Russians halt search for intelligent life in Washington OffGuardian (Chuck L)
Wall Street Executive Telling Friend How Amazing It Is To See Clinton Live Onion (Chuck L)
Pets Aren’t the Same as Children—but They Certainly Feel Like It Helaine Olen, Slate
Our universe has no direction EarthSky (furzy)
‘Space Brain’: Mars Explorers May Risk Neural Damage, Study Finds NBC (David L)
Major Investor Sues Theranos, Claiming It Lied to Attract Investment Wall Street Journal. This is gonna be FUN!
Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster Guardian (resilc). Today’s must read.
China?
Goldman Warns China’s Outflows May Be Worse Than They Look Bloomberg
Hurricane Matthew: Haiti risks ‘real famine’, says interim president BBC
China-isation of working conditions and workers’ rights in Europe European Trade Institute
Brexit
Britain’s Brexit delusions Politico
Hard Brexit could cost £66bn a year The Times
Now we have evidence, everyone can see the real reason it looks like Corbyn didn’t back Remain The Canary (Chuck L). He got the Sanders treatment!
Greece might get stiffed on of some of its bailout cash Reuters
Iceland finds all guilty in banker market-abuse case Iceland Monitor (JM)
Ukraine/Russia
Putin and Erdogan pledge deeper military contact after gas deal signed BBC (furzy)
Turkey Diversifies Foreign Policy: Russia and Turkey Agree to Pipeline Deal Michael Shedlock. Some readers were skeptical when we called this early.
Syraqistan
The Truth About the War in Aleppo David Stockman, Anti-War (sinisterrr). A good overview.
Diplomatic divide over Libya threatens EU unity on defense Politico
Syria conflict: France wants Russia on war crimes charges BBC (furzy)
US ship and Saudi forces targeted as Yemen’s civil war escalates Financial Times
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
FBI Version of NY/NJ Bombing Story Sounds Very Familiar WhoWhatWhy (Chuck L)
Breaking the Black Box: What Facebook Knows About You ProPublica(furzy)
2016
WSJ Poll: Clinton Lead Grew to 11 Points After Lewd Trump Video, Before Debate Wall Street Journal
U.S. Intelligence meddles in U.S. Presidential election: backs Hillary Clinton, tries to stop Donald Trump TheDuran (Chuck L)
Blatant Lie: AP “Fact Checks” Directly Contradict AP’s Own Reporting on Syria Land Destroyer. Chuck L: “Our unbiased press. /snark”
Center for American Progress Advised Clinton Team Against $15 Minimum Wage, Leaked Emails Show Intercept (Baby Gerald)
Debate #2: Breaking the Bottom of the Barrel TruthOut (RR)
Bernie Sanders Won the Trump-Clinton Debate Observer (Kevin C)
An American Tragedy: Trump Won Big Ilargi
The night Bill Clinton and his loose zipper let Trump dodge the bullet that should have killed his campaign for good – and then walk all over Hillary Piers Morgan, Daily Mail (Li)
He saved himself, for now … Sic Semper Tyrannis (resilc)
Yes, Trump Has Destroyed The GOP American Conservative (resilc). It didn’t hurt that Clinton is a Republican.
Buffett Just Released His Own Tax Data to Hammer Trump Bloomberg
Melania Trump Wore Gucci’s Pussy Bow Top to Tonight’s Debate New York Magazine. Resilc: “I would guess all the journos are trying out for the Clintoon payroll full time?”
Women React With Fury to Donald Trump’s Remarks, but Some Offer Support New York Times. Li: ”
Billy Bush suspended by NBC after Trump tape emerges BBC (furzy)
Bayh’s wealth exploded after he left Senate, financial report reveals Indianapolis Business Journal (DO)
Boat capsizes in San Francisco, injuring eight passengers Reuters. EM: “Article misses this bit: boat was named the Monkey Business, erm, I mean the Khaleesi. Karma for the silly naming-after-Game-of-Thrones-character? Moreover, in GoT weren’t the Dothraki peoples of the steppes, i.e. hardcore landlubbers?”
How the owners of Fidelity get richer at everyday investors’ expense Reuters (resilc)
Wells Fargo
Wells Fargo executive Tim Sloan edges closer to top job Financial Times
Guillotine Watch
My First Gulfstream Vanity Fair (J-LS)
Titanic-style disaster warning over luxury Arctic cruises Sky (Lulu)
Class Warfare
Sheila Bair’s One Weird Trick to Make Her College Less White Bloomberg. Important
Germany: Berlin’s war on gentrification Financial Times. J-LS: ” Examines Berlin’s attempt to craft policy to address the housing needs of the majority of its population (contrast this to London). Important policy alternative to market über alles thinking.
Maybe America’s Missing Workers Are Sick in Bed Bloomberg. I know a hair stylist who was very well off (you can make a lot of money doing hair color because you can process a lot of heads at once), as in house in a good part of the Hamptons well off. He kept working until he was close to 70 because being on his feet a lot of the day was good for his diabetes, and he knew he’d sit a lot more when he retired.
60 former UberPOP drivers convicted in Sweden The Local (Cry Shop)
Antidote du jour (yahoo7):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
259 comments
Comments are closed.
Stupid NYT headlines I never clicked on:
When I hear the trigger word “experts,” I reach for my revolver.
NYT: the toilet paper of record. In yet another Wikileaks dump it’s come out that they’re in active collusion with Hillary’s campaign. How anyone is still dumb enough to believe the lies they’re alwaus putting out is beyond me.
Really, it’s fine to be biased lackeys for the rich and powerful as long as you’re honest about it. Pretending to be unbiased arbiters of truth while doing that though is pathetic.
These media presstitutes are so rancidly despicable that I want to throw up whenever I think of them. Newspapers and the rest of the media: want to know why you’re going bankrupt? It’s not the internet–it’s because every day more and more people are clued into the fact that you are pathetic lying scum. In my mind these media people are in the same exact category as child molesters.
If it were a little softer, yeah, it would work for that.
But it’s disgusting getting ink on your butt.
They were in active collusion with the 1990s Clinton campaigns too, but I didn’t have Wikileaks around to confirm it, or the internets for alternative sources of information. I suspected it anyway. I finally cut the cord after 2002.
Well the NYT, WaPo, CNN et al have shot themselves in the foot with this blatant collusion with the Clinton campaign. They’ve pissed off their most intelligent readers & viewers, shown themselves to be knaves and fools, and what are they going to say when HRC is president and investigated up the wazoo for corruption?
If you defeat Trump, you prevail over one guy.
When Clinton is defeated, you win over all those ‘with her.’
For any leverage kind of person, that’s a potential 100-bagger right there.
Yes… But leverage much higher than 100:1…
Not just MSM, but banks, neocons, corrupt ceo’s, and all these alphabet groups keeping us safe…
Hopefully he’d be vindictive against all the elites trying to defeat him.
“Hopefully he’d be vindictive against all the elites trying to defeat him.”
Taking the running joke a little too seriously, but:
You’ve hit on something. Essentially everybody who has power over our politics now has a motive to defeat Trump, because they’ve made him mad. That affects not only “journalism,” but the way the election itself is managed. We already know both “major” parties can cheat in elections; who else can?
Some combination of “it’s a Russian plot” and “we told you so.”
The MSM — they know everything.
NEVER overestimate the intelligence of the American public. If Hillary can get an 11 point lead over a salacious story that affects almost nobody and yet get no drop in popularity over revelations that will affect everyone’s lives, I don’t think there is much hope that the NYT, WaPo, CNN, et al, will get their comeuppance. But Americans who drink in what these MSM sites are feeding them WILL get the President they so obviously deserve, won’t they?
Yes, it’s the public’s fault… despite being subject to the most brutal propaganda campaign in history and being assaulted by years of neoliberalism that barely gives them time to breathe between their three zero-hour contract jobs, it’s their fault and they deserve a president who will grand-bargain away their social security benefits, TPP away the few remaining good jobs and start a civilisation-threatening war with Russia.
And just for the record (/sarc), HRC only has an 11-point lead because most people won’t be voting anyway, as they’ve correctly surmised that the system is completely rigged against them.
As much as I hate to say it, the American Public HAS to take some of the responsibility. I’m not talking about those at the end of the food chain who are spending their time just trying to survive and don’t have the time to listen to or consider what their candidates are saying. And the sad thing is that most of those people don’t even have the opportunity to vote because they can’t take time off from work to go stand in line for an hour or two. I’m talking about what used to be the middle class who bought into Reagan’s trickle down economics and decided consumerism was more important than humanism. They were the first ones to sell out other Americans for what they saw as their own personal gain. Those are the ones who actually had the time to listen to the warnings (and there were people warning them like Howard Zinn and Gore Vidal, etc.,) but they chose not to because they wanted that new house or new car or new something so that they could be “better” than (fill in the blank). Please don’t pretend that the 1% did it all by themselves without collusion from the American Public….
Well the good news is that their number is shrinking, as the children and grandchildren of what used to be a healthy middle class are now solidly in the Precariat, and in fact they know no other reality besides crapified freelancing, debt peonage and forever wars.
And I agree, no 1% in history ever does it by themselves; they always have the credentialed scribe class below them (≈15%) who are wooed with the vague promise of promotion and sycophantry. Plus there are always plenty of troops in the Precariat who will go to war for the 1% because all other viable options for them have been crassly swindled away.
All of that said, I find focusing our wrath at the credentialed class, the oligarchs and the media stenographers totally justified, but I do not see blaming their victims as an effective organising strategy.
People think the French Rev was peasants with pitchforks but that only came later, it was when the top 2% figured out they were also getting screwed by the .01% that the fun started. We’re not there yet. Getting there, but not yet.
Same with the Argentine Revolution of 2001/02. It was not the 20%+ unemployment and 53% poverty rate that brought the governments down, but rather when the middle classes had their bank accounts frozen (“corralito”) and they joined the lower classes who had been fighting back for years.
And election fraud on the largest and most targeted level yet. In reality, no one can say what voters are voting for, because they’re either not allowed to, or results are changed in the machines.
I have not seen the data on that poll but I doubt that it is a “scientific poll”. Many of the polls that I have taken the time to look at the data shows that they avoid asking 35 and under voters and heavily skew the data set to democrats. Lee Camp from Redacted Tonight has also shown this on his TV show on RT. Those even ruskies.
‘Little Big Horn’ (Wurlitzer) Syndrome …..
Just watched a documentary on the murder of Kitty Genovese. It sure made me think there has been a culture of corruption at the New York Times for decades, enabled by outside journalists refusing to question them for whatever reason (intimidation, careerism…).
I always took the mainstream Kitty Genovese story to be more of a revelation of a corrupted culture, long before anyone coined the term “me” generation. That version of the story explains why much if not most of the 99% votes against the interests of their class, as well as the popularity of lotteries, Las Vegas and day trading.
jgordon, did I miss a link above or could you give me a link to the Wikileaks reference? Thanks. I need to pass this along to a friend.
fyi
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-10-11/wikileaks-releases-another-1100-emails-john-podesta-third-data-dump
The question is does it raise any kind of outrage across ‘low information voters’ brainwashed with kool-aid from MSM?
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/09/exclusive-new-email-leak-reveals-clinton-campaigns-cozy-press-relationship/
shorter
from jgordon: “In my mind these media people are in the same exact category as child molesters.”
jgordon, see article below for your exact suggested link. How else does the public get (s)elected convicted criminal, former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert?
http://thiscantbehappening.net/node/1315?page=4
Still Evil after All These Years: The Franklin Scandal and Pedophilia in High Places by: Charles M. Young
The Omaha World-Herald was the foremost local cheerleader for persecuting teenagers instead of investigating their claims. One of its own columnists, Peter Citron, had a long history of arrests for pedophilia and child porn and was implicated by two witnesses at Larry King’s sex parties. The long-time publisher of the World-Herald, Harold Anderson, was a big supporter of Larry King (not TV personality Larry King) and had raised money for the Franklin. During the 18 years that King presided over the Franklin, the newspaper never noticed that King was living a hugely expensive lifestyle when he was supposedly making $17,000 a year in salary. The World-Herald Company is co-owner of Election Software and Systems (now E S & S), which counts half the election ballots in the United States.
Americans have plenty of obvious reasons to hate the rich and powerful. Wars for oil, rampant pollution, the destruction of individual rights, the constant lying about everything. It’s all on the front page, and it’s like old furniture in the living room. It’s hard for most people to notice. Boutique evil of the Gerry Sandusky sort affects fewer victims, but is more easily understood once the initial denial breaks down. If the denial of the Franklin Credit Union scandal ever breaks down, the consequences will reverberate far higher than happened at Penn State. Except for all those who died in suspicious accidents and suicides, the witnesses are still out there. Some might even talk about it. They talked to Nick Bryant.
http://www.franklinscandal.com/
The Franklin Scandal by Nick Bryant
………….
http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2015/10/19/the-peoples-campaign-the-real-hastert-case-all-in-one-place/
The People’s Campaign: The Real Hastert Case- All in One Place
Sibel Edmonds
We have been singlehandedly covering The Real Hastert Case here at Boiling Frogs Post. As we all know the complicit US media has been doing exactly the opposite: blacking out and censoring the real case together with all directly relevant facts and historical context.
CHART of who funds “progressive” media:
https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/011/073/137/02df4e43dde66b18157a7712c773d6ae_original.png?w=680&fit=max&v=1462211812&auto=format&lossless=true&s=0e59a1c364b2d8c7ab3293f88bcd3384
………..
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2010/04/the-strange-death-of-nancy-schaefer-two-items/
(How the Media reported)The strange death of Nancy Schaefer (two items)
…( President of Georgia Eagle Forum, Republican) Senator Schaefer led opposition to HB582 and SB304, two bills introduced by fellow Republicans that would have likely resulted in increasing child sex slave trafficking. These bills would have made it legal for teenagers to participate in certain illicit acts. The bills effectively removed the legal authority that police now have to pick teenagers up and get them into protective custody so that they can no longer be pimped for those acts.
……..
How many politicians and how much media are linked to intelligence agencies?
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2012/4719
Who owns Scytl? George Soros isn’t in the voting machines, but the intelligence community is by Gerry Bello
………….
We need hand counted paper ballots to get rid of those compromised voting machines to elect better leaders.
Tune in to the #GreenTownHall tonight at 9pm ET live on @cspan! Tweet @ CSPAN with questions or call – 202-748-8920 during the forum!
Dr. Jill Stein @DrJillStein
I’ll be in the #NewYorkCity tomorrow with @ajamubaraka. Join us! http://jill2016.com/bronxrally
Stupid Bloomberg headlines I never clicked on:
No doubt. But so would running their own private server outside the company system, then destroying emails in response to a Congressional subpoena.
I worked in one that would have hired him on the spot. This company bought out the CEO of my company and thus, the “merger.” Suddenly I was working for a most disgusting company.
there was some “body language expert” opining about trump on yahoo.
was it the same expert who diagnosed putin?
It’s high time we stop calling these headlines “stupid” and start calling them what they are–OMINOUS–as David Stockman does in the link above.
There is a reason the stalwarts of america–media, fbi, “intelligence” community, doj, congress, the “supreme” court and even the executive branch–have blatantly abandoned any shred of integrity and credibility they had left in the desperate attempt to install the nakedly corrupt and dishonest clinton into the presidency.
And it should scare the shit out of every citizen of the planet.
One has to be against Hillary, if all those who should be objective are biasing in favor of her.
“The only thing necessary for bad things to triumph is for good men..and good women, to do nothing.”
Do something – against big things
If you can’t vote for, then vote against.
Hey, man, I tried. Sometimes you lose. Trump is not an acceptable alternative. Bernie was a great one.
There still is an acceptable alternative, in most states. Or even Gary Johnson, despite his flaws, at least is a vote against the Duopoly.
Aaah, libertarians = neoliberal. You really want to tell America that that’s where the Overton window sits? You can always write in or leave the top of the ticket blank.
Objects in the Overton Window can be moved. To move the concept that the two legacy parties are worthy of respect and place outside the right edge of the window is certainly something.
Sure, Johnson’s a bell-end. Sure, he’s representing the status quo in the welterweight division. Sure, most of his support is encouraged by measured token inclusion in national media just as that of his opponent in the division is disadvantaged by non-inclusion.
“We held the line” is something each and every employee of the Trump Taj Mahal and each and every voter should be proud of.
neither is acceptable.
As far as unacceptable goes, Trump is like the flu while Hillary is like ebola. Now, you have exactly two choices: would you rather catch the flu or get ebola? Keep in mind that there is a 100% chance that you’ll have one or the other come January.
“If you can’t vote for, then vote against.”
There IS a vote for, and that’s for Jill Stein. Its not a vote for much, granted, but I’m not playing this lesser evil game.
Clinton and Trump can both easily f*ck over America or the world, depending on what crisis happens first. Stop playing this lesser evil shtick.
This is a VERY salient point. The degree to which we have so quickly jumped the shark is shocking and should indicate something about where we stand. It would behove us to back up and consider the magnitude of the shift we have undergone.
It is scary, there’s no doubt. But at the same time it’s like.. what we already knew for decades. The media is lying. Politicians are corrupt. Money is running the show. It’s not necessarily that there’s been a fundamental shift, just that it’s so brazen now.. so obvious that you would think people couldn’t possibly believe this shit anymore. But they do. Middle america does still buy what’s being peddled to them on the news, that’s what’s scary. But what should be even more concerning is that we’ve all been cornered into a place where we are seriously considering voting for Donald Trump to be the president of the U.S.
“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
— Antonio Gramsci
Lambert highlighted this great quote in the Water Cooler today.
Exactly. Crooks, liars and corrupt politicians infinitely prefer to be perceived as stupid, bumbling, incompetent Mr. Magoo’s than as having willful malice and greed behind their actions.
Hanlon’s Razor is therefore more useful to the perps than to the victims. Better to be smarmy, smug, and pray for the afterlife or struggle for crumbs (depending on which party presumes to speak for you), if the perps say so, I guess.
Totally OMINOUS and terrifying indeed.
Trump: “So Hilary you have said many times you would impose a no-fly zone in Syria, and as you know that could mean shooting down Russian jets. Now the Pentagon has stated the rebels in Aleppo are allied with al-Qaeda. Are you ready to confirm tonight that indeed you do intend to attack a nuclear nation in order to support al-Qaeda in the overthrow of President Assad?”
It’s About to Get Really Ugly (excerpt)
http://dailyreckoning.com/heres-won-last-nights-debate/
“Major Investor Sues Theranos”
You can’t squeeze blood out of a dead unicorn. Even a tiny drop.
So what’s the point of the suit, other than to show to the world
that the plaintiffs didn’t do due diligence?
“What Wells Fargo Knew”
What I love about this story is that the former WF employee held on to all the incriminating documents
in hard copy. Including a USPS return-receipt-requested receipt! How 20th century.
Recode reports she’s teaming up with Chelsea Clinton at Theranos HQ on March 23rd:
http://www.recode.net/2016/3/14/11586966/theranos-ceo-elizabeth-holmes-is-holding-a-hillary-fundraiser-with
CONVERSATION WITH CHELSEA CLINTON
Monday, March 21st Hosted by Elizabeth Holmes Offices of Theranos Palo Alto, CA
(Address available upon RSVP)
Participation Levels:
+ Co-host: $2,700 – contribute or raise $2,700 includes host reception with Chelsea Clinton
+ Friend: $1,000
Previously, Holmes has participated in Clinton Foundation events, including a January 2015 “Health Matters Summit” that also included Donald Trump’s in-law and Oscar Health co-founder Josh Kushner. This past September, Holmes also spoke at the Clinton Foundation’s “Future of Impact” event in New York City. Chelsea Clinton, who has been hitting the campaign trail on her mother’s behalf, is one of the key figures at the Clinton Foundation and for the Clinton Global Initiative.
+ Supporter: $500
Theranos, through it’s exceptionally well-connected CEO and founder, has always cultivated political ties: Former secretaries of state George Shultz and Henry Kissinger sit on the company’s board, along with former defense secretary William Perry, former senators Sam Nunn and Bill Frist. Holmes also, perhaps not coincidentally, is running a highly (over) valued corporation that could face complete ruin because of government regulation—it sure could help in the years ahead to have a friend in a very high place.
You can always scan a hardcopy to get it into digital form, but to qualify it as evidence in court, or even to counter a challenge of forgery (see the “Russian hackers could have modified those e-mails” story that has been brewing over the last month), it’s nice to have something more that bits on a usb stick. Also gives comfort to the truly paranoid who worry about someone taking a degausser to their electronic storage (not that such methods are particularly reliable). Personally, I also prefer Ed Snowden’s “Three-Laptop Monte” approach, especially because even “highly qualified” presidential candidates have a hard time grokking its genius.
I guess Native Americans** are lumped into the White check box at Sheila Blair’s (George) Washington College. Their website wasn’t much help in finding stats or policy.
**and probably all the different Asians ethic groups get lumped together with whites, though their socio-economic disparity sliced and diced by ancestral language/national group would be greater than the disparity among different European descendant ethnic groups.
HOW TO KNOW IF YOUR COLLEGE (or humor magazine) HAS A RACE PROBLEM.
African-American and White are the only ethnic categories. I know, be thankful racist Columbus Day is over.
I celebrated Minoan Indigenous Young Boxers Dreadlocks Day !
Wikileaks bombshell. Hillary’s 8 point plan to destroy ISIS and Syria: “Qatar and Saudi Arabia providing financial support to ISIL”
About those “alleged” emails: Newsweek is saying they are fakes.
http://www.newsweek.com/vladimir-putin-sidney-blumenthal-hillary-clinton-donald-trump-benghazi-sputnik-508635
Sigh. Wikileaks is not Sputnik.
That said, I will attempt to make lemonade out of the lemon of a link you have produced, so let me replay a few of the comments that were left after your article:
“This should be on the fron page of every newspaper tomorrow. This is proof that Trump and Putin are in cahoots.”
“Long but informative read. The Russians aren’t coming, they are here…in our electronics.”
“Trump is a traitor to this country. He is an agent of Russia and Iran, whose interesting he exclusively and openly advocates in defiance of the interests of the United States of America, and even his own sycophant VP.”
“The Russians misquoted me,” the Newsweek journo cries. “J’accuse!”
What’s it going to take to teach Putin’s plotters simple courtesies such as proper attribution — a mushroom cloud?
Or the even direr threat of a copyright lawsuit? :-0
The article you quote does not claim the emails are fakes. You are either misreading it or making stuff up.
Correct. The article says that an email from Sidney Blumenthal contains quotes from Kurt Eichenwald. Some people have mistakenly concluded that Blumenthal wrote some things that Eichenwald wrote, whereas Blumenthal was really just quoting Eichenwald. There is no claim that the emails are fake. In other words, a tempest in a teapot.
Some of us STILL don’t get how Sidney Blumenthal isn’t facing an espionage rap, after sharing Special Access Program intelligence with Hillary, when he lacked the security clearance to have it.
If I were Sidney, I’d plea bargain it down to copyright infringement … with only a mild 5-year maximum sentence.
And the talking point by all the Clinton/DNC surrogates is that it’s impossible to know if they are the real deal, so I think it’s not unreasonable or tin-foily to think that the strategy on the part of the candidate and the media outlets and reporters identified as being reliably on the Clinton bandwagon is to plant enough doubt about the authenticity of these leaked e-mails that they are rendered useless/meaningless.
Here’s the thing – if any other Republican was running against her, I think Clinton would be fighting for her political life right about now, but as long as Trump is out there making a fool of himself and grabbing all the media attention, any of this normally damaging-to-Clinton stuff is essentially going to keep being as much of a non-story as possible without the media being accused of ignoring it altogether. Because the consequence of tearing Clinton down now is the prospect of a President Trump – and I truly believe the media is working overtime to make sure that doesn’t happen.
But here’s the other thing: if Clinton is elected, I fully expect the media to immediately turn on her and start investigating all this stuff they’ve sort of brushed aside; this will dovetail nicely with the effort I fully expect the Republicans in Congress to make to impeach her. It will be another Clinton-centered sh!tshow.
It’s unconscionable to me that we are going to be forced to go through this, all because the Democratic powers-that-be decided that nothing could get in the way of Clinton having her promised turn to be president.
2020 was a key date. If it was Bernie, I think the VP would be an automatic front runner in 2020 or 2024.
Who outside of Bernie has a national profile in the Democratic caucus? No one. They investigated baseball players not owners, a crowning achievement. I believe a calculation was made that Hillary was toxic enough to not run but it would give Dems the chance to go on the defensive against Republicans and hopefully they could be the one to shine and become the front runner with memories of do nothing majorities safely in the past. If they tried to run starting last year, the majority of Presidential material candidates in 2015 would be eaten alive without the protection of the press and celebrity. Guys like Rahm made trips to New Hampshire to see what kind of response they would get.
Kaine isn’t a serious threat to be anything. He polls 20 points behind Mark Warner in Virginia, and Warner almost lost.
It’s unconscionable to me that we are going to be forced to go through this…..
Boo hoo. Call the waaaaaambulance!
Donald Trump is the first challenger of the status quo that “voters” have been presented in decades and, after the support he has garnered, the last we’re likely to see for a long time if he’s defeated.
And you find it “unconscionable” that you are being given the opportunity to choose? You would prefer the easier, more ‘”conscionable” “choice” between two sides of the same coin that we’re usually “given?”
And if you think “the media [will] immediately turn on her and start investigating all this stuff they’ve sort of brushed aside” after she’s elected, you must have bought a lot of bridges over the years. The media’s corporate owners and their corporate colleagues in the MIC and on wall street have invested millions in her, and they expect a return. At your expense and the expense of countless other millions of humans across the globe.
So stop your fretting and equivocating and appreciate the opportunity you’e been given. The citizens of this country and the planet are depending on you, and the starlets in hollywood will have to take care of themselves.
Do you really think that we are “being given the opportunity to choose”? Far smarter minds that me have noted that the last debate was so nasty is because there really wasn’t any way for either of them to argue the issues that affect us. Both serve the same bosses and both have basically the same policies – there really isn’t much daylight between the two candidates. So when you can’t actually debate the issues, what do you do? Well, you put on a show for the American Public and give them “shiny coins” to play with to deflect them from the reality of the situation.
Do you really think that we are “being given the opportunity to choose”?
I do.
TPP/various other trade deals, “hemispheric” open borders and insane Russian provocation intended to instigate and justify wider conflict being three of the most important issues on which the candidates differ massively.
The last debate got so “nasty” specifically because there is so much daylight between the two, not because there is none.
I am with you Katniss.
Trump is against initiating WWIII or WWIV depending on your ideological background. Trump is anti open borders and anti TPP/trade deals. His positions are the not the same as Clinton in major policy but neither have the ability to talk about the issues. Clinton is able to talk in platitudes and sound bites but she lacks any depth. Trump can not talk in sound bites on policy and his knowledge is even more shallow than HRC.
The media refuses to go into details. James Woosley was on CNN the other day and the pundits were asking him to take positions on the Trump-Pence split on Syria as well as state a position on Trump’s hot mic. Woosley refused to take the bait and told them that he was there to talk about the realities on Syria not take positions. His job is to provide details and the candidates make decisions.
How many people know that Al-Nursa ie Al-Qaida in Syria is in control of East Aleppo?
Trump can not talk about policy in health care or energy because he has very little actual knowledge of these areas.
“How many people know that Al-Nursa ie Al-Qaida in Syria is in control of East Aleppo?”
Not for much longer; the SAA is taking back Aleppo at a pretty astonishing pace. Every day (or two, at the most) they secure another bit of the city. I expect at some point progress will slow as the militants get more concentrated, but even so with every skirmish they use up more men and ammunition they have no way of replacing. On top of that they’re being subjected to airstrikes pretty much 24/7, which is why the West is so frantic about a ‘no-fly zone’ and accusing Russia of deliberately targeting civilians.
As for the rest of Syria: the Damascus suburbs are pretty much in domino mode, the jihadis in Idlib have decided to turn on themselves, and the gains of a recent militant offensive in Hama are being steadily rolled back. Unless the US wants to get directly involved, this conflict is basically done. It’s just going to take a long time for our leaders to admit that to themselves.
Sorry, just b/c electing HRC would result in a sh!tshow, does not mean we are being given an opportunity to choose. We are not.
HRC is horrible in every way.
DJT is horrible in almost every way HRC is awful. Almost. That almost is not a reason to vote for him.
We know what she will do.
We do NOT know what he will do and who will be (mis)advising him. In fact it might be worse. I will not vote for him nor her.
Oh and this
was unnecessary.
Trump’s response on Syria alone represents a stark choice.
It is clear that Clinton sees Syria as an opportunity for proxy war potentially leading to conventional war with Russia. She wants to establish a no-fly zone, which at this time would be a declaration of war from the outset since Russia has just established its own no-fly zone. Those Russian anti-aircraft missiles would need to be taken out, then airfields destroyed. Next we start shooting down Russian aircraft, a provocation which Russia will meet with force. Clinton claims that she will not send ground troops, only special forces. We already have over 5000 troops there. It will take at least 60,000 to remove Russia. She is lying.
The moderator was clearly abetting Clinton by choosing a question framed to compare failure to take out Assad with inaction before the Holocaust.
Trump’s position is to work with Russia and Syria to fight ISIS. He pointed out that Assad has been attacking ISIS, a fact, though the AP, likely in collusion with the Clinton campaign now, called it false. Trump also called out our policy of alerting Syrians to pending strikes, a tactic which hints that we are not serious about destroying ISIS since this gives their fighters ample opportunity to escape.
We have no business being in Syria and Hillary’s goal of regime change, removing the secular Assad, will bring utter death and destruction to the country, creating yet another vacuum for terrorists and extremists to fill. Religious and ethnic minorities will be slaughtered. Engaging Russia could lead to further escalation since Putin already feels threatened by NATO expansion along his border.
That is a huge amount of daylight between the candidates here, particularly since the risk of nuclear war becomes non-zero once we start down the path Clinton has laid out. Trump is calling for detente, Clinton for war.
Thanks to an ‘intelligent design’ (……‘clever design’ is more apt….) based on rampant social engineering, Americans are being offered the illusion of choice.
Hillary Clinton is the optimal outcome desired by an elite and extremely powerful minority with ‘interests’ to safeguard. However, Hillary Clinton is in no way whatsoever, the optimal solution for your average American with ‘livelihoods’ to protect.
This doesn’t negate the fact that Trump, the predetermined ‘crisis of the now’ is sub-optimal as well.
Americans can accept this age-old ‘madness’ and cooperate by ‘choosing’ Trump or Clinton with the same age-old result. Or, they can make a difference.
Americans can instead make a dignified choice between Jill Stein of the Green Party and Gary Johnson of the Libertarian Party. By opting for either Stein or Johnson, they are running the show, not just for a change, but for change, and not just in their pockets. It is by doing this that Americans will create a more promising future for themselves.
In fine fettle this morning, I see…
Was tempted not to read any farther, as your opening line indicates you have some kind of bug up you’re a$$ that you want to make me responsible for – further reading confirms that. But, sorry, not going to wither in your presence and roll over on my back to signal my capitulation.
You think Trump is challenging the status quo? Why, because he has no filter? The man can’t open his mouth without lying, and I don’t regard that as proof that he is challenging anything, except our ability to take him seriously.
Jesus, what is the deal with all the scare quotes? For what it’s worth, I would have preferred that the DNC and Democratic overseers hadn’t fked around with the primary process, and brought all its efforts to bear on making sure Clinton was the last person standing, with her foot planted firmly on Sanders’ chest, but I couldn’t do a whole lot about that, other than cast my vote for Sanders in the primary. Sanders v. Trump would not, in my opinion, be a choice between two sides of the same coin.
Corporate overlords notwithstanding, you seem to forget that the media’s main goal in life is to stoke the fires of scandal and set up steel cage death matches between the parties in order to make sure they capture as many eyeballs as possible on their crappy products – it’s been suggested that that’s why they are still all over Trump, even though it is increasingly clear that he’s not going to win: they don’t want people to turn off the TV or stop reading. So, I don’t think we have credible reasons to expect that if Clinton is elected, that it’s going to be some kind of love-fest with the media for the next 4 years.
I have no idea what this means. The major-party candidates before me do not represent any kind of opportunity for positive change, and I do not see a Trump win as jump-starting the kinds of changes to the Democratic Party that it needs. Time and again, the party has shown that it is more interested in maintaining whatever structure ensures it will continue to benefit those who are part of its power base, ensuring that it will continue to be terminally bad at serving the needs of the electorate.
Have you even followed the wikileaks storylines?
Trump is a “pied piper” candidate and the only candidate that HRC can beat in a general election. The media needs to harp on every horrible thing Trump has said because HRC or WJC have said things as bad or have actually done things that are worse than Trump on the same topic. The media also released and replayed Trump’s hot mic moment ONE HOUR after the first wikileaks batch of Podesta e-mails.
The DNC feeds stories to the NYT and WAPO who in turn are in control of MSNBC and CNN. If Clinton goes down then Kaine is in place to carry on the Neo-Liberal and Neo-Con assault on the world. Kaine is just as bad or worse the Clinton on every issue.
Trump is a terrible person but he has effectively destroyed the Republican party. If he beats HRC then the Clinton dynasty is mortally wounded. There are plenty of Clinton acolytes in government but with out HRC in office they will eventually be forced from their positions by Trump and whoever takes over the DNC after a Clinton loss.
Destroyed the GOP? How so? They will have at most a one seat minority in the Senate with a very favorable map in 2018. They will be the dominant force in 35 states, run local governments, and still control the House. All this despite being a Southern rump party.
I’ll add the GOP has been destroyed by “the party of no,” the teabaggers, Ted Cruz, government shutdowns, not voting on justices (there are still just eight), McConnell, Boehner, etc.
The only thing that has destroyed the GOP is seemingly good Democrats.(2006, 2008, and a little in 2012.). When the Democratic Party becomes Team Blue, the GOP does pretty well.
First, a bit of housekeeping. As I’m sure you are aware, “scare” quotes are also referred to as “sneer” quotes. When not a direct quotation, you may assume that my use of quotation marks is sneering. Google it.
Wrt your first comment, this often repeated contention is infuriating:
Here’s the thing – if any other Republican was running against her, I think Clinton would be fighting for her political life right about now, but as long as Trump is out there making a fool of himself and grabbing all the media attention, any of this normally damaging-to-Clinton stuff is essentially going to keep being as much of a non-story as possible without the media being accused of ignoring it altogether.
As if, with a different republican candidate, you would know how heinous and destructive a creature clinton is but, because Trump sucks up all the media oxygen (and because “eyeballs”), you don’t. You really need to learn to make the distinction between “news” and propaganda. It’s important, and it will not be done for you.
Wrt your response to my comment, this election is not about reformation of the democrat party. It is “irredeemable.” It deserves nothing more than to dry up and blow away, and america would be the better for it.
For decades this country has been a force for self-aggrandizing murder and mayhem. This cannot be dumped on Trump, whatever his personal flaws, and despite the media attention he attracts. It is the fault of career politicians like clinton, who have parleyed their positions into personal “prestige” (sneer) and personal financial gain while professing their “concern” for humanity.
If one does not see this, it’s because one has conjured up a reason not to look. It’s what I meant when I used the word “equivocating.”
And yes, Anne, Trump *is* challenging the status quo because he has been the only one with the stones to state openly the blindingly obvious: ObamaCare is nothing but a giant train wreck; Hilary’s favorite trade deals have impoverished American workers; nation-building has cost trillions with zero benefit; the Fed is just blowing one giant bubble after another; we should be talking with our biggest rivals, not simply provoking them to nuclear war; and unpunished law-breaking by the nation’s leaders in a rigged judicial system threatens the very foundations of our country.
I do not care one teeny tiny little bit whether he made vulgar comments because I know his comments on each of the above are much more important to the life, health, and economic future of me and my country.
The nature of political contests is oppositional, and I find it hard to imagine that if some other Republican had gotten the nomination, that he or she wouldn’t be saying more or less the same things Trump is saying.
It takes no stones at all for Trump to declare the ACA a disaster – his fellow Republicans have been trying to repeal it since Obama signed it into law, so what is so anti-status quo about Trump being the latest in a long line of loudmouths to bellow out his invective against it?
I don’t disagree with you that there is some godawful policy threatening to make life even worse for a lot of people, I just don’t see Trump as being as instrumental in reversing that trend as others do. I also don’t see Clinton as being instrumental in reversing it, either – I think both of them are horrible.
As for Trump’s vulgarity, that isn’t what ought to bother people; it’s his overall attitude toward women, his objectification of them, his demeaning of them to bolster his own ego. He’s said women should be punished for having abortions, he’s taken on a running mate who led the fight to defund Planned Parenthood, signed a bill requiring funerals be held for miscarried and aborted fetuses.
Please don’t think this means I’m in Hillary’s corner – I’m not. It’s like having a choice between a sharp stick in the eye or having one’s fingernails pulled out. No choice at all.
The thing is the media actually has a history of EXACTLY that type of behavior. Covering up W’s telecom spying for a long period of time etc.. I realize he’s an R and Clinton is a D. I don’t actually think the media is liberal though or even strongly in the Dem camp.
“The media’s corporate owners and their corporate colleagues in the MIC and on wall street have invested millions in her, and they expect a return.”
I think they’d get quite a good return by covering her impeachment. More people hate her than tolerate her and impeachment hearings will get a lot better ratings than covering her 138,456,934 point bore-a-thon plan to revamp Obamacare.
They did the same with Trump – cover his every word at the expense of the other republican drones because as Les Moonves IIRC admitted, it may be bad for the country but it’s great for ratings. Now they’re all trying to tear him down after boosting him up.
It’s a tried and true moneymaker – if Clinton gets in simply rinse/repeat.
Yea um I’d think the citizens of the planet were depending on me if Trump showed he had a clue, a single clue, about the environmental crisis. Failing that, no …..
Of all the things the citizens on the planet are depending on us for why this? Especially as most peoples votes will not count anyway even if the machines aren’t hacked as they don’t live in contested parts of the country. Might as well argue they are depending on us to vote Jill Stein. At least her policies are likely to be good for the people of the world whereas Trumps coal and privatize the national parks not so much so (I would not put Clinton above this, I’m just saying that Trump is openly in favor of these things).
Why not the citizens of the world are relying on us to protest war or something, it makes as much the sense. The citizens of the world are relying on us to push for environmental policy. Our influence there as individuals is a great as for most of us in the voting booth, our influence there collectively is likely far greater. Is Trump Kool Aid the orange flavored one?
and clinton will be as ineffective as trump on the environment.
Trump is like the OJ white Bronco chase: grabbing ALL the media attention ALL the time.
They are all “Trump News Networks” now – it was getting to the point where it was clear that having to choose between breathless reporting on Hurricane Matthew and Hurricane Donald was the equivalent of Sophie’s Choice.
There is zero chance that the media “turns on Clinton” after the election. We no longer have a media that can afford to do such things, because their reporting is entirely dependent on the all-important “access” to government officials.
That’s what happens when circulation falls to nothing, revenues tank, and all foreign correspondents are terminated to cut costs.
Not at all. All Clinton has to do is release the transcripts of the speeches. I find it bizarre (not really) that no pundit has asked these surrogates to do just that if they want to prove the emails are fake.
The reason there “aren’t” other choices is because of those of you who refuse to accept them, to allow others to accept them, and to speak of them as equally valid choices to the legacy parties. Might I suggest you think very carefully about your own role in “reality creation” before claiming you’re “forced” to do anything.
Any sh-tshow will be cover for the omnibus bills of our nightmares.
Glenn Greenwald has summarized yesterday’s propagation of fake claims of fake emails. Timeline for the Newsweek/Sputnik erroneous claims starts at paragraph beginning “More insidious and subtle…”
Eichenwald is either totally stupidly shameless or scared shitless about what might emerge about him from this or another trove of emails. Is he on the payroll I wonder?
Thanx 4 must read Greenwald takedown of false claim. Clearly tptb are cooking up another Iraq war style sales job. Will the public buy this time? (Did they before?)
Gnuspeak week ?? They had to melt away to the hardly breathing status since they were obviously…oh your not cleared for that…never mind….
The Rice-Davies rule applies to the entire MSM, when questions of the Western Order come up.
Eichenwald is a fabulist.
Good lord, some of the shitty assumptions in here are infuriating.
Puts to bed once and for all that Libya was not about sieges, but about oil.
Good god. Let’s unpack this:
Peshmerga: Did anyone ask the Kurds if they liked being the paramilitary of the USA? Did anyone ask Turkey what they thought about this? Isn’t there a chance of blowback from both Turkey AND the Kurds if this goes badly?
Surprise to ISIL: Truly? Using the Kurds is going to surprise them into complete submission? How do you figure? They are Levantine, they have been fighting Kurds in one capacity or another for a long, long time.
FSA and the Syrian Regime: Holy hell. So you want to weaken ISIL and the Syrian regime simultaneously by strengthening other islamic extremists and extremist Kurds? WHY WOULD THIS BE A GOOD IDEA? WHY WOULD WE DO THIS?
Realpolitik is very alive and it’s embodied in this insane woman.
Silence of the Lambs-Refugees, EU and Syrian Energy Wars
The Taboo Reality
What is it that leads intelligent politicians such as Schäuble to babble nonsense about dangers of German inbreeding and the capabilities of third generation Turkish women? It’s not what the EU leaders say, but what the refuse to say, largely out of fear of US reprisal, that’s important here.
What Schäuble and Merkel, and others across the EU well know, but keep silent to their people about, is that since years the United States government, its CIA, State Department and Pentagon, along with key elements of the same in Great Britain, in France, in Erdogan’s Turkey, in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, have a Grand (or not-so-grand) Strategy. It involves a complete global reorganization of the control of most world oil and now natural gas.
The strategy is simple and goes back to the previously cited 1999 London speech by Dick Cheney as then-CEO of Halliburton, and even back to Cheney’s draft 1992 Defense Policy Guidance as US Defense Secretary, a strategy to insure no other nation or group of nations could in the future challenge America as sole superpower.
Central to this US strategy that Cheney seems to be the implementer for is not merely pre-emptive wars, but energy wars. They are energy wars, often masquerading as religious wars, to control–provide or deny–vital oil and increasingly, gas resources to the world’s nations. The Syria war initiated five years ago during the so-called Arab Spring– a series of US-steered regime changes that were promoted by State Secretary Hillary Clinton–is a central part of who will control the energy future, and therefore the economies, of the 28 nations of the European Union. That decision, in turn, would decide who dominates the world or not. For Cheney’s Washington friends it’s a life and death game.
The silence of the lambs in the novel of Thomas Harris describes the sound when the last lamb is led to slaughter and there is no more bleating. Silence in front of the truth is a form of communication just as destructive as the lies used to cover up that silence, like Wolfgang Schäuble’s recent silly remarks about inbreeding dangers and third-generation Turkish women.
Needed is one single truth-telling leader with moral courage, the type on occasion demonstrated by France’s President Charles de Gaulle, as when he refused to demonize the Soviet Union and took France out of NATO in 1966, rather than bow before Washington and throw France’s fate to incalculable US politicians.
http://journal-neo.org/2016/10/10/silence-of-the-lambs-refugees-eu-and-syrian-energy-wars/
“What is it that leads intelligent politicians such as Schäuble…”
I think I spot a false assumption in there somewhere.
Erdogan will love the bit about establishing a Kurdish state. Putin should send a thank you note to Hillary.
It’s the Kurdish PKK and their ideological allies which Turkey feels threatened by. Erdogan has a pretty good relationship with the Kurdistan Regional Government. With the Barzani clan / KDP Party at any rate. If Iraqi Kurdistan broke away from Iraq and formally declared independence they’d end up as a Turkish client-state.
Go further -What will the Kurd’ do after freeing someone else’s country when they don’t have one of their own? Did anyone in the Obama administration ask Sultan Erdogan if he wants the Kurds armed and equipped by the USA?
“FSA and the Syrian”
One it gets a direct conflict with Russia in case P****gate doesn’t do it for the borg queen. Second since Aleppo will fall before November 8th nominee Hilary Merkel will have the humanitarian crisis she wants to justify her open borders position and bring in a couple million democratic voters, ah “refugees”, which she will scatter across flyover country.
> WHY WOULD THIS BE A GOOD IDEA? WHY WOULD WE DO THIS?
I’m guessing this is a rhetorical question.
Most of the wishful thinking imo from the email chain involves delusions that Washington could somehow support FSA factions into forming a central command that would unite the opposition in a super moderate and super secular umbrella of democracy-creating awesomeness. The reality is that even now the jihadi-rebels can’t stop from killing each other even while they’re under threat from loyalist/regime advances.
Maybe that’s why Russia thought the US could hold it’s end up of the latest cession of hostilities agreement. Or maybe it was all a diplomatic ploy. I don’t know.
Umm, it’s not like the Kurds didn’t want or need the help. Both the Syrian Kurds and their Iraqi cousins were under attack by Islamic State. There was the battle of Kobani in Syria and the IS march on Erbil which was only stopped by PKK guerillas and American airstrikes. To be completely clear, this is 2014 we’re talking about. Moving forward with the liberation of Raqqa is a whole ‘nother can of worms.
Browsing through the latest Podesta email dump I found more confirmation that it appears to be a well-known fact within D.C. that KSA is up to its ears in funding jihadists, including the 9/11 crew.
This email is from Jack Quinn — a very deeply connected Washington Insider and Clinton-ite whose law firm is representing 9/11 families in their efforts to sue Saudi Arabia — to John Podesta. The email warns Podesta that the discovery process of the suit against Saudi Arabia ia going to dig up even more proof of their complicity (boldface added):
Nice to know Clinton has the kind of friends that are willing to help her manage public perceptions about the Clinton Foundation taking donations from the perpetrators of 9/11 — wouldn’t want things to get awkward, now, would we?
And when do THE disbarment proceedings begin ?? Only little lawyers get show trialled out of the practice of law…
In reading the emails, it is clear that relentlessly managing public perceptions of Bill and Hillary Clinton is the entire life work of many of these people.
Thanks for pointing to this.
It isn’t a bombshell. Joe Biden admitted in public that Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, and Turkey were complicit in launching a Sunni-Shia proxy war and arming/funding Al Qaeda and ISIS/ISIL/IS back in 2014. By the end of the year with their victories in Mosul. Palmyra, and Ramadi they declared war on Saudi Arabia and started to probe the border which climaxed with the assassination of the Saudi general in charge of border defenses.
Personally, I thought at the time that Biden was specifically sent out by the administration to officially leak what most people who were following the Syrian Civil War already suspected. In that specific case the email is a genuine article. But there isn’t much, if anything new, to learn from it either.
Podesta will expose Rowell. It consumes a considerable amount of his time. No matter how one looks at it, it’s frightening as WikiLeaks noted. Either the former and likely future White House Chief of Staff has revealed the existence of alien visitors or he’s delusional and can’t take a hint when the Air Force says there are no aliens.
I can’t emphasis enough that I now blame Podesta for breaking up Blink 182. If you don’t care about pop punk rock of the 1990s/2000s that probably doesn’t matter to you.
I care.
Biden is a Russian plant.
Biden is some kind of plant. How about “Delaware creeper”?
That sounds more like Bill. Biden is more of a Delaware Please Don’t forget Me Not.
Hillary Clinton Privately Pitched Corporations on “Really Low” Tax Rate for Money Stashed Abroad
Jon Schwarz
Oct. 10 2016, 6:17 p.m.
In public, top Hillary Clinton surrogate Neera Tanden said at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia that there’s no need to cut the federal corporate tax rate from its current 35 percent.
But in private, Clinton says something quite different to corporations and trade groups.
An 80-page report compiled by Clinton’s own campaign of potentially damaging remarks she made behind closed doors was published by Wikileaks on Friday. It includes extensive comments on tax policy.
During an October 13, 2014, speech to the Council of Insurance Agents and Brokers, Clinton told the audience that “A number of business leaders have been talking to my husband and me about an idea that would allow the repatriation of the couple trillion dollars that are out there. And you would get a lower rate — a really low rate — if you were willing to invest a percentage in an infrastructure bank.”
American multinational corporations are currently stashing a staggering $2.4 trillion in profits — about 14 percent of the size of the entire U.S. economy — overseas. Multinationals are required by U.S. law to pay the statutory 35 percent tax on profits they earn anywhere on earth, but the tax is not assessed until the profits are brought back to the U.S.
This has allowed Corporate America to essentially hold U.S. tax revenue hostage, refusing to pay its taxes until Americans become so desperate that they will cut a deal giving multinationals a special new tax rate.
https://theintercept.com/2016/10/10/hillary-clinton-privately-pitched-corporations-on-really-low-tax-rate-for-money-stashed-abroad/
and she was the architect at the State Dept to set up “Free Trade” agreements with a number of money laundry / tax evasion centers, like Panama and Singapore (Where Clinton Foundation associates do a lot of banking).
There were a few commenters at end of article that really nailed it…especially this one:
Oct. 11 2016, 1:27 a.m.
This is nothing more than a bunch of successful crooks getting together and using their monetarily gained power to ensure their continued success. They have gained political power by using their wealth to game the system. Now that they are inside the system they can continue to manipulate it to their financial and power ends. This type of skulduggery has been going on since man invented money. I am surprised that so called modern folks cannot see history when it slaps them in the face!
↪ Reply
barabbas ↪ William W Haywood
Oct. 11 2016, 3:46 a.m.
R.I.C.O.
passes available at extra cost.
Patriot Act would be good in this case. All that cash should be used for the war effort. U.S Gov. should just seize all of it. If there are any complaints, call them terrorist supporters and charge the CEOs as such. If you want to be an Empire, at least act like an Emperor.
RE Berlin’s War in Gentrification. Not so sure about this. Happened to stay in Hansaviertel (kinda ugly not very trendy part of Berlin) this summer for short 3 month gig and noticed luxury towers going up near river.
Blatant Lie: AP “Fact Checks” Directly Contradict AP’s Own Reporting on Syria
Remember when they announced the Democratic primary victor before California voting even started? Are we really surprised that AP is still in the tank? Imagine if we did not have the internet to document these sorts of things.
Re Syria/Stockman/the leaked emails…note that Clinton explicitly said that the Libya intervention was designed to intimidate Assad and that the never dropped goal of Assad’s removal was designed to reassure Israel who opposed our gestures toward Iran. She is quite open that we are generating chaos for the benefit of Israel. Presumably this is a “private” as opposed to a “public” position.
Re: Stockman
If anything, the situation is worse than Stockman describes.
How many Americans are aware that Washington is willing to risk nuclear war in order to oust Assad? How many of them would think that’s a good idea?
We are in a situation in which none of these policies are subject to debate in congress. I would really like to hear our representatives make the case that risking incineration in order to remove Assad and show the Russians whose in charge is in my interest.
Good stuff except he ignores the worst drought in Syria in 900 years.
Note7 flames out (literally):
This design debacle is reminiscent of the de Havilland Comet midair crack-ups (due to airframe fatigue) that cost Britain its early lead in commercial passenger jets.
An obvious design flaw in the Comet was square windows, which concentrated stress at the corners.
Half a century on, Samsung and Apple battled over Apple’s design patent for the startling, non-obvious innovation of radiused corners on phones. /sarc
Meanwhile, iPhone6 “touch disease” seems to be related to failure of the touch sensor chip’s solder joints owing to flexing of the thin case, heating-cooling cycles, or the like.
Like rust, metal fatigue never sleeps. :-0
Actually, metal fatigue does sleep, and even when it’s awake, it can be sluggish. There is such a thing as a fatigue limit, below which flexing causes no failure, and even above that limit, the number of fatigue cycles and device lifetime can be predicted, at least in principle. IF fatigue failure really was responsible for the Note7, I would dearly like to know how they got it so wrong. You’d think that by now metallurgical engineering would be pretty well-developed.
But your iPhone patent example raises the question of whether this was actually patent trolling, or a sign of the crapification of what should be obvious practice. I’ve known engineers who, when confronted with some area of personal unfamiliarity, dismiss diligent investigation into such areas as reinventing the wheel, arguing that the principles are old and well-known. Trouble is, not to them.
The problem with all the battery exploding cases is cooling, or lack thereof. With all lithium batteries, if the battery reaches a certain temperature, the case begins to melt and eventually releases a gas that explodes in presence of oxygen. There are a billion different lithium batteries, like sulfur dioxide – carbon bonded lithium, or thionyl chloride, etc. Most likely, Samsung went with a cheaper chemical makeup that allowed quick recharging but did not take into account high environmental temperatures during charging (which seems to be when they explode).
This is the price they pay trying to make every phone as thin as possible…which is rather amusing, because I doubt anyone at this point cares if their phone is 3mm thick or 4mm thick.
Funny that metal fatigue would be the case of the iPhone touch failures. To give Apple some credit, I doubt FEA would have found the problem since the cycles & loading conditions are so low for phones (as compared to cars or any machine with lots of dynamic components). Most likely it is a quality issue (not enough weld, welder at too low or high of a temperature, impurities found in welding compound,etc).
It is astonishing to see the tree of potential errors in a manufacturing process. I recall one that had, at the first level, 105 branches and at the last level 6000 possible failure modes (this was for oxygen tank regulators in jet propulsion systems). Turns out the problem was eventually linked to an insufficiently powerful cooling pump in the factory, so it shows that even the best designed components can have failures due to the least likely of suspects.
Not every metal has such a limit, indeed essentially it is only ferrous metals that exhibit such. Aluminum in particular does not have that behavior. It will eventually crack and fail regardless how small the flex.
Compared to good old SnPb, lead-free solders tend to have inferior mechanical properties, are touchier to process, and have problems of their own (in particular, tin whiskers never sleep). But you’re supposed to recycle your phone every two years, anyway (For Industry!).
Skillful dissection of CIA bullshit by Alexander Mercouris of the Center for Study of the Obvious. The Wurlitzer shows us that Hillary is CIA’s choice as a loyal, compromised, and easily-ruined cadre – the Queen of Mena. Trump is proving resilient to ratfucks (he’s weathered more blatant setups than ‘the 47%’). CIA’s preference is to keep both candidates on their indifference curve so they don’t have to steal the election as in 2000 (Florida/Supreme Court) or 2004 (Ohio). So the focus is on making sure a President Trump cannot resist CIA diktat as did JFK, Carter, or even the weakling Obama. CIA has been infiltrating the Trump campaign since before the GOP nomination. Manafort has passed the baton to traditional CIA mobster cutouts who can control Trump in office or abort his candidacy with sleaze. That’s merely a backup to the institutional ‘focal points’ that ensure he’ll be a puppet in office. And of course if he’s too insubordinate CIA will kill him like a ugly JFK.
This has been reason 9,475,037,859,357 to not give a shit.
The business of generating isotopes for PET scans had a pre-tax profit margin of 73-85%, spun through Charity Hospital St. Teresa. Webb-site investigates the twisted trail of off-shore companies and accounts used to high beneficial relationships between charity directors and highly profitable monopoly suppliers. I mention this case as it models just one interest of US private equity firms in stripping tax efficient profits from operations like formerly Roman Catholic Charity) non-profit tax status Caritas Hospital in Boston, reported early this month on NC Links.
Hmmmm…
Catholic hospital in San Francisco was recently purchased by PE guys. http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2015/12/daughers-charity-blue-mountain-kamala-harris.html
Rumor has it the pillaging has begun.
: “Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton had sex with minors with Jeffrey Epstein.”
That is a credible statement, with evidence which must be investigated.
Epstein is a convicted child molester. Epstein uses evidence of these crimes to control powerful people. Both Donald Trump and Bill Clinton control empires of a billion dollars apiece.
If you don’t wanna know, you will not follow up on this. If you do, let me say this. Bernie supporters are about half of the Democratic Party, about 25 in 100 voters. Now, the Republicans and Democrats have about 1/3 the vote each, about 33 in 100 voters.
If each Bernie voter convinces one person to vote, or who is voting anti-Clinton or anti-Trump, to vote Green, Jill Stein will win in a landslide. She is a lousy politician. But she is not utterly corrupt.
That’s it. That’s the statement I’m broadcasting. I preach agency and I think this is the time.
Jill Stein: “…she is a lousy politician…”
Arguably the first reason to vote for her.
More importantly: her platform, priorities, and agenda. Here’s a late-September 2016 interview from Living On Earth:
http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=16-P13-00040&segmentID=1
A vote for Stein is a vote for Stein- and a signal and message for the direction the ‘leaders’ should follow.
Vote for the lousy politician, it’s important!
Perfect pitch for a legitimacy crisis.
I lived on a small Pacific island nation for a while, and one of the local politicians ran with the following official campaign slogan:
“Mi stealem smol!”
Which translates as:
“I will only steal a little bit”.
He won.
Id rather have a politician that’s lousy at making good things happen rather than a skilled politician who makes godawful things happen like Clinton.
“She is a lousy politician.” Well that’s what I HEARD. From experts.
Well, the experts are right, for once. Where the experts are… well, perhaps not “wrong” so much as “blinkered”, is in believing that political competency is Holy and Righteous and Good. Fortunately, there are enough neoliberal slimeballs for President Stein to call in on contract in the rare case skulduggery becomes necessary.
Agreed.
I’ve said it before that I think it will be considerably easier for Jill Stein and the Greens to learn governance and presidential duties than it will be for Hillary Clinton and the Democrat elites to learn ethics – Hillary keeps proving that she only knows corruption over and over (and over!) again.
And although some see this as a debatable point, in my mind there is really nothing to lose voting Green.
Also regarding the “lousy politician” comment:
This may come as a surprise, but there have been successful elected Greens. Here is a story about Gayle McLoughlin (Green mayor and later City Council member). From this account it seems like there are some successes under her tenure. Granted its only one data point, but at least the track record of elected Green politicians are progressive and modestly successful (and counters the claim that they only run presidential candidates once every four years!)
Judge for yourself
Gayle McLoughlin
Correct link for Wall Street Executive Telling Friend How Amazing…
http://www.theonion.com/article/wall-street-executive-telling-friend-how-amazing-i-54150
Buffett Just Released His Own Tax Data to Hammer Trump
Berkshire chairman says he never used tax carryforward
Trump would have no legal problem sharing return, Buffett says
Billionaire Warren Buffett, who supports Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, released information from his personal taxes and challenged Republican Donald Trump to do the same.
“I have been audited by the IRS multiple times and am currently being audited,” Buffett said in a statement Monday, reporting adjusted gross income of $11.6 million on his 2015 return and deductions of $5.5 million. “I have no problem in releasing my tax information while under audit. Neither would Mr. Trump –- at least he would have no legal problem.”
The remarks escalate the Berkshire Hathaway Inc. chairman’s clash with Trump, who has rebuffed calls to release his returns, citing an audit.
http://www.bloomberg.com//news/articles/2016-10-10/buffett-challenges-trump-on-taxes-discloses-2015-return-data
but has Trump ever been bailed out by government?……hmmm…thus the support for HRC..protecting interests.
boy that gross seems low…but then again you can’t question the mascot of exceptionalism.
Isn’t Berkshire Hathaway the largest shareholder of Wells Fargo. Behind every great fortune…
And to think Tom Hanks likely made more last year and didn’t have to set up a system to rip off customers to do it
>boy that gross seems low
Seriously, you can’t get invited to a half-decent party with that pathetic income – barely a Masters Of Cleveland let alone a Master’s Of The Universe shindig.
But I’m sure it’s all on the up-and-up.
Maybe he’s just slumming it?…
Members of Congress Demand Investigation Into Predatory Practices at Warren Buffett’s Clayton Homes
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/?s=Warren+Buffett
Like Ferlinghetti said…..
“Pity the nation whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money
and sleeps the sleep of the too well fed.
Pity the nation — oh, pity the people who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.”
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Larry Ferlin is a mega-Millionaire. He knows his sheep.
He sold books not bad paper. One opens your mind, the other can make you lose it.
Captain free float is too funny…with that phony shucks thing and his daddys bear hug of those strapping black booters during world war 2 & that gen re thingee in connecticut where he decided to take down aig and the economy for spite…oh…you didn’t read that chapter of the history book…its tucked away in the same place we get fed value investing about the great mr Graham and his mac grow hill first edition in 1934…without mentioning graham (of &newman) was using these processes of “value investing” during the roaring twenties and conveniently “scrubs” those “losses” by rebooting his numbers “after” the great crash…
Captain free float has been using tax loss carry forwards inside berk hath…take a look at his blue chip stamps corporation…he bought dying companies with somewhat underwater pensions to take the responsibilities of keeping the doors open off the hands of incompetent third generationers who didnt really care about what great grand papa built with his sweat, toil, manipulation and machinations…and couldn’t be bothered actually paying attention to that “free float” capital inside the pensions that warren and charlie “redeployed”…
Warren loves his insurance comp-a-knees…working with govmint and usually ex military…if one asked and scratched below the surface…not that any state insurance investigators will actually do this…but one “might” find…that all these folks with personal injury issues had claims regularly reduced due to claims by berk hath insur co…that their insured “probably” were injured during their military service and therefore the injury payment is “mitigated” by the prior “unclaimed” injury…
Yup…that honest abe…he inspires all these wonderful people….thankfully captain free float and grumpy munger will not be breathing our air that much longer…and his house of finance will melt away like samuel insull…no one remembers engulf and devour anymore…
Oh…& dont mention anything about san francisco
What about San Francisco? I’m here to learn.
rich
This is because he has been giving away so much of his shares he can’t have that much of an AGI.
Hard to take home anything when you are giving it all away before you pass. Buffet doesn’t even take his salary from BH anymore.
From left pocket to right pocket?
Warren Buffett, the billionaire chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc, has donated another roughly $2.86 billion of his holdings in the company’s stock to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and four family charities, as part of his plan to give away nearly his entire fortune.
The donations were made on Wednesday, and brought Buffett’s total contributions to the charities to more than $24.3 billion since 2006.
Also receiving donations were the Susan Thompson Buffett Foundation, named for Buffett’s late first wife, and the Howard G. Buffett, Sherwood and NoVo Foundations, respectively overseen by his children Howard, Susan and Peter.
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-buffett-charities-idUSKCN0ZU2IH
Hah, ‘charities’. Riiiiiight.
What a strange man he is. Lines his own pockets from predatory lending to minorities, selling shoddily built manufactured homes, owning shares in banks that bring down the world economy and defraud their own customers. Then donates the money to charity. I cant’ even.
Re: article on Crash: How Computers are setting us up for disaster.
Excellent interview with Cathy O’Neil the author of Weapons of Math Destruction: how Big Data increases inequality and threatens Democracy – all about the misuse, and need to regulate, algorythims. https://www.c-span.org/video/?414440-1/cathy-oneil-discusses-weapons-math-destruction
Just watched “2001, a Space Odyssey” again, with great pleasure. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Dave.”
Whoever (maybe besides Asimov) said conscious machines must obey bags of mostly water?
Stop, Dave.
Will you stop, Dave.
I’m afraid, Dave.
Thank you for that link. I have a mathematician son who is planning to bail out of acadamia (because he is so sick of what it has become) this year to go into data mining. He needs to see this……
He might also be interested in this:
‘Big data’ could mean big problems for people’s healthcare privacy
One little problem the article “Crash” left out is the extent to which modern air frames require a complex control interface to make them flyable. I heard the B-2 air frame was almost unflyable without fly-by-wire or the addition of a pile of heavy control hardware — which would make the plane too heavy and cut down on its payloads capacity. I don’t know how well an AirBus flies without its control interface but it’s a good question to ask. Even in a situation where fly-by-wire isn’t strictly necessary the cost and weight savings it offers over older hardware control systems, and its higher overall fault tolerance make strong economic arguments for replacing analog control systems with fly-by-wire.
When fly-by-wire fails pilots are unaccustomed — often untrained — to fly the air frame without fly-by-wire. The cause of failure can be very complex to diagnose compared with diagnosing the relatively more discrete and more easily understood failures of analog control systems. A pilot can mentally match performance to control system elements. Think about how much easier it was to mentally diagnose and repair an electrical failure in you car before the addition of the computer under your dash.
The fly-by-wire may have only a limited or no analog control surface to smooth over the uncontrolled performance of the air frame when the fly-by-wire fails. The fish-tailing described in the article is a common trait of air frames called the “Dutch Roll”. The “Dutch Roll” is such a common feature of air frames that systems engineers automatically add a Dutch Roll factor to their controller transfer function. At least that’s what one of my professors did who often consulted on controller design in the aerospace industry back in the old days when I studied (but never practiced) system control design.
To capture the instability of modern aircraft flight surfaces in the air, I might suggest as an analogy driving on bald tires on slick roads, where a robot might be able to keep the car moving in the right direction at a higher speed of travel and lower rate of catastrophic failure than might a human, due to its reaction times and its tuned feedback loops (a fair analogy for “muscle memory”). When the prosthetic assistance of auto-compensation is no longer available, and one finds themselves piloting a vehicle that is difficult or impossible to stably pilot without said assistance at the speed said vehicle is moving, it’s helpful to have taken an advanced driver ed course. With 200 souls sitting behind you, it should be bloody well mandatory.
As to A320 flight performance without intermediary control, I understand it’s on par with any similarly-sized seacraft.
The B-2 may be almost unflyable, but the F-117 is literally unflyable without software making constant micro-adjustments. It was designed to maximize radar deflection above all else, and so is incredibly unaerodynamic.
SkyNet provides a good example of how swell computer help can get.
Wow! I just finished writing a paraphrase of the comment that went in through moderation. Thanks Yves for saving my original comment.
From NYT: Women React…
What is with this nonsense of “shielding” kids? Sounds awfully familiar to this “safe space” and “play dates” nonsense. If your children are interested, help them understand it. Teach them, show them the reality and let them experience it. This politicizing of “Oh my god, but what will the children think!?” is a bunch of garbage. The children [see millennials] are going to be pissed that people were so sycophantically obsessed and clueless that they continued to elect feckless leaders that continued to ruin their lives and kill innocent people in a country far, far away, all the while telling them that they cannot ask for too much.
Those kids will grow up, get inspired in a candidate who (finally) represents a positive step for their government, only to be told that they are dumb, stupid, incapable, racist, sexist, deplorable, basement dwellers, by everyone else!
I also cannot stand that this tapes discussion acts as if females have no sexual agency.
“Think of the children” has been used for everything from Jim Crow to marijuana prohibition. It’s a card played over and over again for cynical purposes.
Don’t forget ‘school bonds’ …… That’s always good for a tear jerker …. !!
Funnily enough I think the Trump tape could be a learning experience for children. As in this is inappropriate and disrespectful to women, along with no means no and not being able to say no is also no for boys, and if you have so little respect for yourself that you allow some asshole to kiss you because he is rich as you can see they will have none for you because you might be pretty.
But then I think you would probably need to be in kindergarten to find Trump’s remarks shocking considering what kids are exposed to in media and advertising.
IOW that woman is putting it on.
Ms. Trafton says that her daughter is interested in politics but needs to be protected from the kind where anything controversial exists, like bad words, misdeeds and such. The MSM news her daughter is supposed to be protected from is already the worst kind of pablum with a constant push to respect all things corporate undertone.
Meanwhile, in real life bad things are certain to happen. Being unprepared creates a victim waiting to happen.
This comes from watching Barbie movies and thinking they are documentaries.
Just a thought for an impressionable but civics minded precocious childs teaching moment:
First show her some emergency medical triage photos in Syria, the “words” wont seem so bad!
Uhh. Some of the nastiest hardcore porn is just one wrong click or tap away in this worry. I wouldn’t be surprised to see the innocent ‘pussy cat’ leading to something children probably shouldn’t see
Some of the nastiest hardcore porn is just one wrong click or tap away in this worry
That could be an issue with ubiquitous access to the internet as the virtual babysitter?
OTOH, I drill back to my early childhood, I have pretty good recall of it. My reflection is that before puberty my reaction to porn would be “ohhh, that is gross! where are the Tom&Jerry Cartoons?”
At puberty transition, and my ill-fated week as a introductory Boy Scout in 6th grade, which coincided with a weekend “paper drive” -(sitting in a cube ruck and hopping out to collect newspapers/magazines, WTF am I doing this for?) we picked-up the mother load of Playboy and the like magazines.. Yeah…. so naked women, wow!
.. wait a sec, there are cars!!! A De Tomaso Pantera whaaaaoooh. A Bizzarrini Strada aaaahhhh, where the heck are these spaceships from?????
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! NO
Dad, I want to go to the carshow!! OK ALREADY!?!?
H/T Bart Simpson
Oh yeah, all my friends were atwitter before the second debate, sharing their extensive preparations to protect Junior from getting smacked on the eardrums by a stray Pussy.
Hey OIF
When do you punch out? we should have an adult beverage in the loop sometime before you move
Probably March-April next year, but certainly not before. I would be up for a beer or two sometime in the new year. It would be great if Yves is up for a meet-up in Chi-town too.
..sometime in the new year
that would work fine w/ my schedule. No shortage of convenient venues
..meet-up in Chi-town
Indeed, no doubt some Chicago Area folk would get together.
O and O: Or a rye whiskey.
Just for the sheer-shock-of-recognition. I’m near the Hop Leaf, Foster and Clark.
I spent too many years in Hyde Park to go there voluntarily.
Who’s the organizer?
You are!
Hop Leaf, that brings back good memories. Haven’t been in a very long time though. Right across from Reza’s is Pars, they sell my favorite aged earl grey. Hyde Park is no longer such a desert, if you haven’t tried it you should visit The Promontory. Hyde Park is changing and getting to be too much of a Lincoln Park South. I suppose it is done to cheer up all these depressed Hahvahd rejects at UChicago :) Of course, it also handsomely profits the “non-profit” UChicago by developing their extensive RE holdings with our property-tax-dollar-funded TIFs. Its veritable Urban Renewal Part Deux down here…
I remember discussion of protecting us kids from headlines in the sixties, “Jack Ruby, Owner of Dallas Strip Club …”
It’s been about distraction and division for decades:
It has occurred to me that The Matrix is really an allegorical tale about the Bernaysian propaganda world we inhabit.
There is no pill….
Mmm,
John Carpenter circa 1988
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0096256/
They Live
Budget: $4,000,000 (estimated)
Gross:
$13,008,928 (USA)
Waaaay ahead of its time, produced on the catering budget of The Matrix
A drifter discovers a pair of sunglasses that allow him to wake up to the fact that aliens have taken over the Earth.
Bearded Man: The poor and the underclass are growing. Racial justice and human rights are non-existent. They have created a repressive society and we are their unwitting accomplices.
Bearded Man: They are dismantling the sleeping middle class. More and more people are becoming poor. We are their cattle. We are being bred for slavery.
Drifter: What’s wrong with having it good for a change? Now they’re gonna let us have it good if we just help ’em. They’re gonna leave us alone, let us make some money. You can have a little taste of that good life too. Now, I know you want it. Hell, everybody does.
Frank: You’d do it to your own kind.
Drifter: What’s the threat? We all sell out every day, might as well be on the winning team.
Hold on, I agree with Ms. Trafton. I’ve long thought it’s improper for Afghanis and Yemenis to expose their young children to such unsightly things as drone bombings. No wonder their culture is so violent.
Bad link — How the owners of Fidelity get richer at everyday investors’ expense Reuters (resilc)
I think this is the correct link:
http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-fidelity-family/
It is known.
the dothraki are a pastiche of the mongols
McShame is likely to win another Senate term, because his D party opponent is just toeing the party line:
Coke vs Pepsi … at this point, what difference does it make?
In AZ at the moment. Sheriff Joe seems to be running on his no kill animal shelter. A vote against Arpaio is a vote against puppies and kitties.
Erdogan tells Iraq PM to ‘know his limits’ [Reuters]
The troops will be home before the leaves fall.
…And then eleanors dream melted away into the dustbins of history as tired old men raised their sabers in a vain attempt to relive a past that never was and the children once again had to cry at night in hunger…
RE: ‘Space Brain’: Mars Explorers May Risk Neural Damage, Study Finds NBC (David L)
Yes, space is extremely dangerous, especially the way we are trying to explore it.
We will never get to Mars unless we have a paradigm shift in our thinking about how we “do” exploration. We are still stuck in the Lewis and Clark model where we send a few people out as explorers. But Lewis and Clark were able to use the environment to survive. We can’t do that in space.
Instead we should be thinking about building villages in space, i.e., building our environment as we go. We have the technology to farm in space, we have the technology to give ourselves artificial gravity in space, and we have the technology to protect ourselves from harmful radiation in space. None of this technology works for small groups of explorers (too cost prohibitive) but they would certainly work for colonies.
It isn’t the dangers of space that is slowing down exploration, it is the way we still think about doing exploration.
We would pretty much straight up need fusion power to get close to the amount of energy necessary to do that.
FORWARD into the MARTIAN DITCH ..er.. CHASM ..er.. CANAL !!
It’s part of the space race mania. Obama best achievement is helping NASA escape this nonsense. Even now, Mars is the target because planets come next after the moon despite. Fortunately cooler heads exist at NASA and the other space agencies, but they have to think about it.
Also, I believe there is an unspoken perception that Americans own Mars since NASA and the Soviet Space Agency sort of split Mars and Venus. We need to plant our flag to prove it’s ours.
I think, just maybe, we should try to live on the moon before tackling Mars. You know, learn to walk before you run. All this talk, all these (ridiculous) movies about living on Mars, portrayed as some sort of immense achievement just fans the flames of the misinformation age even higher until someone gets killed. I feel very sorry for the group of astronauts that eventually gets picked for the Mars mission, because they will not be coming back and will most likely live 5 years in excruciating pain and depression as their bodies literally wither and die, both mentally and physically.
The sad truth: without intensive genetic modification or bionics, humans will never be a starfaring species. Earth will ALWAYS be a more suitable home than any other planet because we are ostensibly her children.
I think we should first conquer the Great Pacific garbage patch.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch
I’m sorry but I must disagree. If some of our obscenely wealthy want to travel to Mars I think that travel should be wholeheartedly encouraged and I hope they can take some of their top management with them. Of course it would also be OK if they went to colonize the Moon but Mars is a much more comforting destination. Venus would be a great place to send them if we can arrange some kind of agreement with the Russians. Also the surface of the Sun would be a good destination. I take umbrage at your suggestion they would need intensive genetic modifications or bionics before they travel — they are Masters-of-the-Universe after all.
The Marching Morons by C. M. Kornbluth
Actually — after a little more thought on the problem I believe we should be able to start launches sometime early next year. All it takes is some aggressive scheduling and little can do management driving their staff to excel.
ProPublica on the USAir-American merger:
You can’t make a banana republic omelette without breaking some Sherman Act eggs.
Thus has it always been?
I wonder how long will it take until the remaining airlines lobby Congress to deregulate all those pesky FAA rules. After all the market is self-regulating… even when airplanes fall out of the sky.
Bird and Fortune – Air Traffic Control Privatisation
And boy, oh, boy, has the crapification of American set in quickly. Friend of mine and his wife went to Hawaii over Spring Break. American plane was so old that the armrests still had ashtrays. (Kid you not.)
Service has degraded as the new entity replaces all the good American management with the dregs from Useless Air.
Re: Iceland and bankers
Too bad the US doesn’t have jails to throw bad bankers in.
Oh, wait…
I was disappointed the debate didn’t touch on banks, but not in the least surprised. Just ‘business as usual’ in this country.
‘Oh, look over there! A tape made 11 years ago. Let’s investigate that‘.
This election is the epitome of bad jokes.
Sadly, the punchline is even worse.
Yeah …I’m already feeling the bruises ….. presciently so !
Since friday, the 5 Vox-reading prog/fessionals on my fb (who truly are troubled by social injustice, and who would never explicitly endorse the meritocratic myth, but who do not understand political economy, and who all share Vox News to their timelines by way of ‘endor-/spreading news’) are falling over one another trying to win an apparent award in virtue-signaling. It’s bizarre. Meanwhile, any/all criticism of hillz is ignored, of course.
Which reminded me 1933 didn’t happen because H took power, but because the respectable classes decided look away from evil actions they felt they understood and/or could contain (and/or — of course — live with), when they were faced with a socioeconomic alternative that would’ve meant more fundamental changes to the way society was organized. (Briefly put, the mere prospect of economic fairness was more scary/offensive to them than were Hitler’s reactionary ideas.)
Now, the state we’re in today is organizationally/socio-economically very different, but what worries/sickens me is this conscious choice to look away and ignore bad behavior, and to drown it out by working oneself into a lather thinking about how bad the other side is.
Also similar (troll prophylactic: without drawing direct parallels) is the hubris of both ruling classes. Germany was the height of the civilised world, having formed a high-tech, enlightened culture that was clearly superior to the nations Mr Hilter would later seek to subject with support from the credentialed class. The actions of the empire (eg, Poland, Tanzania) were against far away people who were less civilised and had different, strange religions that could only be improved by healthy doses of the German world order.
But in the Acela corridor most of these similarities are unknown, and instead Hilter means solely the holocaust and Trump/Milosevic/Putin/Castro comparisons. It is their blindness to the true similarities and their emphasising of the differences that will lead them down the same path.
The following is an excerpt from a report by Paul Scheffer (Washington correspondent of the Berliner Tageblatt), written in april 1932, reprinted in FA, jan/feb ’12:
Now, arguably the US is “lucky” because a large portion of its population is struck by one or more diseases of affluence — food poisoning — and thus unlikely to get much of anything done. Also, for now at least, few seem to be giving up on their party affiliation yet (as happened in Germany). And more broadly, I don’t really see a third party happening, because of the way the electoral system works. So where is there room/opportunity for new organizational structures to grow?
Give it a month. These things flame out.
“Stopping Trump is a short-term solution. The long-term solution, and it will be more difficult, is fixing the educational system that has created so many people ignorant enough to vote for Trump.” Andy Borowitz.
“Educated” liberals are the stupidest, most narrow-minded and hateful people I know. Then again, they are most of the people I know so my sample may be biased. Be that as it may, that statement is barf-worthy on too many levels to count.
He’s quite serious about “fixing the educational system,” you know.
That is, “reform” it to inculcate ideological beliefs instead of critical thinking skills.
Ah the public and the private view of education reform…
No wonder K-12 schooling is compulsory!
The serfs must be properly indoctrinated to serve capital.
That’s why they make schoolchildren recite and perform a religious ceremony every single day. You know, the incantations/prayer to the piece of cloth on the end of a wooden stick.
Contrary to American mythology the colonies started out as a for-profit enterprise by the London Company and the Plymouth Company. They simply converted to a non-profit colonial government upon the bankruptcy of both companies.
Everything is going according to plan to bring back profitability! Which has gotta be America’s original sin… if there is such a thing. It isn’t a country as much as it is a business opportunity.
Considering you consistently refuse to engage with the mountain of evidence about the nature of government debt and fiat currency, I don’t think you’re in any position to be talking about critical thinking.
I fully admit to being a narrow minded liberal. I don’t like war mongering, corruption, lack of accountability, choosing the corporation over the people, laws for me but not for top, etc. Nor do I like excuses for not doing your job properly that come down to bull or “it’s hard”. And I don’t care if the person has a R or a D after their name. The last decade has been hard because what I find is that so much of what I consider being liberal is happily jettisoned for team or tribal cheerleading. So I am not only narrow minded I am cranky. Really really cranky.
“The last decade has been hard because what I find is that so much of what I consider being liberal is happily jettisoned for team or tribal cheerleading”
Yep.
……tribal ……
with nuclear tipped spears ….. powered by ICBM atlatls ….. or ‘manpads .. take your pick !!
really BIG ‘sigh’…….
At some point I will probably be unable to read anything written by the liberals I used to enjoy.
The idea that the education system made deplorables think in a way that they see as being in their own best interest is ridiculous. Personal relationships have always been vastly more important than whatever values are being offered in schools. That schools should be in the value programming business is wrong. To argue that people should be reeducated to properly follow the values of the state instead, of worrying about their own needs, truly is a deplorable statement.
I see you have gotten a D on “Acceptance of Your Proper Position in Life” so we’re going to have to hold you back. Try harder next year.
Being an immigrant who was given the “opportunity” to attend elite high school and college, most of my “betters” view me as a huge disappointment for “throwing it all away.” As you may know, recruiting and “educating” some of the immigrant cadres for the betterment of the Empire has been a part of its expansion strategy since the 1980’s. Most of my liberal friends blame my “service” in Iraq for screwing me up. I view it as a blessing and an eye-opener, though it certainly didn’t seem that way for a long while after. For my college International Relations curriculum I wrote many a paper arguing in favor of NATO expansion and foreign interventions, which at the time meant Kosovo (R2P as a term wasn’t coined yet). That’s a big reason why I loath the liberals’ faith in “education.” As it turns out, talking about such lofty ideals as R2P, and implementing them, are two different things. Then there are the underlying motivations behind them. I have no doubt that many people are idealists who sincerely believe that America is exceptional and does what it does selflessly and in the name of humanity. I have no such illusions, not anymore.
The scariest thing about Hillary and her fellow elites is that they believe their own bs. Her self righteousness is impermeable. Whatever mistakes she makes or other countries she wrecks, in her mind she had no choice.
So good for you in rejecting all that brainwashing, peer pressure. We are a great country in many ways and one has only to go out and see it to realize that. It’s our leadership class who constitute the true deplorables.
I think Cecil Rhodes got to “educating” the future leaders of Empire before we did.
Seconded
OIFVet, thanks. I too studied international relations in college (not an elite one, alas) where I was taught by distinguished professor John Spanier, himself a student of Kissinger’s at Harvard. To my disbelief, I found myself parroting his views on exams, arguing for increased US nuclear weapons programs (e.g. the Trident submarine, B-1, Euromissiles) to confront the (as it turned out rapidly fading) USSR. He must have seen through my cognitive dissonance and did not grade me well. Very fortunately I also learned from the distinguished William Woodruff, a British soldier in WW2 and novelist, who taught me to break free a bit of from my Amrican public school programming. He was a student of empire, and made it quite clear to all us American kids that the US was just as much an empire as Britain or any others before us, acted as one, and its behavior should be viewed in that light.
Just learned that Dr. Spanier died recently. Here’s his obit, should anyone be interested:
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/gainesville/obituary.aspx?n=john-winston-spanier&pid=181212704
Education should be about instilling the ability to think, and to seek out information, more than just parroting facts (or should I say “facts”).
Methinks we need a different sort of world for that sort of teaching to happen, one not dependent on depriving different groups of different skills in order to shape society. That’s the trouble with Enlightenment thinking: it presupposes, like so many other ideologies, that any person (or, more weakly, that a certain class of person) is fit to manage the affairs of any others, that that labor is a distraction from the “real work” of cogitation, and that values are more important than interests. Leave the thinkers in charge all the time and you wind up numb. Leave the cavillers and caterwaulers in charge and you wind up dumb. Leave the leaders in charge all the time and you wind up fodder.
Education, in practice is just institutionalized subordination, as the King of Prussia intended. But who’s going to stop thinking and researching all that to get up and feed the chickens? One two three not it
For all its problems I still want public education. No, more education is not a magical panacea that will get everyone a job, like liberals seem to think, but I’d still much rather live in a society where the majority of people are literate than one where they aren’t.
It use to be one of the few occasions where one could meet nearly every ethic group in a civic commons. until the church based (anti-)integration academy re-segregated large swaths of the white middle class.
The Southern Baptist Church and their ilk are the new version of Francis Bellamy’s movement.
Montessori? Okay, that I’ll take. Any system designed to create subordinate cogs can go expletive expletive expletive.
Thats about it. Imo education is the elaboration of the tools to understand what makes things tick, the Nature of things, and importantly, the ability to communicate.
The rest is pretty much self directed enlightenment over the course of the rest of your life
International relations? Treat people as you would wish to be treated… ohhh wait a sec, isnt that the same as domestic relations?
That the educational system has graduated so many liberals voting for Clinton is an indictment on educational industrial complex.
“Today, we go over dissecting a dead human who had donated his body for this purpose to the medical school. Hopefully, this will help you vote liberal candidates.”
I’ve seen that quote posted too many times on FB. Barf worthy indeed. I always remember going to a “top 20” university as a freshman, expecting to encounter a sea of more educated, liberal-loving Democrats similar to (at the time) me. You can imagine how shocked I was to find a large number of Republicans and born again Christians in my midst–one of whom was my roommate.
I quickly learned that you just can’t “educate” a person to vote like you. To Borowitz and the hand-wringing elites, “Physician, heal thyself”
I attended a university with a reputation as one of the most liberal/progressive universities in the US and world. Perhaps that was the case many years ago. What I saw instead was a lack of socioeconomic diversity (masked by more visible forms of diversity) and fairly conservative students. The politics were closer to those of the technocratic/10% class, rather than towards more progressive positions.
I attended a HS with the reputation as one of the most liberal/progressive HS’s in the world (its called Crossroads, in Santa Monica if you want to look it up). Turns out, it was 90% jewish, with 99% coming from families making over $500k a year (tuition was literally the same as a college, I kid you not).
Talk about lack of diversity.
My little sister still goes there, and recently a student wrote about why he is going to vote for Trump in the school newspaper. To make a long story short, he got so many death threats, both at school and online, that he left. That was pretty much what I experienced during the Bush/Gore election year(s).
So whenever I hear about liberals being more open minded, I instantly shudder. They, especially the elite, are some of the most close-minded, myopic, insane people I have ever met. Conservatives are equally as close minded. But I find they usually don’t scream in your face about “safe spaces” when you mention you are for freedom of speech.
China outflows.
More and more China seems to be in a voluntary Diaspora.
Opening the floodgates of capital via debt, much of which even now almost certainly can’t be repaid, has allowed business/party family members to buy property around the world for what appear to be irrational amounts of money. As the yuan heads closer to zero via printing, paying large amounts of cash that cost nearly nothing, except family connections, to acquire may end up being one of the trickiest slight-of-hand maneuvers of all time.
Of course a variation on that is the case for most of the central banks excuses. Printing money and giving it to the rich so that it will miraculously end up back in the economy and revive spending for everyone else is one of the craziest ideas of all time. Crazy like the fox guarding us chickens.
Yves, the Vanity Fair private jet article is from 1998. Just FYI.
Almost twenty years on and still no guillotines.
Sorry for not flagging that. Thought I had.
re: Crash: how computers are setting us up for disaster – Guardian
Excellent article. A computer is a good Servant but a bad Master.
“My First Gulfstream”
Note the copyright date….1998. A lot has changed since then.
For starters, they have reached market saturation with that class of airplane. Everyone who can afford one already has one. And no new “rich people” are being created to “grow” the market.
The customer base for buyers of the lower end bizjets has been disappearing since 2007, between bankruptcy, mergers, no growth.
And just straight stupidity. Companies are dumping their airplanes to demonstrate how dedicated they are to “economizing”. But that doesn’t mean they quit flying. Now, they pay twice as much for chartering.
“I know I’ve made some bad decisions lately, Dave.”
Bowman: You know of course though he’s right about the 9000 series having a perfect operational record. They do.
Poole: Unfortunately that sounds a little like famous last words.
Atlantic Names Jeffrey Goldberg Its Editor in Chief [NYT]
No comment offered or required.
On Billy Bush Suspended by NBC: The Bush family; classy bunch, no? Almost as classy as the Clintons…I wish these “families” would just dry up and blow away, for all of our sakes!
About the same time as the Tudors and Winsors, their relatives, do… from the NYT in ancient days: http://www.nytimes.com/1988/07/05/us/bush-they-say-is-indeed-a-connecticut-yankee-from-king-henry-s-court.html
“I know a hair stylist who was very well off (you can make a lot of money doing hair color because you can process a lot of heads at once), as in house in a good part of the Hamptons well off. He kept working until he was close to 70 because being on his feet a lot of the day was good for his diabetes, and he knew he’d sit a lot more when he retired”
Yea on the other hand you risk getting cancer from all the hair dye chemicals, cancer rates are high in that profession. Diabetes or cancer? What choices this society offers!
http://ije.oxfordjournals.org/content/38/6/1512.full
Why do women do that actually?
>Russians halt search for intelligent life in Washington
“Russian scientists fear intelligent life may already be extinct in vast swathes of the West, creating huge barren areas of empty desert devoid of any discernible culture.”
While I very much agree with the sentiment, I don’t agree with the claim that the West doesn’t have worthwhile culture. I appreciate how Putin is thwarting our destructive ambitions abroad, but that doesn’t mean I have to like him or his domestic policies, which as far as I can see are in large part retrograde. I wouldn’t want to be gay in Russia, that’s for sure. And his fans seem to include a not insignificant number of Stalin revisionists.
One of the great tragedies that could come out of a collapse of the United States and its Western European puppets, I think, would be a great discrediting of Enlightenment ideals that I genuinely think are worthwhile. When I see someone championing ‘traditional values’, I get very worried.
Greer’s conservative argument in favor of gay marriage is a fine example of the sort of work you might consider doing in order to maintain non-reproductive sexuality as legitimate. Forget the Enlightenment — it’s just as totalizing and corrupt as the other options, on average. (“But it’s all I got!”) Ideals have proven themselves unserviceable, anyway. Try interests — they’re delicious and 100% more wholesome.
I wouldn’t trust Greer as far as I could throw him.
Retrograde and you don’t like some of his fans.
I’ll just write that down.
Because…?
the thing is, roughly 90% of russians oppose homosexuality. putin is just reflecting that. do you think gay marriage would be legal in the US if a majority of people opposed it? politicians always “lead from behind” on these issues. russia has the cultural policies russians support and those on the outside trying to change them are cultural imperialists.
I never said I had any desire to change it from the outside. I’m saying it’s a bleak, miserable country and I’m glad I don’t live there.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3833298/The-black-man-claiming-Bill-Clinton-s-love-child-likens-treatment-former-couple-child-master-SLAVE-banished-wife-Hillary-Clinton.html
Holy cow, if this is true.
More on Clinton’s black son.
http://www.chron.com/entertainment/the-wrap/article/Bill-Clinton-s-Son-A-Short-History-of-9643041.php
Houston Chronicle, not exactly Clinton friendly media, but that they reported this story might be the first leak in the dyke.
It gets more confusing.
http://www.wnd.com/2016/10/no-definitive-dna-test-ever-conducted-on-clinton-son/
Terrible sources, and Bill preferred big haired women, etc, but nothing definitive except the boy failing to find a lawyer to help him get tests and sue for support all those years of childhood.
Couldn’t care less about him having a black child vs. any child, if it’s true, then it’s the cold blooded cutting off of all support that irks. Even Grover Cleveland supported his love child. He won the election by showing he had done right.
Momma bear with kids. Nice antidote du jour!
“Titanic-style disaster warning over luxury Arctic cruises”
Who cares about the parasites. The real impact will be like Amoco Cadiz, but far worse for the sensitivity of the environment.
China is going to send container ships spewing black oil laden bilge via the North West Passage, as if we don’t have enough problems with heat absorbing water replacing heat reflecting ice. Neo-Liberal Justin Trudeau welcomes this development as a job maker
Sheila Bair’s One Weird Trick to Make Her College Less White Bloomberg. Important
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I think Sheila Bair and Elizabeth Warren could win a presidential campaign…
The Onion link takes me to a 1998 article: “Congress Passes Americans With No Abilities Act”