marble falls
marble falls's JournalGeorge Orwell's "Story of the Trump Administration in Twenty or So Flash Cards" ....
https://quizlet.com/107009501/animal-farm-quotes-flash-cards/Republican Politician Ejected From Texas Dem Convention After Apparently Brandishing Gun
Republican Politician Ejected From Texas Dem Convention After Apparently Brandishing Gun
by Colin Kalmbacher | 1:52 pm, June 23rd, 2018
https://www.star-telegram.com/opinion/opn-columns-blogs/bud-kennedy/article213697829.html
A GOP state representative was escorted out of the Texas Democratic Party’s state convention on Friday after apparently brandishing his gun when confronted about an anti-liberal prank he had just pulled.
According to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Representative Briscoe Cain and three other men were removed by the Fort Worth Police Department following the incident.
Cain and political consultant Aaron Harris were initially asked to leave after distributing dozens of fake yard signs with satirical messages reading, “This home is a gun-free safe space.” In an image Harris later posted to Twitter, some Texas Democrats can be seen posing and smiling with the signs, apparently unaware of the fun being had.
Cain defended the stunt as an exercise in “irony.” He said, “It’s amazing how many people took one and thanked us. They said they would put it in front of their house. I think it’s funny. Nobody should put this in front of their house.”
Video captured the moment when Cain appeared to brandish his handgun. After being asked to leave the exhibit hall, Cain and the other right-wing activists returned to a foyer on the north side of the building, believing it to be a public place.
At that point, a delegate asks Cain, “When’d you go gun-free?” To which Cain physically replies by lifting his shirt and showing what looks like a holstered weapon. That interaction was around 4:30 p.m. and the police quickly took over. Cain and his group left the building at around 5:20 p.m.
Texas Democratic Party Convention Director Adam Goodrum said Cain’s group had caused “a bit of a disturbance” after delegate Mirian Spencer witnessed Cain allegedly drawing attention to his weapon after the prank had run its course.
In an emailed statement to the Star-Telegram, Fort Worth Police spokesperson Bradley Perez said, “Some protesters were asked to move on and they complied.”
Cain is currently serving his first term in the Texas House of Representatives and has been ranked by Rice University political science Professor Mark Jones as the most conservative lawmaker in the Texas House.
A.I. Has a Race Problem
A.I. Has a Race Problem
Facial recognition software still gets confused by darker skin tones.
By Lizette Chapman
and Joshua Brustein
June 26, 2018, 4:00 AM CDT Corrected June 26, 2018, 10:20 AM CDT
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-26/ai-has-a-race-problem
A couple of years ago, as Brian Brackeen was preparing to pitch his facial recognition software to a potential customer as a convenient, secure alternative to passwords, the software stopped working. Panicked, he tried adjusting the room’s lighting, then the Wi-Fi connection, before he realized the problem was his face. Brackeen is black, but like most facial recognition developers, he’d trained his algorithms with a set of mostly white faces. He got a white, blond colleague to pose for the demo, and they closed the deal. It was a Pyrrhic victory, he says: “It was like having your own child not recognize you.”
At Kairos AR Inc., his 40-person facial recognition company in Miami, Brackeen says he’s improved the software by adding more black and brown faces to his image sets, but the results are still imperfect. The same problem bedevils companies including Microsoft, IBM, and Amazon and their growing range of customers for similar services. Facial recognition is being used to help India’s government find missing children, and British news outlets spot celebrities at royal weddings. More controversially, it’s being used in a growing number of contexts by law enforcement agencies, which are often less than forthcoming about what they’re using it for and whether they’re doing enough about potential pitfalls. Brackeen believes the problem of racial bias is serious enough that law enforcement shouldn’t use facial recognition at all.
Microsoft, IBM, and China’s Face++ misidentified darker-skinned women as often as 35 percent of the time and darker-skinned men 12 percent of the time, according to a report published by MIT researchers earlier this year. The gender difference owes to a smaller set of women’s faces. Such software can see only what it’s been taught to see.
“An inaccurate system will implicate people for crimes they didn’t commit”
<snip>
Engineers are improving how they train algorithms as more agencies purchase the software, but they may not be able to head off growing calls for regulation. The authors of the Georgetown report call for state and federal laws governing how police departments use facial recognition and call on the police to test regularly for algorithmic bias. In April a group of civil rights organizations said it was “categorically unethical” to deploy real-time facial recognition analysis of footage captured by police body cameras.
Some, including the EFF’s Lynch, argue that their concerns will only increase as the technology improves. An accurate image merged with personal information about an individual such as location, family ties, voting records, and the like can be pulled together by authorities using products such as those from Palantir Technologies Inc. to create a digital dossier on people without their consent or knowledge. “Even if we have a 100 percent accurate system, I don’t want that system,” Lynch says. “That means we can no longer walk around and interact with people without the government knowing who we are, where we are, and who we’re talking to.”
(Corrects Microsoft error rate in fourth paragraph)
BOTTOM LINE - Microsoft says it’s cut its facial recognition error rate to zero percent for everyone except darker-skinned women, but as with rivals, those numbers are likely to rise in the real world.
Intern Who Yelled 'F**k You' As Trump Walked Through Capitol Suspended
Intern Who Yelled ‘F**k You’ As Trump Walked Through Capitol Suspended
The woman will keep her job in Sen. Maggie Hassan’s office, however.
By Nick Visser
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/intern-trump-f-you-hassan_us_5b31e278e4b0cb56051ba17a
LISTEN: As Pres Trump’s entourage entered Speaker Ryan’s office in the Capitol, someone on the other side of the Capitol rotunda yelled: “Mr. President, F—k you!!” (He entered about 15 seconds later): pic.twitter.com/KHp16LYMoF
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) June 19, 2018
A Congressional intern who yelled a profane greeting at President Donald Trump in the Capitol last week has been identified as an intern for Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.), the lawmaker’s spokesman told The Hill on Monday.
“We are aware of the situation and have taken disciplinary action, including a one-week suspension and revoking her Congressional intern ID badge (thereby restricting her access to the Capitol), in response to her breach of office policies regarding respectful and appropriate conduct,” Aaron Jacobs, Hassan’s director of communications, told the outlet. “We also facilitated contact with Capitol Police.”
A widely circulated video showed Trump walking near the Capitol Rotunda to meet with GOP lawmakers about proposed immigration legislation last week. Right before the president walks into the frame, however, a woman can be heard screaming: “Mr. President, fuck you!”
Intern who yelled “F—k you!” to Pres Trump ID’ed as Caitlin Marriott, works for @SenatorHassan.
Per spox, “in response to her breach of office policies regarding respectful & appropriate conduct” she’s:
-Suspended 1 week
-Congressional badge revoked
-Still working in Hart office https://t.co/NAtn4Yr7u1
— Frank Thorp V (@frankthorp) June 26, 2018
The woman was identified in several media accounts as 21-year-old Caitlin Marriott. Fox News reports that she’ll continue to work in Hassan’s office through August.
San Francisco Woman Who Called Cops on Black Girl for Selling Water Says She's Not Racist
San Francisco Woman Who Called Cops on Black Girl for Selling Water Says She's Not Racist
And adds that she was only 'pretending' to call the cops.
By Martin Cizmar / Raw Story
June 24, 2018, 1:00 AM GMT
https://www.alternet.org/san-francisco-woman-who-called-cops-black-girl-selling-water-says-shes-not-racist
The white woman who called the police on an 8-year-old black girl who was selling water outside her San Francisco apartment says she's not racist and that she was only pretending to call.
The woman, Alison Ettel, was contacted by the Huffington Post.
“This has no racial component to it,” she said.
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She also told HuffPo that she only “pretended” to call the police on the girl.
In the video, shot by the girl's mother and posted to Instagram, Ettel tried to hide behind a wall as she was filmed.
“This woman don’t want a little girl to sell some water, she’s calling the police on an 8-year-old girl,” the girl's mother said.
Make this bitch go viral like #bbqbecky she’s #permitpatty would you rather my daughter be out here getting into shit Fr cuz an 8 year old selling water in front of her apartment building where she’s lived her whole life is NOT a reason to call the Police
A post shared by So Wavy (@ladyesowavy) on
Jun 23, 2018 at 4:05am PDT
After being busted, Ettel said she was “horrible and heart-wrenched."
She said the issue was noise.
“They were screaming about what they were selling,” she said. “It was literally nonstop. It was every two seconds, ‘Come and buy my water.’ It was continuous and it wasn’t a soft voice, it was screaming... I had been putting up with this for hours, and I just snapped."
Another thing a wypipo did ....
Jeff Sessions Says It's 'Painful' Hearing Christians Condemn His Family Separation Policy "I have c
Jeff Sessions Says It’s ‘Painful’ Hearing Christians Condemn His Family Separation Policy
“I have critics from a lot of different areas,” says the attorney general. You don’t say!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jeff-sessions-immigration-border-family-separations_us_5b2bfdcee4b0040e27410971
By Jennifer Bendery
Apparently it bothers Attorney General Jeff Sessions when faith leaders criticize his policy of separating migrant children from their parents at the border. Maybe they do that because it’s a horrific policy, sir!
WASHINGTON ― Attorney General Jeff Sessions, a longtime member of the Methodist Church, said Thursday that it hurts him to hear Christian leaders condemning his policy of taking children away from their parents at the border and putting them in cages in detention facilities.
“It is painful,” Sessions said in an interview with Christian Broadcasting Network.
“I have critics from a lot of different areas. I think our church people are really concerned about children, that’s what I’m hearing,” he said. “I feel it. I think there’s a legitimate concern there, and I’m pleased to work with the president to address those concerns.””
Sessions is leading the charge on the Trump administration’s zero tolerance policy on immigration, which separates kids from their parents so the adults can be criminally prosecuted for crossing the border without documentation. The administration has separated more than 2,300 children from their parents, so far, and has no plan for reuniting them. Previously, authorities typically kept migrant families together and routed them to immigration courts.
Photos from detention facilities show kids being kept in large cages and given foil blankets. Audio from one facility, obtained by ProPublica, features small children crying out for their parents as a U.S. Border Patrol agent jokes about an “orchestra” of wailing children.
Faith leaders of all persuasions, including the leader of Sessions’ own church, have denounced the policy. When Sessions invoked the Bible to defend it last week, he drew widespread criticism from Christian leaders who described family separations as “immoral,” “disgraceful” and “deeply un-Christian.”
<snip>
All that fuss just puts him off his milk and cookies.
Lili Allen ....
23andme donating DNA kits to help reunite migrant families
23andme donating DNA kits to help reunite migrant families
https://www.mercurynews.com/2018/06/21/congresswoman-jackie-speier-asks-23andme-to-reunite-families-separated-at-border/
The CEO of the popular DNA-testing company 23andMe has agreed to provide DNA kits to help reunite the hundreds of migrant families separated at the border in recent weeks, after Congresswoman Jackie Speier approached the Mountain View-based company with the idea.
“They have committed to providing all the tests necessary to test the parents and the children,” Speier told this news organization.
Speier, D-Hillsborough, said she met with a company leader Thursday to ask if they could use DNA kits to reunite children separated from their parents under President Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, which aimed to prosecute anyone who crossed the border illegally.
They told her they’d consider the idea, she said. Speier then got in touch with CEO Anne Wojcicki, who agreed to take on the task.
For more on immigration and California follow us on Flipboard.
More than 2,000 migrant children have yet to be be reunited with their parents, despite President Trump’s executive order Wednesday reversing the separation of families at the border — families will now be detained together — and it’s unclear how exactly immigration officials plan to do so.
A spokesperson for Wojcicki declined to provide further details about the company’s proposal, but the CEO tweeted Thursday afternoon, “We would welcome any opportunity to help.”
We've heard from many of our customers that they would like to see 23andMe help reunite family members that were tragically separated from each other. Connecting and uniting families is core to the mission of 23andMe. We would welcome any opportunity to help.
— Anne Wojcicki (@annewoj23) June 21, 2018
Speier said the next step is to reach out to federal officials for direction on how to move forward with testing.
“It doesn’t change the fact that these children have been subject to clinical child abuse or that they’ve been scarred for life,” Speier said. “But I feel a little more confident that we’re going to reunite parents and children.”
Under Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy, parents and their children were sent in different directions: Thousands of kids went to juvenile shelters under the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, while parents were taken to adult detention facilities in other areas under the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
It’s this discrepancy that could make reuniting families extremely difficult.
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“I was just trying to think, how are we going to connect these two? How can we guarantee that the parents are going to get their own child back?” Speier told BuzzFeed, which first reported the news Thursday. “I’m thinking, how else are we going to do that? So I was encouraging them to look at whether or not they could provide some kind of assistance here.”
Trump’s “zero tolerance” policy sparked national outrage as images and audio surfaced of children crying out for their parents. Other images showed children in cages in detention facilities in Texas.
Border Patrol agents have said fears of trafficking and exploitation often lead to family separation, since adults and children who show up at the border aren’t always related. The Border Patrol logged 462 cases of fraud among children and family migrants in the Rio Grande Valley alone in the last five years, according to a report by the Los Angeles Times.
Social justice organizations such as the ACLU said they’d support DNA testing to help parents reunite with their children, while others say it’s an aggressive tactic that would put people’s DNA in the hands of strangers with no knowledge of how it could be used in the future.
In a Tweet Thursday, Ivanka Trump said “it’s time to focus on swiftly and safely reuniting the families that have been separated.”
Now that an EO has been signed ending family separation at the border, it is time to focus on swiftly and safely reuniting the families that have been separated.
— Ivanka Trump (@IvankaTrump) June 21, 2018
Speier will travel to the U.S. -Mexico border in Texas Friday with a small group of constituents to speak to some of the families and to deliver clothing and other items to immigrant children.
"Concerned" gentleman keeps physician from entering her gated comunity.....
No score card but you'll know exactly who the players are.
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