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Christopher Marlowe credited as one of Shakespeare’s co-writers Guardian (Derek)
Tiny western U.S. hummingbird flies 8,000 miles, returns to same Lancaster County feeder LancasterOnline (guurst)
UKIP candidate sorry for claiming gay donkey raped his horse Politico
CO2 levels mark ‘new era’ in the world’s changing climate BBC (David L)
Mars orbiter locates Schiaparelli lander’s crash site Spaceflight Now (furzy)
New Evidence of Brain Injury in Kids Who Play Football Atlantic (David L)
Slippery Slope: Study Finds Little Lies Lead to Bigger Ones ABC (Dan K). Why should it be a surprise that practice makes perfect? Dan K also provides a link to the underlying study: The brain adapts to dishonesty Nature Neuroscience. This study is getting a lot of attention; Chuck L and Robert M saw writeups in two other pubs.
Bloomberg warns of the rise Aussie “oligarchs” MacroBusiness
Europe’s Banks Think They’re Incredibly Safe Bloomberg. Lambert: “There’s a confidence builder.”
Monte dei Paschi to cut jobs and sell assets in latest survival plan Financial Times
CETA Panic
Belgium sinks EU-Canada trade deal after Wallonia veto Financial Times. Interesting, lots of pro-Walloon comments, basically pointing out that the article failed to mention its objections, and deemed opposition to ISDS to be a good idea. Word has really gotten out on the TTIP and similar deals.
Wallonia sends EU trade policy back to the drawing board Politico
Refugees attack EU asylum offices on Lesvos EurActiv
Brexit
EU budget: “We have to deal with the problem caused by Brexit” European Parliament
Brexit Bulletin: Bankers Prepare for Exodus From London Bloomberg (furzy)
Sweden holds out olive branch to Brexit Britain Telegraph (David L)
Syraqistan
Syria and the Cycle of American Intervention Atlantic. Resilc: “Can we just do nothing for 50 years and thus save the world from more chaos?”
Haunted by Gaddafi on the fifth anniversary of his overthrow Fabius Maximus (resilc)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Compare the Coverage of Mosul and East Aleppo and It Reveals a Lot Unz Review. We linked to this earlier but it is worth not missing. Margarita: One day, when the obituary for the great American empire is written, propaganda will no doubt be held up as one its main and lasting accomplishments
The CIA shoud be renamed SLICC Sic Semper Tyrannis (resilc)
Trade Traitors
The TPP and Free Trade: Time to Retake the English Language Truthout (RR)
2016
Fact-free conservative media is a symptom of GOP troubles, not a cause Business Insider (sherry). Now increasingly matched by a fact-challenged mainstream media!
Early voter turnout in Bexar County at record high KSAT 12 (furzy). Texas. Hhhm…
Fearing Trump, Bar Association Stifles Report Calling Him a ‘Libel Bully’ New York Times (Dan K)
White House dodges on whether Obama will leave country under President Trump Politico (Mason). Oh come on. His library will be here, and he wants to do venture capital and own a sports team. If he wants to make as statement, after he gets a multimillion advance for yet another autobiography, he can buy a vacation place in Italy or France. The Kennedys took a holiday in Ravello, so there’s even a precedent of sorts.
Time for Clinton supporters to be tolerant and believe in ‘stronger together‘ The Hill (Dan K)
Liberals Hope Elizabeth Warren Will Serve as Clinton’s Scrutinizer in Chief New York Times
Welcome To The George Orwell Theme Park Of Democracy James Howard Kunstler (RR)
US health insurance costs to rise 25% on average next year Financial Times. So much for bending the cost curve.
Peter Thiel’s Politics Become a Deal-Killer in Silicon Valley Bloomberg (furzy)
Justice Dept. Shakes Up Inquiry Into Eric Garner Chokehold Case New York Times
Former Pa. attorney general sentenced to jail The Hill (alex)
Dakota Access Pipeline protest: Drone shot, road reopens CNN (furzy)
Sioux Protest that Inspired the World Defend Democracy
Wall Street 2016: Firms Managing Pension Money Spend Millions To Support Governors, Despite Pay-To-Play Rule David Sirota, International Business Times. Important. Circulate widely.
How the AT&T-Time Warner deal could escape deeper regulatory scrutiny Washington Post (TF)
Twitter Planning Hundreds More Job Cuts as Soon as This Week Bloomberg (furzy)
‘We’re Not Wells Fargo’ Won’t Cut It with Regulators American Banker
Class Warfare
How Amazon counterfeits put this man’s business on brink of collapse CNBC (Dan K)
How Democrats Killed Their Populist Soul Matt Stoller, Atlantic. Today’s must read.
Antidote du jour (Tracie H):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Comments are closed.
THE WORLD’S FIRST robot to control marine pests has completed trials on the Great Barrier Reef, successfully hunting down and killing the coral destroying crown-of-thorns starfish (COTS).
The robot known as COTSbot is the first in the world designed to eradicate the COTS responsible for around 40 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef’s total loss of coral.
The Queensland University of Technology (QUT) said the trials proved the underwater robot vehicle could successfully navigate through difficult reefs, be used detect COTS with remarkable accuracy and deliver fatal doses of bile salts using its innovative injection system.
http://www.australiangeographic.com.au/news/2016/10/new-robot-to-destroy-pests-on-the-great-barrier-reef
interesantemente
That reminds me of my dentist’s Novocain syringe technique.
Have you done any/much reef diving/snorkling in OZ?
Regarding Stoller’s piece, anyone interested in the career of Wright Patman should read the chapter “An Unreconstructed Populist” in Studs Terkel’s Hard Times.
I second that, and the entire book. Studs Terkel was an American treasure.
Yes, because he let people talk, and it turns out most people have something to say that’s worth hearing. And he loved life, just the ordinary everyday living of it, walking down the street seeing all those people he knew had lives they were living.
I’m gonna have to re-read that fine book ! …. as a primer ……
Thanks for the suggestion.
Stoller used to have a Tumblr blog called “Observations on Credit and Surveillance” that had a couple of posts on Patman:
http://mattstoller.tumblr.com/post/74989101523/gerald-ford-was-knee-deep-in-the-watergate
http://mattstoller.tumblr.com/post/77386544058/in-1972-the-dallas-fed-had-more-ping-pong-balls
Stoller had a lot of interesting posts, including some on the history of NAFTA, but I haven’t seen anything recent.
Rick Perlstein includes a ton of detail on the rise of the Watergate Babies and their reckless dismantling of the congressional committee structure in The Invisible Bridge.
Can’t recommend that book enough.
“Watergate babies”, is that a new name for “Boomers”?
Um, you’ve just proven you are a big buyer of the generational hate meme being pushed hard by folks like Stan Druckemiller. in fact thye’d be “Greatest Generation”. Just Google the names. Bob Car was born in 1943. Henry Waxman was born in 1939. It would be pretty much unheard of then as now for someone under 30 to win a Congressional seat. And most of the architects of the move of the country to the right are from older cohorts: Lewis Powell, author of the famed Powell Memo. Henry Manne, who singlehandedly moved legal education way to the right. Alan Greenspan. Bob Rubin.
For groups as large as generations, the differences within them are way greater than differences between them. Members of the 0.1% in any age cohort have far more in common with each other than their generation. Ditto single mothers.
No, it’s not. Stoller is carefully limiting his analysis to a cohort with a history, which he outlines, and a collective institutional presence.
Do consider reading Stoller’s piece instead of proffering low-grade, kneejerk snark, mkay?
That Atlantic piece about Syria was just another pro- intervention argument that ignores the fact that we have intervened in Syria by arming “moderate” rebels. You didn’t have to be a starry eyed fan of Assad and his brutal security services to recognize that encouraging an armed revolt would almost certainly lead to a spiral of ever increasing violence and sectarian hatred. And to top it off, this guy says it is hard to see how intervention would make it worse. Intervention from all sides is precisely what has made it worse, but he thinks American intervention is somehow magically different.
15 years after Iraq and it has already become in the minds of our elite a distant historical episode whose chief significance was it made us too reluctant to intervene in the Middle East.
I just read the other Syraqistan piece, the one on Libya.
The author seems to live in a circle where most people are too smart to defend the Libyan intervention, but I still see devout Clintonites saying it was done to prevent a mass bloodbath. It’s axiomatic with them. In one case I pointed to the recent British report and it made no impact at all. Yes, these people are foolish, but it’s a mistake to assume they are rare. In the current DC environment people are once again cherry picking their facts to make it seem like intervention in the Middle East is something we should be doing. It’s our moral duty.
Clintonites: ” We started a bloodbath in Libya to prevent a bloodbath in Libya! Why are you people complaining?!”
Don’t forget the slavery in Libya now, because markets
Hillary’s got big brass balls bigger than the Donald’s. She rather “get caught trying”. Taking responsibility for your actions or adhering to the doctrine of ‘do no harm’ is for timid little people.
Donald
October 25, 2016 at 7:31 am
It is a lack of schooling, or does it hit too close to the bone that no one ever mentions Orwell’s “Perpetual War?”
Both.
Might be doublethink, doublespeak, doubletongue….
US has been in perpetual war since WWII. But it’s a bit like HC’s scandals: there are so many that everyone ultimately gets overloaded, confused and bored, and in the final analysis, winds up accepting the activity passively as business as usual.
Hillary practically already is president.
Then I ask, how long has that been?
In fact, the Clintons were the first governors of New York…
Both candidates are from NY. Some democracy.
‘schooling’ …. you mean as in the caressing veil of ‘common-cored’ SJW feel-good ‘leave no safe-space behind’ propaganda …. that schooling ??
…a whole generation having to repeat history …. because they were never taught it in the first place !
Don’t blame that trailer trash on NY. Trump, like all garbage, will find his home in Jersey.
Mention “logical fallacies” and check out all the blank stares.
Moon of Alabama linked up this piece which says there never was much of a popular, peaceful “revolution” in Syria and therefore support for the Syrian “democrats” is as phony an excuse to intervene as those made up massacres were in Libya. The author says the so called Syrian revolution was simply part of a longstanding effort by the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamists to turn Syria into a religious state. Most of the population supported Assad since he was their defense against those religious fanatics. The larger context is the US desire to defeat Arab nationalism–at one time because that movement was supported by the Soviet Union and now perhaps having more to do with Israel.
https://gowans.wordpress.com/2016/10/22/the-revolutionary-distemper-in-syria-that-wasnt/
How profoundly ironic that America decided to line up on the side of radical Islamic fundamentalism against a secular democratically-elected leader. As Putin has so calmly and consistently pointed out. I’m pretty sure the people who voted in and continue to vote in these war monsters would be interested to learn this simple fact: the US supports al-Qaeda. But oh I forgot, the other guy said mean stuff about women 15 years ago.
OTPBD: So true!
I’m sure everyone has seen this by now, but here is an email from Wikileaks’ Clinton email dump that details the reasoning behind Israel’s desire to get rid of Assad, which I expect is among the key factors driving US decision making wrt Syria.
https://wikileaks.org/clinton-emails/emailid/18328#efmADMAFf
Correction (or perhaps they just left out THE main reason): With Assad and Syria and Lebanon pacified and walled off from Iran, Israel would be fully free to go full genocide on Palestinians and not have to worry about any repercussions at all.
And of course another way for Israel to guarantee its security would be to make peace and call for regional nuclear disarmament including themselves. It’s rather hypocritical to say that Israel is entitled to use the nuclear threat to give itself a free hand while denouncing that possibility in others. Projection much?
Israel and Iran are natural allies. Contemporary politics regimes are just outliers getting in the way ..will be lost in the sands of time…” and all that. ( an unrecognized ironic mutual observation)
(File under Cyrus the Great https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_the_Great )
Here’s another article I found interesting. Not sure whether it is a significant piece of the puzzle, but it is worth noting.
Israel Grants First Golan Heights Oil Drilling licence To Dick Cheney-Linked Company
http://www.businessinsider.com.au/israel-grants-golan-heights-oil-license-2013-2
I greatly admire NC. It is THE go-to site for real news and analysis in my eyes. As such, I must contest the wild claim that Israel is planning a genocide in the region. I mean, genocide, really? There’s plenty wrong with Israel and its policies, just as there is with all countries, but to call genocide is both empirically rubbish – show me ANY serious evidence, demographic, political, or military, any at all – and culturally insensitive, perhaps deliberately so (?) There’s plenty of vile anti-Semitism and anti-Israel conspiracy theories on Zero Hedge in-between the often very good analysis. I really hope not to see a repeat here as the overall tone of debate in NC is so very, very high and so thought-provoking. Please don’t take this as the start of a “You can’t talk Israel” diatribe. Let’s do so! But with evidence, not wild unsubstantiated claims.
“There’s plenty of vile anti-Semitism and anti-Israel conspiracy theories on Zero Hedge in-between the often very good analysis.”
Can you cite some specific examples of what you have in mind?
The word “genocide” has a broader legal definition than the popular meaning gives it. That’s the reason that some people use it. The UN definition is–
a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
That’s vague enough that it leaves room to extend it to cases of oppression that are not in the same league with, say, Rwanda.
I don’t agree with using the word in this way because the popular meaning derives its clout from association with cases like Rwanda, the Holocaust and so forth and I want to avoid arguments where Israel supporters can pose as victims of what they will claim is antisemitic rhetoric, the standard ploy, but that’s where the usage comes from. I do use words like “apartheid” to describe the occupation of the WB and “ethnic cleansing” to describe the Nakba in 1948 and some sociologist (Kimmerling, I think) used the term “politicide” to describe how the Israelis try to destroy any possibility of a Palestinian state.
Well Israel has been plundering the Palestinians water supplies, destroying their (mainly agricultural) livelihoods, enforced an illegal embargo against Gaza, and had a plan to keep Gazans at near-malnutrition levels. I think some or all of those would fit under (b) and (c) at the very least.
This UN report was from 2002 but things haven’t significantly changed:
UN News Service: Rising Malnutrition Among Palestinians
More on the water supplies:
Think Progress: West Bank Palestinians Without Clean Water After Israel Cuts Off Supplies
Oh, but the Israeli government always finds some way to blame the Palestinians.
I’m sold – Russia should arm the Iranians with nukes so as to restraint Israeli aggression as your quote above mentions. And after NATO says it’s new missiles in eastern Europe aimed as Russia are really because Iran, so let’s take NATO at it’s word – what’s the harm in putting truth to NATO and U.S. lies?
Escalation can work both ways. Time to rattle the cage of the Evil Empire and show it what a 2 way road looks like.
Russia is in some sort of rapprochement with Israel lately.
As the Syrian Civil war spins, check back tomorrow…
so good n MAD then …… I can see that as a rational option ….
I object to the US intervening in ANY country’s civil war the way we keep doing. I’m so glad there was no US-like nation around during OUR civil war so WE could complete it organically ourselves rather than have some outside interest decide the outcome for us (and in THEIR best interest).
It doesn’t matter that 600k+ people were killed in the war, that’s just the nature of civil wars. It was NECESSARY to complete it in order to move on with internal legitimacy. It doesn’t matter one bit if the US likes or dislikes the winning side, it is that country’s, that people’s job to complete the fight themselves to get a legitimate resolution.
Humanitarian-shumanitarian “intervention”, I wouldn’t have wanted such in our country during our civil war. In any case, US “humanitarian” interventions are NEVER humanitarian. They are always heavily dosed with US weapons, US “advisors” (CIA and Special Forces interventions) and ALWAYS focused on getting a pliable neoliberal, pro-Israel government into power.
Praedor: In fact, there was a U.S.-like nation lurking in the U.S. Civil War. It was called the British Empire.
The Special Relationship. So Special.
Rhett Butler: For your information, I was in England, not a month ago, and I’ll tell you this. England will never help the Confederacy. England never bets on the underdog. That’s why she’s England.
Besides, the fat Dutch woman who is sitting on the throne is a God-fearing soul and she doesn’t approve of slavery. Let the English mill workers starve because they can’t get our cotton but never, never strike a blow for slavery.
And as for France, that weak imitation of Napoleon is far too busy establishing the French in Mexico to be bothered with us. In fact he welcomes this war, because it keeps us too busy to run his troops out of Mexico. . . . No, Scarlett, the idea of assistance from abroad is just a newspaper invention to keep up the morale of the South. The Confederacy is doomed. It’s living on its hump now, like the camel, and even the largest of humps aren’t inexhaustible.
I give myself about six months more of blockading and then I’m through. After that, it will be too risky. And I’ll sell my boats to some foolish Englishman who thinks he can slip them through. But one way or the other, it’s not bothering me. I’ve made money enough, and it’s in English banks and in gold. None of this worthless paper for me.
https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/m/mitchell/margaret/gone/chapter13.html
I dont think this is in the movie.
And after the war between the states was over, this (from the Wiki article on the 1939 film, Juarez – the same year Gone With the Wind was made?):
Here we are…still waiting for our first indigenous president, more than 100 years after Mexico got hers.
Well, there was the UK, but it at least had the good sense to recognize the foreeseable damage intervention would cause to its own interests.
There was also strong antislavery sentiment in the UK. With the Emancipation Proclamation, Lincoln essentially killed any chance that the UK would intervene.
Much more likely it was Russia that had a far greater effect on stopping the UK and France from joining forces with the rebels. While the UK had the ships and shipyards to supply the Confederates, it was France that had the army. The threat of Russia’s army and navy joining up with the US was too much for both nations to dare risk.
Of the two, the bigger risk was France. The UK was already over-extended, read somewhere reading one of the British observers with the rebel army was shocked at the scale losses. Both sides lost more men in casualties and losses at Gettysburg than the UK had as a standing professional home army at the time.
Often enough, the US starts those civil wars, Central & South America( alsoiin the 1800s including corporate filibuster or freebooters even back then) Iran, Iraq Syria, Congo, Indonesia, Thailand, etc. etc in the 1950-70s. The list of Civil Wars initiated by US governments is too long.
From The Atlantic article:
“A future president may well oversee a more muscular foreign policy. When the next humanitarian crisis occurs, the cry of “no more Aleppos” may be compelling. In that sense, at least, Syrian civilians won’t have died entirely in vain.”
Won’t have died “in vain.”
So the slaughtered Syrians of Aleppo will do for the next group of victims what the slaughtered Rwandans did for them–justify the killing.
If there is a better example of twisted, malignant elitism somewhere, I haven’t seen it.
Won’t have died entirely “in vain.”
Entirely?
Partially?
It’s about the most profound binary condition I can think of.
Yes, they have all died entirely in vain, somone should give the writer an opportunity to demonstrate partially
i guess we should just kill some more now, in order to save even more later. die now save later! it’s the humanitarian way. then the clinton foundation can provide the survivors with toxic trailers.
R2P is a SLICC.
At 5am this morning I did a Google news search for “Hillary”. I immediate got search results showing 100% positive or neutral stories for Hillary. No mention of Wikileaks, Robert Creamer, etc.
Did the same search for “Trump” and got 100% negative stories about him having a potty mouth and a bad temperament. Nothing positive. There were a few pro-Hillary stories in that search though. Give it a try!
With that in mind, along with Google–a company also shiwn ti be in active collusion with the Hillary campaign thanks to wikileaks–I think it would be nice for outlets like the NYT, Politico, etc to have a helpful disclaimer at the top of their pages stating that contrary to the impression they’re otherwise trying to give they’re not actually journalistic organizations, but rather mouthpieces for the Hillary campaign.
Don’t forget Youtube searches with sexually-tinged image results having nothing to do with ‘Julian Assange’ ‘Jill Stein,’ etc., possible Twitter shadowbans & rotating follower culls; fixed straight-up Google searches, the Correct the Record propaganda Wurlitzer formerly known as /r/politics, Facebook’s takedowns of longstanding users if they get out of line politically, etc., etc.
DuckDuckGo ain’t perfect but I prefer my reality unfiltered.
& don’t forget that Obama wants to go to Silicon Valley later so he can ‘nudge’ more Americans into other doomed-to-implode programs us dummies are just too stupid to understand. It’s for our own good!
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/10/facebook-co-founder-drops-unprecedented-cash-to-stop-trump-230201
https://theintercept.com/2016/04/22/googles-remarkably-close-relationship-with-the-obama-white-house-in-two-charts/
I get depressed whenever I open Facebook, read NYT, WSJ, Washington Post, Bloomberg, or tune into CNN. Trump bashing all the time. Very little about Clinton’s email or Foundation shenanigans. These are always minimized. Nothing to see here, as Lambert likes to say. Even my favorite comedians, John Oliver and Bill Maher have taken to admonishing people not to vote for third party candidates. The media has become one big propaganda machine.
I’d say the media has been a propaganda machine (with a few exceptions) for at least a century, but they’ve generally been subtle about it. They do seem now to be pulling out the stops, so much so that it’s becoming very obvious. I’m trying to decide whether this coming out is being done out of desperation (to get HC elected) or out of a sense of confidence in their abilities. I’m also trying to decide which is worse.
INTERNET SAFE SPACES SMATTERED ……..
One thing I wonder about lately is whether the non-stop, over-the-top media bashing of Trump is actually starting to have the opposite effect. Instead of turning people off of voting for him, is it instead reinforcing the idea that since Trump obviously terrifies the media/political institutions/corporations, that he really is worth voting for. I mean, the trustworthiness of institutions like the media, Congress and corporations are scraping the bottom anyway. Why should anyone listen to what they say on this subject? They have been wrong/criminally liable about so many of the mistakes that have gotten us into this mess. Are they inadvertantly helping Trump now instead of hurting him?
^ Interesting theory worth noting.
Voted for Obama twice but, just like Clinton One’s second campaign, had to hold my nose while doing so. Didn’t think Obama could run for a third term but looks like we’re about to get one regardless. Hope Hillary enjoys her brief time in the sun, because events both foreign and domestic seem likely to eclipse her almost immediately.
Post-election machinations in both parties should be interesting, depending on Congressional election results, and this is where I will be paying the most attention as a Berniecrat who has a few atoms of optimism left.
Agree with the eclipse observation. If Hillary wins, she’ll enter office under a dark, suffocating cloud of mistrust and animosity. Whatever the opposite of a honeymoon is, is what she is in for.
The brain adapts to propaganda.
Young people and old people are all said to be for Hillary.
I will comment on young people here, because young brains adapt with more plasticity….like my skin when I was younger. And that gives hope that, years from now, today’s young Hillary voters will look back and regret why they voted for her at all.
I’m thinking buyer’s remorse will set in just after or even before the Inauguration. Boogeyman Trump will have faded away, and folks will be scratching their hungover heads trying to remember just how they hooked up with that woman next to them in the bed.
Yes. I can’t remember if I voted for Barry Goldwater in my first election in 1964. I think not. He was too retrograde for me at 21. But, then that means I voted for LBJ who sent us into war in Vietnam for no reason except he would not be the first President to lose a war. He ended America’s brief Camelot forever. No doubt my mind and old age have adjusted the neuron connections to avoid unpleasant emotions. I remember watching “Dear America – Letters Home from Vietnam” and the anger I felt even though he’d died years earlier of heart attacks at 64, a victim of his lost war.
‘Liberals Hope Elizabeth Warren Will Serve as Clinton’s Scrutinizer in Chief’ — NYT
This absurd fantasy is an example of the full court press by the Times’ editorial, ‘news,’ and headline writers to spin a seamless myth that the cakewalk is all over, and it’s only a question of how vast Hillary’s spoils will be.
Hillary may even win Texas, they confabulate, after receiving this week’s walking-around money.
Lies … all lies. The cornered rats of the lying MSM are lying like they’ve never lied in their lives.
Meanwhile, thirty people showed up for a Tim Kaine rally in West Palm Beach yesterday. If Hillary herself had been there, they would have pulled in at least seventy rabid fans, and sold some merch too. :-)
“Hillary may even win in Texas”
Well lo and behold, evidence of voter rigging (Soros machines?) all over Texas. Vote for Trump and it’s changed to Hillary. Too many instances for it to be an anomaly . If you vote straight ticket, it marks all the Repub undercard but has Hillary as President. Where is the DOJ? Stupid question, isn’t it?
Of course no mention in the MSM, but all over alt media
What is this D .. O .. J of which you speak ?
DOJ unperson. Substitute Ministry of Love.
” Vote for Trump and it’s changed to Hillary”
Like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RMElvPDza9Q
I’m not sure it’s fair to blame Google’s sorting algorithm, you’d probably get similar results in any news search engine. The problem is in fact far worse and scarier than that, it’s that the mainstream media sources the search engines draw from are completely in the tank for Hillary, and thus any search results based on searching their output will likewise be. The bias in the media I’ve witnessed in this election cycle has been just been shameless and sneeringly obvious. I just hope people see it for what it is, and turn away from those media–or at least view them with a healthy skepticism knowing they aren’t anything close to impartial.
Defeat Hillary and we defeat the bias in the media.
That’s the only way they learn.
I had that thought too, but let’s remember that there are leaked emails of high-up Google execs kissing up to Hillary.
It’s only reasonable to assume bad faith here on Google’s part.
I agree that it’s likely that Google is operating in bad faith.
I’d say it’s more a “one hand washes the other” thing. If the Clinton campaign has inside knowledge of Google’s search algorithm (likely), then the Clinton campaign can optimize statements from its spokesholes, surrogates, and stenographers such that their content “naturally” rises to the top of the search results. Think of it as a sustained series of Google bombs.
Besides plausible denial, the advantage of doing it in this more roundabout way is that a lot more insiders are cut in.
“The brain adapts to dishonesty”
A phenomenon most American’s should be quite familiar with these daze. I’ll be doubly interested in the follow-up “How to de-adapt your brain to dishonesty’.
“The brain adapts to dishonesty”…hmmm
Bill Clinton Era SEC Chair Tells Elizabeth Warren to Muzzle Herself
By Pam Martens and Russ Martens: October 25, 2016
Yesterday, former SEC Chair Arthur Levitt penned an OpEd for the Wall Street Journal, effectively telling Senator Elizabeth Warren to stop criticizing Mary Jo White in public. White is the current Chair of the SEC that Senator Warren publicly asked President Obama to fire this month for her bad leadership.
Senator Warren is a genuine champion of the investing public and understands how the SEC has become a lapdog to Wall Street under White’s inept leadership. Levitt is part of the Bill Clinton machine that de-regulated Wall Street and turned it into a massive looting racket in the 1990s through today. It’s important to take note of Levitt’s effort to muzzle Warren in the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Expect to see more of this coming from a lot more of Wall Street’s cronies.
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/10/bill-clinton-era-sec-chair-tells-elizabeth-warren-to-muzzle-herself/
See also:
Who does Arthur serve…..?………………not us….
Where Bank Regulators Go to Get Rich
Among the members of Promontory’s advisory board are Arthur Levitt, like Schapiro a former SEC chairman (and now a senior adviser to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and a board member at Bloomberg LP); Frank Zarb, a longtime Wall Street hand at firms such as Lazard, American International Group Inc. and Citigroup; Kenneth Duberstein, the former chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and a member of the special committee of the board of directors of Dell Inc.; and Alan Blinder, a Princeton University economics professor and former Federal Reserve vice chairman.
“It would allow the super-rich to scam taxpayers by getting free government sponsored insurance,” Taleb wrote. “Yes, scam taxpayers. Legally. With the help of former civil servants who have an insider edge.”
“Isn’t this unethical?” Taleb asked Blinder.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-07/where-bank-regulators-go-to-get-rich.html?
Rethinking Robert Rubin
Rubin said simply, “It is a myth that the repeal of Glass-Steagall contributed to the financial crisis.”
Born’s plan was to have the CFTC oversee these new, often inexplicable financial products. Rubin, Summers, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, and Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Arthur Levitt countered that Born was out of her depth. (Levitt is a board member of Bloomberg LP, which owns Bloomberg Businessweek.) They argued that the CFTC, created in the 1970s to regulate futures contracts bought by farmers, didn’t have the authority or expertise to regulate complex derivatives in a fast-expanding market. Born was no match for their firepower. They persuaded Congress to ignore her.
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-19/rethinking-robert-rubin
PEU’s love to market their outstanding returns before fees and expenses. Uncle Sam carved out a free range for the PEU boys to operate the last thirty years. The Carlyle Group hired ex-SEC Chair Arthur Levitt in part to keep this uncharted territory.
http://peureport.blogspot.com/2014/04/peu-fees-most-are-inflated.html
Valuable comment. Thanks for the pertinent links. Recommended reading and re-reading lest we forget.
“Stronger Together”.
Over the weekend I was listening to the humorous, news quiz radio program ” Wait! Wait! Don’t Tell Me!” (Don’t worry. I rarely listen to National Propaganda Radio except when I’m in the car at a time a program I like is on), and in one of the regular questions each week the contestant is asked which of three alleged news items of the past week is true. The correct one last week was about an annual British outrageous lying contest that seeks contestants from all walks of life, but from which lawyers and politicians are banned because they have an unfair advantage.
FFS, almost everyone the day with a lie:
“How are you?”
“Great”
Many people start life with a lie believed – There is a Santa Claus.
“Work hard. Study computer programming. You’ll have a good life.”
Little nasty lies like these.
UKIP candidate sorry for claiming gay donkey raped his horse Politico
So there are two legged asses…..
but “Politico” sure is a strange name for a horse…
No stranger than Incitatus, possibly even more apt.
“Liberals Hope Elizabeth Warren Will Serve as Clinton’s Scrutinizer in Chief”
Dream on.
“Liberals, Hope Elizabeth Warren Will Serve…”
Hope harder or Tinkerbell gets it!
Hope springs eternally f#cked ……
…just look at the last 8 years…
Yeah, hope. That should work. Oh, wait…
I rather associate myself with the sentiment expressed in an old Ian Dury and the Blockheads song:
“The hope that springs eternal, springs right up your behind”.
This Is What We Find/Uneasy Sunny Day Hotsy Totsy
Overheard some people talking about a Tracey Ullman interview the other day. Supposedly during the course of this she mentioned how stupid the Brexit vote was, talking about how much better things were in Britain since joining the EU especially the food.
Now I haven’t confirmed this was true or accurate, but it has rumbled around my brain. To me this kind of thinking, coupled with the forearm forklift and knock offs on Amazon story, the increasing revolt towards “free” trade and the media’s collusion about our current election and the election itself are in many ways all about the same thing. As a smaller and smaller portion of the rewards have been allowed throughout the populace, more and more methods of ‘rigging the system’ happen. The balance between those whose lives are crumbling, the great middle where they aren’t getting ahead but have better food and cheap goods and those who are benefiting has been lost. Too many people are trying to feed themselves on pennies who never see the better food. Brexit will probably hurt the people who voted for it, but they get to watch a whole lot of the top suffer, too now. Lots of people around me are sure the Trump threat is over, over confidence. If Trump gets in a lot of his voters will probably suffer, not necessarily more than they would with Clinton but some of the top will suffer, which is why I say overconfidence.
Think of it this way, just because you had better food doesn’t mean the majority of your neighbors did.
Big cities love deindustrialization and loss of sovereignty: more paper to be pushed in the “services economy,” and better ethnic food, right?
Throughout this whole Brexit and Trump cycle, the aspect I’ve been most disappointed by is the lack of empathy across groups. You’ve got big city folks who can’t understand why anyone wouldn’t love how “cosmopolitan” their cities have become in recent years and how awesome the “services economy” is, but can’t bring themselves to think for a moment how devastating it is for a man to lose his work and craft because someone across the planet allegedly does it cheaper (what about quality? It never mattered? That’s tough to hear). These people bring a lunch pale to work and their pub looks the same as it always did, cosmopolitan means nothing.
And so the vitriol goes back and forth and we descend further into identity politics.
Maybe where this all ends up really is de-amalgamation. Let the “global cities” break off into autonomous city-states and let the countryside decide its own fate with its own currency.
Remember, deindustrialization was NOT mandatory. Germany kept their industries. We were sold out because the paper-pushers wanted quick profits versus investment in skills and training. We were sold out by idiot Toryism, thinking “the value of a nation is its land.” No, your land is worthless if it doesn’t generate economic activity.
That is what all this is about, but it’s not being enumerated properly. *WE* as a nation decided to be individualists and not train ourselves and invest in ourselves for long-term prosperity. We threw away our core to push paper and productivity.
Disagree. Humans are not disembodied heads, interact with the world primarily by moving within and manipulating it, require a fairly broad variety of chemical inputs, and cannot be digitized for storage. That land is worth plenty even if I’m just sitting on it growing food. Or maybe some people lack the empathy to understand that no one is entitled to not be rejected for selling out.
Also, don’t use the royal “we” when talking about two separate groups with opposing and asymmetrical power relations. THEY decided it and, in the disgusting English spirit of alacrity, WE failed to throw their fancy azzes into the river.
> Also, don’t use the royal “we” when talking about two separate groups with opposing and asymmetrical power relations
+100
Another article about the lying study, with some useful critique in the last section:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/24/health/brain-lying/
More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle emphasized the importance of habit in his Nicomachean Ethics.
“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.”
They did not reward or punish……always a payoff or risk in real life”
LOL. What planet are you from?
As anyone over age 8 can see, we currently have a situation where the rewards for lying are practically endless, and the punishments few and far between. At least when you are above the “local businessman” level.
what if Barrett is lying ….??
All that speculation about Trump’s post campaign media empire? So it begins…
Trump Launches Nightly Campaign Broadcast Via Facebook Live
He who cackles last, cackles best.
“First time you cackle, you cackle on the lot,
Next time you cackle, you cackle in the pot.”
I don’t put much stock in this media empire/throwing election for exposure hypothesis. Why would a 70 year old billionaire need to do that? I don’t see it benefiting his family much either as HE is the media personality.
I’d like to believe that he is establishing what I have wanted Presidents to start doing a few years ago, regular live contact with citizens via social media. Eating breakfast, clipping their toenails, whatever. Just a check in and connection with the broader public. Now I have little faith Trump is doing this, at least as I want it, but maybe he will at least introduce the idea. It goes ignored unless it is the front page OMG of the day, but I think his Twitter presence is a really interesting, good aspect of his campaign. Normal people use Twitter and most of the time he uses it himself.
Clinton on the other hand will make zero effort to consult/interact with voters. She has a team of experts for that… and she doesn’t know how computers work…
Why would a 70 yr old billionaire do that? To him (and many others in that income bracket) money is a way of keeping score and they like to run up the score. Has Warren Buffet stopped trying to make money? It’s not like he can even spend a fraction of what he has. It’s just second nature to these people. It also gives him one more way to bask in his own narcissistic glory.
I do like that his twitter feed is brash and uncensored even if I don’t like what he says. Feels more real than the obviously scripted/focus grouped Clinton account.
It could be both….he’s willing to win, willing to not win. And while his run may be about ego gratification you could say that about any presidential canddate.
Fireside Chats?
Is Social media really the place for it?
I am one of the many millions who will never have access to “social media”. Don’t like walled gardens, or surveillance, or endless trivial wastes of time. Maybe on YouTube, if you consider that social media. Tune in if you want. No need to have crap pushed at us, nonstop..
Justice Dept. Shakes Up Inquiry Into Eric Garner Chokehold Case New York Times
Stuart London, a lawyer for Officer Pantaleo, said that he had maintained he never violated anyone’s civil rights. “This was always a simple street encounter where Officer Pantaleo utilized his N.Y.P.D. training to subdue an individual,” Mr. London said.
He added: “If it is true that the Justice Department is rejecting the recommendations of seasoned F.B.I. agents and assistant United States attorneys, this is a gross miscarriage of justice. In our system of justice, politics should never take the place of the rule of law.”
========================================
Of course, IT IS THE EXACT OPPOSITE of what the defense attorney says – politics (i.e., good old boys network) is the exclusive arbiter of which laws get enforced scrupulously, and which laws get ignored scrupulously.
I guess we should be grateful for small favors in that the end of the president’s terms allows 1 case to proceed without politics…
If Clinton (or Trump) replaces Lynch, the next AG can just snap it back to the original configuration. Everybody wins! Or at least, they get to feel like they do, for a few weeks.
From the article:
For those that have the stomach for it, here’s the original video, cued up to the beginning of the physical engagement:
https://youtu.be/JpGxagKOkv8?t=4m30s
Pause the video and click-click the go arrow/button to step in increments.
At 4:36, Pantaleo’s left arm is coming around Garner’s neck.
US health insurance costs to rise 25% on average next year Financial Times. So much for bending the cost curve.
“AVERAGE”
I also assume such articles are only talking about insurance premiums???
Or does anybody know if they include increases to co-pays, addendum’s to co-pays, corrections (i.e., additions to co-pays), co-pay surcharges, service charges, co-pay processing fees, co-pay addendum processing fees, fees to process excess administration fees, but does not include fees related to health insurance, etcetera, etcetera….
Great thing about this Obamacare debacle is you don’t need the media to tell you anything. Go directly to the source: the healthcare exchange sites.
Healthcare.gov : main US site, covers states who do not run their own exchange site. Take a look at TX.
MNsure.org : Minnesota exchange. Compare the 2017 numbers to 2016 (I believe you switch it in the URL)
nystateofhealth.ny.gov : NY state. Toggle field from 2016 to 2017 to compare.
CoveredCA.com : California
I found 55% increase in premiums for the cheapest Bronze plan on a major carrier in Minnesota.
You’ll notice PPO plans basically don’t exist anymore. Go to the gatekeeper before you do anything (HMO).
Use a generic zip code from the state. Google “Minneapolis zip code” or “New York zip code” etc. Enter in a young family: two parents in 30s and two children around 2 yrs old. Income of 70k. Ignore the no-name plans like Molina and such, stick to the big carriers like BlueCross, United Healthcare, etc.
The prices are *absolute madness!* We are talking 30% of post-tax income for a plan in upstate NY for a small business owner with two children pulling out $70,000 for premiums alone. And then massive deductibles and coinsurance (20% to 30%).
You’re either blessed to work for a giant corporate overlord who gets a discount and pays for your care or you’re blessed to be poor to have the subsidy cover most of it. But just a regular person trying to run an auto body shop or a cafe… it’s just impossible.
My little business is just me. But no way I can afford it. I’m struggling now. Rock and a hard place. Something’s got to give.
It made me so mad last night when I went to healthcare.gov and saw that it said “most people will pay $75 – $100 a month” for their insurance (with subsidies.) I made less than $12,000 last year– but no subsidies for me, because I am married and together we make “too much.” The assumption is my husband will spend half his salary on my health insurance.
More than mad, also very sad…because it reminded me of how TOTALLY POOR almost everyone in the USA is.
Think I’ll pop over to the NYT real estate section and see “What $2 million dollars buys in Jackson Hole.” That should assuage my grief.
I empathize, I’m in the same boat. Last time I checked, to get even a bronze plan, I would have been on the hook for my entire net income between premiums and deductibles. Obamacare was one giant extended middle finger to small businesses.
Also self-employed and also make just enough to not qualify for subsidies. If you define affordable as $5,000 in annual premiums plus $6,000 out-of-pocket maximum before insurance kicks in with 100% coverage, then yes, the ACA is an overwhelming success. Thanks Obama, indeed.
To quote the great Yakoff Smirnoff:
“What a country!”
Cigna accused of fraud after charging patients co-pays that were 1000% higher than the cost of the particular drug
The suit refers to what it claims was a 2014 transaction in which a Cigna customer paid a $20 co-payment to his pharmacy to purchase the drug Amlodipine – a co-pay that was 1,043 percent higher than what Cigna and the pharmacy had agreed was the cost of the drug.
Cigna had negotiated a price of $1.75 for the Amlodipine prescription, according to the suit. The pharmacy, by agreement, was permitted to keep $1.75 of the $20 co-payment and obligated to return the remaining $18.25, known as “the spread,” to the insurer. The suit claims the delivery of the spread to the insurer is known in the industry as a “clawback.”
http://buff.ly/2eqNZ8h
What a spread…
Thanks for the link to the NY site.
I tried cheap.
Catastrophic Coverage
Per Year $5530
Per Person Deductible $6850
Jeeze where do I sign up? Can I sign up after being hit by a truck or would that be too late?
A word from our insurers…………..
Aetna Says Obamacare Plans ‘Aren’t Worth It’ to Healthy People
High premiums push healthy individuals from market, CEO says
ACA premiums could rise even more next year without fixes
Healthier people will avoid buying Affordable Care Act health insurance plans as premiums climb, threatening the stability of the market, Aetna Inc. Chief Executive Officer Mark Bertolini said.
“As the rates rise, the healthier people pull out because the out-of-pocket costs aren’t worth it,” Bertolini said at Bloomberg’s The Year Ahead Summit in New York. “Young people can do the math. Gas for the car, beer on Fridays and Saturdays, health insurance.”
law.
“What happens is the population gets sicker and sicker and sicker and sicker,” Bertolini said. “The rates keep rising to try and catch it. It’s a fruitless chase, and ultimately you end up with a very bad pool of risk.”
The government has emphasized that subsidies are available for many people to help cushion the premium increases. When they are taken into account, about 77 percent of current ACA enrollees will be able to buy health insurance for $100 or less a month, the U.S. said in a report on Monday.
Leaving the Market
http://www.bloomberg.com//news/articles/2016-10-25/aetna-says-obamacare-plans-aren-t-worth-it-to-healthy-people
Now he tells us after he got richer and richer and richer and richer? Back to kgw’s quote.
That’s called a death spiral….
Upstate NY, your premium pays assholes-
$12.9 Million retirement
http://www.democratandchronicle.com/story/money/business/2014/02/28/david-klein-excellus-bluecross-blueshield-retirement-payout/5896923/
Oh, wait, they forgot more than half, $30 million
http://www.rbj.net/print_article.asp?aID=207198
Non-profit, protected from monopoly/anti-trust by federal fiat. HUGE loss reserves. They never pay anything out. Must be good to be a non-profit bank.
Excellus Blue Cross Blue shield. Can’t get ANY sort of care in upstate without them.
45% increase in Illinois. But have no fear, 0bama has preemptively thanked himself:
That’s a funny guy, i’m telling ya. The last guy in the White House was quite the joker, too. I don’t know what is funnier, Bush searching the Oval Office for the missing WMDs, or 0bama thanking himself on our behalf for 0bamacare, but I do know that they are not laughing with us but at us.
Maybe he’s just a preening idiot. Oh sorry, he’s an intellectual yet idiot as a recent link would have it.
Raging narcissist might be apt. When he says ‘Thanks, 0bama’ he is not joking, he is telling us that we truly ought to be grateful to him.
How did that guy who gave such rousing speeches in 2008 become such an utter jerk?
I shall close Guantanamo,
I shall restore habeas corpus…
I remember sitting in a small hotel room in Tokyo that cold January, watching his first inauguration at about 3AM local time, with tears in my eyes. I honestly thought the USA and thus the world would be reborn after the Bush years and war crimes.
Well, fool me once…won’t get fooled again!
‘no clothes obama’
He lost me at his last State of the Union. He genuinely seemed to believe “Everything is Awesome!” and the media and Trump are just making us cynical. I find it hard to believe that he hasn’t gone onto healthcare.gov and typed in some hypothetical scenarios. Anyone who does would be shocked. Even if you are in the Oval Office bubble for eight years you still know fundamentally that a family earning $70,000 in upstate NY cannot afford to pay 30% of their post-tax income towards health insurance premiums!
Ha, well he lost me just a month after that cold Inauguration day when he appointed Rahm Emmanuel as his chief of staff, the consummate Clinton-era insider. I knew then the “hope and change” would just be an illusion.
He lost me when he flipped on FISA reform in July 2008, and gave retroactive immunity to the telcos for Bush’s program of warrantless surveillance. After promising to filibuster it.
I want to know why he thinks you have better quality health care? Seriously. Has there been a study somewhere where the rube who puts 20% of his after income towards insurance premiums and then has another 10% or so of it as a deductible which he can meet pretty quickly because his required drugs aren’t really covered and the test he needs aren’t covered (oh wait those don’t go towards his either his deductible or out of pocket maximum) gets great care? The bigger question is ‘what care’? Mostly because a large percentage of people are avoiding getting health care because they still cannot afford it. Where is the ‘quality’ in that. I realize it is two different discussions but it is all about the same thing – the state of health care in America. And without recognizing that that is the reality you are not really discussing it – even if the limited health care provided is decent quality.
Obama cannot or will not answer ‘what care’ because there is no “Thanks, Obama” attached to that. Our health care system was a mess before ‘reform’, but it is still a mess. Once again if you are going to enact the Swiss health care system, you have to enact all of it. For a start that means that everyone who spends over 8% of their income on insurance gets a subsidy- no means testing. Want to watch the cost curve bend – watch the government pick up the difference between 8% and 20% for everyone. I won’t even get into the multiple ways Switzerland regulates to make sure that they aren’t subsidizing major stock holders private jets because of that.
But all that is still about insurance NOT health care quality, and once again having friends on both Medicare and Medicaid talk about the differences between the care they got before and after ACA kicked in AND the differences in care that friends with both employer and self purchased insurance got, I really do want to know what the hell he thinks he is talking about.
Tiny western U.S. hummingbird flies 8,000 miles, returns to same Lancaster County feeder LancasterOnline (guurst)
Well, they use one of the kinds of hummingbird feeders I use…now, if I could only get their secret ingredient…
Hey dan, the secret ingredient, we found, is to keep the feeder in the sun and to change the sugar water if they haven’t consumed it all in a few days. The sugar water does go rancid quickly. If it goes rancid they apparently remember and will go to other nectar sources. We keep a bottle of sugar water in the fridge and only put in as much as is needed every few days, rather than filling to the top. Not sure why they like the sun exposure, you’d think they’d want to be under cover. However they refused to go to the nice designer feeder out in the yard under a cherry tree and instead were obsessive about the leaky, two dollar feeder on our deck. Go figure.
Once you find the sweet spot, you have to feed them, because they will come begging. No joke. When the feeder ran dry, the hummers would come to the window and look inside for us, or, if you were enjoying yourself on the deck, buzz your head until you got up to feed them. Smart little guys.
Thanks for that!
My nectar gets drunken…uh, drank? Slurped up in just a couple of days at most.
. It can get up to 115 degrees in Redding – putting the feeders in the sun will dry out a full feeder by sundown.I was living up in Redding, but Fresno is almost as bad And I’m not actually sure if the fluid would actually get to hot to…slurp.
I too would have thought that hummingbirds would prefer more protected spots, but the feeders in the open – in the shade of the house, seem to be more popular than the feeders under tree shade, although they get used plenty as well, just not as much as the open area feeders. Of course, a lot of the attention that a feeder gets seems mostly due to the fact that if one hummingbird visits it, than another has to want it at the same time…
115F! Good lord. Well that could be souring the sugar water quickly. A higher concentration of sugar to water will last longer, I think. But it sounds like you are doing well and are so different of a climate from here in PA that who knows what works and what doesn’t. It took years for us to attract them.
One of the joys of summer is watching and listening to them argue with each other. Who knew they were so territorial? This past summer they also competed with honeybees, bumblebees, yellowjackets, and even our chickens, who liked to try and slurp up the spillage from the cruddy feeder.
1 part sugar to 4 parts water (bit more sugar is ok, too)
red dye is actually harmful
no need to boil, just stir really well til dissolved
make sure the feeder is scrupulously CLEAN: fungus can kill the hummers
if you remove the smaller yellow plastic flowerlets that are in the holes on some feeders, Orioles can drink the nectar, too
here in Los Angeles, the nectar lasts about two days in hot summer sun; change it if it starts to get yellowish or cloudy (assuming it’s not consumed before then)
These people make great feeders. Wide bottle opening, easy to clean. Large capacity, if you need it. The bottom splits in two halves, again easy to clean.
http://www.morebirds.com/
Owner of 3 of these-
http://www.morebirds.com/node/78
Can’t recommend them enough. Dead simple, and very easy to clean/fill. The bottom is two parts, one clear on the bottom, red/clear on top where the holes are. Genius design.
bob
October 25, 2016 at 6:45 pm
I had those when I lived in Maryland!!! Thanks for reminding me! I’m gonna get me some more….
Simple design. I call that genius. Don’t come across it often, so I try to note it when I do.
There are some really great *looking* feeders out there. Filling them, cleaning them…etc…way harder than it should be.
Perhaps honey-water would go bad less quickly, as honey has natural anti-bacterial properties.
OMG NO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
HONEY KILLS Hummingbirds
Thank you. I did not know that.
I use these novel hummingbird feeders that require absolutely no refilling …..
they’re called …. PLANTS !
+1 My quince tree in the early spring, then hardy fuschias soon after, then Crocosmia later in the season all do the hummingbird feeding job wonderfully. And once they are established, you really don’t need to even lift a finger, here at least.
The best way, absolutely. I tend to take hummingbirds into account when planting, and the hummers reciprocate by visiting daily. Win-win.
They dig Zinias..
I grow several Agastache sp., as well as salvias, scrofularia, monarda, and lobelias …. they LOVE these plants!
We also have a Japanese style fountain with a bamboo spout streaming water from a submersible pump into a urn which then dribbles over the rim, and down through pebbles to a sump ….
The great thing about this set-up is not only do the local bird life use it to drink and bathe, especially during hot weather …… but it allows a perch for my honey bees to drink from the well, as it were …..
Quite fascinating to see the rim of that fountain completely ringed by honeybees taking a sip ….. while the occasional wren or hummer comes in for a cool dip !
Polecat
doesn’t exist if you don’t send a pic to Lambert!
It’s fun to take the time to just sit and watch behavior.
perhaps I’ll send a couple of pics next summer when the bees start building new comb …… and yes … It’s way cool to just watch them flit to and fro doing their thing .. they’re still bringing in pollen …don’t ask me where ?? …. but your right ….. when watching them time seems to stop and cares evaporate !!
Nothing like a trumpet vine!
https://www.google.com/search?q=trumpet+vine+campsis+radicans&biw=1024&bih=490&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&sqi=2&ved=0ahUKEwjSsIb5jffPAhVIwmMKHfamAzwQ_AUIBygC#imgrc=Gd08VZaTNBSGDM%3A
Lot of people think their a weed…and say it as if it were a bad thing….
Trumpet vine go great ..with an ice cold beer ………. and a machete …
….. just pullin your vine .. er .. chain there dan ‘:]
as kids we used to suck the nectar from the blooms …occasionally gettin stung in the process …och !
Even powdered sugar will kill them. The anti-caking substance added to it is deadly. Just ordinary sugar and water. I do try to clean out the feeders prior to refilling them, using dilute bleach followed by copious rinsing. I suppose it may help to slow bacterial growth.
https://www.dominosugar.com/family-fun/hummingbird-nectar-recipe
Dan
recipes I’ve seen are typically 1 part sugar 4 part water, I back off the water a little not only because I am not good with rules, less water theoretically should inhibit fermentation, bacteria need water. (ie why honey doesn’t ferment in it natural desiccated state, not enough moisture to support the fermentation process.
With the high temps you describe, try 1:3.5. I add sugar to warm water to aide it’s dissolving, then just let it cool on the counter.
I use the cheapy glass flask w/ the red plastic bottom feeder you see everywhere. Work fine. As a point of information, the most popular feeder is hung from a piece of monofilament from the tip of a blue spruce branch in western exposure. There is a garden wall in front of it with potted plants.
They usually (two at a time appear) feed one at a time and the second one will sit on the top of a potted plant near the feeder on the wall, or alternately high cover on a utility wire while the other chows down. They are funny little critters –vectored flight..
The fights are insane. Gravity and logic defying too. Once you begin to “see” them, you’ll see them all over the place, where most people don’t even notice. Train your brain for fast.
Try one of these, the last I bought, 3 years ago, were off amazon. Same price, way better product.
http://www.morebirds.com/node/78
Also- the are related to swifts, my favorite ‘normal’ bird.
optimader
October 25, 2016 at 3:19 pm
PEOPLE!!! People, people – I was just kidding about trying to get the SAME hummingbird to fly 8,000 miles back to my feeder! Really, I got hummingbirds flying out of my ears! Their on my ass all day long telling me to get them more sugar water!
I don’t use feeders. I use bee balm! Lots of it!
Welcome To The George Orwell Theme Park Of Democracy James Howard Kunstler (RR)
I’m more comfortable about Hillary — though I won’t vote for her — because it will be salutary for the ruling establishment to unravel with her in charge of it. That way, the right people will be blamed for the mismanagement of our national affairs. This gang of elites needs to be circulated out of power the hard way, under the burden of their own obvious perfidy, with no one else to point their fingers at. Her election will sharpen awareness of the criminal conduct in our financial practices and the neglect of regulation that marked the eight years of Obama’s appointees at the Department of Justice and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
=================================================
There are those who think if will be total gridlock – my view is that gridlock only happens to the little people – the 1% always get what they want lickety split.
But I not sanguine that the Clinton machine collapse will see the comeuppance of those most responsible – I think we passed the event horizon of the corruption black hole a while back…
The Ruling Establishment will not unravel…at least not before several severe crises that irrecoverably damage the Little People.
That’s why the Ruling Establishment wants her in charge, for any upcoming difficulties.
And that’s why we have to stop her.
Shock Doctrine demands we stop her, lest the Ruling Establishment gets more powerful.
I believe it’s naive to think ‘she will get the blame.’ Mao cared not for blame, when he had the barrel of a gun in his hands…or power in the case of a state under total control.
Co. Stauffenberg and his conspirators knew to capture the radio stations to establish control.
When Mao captured Beijing and Shanghai, with the KMT fleeing to little Taiwan, the former had the whole of China to tax, to give value to his fiat currency, while the KMT had a just one province. He who controls the capital, its bureaucracy controls power, and thus controls the empire – that’s a recurring theme played out in Chinese history, and elsewhere.
So, you never invite anyone to take over the capital.
Bad move (again, Shock Doctrine).
Birds are stupendous. I had some house wrens living in a little wren house by my back door. Very entertaining to watch them bring food in and give it to the babies through the hole. I noticed they made a cute noise whenever I went out the door. Come to find out that was their “warning song”. They don’t have to be afraid of me! Who do they think goes out there and changes their bath water periodically?!
It could be a warning (notice) that there is fresh bath water!
‘hey everybody, the two legged cow somehow put new water in the little pond! – lets go!’
I know when the feeders get low, the hummers buzz right outside the window giving me the evil eye that seems to say – ‘hey fatso, get some sugar water out here!’
No, I actually researched wrens and they have a special song for warning. It looks like they have one member that stands guard, perched up on the gutter, and when he sees a human he sounds the warning cry to the others, who may be frolicking in the bird bath or whatever. Well, by utilizing the birdhouse with the little hole, at least they are protected from the merciless bluejays, who put their eggs in the nests of other birds so their babies get free food.
Our barn swallows can’t stand us, but nest on our porch, and in our barn, and scream holy hell whenever we act like we live there too. Apart from that they’re great company. My wife hung her hummer feeders by my hammock off the porch, where brawls all afternoon keep me from reading. Hummingbirds are fabulous jewels in flowers, but in your face because your wife isn’t cooking the sugar water fast enough (can you say bird-crank?), they’re gigantic buzzing flies deserving only a super-swatter. Sugar water should be regulated.
Yeah, I didn’t like messing with that sugar water either, because invariable some of it spills, drawing ants.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3216766/
Hummingbirds Jewelled Messengers (2012)
You may be able to find it on the internet, but even the internet isn’t fast enough for them. It has a TON of great film work that gets lost with online video. Most of the hummingbird shots are slowed down by about half, maybe more, so that you can actually see what the hell they are doing. They captured one on film plucking a bug out of the air.
The voice-over narration was too much for me. But the video work was the best I’d ever seen.
The “nasty woman” meme has got to go. I mean, I get that some have latched onto it to try to flip the meaning as Trump intended it to something positive, but I find myself being really annoyed by it.
Take Elizabeth Warren’s speech yesterday at a rally for Clinton. She said,
Other than picking up on Trump calling Hillary a nasty woman, and trying to throw that term back in his face, what does prefacing every reference to women with the label “nasty” really add to this argument? Why would “nasty” women have “really” had it with Donald? Do you have to be “nasty” to validate your assessment of Trump?
Suppose she had said, instead, “Women have really had it with guys like you. Get this Donald: women are tough, women are smart and women vote. And on November 8th, we women are gonna march our feet to cast our votes to get you out of our lives forever.”
Doesn’t that version accord more power and strength to all women? Why would she want women to be reduced to playing this from Trump’s level, when she can, simply by removing the label “nasty,” put them on much higher, more principled ground?
I don’t know – it just bothers me that now, thanks to someone’s half-witted idea to try to use Trump’s words against him, women can’t just be strong on their own – as they have always been, by the way, even when the law didn’t allow them to stand on the same level playing field as men.
It was like an inside joke. Being called nasty by Trump is now a badge of honor, but I think EW should have inserted one more nasty in there.
. . . we nasty women are gonna march our nasty feet to cast our nasty votes to get you out of our nasty lives forever.”
Yeah, that doesn’t really work.
I get the so-called joke. And I also get that it’s an effort to turn “nasty” from a negative to a positive, but I don’t regard it as being any kind of badge of honor just because Trump pinned it on Clinton. Should we take some of his other slurs and turn them into badges of honor? Should we declare that “fat pigs” vote? How about ugly women? How much use could we get out of “lying” women (although that’s one Clinton probably doesn’t want to get anywhere near)?
Would those be “badges of honor?”
I am not a Clinton supporter (I am also not a Trump supporter). What I am is a woman who has had enough of labels and memes. What I am is a person who feels that if we keep making this about gender differences, we’re perpetuating the gender divide, not closing it.
Whatever positive or negative qualities Clinton and Trump have, they are not exclusive to their gender; name-calling and labeling don’t add anything to or improve the content or quality of the discussion, they distract and divert from and diminish them.
Around here, the Democrats are running commercials against their opponent using Trump’s pu$$y grabbing incident as leverage. What that says about politicians is that nasty is a big part of their lives. On the one hand, asses have to be kissed, on the other backs get stabbed and in the middle, who knows?
Most people, the incredible majority in my view, don’t want to be like that or live like that. Wanting power should automatically disqualify one from getting it, and I am open to the idea of a random draw from the population as part of the people to run the government. Right now there is no check on the insanity.
I watched that clip on the news, and when Elizabeth said nasty feet, the body language and reactions of herself and the people around and behind her told me that they became self aware of the absurdity of what she was saying. They were even openly laughing. Hillary had the great grin.
There will be not even one winner in this election.
More than anything, I thought the trump tapes showed a giant lack of understanding of human anatomy, much like his younger alter-ego
http://southpark.cc.com/clips/qo9joa/thats-a-vagina
well … she could’ve said “we nasty women do it better … so you better watch out Donald !” …. ‘:]
Unless one’s a saint, one’s opponent, man or woman, is always assumed to be nasty.
We’re with HER …. nasty together !
That’s Ms. Clinton if you’re nasty:
Not sure why fomenting wars isn’t nasty.
Her retort sounds like a schoolyard taunt. So much for our highly educated leaders /s.
The message in every sentence is scary Trump. Rational conversations would dilute that.
Warren, like Hillary, is a born again D. They were both raised and first declared as Rs. Hillary converted in college (probably because Bill had a plan to submarine the Ds) and Warren switched a few years back during the banking / economic crisis. The idea that one Goldwater girl is the only force capable of making the other one be more D-like is kind of silly.
Warren’s primary interest is in reining in financial misdeeds because it’s bad for those that need to trust those markets. For everything else Warren has little passion, so reading from the Hillary playbook is probably just an attempt at horse trading. The fact that Hillary has no interest in quid-pro-quo that involves financial reforms probably hasn’t come up, outside Hillary telling Elisabeth and everyone else to “make her” keep her promises.
I’m not going to do it.
Oh yeah? Make me.
How much money do you got?
But not by HRC’s husband Bill?…What principled ground?..If people voting for HRC had principles on they would not be voting for her.
It’s a double standard and hypocrisy.
I’m not a woman and I don’t endorse Trump’s crude behavior but my god let’s stop playing games, Elizabeth.
This clip is on the rigging comment but it can be applied to and for the respect of women.
Morning Joe goes on epic rant slamming liberal hypocrisy regarding Trump election qualms
https://youtu.be/yDTPXFfX9uQ
For some reason, Warren feels compelled to hurl schoolyard-type insults and taunts at Trump – which, in my opinion, makes her no better than he is, but maybe she thinks it will distract from the real problems Clinton has as a candidate and potential president. Better, I guess, in her mind, to keep everyone looking at the bright, shiny “nasty woman” thing than take a chance that people will pay more attention to the Wikileaks e-mails and Clinton’s own record of being for/against things before she was against/for them, and the whole Clinton Foundation cesspool, right?
I still have no idea why Warren thinks Clinton is going to be supportive of the kinds of policies and actions Warren feels the FIRE sector is badly in need of – Clinton, I’m sure, has no intention of “rewarding” Warren for stumping for her, and if there is any reward at all, it is likely to be of the throw-her-a-bone kind that will be largely symbolic and devoid of actual substance.
Which means more of the same of the last 10 years. So that helps….them. Divide and conquer works.
“HEY ……where’d the football go ?”
Agreed – her twitter insults against Trump come across as particularly juvenile. Not giving me any confidence in her whatsover.
Yep. I dunno if she’s wrecking her brand, but she’s certainly transforming it.
“For some reason, Warren feels compelled to hurl schoolyard-type insults and taunts at Trump – ”
Is it because we’ve become what we despise…?
The Bully Party
Yes, yes, I realize Trump supporters say bad things about Clinton supporters too. I don’t defend the bad apples on either side. I’ll just point out that Trump’s message is about uniting all Americans under one flag. The Clinton message is that some Americans are good people and the other 40% are some form of deplorables, deserving of shame, vandalism, punishing taxation, and violence. She has literally turned Americans on each other. It is hard for me to imagine a worse thing for a presidential candidate to do.
I’ll say that again.
As far as I can tell, the worst thing a presidential candidate can do is turn Americans against each other. Clinton is doing that, intentionally.
Intentionally.
http://blog.dilbert.com/post/152293480726/the-bully-party
Also another worst thing – to establish a precedent that the path to the White House is through a foundation.
No, no, I don’t mean she enters it through the basement. Male and female presidents all enter through the front door. Only serfs enter down below.
Just how many foundations do you want to see in future?
Just say no.
And vote against her.
Wait til the foundation donations become Executive Orders….then we’ll really be floored.
I’m sorry, but Scott Adams appears to have derailed somewhere close to Crazy Town. Trump wants to unite us all under one flag – really? Which flag – the Confederate one? The White People’s flag?
I think he’s kind of hoping many of the brown people can be sent back to where they came from. He doesn’t favor policies that support women, he is wildly out of touch on health care, he seems to think all the black people live in ghettos, have guns and are illiterate and lacking in morals. A lot of Americans are Muslim, and there seems to be no particular affection for them – for some reason, he seems to think that all Muslims know what all the other Muslims are up to and just aren’t reporting them to the proper authorities.
I don’t see Clinton as a uniter, either, for what that’s worth. She’s been exposed for what and who she really is, and I think that is less about turning people on each other and more about her overriding need for power and wealth – we’re just the stumbling blocks, and probably the collateral damage littering her path. Nobody puts Baby in a corner!
Two candidates with what should be eligibility-canceling flaws and defects; it’s a mystery to me how the two of them have gotten millions of votes.
Both are flawed but whose network is already in place?
We thought Obama was going to stop the insanity…how did that work out?
Video of the Day – Rules for Rulers
The following video is a must watch, particularly in light of my post on corruption published earlier today: Democratic Senate Candidate Evan Bayh Represents Everything Broken, Corrupt and Wrong With America.
It’s called “Rules for Rulers” and it brings home the point that, if we want to make the world a better place, we better understand how the world works.
http://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2016/10/25/video-of-the-day-rules-for-rulers/#more-38924
There’s a straw man on a slippery slope. It’s almost irrelevant what flag he wants us to coalesce around. He’s a showman. He responds to popular pressure, which is admittedly better with the corporate media plowed under than not, and usually in a crowd-pleasing sort of way. The fewer plans he has, the better. (Not to say he couldn’t have a “private” position as well, but I don’t get the impression he has even his most disgruntled customers killed. Card counters, I can’t be so sure…)
They got millions of votes because they pushed everyone else off the ballot. Competition has no other purpose than to create losers.
My theory is that four years of stasis is better than four years of signing our futures away and initialing every paragraph. So not #NeverTrump’ing, still voting Stein.
Not sure about the rest of you, but I think “nasty” is a pretty appropriate description of greedy, selfish, corrupt, warmongering Hillary Clinton. Or her rich Saudi pals who give her “foundation” 10s of millions of dollars whilst killing gays, stoning women, and committing genocide in Yemen with US armaments.
Oh, but TRUMP groped some women a dozen years ago and insulted hundreds of people on Twitter and bankrupted a few companies. I forgot.
Yes, Trump’s personal failings far outweigh Clinton’s record of death, destruction and impoverishment. Everybody says so, at least.
Oh, no question that “nasty” suits Clinton – but it suits her as a person and has nothing to do with her gender. I am not just unable to understand why the term should be considered a badge of honor for anyone, not least women, but I am unable to understand how anyone can’t see the utter hypocrisy in which the Clinton campaign is drowning.
I think I am tired of there always being this need to find equivalence in order to make some particular issue go away, when what we ought to be doing is looking at each person’s actions, agenda, history, etc, and deciding not which one is better or worse when compared to the other, but whether either or any are actually qualified on a stand-alone basis. And on that basis, I don’t judge either Clinton or Trump to be worthy of the one-and-only vote I get to cast for this office. [By the way, I have to say, nice work reducing Trump’s failings to insults and groping, when aside from what that says about his character, he has a long string of failed businesses, a penchant for not paying for goods and services for which he and his companies have contracted, and is openly racist, mysogynistic and xenophobic – and he’s floridly narcissistic and has no discernible plans for anything, other than that whatever the issue, he will solve it and it will be unbelievably fantastic. ]
I realize that’s not how this process has been engineered to work; if it was, we would have “None of the Above” as an actual choice on our ballots – for every office. We keep settling for some kind of lesser evil, and people don’t seem to realize that the level of evil – and our tolerance and acceptance of evil-as-normal – keeps going up, not down – the bar has been lowered in every election cycle in recent memory, so why do we keep thinking that somehow, that’s going to result in good government or good policy? If we had the ability to vote NOTA, we’d be saying, “nope – not good enough, try again.”
Maybe in my children’s lifetimes, or in their children’s lifetimes, such a thing will eventually come to pass, but until then, I’ll continue to make my decisions based not on relative, comparative terms, but on a stand-alone basis.
Fair comment Anne. My impression too of strong and progressive women is that they are confident in their abilities. So, in this particular case it’s as if we’re presented with an illusion. It’s an example of a projection of two supposedly strong and progressive women, who in reality have become reactionary by subjecting themselves to the antiquated will of a man, Donald Trump.
It also shows that both a lack of good sense and knowledge may exist without gender, and then runs the risk of steering us off course. It reminded me of an old Seinfeld episode in Season Two in which a Doctor waxes lyrical to Elaine about the dubious elements of tongues. In that Seinfeld scene and the one we’ve just witnessed between Trump, Clinton & Warren, the difference is though Elaine also allows the tongue of a man to enter her mouth so-to-speak, she steers the interaction to a satisfying and progressive conclusion to avoid typical prejudice.
Syria and the Cycle of American Intervention Atlantic. Resilc: “Can we just do nothing for 50 years and thus save the world from more chaos?”
=============================================================
I would be all for isolationism, but the people who go on, and on, and on about Hitler, Poland, etcetera have a much bigger megaphone than the people who bring up Iraq….Afghanistan….Libya….Syria…..Yemen…..(and Vietnam for old time’s sake)
Of course, maybe WWII would not have occurred if we had not intervened in WWI – and of course, back in those days people understood how profitable war was…
“I would be all for isolationism,”
Someone in ‘the powers that be’ put on the “isolationist” label and it’s been tattooed on ever since. Non-interventionalist or multi-lateralist are more appropriate. But i don’t write a column in the NY Times.
And don’t forget he’ll have to be here to collect his payoff for his shameless TPPimpin’
ECB calls for light touch on high frequency trading [Reuters]
A light touch for the HFT pirates. Crushing austerity for the unwashed masses. Because markets.
Let them eat
cakeco-located servers.Matt Stoller on the Watergate Babies. Accurate and interesting but sounded a little too neoliberal for me. Among all the ills of neoliberalism, there is one that comes in second only to inequality and it is the voracious destruction of the planet in the name of freedom and progress. Yes we have a tolerant society – on the surface – but scratch it and you find unmitigated arrogance and lack of imagination. And ideology is the thing that keeps one wheel in the ditch. Matt made sense of one thing: how the media has become big brother – everybody’s on the same page. When the history of the neoliberal debacle is finally written it will be full of accounts of irresponsibility, destruction, hubris and greed.
“Accurate and interesting but sounded a little too neoliberal for me.”
Agree wholeheartedly.
For example, this bit at the end:
And none other than Hillary Clinton, in an October 3, 2016, speech on renewing antitrust vigor, noted that Trump, while a unique figure, also represents the “broader trends” of big business picking on the little guy.
It’s as if Stoller has quickly forgotten the words he has just written, and decided to put his faith in the penultimate “watergate baby” he has just finished bemoaning at length.
He also seems to have forgotten that earlier during this campaign it was Donald Trump who accused bezos/amazon of numerous “antitrust violations,” thereby earning himself relentless journalistic vitriol, much of it of questionable veracity, from bezos’ washington post.
Since you mention Amazon (a reader also mentioned Amazon in a comment to the Dean Baker article today), people might be interested in this study of the economic effects of Amazon:
http://www.civiceconomics.com/empty-storefronts.html
The article was originally released in January, 2016, so it may have already been mentioned here at NC, but I didn’t know about it until today. From the article:
Multiply all of that by 10x, for the loss of US company sales, infringement, counterfeiting, etc.
Amazon looks a lot more like Ebay nowadays.
Vatch
October 25, 2016 at 11:28 am
Very good example of who pays, and who doesn’t. If people really believed in ‘competition’ and the equality of the ‘market’ why exactly should there be an “industrial policy” that favors a giant monopoly with unique tax avoidance benefits that local, small merchants aren’t privy to???
Why aren’t all those free enterprise repubs screaming about this day and night??? isn’t no taxes for local ‘entrepreneurs’ a win win!?!!???? So WHY doesn’t it happen? Why is it affordable when done by billionaires, but no one else….hmmmmmm.
A cynic might believe that the taxes that remain to hinder the little people are as important to the success of Amazon as the tax breaks that Amazon gets…..but that would be totally cynical, and rah rah America is the greatest….
I have trouble reading Stoller’s piece as “accurate and interesting”.
— Kennedy “… wanted to end the war in Vietnam and expand racial justice.”
Howard Zinn’s speech “Southern Influences in National Politics”, 1963 details just how hard Jack Kennedy worked to expand racial justice. Zinn’s “slow-writer” story gives a very different picture of Kennedy. Zinn also points out how easy it would have been to sway the small number of votes required to change the Senate’s Rule 22 for limiting fillibusters a rule change which could have removed a critical obstacle in the way of Civil Rights legislation. Kennedy spoke in favor of Civil Rights but moved very very slowly and only under pressure. Zinn repeats a quip from around the time after Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage” came out. One senator said of Kennedy that he shows a lot of profile as a Senator but not much courage. And I’m not sure there is full agreement that Kennedy would have ended the war in Vietnam.
Hubert Humphrey as a “… New Deal populist and Vietnam War supporter” doesn’t match my impressions of Humphrey from the time. He may have been a New Deal populist at one time but I remember him as the grey man behind Johnson who had close ties to organized labor at a time after organized labor began to sit on the same side of the table as the management.
“Galbraith argued that big business—or “the planning system” as he called it—could in fact be a form of virtuous socialism.”
I’ve real only a small amount of Galbraith but I doubt he would agree with Stoller’s characterization of his thoughts. I think Galbraith might some heartburn with the distillation of his “Affluent Society” into a Stoller’s formula. Didn’t Galbraith argue against the notion that a “free-market” economy is more efficient than a planned economy run by the government by pointing to the fact that our nation instituted a government controlled and planned economy in times of war?
And @Bugs Bunny: the phrasing of “reckless dismantling of the congressional committe structure” suggests some merit to the congressional committee structure. Zinn’s speech — referred to above — presents some counterpoint notions of what merits to attribute to the congressional committee structure. President Woodrow Wilson dismantled the existing committee structures in the 1913 Congress to make sure Congressional Committees would not block legislation he wanted. In other words the “reckless dismantling” is a method of politics used to achieve an end. True — the end the so-called Watergate Babies sought was reckless but the dismantling is not new.
As far as I know we still have anti-monopoly laws on the books — they’re seldom and only selectively enforced. I recall arguments made in the Reagan years that we must allow our Corporations to merge and grow into Cartels so they might be competitive with the giant Japanese Cartels rampaging through our Industries both domestically and in the world markets.
Corporate capture of government regulatory agencies was used as a means to promote neoliberal agendas. There is nothing in the fact of Corporate capture that argues against government regulation of Corporations. It argues for the need to get Corporations out of the regulatory agencies. So where did the Watergate Babies get their arguments that it meant we must remove regulations? Maybe I”m just the kind of cranky old man who favors conspiracy theories — but I prefer Phillip Mirowski’s explanations for how we got here detailed in “Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste”.
My feeling about the Stoller piece is that it reads less like hard analysis than a strange kind of myth-making. And I have no idea what intent drove Stoller’s writing of this piece.
“My feeling about the Stoller piece is that it reads less like hard analysis than a strange kind of myth-making.”
Tend to agree with you Jeremy. Stoller still seems to have allegiances to a totally compromised and opportunist center-left liberalism(Watergate Babies etc.) that is partially responsible for our current financial/economic/political/cultural crisis.
By the late 1890s public opinion about markets had regrouped into 3 main tendencies: one associated with a small producer, or a more populist outlook, the second with an emerging paradigm arguing for the legitimacy of corporate capitalism and a final perspective associated with a more socialist outlook among some workers, intellectuals, farmers and feminist reformers.
If Stoller would ever seriously consider making a genuine move against our modern-day corporate/state system he first needs to understand why the political movement for the corporate administration of capitalism was so successful in the late 1890s.
He then needs to reflect more closely on the inadequacies of the post 1945 Keynesian model which simply ended up trying to subordinate the market to the state in terms of more social-democratic corrections (various forms of gov. intervention, work programs,subsidies and incomes policy– with such corrections ultimately becoming further enabling devices for governmental and capitalist power.
Stoller’s summary of Watergate Baby repudiation of New deal economic populism focuses only on Congress. But the ideology spread very rapidly at the top of the Democratic Party in the 70s; I am inclined to think that suggests a more deliberate and orchestrated effort at work, and I have a personal story about how it worked in California.
Remember the big interstate truck lines of the 50s and 60s, with their large unionized work force of drivers? My Dad worked as an in-house attorney for one of them, PIE, until it was bought out in a big LBO at the end of the 60s. A lot of his time was spent doing regulatory work, arguing for authority to haul from the Interstate Commerce Commission and state public utility commissions: trucking was highly regulated to ensure that truck lines using public highways delivered service even to relatively unprofitable towns and regions along a route. (Montana PUC members sometimes settled their differences by fistfights.)
Eventually, by the mid-70s, he ended up working for the California Public Utilities Commission as a Hearing Examiner (aka ALJ). By that time, interstate trucking was being deregulated at the federal level. As a teenager, I got a blow-by-blow description from my dad of the California PUC’s internal moves to deregulate intrastate trucking under democratic Governor Jerry Brown — and the initiative came from the top down. First, newly appointed commissioners created their own new staffs to assemble the policy, and did not use the existing commission staff. It was understood from the start that deregulation would be the end result of the public process.
Dad presided over the first public hearing in San Francisco, which featured a big hostile turnout and heavy union opposition to the deregulation proposal. After that, as he expected, he was replaced by a new examiner who he understood was a more political creature closer to the Brown appointees. The surviving Reagan appointees he portrayed as largely passive supporters of the previous regulatory status quo. He considered the deregulation initiative to be largely motivated by ideological fashion among younger democratic policy-makers, though combined with a desire to break de facto Teamster ability to shut down US transport during a strike. Intrastate trucking in California was deregulated as a result of the case.
Unwinding with a cigarette and a drink after a day at the office, he used to tell me, “The freedom of the marketplace, son! You’ll be able to go out and be free to ask to be paid as much as you want!” — here he would take a drag from his cigarette — “The freeedom of the marketplace!”
This is such a great anecdote. Yeah, that’s how it worked, it was an intellectual fashion trend to deregulate and get rid of New Deal norms like universal service and labor protections. Fascinating how the Reagan appointees were basically New Dealer default types.
Any fashion trend has a superstructure that includes influence, funders, and designers, and the democrat deregulation wave of the 70s must have had them, judging by the speed and geographic reach of the trend.
It is likely that the Reagan appointees were Eisenhower Republican types that accepted regulation and unionization as part of the post-WWII growth machine that enabled the warfare-welfare state during the Cold War. The Brown administration deregulators were younger than the old guard.
Great piece. I read it. Not sure what, exactly, the people above are saying. Captured by identity politics and whining?
“He was just too…ah…I dunno, yanno?”
I think the “fashion trend” is better explained as the result of a long and well-funded effort. I prefer Phillip Mirowski’s explanations for how we got here as detailed in “Never Let a Serious Crisis Go To Waste”.
I can’t dredge up the source but I’ll venture out on a limb — The Democratic Party had formed a coalition between Northern Democrats and the very different Democrats of the South. As long as the South could carry on with their traditions of discrimination againt Blacks without impediment the Southern Congressman would help Northern Democrats push through legislation which mainly affected Northern cities and the Northern labor supporters which formed the other half of the coalition. That all changed after the Civil Rights movement.
With the end of the North-South coalition the Democrats opted to court big money. By that time labor was losing power and Northern labor alone could not provide a majority. Neoliberal think tanks and economists worked to undermine many of the principles the New Deal was supposedly based on, tilling the ground for Reagan and the neoliberal Democrats and Republins who came after.
AT&T Is Spying on Americans for Profit, New Documents Reveal [Daily Beast]
A panopticon with an NDA attached.
Reach out and crush someone.
Wonder if this is related to Room 641A in AT&T’s San Francisco building, and one of the first locations made famous by Snowden’s whistleblowing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A
Granted, 614A was a hub for internet traffic and not call data if I remember rightly, but I think it’s becoming apparent that one of the carrots the NSA uses to secure the cooperation of such corporations is to approve (or not investigate) the use of technologies uncannily akin to those developed by the NSA, but for private gain rather than public security. The plot of the latest Jason Bourne vehicle actually involved something of this sort between the CIA and a fiction corporation resembling a hybrid of Facebook/Google/Apple.
Actually, room 614A in Folsom Street was already famous in 2006 long before Snowden (thanks to former AT&T technician and whistleblower Mark Klein). As your link in fact shows.
I’m so old I remember room 614A as an episode in the Bush warrantless surveillance scandal; there was quite a cogent analysis by “progressives” on the fascist aspects of Bush’s panopticon. (IIRC, the authorization process was an example of Bush’s theory of “the unitary executive”). In fact, I agreed with that analysis then and now, but the “progressives” dropped it like a hot potato when Obama was elected, and Obama then proceeded to rationalize and normalize everything Bush did. And so it goes.
Racketeering. We’ll help you do illegal things but … shhh, omerta.
This from Michael Moore was so shockingly accurate given his support of Clinton, I’m not totally convinced of its authenticity, but here it is:
https://mobile.twitter.com/ChristiChat/status/790684875258986496
If it’s not MM it’s a perfect imitation of him. I think his outrage at the destruction of the middle class outweighs his docile support of Hillary. Hillary’s Achilles heel.
I just listened to this myself and Moore perfectly captures the simmering rage that is coming to a boil. Come election day, a surprising number of stealth Trump supporters are going to slip into voting booths across the country and vote for Trump (the human Molotov cocktail).
Interesting and very plausible. See this from NC in August:
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/08/links-8916.html
Another problem for the HRC election theft plan is there will be foreign observers at the polls, as well as some American observers. Can she win an honest election? I really don’t think so.
how can they observe vote theft via software, though?
Well, there will be a variety of poll watchers checking with a variety of ideas. You’re right—theft via software can’t be checked, as far as I know. But attempts will be made to keep the crooked HRC campaign as honest as possible. Trump will probably fight if there’s evidence of skullduggery, and he’s known as a tenacious fighter.
the more the better! i’m getting this sinking feeling of inevitability, but haven’t given up yet. and a new battle starts nov 9th.
They will call that the November Surprise of 2016.
Beware of violent outbursts by the Hillaroids, after their MSM-guaranteed cakewalk evaporates in a puff of smoke.
11/9 is 9/11 inverted.
I can’t play that video on my computer on any browser. Is there a transcript of it or a better link to it?
Try this:
Trump’s election will be the biggest “F—ck You” in human history — Michael Moore
Thank you so much. That’s powerful stuff and I’m surprised to hear it come from Moore.
He’s getting to the point where he’s more misquoted and misrepresented than jesus.
That he’s usually trying to include the “lower class” is probably why. Bad for your resume.
S&P’s Case-Shiller national home price index has recovered to just 0.1% below its July 2006 all-time high.
Of course, the CPI has risen about 20% in the past ten years, so house prices have not kept up with inflation since 2006.
Nevertheless, with both house prices and the Nasdaq flirting with record highs, the question is which will be the better vehicle to ride the culminating crack-up boom of this magnificent Bubble III?
That’s the national price index.
The swing state housing price index can’t match up with the Hillary-zip-code housing price index. It’s very hard to imagine any one making enough to buy a house in, say, Santa Monica.
I always ask myself if its a price or inflation problem and then look at wages…
Fed risks repeating Lehman blunder as US recession storm gathers – Ambrose Evans-Pritchard
Hope you enjoyed that recovery folks!
Well that was terrifying.
I love the Feds reaction:
So we must raise rates now to lower them later? Doesn’t that sound meaningless and utterly devoid of understanding to anyone else? Also see yellen’s recent comments on inflation: They don’t know why they are raising rates, they don’t know when a recession is coming, and they say they have no tools for it and so need to act now to have tools later… wow
Maybe others can raise taxes NOW, so they can lower them LATER (to create a buffer)???
“Anything to fight the coming recession.”
“It is a little scary. When nominal GDP slows like that, you can be sure that financial stress will follow. Monetary policy is too tight and the slightest shock will tip the US into recession,” said Lars Christensen, from Markets and Money Advisory.
How much looser can monetary policy possibly be?
and THEY (the FED) think we don’t know just how transparently phony they truly are !
to the person(s) who previously posted the new adam curtis documentary, thanks.
For anyone else, here’s the trailer—the full doc. is 2.5+ hours.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtjfoEvsR9w
well worth your time. Basically a history lesson on how we got to be here. A better link without the Vice overlay and subs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Js19h1GW32o
Killing the messenger…penn ag goes to jail because she would not play along…if the donald really wanted to be president he would jump on this and demand she get an immediate pardon…she shut down a make believe 5 year plus investigation, which was really a witch hunt, that had spent five years and hundreds of thousands of government investigative dollars to “prove” 5 black philly politicians took less money(over 5 years) then he spends on jet fuel in the morning…
She shut it down since the “bribes” were being pushed by the government investigators and the very questionable informant…
The homey the clown “passin” philly district attorney saw no need to prosecute basciano when he “dropped” a building on 6 people, killing them, so he could work on a real estate project…
that was just bizness…
but black politicians taking money for donuts and coffee…
themz iz coe rupssianz…
the philly district attorney in the short time he railroad this non case thru spent more money in manpower hours holding media events than all the “bribes” these “knee growz” were accused of taking…
donut money…
welcome to post democracy america…
and nothing proves the donald does not want to be president than this gift opportunity handed to him on a silver platter…
a giftt he will probably not accept
Executive Orders for Sale? Leaked Email Shows Hillary Camp Answering Wealthy Donor’s Questions about How Executive Orders Work
In a leaked email thread between Podesta and Mary Pat Bonner, a “donor adviser” who gets millions for her elite connections in bringing in donors and for being what The New York Times describes as a “master of making donors happy,” it’s all but admitted that Executive Orders are another pay-for-play item on the corrupt American political menu.
Read this from the bottom up:
In an email with the subject line, “Is there someone in your shop,” Bonner writes, “Who totally understands ‘executive orders’. It is to answer a very big donors questions.”
Podesta responds with simply, “Me.”
Bonner: “It is for Michael King.”
Podesta: “What does he need?”
Bonner: “He has an idea and just need answer [sic] to a bunch of easy questions about how this works.”
Oh goody. Mega wealthy donor Michael King has an “idea” about executive orders…
The Michael King they are likely referencing is rich TV mogul Michael King, the exec who inherited King World Productions later acquired by CBS. To give you an idea, King World Productions launched Harpo’s The Oprah Winfrey Show and Dr. Phil’s talk show.
http://www.thedailysheeple.com/executive-orders-for-sale-leaked-email-showed-hillary-camp-answering-wealthy-donors-questions-about-how-executive-orders-work_102016
Interestingly, the Shakespeare link might be equally classified under ‘class warfare’.
One of the major historical arguments disputing the authorship of Shakespeare’s works are closely related to education and class. Names suggested as the true authors of his work include Christopher Marlowe, a Cambridge educated playwright, and the nobles Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th Earl of Oxford, and the 6th Earl of Derby. At the heart of this debate, many doubters believe “Shakespeare canon exhibits such breadth of learning and intimate knowledge of the Elizabethan and Jacobean court and politics that no one but a highly educated nobleman or court insider could have written it.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_question#Overview
William Shakespeare on the other hand was seen as the son of a glovemaker from Stratford-upon-Avon with a grammar school education that couldn’t possible have independently developed the talent to write his credited plays. It’s extremely unlikely that a person of his lower station was able to take credit for the published works of nobles and the educated in stratified British society. That said, I am deeply skeptical of the motivations behind questioning the authorship of Shakespeare’s plays.
You’ve got this backwards. The argument is that he was given credit because the ghost writers could not afford to have their names involved in such pass times and political theater.
doubtaboutwill.org
Ugh……that’s even worse. Following this argument, maybe Copernicus was a dupe for some intellectual noble who wanted to avoid the church’s wrath over his heliocentric theory. Maybe Newton’s Principia was really authored by someone of noble birth. I don’t buy either argument (not that I believe you necessarily do either).
Marlowe was the son of a shoemaker, not a nobleman, and went to Cambridge on a scholarship. Although he may well have done some spying he was probably not a court insider. College students were often recruited for intelligence work because they spoke multiple languages and had plausible reason to travel internationally.
This is a fun site:
Because, ya know, noblemen and court insiders are so creative at inventing words.
Since we’re barding:
A friend who’s a Shakespeare scholar, with a main specialty in Old English, told me that he’s about 1 in 1000 on the planet, but the guy who’s twice as good as any of the rest of them is David Crystal. Our ‘Much Ado’ last June had Prince John speaking original pronounciation, which Crystal has been a leader in studying and promoting. Here’s his site:
Shakespeare’s Words
What fascinates me the most regarding the obsession over the authorship of “Shakespeare’s” plays is not the class-based snobbery that is most often discussed, but the more likely explanation: crowdsourcing. My days in the Widener archives are long, long in the past, but from my memories of how Elizabethan theater operated, and having done time in the theater myself, it seems likely to me that what eventually was written down reflected the contributions of the original author (probably William Shakespeare) plus lots of improvisations by the actors, which then were kept and honed based on how audiences responded. If you’ve ever spent time immersed in iambic pentameter, you’ll know you can internalize so that thinking and speaking in it becomes pretty easy. Obviously, gorgeous language and resonant metaphors and nuanced characterizations aren’t easy. But it’s quite possible the creative process was much more symbiotic than non-creative scholars would understand. He’s inspired by his actors, he writes to fit them, they add stuff, the audience likes some of it so they keep it, he makes changes, then the actors make changes…
Our culture tends to default to the “Great Man” theory in every aspect of life: warfare, governance, science, art, etc. But that’s almost always fallacious, in one way or another. Most scientific breakthroughs, for example, are either more than one person working together, and past a pair, the rest get forgotten (especially if they’re women, ahem), or many people figured out the same thing around the same time, and either luck or connections leads to one person getting all the credit and their peers vanishing from history. Since it was his company, under theater-variant auteur theory*, Will Shakespeare gets to take credit for whatever ended up being said on stage, because if he didn’t actually write it, he decided whether to keep it in or not. And I think there was a real guy and he was a really good writer. But some of the mystery around the range of knowledge, speech patterns, etc. dissipates if you consider that other people’s contributions — not secret noblemen, but working artists — could easily account for it.
*Yes, I made theater-variant up. But it works, no?
From a February 26 2016 email from Joel Johnson at GPG to Jennifer Palmieri:
“I know you can’t look past Bernie and March primaries — but who is in charge of the Trump swift boat project? Needs to be ready, funded and unleashed when we decide — but not a half assed scramble. >> ”
To which she responds, I take it sarcastically:
“Gee. Thanks, Joel. We thought we could half-ass it. Let’s discuss.”
And then Joel again:
“Sorry. I’ve been behind too many curtains in my day…”
https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/27434
from r/thedonald group
Maybe readers are aware of this but I haven’t seen much discussion of it. The phrase “swift boat” is interesting, suggestive of a concocted bullshit scandal planned well in advance. I wonder if this email provides evidence of Trump’s accusations about him being slandered by a conspiracy of the Clinton campaign known by them to be false. Or maybe not. But interesting nonetheless.
Both ways.
Dishing out little lies leads to dishing out big lies.
Believing a little propaganda leads to believing a lot of propaganda.
“Be flexible. Your brain is plastic. Let it adjust.”
“Who are you going to believe – yourself, or the 100 million people who read my newspaper?”
“Believing a little propaganda leads to believing a lot of propaganda.”
Part of the reason Im not voting for Trump, no matter how terrible a Clinton candidacy would be. I just have a feeling folks here who might be willing to vote for Trump over Clinton (or vice versa) might be more likely to vote for more right wing bullshit later on, which would be unfortunate
not me, i just want to torpedo the duopoly. i think trump gives us a somewhat better, tho still not large, chance of doing that. it’s hard to envision what the world will be like in 30 years, but i think we are in for some very interesting times.
And I wholeheartedly support that and what youre doing. Im just saying to be careful to not support it to much, is all Im saying. Just worried some of the more vocal people on here might start liking Trump or something rather than just voting for him. I mean, ive seen people who voted for Obama only because McCain is oh-so-much-worse or whatever turn into Obots, at least for a little while. At least until Obama’s lustre more visibly diminished around 2013.
“Everything Hillary Mud tells you .. is a LIE !”
In the matter of infringing the patent by Amazon vendors, it would appear that Arista v. Flea World and Fonovisa v. Cherry Auction would allow this guy to sue.
After all, Amazon contacted him, and said that knockoffs were on their site, and that he needed to lower his prices, and were informed of the patent.
Note: I am not a lawyer.
It Appears to me that Amazon could be sued under the various precedents where flea markets were successfully sued for allowing in vendors who sold bootleg music and video.
If you read the article, it is clear that Amazon knew about the knock offs (they contacted the guy about it) and that they knew that they were infringing patents, and have been as uncooperative as possible in response to his complaints,
Stephen Schulhofer’s Unwanted Sex: The Culture of Intimidation and the Failure of the Law (2000) will be of interest to several of yesterday’s contributors to this comment section. When he wrote it he was on faculty at the University of Chicago Law School. Presently he is participating in an effort for the rewriting of US laws pertaining to rape and sexual assault.
Maureen Dowd says that Bill Clinton is livid that Trump brought up his sexual problems (because you know she talks to them all the time – not). And she is appalled, shocked I tell you, that Trump had the audacity to bring Clinton’s accusers to the debates. That was all in the past. Everyone was over it.
Admittedly the accusations against Bill Clinton are older than Trump’s, but unless I’ve missed something none of Trump’s accusers are talking about anything recent, i.e the events were. in the past. And I’m pretty sure the women who took Trump up on his offer weren’t ‘over it’. But you have to remember that Bill is currently approved and Trump is not. If you apply the same standards to both men either both are fair game or neither of them are.
But then I’m appalled that like the ‘nasty woman’ thing, this is a political football for game play. Yes, Clinton is a nasty woman, Trump is a nasty man. While their gender may shape some of the forms their nastiness takes, it has nothing to do with their choice to be nasty. And instead of talking about the gist of the emails, we get “Russia, Russia, Russia”. Instead of a real discussion of the means and methods our election system has been corrupted – we get ‘he’s a sore loser who doesn’t believe in Democracy’.
But Maureen Dowd can put out a book before the election is even over…
maybe Maureen should eat another marijane bar ( this time in measured amounts ) and take a LOOOONG nap in the hamptons, or perhaps Martha’s Vineyard …..
you forgot the whine
“Bill is currently approved and Trump is not”
Bill is approved by liberals for being married to Hillary Clinton. If Trump were married to Hillary Clinton (and not running for president) he would be approved by liberals, too. Sort of scary thought, in a way. All that matters to them is not what you have done but whose ‘side’ you are on. Conservatives are largely no different.
Haunted by gaddafi…
A must read.
Bernie was an acceptable messiah, trump a little problematic in that role.
But we agree massive corruption throughout the elites and endless wars are not desirable…
And so we want a revolution…
Can we afford to wait?
Do we think if Clinton wins a dem populist will get the nomination in 2020? In 2024?
If trump loses, would a rep populist win the nomination in 2020? In 2024?
How about the greens? Is it credible to think they could win the presidency any time soon?
Revolutionaries must first overturn the status quo. Not so easy when elites throughout gov, industry and media are all arrayed against. These are desperate times and past time for desperate measures.
Wannabe revolutionaries in swing states cannot afford to be choosy, IMO should hold their noses and vote trump, as I advise my daughter in PA. In CA I have the luxury of voting stein.
From an almost-messiah:
That is, we are all messiahs.
Time to focus on some dos-and-donts related to the writing of eye-catching headlines, using today’s Links as grist for the mill:
o “UKIP candidate sorry for claiming gay donkey raped his horse | Politico” — now *that’s* an eye-catcher there. Short, clickbait-trope-free, and completely non-ignorable. Just admit it – even if you haven’t yet followed the link, you’re dying to. (I of course had to follow the link in the interest of scientific objectivity.)
o “Refugees attack EU asylum offices on Lesvos | EurActiv” — Not a bad attempt, but would be 10x more interest-awakening via just a little tweaking, say preceding the above ‘just the facts’ version with “Lesbians up in arms: …” Erm, I mean “Lesvians” of course.
o “Sweden holds out olive branch to Brexit Britain | Telegraph” — I was unaware olives grew in Sweden … wouldn’t, say, “holds out spruce twig” be more apt? Or is this a sneaky global warming reference?
o “Fact-free conservative media is a symptom of GOP troubles, not a cause | Business Insider” — I see your headline, and raise you a “Using singular ‘is’ in referring to plural ‘media’ is a symptom of websites I am better off ignoring.”
o “Peter Thiel’s Politics Become a Deal-Killer in Silicon Valley | Bloomberg” — Another headline afflicted by being overly mild-mannered. How about leading in with, say, “Nosfer@2: How Flamboyant Gay Vampire Peter Thiel’s Fascist Politics…”
o Lastly, no fewer than three of the last five headlines suffer from “How-itis” – yah, we get that you’re gonna try to tell us how, you can drop the how-to lead-in. E.g. for the Stoller piece, go with simple declarative “The Democrats Have Killed Their Populist Soul.” Or maybe go with a mixed meretricious/botanical metaphor and more punch, say, “Fellating Davos Man: The Democrats Have Ripped Out Their Own Populist Roots and Become Just Another Bunch of Bed-Hopping Whores to Globalist Money.” Admittedly longer, but no way are you not gonna click that.
“All your medias are belong to us”
“Jounalistic Independence have no chance to survive, make your time”
Sheila Bair Unloads On Larry Summers
The latest fun find in the Wikileaks dump of John Podesta emails.
In an email to Hillary Clinton speechwriter/policy adviser Dan Schwerin, Sheila Bair unloads on Larry Summers:
I must say it gave me pause when I read in Sunday’s NY Times that Larry Summers is taking such a prominent role in her policy operation (or at least, that was the impression he was trying to create).
I don’t think people view him as someone who understands or is sensitive to middle class issues, and justifiably so.
Frankly, the policies he has embraced have done a lot to help Wall Street but not much for Main Street.
http://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2016/10/sheila-bair-unloadson-larry-summers.html#comment-form
Which makes him perfect for a Hillary Clinton administration.
Thanks for thumping the Matt Stoller piece in The Atlantic. Damn good read.Maybe the best I’ve read all year. Howard Zinn style history lesson with sweep, context, understanding and urgency. Definitely worthy of the Naked Capitalism “Must Read” label of approval.
Odd that Nc doesn’t cover evegeny morozov’s work even though it’s very relevant. Here’s a good start- ‘what is technological sovereignty’ https://youtu.be/QYW3jBKg-3k