Man Is Arrested For Drinking Soda In Public

By Matt Agorist

New York, NY — Shawn Thomas films the police. He does so because it’s his right and he’s also great at fending off and exposing their rampant corruption.

Many of those who choose to film the police are polite and cordial, even when they are disrespected.

However, Thomas is not afraid to answer back to police who attempt to violate his rights, and he does so with an eloquent knack for profanity.

If you visit Thomas’ YouTube Channel, you will see that he is no stranger to these interactions.

Officer Kevin McAlister, badge number 17304, was the latest tyrant to violate this man for doing nothing wrong.

As Thomas was minding his own business, he was approached by McAlister for drinking a non-alcoholic malta soft drink. As he proceeded to violate this man’s rights, McAlister wrongfully claimed that Thomas had a Sam Adams beer.

Thomas stood his ground and refused to bow down and be harassed, illegally. Even if he would have had a beer, the response from police in this instance is utterly ridiculous. Five officers were called to the scene because a man had a soft drink in paper bag.

 

Thomas was forcefully handcuffed, and his cellphone, wallet, and ID were confiscated. Illegally.

After assaulting him and depriving Thomas of his freedom, the officers realized that they had no justification for the stop and they were forced to let him go.

In the land of the free, this is what protecting and serving has become.

How The Egg Lobby Paid Food Blogs And Targeted Chef To Crush A Vegan Startup

Internal emails reveal coordinated attack by American Egg Board to quash the rise of Hampton Creek’s egg alternative in possible breach of federal regulations

By Sam Thielman

A government-controlled industry group targeted popular food bloggers, major publications and a celebrity chef as part of its sweeping effort to combat a perceived threat from an egg-replacement startup backed by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest names, the Guardian can reveal.

The lobbyists’ media counterattack, in possible violation of US department of agriculture rules, was coordinated by a marketing arm of the egg industry called the American Egg Board (AEB). It arose after AEB chief executive Joanne Ivy identified the fledgling technology startup Hampton Creek as a “crisis and major threat to the future” of the $5.5 billion-a-year egg market.

A detailed review of emails, sent from inside the AEB and obtained by the Guardian, shows that the lobbyist’s anti-Hampton Creek campaign sought to:

• Pay food bloggers as much as $2,500 a post to write online recipes and stories about the virtue of eggs that repeated the egg lobby group’s “key messages”
• Confront Andrew Zimmern, who had featured Hampton Creek on his popular Travel Channel show Bizarre Foods and praised the company in a blog post characterized by top egg board executives as a “love letter”
• Target publications including Forbes and Buzzfeed that had written broadly positive articles about a Silicon Valley darling
• Unsuccessfully tried to recruit both the animal rights and autism activist Temple Grandin and the bestselling author and blogger Ree Drummond to publicly support the egg industry
• Buy Google advertisements to show AEB-sponsored content when people searched for Hampton Creek or its founder Josh Tetrick

The scale of the campaign – dubbed “Beyond Eggs” after Hampton Creek’s original company name – shows the lengths to which a federally-appointed, industry-funded marketing group will go to squash a relatively small Silicon Valley startup, from enlisting a high-powered public relations firm to buying off unwitting bloggers.

One leading public health attorney, asked to review the internal communications, said the egg marketing group was in breach of a US department of agriculture (USDA) regulation that specifically prohibited “any advertising (including press releases) deemed disparaging to another commodity”.

Tetrick called for the USDA to clamp down on the food lobby, as thousands of petitioners called on the White House to to investigate the USDA itself for “deceptive endorsements”.

“This is a product that has been around for a very long time,” the Hampton Creek founder said. “They are not used to competition and they don’t know how to deal with it.”

In statements, AEB’s Ivy and a USDA official denied any wrongdoing. An agriculture department official said that it “does not condone any efforts to limit competing products in commerce”.

The AEB contracted Edelman, the world’s largest public relations company, to coordinate the attack. One passage within the email tranche suggests that AEB amended its contract with Edelman to include a section called “Beyond EggsConsumer Research”.

“Conduct qualitative/quantitative consumer research to pinpoint and prioritize areas of focus. For example, research will, ideally, provide actionable intelligence on what attacks are gaining traction with consumers and which are not so as to help industry calibrate level of communications response (if any) to ensure a consistent response strategy moving forward,” the passage reads.

“Ads considered disparaging are those that depict other commodities in a negative or unpleasant light via either video, photography or statements,” said attorney Michele Simon, of the law firm Foscolo and Handel, after reviewing the AEB emails. “The entire contract [amendment] with Edelman violates this rule.”

Some of the web’s biggest food blogs were unwittingly paid from the “Beyond Eggs” budget to write supportively about eggs as AEB executives privately expressed mounting frustration about Hampton Creek, whose high-profile backers include the Facebook backer Peter Thiel, billionaire investor Vinod Khosla and other Silicon Valley luminaries.

When one Edelman executive, Jamie Singer, advised that the board wait on “an eventual and organic balancing of the media narrative”, Kevin Burkum, AEB’s senior vice-president of marketing, shot back: “Help us understand why the recommended course of action seems to always be sit back and do nothing?”

More recently, Hampton Creek has in fact faced its own PR woes with allegations of suspect science and hazardous work environments. And last month the US Food and Drug Administration warned the California startup that the name of its flagship product, Just Mayo, was misleading and and should be renamed, insisting an egg-less product should not be described as mayonnaise.

The emails reveal how AEB executives had grown increasingly frustrated about coverage of Hampton Creek, hailing the company as providing a high-tech and sustainable alternative to factory-farmed eggs.

In an email an AEB executive noted a blogpost by Zimmern – an influential TV celebrity – that complimented Hampton Creek and described caged-chicken egg production as “the poster child for everything farming and food systems shouldn’t be”.

The AEB executive complained Zimmern’s post was “a new love letter” to Hampton Creek and suggested sending the TV chef a study underwritten by the AEB to contradict his take. A long exchange discussed whether or not to respond to Zimmern’s offer to host a bake-off between Beyond Eggs and hen eggs.

On behalf of the egg group, Edelman contacted high-profile food blogger and Food Network star Drummond, author of several top-selling cookbooks. Drummond did not agree to work on the campaign, the emails indicate. The group also sought out Grandin, another famous figure whose endorsement would have been valuable. Grandin, too, appears to have declined.

In 2013, Google bought ads against Hampton Creek’s name and other search terms including Tetrick’s name and his chief product, Just Mayo, so that links to egg board-sponsored talking points about industrial farming would pop up alongside links to Hampton Creek. The AEB emailed about how to deal with Buzzfeed’s Rachel Sanders, who reported on the ads, and others who followed up on the campaign, in the emails.

The AEB retained at least five bloggers and contacted many more during the period covered by the emails. The bloggers disclosed the egg group’s advertising on their sites. The two bloggers who responded to the Guardian for this article said they were completely unaware that the sponsorships were part of a concerted effort against Hampton Foods.

Hemi Weingarten, author of the popular food blog Fooducate and an occasional columnist for the Huffington Post, published a post marked as sponsored by the AEB entitled “10 Reasons to Love Eggs” that including this sentence: “At just $0.15 each, eggs are the least expensive source of high-quality protein per serving.” This language is consistent with one of the American Egg Board’s most regularly used talking points.

Weingarten said he knew nothing of the campaign against Hampton Creek and pointed out that his blog had published positive coverage of the company. “As part of our ad sales activities we reach out to healthy brands and commodity boards to spend their ad dollars to reach our audience,” Weingarten told the Guardian.

Lori Lange, of the popular blog Recipe Girl, is listed by Edelman as receiving a fee of $2,500 for a bagel quiche recipe. Lange disclosed the post was sponsored. The Guardian emailed Lange for comment; she did not respond but did remove an AEB infographic that read in part: “Today’s hens are producing more eggs and living longer due to better health, nutrition and living space.”

Blogger Gaby Dalkin was paid $2,000 to include the AEB’s “Incredible Eggs” talking points in a recipe for breakfast burritos, and Susan Whetzel of Doughmesstic included the language in her in her Italian Egg Frittata recipe, according to the emails. Both disclosed the posts were sponsored.

Whetzel said she, too, was unaware that the blog post was considered part of a campaign against Hampton Creek by the AEB, and that she had adhered to the Federal Trade Commission’s advertising guidelines by including a disclosure notice. “It’s obvious it’s a sponsored post,” she wrote in an email to the Guardian.

Dalkin did not respond but an email bounce back said she was out of the country.

The cache of 600 pages of AEB emails, first reported last week, was obtained by Ryan Shapiro, a Freedom of Information Act (Foia) expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Washington DC-based Foia specialist attorney Jeffrey Light.

The messages show Ivy, who is set to leave the AEB at year’s end after being named the industry’s 2015 Egg Person of the Year, received many messages from egg producers and processors who make up the board’s constituent members, are required by law to supply its budget and were evidently unnerved over the rise of Hampton Creek.

Ivy expressed a desire to push back at the positive media coverage the company would start to receive, from the pages of Forbes magazine to Buzzfeed and beyond.

“We know that shell egg producers are [...] feeling threatened by the introduction of this product,” she wrote in a September 2013 email.

In a statement to the Guardian, Ivy said the AEB’s efforts to “balance existing media efforts” were “common” practice and “part of a larger business strategy”.

“While egg replacers have been around for many years, we recognize that the interest in this category has increased recently,” she said. “In response, we bolstered our efforts to increase the demand for eggs and egg products through research, education and promotional activities.

“These activities, which are common within the consumer products industry, include continuing to work with industry thought-leaders, conducting a paid social media strategy to balance existing media efforts and liaising with partner organizations.”

However it is the process of targeting a perceived rival that could prove most controversial for the AEB, a statutory body paid for by industry but partly appointed by the US agriculture secretary.

Paid-for or “sponsored” blog posts are not uncommon, but the notion that a quasi-governmental body funded a campaign to undercut a Silicon Valley food startup could raise eyebrows.

Tetrick, the Hampton Creek founder, called for a congressional inquiry on Thursday, saying that the agriculture department should be held responsible for the AEB’s actions.

“They have gone way beyond what they are allowed to do,” Tetrick said of the egg lobbying group.
He said the scale of the egg lobby’s retaliation against his company’s rise was “hard to wrap your head around”.

“They play the same game over and over again,” he told the Guardian on Friday. “They say they are doing it to promote eggs, but it’s got nothing to do with competition.”

As MSNBC Makes Big Changes, Only One Scenario Remains for Brian Williams

By Joe Concha

As you may have heard, MSNBC has seen some big (and warranted) changes in 2015. Add it all up, and every program that existed from 1:00 PM to 7:00 PM EDT as recently as six months ago no long exists.

The alterations are swift: A national correspondent (Kate Snow) and a political director (Chuck Todd) will be joining and rejoining, respectively, the 19 year old cable network. Morning Blow will occupy 25 percent of live (or plausibly live) programming per day. Opinion-based programming––at least after the morning show and before prime time––has been cleared away as a more traditional news focus takes it place.

But of all the moves made by NBC President Andy Lack over the past six months, the most significant is Al Sharpton‘s move to Sunday mornings, thereby vacating the 6:00 PM time slot on weekdays. And with most of the chess pieces now in place, the elephant in the room (See: Williams, Brian) appears to finally have a home: 6:00 PM, Monday through Friday.

In the end, it only makes sense to give Williams his own program instead of simply having him on standby for breaking news stories, a la Shep Smith at Fox. Because while Shep will jump into the network’s opinion programming at 5:00 PM (The Five) or in prime time (particularly when Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity are in tape) when warranted, he still owns his own hour at 3:00 PM with Shepard Smith Reporting.

Know this: You don’t reportedly pay someone in the $10M/year range to only work a few times per month. And in the case of Williams per a must-read piece by the Washington Post‘s Erik Wemple back in June (Title: Will Brian Williams have anything to do at MSNBC?), the highly-compensated anchor would likely only be called upon (maybe) a handful of times per month. And with seasoned pros like Snow coming on board and more-than-capable anchors like Tamron Hall, Thomas Roberts, and Jose Diaz Balart already there, it’s doubtful they would be preempted to make way for Williams, as such a scenario would not only be somewhat insulting to them, but an awkward date for viewers at home.

Instead, all signs point to Williams serving as a bridge between Todd (5:00 PM) and Chris Matthews (7:00 PM) at 6 in the east. Prime time––particularly the vulnerable 8:00 PM slot––has been offered up in some media circles as a possible home for Williams, which he occupied on MSNBC in the pre-Olbermann days up until 2002 with The News with Brian Williams. But that was a different time… a time when a good chuck of the audience didn’t already get their news on their phones, computers and tablets during the day in the dominant way they do now.

And by the time 8:00 PM rolls around and the network and local newscasts complete, most folks know the basic meat of big stories of the day (who, what, when, where)… what many are looking for is perspective and analysis on those stories, particularly when the tremendous (and often ridiculous) theatre that is the race for the White House dominates the news cycle.

In the end, it appears the only true home–and true value–for Brian Williams at MSNBC is at 6:00 PM EDT.

Big changes with some fairly big NBC names in Kate Snow and Chuck Todd are coming. But the biggest name of them all still needs to be assigned.

Brian Williams, solely a breaking news anchor sitting around in a bullpen waiting to be called to the mound? Don’t think so.

Host of an hour-long traditional news program to set the table for the network’s editorial page in prime?

By all appearances, this is the only scenario left that makes sense.

Here's What the Earth Will Look Like After All the Ice Melts

By Ben Dreyfuss

Remember a few years ago when National Geographic came out with a map showing what the world would look like after sea levels rose 216 feet from all the ice melting? Well, it happened. (There was also some pushback that the data was too optimistic) Anyway, the guys over at Business Insider just put together this nifty video exploring our would-be watery world.

It would take a very long time indeed for all the ice on Earth to melt. I don't know how long. But long. Like a thousand years? Point is it's not like this is going to happen on Tuesday or even a thousand Tuesdays from now, but the arc of history is long and our descendants will never "sit upon the ground and tell sad stories of the death of kings," if there is no longer any ground for them to sit on.



Global warming is bad, and every day we don't do anything about it we should feel bad.

5 Chinese ships seen off Alaska coast, Pentagon says

http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-34131429

Trump Could Ensure Democratic Dominance For Years

By Taegan Goddard

Politico: “Donald Trump knows the United States will never deport eleven million undocumented immigrants or do away with birthright citizenship. But what if we did—what would be the political impact if Trump and other angry nativists in the GOP actually achieved most or all the changes they desire, cutting immigration back sharply?”

“We already know, because something very similar happened once before in American history.

Ninety years ago, two Republican presidents—Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge—and a Congress dominated by Republicans enacted equally harsh policies against immigrants. Their success helped usher in the longest period of one-party rule in the 20th century.

But it was the Democrats, not the GOP, who benefited, in one of the most whopping instances of unintentional consequences in American political history.”

Unrelated strangers look like identical twins

By Mark Frauenfelder 

Ambra, 23, of Fayetteville, North Carolina, and Jennifer, 33, of Spring, Texas were brought together as part of the Twin Strangers project. "I did not want to take my eyes off her," said Ambra.

The Simulacron

Sarah Palin Interviews Donald Trump In A Weird Meeting Of Simpleton Political Minds

Palin manages to squeak out 15 more minutes of relevancy as she jumps on the Trump bandwagon.

 

By Adam Johnson

 

What the hell just happened?

Right-wing darling Sarah Palin evidently has a talk show, and she used this talk show to interview Donald Trump Friday night. The 10 minute segment aired on something called the One America News Network, a network that is hard to find, and whose production values are a cross between an ISIS propaganda video and a generic newscast you would see on an under-produced crime drama.

The segment started out with a crude montage about how terrible things are (of course, Obama), complete with populist filler involving infrastructure crumbling, stock video of unemployment, and, "millions of people flowing through our southern border."

Sarah Palin goes on to lob Trump a series of softballs about his recent experiences purging critical journalists and defending him from "gotcha questions" like "what's your favorite bible verse?" a question so tough its answer can easily be found in the crowd at any given football game.

"Since the day he made the sacrifice to hit the campaign trail," Palin sycophantically began, "voters crave the anti-establishment politician. They want results, they want a fighter. They want someone to fire all those politically correct police."

It's unclear if Trump has the authority to fire the "politically correct police" if such a thing even exists (it doesn't), but the rest of the bizarre interview went on like that: An unlettered Palin, giddy with praise, and an on-message Trump exchanging talking points and praising each other in a creepy dance of populist glee.

Watch the clip below, if you can manage:

Chris Christie Proposes Tracking Immigrants the Way FedEx Tracks Packages

Posted by timothy

 PolygamousRanchKid submits the news that New Jersey governor (and Republican presidential candidate) Chris Christie said yesterday that he would, if elected president, create a system to track foreign visitors the way FedEx tracks packages.

The NYT writes:

 Mr. Christie, who is far back in the pack of candidates for the Republican presidential nomination, said at a campaign event in New Hampshire that he would ask the chief executive of FedEx, Frederick W. Smith, to devise the tracking system."At any moment, FedEx can tell you where that package is. It's on the truck. It's at the station. It's on the airplane," Mr. Christie told the crowd in Laconia, N.H. "Yet we let people come to this country with visas, and the minute they come in, we lose track of them." He added: "We need to have a system that tracks you from the moment you come in."

Adds the submitter: "I'm sure foreign tourist will be amused when getting a bar code sticker slapped on their arm."

Trump Is A Racist And His Supporters Are Nuts

By Susie Madrak

So Chris Hayes invited Rep. Alan Grayson, who's running for the Florida senate seat left open by Marco Rubio's run for the Republican nomination, as someone "several people" have called "Trump of the Left."

Which is a pretty stupid premise, since Grayson actually gets things done and has a consistent political worldview, and Trump seems to be an utter anarchist, but hey. Whatever it takes to get the ratings up, right, Chris?

So it was fun watching Grayson grab the wheel and steer it where he wanted the conversation to go.



“People say about Trump that he’s saying what they’re thinking and nobody else is saying. They’re nuts," Grayson said.

"So that’s a pretty fundamental difference. Recognize how narrow his support base really is. Only 4 percent of the public votes in a Republican primary. He’s got 30 percent of 4 percent. We’re looking at the worst 1.2 percent in America.”

“He’s thrown away the dog whistle. It used to be you had to speak in metaphors, now you can just come right out and be racist. You know who likes that? The racists like that.”

Behind the Trump-stone split

Tonight on The Big Picture, Thom talks with Mark Ames, Senior Editor at Pando Daily about the Donald Trump and Roger Stone split. Mark breaks down the relationship between the two and reveals interesting points about the Trump campaign. Then lawyer and host of Ring of Fire Radio, Mike Papantonio joins Thom to talk about former KKK leader David Duke’s support for Trump. Is Trump the candidate for white supremacists?

And state and county officials in Kansas are blocking the release of voting machine logs to Wichita State University. Mathematician Beth Clarkson, who has requested these records under the Kansas Open Records Act, talks to Thom about this case and what could be wrong with voting machines in Kansas. In tonight’s Green Report, Patty Lovera talks to Thom about the use of pesticides and filmmaker Monica Ord tells us about her new film, “Chloe & Theo,” which highlights the story of Theo Ikummaq, who travels from his home in the Arctic to speak to world leaders about the impact of climate change.

The Labor Ruling McDonald's Has Been Dreading Just Became A Reality

By Dave Jamieson

WASHINGTON - McDonald's, Burger King and every other company that relies on a franchise business model just suffered the legal setback they've been fearing for years.

 The National Labor Relations Board ruled on Thursday that Browning Ferris Industries, a waste management company, qualifies as a "joint employer" alongside one of its subcontractors. The decision effectively loosens the standards for who can be considered a worker's boss under labor law, and its impact will be felt in any industry that relies on franchising or outsourcing work. McDonald's, for instance, could now find itself forced to sit at the bargaining table with workers employed by a franchisee managing one of its restaurants.  

That's a big deal. In the case of McDonald's, roughly 90 percent of its locations are actually run by franchisees, who are typically considered the workers' employers. One of the main reasons companies choose to franchise or to outsource work to staffing agencies is to shift workplace responsibilities onto someone else. But if a fast-food brand or a hotel chain can be deemed a "joint employer" along with the smaller company, it can be dragged into labor disputes and negotiations that it conveniently wouldn't have to worry about otherwise. In theory, such a precedent could even make it easier for workers to unionize as employees under the larger parent company.

The Democratic-majority board, whose members were appointed by President Barack Obama, ruled 3-2 along partisan lines, with the two Republicans dissenting.

© Bloomberg via Getty Images A McDonald's Corp. sign is illuminated at a restaurant in Shelbyville, Kentucky, U.S., on Friday, Jan. 23, 2015. 

Labor unions and worker advocacy groups have been hoping for just such a decision. In their view, since companies like McDonald's influence the working conditions in their franchised stores, they should be legally accountable to the workers who wear their logos, even if it's a franchisee that's technically signing the paychecks. Bringing companies at the top of the contracting chain to the table will help restore corporate responsibility in a "fissured" economy, advocates say.

The franchise lobby, meanwhile, has been warning for months that a ruling like this one would doom the business model. Franchisers argue that naming parent companies as joint employers would force them to take more control from their franchisees to contend with new liabilities. The lobby has worked hard to paint the "joint employer" standard as something that will hurt small business owners, not fast-food giants and other name brands.

The Browning Ferris case grew out of an organizing effort by the Teamsters. The union sought to have the waste management company named as a joint employer for workers employed by the staffing firm Leadpoint Business Services, a subcontractor for Browning Ferris. If Browning Ferris were deemed a joint employer, it would have to join Leadpoint in bargaining with the Teamsters. Such a determination could also make it easier for the Teamsters to organize workers at other staffing agencies that do work for Browning Ferris.

A regional director for the NLRB ruled that Browning Ferris did not exert enough control over Leadpoint workers to be considered a joint employer under current standards, but the Teamsters appealed that ruling to the federal board. Thursday's ruling will change those standards for future cases.

The decision will no doubt agitate some powerful business lobbies and Republicans on Capitol Hill. The ruling will likely spur congressional Republicans to renew their calls to defund an independent agency they view as having been too friendly to labor unions in the Obama era.

McDonald's and other franchisers have been bracing for a ruling like this for years. The board's general counsel, who functions as a kind of prosecutor, has already named McDonald's as a joint employer alongside some of its franchisees in several cases involving alleged unfair labor practices. Many observers took that move as a sign that the board would soon revise its standards for what makes a company a joint employer.

Who Hacked Ashley Madison?

By  Brian Krebs

AshleyMadison.com, a site that helps married people cheat and whose slogan is “Life is Short, have an Affair,” recently put up a half million (Canadian) dollar bounty for information leading to the arrest and prosecution of the Impact Team — the name chosen by the hacker(s) who recently leaked data on more than 30 million Ashley Madison users. Here is the first of likely several posts examining individuals who appear to be closely connected to this attack.



It was just past midnight on July 20, a few hours after I’d published an exclusive story about hackers breaking into AshleyMadison.com. I was getting ready to turn in for the evening when I spotted a re-tweet from a Twitter user named Thadeus Zu (@deuszu) who’d just posted a link to the same cache of data that had been confidentially shared with me by the Impact Team via the contact form on my site just hours earlier: It was a link to the proprietary source code for Ashley Madison’s service.
Initially, that tweet startled me because I couldn’t find any other sites online that were actually linking to that source code cache. I began looking through his past tweets and noticed some interesting messages, but soon enough other news events took precedence and I forgot about the tweet.

I revisited Zu’s tweet stream again this week after watching a press conference held by the Toronto Police (where Avid Life Media, the parent company of Ashley Madison, is based). The Toronto cops mostly recapped the timeline of known events in the hack, but they did add one new wrinkle: They said Avid Life employees first learned about the breach on July 12 (seven days before my initial story) when they came into work, turned on their computers and saw a threatening message from the Impact Team accompanied by the anthem “Thunderstruck” by Australian rock band AC/DC playing in the background.

After writing up a piece on the bounty offer, I went back and downloaded all five years’ worth of tweets from Thadeus Zu, a massively prolific Twitter user who typically tweets hundreds if not thousands of messages per month. Zu’s early years on Twitter are a catalog of simple hacks — commandeering unsecured routers, wireless cameras and printers — as well as many, many Web site defacements.

On the defacement front, Zu focused heavily on government Web sites in Asia, Europe and the United States, and in several cases even taunted his targets. On Aug. 4, 2012, he tweeted to KPN-CERT, a computer security incident response team in the Netherlands, to alert the group that he’d hacked their site. “Next time, it will be Thunderstruck. #ACDC” Zu wrote.

The day before, he’d compromised the Web site for the Australian Parliament, taunting lawmakers there with the tweet: “Parliament of Australia bit.ly/NPQdsP Oi! Oi! Oi!….T.N.T. Dynamite! Listen to ACDC here.”

I began to get very curious about whether there were any signs on or before July 19, 2015 that Zu was tweeting about ACDC in relation to the Ashley Madison hack. Sure enough: At 9:40 a.m., July 19, 2015 — nearly 12 hours before I would first be contacted by the Impact Team — we can see Zu is feverishly tweeting to several people about setting up “replication servers” to “get the show started.” Can you spot what’s interesting in the tabs on his browser in the screenshot he tweeted that morning?

Twitter user ThadeusZu tweets about setting up replication servers. Did you spot the Youtube video he’s playing when he took this screenshot?

Ten points if you noticed the Youtube.com tab showing that he’s listening to AC/DC’s “Thunderstruck.”

A week ago, the news media pounced on the Ashley Madison story once again, roughly 24 hours after the hackers made good on their threat to release the Ashley Madison user database. I went back and examined Zu’s tweet stream around that time and found he beat Wired.com, ArsTechnica.com and every other news media outlet by more than 24 hours with the Aug. 17 tweet, “Times up,” which linked to the Impact Team’s now infamous post listing the sites where anyone could download the stolen Ashley Madison user database.

ThadeusZu tweeted about the downloadable Ashley Madison data more than 24 hours before news outlets picked up on the cache.

WHO IS THADEUS ZU?

As with the social networking profiles of others who’ve been tied to high-profile cybercrimes, Zu’s online utterings appear to be filled with kernels of truth surrounded by complete malarkey– thus making it challenging to separate fact from fiction. Hence, all of this could be just one big joke by Zu and his buddies. In any case, here are a few key observations about the who, what and where of Thadeus Zu based on information he’s provided (again, take that for what it’s worth).

Zu’s Facebook profile wants visitors to think he lives in Hawaii; indeed, the time zone set on several of his social media counts is the same as Hawaii. There are a few third-party Facebook accounts of people demonstrably living in Hawaii who tag him in their personal photos of events on Hawaii (see this cached photo, for example), but for the most part Zu’s Facebook account consists of pictures taken from stock image collections and do not appear to be personal photos of any kind.

A few tweets from Zu — if truthful and not simply premeditated misdirection — indicate that he lived in Canada for at least a year, although it’s unclear when this visit occurred.

Zu’s various Twitter and Facebook pictures all feature hulking, athletic, and apparently black male models (e.g. he’s appropriated two profile photos of male model Rob Evans). But Zu’s real-life identity remains murky at best. The lone exception I found was an image that appears to be a genuine group photo taken of a Facebook user tagged as Thadeus Zu, along with an unnamed man posing in front of a tattoo store with popular Australian (and very inked) model/nightclub DJ Ruby Rose.

That photo is no longer listed in Rose’s Facebook profile, but a cached version of it is available here.

Rose’s tour schedule indicates that she was in New York City when that photo was taken, or at least posted, on Feb. 6, 2014. Zu is tagged in another Ruby Rose Facebook post five days later on Valentine’s Day. Update, 2:56 p.m.: As several readers have pointed out, the two people beside Rose  in that cached photo appear to be Franz Dremah and Kick Gurry, co-stars in the movie Edge of Tomorrow).

Other clues in his tweet stream and social media accounts put Zu in Australia. Zu has a Twitter account under the Twitter nick @ThadeusZu, which has a whopping 11 tweets, but seems rather to have been used as a news feed. In that account Zu is following some 35 Twitter accounts, and the majority of them are various Australian news organizations. That account also is following several Australian lawmakers that govern states in south Australia.

Then again, Twitter auto-suggests popular accounts for new users to follow, and usually does so in part based on the Internet address of the user. As such, @ThadeusZu may have only been using an Australian Web proxy or a Tor node in Australia when he set up that account (several of his self-published screen shots indicate that he regularly uses Tor to obfuscate his Internet address).

Even so, many of Zu’s tweets going back several years place him in Australia as well, although this may also be intentional misdirection. He continuously references his “Oz girl,” (“Oz” is another word for Australia) uses the greeting “cheers” quite a bit, and even talks about people visiting him in Oz.
Interestingly, for someone apparently so caught up in exposing hypocrisy and so close to the Ashley Madison hack, Zu appears to have himself courted a married woman — at least according to his own tweets. On January 5, 2014, Zu ‏tweeted:

“Everything is cool. Getting married this year. I am just waiting for my girl to divorce her husband. #seachange

A month later, on Feb. 7, 2014, Zu offered this tidbit of info:

“My ex. We were supposed to get married 8 years ago but she was taken away from me. Cancer. Hence, my downward spiral into mayhem.”

To say that Zu tweets to others is a bit of a misstatement. I have never seen anyone tweet the way Zu does; He sends hundreds of tweets each day, and while most of them appear to be directed at nobody, it does seem that they are in response to (if not in “reply” to) tweets that others have sent him or made about his work. Consequently, his tweet stream appears to the casual observer to be nothing more than an endless soliloquy.

But there may something else going on here. It is possible that Zu’s approach to tweeting — that is, responding to or addressing other Twitter users without invoking the intended recipient’s Twitter handle — is something of a security precaution. After all, he had to know and even expect that security researchers would try to reconstruct his conversations after the fact. But this is far more difficult to do when the Twitter user in question never actually participates in threaded conversations.

People who engage in this way of tweeting also do not readily reveal the Twitter identities of the people with whom they chat most.

Thadeus Zu — whoever and wherever he is in real life — may not have been directly involved in the Ashley Madison hack; he claims in several tweets that he was not part of the hack, but then in countless tweets he uses the royal “We” when discussing the actions and motivations of the Impact Team. I attempted to engage Zu in private conversations without success; he has yet to respond to my invitations.

It is possible that Zu is instead a white hat security researcher or confidential informant who has infiltrated the Impact Team and is merely riding on their coattails or acting as their mouthpiece. But one thing is clear: If Zu wasn’t involved in the hack, he almost certainly knows who was.

KrebsOnSecurity is grateful to several researchers, including Nick Weaver, for their assistance and time spent indexing, mining and making sense of tweets and social media accounts mentioned in this post. Others who helped have asked to remain anonymous. Weaver has published some additional thoughts on this post over at Medium.

PS4 Code Execution: Some Details

by wololo · August 25, 2015

Hacker CTurt announced a few days ago that he has “code execution on the PS4“. Many asked for clarifications on this statement, others told me this wasn’t CTurt’s exploit to release… details were obviously needed.

CTurt has contacted me lately to share a few details

PS4 Code Execution: Firmware 1.76 only

I had the hope this would mean some cool stuff down the road for users on current PS4 firmware. CTurt confirmed the exploit is 1.76 only. Now, this could lead to additional information being found in the system for owners of more “up to date” firmwares, but for now don’t expect anything from this if you’re not on PS4 1.76

PS4 Code execution: for devs only

CTurt mentions he was given information by flat_z for this. It was strongly hinted to me that they are not the two only ones who know about the trick used to get code execution on PS4 1.76. What CTurt told me is that this is useful for devs only at this point. I assumed the trick is shared between hackers (although I’m not sure it’s that much of a secret at this point, people who’ve been following up on twitter can easily find leads on the technique used – and yes, this goes through the webkit exploit -) who are helping with the PS4 SDK.

CTurt mentioned however, that if they reach a point where a homebrew launcher can be made, he’ll consider doing a public release.

Black pitmasters left out of US barbecue boom

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-33994947

Barbecue is an American tradition – of enslaved Africans and Native Americans
 
By Michael W Twitty
 

The traditional holiday cookout has its roots in the cooperation between black and indigenous peoples struggling to get or keep their freedom from colonialists

Barbecue is a form of cultural power and is intensely political, with a culture of rules like no other American culinary tradition: sauce or no sauce; which kind of sauce; chopped or not chopped; whole animal or just ribs or shoulders. And, if America is about people creating new worlds based on rebellion against oppression and slavery, then barbecue is the ideal dish: it was made by enslaved Africans with inspiration and contributions from Native Americans struggling to maintain their independence.

The common cultural narrative of barbecue, however, exclusively assigns its origins to Native Americans and Europeans; the very etymology of the word is said to derive from both Carib through Spanish (barbacoa – to roast over hot coals on a wooden framework) or from western European sources (barbe-a-queue in French – “head to tail” – which fits nicely with contemporary ideas of no-waste eating and consuming offal). Some American barbecue masters have taken to attributing the innovation of barbecue to their German and Czech ancestors.

If anything, both in etymology and culinary technique, barbecue is as African as it is Native American and European, though enslaved Africans have largely been erased from the modern story of American barbecue.

At best, our ancestors are seen as mindless cooking machines who prepared the meat under strict white supervision, if at all; at worst, barbecue was something done “for” the enslaved, as if they were being introduced to a novel treat.

In reality, they shaped the culture of New World barbecuing traditions, from jerking in Jamaica to anticuchos in Peru to cooking traditions in the colonial Pampas. And the word barbecue also has roots in West Africa among the Hausa, who used the term “babbake” to describe a complex of words referring to grilling, toasting, building a large fire, singeing hair or feathers and cooking food over a long period of time over an extravagant fire.

In the earliest colonial days, the West Indies served as a seed colonies for the presence of enslaved Africans in the New World especially because, within 10 years of European arrival, indigenous Americans endured mass, genocidal losses due to the introduction of diseases common in Europe. With only a few remaining Carib and Arawak indigenes, Africans quickly became the majority on the islands and, eventually, the Southeastern coast (where many island colonists resettled in the late 17^th and early 18^th centuries, often with their enslaved people in tow).

In Jamaica, maroon rebels who resisted slavery and formed their own settlements forged ties with rebellious indigenous islanders in the West Indies and Latin America (leading, eventually, to the modern form of barbecue known as jerking). Similar ties were established in the first areas of the United States to see the arrival of enslaved Africans, which occurred in 1526, after Spaniard Lucas Vasquez de Ayllon died in an effort to establish a colony in what we know now as South Carolina. Ayllon’s political successors abandoned the area, leaving behind the enslaved Africans and the Native Americans who had guided them there. With the Spanish had come pigs, which became feral and to this day infest Southern woodlands. It was in that context that barbecue made its debut on what is now American soil.

Enslaved Africans and Native Americans had a lot in common, culinarily-speaking: they had been cooking and eating in similar ways. despite an ocean between their civilizations. It only makes sense that, when their food ways, crops, cooking methods and systems of preservation, hunting, fishing and food storage collided, that there would be deep similarities and convergences of technique, method and skill. And West and Central Africans had always had their own versions of the barbacoa and spit roasting of meat. While living in a tropical climate, salting, spicing and half-smoking meat upon butchering was key to ensuring game would make it back to the village with minimal spoilage. Festivals were marked by the salting, spicing and roasting of whole animals or large cuts of meat.

Thus, in colonial and antebellum North America, enslaved men became barbecue’s master chefs: woodcuts, cartoons, postcards and portraits from the period document the role that black chefs played in shaping this very American, and especially Southern staple. Working over pits in the ground covered in green wood – much as in West Africa or Jamaica – it was enslaved men and their descendants, not the Bubbas of today’s Barbecue Pitmasters, that innovated and refined regional barbecue traditions. If anything, German, Czech, Mexican and other traditions in South Carolina, Missouri and Texas were added to a base created by black hands forged in the crucible of slavery.

In some ways barbecue is true Independence Day food. As European Americans acclimated themselves to the custom of forsaking utensils and even plates to eat more like enslaved Africans and Native Americans – from spareribs to corn on the cob – they used their hands in an unprecedented break with Old World formalities. It is not without some irony that enslaved people, the earliest barbecue pitmasters, were called upon to avail slaveholders and politicians with Fourth of July barbecues meant to win over neighbors and constituents. When they obtained their own freedom, the formerly enslaved celebrated Juneteenth with none other than their favorite freedom food – barbecue.

Barbecue is now widely recognized as a staple of the American culinary canon – so much so that at least three national holidays (Memorial Day, Independence Day and Labor Day) are associated with it. Barbecue is laced with the aspiration of freedom, but it was seasoned and flavored by the people who could not enjoy any freedom on Independence Day for almost a century.

Sparky's Inferno

Bernie Sanders may be more of a Democrat than the Democrats

By PatrickforO

He is talking about issues that at one time formed the core of the Democratic ideal. If you read some old speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt and other New Deal Democrats, you'll see that Bernie has come back to that core message; it is a message that saved America from going Communist in 1933, and created a powerful middle class that helped this nation become great. It created a 'great prosperity' from about 1950 to 1980 when the deterioration began.

So, you see, if you take a little longer view of history, you will see that beginning in the 1980s, the Democratic Party began its evolution toward the right as the Republicans 'evolved' even further right.

In the context of history, Obama and Clinton are what used to be called 'Eisenhower Republicans.' In fact, if you read Ike's brilliant 1963 essay, "Why I'm a Republican," and compare what he says in it, you'll see that Obama and Clinton are a little to the right of the ideas espoused therein, particularly on so-called 'free trade.'

So, what I'd say to you is that in Bernie, we have a reversal of the destructive neoliberal/neoconservative 'evolution' of Dems throughout the 80's, 90's, and 00's. Bernie is taking us back to the New Deal, which is basically a set of policies to strengthen the American middle class. Bernie does one better, though. He's got a good platform on racism and reform of the correctional system.

This is why so many of us are responding to Bernie. The American people are angry at how the game has been rigged against us, at how hard it is to get ahead now, at how dim the futures of our children are compared to ours. We are ripe for another New Deal - a Real Deal where our interests are once again put front and center. 

Trump, Alabama and the ghost of George Wallace

The South rises for Trump, but only 20,000 of them.

By Ben Schreckinger

AP Photo

MOBILE, Ala. — It was immigration, not segregation, that brought some 20,000 southerners — far fewer than predicted — out for Donald Trump on Friday night, but the ghost of George Wallace loomed large.

Wallace, an avowed segregationist, was the last presidential candidate to win electoral votes as a third-party candidate. The threat of Trump doing so, propelled by a hardline immigration stance that many have condemned as racist, looms over the Republican Party now as it did over the Democratic Party then, even as the enthusiasm of his following, for once, fell far short of expectations.

Wallace carried five Southern states, and Trump, who is leading early national polls in the race for the Republican nomination, touted his leads in Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, Florida and Texas.

Trump also panned birthright citizenship as a bad deal for the U.S., saying, “We’re the only place just about that’s stupid enough to do it.” Trump’s recently released immigration plan calls for ending birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, which is guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, according to the legal consensus, though Trump disputes that point.

Trump invited Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, one of Congress’s most ardent immigration hardliners who helped the businessman craft his immigration plan, to the podium, where the two embraced.

He also attacked his favorite punching bag, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, on the issue. “ Jeb Bush, ugh,” said Trump, pausing for dramatic effect, before calling the former governor “totally in favor of Common Core, weak on immigration.”

Praising a woman who had brought Trump’s book “Art of the Deal” to the rally, he said, “I’ve got to get her the hell out of here, she’s so beautiful.”

He went on to say, “I will protect women. It’s so important to me”

There were also vestiges of Wallace’s Alabama, including on the sample editions of “The First Freedom” newspaper one man handed out to drivers as they entered the parking lot. The paper’s front page included a story about “black-on-white crime in South Carolina” and an editor’s note about German media’s silence about “the actual programs these peaceful ‘neo-nazis’ stand for.”

The vast majority of supporters where white: of over 1,000 people waiting to enter on the east of the Ladd Peebles Stadium at 5 p.m., eight were black.

A black pastor opened the rally with an invocation, asking, “What if we could replace hate with love?” He was followed by an all-black middle school student council that led the crowd in the Pledge of Allegiance.

Marty Hughes, 47, wore a camouflage hat with Confederate flag detailing and said he liked Trump’s stances on immigration and taxes. He called the removal this year of Confederate flags from government property across much of the South “stupidity” and said he didn’t think a President Trump would stand for it. He named Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and neurosurgeon Ben Carson as other candidates who appealed to him.

Trump’s appeal to Leo Renaldo, is, “That he’s going to send them packing,” explained the 65-year-old, who drove four hours from Mississippi for the event, before his wife interjected, telling him, “Don’t say that.”

“Legal immigration is fine,” added Renaldo.

“He tells it like it is,” said Bob House, 57, a maintenance manager, of Trump’s appeal. “None of this political correct stuff.”

Earlier, the city said it expected 40,000 supporters at the rally, but various media outlets estimated that the total was in the ballpark of 15-20,000, leaving the stadium looking less than half full. Police officers at the rally said they would not be providing a crowd estimate.

The Trump campaign, which had said it expected 36,000 attendees, referred POLITICO to Colby Cooper, chief of staff to the mayor of Mobile, who said the city’s estimate was 30,000 attendees. “It’s an approximate number,” he said.

'He tells it like it is,' said Bob House, 57, a maintenance manager, of Trump’s appeal. 'None of this political correct stuff.' | Getty

“This is one of the largest events Mobile has successfully pulled off, next to our Mardi Gras,” Cooper added. “We’re grateful to the Trump campaign.”

Trump has repeatedly claimed that 15,000 people attended a rally he held at a convention center in Phoenix, Arizona, in July, but the room’s capacity was just over 2,000 people. A convention center staffer at that event told POLITICO that the fire marshal had permitted just over 4,000 people to enter the room for the rally.

Trump continued to show a flare for showmanship, as he has at previous rallies. “If it rains I’ll take off my hat and prove once and for all that it’s real,” he said toward the outset of the rally, before following through and showing the crowd his hair, to loud cheers.

Before the event, his plane circled the stadium, eliciting a standing ovation.

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