It’s never been easy to be a woman in the Marine Corps, which is the most physically demanding branch of the military and the one with the smallest percentage of female service members: 7.6 percent. Disturbing revelations in March made it even tougher: Male members of the 30,000-strong Marines United Facebook group had been soliciting and posting explicit photos of current and former female Marines without their permission, often accompanied by violent and obscene comments.

The Corps continues to grapple with the fallout. Thus far, it has disciplined 44 Marines, strengthened its policies for addressing social media misconduct and established a task force to look at how it recruits, trains, assigns and mentors service members in an effort to eliminate gender bias. As it was taking these steps, we reached out to current and retired female Marines to find women interested in posing for photographs that would let them define how they were portrayed, as service members, left, and as individuals, right. We also spoke with them about their experiences in and out of the Corps, and about what they hope the photographs convey. (The interviews have been edited and condensed.)

There were areas of commonality: All but one said they were inspired to join the Marines in part because they had relatives who were in the Corps or another service; some said they’d had this desire since they were tiny children. All spoke about becoming a Marine in terms of the challenge — of proving they had what it takes, and often, in the process, proving others wrong. “It just always seemed like if you could do the Marine Corps you could do anything,” said Capt. Lauren Finch Serrano.

To varying degrees, being a woman in the Marine Corps has tested all of them. Stephanie Schroeder said she was discharged after reporting a rape and spent years fighting for the Veterans Affairs disability benefits she now receives. Others have stories of enduring insults, being propositioned, being stared at, feeling like they couldn’t be themselves, having to prove themselves over and over. “As a young woman in that time, you were easy prey,” recalled retired gunnery sergeant Carrie Ann Lynch, who enlisted in 1990. “It would have been easier to be a Marine if I was just invisible,” said Justine Elena, a captain in the reserve who left the service a few years ago. Five have combined their careers with parenthood. Four are married — all to current or former Marines, which comes with its own set of complications.

Chatbots. They’re usually a waste of your time, so why not have them waste someone else’s instead? Better yet: why not have them waste an email scammer’s time.

That’s the premise behind Re:scam, an email chatbot operated by New Zealand cybersecurity firm Netsafe. Next time you get a dodgy email in your inbox, says Netsafe, forward it on to me@rescam.org, and a proxy email address will start replying to the scammer for you, doing its very utmost to waste their time. You can see a few sample dialogues in the video above, or check out a longer back-and-forth below.

It looks infuriatingly effective.

Using chatbots to give email scammers a taste of their own medicine isn’t that new. And although Netsafe has made a very fancy looking video promo for their bot, the technology behind it is relatively simple; relying more on pre-programmed conversational misdirects than sophisticated artificial intelligence.

Really, though, that’s all it takes. Another famous chatbot time-waster is “Lenny,” which is designed to waste telemarketers’ time, and does so without any AI or speech recognition component. Instead, Lenny uses just 16 pre-recorded snippets of dialogue, each of which is as vague and ambiguous as possible. Lenny simply waits until there’s a gap in the conversation, then plays one of its bits of dialogue, cycling through all 16 in various patterns.

The technique is surprisingly effective, as the video below shows. (You’ll feel sorry for the caller before long.)

The Daily 202: Fresh Democratic faces emerge from anti-Trump backlash. Here are six stars who were born with Tuesday’s elections.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2017/11/09/daily-202-fresh-democratic-faces-emerge-from-anti-trump-backlash-here-are-six-stars-who-were-born-with-tuesday-s-elections/5a03ba7d30fb045a2e002eba/?hpid=hp_rhp-top-table-main_daily202-738am%3Ahomepage%2Fstory&utm_term=.2b529571ccf3

THE BIG IDEA: Revenge is a dish best served at the ballot box.

Donald Trump got them mad enough to run for office. On Tuesday, they got even by toppling Republican incumbents. On Wednesday, a slew of first-time candidates across the country — previously unknown beyond their home towns and in some cases given little chance of success — woke up as rock stars on the left.

It remains to be seen whether this energy will persist through 2018 and into 2020. Winning in red House districts remains difficult — just ask Jon Ossoff — and the president may still have time to course-correct, if he so chooses.

But Tuesday raised the specter that the Trump era will one day be remembered as the last gasp of white male privilege. If that’s the case, this week will be an essential element of the narrative. The backlash to Trumpism is accelerating long-term demographic trends, emboldening the rising American electorate and motivating core Democratic constituencies that were relatively ambivalent about Hillary Clinton in 2016: millennials, Latinos, African Americans, the LGBT community and college-educated women.

With the unexpectedly strong Democratic wave sweeping from coast to coast, a lot of candidates won mainly because they had a “D” after their name. There were a lot of “firsts” that highlighted the party’s diversity and inclusivity. Now these newly elected officials will get a shot to prove themselves in office. We’re still getting to know most of them, but here are six people who won on Tuesday that are likely to develop national profiles:

After being targeted in widely-circulated, racist campaign fliers, two school board candidates in New Jersey won their election.

Jerry Shi and Falguni Patel won seats on the Edison Township Public Schools board on Tuesday night, despite being attacked in anonymous ads that featured “Deport” splashed on top of their pictures. The fliers also targeted the Asian communities in the township, which has a significant Asian-American population. The text read: “The Chinese and Indians are taking over our town.”

But the two candidates’ wins has led to an outpouring of support from people across Twitter, including former United States Deputy Secretary of Labor Chris Lu, who praised those in Edison for ignoring the message of the disparaging fliers.

https://twitter.com/ChrisLu44/status/928109450883424256

In addition to Shi and Patel, Beth Moroney and Paul Distefano also won seats on the board. Authorities told HuffPost that an investigation regarding the mailers is still underway. The culprit has not yet been determined.

Suman Raghunathan, the executive director of the nonprofit South Asian Americans Leading Together, previously told HuffPost that ads, which were also printed with “Make Edison Great Again,” a riff on President Donald Trump’s campaign slogan, echoed the administration’s rhetoric and crackdowns on both legal and illegal immigration.

?c=254

Higher enthusiasm and polarization were the key features of Tuesday’s gubernatorial election in Virginia, suggesting that President Trump has energized voters on all sides.

Academic studies have found that wall-to-wall negative television advertisements can discourage voters and keep them home.

Turnout, however, was the highest in 20 years for a gubernatorial race, five percentage points and 10 percentage points higher than the last two. And voters in the urban and rural regions of the state broke more heavily along party lines than they had in the prior elections.

Looking at the state in six regions shows every one of them split by party more forcefully than four years ago, when Democrat Terry McAuliffe defeated Republican Ken Cuccinelli by 2.5 percentage points. The three relatively urban regions — Northern Virginia, Central Virginia around Richmond and the Hampton Roads — each gave Governor-elect Ralph Northam bigger vote margins than McAuliffe earned over Cuccinelli. On the flip side, Republican Ed Gillespie scored bigger wins in the three more-rural regions, Shenandoah Valley, Southside and Southwest Virginia.

https://extranewsfeed.com/woman-fired-for-flipping-off-trumps-motorcade-receives-453-673-job-offers-ad9df89bdbe2

Juli Briskman, the 50-year-old mother of two who cycled her way into America’s heart, won’t be out of work for long



When Donald Trump’s motorcade passed her on the back roads of Virginia last week, cyclist Juli Briskman did what any patriotic American would do, she saluted — with a raised middle finger.

The real Wonder Woman, Briskman says she’d do it all over again. (Credit:heavy.com)
A photo of the incident, taken by a press pool photographer riding in the caravan of black SUVs, went viral the next day, making Ms. Briskman an overnight Internet sensation. But it also cost the 50-year-old marketing executive her job at Akima LLC, a U.S. government contracting firm.

No worries. A week after giving the president the finger and finding herself out of work, Ms. Briskman has now received 453,678 job offers (and counting) from employers large and small, from every state in the union.
“She’s my ‘she-ro,’” said Lucy Clementori, who owns a chain of fitness centers throughout the Southwest and promised to hire Ms. Briskman, sight unseen. “She can take over our spin classes and teach everyone that great presidential salute!”

http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/2017/11/06/papa-johns-condemns-white-supremacists/835112001/

Papa John's pizza has a new customer, the alt-right.

In the days following a rant by Papa John's CEO and Louisville resident John Schnatter where he blamed the NFL and anthem protests for low sales, a white-supremacist publication claimed it as their official pizza.

In a blog post at the Daily Stormer, a photo of pizza with pepperonis arranged in a swastika has a caption that reads "Papa John: Official pizza of the alt-right?"

"This might be the first time ever in modern history that a major institution is going to be completely destroyed explicitly because of public outrage over their anti-White agenda," Daily Stormer writer Adrian Sol said, describing the backlash against the NFL.

Peter Collins, the senior director of public relations at Papa John’s, said the company was taken off-guard by the endorsement.

“We condemn racism in all forms and any and all hate groups that support it," Collins told Courier Journal. "We do not want these individuals or groups to buy our pizza.”