlanta, GA, where she graduated Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude with honors; master of science in Migration Studies from the University of Oxford, UK; and master of arts in History with a concentration on African and Global history from Columbia University in the City of New York. Ndoye currently serves as the National Coordinator for Scholarships and Emerging Leaders at the American Baptist Home Mission Societies. 

- The Baptists Paid this woman to keep quiet about Warnock after the Dailymail Domestic Violence story broke in December - It is an OH TOO SWEET Irony That She is a specialist in Human Trafficking in light of the human trafficking massage parlor murders last week.

pathwaystofreedom |  Spelman College graduate Ouleye Ndoinye Warnock brings a wealth of local knowledge to her new role as Atlanta’s human trafficking senior fellow. With more than a decade of experience working to address human trafficking and other human rights-related issues around the world, Ouleye is well-positioned to lead efforts to tackle labor and sex trafficking in a city with a rich history of civil rights leadership.

 

Andrew Cuomo A Case Study In The Loss Of Public Trust In Industrial "Democracy"

newyorker |  But why did it take two months for Boylan’s accusations to be taken seriously by reporters, lawmakers, and law-enforcement officials? Her December 13th tweet received some initial news coverage. “Bombshell Cuo Claim,” one headline in the New York Post read. But, by the end of the month, the bombshell had fizzled. In an Albany Times Union article on December 26th that recapped the Governor’s year in the “national spotlight,” Boylan merited just three sentences. Partly, this can be explained by Boylan’s decision in December not to talk to reporters, and by the fact that she was, at the time, a lone accuser, whereas now she is one of several. But there is another reason: soon after she went public, someone tried to damage Boylan’s credibility and undercut her accusations by leaking damaging information about her to the press.

Within hours of Boylan’s tweet on December 13th, several news outlets reported that they had “obtained” state-government documents relating to Boylan’s job performance in the Cuomo administration. The documents—described by the Associated Press as “personnel memos,” by the Post as “personnel documents,” and by the Times Union as “personnel records”—said that several women had complained to a state-government human-resources office that Boylan had “behaved in a way towards them that was harassing, belittling, and had yelled and been generally unprofessional.” According to the Post’s account, “three black employees went to state human resources officials accusing Boylan, who is white, of being a ‘bully’ who ‘treats them like children.’ ” According to the Associated Press, the documents said that Boylan resigned after being “counseled” about the complaints in a meeting with a top administration lawyer. Reporters who wanted to dig into Boylan’s accusations against Cuomo now had to contend with the possibility that there were people out there who might have accusations to make against Boylan. At best, the documents seemed to raise questions about Boylan’s reliability. At worst, they painted her as a racist.

In a statement, Boylan’s attorney, Jill Basinger, told me Boylan has never seen the documents that the news accounts referenced—which Basinger called a “supposed ‘personnel file.’ ” Basinger accused the Governor’s office of leaking the documents, and also said she expects that the attorney general’s investigation will look into the leak. “It is both shocking and disgusting that the governor and his staff would seek to smear victims of sexual harassment,” Basinger said. “Ms. Boylan will not be intimidated or silenced. She intends to cooperate fully with the Attorney General’s investigation.”

At a press conference last week, Cuomo said that he supported “a woman’s right to come forward,” and that he was “sorry for whatever pain I caused.” At the same time, he pleaded with New Yorkers to allow him some due process. “Wait for the facts from the attorney general’s report before forming an opinion,” he said. That’s how the Governor would like to be treated. But that’s not how he traditionally has treated others. For decades, the Governor has had a reputation for scorched-earth tactics, and for retaliating against those who corner him, threaten him, or simply displease him. As Boylan weighed whether to come forward last year, her lawyer told me, she “believed that she would be retaliated against for going public with her mistreatment.” One former senior official in the Cuomo administration whom I spoke to said it was impossible to imagine that Cuomo himself hadn’t approved the leak of the Boylan documents. “There’s no question he would know about it, and direct it,” the former official said. “That’s how he would think.”

In the nineteen-nineties, while Cuomo was the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, under Bill Clinton, he fell into a long-running feud with Susan Gaffney, the agency’s inspector general. In 2000, Gaffney accused Cuomo of sexual discrimination. “Gaffney claims that Cuomo has called her at home on weekends to berate her, has started collecting information to smear her, and has leaked damaging information about her,” the Post reported, at the time. In the same story, a Cuomo spokesperson said, of Gaffney, “This is nothing more than a diversion from her misconduct regarding the downloading of pornography in her office and retaliation for our efforts to get to the bottom of it.”

In 2013, Michael Fayette, a state Department of Transportation engineer, gave a few quotes about his department’s operations during Hurricane Irene to the Adirondack Daily Enterprise. His statements were innocuous—“We were up for it,” he told the paper—but they hadn’t been cleared by the higher-ups in Albany. The press found out that Fayette’s superiors were moving to terminate him, and started asking how it was possible for someone to be fired over such a harmless episode. In response, a top Cuomo aide gave a radio interview during which he read aloud misconduct allegations contained in Fayette’s personnel files, including that he’d had an improper relationship with a subordinate. “They can run over you like you’re a freaking speed bump,” Fayette, who retired before he could be fired, told me, last week.

Da'Fug Wrong With Andrew Cuomo's "Oh Me So Horny" Ole-Ass?!?!?!

NYTimes |  Anna Ruch had never met Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo before encountering him at a crowded New York City wedding reception in September 2019. Her first impression was positive enough.

The governor was working the room after toasting the newlyweds, and when he came upon Ms. Ruch, now 33, she thanked him for his kind words about her friends. But what happened next instantly unsettled her: Mr. Cuomo put his hand on Ms. Ruch’s bare lower back, she said in an interview on Monday.

When she removed his hand with her own, Ms. Ruch recalled, the governor remarked that she seemed “aggressive” and placed his hands on her cheeks. He asked if he could kiss her, loudly enough for a friend standing nearby to hear. Ms. Ruch was bewildered by the entreaty, she said, and pulled away as the governor drew closer.

“I was so confused and shocked and embarrassed,” said Ms. Ruch, whose recollection was corroborated by the friend, contemporaneous text messages and photographs from the event. “I turned my head away and didn’t have words in that moment.”

 Ms. Ruch’s account comes after two former aides accused Mr. Cuomo of sexual harassment in the workplace, plunging his third term into turmoil as the governor’s defenders and Mr. Cuomo himself strain to explain his behavior.

A spokesman for the governor did not directly address Ms. Ruch’s account, referring to a general statement that Mr. Cuomo released on Sunday night in which he acknowledged that some things he had said “have been misinterpreted as an unwanted flirtation.”

“To the extent anyone felt that way, I am truly sorry about that,” the statement said.

Ms. Ruch’s example is distinct from those of the former aides: A former member of the Obama administration and the 2020 Biden campaign, Ms. Ruch has never been employed by the governor or the state. But her experience reinforces the escalating concerns and accusations about Mr. Cuomo’s personal conduct — a pattern of words and actions that have, at minimum, made three women who are decades his junior feel deeply uncomfortable, in their collective telling.

Protected Selected Corporate Fascist Chosen One Hoisted By His Pathetic Old Petard...,

As the Daily Mail noted on Thursday, CNN, ABC, CNN and MSNBC have devoted little to no time discussing Cuomo's nursing home scandal, or explosive new sexual harassment claims levied against the New York governor.

WATCH: CNN’s Jim Acosta confronted at CPAC over his network’s failure to cover Cuomo’s multiple scandals. pic.twitter.com/5AWGIeZ55F

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) February 26, 2021

ABC, CBS, CNN and MSNBC on Wednesday avoided discussing the explosive new sexual harassment claims against New York Gov Andrew Cuomo during their evening news broadcasts.  

Earlier on Wednesday, Lindsey Boylan, shared on Medium that during her more than three years in the Democrat's administration, Cuomo 'would go out of his way to touch me on my lower back, arms and legs,' compared her to one of his rumored ex-girlfriends and once remarked they should play strip poker. 

And according to Fox News, which cited Grabien transcripts, ABC's World News Tonight, CBS' Evening News, and NBC's Nightly News made no mention of Cuomo or the allegations against him. 

CNN and MSNBC also skipped over the allegations against the governor whose spokesperson Caitlin Girouard said that all Boylan's 'claims of inappropriate behavior are quite simply false'.

During CNN host Chris Cuomo's segment Wednesday night, he discussed why Democrats can't get a deal on pandemic relief, the January 6 Capitol riot and the Boeing 777 incident from last weekend.  

Maybe Marcus learned to interrupt people from Acosta?

Awwwww SNAP!!! Gov. Andrew Cuomo Done Fscked Up Now!!!

WSJ  |  Three months ago New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo was awarded an Emmy for “his leadership during the Covid-19 pandemic and his masterful use of TV to inform and calm people around the world.” Turns out the Emmys had the right actor—but the wrong performance. Increasingly it looks like Mr. Cuomo’s real act was to keep people from finding out how many people in his state’s nursing homes died from Covid-19.

On Thursday the New York Post reported that Melissa DeRosa, the Governor’s top aide, admitted to Democratic leaders that the state had deliberately kept the true numbers from them. In a Wednesday conference call, Ms. DeRosa told Democrats the Cuomo administration rejected a legislative request for the figures last August because Donald Trump was tweeting that “we killed everyone in nursing homes” and was directing “the Department of Justice to do an investigation into us.”

As Ms. DeRosa put it, “Basically, we froze.” The administration wasn’t sure, she said, if any information it released to state lawmakers or the Department of Justice “was going to be used against us” or “if there was going to be an investigation.”

Nursing home deaths are a sensitive issue for Mr. Cuomo because of a March 25 health department directive that barred these homes from rejecting people because they had Covid-19. The Associated Press reports that 9,056 recovering patients were sent into nursing homes after the directive, more than 40% higher than what the state had previously reported. 

In January state Attorney General Letitia James released a report on an investigation into complaints about how the nursing homes handled Covid-19. Two findings stand out. First, that “a larger number of nursing home residents died from COVID-19 than” the official data reflected. Second, that the March 25 directive “requiring the admission of COVID-19 patients into nursing homes may have put residents at increased risk of harm in some facilities and may have obscured the data available to assess that risk.”

Timnit Gebru: Google Definitely Has A "Type" When It Comes To Diversity And Inclusion...,

technologyreview |  The paper, which builds off the work of other researchers, presents the history of natural-language processing, an overview of four main risks of large language models, and suggestions for further research. Since the conflict with Google seems to be over the risks, we’ve focused on summarizing those here.

Environmental and financial costs

Training large AI models consumes a lot of computer processing power, and hence a lot of electricity. Gebru and her coauthors refer to a 2019 paper from Emma Strubell and her collaborators on the carbon emissions and financial costs of large language models. It found that their energy consumption and carbon footprint have been exploding since 2017, as models have been fed more and more data.

Strubell’s study found that one language model with a particular type of “neural architecture search” (NAS) method would have produced the equivalent of 626,155 pounds (284 metric tons) of carbon dioxide—about the lifetime output of five average American cars. A version of Google’s language model, BERT, which underpins the company’s search engine, produced 1,438 pounds of CO2 equivalent in Strubell’s estimate—nearly the same as a roundtrip flight between New York City and San Francisco.

Gebru’s draft paper points out that the sheer resources required to build and sustain such large AI models means they tend to benefit wealthy organizations, while climate change hits marginalized communities hardest. “It is past time for researchers to prioritize energy efficiency and cost to reduce negative environmental impact and inequitable access to resources,” they write.

Massive data, inscrutable models

Large language models are also trained on exponentially increasing amounts of text. This means researchers have sought to collect all the data they can from the internet, so there's a risk that racist, sexist, and otherwise abusive language ends up in the training data.

An AI model taught to view racist language as normal is obviously bad. The researchers, though, point out a couple of more subtle problems. One is that shifts in language play an important role in social change; the MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, for example, have tried to establish a new anti-sexist and anti-racist vocabulary. An AI model trained on vast swaths of the internet won’t be attuned to the nuances of this vocabulary and won’t produce or interpret language in line with these new cultural norms.

It will also fail to capture the language and the norms of countries and peoples that have less access to the internet and thus a smaller linguistic footprint online. The result is that AI-generated language will be homogenized, reflecting the practices of the richest countries and communities.

Moreover, because the training datasets are so large, it’s hard to audit them to check for these embedded biases. “A methodology that relies on datasets too large to document is therefore inherently risky,” the researchers conclude. “While documentation allows for potential accountability, [...] undocumented training data perpetuates harm without recourse.”

Research opportunity costs

The researchers summarize the third challenge as the risk of “misdirected research effort.” Though most AI researchers acknowledge that large language models don’t actually understand language and are merely excellent at manipulating it, Big Tech can make money from models that manipulate language more accurately, so it keeps investing in them. “This research effort brings with it an opportunity cost,” Gebru and her colleagues write. Not as much effort goes into working on AI models that might achieve understanding, or that achieve good results with smaller, more carefully curated datasets (and thus also use less energy).

Illusions of meaning

The final problem with large language models, the researchers say, is that because they’re so good at mimicking real human language, it’s easy to use them to fool people. There have been a few high-profile cases, such as the college student who churned out AI-generated self-help and productivity advice on a blog, which went viral.

The dangers are obvious: AI models could be used to generate misinformation about an election or the covid-19 pandemic, for instance. They can also go wrong inadvertently when used for machine translation. The researchers bring up an example: In 2017, Facebook mistranslated a Palestinian man’s post, which said “good morning” in Arabic, as “attack them” in Hebrew, leading to his arrest.

Rafa Still Gassing About MIT's Corrupt Old Nerds And Epstein's "Irresistible" Jailbait

To the members of the MIT community,   Last January, following the release of a fact-finding report about Jeffrey Epstein’s ties to MIT, I articulated five actions to address the challenges that emerged during that difficult time. I write with updates on those actions.   Please know that MIT offers extensive resources for survivors. I encourage you to use any you might find helpful.

1. We are establishing clear policies and processes to guide decisions about controversial donors.   In September, Provost Marty Schmidt and Chair of the Faculty Rick Danheiser released the draft reports of two ad hoc committees, one charged with identifying values and principles to guide MIT’s outside engagements, and one with improving MIT’s processes around gift acceptance. Following a comment period and a forum to gather feedback, the committees are incorporating community input into the final versions of their reports and recommendations. You will hear about next steps early in the new year.   Separately, the MIT Alumni Association and Resource Development retained Huron Consulting to review MIT’s donor and alumni database. The review confirmed that the information captured in the database is accurate and secure. It also proposed a number of steps MIT is now pursuing to further centralize the handling of donor and alumni information across the Institute.

Tada - Macking On Musty Patchouli Pannies Involves A Swole Peen, Not A Swole Belly....,

selfishactivist |  For the last two years, I’ve been actively and covertly being bullied by a group of people who have been engaging in accountability abuse and smears about me in various local communities around Montreal and the general area of the Pacific North West.

This has resulted in the loss of relationships with colleagues and clients, as well as work and income that went along with those relationships, including more recently being asked to step away from facilitation at an ancestral skills gathering, after smears reached some of their stakeholders.

During this time, I’ve also suffered from debilitating chronic fatigue, chronic pain, and vertigo during this period, which has been profoundly affected by the bullying. I’m luckily more resourced, in both a psycho-emotional sense and financial sense, than other people in my community, but I know many people in my community would not have been so lucky and ended up permanently traumatized.

As I am coming out of the worst of my condition, I feel like finally have the energy to address these matters more actively and take the responsibility to protect myself and the people who are connected to my work.

I want to specify that this note is a call for accountability from those who have bullied me, with the understanding that accountability is a path to repair.

Here, I want to share with you how I define what has been happening to me as accountability abuse and a form of defamation.

In the more-than-a-year period of constant secretive communications of projections and fabrications about me being spread in my local communities, I have received no direct contact or engagement from any core parties about the actual claims of me, and therefore no due process, no clarification, and no attempt at verification, all the while I have suffered massive damage to my mental health and relationships.

The innate lack of transparency and accountability of these claims defines what I refer to as accountability abuse – abuses of power that happen under the pretense of holding someone accountable for harm, which in turn abuses the spirit of accountability itself.

Adding to this problematic dynamic has been that the many community members who were engaged by this campaign, many of whom are organizers with ample social capital, would tell me that they cannot share who the claimants or what the claims are because they deserve to be protected, even while they pursued or enabled actions that harm me emotionally and financially.

My feelings about this are very clear: it is problematic for people to be able to say whatever they want about others under such protective anonymity AND have their claims validated through belief and action – it creates an extremely untransparent and unaccountable dynamic that is easily manipulated. For myself, I would love to see our communities adopt a standard that claims are deemed lacking actionable validity until they are specifically backed up by information such as who is the claimant and what they are claiming AND all parties are able to respond to transparent information.

Survivors 100% deserve trauma-informed attention and be heard, that is my core belief as a therapist, but we also need to be held responsible for having courage, in order to facilitate real healing and prevent traumatic patterns causing unnecessary harm through projection and fabrication. What I have seen over and over again is that, without such responsibility, survivor support turns into codependent coddling that reifies trauma.

 

(Cheerleading) Monopoly Power And Sexual Abuse

mattstoller.substack  |  When I started writing this newsletter on monopoly power, I would not have predicted that one of the more interesting and popular themes would be on how market power plays out in the world of cheerleading. And yet, the story of monopolization in cheer is a great example of the problem of concentrated corporate power, because it reveals so much about how our economy actually works.

As a quick recap, the company involved is called Varsity Brands, which has monopolized the sport of cheerleading by buying up most major competitions. Varsity is owned by private equity giant Bain Capital. What makes this story so useful is that there are no fancy high tech gadgets in cheer, no possible excuses from economists; it’s just the use of raw power to extract money from teenagers and their families through a business conspiracy.

The story also speaks to the power of advocates to make change. Over the past six months, competitors and customers have filed multiple class action antitrust lawsuits against Varsity, all essentially alleging the same anti-competitive practices from different angles. These cases hit one after another, building on each other and adding more details to the overall story of recklessness that occurs under a monopoly.

And now another shoe just dropped.

Last week, Marisa Kwiatkowski and Tricia L. Nadolny at USA Today detailed a massive scandal of rampant sexual abuse in cheerleading. There’s a high-profile aspect of this scandal; Netflix’s Cheer celebrity Jerry Harris was arrested for producing child pornography involving young cheerleaders, with complaints about him seemingly ignored by the main cheer governing body. But the scandal is more far-reaching than just Harris. What Kwiatkowski and Nadolny found was that over a 100 convicted sex offenders who had raped or assaulted children or otherwise engaged in sexual misconduct were allowed to work in the cheerleading world, and the two governing nonprofits of the sport - USA Cheer and the U.S. All Star Federation (USASF) - did not put these sex offenders on their list of people banned from the sport.

This kind of abusive behavior happens in every sphere of human activity, so one might think that abuse is not intrinsic to any particular business model. Further, these offenders by and large did not work at Varsity, but at independent gyms and associated companies doing business in the cheerleading ecosystem, so it’s even easier to see this as an isolated scandal. And yet, while it may not at first seem like it, this scandal about predators is part of the same monopoly story that I happened to hit on in January. This is a story of a theme I’ve hit on in other industries, or what is known as absentee ownership.

Side With Virginia Giuffre Against Rich Degenerate Old Cheesedicks...,

Knowing He Couldn't Dance A Lick, Joe Biden STILL Thought He Was Daddy Long Legs...,

caitlinjohnstone |  I’ve been avoiding writing much about Tara Reade, for a lot of reasons. Firstly I’m a survivor of multiple rapes and it brings up a lot of ouch for me, especially since whenever I write about rape as a problem I always get a deluge of highly triggered men (and sometimes one or two highly traumatized women) calling me a man-hater and saying all kinds of nasty things to me. Secondly I’ve been trying not to spend too much time on the details of an election we all know is fake anyway between two establishment candidates we already know are deeply depraved.

But mostly I avoid the subject because it’s just so goddamn gross. It’s gross to watch liberals going around pretending they believe that Handsy Uncle Hair Sniffer would never dream of shoving his fingers into a woman without her consent. It’s gross watching the language of leftism being borrowed to defend pure, relentless victim smearing. It’s gross watching people who’ve built their political identities around pretending to care about women try to spin these allegations as Reade being dishonest for partisan reasons, when in reality that’s exactly what they themselves are doing.

Due to my experiences with and sensitivity to the subject matter, going through this stuff feels kind of like getting punched in the privates over and over again. There are smears everywhere, from the establishment narrative managers to their brainwashed rank-and-file herd. Yesterday some “KHive” asshole told me that Reade is mentally ill and talking about her experience will probably drive her to suicide, citing a baseless smear by McResistance pundit Sally Albright as his evidence. There’s a Twitter thread with thousands of shares going around right now where some liberal combed through all Reade’s old tweets highlighting typos she made and claiming they show Reade tweeting “in a Russian accent”.

It sucks because if we’re to build a healthy world we’re going to have to get rid of all the people who shouldn’t be in power, and the very first lot we should eliminate are the ones who abuse their power to assault the sexuality of other human beings. If you use your power to rape people, you will with absolute certainty use it to do other unconscionable things as well, so eliminating those who do so is the first step toward health. That’s step one, and we can’t even get there, because blind partisan hackery turns pussyhat-wearing liberals into a bunch of snarling male supremacists.