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Last of Secret JFK Files Slated for Release This Fall

Fresh Air interview with Philip Shenon, author of A Cruel and Shocking Act: The Secret History of the Kennedy Assassination, airing now. Will edit link in later.

Walmart is apologizing after a display seemed to market guns as back-to-school items

Walmart apologizes for sign marketing guns as back-to-school items

Did Walmart Place a Sign Over a Gun Display Urging Kids to 'Own the School Year Like a Hero'?

The official Kek cult attire is now a trenchcoat.

FBI agents raided Manafort's home in July

Model says she was freed after 'deep web' kidnapping in Italy: Police

The alleged abductors used encrypted accounts to ask the model’s agent for $300,000 to stop the auction from taking place, claiming to work on behalf of something called the "Black Death Group," which operates within the so-called deep web, police said.

The deep web, or "dark web," is a network of websites that cannot typically be found by search engines, and are often protected through encryption. Billions of dollars in drugs, weapons and other items have been illegally traded on the sites.

Investigators discovered evidence that the suspect, Herba, may have previously organized several online auctions of abducted women, through ads he allegedly described the women and set starting prices. Police said it is unclear whether he actually abducted the women or whether they had ever really been for sale.

Italian police described Herba as a "dangerous subject with aspects of mythomania," which is a pathological inclination to exaggerate.

"It is unclear ... whether the young people were really kidnapped or whether the man invented everything," Deputy Prosecutor Paolo Storari said at a press conference. "The man also presented himself as a professional killer."

Mythomania, they say.

Update: Milan kidnap case: Chloe Ayling 'held to pay for cancer treatment'

Is There a Giant Planet Lurking Beyond Pluto?

Not much new here, but this looks promising:

Michael Medford and Danny Goldstein, graduate students at the University of California, Berkeley, think they have a solution to that problem. Drawing on hundreds of thousands of images covering the search area for Planet Nine—all shot from 2009 to 2016 using a 1.2-meter telescope in the mountains north of San Diego—their system will combine multiple images in an ingenious way that should brighten the faint flickers of light from Planet Nine enough to distinguish them from background noise.

“Because the planet is moving with respect to the background stars, you can’t just add overlapping images together,” Medford points out. Instead, their software selects each of the many distinct plausible orbits for Planet Nine, projects the planet’s movement onto the relevant patch of sky, and then offsets successive images to superimpose—and brighten—any pixels corresponding to the planet. A pipeline of software written with Peter Nugent, their faculty advisor, performs the overlapping and subtracts known objects such as stars.

The computational task is enormous because the planet’s orbit is still so uncertain. To do a 98 percent complete search, Medford estimates, they will need to perform 10 billion image comparisons. Fortunately, Nugent has time allocated on the Cori supercomputer, a new Cray XC40 system that recently ranked as the fifth most powerful in the world.

False positives are unavoidable. “Even if we get only one false hit for every million searches, we’ll still get 10,000 fake planets,” Goldstein says. “So we will be passing all detections through a machine-learning system trained to catch and reject artifacts: satellite trails, hot pixels, cosmic rays, and other spurious sources.”

With the data already in hand, the two expect the system, running in parallel on hundreds of Cori’s CPU nodes and 278 hyperthreads per node, to finish the work in just a few days when they flip the switch in August. “We’ll be sitting on the edge of our seats,” Goldstein says. “And whether we find P9 or not, this method can be used to detect other TNOs.”

Battle of the racial alternate reality fiction concepts:

Amazon's Making Its Own Post-Civil War Series Called 'Black America'

A couple weeks ago, HBO announced that the guys behind Game of Thrones—no, not George R. R. Martin, but showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Weiss—are working on a new series about an alternate history where the Confederate South won the Civil War and seceded from the union. The show, titled Confederate, caused a big stir online from people who thought that, well, maybe a pair of white dudes best known for making a fantasy show about dragons and zombies and incest aren't the best people to tactfully address modern-day slavery.

In the wake of the controversy, Amazon took the opportunity to announce that it had also been working on a similar alternate history show over the past year—but with a few key differences, Deadline reports.

First, Amazon's show, called Black America, will be the brainchild of Boondocks genius Aaron McGruder and producer Will Packer, who did Straight Outta Compton and, more recently, Girls Trip. Also, instead of Confederate's faux-history about a split United States where slavery still lives on, Black America is set in a world where freed African Americans were given a trio of Southern states after the Civil War as reparations. Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama are fused to form a new nation, called New Colonia, and the series tackles its tenuous relationship with the original US of A.

Confederate reminds me of the fun but low-budget mockumentary C.S.A.: The Confederate States of America. Black America reminds me of Ta-Nehisi Coates' article The Case for Reparations. He is also involved in entertainment; he wrote the new Black Panther comics for Marvel last year, which have been cited as an influence for the upcoming movie.

Amid HBO’s “Confederate” fallout, Amazon introduces alt-history show “Black America”

The African-American community has long made the case for reparations from the United States government. Ta-Nehisi Coates convincingly argued in 2014 that the freedom given to slaves after the Civil War was not enough — that black people in America had suffered through institutionalized racism long after slavery had been abolished.

Packer told Deadline that the controversy surrounding “Confederate” pressured him to divulge the upcoming project. The show itself is not a reaction to “Confederate,” as reports say it has been in development for over a year.

POLITICS:
Has CNN finally got it (almost) right about why Trump won: and better yet, why Sanders would have won?

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/opinions/why-trump-won-zakaria/index.html

Reasons:
1. The first is capitalism. There was a time when the American economy moved in tandem with its middle class. As the economy grew, so did middle class employment and wages. But over the last few decades that link has been broken. The economy has been humming along, but it now enriches mostly those with education, training, and capital. The other Americans have been left behind.

2. The second divide is about culture. In recent decades, we've seen large scale immigration; African-Americans and Hispanics rising to a more central place in society; and gays being accorded equal rights. All of this has meant new cultures and narratives have received national attention. And it's worried a segment of the older, white population, which fears that the national culture they grew up with is fading.

3. The third divide in America today is about class. The Trump vote is in large part an act of class rebellion, a working class revolt against know-it-all elites who run the country.

4. The final C in this story is communication. We have gone from an America where people watched three networks that provided a uniform view of the world to one where everyone can pick their own channel, message, and now even their own facts.

The first one is spot on: the divide is greater and there is a feeling (a Truth!) about the rich enriching themselves at the poors' expense: the Trickle down effect that is a failure (except if you are rich: it is a success).

The second: yes, people are scared if they are intolerant and susceptible to prejudice. (But i think this is much more about job loss than anything else).

The third is why HILLARY lost: the entrenched elite looking out for themselves and their friends is why the first one (Capitalism) came about. People are tired of elites looking out for elites, rich enriching rich. THIS IS WHY THEY SHOULD HAVE RUN SANDERS. Hillary was elite looking out for elite: Trump portrayed himself as the outsider who would shake things up and look out for the 'little guy' (true or not STILL has to be seen).
If they had run Sanders, i believe the Dems would have won.

Four: this is just a truism. Will CNN look at this and start reinvigorating itself and re-imaging itself as a bastion of real news?
.......ummmmm..... well i won't hold my breath.

CNN has it at least half right, but they are still skirting around the issue: Trump won because people distrusted Hillary to do anything but look after herself and her friends. In other words,

Hillary represented status quo: same old, same old.
Trump represented change (not Obama change, but change).

In my view/belief, Sanders represented the change people looked to Trump for: i believe Sanders would have done MUCH better than Hillary and would have won.

Rant on, Snidely. Rant on.

U.S. military detects WMD HIGHLY unusual submarine activity from North Korea:

What is the U.S. up to? Will there be a 'final solution to the North Korean problem'? Is there going to be some 'unusual military activity' from the US military in the N.K area?

Popcorn at 11, bring butter for your news: you may need it for easier insertion.

http://www.cnn.com/2017/07/31/politics/north-korea-ejection-test-submarine-activity/index.html

Can we believe ANYTHING we are told by the U.S. military/Government after sooooooo many lies?
Will America finally start realizing that EVENTUALLY lies stop being believed after so many cries about wolf?

Will Roger stop fooling around on Mary with Paul? Will Hammond Industries keep itself from bankruptcy by killing George the CEO? Will Mary's psychiatrist tell his priest about Mary really being Paul?
STAY TUNED..... SAME. BAT. TIME....... SAME. BAT. CHANNEL!

Wow, @Scaramucci is the worst kind of loser -- a total fool. Threw the White House into complete chaos. Screw him, he's FIRED!

Coca-Cola Revamps Coke Zero

Coca-Cola to replace Coke Zero in U.S.

Coca-Cola is killing Coke Zero as we know it — and people are freaking out

What, no stevia?

I would submit this, but like, nah.