"The butt of global jokes": who might this be? (Talk Trump)

[Tero]

If Trump really gets into some deep trouble and Pence makes a move, is there some possible room for Trump to name Ivanka or Nikki Haley as vice president?

See
https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/hi ... d_Ford.htm

and Wiki
1973: Appointment of Gerald Ford as vice president

Further information: United States vice presidential selection, 1973
On October 12, 1973, following Vice President Spiro Agnew's resignation two days earlier, President Richard Nixon nominated Representative Gerald Ford of Michigan to succeed Agnew as vice president.

The Senate voted 92–3 to confirm Ford on November 27 and, on December 6, the House of Representatives did the same by a vote of 387–35. Ford was sworn in later that day before a joint session of the United States Congress.[14]

1974: Gerald Ford succeeds Richard Nixon as president

[Scot Dutchy]

A hairy thought.

[Cunt]

Cunt, you have bots up your butt. Nobody on Ratz ever changed the opinion of any Ratz on any topic.

I've changed my mind, because of a Ratz poster.

Next you'll be calling everyone who doesn't kowtow to feminism as a misogynist. I mean, if you are as stupid as you seem, you almost won't be able to help yourself.

[Tero]

What did you change your mind on?

In the early days and on the RD forum it was mostly fine tuning of atheism and evolution threads.

[Cunt]

What did you change your mind on?

In the early days and on the RD forum it was mostly fine tuning of atheism and evolution threads.

I changed my mind on you. I used to think you were here to discuss your ideas, but later realized you are mostly 'doing the pErvinalia'.

I've changed my mind on the political left. I still mostly identify with their espoused views, but I have learned that most of the noise coming from them is ignorant hate directed at anyone not 'on their side'.

I identify myself to my friends as conservative now. I vote for whoever I think will do the best job on the day (could be liberal, NDP or PC) but it is a helpful way to identify which of them is going to treat people horrible for their politics, regardless of their actions.

Believe me, lots of people can't see past their Trump-Derangement-Syndrome. It's easy to see, for example, that you are one of them.

[Tero]

We welcome all ignorant white folk right winger talk. It’s when a Trump goes and directs them to cut his own taxes and he and they start to talk values and patriotism that we have to puke.

[Jason]

When you have to puke, puke, don't talk.

[Cunt]

We welcome all ignorant white folk right winger talk. It’s when a Trump goes and directs them to cut his own taxes and he and they start to talk values and patriotism that we have to puke.

Why do you choose a home country which has freedom of speech, freedom of self-defence and a right wing to their politics?

You could move to Canada and have a 3-party system, where NONE of them are 'right wing'.

[Tero]

Too dark all winter.

[Seabass]

This is some shady shit, man...

Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?
A team of computer scientists sifted through records of unusual Web traffic in search of answers.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... p-campaign


In June, 2016, after news broke that the Democratic National Committee had been hacked, a group of prominent computer scientists went on alert. Reports said that the infiltrators were probably Russian, which suggested to most members of the group that one of the country’s intelligence agencies had been involved. They speculated that if the Russians were hacking the Democrats they must be hacking the Republicans, too. “We thought there was no way in the world the Russians would just attack the Democrats,” one of the computer scientists, who asked to be identified only as Max, told me.

The group was small—a handful of scientists, scattered across the country—and politically diverse. (Max described himself as “a John McCain Republican.”) Its members sometimes worked with law enforcement or for private clients, but mostly they acted as self-appointed guardians of the Internet, trying to thwart hackers and to keep the system clean of malware—software that hackers use to control a computer remotely, or to extract data. “People think the Internet runs on its own,” Max told me. “It doesn’t. We do this to keep the Internet safe.” The hack of the D.N.C. seemed like a pernicious attack on the integrity of the Web, as well as on the American political system. The scientists decided to investigate whether any Republicans had been hacked, too. “We were trying to protect them,” Max said.

Max’s group began combing the Domain Name System, a worldwide network that acts as a sort of phone book for the Internet, translating easy-to-remember domain names into I.P. addresses, the strings of numbers that computers use to identify one another. Whenever someone goes online—to send an e-mail, to visit a Web site—her device contacts the Domain Name System to locate the computer that it is trying to connect with. Each query, known as a D.N.S. lookup, can be logged, leaving records in a constellation of servers that extends through private companies, public institutions, and universities. Max and his group are part of a community that has unusual access to these records, which are especially useful to cybersecurity experts who work to protect clients from attacks.

Max and the other computer scientists asked me to withhold their names, out of concern for their privacy and their security. I met with Max and his lawyer repeatedly, and interviewed other prominent computer experts. (Among them were Jean Camp, of Indiana University; Steven Bellovin, of Columbia University; Daniel Kahn Gillmor, of the A.C.L.U.; Richard Clayton, of the University of Cambridge; Matt Blaze, of the University of Pennsylvania; and Paul Vixie, of Farsight Security.) Several of them independently reviewed the records that Max’s group had discovered and confirmed that they would be difficult to fake. A senior aide on Capitol Hill, who works in national security, said that Max’s research is widely respected among experts in computer science and cybersecurity.

As Max and his colleagues searched D.N.S. logs for domains associated with Republican candidates, they were perplexed by what they encountered. “We went looking for fingerprints similar to what was on the D.N.C. computers, but we didn’t find what we were looking for,” Max told me. “We found something totally different—something unique.” In the small town of Lititz, Pennsylvania, a domain linked to the Trump Organization (mail1.trump-email.com) seemed to be behaving in a peculiar way. The server that housed the domain belonged to a company called Listrak, which mostly helped deliver mass-marketing e-mails: blasts of messages advertising spa treatments, Las Vegas weekends, and other enticements. Some Trump Organization domains sent mass e-mail blasts, but the one that Max and his colleagues spotted appeared not to be sending anything. At the same time, though, a very small group of companies seemed to be trying to communicate with it.

Examining records for the Trump domain, Max’s group discovered D.N.S. lookups from a pair of servers owned by Alfa Bank, one of the largest banks in Russia. Alfa Bank’s computers were looking up the address of the Trump server nearly every day. There were dozens of lookups on some days and far fewer on others, but the total number was notable: between May and September, Alfa Bank looked up the Trump Organization’s domain more than two thousand times. “We were watching this happen in real time—it was like watching an airplane fly by,” Max said. “And we thought, Why the hell is a Russian bank communicating with a server that belongs to the Trump Organization, and at such a rate?”

Only one other entity seemed to be reaching out to the Trump Organization’s domain with any frequency: Spectrum Health, of Grand Rapids, Michigan. Spectrum Health is closely linked to the DeVos family; Richard DeVos, Jr., is the chairman of the board, and one of its hospitals is named after his mother. His wife, Betsy DeVos, was appointed Secretary of Education by Donald Trump. Her brother, Erik Prince, is a Trump associate who has attracted the scrutiny of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia. Mueller has been looking into Prince’s meeting, following the election, with a Russian official in the Seychelles, at which he reportedly discussed setting up a back channel between Trump and the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. (Prince maintains that the meeting was “incidental.”) In the summer of 2016, Max and the others weren’t aware of any of this. “We didn’t know who DeVos was,” Max said.

The D.N.S. records raised vexing questions. Why was the Trump Organization’s domain, set up to send mass-marketing e-mails, conducting such meagre activity? And why were computers at Alfa Bank and Spectrum Health trying to reach a server that didn’t seem to be doing anything? After analyzing the data, Max said, “We decided this was a covert communication channel.”

The Trump Organization, Alfa Bank, and Spectrum Health have repeatedly denied any contact. But the question of whether Max’s conclusion was correct remains enormously consequential. Was this evidence of an illicit connection between Russia and the Trump campaign? Or was it merely a coincidence, cyber trash, that fed suspicions in a dark time?

In August, 2016, Max decided to reveal the data that he and his colleagues had assembled. “If the covert communications were real, this potential threat to our country needed to be known before the election,” he said. After some discussion, he and his lawyer decided to hand over the findings to Eric Lichtblau, of the Times. Lichtblau met with Max, and began to look at the data.

Lichtblau had done breakthrough reporting on National Security Agency surveillance, and he knew that Max’s findings would require sophisticated analysis. D.N.S. lookups are metadata—records that indicate computer interactions but don’t necessarily demonstrate human communication. Lichtblau shared the data with three leading computer scientists, and, like Max, they were struck by the unusual traffic on the server. As Lichtblau talked to experts, he became increasingly convinced that the data suggested a substantive connection. “Not only is there clearly something there but there’s clearly something that someone has gone to great lengths to conceal,” he told me. Jean Camp, of Indiana University, had also vetted some of the data. “These people who should not be communicating are clearly communicating,” she said. In order to encourage discussion among analysts, Camp posted a portion of the raw data on her Web site.

As Lichtblau wrote a draft of an article for the Times, Max’s lawyer contacted the F.B.I. to alert agents that a story about Trump would be running in a national publication, and to pass along the data. A few days later, an F.B.I. official called Lichtblau and asked him to come to the Bureau’s headquarters, in Washington, D.C.

At the meeting, in late September, 2016, a roomful of officials told Lichtblau that they were looking into potential Russian interference in the election. According to a source who was briefed on the investigation, the Bureau had intelligence from informants suggesting a possible connection between the Trump Organization and Russian banks, but no data. The information from Max’s group could be a significant advance. “The F.B.I. was looking for people in the United States who were helping Russia to influence the election,” the source said. “It was very important to the Bureau. It was urgent.”

The F.B.I. officials asked Lichtblau to delay publishing his story, saying that releasing the news could jeopardize their investigation. As the story sat, Dean Baquet, the Times’ executive editor, decided that it would not suffice to report the existence of computer contacts without knowing their purpose. Lichtblau disagreed, arguing that his story contained important news: that the F.B.I. had opened a counterintelligence investigation into Russian contacts with Trump’s aides. “It was a really tense debate,” Baquet told me. “If I were the reporter, I would have wanted to run it, too. It felt like there was something there.” But, with the election looming, Baquet thought that he could not publish the story without being more confident in its conclusions.

Over time, the F.B.I.’s interest in the possibility of an Alfa Bank connection seemed to wane. An agency official told Lichtblau that there could be an innocuous explanation for the computer traffic. Then, on October 30th, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid wrote a letter to James Comey, the director of the F.B.I., charging that the Bureau was withholding information about “close ties and coordination” between the Trump campaign and Russia. “We had a window,” Lichtblau said. His story about Alfa Bank ran the next day. But it bore only a modest resemblance to what he had filed. The headline— “investigating donald trump, f.b.i. sees no clear link to russia”—seemed to exonerate the Trump campaign. And, though the article mentioned the server, it omitted any reference to the computer scientists who had told Lichtblau that the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank might have been communicating. “We were saying that the investigation was basically over—and it was just beginning,” Lichtblau told me.

That same day, Slate ran a story, by Franklin Foer, that made a detailed case for the possibility of a covert link between Alfa Bank and Trump. Foer’s report was based largely on information from a colleague of Max’s who called himself Tea Leaves. Foer quoted several outside experts; most said that there appeared to be no other plausible explanation for the data.

One remarkable aspect of Foer’s story involved the way that the Trump domain had stopped working. On September 21st, he wrote, the Times had delivered potential evidence of communications to B.G.R., a Washington lobbying firm that worked for Alfa Bank. Two days later, the Trump domain vanished from the Internet. (Technically, its “A record,” which translates the domain name to an I.P. address, was deleted. If the D.N.S. is a phone book, the domain name was effectively decoupled from its number.) For four days, the servers at Alfa Bank kept trying to look up the Trump domain. Then, ten minutes after the last attempt, one of them looked up another domain, which had been configured to lead to the same Trump Organization server.

Max’s group was surprised. The Trump domain had been shut down after the Times contacted Alfa Bank’s representatives—but before the newspaper contacted Trump. “That shows a human interaction,” Max concluded. “Certain actions leave fingerprints.” He reasoned that someone representing Alfa Bank had alerted the Trump Organization, which shut down the domain, set up another one, and then informed Alfa Bank of the new address.


full article:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... p-campaign

[Hermit]

This is some shady shit, man...

Was There a Connection Between a Russian Bank and the Trump Campaign?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018 ... p-campaign

So what if there was. Trump is a businessman. He and a bank were communicating. It's what businessmen and banks do. Nothing to see here. /Coito Too

[pErvinalia]

What did you change your mind on?

In the early days and on the RD forum it was mostly fine tuning of atheism and evolution threads.

I changed my mind on you. I used to think you were here to discuss your ideas, but later realized you are mostly 'doing the pErvinalia'.

Your list of "pErvinalia like people" is growing daily. What's the common thread? - You. Should give you pause for thought.

[Tero]

President claims best insurance, pre-existing conditions etc etc.
References to his op ed show exactly opposite:
Why do the citations in President Trump's USA ﹰToday op-ed all lead to sources that contradict his claims?
https://www.quora.com/Why-do-the-citati ... srid=34Gtv

[Jason]

rEv, has anyone ever told you you're just a gaslighter?

[pErvinalia]

I don't know what that is. So no.