Bobcat Drags Shark Out of Florida Surf National Geographic. Bad photographer scared the bobcat away from his meal.
Polish Nurse Cat, Rademenes, Comforts Sick Shelter Animals Until They Feel Better Huffington Post (kristiina)
Why humans love pet dogs as much as their children Telegraph
Police Collar a Coyote In Chelsea Courtyard Wall Street Journal. Adrien: “Can’t help but reflect on the apparent hierarchy of values in New York City..where banksters do not go to jail, an African American man selling cigarettes on the street gets choked to death by police officers but..where a coyote is safely sedated by city officers before being taken care of by the city…”
Happy birthday to Moore’s Law Washington Post (furzy mouse)
The coming digital anarchy Telegraph. Note this is Silicon Valley sales talk.
Grexit?
Yanis Varoufakis: We want a new deal with partners – business live Guardian. Live blog. Valuable even after the fact because includes lots of Twitter commentary. Also as djrichard points out, mentions that Greece could pay workers and pensioners in scrip.
Lagarde dashes Greek loan respite hopes Financial Times
Another 5.27 Billion in Capital Flight from Greece in March Michael Shedlock (furzy mouse)
Dumb money update, Greek edition FT Alphaville
Ukraine/Russia
Worst is over, Putin tells Russians Financial Times
Syraqistan
Iraqi PM warns Isis could become unstoppable as key city threatened Guardian (furzy mouse)
Vladimir Putin Defends Move To Approve Sale Of Missile System To Iran Huffington Post (timbers)
Syria, Yemen Conflicts only seem to be about Sunni-Shiite from 30,000 Feet Juan Cole
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
WikiLeaks republishes all documents from Sony hacking scandal Guardian (furzy mouse)
The US Government Asked Sony to Help Counter ISIS Propaganda Motherboard
Fifty Years of Secrecy: Investigating CIA Mind Control Experiments in Vermont Firedoglake (furzy mouse)
Imperial Collapse Watch
How The World Bank Broke Its Promise To Protect The Poor Huffington Post (theartistformerlyknownasfrostyzoom)
Deal Reached on Fast-Track Authority for Obama on Trade Accord New York Times. Appalling. However, note that this is a deal reached among party “leadership”. The “deal reached” is meant to convey a sense of inevitability when this is not in fact done. The Democrats are in revolt and not all Republicans are on board. And party rank and file have bucked the leadership, most notably on Syria. So now is the time to make calls, particularly if your Congresscritters are Republicans or centrist Dems. Tell them that this deal is not about trade but subsidies to multinationals, Big Pharma, and Hollywood. Refer to our post today, about how it will even undermine local zoning. And if you are calling a Republican, position yourself as a businessman concerned about the impact on in-state industries.
Lawmakers Unveil Secretly Negotiated Deal To Fast-Track Free Trade Huffington Post
Tombstone of Hillary Clinton’s father knocked over: newspaper Reuters. EM: “Local officials were quick to dismiss as ‘unfounded’ rumors that the later Hugh Rodham’s headstone might have fallen over as a result of the deceased turning over in his grave.”
EXCLUSIVE: Hillary Clinton Said to Hire Former Wall Street Cop Gary Gensler as Campaign CFO Bloomberg. Bill Black shreds this move. His post goes live at 10:00 AM.
Martin O’Malley takes shot at Clinton over gay marriage and immigration Guardian (furzy mouse)
Battle for Oregon highlights Obama’s free-trade challenge
Reuters (EM)
Florida paper draws scrutiny for knowing in advance about Capitol gyrocopter stunt Japan Times
‘Slicing and dicing’: How some U.S. firms could win big in 2016 elections Reuters (EM)
Despite Changes, US Government Still Unwilling to Provide Meaningful Information to Americans Put on No Fly List Kevin Gosztola, Firedoglake
Emancipation Day and Washington D.C’s Living Legacy of White Theft, Black Loss Jason Rathod
The police shooting video Chicago has paid $5 million for us not to see Daily Kos
Why confidential tips to the government may not be confidential after all Washington Post (furzy mouse)
SEC Targets Confidentiality Agreements That Stifle Whistle-Blowing JD Supra Business Advisor
Chris Christie: New Jersey Pension Launches Probe Of Fees to Wall Street International Business Times
L.A. schools iPad program subject of inquiry by SEC Los Angeles Times (furzy mouse)
Some Fear Fallout From Preet Bharara’s Tension With Judges New York Times
Detroit, Stockton bankruptcies may flag wider problems: Fed’s Dudley Reuters. EM: “Of course none of the ‘wider problems’ have anything to do with Fed EZ-money policies and the resulting boom/bust economics.” \sarc
IRS Should Crack Down on Private Equity’s Abusive Tax Alchemy Eileen Appelbaum, Huffington Post
Ben Bernanke Will Work With Citadel, a Hedge Fund, as an Adviser New York Times. Let us just say that Citadel is extraordinarily secretive. Honestly, even DE Shaw (where Larry Summers got paid a ton for hanging out) is more savory-looking.
Bloomberg Terminals Go Down Globally Wall Street Journal
Class Warfare
The Mansions Owned by White-Collar Criminals Wall Street Journal
The numbers are staggering: US is ‘world leader’ in child poverty Raw Story
Antidote du jour:
And a bonus video (hat tip Kokuanani):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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good link:
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2015-04-16/exclusive-hillary-clinton-said-to-hire-former-wall-street-cop-as-campaign-cfo
During her first visit to Iowa as a newly minted presidential candidate on April 14, Clinton struck a suprisingly honest tone, saying “there’s something wrong when hedge fund managers pay more in taxes than I do,” a reference to her plans for her presidency.
“I think it’s fair to say that if you look across the country, the deck is stacked in favor of those already at the top,” the former secretary of state said from her perch at the top.
The response should be, “Senator, do you support the return of the capital gains tax rates before President Clinton cut them?”
the 50 years of secrecy link is a terrifying must-read that exposes the CIA as an ocean of bottomless evil.
however, if i’m not mistaken, classified documents become unclassified after 50 years, so maybe ms. wetmore will have better luck with her FOIA requests for 1965 files.
Like Capone, you have to deal with it from the money/budget perspective.
Unfortunately, it’s a subsidiary of Budgets Unlimited Inc.
Not if reclassified by shredder first.
Re Bernanke and Citadel.
Such a move ought to be illegal. It is prima facie proof that the Fed’s function is first and foremost to protect and further enrich oligarchs.
Spanish police search home and off ex-IMF chief Rodrigo Rato
Spanish authorities have searched a former IMF chief’s home and office over suspected fraud and money laundering regarding his personal wealth.
Rodrigo Rato, 66, was seen being taken from his Madrid home on Thursday by officers from Spain’s tax authorities.
He is already being investigated for fraud over his time as chief executive of the Spanish bank, Bankia, which had to be bailed out by the government.
Mr Rato served as a prominent member of Spain’s Popular Party (PP).
He was Spain’s finance minister in the conservative government of Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar and later a leading figure under Mr Aznar’s successor Mariano Rajoy.
He headed the IMF between 2004 and 2007.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-32335842
Should have laundered his influence through a post advisory position at a hedge fund for the big PAY DAY…now doesn’t that sound more professional?
Ex-Walmart CEO Goes PEU with Carlyle Group
1) A five year hold is relatively common for Carlyle Group investments that can’t be flipped in the first year or two for monstrous profits. Duke was with Wal-Mart for five years. A major business reporter wrote four years ago:
I have seen so many people — particularly those in their 50s – 70s — taken apart by what has happened in their industry as greed has hollowed out the economy. These are people took pride in their jobs and held themselves to this invisible standard that we all just took for granted, but is being wiped out.
The Carlyle Group scares me more than anything I’ve ever seen on Wall Street. It seems to exist to corrupt politicians and it’s hard to know who they even represent.
I watched a video interview of (David) Rubenstein and his arrogance is really beyond tolerance. He was going on about the debt ceiling problem and how there would need to be cuts in services and higher taxes. When the reporter asked him about tax on carried interest he turned really disdainful and said that this “only” amounted to $22 billion over some number of years and this was not serious money. Boy, nothing like everybody doing their small part to save the country from oblivion!
2) Wal-Mart provides low wages and less benefits, like many Carlyle Group affiliates.
Ah, Chinese management practices which include two sets of books on quality measures, one for Western buyers, which often times is pure fiction. Both Carlyle and many Chinese leaders have a history of bribing.
Duke and The Carlyle Group is a match made in heaven for someone, but it’s not employees.
http://peureport.blogspot.com/2015/04/ex-walmart-ceo-goes-peu-with-carlyle.html
Warren Buffett isn’t much better than Carlyle in his track record of employee relations. He claims to be hands off on relative to management of acquisitions, to distance himself from operational details.
Thank you for these, . . . revelations.
It seems to me, the only thing the PE parasites understand is money. It would be a worthwhile project to identify what they own and control, so as to boycott those businesses.
A PE parasite took over Tim Hortons in Canada with the Burger King inversion, and I avoid Timmies like the plague now. Their first act after taking over was to fire several hundred employees.
It’s like PE is the repository for the gains of all the derivatives of value (non specific money). And they want to reinvest it in more non-stuff. But if they had an epiphany, after we all fainted and re-emerged, we would see that they could really recognize value because they would all have invested in the environment, doing “whatever it takes” to quote Draghi. Whatever is needed, we will do. And the PE goofballs would be pleasantly surprised by their popularity and their achievements.
As I’ve mentioned before, the fact that Carlyle has their headquarters in DC tells you most of what you need to know about their business strategy.
I imagine 3 sets of books.
One for Westerners.
One for the Chinese government.
One for management.
Re: heirarchy of values
I believe Foucault’s term for this was biopolitics – the state being allowed not only to manage life but death. Not dissimilar to the prohibitions on suicide, but the encouragement of drone bombing. I also am happy they calmly sedated a coyote, and appalled at how they treat youth of color daily here in Brooklyn.
Not just youth…
It is certainly worth a shot to prevent fast track from slipping by! The good people who run this website have made it very easy for all of us to contact our congresscritters: https://www.stopfasttrack.com/
I called all three of my congresscritters yesterday. Told them I considered any of them who supported fast track or the underlying “treaty” components to be a traitor to the nation because they would be abdicating their responsibility to legislate for what was in the best interest of the U.S. The young woman who took my call in Senator Durbin’s office seemed in agreement; the two young men who took the other calls seemed stunned by the language, but, when I backed up my statement with examples of the damage that would be caused, they seemed to understand that I was an informed constituent deeply concerned about the issue.
Although I am neither a Democrat or a Republican, I have to admire the Repub’s ability to use loaded language. Those of us who disagree with our corporatocracy masquerading as a democracy need to use more emotionally charged language in making our point, IMO, or else we’ll simply be drowned out by the propaganda machines.
Karen Wetmore’s a hero up there with Manning and Snowden. No reason for her to waste time with US authorities; they’re all subordinated to the CIA impunity regime, CIA Act section 6 – the real constitution. Go over their head to the world.
Next month the Human Rights Council subjects the US government to Universal Periodic Review. Their procedure for considering human rights violations is here:
http://www.ohchr.org/EN/HRBodies/HRC/ComplaintProcedure/Pages/HRCComplaintProcedureIndex.aspx
Every treaty body and charter body presses the US government on medical experimentation. If they can work with a victim to focus the shame and disgrace, it changes everything.
Time is short, but civil society can incorporate Ms. Wetmore into the proceedings
http://www.ushrnetwork.org/our-work/project/upr-universal-periodic-review
Interesting bitcoin anarchy suggestions….but a move to bitcoin would not allow for fiat currencies, I suppose. And right there, the game would stop…how can a person receive their SS monies in bitcoins? How could the military, State Dept., welfare recipients, bailed out banks, etc, receive their payments? Certainly not in bitcoins!!
“The pound is worth something only because people decide to place value in it.”
That, right there, is problematic. With that, the writer is starting by assuming we live a world without governments, without taxation and, then proceed to say in the future, there will be no need for government. That’s tautology.
The pound is worth something because taxation.
“The true identity of Satoshi has never been revealed, although rumours abound: a lone academic, a group of disgruntled, anarchist programmers working in the financial sector, the CIA…”
What is your best guess?
The CIA?
Last year Cyprus horrified citizens when it announced that it would seize up to 60 per cent of all savings over €100,000 to save its struggling banks. Suddenly Bitcoin seemed less risky and transaction volumes soared as people poured cash into the digital currency to keep it out of government coffers.
Hopefully, they didn’t get them from, or pour cash into, Mt. Gox.
No treasury can print more Bitcoins and inflate away the value of your savings, or recklessly lend them out for years to people with no chance of meeting repayments, eventually bringing the whole system crashing down.
Why don’t they just go straight to the gold standard? Too Neanderthal-ish?
People worrying about money supply expansion “inflating away the value of their savings” don’t seem to realize that the bottom 90% of the country essentially have no savings (Was it here I saw that graph the other day?). Sure, they may have a few grand in the bank account, but they’ve got a heck of a lot more that they owe on the mortgage, the student loans, etc.
For most people, inflation will be eroding the value of their debts much more than of their savings. People like to kid themselves though…
The way the money supply is currently created (by banks) is definitely wacky. Bitcoin, however, is just as wacky.
People should be paid more so they can have savings.
Wage inflation is the best way to erode the value of their debts.
That way, we don’t make more savers victims. Milk price inflation is not healthy for calcium challenged seniors.
Inflation not anticipated by the lender erodes debt as you say, but presumably inflation anticipated by the lender would be reflected in an accordingly higher interest rate. Like an asset bubble, inflation benefits those who are early to the party. Some are early to the party by chance, but being financially sophisticated gets you an engraved invitation, and being financially sophisticated correlates with being wealthy.
Neither are credit-fuelled binges possible. The smoke-and-mirrors system that banks use to magic money into existence when they create loans is not possible in a Bitcoin world.
This holds a lot of appeal. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf recently called for banks to be stripped of this bizarre right to create money from thin air, claiming that it was the root cause of credit bubbles and busts such as the painful cycle we have just witnessed. In his view, they should be confined to only lending the amount they have taken as deposits from savers. It’s hard to argue against such a commonsense proposal.
This Guardian writer seems like a crypto-libertarian with his anti-zero-fractional-reserve banking position.
As the adage goes: “If you’re not paying, then you’re the product”. You don’t pay a penny for Google’s search engine, email or calendar products.
:(
No such a thing as ‘no strings attached.”
That’s why we have to empower ourselves – and not depend on the Great Omnipotent Father anywhere…up there among the stars or in the great halls of power.
Become a fisherman. Don’t just take the fish.
“Sorry, that new money belongs to us.”
In an interview with McSweeneys, Eggers said he often had to delete sections of his manuscript when truth caught up with fiction: “A lot of times I’d think of something that a company like the Circle might dream up, something a little creepy, and then I’d read about the exact invention, or even something more extreme, the next day.”
Greed drives imagination and creativity.
:<
Charlie Stross threw in the towel on part 3 of a near-future trilogy a few years ago. Reality had lapped his plans for it.
Consider, for example, Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal – ironically, one of the companies Bitcoin aims to blow out of the water. He has donated $1.25m to the SeaSteading Institute, a group which aims to create an autonomous nation in the ocean, away from existing sovereign laws and free of regulation
Would that be before or after we have killed off all living beings in the ocean?
“Let’s bring our polluted way of life into the water. And we take no prisoners, unless they are our pets or indoor plants.”
Who tracks how much money everyone has, if not the bank? If it were left to individuals, we would all add a few zeros to our balances and the whole thing would descend into a fraudulent farce.
Bitcoin’s solution is for everyone to record all information
The cure sounds like worse than the disease.
Is this another case of ‘too much intelligence and not enough social skills?’ The writer, like many people I know, seems to be impressed with smartness and knowledge of science and technology.
How do I know if you are not a hypocritical progressive?
Let’s track all the voluntary activities and donations (not just money, but time and, say, food to a food bank).
Maybe we just improve banks or replace them with some other tangible institutions, where humans and human trust (however fallible that is) have a part.
Maybe people would extend credit informally to those who wish to engage their services, much as they did before banks. That means your credit limit and balance depend on who you ask and what you need from them, but at least useless jerks would straighten up or starve pretty quickly.
Bitcoin “miners” are so called because gold miners traditionally have to put in a lot of work before they see any reward in the shape of precious metal.
Can low IQ people successfully mine a lot of Bitcoins? Or only the smart people get all the new Bitcoins?
There certainly are turnkey mining machines, on eBay etc. So the “more dollars than sense” constituency could do it. But the concentrations of the ore make physical mountaintop removal mining look easy by comparison, and I wouldn’t even try to do it with just a pickaxe, pencil and paper.
It then favors those with computers. Poor people in Bengladesh or Burundi – they will never be able to mine any.
In other words, the blockchain remains both public and infallible. It’s a totally reliable and trustworthy record of who owns what, but also who owned what back through time, all the way to the creation of Bitcoin.
Anyone attempting to alter that ledger to steal a coin would have to re-do all of the difficult calculations that were done to embed it there the last time it was traded. Then they would have to do the same with all the later blocks on top of it up to the current date, and then get far enough ahead that they were the first people to crack the newest block and get it accepted as the definitive version
Sounds like someone came up with a clever idea.
A clever, technical idea.
It’s not wise to build a world on just one technical idea.
Maybe a non-technological idea like ‘love one another,’ but for me personally, and this is just my opinion, it’s not wise to do it with one technical idea, however clever.
Maybe we first try it on real estate title recording.
Baby steps. Let’s see if we can first start with something like “tolerate one another.” Even that seems like too much for a lot of us.
To be fair, there are a lot of unwritten riders on “tolerate one another”, as used in practice — most of which are a tick list of bought-and-unpaid-for partisan coalitions — that make doing so a harder job than it needs to be. Unpacking that, as individuals and as a society, would yield great advances, if we would honestly know our group interests and demand they not be deprecated.
Tangent: back before “shut up and don’t think”, talking to oneself was apparently considered a perfectly fine and productive form of meditation. Maybe we need to start talking things out again more generally, indifferent to how the unthinking would react.
Apparently the author has never heard of a 51% attack or doesn’t realize that 51% has been achieved (or is way long bitcoin):
As for “no untrustworthy middlemen”, theoretically, yes, but in practice there is (was) Mt. Gox.
The best laugh was the byline-
By Matthew Sparkes, Deputy Head of Technology
The anarchists have a deputy head, as well as a presumed head of technology? Sounds awfully top heavy to me.
New title suggestion- Deputy Disruptor!
Gotta have the exclamation point.
RE: Iraqi PM warns Isis could become unstoppable as key city threatened
The struggle for the refinery at Baiji is intended to focus attention and American airstrikes away from the city of Ramadi and Anbar province. While looting economic resources has always been a tactical strategy of the Islamic State they’ve never lost sight of their strategic goals. Originally I thought that IS would launch an attack from the Thar Thar region on Iraqi-Shia forces’ communication and supply lines during the battle for Tikrit. Cutting a vital lifeline that stretches along from Tikrit-Samarra-Baghdad. Instead it appears the Islamic State is positioning themselves for the battle for Baghdad if and when the city of Ramadi falls. I already covered what is probably going to happen if the IS campaign in Anbar is successful so I’m not going to bother repeating it again here.
I don’t have any doubt that there are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of IS sleeper agents hidden among the refugees fleeing from the area surrounding Ramadi. Which will only add to the underground force the Islamic State already has in position for an uprising in western Baghdad. Overall, I’m guessing that the Islamic State is moving ahead with it’s plans for a campaign against Saudi Arabia while their attention is focused on Yemen and it’s enemies are still divided.
The greatest strength of the Islamic State has always been the lack of unity among it’s enemies.
On Baghdad-by-the-Potomac, we too have a Green Zone, as in Green Money Zone, where bankers are safe from the rest, from those who are under surveillance or being tested.
Tombstone of Hillary Clinton’s father knocked over: newspaper Reuters. EM: “Local officials were quick to dismiss as ‘unfounded’ rumors that the later Hugh Rodham’s headstone might have fallen over as a result of the deceased turning over in his grave.”
My chuckle of the day!
Vladimir Putin Defends Move To Approve Sale Of Missile System To Iran Huffington Post (timbers)
This latest episode in the Iran negotiations saga is amazing. From the kabuki of Netanyahu-Congress-neocon “bad cop” to the (sham)nobel-winning Presidential “good cop” to presidential legacy. Not sure how to characterize what led to what is developing into a failed peace deal: both “full retard” and “jumped the shark” come to mind.
If Russia had respected the sanctions and Iran had been more respectful/fearful of losing the hard-win “peace” negotiated with Obama so that the S-300 would NOT be delivered to Iran, would Israel have bombed Iran’s the nuclear installations after they stopped spinning uranium (thus reducing the environmental impact of an attack)??? If so, will they attack before the S-300 is delivered? Was the peace deal every really possible? If not, was peace ever really in the cards? Did US-Israel-neocons fail to account for the high level of distrust that Russia and Iran have for them?
Obama’s grab for a legacy that is different from the droning and chaos that he has come to be known for, involved engaging media boosterism to ‘bank’ a political/propaganda win by pushing the notion of the non-deal as a done-deal, makes it exceedingly difficult for the administration to object to the S-300 transfer to Iran!
I hope that peace is achieved. Some day we will get the full story. I expect it’ll be a familiar story of hubris, narcissism, miscalculations, etc. with its own twists. But I feel that today’s faux peace is more dangerous than it seems.
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There’s much more to this than the saber rattling of Israel and the United States. It’s entirely possible that the negotiations were meant to be used by other powers at the negotiating table as diplomatic cover to remove sanctions on Iran even if it’s only on the behalf of the BRICS countries.
The removal of any sanctions is an important step back from war. It’s not like the Iranians need nuclear weapons anyway. Just as long as they have the support of an outside nuclear power. Nor do I buy the propaganda that Iran even has a nuclear weapons program. This is about regional hegemony and Israeli/Saudi insecurity.
Maybe that’s why Putin brought up Yemen?
. . . entirely possible . . . diplomatic cover to remove sanctions . . .
The scenario you describe is an optimistic one: a group of countries working to release sanctions on Iran (to benefit from commercial opportunities). Thus making an end-run around the neocons and others that don’t favor peace. Many think that Obama is included in this camp (to me, that is unclear and I suspect otherwise).
Because this the ME, where one can not be too cynical, I tend toward a darker view. The entire exercise was more likely an attempt to make peace on terms favorable to neocons/hardliners. That such a peace may have made an attack more possible (by reducing environmental concerns) would be a feature, not a bug.
We will see. The most likely scenario, I think, is that neocon hardliners, unable to get a suitable “peace”, “veto” the peace non-deal and Iran is blamed for spoiling the peace initiative. Sanctions are then extended/deepened (European allies are bullied to go along as “Iran can not be trusted”). Naturally, Obama would still lay claim to the mantle of peace-maker, even though no peace was made.
Yet, attacking before the S-300 is operational is a possibility as it may be the last chance for such an attack.
psb4ukr.nato.int indeed! (Moon of Alabama) — first Richard Engel, now Brian Williams, now Sony Pictures emails in a searchable archive, now we see the whole Party of Regions assassination of 11 all but ordered on NATO letterhead.
The story at Moon of Alabama is very important indeed. Now we see the move to a favored CIA tactic, the usage of Death Squads, happening in near real time. b did some sleuthing and discovered that activity in support of the recent wave of assassinations of former Party of Regions political figures, and even critics of the current regime in Ukraine, was being done through a NATO-registered server. Laissez vous le bon temps roulez.
Jackrabbit, you are thoroughly justified in the cynicism you maintain toward the actions of the Deep State.
Imagine if some 4channer were to hack in and put FinMin Jaresko’s info on there. With custom web server software, it might be difficult, but maybe that’s just a spoof…
OK, I promise this is the last time I comment about this, but I really do think you should link to the NBC Engel kidnapping story from yesterday.
Summary: it was widely reported in 2012 that NBC journalist Richard Engel was kidnapped in Syria by Assad forces and subsequently “freed” by our rebel friends. Yesterday the NYT reported that it was all a fraud — the captors were in fact rebels posing as Assad forces.
The most troubling part is whether NBC executives knew or suspected the fraud, but chose to suppress that information.
Links:
NYT
Glenn Greenwald
Moon of Alabama
ps is there a bias against linking to Greenwald here? His alliance with Omidyar is unfortunate but still, he does excellent work.
Too many links and Skynet can think you’re a spammer. Nothing to do with Greenwald.
That threshold appears to be breached after only 2 links.
Is there anyway to raise that to, say 4 or 5? Or to raise/eliminate it for those who are not new users (after 20 comments or comments spanning at least 6 months, for example).
Akismet has developed its algos over thousands of sites. Its rules are more complex than just the number of links
And if the rules were transparent, the spammers would immediately game them.
Many mansions…
To those who believe, their father’s house has many mansions.
What is not well known is that there are also many mansions, actually more like cells, in Hades. With real estate, at all times, it’s location, location, location.
The World Bank broke its promise.
The IMF and the World Bank are not going to lend to Country A with Country A’s currency. Their very existence presupposes borrowing in another currency.
Only one exceptional nation is exempt from that from existential bane, backed by thousands of nuclear warheads.
Reuters on Interwebs/Big Data campaign advertising for 2016:
Not sure how Reuters defines environmentalist…I think “anti-fracking protest action” would be a more appropriate example of the kinds of searches enviros are likely to be making. But no, environmentalists are apparently just people who buy Priuses…
I also found the caption under the header image interesting. It’s not often that you see a campaign ad referred to as propaganda, at least not in the mainstream press. That and the correction note at the bottom, indicating that neither the author nor the editor knew off-hand who manufactures the aforementioned Prius lead me to believe that the author tends to vote Republican…
Reuters being a propaganda organ of neoliberalism, I suspect their position is that if it doesn’t exercise market agency, there’s no reason to believe it’s sentient.
About Teddy the porcupine. He speaks beautifully. Those squeaks are articulated. Can anyone translate for me?
” Those are very nice fingers you have there , madam. Would you like to keep them ? “
“Ukraine ally of ex-President Yanukovych found dead”
Actually, 8 individuals associated with the Yanukvych era opposition have been murdered, or suicided in some cases. Recently, two Ukrainian journalists critical of the Kiev regime have been murdered. A website, ‘peacekeepers’ apparently under control of Ukraine ex-pats in Canada publishes names, addresses, photographs etc of these so-called ‘terrorists’. It appears that anyone who opposes the current regime is deemed a terrorist. Information relating to the some of the individuals was posted on this website shortly before their murder. The poster was rewarded.
http://slavyangrad.org/2015/04/17/murder-of-oles-buzina-an-act-of-intimidation-by-nato/
Hosted by NATO, at that.
If the NYPD would have shot that coyote, the Vegans for Animal Rights would have protested. And so far the Vegans for Animal Rights lobby is louder and stronger than the Don’t Choke-Murder UnArmed Black Men For The Fun Of It lobby is.