Welcome to DU! The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards. Join the community: Create a free account Support DU (and get rid of ads!): Become a Star Member Latest Breaking News General Discussion The DU Lounge All Forums Issue Forums Culture Forums Alliance Forums Region Forums Support Forums Help & Search

Zorro

Zorro's Journal
Zorro's Journal
May 30, 2018

Pompeii's Unluckiest Man Excavated, Internet Gives Him Second Life

The remains of a man trying to escape the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius nearly 2,000 years ago were found in Pompeii, Italy, this week, and the photographs have become a meme.

Why would people do this? Because the internet is a bad place.

Archaeologists believe the man was fleeing to safety, having managed to escape the first volcanic eruption, but was subsequently crushed by a large stone in the process. They believe the stone was a door jamb, according to USA Today.

Additionally, archaeologists believe the man was around 35-years-old and suffering from a bone infection. His head has not yet been found.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/pompeii-apos-unluckiest-man-excavated-153030003.html

May 30, 2018

Jeff Bezos Announces Customers Can Delete All Of Alexa's Stored Audio By Rappelling Into Amazon HQ

SEATTLE—Responding to news of the digital assistant recording users’ conversations without their knowledge, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos assured critics Tuesday that Alexa’s stored audio can be deleted by simply rappelling into company headquarters, maneuvering through an intricate laser field, and destroying every server with a nanovirus.

“We take privacy concerns seriously, and I want our valued customers to know they can erase all the information their Amazon Echo has gathered just by being dropped from a helicopter over one of our towers, using a diamond-tipped glass cutter to carve out a hole in a 32nd-story window, and then employing advanced cyberwarfare techniques to compromise our data centers,” said Bezos, who added that users merely need to have their demolitions expert blow through a 7-foot steel barrier and reach Amazon’s highly complex cloud storage system to access the audio captured by Alexa.

“If, by this point, you haven’t been detected by our surveillance system and attracted the attention of our CIA-trained super soldiers, you’ll only have to wait while your team’s martial arts expert silently neutralizes several armed guards and cuts out one of their eyeballs to open the doors secured by retina scanners. Then, assuming you’ve trained for months in a full-scale model of our headquarters that you built in an old warehouse to plan your exact path through this labyrinth, it’s a relatively straightforward matter of uploading the nanovirus and shooting your way out of a building that is rigged to self-destruct within 60 seconds of a data breach.”

Bezos added that once customers complete this process, they will still need to erase the backup copies of their Echo data stored in the drive he wears around his neck, a task that requires finding him in Amazon’s caverns miles below Seattle and fighting him to the death.

https://www.theonion.com/jeff-bezos-announces-customers-can-delete-all-of-alexa-1826395638

May 29, 2018

White House in Panic Mode After TV Star with Racist Twitter Feed Loses Job

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—The White House was reportedly in panic mode Tuesday afternoon, shortly after news broke that a television star with a racist Twitter feed had been fired. According to a White House source, Donald J. Trump immediately huddled with close advisers to discuss the firing, which, staffers agreed, “set an ominous new precedent.”

“We’ve been living under assumption that a TV personality could tweet out as many racist things as he or she wanted with no consequences,” the source said. “Now, all of a sudden, our worst nightmare has come true.”

White House staffers are reportedly combing through Trump’s thirty-seven thousand tweets, searching for ones that could be deemed fireable offenses, and have so far flagged more than thirty-six thousand of them.

Many on Trump’s team are urging calm, however, claiming that the dismissal of one racist TV star could be an “isolated example.” “The only people who can fire Donald Trump right now are congressional Republicans, and they don’t have the high moral standards that TV executives have,” the source said.

https://www.newyorker.com/humor/borowitz-report/white-house-in-panic-mode-after-tv-star-with-racist-twitter-feed-loses-job

May 29, 2018

LOUISIANA TELEVANGELIST SEEKS DONATIONS FOR $54 MILLION PRIVATE JET

A Louisiana televangelist asked followers to donate money for a $54 million private jet that will “go anywhere in the world in one stop.”

Jesse Duplantis, 68, a Christian minister based in Destrehan, Louisiana, about 25 miles east of New Orleans, made the appeal in a video posted last week on his ministry’s website, reported the Times Picayune on Monday.

"I really believe that if the Lord Jesus Christ was physically on the Earth today, he wouldn't be riding a donkey," Duplantis said in the video. "He'd be in an airplane flying all over the world."

He claimed his Jesse Duplantis Ministry had paid cash for three private jets and had been "just burning them up for the Lord Jesus Christ."

http://www.newsweek.com/louisiana-televangelist-seeks-donations-54-million-private-jet-946943

SMH...

May 28, 2018

Endorsement 50th district: Anyone but Duncan Hunter

Residents of eastern San Diego County have elected men named Duncan Hunter to Congress every two years since 1980. In 2008, the first Hunter retired and cleared the way for son Duncan D. Hunter to replace him. For years, the former artillery officer in Iran and Afghanistan — who shares his father’s military background and gung-ho political conservatism — seemed a good fit for his district. No more. His call in September 2017 for a unilateral nuclear strike on North Korea, which would lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths in U.S. ally South Korea, was a moment of lunacy for a Marine veteran sitting on the House Armed Services Committee.

But the Alpine Republican’s campaign finance scandal — the subject of an FBI criminal probe now in its second year — and his pathetic attempts to depict himself as a victim in the mess are even stronger reasons to conclude he is unfit for another term representing the 50th Congressional District.

The scandal, which The San Diego Union-Tribune first reported on in April 2016, centers on the repeated use of campaign donations to Hunter to pay for all manner of the Hunter family’s bills, services and consumer goods — oral surgery, school tuition, vacations, video games, garage repairs and much more. From the start, Hunter has argued that these dozens of expenditures somehow amounted to an honest, inadvertent mistake. After he announced in November 2016 that he would repay his campaign, he seemed to think that everyone would move on. When that didn’t happen, Hunter took to Facebook the next month to trash the Union-Tribune’s allegedly “dishonest” reporting.

And when that didn’t quell scandal coverage, Hunter gave an extraordinary interview to Politico in March 2017 and pointed the finger at someone else — his wife. Duncan and Margaret Hunter were the only ones with access to a campaign credit card that was repeatedly used for their family expenses, $60,000 of which the congressman has now reimbursed. “I didn’t make any of those charges,” he told Politico. “None. None of those expenditures.” Who did? He wouldn’t say. He didn’t have to.

http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/opinion/editorials/sd-anyone-but-duncan-hunter-50th-20180525-story.html

You have to be an exceptionally crooked Republican candidate when the historically Republican Union-Tribune doesn't like you.

May 25, 2018

Other 193 Countries Begin Insulting Mike Pence In Hopes Of Avoiding Future Meetings With Trump

BERLIN—Leaping at the chance to never again deal with the U.S. after North Korea’s disparaging remarks towards the Vice President, leaders from the other 193 nations of the world began insulting Mike Pence Thursday in hopes of avoiding future meetings with President Donald Trump.

“Mike Pence is just a dumbfuck partisan hack who doesn’t have the faintest clue about international relations or running a country,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, joining nearly 200 other presidents and prime ministers who mercilessly degraded Pence as “cowardly,” “full of crap,” and “repulsive” in a concerted effort to stave off any more direct contact with Trump or have him ever visit their countries.

“Mike Pence was a shit governor of a shit state, and he’s as incompetent as he is ugly. Just a pandering, feckless asshole with the personality and intelligence of roadkill. Meeting him in person was one of the worst encounters of our lives—he and his whole family can go fuck themselves.”

World leaders finished their comments by adding that if there were any justice in the world, Mike Pence would rot away alone in the dank halls of a federal penitentiary.

https://politics.theonion.com/other-193-countries-begin-insulting-mike-pence-in-hopes-1826305704

May 24, 2018

Nation's Rich And Powerful Wondering When Rest Of Americans Will Just Give Up

WASHINGTON—Finding themselves increasingly annoyed with the inexplicable and infuriating persistence of their feeble socioeconomic inferiors, America’s rich and powerful were at a loss Wednesday as to exactly when the rest of the country would finally relinquish all hope and simply give up, sources close to the 1 percent confirmed.

“What exactly is wrong with them? I mean, there’s no possible way they’ll ever stop us from getting everything we want, so the poor—and I suppose what’s left of the middle class—are only delaying the inevitable,” said one outrageously wealthy citizen, speaking on expectation of anonymity and adding that, realistically, no one in their right mind could possibly see the use of struggling against those who control the nation’s media, financial, and political institutions.

“I suppose I should admire their sheer animal persistence, but, Christ, it’s been over since we somehow got them to accept that trickle-down bullshit. I know, I know, we tied their education to their property taxes to encourage them to ass-fuck themselves almost as hard as they ass-fucked their neighbors, but to think they’re so stupid they can’t get the concept of ‘being fucked’ through their thick skulls?”

At press time, the nation’s most wealthy and influential citizens said they felt a sense of renewed hope and optimism upon realizing how few poor people had voted in recent elections.

https://www.theonion.com/nation-s-rich-and-powerful-wondering-when-rest-of-ameri-1826268763

May 23, 2018

Gun was hidden in oven for safekeeping. Oblivious baker found out with a 'bang,' cops say

Using your oven for gun storage? Turns out it’s a recipe for disaster.

A Warren, Ohio, father wanted to keep his revolver out of his kids’ hands when they visited his home Sunday, so he hid the weapon in the broiler of his Maytag oven, according to police. But Robin Garlock, 44, didn’t tell his girlfriend about the hiding spot before she started heating the oven to do some baking later that night, the Youngstown Vindicator reports.

She found out about the gun with a “bang,” police said — though at first she assumed the gunfire she heard had come from outside the house, the newspaper reports. The girlfriend yelled for Garlock, who told her to run for cover, according to police. Garlock then headed for the broiler himself, where he was burned as he tried to secure the weapon.

“It’s too hot,” Warren Police Detective Wayne Mackey told the Vindicator. “The gun literally spun around because it’s going off.”

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article211693954.html

The Maytag was armed and dangerous.

May 23, 2018

The Onion is at it again

In Response To Michael Cohen, ‘The Onion’ Pledges To Remove All Negative Trump Coverage In Exchange For A Direct Line To The President

The Onion, in recent days, has attempted to contend with a serious legal threat issued in 2013 by the president’s personal attorney. In exchange for removing an offending piece written by Mr. Trump, titled “When You’re Feeling Low, Just Remember I’ll Be Dead In About 15 Or 20 Years,” our publication hoped for a speedy resolution to what could otherwise be a prolonged and costly legal battle. Shortly thereafter, however, our editorial board was shaken to its core by Mr. Cohen’s response issued on social media—a shrewd legal riposte, almost Machiavellian in its audacity. We now understand that Mr. Cohen is playing hardball, and our editorial board has correspondingly voted to up the ante, so to speak.

As such, we now formally offer to remove the complete archive of The Onion’s reporting on Donald Trump, spanning hundreds of articles that stretch back to the late ’90s, so long as Mr. Cohen can pledge to provide us with a direct line to the president.

Just say the word, Mr. Cohen, and all of these articles will vanish without delay. All you need to do is provide our editorial staff with the president’s phone number and a promise that he will be available at any time of the day or night to address our concerns. Imagine, for a moment, the benefits you and your client will reap: No longer will Mr. Trump need to contend with the embarrassment of readers learning about his proclivities in articles such as “Donald Trump Forlornly Stares At Tiny Penis In Mirror.” Such accounts—fully sourced though they may be—will disappear from our archives immediately if you hold up your end of the deal. Should curious minds ever inquire about the pieces, we would emphatically deny their very existence.

To be clear, our newsroom stands behind the sterling reportage in each and every one of these stories. Whether it is the insider accounts utilized for the vivid profile in “Crowd Shocked After Unhinged Trump Dangles Baby From Truman Balcony” or the expert witnesses used in 2011 to corroborate the narrative in “Trump Unable To Produce Certificate Proving He’s Not A Festering Pile Of Shit,” these news stories fully complied with the strenuous editorial standard that only America’s Finest News Source can claim to uphold.

https://www.theonion.com/in-response-to-michael-cohen-the-onion-pledges-to-re-1826240139

May 22, 2018

Tesla's Musk admits Model 3 braking issue, promises fix

Source: Reuters

Tesla Inc Chief Executive Officer Elon Musk has sought to play down a report identifying "big flaws" in its Model 3 sedan, admitting there is a braking issue with the vehicle but saying it will be fixed with a software update within days.

Responding to a review by influential U.S. magazine Consumer Reports which stopped short of recommending the car, Musk said in a round of tweets late on Monday that the magazine's tests - which used two separately-sourced vehicles - had been of older versions of the car that had already been improved upon.

The issue, which ate into gains for Tesla shares on Monday, came at a time when Tesla is dealing with reports of crashes involving its vehicles and growing scepticism over its finances.

Tesla stock, down around $100 dollars since last September, gained around 1 percent on Tuesday, having finished almost 3 percent higher on Monday, helped by an easing of trade tensions with China which may aid its plans to produce there.

Read more: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/teslas-musk-admits-model-3-103855989.html

Profile Information

Gender: Male
Hometown: America's Finest City
Current location: District 48
Member since: 2001
Number of posts: 15,737
Latest Discussions»Zorro's Journal