Theresa May lines up new job for life after Brexit Metro.uk
New York Moves to Tackle Emissions as it Wrestles with Climate Costs Climate Liability News
Would you agree to be weighed before flying to help cut carbon emissions? Lonely Planet
Two men arrested in connection with murder of Lyra McKee Independent
Waste Watch
Canadian grocer to allow reusable containers for meat, seafood, deli TreeHugger
Outdoor Retailer REI Doubles Down on Rentals and Used Gear Sales Forbes
Fashion industry’s carbon impact bigger than airline industry’s CBS
Our Lying Eyes NYRB, Judge Jed Rakoff.
John Lithgow Thinks the Clintons Would Have a Hard Time at His New Play New York magazine
Jerrie Cobb, one of the most gifted female pilots in history, has died Ars Technica
This robot could make pesticides obsolete WTSP (David L)
YOU’RE NOT GETTING ENOUGH SLEEP—AND IT’S KILLING YOU Wired
Housework could keep brain young, research suggests Guardian
2020
Mike Gravel Is Running for President — But He Doesn’t Want to Win TruthOut
Warren approaches breakout with black voters Politico
Trump’s Neocon Administration Want War in Venezuela: Gabbard telesur (furzy)
Five former Obama ambassadors back Buttigieg The Hill
(Kevin C).
India
Food insecurity in India is hurting children’s ability to learn Scroll.in
As Economists Bicker Over Jobs Data, Underemployment Chokes Young Graduates The Wire
Mobile phones, consumer electronics lift Reliance Retail Economic Times
North Korea
Viet Nam’s Economics Miracle Haunts US-DPRK Talks New Eastern Outlook (chuck l) From last month; still germane.
China
My way or the Huawei: how US ultimatum over China’s 5G giant fell flat in Southeast Asia SCMP
Censorship in a China Studies Journal Inside Higher Ed (furzy)
Chinese expansion in Central Asia no threat to Moscow, Russian ambassador says SCMP
The dark side of China’s latest rebound Asia Times (The Rev Kev)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced TruthDig. Lee Camp.
Libya
Libya – U.S. Reveals Support For Hafter’s Side Moon of Alabama
Trump praises Haftar in apparent reversal of US policy on Libya Al Jazeera
Class Warfare
Took a Plea? Brooklyn’s District Attorney Will Support Your Parole Marshall Project
Did rising rents kill the Bay Area’s urban homesteading movement? San Francisco Chronicle
Landlords will be forbidden from evicting tenants for no reason – but reform has only just begun Conversation
Life-saving opioid addiction treatments get a negative slant Columbia Journalism Review
As President, Bernie Should Cancel All Student Debt Jacobin
Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016 JAMA Network (Dr. Kevin). From last summer; still germane.
An engineer at Uber’s self-driving car unit warns that it’s more like ‘a science experiment’ than a real car capable of driving itself Business Insider (David L)
Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find MD Linx (ChiGal)
YOUTH STRUGGLE WITH AFTER-EFFECTS OF GUN VIOLENCE Who What Why
RussiaGate
Chomsky on the Perils of Depending on Mueller Report to Defeat Trump TruthOut
Former Obama White House counsel Greg Craig set for Aug. 12 trial Politico
After Mueller report, Democrats divided over end game — investigate Trump or impeach WaPo
Trump Transition
Trump’s Sanctions Kill Iranian Reforms American Conservative
‘Washington is a bit hysterical’: French envoy offers advice as he bids adieu Politico
Jimmy Carter Lectures Trump: US Is ‘Most Warlike Nation in History of the World’ telesur (furzy)
Antidote du Jour (via):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Corey Robin has put up a really interesting blog post on the unionisation drive at Yale in the 1990s, prompted by the recent death of one of the central figures: David Brion Davis, 1927-2019: Countersubversive at Yale. What’s really fascinating about this is the pattern of elite conspiracy theorising that lay behind senior faculty paranoia about graduate student unions, which led them some of them to actually blacklist their own PhD students:
There are some interesting parallels here with the current Russiagate panic among the same constituency today (high-status, and highly status-anxious liberals, of whom there are a great many in academia).
Outdoor Retailer REI Doubles Down on Rentals and Used Gear Sales Forbes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
To set you up for a backpack trip, you’d need around $500 worth of gear (backpack-tent-sleeping bag-sleeping pad-stove-water filter, etc.) at a minimum, plus hiking boots, poles, clothing & raingear, we’re talking about a grandido worth, that’ll last you a decade or 2.
It would suck to spend all that money and decide it isn’t your bag, so renting makes a lot of sense, and socialism ain’t no big thang with young adults, they’ve been reared on sharing.
The movie Wild*-with Reese Witherspoon was quite the catalyst in prompting Millennials to be the master of their own domain in the back of beyond, women in particular. the makeup used to be typically 75% men-25% women, but now it’s closer to 60/40, or even 50/50.
And the numbers of people making overnight trips has gone up dramatically, and as just so many wilderness permits are available, some routes here such as the High Sierra Trail (72 mile traipse across the Sierra from Crescent Meadow to Whitney Portal) have exactly 1 day available to start your journey in all of July & August, peak times to go.
I see salvation for young adults in the wilderness, as it’s the one place in our feverish whoever has the most assets wins society, where money doesn’t matter, there’s nothing to spend it on.
This is really smart thinking by REI, and essentially they have no competition as far as other outdoor retailers**, where else are you going to go, Big 5? ha!
* I cringed throughout this awful movie, and yeah I get it, she’s knows nothing about what she’s set out to do, and how does Reese stay pasty white after walking through the desert w/o a hat for hundreds of miles?
**I mourn the loss of Sports Chalet, a victim of Private Equity hoodwinks.
+1
Add Eastern Mountain Sports to the list of deceased outdoor retailers because of private equity. 250 stores gone. They still have an on line store, but who wants to buy expensive gear without trying it on?
Aw crap, I really liked EMS
EMS is still bricks and mortars here in New Hampshire, with a Concord store just off I-93. Their current offerings in-store are the best they’ve been in a while, IMO.
I think that if you’re a relatively large retailer with 100+ stores – with buildings owned outright, you have a big target which the hedgies and PES are gunning for. Similar to resource rich nations at the mercy of western countries.
EMS, RIP. I really miss their affordable and very good house brand hiking boots. I now wear the excellent Keen from REI. Recycling and rentals, given the uncertainties of work scheduling and vacations, make eminent good sense.
Off topic, the quality of many outfitter items is well worth the cash. I bought a Patagonia messenger bag in 2006, which I use every day for work, and it’s still in fabulous shape.
Since SierraTradingPost got all’et up by TJX and EBay/ PayPal proved to perpetually be on the dark side. I’d kept buying most outdoor stuff from the various GearExchange type sites or very specific 2nd hand stores in cities with ridiculous income disparity (we’d discussed this, several weeks back; about yuppies gaining a pound, and our picking up 800-fill goose down/ GoreTex Moonstone for $8 and wearing it daily for three decades). After kids started shooting each other for Marmot parkas here in NYC, suddenly ALL of Hillary’s mourners sold their NorthFace & Patagonia; running right out into the snow to retail shop for $670 jackets, we were ordering for $41 delivered, tax free.
On private university campuses, “Canada Arctic Expedition” goose down jackets are de rigeuer especially for women. $1000 bucks a pop. Probably hot items for muggings, too.
They have a sleeve logo badge; my wife saw 30 high school girls touring Syracuse University in March, 28 having the uniform. She said “I wonder what club they are in?”. I told her the 0.01% club!
I’d worn Marmot, Patagonia, Moonstone USED, to avoid the distraction & confusion of hypothermia, working atop boilers & bridges. Thank GOD, der yuppies stopped free-basing cocaine and started eating Mediterranean diets, washed down with 140 calorie ale; tossing out that which kept us alive? I’d sprung for a Primaloft, hemp/ PTFE parka & hemp/ yak wool sweater, used hemp shorts & shirts… but, no mugging yet. We spoke with another ‘old person’ carrying a Leica M10 (I had quite a fight over an M4, 35 years back). He thought we’d have a greater chance for trouble, shooting from the hip with this goofy HTC phone?
A friend haunts Hollywood thrift stores, and sometimes full clothing ensembles show up via the studios, and he bought pretty much everything the cast was wearing on the set of Vertical Limit, and it was a long time ago, but I remember him telling me they were afraid to price anything more than $10, most $3 to $5, for a bunch of Patagucci wear.
The very best we could hope for, where I grew up, was Beal’s bicycle, Loggia’s mob boss suit. Or Savini’s Wrist Rocket slingshot from 1977. Our equivalent was 35 pairs of Red-Wing (hand assembled Vasque) boron steel metatarsal guard boots, roughly $5/pair ot actual Vise Grips, Channelocks & All-Clad skillets? Or Honer accordions $25•
I outfit myself on ebay, not so much for outdoor gear as for general clothing, you can often score $70 merino wool sweaters and the like for under $15, nice Italian shirts for $10, etc. For any kind of upscale gear (camping, cycling, household goods etc) Seattle craigslist is a goldmine. I bought a Jenn-Air gas range/convection oven from craigslist for $50 when somebody was tearing down an older house to build their dream home and liquidating the appliances.
My local University rents camping and hiking gear, too. It’s cheaper for students, but still affordable for non students. Gear rental is already fairly common for winter sports like skiing. So it makes sense that you could apply that system to summer recreation. Maybe it’s being in a big outdoor state (5 national parks, many major ski resorts, etc) that makes me see this as a normal thing to do. Or maybe it’s my millennial status, who knows.
Something you see occasionally with Europeans on the great circle the Sierra & beyond tour starting in either LA or SF, is to get a rental car, and make a beeline for Wal*Mart or Target and buy $250 worth of car camping gear (a Coleman tent & 2 burner stove, pots, dishes utensils, etc, sleeping bags and blow up mattress, lantern, etc.) to use during their 3 week stay.
You can’t take it back with you, so either it gets gifted to someone in need, or it gets tossed.
Three weeks? Most of the ones I meet doing the southwest have six weeks. Fun campfire conversations.
Let us not also forget that had our society not had a fraying social safety net, Reese Witherspoon would not have had to walk into the WILD to quit opioids and domestic violence.
That said, i kinda enjoyed Wild. Into the Wild is much better(worse?)!
The “Into the Wild” ending is not as cheery, though he does have an exciting death-rattle hallucination when his expression gets all dreamy, and you hear his heart beating faster and faster. If you’ve ever been with someone in intensive care right before they die, the monitor show their heart beating really fast at the end.
re; sleep
“Eventually, he said, he may be able to offer an “affordable, portable” brain-stimulating device that would use transcranial direct-current stimulation to help people have deeper sleep. (Walker has just started a company called Stim Science, with backing from Khosla Ventures, to make such a product, he told WIRED.)”
And there it is. The thing Philip Mirowski warned us bout 10 years ago. This guy is trying to cash in on his research directly. The total and complete destruction of science as a discipline is well underway.
…any mid-day nappers among us?
For a few years now, i’ve been taking 3 to 4 hour naps once a week usually, where I just conk out, and then wake up so refreshed.
“…any mid-day nappers among us?”
I have had difficulty sleeping for years which didn’t really improve with retirement. I have read umteen books and do all the “sleep hygiene” I’m supposed to.
What has helped enormously is giving myself permission to nap during the day.
I almost always take a 20 minute nap every day, I even arrange my schedule around it. Sometimes I don’t sleep, but I always feel rested after my downtime.
Inspired by my dogs, I have been taking a mid afternoon nap for sometime now. We have developed a routine -my lunch then their afternoon outdoor play then a pack nap. Of course, they tend to chill for about three or more hours while I like 30 to 45 minutes before going back to work or house chores. Yet another good lesson my canine companions have trained me to follow.
Very refreshing for the afternoon, but perhaps even better than that it gives me time to reflect and also really take in their positive and peaceful energy mid-dayish.
Neatly put! A coworker and myself used to tease our dearest friend and boss, 32 years our senior, for dozing to Oprah (yes, we shared a room at the Hojo!) while we drank beer by the pool, barbecued mostly dead protoplasm, chased women and fished (though, seldom simultaneously). Years PASS. Huh? I’d noted that our insomnia cure: Samuel Smith Oatmeal Stout (Tadcaster) now has Glyphosate as an adjunct? Maybe CBD/ Terpenes?
Due to Phyl’s cancer twisting her internal ‘cycles’ all around, I tend to stay up with her half of the night now and sleep for a few hours during the day. The “confusion” factor becomes an issue when trying to mesh the schedule of the “Everyday World” and the “non-standard” schedule I have fallen into. I’ll often do the shopping early in the dawn now, get home, conk out for a few hours and get back up for the evening and night shift.
As mentioned elsewhere, ‘anxiety’ plays a part in how ‘restful’ the sleep is. I am continuously amazed at how anxious I get when the monthly cheque runs out. I guess I’ve been conditioned to be the “dutiful little member of society.” Unfortunately, many of us have been taught to confuse, or perhaps conflate, having disposable income with being “worthy” members of society.
The love of money indeed is the root of all evil.
Perhaps I should sleep on it.
“Worthy” = what you contribute. This picture of your life is worth a lot to our NC society.
May the days ahead be good to you and Phyl.
Thanks. Every day really is an adventure now.
Many of us go through life taking so much for granted. I’m learning different. Old dogs and new tricks department.
Echoing mie Detroit. Best wishes from our family to yours, ambrit.
Thank you very much.
It may not intend to be, but sites like this tend to attract the more thoughtful and introspective among us. Thus, walking the fine line between commentary and ‘message boarding’ is a task that keeps many of us on our toes. It also keeps the mind sharp.
Thanks to Yves and Lambert et. al. for turning the occasional “blind eye” to the lapses some of us fall into from time to time.
Ambrit, always look forward to your thoughtful comments here at NC. Every insightful, humorous and kind comment is of priceless worth. Happy Spring to you and Phyl.
Here’s hoping for a clement spring, and trenchant commentary ‘newcatty.’
Happy spring right back. Now that we have passed the equinox, everything will be growing, including, hopefully, us all here.
ambrit, I just wanted to let you know that I enjoy reading up on what is happening around the world through the eyes of the intelligent and rational bloggers such as yourself on this site. I find that I am isolated these days although I do have 6 little dogs and they are always making me laugh unless of course we are napping!
I’m sending you some HI sunshine and papaya through the airwaves and pls know that you and your wife are in my thoughts during this awful time.
You seem to be balancing the stresses out well. It gives others a sense of Hope. (It does me.) “If he or she can do it, so can I.”
Not to be corny, but my Mum used to do up a Christmas Pineapple, sort of an older English holiday dish. I do remember that the recipe included rum. Even as a child I had an alcoholic appreciation for spirits.
Uncle Jerry and his Indonesian wife had no children, but they had the next best thing; a Jack Russell terrier. ‘Missy’ was so smart, Uncle Gerry used to say that she would be perfect if she could only figure out how to make a perfect Martini. “She makes them too dry,” he would remark. “I guess dogs have different taste buds than other people.”
Thank you, Ambrit.
De nada CristopherJ. I’m constantly being happily surprised by the positive quality of the commentary here. (Although I do tend to be a Cynic, I do appreciate the opposite point of view.)
Be healthy and happy.
I enjoy a nap in the afternoon when I can grab one, which is increasingly just about every day.
Naps are golden. I take short daytime naps at least 3-4 times a week. I’m also a big user of earplugs and night masks, especially when traveling. As I’ve gotten past 60, if I don’t get decent amounts of sleep I’m mentally worthless.
I stay very very far away from Ted Talks as a primary information source, as the author of that article did. Most of their speakers are experts, but TED doesn’t have a good enough of a filter on their speakers and some horrible idiots make their way through, particularly if they flatter the world view of the Silicon Valley crowd.
I’d only watch a TED talk if the speaker came recommended to me through other sources, and even then, the 20-minute one-size-fits-all format means that some talks get stretched to fit and others leave out important information.
TED Talks really should all start with a “Full Disclosure” statement outlining the speakers priors and present associations. Institutionalize it.
The greatest TED Talk in human history: Ms. Theranos herself, in 2014.
Yeah, and this Walker “sleep guy” insists we need to give up coffee and alcohol. What is he, Mormon? As the great running doctor, George Sheehan, from thirty years ago said, “If I have to give up coffee, why live?”
Ah, well, Camus deserves a place in this discussion:
“”Should I kill myself, or have a cup of coffee?”
Old Soviet Joke (anekdota):
Ivanov applied to the Communist Party. The party committee conducts an interview.
“Comrade Ivanov, do you smoke?”
“Yes, I do a little.”
“Do you know that comrade Lenin did not smoke and advised other communists not to smoke?”
“If comrade Lenin said so, I shall cease smoking.”
“Do you drink?”
“Yes, a little.”
“Comrade Lenin strongly condemned drunkenness.”
“Then I shall cease drinking.”
“Comrade Ivanov, what about women?”
“A little….”
“Do you know that comrade Lenin strongly condemned amoral behavior?”
“If comrade Lenin condemned, I shall not love them any longer.”
“Comrade Ivanov, will you be ready to sacrifice your life for the Party?”
“Of course. Who needs such life?”
Ah, the modern ‘sleep industry’. The ideas in this 2012 Guardian article are interesting: First and second sleep with a wakeful hour or two in between.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/feb/24/sleep-twice-a-night-anxiety
adding: The linked BBC article about first and second sleep is also very interesting, imo. From 2012.
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-16964783
I’ve started doing that, involuntarily. Hearing that it’s a thing might have helped establish the habit.
Rather than afternoon, I also frequently take a short nap in the evening, after eating. The other members of my family stay up much later than I do, so it helps me get through the evening.
It’s what I follow without apology, especially if I fall asleep early enough. The middle of the night peace is quite nice.
I once worked as a contractor at a piece of the de-monopolized AT&T where I heard a story about the famous Bell Labs research center in Murray Hill, New Jersey. Some time in the 1980s or 1990s there was a strange change in the climate inside Bell Labs — the story didn’t pinpoint time or cause. Before this shift all the doors inside Bells Labs were open and researchers working in different areas would visit each other’s work and share ideas — ideas drawn from the widely varying backgrounds and specializations. There were lively discussions in the lunch room and in the halls.
After the shift, cypher locks started appearing on the doors, and no one shared any ideas or discussed their research for fear of losing their claim on the results of their research. Much of the research became “Secret” and could not be shared unless there were a “need-to-know”. Other of the research might lead to a significant prize or valuable Intellectual Property which could mean raises, promotion, and assured research monies for the future.
Clearly Phillip Mirowski was prescient of the present demise of Science but also observant. More disheartening than this example of petty self-serving ‘entrepreneurial’ science is the growing prospect of “the best Science money can buy”. The Market, not experiments and analysis will become the source of Truth, with Science as its wholly owned mouthpiece bolstering whatever Truth the Market discovers in the great “marketplace of ideas”.
Or when you convene a “Birds of a Feather” meeting and realize you know which attendees are the NSA guys.
Or when you can’t give a presentation outside the company without the lawyers first scrubbing your slides.
Or when the engineer accompanying you takes copious notes during a brainstorming session (without contributing any ideas at all) and afterward dashes to the corporate patent liaison. First to file. Blech.
“John Lithgow Thinks the Clintons Would Have a Hard Time at His New Play”
A play about the 2008 election? Meh. What I want to see is a play about the night of 8th November 2016 when things fell apart for Hillary on election night in her HQ. You could call it “Shattered” and it is all there. The absolute confidence of winning against Trump, the pre-celebrations, the party wheeler-dealers going in and out seeking jobs in the Hillary administration. Then the first disquieting news of one or two States being lost. Then things going into a slow panic as everything falls apart. You could have a screen in the background all this time showing the reactions of the crowd to the news. It would be the stuff of high drama ending in the phone call to a triumphant Trump. Even as a movie it would rock. I’d pay to go to see that.
I would too. That was the most interesting election night I can remember! I really wish there was more out there about it. It was amazing watching it unfold.
https://www.salon.com/2008/05/05/clinton_blackvote/ (too much is made of Oprah’s endorsement)
Memory fades, but if you thought Hillary 2016 was a bad campaign, let me to tell you about 2008. This was night after night of the Clinton(s) campaign saying something horribly offensive. She capped it off by disappearing into the woods for three days. Then she does have a Klobucharesque reputation. Though I suppose not understanding the electoral college was worse than delegate allocation.
The author of the play believes Buttigieg is the real deal, so I imagine the characters in the play are dull and one dimensional.
The disaster of that 2008 campaign including some reveal of how disconnected it was from the less privileged and connected was why I was gobsmacked by how many of the top campaign slots were the same in 2016.
(Not understanding how the votes are counted in a long established system is worse only because there is no excuse and it is simple to point the incompetence out. Forgetting that both Clintons had been deeply embedded in DNC decisions, her campaign staff were very well paid to understand delegate allocation.)
Saturday Night Live had a skit about that where the true believers slowly realized the inevitable.
Always loved Chappelle in that… nothing new in this for Black folk, welcome to life in the USA.
Meryl Streep as Hillary?
Hillary has already been depicted in a movie BTW–by Emma Thompson in Primary Colors. I’d say Streep seems closer to the mark casting wise.
But who to get to play Bill Clinton? I could see him in that play eying off young women as they entered the room and with Hillary rolling her eyes or alternatively giving him a death stare like was caught on a YouTube film once.
Reread the book. The scenario you posit would have had the two “Big Dogs” eyeing each other like two tomcats both after the same kitten.
As for playing an old Bill Clinton? why, get John Travolta to reprise his role. Get the Scientologists to bankroll it and rename it; “Battlefield Beltway.”
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=eYt0khR_ej0
Sadly, there was only one man who could play Bill Clinton.
Yes he is missed. I recently learned he had an earlier career doing LP cover art (under the name “Hartmann”). He did a lot of famous covers.
Meryl Streep looks right for the part, but she has full-blown TDS and would never play a role that portrayed Clinton in a negative light. There are very few Hollywood actors who would risk their career by accepting a role that revealed the true character of the liberal establishment. Shortly after Trump was elected, Nicole Kidman said that the US should support whoever is president, and lost contracts for doing so. If you want to work in Hollywood you toe the line, which raises the question: Who runs Hollywood?
Hollywood has always been about Money, with a capital ‘M.’
Check out how Hollywood kneecapped the EPIC campaign of Upton Sinclair back in the thirties. It’s all there.
Read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End_Poverty_in_California_movement
Also, a contemporary post mortem of the campaign: http://depts.washington.edu/epic34/campaign.shtml
Kidman may work in Hollywood but last I checked she lives in Nashville. I doubt she’s sweating her Hollywood shunning too very much. She still gets lots of work.
I do think La La Land is a bit worried about their anti Republican image. You’ll note in the most recent Oscars they cut down on the Trump jokes. My local library now features more than a few “Christian” movies and some with A-list actors. And fair enough since everyone should be able to find material that they like.
I count on the local Grocery Outlet for my entire input of contemporary evang muzak that comes wafting down from on high, where the speakers are.
Been listening to it for years now, and there’s always a heaping of praise in every ditty, without fail.
Wow. Our local GrossOut (as we refer to it) plays great music, rock, soul, etc. Guess I should count my blessings, so to speak.
Kidmans from Oz too.
Establishment through and through. Just see her latest ‘Destroyer.’ ‘Big Little Lies’ is another establishment trope albeit very fn good. Reese is also in it too!
Oz…practically a suburb of Los Angeles, eh? Those convict ancestors just produced too many good looking descendants
America, land of the free, and home to rich Australians, Brits, Kiwis, and Canucks, Koreans, Indians, Saudis, Israelis, Jordanians…
Well, those are the ones the Ozzies let out. The ‘Normals’ must be corralled somewhere in the suburbs of the Big Cities.
That may be the case now, but the Clintonites are going to be gone sooner or later. Hell, the Clinton’s themselves will be gone in years or a couple decades. It’ll be really interesting to see just how quickly the whole thing implodes once they’re gone. What kind of gritty, ugly tell all biopics will be being made in fifty years (assuming anyone is making movies in fifty years and not just spending all their time scavenging the wasteland)?
I’ve never understood the Clinton brand. Like, okay, Bill has a certain charisma I get that. But Hillary is as big an unlikable mediocrity as there has ever been in DC. I’ve never gotten why these people of all things have been elevated to some sort of cult status. Seriously, Hillary Clinton is viewed as some sort of feminist role model? Forget a stupid hill to die on, the Clinton’s are like a multi-decade mountain range. Why on earth is *that* worth fighting for?
In my entire life there has been maybe, possibly two or three presidents that I might have accepted. Despite my general dislike of presidents during my life I never thought I should not support them. I absolutely loathe both Clintons as well as President Trump, but in a democracy, you don’t get everything you want. Kidman was only supporting the rule of law and the functioning of the institutions that keep our nation’s democracy and country running. Sometimes I think that all of our supposed elites, the “adults” running our society are mentally incompetent.
Angela Lansbury certainly had a physical resemblance to Hillary some decades ago. She was brilliant as Eleanor Iselin in The Manchurian Candidate:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCjBOZ4r9Ck
I don’t think corporate media companies would ever produce an honest “Shattered” movie, no matter how relevant or entertaining it would be. Anybody suggesting would be excommunicated from the elites.
Oh, what Robert Altman could have done with this subject matter. Perhaps he would not have given a damn as to hanging with those elites, so long as he could raise the funding and organize the distribution. And “Shattered” via The Factory could have been a real experience.
Netflix, do a 180 fom your successful series “The Crown” and produce “The Failed Corranation”!
Ha! Andy Warhol’s “Shattered!”
Not too far from the “reality” of the situation I’ll assert.
I don’t know about ‘Shattered’, but Hillary might have potential as a lead character in say, a sequal to the ‘Reanimator’ movie franchise … something entitled .. like ‘ Reanimated — Full of Cons’ .. staring HER-> of course, with Nancy P., and Dianne F. as co-stars … with a full-HOUSE of castoffs !
The scuttlebutt I have seen is that nobody cares. Everybody is supposed to be lined up to see the Lehman Brothers play.
https://www.npr.org/2019/04/03/709206827/financial-catastrophe-makes-for-riveting-theater-in-the-lehman-trilogy
Neither one is a musical. Did you ever read the story about Nixon singing Broadway musical bits in the shower? Impossible Dream and whatnot? I like to sing Do a deer a female deer myself.
But but, the Russians are to blame.
As produced by Max Bialystock no doubt.
“Springtime for Hillary.”
This is an absolutely sadistic but funnier than hell pro-Trump montage of election night news clips set to the Hall of the Mountain King (3 minutes):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGomGRZIDIE
We went to a memorial service for a cousin that day, and on the 2 hour drive home, I could hear the disquiet grow amongst the NPR announcers as it took longer than expected for Virginia to be called for Clinton. By the time we got home around 9, it was obvious that it was going to be a tough night for Clinton.
Bravo to Carter for saying things that you can’t actually say in the US. He wasn’t a perfect president by any means, but the good works he’s done since then mitigate that to some extent.
Jimmy Carter: the only American president in possession of a human soul.
Mr Carter was too ethical to be a good president IMO
All that is good, but one must be reminded of the pernicious “Carter Doctrine” and his rôle in creating the armed anti-Russian mujahideen that eventually spun off Osama bin Laden, al-Qaeda, and the Taliban, which induced the US, 30 yrs later, to replace the Russians as an imperialist invader of Afghanistan, amongst other “blowbacks”. Perhaps Jimmy Carter was overly influenced by “Zbig” Brzezinski, who saw himself as the “new” Henry Kissinger, but those policy decisions lay the groundwork for the disasters that inform contemporary US Middle East policies.
+1
Some sins are not forgiven.
Maybe not, but I will give Carter some points for being the only ex President even trying to make up for their sins.
All sins are forgiven. Beware of judgements.
Carter’s sin keeps on giving, doesn’t it? 40 years later…
One could make the case that it set the entire world on a path of destruction by making the world safe for fossil fuels, collapsing detente with the USSR and its knock-on effects and a war against a religion.
It seems to lead to either environmental or nuclear holocaust, doesn’t it?
Carter made a sound decision. It’s pointless to blame him because some of his successors were asleep at the wheel.
Carter’s CIA provided the arms and Saudi Arabia provided the radical ideology to – over time – enable franchising of Islamic radicalism throughout South Asia and the Middle East. Nobody was “asleep at the wheel”, man, it was and is a continuation of those early policy decisions. Witness American direct assistance of “friendly” extremist movements in Syria, and its attempts to identify “friendly” militias in Libya…actions cut from the same cloth. Chalmers Johnson’s book “Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire” describes the entire ca. 40-year-and-counting clusterfu*k in detail.
There’s no such thing as a passive “continuation”. Carter’s successors decided to continue this or that, to do or not do this or that. Their decisions were not his responsibility.
When Clinton was arranging the deaths of tens of thousands of Iraqi children by means of his sanctions, or bombing Serbs who were no threat to any American vital interest, he could instead have been dealing with “Islamic radicalism”. He didn’t, and that was his decision; it wasn’t Carter’s.
To blame Carter for the even more remote decisions of Obama and Hellary is simply delusional.
The “Carter Doctrine” is named for its creator. He has never disavowed or disowned it, to my knowledge.
Cent Com had its genesis with Carter. Like all things MIC, it is a self-licking ice cream cone that has grown to gargantuan proportions. So many people are dead because of his actions.
Had Carter willingly NOT intervened in Afghanistan, what followed may not have happened. Carter was intervening BEFORE the USSR invaded. Carter intentionally precipitated the invasion to give the USSR its Vietnam, as Zbig bragged.
This is the same as NC commentariat’s condemnation of Clinton abolishing Glass-Steagall. Clinton was long out of power by the time the GFC hit. Is there not a clear and direct lineage to Clinton’s action?
Carter endorsing Tulsi Gabbard would be a marvelous thing and a great way to repudiate the damage that that eponymous doctrine has caused.
For what it is worth, Carter did endorse Bernie Sanders in 2016.
https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/democrats-vs-trump/jimmy-carter-reveals-he-voted-bernie-sanders-over-hillary-clinton-n756846
GSA was handicapped long before GLBA (Graham Leach Bliley Act) put the final bipartisan nail in the coffin under Clinton. GSA erosion began in earnest in the 70s and 80s when commercial banks began to perform investment functions and securitization. (Alas the FDIC still stands to socialize the risks).
I guess this begs the overall question: should Carter be blamed for being part of the overall neoliberal and interventionist age? Can any “well-meaning” President meaningfully stand apart from it?
Airline, trucking and railroad deregulation were Carter’s babies, too.
Thus began the road to crapification of transportation and considerable union busting.
Pure neoliberal in my book.
How much air pollution could have been avoided by keeping those transportation systems smaller and regulated?
Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. Is this period, you were the national securty advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?
Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahiddin began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan on December 24, 1979. But the reality, closely guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.
Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into the war and looked for a way to provoke it?
B: It wasn’t quite like that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.
Q : When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against secret US involvement in Afghanistan, nobody believed them . However, there was an element of truth in this. You don’t regret any of this today?
B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter, essentially: “We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war.” Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war that was unsustainable for the regime , a conflict that bought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.
Q: And neither do you regret having supported Islamic fundamentalism, which has given arms and advice to future terrorists?
B: What is more important in world history? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some agitated Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war? – Interview with Le Nouvel Observateur, January 1998
It’s not about what future Presidents did, it’s squarely about what Carter did. There’s a direct line from Carter’s signature on that directive to 9/11, and everything that followed.
Thank you for that!
But – we – won …. /s
Presidents come and go, but the CIA is always there…
There you go. Remember that, and events™ make so much more sense.
Before WW2, the CIA, or version thereof, was not a monolithic State entity.
Is the dysfunction built into the system from the beginning?
Some characterize the rapacious hedge funds as “Pirate Equity.” (I guess that there could be non-destructive hedge funds.) So, using that template, I will characterize organizations like the CIA, NSA,. Homeland Security, and the like as “Pirate Government.”
Right at the start of the article:
“The only U.S. president to complete his term without war, military attack or occupation has called the United States “the most warlike nation in the history of the world.”
That loud flushing sound is actual history, disappearing down the memory hole.
there was nothing qualitatively different about interfering in the middle east, nor did he take the democratic party anywhere they didn’t already want to go. the u.s. had been arming factions in the middle east for long before carter or brzezinski had any influence, and increased that interference after he was gone.
I remember Carter vividly, and I think his problem was that he was corrupt, beholden to the Rockefellers via the Tri-Lateral Commission. Hence letting the Shah into the country, his biggest disaster.
As an ex-President, he needn’t be beholden to anyone, so we get a different man. I think he’s spent his retirement trying to make up fo rhis Presidency.
Carter has done a ton of repenting since leaving office, and it’s fair to say that later in life he really did come to understand the consequences of his “Doctrine”, and tried to atone for his sins.
The more I read the real history (not the fluff) of the US the more my illusions of it being a decent country at any point in time are totally shattered. Sadly it feels like all of our presidents possess(ed) these qualities in spades: a disregard for the feelings of others, a lack of remorse or shame, manipulative behavior, unchecked egocentricity, and the ability to lie in order to achieve one’s goals. In other words the personality of a first rate sociopath. Currently I am reading “Operation Gladio: The Unholy Alliance” and as shocked as I am, NOT, about all of the facts and history it is interesting to go down the rabbit hole of who’s who and how it was all created. Speaking of who’s who I only just learned that Wm F Buckley (CIA asset) was kidnapped in 1985, tortured and murdered. (I was just a kid at the time) and now The Heritage Foundation is giving out the Wm F Buckley award. I guess that this killing machine is never going to be put down. :-(
If interested here is a book review
https://off-guardian.org/2019/04/06/operation-gladio-the-unholy-alliance/
Between the Vatican, the CIA and the Mafia: Overview of the book by Paul L. Williams.
I think you’re talking about two different Wm. F. Buckleys. The more famous was a conservative pundit and editor of (IIRC) the “National Review.” Part of the conservative revival of the 70s and 80s. Debated Gore Vidal and lost – people who debated Vidal usually did.
The other was a spy, captured in the ME.
Oregoncharles, thanks for clearing up my confusion and I do so enjoy watching old posts of Vidal telling it like was/is!
You and me both!
Yeah, read Judith Stein’s “Pivotal Decade” and you’ll discover that for all of Carter’s personal integrity he represents the advent of neoliberalism in action in the White House
https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300171501/pivotal-decade
Carl Sagan, stoner.
http://marijuana-uses.com/mr-x/
SMOKING A BOWL AS WE SPEAK! GREEN DRAGON, AN INDICA!
If anyones in Uptown New Orleans and wants to smoke WEED, ill be happy to share!!!
I feel like that when reading Nakedcapitalism, the sense of clarity and absurdity. Also when watching film n tv shows!
Happy 4/20, COMRADES!
Why indica? I always think of sativa as the more head trip one that doesn’t knock you out, which kinda seems like a waste.
Sometimes you want to get high, and sometimes you want to be stoned.
I prefer Sativa tbh but as im buying illegally i take what i can get.
what do you think about vaping?
I will let you all make the connection…
On “Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find”:
2018: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6265266/
2016: https://www.nature.com/articles/srep21774
2017: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/8242251
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0891061815000599
Point well taken, BUT also note
This is an impact 5x that of the digital devices. And these kids would have been 7-14 when Wall Street gutted Main Street.
Wonder how many of them lost their homes and along with home likely their neighborhood school, friends, etc…
Do digital devices demand time or is it just cheaper way to fill the time? And one that can avoid uncomfortable questions. My suspicion is seeming “phone addiction” is an outlet for anxiety.
Saying that phone addiction is an outlet for anxiety is like saying alcohol addiction is an outlet for anxiety.
I have no smart phone or laptop and I sit at coffee shops and watch college kids from UNC use their deceives. If they are on a laptop they are constantly switching between school work and facbook/instagram. Or they are constantly picking up their phones while they are trying to do work on their laptop. Most of them are bouncing their leg up and down frantically.
I think the reasons for this internet media addiction is complex and singular to each person and needs to be treated from all angles. It might not be enough to get rid of social media apps and keep teh phone if the phone is still effecting ion channels and causing anxiety that pushes you back on social media.
I agree, I was not dismissing the financial issues at all, just focusing on my area of knowledge. So are the EMFs from mobile phones decreasing their resiliency causing more anxiety from financial stress?
“Housework could keep brain young, research suggests”
Nobody likes housework. You do it because you have to, not because you want to. Otherwise you might find yourself on a episode of “Hoarders”. Personally, I regard housework in the same way that Jerome K. Jerome of “Three Men in a Boat” fame regarded work in general-
“It always does seem to me that I am doing more work than I should do. It is not that I object to the work, mind you; I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours. I love to keep it by me: the idea of getting rid of it nearly breaks my heart.
You cannot give me too much work; to accumulate work has almost become a passion with me: my study is so full of it now, that there is hardly an inch of room for any more. I shall have to throw out a wing soon.
And I am careful of my work, too. Why, some of the work that I have by me now has been in my possession for years and years, and there isn’t a finger-mark on it. I take a great pride in my work; I take it down now and then and dust it. No man keeps his work in a better state of preservation than I do.
But, though I crave for work, I still like to be fair. I do not ask for more than my proper share.”
Housework is like car maintenance. You do it or you pay the price later. Why fight the inevitable instead of just accepting the necessity and getting it done!
We clean house every 6 months – whether it needs it or not.
love it–I’m definitely gonna borrow it, thanks!
I love that book which was written back in the 1880s. He has a great sense of humour and his other books are funny as well. Here is another quote from that book-
“I can’t sit still and see another man slaving and working. I want to get up and superintend, and walk round with my hands in my pockets, and tell him what to do. It is my energetic nature. I can’t help it.”
Jerome K. Jerome: the MBA as Jules Verne: the Apollo program.
My solution to the need for dusting is to take off my glasses.
Housework for me is akin to meditation. It’s simple, methodical and the results are predictable. Not much else in my life is like that.
If you live alone. Otherwise…
I’ve always loved housework…or any relatively repetitive/safe type of inside/outside work.
An old ex-girlfriend of mine (born in Gwangju, SKorea, where she insisted her brothers and male classmates would rather have gotten drafted and go to war instead of do *any* type of housework) used to pour herself a glass of wine, theatrically insist that it was finally _her_ turn to do some of it, all the while knowing I had either already taken care of it, or would find ways to do it before she had much of a chance.
I’ve always enjoyed putting one part of the brain on a repetitive mildly physical task, while ‘disconnecting’ other parts of the brain to cogitate on something more interesting or problematic at the same time. Plus, there a certain positivity in relaxing at completion within an environment that just….looks neat and clean.
My lady friend hated housework, and I have to admit (in pure mercenary fashion) …it also had great and lasting benefits in the form of ‘having a culinary feast lovingly and regularly prepared for you’ when the cook knew she wouldn’t have to lift a finger to clean so much as a soju glass once the food was enjoyed. :)
Me too marcy! For many years I have treated the dishes, the mopping the floor, clothes on the line, all chores as a form a meditation and concentration, a period to give time out and still the mind.
When I wash a dish, I observe it as closely as I can, the texture, how heavy it is, the sound it makes when it goes in the soapy water, the soap suds run off it when it goes in the rinsing water, the sound it makes when it goes in the dish rack and perhaps clinks with another dish. Try to observe every tiniest detail. Then move on to the next item and do the same thing again, whether a fork, cup, saucepan. It becomes like a meditation as each item I treat like observing a new breath when meditating. Literally and figuratively rinse and repeat!
Lots of people say they don’t have time for meditation, but actually there’s loads of things and oodles of time that can be meditation time, meditation is about giving your sole attention to an object, whether it be a breath, a dish or an image. It all trains and stills the mind. A still mind is a happy mind…
Thank you for explaining so eloquently how I also feel.
:- ) !!
+++
Anxiety ‘epidemic’ brewing on college campuses, researchers find MD Linx (ChiGal)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Seeing as you don’t really remember anything before say 4 years old, damn near every college student has only known their country to be on a constant war footing since 9/11, with basically no deviation from it, as far as they are concerned, we’re some modern day version of Sparta, where it’s normal. Our vaunted military is meeting much reluctance in getting new fodder from their ranks, dangling reenlistment bonuses of $20k to those Johnny Got His Gun types on the verge of hanging it up, as incentive to stay on.
Add in the aspect of student loans, the amount of which would buy you a house in many parts of the country, AI poaching jobs, and the idea that young collegians are staring into their various black rectangles 16/7 (gotta take 8 hours off for sleep, how long before that too gets interrupted?) and yeah, I could see an anxiety outbreak.
Agree with your points, Wukchumni. Also, having some contact with teenagers still in high school… The pressure is off the charts to be ,for lack of a better word” successful “. The clicks are still there in full force. If a kid is jock, then extreme pressure to be good at your sport. If a kid is a cheerleader, same. If a kid is a nerd, same. If a kid is a misfit, then kid has pressure to be cool in their circle. If a kid is in band, then kid has pressure to be first tuba or whatever. I know some kids who have the preturnatural maturity and sense of self worth to find their way through this maze. They usually find each other and band together. Then, we all know kids who have broken parents. I have said, then who is the parent? This is not even taking into account the kids who are abused and neglected in this country. This is not taking into account the fact that many kids are literally hungry most days in our towns and cities. I just read that some college kids asked for a food pantry at their school. Kids are sleeping in cars or tents. So, anxiety outbreaks begin before college for many kids.
Re ‘Five former Obama ambassadors back Buttigieg’
A very revealing article. The money people are literally proclaiming Buttigieg a Gay Obama, and praising him for all the same qualities — his “intelligence,” appearance and demeanor, ability to charm, etc. The only policy issue mentioned was his “picking a fight” with Pence on LGBT issues. “Some of Buttigieg’s backers say they’re gobsmacked by the swiftness of his rise.” That’s funny. Clearly they are trying to find a candidate they can sell and marketing that commodity furiously. Sorry Beto.
It’s been remarkable how swift Beto’s crash-and-burn has been. He was in trouble before the Buttigieg boomlet got underway, but now he’s being rapidly snuffed out. I can’t wait to see his fundraising drop off in the next round of FEC filings.
They’ve got a new telegenic young white guy with a better resume to say soothing things to reassure the centrist establishment and the segment of voters that still believes they understand politics. And he doesn’t sound as cartoonishly ridiculous as O’Rourke.
Lesson to O’Rourke….the establishment is a very much a fair-weather friend!!!
There was this video recording of Beto in March, openly applying what he learned about race relations in Texas to Netanyahu and Palestinians… without having thought through the political consequences. So it goes.
A few days ago Buttigieg was on MSNBC / Morning Joe and the amount of fawning over him was rediculous. Joe was making a point that Buttigieg is a big country music fan so as prop up his “regular guy” bonafides. With the elites Mayor Pete has clear glide path for big donations and uncritical coverage. Interesting to see if actual voters agree.
I’m sure he will also love the hip hop and the sports ball games too! Whatever you like, Martin Prince…I mean Pete Buttigieg likes too.
I think for elites who weren’t impacted by the Clinton years or the Iraq War negatively might not have realized Obama represented more than an empty suit. They never grasped Obama’s candidacy.
“Some of Buttigieg’s backers say they’re gobsmacked by the swiftness of his rise.”
The double entendre candidate from South Bend.
lol
Glenn Greenwald predicted Buttigieg back in May 2014 even when Hillary was expected to not lose:
“Hillary is banal, corrupted, drained of vibrancy and passion. I mean, she’s been around forever, the Clinton circle. She’s a fucking hawk and like a neocon, practically. She’s surrounded by all these sleazy money types who are just corrupting everything everywhere. But she’s going to be the first female president, and women in America are going to be completely invested in her candidacy. Opposition to her is going to be depicted as misogynistic, like opposition to Obama has been depicted as racist. It’s going to be this completely symbolic messaging that’s going to overshadow the fact that she’ll do nothing but continue everything in pursuit of her own power. They’ll probably have a gay person after Hillary who’s just going to do the same thing.”
Being for a Real Democrat and a truly qualified candidate, Tulsi and Bernie,
I’m tired of hearing about him already.
Friend call this affliction “Butt-itch-itis”
The worst thing you could possibly say about either of them, “a real Democrat”. Think and talk about policy, please. It’s their best feature… not about their worst failing. The Piranhacrats will eat them alive if need be.
Bernie and Tulsi look to me to be serious people who are giving thought to real issues. Medicare for All deserves a forum. Ending these unending wars for the greater glory of the arms makers, the corporations, and the financial weenies who skim their cut needs open and complete discussion. It would be pleasant if we could avoid the slide into fascism so well begun. The only way any of this is going to have a chance of happening is if we get a president who is willing to not only shake things up, but radically reorder priorities.
The first time I saw Butt-igieg on some Tee Hee news show, I thought here he is: the great white candidate for the Dems. What is more polically correct then a woman candidate? He checks all of the boxes. So many in fact, it’s not hard to think he was groomed for the throne. I am sure I will miss some, butt: male(Its OK now, she had her turn), gay( it’s OK, AZ has a repug Kyle and Synema, too, a repug in sheep’s clothing), telegenic(at least for mainstream), not old, “brilliant mind”, multi lingual, cute boy charm, married, resume includes being ! Mayor Pete!, and sounds like a good chameleon.
Where do they find these people?
Ex military-intelligence, check, Middle-Eastern deployment, check,
endorsed by the head of AIPAC, check…
Better yet, his father was a founding member and president of the International Gramsci Society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Gramsci
Gramsci was one of the founders of Cultural Marxism and the Great Neo-Con Job that’s dragged our country into 3, or 4, depending how you define it, losing wars in the Middle East.
The father of Democratic presidential hopeful Pete Buttigieg was a Marxist professor, an adviser to Rethinking Marxism, an academic journal that published articles “that seek to discuss, elaborate, and/or extend Marxian theory,” and a member of the editorial collective of Boundary 2, a journal of postmodern theory, literature, and culture.
He spoke at many Rethinking Marxism conferences and other gatherings of prominent Marxists. The elder Buttigieg was best known as one of the world’s leading scholars of Gramsci.
But hey, Junior can play allegedly play the piano and speak French, that’s more important than all that historical stuff.
Kyle Kulinski calls him Booty-Judge which I think is just excellent and catchy. His nicknames [Bet-On-My-Stork, CloudBootJar, and BootyJudge] have been one of the highlights of this primary cycle so far.
Has anyone ever gone from Mayor to President before?
I know Trump wasn’t even a Mayor, I’m just curious if anyone before Trump was able to overcome the idea that it’s a pretty big step from local office to Leader of the Free World.
The truth is, being Mayor is very low on the resume items that some seem to think qualifies him to be President. It’s all about the MIC and elite school background, combined with an Identity that they think they can sell in the era of identity politics.
Shallow Pete is Obama’s Mini-Me….
CJR
Tragic that collectively our attitude toward addiction continues to be to punish, not treat, it. For how much longer will evidence-based treatment be withheld in favor of the 12-step Nazis who insist the answer is to “just say No”?
How many more mothers need to lose their sons?
Hear, hear.
Im almost 5 years sober with alcohol. I smoke weed obviously but that helps more than hurts my sobriety. Nonetheless, i spent 7 months in a VA sponsored Rehab for Veterans AND for civilians. All AA All the time. Im lucky in that my drug counciler told me to get through as many steps as i could. I got through the 1st step- admitting im powerless over alcohol. cool. Thats it. From there i figured out my own personal Atheist Alcoholics 12 steps.
Quitting ur drug of choice is lonely, miserable, and depressing, but avoiding that feeling ‘the mornin after’ is priceless.
Sometimes it was the whole d— day after.
We’re gonna rock, rock, rock non-stop tonight…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RI5okqUxi2k
I love Dore, Greenwald, Taibbi. Maté, et al but I’ve been waiting for them to name names and to put it all together. Clearly the past 3 years has been a cover for backstabbing Bernie and play-for-pay at our favorite Billary Foundation…this is a step in the right direction:: [ redacted for space ]
AN EMPIRE OF BULLSHIT
by James Kunstler
After two years of gaslighting the public while it blew smoke up America’s ass, the Jacobin news media enjoyed its final feeding frenzy with the release of the 400-page Mueller report. They expected 1000 pounds of raw filet mignon, but it turned out to be tofu fried in olestra…The Times’ Maggie Haberman fuming that the White House had played the “Nazi anthem” Edelweiss — very fake news, it turned out, since the tune was written for Rodgers’ and Hammerstein’s 1959 Broadway show, The Sound of Music (and sung by the anti-Nazi hero Baron von Trapp). Meanwhile Rachel Maddow had the balls to confab in prime time with disgraced former FBI mandarin Andy McCabe, officially identified as a liar by his own colleagues at the agency. What a circus of perfidious freakery!
Understand that the Mueller Report itself was the mendacious conclusion to a deceitful investigation, the purpose of which was to conceal the criminal conduct of US government officials meddling in the 2016 election, in collusion with the Hillary Clinton campaign, to derail Mr. Trump’s campaign, and then disable him when he managed to win the election. Mr. Mueller was theoretically trying to save the FBI’s reputation, but he may have only succeeded in injuring it more gravely.
The whole wicked business began as a (failed) entrapment scheme using shadowy US Intel “assests” Stefan Halper and Joseph Mifsud to con small fish Papadopoulos and Carter Page into incriminating themselves (they declined to be conned) and moved on to ploys like the much-touted Trump Tower meeting to ensnare Trump Junior and then to several efforts (also failed) to flip Paul Manafort and Michael Cohen — the final product of which was an epic failure to find one instance of real chargeable criminal collusion between anyone connected to Mr. Trump and Russia.
By the way, the Mueller Report failed to mention that the two Russians present in that August 2016 Trump Tower meeting, lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya and lobbyist Rinat Akhmetshin, were on the payroll of Hillary Clinton’s oppo research contractor Fusion GPS, and met with that company’s principal, Glenn Simpson, both before and after the meeting — just one example among many of the Mueller Team’s shifty tactics, but a move that speaks volumes about Mr. Mueller’s actual intent, which was to keep his prosecutorial circus going as long as possible to interfere with Mr. Trump carrying out his own duties.
…., the media’s frenzy will run out of steam (and credibility) and now they will be whipped like dogs for betraying their public trust. There is a counter-narrative to the “Resistance” narrative, and it is a true crime story. That suppressed story is finally going to roll out in the implacable workings of actual (not fake) justice and it is going to crush a lot of people who concocted this epic political hoax, including some members of the press who knowingly and dishonestly abetted it.
Many criminal referrals have already been made on the likes of James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, and Bruce Ohr, and a big net has been cast to pull in the figures who have been hiding in the thickets lo these two-and-a-half-years of smoke and gaslight: Loretta Lynch, Sally Yates, William Brennan, James Clapper, Nellie Ohr, Samantha Power, Bill Priestap, Jim Rybicki, James Baker, Mike Kortan, John Carlin, Mary McCord, Josh Campbell and more. Some of these are going to jail and some have already flipped. The fetchings should reach the Obama White House. Mr. Mueller himself, even in his majestic granitic silence, will be liable for failing to inform his boss, the Attorney General, that the predicate document for his witch hunt was known to be a fraud back in 2016, and was used anyway to spy on a presidential candidate.
Let congress put on a carnival of its own now. It will be greeted like a TV commercial for a hemorrhoid remedy while the real national psychodrama plays out in grand juries and courtrooms, demonstrating what a grievous injury was done to this republic by its own vested authorities.
(Support Kunstler’s writing by visiting his Patreon Page:
https://www.patreon.com/JamesHowardKunstler)
When’s the Inspector General’s report due? Before Memorial Day?
the idea that the FBI was pro-Hillary is laughable. Had Comey alerted the public about he activities of the Internet Research Agency Trump would have lost all 50 states. Instead Comey launched a last minute smear of Hillary. Trump owes his election to Comey and voter suppression.
The Internet Research Agency was(is?) a for-profit firm that sold people on social media marketing as a service. There is no proof that the company had any ties to the Russian govt.
moonofalabama.org:
Here are two posts that describe the motive and methodology of the IRA in creating fake accounts:
see here:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2017/10/3000-facebook-ads-the-russian-influence-campaign-is-a-profitable-click-bait-scheme.html
and here:
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/02/mueller-indictement-the-russian-influence-is-a-commercial-marketing-scheme.html?p=2
In the first one, this often overlooked point is made:
Over half of the election related ads were not seen until after the election. 25% of the ads were never seen in this country by anyone.
The Internet Research Agency had no effect on the 2016 election at all. It is another red herring in the man-made lake full of red herrings which was Russiagate.
Touché!!
The Internet Research Agency was a joke. It was for click-bait purposes, to get eyeballs, to make money. A significant percentage of the “ads” were post-election, and were both for an against various candidates. Not all the ads were political
Moon of Alabama exposed this early on.
You’re correct, however, in the sense that many voters would have succumbed to the additional psyops.
Is that true??
No. Here is an excellent article on Veselnitskaya:
Don’t Believe Everything You Read About Russian Lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya Llama
Thanks for this interesting link. The real Browder story is a crucial part of the whole anti-Russia campaign, so of course it is completely taboo in the Western press. It’s not surprising that the Veselnitskaya incident is so muddled and/or repressed.
Here is Bill Browder taking a bit of exercise on a slushy Manhattan street in ’15…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ryVavTF6hR0
It’s worth reading the section on the Trump Tower meeting in the Mueller report. It runs from page 110 to 123 of Volume I, and contains quite a lot of info. Interestingly, Sergei Magnitsky is correctly identified as a tax specialist, rather than a lawyer as claimed by Browder, and then widely reported by the media. Unfortunately the PDF of the report does not allow text to be copy-pasted.
Thank you for responding.
Kunstler held that factoid out as resolving confusion over the meaning of an event (the August 2016 Trump Tower meeting) into the dubious clarity of a hidden conspiracy of sorts. I guess the relevant question is why K thought he needed to bother.
A lot of hot air was blown into the Russiagate balloon to achieve liftoff, and the insignificance of the Trump Tower meeting just made it that much more inflatable, I guess.
Trump Dossier Firm Also Supplied Info Used in Meeting of Russians, Trump Team
Some of these are going to jail and some have already flipped.
Be still my patriotic heart. I hope he’s half right.
If for nothing else, watch the Sanders SC Poverty Roundtable for Cornell West’s closing remarks. A stem-winder in three minutes.
Thanks for the reference, Otis. That was something!
+1, would have missed it and been less for it
That was fantastic! well worth watching brother West!!
and brother Sanders!
Let’s stand up to ‘milquetoast centrist leadership’
Yes! West and Bernie’s Sanders both in top form!!!
Just watched it as well.
Is it me or has Dr. West gotten better????
Wow, thats some inspirational stuff.
At least ive got dat dude on my side!
I think West has always been principled and excellent and an excellent rhetor. If he’s becoming even more of what he already is so much the better for Sanders and all of us.
oooh-wheee!
Yes, indeedy!
From the “Five Former Obama Ambassadors Support Pete Buttigieg” article:
“I am all in with Mayor Pete. No one else. I don’t see anyone else who comes close,” said Eacho. “His ability to come across as authentic, honest, and trustworthy”
We know all about his many abilities but, is he any of those things? Trustworthy? Don’t ask the former Police Chief of South Bend or the residents of the homes he demolished.
Pretty much Obama 2.0.
As others have noted here, the Democratic nominee only wins by both turning out the base and bringing Trump voters back to the D column. Deploristan is fed up with BOMFOG, Ted talks and Oprahbabble.
Only Sanders and Warren show the necessary fire in the belly. But Warren’s purse lipped moralizing is also a misread of the heartland. And her fawning over AOC just looks like an awkward bid for some ‘wise Latina’ mojo.
Also, I’m a “love is beautiful wherever you find it” kind of guy, but a gay candidate is going to have trouble in the black and Latino community, even with a spotless record. Remember the gay marriage ban that was voted in with strong nonwhite support in California? Not that the base is so phobic as to flip to R, but all they need to do is stay home and 45 is reelected.
“I am all in with Mayor Pete” = “I’m in with HER->”
Same starry-eyed crap …. !
Heh. Sincerity – once you can fake that , you’ve got it made.
You will notice that he has the “ability to come across as authentic, honest, and trustworthy,” not that he actually HAS these qualities. Surface is all.
Just noticed that lyman alpha blob, beat me to it. And I love the sincerity thing.
Integrity, if you can fake that, you have it made.
Said somebody sometime
> “His ability to come across as authentic, honest, and trustworthy”
“The key to success is sincerity. If you can fake that you’ve got it made.'” –George Burns
“Nearly 100,000 Pentagon Whistleblower Complaints Have Been Silenced”: ‘For example, there’s the time in 2003 when the U.S. flew $12 billion in cash to Iraq and promptly lost track of it…..This was giant pallets of cash money vanishing without a trace. In fact, it was 281 million $100 bills, weighing in at 363 tons.’
I should add that that money was not a result of American generosity but was Iraq’s money which was stolen from Iraqi oil sales, surplus funds from the UN oil-for-food program and seized Iraqi assets. American soldiers were playing football at the airport with a shrink-wrapped block of $100 bills after the plane landed.
Paul Bremer in his wisdom just had the money flown in without telling the Treasury Department and dropped it in the middle of a war zone and said here is your money back which you asked for. Lots of that money ended up in the hands of the Iraqi resistance to buy weapons to kill American soldiers with.
But no worries. Paul Bremer had learned his lesson and said afterwards: “I acknowledge that I made mistakes and that with the benefit of hindsight, I would have made some decisions differently.”
It just dawned on me that i’ve carried a whistle for many thousands of miles in the wilderness and have never used it once.
…some whistle blower I turned out to be
“His ability to come across as authentic, honest, and trustworthy.”
Yeesh, Team Blue is terrible. They keep saying the quiet part loud. Though I suppose if you are an ambassador, policies of the U.S. government aren’t going to affect you, so one can treat voting as a trip to central casting.
I like how these people are credentialed as “ambassadors”, when the way they got to BE ambassadors was principally as a reward for being big fundraisers.
Good Chomsky transcript. He makes the point that Trump, far from being a radical departure, is just the latest in a Republican strategy of fake populism based on wedge issues. While this may not have been obvious three years ago, Trump’s consistent surrender to the plutocratic, militaristic GOP agenda has produced “facts on the ground” more compelling than MAGA rhetoric.
And as always the real villains are the Dems who decline to contest fake populism with the real thing. Sez Chomsky, this started with Jimmy Carter (mentioned above). One could argue that Carter’s saintly current posture is an attempt to atone for his presidential sins.
Carter: exactly.
TBF, it indicates he has a conscience.
Incidentally, according to a chart recently posted here, the downward departure of US wages from productivity, a crucial break in the economy, occurred several years BEFORE Reagan was elected, under Jimmy Carter.
One thing to remembet about Carter, that nobody seems to remember, is that he was was nominated post ‘68, so with reform to the process where delegates for the first time (with McGovern actually ‘72) were required to be allocated according to primary results. I’m not sure when superdelegates started, but know for sure there weren’t any involved in the ‘76 process.
My point is that carter gains legitimacy, in my view, for achieving his nomination more entirely from a popular vote than any candidate before him, except for McGovern. And after him, not too long afterward, we have superdelegates influencing the process, and candidates like b. clinton and h. clinton and a. gore being virtually nominated begore a vote is cast.
Okay, now I need to check, what is the history of “superdelegates”?
Superdelegates began in ‘84, immediately post carter; it could even be said they were applied in reaction to carter’s nominations in ‘76 and ‘80.
I think carter gets way too much s*&^ here. He was not any kind of lefty, but he was elected honestly, and compared to much of what’s followed that is saying something. Also, lumping him in with the beginnings of neo-liberalism, or the dlc, as I’ve seen on here before, seems a bit sloppy to me. He definitely connects with the neo-cons through zbig and supporting the jihadists, no argument there. But he was never part into that dlc takeover of the dems, and I don’t see him as a major or even minor pusher of austerity, the neo-lib calling card. He seems to have a sincere committment to representative democracy and it’s legitimacy, which would again set him outside the typical concerns of neo-liberals. The process of the neo-lib takeover of the dems started during his presidency, no argument, but I don’t see that he was really part of that.
Anyway, I apologize for strawmanning if you don’t happen to like carter but don’t see him as a neo-lib either. I am open to considering other perspectives…
Ahem, Carter deregulated trucking, which was a much bigger deal as far as the # of workers affected than any of the Reagan anti-labor actions (although breaking Patco did have huge symbolic importance). Carter’s team accepted the premise that deregulation would boost efficiency even though that wasn’t proven, and their statements weirdly acknowledged that (I’m too lazy to look it up but ECONNED had direct quotes with the turn of phrase).
Carter also appointed Paul Volcker as Fed chair, who is arguably one of the worst things that happened to American workers. Volcker explicitly set out to crush wages when he drove short-term interest rates to 22%. Volcker thinks inflation should be zero, which has the effect of privileging capital over labor even more than it is now.
While I lived in Georgia after Carter had been governor he was apparently a typical Ga Dem–business oriented and leaning rightward. He was trained as a Navy engineer and saw himself as a technocrat who embraced the then nascent neoliberalism. It’s worth remembering that Charlie Peters and others pushing the idea back then were originally New Deal Dems who thought they were going to “fix” the welfare state and make the trains run on time. Hubris meet our current rightwing nemesis.
“Viet Nam’s Economics Miracle Haunts US-DPRK Talks”
Wouldn’t that be ironic. A treaty is established between the US and North Korea for denuclearisation with Russia and China acting as guarantors. Then in twenty years time, North Korea is an economic powerhouse in the same class as South Korea and Japan using the China method of government. It can’t be allowed.
Come to think of it, there are a lot of countries being attacked because they are socialist. That is one of the reasons Trump gave for going after Venezuela. Same with Cuba. And China. Is this a strategic reason then for explaining so much ongoing trouble? That the thought of successful socialist governments in competition with failing capitalistic countries cannot be tolerated?
My hunch is its Trump shopping for easy targets. The initial saber rattling in regards to North Korea followed ACA repeal effort defeats. Bolton and friends might have their own interests, but as far as elected are concerned, roughing up poor people is perceived as an electoral winner and something to do when policy making is hard because the actual work gets shifted to the Pentagon. Work is also anathema to our political class as well. It’s why AOC is such an odd duck. She is prepared, not rereading David Brooks columns.
Anxiety epidemic. I have some experience with employees on this issue. From 24 year olds to 40 year olds I have had people who become paralyzed with anxiety. Can’t go to work, can’t leave the house. All to their personal detriment. They can’t finish college, they can’t keep a job, they still rely on family to help.
I can’t understand it. I have extreme anxiety praying that the customers keep coming in so I can meet payroll and pay the bills and make sure everyone can be fed. Maybe that’s a generational difference.
Perhaps, you’ve missed the long term economic decline in the U.S.? After a time, hopium runs out.
Yeah, It’s hard to live on unobtainium … And really, with sooomuchium floating indiscriminately amoungst the CLOUDs, who WOULDN’T be anxious ??
Anxiety = Americans Checking Out?
Life on a smartphone is ‘fun’ 24/7. Dont go outside. FEAR FEAR FEAR. Malls and Social Spaces shutting down. BE CAREFUL WHAT YOU SEND ONLINE. Everyones Watching.
Time for populists to crush the establishment elite.
This may, or may not, be related but I’ve noticed that when driving and pulled up to the limit line at a stop light more often than not a car driven by a younger person (30ish) will not line up to where I am but be about 3 feet behind in the next lane. It’s like there is no wish for any sort of chance interaction in the form of a glance.
Talking to people face to face is becoming ‘anxiety inducing’. I see it in my 22 y/o fem cuz about to graduate. I literally have to give her pep talks and tell her no ones looking at you. Youre fine! Youre alive! Have Fun!
Ah no, anxiety does not pick a generation. But the way a person experiences her environment does play a huge part. Millennials came of age at 9/11, then the wars in the Mideast, then the stock market crash, their parents lost their jobs and homes, then there were no jobs even for college grads or even for tradesmen like electricians. Lots of events to be anxious about, and all along the way, terror attack warnings, school and other shootings. Then there’s social media, everyone watching everyone and gossiping, ragging on everyone. And the police state, NSA, all the alphabet agencies recording everything. Good Lord.
Frankly, as Krishnamurti said “It’s not a sign of health to to be well adjusted in an insane society.” This could be a long discussion but I am not up for it today, too much anxiety!
Exactly. NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT ANYTHING.
Sigh
Its all i wanna talk about. Oh well, if i cant reach the Old, ill focus on the new!
echidne has a great summary of the Mueller report, takes the opposite view of this community, but well worth reading, or so say I
volume 1
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2019/04/echidne-reads-mueller-report-volume-one.html
volume 2
http://echidneofthesnakes.blogspot.com/2019/04/echidne-reads-mueller-report-volume-two.html
People make a big deal out of Mueller’s seemingly wholehearted endorsement of the “Russia-hackers-Wikileaks” nexus, citing the twelve alleged “ GRU” operatives, “Gucifer 2.0”, and all that, without offering any substantive proof of Russian complicity, other than the highly questionable Crowdsource study. No forensic examination was ever made by US federal investigators of the DNC server, and other independent parties – VIPS, for example – have maintained that the files were downloaded onto a flash-drive, thence despatched to Wikileaks. That Mueller relies upon those uncorroborated claims certainly taints anything pursuant to allegations subsequent to and dependent upon “Russian hacking”.
“Russian hacking” during the 2016 elections has now passed into American lore, unchallenged and uncritically accepted as established fact, and conveniently hauled out whenever the “legitimacy” of Trump’s election is questioned.
From echidne on Vol.1:
“What struck me most about this first volume is how very clearly it states that the Russian government was behind the different forms of cyber warfare aimed at Hillary Clinton’s candidacy and, more importantly, at directly affecting the 2016 US elections…”
Yes, it “clearly states” this. But as I read this summary, and the report itself, there is no evidence presented beyond what has been revealed over the last few years. That evidence is weak and has been pretty convincingly challenged, in my view. Is there some reason that we should believe Mueller’s “clear statement” any more than Brennan’s, Clapper’s, Rachel Maddow’s, or that of countless other media shills? I mean this as a legitimate question, because I can certainly think of reasons to doubt Mueller’s veracity as well.
I keep pointing to this 1/17 bit of official, evidence free, crappola: Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions as the quicksand foundation of all of the “Russian interference” nonsense. It’s only 12 pages of he-said, she-said and kicking RT for being un-American. How anyone with even the remotest of critical thinking skills can read this as anything but dis-information is beyond me. Here’s your cyber-warfare…kill me now. Of course the problem is, nobody has read it. aaaarrrrgghh….
https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf
I assess that it was not written to be read.* Its existence was all that was necessary to add support to narratives written elsewhere that would reference it.
*And, yes, I did read it shortly after it was published.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/billionaires-raced-to-pledge-money-to-rebuild-notre-dame-then-came-the-backlash/2019/04/18/7133f9a2-617c-11e9-bf24-db4b9fb62aa2_story.html
Billionaires to the rescue….of historical monuments….that they like….but not any others….or any people, either…
FWIW Murray Waass has an article up on the NYR Daily purporting to identify the obstruction of justice “smoking gun”, which is a fallout from Don McGahn’s OSC testimony regarding Trump’s knowledge of the FBI investigation into Gen. Flynn’s December, 2016 discussions with Russian Ambassador Kislyak; Trump later into early 2017 had the infamous conversation with Comey about “laying off” Flynn coz “he’s a good guy”, etc., but then later claimed he – Trump – had no knowledge that Flynn was under active investigation for lying to the FBI when he met with Comey:
https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2019/04/19/the-mueller-reports-smoking-gun-on-
obstruction-of-justice/
Now this business with Flynn, as Trump’s National Security Advisor nominee at the time, having these discussions with Ambassador Kislyak had figured prominently in the RussiaGate collusion narrative, which is nonsensical on its face, as Trump was clearly not on board with Obama’s Russia sanctions, and wanted – through Flynn by way of Kushner – to let the Russian government know that changes were coming. But I could never understand why Flynn lied about his meetups…did Trump and/or close advisors see bad publicity coming from all this and deliberately let Flynn take the initial hit, and then Trump stepping in privately with Comey to persuade the FBI to drop the investigation/charges? Flynn was properly nailed for his sleazy lobbying for Turkish government interests without filing as a “foreign agent”, influencing policy decisions absent his declaration of a vested interest in those very decisions, but surely there was no crime in meeting – officially or unofficially – with Kislyak in order to acquaint him with some of Trump’s views vis-à-vis US-Russian relationship going forward. As shady a character as Flynn has proven to be, the December meeting with Kislyak and its aftermath still seems to lack a solid resolution.
It’s Bernie’s World (And 2020 Democrats Are All Living in It)
https://cookpolitical.com/analysis/national/national-politics/its-bernies-world-and-2020-democrats-are-all-living-it
Hmm….sentences like “Today, Medicare for All has become the default position of almost every candidate in the race” leave me lukewarm. How many of the current candidates do we really believe would push hard for *real* Medicare for All upon being elected?
> How many of the current candidates do we really believe would push hard for *real* Medicare for All upon being elected?
One.
Fresno is very anti 420, and makes up for it by having been judged the most drunk American city a number of times over the years…
It’s smack dab in the middle of the Central Valley Bible Belt, small wonder.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/social-equity-fresnos-west-side-lost-in-the-war-on-drugs-and-now-it-hopes-a-revival-will-be-tied-to-marijuana/2019/04/12/64580252-54a5-11e9-8ef3-fbd41a2ce4d5_story.html?utm_term=.092865c089aa
Ever spend any time in the Bakersfield-Taft area? Whoa, that’s “sundowner” country. Years ago Taft JC was perennially one of the strongest teams in CA JC football, the rosters full of young males from the local oil-patch roughneck communities…no MJ here, now it’s prolly crystal meth and opiates.
The 420
On our local PBS radio station right now and hopefully it will be archived and available for streaming:
WNYC and Colorado Public Radio Present “Ask a Legal State: A National Conversation About Pot”
https://www.wnyc.org/press/wnyc-cpr-ask-a-legal-state/041619/
Reasonable, informative discussion.
Association of Chronic Opioid Use With Presidential Voting Patterns in US Counties in 2016
Racist and bigoted against white working class.
How about Chronic Chardonnay use and voting patterns? = Hillary?
Or, Chronic Malt Liquor use and voting patterns? = Obama?
Did rising rents kill the Bay Area’s urban homesteading movement?
Only white women get the glory? Blacks in Hunter’s Point and Oakland have been growing greens,peppers and poke since the 1940s. Chickens can be seen wandering around the projects in movies shot there in the 1960s. The Mexican immigrants usually have chickens if enough space, the Hmong turned any scrap of land into a garden and Back to the Land Hippies did the same, to and including Haight Ashbury backyards, but especially in the areas north of the city after the Hippie Diaspora.
All these are common sense and great activities. School gardening is now part of the California Curriculum.
The denial of reality, “I rent and now some immigrant just bought my house for his family and wants to kick me out and rip out my garden?” is palpable. If you don’t own land, you don’t control it.
Novella Carpenter, quoted in the article was victimized over and over again in crime ridden Oakland. She was being interviewed about her gardening on KPFA, the so called progressive radio station, and she committed the sin of mentioning that her watermelons had been stolen and was roundly condemned as a racist.
Any truth to this, Pelosi pushing for drug price arbitration?
https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/democrats-ran-on-lowering-drug-prices-now-they-could-cut-a-bad-deal-with-donald-trump_n_5cba1934e4b068d795cc45b5
Maybe they’ll appoint a Blue-Ribbon Commission to study™ the matter.
Until all the proles are dead.
>After Mueller report, Democrats divided over end game — investigate Trump or impeach WaPo
“We’re completely out of ammunition, sir.”
“Yeah yeah, right, okay so what should we aim at?”
So, four more years of Trump then?
Great photo of owls today, Jerri-Lynn. A true twofer! Thanks.
Re getting your weight taken before flying.
I’ve been saying for a long time, why are you weighing my luggage and not the passengers?
If people were charged by the kilo on planes and other public transport, I think there’d be a few pounds lost to save some money.