Dr. D
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This is why we have slander and libel laws which should be dusted off and used vigorously.
You can’t just go saying things to ruin people without consequences. That goes for Ford as well as Infowars. That follows for breathless NYT allegations of chemical weapons, Kuwait incubators, and Gulf WMD’s as well as Julian Assange.
The reason we have this is to forestall just such madness as we see today. If you are correct, and your story is true, there is little risk (in the U.S. at least, where unlike Europe the underdog does not end up paying all fees) — even if you’re a reporter that’s wrong and you can point to the people quoted, the multiple sources, you are legally protected. But you can’t just walk around accusing everybody of everything, printing lies, tying up the legal system at no cost and increasing profit. Such lies put individuals and collectively the entire society at mortal risk and should be shunned, sued into oblivion, with the victors taking the spoils.
However, why do I bother? Like all the other laws: fraud, antitrust, declarations of war, libel has been on the books a hundred or a thousand years. If the people are immoral and do not wish to adhere to law, process, or sanity, no additional words will avail. They love the violence, the chaos, the abuse, and they hate the law and the logos with a burning passion otherwise the world would not look as it does.
Nevertheless, I will remind you of this thing. Fixing these problems are very, very easy. As easy as following the law, as easy as doing what you always did before, you and your father’s fathers who most painfully developed the solutions ages ago and wrote in a thousand books. And so long as people love evil and hate good, the government will be no help, nor is the media, and no new law will prevail, as we follow no laws now. The people like this, support this, advance this, wallow in this, because that is who they are. Can I help them from themselves?
If resting unproven, and possibly even if true, Ford has attacked all women who are legitimately harmed and won’t be believed, undermining 50 years of hard struggle. She has attacked the rule of law by taking all means to avoid due process, presumption of innocence, and speedy, fair trials. She has attacked another individual specifically. There are responsibilities that go with those things, and were I accusing another I would be aware of them. Things like: to file complaints in a timely manner, or at all. To not expect a bureaucracy to have investigated and/or solved your problem before you presented it to them in writing and started a process. To approach them only when I have necessary and provable details such as who, what, where, when, and how, and to otherwise not waste their time even were my injury real, as it so often is. A dozen crimes are committed against me daily and no one in the legal system cares, or will research, support, or give me the time of day. As an ordinary citizen you can be violently attacked and the police won’t show soon, if ever. They don’t investigate a thousand such reported crimes daily. Complaints ARE filed, often in Minnesota, WITH a date, location, reason, victim, and alleged abuser, WITH painfully acquired medical photos, lodged with a police report having two available witnesses, in a high-profile case published in papers nationwide, against powerful people and nothing is done about it.
The expectation of extraordinary measures not given to any other citizen in the whole United States is astounding, and the media’s support of this — the same media that regularly trashes Corey Feldman and protects Harvey Weinstein’s active, open, serial, violent rapes for decades, with his open, on-book payoffs to Cuomo for the privilege of raping New Yorkers — is no less astounding than that the people also support this. Openly, enthusiastically, willingly, supporting such breadth of double standard, and such vicious attacks on victims, or alternately supporting them instead without evidence or reason as it suits the momentary interests of the capricious, Jacobite mob.
Either extreme I can stand. Both at once as suits them? From the same people, resting only on whether today you are popular or not? #StarkRavingMadness, and they should beware what history says about leaping on the back of a tiger you can never dismount. This is the definition of why the Founding Fathers were terrified of Democracy, and contained it by every legal method available.
“Were I a common laugher, or did use/To stale with ordinary oaths my love
To every new protester, if you know/That I do fawn on men and hug them hard
And, after, scandal them, or if you know/That I profess myself in banqueting
To all the rout, then hold me dangerous.” — Julius Caesar, Act1 Sc2Rosenstein has been trying to see Trump for a few weeks. Trump has said no, I don’t think so.
So in a gambit to MAKE Trump obey and see him, Rosenstein stages a media attack and possible fake (i.e. unwritten, unofficial) resignation. I suspect he wants to see Trump in order to so antagonize him in person that Trump will fire him the way the NYT ordered Trump to some months ago, and earlier this week. Then they can start the “obstruction” proceedings and delay the Kavanaugh vote, because if any of that goes through, they are all going to go to jail for sedition, possibly/hopefully forever. So what’s to lose, right?
But again they constantly project onto Trump as an unhinged idiot, which despite the depictions they themselves create, never seems to occur in the deeds, and he somehow accidentally, miraculously, inexplicably wins against them, e.g. 17 candidates and 2 political parties + Kin Jong Un, because he’s a seething maniac and a mouth-breathing moron. Conclusion: why would Trump fire Rosenstein regardless of what antagonizing nonsense he attempts, when it’s far more entertaining to watch him squirm ahead of a grand jury, a few days before he’ll declassify the long-held evidence and Rosenstein will be booted and/or indicted anyway? I mean, isn’t his visit just bonus entertainment at that point?
P.S., allies have called Trump in a strange attempt to stop declassification. A few things here:
1) If the FBI and everybody did their jobs admirably, why wouldn’t they want it public?
2) If Trump is guilty and spouting nonsense, wouldn’t declassifying help their case?
3) In an open democracy, it’s actually illegal not to declassify, as standing policy is that ALL records are public unless there is a very specific, written, compelling reason not to.
4) The documents they attempt to classify cannot possibly BE classified, as the Strozk-Page texts were sent in plain text on unprotected phones. If the material was secret, that would be 50,000 felonies for them alone.
5) Since the FISA warrants are the very definition of “Top Secret”, known to no one but the judge and investigators, how on earth do our allies know what’s inside them?
6) If they know what’s inside them and they were behaving themselves and NOT committing felonies to overturn an allies’ democratic election, then why would they be at all concerned they were released?
7) Opposing this reveals not only that they know information they shouldn’t, exposing their own secrets, but that the information is VERY IMPORTANT, and also detrimental to our relationship; i.e. that they are guilty as sin, quite an additional admission to make, both as a nation, and as a spy agency openly exposed.
8) Although THEY know this and WE know this, they still are afraid of the PEOPLE knowing this. That is, they are still in opposition of the people reading, knowing the truth, and voting thereby.Because why would we want a democracy in Britain or here, where people honestly and completely know what’s going on?
Science! We make s**t up!
Britain = 209,000 km2
Oceans = 85,133,000 km2
407x larger. So raise sea levels by several inches? Sure. And that’s not accounting for sea ice is already floating, and therefore its melting would be 1/10th of even that size. But they count on and are hugely justified in nobody being able to do the simplest sanity-check back-of-envelope math, or having ever seen a globe, would realize how tiny Britain is in the world scheme.
I wish I could stop there, but wait! There’s more bizarro-land insanity at no additional cost! Science, which can’t build a bridge without it failing or a world-wide, a humanity-saving seed vault without putting the entrance downhill, under water, the science that can’t figure out that poisons like glyphosate or Neonicotinoids might be *poisonous*, the science who can’t find a solution to plastics or how to build a non-leaking nuclear power plant, the one that purposefully injected toxins into the water supply by fracking, cancerfied the whole gulf with corexit, and bankrupted themselves with a failing grid, faulty cities, and planes that can’t shoot and ships that can’t sail — that science — is now going to build an underwater platform out of I dunno, steel girders, concrete foam, and unicorn dust, TO HOLD UP GREAT BRITAIN…or glaciers of like size. How, you ask? How, when they can’t even build an underwater drilling platform to get oil and/or without exploding? Where will they get the money, you ask? Hey, let’s not get crazy here. Let’s lightly place that aside. Let’s give them everything, and their narrative.
How long do you think it will take to build, seeing as we know…I dunno, exactly nothing about building it? We have exactly nothing, no anti-eternal-corrosion titanium-steel mills, no “glacier-holding yard” with requisite knowledge on earth? Once built, what then? How long will it last? Seeing as how they propose: a) it’s ice, and b) the whole world is infinitely warming, maybe, perhaps, the ice will melt around the dam that we a) cannot build b) would ruin the worldwide economy and kill millions to build and c) wouldn’t work anyway since they can’t even build an iPhone that can make calls, a car that doesn’t light on fire, or a PC that doesn’t crash and get hacked.
I predict they’ll have this built about 20 years after the glaciers have already melted, in the open sea, 12m underwater, built by Halliburton, 900% over budget, and wonder why we no longer trust “experts” or “science.” …Or the media.
Oh, P.S. they already know “reducing carbon pollution [not] be enough” meaning they plan on building it, knowing it must do no earthly good whatsoever since they already say it’s too late.
But don’t relax! Don’t move 500m back from the coast! Pay your worldwide carbon credit taxes instead, although they already say it’s too late, won’t help, crash the U.S., help China, kill billions of the mostly poor, and give all the carbon trading profits to Elon Musk, Al Gore, and Goldman Sachs!
And I thought yesterday was peak stupidity day.
How about some good news? Having no requirement to and actually withdrawing from the Paris and all other climate accords, being run by villainous pro-business, anti-AGW people, the U.S. has dropped carbon emissions most of any nation completely voluntarily, as a natural side-effect of the efficiencies of capitalism and technology, and therefore SAVING money (since it’s market-driven). You heard it here first, since you won’t read THAT in the news.
If they need to keep voting until they get it right, Bayer needs to keep jurying until they get it right. Oh, and they don’t have “40 years of studies”. The EPA here was very specific in that they can’t say glyphosate is dangerous because all scientific studies have been prevented. Prevented by having the Monsanto COE become the head of the EPA. So they’re being honest when they say “no studies show”; no studies have been allowed. Wait, how is it that a major herbicide (poison) was released to the public with no studies whatsoever on its effect or safety? Read above on the EPA head being the Monsanto head. Revolving door. Sit and spin.
It’s contested, but UK Independent is just making things up on April 20th, as is their motto, along with The Guardian, CNN, and the NYT. “What we don’t know we’ll make up!” Although it was said to be a 4-20 police call in CA law, there is no such thing. So it appears to be something made up by stoners in San Rafael around 1970. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/04/20/420-meaning-the-true-stor_n_543854.html After it got to be slang, it seeped in nationwide, before going big time, such as the meet up dates, or movie hints.
But it’s The UK “Independent.” They can’t just google it and read their co-major news organization that already did a large expose of it. In 2010. Fact-checking, or even looking for sheer curiosity and interest is too much work for them. Imagine their coverage of places they can’t get to, like Syria, people who won’t talk, like the FBI leakers, or people they want to murder, like Assange.
Showing no one cares about science: “Europe’s animal farming sector has exceeded safe bounds for greenhouse gas emissions.”
The other two, which may save theories or a55e5, will kill people (of course!) but may at least make sense. Animals are not going to release greenhouse gasses. Why? Because as herbivores, the carbon they are releasing was only just captured by plants only 12 months ago! So it’s a tiny net carbon pause. If you believe in this stuff, one car in one year would release more deep stored carbon than all the ruminants in Europe. …Oh and P.S., if you kill all 300 Million people like Thanos and replace them with forest, the deer and other wildlife there will also eat the grass and release the same carbon.
…You do know Thanos was supposed to be a Marvel villain, right? If they got a fraction of their way, these green horse scientists would kill more people than WWII’s 60 Million. That’s a fraction of Communism, their other true love, but of course it’s to SAVE those people that we need to remove their food supply and kill them. So the theory by the schmartz guys is if we shoot ourselves in the head we can divert that bus crash? That doesn’t sound very smart to me. I can take a big chunk of this problem out in 5 years…anyone who knows anything about farming could. But that isn’t what they want. They’re trying exactly nothing, or rather the dead opposite of what works, in farming, in net energy, and if you like, in CO2. 40 years of identical accidents, as every year we move further from a workable goal and pattern? And next year we double down in the wrong direction again? Well of course because I’m a coincidence theorist, and when the wheel comes up red 500 times it’s just an accident. It’s these cotton-headed ninny muggins that run cover for them: paid science, and The Guardian. “Rig the wheel? Naw, it always does that! Ask our on-call statistician! He’ll tell you it can definitely happen!” (it’s just really, really, REALLY unlikely)
“Science! We just make stuff up!” (for money)
While we’re on it, we probably reached the cycle extreme and ice pack in the poles and Greenland is increasing, ice thickness is beginning to follow. There’s snow in Alberta and Newfoundland in the the dead of summer. As also on schedule, cold-causing volcanoes are going off all over the world. They ran out of time to get their poor-killing tax plan through, and now the story falls apart. But never fear: that won’t stop them from saying it anyway, as the good fellows at The Guardian attest.
“the European commission president appealed to MEPs and heads of government to give the EU the powers and characteristics traditionally restricted to states.”
Maybe they’d like to add some democracy first.
Speaking of, their best friend Google vows to “ensure that populist [i.e. ‘Democracy’] movements around the world are merely a “blip” and a “hiccup” in the arc of history that “bends towards progress. [i.e. corporate fascism]” Fixed it. Yeah, we know who you are, you who are both helping China’s new scientific dictatorship, and selling U.S. intel-ready data to China as well.
Thankfully America exceeds the Constitution. It is a CONTRACT, of contract law, between a government that was erected by, and reports to, the PEOPLE. The people are supreme, not the government, not the law. They can, if they wish, dismantle this government, or even this Constitution, and erect another one.
So what does that mean? If, for instance, the Supreme Court goes on judicial activism and makes Droit du Seigneur with your 12 year old daughter legal — as seems increasingly less unlikely — the people can just ignore them because they are foremost and the government is secondary. This is precisely what happened with sodomy laws and the 18th Amendment. At first they followed it, then more and more people ignored it until it was unenforceable and unprosecutable. Eventually states, led by NY, told the Feds if they wanted the law, they could enforce it themselves. The Feds knew that would be both too expensive and a lost cause, and repealed. The same is happening with drugs right now. They tell the law, and their enforcers, to stick it. The Feds don’t have the means to go to CA and CO, and they know if they did, the world would realize how deeply powerless they really are.
So you can SAY whatever you like. You can CLAIM whatever you like. In fact, the Feds already lay claim to everything you own, plus your body to conscription, slavery and unpaid work by various “emergency” edicts. But upholding your will by force against the people is a losing battle under which the government, and their posh employees, will cease to exist. Then shortly after their employers, the billionaires, will cease to exist. So try it if you want — and for many years it looked like they would — but history doesn’t illustrate a great outcome from the attempt.
As far as the giants go, FB just banned #walkaway because he’s having a rally because the DNC won’t make simple, election-winning reforms. So they ban gay hairdressers from political speech now, a new low. But with every person FB bans, another person goes “What? I know that guy! I thought that was all made up!” Because, as Diogenes might say, no one cares until it’s them. But when it is them, and every person is being banned and depersoned for some different and ever-smaller thoughtcrime, then the army opposing the giants, who are essentially the Deep State and fascism rolled into one, and are pretty clearly the owners of government, becomes near infinite. Ask Walesea what happens next.
What happens next? There was a movie that shows us:
“There are only two forces in the world, the sword and the spirit. In the long run the sword will always be conquered by the spirit.”
“Do you know what amazes me more than anything else? The impotence of force to organize anything.” – Napoleon Bonaparte
• Europe Is Voting On Controversial Internet Copyright Law (CNBC)
It doesn’t matter what law they pass, the law is a smokescreen. The only thing that matters is selective enforcement. If you’re The Guardian, all’s forgiven. If you’re any of us, we erase your website from creation and sue you to penury.
Same with “Protecting user privacy.” YGTFKM. Really? Facebook, who sold all data to everyone, as their very business model, who coordinates with insurance companies and banks to track you, who are now selling to and from China, they have the temerity to claim user privacy? Looking-Glass world indeed. There’s one person who lost my passwords, credit cards, SS#, and user data, it’s them. Never, never has it been me. Always them, “accidentally” for a profit. Maybe the National Health should coordinate with them about that time they lost the names and addresses of the medical notes of every pre-pubescent child in Britain. That government and others like it are the ones in charge of this “user privacy” rules.
The Constitutional social media isn’t really a matter of law. It’s a matter of sense and what’s possible. That’s why the founders and the enlightenment thinkers picked it themselves. I’m sure they would also have liked to outlaw free speech and enforce or encourage a more polite society, but guess what, you can’t. That’s because there’s no possible solid definition of what the word means, and therefore it means that those in power abuse those not in power — a worse result still. So they choose open discussion and tolerance in a marketplace of open ideas instead. And unlike most times and places, that seems to have worked out pretty well. So setting the rules there predate law and the United States itself, and have far deeper roots in the nature of man and how he functions in his world. –If you tried otherwise, it would cost too much to enforce, and lead to a price in blood as repressed and repressors take to the streets, as those on top most earnestly hope we will, encouraging it savagely in CNN and AJ with the most outrageous stories and lies.
This is much to be desired, for how did you think IncSoc got in charge and O’Brien came to power? With a disruption to Oceana that had people desperate and demanded martial law. If that doesn’t happen naturally, it must be encouraged by ‘accidentally’ being ‘incompetent’, and then Oops! A crisis that doesn’t go to waste. …I mean, really? If it bothered any of England’s many billionaires, they’d coordinate and take out May in a tryst. But they’re not bothered at all are they? So what are they up to?
As a concerning coincidence, Florence is targeting a direct hit on two U.S. nuclear plants, as by electromagnet. After decades of being a golf ball in the ocean, Hawaii is being sought out by a second storm as well. Amazing how unusual that is.
What? I missed that. People were interested in reading Nassim.
Anniversary, but what can one say that hasn’t been said?
• No-Deal Brexit Could Lead To “Military On The Streets” (Ind.)
Their ultimate dream. Kills those dirty poor, adds fascism and totalitarianism, concentrates control for easier theft. And as part of the win-win we’ll gave you one last chance: you voted wrong, now go back and vote until you get it right and obey us willingly and slavishly. The ultimate high of narcissists. That I know that you know that I know you’re lying, and you’ll lick my boots anyway. Power.
It was hard to take listening to O-man talk about journalism, having prosecuted more whistle blowers than anyone ever. Most illegally. And then wiretapping and intervening with reporters right in their offices. And why? There was never a day he wasn’t reported as Jesus Christ in the media, regardless of how many wars he started, how many citizens droned, how many slave markets opened, how many millions killed. Nope. Never happened. Trump Trump Trump. Everything was rainbows and unicorns, kumbiya until he showed up. There were shootings, especially in Chicago, runaway wealth disparity, collapsed, bankrupting health care, militarized police, constant wars, and human trafficking with unbelievable desperation and opioid deaths, life expectancy dropping faster than Russia 1999 among the masses.
As with May, above, that’s their dream world, what’s not to like? No wonder they remember him so fondly. They don’t want a return to 1950. They want a return to the profits of 2005 when you could pay Governor Cuomo $30k to violently rape any person in the state with perfect impunity. Halcyon days.
May is playing catch up. Maybe she can finish installing this for her citizens, if you just give her time.
Everything seems to be going video, unfortunately. However, practice works like everything else, it’s a different skill set.
This guy has the accent of Michael Caine.
Agree with the AJ thing, I don’t entirely understand it, and I’m not sure if they’re aware themselves, but to some extent they are controlled opposition. Herd all the ‘enemy,’ the opposition into one corner so they can shoot at them, or use them as they wish much more easily by engineering what they think and believe over time. Poison their brand vitamins, I dunno. However, they are major purveyors of sensationalism and paralytic fear, not reasonable action. I can hypothosize they spent 40 years setting up a Russian revolution type civil war, and so needed to arrange a proper enemy — but neatly contained! — for Hillary to shoot at. And it doesn’t really matter who won, the war itself would be the win. However with her loss, that, plus the race war they’re still belatedly attempting, seems now off the table, or at least not in the preplanned way. Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face.
So they invested limitless time and money to defend and protect him all these years, and times are desperate. How to use this card now that you need to play it? Well, just musing, I don’t really know he’s the ‘patriot’ corral, whatever that means, or what they’re up to now. Need to up his cred to feed that last trojan info? Stage some violence with guys you bought wearing AJ shirts? With what goes on, what’s reported with a straight face but is perfectly obvious is a sham, anything’s possible. It doesn’t have to be true, or even look true, it doesn’t even have to be plausible. We just make it up and report it. Russia Russia Russia.
I hope JA is safe, as well as can be, and protected as a major witness in the DNC leak case that will ruin the Mueller case. Both sides would have a lot at stake. But unlike AJ, you can tell he’s real because the media will blackout all info, as they are in Idlib right now. Youtube shut it down.
“Increase the pressure on Trump with anon op-eds and Mueller, and see if he bombs Assad.”
Sure, except the first time he barely bombed an unused airfield, and the second time he shot off 100 missiles and hit virtually nothing except a staging area for chemical weapons…owned by the rebels/ISIS. If I remember, 200,000lbs of explosives went off and no one was killed except a guy accidentally in a turnip patch – an amazing feat in itself. Also, Britain’s “Shiny new missiles” were captured and sent to Moscow. So if they’d like another display of hitting nothing, and/or blowing up ISIS, and undermining NATO, go ahead and stage your attack.
Of course, it’s a strange attack where chemicals are safer than coffee stains, and are washed off with a garden hose wearing no protection.
Blast from the past, when they couldn’t pull it off so just showed up in the ER and shouted “Chemical!”, dropped some wet kids on the floor, and ran:
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201804261063922143-douma-doctor-white-helmets-lies/#Starkravingmadness #antilogos
If two Russians get off a plane, did they commit murder?
There are a lot of steps to prove other than, “Your honor! The photos of the murder are in the courtroom, and so is the defendant! Coincidence? I think not.”
The NYT seems to have proven beyond all doubt that a small group of unelected bureaucrats are defying and undermining the President, and with it, democracy, and are trying to overthrow an election in ways both large and small. Golly, would that be, dare I say it, treason? And would you call this group of unelected bureaucrats a “Deep State”? Amazing how as rotten as he is, they keep proving his case for him. And really, the dumbest guy in Indiana can understand this, but the NYT editor can’t? Hey editor: if you don’t like Trump, stop proving his case for him, stop making him right.
PS, how does his ridiculous, half-baked, lambasted allegation that Obama wiretapped his campaign look now? If there’s no FOIA on a FISA for Page, as is alleged, the only alternative is that it was directly authorized by the former President, to look inside the live campaign of the opposition party.
Since no one seems to have a problem with that, perhaps Trump should wiretap every Congressional campaign then send the DoJ in to arrest every opposition candidate he finds? Since that’s how we do things now, CNN, NYT, the DNC shouldn’t have a problem with it, right? He’s sure some terrible excuse for Hitler if he DOESN’T wiretap and arrest them all as they themselves claim is legal and moral. What’s the holdup already? Or maybe he does at least attempt to follow the law and is satisfied with NY Republicans being taken out for corruption right before a pivotal election.
And “Senior Official”? Yes, probably. A senior official at the CIA. If you hadn’t caught on, it seems that some parts of the government are not fond of our President and would like to remove him using illegal means. The technical term for it is sedition. But “there’s no crime when it’s my guy.”
Stark raving madness.
Since I have some time, what do we make of the denials of officials Woodward claims to have interviewed and have on tape? They say they didn’t say what he claims. Show me the tapes, ’cause that’s odd. Also, suppose you WERE in office, and suppose you WERE stealing stuff off his desk every day because you thought he was an unhinged menace. So you believe you’re the only person between him and the red button, and you publish that you’re in there, tampering with him??? Here’s a clue: if you’re a CIA mole, you keep your mouth shut and stay very, very quiet while you do your work and ferret your info out. You don’t get on TV and say “Over here! There’s a mole over here! Somewhere in this department!” And especially, perhaps exclusively if you think he’s unhinged, because he’s all the more likely to chop heads everywhere, right or wrong. You’d just keep your head down, stop him where you can, leak stuff, sabotage, find allies, and look for an opening like the 25th.
So the NYT’s own story is internally inconsistent and irrational, or else his source is, and probably both. But nobody cares about illogic anymore. Starting a 50-year peace is now war, people who are biased don’t have the bias they admit they have, no one’s trying to get the guy they all say they’re getting, leaders who are winning use chemical weapons, nerve gas is safe as water, and all Russian photos have the same timestamp.
Like I said: Stark. Raving. Madness.
The People: Stop it.
The Government: Make us.
Nothing will happen until you grab them by the hair, push their feet in the fire and make them stop. But it’ll be ugly. I can’t help that.
So if the powers ignore the referndum, supposedly the people’s will, and just choose to make things wildly worse for them instead, should we just let them? Should they get their way, overturn the vote and not Brexit because they stamp their feet? What to do?
Brexit Gone Wild: What a prefect excuse to install that Totalitarianism you always wanted.
Never let a crisis go to waste: create one on purpose instead.
“The White House did not provide any evidence to support the president’s complaints…”
I’ve seen this journalistic ‘aside’ in several articles, which is unusual. The journalist is reporting evidence of what is, then stops to point out, it isn’t. Except it is, again, fake news. The President took screen shots of Google search and posted them with his comments. Is that somehow not evidence now? No doubt the gentleman (or in his case, ‘man) who has direct access to the highest secrets and clearance is promoting “conspiracy theories”. Because that’s what we say about the person who can and does directly read all those secrets we can’t: he doesn’t read them, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and he knows less than a 1st year reporter from Buzzfeed, who’s going to tell him how it is, I kid you not. Many times now saying the man with highest clearance doesn’t know, but they, a reporter in San Bernardino, does. That Vice reporter knows the inner workings of DARPA and DJT doesn’t. Hey, he can be liar, and often is, but I don’t think he can credibly be a conspiracy theorist, because he’ll just call down the NSA and say, “deliver the records.’ How far we’ve come. So if it’s this looking-glass, when is the word used now and why?
In any case, that leaves BBC and NYT saying “presented no evidence of this foolishness” when the 40 million on his Twitter feed saw the screen pic of the bent results. And that’s aside from how it couldn’t be more obvious, except that each side is saying it’s them, instead of recognizing that they’re equally ecstatic to bend and suppress the Progressives, because their goal is the status quo at all costs. For instance:
“We do not shadow ban. You are always able to see the tweets from accounts you follow (although you may have to do more work to find them, like go directly to their profile). And we certainly don’t shadow ban based on political viewpoints or ideology.” -Twitter
So when a person is undiscoverable even by a direct name search, that’s not shadowbanning. Got it.
Says Olinda Hassan, a Policy Manager for Twitter’s Trust and Safety:
“Yeah. That’s something we’re working on. It’s something we’re working on. We’re trying to get the shitty people to not show up. It’s a product thing we’re working on right now.”Who decides who’s ‘shitty’? Read on.
“Twitter Content Review Agent Mo Nora explains that Twitter doesn’t have an official written policy that targets conservative speech, but rather they were following “unwritten rules from the top”:
“A lot of unwritten rules, and being that we’re in San Francisco, we’re in California, very liberal, a very blue state. You had to be… I mean as a company you can’t really say it because it would make you look bad, but behind closed doors are lots of rules…There was, I would say… Twitter was probably about 90% Anti-Trump, maybe 99% Anti-Trump.”
Pranay Singh says Twitter digs into your profile to determine whether or not you’re a “redneck” and therefore worthy of being banned:
“Yeah you look for Trump, or America, and you have like five thousand keywords to describe a redneck. Then you look and parse all the messages, all the pictures, and then you look for stuff that matches that stuff.” When asked if the majority of the algorithms are targeted against conservative or liberal users of Twitter, Singh said, “I would say majority of it are for Republicans.”
“[I] Must admit that when some [Republican] sources have complained about this to me I mocked them to their face as conspiracy theorists,” said Axios’ Jonathan Swan. He said the Vice report had caused him to rethink the issue.”
But that’s not evidence according to NYT and BBC. How about this?
Twitter head Jack Dorsey said, “We do not look at content with regards to political viewpoint or ideology… I think we need to constantly show that we are not adding our own bias, which I fully admit is left, is more left-leaning,”So his bias, which is doesn’t have, is a bias he has that doesn’t matter that he has it. Not like his engineers and staff are voluminously quoted as admitting overwhelming bias and banning, as reported by anti-conservative outlets like Vice and Buzzfeed or anything.
Hey BBC, you know what we call that? “Censoring conservative news outlets in its search results.”
(P.S. plus Progressives who are antiwar or not corporatist enough)
While this example is Twitter and not Google, Google is both worse and easier to prove. Recently a report showed they could swing segments of voters 12%, far over the margins of error, and it was reported today that they in fact did this in Russia, for (yet another) example of election tampering. I know this is Breitbart, but it’s just screen shots, did you really think BBC or NYT would assemble this?
https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2016/09/13/hillary-google-bias-confirmed-experiment/Wow, what a coincidence, right in the middle of an election. But I’m sure the search results for DJT were just as universally laudable, right?
Yup, no evidence here. And there’s no fake news. The guy with access to all, plus posting screen shots any one of us can duplicate, is just an unhinged conspiracy theorist. OMG, why do they report such false stuff that they force me to defend him/it? Nobody wants that.
I just feel the news is getting worse and worse, with each lie compounding instead of being punished the grip on truth and reality comes loose and the stories all walking in circles, unmoored from any compass, any logic of reality.
Such is the logos.
I see that in the Brexit article? True? False? It’s an opinion, and yet so complicated, with multiple metaphors and similes (sic) that may or may not be true, may or may not be relevant. History is complicated. A lot of stuff happened, most of it contradictory. Correlation is not causality, your mileage may vary, etc. It needs something to cut through the crap to the essence, the deeper bones within, but this is not wanted.
Essentially, crimes, cons, and frauds, thefts and power-over are very simple. It takes this university language to get otherwise sensible people to believe the most outrageous things, contrary to all sense, even its own. So the complication is a universal smokescreen, and you should smell burning bull patties thick enough to block out the sun, usually when “experts” or IYI’s are involved. Hard to take and not useful. Yet what would we do? This is presently a news aggregation and commentary site. Stop reading and commenting on it, since the needle now read 80-90% pure nonsense?
“Those who can make you believe absurdities, can make you commit atrocities.” ― Voltaire
There’s no capitalism without competition, that competition forestalled by the merger of the special people and their corporations with the power of the state. So if corporations, at least the top 200 all with interlocking boards and people, are all also interlocked with lobbyists, lawmakers, and selective enforcement, don’t you really have central planning, or more of Mussolini arrangement? And that’s to say nothing of a central bank, making capital free while other programs: health care, etc, make labor very, very expensive and inflexible. Oops. All an accident I’m sure that all decisions, made by these same 200 companies, governments, and their people always advantage themselves and central control, and disadvantage the common man.
How much worse when, after central planning and lack of enforcement collapses their industry, as it always and inevitably does, AND the poorest donate their houses and pay for it in taxes — or more properly, inflation? Yeah, I can see how Capitalism failed when we have central planning, paid judicial special protection, and no possibility of bankruptcy. In the sense that it failed because there is no Capitalism. Or “Capitalism for thee, not for me.” It’s not said, but Capitalism relies on the strength of property rights. Property rights depend on a rule of law, and we have none. They will argue that corporations have all these rights, but that’s the negative — their ability to steal, cheat, bribe, is paid on the destruction of other people’s property rights, particularly the citizens’. It’s those rights, those laws of the common man, for common justice, that haven’t been enforced in decades…except against them.
Am I over the top in this? Remember MF Global? Mixed internal and customer funds for years without caring which is which, lost a trade, owed billions, and simply stole client funds to cover it, locking them into whatever trade they had open that minute. No one cared. The SEC insurance, which covers only and exactly this kind of crime, refused to cover. No one cared about that either. How about Sachs’ aluminum rigging, I think reported in the NYT, where 5c of every can in the nation was going to them for price fixing? Not enough theft, not well-known enough, Congress, the FBI didn’t notice when their case was published for them in black and white? Wells Fargo, creating fake owner accounts on felonious signatures, then ginning, again felonious fees, then arranging repossession of property never owed, again…and again…and again…while Wall Street doesn’t mind their stock and Buffett, one of their owners, considered squeaky clean cowboy. No need to go on as you could fill the gigafarm with documents and examples, but you do not have capitalism without property rights. That means law enforcement must punish theft and fraud, or there are no property rights, no capitalism, and no production. Why? Because whatever you make is stolen, so why bother? And that’s where we are with hard work and production in the U.S., : they won’t pay you and they’re going to steal it anyway, so why work? Why go through the heartbreak? As the Soviets said, “We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us.” “You pay peanuts, you get monkeys.” And so, the non-capitalism we don’t have collapses, as all socialist or their sibling fascist systems do. Do we blame the thieves, the liars, the frauds, the brutal enforcers of crooked justice? Not on your life. We blame the productive, still trying to get things done for reasons no one can explain, to succeed on a productive and voluntary, non-violent basis. To be somebody and own something, instead of falling into line, joining the cartel, and telling others what to do, to pay up or else.
The West did used to build things. Even as much as I don’t innately approve, most everything presently on earth. They built New York out of a forest, Phoenix out of a desert, Johannesburg out of a savannah. Other cultures didn’t, or at least not many of them. It’s the “western” way that Japan emulated, other nations, to survive against the technical and industrial success of the west, which led to their military superiority for a time. But all that building was almost exclusively “the West”. Now China is going to fall into the same trap no one means to fall in, because, what are they going to do when so many of these countries do what they’ve done for a hundred years, keep being who they are, and don’t pay? Is China going to smile and donate those trillions like a pal, when their own people work so hard and need so much? No, they’re going to act just like that horrible, unfair West and want to get fair return on what they gave. So they don’t know, but will be dragged out to the Pacific Rim, protecting it, and begin meddling in Africa and all over, so maybe we can finally stop this nonsense about how it’s only white, male, western guys who colonize, who militarize, and extract. A 99-year city lease sure sounds like colonialism to me, just as these empires always turn, if you look back more than a blip in time, back 4,000 years instead of 400, and learn world and cultural history as I hear we’re supposed to, instead of being myopic on the West. The West was at the bottom for millennia, and we can go there again, quick. Every other culture has histories at least as dark as Europe has.
The Bancor is essentially the terrible system we have now: a tiny group of unaccountable insiders have no limits on the creation of money backed-by-nothing, mainline ties to governments and violence, and inevitably abuse it for their own ends. The difference is, national currencies can be rejected by other nations and brought to heel, as Russia and China are destroying the dollar system now. Once in place, however, a Bancor supersedes governments and sovereignty and their fraud, corruption, and totalitarian power would be inescapable. Which is why they want it so much, and have worked tirelessly for 100+ years to get one. Hundreds of their white papers are all on file, ready to read.
If you want a pan-national currency that is not corrupt and run solely by the weakness of men, we have one. It’s called gold, it enforces honesty, and it has overseen the most successful periods in human history. That being the case, why would they want the unproven Bancor instead? Is it because they know it will enforce fraud and power, and not honesty and fair trade? Beware geeks bearing gifts.
Put another way they are either platforms as they claim, neutral providers of a posting service that removes no one without an actionable crime, OR they are publishers, meaning they choose and form the news including editorials. There are existing regulations for both types, and all of them would be subject to Sherman anti-trust monopoly laws, none of which have been enforced for 40 years, insuring we have neither capitalism nor democracy.
Trump’s personal position is also untenable. Existing law already recognizes that a CEO cannot, as Elon Musk did, simply spout off ‘personally’, as if their opinion is somehow unrelated to the company. And the point at which an employee, like the fry chef at McDonald’s becomes a spokesman for the company, is most ill-defined. Companies routinely demand humans be their spokespeople, 24/7 simply as employees, claiming their time and their lives and off-time actions in some bizarre reconstruction of slavery. At the same time, whenever convenient, they overlook the Hampton coke parties, and are not a representative of Goldman Sachs there. That’s because there’s no rule of law in America, just the rule of men and what you can (pay) to get away with. Whether you’re a ‘pal’ on the in-crowd, or an enemy we prosecute for breathing. No different for Zuck and Dorsey, Trump, Clinton, Cheroff, Assange, or Manning. If you’re a pal, all is forgiven: theft, treason, murder, war crimes, we understand. If you’re not a pal, a 10 year old tweet will have you lose your job and career without trial or appeal, and in so very many cases, of so many reporters, your very life. Sounds great! Sounds great to be on top! One thing, when Bosch and Bayer backed the Nazi party, got on top the in-crowd: before too many years, their in-crowd kidnapped their families and held them hostage as assurance of loyalty to the state. Right now a flip of in-crowd has made all the former darlings under investigation, and all the former crumbs in control. But as they say about jack boots going up the stairs and slippers tumbling down.
This is why there is rule of law and not rule of men. Before long, it’s not the men who rebel, having been always abuse by police, used at the whim of the law and power, no, it’s the lords, the aristocracy, the oligarchs who put King John in a ditch and make him sign a Magna Charta of limits and rules and juries and evidence. Because when “the law is in my mouth” the only possible result is madness. Corporations are trying this now, being one thing with one judge and ruling, and the opposite with the next judge, or not infrequently, both at the same time, from paragraph to paragraph, word to word, as you see in CNN, or with the FBI or Dorsey saying on T.V. ‘we don’t have the bias we have because we’re left-leaning’, ikyn.
So we certainly have these problems with picking the law, the rules, but a far larger problem with having no rule of law in the first place, and no rule, no desire, no expectation of there being any law but what I can get for myself, today, within everyone I know from the janitor to the President. And that does not go well. Such cultures lose, if no collapse, as we are losing and collapsing now, with these same men helping it along on purpose.
As it seems all lies and Kabuki theatre all the time, why not look at the pieces on the board.
Iran is now imbedded in a weakened Syria, and although not making much trouble at the moment, is alarming an easily alarmed and easily violent Israel. At the same time, the conditions are that the U.S. has no force and never had mandate in Syria, and the CIA’s proxy force ISIS is all but rolled up despite some attempts at additional help.
So…looks like the U.S. is going to withdraw, losing yet another war, like every other war in 70 years. And what, leave Iran in charge? Syria can’t really stop them, nor expel them as they need the help to hold control. So sounds like to both leave and keep the peace, we need another group in there. Like, I dunno, the Russians? But in this lying, cheating, double-crossing, accusatory environment how are you supposed to hand over a major nation to Russia, next door to Crimea and on top of a major pipeline?
I guess you’d have to have some plausible story, wouldn’t you? Russia goes in to stop a fake attack and the U.S. is “too weak” to prevent them, as “everyone” can see it would cause a exchange of battlefield nukes, from Russia’s recently deployed bombers, that no one has an appetite for. Russia takes over as a least-bad option, Iran is edged out, Israel doesn’t attack anyone, and the U.S. comes home and has a victory parade in D.C. for another war we lost. Yay us!
Hey, why not? Does anything else make better sense?
That would explain a lot about why they want an ongoing refugee camp with ongoing conditions: it’s good for the NGO human trafficking business, and the dark side therein.
While you know I also disagree, I think I also understand what TAE is saying. Sure Brexit is bad, and why? For no logical reason. Same with austerity: will Britain stop building carriers with no planes and ships with no missiles to bomb countries of no danger and kill children of no blame? Of course not! We’ll do it moar while we kill them, and their poor, deplorable periphery parents at home too.
Maybe if we bomb them and clobber their economies with neoliberal policies we can have NGOs advertise to get children on the beast train, use NGO money to cross the straits, pick them up in NGO boats, then use them to hammer the home nations so badly that corporations and capital — not governments and citizens — will become supreme.
But what’s the point here? That those people are blameless and should not be punished for surviving and seeking a better life. While the disruption they cause can be an injury, in the main they are blameless, pawns in the game of larger men, hammering them this way and that with economic mallets, hoping beyond hope that they will die and kill others in the process. So should we be austere in our response? Lock the doors, put out the lights? No, but we shouldn’t swing them wide open either. Perhaps it’s a reaction to news that relentlessly divides and seeks for us to harm each other instead of justly those who harm us all.
I disagree on these things. I too think Britain should leave now, should have left before, should do so without asking. But they’re doing it the worst way that harms the most people on all continents. I think immigration should be wildly contained, and allowing refugees in this manner is murderous and irresponsible and that the people of Sweden and Germany are no less entitled to safety than the people of other nations — nevertheless, we should and must stop attacking those nations, then making ourselves the victims of violence we create. Austerity is not just a word, it means not cheering for drugs today while screwing your children for when the bill arrives. Nevertheless, that hardship falls only on the poor and powerless, never on the masters, which is unjust and in fact illegal.
So yes, the world will get smaller, more local, poorer, and less able to help, nevertheless it’s hard to see day after day, the fact of that twisted into we MUST make the world smaller, meaner, and poorer in order that the rich may still keep what they have. And this is the method: something true, like limitations, to something false, like killing a few million for the greater good. Something true, like cultures having different and incompatible values, into something false, like that we must destroy them. But figuring out just what to do, how much of this and how little of that, what’s most urgent or what can wait, that’s the hard part, isn’t it? That’s the part we disagree?
Some would say growing vegetables at home is too much, others not enough, that I still owe and must pay. Some would say setting the example is the only right path, others that I must convince others by terrifying force. Which is it? I don’t know, but I don’t think anyone here has given up their values yet. They’re just worried about the people on the ground and not the theory. I’m more into theory, and yet I understand.
Taxing the rich isn’t going to work. Not only has it been tried, there’s a whole series of problems.
Did you see in NJ where the departure of one billionaire left a gaping hole in the state budget? The legislature had to meet to address the problem. Does that give you an idea of how you can’t tax them? How much they’re already at the limit? Other wealthy, like Tiger Woods, have moved residence to Florida to save millions in taxes. If Florida is not enough, they can move to the Caymans, Monaco, or wherever they like. You think they’re going to sit around and lose a fortune every day? Jersey and Illinois sure think so, but their ever-collapsing budgets say otherwise. Same is true in Philly, Detroit, and Baltimore, once all great cities who drive out everyone who can move with taxes and oppression. Then as it shrinks, more leave and it shrinks more until, like Venezuela, everybody with wealth or ambition is gone. Welcome to Socialism! We eat zoo animals here!
Second, “The wealthy are not like you and me” (They have more money.) You can tax idiots like us donkeys, slaving on a paycheck with too little to hire an accountant, but that’s not true even one slice above. Read Kiyosaki: the wealthy own nothing and control everything. You “invest” in a company that owns condos, then “visit” them. The company owns the car, fills the tank, and writes off travel as a business expense. It buys your groceries, it donates to charity. On paper, you own as little as you want to, basically paying your taxes voluntarily. Now tell me how you think you’re going to stop this? Taxes are so onerous that you could buy 10 creative accountants and offshore/shell everything out of jurisdiction. Many have.
Which leads to the top 10 corporations who pay no taxes at all. GE, GM, United, nothing, bupkas. Apple, despite trillions, simply refuses to move and invest that money. How do you plan on making them? With your stern face? So the wealthy own their assets in corporations that legally pay no taxes. At all. Or rather their taxes are an offset of voluntary convenience. And they’re also perfectly happy at this time to invest in nothing, ever again, make no production, and hire no people to avoid taxes, which they have, for 10-20 years. Ask Denninger, a high level ISP CEO and professional programmer. He refuses to work, and therefore refuses to hire. So what now? Centralize the whole economy under the Politboro? Yeah, that worked out well.
How about a solution that works? You get what you incentivize. You need to incentivize work and innovation and production. All that takes is, just like the last gilded age, to break monopolies, arrest bribery and fraud, and allow completion. That will take out these crippled dinosaurs and allow the small working to eat their lunch like piranhas. But they won’t enforce the laws we have, for 100 years, , which will pull the wealth back to the middle class, and then the lower.
Why? Is it because they own, bribe, and are immune from the law? Well, yes, but that only exists because the people have no morality in themselves and don’t want the law enforced. They don’t demand it. They don’t protest. They admire and love a thousand villains like Bezos, Jobs, Romney, McCain. They want to their kids to grow up and be just like Wasserman and Weinstein and Stormy Daniels and Brian Williams. Real American heroes.
So what am I supposed to say? If the people don’t want to enforce the hundred thousand 100-year laws we have, up to and including the Constitution, what do you think this corruption will bring? The corrupt will get rich, and the honest — even including the billionaires — will be eaten away and destroyed by the unscrupulous. But I can’t help you with that unless you WANT justice, honesty, and force of law. But they don’t.
Bonus question: if the entire system is corrupt, will concentrating it further in a central committee, a) help corruption, or b) make existing corruption harder? Um, yeah, I’ll take dispersing power as far down to the people as possible, please. I guarantee if there was only one lever of control, the most corrupt man would grasp it. That’s why the middle class is the defense against these things.
In opposition to the article, the American people CAN fix this. Easily. They don’t want to. They haven’t had enough yet, they still want to be corrupt.
Ocasio-Cortez says McCain was an “unparalleled example of human decency”, not for Vietnam, which might be understandable, but looking at his recent 30 years of unparalleled warmongering. Nice going Progressives! At this rate, Cortez will be able to keep up with the 1 million a year killed by Socialism for 100 years. But then, she does have the stamp of the CFR, as did McCain for sure.
While it’s fun to talk about the children, and brings it home as they cannot have responsibility of action the way adults do, keep in mind that every parent — and sometimes both — will suffer as badly, in poor eating, in overwork, and endless, unfruitful worry over money. Of course, yes, the U.S. is already well on the way to being a Soviet state, and the real victims aren’t entirely those who are on food stamps and related care, but anyone who works. The all-in support of welfare, Medicaid, etc, has been calculated to be as high as $35,000/year. Better, actually, as you cannot be fired, which most working people are. You also have health care, which working people effectively do not. So you need to go from the streets to, I dunno, $40k with benefits to compare to being on the dole, and I kid you not. I have no idea why anyone works at all. It says something about how independent, how responsible and how proud they are as citizens, because it sure ain’t the math. The math says Social Services should come and take your kids if you’re NOT on welfare, for unconscionable risk and unreasonable abuse. So most are, as the article points out, and the U.S. makes it as terrible, as Kafkaesque, and as slave-like as possible, removing all outlets to work, to progress, or to advocate for yourself. In a way it’s worse than slavery, as it’s sort of warehousing lives-of-sentence without possibility of parole. Some charity! And people advocate for more!
Anyway, the point is that the parent of these children are in the same, or worse situation. The parents know what they’re up against and to fear, the children largely don’t.
“Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me — the present only toucheth thee:
But, Och! I backward cast my eye on prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!”Got them!!!
Manafort on a 10 year old tax evasion, back when he was working with Podesta, Cohen on a 5 year old taxi medallion case.
That’ll show ’em. Hey wait, no collusion? No connection to Russia at all? Still the people, Podesta, Manafort, Davis, all working with the Clinton State Dept in Ukraine and to sell 20% of U.S. Uranium to Russia Russia Russia?
So where does the Donald fit into this? They illegally, and in violation of 500 year precedent, raided his lawyer’s offices on a fishing expedition, and found…taxi medallions, not related to the Trump empire? What gives? And that charge itself is tenuous, since the raid could easily be overturned, but it was meant to let them know what dirt was going on, which they could then back-corroborate (which is itself illegal) using non-warrant sources.
Okay, but this proves campaign payoffs, right? Um…you might want to sit down. Cohen pled to a number of charges to avoid his other crimes, but pleading to a crime does not prove that crime. Normally, this might not matter, it should be easy to prove, but in this case, what was the allegation? Cohen, Trump’s lawyer, paid Clifford hush money to stay quiet. Okay, is that illegal? No, only if he used the bank account of campaign contributions to do so. But for the love of God, why would he? Trump is a multi-billionaire, Cohen no doubt has connections to Trump bank accounts, and if nothing else would leave a paper trail to the campaign instead of a quiet, personal bank account. Even if Cohen did, all Trump has to do is say he mismanaged campaign funds, and therefore is innocent, although again, I don’t see why it would ever have happened in the first place. In fact, I believe he said it didn’t. So if he used his own money to run some aspect of his own douchebag life and empire, the crime is…?
And this is the best they can do??? They’ve had 3 years and $90 Million dollars with a prosecutor well-known for fabricating evidence and covering it up. …That’s not just talk, the U.S. government had to pay $30 Million in reparations to several men Mueller railroaded, and those admissions almost never happen. With Davis getting his false allegations in the headlines, then retracting them. Where do they think that will get them? Trump voters already don’t believe CNN, and Democratic voters already do. The allegations, without any legal weight to press with, are just feel-good tissue, some projected lights, changing nothing, not even the election. I’m baffled. You could find better felonies on any contractor or small trucker anywhere in America. Are they too chicken to plant evidence, tamper with testimony, and arrest the guy’s family, like prosecutors usually do? Ask Martin Armstrong if I’m kidding.
So surprisingly, these are unexpectedly weak results. Still, I stand corrected on Manafort; needless to say, the professional attorney who studied the jury was right, and I, having not extensively researched the case, was wrong. However, he was guilty, so that’s sort of a correct result. Question is, are they going to now prosecute Podesta and the other 5,000 tax-evading election-riggers, like Davis, out on K Street? I don’t think so. If they want to start a GoFundMe for those mass arrests, believe me, I’ll donate.
Hunt is the definition of hubris. So he’s going to tell Trump what he must do down to the smallest detail, because Trump is always so obedient and accomodating? Or because otherwise MI6 will throw the next election with a Steele dossier part deux? Amazing. And that’s aside from his demands being a list of lies and half-truths Johnstone would be happy to address with colorful language.
In the byline of every article on student loans, every day, anywhere in America, should be this: “Article 1, Section 8, Clause 4 authorizes Congress to enact “uniform Laws on the subject of Bankruptcies throughout the United States.” That is, due to terrible former abuses and the unexpected advantages of allowing people a fresh start, bankruptcy is a required legal outlet. That is to say, you MUST be allowed to go bankrupt. …At least until Clinton took a ton of cash from Wall Street and made student loans undischargable. I wish it weren’t Clinton as it sounds partisan, but it was, and here we are, with a generation of citizens now serfs, or the modern equivalent, lifelong indentured servitude. To whom? Essentially to the banks. Neocon Neoliberal Neofeudalism at its finest. Not dissuaded by the appalling abuse and the savage deficit of jobs, as opposed to becoming a plumber college-free, they’re still signing up by the millions to get it good and hard. What can I say? Tables have turned, now the dumbest are in college getting dumber, and the smart ones are outside. The Wheel of Fate turning ever-slowly.
MoFlora somehow Raul has commented on Global Warming or Monsanto or extinction or the seas in nearly every post for 2 years. Somehow I think that qualifies as concern about the environment.
So do the readers I expect, but if you’re really in the soil, you know that growing, living simply, is at this point in America, nearly a death warrant. Death for shit life syndrome, living in a poor rural area, with no health care, no income, no opportunities, and no help from neighbors, the rural ways having been erased with a 50 year social genocide. So it’s difficult to cut some slack for people who have to drive to where there is work, or buy food on Styrofoam wrapped in plastic. You can do that or die, and I’m sure WalMart would be happy to join Monsanto and General Mills and help us all along. Most people do what they must, what they’re capable of. They don’t mean ill. You get what you incentivize, and none of us are in a position to radically change the incentive structure.
If there is such wide evidence of Trump money laundering and worldwide corruption, why hasn’t it been used by his enemies in three years? Did they intend to hold back so he could win the election? Is the Mueller investigation a scam? Does the FBI and other agencies not really dislike him? If so, why don’t they obey him and congress? If they’re for him, why do most Judges rule against? They’re investigating and tying him down because…? While they don’t actually arrest or lambast him for evidence they do have because…? It’s a difficult worldview, because so many things would have to be the opposite of their appearance. Surely SOME of what we see must be true.
You must have a lot to do now that Cait Johnstone got bot-banned. Jimmy Dore follows up on how his liberal friends: close, smart people, say they’re against banning…and then proceed to approve banning and be against liberal values like tolerance and freedom of speech so long as it’s the other guy. He even had one on his personal panel, I don’t know if she’ll make it back.
So if the left is now against all liberal values, against social tolerance, against freedom of religion and expression — and as Cait discovered, it’s the LEFT who is wildly pro-McCain, one of the most vicious, unhinged neocon war hawks ever — well, what do they have? They’re not cleaning the water or fighting Monsanto. Shaking my head, and so are other old time leftists too.
The other Dore articles are on how attacking Green Party candidates is not exactly wowing them back into a Dem party that just decided to take oil money and would rather double wars than help Flint. Nor is attacking all voters as “traitors” if they vote for, Greens, Socialists, Libertarians, and naturally Republicans or Tea…that is to say, 70% of the nation are traitors according to them, i.e. people who need to be taught a bike lock lesson or shot, is not exactly a great way to convince them to turn out and/or rally to your flag. We’re all amazed you need to explain this sort of thing. It’s as if the world is REQUIRED to vote for them, even when they lie, steal, and provide nothing, and they’re ENTITLED to any vote they, in their mind, feel like.
Like I’ve said before, it’s not that hard: you simply promise them stuff, then lie and double-cross them, a time-honored tradition. The truly unhinged part is that they won’t reduce themselves to doing this. They won’t ask, they won’t court and woo the common man, no; they ORDER them they’re GOING TO vote for you, or else. Even if you’re evil or self-serving, that behavior literally only makes sense if you’re a narcissistic sociopath, unable by your mental illness to get things done by the more common means, bare-faced lying. Why? Because if you had to ask these vermin deplorables, they wouldn’t be better than America, better than everybody else, and feel themselves to have power.
Take Cuomo’s comment that “America was never that great”. While yes, taken out of context, it’s just a line of unhelpful, voter-shaming, citizen-shaming, cruelly divisive trollop, rather than, as Kennedy, inspiring people to greatness dormant within them. And although imperfect, compare the actions of America to the other students since 1800, the normal way to grade a class. In 1800 much of the world was in slavery, including England, and citizen Democracy (in the loose sense) had been dead for 2,500 years. While making the mistakes of other nations, America pulled in a direction over time, and appeared to have brought the Enlightenment ideals into being through the messy business of succeeding with them. Cuomo is telling us to be ashamed of that because we weren’t perfect all along, that we didn’t finish at the beginning, by summer 1790, and that’s simply irrational for so many reasons, but it’s also unhelpful.
Can somebody tell me why, if I work at Taco Bell regional, my account and badge are shut off in 24 hours when I depart, yet the top secret security clearance is continued for gol-darned everyone, even when the re-up date is only 2 years? Not only would every warm body in D.C. have clearance after a while, but NOT working there gives you better clearance than WHEN working there, since you have to be re-examined periodically to keep clearance. So as expected, the Government is worse at security than Joe’s Trucking, worse than Taco Bell, and worse than your ex-girlfriend who you’d get the key from. Got it.
By the way, Brennan, of he-who-should-not-have-clearance, the worst war-mongering neocon ever, who covered for the police state, supported war crimes and lied us into Iraq (now hero and media darling), one reason we’re concerned about your mental health is that you argue that stopping clearance is cutting off your Freedom of Speech. Au contraire, mon frere. He’s letting you speak super-freely, all day long on T.V., which as a National Director, you should never do, nor should any objective newsroom ever hire you. He’s stopping your freedom to READ state secrets, not to write or speak. If you’re so deranged you can’t tell the difference between reading and writing, between public and private, you should have your clearance pulled for other reasons. And since as a private citizen you shouldn’t be using it anyway except under the direct supervision of a Intel employee, it cannot possibly be a punishment. That’s like revoking my right to go to the moon: I won’t notice. …Or are you saying you HAVE been using your clearance to do things that are NOT authorized to while not under the supervision of an active Intel employee? You know, like Bruce Ohr seems to have done?
Meanwhile, in medialand, 300 papers collude to attack the President in unison as a way to prove how honest and objective they are. Or as we’d call it: any given Friday since November 2015.
Stark. Raving. Madness. And don’t think a whole bunch of Americans haven’t noticed. Sad part is, their nonsense is distracting me from covering very real war preparations in Turkey, China, and Russia, and the Powell’s dollar shortage economic collapse that will set them off.
But not to worry, as they’re banning both the Right and the Left with lavish aplomb, pretty soon no one will be able to speak, and we’ll have all the time we need.
Employees only now realize Google is one of the ten most evil companies on the planet? For schmartz guys, they sure are schtoopid. But maybe schmartz guys think that universal panopticon of surveillance run by a company merged with the military and secret services is the sort of thing that’s only ever served for good.
Sadly I agree Manafort may be acquitted. He’s guilty as possible to be…of taking private money like every other K Street crook, to prop up or topple foreign regimes by “collusion” in election “meddling”, but then found himself on the wrong side of the CIA fence (when they spent $5B openly toppling his client Yanukovich) and then the wrong side of the narrative (they needed someone to fry for the news cycle, and he had failed as a plant within the Trump campaign, being discovered and purged too early thanks to Admiral Rogers). However, Mueller’s case is ridiculous, so bad it almost seems he wants to lose. His argument is “Your honor, Manfort had a lot of money and spent it badly. Ha! Explain that!” Are you kidding me? Under American law (and our national personality) he doesn’t have to explain jack. He can say he found it under the bed, on the beach, in a trunk he bought on ebay, or in his case, nothing at all. They did this to Kim.com, back when, a 60 minute exposé on national T.V. showing how he enjoyed his money too much. You know, because Americans hate money, glamor, and successfully punking authority.
Some police state when they can’t — or won’t — produce phone calls or bank records as evidence. It can’t be that hard. I have that kind of surveillance on my checking account, and it’s a rare week when the account uses that thing called a ‘comma’. What do we pay these guys for? Why do we tap every phone and have a camera on every inch of planet earth if they can’t figure out where a hundred mil is deposited or who talked to the Skripals in which park? …Or should I be suspicious? But I’m a coincidence theorist: everything that happens is a coincidence, everything’s an accident, everybody’s just dumb or playing it on T.V.
So if they’re throwing the prosecution, have they jury tampered too just to make sure? You know, coincidentally a month before the midterm elections? Does Hulk Hogan really hate Randy Savage? Did he really hit him with that chair? Tune in next week to the thrills and spills of your real fake news…
We passed that last week: Brennan already said “Obama made me do it.” We were all pretty wowed, but naturally the media never commented or followed up…Although it was on Meet the Press or some huge show.
So if you work for Brennan, why would you do loyalty? He doesn’t. Not a fan.
Note, if the government is “Reshaping Capitalism”, it may be necessary, but it’s not Capitalism. That’s starting with Democratic Socialism and the problems therein. Just pointing out that the Market is the base state, and the Government is the distortion. Jiggering around too much is how we got in this mess. (as opposed to too little in the 1870s)
• RBS Bankers Joked About Destroying The US Housing Market (G.)
Should be titled: “…And nobody went to jail…”What will Tesla do without Musk? Considering their bumpers fall off in the rain and their batteries regularly cremate the occupants, I would think a whole lot better. He’s the worst businessman I’ve ever seen. Too bad to prove how awful he is he already fired or drove off all the good managers and engineers he had on staff this year. I think he’s planning to build all the cars himself, by hand. Why else would he fire all the workers? With a record like that, can the question even be asked?
So goes your “Alien Dreadnaught” factory, and the victory of AI. AI and robotics can’t even use a glue gun without breaking. #fail. They are, however, already good at killing unsuspecting humans.
Professors recommend massive central planning as a positive solution? At the same time the media has banned Venezuela’s news agency from view, perhaps so no news about the catastrophic failure of socialism and central planning hits the news every day? Typical.
Yes, it *might* help this particular problem. But at the risk of creating hundreds of others, with thousands or millions of deaths, as demonstrated by 150 years of history. Ask any professor, who knows that self-same history, and he’ll give you a double-sided answer, usually “it’s different this time”, “not so long as they obey my brilliance and majesty” and “that wasn’t real central planning/socialism/they didn’t go far enough into economic totalitarianism.” For schmartz guys they sure are dumb.
Not to despair, I have a solution as well: instead of looking into history and doing all the things that DIDN’T work and killed millions, why don’t we look into history and enact the things that DID work? I’m not a genius or anything, but that seems a better plan to me. Somewhere, sometime, somebody solved this. Find them and try.
Oh, PS, although technically concrete, the Roman version is a different chemistry and flavor. Maybe the point is that although at least now we know how to make real 1,000 year Roman concrete, we choose to make dissolving substandard 30-year concrete.
I’m not sure if this is better or not when we’re making crappy condos and malls instead of lifegiving aquaducts and villas. Maybe it’s for the best for this demented culture to dissolve with our works back into the the forests and the seas.
The concrete problem, so to speak, is when everyone is lying, and no one can trust anyone to keep their word and do their job without lying. The engineers may or may not have anticipated Italy to cheap out on substandard concrete, but maybe did not anticipate the Japanese steel. Or the round sand, not gravel, or as the overpass that failed in Florida, the construction would break critical rules that broke the stressing procedures. Each group of workman shortsightedly think they’re the only ones cheating and stealing, and they’re the only ones borrowing the engineers’ overbuilding overcapacity. They’re not. As concrete mafia liars spreads across society to sand-and-gravel liars, hardhat liars, lie-about-delivering-coffee liars, society cannot survive all against all, everyone cheating everyone all the time.
Ultimately only moral societies can cooperate. Only accurate cooperation can sustain complexity. That complexity, that infrastructure efficiency is what makes society able to exist as we know it. Drop morality, drop the logos, and you have anti-logos: chaos, disorder, misery, and death. You choose.
A straightforward ‘Earth or Tainter reading is that societies overinvest in infrastructure, then on any contraction, have to overspend to maintain past projects, with nothing for today. Although not infrastructure, police and fire pensions vs active police and fire employees is a good example. Several cities seem to want NO firemen in order to pay men who haven’t worked in 40 years. Whatever the promises, that’s not a working plan.
In the same way, it wouldn’t surprise me if the bond on that bridge hasn’t been paid off yet, and the concrete has failed. And guess what? It will cost 1/4 of a bridge just to clean up and pay off the mess. So Genoa will have to pay the new bridge, the old bridge, AND the insurance/clean up. Winning! So yes, overinvesting in infrastructure is a sure path to ruin. You should live as modestly as you can stand, for the other reason that today may be the day we need to contract and go back to the old ways. If you have one 40-story silo instead of 200 modest-sized barns, you can’t just adjust. Infrastructure isn’t flexible. But that efficiency –going fast across the valley, going cheap — is the enemy of resiliency.
But that leads to the other problem: when money if free, you’re guaranteed to overinvest in projects (and underinvest in people). That’s a double-whammy since we’re already not paying wages to living people, but past ones. So where’s your buy-in from the young? Why won’t they say, “Burn it All”? These past people, past projects, decision makers have only destroyed them. That’s not healthy for cohesion and society. Rome fell when the army would sack a Roman city to get paid. That’s more or less what Chicago is doing. Or Athens.
Then these crap bridges, unnecessary vanity projects, made with lying, substandard Japanese steel, fall down. How do you defend that? Defend making another one? Who will trust them when they can’t keep it for 30 years and the Romans 3,000?
All infrastructure. It’s expensive, promising in sunny weather, until the rains.
Taken for granted that the U.S. can crash Turkey at will. Really? What Department is this run out of? What mechanism is used? Does that mean there are very large, unaccountable financial forces around, say a “Dark State”, not a Deep State? Is that where our $21 Trillion went?
Note how Erdogan still says “Galen” when that guy is a nobody, put up in Pennsylvania mostly in violation of the law (training and arming his Muslim followers, not all of whom are citizens; certainly he isn’t), when he’s really just a CIA puppet given multi-millions to sit around in luxury and do their bidding. If Erdogan dares not say the blatant obvious, apparent to pre-schoolers, how powerful are they? I mean, just say the CIA has a guy on tap, they staged the coup, and are still screwing with us today. He-who-must-not-be-named.
In any case, so this is how the U.S. plans to crash the Euro? Seems like: give it 30 days when the (derivative) contracts come due. Is this to protect Greece? By keeping Turkey busy? Because them looming over Greece and Europe was a big sword, especially with Erdogan running on the Ottoman Empire platform that would restore Islam (under Turkey, ‘natch) all the way out to Austria and Italy. Or will it entice him to attack to distract from his troubles? Either way he’ll end up with Russia, but that was inevitable a while ago, from the coup or earlier with India and the SCO. I don’t see how you can take out something as large as Turkey without crashing the banks in Europe…which of course we want to do. In 2018. As advertised by the 1988 Economist.
I heard a more sensible theory of VanGogh, who was in fact a crazy man, to say nothing of the drugs they were giving him as a result. It says that he and Gauguin used to fight all the time, well recorded in history. This one time they were fighting worse than usual and Gauguin used a sword to defend himself, cutting off Vincent’s ear. Now both were friends, were drunk, and very sorry, however, you can’t exactly explain this to the Gendarmes, who will need to arrest someone for what would be no good end at all. So they had to come up with an idiot story of two drunken crazy men, to put it off harmlessly…at least in the legal sense. I think this makes a lot more sense in the big picture, but shows the power of lies that no one questions them, and they have legs centuries after that one night’s needs-must-drive, has long passed.
Yeah, he’s whistling down the wind. U.S. romance Russia away from China? In this environment? Are the odds 0% or 0.0%? So nice going neocon media, that may have been your only chance for even a small rearguard action. China and Russia won’t break now for 50 years.
Odd part is, these guys TOTALLY 100% to the death believe in the MacKinder theory, even after air flight and space strikes, but then these are the same dinosaurs who believe Russia is communist. Russia hasn’t been the USSR in 30 years. There are Colonels, maybe even Generals who weren’t even born when the Soviet Union fell. For the love of God read a newspaper or something, times have changed. They’re doing the same with a race war in a country that doesn’t have race anymore. Everyone is intermixed, intermarried, with peoples from all over in every corner. Tibetan minority in rural Vermont? Serbians in Chicago, Ethiopians in Ohio? You got it. Intermarrying freely? Yup. Yet these tone-deaf nonagenarians and their media handmaidens think there are only two races…at least whenever it’s convenient. There aren’t even only two races or “purity” whatever the heck that means even in the “white” hinterlands like West Virginia, to say nothing of Georgia (hello Atlanta). This isn’t 1962 back when you were 40. It’s different. It’s just media nonsense and villainous stereotyping. /r
Back to MacKinder’s possibly false but certainly outdated theory, there is a corollary: if pan-Asia can confront and defeat the Anglo sea power of Oceana, then what about the Americas? Aren’t they big? Where do they fit in? Well, looking from the failed war of 1812 to recapture the colonies, the Crimean war, the attempt of division and dissent in the US Civil War, back to the sale of Alaska and the re-attempt on Russia in 1917, you can see a ping-pong action of similar interests and attacks. Russia backed the Union in the Civil War and floated their ships into NYC to keep off any British ideas of blockade in favor of the South. The U.S. invaded Siberia in 1900 against Japan. These US-Russian alliances, maybe dalliances, are footnotes of history, never mentioned in the main text.
My theory is that if there’s a MacKinder heartland theory, there’s another theory of equal or greater force: Keep the U.S. and Russia from ever uniting, by any means necessary. Revolution, Cold War, sabotage, engineered fabrications, fake missile launches, stark-raving nonsense, doesn’t matter. Because by any outside view, the U.S. and Russia have the most in common and are natural allies with similar outlooks — a thing often mentioned in the late Cold War.
So again I ask at Helsinki, what would happen if the U.S. and Russia stopped being enemies? What would happen? Something? Nothing? Who would be their enemy? Maybe the nation that used their secret service to inject false stories to rig the 2016 election? The secret service can’t seem to get any stories straight about Salisbury, nor find their head with both hands except for baseless, illogical allegations that are used against only one nation? Perhaps Mackinder said this himself somewhere; I haven’t read his full works. It would be only logical, though: if you’re at mortal risk of one continental railroad power, wouldn’t you be at twice the risk for two? And if they combined….
Now wouldn’t you be really mad if there were someone who could destroy all that hard work and bad feelings with a 10 minute senate testimony? Have a nice weekend. It’s not slowing down any.
Outside news:
To make their point about how they’re pro human rights, Saudi Arabia decided to crucify someone. I only wish I was kidding. And then attacked that well-known villain Canada. But they’re our closest ally, so it’s all good.
Congress says to save Democracy, they need to eliminate free speech. Again, I wish I was kidding. Because that’s what America stands for, n’est-ce pas? P.S. the U.S. is not a democracy, it’s a Republic. A Republic assures the rights of the minority and the minority opinion. This is why.
So and so hates Free trade and approves of tariffs to save people….except when Trump does it. Predictable.
And the sanctions are the best possible way to help Russia and assure SCO and the Silk Road. Russia is forced to unite with China and become independent and strong in all things, unable to be attacked or embargoed, and they get to offload the short-term domestic pain by saying it’s America’s fault. Imagine if Putin had just done this out of the blue as a pre-emptive measure, anticipating the eventuality. He’d be attacked and weakened as life in Russia is hard enough. When Obama/Trump do it though, he’s a hero to create (and pretty rapidly) his domestic work, industry, and food. So thanks!
P.S., it wouldn’t shock me if the diplomats and oligarchs they’ve specifically sanctioned are troublemakers Putin wanted out anyway, but needed an excuse. Why not?
The other party affected is Europe who finds out the U.S. is no help, helping themselves while crushing the Euro economy, while losing all the developing Russian market, so they can find out what Russia was doing for them. Presently, they have to choose between Iran, a country the size of Maryland, or trading with the whole United States, with a $15T GDP. They chose Iran.
“If Europeans stop trading with Iran and don’t put pressure on US then we will reveal which western politicians and how much money they had received during nuclear negotiations to make #IranDeal happen.” –Raman Ghavami, Iranian senior advisor.
Yes, this is the deal that was never a deal, since no one’s read it (according to John Kerry) and was never signed. By anyone. But hey, stick with Iran on that. Good on ya.
Agree and so do most on my side of politics. Private companies.
BUT! Not so clear.
1. They have user agreements they are using to ban people. Okay, cool. However, their weasel-worded legal agreements still say they are a neutral platform. They are presently being sued for breach of contract, which is oddly appropriate. They could of course just say, “It’s my house and I ban everyone who disagrees with me” but that wouldn’t have created the appropriate illusion. Also,
2. If you have only 40% of the population, because you’ve banned/shadow banned/antagonized the rest of your potential audience, then perhaps your stock is 40% overpriced? Or worse, since you’re past saturation and have no growth premium? In fact, a bunch of your accounts are false, since they exist but are abandoned by your actions. Maybe you can ask only 40% lower price for ads?
3. Sherman anti-trust laws are well into effect here. Not that they’ve been enforced for 100 years except against the little guy in favor of the big conglomerates (See interlocking Board of Directors in every top company), but they should be enforced as a contract with have with permission of being a monopoly. Facebook, Twitter, Google, de facto utilities, totally regulated…unless you break them into 100 pieces, which is a pleasant option. Then their stock prices again will reflect their non-monopoly, utility pricing.
4. They’re not actually private. Nothing of importance is. With Amazon taking $250m from the CIA — coincidentally the exact price of buying the WaPo and thereafter publishing nothing but CIA talking points — it’s pretty clear there is universal entanglement of Government and Social Media interests. Since a school that takes even $1 can no longer pray before an off-site football game, why are companies held to a different standard? If Amazon, Facebook, Google, take $1 in government money, they too must obey Queensbury Rules and enforce non-partisan free speech, etc, as a government agent. Goose. Gander.
So much for being “privately owned.” They’re not. What is it Smith says, the RoI of government is 10-100x actual business investment? No one in America makes money without buying a Senator. They can’t, because their competition will, and drive them out of business. Looking at you, Musk and Bezos, Zuck who took over for the U.S. Army’s “LifeLog” project.
What was that quote by Benny somebody-or-other? “Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power.” Not independent. Wish that they were.
That said, What are they thinking??? You’re trying to use your enemy’s platform to defeat them? You think they’re just going to sit around and let you do that? OF COURSE they’re going to shut you down, legally, illegally, they don’t care. They’re going to use it to track every rebel and dissident, and you’re going to help your people get on their lists. Why on EARTH would you make your major presence on their platform? Anyone? I’m talking to the readers and viewers too. Crikey.
