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Warren emerges as potential compromise nominee

I've predicted that Warren will be the 2020 Democratic candidate for some time now. But now it's going to require Biden shoving his foot in his mouth or otherwise getting heavily attacked (and there's a lot of inconvenient stuff in his long political career). The meat grinder debates on June 26th and 27th (Wednesday and Thursday) should help with that.

Some potential good news for Warren:

1. She is in the first debate night.
2. Biden, Sanders, Kamala Harris, and Buttigieg are in the second group. Warren's closest competition is Beta O'Joke. The two groups were randomly selected.
3. She will literally be center stage, along with Beto, Cory Booker, and Amy Klobuchar. Position is based on polling.

Maybe I'm wrong and being separated from Biden and Sanders will mean lower viewership and less chances to directly confront her top opponents. What do you think?

Biden/Sanders, Warren/O'Rourke to be center stage at first debate

The event is hosted by NBC News, MSNBC and Telemundo, and will air live across all three from 9 p.m. to 11 p.m. ET both nights. The debate will stream online for free on NBC News' digital platforms, including NBCNews.com, MSNBC.com, the NBC News Mobile App and OTT apps, in addition to Telemundo's digital platforms.

Savannah Guthrie, Lester Holt, Chuck Todd, Rachel Maddow and José Diaz-Balart will moderate the debate, NBC announced last week.

No comments, please, out of respect for the dead. I miss MDC, and frojack, and all the other Soylentils no longer with us. Just let the entire BuckFeta experiment submerge beneath the waves of alt-right internet auto-asphyxiation. We mourn what might have been, and hope still for a future where incels can learn to meet women, where programmers can actually get living wage jobs, and where it is OK to be white, because that is the way it has always been, you firkening racist asshole.

aristarchus is dying. Khallow wanted him to flame out, but that is not the way it is going down. He has overstepped, become shrill, annoying, and the alt-right has taken advantage of that, by making it rain before Trump's most recent rally. Nothing angrier than a wet Trump supporter but a wet hen, and they have comparable intelligence.

STEM is a SCAM, a Socially Corrupt Attempt to Manipulate. We need people here who understand how tech is used, paraded before Vulture capitalists, and works against humanity. We need to take a stand on political matters, a technically informed stance, lest we be Damored by ignorant techies.

And, finally, this journal entry makes no sense. I could regale you with the saga of hundred more rejected submissions, unfair and unjust down-modding, and erroneous accusations of sock-puppetry, but I will not. Perhaps you should look for what Friedrich Nietzsche called "the philosophers of the Future", the ones who will come, not with a hammer or a gallon of gasoline, but with a tuning fork, to test the idols of the present, and to see which ring hollow. (hrumpgh, Peterson, Milo, Gavin, jmorris) And then the revaluation of values can begin.

***************Quote Nietzsche:
Eine neue Gattung von Philosophen kommt herauf: ich wage es, sie auf einen nicht ungefährlichen Namen zu taufen. So wie ich sie errathe, so wie sie sich errathen lassen - denn es gehört zu ihrer Art, irgend worin Räthsel bleiben zu wollen -, möchten diese Philosophen der Zukunft ein Recht, vielleicht auch ein Unrecht darauf haben, als Versucher bezeichnet zu werden. Dieser Name selbst ist zuletzt nur ein Versuch, und, wenn man will, eine Versuchung.

****
aristarchus is nearer to dead. A third spam mod, to one of the original members of the Buckfeta movement! Oh, the huge Manatee! And in an aristarchus submission, where I was just providing context and explanation! Oh, my vision is getting dark. My karma is the lowest my dogma has ever allowed it to be. I haven't felt like this since the early days, when someone modded me to oblivion for saying things they did not like, and Runaway1956 came to my aid. . . wait a minute! He was there? Already! Oh, dear.

Anyway, I have slung threats and hurled insults and made ultimatums, so now I await the judgement of Soylentils. Is this site worth saving? Or do we need to kick khallow out?

When I was young, it was uphill both ways, and in plain ASCII, no GUI.

You had to memorize a stack of manuals -- that couldn't be removed from the computer room because they were bolted (literally) to the table. Young people learned to type properly, otherwise you would have to DUP the card you were punching up to the column where you made the mistake. There was no backspace -- the hole is punched into the card and can't be un-punched. And stand up straight. Pay attention. Don't drop your deck of cards on the floor -- that's a real mess to sort out.

This was just target practice, right?

Because if they were shooting at Russia, they could use some!

Says here in the Times, regarding US "attacks" on the Russia grid:

Two administration officials said they believed Mr. Trump had not been briefed in any detail about the steps to place "implants" -- software code that can be used for surveillance or attack -- inside the Russian grid.

Pentagon and intelligence officials described broad hesitation to go into detail with Mr. Trump about operations against Russia for concern over his reaction -- and the possibility that he might countermand it or discuss it with foreign officials, as he did in 2017 when he mentioned a sensitive operation in Syria to the Russian foreign minister.

First, it's the Times, so bring a bag of salt. Second, why would they say this? Sounds like silly bullshit for the campaign, but it's the Times.

So, who runs the country, eh?

Let's take a vote. Who do you want to run the country? The DOD? or the prez?

Or should we just blow this off as some sort of tabloid fairy tale for ratings?

Notre Dame Cathedral holds first mass since devastating fire, with attendees in hardhats

We're gonna need a harder hat.

It was a little cocker spaniel dog in a crate that he'd sent all the way from Texas. Black and white spotted. And our little girl—Tricia, the 6-year-old—named it Checkers. And you know, the kids, like all kids, love the dog and I just want to say this right now, that regardless of what they say about it, we're gonna keep it.

Wanna buy one?

The Dark Implications of Facial Swap Filter Technology

Last month, Serena Lee was just another bubble tea-addicted New Jersey college student who loved to watch The Office while searching for her future beau on Tinder.

Except, actually, she wasn't. Lee was actually a male Princeton student named Sean who "got bored while cramming for finals and decided to catfish people with the new Snapchat filter."

Yep, that one. The one that makes men look like beautiful women and women look like men you'd cross the street to avoid. The one that's so popular that a lot of people who left Snapchat are re-downloading it just to see what the hype is all about. Snapchat's "gender-swapping" filter, which came out in early May of this year, quickly became a social media hit. And Lee wasn't the only one who immediately used it to pose on Tinder — there's a whole trend of catfishing-for-jokes, which consists almost entirely of men pretending to be women.

While on a surface level the filter may seem like harmless fun, its implications, both conceptual and practical, are deeply troubling. Besides spawning this real-life catfishing phenomenon, which tells us nothing new about men online, Snapchat's employment of face alteration technology along the axis of gender enforces stereotypical ideas of male and female appearances, and raises questions about how we should employ such identity-altering (or concealing) technology in the first place.

Student uses gender-bending Snapchat filter to catch cop allegedly seeking underage sex

A college student wanted to take down potential predators on Tinder. So, he posed as a teen girl using Snapchat's new gender filter — and ended up catching a cop allegedly looking to hook up with a minor.

Ethan, a 20-year-old from the San Francisco Bay Area, used the Snapchat filter to pose as a 16-year-old girl named Esther. He created a Tinder account as a 19-year-old girl, but said he was communicating with San Mateo Officer Robert Davies as a 16-year-old, police say.