boscohorowitz
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I see China is buying lots of dollars. That makes me happy. I want our currency to stay artificially solvent a few more years. Entirely self-serving wish but after so many pretty girls in bikinis have wished for an end to war and world hunger, live, on so many TV beauty pageants, and things just get worse, I’ve grown jaded.
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“Uber has never turned a profit, and in an industry as profit-thin as pizza parlors, there’s no reason to think they ever will. So who’s funding them for multi-billions and why?”
I’ll play paranoid and ponder how mapping the physical routines of bunches of people and collating that with their debit/credit history (i.e., every known fact concerning them) might be worth funding by the usual snoopscoop suspects loosely known in vernacular as the NSA Deepstate.
Add the announcement that Uber (or was it Lyft? same diff) plans to audio-record all rides “for safety reasons”. Then get a buncha people strung out on Uber as their bread gig, and see how handy they might be for delivering people to the wrong place or some shit. I dunno.
Here’s something genuinely eerie: Tesla’s ten zillion commsats. So we can have selective internet? Shut down the mainstream net while maintaining alternate private nets?
Small example of the potential for mayhem that any disruption to either the power grid or the interwebs: We’re raising a generation of younguns here in Portland that don’t drive and don’t know how they got from here to there. Just click Lyft, wait, get in, ride, click*pay, get out. With your nose in your screen the entire time.
Paranoia off now. Still seems plausible. “Sometimes, they really are after you.”
But stupidity could explain it equally well. Incompetence crafts its own evil in its attempts to cover its ass for what were, alas, honest mistakes. My impression is that the sycophants of genuinely malignant sociopaths become, after years of yessiring to higher ups, more malignant than the originals. Moral character is in part a brain function, and the brain is plastic. It changes over time.
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No one owes me nuthin but I am nonetheless still impatiently waiting to be thrown at least a cryptic hint as to how the generals put Trump into office.
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Yeah, socialism and capitalism are both great for starting things, getting an operation or a trend into motion, but both turn to swamp juice once they’re institutionalized. But so it goes with anything based on trust in and worship of Mammon.
And both suck inherently when applied to mega/giga population groups. One does not create sane governance of virtually uncountable frothing hordes of lab rats in giant cages within giant cages within giant cages. The result is always some version of that efficiency which is death. The result is usually something like this:
A single death is a tragedy, 14,600-33 is a statistic
I always tell people how convenient it was for the likes of Baden-Powell, Stalin, Hitler, et al, that we already had these things called cattle cars and this concept of industrialized disassembly line factory slaughter. Just add unwantables and… what? No one’s hungry? He. If I’d known you were coming I’d have baked a kike, as a joke from 1968 7th grade schoolyard says.
Something tells me that this go-round of concentration camps will find more efficient uses of dead meat than burning it with expensive energy resources.
Waste not, want not.
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On a happier note:
A note on how societies generally unravel:
“The only thing this is causing is rising separatist movements and inevitable violence.”
Aye. Bricks and bats. I’ll add to this bloke’s mention of socialism’s failed promises, those of capitalism as well. And fascism. And monarchism. And corporatism. As for communism: it still works on the tribal level, a nifty extended family size humanity should never have evolved out of. On larger scales, it just becomes another flavor of Mammon. Like that E. O. Wilson quote, Raul posted the other day:
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”
Mammon is as Mammon does.
So it’s The Guardian. Sue me. No one’s selling electric cars in this aerticle, just a more complete, nuanced, and balanced look at the known facts:
Historical forebear:
P.S. Since you quote your share of Calvin & Hobbes, I would welcome high-quality HD images of the finer color Calvin & Hobbes, especially his Spiff the Spaceman work. I’d love to suffocate Andy Warhol with a rolled up Calvin & Hobbes illustration-size paperback.
We could discus it as art. Zappa would smile in his grave, and the Might Hobbes Himself would beam upon us from His Heavens.
srsly
“Is it too late for me to be known as The Claw?”
Only if you don’t ‘splain, or point to where you’ve already explained why it is that yiou claim the military, Marine Generals in particular, who got Trump elected.
I don’t wanna go from RussiaRussiaRussia to gen’rlsgen’rlsgen’rls, jah? I have this severe allergy to unsubstantiated dogma, even the sole-sourced unique variety.
Gimme that and I’ll not only call you The Claw, I’ll call you The Claw of Dr. D.
Don’t give me that, I just might call you The Crab. And then send someone’s kids to track dirt all over your nice clean kitchen floor. cuz that’s how I roll. 😉
Curious little trouble-maker observation from the wiki on America First:
“Conservative commentator Pat Buchanan has praised America First and used its name as a slogan. “The achievements of that organization are monumental,” writes Buchanan. “By keeping America out of World War II until Hitler attacked Stalin in June 1941, Soviet Russia, not America, bore the brunt of the fighting, bleeding and dying to defeat Nazi Germany.”
Cold hard logic there. Pat Buchanan is a very odd duck, but on certain issues of realist geopolitics, he is almost always spot on when few others are. He may not be right any more often than a stopped clock, but like a stopped clock, when he is right he is spot-on.
And then there’s that oh-so-earnest hound dog squint of his, an expression on his face like he suffers severe chronic gas, or maybe an undescended testicle.
I’d like to see him alone, holding a baseball bat, in a room with Bill O’Reilly.
Brick’n’Mortar replaced by robo-drones
Well, banking is traditionally a brick’n’mortar retail biz, jah?
I see homeless people.
“Jay Hanson”
Sort of an insider joke. I joined what was the last, I think, of Jay’s Brain Food fora, one discussing what might be pragmatically practical (that’s so close to a tautology I might have it p[rinted on my too-too tutu).
He moderated with some sternness on that forum. Kicked several people out. Some of them deserved it. Some of them just ran afoul of what I assumed were Jay’s volatile mood swings from dealing so long with such a dire set of issues.
Anyway, we named him The Claw, after The Claw in the first Toy Story:
I leave it as his unflinchingly Darwinian epitaph.
“…yes, but online is wildly smaller than retail, so a huge jump in it doesn’t offset the malls. That is, we’re in recession, overall sales are way down because the people don’t have money. So what little money they have is doing discounts online and saving gas by not driving and eating out.”
Also, a minor but symbolically giant factor, is that so many people work in lousy retail/service jobs of the brick’n’mortar variety that going to the store to shop is the last way many people want to spend their money.
Go back to the salt mines to buy lingerie when a smiling robot will leave it at your friend door with a beep, a wink, and a friendly wave?
“But still fascinated with Musk. Why?”
My only guess is that Musk has become the most reliable snakeishly oiled pork barrel creator around. He has a gift for selling ideas to the public which in turn gives Congress to grant subsidies and tax breaks that attract investors into stuff Congress can reliably drain their 10% off.
He’s like advertisement for an expansion of the milindustry complex via private investment inspired/sanctioned by government largesse.
It’s all I got.
“American Oversight” comes ickily close to Big Brother Is Watching… with the question of whom he is watching left to an individual’s bias. He’s watching the bad guys for our protection? Or he’s watching everyone for reasons he can neither confirm nor deny?
Now they’re going for pinnacle Modernist masterpieces:
Most of all, I suppose, in this political version of Creepy Crawlers (collect ’em all!), what frightens me/boggles my mind is how pert near everyone believes that if we just get the Right Person (which in this case is, apparently, Anyone But Trump) in the White House, Our Problems Will Be Solved and we can resume waiting for the economy to “pick up” (like how Mom cleaned your bedroom when you were a kid) while Peak Oil, global climate disruption, an unsustainable agriculture, etc., are miraculously resolved now that Trump is gone because, after all, we were doing such a good job of dealing with these things beforehand that we could afford to fuck off so severely that we let our chosen parties prevent any decent candidate from winning while ensuring that a person like Trump would attain the throne.
After all, the fact that Trump is doing a better job (fucked as it is) than any of the allowed candidates would have done reveals just how toxic our mainstream political power aggregates have become.
How I envy Russia. They have a benevolent dictator, an ethical sociopath named Putin, running their affairs. We have an unethical malignant narcissist (in D&Desque card games, the Ethical Sociopath card always, er, trumps the Malignant Narcissist card every time).
I am still stunned by Nicole. I mean, the woman is an analytical genius. I have never heard anyone marshal so much arcane data into comprehensible sound bites. An amazing feat. But she sees Trump in her closet and, apparently, Russia under her bed at night where it glows like a nuclear fungus.
“None of these were problems until their identity politics required them to be problems, and to mistrust and turn on anyone slightly different from yourself. ”
I see this more and more.
I was raised on the USA “melting pot” mythology. Ellis Island, The Golden Lamp of the Statue of Liberty, etc. This land is your land, this land is my land. We all thought it was so wonderful.
But a melting pot stirs it all together into a uniform Stalinoid gray. You can have a diversity rainbow, but everyone has to stay in their designated color bar. I imagine all the poor singles who didn’t get laid because they let slip their open-minded attitude about Trump, Russia. pragmatic realism toward environmental resources, etc.
I still say Epstein is alive. If you can fudge things enough that he could conceivably commit suicide or be murdered, you can fudge things so he’s deemed dead with an official autopsy report with neat plot twists to appease the semi-credulous semi-skeptical.
He had dirt on people from here to Neverland. By now even the fools in charge know that torture is an unreliable way to get the info you need, and after you torture them you have to kill them lest they run amok, and once you kill them, you can’t go back and ask, “OK. Where’s the THIRD copy of those tapes?”
Meanwhile, Russia says it has yet more super-duper weapons that can penetrate any defense the USA has. One can assume they’re telling the truth since such previous claims have proven to be adamantly correct, but one can also assume that, having proven their hypersonic street cred, they’re free to lie-lie-lie like the USA military does. Most people not under the USA propaganda sphere will believe Putin now when he says, or at least implies, that Russia is close to having first strike superiority over USA while enjoying such powerful missile defense systems that they can risk an all out USA retaliation (one assumedly diminished by the first strike).
Not that I see that scenario being the most likely one. I see such developments being more a version of ‘walk softly but carry a big stick’. The real danger to the USA, imo, is a series of major cyberstrikes that shuts down vast swaths of the USA power grid.
I would anticipate such things happening if someone replaces Trump before some kind of sanity returns to the USA plebiscite (as IF…)
Don’t you just love it when VietnamVet posts? Concise, deeply informed, filters facts through fundamentals…
I recently stumbled across people I knew very well 20-30 years ago. Bright bright people. Chemist. Asian history major. Clever, witty, funny, soulful, talented… and they’re all determined to Beat Trump and Vote Dem even though they watched the Dems shaft Bernie, the one candidate who, said polls, could knock Trump out of the park with one nut tied behind his back.
And the, and then, there’s this sad faith that getting the Right Man in the White House will somehow fix all these problems.
As if putting Casey Jones at the engineer throttle would somehow stop a runaway train with no brakes screaming down a steep hill toward a broken bridge over a 1,000′ chasm… would somehow stop said train..
“19% correct, that is”
I’m sick today and can’t see straight. That’s One Hundred & Nineteen per cent.
The war on poverty didn’t bankrupt us. War, period, and all its attendant freak shows, did.
MLK got shot because he denounced the Viet Nam war not just morally but because it financially gutted said War on Poverty, turning it into a mere charity program, which is not how you solve poverty, just how you alleviate it.
It’s frustrating. Raul is, imo, 119% on heavily taxing the rich as a fiscal means of redistributing (the re-d-word! I dun used it! strike me down!) the tendency for welath to sip[hon upwards in a capitalist economy. (Well, it does. Sue me for it being true.)
But the money the wealthy hold is mostly worthless already. There aren’t enough resources on hand to grow our way out of this, and all redistribution does is inspire more growth.
What is needed is a very severe belt-tightening, and that work is always left to poor old Mother Nature.
The time for that turnaround was several decades ago. Carter was on it, but America wanted Reagan’s Morning in America MAGA nonsense, and then we wasted several decades after that playing silly games with words while the rich sold everything off and the rest of us watched, too many of us not realizing what was happening or how incontrovertible the results would be.
And finally:
“The age of firearms and weapons utilizing gunpowder further contributed to the decline of the “capitani di ventura”. Although the mercenary forces were among the first to adapt to the emerging technologies on the battlefield, ultimately, the advent of firearms-governed warfare rendered their ceremonial fighting style obsolete. When battlefields shifted from chivalric confrontations characterized by ostentatious displays of power to an everyman’s war, they were ill-prepared to adjust.”
“The soldiers of the condottieri were almost entirely heavy armoured cavalry (men-at-arms). Before 1400, they had little or nothing in common with the people among whom they fought, and their disorderly conduct and rapacity seem often to have exceeded that of medieval armies. They were always ready to change sides at the prospect of higher pay – the enemy of today might be the comrade-in-arms of tomorrow. Further, a prisoner was always more valuable than a dead enemy. As a consequence, their battles were often as bloodless as they were theatrical.”
Ah, the relatively bloodless days…
Looks like Mike Pence… … staring across the SK/NK border sternly trying to show “America’s resolve”.
“That’s Lieutenant Colonel Queenforaday, not Mr. Queenforaday”
“In an exchange between Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA) and Alexander Vindman, a US Army Lt. Colonel, Vindman insisted that Nunes address him by his rank. ”
That caught my eye too.
As I understand it, history shows that one sign an empire is about to crash in its chips is the prevalence of condottieri
Italian prince states of the Renaissance, Roman swords-for-hire, Blackwater (or whatever it’s been re-re-named now), the many flavors of al-qaeda, ISIS, “freedom fighter” acronym of the week.
“soon be able to visit the “Elon Musk future museum theme park” on our flying vac-bots all the way to Mars baby”
Returning Home by Aaron Paquette
Remember when the internet wasn’t broken, when basic html reliably worked?
“The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions; medieval institutions; and god-like technology.”– E.O. Wilson
Now *that’s* what I’m talking about.
Dedicated with affection to Dr. D., with whom I often beg to differ on details but with whom I feel a strong accord of core beliefs. Same roots, different branches.
“Now since they also aren’t stupid and they all KNEW they were being filmed, why did they do it?”
I think it’s quite possible they were stupid enough to trust their privacy was being protected. I’m not begging to differ, because one never knows until one knows. It’s just that I’m not willing to assign intelligence to these people gratis. Bright and clever, yes, but functionally intelligent in a way where the loose ends tie up sanely? Not sure they’ve demonstrated that ability. Prince Andrew comes to mind.
When the blood drains from the upper head to the lower head, intelligence tends to fade…
“Jeffrey Epstein Guests Were Secretly Filmed in Every Bedroom and Toilet (Sun)”
And now we know why I believe that Epstein is alive and well. (pins a bright feather to his bonny tinfoil chapeau, pivots before the mirror)
It seems that if one doesn’t adequately despise Trump above all other politicos, one has wed the devil.
Maybe it would appease some peop-le if we had a 5-minute Daily Hate of all things Trump.
I’ll start… oooh! golf! hair spray! dirty deals! erratic syntax! rambling soundbites! twitter tweets! oooh! We hates the Trumpe, we hates him!!!!
Dedicated to our dear Prince Andrew:
One more thing: Raul somewhat depends on his loyal readers to provide nuanced counter-balance when needed, not needle him for an editorial strategy they obviously don’t fully comprehend.
“And I dont care that Raül says he is not a Trump fan, obviously he is not looking to convey a balanced analasys, and ai known its out of contrarianism to the news but still the effect is support for the man. ”
You miss something important in your analysis.
Firs, I’ll note that you commit the sin you accuse Raul and Nicole of: “apparently they had to take sides in this elite charade between protofacist Trump, yes this critique of him is easily verifiable and closetfascist Dems”
Second, Raul understands quite well that Trump is also a predatory scoundrel. Anyone with half a brain left in the fridge knows this. I’ve never seen Raul applaud or ignore the existence Raul Trump’s bad actions.
Third, you’re missing an uber-critical point: the Dems, the only established opposition to this strange beast in the White House, almost entirely ignore Trump’s real sins and instead focus on his imaginary sins or at most penny ante sins.
At times, in fact, the GOP has been a more effective critic of Trump than his oh so loyal “opposition”, the DNC/Dems.
Raul points this out because he despairs of seeing even token effective remedy from either party.
However, it is the Dems who consistently cry Trump Bad Bad Bad! with no punch ever reaching him even though there is powerful ammo should they choose.
Why? Because it’s a dog’n’pony house of mirrors act to keep the American people from identifying the truly egregious sins that both parties have committed, not to mention the many evils Trump has perpetrated by his cute widdle flossy-eared self with the help of whatever bunch of crooks willing to take a chance on him.
Trump makes a fine whipping boy scapegoat for the Dems who, if you’ll recall, ran on a platform little more than “we are not Trump”.
Which reminds me: “Are you now or have you ever been Donald Trump?” The sole merit in the logic of your post resides on that single crucial fact, after all. Everyone knows this. The TV told them so.
Wow. I don’t know whether to be elated or deflated. Nicole’s tweet shows this aging sot that person can be as magnificently coherent and articulate on a very dense collage of complex data such is her immaculately detailed yet succinct descriptions of our eco-nomic/logic/energic dilemma yet be entirely delusional about political realities. It’s beyond my imagination, or was, until now. As a writer and a sometimes jaded old man, this is delightfully refreshing in its revelation of Something New, but dismally depressing in its expression of the Same Old Shit.
But I’m a logician at heart. Diogenes is my man. So I’ll posit this unseemly and disturbing question: what if Ms. Foss decided a little payoff money on the side was the best way to raise short term capital by which to buy physical resources when the Price of Things goers downslip? What if she has lost all faith in politics (that’s OK; so have I), and deemed that justification to lose all faith in essential principles?
It happens, and I don’t know if I could blame her. No one’s gonna hear about Trump or Shiff when food and water are scarce, etc.
If that’s insulting to our dear Nicole, oh well: her position on the matter, and dismissal of Raul thereby, is also insulting. Live by de sword, die by de sword. Either way, I am grateful for the raw amazement she has thrilled my tired old soul with. It’s like watching Fergie speak of how honest and forthright our Prince Andrew was in his recent disastrous interview regarding Epstein and shared victims. Except that I totally wasn’t surprised that Fergie did that. She’s an old whore from ages past.
But Nicole?
Let’s go to the movies. Something light and amusing, a break from all this insanity
Holy Mother of Jesus jump-starting Lazarus over and over with battery cables, Batman! It keeps coming back to life!
That said, I’ve never the Constitution from beginning to end. I’ve read enough to know that it has become something more like suggested Guidelines rather than rule of law, and gah, what a bore. Best I can tell, it was over when Washington and Hamilton pulled that Whiskey Rebellion stung and let it be known that only the rich are entitled to reliably prosper.
