Tracker

In vino veritas.

Donald Trump Sues Bob Woodward For Publishing Audio Interviews Former president Donald Trump is suing journalist Bob Woodward for releasing recordings of their interviews, claiming he never agreed the tapes would be turned into an audiobook. Trump did 19 interviews with Woodward between December 2019 and August 2020, and also in 2016 when he was just a candidate. Woodward turned the interviews into a book called “Rage,” and compiled the audio interviews into another book called “The Trump Tapes” that was released in October. Trump filed a $49 million lawsuit against Woodward and his publishing company Simon & Schuster on Monday, saying that while he agreed to be taped, he never approved their public release, according to Bloomberg News.

Judge quashes Trump bid to hide money he paid to former staffer in nondisclosure agreement settlement Former President Donald Trump's effort to keep details of a settlement related to a past nondisclosure agreement lawsuit were dealt a setback on Monday. Bloomberg News reports that US District Judge Paul Gardephe has ruled that Trump must disclose the amount of money he's paying to former staffer Jessica Denson, who had filed a legal challenge to Trump's mandate that all campaign staffers sign NDAs as a precondition to working for him. "Under the settlement, the campaign agreed it would not enforce the nondisclosure and nondisparagement agreements going forward, and there was a financial component as well," according to Bloomberg's report. "Denson was set to receive an incentive fee for pursuing the case for years, and the campaign also would pay her lawyers’ fees. Those amounts were redacted in documents filed in court a few weeks ago." Attorneys representing Trump argued earlier this month that disclosing the terms of the settlement “would have a deleterious effect on, among other things, the Campaign’s future ability to negotiate similar agreements." However, Gardephe rejected this reasoning and said that the only piece of information in the deal that should not become public was Denson's bank account number. https://www.alternet.org/trump-judge/

He will be poutine most if his money in the bank.

Rest in peace Cindy Williams will always remember you (picture:1976)

"I would expect federal indictments": George Santos' top donors don't appear to actually exist More than a dozen donors who contributed significant amounts of money to George Santos' 2020 congressional campaign do not appear to exist, an investigation by Mother Jones found. Santos' campaign reported that Victoria and Jonathan Regor had each contributed $2,800 to his first bid for a House seat, but after searching through various databases, Mother Jones found that no one in the United States with such names exist. The apparent donors listed their address as 45 New Mexico Street in Jackson Township, New Jersey, but even that was questionable since the numbers on New Mexico Street in Jackson end in the 20s. Another donor by the name of Stephen Berger, who was included in Santos' 2020 campaign finance reports, contributed $2,500 – the maximum amount. He was listed as a retiree living on Brandt Road in Brawley, California, but a spokesperson for William Brandt told Mother Jones that Brandt has lived at that address for at least 20 years and "neither he or his wife have made any donations to George Santos. He does not know Stephen Berger nor has Stephen Berger ever lived at…Brandt Road." The contributions are among more than a dozen major donations to the 2020 Santos campaign for which the name or the address of the donor cannot be confirmed. Separately, the documents identify that a $2,800 campaign donation was attributed to a friend of Santos, but the person denied making the donation to Mother Jones. These contributions account for more than $30,000 of the $338,000 the Santos campaign raised from individual donors in 2020, according to Mother Jones. Under federal campaign finance law, it is illegal to donate money using a false name or the name of someone else. The newly-elected GOP lawmaker, who has faced repeated calls to resign from Congress for fabricating his resume and lying about his background, received more criticism after the Mother Jones report was released. "Somehow, George Santos's campaign finance scandal just got a lot worse," the watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington said on Twitter, questioning whether Santos' donors "even exist."

Manhattan DA Investigating Trump To Present Evidence To Grand Jury: Report The Manhattan district attorney’s office is set to begin presenting evidence to a grand jury Monday regarding Donald Trump’s alleged role in getting hush money payments to an adult film star during his 2016 presidential campaign, people familiar with the matter told The New York Times. The development brings prosecutors one step closer to possibly filing criminal charges against Trump, marking a major escalation in the longest-running criminal investigation into the former president regarding his alleged affair with the porn star Stormy Daniels. The district attorney’s office declined to comment on the report.

Well, at least Regina is first in something.

Group 'linked to staunchly conservative causes' will run Super Bowl ads to 'redeem Jesus' brand' From electric vehicles to cosmetics, and even the word “mummy,” there is a lot of rebranding going on. Bowing to anger from right-wingers and conservative commentators, M&M’s decided to rebrand the decades-old multi-colored candies after outrage over its latest addition, purple, and its new “spokescandy,” also named “Purple.” “Roughly a year ago, Mars Wrigley updated the look of its M&M’s characters, announcing an initiative to make the mascots fit a ‘more dynamic, progressive world.’ As part of these changes, the company introduced new designs of some of M&M’s characters and wrote weirdly elaborate backstories for others. Most notably, the company made the green M&M less ‘sexy’ by shortening her legs and replacing her high-heeled boots with sneakers,” Vox Media’s Polygon reported last week. Fox News personality Tucker Carlson infamously has waged war on the “woke” spokescandies, declaring at one point, “M&M’s will not be satisfied until every last cartoon character is deeply unappealing and totally androgynous.” Fast forward to now: Actress and comedian Maya Rudolph is their new spokesperson, although the “spokescandies,” perhaps after some additional rebranding, will be returning in a new ad on Super Bowl Sunday. Which brings us to the rebranding of another icon: Jesus Christ. He too will be part of the Super Bowl Sunday ads.er the next three years a $1 billion mostly-dark-money campaign – which reportedly will include funds from billionaire right wing anti-abortion and anti-LGBTQ funderDavid Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby – will promote Jesus in ads, including during the Super Bowl on February 12. Those two Super Bowl ads to “to redeem Jesus’ brand” will cost $20 million, Religion News Service reports. The campaign to promote Jesus includes $100 million in ads declaring “He Gets Us,” from “the Servant Foundation, an Overland Park, Kansas, nonprofit that does business as The Signatry,” RNS adds. The “donors backing the campaign have until recently remained anonymous — in early 2022, organizers only told Religion News Service that funding came from ‘like-minded families who desire to see the Jesus of the Bible represented in today’s culture with the same relevance and impact He had 2000 years ago.'” But the full list of donors remains unknown.

America Takes Action On the School Shootings:

Former Aide Says Trump Won’t Pick Marjorie Taylor Greene For VP Because Of Her Looks Former Pence aide Olivia Troye said that Donald Trump is so shallow that he won’t pick Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to be his VP because he will think she doesn’t look attractive enough. Troye said on MSNBC, “Honestly, Donald Trump is a shallow human being. And I don’t think she’s gonna meet the looks match for him. I hate to say that to disparage another female, but we know how shallow this man is.” Trump thinks that putting a woman on the ticket will get him back to the White House in 2024, so he is considering a female running mate. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem has been campaigning for the slot on a potential Trump 2024 ticket for years. Given Trump’s shallowness, she brings all of the devotion to Trump that Greene has in a package that the terrible human being of a former president might think will look better on TV.

Lisa Marie Presley Was Taking Opioids, Weight Loss Drugs Before Death: TMZ Lisa Marie Presley was undergoing an extreme weight loss regimen before her death because she wanted to look good while attending award ceremonies for Elvis, according to TMZ. Citing family sources, the outlet reports that Presley had plastic surgery and was taking weight loss drugs, shedding between 40 and 50 pounds in the six weeks before the Golden Globes on Jan. 10. Presley, who died two days later at the age of 54, was also taking opioids, relapsing into an addiction she’d battled for years, the sources tell TMZ. While her cause of death may not be revealed for months while toxicology results are still pending, Presley reportedly complained of abdominal pain on the morning of her death.

WHO: COVID Still An Emergency But Nearing 'Inflection' Point GENEVA (AP) — The coronavirus remains a global health emergency, the World Health Organization chief said Monday, after a key advisory panel found the pandemic may be nearing an “inflexion point” where higher levels of immunity can lower virus-related deaths. Speaking at the opening of WHO’s annual executive board meeting, WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “there is no doubt that we’re in a far better situation now” than a year ago — when the highly transmissible Omicron variant was at its peak. But Tedros warned that in the last eight weeks, at least 170,000 people have died around the world in connection with the coronavirus. He called for at-risk groups to be fully vaccinated, an increase in testing and early use of antivirals, an expansion of lab networks, and a fight against “misinformation” about the pandemic. “We remain hopeful that in the coming year, the world will transition to a new phase in which we reduce hospitalizations and deaths to the lowest possible level,” he said. Tedros’ comments came moments after WHO released findings of its emergency committee on the pandemic which reported that some 13.1 billion doses of COVID-19 vaccines have been administered — with nearly 90% of health workers and more than four in five people over 60 years of age having completed the first series of jabs. “The committee acknowledged that the COVID-19 pandemic may be approaching an inflexion point,” WHO said in a statement. Higher levels of immunity worldwide through vaccination or infection “may limit the impact” of the virus that causes COVID-19 on “morbidity and mortality,” the committee said.

Answer: the Riders will probably be interested. Any port in a storm.

History says that its only a matter of time until a player shaves or throws a game. It has happened before and thus will happen again. All you need is a player (typically a star) who has run into financial distress and an entity with enough vested interest in the game outcome and enough money to seduce that player. People are people and money and ego are always in play.

Loved him in Fenster and Dickens.

Why More Physicists Are Starting to Think Space and Time Are ‘Illusions’ This past December, the physics Nobel Prize was awarded for the experimental confirmation of a quantum phenomenon known for more than 80 years: entanglement. As envisioned by Albert Einstein and his collaborators in 1935, quantum objects can be mysteriously correlated even if they are separated by large distances. But as weird as the phenomenon appears, why is such an old idea still worth the most prestigious prize in physics? Coincidentally, just a few weeks before the new Nobel laureates were honored in Stockholm, a different team of distinguished scientists from Harvard, MIT, Caltech, Fermilab and Google reported that they had run a process on Google’s quantum computer that could be interpreted as a wormhole. Wormholes are tunnels through the universe that can work like a shortcut through space and time and are loved by science fiction fans, and although the tunnel realized in this recent experiment exists only in a 2-dimensional toy universe, it could constitute a breakthrough for future research at the forefront of physics. But why is entanglement related to space and time? And how can it be important for future physics breakthroughs? Properly understood, entanglement implies that the universe is “monistic”, as philosophers call it, that on the most fundamental level, everything in the universe is part of a single, unified whole. It is a defining property of quantum mechanics that its underlying reality is described in terms of waves, and a monistic universe would require a universal function. Already decades ago, researchers such as Hugh Everett and Dieter Zeh showed how our daily-life reality can emerge out of such a universal quantum-mechanical description. But only now are researchers such as Leonard Susskind or Sean Carroll developing ideas on how this hidden quantum reality might explain not only matter but also the fabric of space and time. Entanglement is much more than just another weird quantum phenomenon. It is the acting principle behind both why quantum mechanics merges the world into one and why we experience this fundamental unity as many separate objects. At the same time, entanglement is the reason why we seem to live in a classical reality. It is—quite literally—the glue and creator of worlds. Entanglement applies to objects comprising two or more components and describes what happens when the quantum principle that “everything that can happen actually happens” is applied to such composed objects. Accordingly, an entangled state is the superposition of all possible combinations that the components of a composed object can be in to produce the same overall result. It is again the wavy nature of the quantum domain that can help to illustrate how entanglement actually works. Picture a perfectly calm, glassy sea on a windless day. Now ask yourself, how can such a plane be produced by overlaying two individual wave patterns? One possibility is that superimposing two completely flat surfaces results again in a completely level outcome. But another possibility that might produce a flat surface is if two identical wave patterns shifted by half an oscillation cycle were to be superimposed on one another, so that the wave crests of one pattern annihilate the wave troughs of the other one and vice versa. If we just observed the glassy ocean, regarding it as the result of two swells combined, there would be no way for us to find out about the patterns of the individual swells. What sounds perfectly ordinary when we talk about waves has the most bizarre consequences when applied to competing realities. If your neighbor told you she had two cats, one live cat and a dead one, this would imply that either the first cat or the second one is dead and that the remaining cat, respectively, is alive—it would be a strange and morbid way of describing one’s pets, and you may not know which one of them is the lucky one, but you would get the neighbor’s drift. Not so in the quantum world. In quantum mechanics, the very same statement implies that the two cats are merged in a superposition of cases, including the first cat being alive and the second one dead and the first cat being dead while the second one lives, but also possibilities where both cats are half alive and half dead, or the first cat is one-third alive, while the second feline adds the missing two-thirds of life. In a quantum pair of cats, the fates and conditions of the individual animals get dissolved entirely in the state of the whole. Likewise, in a quantum universe, there are no individual objects. All that exists is merged into a single “One.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/why-more-physicists-are-starting-to-think-space-and-time-are-illusions?ref=home

Inside The Online Community Where Home-Schoolers Learn How To Turn Their Kids Into ‘Wonderful Nazis’ On Nov. 5, 2021, a married couple calling themselves “Mr. and Mrs. Saxon” appeared on the neo-Nazi podcast “Achtung Amerikaner” to plug a new project: a social media channel dedicated to helping American parents home-school their children. “We are so deeply invested into making sure that that child becomes a wonderful Nazi,” Mrs. Saxon told the podcast’s host. “And by home-schooling, we’re going to get that done.” The Saxons said they launched the “Dissident Homeschool” channel on Telegram after years of searching for and developing “Nazi-approved material” for their own home-schooled children — material they were eager to share. The Dissident Homeschool channel — which now has nearly 2,500 subscribers — is replete with this material, including ready-made lesson plans authored by the Saxons on various subjects, like Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee (a “grand role model for young, white men”) and Martin Luther King Jr. (“the antithesis of our civilization and our people”). There are copywork assignments available for parents to print out, so that their children can learn cursive by writing out quotes from Adolf Hitler. There are recommended reading lists with bits of advice like “do not give them Jewish media content,” and there are tips for ensuring that home-schooling parents are in “full compliance with the law” so that “the state” doesn’t interfere. The Saxons also frequently update their followers on their progress home-schooling their own children. In one since-deleted post to Telegram, they posted an audio message of their kids shouting “Sieg Heil” — the German phrase for “hail victory” that was used by the Nazis. Over the past year, the Dissident Homeschool channel has become a community for like-minded fascists who see home schooling as integral to whites wresting control of America. The Saxons created this community while hiding behind a fake last name, but HuffPost has reviewed evidence indicating they are Logan and Katja Lawrence of Upper Sandusky, Ohio. Logan, until earlier this week, worked for his family’s insurance company while Katja taught the kids at home. The Anonymous Comrades Collective, a group of anti-fascist researchers, first uncovered evidence suggesting the Lawrences are behind Dissident Homeschool. HuffPost has verified the collective’s research. The Lawrences did not respond to repeated requests for comment made via phone calls, text messages and emails. A HuffPost reporter also left a message in the Dissident Homeschool channel asking Mr. and Mrs. Saxon for comment about the Anonymous Comrades Collective’s research. That message was immediately deleted by the channel’s administrators, who then disabled the channel’s comment and chat functions. A short time later, Katja Lawrence deleted her Facebook page. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/home-school-nazis-telegram-dissident-saxon_n_63d596c4e4b01a43638e6a0a

I understand the confusion and frustration of all those who cannot understand Garland's glacial pursuit of Trump and his co-conspirators. However, from where I stand (metaphorically) , I perceive that America is teetering on the edge of yet another civil war, and Trump has to be convicted on the basis of as close to irrefutable evidence as humanly possible. Trump's thralls will never accept any evidence, no matter how blatantly culpable he is shown to be, but there are some probably semi-open to accepting it. That is the audience the process theatre is playing to. According to what I learned in sociology, there is a certain percentage that , when reached by violent dissidents, becomes the threshold of civil war. There are LOT of potentially violent, armed extremists in the US with differing perceived grievances but with equally similar willingness to resort to violence to gain their ends. Trump is their poster boy and the icon behind which the "Christian" right, anti-vaxxers, racists, fascists and conspiratory-believers could potentially unite. They would be at each other's throats in no time, but would do a lot of damage while together and probably plunge the US into marital law and authoritarian rule.

How Reagan Convinced Himself He Didn’t Sell Arms for Hostages Shocking news about secret arms-for-hostage deals rocked Washing­ton in late 1986. The first hint came with a White House announcement on November 2, that David Jacobsen, an American held hostage in Lebanon by Iranian-directed Islamic forces, had been released. As Secretary of State George Shultz read a draft White House statement about the development, he noted that it referred to freed “hostages,” with the “s” crossed out. That told him that the White House had expected Jacobsen would not be alone. Shultz suspected that the news meant that clandestine White House efforts to free captive Americans in the Middle East by send­ing arms via Israel to Iran might be responsible. He had first heard about the possibility in mid-1985. Within a few weeks, the dimensions of the story expanded exponen­tially with word that some Iranian payments for American arms had been secretly diverted to the rebel Contra forces in Nicaragua that Washington hoped would topple the leftist Sandinista regime. The funding was in clear violation of a congressional cutoff of aid to the Contras. Overnight, the affair, quickly dubbed the Iran-Contra scandal, engulfed the White House. Shultz realized that President Ronald Reagan faced an explosive crisis similar to Watergate that might upend his presidency. The fiasco staggered Shultz. It exposed his own failure to stop the arms-for-hostage dealing at several critical moments when he heard about pieces of it, objected to it but stopped short of forcefully intervening. He had delib­erately kept his distance, telling the White House officials who managed the arms shipments to Iran that he did not want to know the details. The scandal also forced Shultz to face up to Reagan’s weaknesses as president, for the affair, at its core, was a colossal blunder. As Shultz confronted the issue, he struggled mightily to remain loyal to Reagan while simultaneously protecting his own reputation and legacy. In doing so, he barely escaped indictment for obstruction of justice.