Stephen Colbert on Monday defended fellow CBS host John Dickerson against Donald Trump after the president told the renowned journalist he refers to the (award-winning) news program “Face the Nation” as “Deface the Nation.”

“Donald Trump, John Dickerson is a fair-minded journalist and one of the most competent people who will ever walk into your office,” Colbert began during his opening monologue on “The Late Show.”

Colbert noted Dickerson has too much “dignity to trade insults with the president of the United States to his face,” adding “But I, sir, am no John Dickerson.”

“Here we go,” Colbert began, before ripping into Trump.

“Mr. Trump, your presidency? I love your presidency, I call it ‘Disgrace the Nation.’” Colbert said. “You’re not the POTUS, you’re the BLOTUS. You’re the glutton with a button. You’re a regular ‘Gorge’ Washington. You’re the presi-dunce. But you’re turning into a real prictator.”

Colbert said Trump “attracts more skinheads than free Rogaine,” has “more people marching against [him] than cancer,” and talks “like a sign-language gorilla who got hit in the head.”

Going all-in against the president, Colbert added: “Sir, the only the only thing your mouth is good for is being Vladimir Putin’s cock holster.” …’

Source: Raw Story

‘Late-night host Jimmy Kimmel delivered a tearful monologue last night about his newborn son who was born with a heart defect and had life-saving surgery at just three days old. And today, Republicans are trying to get the votes to pass a health care law that will make it next to impossible for people like Kimmel’s baby to ever get care they can afford…’

Source: Lifehacker

‘A conservation group has rescued an incredibly rare albino orangutan from villagers on the Indonesian part of Borneo island, who were keeping the blue-eyed, white-haired primate in a cage. Sick, dehydrated, and exhibiting signs of a bloody nose, it could take a month before the ape can be released back to the wild.

 The group responsible for the rescue, the Borneo Orangutan Survival Foundation, learned about the five-year-old female orangutan from the Kapuas Hulu Police, who also participated in the rescue…’

Source: Stunning Blue-Eyed Albino Orangutan Rescued From Gizmodo

‘The New York Times’ new columnist, Bret Stephens, is an everyday conservative: he thinks institutional racism is imaginary, that campus rape is a big lie, and that the “Arab Mind” is “diseased”. But these are just opinions, and common ones on the right. It is his anti-science positions, on display in his first fact-mangled column about climate change, that has galvanized disgust.

Much has been said about him, but it is the Times itself that has committed a “jaw-dropping error” and whose warped motives promise that it will be repeated…’

Source: Boing Boing

‘Through successive reboots, the King Kong franchise continues to dramatize contemporary cultural concerns…’

Source: Pacific Standard

‘Hidden in the dense jungle of the Peruvian Amazon is a percolating, roiling river. The steaming turquoise waters that can reach up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit are guided by ivory-colored stones and guarded by 60-foot walls of lush forest and vegetation. Locals believed that the river was sacred and that the hot waters held healing powers, and shamans incorporated it into medicines.’

Source: Atlas Obscura

Need to go there!

‘An investigation into a term that seems to perfectly capture the indignities and absurdities of the modern economy…’

Source: Why the Phrase ‘Late Capitalism’ Is Suddenly Everywhere – The Atlantic

‘There are plenty of privacy-invading marketing ploys to worry about in life. Some examples are in your face, some are more subtle. And a relatively new kind manages to be outright invisible.

In the most inconspicuous hustle of all, apps have increasingly incorporated ultrasonic tones to track consumers. They ask permission to access your smartphone microphone, then listen for inaudible “beacons” that emanate from retail stores, advertisements, and even websites. If you’re not paying attention to the permissions you grant, you could be feeding marketers information about your online browsing, what stores you go to, and what products you like and dislike without ever realizing it.

There are certainly legitimate uses of “ultrasonic cross-device tracking” technology. Some apps are part of rewards programs that automatically offer customers promotions when they visit particular stores. Others facilitate ticketing at events like sports games.

But plenty of apps deploy it without so clear a use case, at least as far as direct benefits for the person who downloads them. In fact, research presented last week at the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy found 234 current Android applications that incorporate a particular type of ultrasonic listening technology. That doesn’t quite constitute widespread distribution, but the infrastructure to support it has landed in more and more apps every year…

…Fortunately it’s easy to monitor what’s accessing your phone, and stay in control if you’re wary of all this dog whistlin’.

Since you can’t stop beacons from emitting these frequencies around you, the best option is to reduce the chance that your smartphone can listen for them and feed data to a third party. The researchers suggest simply assessing the privileges you’ve granted your apps to make sure they make sense. Skype wants microphone access? Sure! An app for some clothing store? Probably not. Common sense works best here.

On Android 7, navigate to Settings, then to Apps. Tap the gear icon in the upper right, then tap App Permissions to see and edit the privileges you’ve granted each app. And on iOS 10 go to Settings, then Privacy, then Microphone to see which apps have requested access, and which ones you’ve granted it to…

Source: WIRED

‘Whether he intends to or not, US president Donald Trump is making a lot of people nervous about the prospects of an American attack on North Korea. This week, he said that “a major, major conflict” is a possibility, and he summoned the entire Senate to the White House for a briefing on the rogue nation’s weapons programs, which aim to develop nuclear-tipped missiles capable of hitting US cities.

Even though Trump has a nuclear submarine and an aircraft carrier, the USS Vinson, positioned near the Korean peninsula, experts still put long odds on the US flat-out attacking just based on North Korea’s behavior to date. “I don’t know a single serious Korea analyst, hawk or dove, who thinks it’s a good idea,” says Robert Kelly, an associate professor of international relations at Pusan National University in South Korea. “I would say the likelihood is less than 10%.”

But there are other ways the US could get drawn into a military conflict in the region…’

Source: Quartz

Nasty, Brutish and Short — What a War With North Korea Would Look Like

‘As long as China didn’t get involved to help the North, says Robert E. Kelly, a professor at Pusan National University in South Korea, the Kim-controlled Korean People’s Army (KPA) would lose in a conventional ground war to the US and its allies within “six weeks, a month, two months max.”

Of course a two-way nuclear exchange would play out differently, but the US and its allies would be hesitant to use that option. “If we’re exchanging nukes across the peninsula then things have deteriorated to the point when all other options have been exhausted, and we’re in a very different world. But it’s not a path that I think they would use,” says Graham…’

Source: Quartz

‘There are approximately 1,400 Iraqi nationals in the United States who have final orders of removal.’

Source: The Washington Post

‘Scientists have uncovered more than 50 biases that, like this one, can mess with our thinking. For instance, there’s the “availability heuristic,” which makes us think something that’s easy to recall (because it’s emotional or because we’ve experienced it many times) is more common or probable than it really is. (Despite what you might think from watching CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, the world isn’t full of serial killers.) There’s also the “distinction bias,” which makes two options seem more different when considered simultaneously; the “denomination effect,” which makes us more likely to spend money when it’s in small bills or coins; and the “Dunning-Kruger effect,” which makes experts underestimate their abilities and laypeople overestimate theirs.

Such biases can still affect you even if you know all about them because they operate unconsciously. We judge whether we have a bias by examining our thoughts, and because we believe our thoughts are rational, we often think we’re not biased when we are. Psychologists call this contradiction the “bias blind spot.” Although we’re quick to see biases in others, we have more trouble noticing them in ourselves.

And the more we convince ourselves that we don’t have certain biases, the more likely we are to exhibit them. If we believe we’re good people, for example, we may stop trying to be better and may be more likely to act indecently. Similarly, if we think we’re smart, we might skip studying for a test and give ignorant answers. In general, if we believe we’re unbiased, we’re giving ourselves permission to be biased…’

Source: Nautilus