Bette Midler: They Aren’t Just ‘Blackground.’ There’s An Actual ‘Blacks for Trump’ Group

Iconic singer and actress Bette Midler recently stirred controversy over a tweet she posted about black Trump supporters in camera view at the President’s last re-election rally. She called the African American men seen in a somewhat grainy photo and wearing white t-shirts,  ‘blackground’ and suggested they were being paid to attend.

Look, there are African American men in this shot! How much did he pay them to be “blackground”? pic.twitter.com/pTkoHTIpQl

— Bette Midler (@BetteMidler) July 24, 2019

Both at Trump’s pre- and post-election rallies, many have noticed several black people holding signs displaying “BlacksForTrump2020.com.” While the image in Midler’s post isn’t clear whether the black individuals seen in the picture are affiliated with BlacksforTrump2020, black people wearing t-shirts with that website address can often be seen at Trump rallies.

Social media abounds with accusations that these are people put in place by the Trump camp. Others claim they are paid to give the impression that Trump has a multicultural following. The Huffington Post even called BlacksforTrump2020, “Trump’s latest con.”

So, just what is BlacksforTrump2020.com?

For starters, it’s an actual website. A WHOIS lookup on that domain name shows the site is registered to “Domains by Proxy, LLC.” A website owner’s personal information is masked when a site is registered through Domains by Proxy.

The Washington Post revealed that purchasing anonymous domain names increased for both Republicans and Democrats during the 2012 election.

The article points out that since many of these domain owners’ details are anonymous, it’s unclear whether actual politicians are buying them. Or, if squatters buy them in presidential campaign years with hopes of selling them for big bucks.

The self-professed owner of BlacksforTrump2020.com is not seeking anonymity at all, he told Black Enterprise.

Florida-based Maurice Symonette says he is the owner of BlacksforTrump2020.com. In a phone interview with Black Enterprise, Symonette dismisses the notion that he is paid by the Trump camp.

“Not even 32 cents,” he insists. “The fact is I wouldn’t even take any money because you are not going to call me a sellout. From Bush to Allen West to anyone I assisted we did it on our dime.”

He says he gets right behind Trump on camera with the signs so people can see the website, go to it, and understand why he is an ardent Trump supporter.

“I put my website on [the signs] because they are calling this man a racist and I don’t want to be holding a sign and look like some Uncle Tom sellout without explaining my position,” he says.

He also says he doesn’t use the Domain by Proxy registrar for anonymity. “I’m out here in the open.”

Taxes are “Slavery;” Building a Wall is “Scripture” 

Symonette, a former member of the black separatist sect, Yahweh ben Yahweh, cites his main reasons for supporting Trump as taxes and the rollback of regulations. He often uses biblical references to underscore his viewpoints.

“The most beautiful thing [about Trump] is ‘give me my money’,” says Symonette. He considers any taxes over 10% as “slavery” and wonders, “how can you have the nerve to charge more than God?”

He also supports Trump’s rollback of Dodd-Frank regulations. Symonette makes the dubious claim, “All these regulations that keep you from getting money–when Bush did it [rolled back business and financial regulations] you saw black men with these $3 million houses.”

Symonette also supports Trump’s wall, citing what he says is scripture from Isaiah; “Build me a wall great and high and all nations say please come let us help you. So if God said to build the wall…”

When asked if he has ever met Trump face-to-face Symonette says he has not but he has shaken hands with the president.

Still, Symonette seems to be a known figure among conservatives. In 2012, then-Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum invited Symonette to his rally in Coral Springs. His YouTube channel attracts hundreds of comments and views, with many white conservatives enthusiastically in agreement with him.

 

 

 

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Nintendo's Reportedly Fixing Those Broken Joy-Cons for Free

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Amazon's Revolutionary Retail Strategy? Recycling Old Ideas

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Janice Dickinson reaches ‘very large settlement’ in Cosby defamation case

Former supermodel Janice Dickinson who was one of the leading sex abuse accusers against Bill Cosby is getting paid a “very large settlement” from his insurance company as a result of her defamation case.

On Thursday, Dickinson’s attorney Lisa Bloom announced the mega pay-out during a press conference, adding that the reality star will be “fully compensated for being called a liar.”

Dickinson, 64, filed the suit in 2014, claiming that she was victimized in 1982 by Cosby who she said drugged and assaulted her in Lake Tahoe, Nevada. Cosby’s former attorney Marty Singer went on a campaign to shame Dickinson, calling her a liar so she sued Cosby for defamation.

—Gabrielle Union, Dwyane Wade, Ciara and Russell Wilson team up to produce inspirational story about former NFL star Vernon Turner—

“Truthfully, a settlement is a victory and a measure of justice,” said Dickinson, CNN reports.

Her attorney presented her with a bouquet of flowers for the “epic” win.

“Let’s stop yielding our power to the perp,” Dickinson said. She encouraged victims of sexual assault to be unafraid to speak their truth.

“Tell your story and stand up for your rights.”

Andrew Wyatt, Cosby’s attorney disagreed that the settlement meant the convicted rapist was guilty.

“To be clear, AIG’s settlement of this lawsuit has no bearing whatsoever on the merit of Ms. Dickinson’s claims. Mr. Cosby has every confidence that had the case proceeded to trial, a jury would have found that the statements issued by his former attorney — statements which Mr. Cosby himself never spoke and which he played no part in preparing — were not defamatory,” he said.

Wyatt said the insurance company AIG even though they objected.

“This is the third example in recent months of AIG robbing Mr. Cosby of the opportunity to clear his name in a court of law, where evidence and truthfulness are supposed to be elevated above headlines and gossip,” Wyatt said.

—Supermodel Janice Dickinson: ‘Bill Cosby Raped me’—

“AIG’s apparent strategy to have Mr. Cosby tried exclusively in the court of public opinion has become clear, and its decision to settle each of these lawsuits over Mr. Cosby’s objections is illustrative of AIG’s bad faith.”.

Dickinson released her memoir (No Lifeguard on Duty: The Accidental Life of the World’s First Supermodel) in 2002 and says she attempted to write about the assault but was blocked by her publisher HarperCollins and Cosby’s lawyers.

She testified during Cosby’s trial saying she and Cosby had dinner in Lake Tahoe, and then he gave her a glass of red wine and a pill, which she asked for because she was on her period and had stomach pains.

In April, AIG reached a settlement with seven Cosby accusers.

The post Janice Dickinson reaches ‘very large settlement’ in Cosby defamation case appeared first on theGrio.

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Wendy Williams blasts Bow Wow for disparaging Ciara during a club appearance

Wendy Williams slammed Bow Wow and defended Ciara on her show after the rapper called the singer a “bitch” and bragged that he “had her first” during a weekend club appearance.

—Ciara and Russell Wilson launch new TV, film and digital production company—

On Wednesday, Williams tore into Bow Wow during her hot topics segment on The Wendy Williams Show for talking bad about his ex-girlfriend and hurling unnecessary insults at the Level Up singer who is married, Page Six reports.

“Bow Wow, I’m not hating on you, but young man, so what?” the 55-year-old began.

Williams then scolded the 32-year-old rapper and said he was acting immaturely.

“It’s very distasteful. We’ve all had somebody before we had you, man. We’ve all lived, but to be shirtless in a club and calling her a ‘bitch,’ you were so wrong for that.” she said.

“… Going from Ciara to Erica Mena — where are we going with your track record? … Ciara made the right choice,” said about the singer who is happily married to NFL star Russell Wilson.

Bow Wow and Ciara were an item from 2004 to 2006 but thankfully she came to her senses and leveled up with Wilson.

Surely Ciara doesn’t have time to reply to this boy since she’s making big moves with her music and producing movies.

In fact, Ci-Ci teamed with Gabrielle Union, Dwyane Wade, and her husband to produce an inspirational story about former NFL star Vernon Turner.

And this is not the happy couple’s first business venture.

—Gabrielle Union, Dwyane Wade, Ciara and Russell Wilson team up to produce inspirational story about former NFL star Vernon Turner—

Ciara and Wilson earlier this year launched Why Not You Productions, which according to the announcement, plans to focus on creating television, film and digital content projects that will include “inspiring and aspiring narratives and human interest stories.”

“While we work in different fields in our day-to-day, we are excited to come together to collaborate and create stories that we hope will touch people’s lives,” the couple explained in their joint statement. “We are both storytellers at heart and we want to be able to share stories that uplift people and inspire others to create positive change. That’s ultimately what we want this company to represent.”

 

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Seeking new physics, scientists borrow from social networks

When two protons collide, they release pyrotechnic jets of particles, the details of which can tell scientists something about the nature of physics and the fundamental forces that govern the universe.

Enormous particle accelerators such as the Large Hadron Collider can generate billions of such collisions per minute by smashing together beams of protons at close to the speed of light. Scientists then search through measurements of these collisions in hopes of unearthing weird, unpredictable behavior beyond the established playbook of physics known as the Standard Model.

Now MIT physicists have found a way to automate the search for strange and potentially new physics, with a technique that determines the degree of similarity between pairs of collision events. In this way, they can estimate the relationships among hundreds of thousands of collisions in a proton beam smashup, and create a geometric map of events according to their degree of similarity.

The researchers say their new technique is the first to relate multitudes of particle collisions to each other, similar to a social network.

“Maps of social networks are based on the degree of connectivity between people, and for example, how many neighbors you need before you get from one friend to another,” says Jesse Thaler, associate professor of physics at MIT. “It’s the same idea here.”

Thaler says this social networking of particle collisions can give researchers a sense of the more connected, and therefore more typical, events that occur when protons collide. They can also quickly spot the dissimilar events, on the outskirts of a collision network, which they can further investigate for potentially new physics. He and his collaborators, graduate students Patrick Komiske and Eric Metodiev, carried out the research at the MIT Center for Theoretical Physics and the MIT Laboratory for Nuclear Science. They detail their new technique this week in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Seeing the data agnostically

Thaler’s group focuses, in part, on developing techniques to analyze open data from the LHC and other particle collider facilities in hopes of digging up interesting physics that others might have initially missed.

“Having access to this public data has been wonderful,” Thaler says. “But it’s daunting to sift through this mountain of data to figure out what’s going on.”

Physicists normally look through collider data for specific patterns or energies of collisions that they believe to be of interest based on theoretical predictions. Such was the case for the discovery of the Higgs boson, the elusive elementary particle that was predicted by the Standard Model. The particle’s properties were theoretically outlined in detail but had not been observed until 2012, when physicists, knowing approximately what to look for, found signatures of the Higgs boson hidden amid trillions of proton collisions.

But what if particles exhibit behavior beyond what the Standard Model predicts, that physicists have no theory to anticipate?

Thaler, Komiske, and Metodiev have landed on a novel way to sift through collider data without knowing ahead of time what to look for. Rather than consider a single collision event at a time, they looked for ways to compare multiple events with each other, with the idea that perhaps by determining which events are more typical and which are less so, they might pick out outliers with potentially interesting, unexpected behavior.

“What we’re trying to do is to be agnostic about what we think is new physics or not,” says Metodiev.  “We want to let the data speak for itself.”

Moving dirt

Particle collider data are jam-packed with billions of proton collisions, each of which comprises individual sprays of particles. The team realized these sprays are essentially point clouds — collections of dots, similar to the point clouds that represent scenes and objects in computer vision. Researchers in that field have developed an arsenal of techniques to compare point clouds, for example to enable robots to accurately identify objects and obstacles in their environment.

Metodiev and Komiske utilized similar techniques to compare point clouds between pairs of collisions in particle collider data. In particular, they adapted an existing algorithm that is designed to calculate the optimal amount of energy, or “work” that is needed to transform one point cloud into another. The crux of the algorithm is based on an abstract idea known as the “earth’s mover’s distance.”

“You can imagine deposits of energy as being dirt, and you’re the earth mover who has to move that dirt from one place to another,” Thaler explains. “The amount of sweat that you expend getting from one configuration to another is the notion of distance that we’re calculating.”

In other words, the more energy it takes to rearrange one point cloud to resemble another, the farther apart they are in terms of their similarity. Applying this idea to particle collider data, the team was able to calculate the optimal energy it would take to transform a given point cloud into another, one pair at a time. For each pair, they assigned a number, based on the “distance,” or degree of similarity they calculated between the two. They then considered each point cloud as a single point and arranged these points in a social network of sorts.

Three particle collision events, in the form of jets, obtained from the CMS Open Data, form a triangle to represent an abstract "space of events." The animation depicts how one jet can be optimally rearranged into another.

The team has been able to construct a social network of 100,000 pairs of collision events, from open data provided by the LHC, using their technique. The researchers hope that by looking at collision datasets as networks, scientists may be able to quickly flag potentially interesting events at the edges of a given network.

“We’d like to have an Instagram page for all the craziest events, or point clouds, recorded by the LHC on a given day,” says Komiske. “This technique is an ideal way to determine that image. Because you just find the thing that’s farthest away from everything else.”

Typical collider datasets that are made publicly available normally include several million events, which have been preselected from an original chaos of billions of collisions that occurred at any given moment in a particle accelerator. Thaler says the team is working on ways to scale up their technique to construct larger networks, to potentially visualize the “shape,” or general relationships within an entire dataset of particle collisions.

In the near future, he envisions testing the technique on historical data that physicists now know contain milestone discoveries, such as the first detection in 1995 of the top quark, the most massive of all known elementary particles.

“The top quark is an object that gives rise to these funny, three-pronged sprays of radiation, which are very dissimilar from typical sprays of one or two prongs,” Thaler says. “If we could rediscover the top quark in this archival data, with this technique that doesn’t need to know what new physics it is looking for, it would be very exciting and could give us confidence in applying this to current datasets, to find more exotic objects.”

This research was funded, in part, by the U.S. Department of Energy, the Simons Foundation, and the MIT Quest for Intelligence.

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SpaceX Just Unleashed Its Starship Rocket for the First Time

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California's Auto-Emissions Deal Could Trump the Feds' Plans

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Africa's week in pictures: 19-25 July 2019

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Lisa Leslie suggests boycott of companies who won’t support equal pay for women

Rapper Tay-K sentenced to 55 years in prison for his role in shooting death of Texas man

On Tuesday viral sensation Tay-K was handed a 55-year prison sentence for a murder that took place during a robbery in 2016, according to the Tarrant County Criminal District Attorney’s Office.

Tay-K, whose real name is Taymor McIntyre must serve also 30 years, plus two 13 year sentences for the two counts of aggravated robbery, which all must be served concurrently, according to reports.

Taymor McIntyre has been found guilty by a Tarrant County jury of Murder and 3 counts of Aggravated Murder. He was sentenced to 55 years for Murder, and 30 yr, 13 yr and 13 yr sentences for the Aggravated Robbery convictions.

— Tarrant County DA (@TarrantCountyDA) July 23, 2019

—Wendy Williams breaks down about divorce and opens up about upcoming Lifetime biopic—

In 2017, the 19-year-old Texas rapper became a household name with the release of the song “The Race,” which he recorded while on the run from police. The video for the song now has over 100 million views on YouTube and according to CNN, the song debuted at No. 70 on the Billboard Hot 100 Charts. McIntyre also received widespread support from rappers like Lil Bibby and Travis Scott. He was taken into custody after being on the run for three months.

Prior to the release of the song, McIntyre was involved in a home invasion with six other people in 2016 that resulted in the death of 21-year-old Ethan Walker, who was fatally shot in the stomach according to People. CNN reported that Walker, a young father, did not even have the money or drugs the group was looking for.  McIntyre and the others involved were initially arrested on capital murder charges in July 2016. He was then placed on house arrest, where he somehow removed his ankle monitor and went on the run.

—Nicole Murphy issues apology for kiss with Lela Rochon’s husband—

Prosecutors argued that though McIntyre was not the one that made the fatal shot, he was just as responsible because he was aware that someone was going to be shot in the process of the robbery.

People reported that a 15-year-old girl devised the plan and reached out to the rapper to see if he could get guns for the robbery. When McIntyre told her he did not have guns, he also said he knew someone who was “trigger-happy.”

McIntyre is also facing a capital murder charge for an April 2017 robbery that took the life of 23-year-old Mark Saldivar at a Chick-fil-A in San Antonio.

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