Plan B Forum

I read where that guy from InfoWars, Alex Jones, will be interviewing for the position tomorrow afternoon.

Chris Christie is still not doing anything. Maybe he would be interested.

And he has no reputation to worry about sinking, because he's already sent his to the bottom of the Mariana Trench...

"Fear an ignorant man more than a lion" This get credited online as both a Kurdish proverb and a Turkish proverb. Both ethnic groups have a history of experience with both lions and ignorant men.

POTUS 45 is the most ignorant president we have ever had. Harry Truman had little formal education, but he seems to have made up for it with an ability to learn from others. Dan Quayle was one heart-beat away from the oval office and really dumb, but he did not pretend other wise and tried hard to overcome it. Trump is profoundly and dangerously ignorant. He cannot even begin to understand what Donald Rumsfeld was taking about:

"There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don't know we don't know. And if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones".

POTUS 45 cannot even be bothered to study his morning intelligence briefing report. "Fear an ignorant man more than a lion."

snailgate

From Dicken's A Christmas Carol:

This boy is Ignorance. This girl is Want. Beware them both, and all of their degree; but most of all beware this boy, for on his brow I see that written which is Doom.

And yet we still haven't learned; indeed we tend to revel in ignorance.

This gets weirder. Manafort's attorneys filed a response to Mueller's accusations that he had lied to investigators, that being at least part of the reason he is locked up. What they did not realize is that some of this filing, although redacted prior to publication by placing black bars over several lines, was legible after cutting and pasting to another document. Try it: it's fun! You can find the document here on Slate.com; highlight some of the lines including the blacked out ones, CTRL C and CTRL V into a document (I used Pages but I assume it will work with Word) and hey presto! you can read the forbidden bits.

Reporters used this to discover that Mueller had evidence that he had talked to someone with links to Russian intelligence during the campaign. (Hint: it's the C word that sounds a it like collision but isn't.)

My guess here is that someone doesn't know how to use the 'track changes' thing in Word. I was once (OK 20 years ago now) working on a fairly major proposal for my company to do with site assessments and proper environmental stewardship of a gas pipeline on Sakhalin Island in Russia's far east. Sakhalin is where the Siberians used to send their prisoners if that gives you an idea . . . . So they sent a team of us to Sakhalin to scope out the ground - what effect will this pipeline have on wildlife and how many birdwatchers and bearwatchers and whalewatchers and and scuba-diving forensic sedimentologist geochemists (OK I made up a job for myself) will we need? We got the Request for Proposal (RFP) from a major oil and gas company which shall be nameless to avoid embarrassment but whom we shall call Mobil for convenience. 'Mobil' sent me an electronic copy. It arrived - all 35 MB of it; but I was a little surprised how small the actual document was - only a few dozen pages and I was expecting, from the size, several hundred pages. I was reading this thing and had decided that our part of this was gong to be in the $8 to $10 million range. I copied and pasted a portion of the RFP to send to a colleague for her opinion on something and I noticed that the "Accept all changes" button was toggled on. Out of curiosity, I toggled it off.

Holy shit.

Every comment/remark/question/edit made since the RFP was first drafted was still there. Things like (I don't have my notes any more but I can recall the flavor) Frank: Are you sure we need this? George: Yeah that bit's only a few hundred G and it'll keep the Russians quiet. Frank: I don't give a shit about Steller's fucking sea eagle. George: Apparently they do. Frank: I've been to Sakhalin and trust me, it's too fucking cold for any birdwatchers. They'll never know.

Some of it was entertaining; much of it was enlightening; all of it was helpful to a competitive bidder. In the end we did not submit a bid because their requirements for Russian participation were absurdly high. I got a couple of weeks in Moscow and Sakalin out of it (although I do not recommend December unless you are a fan of brass monkey weather). But I did learn a lesson: if you use 'Track changes' be very careful when you go final or else everyone can see what you had originally written.

It's not a track changes problem, they had to use the highlighting function (in black instead of bright yellow) to cover the text, and highlighting allows access to the underlying text by design. When converted to PDF, you can't undo the highlighting but you can still select the text beneath it. They should have deleted the text before highlighting, or created the PDF from a scan instead of by conversion.

It makes me wonder if this has happened before, in any context where documents are redacted to protect privacy and confidentiality. It wouldn't have occurred to me to think about it until this happened.

Scooter wrote: It makes me wonder if this has happened before, in any context where documents are redacted to protect privacy and confidentiality. It wouldn't have occurred to me to think about it until this happened.

I thought it was pretty common knowledge to all regular filers of federal court documents on PACER. You also don't want to file anything on court systems that accept Word-format documents unless you're sure you've got all the "track changes" and "comments" info scrubbed.

Again, this wasn't track changes, the PDF version would not have any way to undo it. This happened because applying highlight to text is not intended to render the text impervious to other functions or edits. The text was still there to select and copy in the PDF,

An episode of a 1950s Western drama may have foretold America’s current border wall crisis more than sixty years ago.  One episode of the old TV show "Trackdown" featured a man named Trump and his snake-oil scheme for a wall that promised to protect every citizen from danger.

“Trackdown” aired on CBS between 1957 and 1959 and was set in Texas following the Civil War.  The series followed Texas Ranger Hoby Gilman, played by Robert Culp, and his adventures protecting the people of the Lone Star State.  The 30th episode of the show, titled “The End of The World”, premiered on May 9th, 1958, and saw a con man named Walter Trump (played by Lawrence Dobkin) attempt to scam the entire town.

The fictional Trump warned the Texans that apocalyptic meteors would strike the town at midnight, but he could protect everyone.  “I bring you a message,” he said.  “A message few of you will be able to believe… but be not afraid, my friends:  I also bring you the means with which to save yourself.”

His solution was to build a wall made of magical metal that would repel the meteors and keep everyone safe.  As the citizens started to believe Trump, he offered to give them walls for $50 each.  However, Ranger Gilman wasn’t convinced.  Pandemonium erupted in the town, but in the end Gilman arrests Trump for grand theft and fraud.

Snopes confirmed that the eerily prescient episode was real.

Even though “Trackdown” was a fictional show, the events of that episode closely mirror what is happening today.  As today’s government shutdown enters its fourth week — 22 days so far and counting — with no compromise on the Mexican border wall in sight, maybe what this country needs is a Ranger Gilman of its own to bring an end to it.

-"BB"-

….Gilman arrests Trump for grand theft and fraud.

One can only hope.

From Wikipedia

"Trackdown": The End of the World

In "The End of the World", a rabble-rousing doomsayer named Walter Trump (played by Lawrence Dobkin) comes to town. He scares the townsfolk with talk of an impending disaster and claims to be the only person who can save them – by building a wall. He also threatens to sue Hoby when accused of dishonesty. By the end of the episode, he is arrested as a conman and fraud. The coincidental similarity to Donald Trump's name and proposed border wall was noted after his 2016 election.[5] Vanity Fair wrote that "of all the books and movies that presaged the rise of our reality-TV president... none are so eerily on the nose as this once-obscure, 1958 episode of Trackdown in which a demagogue named Trump attempts to convince a town that only he can save its citizens from the threats outside their borders... by building a wall."[6] The Wrap asked, "Want to talk about a weird coincidence?.... Some may call this episode titled 'The End of the World' the ultimate illustration of life imitating art, considering the episode aired May 8, 1958... it is pretty amusing, especially when the TV character threatens, 'Be careful, son. I can sue you.'"[7] The San Francisco Chronicle stated that "the character's speech is so similar to the president-elect's, it almost seems as if Donald Trump borrowed some catchphrases from Walter Trump."[8]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackdown_(TV_series)

Obama roasts the Orange Cheeto at the 2011 WH Correspondents Dinner.

http://time.com/3991301/donald-trump-barack-obama/