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Exclusive: Russia Carried Out A 'Stunning' Breach Of FBI Communications System, Escalating The Spy Game On U.S. Soil

Is the President suggesting the Obama-Netflix deal be investigated? Maybe. Maybe not. New York Post: Netflix is now a propaganda machine for the Obamas

From LiveScience: There's a New Blackest Material Ever, and It's Eating a Diamond As We Speak

Here's a story that invites thought about 'Fake News' ... Court revives suit alleging Fox News inflicted 'emotional torture' on Seth Rich family

The Gang from QAnon Anonymous podcast hooked up with the jaded, middle-class meddler Jared Holt. Maybe we could assemble a list of OL Member-Approved QAnon-whisperers. My guess is that Praying Medic, InTheMatrixxx, Liz Crokin and Joe M (StormIsUponUs) would be in a Top Ten.

Pre-newbies, newbies, crypto-newbies, and post-truth newbies adjust their opinions ...

The big demonstration at the monument has attracted at least a couple of hundred people. The live Periscope feed has no sound, which is kind of sad for the producers. New beginnings and ... wrath. Which makes me think of the lust for a purge, and the Committee of Public Safety.

Writ drop! Elle can relax somewhat, as she foresaw Trudeau ignoring the law and possibly being subject to removal by extra-parliamentary means. A bit zany, but hey. Politics always has a circus element. For Canadian OL lurkers and members, the photo-link below of Elections Canada (Elections.ca) gives you everything you need to know about the election. Who what when where how ... and provides the means to register if you are not already registered. In my riding, the Conservative incumbent will be returned to office in the new Parliament. I don't trust the 'horse race' polls** at the moment, of course, but with only 41 days in this campaign, the race is relatively short, and provincial-level polls will reflect at least the grossest indications. I still find it most likely -- going by 'feel' -- that the Conservatives will form government in the new parliament. ** -- national polls are usually sectioned out by region, but with larger margins of error than provincial/regional polling. It takes a kind of weighting informed by individual riding contests to interpret raw percentages in these surveys. The conventional wisdom is that the CPC and LPC are tied ... the slogans are kind of sad ... though tastes will differ. At the heart of my uncertainty is the uptick in sentiment about the future ... "There is a malaise within the land ..." [link]

"Are you overwhelmed at the amount, contradictions, and craziness of all the information coming at you in this age of social media and twenty-four-hour news cycles? Fake News, Propaganda, and Plain Old Lies will show you how to identify deceptive information as well as how to seek out the most trustworthy information in order to inform decision making in your personal, academic, professional, and civic lives. • Learn how to identify the alarm bells that signal untrustworthy information. • Understand how to tell when statistics can be trusted and when they are being used to deceive. • Inoculate yourself against the logical fallacies that can mislead even the brightest among us." The author of the book is Donald A Barclay, librarian, who gave an interview to Publisher's Weekly last September. This excerpt mirrors a part of the preface, which I will dictate and post below. Dude sounds like a dang Objectivist here, if a plodder ... -- cross-linking here to a dedicated Front Porch topic thread "Fake News," and to a "fake news" OL-internal-search page of this blog, "Friends and Foes." There are at this moment 732 items in the "Fake News" phrase search returns of the whole of the Objectivist Living community. The subtitle to Barclay's book is "How to Find Trustworthy Information in the Digital Age."

Bolton out? Bolton out.

Gitmo? From the Baltimore Sun -- which was the source of the Zerohedge article: The Zerohedge article had a 'this article will be updated' tag at the bottom. As of this moment, the story is not updated ...

This tweet is from one of the estimated 45 million UK citizens who are not pleased with anything in Parliament. The red rose means this guy is as close as you can get to communism without becoming Bernie Sanders ... The relish with which Jones trims down his list of facts should not obscure the facts. Everything put to Parliament failed -- May's biggest move, the free-vote on no-deal Brexit -- failed. Johnson has lost control of Parliament, but is still in titular charge of government. The most likely or probable outcome is anyone's guess. My own rough guess is based on the unremitting failure of any government to get agreement with the various parliamentary blocs and interests. If everyone has failed so far, shouldn't we accept failure as almost fated, in the circumstances? Johnson fractured his own party, and has been unable to control the order paper since. Can he regain leadership of the House of Commons and Lords? The Queen is duty bound to take the advice of her ministers, so anything Johnson asks of her will be granted -- like a snap election (but of course only after he can pass legislation overruling the current 'fixed term Parliament' law). The best option for getting the exact 'deal' he wants out of the EU -- so-called hard Brexit -- is to obey the letter spelled out in the law passed by both houses and assented to by the Queen: if no deal by the trigger date, Boris Johnson must send a letter to Brussels requesting an extension till the end of January. In Canada we always imagine various exit strategies of our provinces, should they wish to leave the federation. Alberta and Quebec are the restive territories. In the deals envisioned in Quebec, the divorced citizens would share citizenship and mobility coast to coast to coast. The first deal was a coral garden of extrusions called 'sovereignty-association' ... the second a rather more straightforward exit plan that -- surprise surprise -- would retain the Canadian dollar and joint-citizenship divorce. Kind of the present Irish system where the lawful border has essentially disappeared as a barrier or impediment between the peoples south and north. Sometimes a border has to harden, despite outcries and imagined pain and horror. I think Johnson is willing to enforce a hard border with the EU. I just don't know if he can win a fight right now. If anyone else plays close attention to the Brexit drama in the UK, do you have any guesses? The prime minister would like to get out on Hallowe'en without a 'back-stop.' This is unacceptable in the republic of Ireland, thus also in the EU. It's a built-in problem in the British Isles constitutional strait-jacket.

Here is some helpful input for our fiction ...

Did I misspell friction? No, but. 1. Dr. Franklin 2. The Weather Wizard 3. Nicholas Demente 4. GALAXY 5. Destro 6. Colonel Cobb 7. Sir August De Wynter 8. Simon Bar Sinister 9. Crimson Cowl 10. The Weatherman

I am going to have to do some research on these items, since I expect we don't want to repeat earlier fiction -- at least not without a few tweaks. From Gizmodo's Gordon Jackson and Charlie Jane Anders: 10 Villains Who Used Bad Weather as a Weapon

What kind of untuned drum is being beaten here?

The place to be on September 11? Washington DC, apparently.

HA Goodman has been predicting that Clinton will be the nominee for the Democratic party for several months. I think not, but he seems pretty sure of himself.

Part of the fun of Q is that you can invert a normal process of deduction. Our old friend Poker and Politics highlights this phenomena. If you cannot trust NOAA, who can you trust? Trust No. 1.

The bill sailed through the Lords ...

Just when it seemed safe to go back in the water ...

"Fuck off, pedophile."

Some people are not nice ... from this nasty NBCNews story:

So, how are things going with Brexit? To put it simply, there have been a few bumps in the road since my last post above. The biggest bump yesterday was that the Conservative Party lost its majority in the House of Commons, and thus lost its control of the 'order paper.' That means the government has no power to force anything that the rest of Parliament does not agree. The latest bump is a bill sent to the House of Lords. In a nutshell it says there will not be a no-deal Brexit come Hallowe'en. He can indeed 'call for' a fresh round of elections, but since he cannot command the 2/3 Commons majority vote necessary to overturn the UK's 'fixed elections' timetable ... the road ahead is pretty obscure.