NSFW, But Perfect End To Obama Presidency

Key & Peele perform President Obama
and his "anger translator" in a farewell address

Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama has been called "No Drama Obama" for his lack of weirdness, his quiet steadiness, aversion to scandal and his famously calm demeanor.

Comedians Jordan Peele and Keegan-Michael Key (Key & Peele) have made good use of this during the past eight years, often playing the calm Obama and his anger translator, which is Obama's Id, the pissed-off version of the president.

Here, from Comedy Central, we have Obama and his anger translator give us a final address to the nation. Remember, the language here is TOTALLY NSFW, but it's worth the watch.

Kind of because it feels cathartic.

Here you go:

Donald Trump Doth Protest Too Much As Russia Tries To Seize America

I hope this isn't reality, but it feels like it lately.

This is beginning to feel like a bad James Bond movie.

It's becoming more and more apparent that Russia, Wikileaks and maybe Trump or his minions are trying to turn the United States into a wholly owned subsidiary of Putin, Inc. 

Unless we get a James Bond-like figure to save the day, I worry that this effort might succeed.

Friday, the nation got more details on the intelligence gathering that shows Russia was trying - and succeeded, apparently - at tilting our elections toward Donald Trump last November. Vladimir Putin was personally involved in some of this, apparently.

We have Trump get his top secret intelligence briefing on the issue, and still insisting that there wasn't much to the intelligence gathering that Russia did this...

Maybe most ominously, we got more evidence that WikiLeaks, far from being a way to prompt government and corporate transparancy world wide, is more like Putin's goon squad.

The news from WikiLeaks kept getting weirder and more ominous Friday.

First, WikiLeaks objected to Thursday leaks detailing parts of the intelligence report on Russia to NBC News. 

WikiLeaks tweeted: "The Obama admin/CIA is illegally funneling TOP SECRET/COMINT information to NBC for political reasons before PEOTUS even gets to read it."

(POETUS refers to President-elect Trump.)

But get this: WikiLeaks was critcizing.......leaks. A little hypocritical maybe? Or was WikiLeaks just ,mad because the NBC leak had the potential to make Trump look bad.

Besides, it appears what got leaked to NBC News Thursday was the declassified version of the intelligence report that was widely released to the public Friday.

Much more ominously, WikiLeaks seemed to issue a warning of a witch hunt against journalists and others who discuss, investigate or report on Russian meddling.

Which is interesting, since Trump himself called reports of Russian influence on the U.S. election as  political witch hunt, prompted by sour grapes among those who lost the election.

The worrisome potential WikiLeaks, went like this, as Ars Technica reports:

"A Friday Twitter post from WikiLeaks' official task force declared intent to build a publicly seachable database revolving around a particular group of people: Verified Twitter accounts.

'We are thinking of making an online database with all verified Twitter accounts & their family/job/financial/housing relationships,' the Friday tweet reads.  A follow-up post sought suggestions fro the public and said the group is 'looking for discrete (father/shareholding/party membership variables that can be put into our AI software."

In short it appears that WikiLeaks might want to intimidate journalists into silence by "doxing" them. That means making their personal information such as home, family etc. public so goons who support  Trump can harass, threaten or even assault journalists or others who criticize Trump.

A very Russian thing to do, don't you think?  Suppress dissent, intimidate critics, stamp out free speech.

And WikiLeaks says they're for the truth? Ha!

I'm not sure what's in store once Trump takes office. Trump's constant dismissiveness of Russian hacking indicates either he wants to partner with Puting to squelched democracy, or more likely, Russia thinks Trump is a chump and has the goods on him.

Either way, this won't end well.

Let's hope people - and the media - fight efforts to stop the spread of information about who is influencing what in America, and holding on to the basics of democracy.

It's interesting that an outfit like WikiLeaks which says they want information freely available now so obviously shilling for such an anti-freedom outfit like Russia.

Once press freedom and freedom of speech is suppressed, which seems to be the effort underway, we all sink under the thumb of oppressive dictators.

I hope the resistance is stronger

Trump keeps calling the news about Russian hacking "a political witch hunt."

Trump appears to have gotten a number of important details wrong about the NBC story. No one “gave” NBC the top-secret report, as Trump claimed. As the NBC story notes, the official quoted by the network never even saw a copy of the intelligence report; he or she just repeated to NBC what someone had said about its findings.

On Friday morning, Trump told The New York Times that the ongoing public interest in possible Russian interference in the presidential election was “a political witch hunt.” He also complained the election-hacking story was getting more attention than other instances where government computers were compromised. These previous hacks, however, did not include releasing the stolen information to the public.

See, Church Can Be Fun!

The title of the YouTube video in this post is "Joyful Noise While Praying"

It starts off with a solemn moment with the preacher, until his assistant gets in the act.

Lots of fun!

Attempts To Avoid Publicity Garner Publicity For This Drunken Driving Suspect

The mugshot that Joseph Talbot
of upstate New York did not
want you to see. 

Drunk driving is wrong, and also, less importantly, embarrassing.

If you're caught driving while intoxicated, chances are your local paper will pick up on this story and publish it. Especially if you live in a small town and/or you're fairly prominent.

Guess what? It gets even worse if you try to hide the news.

According to The Times of Wayne County, one guy learned this truism the hard way.

Police say a guy named Joseph Talbot, 43, of Newark in Wayne County, New York, was arrested recently because authorities said they saw him driving erratically on Route 31 in Palmyra, New York.

He failed several field sobriety tests, and was brought to a police station, where he refused to give a breath sample, let troopers take fingerprints or take a mug shot. (They ended up taking a mug shot anyway.)

Police said Talbot told them he was angry that the mug shot would end up in "that rag" (The Times of Wayne County) and that police were trying to ruin his family.  Police probably wouldn't have tried to "ruin" his family if this guy stayed sober while driving.

Talbot's lack of cooperation  prompted police to add a charge of obstructing governmental administration, in addition to the DUI charge, says The TImes of Wayne County.

The trooper had tried to explain to Talbot that his refusals would create an even bigger story in the newspaper.

It turns out the troopers were right. The big headline in the Times of Wayne County was "Bank VP/Palmyra Man Calls Trooper Asshole. Refused To Have Mugshot Taken."

The article with this headline helpfully included a mug shot of Talbot.

Talbot wasn't done yet. He was released on conditions, and went out to buy 900 to 1,000 copies of the local paper, The Times of Wayne County, from eight different stores.

Newsstand copies of the paper sell for $1.25 apiece, so this idiot might have spent as much as $1,250 on this escapade.

As is always the case with this type of thing, Talbot really made matters much worse for himself. First of all, there are no doubt subscribers to the paper that got home delivery, which Talbot could not stop.

When the stores reported that all the copies of the paper had been sold, The Times was nice enough to estocked the stores with fresh copies of the paper

Plus, as the paper notes, "Now the story has been picked up by several national news outlets."

Embarrassed yet, Mr. Talbot?

Now, Apparently, We Need Clothes That Confuse Face Recognition Technology

Will we all have to wear clothing with patterns like
this to fend of advertisers who use face recognition
technology to make pitches to us?

It seems a lot of businesses and other entities want a good look at our faces.

There's a building demand for technology that would use face recognition to determine, say, what kind of mood you are in when you go into a store. That would help determine what kind of sales pitch you get.

An example of this brave new world is in China, where a KFC uses face recognition technology to figure out people's gender, age and mood to make recommendations of what to order.

Facebook is experiment with face recognition to help its dreaded algorithms determine what users want to do, and to target advertising, of course. Google Face Unlock allows users to get into their Android devices without using a password or other inconvenient method.

Sounds great, until you realize that it'll seem like everywhere you go, marketers will use face recognition on  you to target advertising. You can imagine governments using it to figure out what you do, where you go and who you're with for "law enforcement."

You can see how some people would be weirded out in terms of privacy and just general creepiness.

So it's come to this: An artist and technology geek in Berlin has come up with a line of clothing to confuse facial recognition devices, says The Guardian.

The artist, Adam Harvey, calls the project Hyperface.

According to The Guardian:

"They Hyperface project involves printing patterns on to clothing or textiles, which then appear to have eyes, mouths and other features that a computer can interpret as a face. "

Harvey said Hyperfine is about "overloading the algorithm with what it wants, oversaturating an area with faces to diver the gaze of the computer vision algorithm."

The artist has also previouslyk come up with hairstyles and makeup people can adopt to confuse face recognition technology.

Yes, it's coming to this. We have to wear special clothes and makeup just to avoid the constant bombardment of marketing we experience all the time.

It's fine to advertise, yes. But must 100 percent of our lives be taken up by fending off the marketing department?

Geez!

Alexa Talks A Blue Streak

Alexa, our new Amazon Echo voice activated
personal assistant, sits in a central location in our
house for easy use. But learning that it can
talk a blue streak has me wondering if
it should be hidden away when we have company.

The Modereger relatives in South Dakota gave us an Amazon Echo, or Alexa, the voice-activated personal assistant device.

Jeff and I love it!  

It's really cool, as many of you who have one know. It answers any question you have, and is a great personal assistant that hooks us in with entertainment, music and news, too.

Thanks Brian and Michelle and all the Moderegers!

We've put it to quick use, asking Alexa all sorts of spur-of the moment questions, many of them absurd, just to see how she would respond.

After a couple failed answers, I asked Alexa if she was OK, and to our delight, she said "Fine, thank you."

A television commercial played the Doris Day song "Que Sera Sera" prompting us to wonder if Doris Day is still alive and if so, how old is she. Alexa assured us that Doris Day is alive and 94 years old.

Jeff was mildly concerned about the weather back home in Yankton, South Dakota on Sunday, but Alexa assured us it was mild (34 degrees) and partly cloudy.

However, we've learned that Amazon Echo can have a few glitches.

In a viral video, a child asked it to an Amazon Echo Dot, one variation of this device to play "Digger Digger." As Consumerist notes, we can assume the youngster wanted to hear one of two chidrens' songs, either "Diggers, Dumpers and Trucks," by Kidzone or "Diggers (Diggers and Dumpers) by Tractor Ted.

Both songs are safely rated G.

However, we think Echo Dot misunderstood the question, and it turns out Alexa talks a blue streak. The viral video is below but beware, the audio is definitely NOT NSFW.

As you can hear, the Echo let loose a string of nasty words, including "dildo" as the adults in the room frantically pleaded with the device to just shut up.

Here's the funny NSFW video:

"Pizzagate" Just Keeps Getting Weirder And Weirder

Dallas Mavericks center Andrew Bogut was sidelined by a knee
injury, which wouldn't be exciting news except for the fact
the weird Pizzagate conspiracy theorists say Bogut
is actually being punished for publicizing Pizzagate.  

We now live in a world where a big subset of people will believe anything, and the biggest proof of all is Pizzagate, which believe it or not, is getting even weirder, which I never thought was possible.

As the New York Times explains this convoluted conspiracy theory, it was borne from Wikileaks, which released emails hacked from John Podesta, who was Hillary Clinton's campaign manager.

Note, you really have to read this New York Times explainer. It is SO amazing people will leap to such weird conclusions as fact. God help us.

Anyway, within Podesta's emails were mundane missives, including plans between Podesta and his brother, lobbyist Tony Podesta, to meet at a Washington DC pizza restaurant called Comet Ping Pong  for dinner.

Somebody on 4chan, a wacko extreme right wing message board, noted the phrase "cheese pizza" in the emails.

According to the nuts on 4chan, pedophiles use the initials "c.p." to denote child pornography. "Cheese pizza" has the same initials, so naturally, according to the wonderful minds on 4chan, Podesta was running a child sex ring at this pizza place, and that of course meant Hillary Clinton was also running this child sex ring.

Totally logical, right?

That, of course led to a another nutcase from North Carolina to head up to Washington DC to personally investigate Comet Ping Pong and rescue the children from the nonexistent sex ring in the nonexistent basement of the restaurant.

He shot up the place, but alas, rescued no children, since there were no children to be rescued.

That hasn't stopped the Pizza Gate conspiracy people, who won't let facts get in the way of their juicy scandal. They're still threatening employees of the pizza place, and people who work at neighborhing businesses, since they're in the same neighborhood and are obviously in on the crime.

In the latest development, some of Donald Trumps most paranoid, weird supporters are claiming NBA Dallas Maverick's center Andrew Bogut was banned from playing because he sort of agreed that Pizzagate might actually be a thing,  says the Daily Beast. 

The theory goes that Bogut was exposing "the truth" about Pizzagate, so they forced him to stop playing to silence him.

In reality, he was sidelined by a knee injury, that thousands of people saw on TV, but never mind eyewitnesses or reality.

There's a surprising number of people who subscribed to the "They're Silencing Bogut" theory.

As the Daily Beast notes, Reddit, which can be a swamp of weirdness anyway, has a lot of people on this "story." For instance, one headlined "Bogut Risked His Career To Help Expose The Truth,", written by WhiteGenocideXLV, had over 8,000 upvotes on Reddit.

As the Daily Beast also notes, this post was put up just a few hours after Bogut played 22 minutes in a Mavericks' 12-point win against the Los Angeles Lakers.

And never mind a whole bunch of people actually witnessed Bogut getting injured, and, again, there's a widely viewed video of Bogut injuring his knee on YouTube.

But video proof of something isn't good enough for the Pizzagate enthusiasts, no siree!

This will remain alive forever. It also helps explain why so many people voted for Trump. If some people are willing to suspend disbelief and become convinced Hillary, Podesta and even Barack Obama are running a child sex ring out of a Washington DC pizza parlor, they'll believe anything.

Even Donald Trump's slightly less fanciful statements and promises.

We blame the politicians for the failures and embarrassments and corruption in the United States. But let's face it, they're totally aided and abetted by too many head smackingly stupid, moronic people who will believe anything they hear, as long as it feeds their ignorant emotions.

As I've said before, too many of us live in a fact-free world, and that is at all of our peril.