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President Donald Trump revoked a requirement that U.S. intelligence officials publicly report the number of civilians killed in drone strikes and other attacks on terrorist targets outside of war zones.

Trump formally ended the requirement with an executive order on Wednesday, months after signaling such a move. The administration last year ignored a May deadline for an annual accounting of civilian and enemy casualties required under an order signed in 2016 by then-President Barack Obama. The order was part of an accountability effort to minimize civilian deaths from drone strikes.

Trump Cancels U.S. Report on Civilian Deaths in Drone Strikes

Mardi Gras

Mardi Gras: The most fun you'll have with a history lesson

Patricia Clarkson on leading the Mardi Gras group breaking with tradition

In New Orleans, The Fight Over Blackface Renews Scrutiny Of A Mardi Gras Tradition

Mobile mom says shoes thrown from Mardi Gras float sent her kid to the ER

Popeyes might be onto something with chicken-tender-cradlin’ Mardi Gras beads

Sounds like a great way to get grease all over your shirt on Fat Tuesday.

Opened my mail, and found "Dissenter is a Gamer Changer". Hmmm - from Gab. New member or something? Sorry, not much interested . . . scan on down through the list of emails. Slide the mouse toward the top of the page to select another tab, and I notice "Dissenter is a browser extension".

Alright, curiosity piqued.

GAB

Earlier this week we launched our new sister app, Dissenter. Dissenter is a browser extension and website that allows you to comment on any URL online and also see what others have commented. This includes Wikipedia articles, Amazon products, Tweets, YouTube videos, CNN articles, and more.

Many people are saying that Dissenter.com is a “game changer” for the internet. It empowers the voice of The People and makes surfing the web fun again. At a time when most websites have removed or heavily censored their comment sections, Dissenter brings back the wild west of internet comments.

We fundamentally believe that Dissenter is going to be revolutionary for free speech online, but don’t take our word for it:

Dave Cullen says Dissenter is “incredibly innovative and important.

Styx says “I believe Dissenter has the capability of becoming the next big thing in tech.”

The Financial Times says “There is a clear demand for this sort of freedom. Some argue the concept is therefore a billion dollar idea with the potential to completely disrupt conventional media's control of its comment real estate.”

Discover what the entire internet is talking about, literally. Visit Dissenter.com and download the Dissenter browser extension today.

Alright, didn't we do this once before? I very specifically remember an extension that permitted people to comment on a page, but those comments didn't show up on the page unless you had that extension installed and enabled. It was kinda cool, but, I dropped it for reasons - probably security related reasons.

Alright then - let's look at this reincarnated potential security disaster that will lead the NSA right straight to my front door . . . I think maybe I'll test it with Chrome, keep it away from my Fox family . . .

Youtube "tutorial" on the extension here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYsdpKfe0w4

Hmmm - to comment you have to create an account. That isn't looking really great. If I wanted to leave anonymous comments, I'm kinda screwed. I usually sign my name to stuff anyway, but, I may just feel like visiting the White House to tell Donald Duck how damned STUPID he is for - oh, I don't know - appointing Ajit Pai? I can tell him nicely, and sign my name, or I can tell him rudely, and remain anonymous, except I can't do so with this extension.

Hmmm again. Can't seem to sign up and/or log in with the fork of Chromium that I installed to. I can read comments, but can't make comments, sign up, or log in. It *appears* that a Gab login credential might work to sign in - which is not good. Signing in to use the extension should be separate from any site's log in credentials.

Let me try this on another browser . . .

Ahhhhhh - Browser extension installed on Iron browser, and it works much better. I attempt to log in, it rejects my first login attempt, so I sort through some of my logins. Naturally, since I'm already suspicious that my Gab credentials will work on the extension, I try one of those credentials first. And, I'm in.

I'm presented with a popup:

Dissenter | Comment On Any URL Online. is requesting permission to access your account.

This application will be able to:

Read access to your profile and feeds
Send new posts
You can revoke this app's access later under Settings / Authorized Apps.

Nahhhh - I'm mildly impressed with Gab, and I agree with their stated purpose in life - but I don't trust them with the ability to track me around the internet any more than I trust FaceFuck. Cancel. Errr, wait. Maybe I'm being hasty. I don't USE Iron for anything. In fact, it doesn't have a single login saved. This login to Gab is the first and only login it has.

Nuts. "Authorize". See what I see, I guess.

Hmmmmm - still broken. I have "signed in" repeatedly, but still can't make a comment. Does Dissenter rely on something that my forks of browsers have ripped out of the browsers?

Ehhh, time to uninstall, and purge the browser's cache history. I've devoted more than enough time to this thing already.

New CPAC stars: Black gun rights activists

For a few minutes at the Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday afternoon, the message was more Malcolm X than William F. Buckley.

Sporting a red hoodie, his hair in cornrows, Maj Toure touted his group, Black Guns Matter. "We go where there's high violence, high crime, high gun control — high slave mentalities, to be perfectly honest,” he said, “and inform urban America about their human right, as stated in the Second Amendment, to defend their life."

A besuited interviewer seated on stage next to Toure told him, "You don’t look or sound like your stereotypical Second Amendment advocate."

[...] Philip Smith, president of the National African American Gun Association, said Trump was one driver of black interest in gun rights, along with general anxiety about the state of the world. "They are seeing the uncertainty within society across the board," he said. Smith, who did not participate in CPAC, founded his group in 2015, hoping he might attract a few hundred members. Membership quickly climbed into the thousands, and it tripled in the months following Trump’s inauguration. He said the group now has about 30,000 members.

Smith said that 60 percent of his members are black women, who often feel the most vulnerable to violent crime.

First ~6 minutes is the action, the rest is the extended version.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fax-kXMCbtA (NSFW language)

It was lit.

Culture Shock for French in Quebec: ‘We Smoke Cigarettes, They Smoke Pot’

Some Montrealers call them “FFF’s” — French from France.

FFFFFFFFFFFFFF

Kraft Charges Reveal a Sordid World Thriving in Florida

The 77-year-old Kraft proclaims his innocence in a broader investigation that ensnared two other prominent financiers, including John Havens, Citigroup Inc.’s former president. John Childs, a buyout pioneer, was also charged in a related prostitution investigation. The police say in total 26 encounters are captured on video in the Orchids.

The case has peeled back one of the most unsavory aspects of this stretch of Florida -- where a playground of the wealthy filled with golf courses and beaches meets with what authorities say may be a human trafficking ring spanning from China to the U.S. There are multi-million dollar mansions as well as the massage tables that police say women slept on when not engaged by customers.

[...] Jupiter is home to countless celebrities and sports stars, as well as the Trump National Golf Club, where the president golfed with Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus earlier this month. Thirty minutes to the south, in the area around near Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club, there are $10 million homes tucked behind carefully groomed hedges and the valet lines teem with Lamborghinis and Rolls-Royces.

Reimer: Prostitution charges against Robert Kraft are degrading and beneath him

Robert Kraft, one of the most powerful and recognizable men in the country’s preeminent entertainment industry, visited a seedy day spa in a Florida strip mall twice last month and illegally solicited prostitutes, law enforcement officials say. Even worse, police say Kraft’s alleged acts are captured on videotape.

TMZ staffer Evan Rosenblum told “Dale & Keefe” Friday he thinks it is “almost a certainty” the videos get released. Florida does have one of the most transparent open records laws in the U.S., which mandates any records received by a public agency, such as state law enforcement, be made available for examination, unless the state legislature rules otherwise.

For anti-human trafficking crusader Ivanka Trump, Robert Kraft could make things awkward

If you're a billionaire, don't be stingy. Just buy a live-in sex slave.

Sorry people, comments disabled. Perhaps I'll enable them later, if I am still able. I just can't see this progressing anywhere at all if nasty rhetoric is allowed in at this point. (No Ethanol needed, thank you very much!)

Dr. King. We all know about him - he was a great civil rights leader in the US. But, how well do we know about him? Hmmmm. Let's see!

Doctor King has been politicized, as well as monetized, so it's hard to decide where to look for information on the man. There are those who blindly build him up past sainthood, and perhaps to godhood. There are of course others who want to tear him down. By necessity, we'll rely on one of the websites that I suspect has monetized Dr. King. http://drmartinlutherking.net/

So - who was this doctor? http://drmartinlutherking.net/martin-luther-king-education

The Schooling of Martin Luther King Jr

Martin Luther King’s education began at a very early age. His mother was a school teacher who taught the young MLK to read before he even entered school. He attended David T. Howard Elementary School in Atlanta at the age of five years old but the starting age at that time was six so he had to return the next year.

Martin Luther King never really completed high school. MLK Jr. was so intelligent that he skipped his first and last year at Booker T. Washington High School and went directly into college during his junior year. He entered college when he was just 15 years old.

King graduated from Morehouse College in 1948 with a Bachelor of Arts degree in sociology. It was at Morehouse that Martin Luther King was exposed to the writings of Henry David Thoreau. King was inspired by Thoreau’s essay on Civil Disobedience, and it started the momentum that would one day change the landscape of our society.

The church soon called to Martin Luther King and he used its platform to begin his journey towards equality. At seventeen years old, MLK Jr delivered his very first public speech at the Ebenezer Church, where is father was a pastor. King was ordained as a minister and worked closely with the senior King at the church.

In 1948, MLK Jr. attended his first integrated school, Crozer Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. King absorbed the teachings of many inspirational leaders from the past but it is here where he first became exposed to the reflective teachings of Mahatma Gandhi. King graduated with a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Crozer in 1951.

In 1955 MLK became Dr. Martin Luther King when he earned his PhD on theology from Boston University. It was while he attended school in Boston that King met a young Southern girl, Coretta Scott, who was attending the New England Conservatory of Music nearby. Coretta Scott would soon become the wife of Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pretty smart kid, huh? I guess that went without saying - no dummy could have accomplished the stuff he did.

Stay tuned, children, as I make further entries in this journal.

So a lot of folks had a lot to say about my last journal entry. For a little bit I was responding to various comments. After a while though I became a whole lot more interested in the types of objections I was seeing. Not refutations, mind. There were zero of those. Not one.

Seriously, not one of the ranty hate nuggets made even the slightest claim that the plan I laid out, if followed conscientiously, would not produce some very decent human beings. Every last one dealt with how others have practiced Christianity throughout the years, told me I didn't understand the source materials, or other utterly irrelevant to the point of the journal entry arguments.

It really amazes me how many people very obviously have a chip the size of Texas on their shoulders about any mention of Christianity or Jesus, to the point that they cannot even study or discuss it without seeing anything but what they want to see. They have pre-judged (literally what the word prejudice means) it as the worst thing ever and will not allow themselves to even understand discussion that does not align with this.

It's sad, really. I hate seeing minds not just closed but closed, locked, the key melted down, welded shut, and guarded by rabid tasmanian devils. If you're unwilling to consider the possibility that you're wrong, you're completely unable to improve yourself. Ever.

How Twitter Amplified The Ugliest Awards Season Ever