gizmodo
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bad code
disaster cap'lism:
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SEEKS PARDON TRUMP SCOTUS
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AN 10 26
OMG DOH
President Donald Trump adores felons with bottomless pockets, and now one of the tech industries most infamous felons is almost through the ribbon, reports Gizmodo.
“Sam Bankman-Fried, the FTX cryptocurrency exchange founder about three years into a 25-year prison sentence for around $11 billion in fraud against FTX customers, investors, and lenders, presumably thinks the amount of time he’s served so far should just about square the bill,” said Gizmodo.
“In a prison interview with The Economist’s “Money Talks podcast,” Bankman-Fried continued to insist on his innocence even as his lawyers argue the $11 billion forfeiture in the case (an amount basically equal to what he stole) should be thrown out on constitutional grounds.”
The BBC reported in June that Bankman-Fried’s lawyers were seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump. But now they are pursuing a petition before the Supreme Court while chasing Trump’s generosity.
“Donald Trump, … uses pardons as patronage and is happy to hand them out to other powerful men who claim to be victims of partisan lawfare,” reports Gizmodo. “Last year, Bankman-Fried began praising Trump’s wisdom on pardons on X, writing that ‘President Trump knows that, when you weaponize the DOJ, you start putting innocent people in prison.’
“Getting a pardon is “an uphill battle,” Bankman-Fried told Money Talks. “All I can do is put forward, you know, the truth as I see it, and hope that parties are more reflective, and that there’s less visceral reaction than there was before.”
But Gizmodo said that “The visceral reaction Bankman-Fried is referring to” is likely a U.S. Senate resolution to Trump urging the president not to pardon him—which was passed without opposition.
“For the record, Bankman-Fried’s transfer of $8 billion from FTX to his crypto trading firm, Alameda Research, was fraud," assures Gizmodo. “It was not normal margin trading, and his lawyers have already lost one appeal predicated on a similar argument.
Bankman-Fried told Economist hosts that FTX was “a legitimate and successful business,” but suffered a “run on the bank, which is a thing that happens with margin businesses. But Gizmodo writes that his supposed “run” came after FTX was already insolvent and Bankman-Fried had padded Alameda’s balance sheet with FTT, a worthless trade token that FTX cooked up itself.
“About the only thing this interview is effective evidence for is the thesis that money poisoning causes permanent brain damage,” added Gizmodo writer Tom McKay.
Meanwhile, critics like DOJ's former pardon attorney Liz Oyer, accuse have condemned Trump's approach to the clemency process and accuse him of abusing his Article II powers. Oyer and others claim Trump is using the "unfettered executive power" to grant pardons in a way that has served to "degrade, corrupt and politicize the justice system.
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Trump Brings Putin's Booted Propaganda Goon Back to U.S.
The Daily Beast
https://www.thedailybeast.com › trump-brings-putins-bo...](https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-brings-putins-booted-propaganda-goon-lauren-chen-back-to-us/)
6 hours ago — ... State Department senior adviser Joe Rittenhouse. She credited Rittenhouse with “moving mountains to ensure we were able to return in time ...Read more
[### Right-Wing Influencers Rejoice: Trump Admin Gives a Visa ...
Gizmodo
https://gizmodo.com › right-wing-influencers-rejoice-tr...](https://gizmodo.com/right-wing-influencers-rejoice-trump-admin-gives-a-visa-to-accused-russian-propagandist-2000704325)
1 hour ago — In a post on X on Christmas Day, Chen announced that she and her husband were in Nashville and thanked the State Department's Joe Rittenhouse, a ...Read more
As season one of the Trump administration reboot comes to a close, they are already rooting around deep in the bag of fringe characters. According to a report from The Bulwark, D-list conservative media personality and alleged Russian propagandist Lauren Chen appears to have been granted a visa by Trump’s State Department and is once again back in the United States.
Read More
In a post on X on Christmas Day, Chen announced that she and her husband were in Nashville and thanked the State Department’s Joe Rittenhouse, a senior adviser on consular affairs, for making it happen, saying he helped in “moving mountains to ensure we were able to return in time for the holidays!” Chen also offered appreciation for the “CBP, the new leadership at the FBI, and the administration” for helping her return.
The whole situation is a bit of a “Who’s Who” of “Who is that again?” So, as a refresher: Lauren Chen is a long-time conservative media commentator who made it “big” playing footsie with the alt-right during the first Trump administration while posting as the “Roaming Millennial.” She got attention for interviewing white supremacist Richard Spencer shortly before his involvement in the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, that resulted in the death of a counter-protester and injuries to many others after a neo-Nazi drove their car into a crowd of people.
After a series of unsuccessful independent media ventures, she settled into the right-wing ecosystem, becoming a contributor to Glenn Beck’s The Blaze and Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA. But in 2022, she and her husband, Liam Donovan, launched her most notable venture, Tenent Media.
According to an indictment filed by the Justice Department in 2024, Tenet Media received millions of dollars from the Kremlin-run media company RT, which Chen previously contributed to, and funneled that money to conservative commentators in an effort to disseminate pro-Russian content. Recipients of those funds, who supposedly were unaware that they came from Russian interests, included online influencers Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and David Rubin, all of whom allegedly were paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by Tenent Media for their content.
While the Justice Department’s case against the Russian funders of Tenet Media is still open, per The Bulwark, Chen never really faced legal consequences—though she did have her visa “nuked” by the Biden administration and was, at least for a time, unable to return to the United States.
That appears to have changed thanks to another Trump Show backbencher, Joe Rittenhouse. According to The Daily Beast, Rittenhouse is a former actor turned Trump campaign booster who was rewarded with a role in the administration and has apparently used his position to get Chen back into the country. Rittenhouse appears deeply engaged in the Online Right, based on the fact that he posted a picture of himself in a federal office watching a Sargon of Akkad video. So it probably shouldn’t be a surprise that he’d know and want to help out Chen. The State Department didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Gizmodo; we’ll update this post when we receive a reply.
Fittingly, Rittenhouse also previously briefed the press on the Trump administration’s decision to revoke the visas of students who participated in the anti-genocide protests that took place on college campuses earlier this year. So if you’re keeping score at home: Protesting a genocide gets you kicked out of this country, but accepting money from the Kremlin and distributing it to create propaganda gets you an expedited invite in. As Rittenhouse says, that’s just what “American First Consular Affairs looks like.”
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https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2021/07/climate-supervillain-creating-new-tv-channel-to-report-on-weather-he-helped-fuck-up/
we’ve reached the final boss level of climate irony. The New York Times reported Tuesday that Rupert Murdoch, the media tycoon whose News Corp. owns Fox News, plans to launch a full-time channel focused on the weather called Fox Weather.
Apparently, viewers are hungry for weather content — the Weather Channel’s viewership was up 7% in the first half of this year, while viewership fell for big cable networks. And looking at the historic heat waves gripping much of the country this summer — caused partially by stalled climate action aided by Fox News working in tandem with oil companies and the Republican Party to spread climate misinformation — it’s not hard to see why.
The irony of Fox creating a weather channel, of all things, is as deep as the rapidly heating ocean and as wide as our swiftly overheating country. As much of the rest of the world ponders how to dig ourselves out of this mess we’ve made, Fox News is still clinging desperately to denial.
Last month, star Tucker Carlson used his show to allege that climate activists want to “experiment to make children smaller” to fix global warming (spoiler alert: that is, uh, not true), while in May, climate denier Steve Koonin was invited to not one, but two Fox News programs to promote his book claiming that other scientists are getting too worked up about this global warming thing....Even the supposedly nonpartisan evening news show hosted by Brett Baier has a distinct denier slant: A Media Matters analysis of Baier’s climate coverage from 2009 to 2021 found that a whopping 88% of it ran the gamut from misleading to promoting bad-faith narratives to flat-out lies.
“It’s not just the bigger climate denial,” said Allison Fisher, the director of the climate and energy program at Media Matters. Fox News, Fisher said, “specifically use[s] weather to push climate denial. That is a long-worn tactic of Fox News, even before Trump was tweeting out, like, ‘where’s your global warming now?’ during a snowstorm. That’s a very classic Fox move.”
Fisher pointed out that as recently as this year, Fox News contributors used an April cold snap to claim climate change was a hoax. “They’re emphatic about dismissing the relationship between climate change and weather, whether it’s during a megastorm or the wildfires last year or the record-shattering heat this week, and then also mocking the idea of global warming during moments of abnormally cold weather,” she said. “They’re the ones who have made weather political.”...News Corp owns the denier-friendly Wall Street Journal and New York Post, as well as several right-wing outlets in Murdoch’s home country of Australia. While Murdoch...;released last year found that News Corp’s coverage of the devastating 2020 Australian wildfires drove a “viral misinformation campaign” intended to spread misinformation on the causes of the fire and protect the coal industry in Australia. The company’s explicit and implicit endorsement of climate denial has even led to a fracture in the Murdoch family: during the wildfires, Murdoch’s younger son, James,...issued a rebuke of the company on its handling of climate, and he...According to Fisher, Fox News has meteorologists on staff who report on the weather, but they mostly do “straight reporting” of what is going on. “They’re not contextualising” that weather, she said — despite the fact that other networks are ...tting their meteorologists discuss how extreme weather is shaped by climate change. “That contextualisation of these events as climate is what makes Fox’s entry into this space really suspect and troubling.”
All of this raises the question of how, exactly, Fox is planning to go about reporting the weather when it keeps getting more extreme thanks, in part, to a mess they helped create. As Deadline reported a few weeks ago, Fox has tapped at least six meteorologists from different local markets — Britta Merwin, Jason Frazer, Craig Herrera, Bridgit Mahoney, Stephen Morgan, and Nick Kosir — to flesh out the basis of its news team. Earther was able to find just a few tweets from three of them that mentioned climate change.
“Climate change is real and it is a fact,” Merwin, a future Fox morning host and formerly of KPRC-TV in Houston, responded in February to a Twitter user using Merwin’s report of snow on the beach to claim climate change was a hoax. “It is about science,” she wrote. Her future morning cohost, Frazer of WKYC-TV in Cleveland, thanked a meteorologist in 2017 for “sharing … expertise on climate change” and mentioned climate change in 2018 when discussing the size of a tropical storm. (“You could argue Climate Change but I am not touching that hot potato,” he wrote.) Meanwhile, Herrera, who covered weather for Seattle’s KING-TV and will serve as another coanchor, tweeted about climate in 2013 and 2014, when he covered an IPCC report and did a piece on California’s drought. “We have a long way to go but education and facts are key,” he responded to one user thanking him for his coverage. “Can’t dispute the science or numbers.”
Gizmodo reached out Frazer, Merwin, and Herrera, along with another of their future coworkers, to ask how they planned to handle climate coverage. We will update when we receive any responses.
According to the Times, Fox is dipping a toe into this space because it’s so profitable; it quotes a TV executive saying that “climate change and the environment will be the story of the next decade,” while a spokesperson for Fox told the Times the network will offer “in-depth reporting surrounding all weather conditions, and we are excited to showcase to viewers what a full-service comprehensive weather platform can deliver beginning this [spring].”
Some of Fox’s future competitors making hay out of the climate crisis could goad the network into figuring out ways to cover it: The Weather Channel, the Times reported, has a whole host of climate change programming planned, including a show about miners looking for minerals in Greenland exposed by newly melted ice (sorry, what?).
But Fisher sees a darker possibility for the new weather service.
“It’s the content they’re producing that’s going to get amplified,” she said. “If they bring on a denier like Marc Morano, if he starts to get a platform there — that content is going to go on his website, it’s going to go into other right-wing media infosphere, it’s going to bounce back on Fox, it’s going to go on social media, and they’re going to push that out in moments when everybody else is saying, ‘this is climate change’–they’re going to be able to tell this right-wing media bubble, it’s not.”
More From Gizmodo Australia
Why Can’t We Call It an Emergency?
Joe Biden Is Not Coming for Your Poorly Cooked Hamburger
The Social Cost of Methane Is Much Higher in the U.S. Than Current Government Estimates
What’s the Most Climate-Safe Place in the World?
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// thiel gawker?
https://www.alternet.org/2020/09/top-trump-supreme-court-pick-involved-in-100-million-controversial-lawsuit-involving-top-trump-campaign-strategist/
roger salon
Florida judge rumored to be on short list of nominees to fill the Supreme Court seat left vacant by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's death is currently hearing a $100 million lawsuit from one of President Donald Trump's top campaign strategists.
Judge Barbara Lagoa was appointed to Florida's 11th Circuit Court of Appeals less than one year ago by Trump. She is one of two Trump appointees on a three-judge panel which will decide whether the effort by the president's senior campaign strategist Jason Miller to revive a $100 million defamation suit against Gizmodo may advance.
Miller has sued the media conglomerate over a 2018 article in its now-defunct subsidiary website Splinter reporting that he drugged a woman with an abortion pill without her knowledge after learning she was pregnant.
Splinter reported that the allegation came in a court filing from A.J. Delgado, a former Trump 2016 campaign aide. Delgado has been engaged in a bitter custody dispute since 2017 with Miller, a married man who fathered her child while they worked on the campaign. Delgado claimed in a court filing that the alleged smoothie incident involved another woman, whose identity she did not publicly reveal.
Miller filed a $100 million defamation suit against Gizmodo Media and Katherine Krueger, the reporter for Splinter. He denies the allegations.
A Miami-based federal district court judge tossed out the case a year ago, ruling that the report was a fair and accurate summary of a judicial proceeding — and therefore shielded from libel charges. Miller appealed that ruling, and the court heard opening arguments last month.
The appeal hangs on Miller's argument that the "fair report privilege" should not apply, because the filing cited by Splinter was been under seal at the time of publication. However, Gizmodo claims that the document was available for at least a three-day window before Miller's lawyers filed to seal it. Because the court did not automatically seal the document, Gizmodo says it had a fair claim for publication under New York law.
The two Trump-appointed judges on the panel — Lagoa and Andrew Brasher — "seemed friendlier to Miller's case," according to a Politico report on the initial hearing last month.
For a Supreme Court nominee, Lagoa's judicial experience would be thin by historical standards. Lagoa has about nine months of experience on the federal bench, and she previously served for less than one year on Florida's Supreme Court.
In addition to the Miller case, Lagoa is also currently ruling on a challenge to a Florida law requiring anyone with a serious criminal conviction to pay all fines and legal obligations before they can vote. Florida is a key swing state in the 2020 elections.
Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee recently wrote to Lagoa and Brasher, along with Trump appointee Robert Luck, asking them to recuse themselves from the case. The senators cited judicial ethics rules barring judges from ruling on cases if their impartiality can be "reasonably" questioned. Though Brasher recused himself, Lagoa and Luck have not.
Lagoa's potential conflicts of interest in that case may go beyond her connection to Trump. During her short stint on Florida's Supreme Court, the judge ruled to reverse a decision invalidating the felon voting law. She argues that the federal case is different from the state-level case, which some see as a gray area when it comes to recusal.
The Trump campaign views Florida as a must-win on its path to electoral victory Nov. 3.
Lagoa, a Cuban-American from Florida, was also featured on Trump's Sept. 10 list of potential nominees.
Financial affidavits from Miller's child support case, reviewed and first reported by Salon, showed the Trump adviser has consistently argued for years that he is broke despite simultaneously reporting incomes anywhere between $20,000 and $67,000 a month. His August affidavit showed a $35,000 monthly income starting in June, when he joined the Trump campaign. However, the campaign has not disclosed any payments to Miller or other top staff members.
Delgado has publicly claimed that Miller may be financially "desperate" to overturn the initial ruling on his $100 million lawsuit.
"It's Lagoa who decides it," she tweeted. "So she was placed on this list and now has to rule in Miller's favor."
Federal judge Amy Coney Barrett has been reported to be the front-runner to replace Ginsburg. Trump said Monday that he intends to announce a decision by "either Friday or Saturday."
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...OANN broadcast a segment on Tuesday filled with conspiracy theories about Gugino supposedly trying to “scan police communications” with his phone.
“Newly released videos appear to show Gugino using a police tracker on his phone, trying to scan police communications during the protest,” OANN insisted on Tuesday. “The tactic, known as skimming, is an old trick used by Antifa to locate police officers and plan violent activities, bypassing the police response.”
Why would Gugino be trying to “locate” police when they’re standing right in front of him? That obvious question goes unanswered in the report. And it gets even dumber from there.
“In addition, the 75-year-old, who’s been referred to as an agitator, was supposedly using the technology to black out police communications. That, however, didn’t quite work,” OANN said. “And many police officers support their police colleagues.”...
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TargetPoint and Causeway, the two firms employed by the RNC in addition to Deep Root, apparently layered their own analytics atop the information provided by Data Trust. TargetPoint conducted thousands of surveys per week in 22 states, according to AdAge, gauging voter sentiment on a variety of topics. While Causeway helped manage the data, Deep Root used it to perfect its TV advertising targets—producing voter turnout estimates by county and using that intelligence to target its ad buys.
A source with years of experience working on political campaign data operations told Gizmodo that the data exposed by Deep Root appeared to be customized for the RNC and had apparently been used to create models for turnout and voter preferences. Metadata in the files suggested that the database wasn’t Deep Root’s working copy, but rather a post-election version of its data, the source said, adding that it was somewhat surprising the files hadn’t been discarded.
Because the data from the 2008 and 2012 elections is outdated—the source compared it to the kind of address and phone data one could find on a “lousy internet lookup site”—it’s not very valuable. Even the 2016 data is quickly becoming stale. “This is a proprietary dataset based on a mix of public records, data from commercial providers, and a variety of predictive models of uncertain provenance and quality,” the source said, adding: “Undoubtedly it took millions of dollars to produce.”
Although basic voter information is public record, Deep Root’s dataset contains a swirl of proprietary information from the RNC’s data firms. Many of the filenames indicate that they potentially contain market research on Democratic candidates and the independent expenditure committees that support them. (Up to two terabytes of data contained on the server was protected by permission settings.)
One exposed folder is labeled “Exxon-Mobile” [sic] and contains spreadsheets apparently used to predict which voters support the oil and gas industry. Divided by state, the files include the voters’ names and addresses, along with a unique RNC identification number assigned to every US citizen registered to vote. Each row indicates where voters likely fall on issues of interest to ExxonMobil, the country’s biggest natural gas producer.
The data evaluates, for example, whether or not a specific voter believes drilling for fossil fuels is vital to US security. It also predicts if the voter thinks the US should be moving away from fossil-fuel use. The ExxonMobil “national score” document alone contains data on 182,746,897 Americans spread across 19 fields.]...
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