Zooey wrote:

zn wrote:

league sources say Rams done due diligence in Odell Beckham Jr. in a possible trade.

Skuze me, what?

I want no part of that.

================

I dunno. The thought of O’dell wearing a “We, Not Me” t-shirt
just brings a smile to my face. I think it would be the perfect
symbol of…’the situation.’

w
v

Peters, Talib, Suh — Now they need to sign OBJ so they can have a fourth pillar.

I dunno about any of this. Its all kinda surreal. I dunno how to process it. The Rams have moved to LA and become the Raiders.

Sigh. Might as well draft a pass-rusher now and totally cluster-fuck the quarterbacks in the NFL.

I dont like the fact that every yappy-celebrity-pundit in the universe is gonna predict a championship for the rams now. And they havent played a down together.

I could live without the hype.

Ah well. Welcome to LA.

w
v

Zooey wrote:

I’m in favor of it, now. I’m all in.

I think watching Suh and Donald together could very well be some big source of entertainment. I think – despite not having any blue chip LBs – this defense could just kill teams, and I love a devastating defense. I want to see it.

==================

Well, I’ll tell you what I’m ‘not’ for.

I’m not for reading post after post of “what nickname shall we give the Rams D Line now that its the best D-Line in the history of the NFL”

….what about…”The Good, The Bad, and Brockers”

Or how bout….”The line that cost us Sammy Watkins.”

Or…”The line with a great player, a good player and a guy that doesnt fit the scheme”

w
v

Yeah, i agree with all that. I think we’ve all talked about that ‘backfire effect’ many times over the years.

The good folks at Cambridge Analytica and the good folks at the CIA pys-ops research facilities all study that dynamic and the ways to ‘use’ knowledge about how the human-amigdyla works to get results they want.

Anyway, nice, clear, accessible article. Teachers should use that one in class-rooms. (for all the good it will do)

w
v

Well these are the same future-predictors who had the Seahawks at no.2 and the Rams at 29 in Week One last year. They
had the Jaguars at 31. And — the Eagles at 19.

NFL:http://www.nfl.com/news/story/0ap3000000839325/article/nfl-power-rankings-week-1-seahawks-surging-toward-top-spot

I dunno about the Rams right now. I dunno about the Oline or the Passing game.
They were SOOOO lucky last year on the OLine. That will not happen again.

w
v

a little more on the C.A. thing:https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/mar/21/mod-cambridge-analytica-parent-company-scl-group-list-x
MoD granted ‘List X’ status to Cambridge Analytica parent company

MPs call for investigation into concerns over SCL Group and its access to secret documents

Why is his name Robey-Coleman?

I dont trust hyphenated people, unless theyve got a damn good reason
for being hyphenated.

I dont trust semi-colon people either.

w.v-ram
========

wiki:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double-barrelled_name
…British tradition

A few British upper-class families have “triple-barrelled” surnames (e.g. Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe; Cave-Browne-Cave; Elliot-Murray-Kynynmound; Heathcote-Drummond-Willoughby; Smith-Dorrien-Smith; Vane-Tempest-Stewart). Not all of those with multiple names were of the nobility; landed gentry such as George Henry Lane-Fox Pitt-Rivers consolidated the estates and wealth of several families in their multiple names. These are sometimes created when one spouse has a double-barrelled name and the other has a single surname. Nowadays, such names are almost always abbreviated in everyday use to a single or double-barrelled version. There are even a few “quadruple-barrelled” surnames (e.g. Hepburn-Stuart-Forbes-Trefusis, Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, Montagu-Stuart-Wortley-Mackenzie, Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, Stirling-Home-Drummond-Moray, and the Danish Krag-Juel-Vind-Frijs family). The surname of the extinct family of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos was the quintuple-barrelled Temple-Nugent-Brydges-Chandos-Grenville.

Captain Leone Sextus Denys Oswolf Fraudatifilius Tollemache-Tollemache de Orellana Plantagenet Tollemache-Tollemache is sometimes quoted as the man with the most ever “barrels” in his surname (six), but in fact all but the last two of these (Tollemache-Tollemache) were forenames.

Many double-barrelled names are written without a hyphen, which can cause confusion as to whether the surname is double-barrelled or not. Notable persons with unhyphenated double-barrelled names include politician David Lloyd George (born with Lloyd as a middle name, but self-transformed into a double-barrelled surname), the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, astronomer Robert Hanbury Brown, actors Kristin Scott Thomas and Helena Bonham Carter (although she has said the hyphen is optional)[2] comedian Sacha Baron Cohen (however, his cousin Professor Simon Baron-Cohen opted for the hyphen) and Sylvia Llewelyn Davies.

Iberian tradition…

Greg Palast on the Psy-ops-propaganda thing. Fwiw

GP:https://mailchi.mp/gregpalast/cambridge-analytica-aint-nuthin-look-out-for-i360?e=3c62b43786

Cambridge Analytica Ain’t Nuthin:
Look out for i360 and DataTrust
By Greg Palast

The story is that Cambridge Analytica, once directed by Steve Bannon, by shoplifting Facebook profiles to bend your brain, is some unique “bad apple” of the cyber world.

That’s a dangerously narrow view. In fact, the dark art of dynamic psychometric manipulation in politics was not pioneered by Cambridge Analytica for Trump, but by i360 Themis, the operation founded by… no points for guessing… the Brothers Koch.

Mark Swedlund, himself an expert in these tools, explained in film The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, that i360 dynamically tracks you on 1800 behaviors, or as Swedlund graphically puts it [see clip above],

“They know the last time you downloaded porn and
whether you ordered Chinese food before you voted.”

Swedlund adds his expert conclusion: “I think that’s creepy.”

The Koch operation and its competitor, DataTrust, use your credit card purchases, cable TV choices and other personal info — which is far more revealing about your inner life than the BS you put on your Facebook profile. Don’t trust DataTrust: This cyber-monster is operated by Karl Rove, “Bush’s Brain,” who is principally funded by Paul Singer, the far Right financier better known as The Vulture.

Way too much is made of the importance of Cambridge Analytica stealing data through a phony app. If you’ve ever filled out an online survey, Swedlund told me, they’ve got you — legally.

The second danger is to forget that the GOP has been using computer power to erase the voting rights of Black and Hispanic voters for years — by “caging,” “Crosscheck,” citizenship challenges based on last name (Garcia? Not American!!), the list goes on — a far more effective use of cyberpower than manipulating your behavior through Facebook ads.

Just last week, Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas and Trump’s chief voting law advisor, defended his method of hunting alleged “aliens” on voter rolls against a legal challenge by the ALCU. Kobach’s expert, Jessie Richman, uses a computer algorithm that can locate “foreign” names on voter rolls. He identified, for example, one “Carlos Murguia” as a potential alien voter. Murguia is a Kansas-born judge who presides in a nearby courtroom.

It would be a joke, except that Kobach’s “alien” hunt has blocked one in seven new (i.e. young) voters from registering in the state. If Kobach wins, it will, like his Crosscheck purge program and voter ID laws, almost certainly spread to other GOP controlled states. This could ultimately block one million new voters, exactly what Trump had in mind by pushing the alien-voter hysteria.
Become A Kobach Litigation Supporter
Help us fund our mass litigation operation against Kris Kobach (Trump’s Vote-Thief-in-Chief). For now, details must remain confidential.
— Click here to make a tax-deductible donation.
The Cambridge Analytica story was first reported by The Guardian and Observer in 2015. Did we listen? Did any US paper carry the story the British paper worked on for years? So, my first reaction reading this story was nostalgia — for the time when I was a reporter with The Guardian and Observer investigations team. We could spend a year digging deep into complex stories, working with crazy insiders. There, in 2000, I uncovered another cyber-crime: Using database matching to purge felons from Florida voter rolls. (None, in fact, were felons; most were Democrats.)

I moved back to America, but found I had to give up any hope of doing true, deep investigative reports for newspapers in my own country. US papers will sometimes re-report Guardian news, but American media almost never initiates deep investigation. And THAT, fear of the cost, difficulty and risk in digging out the truth, is a greater threat to America than Steve Bannon.

Well there’s several different issues there. Did CA ‘steal’ something from ‘facebook’? If they did why hasnt the FBI arrested someone? Is it ‘illegal’ to steal from facebook or is it a gray area?

Secondly are you saying CA is a russian organization? Or that simply a russian is part of it?

Btw, here is a post i read today on the lifeboat board. Its about CA as well. It was noted that CA has links to the British-CIA, not the Russian-CIA 🙂
Fwiw.

__________________________
There’s a lot of fuss about CA now, seemingly because someone thinks they can convince everyone that Brexit and/or Trump only happened due to computer voodoo, and we should therefore reverse them. While they’re obviously dodgy, I think this story has been overblown by hopeful remainers: eg CA worked for ted cruz first for ages before trump – didn’t do cruz much good – most of the data they had was related to cruz – they switched to trump late in the day, so the effect of any direct trump-related psychometry had would have been minimal i’d guess. Similarly with brexit – they were going to work for leave.eu if they got the main funding, but they didn’t so they didn’t apparently. Companies like CA are in the business of overstating the power of their algorithms seems to me.

The real issue for me is that SCL, CA’s parent company used to work for MI6 (or be run by them) and this technology was used by them in god knows what elections around the world for the good of the empire – and no doubt still is being used by many agencies, private and otherwise – and probably to a much higher sophistication level than CA has. Not to mention the same technology as used by the major social media giants in-house as a matter of course in their own business models.

(I read somewhere that the tories have apparently been in talks with CA for three months about working for them – can’t remeber where now)
=====================

Billy_T wrote:

I thought we were waaay beyond any doubt more than a year ago of Trump’s absolute guilt. There is just overwhelming evidence that he’s a crook on a massive scale, and that he sought and received major, illicit support from Russia (and other actors) to win the election. Since becoming president, the evidence is overwhelming that he’s covered this up, lied hundreds of times about it, and has engaged in serial obstruction of justice.

And now comes this:

http://www.businessinsider.com/cambridge-analytica-trump-russia-ties-2018-3

Excerpt:

The London-based data firm Cambridge Analytica was testing out slogans like “Drain the Swamp” and “Build the Wall” as early as 2014, the same year Russia launched its social media influence operation targeting the 2016 US election.

Those slogans would later become the bedrock of Republican nominee Donald Trump’s platform while he campaigned for the presidency. He invoked them frequently at his rallies, and his supporters often chanted them.

“We were testing all kinds of messages and all kinds of imagery, which included images of walls, people scaling walls,” Christopher Wylie, a former employee at Cambridge Analytica, told CNN. “We tested ‘drain the swamp’ … ideas of the deep state and the NSA watching you and the government is conspiring against you.”

“And a lot of these narratives, which at the time would have seemed crazy for a mainstream candidate to run on, those were the things that we were finding that there were pockets of Americans who this really appealed to,” Wylie added.

Steve Bannon, the former White House chief strategist and Trump campaign CEO, sat on the data firm’s board of directors, which is largely backed by Republican megadonor Robert Mercer.

Wylie said Monday that Bannon’s push for the Trump campaign to endorse far-right positions on issues like immigration and law enforcement largely stemmed from Cambridge Analytica’s research on those topics.

The Trump campaign hired Bannon in the summer of 2016. Around the same time, it also tapped Cambridge Analytica to manage its data operation.

A Trump aide told Wired that the firm played a “key role” in identifying political donors that helped them raise $80 million in July 2016.

In all my life, I have never seen a more obvious, slam-dunk case against a politian. And this latest revelation demonstrates yet again how mendacious he is and how he sold his voters a phony bill of goods. Social media/psych app testing, not his own beliefs, drove his campaign.

=================

I dont get it BT. I dont see the illegality in any of that. (granted i havent studied on it)

That analytics stuff just looks like the same ole political focus group crap that Obama, Clinton, and all the rest of them have used for a long time. Whats illegal about it?

w
v

I prefer Suh to Bradford, fwiw. Just sayin.

Not tryin to start a board war.

w
v