By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
2016
Sanders proposes two free years of free tuition at college [The Hill]. It’s a start. Why not four, like Germany and Chile?
Another look at the Clinton Foundation: “[S]ubstantial overlap between the Clinton political machinery and the foundation” [Washington Post]. Surely nobody’s suggesting that the Clinton Foundation is a gigantic machine for dispensing walking around money?
The Democrats’ weak bench means they may have a tougher time retaking the Senate than expected [Politico]. Remember the 50-state strategy? Remember when Obama shut down OFA? Remember Steve Israel throwing elections? Say, where the heck are all those Blue Dogs, anyhow? Oh, and Robby Mook, presumptive Hillary campaign manager, was Steve Israel’s executive director at DCCC. And on and on and on.
“Swing-state poll: Voters want change” [Poltico]. And we’ll give it to them, good and hard.
Conservative activists release video of Jebbie awarding Hillary the “Liberty Medal” in Philly on the eve of the first anniversary of Benghazi ZOMFG!! [Politico]. Cue frothing and stamping.
Establishment
Jebbie on Iraq: “There were mistakes made in Iraq, for sure” [Slate]. BWA-HA-HA-HA! The classic non-apology apology: “Mistakes were made.” Note the lack of agency. Who made them? Incidentally, this was Bush’s proffer during the Q&A, and the current conventional wisdom is that he’s better doing that (“when he dazzled“) than he is at formal speeches. So what does that tell you?
“19 of the 21 people on [Jebbie’s list of advisers] worked in the administrations of his father or brother” (with handy Venn diagram) [WaPo]. Jebbie says he’s “his own man,” and that it’s not fair to hold him accountable for what his brother did. But you’re not really voting for Jebbie. You’re voting for the Bush dynasty, which is what you’ll get.
Clown Car
CNN/ORC poll: Huckabee takes national lead at 16% [Washington Times]. Hilarity ensures.
Huckabee dances with Yonatan Razel on stage [Israel National News], which concludes: “Huckabee has been an adamant supporter of Israel, and particularly for its sovereignty over Judea-Samaria.”
CBS Poll: More than 40% of Republicans won’t back Christie, worst showing among potential candidates [Star-Ledger].
“[S]pending data indicate that liberal and conservative outside groups along with the national parties were all pouring money into the same relatively small set of races that were considered competitive, and there was almost perfect agreement about which races those were” [Larry Sabato]. So the two sides cancel each other, but operatives, the party apparatus, and our famously free press make out like the bandits they are. It’s all good!
Herd on the Street
“The 500,000 full-time and part-time Walmart and Sam’s Clubs staff benefiting from the new policy will from April earn at least $9.00 an hour” [FT,”Walmart to raise the pay of 500,000 employees”]. Wowsers.
Traders betting Sears next to fail [Bloomberg]. I’m surprised they’re still alive. My local Sears is just as depressing as Walmart, but less crowded. Hope the mall finds a replacement anchor tenant…
Over 100 exposed to “superbug” in UCLA hospital system [Reuters]. A pure play on… On what, exactly? Respirators? Body bags?
Stats Watch
“Year-on-year growth in average hourly earnings … has been stuck in a 2 percent range for almost the entire expansion” [Bloomberg]. All together now: “That’s not a bug….” I also like “expansion” rather than “recovery.”
Leading indicators, January 2015: Strength “negligible.” “A clear negative reading in the report was a decline in building permits” [Bloomberg]. Boosted by Fed policy but “little else to indicated optimism.”
Jobless claims, week of February 14: “[F]ell a sizable 21,000 in the February 14 week to a slightly lower-than-expected 283,000” [Bloomberg]. A significant month-to-month improvement over January.
Bloomberg Consumer Comfort Index, week of February 15: Consumers more upbeat about the U.S. economic outlook than any time in the last four years [Bloomberg]. “Some 26 percent of Americans surveyed this month said the economy is getting worse, the least since January 2011. Thirty-five percent said it’s getting better.”
Warmongering Watch
On Graeme Wood’s Atlantic article on ISIS: “So when I read these inevitable articles, so full of worry about what we should do, I want only to remind everyone that for God’s sake, we made them; might we not make it worse? [Jacob Bacharach]. Massive takedown. As Yves points out, the Monroe Doctrine had a lot to be said for it.
On the Atlantic: [Fredrik deBoer].
If you are a young journalist or political writer, and you review the post-Iraq careers of those in the media who were for or against the Iraq war, the message is powerful and incontrovertible: when the next war effort comes around, as it surely will, be for it rather than against it. For if you go person by person through the rolls, you will find that those who were on what we widely acknowledge to be the wrong side of the question have achieved vastly more career success in media than those who were right. … They are, as a class, speaking from positions of the greatest mainstream authority or drowning in VC cash, with the black swan exception of Judith Miller simply serving to prove the rule. That’s true whether the writers in question engaged in the apology theatrics that briefly came into fashion. (Such “apologies” usually took the form of being “wrong but for the right reasons,” of course.) No publication better reflects this tendency to reward those who were unforgivably wrong about the biggest foreign policy mistake in decades than The Atlantic.
People ask why media never gets better. It never gets better because its members have no incentive to get better. When failure is rewarded and success ignored, the result is a series of broken institutions. At the airport, yesterday, I watched Wolf Blizter and his “terrorism expert” guest busily validate the case for ground war against ISIS. So: which way do you think the ambitious young strivers in our media will ultimately break?
Yeppers. “Mistakes were made.” And proved very profitable!
Hong Kong
Hong Kong CEO CY Leung: “In the coming year, I hope that all people in Hong Kong will take inspiration from the sheep’s character and pull together in an accommodating manner to work for Hong Kong’s future” [Reuters]. Baaa!
Mainland tactics show up in Hong Kong: Email hacks, shadowing, petitions, placards and curses are being aimed at the organizers of Hong Kong’s ‘umbrella movement,’ which ended months ago [Christian Science Monitor].
North American Petrostates
Explosion and fire at Exxon refinery in Torrance, California [KTLA5].
In 4-3 decision, Ohio Supreme Court decides the home rule clause of Ohio’s constitution doesn’t allow a municipality to block drilling activities otherwise permitted by the state [AP]. Unlike New York.
The Center for Biological Diversity says it has found dangerous levels of toxic and carcinogenic chemicals such as benzene and toluene in fracking flowback, a component of oil industry wastewater often injected back underground [Desmogblog].
Small earthquakes from fracking wastewater injection wells can lead to larger quakes, as the fluids propagate over larger and larger space [Think Progress].
The Mounties: Anti-petroleum movement a growing security threat [Globe and Mail].
Handy interactive map of CSX oil routes [CSX Crude by Rail].
Corruption
“A Malaysian police commander sentenced to hang in Kuala Lumpur [says] he was ordered to kill a Mongolian socialite at the centre of high-level corruption allegations in Malaysia” [The Age].
Allegations have simmered for eight years that Ms Shaariibuu was murdered to keep her quiet about purported kick-backs to high-level Malaysian officials over the US$2 billion purchase of two French and Spanish-built Scorpene submarines when Mr Najib was defence minister.
Ms Shaariibuu, described as sophisticated jet-setting party girl, worked as a translator in the later stages of negotiations.
My goodness!
Cuomo lacks Presidential buzz [Times-Union]. Awww!
Big Brother Is Watching You Watch
“Lenovo accused of compromising user security by installing adware on new PCs” [Guardian]. This is very bad. For starters, LeNovo is a Microsoft Royalty OEM. And then there’s this:
Lenovo-preinstalled adware Superfish makes itself an unrestricted Root Certificate Authority at the same level as Microsoft.
— InfoSec Taylor Swift (@SwiftOnSecurity) February 19, 2015
When hackers get Superfish root cert private key, they will be able to make their viruses look like Microsoft wrote them to Lenovo customers
— InfoSec Taylor Swift (@SwiftOnSecurity) February 19, 2015
Forbes summarizes; as does The Next Web; and The Register.
“Hard disk hacking” [SpritesMods]. Imagine what people this smart could do with real money.
Kaspersky’s complete report: Equation Group Questions and Answers [Kaspersky (PDF)].
Chicago detective Richard Zuley brought Chicago Police Department torture techniques to Gitmo [Guardian].
Class Warfare
Why a union for fashion models makes sense [Talking Points Memo]. “BLS suggests models in the U.S. earned on average only around $19,300 in 2013, which breaks down to a mean hourly wage of $9.28 per hour.”
“Two U.S. Cabinet secretaries joined congressional leaders, three governors and a big-city mayor on Wednesday in pushing shipping lines and the dockworkers’ union to settle a contract dispute” [Reuters]. And I’m sure all of ’em are on the side of the unions…
Indian millionaire charged with killing security guard for being “too slow” [Asian Correspondent].
News of the Wired
- This sentence stuns: “Parents have made news recently after being detained for purposefully leaving children on their own” [NPR]. You mean, “alone” when I rode my bike to school all by myself? This is news? Compliance culture.
- “[I]t may be useful to understand Malaysian politics as pantomime” [Asian Correspondent]. So, we aren’t the only ones….
- Book lists at the Long Now Foundation; rather than books for a desert island, books to carry through the chokepoint of collapse [Open Culture].
- Scholz’s star, a binary, passed through the outer reaches of the Oort Cloud some 70,000 years ago. It came within 0.8 light-years of earth, making it the closest known flyby of a star to the Solar System [io9]. Phew! That was close!
- Plan to put tolls on New York’s East River bridges [Bloomberg].
- The idea of two sexes is simplistic. Biologists now think there is a wider spectrum than that [Nature]. “̌[T]he identity of the gonad emerges from a contest between two opposing networks of gene activity.” So Ursula LeGuin got it right in The Left Hand of Darkness.
Bonus image:
Readers, feel free to contact me with (a) links, and even better (b) sources I should curate regularly, and (c) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi are deemed to be honorary plants! See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. And here’s today’s plant (MR). Next week: Fungus Week, so if you’ve got some excellent fungi, please send them in!
I could still use another cactus!
If you enjoy Water Cooler, please consider tipping and click the hat. It’s the heating season!
Talk amongst yourselves!
47 comments
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OFA is a major problem. It stayed ibstead of being shut down. It is an Obama cult, not an election oriented operation. Back in 2009, OFA was poaching potential volunteers for Obama worship sessions instead of helping in the governor’s race in Virginia.
I’m still mad as hell about OFA. They delivered Taliban Bob to the state and let that twit Sazlaw sink the state Democratic Party.
Chicago PD, the gift that keeps on shaming the rest of us (and emptying our pocketbooks to pay for the civil settlements, but that’s another story). Hate to lump those decent officers who are a part of it, but many CPD cops are racist, entitled, authoritarian sadistic pigs. Just take a look at the Second City Cop blog, where the commentariat are verified cops before they are allowed to post. Thankfully the Aryan Brotherhood-loving Detective Shaved Longcock blog was shut down a couple of years ago, but that was only a cosmetic fix.
I love ThinkPads and have several of them (all bought used; newest one is five years old) and the first thing I do with them is remove Windows. Still, it’s sad to see the brand tainted by this Superfish nonsense.
I have two ThinkPads – DBANed them first thing (overwrote the hard drive with random numbers multiple times) and then installed Linux. That does not affect the firmware, which is programmed into the chips inside the hard drive. I wonder what is loaded in there….
Dunno why Lambert insists on calling this “clown car”. Looks like serious stuff to me.
“Huckabee dances with Yonatan Razel on stage [Israel National News], which concludes: “Huckabee has been an adamant supporter of Israel, and particularly for its sovereignty over Judea-Samaria.”
We learned in some recent article about “What ISIS Wants” is a return to the 7th century and, for some reason known only to religious types, a prompt commencement of the Apocalypse.
OK, so we have some common ground, but if we can jump all the way back in time to Samaria, that means we’re first and we get all the squatters rights that come with being first. This is a big deal for a place like America!
If it were up to me, I’d time jump to just between Garden of Eden and Fallen Angels – then I could prove the labels “Big Satan” and “Little Satan” are a bunch of crap too!
Whoa, there buckaroo … ya gotta go back a couple thousand years before these guys claim the world was created to find the original squatters. Bad idea. I think they should stick with “Manifest Destiny” (Go USA, USA, USA!) and feel good about being the latest … oh … ooops … ISIL is trying to do that “be the latest” thing. Hmmm.
It’s not just the composition. It’s the Satanic-rouge red used to signify martial aggression in the assailer’s face and the impasto of heavenly white light caressing the vulnerably pink cranium of the assailee (i.e. the man be assailed). The Manichean dialectic is echoed in the radiantly high-keyed illumination of the hands reaching in for help, one of whose cuff also hints at the imagery of priest’s white collar. It’s not entirely wonderful as a composition, as the lines of the arms and shelving fly off the canvas, but the circularity of the illuminated hands provide a ring of containment that ascends from each side to the jewel of the aggressor’s Satanic head, in a sly metaphor that, by placing bloodlust at the apex of a virtuous circle as if a diamond on a ring, questions the very nature of the moral foundation of existence. This is like something Caravaggio would have produced between sword fights. But he was a wacko wasn’t he? hahaha
Scarification is back as a tattoo technique in the bay area
I could link you, but I would have to kill you
Love the antidote! You can get around the ‘meat’ aspect of the subject simply by say the guys in the picture are ‘vegging out, man.’ Also, the Ukies are applying the principles of the Golden Mean, which shows their relationship to Golden Dawn clearly. Yeats said it best:
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Perhaps, given the almost weekly images and videos of fights in the Rada, these fine, glorious warriors belong on the front lines in Donbass, not in parliament. Before you know it they will be knocking on the doors of the Kremlin. Or not.
*sarc (sort of)* I wonder why we don’t get any MSM coverage of the Rada Night at the Fights? Could it be seen as perhaps an embarrassment to the Westies claims of supporting the ‘United Unto Death Against the Bear’ regime in Kiev? *sarc off*
Even conceding some direct support from Moscow, the complete collapse of the Ukrainian troops in the Debaltsevo cauldron bodes ill for the Kiev army. How many armed ‘separatists’ are there anyway? Most importantly, how well are they trained and motivated? One can have all the shiny trinkets that go boom one wants. If one doesn’t know how to use them properly, they become useless junk. I’ve read about the mass draft dodging going on in parts of Ukraine. Does that mean that the average soldier in the Ukraine Army today is a barely trained draftee? That the Kiev Junta seems to rely so heavily on the Fascist Brigades suggests so.
I think these guys are stand up guys
they just have a lot of head locks goin’ on
Is this sort of like Chicago politics?
Not at all! These fine folks still haven’t settled on equitable division of the loot. In Chicago the division of the spoils has long been settled and thus peace and harmony reigns. There is one undisputed despot, Pharaoh Rahmses, and 50 court jesters who each have their own fief to pillage at the pleasure of Rahmses. Thus they are always very well-behaved lest they displease their despot, after all infighting is bad for business and there are tributes and the daily blow job to be paid to Rahmses. Of course it wasn’t always thus, at one point in the late 80’s a dark-skinned outsider accidentally acceded to the top of the heap, and thus ensued the Great Council Wars of the court jesters against the darkie, which only ended after he had an untimely heart attack. After that his benevolence King Richie the Second ascended to his hereditary throne and all lived happily ever after except the vast majority of Chicagoans. The End.
While putting tolls on the East River bridges is better, at accomplishing the same thing, than the Rube Goldberg “congestion charge” idea, I don’t think it is practical. The bridges were built pre-expressway and the most of the entrances are right on normal city streets. I don’t see where they is space to put toll plazas.
they’ll put up cameras and photograph plate #s; then send you a bill. or regular users will have electronic meter devices (I forget what they are called).
Big Brother tolling: GPS trackers. Will fit in nicely with the insurance companies’ implementation of GPS tracking as a way to “save” you a buck. I just read about it yesterday in BG media: rather than buying a yearly vignette the government now wants to implement a mileage-based charges, with GPS tracking at its base. That’s because roads will be build exclusively using Public-Private Partnerships, so the rentiers want to maximize their rents, while Big Brother wants to maximize his intrusion into privacy.
This is already done on Henry Hudson Parkway between Manhattan and Bronx. If you have no E-Z Pass, just drive through and they mail you a bill.
But step back a bit. What happens when a city is balkanized by toll crossings between its boroughs? When it’s cheaper to drive 15 miles north into Westchester from the Bronx than to cross a bridge into Manhattan or Queens?
Ask Staten Islanders, who feel cut off from the city with no free crossings. No free movement, no sense of community.
Didn’t former Mayor Bloomberg once say that nobody who made less than a million a year belonged in Manhattan? Or did he merely think it really loudly?
I love New York City. It’s been part of my dreams or my life for most of my 56 yrs on this planet.
It now seems like a ready made castle. Through its standardization and greed it has died for me.
Time to bring on the crocodiles, forget the bridges.
Just want to say thanks to all of you-at lunch today I got into a discussion about economic policy with a group of guys from our spin-off company and I was able to hold my own, make compelling arguments, and actually convince them/get them to change their minds. Wouldn’t have been able to do that without NC. Cheers!
That’s great and great for NC giving us all the info;)
This may sound weird, but it felt empowering. I think I surprised them as I’m always pretty quiet, or they think I’m just a scientist and don’t know much about other topics. Hopefully it will mean some good for the world in the future, even if just a little bit.
Thanks! We’re doing our job… The empowering part, I mean.
“Communities today may be made up of strangers…”
Technology – TV’s, A/C, and cars – turned neighborhoods into collections of strangers. Before TV and air conditioning, people sat on their front porch or played outside during the summertime. People without yards would sleep in the parks on particularly hot summer nights, to stay cool.
As a kid, I visited my great-grandfather, who lived in an older urban neighborhood. We would hang out on his porch swing, and he would chat with people as they walked by. Later, we would walk down to the drugstore for a comic book and a soda.
Modern painting of parliamentarians engaged in a row. http://mag.magentafoundation.org/5/exhibition-reviews/brendan-flanagan
Meet the New Masters, same as the Old Masters…
The painter is Canadian, and both his use of thick flowing paint and his attempt to escape “the illustrious yet banal world of Canadian landscape painting” remind me of the Quebecois abstract expressionists, who (IMNSHO) were really good, a school of their own, not a provincial offshoot.
The disgraceful but obvious fact that supporting the invasion of Iraq, or any American military intervention, is the only safe and effective way to further your career in the media cannot be reiterated too many times or too strenuously. John MacArthur wrote a terrific little book right after Desert Storm called Second Front which showed in ominous detail the obsession with access and the desire to play ball with the military that is ubiquitous in American (and to a less but growing extent British) media. You had Cheney and Prince Bandar dictating the terms under which the war would be covered, and the media bending over backward to comply. When the St. Petersburg Times got the Landsat pictures that showed that no Iraqi army was poised on the border of Saudi Arabia poised to strike, the attitude of Ben Bradlee et al. was “who the fuck are they and why should we believe them just because they have pictures to prove it.” In short, they bought everything they were sold, and that was before 9/11. How this obvious genuflection towards the military is to be reversed, especially considering you’ve got at least half the populace convinced that we have a “liberal media”, is beyond me.
How this obvious genuflection towards the military is to be reversed . . . is beyond me.
Propaganda works, and constant war and mayhem perpetrated by the US military is sold as “helping people”.
We are the oddballs, by noticing and pointing out the galactic insanity and hypocrisy of the system. When trying to discuss with friends some of the economic and political issues discussed on NC every day, they are determined to stay blissfully ignorant.
War, the word, is used indiscriminately and has lost it’s true meaning. The “war on drugs”, the “war on illegal immigrants”, “the war on terrorists”, the “war on bad drivers”, the “war on whatever is disapproved of at the moment”. It’s a word that is used ubiquitously and has no shock value anymore.
The “entertainment” businesses glorify war. All the killing and shooting video games glorify war, and the bloodier and messier it is on screen the higher the rating. Young, impressionable, non critical thinking people are playing these games constantly, and fucking up their minds.
How adults can turn out this horrible garbage and sleep at night . . . is beyond me
+2
(+1 for James Levy, and +1 for you)
US Army officers are liars: study. The topic came up several weeks ago here on NC. This study focused on the Army, but the AF, Navy, and Marines are no different, the system rewards dishonesty in the pursuit of the officers’ careers. From the article:
It’s just like the Army to commission a study that shows what everyone already knows, and then fail to do anything to fix the problem. It’s an institutional military problem, and no one has any interest in fixing it, to do so will make it hard for the grasping strivers to advance and then enjoy a solid retirement income as members of DI boards and execs.
See any difference between that and getting ahead in Corporate America? Me neither.
Had heard all about this from my dad(Korean War vet) back in the day when I was a kid. It’s been going on for quite a very long time.
Officers are management. Management are leaders. Leaders lie.
The adults lie, the children can’t figure out why the adults lie.
The adults have duplicity about morals, the children can’t figure out why the adults say one thing and do something else.
You know you’re an adult when you can live a happy duplicitous life.
in an environment were murder, torture and rape are S.O.P, we should be shocked that these people also lie
where, not were
The disk hacking at Sprites-Mods is amazing. Take a look at some of the other hacks there — in addition to the disk hack there was a keyboard hack called “Snake on a Keyboard”, http://spritesmods.com/?art=rapidisnake. The last page describing the hack commented on how it could be used to add a key-logger to the firmware of the particular smart keyboard Sprite reverse engineered.
Using a zero-day exploit an attacker could establish an invisible root-kit in hard drive firmware and/or an invisible key-logger on a smart keyboard. Of course the hacks as presented would only work on the very specific hardware Sprites-Mods reverse engineered but they make a very scary proof of concept for what may be a large class remote hacks against embedded firmware.
I have a little red notebook my daughter gave me recently. Anything I don’t want to end up on Cyber-Command’s watch-list gets written there. And I don’t write in it in sight of any of my computers or tablets or smart-phones that might be taking pictures.
Now, if only I could think up something interesting enough to write to make all that paranoia worth the effort.
i’m going to sneak into your place while your away, photograph the contents of your notebook with a pen camera, and you’ll never even know.
you’re away not your. having a bad grammar day.
The UCLA superbug story offers the prospect of a Pure Play on better autoclaving/ sterilizing machines and protocols, if such can be found or invented to kill every superbug bacterium there is.
Over 100 exposed to “superbug” in UCLA hospital system
Today, on national news, was this report and the highlight was half a dozen “doctors” outside being collectively interviewed standing in a semi circle. The voice said it was serious but “in control” and the looks and body language of the doctors said “oh fuck”.
Never mentioned was the notion that the hospitals themselves are the incubators and nurturers of superbugs.
75,000 customers of the US health care system die from some type of infection caught through an interaction with the health care system, annually.
. . . sterilizing machines and protocols, if such can be found or invented to kill every superbug bacterium there is.
Sounds like an arms race to me. If we keep it up, eventually a bacteria will be born that can’t be controlled by any means!
Free tuition. Sounds like a good idea. They’ll need cars to get to school tho, most places don’t have public transportation in the US. So, we’ll need free cars too. They’ll need places to live: so might a well throw in free rent. They’ll need doctorate degrees too, so that’s free stuff for at least 6 years. But, it would be cruel to cut-off all this free stuff when they leave school, so let’s have free stuff until the first job.
They’ll need a free pony too. We all do.
(Disclaimer: I work for a TBTF bank. I work in the student lending scam, and the auto-lending scam. My spouse “works” for the state of California. We live in a limousine-liberal college town overflowing with student-lending loot. Everybody should have a good scam to live off of. If Bernie can get another “free scam” running in the US, more power to him and to the people who will eventually be living off the scam and the graft that will keep it going. As long as my scam keeps going until I’m on the Social Security / Medicare scam I’m perfectly happy with others trying to get their own scam.)
a university degree in the states is still a four-year program, amirite?
2 free years of college means that students feel invested to complete and get their degrees, which leaves universities to jack annual tuition rates even higher as the students will feel more pressure to shell out, giving them even greater profits from an even greater student base. naturally, the two free years will be paid for by the guvment, so the unis won’t lose any income.
is sanders a university admin? a few years ago in the canadian elections, the liberal party candidate announced a similar campaign promise of giving each student 6k for post-secondary education. he had strong for-profit university ties.
The Fibbonacci spiral forms of Ukraine Parliament was one of the best internet memes I’ve seen in a while.
Re Fredrik de Boer on The Atlantic: The Media ARE, The Media is not IS. If the media IS, then it is a thing, monochromatic and unitary. Simple observation determines that said IS is not. Thus The Media ARE. Maybe in the Soviet Union, The Media IS or WAS IS, but notwithstanding herd behavior among the principal examples of media available to us, The Media in this country still ARE. If The Media were IS, Naked Capitalism would be part of this singularity consubstantial with CNN, Fortune, and the Wyoming Daily Boomerang, which it IS not.