California Coyotes on Drugs? Alternet
Retreating Clinton Campaign Torches Iowa Town To Slow Advance Of Sanders Volunteers Onion (David L)
Dazed Marco Rubio Wakes Up In Koch Compound To Find Cold Metal Device Installed Behind Ear Onion (David L)
The End of Twitter New Yorker. Twitter appears to remain the preferred venue for journalists.
How one Macalester student helped his dad fight PTSD-fueled night terrors MinnPost (Chuck L)
Why is Cornell University hosting a GMO propaganda campaign? Ecologist. Better yet, funded by the Gates Foundation.
Vaccines, drugs, and Zipf distributions VoxEU. Confirms the instinct that drug companies make more from treating HIV than they would from devising a vaccine.
Goldman Sachs executive takes ‘personal leave’ amid Malaysian fund corruption probes RT
Japan Goes Negative
In shocking move, Japan adopts negative interest rate as deflation fight falters Japan Times
Bank of England promises to ‘up our game’ to avoid civil war Telegraph
Brazil’s Olympic Costs Up Another $100 Million on Electric Bills Bloomberg (resilc)
Refugee Crisis
Greek match delayed as players stage sit-down protest over migrant deaths Guardian
AFD chief will be necessary to shoot at refugees Handelsblattt (guurst). German original here.
Syraqistan
You have now landed in Geneva, Syria RT (resilc)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Anaheim police have secretly been using cell phone surveillance devices KPCC. And the ACLU is suing them.
2016
Understanding the Trump/Sanders Constituencies: Inequality Is Something the Elites Did Beat the Press (Fresno Dan, Steve Waldman)
The Sikh man who stood up to Trump BBC
Why Does Twitter Refuse to Shut Down Donald Trump? Lauren Weinstein (Chuck L)
Donald Trump: The Art of Losing the Deal New Yorker (furzy)
Trump Overtakes Cruz in Des Moines Register/Bloomberg Politics Iowa Poll Wall Journal
Hillary Clinton Gets $13 Million From Health Industry, Now Says Single-Payer Will “Never, Ever Come To Pass” International Business Times. Circulate widely.
The Clinton System New York Review of Books (MW. Ray P). Details some unquestionably corrupt moves by the Clintons to advance the interests of the Clinton Foundation, who dutifully kicked more in as a presumed payback.
Ray P reminds us of this 2015 story: Clinton Foundation Donors Got Weapons Deals From Hillary Clinton’s State Department International Business Times
” … 22 Clinton emails contained top secret information.” LA Times Sic Semper Tyrannis (resilc)
No, the Hillary Email Story Will Never, Ever Go Away Charles Pierce, Esquire (resilc). Never knew he had a soft spot for dinosaurs….
Quotations From Madame Hillary Counterpunch. Counterpunch, which was attacking Sanders all the time a month or so ago, suddenly seems to have grokked the idea that that was tantamount to endorsing Clinton….
Inevitability Lost: the Clintonites Strike Back Andrew Levine, Counterpunch
Bernie Sanders moves from fringe to zeitgeist Financial Times. Interesting, the comments are generally positive…and perhaps more important, anti-Clinton.
The Escalating Media Assault on Bernie Sanders Bill Moyers (steve h)
A Panel of Experts Trying to Defend Walmart From Bernie Sanders? Awkwaaard Good (Phil D)
Japan’s Devaluation and Iowa Voters Barrons. Google the headline.
The Framers’ “Demagogues” Are Our Charismatic Party Leaders. What to Do? Washington Monthly
Flint
Lead and Race In Flint—And Everywhere Else Mother Jones
Michael Moore: 10 Things They Won’t Tell You About the Flint Water Tragedy, But I Will EcoWatch (Glenn F)
Rick Snyder Won a Governing Magazine Award After Flint’s Switch to Poison Water Slate (resilc)
CalPERS is underfunded and unrealistic. Can it save itself? Los Angeles Times (resilc). As we’ve pointed out, this is the elephant in the room that retiring CEO Anne Stausboll refused to address. It’s being dumped on her successor.
US consumer is the last defense against strong dollar drag on the economy Sober Look
Oil price crash: Saudis told to embrace austerity as debt defaults loom Telegraph
The Big-Oil Bailouts Begin Wolf Street
Class Warfare
How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix The Prison System Man Eating Robot. (MS). The scary part is that this is serious. People need real social interaction, not better interfaces.
Declining Life Expectancy: Brought to You by Washington Counterpunch
How the Homeless Population Is Changing — and Becoming Much More Vulnerable The Conversation
Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap” El Pais (martha r). Important. This article is mainly about inequality, which Bauman was early to identify as a “metastasis”.
Antidote du jour. Propertius: “Minnie the Wonder Dog, channeling her inner Dire Wolf”:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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HT Skluzacek for myBivy…
And I feel like I’m being eaten
By a thousand million shivering furry holes
And I know that in the morning
I will wake up in the shivering cold
And the spider man is always hungry
The Cure / Lullaby
sounds like you’re in bad shape.
when I get like that it’s 1) xanax, 2) red wine and 3) Youtube.
I think we’ve got Ed Bucks the MIT Mathematical Economist ready to realize he won’t see “the Face of God” in the tree there in New Hampshire woods and there aren’t any equations for it. All he’s gonna see is a bunch of deer. That’s not really God. He wants to come back to the University and back to his equilibrium — sitting in his office with the heater on looking out the window. He wants to write on a blackboard and mess around in MatLab. It certainly takes a unique disposition to see ideas of order that are not entirely clear to most people. I’m not sure Ed was the right person for that — although he tried in his own determined way — but if you need help with stochastic calculus, like I do, then Ed is the guy for you!
Why can’t a Sanders/Trump ticket be the winner? Even Josephus left the cave and became a Roman. You do know what I’m talking about don’t you? I hope so. You need to have people who understand where you’re coming from.
stochastic calculus
All I need to do is see the terms “Stochastic process”, “Brownian Motion”, “Finance” or “Economics” used in the same paragraph, then I quickly decide my time is better spent watching Youtube. I know BS when I see it. Even if it does use symbols not found on a computer keyboard, but you may find them in MatLab.
what if you just see “Stochastic Calculus” and “Brownian Motion”. But you don’t see Finance or Economics.
Do you still want to vomit, or do you think to yourself “Hmmm. That looks like something I can dig into!” hahaha
See the thing is, you do one for a while and then you go to Youtube. Back and forth, back and forth. With an average of 1.5 hrs of one and 3 hours of the other, but with a perturbation factor that’s a random variable around the mean so you can’t anticipate exactly what happens each hour. After a while you look back and you say “I’ve watched 14 hours of Rhianna and Adele videos and I’ve studied stochastic calculus for 7 hours.” That sounds about right.
actually I’m only on the basic calculus stuff, that’s why I need Ed to help me.
Back in engineering school, they only made the chemical engineers take Stochastic Calculus. But I can’t remember hardly any math from school anymore, so it all makes me vomit when I look at it. Except if it’s all done already. My quad flight controller firmware uses matrix algebra and Euler numbers to crunch data from gyro and accelerometer sensors. Then there are various PID control algorithms (proportional-integral-derivative) taking in the sensor data and doing digital servo control controlling the motor drivers. But the math is all reduced, solved and coded already, so I don’t have to think about it too much. That makes things a lot easier. haha.
I think what Ed maybe had in mind was to test out Stochastic Calculus on deer, being kinda a step up from gas in jar, and see how it went. If things looked promising, he could move up to chimps next.
But it looks like maybe he gave up and is now soul searching back at the office. Like maybe he should be a chemical mathematician instead of a finance mathematician, even tho the pay isn’t anywhere near as good.
If I take the indefinite integral Summa over Rhianna times Adele 2x dx for some reason i keep gettinng (Diana Ross + Linda Rondstat)/Cher.
I’m not sure about Cher but I just can’t figure out where I’m going wrong Mathwise even after a few blunts and some Spanish wine. I’m trying to use integration by parts but no trigonometric substitutions, that’s’ too confusing
I guess it doesn’t really matter. But it’s good practice.
That guy Euler, he got around. I always thought he was You-ler until some Youtube video said it was Oil-er. He’s always You-ler to me. Why is that America’s are expected to speak foreign names accented properly but Eurotrash comes over here, hits the nightclubs, butchers the American language with accents and gets laid? Maybe it’s the money. So that means it”s not the accent. You-ler. You-ler. You-ler’s constant. You-ler. That’s American.
Was it really Josephus or his ‘Shadow?’ Don’t forget all that “Render unto Cesar…” stuff.
The Imponderables.
But C’man, what if it’s Trump/Sanders?
Because they agree on very little, except the need for more domestic spending, and for that spending to be targeted at infrastructure and the working class (though they say middle because Americans have pretensions of independence). The pleasant thing is that America’s two political parties have agreed on half hearted austerity and privatization for decades, getting them to agree on even half hearted investment would be a sea change. If Eisenhower and Nixon were scared to buck the FDR consensus, and Clinton and Obama were scared (or more likely corrupted out wanting) to buck the Reagan consensus, we can all hope for a Republican or Democrat in 2024 scared to buck the Sanders or Trump consensus.
You don’t really combine Xanax and alcohol, do you? That’s alarming.
You’re sleeping rough? If so I’m very sorry to hear this.
Oh, I see this is what you were referring to.
“How Soylent and Oculus Could Fix The Prison System”
This is a prime example of why they call geeks…geeks.
Even so, one quibble. He forgot the Facebook page and Twitter account. You could give these to pot smokers and shoplifters that don’t really deserve solitary confinement.
Holy sh*t. Somebody actually made a food product and named it “Soylent”?!? Is it green, too? Who are these sick f***s and why would anyone buy their probably cannibalistic food-like product?
I read about “Soylent” a couple years ago. It was the idea of a computer geek (in SV) whom was all twitterpated about wasting time eating. So he “researched” nutrition and mixed up some vitamins and protein drink stuff and named it “Soylent”, because cleverness. I think he wasn’t aware of fiber, so I imagine he spends a lot of time coding in the bathroom.
Soylent also called Boost, Ensure, etc.
Well, according to
craazyboy
January 31, 2016 at 9:51 am
there are no people in it. Now, it strikes me the geek is skirting copyright infringement, trademark violations, and patent infringement by using the term “Soylent” – kinda like selling something labeled Tifany instead of Tiffany. All depends on how critical “green” is.
But it strikes me that without “PEOPLE” in the soylent, it really is false advertising. Its like Hawaiian punch without the 1% real fruit juice – without that, you may as well be drinking KoolAid
Not to mention the lack of important vitamins and nutrients.
Plus, real Soylent Green is just the tastiest stuff in the world. I’ve had Soylent Green where they skimp on the main ingredient, and it just doesn’t have that rich, satisfying flavor of Soylent Green that doesn’t have fillers and artificial ingredients….
You have to read the label and check for “artificial people flavor”. It’s the only way to know whether you’re getting the good stuff or not. Avoid the stuff on Ebay – it’s made with cloned people.
Always read the label!!! That is excellent advice!
but, I am sad to report, and it seems almost unbelievable, but the same Soylent canners that adulterate their Soylent with rats, moles, voles, mice, bugs, worms, and …yuck – horsemeat!!! – do not list extraneous ingredients on the label!!!
I know it is shocking….
It is a particular problem with Asian suppliers….
(WARNING – YOU MAY WANT TO STOP READING….)
(you have been warned!!!!)
(its not too late to turn back)
Which is really to bad…..because I love to eat Chinese.
Country-of-origin labeling was repealed in the name of anti-racism. Sorry about that.
GMO people is Frankenfood.
NY Times Endorses Hillary.
3000+ comments, summarized: “HELL NO!”
Time to do what the Guardian is doing and blame the commentariat under the banner of becoming “responsible hosts”:
http://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/jan/31/comments-audience-censorship-criticism
That’s about as edgy and surprising as a panda bear endorsing bamboo.
… or the “fox community” endorsing federal aid for hen house construction.
Tastes like chicken!
From day one, I have been less than enthusiastic about our triangulating couple, but I find myself falling behind, more and more, in the heavenly rage of love to hatred turned.
But what is is…except on those occasions when we are not sure what is is.
The Times Endorses Hillary Clinton with a Banner Ad from Citigroup
The New York Times has a long, storied history of getting it wrong about who is a proper advocate for women. In January 1868, Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Parker Pillsbury initiated publication of The Revolution, a news weekly hoping to spark another political revolution. Anthony and Stanton, who would lead the revolution to secure U.S. women the right to vote in 1920 (a disgraceful 144 years after the founding of our “democracy”) were ridiculed by the New York Times. It wrote at the time:
“Our women – a great many of them – ‘Nelly and Kitty, and Dolly and Ketty, and Dorothy Draggletail,’ are anxious to give a helping hand in the government of the world and set things to right, in a general way, and chiefly by means of the ballot-box. We think they are all wrong…
“The ladies mistake their own case, and the world’s case as well. They have power and influence enough – exercised as these are in the sacred places and citadels for the sake of which men go out, and work and trade and fight and run from one end of the world to the other – their homes…
“If women were to quit their family sphere, as a general thing society would run wild or drop loose. They are deficient enough in the practice of those home duties, as matters are at present.”
The Times also famously led the false propaganda campaign that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction in the lead up to the Iraq war – which Hillary Clinton voted for — only to issue a weak apology later, writing: “In some cases, information that was controversial then, and seems questionable now, was insufficiently qualified or allowed to stand unchallenged. Looking back, we wish we had been more aggressive in re-examining the claims as new evidence emerged — or failed to emerge.”
And it was a steady editorial drumbeat at the Times that helped Citigroup and Bill Clinton overturn the Glass-Steagall Act, which it also ended up admitting was a dead wrong decision. In a July 27, 2012 editorial, the Times sheepishly apologized:
http://wallstreetonparade.com/2016/01/the-times-endorses-hillary-clinton-with-a-banner-ad-from-citigroup/
Looking less fit all the time??
They look more than ever as a part of the status quo.
Thanks for the history.
However, perhaps they are helping to educate the public, in that being so wrong about so much, reminds people that there are two (or more) sides to every news report…
Can’t wait for Trump and Bernie to win their respective nominations, then watch as the NYT figures out which one to endorse. Pass the popcorn.
That’s an easy one. Bloomberg.
Bloomberg, Romney, Resurrected Corpse of Reagan……the choices are infinite.
Wow, it’s now just under 5000. They’ve closed comments. I scrolled down through the first batch and could not find a single one in favor of her.
Regarding the drivers of Bolinas: Firstly, they are highly accustomed to dogs in the road, dogs there being like cows in India, who might sit in the road or take a ten minutes walk down the middle of the road. This coyote is not much different. Secondly, one must not discount the likelihood that the driver(s) are the ones on magic mushrooms. Thirdly, the people (who most likely are also the drivers) of Bolinas are famous for hostility to outsiders and thinking of ways of discouraging people from visiting, suggesting a media plant for this purpose. And if that doesn’t make sense, see mushrooms.
in a vetted tasting panel Bolinas coyotes prefer blue caps
A very important note: aminata shrooms are not “magic mushrooms”. If you want the true magic mushroom experience (something that can be truly wonderful and inspiring), stick to psilocybe species. Out of the various psychedelics I’ve, uh, seen other people doing, the psilocybe experience is definitely the warmest and most thought provoking.
Agreed. Nothing is more tediously aggravating, yet flashed through with episodes of pure terror than trying to help someone through a bad trip. Redhead shrooms are very dangerous, even to the well ‘travelled.’ (The original comment mentioned cow pastures which makes me think that they might be mistaking the psilocybe varieties for something else.)
I wondered when I read the article yesterday if this phenomenon explains the Native stories about the Coyote Trickster.
Like tripping while you have the flu. Don’t do it.
Regarding your favorite magic mushroom, medical studies indicate that it can, for some, induce temporary aphasia. Perhaps your “the warmest” observation is a reflection of this.
Much of the significant contemporary medical work has been done at Johns Hopkins.
coyotes on peyote
Here’s the video that goes with the Hillary single-payer article. Wow, she sure knows how to inspire.
Shorter Hillary: “We are why you can’t have nice things.”
Sorry, Lambert, that quote is to be used exclusively for #JamieDimon.
The quote specifies “we,” as in plural, so I think it should be applied liberally to any and all flexians.
Not mutually exclusive.
But it’s the royal “we”.
That’s depressing as she basically says “Support me because I know we can’t make things better like the stupid people running against me believe” to cheering and waving.
Obama said “Hope”
Hillary says “Give up”
Hillary says “Nope.”
…the audacity of “nope.”
I thought this was an interesting contrast to Hillary and her “never, ever”.
If Hillary was honest (ha!) she would have finished her thought.
“Single payer will never, ever come to pass … if I have anything to say about it.”
Flint. At the next Democratic and Republican debates glasses of Flint water should be placed before each candidate and (preferably) Megyn Kelly (because she is poison enough) should ask: “So, whoever really, really wants to be president — drink the water.”
Hill & Cruz would fight over the glass.
The Flint crimes.
Speechless.
Truly. Nothing screams out “infrastructure investments leading to well paid employment” louder than this. Instead Obama gave us trickle down. I’ve been haunted by the thought all week, (since I think Brooklyn Bridge brought it up? I’ll try to track it down and follow up) about great lakes water, combined with diptherios reports about Carlyle out of montana, regarding privatizing the great lakes water by building a publicly funded water purification system for the disaster capitalized flint/detroit metropolitan area. At first I thought o that’s maybe too foily but then I thought hmmm pipeline through canada from the arctic to take melting glacier water and replenish the great lakes as they are being filtered for eventual sale to the most deserving population and neutralizing global warming at the same time (just phantasmasizing myself into the mindset of a globalist elite to whom every problem has a ridiculously complicated solution that just happens to get them closer to being the first trillionaire).
For those who travel or live outside the US, the state of US infrastructure is really embarrassing.
Try any rural road or train station or subway or bus or bridge or highway or airport in France sometime (same debt/GDP as the US) and get depressed.
Or try many “third world” airports (let alone second or first world) and compare them to LAX or Atlanta or JFK.
Your tax dollars at work (blowing up goat herders and wedding parties around the globe).
I just arrived at Singapore’s spotless airport this morning. It took about 15 minutes to get through passport control (including the walk from the gate) and my bag arrived on the belt 5 minutes after that. The ride into town took 20 minutes along perfectly-manicured and planted roads, and cost all of $20 (US). Contrast that with a $50 taxi ride to LaGuardia — in the nation’s financial capital! — on roads that look like they belong in Beirut, and a terminal that could be in some banana republic. (Well, come to think of it, it is in a banana republic!)
Speaking of tax dollars at work, David Swanson at Washington’s blog has an excellent albeit depressing post on US military spending:
What Does a Progressive Budget Look Like?
Spoiler alert: nothing like the budgets of Clinton, Bush, Obama, etc.
Here is the spending, per Swanson, in 2016 dollars:
Norway, can we have that Peace Prize back please?
And Sanders is infinitely better than any recent candidate in history, but he is silent on this $600 billion gorilla in the room.
The NY Review of Books article on the Clinton Money Machine is good for the most part, but still displays an astounding amount of naivete. I mean, consider this gem:
The B&M Gates foundation has nothing to do with the Microsoft corporation…why would anyone think that? {facepalm}
And consider this:
But didn’t we just see a story not too long ago (from Sirota or Dayen I think) about how relatively large percentages of donations to the Clinton Foundation never made it to program work. I seem to recall 10s, if not 100s, of millions being unaccounted for. I guess the author missed that….
Thanks for that!
This is always one of those things where I wonder – – with so, so, sooooo many foundations (Rockefeller, Carnegie, Ford – the list seems almost endless) how is it that so little improvement seems to happen?
If you took the total endowment of each foundation, and just divided the funds among the lower 30%, wouldn’t that actually do more for the needy than all the other rigmarole????
How much money do these foundations actually disperse? How much is that per needy person?
From what I can tell, charitable Foundations (~99% of them, anyway) exist for a couple of reasons:
1) as a tax-dodge for rich folk;
2) as a way to stealthily push a political agenda under the guise of philanthropy, e.g. by making sure grantees stay away from certain areas of inquiry and/or frame issues in a donor-friendly way;
3) as P.R. for rich folk and their corporations;
4) to create an organization with “patronage positions,” i.e. cush jobs that can be used in exchange for political favors (or to make a no-account son/daughter/nephew/niece look respectable);
5) salve for the guilty conscious of rich folk (this is purely speculative–I don’t know if any of them actually feel any guilt);
6) and of course, as a way to launder kickbacks for the abuse of office by politicians that benefits the donors.
As a side-benefit to this system, good organizations occassionally are able to grab some of that foundation cash and use it for legitimate purposes, without being entirely co-opted. But even in that case, reason number 3 still applies.
In the case of non-U.S. donors, #6 probably is the first and only motivation.
‘Oo-ooh that smell! Can’t ya smell that smell?’ — Lynyrd Skynyrd
2) as a way to stealthily push a political agenda under the guise of philanthropy, e.g. by making sure grantees stay away from certain areas of inquiry and/or frame issues in a donor-friendly way;
This is a rapidly growing phenomena among the tech elite, see Gates & Zuck.
I agree that the article is understated but, in a way, that makes it even more powerful. This is grifting on a monumental scale with no restraint or decency. The Clintons belong in prison, not the White House,
Europe Training Financial Firepower on Terrorism
Funny how that budgetary flexibility wasn’t there when people were feeding themselves out of garbage cans
in Ireland, Greece and Spain. How many thousands of premature deaths has austerity caused?
That is the basic question regarding the idea of the government being able to spend as much as it desires.
And the Anaheim police surveillance story is another red flag for the alternative idea of devolving that unlimited spending power from the federal to the local, municipal level.
On the other hand, the idea of giving, or rather, restoring, that power to the Little People is still waiting for more acceptance.
re: Antidote / Minnie…
Over the past few years I have I have realized that human consciousness is not superior or more advanced than that of a dog (or cat). Dogs have access to sensory phenomena that we have no clue as to what it is. Dogs certainly can be teachers to us if we are open and observant.
If you are open and observant, literally everything will have something to teach you.
This world is full to the brim with teachers…however, it could use a few more learners.
Diptherio–
:D
Yeah, man!
–Gaianne
Ever since the link a few days ago about the boundaries of human consciousness (if too many synapses connect we are hallucinators; if too few we are comatose drool) I’ve become convinced that we prefer, and evolve, toward hallucination. The one thing that we cannot abide is boredom. Just imagine how nuts we’ll all be a thousand years from now.
I didn’t read that article, but it seems to me that imagination is much closer to hallucination, and that if cultural evolution depends on imagination (by allowing cultural adaptation through reifying imagined possibilities) then it would make evolutionary sense (if you believe in cultural evolution) for people to be more on the hallucinatory side of the spectrum.
I like this comment so much I’ll chance irrelevance. From Alkon’s ‘Memory’s Voice’ concerning a girl he knew who became catatonic:
Michelle, whose story unfolds in the course of this book, was beaten frequently from the age of eight or nine until she was thirteen or fourteen…
As she adopted strategies to cope, Michelle followed an anatomical path to torment. An assault on her senses was integrated and processed within her brain, determining behavioral outcomes. Working backwards along this path from behavior to sensing, she began by desperately casting about for a behavior that worked. Failing, she resorted to manipulating her own integrative processes. And with no choice left, she altered her sensing capacity itself.
Minnie thanks you for the compliment, Brindle – although she’d appreciate it more if you’d toss her a squeaky toy.
It does seem, however, that she’s more often Fool than Magus.
re: Antidote, Minnie the Wonder Dog as Dire Wolf.
I recognized the look immediately. It is the old dog stare/suggestion: “I think that you, gullible human being, have to leave the room right now. There is a piece of cheese on the table that must be eaten. I am only doing this to protect you.”
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/267600-rent-is-too-damn-high-party-founder-endorses-trump
Jimmy McMillan, an advocate for affordable housing and a Vietnam veteran, told the New York Daily News that Trump’s support for veterans outweighs any negatives.
“He’s the only one who is supporting my brother veterans, which is good enough for me,” McMillan said of the Republican presidential front-runner.
“My main concern is helping my brother veterans get help,” he added. “America needs change.”
McMillan, who also ran for president in 2012, said he wanted Trump to be his vice president at the time.
===========================================
What this made me think about – – and there have obviously been some terrible short circuits in my neurocircuitry – – is the NYT endorsement of Hillary, as well as the Washington Post’s vapors about Sanders’ socialism….
Bear with me.
The information we get through the filter of the media seems to be so conventional, so part of a clique, so stereotypical, that the endorsement by Jimmny McMillian seemed so off the wall, that it seemed as if people are just not acting like they are “supposed” to. I had known McMillian had run for president, but I didn’t know he wanted Trump as VP.
Maybe Sanders’ “socialism” is not the frightful terror to most Americans that the Times and Post think it is. Maybe the “Socialism” that gave TRILLIONS to Goldman Sachs, et al, is the socialism that most Americans really fear and detest…
Maybe this is why the repubs Trump attacks that say he is not a true “conservative” gain no purchase.
Maybe just as noted in CAROLINIANS’s link to the Tucker Carlson commentary that the repubs don’t really know their base (and don’t want to know it, or accept it), maybe the people who write at the Times and Post are so divorced from most of the country that their idea that Sanders can’t prevail is just ridiculous – – I can’t help but think of the French aristocracy?
With Facebook, Tweets, Blogs and really almost any publication you want to read readily available (I OWE a DEBT OF GRATITUDE TO NC FOR GREATLY EXPANDING MY LIBRARY OF PUBLICATIONS, AND THEREFORE MY OUTLOOK, and I suspect this is happening to more and more people), the big papers can no longer claim to be purveyors of critical thinking or great insight. At one time, the argument could be made that they had a greater scope and access to information, but that is obviously no longer true, and by the endorsements they make, they should how estranged from the average person they truly are.
Want to know the difference between Bernie and Trump?. Anytime there is a protest by anyone at a Trump event – they are immediately removed by force and are mocked by the candidate as “loser”, etc.
Given the choice between these outsiders – I support right to have and voice a difference of opinion without being threatened with ejection / violence.
Related to that is the question to Twitter, why doesn’t Twitter shut down Trump?
If what Trump is saying these days violates the freedom of speech, then, not just Twitter, but all forms of media should be denied to him.
If what Trump is doing at his own events violates free speech, then the government should step in.
I believe some pro-Palestinian protestors at a Sanders rally were told to “just shut up.” At another rally they were barred from entry (his campaign later apologized for that one). True, he didn’t call them losers.
And a lot of what Trump says seems to be a crude form of ribbing–his idea of a joke. Boorish, perhaps, but not exactly “hate speech” unless you are a pearl clutcher.
Just a link on the above. People who attend rallies are often passionate supporters who don’t always do the right thing. Cuts both ways.
https://theintercept.com/2015/10/05/dissent-on-israel-not-permitted-at-bernie-sanders-event/
Yep…I concur
Choice between Sandres & Trump: Sanders
Choice between Clinton & Trump: Trump
Any other choices, abstain unless Hillary gets handcuffs and Warren announces: then the next round of debates get interesting (see SSTyrannis link above)
It’s possible that Trump vs. Hilary, Hilary wins.
It’s a long race.
Not predicting the outcome, just my vote. I any of the current crop but Sanders or Trump wins its just another drip of amber onto the embalmed corpse of our politics
Sorry, Mis-read that.
I agree right now Hillary looks like the winner, but Trump would pound relentlessly on her corruption. That would reinforce the Sanders voters and fence-sitters on her staying away. I can see the messaging, variants of “She’s bought and paid for, I’m not beholden to anyone.”
I think he’d shellack her in the debates. He can out arrogant her by a long way. By contrast, Sanders and Trump would largely talk past each other.
The republicans have so much ammo on HRC by now I don’t see how she can win. Here is a scathing 33 minute youtube on her “flip flops”. The editing is pretty crap, but the clips of her contradictions and lies are absolutely damning:
Hillary Clinton’s Flip-Flops
Not sure the fascism vs. not-fascism binary holds up. Corruption and fascism are not necessarily opposed; I seem to remember Hitler awarding his Generals with landed estates, and one of ’em in some some of property boundary fight as late as 1943…
US consumer last defense against strong dollar drag on economy.
What has the economy done for you lately that you need to defend it?
Ia it possible that the economy drags, but with the pie more equitably shared, the life of an average Joe actually improves?
Are we to recall our Pavlovian training and react accordingly to that threat of economy drag?
I am not against consuming all sorts of sh*t….I just don’t got no money!!!! Now, correlation does not prove causation, but nobody sells me anything UNLESS I exchange dollars….sometimes very many dollars, for it. Who knew?
If the FED would only give me a 1/100 of the money they gave to just Goldman Sachs (I don’t even need all the extra from the other banks!!!), the stimulus I could provide. Sex, drugs, and rock and roll. And the multiplier Effect!!!! Its well known that those types of wholesalers are all spendthrifts!!!!!!!
‘The State Department announced that 18 emails exchanged between Mrs. Clinton and President Obama would be withheld, citing the longstanding practice of preserving presidential communications for future release.’ — NYT
Let’s rewind the videotape to March 7, 2015:
It’s not illegal for the president to lie to us (though it’s a 5-year prison sentence if we lie to him or other federal officers).
But the 18 withheld emails are written proof that Obama knew Hillary was running a private server.
So he owes her a pardon, after ‘justice’ takes its course …
Couldn’t he have exchanged eamils with the Sec. of State without knowing Clinton’s personal email system was run from her home?
The surveillance underlings might have known, but did he?
The red flag is ‘personal email system,’ not ‘run from her home.’
It could have been situated in the Mount Weather COG (continuity of government) bomb shelter. But it would still have been an unsecured personal email server.
The Times story says the additional 18 were just presidential communications, not classified. They could have been talking about the weather.
Although, given the frequency with which government servers have been compromised over the last few years one wonders if there isn’t some security advantage to being a small, inconspicuous, not-.gov and not-.mil target. It’s not that I don’t appreciate the three years of “credit monitoring, identity monitoring, identity theft insurance, and identity restoration services” I’ve been offered by OPM – I’d just rather they’d been a little more careful in the first place.
Just how far does the ” selective incompetence ” defense go with President NSA BlackBerry Drone Obama?
I looked like a real Luddite there, forgetting the dot gov extension.
Brazil Olympics.
The real Olympian corruption is what has been done to the spirit of the games. Very few real amateur athletes. Many are professionals already or competing with delay future payments.
Maybe only the lowly volunteers are the only real amateurs.
dog: “hand over the bacon pieces in your pocket and nobody gets hurt.”
Yup. That’s definitely Minnie – although she wouldn’t turn up her nose at a nice plate of lamb vindaloo, either.
Lamb vindaloo! That is one tough dog! “No more ‘Bad Breath In Dogs!'”
The escalating media assault on Sanders.
Well, 10, that’s ten, publishers accounts for 1/2 of online news. A few people can have disproportionate impact.
Can a president do anything about that? I think that should be addressed before we can take on any inequality issues.
From the linked LA Times editorial on Calpers:
Let’s review the history:
For half a century, it’s been accepted that stock returns offer an ‘equity premium’ over bond returns. Its size is debated, but the facts show that bonds have returned about 5 percent over the past 90 years, while stocks returned nearly 10 percent.
Advocating that Calpers roll back the clock to invest in 75 percent bonds, when long Treasuries yield only 2 percent, is financial Luddism.
Next: an LA Times editorial opposing the teaching of evolution in public schools.
thanks for the history lesson!
Over weighting to bonds is as foolish as getting caught up in a stock bubble and buying all tech – – barn doors, horses…..
One would think that Calpers would just go with a low cost total stock market index and a total bond fund index re balanced annually (having a long term horizon, undoubtedly they could overweight to stocks). But of course, than the politicians might have to acknowledge that they are under funding the pensions, and that is either going to upset state employees, or state taxpayers…easier to self delude that plenty of money will be earned by hedge fund out performance….
Unless we do the full Japanese experience and stocks drop to 25% of what they are now and stay there for a couple decades, while the Fed feverishly pushes Treasury rates down to zero forevah.
That’ll last until we get real climate change and then on to Mad Max World. They didn’t even have a stock market in Mad Max!
When pension managers expect 6-8% returns and the result is far far less, will the pensioner revolution begin when retirees realize that their benefits may be cut by 2/3?
Ed Ring is the executive director at the California Policy Center.
The California Public Policy Center is a right-wing pressure group based in California. Founded in June 2010, it is a state affiliate of the $83 million right-wing State Policy Network (SPN), a web of state pressure groups that denote themselves as “think tanks” and drive a right-wing agenda in statehouses nationwide.
NYTimes endorses Hillary?
I donate to Bernie.
Simple. As. That.
Wish there were a Smash the MSM Foundation to which we could donate.
The MSM is the enemy.
Jim, look for the tip jar wherever muck rakes are sold.
perpetualWAR, winner takes all, so I suggest contouring accordingly. If only there were a way to non-transferably pledge to Sanders contingent upon his ongoing campaign…
Understanding the Trump/Sanders Constituencies: Inequality Is Something the Elites Did Beat the Press (Fresno Dan, Steve Waldman)
There is an important point that Judis leaves out of his story. The policies that have led to so much upward redistribution were not simply “free market,” they were policies that were designed to redistribute income upward.
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Not to beat a dead horse, but the propaganda about the “free” market and “free” trade, when it is ALL about diminishing competition and increasing profits, means that I now look upon market advocates the way I look upon self proclaimed patriots – as scoundrels. Some of the stuff I read about how some shills just can’t figure out why this is happening, or it is some unstoppable confluence of modern technology and “free” trade (we would be so much worse off without that “free” trade!!!!) – – WHY, it just happens!!! Its nature. Its God’s will!!!! (Pay no attention to those thousands upon thousands of lobbyists on K street that get paid millions upon millions – they are just there to lobby for national shoestring day or national hotdog appreciation week. Nothing to do with money….)
The way the constitution has been defiled merely for the purpose of increasing Hollywood and corporate profits by changing intellectual “protections” is unconscionable – it is a very good example of how moneyed interests screws the average person. But in our Orwellian world, the rich socialists who extract excess rents with the force of the governments gun, paint themselves as believing in the free market when they are the exact opposite. Well, I guess if someone paid me millions I would say the sun is the moon, and the moon is the sun.
If you are getting your trade free, you are the product. Your rights as an worker are being transacted.
If you are getting your market free, you are, again, the product. Your rights as a consumer are being transacted.
I’m concerned that there might be a factual error in the Onion article about Marco Rubio. The article clearly states that the device is implanted behind his left ear, yet the photograph shows him fingering his right ear. I’m very disappointed that such an error could occur at America’s most trusted news source.
Somebody probably just flipped the negative when they printed the photo, I wouldn’t let it make you doubt the veracity of the Onion.
being a delicate device, I would imagine the power/volume switch would be behind the opposite ear…
Many members of the Zweibel family are now resting uneasily in the graves. Yet in spite of it all, The Onion is till the nation’s most trusted news source and oracle.
The Cornell Alliance for Science, CAS, is representing the opinion and goals of Monsanto which is half(?) owned by Bill Gates. CAS’s job is to propagandize like a snow plow clearing the way for Gates and Monsatan to grow GMO in Africa to “feed” Africans and to do vertically integrated food production from poison crops to poison irradiated dinners to the mouths of Africans kept starving by policy and chaos. And after they have proved that GMO food doesn’t kill anyone acutely they will push their way into the USA with all our unenforced laws, and giveaways for big international corporations. And etc. The best way to put Monsanto out of bz is to create the alternative food industry that all of us want. Why should we let them keep us hungry as an agribusiness policy or sick as a pharma and insurance policy.
Thank you for linking Zygmunt Bauman: “Social media are a trap” El Pais.
Bauman bring up the choice between freedom and security, but I think he fails to examine (or at least present) that choice thoroughly. Security is inherently static, and that is a danger in itself, in addition to the compromise of (some) freedom (taking freedom to mean access to responsibility and opportunity, as opposed to permission to be any dumb thing without consequences). Freedom, on the other hand, allows opportunity to risk. Risk is also two-sides, one may succeed or fail, gain or lose. That is where intelligence and observation (and experimentation) come in. The careful observer can devise strategies addressing risk, and thus increase the net ration of benefit against loss. In other words, security is attractive if one doubts 1) one’s own intelligence, and 2) the general case for intelligence (and knowledge/science) being effective. I call on you to think of your own areas of skill and experience: doesn’t it give you the ability to take on challenges that other’s might chose to avoid?
So the choice between security and freedom is not bivalent, unless we dismiss our own intelligence and capability for careful judgement.
Also, Bauman’s observations on social media are certainly perceptive and telling, but again limited. I think he fails to make an important distinction between social media as a product (SM, or SMaaS if you will), and social interaction that leverages available (“new” or old) technology. People will not become suddenly wise just by interacting on SM, especially if they do not anticipate that they will experience new things. When confronted with challenging new information, they may withdraw, as Bauman discusses. Access to a medium does not create the need for the medium. On the other hand, the open source software movement, which by now can be said to have clearly proven it’s worth (“… you’re soaking in it!”), was only possible through the advent and reach of email (the second wave or electronic social media after IRC, and for that matter the IRC is not clearly appreciated outside of it’s own circle, but it’s impact on the world has been profound). Contemporarily, Twitter, Facebook, et al are flooded with garbage, but people interested in doing something useful with them are able to do so. Bauman says: “Social media don’t teach us to dialogue because it is so easy to avoid controversy.”, again, it’s simplistic and naive (and buying into the marketing of computer technology) to think that exposure causes or rapidly produces learning. And certainly we have educational woes; electronic communication will never fix those problems, it may however be used as a channel for the discussion and distribution of initiatives towards remedies. Of course, any such channel can be abused, especially when leveraged against the inexperienced and ignorant. So lets blame irrational idealism, and bad actors; but these things are not brought about (or solved) by any medium.
So although Bauman may sound appealing to the armchair intellectual (while stroking the armchaired by implying that one isn’t in one if one follows his reasoning), I find his thrust to be simply a two-dimensional rationalization (also, straw-man). I also see an overuse of deductive reasoning; lazy application of deduction tends to ignore induction. Even Sherlock Holmes used induction to solve many of his cases, he just didn’t mention it as a contrasting strategy, which he would use after deducing scenarios in which induction might succeed (see intelligence and risk, above).
thank you for that – I really enjoyed your analysis and gave me a banquet for thought….
“When confronted with challenging new information they may withdraw as Bauman discusses.”
What Bauman actually points out is that many individuals(without initially being confronted with challenging new information) seem to use social media primarily as a network to create comfort zones for themselves where the only sounds they hear (or allow) are the echoes of their own voices and– in this sense–social media becomes a trap.
The social media network becomes a substitute for a community without dissenting voices.
That certainly does happen.
But I don’t think that’s static. People’s messages to each other change over time, and there are ways to inject ideas based on the existing contexts. Which is of course another vector for abuse, but it’s also possible to leverage it constructively.
I don’t think Bauman is very far wrong about anything, I just think he stops short when things get dramatic and challenging, instead of looking for and finding escapes from the traps.
It’s like saying, “all tires go flat, eventually”. That seems true. OMG! So… let’s not go anywhere? The implications bother me. There are ways to repair tires. There are solid core tires (for bikes). There are things one can do. Looking at all the things helps us set priorities and agree with each other on them. Convergence happens, except if one stops dead.
It’s just my 2 cents.
RE: The Clinton System New York Review of Books (MW. Ray P).
All of this sliminess is chronicled in even greater detail in the book Clinton Cash, and it is as nauseating as it is brazen.
The tag team of an ex-president who will never again run for elected office and his wife who is just beginning her elected career at the senate level is unprecedented in us history. It is also an unprecedented opportunity to run a lucrative influence-peddling scam on the grandest of scales.
In my humble opinion, enabling this scheme and protecting it from scrutiny is the real reason for the clinton basement server. There is more than a passing connection between sidney blumenthal’s business in Libya e-mail and “we came, we saw, he died.” He had every reason to expect his business concerns in newly “liberated” Libya to be taken seriously. It was the clinton family business.
Sic Temper Tyrannis is “puzzled” about how bill could have let her do this to herself. The scope and profitability of this global grift would seem to answer that question. If a few “confidential” e-mails got caught up along the way, so what. The clintons know better than most that this global war on terrorism is largely an orchestrated hoax in service of the empire.
And, just like Benghazi, all this talk of felonies, indictments and “jail” can just be explained as so much vast, right-wing conspiracy blah, blah blah.
The one thing they may not have counted on, though, is……Trump, who can turn ted cruz into a Canadian with a goofy grimace and a wave of the hand.
In a certain way, one has to admire the sheer brazenness and perfidy of the Clintons.
Now that 21 email chains designated top secret have been withheld from release, Hillary has effortlessly pivoted to advocating their release (knowing they won’t be), as if she’s the one with nothing to hide.
Vote Hillary … for the second-most transparent administration in history!
With Hilary, it looks like transparent opacity.
With many candidates, it’s opaque transparency.
That is a very, very interesting insight!
It reminds me of the “Die Hard” movie – the terrorism is just a scam to cover a robbery – they are nothing but common crooks.
With the Clintons, politics is just a cover – gifting is not what they do on the side, it is their raison d’être…..
they don’t accept bribes to become president, they become president to accept bribes…
It’s quite likely the Clintons see themselves as liberal do-gooders. The biggest lies are the ones you tell yourself. In the same way her cattle futures scam was “taking care of her family.”
Which is why people must always be judged by their actions rather than their statements or intentions. It’s Hillary’s reality distortion field that makes her so dangerous. Wonks can be quite dumb.
Very insightful comment.
Absolutely. And we’ve seen that distortion field full tilt…
When she had to take it in the shorts for Bill, many times, publicly covering for his philandering.
Katniss: “how bill could have let her do this to herself[?]”… he’s been doing to her all along.
Hillary has gone through a deep and complex abuse cycle for a long long time. Google “abuse cycle” and “shame cycle” there are a lot of patterns (many questionable, the cycle model itself can be used to manipulate and abuse). Hillary’s involves:
– a talented charmer with flexible principals and pretensions of benevolence
– marrying him
– having to protect him (and herself) from his own messes; including lying, very publicly
– being told / telling herself it’s for the greater good (because he’s great, and good)… the distortion field
– finding out that this kind of distortion field is actually a valued commodity in the oligarchy (like Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein, Koch 1&2, etc), that she can maintain access to by virtue of… (repeat cycle)
The residual shame picked up along every stop accumulates, and avoidance of it locks the subject into their syndrome.
Hillary and Bill are not stupid people (and Bill is very intelligent). But they got caught up by their own insecurities, their desires for self-indulgence, and finding social (and financial) reward through their own avoidance patterns.
Donald Trump is another case. Born to privilege, everybody around him (outside of his family) had to kiss his ass since childhood, not always willingly. He had figure out how to deflect resentment, and make people feel good about supporting him. He addresses their ambivalence by diverting it towards other similarly exasperating themes, blending truths and truisms as needed in the moment (I grew up around people like this).
And importantly, people develop these patterns to comfort themselves, rationalize their compromises, and accept unpleasant knowns rather than risk the unknown (the “wise” choice). The deception of others is a side-effect, albeit a useful and self-confirming one. First reactions to challenge are often denial and defense of the rationale; a replay of their own internal pattern.
I’m not trying to excuse any of these folks. I think it’s useful to recognize and understand their patterns; patterns which they won’t fully recognize in themselves, for risk of losing the advantages the patterns provide (and because it’s personally wrenching to undo them; seems so much trouble, and for what?). Terms like high-functioning sociopath tend to examine the consequences, not the origins. Assisting people in finding their way out of their destructive cycles is a mitzvah (a good for all).
Great comment.
The testing opt-out movement is growing, despite government efforts to kill it
Mirabile dictu, a Democrat standing up for public education.
In my humble opinion, enabling this scheme and protecting it from scrutiny is the real reason for the clinton basement server.
Certainly seems plausible. I’ve said all along that the content of those emails will be Clinton’s undoing. Now the stories are beginning break detailing the prima facie corruption endemic throughout the Clinton Machine. And remember, this is based solely on the emails that Clinton chose to disclose. The other 30,000 or so emails, the ones she didn’t want anyone to see (you know, the ones pertaining to downward dog adjustments and Chelsea’s wedding bouquet), those are in the hands of the FBI. If public corruption still exists in this country, if we haven’t yet defined it out of existence (public-private partnerships are the bees knees, you know), then one thing is certain: the Clintons belong in prison, not in the White House.
Sorry. Intended as reply to Katniss Everdeen at 12:55 pm.
The Governing Magazine award to Rick Snyder belongs under Guillotine Watch.
No, the Hillary Email Story Will Never, Ever Go Away Charles Pierce, Esquire (resilc). Never knew he had a soft spot for dinosaurs….
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(Washington Post: …..
“What concerns us is not that Mr. Sanders’ program to tackle these issues is “radical,” as he put it, but that it is not very well thought out.”
If you’re keeping score at home, this editorial is in response to Sanders’ response to an earlier editorial that we discussed here in the shebeen on Thursday. And it behooves us to remind us that this charge that Sanders is dealing in half-baked ideas that are “not very well thought-out” is presided over by a guy who went all in on C-Plus Augustus obviously fully baked plan to turn Iraq into Westchester County, and who regularly trafficks in nonsense about Social Security and Medicare, and who fell all over himself to hire hacks from the worst administration in the country’s history. He also drapes his prose in a kind of fairy-tale “centrism” that is far more fanciful than any idea Bernie Sanders ever has had.
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I can’t say it better.
Wisconsin bill would allow privatization of water supplies
No surprise that ALEC members are all for privatizing public water systems.
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2012/05/04/477937/private-water-industry-defends-alec-membership/
It would be interesting to scan Wisconsin’s AB 554 against ALEC model legislation template and see how closely they track.
http://www.wisdc.org/pr012916.php
From ‘In The Public Interest’ on water privatization:
http://www.inthepublicinterest.org/giving-thanks-for-public-water/
This is happening all over the country. MSM doesn’t report this.
adding: letting infrastructure deteriorate opens the door to neoliberal privatization schemes. For example: starve public schools of funding, let schools deteriorate, and presto! – declare charters schools the answer.
AFD chief will be necessary to shoot at refugees
I’m sure they could find some retired VoPo-s who wouldn’t find the work objectionable – perhaps after they build the “anti-refugee protection rampart”.
Off topic.
Here is how Edward Gibbon described the Goths’ sack of Rome in August 410AD:
“ … In the hour of savage licence, when every passion was inflamed, and every restraint was removed … a cruel slaughter was made of the Romans; and … the streets of the city were filled with dead bodies … Whenever the Barbarians were provoked by opposition, they extended the promiscuous massacre to the feeble, the innocent, and the helpless …”
For Bryan Ward-Perkins, the Fall of Rome was “violent seizure … by barbarian invaders”.
The end of the Roman west, he writes in The Fall of Rome (2005), “witnessed horrors and dislocation of a kind I sincerely hope never to have to live through; and it destroyed a complex civilisation, throwing the inhabitants of the West back to a standard of living typical of prehistoric times”.
“The end of civilisation”, in Ward-Perkins’s phrase, came within a single generation.
“Romans before the fall,” wrote Ward-Perkins, “were as certain as we are today that their world would continue for ever substantially unchanged. They were wrong. We would be wise not to repeat their complacency.”
Thank you for the link to the article about Goldman’s involvement in the Malaysia corruption probe. Seem to be shenanigans galore in East Asia these days. Even more than usual. Senator Bernie Sanders’ comments about Wall Street’s business model come to mind.
Wonder to what extent the MSM’s assault on Sanders described by Bill Moyers in another link here today is related?
The CIA not only lies to the public and Congress, it lies to itself:
Maybe that’s why the CIA is so dead set against its release.
http://cepr.net/blogs/beat-the-press/paul-krugman-bernie-sanders-and-the-experts?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+beat_the_press+%28Beat+the+Press%29
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Today most of the experts are telling us the economy is near full employment. To accept this view we have to believe that millions of prime age workers (between the ages of 25-54), just decided they don’t feel like working any more. The drop in labor force participation rates occurred at all education levels, including people with college and advance degrees. This massive loss of interest in working was completely unpredicted by the experts just a few years ago.
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Plenty of examples of the bull economists sling. As he states that Krugman is his friend, he goes far to easy on him and economists generally. And as economists generally refuse to consider the moral dimension of distribution and tilt only to GDP growth (even though war increases GDP), even though the last few years 95% of all growth has gone to the 1%, their opinions on HOW the economy should be run are no more valid than anyone’s.
If Sanders get elected, there is your prima facie evidence that things have “changed” and what was not possible is not nearly as impossible as it was. things get changed by changing them…