Loyal Service Dog Gets A Place In The Yearbook Alongside Her Boy The DoDo (Chuck L)
Review: Pat’s Backcountry Beverages Wired. Chuck L: “Instant Beer!! This will revolutionize back-country outings for us hikers and paddlers.”
AUSTRALIA WILL UNLEASH HERPES ON INVASIVE CARP Newsweek (vlade)
Remembering Slavery At Whitney American Conservative (Chuck L). Put this on your list for your next visit to Louisiana.
Zimbabwe to print own version of US dollar BBC (furzy). Taking currency pegging to a new level…
The wildfires ravaging Canada might have a lot to do with climate change Business Insider (David L)
Exxon Mobil Backs FuelCell Effort to Advance Carbon Capture Technology New York Times
Math Stumps Your Doctor, Too Bloomberg
IRS First Look Media Works 2015 Cryptome. See p. 37 of the PDF. Greenwald gets $490,000 a year through a shell company. A source says, “Insiders have told me other schemes are used to boost his pay to well over a million….The big missing story that has yet to be written is the super-high-security setup holding the Snowden secrets here in NYC, in the First Look Media building one floor above the editorial floor. It’s a kind of private super-hi-tech secured NSA vault with all kinds of security and hi-tech shit. No one talks about it publicly, but it’s about the worst kept secret.”
China?
China’s spiraling pork prices and global markets Reuters
China’s rapidly ageing population is an economic ticking timebomb Business Insider
Costco starts selling cut-price coffins in Australian stores Sydney Morning Herald. EM: “I’m waiting for the in-store eco-friendly quick cremation service, myself. Coming up with tasteful-yet-catchy potential ad slogans for that is fun … ‘Every Wednesday is Ash Wednesday at your friendly neighborhood Costco!’, or maybe ‘Allow your dear departed to get fired in style! – they’ve urned it!'”
ECB should change course before too late Financial Times
EU Approves Deal With Turkey (Then All Hell Breaks Loose) Michael Shedlock (furzy)
London may elect first Muslim mayor CNN
Inmates Talk About How Synthetic Cannabis Is Fucking Everyone Up in Prisons Vice (resilc)
Syraqistan
Russian orchestra, Putin’s friends, play Syria’s Palmyra Reuters. Furzy: “This was so beautiful, touching….CNN played a long segment….trying to find that, as well as the riveting, modern? composition …..”
Russia’s Valery Gergiev conducts concert in Palmyra ruins BBC. Resilc: “Obomba could send Beyonce.”
Lifting immunity of Kurdish MPs in Turkey will lead to civil war: HDP warns ARA News (guurst)
Big Brother is Watching You Watch
Cops deploy StingRay anti-terror tech against $50 chicken-wing thief The Register (Dr. Kevin)
Requests for data rise sharply under secretive U.S. surveillance orders Reuters (EM). Quelle surprise!
Subject: Tell Representative Speier: No ID for cell phones Color of Change. Please consider signing this petition. “Burner” phones are used overwhelmingly by blacks and elderly people (my mother has two since she always seems to wind up with phones that crap out, so she has a backup at ready), and IDs are an impediment to getting one (and what about the homeless?)
Clinton E-mail Hairball
FBI likely to interview Clinton soon in emails probe: CNN Reuters. Does anyone know if Huma has finally gotten independent representation?
2016
“You can’t always get what you want” – the Rolling Stones dump Trump euronews (furzy)
Ryan fans GOP civil war over Donald Trump The Hill (furzy). A rearguard action against Trump’s hostile takeover. Notice the anonymous Republican saying, basically, “The voters have spoken and the leadership needs to get used to it.” The fact that Cruz and Kasich withdrew well before the convention gives Trump longer to complete his mopping up operation, and he has stump speeches in the upcoming primary states to keep him in the media spotlight and let him rally his troops. Which won’t stop his opponents from make this as painful as they can….but can they really keep this up for even as long as two months?
Romney skipping GOP convention, joins list of presidents, leaders CNN (furzy)
This one number foretold Donald Trump’s rise Yahoo
Exclusive: Top reason Americans will vote for Trump: ‘To stop Clinton’ – poll Reuters (furzy)
Trump raises prospect of replacing Yellen Financial Times
Democrats slap Trump with a nickname: Dangerous Donald. That name is popping up over and over in conversations with top Dem operatives. @JenniferJJacobs. Alice M: “Yeah, that will really work with The Donald.” Lambert: “The Democratic Consultant Class.” Moi: “Even if this gets traction in the punditocracy, it’s not hard to see Trump turning this into an ‘I welcome their hatred’ badge of honor.”
Trump Can’t Win White House With White Men Alone New York Magazine. Resilc: “The over confidence is amazing.”
Trump’s Big Win Is a Giant Setback for Data Crunchers Wired
Republican Trump’s new finance chair previously donated to Democrats Reuters
Hillary forces target Bush donors Politico. Lambert had this in Water Cooler yesterday, but worth underscoring.
How Not to Make a Campaign Ad Scott Adams Blog. Chuck L: “One of a series of Adams’ blog posts on Hilary bringing knives to advertising contests that are gun fights. My erstwhile copy writing and advertising manager wife generally agrees with his analyses.”
2,000 doctors say Bernie Sanders has the right approach to health care Washington Post (resilc)
2020 Republican Presidential Race Already Going New York Magazine
At Maine convention, Democrats to vote on eliminating superdelegates Bangor Daily News. Martha r points out, not effective till 2020 election…
U.S. to end bid to close major California pot dispensary: lawyers Reuters. EM: “In related news, news broke yesterday that legalization, having garnered over a half-million signatures in support, will be on the CA general-election ballot this November.”
The Shale Sector Just Got Two Critical Wins – In Two Different States OilPrice
NYC lawmakers impose 5-cent charge for plastic bags Associated Press. One annoying thing is the tote bags you see for sale in stores as an alternative are all solid material, which makes them a bit bulky when you fold them up. In France, decades ago, mesh bags were common and I would assume they pack up smaller. However, an even bigger priority ought to be outlawing colored plastic, which as I understand it can’t be recycled (I believe white can be, along with clear).
Police State Watch
When Someone You Love Dies in Police Custody and They Blame ‘Excited Delirium’ Vice (resilc)
Gunz
One Week in April, Four Toddlers Shot and Killed Themselves New York Times
Measuring the Value of Free Project Syndicate (David L). Some really misguided thinking here. He notes the decline in music sales as streaming and downloading supplanted CDs, and argued, “.. its contribution to GDP (as we currently measure it) may be falling, even as the quantity and quality of services are increasing.” Huh? I have a lot of CDs and have bought virtually no music online because the sound quality is inferior to CDs, and that was after having to accept that CDs were worse than vinyl. I could regularly hear the difference between the vinyl and a remastered CD, which typically was thinner and brighter/brassier. And I’m not a music snob. I listen to far more pop recordings than classical or jazz.
Betting and investment both require skill and luck Financial Times (David L)
US job cuts hit highest level since 2009 according to new study Guardian
Technical Weakness Is Spreading Through the Stock Market Fiscal Times
US stock funds suffer $11bn of outflows Financial Times
OTC derivatives statistics at end-December 2015 Bank of International Settlements (guurst). Notice the decline, but derivatives are higher at US banks, so one wonders if this is due to the sick state of Eurobanks and measures like the Swiss forcing high capital levels on UBS and Credit Suisse, both of which had been big derivatives players. And the fall was in interest rate swaps, which are overwhelmingly plain vanilla and low risk. So despite the decline in notional amounts, I wonder if the risk reduction is less than proportional. Informed reader comment appreciated.
Guillotine Watch
Burning Man for the 1%’: the desert party for the tech elite, with Eric Schmidt in a top hat Guardian. Nowhere:
“During a wellness panel on “Adventure Travel: Journey As Wellness”, someone asks the instructor Fabian Piorkowski about privilege.
“We’re so privileged to come to these spiritual places – Further Future, Tulum – but not everyone can,” the audience member says, asking Piorkowski how he should reconcile that.
“It’s all about balance. We are the ones meant to be the air, not the earth,” Piorkowski said. “So you have this group who can travel. The purpose can never be to enable everyone to travel because that would create imbalance.”
CCRI Daycare Center Being Moved Out for Goldman Sachs GoLocal. Peter K:
I wish I was making this up, but RI’s venture capital Governor, who invested heavily in hedge funds while she was State Treasurer, recently announced a partnership with Goldman Sachs to help them burnish their image. So to bring them to RI, she’s displacing a daycare facility at the state’s Community College.
Class Warfare
So Sue Them: What We’ve Learned About the Debt Collection Lawsuit Machine ProPublica. Additional commentary at Credit Slips
Bernie Sanders Misses Chance to Explain Government’s Role in Life Expectancy Gap Intercept
Antidote du jour (furzy):
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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I’ll try to send some links for the Watercooler, but also (file under “UK Politics”) Labour achieved a respectable showing in county elections (London mayoral result still awaited) despite Liberal-in-name-only pundits gleefully predicting some sort of annihilation — which was never going to happen.
British readers may also be observing that while Labour had a bad outcome in Scotland (where the SNP really has stolen their clothes) they had a victory of similar or even greater magnitude to that of the SNP’s in Wales. But hey, everyone ignores the Welsh and anyway, it would detract from the pearl-clutching concern trolling media narrative aimed at Labour and its avowedly socialist leader Jeremy Corbyn.
The SNP hardly stole them, the utterly abject scottish labour had discarded them a long time ago.
If we didn’t have a PR (d’hondt) system designed to prevent a majority, the SNP would have done a lot better (In my region snp 36% no seats,greens 11% 2 seats).
Glad to see Corbyn doing OK down south though, especially after the well timed antisemitism bombshell that only the metropolitan media gave a toss about.
What have the blairites got left now?
Well, Blair himself has been concern-trolling our (US) elections of late. There’s something weirdly ironic about Tony Blair taking Donald Trump to task for being a dangerous blowhard.
As for the SNP, Scotland has always been well to the left of the rest of the UK politically, so it was only a matter of time when Labour decided to stop being even a left leaning party that someone would come along and outflank them with a plank of modestly social democratic policy positions.
Yes, your phrasing is much better; Blairite Labour tossed the people of Scotland into a ditch and the SNP dealt them a two-fer with popular nationalism and anti-neoliberalism.
I read the tealeafs (okay, I admit it, I’ve been watching Sky News to get my daily dose of fainting couch Labour class traitors mugging to the Murdoch camera and dissing their own party) that the Blairites seem to be getting the stuffing knocked out of them. Just a bit, anyway. Good.
Out of curiosity, are the SNP acknowledged on that Sky television as the third largest UK party in Westminster?
Nope. For the MSM, what happens in Scotland apparently stays only in Scotland. It’s like the whole country has fallen through the looking glass as far as being a presence in parliament, that is if you rely on what’s reported.
So, the same as up here.
Far from bristling with pride, our anglophile mass media would have you believe they set sail on the Marie Celeste.
Its going to be interesting watching Labour & Tory tag teaming to ‘hold the holyrood government to account’.
FBI likely to interview Clinton soon in emails probe: CNN
“What does representatives mean to you, sir?” he said in an email, but declined to elaborate.
LOL. Nothing has changed since her husband was president.
Jeez, Team Clinton are turning into caricatures of themselves.
The context for the above:
Does anyone think HRC & Co aren’t going to make a series of serious missteps before November? Just look at the “coal miner” gaffe this week? The polls say (as noted in Links) that most Trump supporters just detest Clinton. WTF are the DNC thinking?
I understand that the DNC and Clintons are completely tone deaf… but come on guys, is your pride really worth it? I did not think it would have too much of an impact before, but Trump succeeding seems to have hurt Clinton, just based on my interpretation of observations. People seem to have turned more negative towards her and her obvious flaws, which is the opposite of what I expected to happen.
At this point Sanders is their pancea. Why choose from the bottom of the barrel? But I doubt they know the meaning of that word.
Of course it’s not just the DNC and the Clintons — the MSM are totally in the bag for HRC. Politico headlined a poll yesterday saying both Clinton and Sanders beat Trump handily in the polls. But in the body of the article they didn’t mention Bernie’s polling at all, presumably because he did better than Hillary.
Trump begins in a massive hole:
The presumptive GOP nominee trails Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders by polling margins not seen in a generation.
Note: Sanders polled 56 to Trump’s 40% in the same poll.
The only mention of Sanders apart from the subhead is at the very end of the article:
Great stuff, DNC, nominating the second least popular candidate ever!
After 2008, I couldn’t imagine the Democrats ever nominating an Iraq War supporter, but here we are. Lining up sheepdogs and selecting a bland DLC type would have made more sense, but then again Democrats are still Democrats. The GOP was dead in 2008, and the Democrats moved heaven and earth to run the party in a place where losing to Trump is possible.
If it weren’t for the fact that the repubs HAVE TO do the opposite of Obama, we’d be in Syria…..and, mission accomplished – I joke – HRC would not say “mission accomplished” HRC would say through hard work (always hard work – just for variety, why don’t they try taking it easy??? – they couldn’t do any worse….) and determination, US leadership has resulted in a path to a more stable mid east, but continued vigilance and blah, blah, blah….
In response to Clinton beating Trump by 10 in a poll, someone found an old May 12 poll article showing Dukakis up 10.
Here’s an article from the NYT ….http://www.nytimes.com/1988/05/17/us/poll-shows-dukakis-leads-bush-many-reagan-backers-shift-sides.html?pagewanted=all
[ Mr. Dukakis, the probable Democratic nominee, ran ahead of Mr. Bush, the almost certain Republican candidate, by 49 percent to 39 percent among 1,056 registered voters.]
[The survey, conducted May 9-12, represented a significant advance for Mr. Dukakis since a Times/CBS News Poll in March when Mr. Bush had 46 percent and Mr. Dukakis had 45 percent.]
[In the latest poll, Governor Dukakis of Massachusetts led in all regions, but he ran especially well in the Northeast and Middle West. The poll found Mr. Dukakis with very substantial advantages over Mr. Bush among women, union members, Roman Catholics and blacks.]
[Strikingly, 28 percent of those who said they voted for President Reagan in 1984 said they preferred Mr. Dukakis over Mr. Bush this time]
Clinton vs. Trump.
Sanders vs. Trump.
All too early to base anything on these polls at this time.
“…He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” – Poe
“Why must the Trump alternative be self-satisfied, complacent Democrats?”
Thomas Frank nails the tone-deafness.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/04/democrats-acting-elitist-not-progressive-thomas-frank
” What [the Dem establishment] have in mind for 2016 is what we might call a campaign of militant complacency. They are dissociated from the mood of the nation, and they do not care.
“I mean this in ways both great and small. The party’s leadership is largely drawn from a satisfied cohort that has done quite well in the aftermath of the Great Recession. They’ve got a good thing going. Convinced that the country’s ongoing demographic shifts will bring Democratic victory for years to come, they seem to believe the party’s candidates need do nothing differently to harvest future electoral bumper crops. The seeds are already planted. All that is required is patience.”
The under-40 voters disagree.
Sounds more appropriate for 2012.
Now, we have just wasted the last 4 years, in addition to all the other years we have wasted.
HIllary is rightly to be criticized.
No campaign can be legitimate when it fails to call out the leader.
OK, if you say so, boss. Talk about tone deaf.
They are thinking it is better to keep their party and lose the election than win the election and lose their party to the Sanderists.
Well, that depends on what the representation of ‘representatives’ represents.
Around 7pm last night, CNN had a segment saying that the FBI was closing the investigation having found no evidence of ‘wilful wrongdoing’ in Hillary’s handling of the email. This was presented, as you can imagine, as great news for the Clinton campaign.
And yet, it was mentioned that Clinton will still be interviewed.
Ummm. Excuse me, no ‘willful wrongdoing’? Ignoring security precautions demanded of every other State employee and across the government for those with access to highly classified material is not ‘willful’? I seem to be having a moment of wondering what the definition of ‘is’ is.
Perhaps I’m a bit too paranoid, but it seems we are being readied to accept the inevitable ‘let’s move on.”
They must not be paying attention. Over half of us won’t be moving on even if the FBI says there isn’t willful wrongdoing.
You can pretty much guarantee that there is a portion of the GOP that won’t be moving on either. They are going to say she wasn’t charge because a Democratic President saved her backside(and I, an independant, would agree with that conclusion.)
Chelsea Manning does jail time for whistle blowing and Hillary Clinton gets a pass while discussing how much money can be made out of the mess her State Department has made in various parts of the world? I don’t think so.
“Willful wrongdoing” is not the legal standard for security violations. Clinton operatives have been pushing variants of this line, and it’s simply not germane. But it’s great for fooling the public.
I’m now confident enough to predict Hillary’s VP pick.
Chelsea.
Just in case this turns out bad for Hillary.
Intersectionality, old boy. Intersectionality.
Manning?
he/she will need a pardon too
He will need an executive pardon too
Why does Chelsea need to ever do…anything?
Set up with Hedge Husband with Clinton Connection$
And we know she “tried to care about money but I just couldn’t”.
The con man apple has fallen far from the tree, it would seem. This is what happens when you spoil your kids I guess…
http://www.nbcnews.com/video/rock-center/51666976#51666976
Chelsea Clinton, purported journalist. Does an interview with the Geico Gecco spokes-thing from a few years back. You know, on a news channel. This video skips the pandering-in-studio lead in, unfortunately.
Either she or Hillary would have to change residences (as Cheney had to do in 2000). The Constitution does not permit the President and the VP to come from the same state.
– So Sue Them: What We’ve Learned About the Debt Collection Lawsuit Machine
Well-done comparative analysis. Good to know the differences who and where make. Our last extraneous debt is with Cap1, I shall be very careful when I finally kill it.
You may well know all of this, but your rights under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act include asking for verification of the debt. Essentially this means that the outfit dunning you with a collection letter must provide written verification that 1) they actually own the debt and 2) you actually owe the amount claimed.
The first point is particularly important since most of these outfits have bought the debt for pennies on the dollar, frequently from another debt purchaser. You have a right to have them produce the documents showing they purchased it–essentially a chain of assignment from the original creditor through other purchasers, to them. Frequently, once they get your verification letter, they will disappear–too much trouble, or it’s an outright scam to begin with.
Good to know.. thank you.
Shouldn’t an individual be offered the same opportunity… to buy their own debt at pennies on the dollar? If a creditor is going to discount or sell your debt you should be informed up front and have the choice whether or not to buy it.
There’s a funny thought.
“How now! interiections? why then, some be of laughing, as ha, ha, he.”
The FDCPA letter typically causes collection attempts to cease forever. I say this because I have personal experience writing them for others. If they follow up with a second letter, you write back asking for them to answer the legal question in the first letter. The legal answer is NEVER included in a reply.
No response has ever come to a 2nd letter asking them to follow the law.
Debts are sold so many times and consideration is paid so many times that the amount of debt claimed can’t be publicly stated any longer, or proven in written documents.
That’s the basis of Strike Debt / Rolling Jubilee project – buy up debt for pennies on the dollar and then abolish it. They’ve abolished $32M in debt so far (mostly medical debt).
Strike Debt!
“……..your rights under the Fair Debt Collections Practices Act…..”
How quaint.
No, it’s not quaint. It’s the legal standard and debt collectors fold when challenged. They are relying on getting a default judgment.
You do not want just verification – that’s become just an assertion by the debt collector. You need to demand a copy of the original billing for the debt, as part of FDCPA.
Sleepy is 100% correct, and that BTW includes presenting the signed copy of the original credit agreement.
Yesterday I could finally attend to Bill Mitchell’s presentation of the spanish version of his book “Eurozone dystopia: groupthink and denial on a grand scale” in calle de Atocha Madrid at 19:00 local time. It was a small room filled with about 60 listeners and he was accompanied by two spanish economists, of the rare species compromised with full employment, and by his spanish editor.
Bill presentation of his own book was relatively short because previous speakers introduced much of it and because his speech was translated phrase by phrase to spanish by his editor. Nevertheless, his presentation was well focused, interesting and educative. For me it was really great: I bougth the book, Prof Mitchell wrote a kind dedication for me and we shook hands.
The audience was interested and mostly cautivated by Mitchell’s narrative, and after the presentation several attenders were able to ask direct questions to Bill. Not me, I was plainly ignored by the moderator!! ha,ha,ha! A representative of one of the largest spanish syndicates didn’t buy Mitchell’s narrative (mainly in monetary terms) and wanted to frame the discussion in terms of competitivity, productivity and innovation. It was striking to me to notice how the sindicates have been kidnaped by the neoliberal discourse and seem unable to understand Mitchell’s approach. Another question dealed with trade offs between economic growth-full employment with environmental issues-climate change. Bill’s answer was sensible and good: of course full employment policies must be sensible and accompanied with environmental policies to make them sustainable. But environmental concerns musn`t be an excuse to favour unemployment.
Bill Mitchell told the audience that if the eurozone wants full-employment policies there are only two alternatives: true federal (fiscal) integration or euroexit. He concluded that the first is quite difficult and the most practical for countries like spain is to push our governments for euro exit.
Then I wanted to ask him what he thinks about the possible financial chaos/meltdown that is often argued against euro exit but I didnt have the chance. I commented this to him later when he signed my copy and he seemed to agree that this was a possibility that had to be addressed.
My opinion: it was great to have Professor Mitchell visiting Madrid, and hearing his speech. Now it is time to read his book!
Thanks for the report, Ignacio! For those of us who aren’t familiar with the Spanish terminology, why do you mean by the syndicates? Are those your labor unions?
Ups!
Unions, not syndicates. What a mistake!
Wasn’t Speier one of those must elect dems who would save us from both those centrist dems and republicans controlling congress?
Color of Change’ letter in so few intro words exemplifies – Kettling, totalitarianism, fear-mongering, the veal pen, the Prog misleadership class and on and on.
There is nothing Valiant about this bill nor the response letter, nor is there the potential of safety. Nor should it be just about poor people vs drug dealers vs terrorism. All while ignoring the best parts of constitutionally guaranteed speech, privacy, need for individual warrant, papers and effects – which imo a phone should be considered as much in these times, etc.
Just to throw out, it’s not really an opinion about the phone.
The right to be secure in our papers and effects.
Effects is pretty clear; it’s our stuff. You can’t just go rifling through my things.
Now, as for papers, it’s slightly less clear. Most people at the time didn’t own a lot of books, and it would be weird anyway to specifically mention someone’s library. But there were a lot of letters, notes, contracts, bills, etc. And what are those?
Communications.
Considering the phrasing of the times, that there was the freedom to assemble, and there weren’t exactly recording devices besides paper, it’s pretty clear that being secure in your “papers” would mean that by today’s standards your phone would need a warrant to be searched. QED.
I was taught this in school, by the way. I’m really impressed that we’re at the point that the very foundational tenets of our society that we all agreed on–seemingly a short time ago–are now up for debate on a semantics level. It reminds me of the torture debate, but somehow deeper and more insidious than even that.
(Why I mentioned at all really; just to point out how weird it is that someone would consider American’s communications being safe from the government’s unwarranted intrusion an “opinion” and what that really says for how far we’ve fallen.)
I agree with your analyis, but the government now operates as “all your stuff belong to us”
And probable cause now mean “you’ve probably done something, so we can look because terrorism*”
*the only searches the government can’t make is with regard to anything that MAY make the Saudi’s look bad….
remember not too long ago Speier’s comrade in arms Feinstein proposing that lowly bloggers can’t be considered REAL journalists, or some such……..
I swear…all of congress must be on really bad acid !!
The Great Chain of Having.
Soon, it will be “The Great Block Chain of Having.”
“Some time, in the 21st century of the year of our lord, sorry, common era (common to the 2 most important religions in the world, forget Buddhism, Hinduism, etc – they are nothing), a nobody used this bitcoin to buy a mp3 song.”
Speier’s always been a fan of managing the means of production. The only noteworthy sponsorship from her time as a California state assemblywoman was her attempt to get kill switches into automobiles. I’m sure OBD-III turns her into a tittering high school girl.
If Huma Abedin doesn’t get her own legal counsel she’s going to get an education. Ouch.
Huma’s a good friend. I’m sure Hillary will look out for her.
Was that sarcasm, sleepy? Surely Hillary has proven by now that the only person she looks out for is Hillary.
Feminists will be not happy to know this, but she learned it from Bill…he looks out for Bill only.
Always men first.
To the Clintons, a friend is just someone whose goodwill and loyalty you haven’t spent yet it pursuit of personal goals.
Ryan fans GOP civil war over Donald Trump The Hill (furzy). A rearguard action against Trump’s hostile takeover. Notice the anonymous Republican saying, basically, “The voters have spoken and the leadership needs to get used to it.” The fact that Cruz and Kasich withdrew well before the convention gives Trump longer to complete his mopping up operation, and he has stump speeches in the upcoming primary states to keep him in the media spotlight and let him rally his troops. Which won’t stop his opponents from make this as painful as they can….but can they really keep this up for even as long as two months?
=======================================
“Ryan’s comments are remarkable for another reason: Trump has won waves of support and run away with the GOP primary contest on one message. Ryan now wants him to change it to another.
It’s a request Trump flat-out rejected on Thursday.
“I am not ready to support Speaker Ryan’s agenda,” Trump said in a terse statement. “Perhaps in the future we can work together and come to an agreement about what is best for the American people. They have been treated so badly for so long that it is about time for politicians to put them first!””
=====================================================
WOW!!!!!
I don’t want to read into Trump what I want Trump’s policies and views to be – but it seems to me Trump is really rejecting the standard repub baloney that defeated the other 16 candidates.
Repubs can so self deluded that they think a majority of people actually think “Bush kept us safe” and that more war is a good course of action, and oh yeah – we really, really, really need to amp up the cold war with those commies – both Chinese and Ruskis!!!
The fact is that our “representative” government is well designed to ignore the majority of the views of the majority of the people for quite a while, but at some point not even the repub party can continue to represent only the most reactionary 1%. Hopefully, next cycle the dems can implode….
Hooray for Trump – there is no good reason to keep the current incarnation of the republican party, which provides no alternative to the dems, except with regard to transgender bathrooms.
Yeah, to be honest, I kind of relish Trump’s flipping the bird to Ryan and his oligarch army.
(Washington Post 5/6/2016 David Weigal) The decision of the two living Republican presidents to snub the party’s 2016 White House nominee is extraordinary, yet completely predictable. It’s the culmination of an anger inside the Republican Party that gave way to an alternate history of the decades since 1980 — and especially the years after 2008.
And while it demonstrates Trump’s inability to unify the GOP, it is the best example yet of his strategy of breaking the electorate in half and hoping he wound up with the bigger piece. Losing the endorsements of George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush — as harsh an indictment as the “establishment” can offer — is no punishment at all in the eyes of many conservatives.
This was tested in real time just months ago, when the younger Bush appeared on the campaign trail for the first time in a decade. (His poll numbers cratered during the crisis-strewn final two years of his presidency, and he neither campaigned for a candidate nor appeared at the 2008 and 2012 Republican conventions.) He rallied for his brother, Jeb Bush, who started in a hole with Republican voters and became less popular as he campaigned. The result: A weak fourth-place finish in South Carolina and the end of his run for president.
The context of that loss was even worse for the Bush brand. In the hair-tearing GOP debates before the primary, Trump mocked Jeb Bush for his brother’s foreign policy record. “The World Trade Center came down during your brother’s reign,” said Trump. “Remember that.”
Conservative pundits almost universally thought Trump had blown it, insulting the Bushes in a state that had only given them election wins. “I hope the people of South Carolina will send a message to Donald Trump that we don’t like Putin, we like W,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
===================================================
“I hope the people of South Carolina will send a message to Donald Trump that we don’t like Putin, we like W,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
Apparently, the present repub party is turning South Carolinians into commies….
“we like W”
With the number of votes Graham got in the primary, he must mean he and his wife like W.
Besides, it wasn’t W that restarted the Cold War because Putin attacked the World Trade Freedom Center. If I interpret how Lindsey connects the dots here correctly.
http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/graham-on-bachelorhood-im-not-defective-118896
Sen. Lindsey Graham says he’s not “defective” because he’s single.
============================================
He’s single because he’s defective….in every possible way
Oh, I forgot this:
including, but not limited to, schizophrenia….
Graham exists because the SC Democratic party practically doesn’t exist….at least for Federal elections. It’s all part of the marriage of convenience between the mainline Repubs and the Dems.
Trump won overwhelmingly in the SC GOP primary. This just shows the disconnect between the state’s Repub leaders and the voters.
The swinish fear the incoming one?
Does the Republican Party establishment have no shame ? I actually don’t blame Trump for calling out “Ma! He’s Making Eyes At Me” but can’t believe Ryan ever seriously thought he’d go for it.
According to this Gallup survey, only 26% of americans identify as republicans.
Ryan and the rest of the republican “elite” should be thanking Trump profusely for saving their sorry asses, and lining up behind him.
The democrats don’t do much better.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/188096/democratic-republican-identification-near-historical-lows.aspx
Anecdote is not data, However: the majority of the Republicans that I know personally (almost everyone I know…) became so disgusted with the GOP brand under W that they switched to the Conservative party, favoring the usual claptrap from Grover Norquist and a very strict literal interpretation of the original 13 Amendments. I basically wrote them off a long time ago, even tho they are family and close friends in many cases.
I think Trump should be lining the rep elite in front of them…..with their sorry asses against the wall, along with their dem brethren !!
Is Ryan a super-delegate or just a super Republican?
I believe Super Republicans work similarly to the permanent members of the UN Security Council – the world needs their steady wisdom lest we exploit each other ruthlessly.
He’s is Super Republican. He has risen to top of the ranks after years of hard and diligent work on the US Budget and has determined that entitlement spending is too high and military spending too low – and that America needs to be strong like Super Hero, and needs $800 hammers like Thor!
Ryan could fly and destroy all of Americas enemies with his laser vision and super duper strength if only Obama would let him…but unfortunately the liberal democrats won’t fund the little flag lapels that go on the cape, and a republican superhero loses their invulnerability without the little flag….
…….power’s in the beard….too bad he shaved it off……..
Ryan is a Hillary superdelegate, along with Romney and McCain.
You mean he’s not the zombie-eyed granny starver (Charles Pierce ? Paul Krugman on a rare good day ?) we’ve always believed him to be ? Color me disillusioned.
In other news: Even HillBooster Pierce thinks the Dangerous Donald thing is “Childish and Stupid”. Is the whole Clinton campaign team just losing the plot due to exhaustion ?
They expected a quick coronation and were just not set up for or prepared for this length of primary campaign. Bernie’s secret strategy – wear them out and wait till they start making stupid mistakes.
Which leads me to my 2nd Napoleon quote for today:
“The most desirable quality in a soldier is constancy in the support of fatigue; valor is only secondary”
WP lays it on the line:
“The tensions between Trump and Ryan go beyond temperament. They have philosophical differences about the size and scope of government … Ryan champions free-trade agreements, international military engagement, and sweeping overhauls of Social Security and Medicare, whereas Trump is an avowed opponent of recent trade deals, foreign interventions and proposed changes to entitlement programs.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ryan-says-he-is-not-ready-to-back-trump-deepening-gop-divide/2016/05/05/fab4c590-12ff-11e6-81b4-581a5c4c42df_story.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_daily202
On free trade, forever wars, and the Grand Bargain; Hillary Clinton and Paul Ryan will work hand in glove. I am reconsidering my 2003 vow to never vote again for a Republican and changing it to “I will never vote for a neo-liberal or a neo-conservative”.
Dangerous Donald vs. Crooked Hillary
Does that framing need some exclamation points?
Like it or not (we sure don’t like it), that appears to be how far the presidential campaign has sunk.
Will the Sanders campaign grudgingly recognize this deplorable development by taking advantage of an opening to brand their candidate with a name such as Likable Bernie?
Trump: Of course I’m dangerous, to them.
It’s safe to say this: We live in a dangerous world, with or without Donald.
If you don’t get a degree, you are in danger of losing your job or not gettng a job.
Thus, education is not about enlightenment, it’s about keeping your job or getting someone else’s job.
And if you do get a degree, you’re still in danger of losing your job or not getting a job – with 5 or 6 figures worth of non-dischargeable debt as an added bonus.
What makes Trump dangerous, to them, is that he knows exactly how they operate and particularly with the MSM can swat these leading questions aside, and look classy doing it.
The other day when he won the Indiana primary and was on NBC during the news, Lester Holt led with questions about what Donald thought about the video of Republicans burning their voter registration cards because he was the presumptive nominee and Donald responded by pointing out that people are free to do what they want and that thousands of people have been brought into the political process from him running.
Then Lester asked very pointedly for names of prominent people that have contacted him since he won Indiana and offered support, and Donald simply declined to name them, in a polite way telling Lester he wasn’t going to name names, and if those people wanted to come forward it was up to them.
He isn’t a politician and he is comfortable in front of a camera and instinctively seems to know what to say and how to say it, depending on circumstances.
I suspect this election will end up being decided along racial lines, and race relations could be set back substantially. Democrats have dismissed the pain of people not in their circle as not worth addressing, and usually they would have nowhere to go, but this election cycle is different and Donald Trump is channeling that pain into a run for President. The people are pissed off at the system and Donald Trump is their middle finger.
I’m thinking that as the Rolling Stones don’t want Trump using their music, Trump should go with the theme from Shaft, with a few modifications….
Who’s the black (ginger) private dick
That’s a sex machine to all the chicks?
Shaft, (Trump) ya, damn right
Who is the man that would risk his neck
For his brother man?
Shaft, (Trump) can you dig it?
Who’s the cat that won’t cop out
When there’s danger all about?
Shaft, (Trump) right on
They say this cat Shaft (Trump) is a bad mother
Shut your mouth
But I’m talkin’ ’bout Shaft (Trump)
Then we can dig it
He’s a complicated man
But no one understands him but his woman
John Shaft (Trump)
Dangerous Donald is a bad mother fuc…SHUT your mouth….
If Trump is more fun than a barrel of monkeys,
then Clinton is more tricky than a barrel of Nixon.
“Mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
Costco starts selling cut-price coffins in Australian stores Sydney Morning Herald. EM: “I’m waiting for the in-store eco-friendly quick cremation service, myself. Coming up with tasteful-yet-catchy potential ad slogans for that is fun … ‘Every Wednesday is Ash Wednesday at your friendly neighborhood Costco!’, or maybe ‘Allow your dear departed to get fired in style! – they’ve urned it!’”
====================================================
Being a bird watcher and Audubon supporter, I intend to feed the raptors (aka buzzards) with my carcass….
and they do it for free. Now if I die in Australia, I will certainly give first chomp to the dingoes…..
The Tibetans call this a sky burial.
Elsewhere, the body is served to birds in a Tower of Silence.
I want to be freeze dried and processed into chew toys
Don’t let the flies getcha first. You’ll spend the afterlife eating shit too!
I support the sale of coffins…. Funerals are a rip off. I prefer the composting research for myself. I like the idea of being in a mushroom shroud, carried up a spiral walkway, placed in chips and dried flowers and herbs and emerging at the bottom as compost.
“I want to live!”
Maybe I will check out that movie again.
Ex HP Boss Carly Fiorina Sacked one week into new job.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/05/04/ted_cruz_carly_fiorina/
She’s an astounding success at failure, bless her heart!
She’ll probably tell it different in her autobiography. Starting with how she transformed Lucent into an ubiquitous entity – The Internet.
The wildfires ravaging Canada might have a lot to do with climate change Business Insider
================
Here in Canada, conservative politicians and pundits are desperately trying to create a taboo around talking about climate change in connection to this obviously unseasonal and unprecedented wildfire. Much like how in America you get disingenuous pols in the pocket of the gun lobby popping up after mass shootings to insist that now is not the time to talk about gun control, we’ve had an onslaught of calls to respect the families of Fort McMurray in this difficult time by not bringing up the elephant in the room.
The leader of the federal Green Party had the nerve to say that climate change may very well have a lot to do with this disaster, and she had her head bitten off by the professional commentariat and a Twitter mob. Even our sainted Prime Minister got himself in front of some cameras to telegenically call her out for her insensitivity.
Of course, the situation is made more complicated by the fact that Fort McMurray is the epicenter of Canadian fossil fuel extraction (and emission). So by highlighting this tragic event as a reason to immediately transition away from oil, one would essentially be saying that the people of Fort Mac ought to be losing their jobs on top of their homes and possessions, which does seem a bit harsh.
Still, pundits aren’t feeling any reluctance to comment on the potential economic impacts of the fire, what it’s going to mean for the tar sands industry and the price of oil and Alberta’s already massive deficit and etc. It just seems to be science that they’re scared to talk about…
When you live be the sword you die by the sword. It is not harsh at all. It is the duty of the citizens to keep their sociopaths in check, and not to enable their excesses.
The reason that it is a collective duty, is that if one permits continual divide and conquer, then you have made your choice willingly and deserve the results.
One really does have to be ready to die for one’s beliefs. In this current neo-feudal age, dying includes being prepared to be fired – as being fired is the current neo-feudal mechanism for summary execution.
“Increases in fire frequency due to climate change as predicted by model runs are illustrated in the map above. According to a report at WeatherUnderground — “A large increase in fires over much of the globe is expected as we move through this century. Using fire models driven by output from sixteen climate models used in the 2007 IPCC report, researchers found that 38% of the planet should see increases in fire activity [due to climate change] over the next 30 years. ”
https://robertscribbler.com/
It *is* harsh. You don’t go that far freaking North and drive a truck because you think oil is so much more important than the law firm partner job you were offered. You think 80k people lived in the middle of nowhere because they were in love with what they were doing?
“Fort McMurray looks like Hiroshima. Fort McMurray is a wasteland,”
Neil Young got hammered in 2013 by the politicians and media for these and other comments he made about the environmental devastation up there.
Methane is the killer GHG that now exceeds the radiative forcing of CO2 over the short term. Our attention should be focused on the methane veil that has been spreading from the Arctic to cover the whole of the northern hemisphere. Increasing methane emissions from the melting permafrost and sea beds are causing an acceleration of heating, thus decreasing the temperature differential between the Arctic and the subtropical zone, thus slowing the Jet Stream and causing more extreme weather conditions.
Scientists have spelled out the catastrophe that we are in the midst of, but we citizens are acquiescent and complicit as politicians and all the other operatives of the capitalist cannibals continue their plundering. There is only one way to allow for any chance to recover some stability of the earth’s climate moderating system and to restore habitat for life: END CIVILIZATION NOW and STOP MAKING BABIES.
check out this blog if you haven’t already. it deals with methane
http://jumpingjackflashhypothesis.blogspot.com/
fw http://movement4bernie.org/run-all-the-way
Seattle Councilwoman Kshama Sawant is trying to get Sanders to run as a Green or Independent.
I read elsewhere (apologies forgot the URL) that Jill Stein said she is willing to run as VP on a Sanders/Stein Green ticket. Apparently if Sanders were to run as a Green, ballot access would be much easier, than the logistics of getting ballot access as an Independent.
I would suggest Sawant/Stein/etc commission these polls:
1 3-way race: H Clinton (D) v Trump (R) v Sanders (Green)
2 4-way race: H Clinton (D) v Trump (R) v Sanders (Green) v “Independent Republican Pol” (R Establishment Tool like Paul Ryan, Sen. Ben Sasse, etc) (as per the reports I’ve read that the R Establishment are considering this tactic, to help the Senate Rs win elections, by allowing Senate Rs’ to campaign-“hug” the “Indy R” instead of Trump).
I checked the Wiki page on 2016 Pres polls. There are no 3+ way polls that have both H Clinton & Sanders. Most of the 3+ way polls on that page, add a 3rd neoliberal rightwing oligarch like Bloomberg to the other 2, H Clinton & Trump.
Perhaps if Sanders read a poll indicating he would have a decent chance, he MIGHT reconsider the idea of running as a non-D, overriding his fear of being outcast & hated as a “Nader 2000”. I know there are duopoly-designed challenges that reduce the chances of an non-duopoly candidate, as well as a BigMedia blackout/ignoring.
However, Sanders has a passionate voter base, spread the message outside of the BigMedia on the internet/etc, has very low negative ratings, whereas Trump & H Clinton have historically high negative ratings.
I could imagine Sanders ticking off his agenda in a debate: “I support MedicareForAll, H Clinton & Trump won’t allow MedicareForAll – apparently they want to keep killing 45K USians/year as the Harvard Public Health Professors report”. Ditto for $15 min wage, free public university tuition, etc.
I think Sanders could win such a 3-way or 4-way race: Sanders the 1 candidate who supports policies with majoritarian support (e.g. a Democracy), vs. 2-3 oligarch tools or oligarch who mostly oppose these policies – the oligarch vote is split 2-3 ways.
What do you think?
I have my doubts that he would want to, or that he would succeed. I think that we’re one or two election cycles away from something like this being possible. For better or worse, a lot of people are still attached to the Republican – Democratic duopoly. Trump is doing a fine job of killing off the Republicans. I think that we need more time for Clinton to do the same to the Democrats.
I agree with your analysis – but if Bernie would run, there is the possibility he could win, AND if it doesn’t succeed it still helps to start the toppling….people need to understand that they don’t HAVE to vote dem or repub….
That’s starting to happen even if he doesn’t happen. The Bernie or Bust movement is essentially arguing that they won’t be voting democratic if he isn’t the nominee.
Speaking for no one but myself, I think this is a terrible idea. Sanders is running for Democratic presidential nominee, fought an amazing fight, and is likely to lose. He needs to respect that outcome, tepidly endorse Clinton, “not quite as bad as Trump, probably!” and go back to the Senate. Running third party will split the democrats and hand the election to Trump. Whatever he says or does, there is no way for him to run and not be tagged as the new Nader.
yes, for no one but yourself..
anyhoo,
i consider myself a commie (shout out to csis!), but if i could, i would vote for mr. trump, who would turn america into a giant hungarian restaurant, over ms. clinton, a proven psychopath. i bet i’m not the only one.
in this case, mr. sanders would peel away voters from both candidates, if only for the fact that he appears to be reasonably sane.
I see a Trump v. Clinton match as a lose-lose and am totally ambivalent as to who will win. However, I had a conversation last night with two friends of mine; both queer people of color, one of whom is undocumented. They legitimately see Trump as a threat to their safety and liberty. I think sometimes it is easy for us to dismiss this race as being between tweedle dee and tweedle dum. Others, for better or worse, believe they have a much bigger stake in the outcome.
queer people of color, huh?
do they favour incinerating children in the middle east?
By undocumented, you mean i this country illegally?
That’s what that usually means.
Trump is in favor of letting trannies use bathrooms of their choice. He said in an interview that he didn’t get what the big deal is.
I have yet to see evidence that Trump is hostile to gays or in any way intends to reduce their rights.
I dont believe he is hostile toward all people that are illegally in this country perse, either. Certainly some hostility directed toward the governments of countries that create untenable conditions for their most poor citizens to remain in their own country.
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/positions/immigration-reform
I find i can agree in spirit with alot of the position content. Some is fodder(eg: a border fence) but organizing immigration policy to reflect the law, and changing the law where it is an adverse enabler, like the extraordinary benefits of birthright citizenship for example, and deportation with no expidited legal return for those with violent criminal records makes sense… Obviously details to follow.
The current immigration policy is not a Policy, it is an unsustainable train wreck that incidentally also unfairly throws out the anchor on those that are following the legal procedures for immigration -including those whom we as a Society owe some deference to for having actively destroyed their countries.
There is much to Trumps position content that will make both the D&R party bankrollers go Tilt
I’ll just leave this here:
Political Psychopathy–The “Culture of Psychopathy” as Epitomized in the Presidential Campaign
https://psychopathsdemystified.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/political-psychopathy-the-culture-of-psychopathy-as-epitomized-in-the-presidential-campaign/
left.
It’s another one of those annoying inconsistencies of the election that Trump can be used to burn down the Rs but can’t be used to burn down the Ds.
The more grave concern is that an independent run by Sanders in a 3 way race with Trump and Clinton may throw the (s)election to the House of Representatives. Which would very likely give us Paul Ryan as President. The only block on extremist, doctrinaire Republican rule might — might — be a Democrat Senate. We would end up with at least 3 extreme rightist Supreme Court justice appointments, an immense military/security state build up, and decimation of the federal social safety net.
The only advantage to this scenario is that a godawful decade from ~2016 – 2026 would probably be followed by dissolution of the Union, and 50-60 years of honest to God socialism in the far west where I live.
The dissolution of the Soviet Union hasn’t worked out well and I doubt the dissolution of the United States would work any better.
Sanders is a politician and this is America. He knows the chance of getting enough Electoral Votes in a three-way is slight. And even if he did, the country would be almost ungovernable and the Congress would be against him. All the obstruction Obama has seen (and he has seen some as much as he has used it for his own nefarious ends) would be tiddlywinks compared to what the Repubs and Dems would do to Sanders (forget about the MSM). It would be a fool’s errand for Sanders to try to grab the Oval Office in a three-way.
The secession didn’t work out well for the rebels either.
It would be treasonous, for example, for Vermont to secede. Jefferson Davis might have received amnesty, but that should not be taken for granted.
by the way,
is this yours?
http://www.tejanojim.freeservers.com/nuke.html
Dear god. Yes, but written years ago as a thought experiment/joke. Thanks for reminding me that it still exists.
Perfect. The Democratic Party as a firm needs to die. For all I care their business supremacists can go sit next to the smelly Republicans and suffer for all eternity or until their last tumbrel ride, whichever comes first. I’m not necessarily fond of taking it out Gadhafi-style, but if that’s what it takes, it is what it is.
Some have said, only idealistic Quixotes try to save that party.
Bernie or Trump,
Or Bernie or write in Bernie as a protest,
Bernie or vote for nobody.
Unless Sanders has filed to be a write-in candidate, in 35 states the “protest” is invisible. Even under an orderly vote-counting process, it isn’t counted. 7 states don’t allow write-in at all.
What if their goal is for you to disenfranchise yourself by not voting or voting for nobody?
First, self-brainwashing. You crave to more news and expert analyses. Can’t even jog in the park without your radio.
Now, self-disenfranchising.
“Look at Saudi Arabia. They won’t let some people vote, except in municipal elections. We don’t do that here. We let people vote. It’s not our fault people don’t vote.”
Dave,
A modest suggestion: If you’re in a reliably red or blue state: Jill Stein, Greens. In a swing state, vote for the LOEs.
The Green Party convention is in August after the Damnocrats nominate the Warmongress in July. While there probably won’t be 1968 demonstrations in the street, Sanders supporters will be beaten or ignored in the convention.
The real issue is whether the Green Party can become a “real” political party and not just a one issue pressure group. They will have to modify the attitude and platform to attract those that are voting for Trump because they have lost their jobs, savings, and pensions. Those that work (or worked) in coal mines and factories making goods aren’t the enemy as posited by many that think they alone are causing global warming. We can put many to work developing more (all eventually) renewable energy as well as changing the direction of the economy.
When I voted for Nader 3 or 4 times, it wasn’t to support the narrowness of the Green Party but more of a protest.
After Sanders in trashed in July and if the Greens are open, a Sanders/Stein candidacy can actually win and, if not, begin to destroy the lesser of two evils monopoly! And for my money the lesser of two evils is Trump.
If you have about an hour to wade through this–the link is to the most thorough, sourced, timeline of Hillary’s email scandal I have seen http://thompsontimeline.com/The_Clinton_Email_Scandal_-_Short_Version_-_Part_2
Reading through it, there is one inescapable conclusion–Hillary (and probably her aids) cannot escape criminal prosecution. Assuming the sourced material is accurate, the scandal goes far beyond Hillary maintaining 22 top secret documents and over 2,000 confidential documents on her private basement email server.
What is most interesting, is what Hillary did with the private server after leaving State. Where it was stored, who went through the documents, etc.
The criminal prosecution may be politically complex, but how Hillary can ever maintain a security clearance is impossible to understand. In my opinion, her conduct in maintaining, concealing and using the basement private email server goes beyond reckless, gross negligence, or whatever term of art you want to ascribe to it. Because the press refuses to cover the story, her supporters get away with such wild claims as–every sec. of state did it, the private server was never hacked, she did it for convenience, etc.
Why anyone in Hillary’s position would ever do something like this tells you a lot about the woman and her lack of competency, ethics, etc.
Where is the best place to read refutations of the “Other SOS’s did it first” argument? I have read a little and from what I can gather Colin Powell is the only real comparison but it was something like a separate account for personal emails that he still used via this secure government computer at work.
That’s the Colin Powell story I heard too.
Some forgotten Twitterer told me (reminded me?) that Kissinger emptied his entire office, papers and all into a moving van and took the away.
As if that was reasonable justification.
That only means that HK remains an unprosecuted felon.
If a neighbor shoots another neighbor and gets away with it, does that mean it is now legal for me to follow suit and shoot him and his family??
Im no lawyer, but I dont think unprosecuted felonious behaviour is precedent for someone to behave inkind or worse with impunity while being indignant that someone else got away with it too!
Jeeze, this is basic playground-rules material.
The Timeline explains Powell was found with two confidential documents on a private server (I think maybe AOL). They apparently were pretty low level. He had a private phone line in his office he could use for private emails–the same arrangement Hillary rejected when offered. Neither Rice, nor Albright, used email.
Hillary’s case is not the same. She used the private basement email server as her exclusive means of email communication. I have never heard of anyone else in government using the same type of system. And if anyone else had done so, they would be prosecuted and lose their security clearance.
All sorts of people in government have two devices and separate personal from business. You see this with Congressional staffers.
That is not what Clinton did and so the Powell example is utterly irrelevant. She refused to have two devices.
Per ScottW’s comment, I read Powell that when Powell sent something official on his personal device it was by mistake. He immediately notified whoever he was supposed to notify at State. There’s a procedure for security breaches. Again, Clinton did no such thing.
Thank you for this. I went back to Part One just because the whole story interests me so much. I’m guessing that nothing will happen over it. But, I can’t stop looking at it. From Part One:
It’s incredible to me.
That is exactly where I just paused to throw up my arms and give WTF looks to my imaginary audience. Seriously, unbelievable. The very first quote is astounding as well. She is someone who never wanted to use email. Anything that is inconvenient to her, she ignores as much as possible.
Hillary and Bill have always avoided prosecution because their scandals are investigated by politically driven entities, so they can always claim it is a witch hunt.
Hillary’s team even tried to do the same to the State Dept. Internal Investigator when it was disclosed Hillary had thousands of confidential documents on the server. That was when Hillary invented the “after the fact classification” misstatement. But now that the FBI is in the lead, it is impossible to claim political persecution.
My hunch is Hillary will throw her staff under the bus, as time goes by. It appears her staff vetted many of the documents and then passed them on to Hillary. There are allegations that the confidentiality rating was stripped from them by the staff before passing them on to Hillary.
One thing is beyond dispute–this was not a matter of convenience, or negligence, but an intentional system to avoid FOIA and any other scrutiny of her communications. As we see with her speaking transcripts, Hillary strives for total secrecy in her words and deeds. Sadly, her supporters are complicit in letting her act as she does.
It’s not one reason except Hillary is the queen and wants things done a certain way when she wants it done.
-computers are a mystery to most people even millennials. Signing up for snap chat and having a rocking MySpace page isn’t not the same as understanding how computers work.
-Democrats expected to capture Hispanics the way they captured blacks which was expected to deliver elections worry free except for the clustering of Hispanic voters in the wrong states
-Democrats expected young women to feel the same as about Hillary as older women despite younger women growing up in a post Title IX world. The connection to Hillary’s Era is limited, and there already have been two female VP candidates. Ferrara predates many Sanders voters. Warren could have challenge get easily.
-Obama declared open season on crime very early and got away with it. So why not Hilary? People voted for in 2008, and she was terrible then too.
-the technocrats elite are simply morons
The technocratic elite is badly educated and unimaginative.
Hillary Clinton is the kid in your high school who was president of everything, got the best grades, but had no imagination, inner life, or perspective. Everything was a test to pass, every interaction a chance to outdo others and win the prize. People like that then go on to university, where they never take a course that doesn’t help them get what they want, and on to professional school (medicine, law, business, economics) where they are taught the how but never the why or what for. These are the people who have taken over our world.
I was listening to a talk by an Historian of Rome who argues that a big problem that arose in the Crisis of the 3rd century was the “equistrianization” of the Roman Empire. The people who had run the place (often well, occasionally badly) up through Marcus Aurelius had been from the highly educated Senatorial elite. Over time the Senatorial class was replaced by Equestrians, who were not as rich, not as well educated, and tended to be specialists in either civil or military administration (Senators bounced back and forth). These were the people Diocletian used to bureaucratize and militarize the Empire around 300. They were at heart systematizers and schemers, lacking any broad outlook or vision beyond the needs of control and taxation. And he thinks these people ran the Empire into the ground. Right or wrong about Rome, I fear that similar types are running our society into the ground today.
the Historian’s name please?
Kulikowski
This sounds a bit like Gibbons, and Gibbons had his own prejudices about the little people getting into office in the UK instead of the traditional lords. Conversely, the first three Caesars did pretty well expanding who could vote and opening offices. Gaius Marius was a new man and he saved Rome when the Senatorial class failed.
I still think Christianity allowing Romans to become important without paying taxes was a much larger problem.
Equestrians were not little men. They had to be worth at least 400,000 sesterces when a legionary made 1200 a year. They were the nouveau riche (you know, strivers like the Clintons).
I have met too many ‘that’s a career that will put me in the 1%, and that’s why I am majoring in that,’ to know that many college courses should not be tuition free.
Financial Derivatives 101 is free.
But you have to pay to learn how to drive a truck.
Conversations with History – Edward N. Luttwak – “The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire”
Interesting that it was the Western Roman Empire, which faced no real external threat which self-destructed, while the Eastern Roman Empire continued on for several hundred more years.
Peter Heather writes that a critical ingredient in the Western Empire’s collapse was the need for food. (see The Fall of the Roman Empire: A New History of Rome and the Barbarians by Peter Heather)
As you might imagine, farming with slaves (as the empire did) depletes the soil. It was one of the motivators for the American Civil War. Depleted soil meant that Southerners needed those new Western territories for slave farming; they weren’t optional.
Anyway, the Romans needed the food from North Africa, and the Vandals and Visigoths cut off the supply. RIP Rome.
The irony is that, despite Roman’s relatively advanced technologies, extractive agriculture ran up against its limit, and that killed the Empire. The microbes and soil insects are what counts, not superior technology, armies, grandiose historical figures, etc.
The Chinese ruined their soil with New World crops (sweet potato) that would grow in previously unsuitable soil. Farming collapsed and gunboat diplomacy began, even though the Chinese were often technologically advanced compared to their occidental colonial masters.
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations by David R. Montgomery describes this too.
T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) wrote that the Arabs liked monarchies because they prevented clever, ambitious men from rising to power.
I think that’s interesting. I’ve wondered about that myself. The old WASP elite seems to have fostered a leisure class of scholar intellectuals who were neither narrow professionals nor a careerist professoriate. The Brooks Adamses and the William Jameses etc. Jane Addams. Eleanor Roosevelt.
Today even our putative “elite” almost universally casts itself in a working class mold, which is ultimately all about individual economic pursuit out of necessity and felt necessity. Just look at how everyone almost universally talks about the “American dream” in individualist economic terms.** People in real need are left to struggle by themselves against the interests of those with real power while people who would like to make change can only afford to do so if someone with real power pays them to. In our benighted age, this is a recipe for disaster.
I’ve actually gotten quite disgusted with this. HRC would like to live off the reformist reputation of that earlier class of elite women, but her own daughter could have done absolutely anything she wanted in life and she becomes a hedge fund manager and goes to work for McKinsey. I guess today Chelsea lives off the Clinton foundation, but for what?
**Eleanor Roosevelt, for example, did not define the American dream in terms of the fruits of the New Deal, but in terms of the dream of democracy. It might even be possible to say that she defined it against the fruits of the New Deal:
“The future will be determined by the young, and there is no more essential task today, it seems to me, than to bring before them once more, in all its brightness, in all its splendor and beauty, the American dream, lest we let it fade, too concerned with ways of earning a living or impressing our neighbors or getting ahead or finding bigger and more potent ways of destroying the world and all that is in it.
No single individual, of course, and no single group has an exclusive claim to the American dream. But we have all, I think, a single vision of what it is, not merely as a hope and an aspiration, but as a way of life, which we can come ever closer to attaining in its ideal form if we keep shining and unsullied our purpose and our belief in its essential value.”
Let me add that I am, therefore, somewhat uncomfortable with today’s pious (on the left) and heady (on the right) valorization of The Working Class. I’m not sure that the great reset many of us think we need and desire to see will actually come out of that cast of mind.
This is actually different from what I thought a few years ago, but I roll with the punches.
Plastic Bags – a cheep shot to look good may be worse in the long run
Hong Kong did the same thing 5 years ago. The local office of Green Peace proclaimed it a great success, probably got a bonus in their pay packet for finally getting something done. However recently a university student collected data from a sample of grocery shops showing that purposed garbage bag sales went up, and because the garbage bags are significantly large than the shopping bags, he estimated about 25% more plastic bag material is going into the landfills than before.
This. I live in the city, and do you honestly see people adopting ‘reusable’ bags to take their garbage to the recycling and garbage collection area of their buildings? Sure, they are going to take things down there empty out the bag and then take it back to their apartment to wash out before putting it back in their trash cans – not. I don’t know about the rest of NYC, but most of my trash cans are lined with plastic bags from the super market. They actually work well for small trash cans in bathrooms and for my smaller kitchen can. Now while the bag in the bathroom can be ‘used’ over and over, the kitchen one not so much. And I will have to buy bags larger than I need for for that one. And most of the purchased bags seem to be ‘thicker’ plastic as well as larger.
I don’t know the answer for this, but I’m pretty sure this is going to be as cosmetic as it apparently was in Hong Kong.
Garbage companies require bagging garbage. The bin is not enough. My guess is the garbage takes flight during transportation but we wanted to wrap garbage in old newspaper and were told no. It must be plastic bagged. We produce very little garbage so we will probably get rid of pick up and just drop off our one small bin volume once a month. They don’t care how it’s packaged for the facility.
I use plastic shopping bags for kitty litter. Not gonna reuse them. Also pretty sure the garbage collectors would complain about loose kitty litter in the garbage.
This assessment is debatable. Firstly, it assumes that a vast majority of single-use shopping bags are filled with trash and sent to the garbage full. Unlikely. In actual use, single-use bags have a tendency to tear or split or have holes, in which case it becomes trash itself, and quite a lot end up as litter that ends up in landscape or waterways (which is the actual reason cities pass these bans, not to reduce plastic entering the waste stream).
Secondly, a larger garbage bag’s surface ratio to volume is decreased (being roughly spherical), not increased. Only if they consistently throw away fairly empty bags of garbage would the statement be true.
They both have to fit the trash bin, and the bins most people have in their home were sized to fit the standard shopping bag. The cheapest trashbags, and therefore the most popular, were designed for another user, the urban councils wet markets, which are significantly larger bins. BTW, trash pickups in HK are a daily affair, semi-tropical environment and festering trash do not make for a happy environment.
Anyway, you may have your opinion, but if you want, you could even stop guessing/being a pundit without actual facts. Hong Kong is open for visitors.
Holy smokes it’s a far more serious problem there than I had been aware, banning bags won’t go nearly far enough:
http://hongkong.coconuts.co/2015/01/15/talking-rubbish-hong-kongs-waste-problem-explained
I’ll have to pay much more attention to Hong Kong’s policies going forward, as whatever effective solutions your city comes up with will matter a lot to many world cities soon enough.
Yep, it’s pretty bad, and unlike NYC, we don’t dump at sea so it’s problem we have to own instead of giving it to the whole world.
Yes, the drop in the inflation adjusted median household income does explain why people in the U.S. are frustrated and angry. But let’s face it: Trump’s a billionaire, and is an expert at gaming the system for his own benefit. From today’s article by Nomi Prins:
What the article does not explain is why Sanders is still in second place behind oligarch friendly Hillary Clinton. Sanders is the only major party candidate who is serious about solving the problem of the declining median income.
I fully believe this is because our media no longer seeks to present facts and information. Between the race for numbers that have nothing to do with news but serve to raise money AND the concentrated ownership of our press, our electorate is sadly undereducated and massively ill informed. When people actually hear what Sanders has to say and examine his record, they largely support him. Presented with a real, not imaginary record of Clinton they recognize that her image – good and bad is largely a creature of PR. Given the facts about Trump not the showmanship and carnival barker salesmanship, you get that he is all over the place and there is not much there there.
Deep down, the relationship between representative and electoral may be so broken, and understood by so many to be broken, that if voting doesn’t matter, you might as well elect the guy who is most entertaining. Since there is no reason to believe a word Donald Trump says (and he is a master of confused and contradictory discourse, which he uses to baffle and distract those whose pockets he so successfully picks) you can only vote for him for a few reasons: 1) lesser of two evils; 2) screw you to the system; 3) he’s a charlatan, but a very entertaining charlatan.
I’ll giver the doomsayers one point: this is not the best result the promise of a democratic republic has going for it.
The media is so distrusted I don’t think Trump can go down at this point. Trump’s 5th Avenue observation was dead on. Of course, the GOP elite thought Romney lecturing Republican voters would go over well. Once the Washington and media elites lined up against Trump last Fall he became inevitable.
He named his kid “Baron. ” Baron?!?! The Washington elite is simply despised if people would vote for Trump.
Maybe Trump is a Flash Gordon fan, and he didn’t realize that this should be spelled “Barin”. Maybe not.
Perhaps a variant of “Baran”; see this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baran_%28surname%29
Trump does resemble the Baron Harkonnen of Dune:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Harkonnen
If only Trump could float whenever he lied, he would be able to fly much higher than Harkonnen
That Zimbabwe currency controls article really got me thinking about what Bad Samaritans says countries should do when they’re in a hole: stop digging.
Probably the best and biggest experiment in modern currency controls there is, and we get to watch it happen in real time.
Ageing population in China…economic time bomb.
Isn’t an aging population a good thing (humans experiencing such)?
But for the economy, it’s bad.
That is, what is good for humans is bad for the economy.
What is next?
Happy humans are good for humans, but bad for the economy?
Well, yes. That means the serfs will be likely to be motivated to work.
Thus, never free money for them.
I would think an aging population would be practically the best news possible–at least for the planet and every living thing on it. When I hear people bemoaning “an aging population” all I can think is how damn self centered can you be? “Who’s gonna wipe my ass for me or even pay into my retirement fund when I am ten or twenty years past my natural lifespan?” isn’t a valid argument for destroying the planet with an unsustainable birthrate.
Here’s to an aging population everywhere.
An aging population is bad for sweatshop employers but great for the workers themselves. Easier to demand higher wages and treatment if you’re not competing against a million others.
The other solution (that the economy-ueber-alles proponents like) to the ‘problem’ of an ageing population is for the aged to go off to Towers of Silence sooner than these old people would prefer.
That really sounds better in the original German, you know.
http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36219612
Wow, look at the contract in attitudes….
Trump on Brexit: “I want them to make their own decision.”
In April, Mr Obama said Britain would go to the “back of the queue” for trade deals with the US if it votes to leave the European Union, sparking anger among Leave campaigners in the UK.
The funny thing is that going to the back of the queue would be the smartest thing the UK could go
Not for nothing, but the photo attached to the Politico article about Hillary’s people trying to sound out Bush supporters for cash is a disturbing static record of a Clinton habit that annoys some of the NC denizens. It is of her pointing to the audience and breaking into a big smile as if she sees someone she didn’t expect to see. This one has a particularly maniacal smile.
Oh, and apparently the attempt to hook more money is not going well if the article is to be believed. More we don’t like Trump, but we aren’t going to do this either. So apparently the Bush boys may think of Bill as a brother from another mother, but they aren’t going to free up their money people to help out their ‘sister-in-law’.
“It is of her pointing to the audience and breaking into a big smile as if she sees someone she didn’t expect to see. ”
Hillary has invisible friends! Sumthin else to worry about.
The other thing to watch out for is if she sets her cellphone timer to go off during a speech then pretends to answer an important phone call. She’ll still be speaking into the mike while pretending to talk to an imaginary caller.
Ah!, Hello Mr. Putin. What a pleasant surprise. (rolls eyes at camera) Anything I can do for you today?
(silence)
Return Boris? Your Russian Wolfhound? Why….I don’t know what you are talking about? (rolls eyes at camera) Why do you think I have Boris? (Makes barking noise in background – waves at audience and smiles)
(silence)
You found footprints? And that proves what?
(silence)
Oh. They were size 12, 2 centimeters deep in frozen ground, and embossed soles say, “Top Secret – US State Dept.” …..Well, ok, but you still don’t know who! (smiles at audience) …..Ooooooh, embossing also say “property of V. Nuland”……well…..Vicky has a sense of humor that way (waves at audience)…You know, Vlad, you really need to tighten up your security there in the soviet…er, I mean Russia. (smiles at camera)…anyway, Vlad, I’m in the middle of an important speech. You’ll have to try calling back later. We can talk some more about Boris, then. Shalom.
re: Burning Man for the 1%….
Vomit inducing. So these self-obsessed peacocks are supposed to be the vanguard of human evolution?
Schmidt is truly cringeworthy. I wouldn’t be surprised if he turned out to be a robot built by Google engineers.
This article is crap. https://theintercept.com/…/beyond-schadenfreude-the-specta…/
Why it is crap is an interesting issue. It isn’t that the pundits getting Trump wrong isn’t worth remembering. But it ignores the fact that plenty of people were right about Trump from the start. The MSM doesn’t want to pay any attention to such people. It also acts like the remedy to the people being so very very wrong is that they should apologize, like they apologized for helping lie the country into the Iraq war. A real remedy would be to get them fired. Ignoring them in the future is really the least we can do.
From the Zim link:
This experiment was run in Argentina, where pesos and U.S. dollars circulated side-by-side at a 1:1 exchange rate. When the country fell into recession, overindebtedness and forex reserve shortages in 2001 and pulled the plug, the peso fell to 3 to the dollar within a year or so.
Zimbabwe starting out with $200 million of borrowed reserves tells you in advance that this hinky scheme isn’t gonna last long. Ask ol’ Gideon Gono, the genius central bankster who engineered Zimbabwe’s legendary hyperinflation:
‘Under construction since 2000′ — says everything you need to know. No printing press in the basement? That money’s gotta be coming from somewhere.
Ol’ Gideon keeps truckin’ and the chickens keep a-cluckin’ …
So sue them propublica…certainly the firms attack parties who probably can not afford to hire an atty…but…these law firms should be qualified as part owners of the debt since most do not get paid in a direct attorney client scenario, but as a percentage of collections…25 – 45% from what little I have seen…also this total refusal of most state ag offices to prosecute on usury is a sad reflection of the timocracy we live in today…
Trump tries to reverse his low standing among Hispanic voters.
Dangerous Donald…hillaryus must not really want to be president…can see el donaldo having himself in the classic george reeves pose with the planet earth behind him and a red white and blue cape with that orange hair flap waving and dd on his chest…
hillaryus2016…designed 4 failure
Resilc: “Obomba could send Beyonce.”
Or, perhaps we could just send the first couple to dance with “Storm troopers and R2D2” (If you haven’t already seen it, search for it. Ugh.)
Re CDs vs. mp3s:
It’s been 15 years now since a German magazine conducted a blind listening study with a carefully chosen panel of 12 audiophiles and high-end audio equipment. And what they found was that *nobody* could reliably distinguish between 256kbps mp3s and the original CD sources.
Source: http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/index.php?showtopic=27324
As I understand it, anybody who thinks they can hear the difference between 256kbps mp3s and CDs is kidding themselves.
I’m going to try not to be impulsive here, but 12 people does not a fact make.
I also don’t know if all downloads are really 254kbps; like download speeds, the real number may be different from the presumed number.
Lastly, if I listen to an old DG vinyl recording of, say, Parsifal, and I listen to a CD of Parsifal, I can damned well hear the difference, and the vinyl is better. I still have my old Donna Summer’s Greatest Hits on Casablanca vinyl, and it’s not comparable to the similar material downloaded by my kids for their MP3 players–it’s way deeper and richer-sounding for sure.
“the vinyl is better”
Sorry Jim – it is preferred by you, and that is fine, but don’t do the old man shouty thing about it. This isn’t an athletic contest, more like one of those skating things where nobody helped the judges by falling down so they give it to the girl with the most appealing dimples.
Your record does not sound like it does in person. Would you seriously argue that?
It’s important we make our own music.
And because art is about unlocking one’s own creativity, there is not ‘this is best or that is first.’
That is, it’s not about who is the first woman president…
No ranking, no discrimination, no preference.
In Zen, it’s called being a man of no rank.
Your own music is what is meaningful to you.
Doesn’t matter if we rephrase and say, it’s important we make our own noise.
Our own music. Our own noise.
And sure enough, there was a link a while back, about delaying senility by talking, even to oneself. The act of making sound is healthy – who could have known?
And it is always ‘in person.’
I agree on MP3s. I can tell the difference. The only benefit to MP3s is compression in terms of file size.
On vinyl I agree historically but many of these new age, trendy “audiophiles” who think vinyl sounds better fail to understand that these days new music is almost always recorded and mastered digitally. Any benefit of an analog signal is gone before the record is even pressed, and that would extend to any reissues and especially remasters. It is all cosmetic these days, part of the nostalgia market.
Now straight analog vinyl, there is something to care about, if you are into that.
I think the best is 16 track tape for recording then onto vinyl or cd. The problem nowadays is getting your hands on good tape. Not easy.
more clearly, and as you imply, the reason traditional vinyl is (IMO) better is because it was mastered on tape, vinyl doen’t fix any of the problems with digital mastering (now we’ve crossed into should you cut your mushroom or pluck it territory, I have friends firmly entrenched on both sides) What is great about tape from a players perspective is this…I have access to both types of studio. In the digital studio the feed is always running, we have gazillions of gigabytes of unlistenable material, fishing the few gems out would be impossible, so it’s effectively unrecorded, while when on tape everyone gets on the same page, gets ready, then the call is made,” we’re ready right, ok roll the tape”. Much better results, no lost files, transfer to digital, everyone goes home with a copy.
Drect to disc vinyl recordings do not have a tape master in the signal attrnuation path…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct-to-disc_recording
Jim
Many younger people have never been exposed to high fidelityrecordings/reproduction and that is a real shame.
I consider mp3 s to be the audio equivelant of viruses.
They are fatuging to listen to crap.
For reasons i wont bother to get into, people that download compressed format audio files in proprietary formats say from Apple then create a cd for a friend to rip into some other propritary format say wma, everytime that is done, more noise artifacts and defects accumulate on what started as a compromised digital file.
I will point out that much of what you may perceive as superior about the vinyl analog recording /reproduction has to do with dB range of the reproduction (search on the subject “loudness wars”).
Digital recording have allowed studio engineers to saturate the dB range, well beyond what is possible with vinyl,( not to be confused with compression –eg: mp3, which removes content).
The consequnce of saturating the signal destroys the “breathing” or the queit content of the source material.
Long story short i have excellent digital recordings that are imo superior to analog (vinyl) My reference stereo is all digital from source through a digital “amp” to speakers with digital crossovers. No better reproduction possible. Where there is no signal, inky black quiet
Start here
http://dynamicrangeday.co.uk/about/
Compare:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Mclaughlin&album=
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Saval&album=
To this:
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=Beyonce&album=
http://dr.loudness-war.info/album/list?artist=50+cent&album=
From the bookmark archive
http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/software/the-future-of-music
Two part, good reading on the subject
Yeah much as I adore my hosts the “thinner” (define that? Bet you can’t) and “brighter/brassier” — actually I think that is definable — might just mean the CD is more accurate. I don’t believe so, they are both representations of what happened and err in their own way. Then you have the amplifier (hey I think tubes are cool beyond reason but also don’t think they are any more “accurate” — a tube amp/phonograph combination + whatever (mind’s blanking) speakers will certainly give you a better representation of how Dad heard the Beatles but doesn’t make it “more correct” for -insert band comprised of 20 yr olds here- new work)
Anyway I’ve never hand a “modern” (CD or MP3 or whatver) pop or skip and that’s pretty much the game for me. And I am not young.
different chris–
You are young indeed if you have never heard a CD skip!
In one respect they are no different from vinyl: Treat them gingerly or they won’t play!
Thirty thousand years from now when the cockroaches’ archaeologists are digging up our bones, they are going to dust off our vinyl records as well and play them–for good or ill.
CDs not so much.
–Gaianne
True, but a well made CD can kept dryish and from under extreme heat can apparently hold its data reasonably well into the thousands of years.
This link is to the published results of a study commissioned by the Library of Congress:
https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rt/CDservicelife_rev.pdf
In the last tables of the paper of estimated life spans among the various samples you can see four digit estimated lifespan and numerous “right censored”, which sounds suspect but is just the term for discs that showed no measurable loss of data integrity and as such impossible are to assign a life span number. That Soundgarden disc you burned on your newfangled CD burner back in 1994, maybe not so long.
IIRC there are two things here that get in the way of this being apples2apples. First that the early mass MP3s were 128Kb/sec with much more lossy compression, 256Kb ones were less compressed (even lossless ?). Secondly some early CDs were quite poor, in comparison to vinyl, due to the choice of the digitization point: The N-track master recording , the mixed result, or the final CD master. There was even, at one point, an indicator on the CD like “AAD” which would imply Analogue mastering, Analogue mixing, Digital CD master.
Oh man, there are some absolutely terrible CD masters. Lots of 80s classical I have heard, the Phil Collins early catalog (thank Bogart for the recent remasters), RCA CDs in general…
The point the original author in the article was making seemed to be that finding, buying and and listening to digitally downloaded music is more convenient than discs, and therefore better quality from an macroeconomic point of view.
Or not. Either way, I’m hanging onto my CDs.
“Many of the listeners were surprised at how good an MP3 recording can sound through the outstanding Marantz player.”
Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. No mere flesh wound, this. The CD player as DAC is a gigantic confounding factor. Older CD pressings were known to make for harsh listening, thanks to the lack of experience with the medium. CD players typically employ a lot of filtering to dampen the top end where encoding or just digital playback artifacts would be heard. It would be interesting to repeat that test with a quality studio DAC and the ripped WAV vs. MP3 played through it, so as to eliminate the CD player (and its filtering) as a confounding factor. It would also be interesting to know whether 256k was a constant, variable or average bit rate specification, each of which allows more bits to be reallocated from easy blocks for use in more complex blocks (and which is therefore less feasible for streaming).
Furthermore, observe the correlation between the song’s identification score and its genre on that playlist. Pop songs (especially shaker-laden urban beats such as Chic’s “Jusagroove”) tend to contain more detail in the 13-16kHz range and less “soft focus” from the (nonexistent) room than, say, Anne S. von Otter’s symphonic+vocal performances. Electric genres tend to span less dynamic range, and to have a stereo image defined more by channel mixing than channel delay, both of which require extra bits to encode faithfully. In particular, multi-band dynamic range compression, a nearly ubiquitous mastering treatment in pop recordings, tries to even out the power along the time domain and over broad sections of the frequency domain, which means more tough choices for lossy encoders to screw up.
This is interesting. This stuff is really technical for most people, but once you wade into it, incredible things can be done with digital audio now.
“But the BBC’s Brian Hungwe in the capital, Harare, says that bank customers are not always able to withdraw the amount of US dollars they want because of a shortage of dollar notes in Zimbabwe.”
Haha, of course. Why would you print your own dollar notes purportedly backed by actual dollars rather than simply distributing the actual dollars, unless it was a scam?
It’s a shame JG Ballard is dead.
The world he described so thoroughly in Super Cannes and Cocaine Nights is being baselined.
Hillary forces target Bush donors Politico. Lambert had this in Water Cooler yesterday, but worth underscoring.
As I observed last week, Jebs! donor list should be more relevant to HRC than Sander’s. I doubt Sander’s donor list would recover the postage cost to solicit them..
A liberal NYC Republican versus a conservative Arkansas Democrat for President. Genuinely weird.
Hillary grew up in the Chicago suburbs. She only showed up in Arkansas in 1975.
During her first two years in the governor’s mansion in Little Rock, Hillary made clear that she regarded Arkansas as a rather pokey place. Locals picked up on the snotty big-city-girl ‘tude and returned the favor by giving Bill a two-year vacation from the governor’s mansion.
Funny how that happens over and over:
Hillary is vastly overrated, both as a political force and as an administrator.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
By the way, that’s how those hard working rich people got NAFTA and bank bailout to pass. They kept trying.
Can our excited young voters do anything less? “Just do it, even when you are not excited.” (In fact, that’s how many not-so-young people cope with life).
Targeting Republican voters too. There’s a page on her website for Republicans to share why they think Trump shouldn’t be president.
https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/728613495969853440
We should never under-estimate our opponents.
That’s a smart move on her part, I have to say, though maybe she is halting at Dunkirk and starting operation Barbarosa a bit too soon.
Re: Dangerous Donald & Scott Adams’ takedown of the “attack” ad.
We now know what the Donald’s best strategy from now until the general in November. Follow the maxim – attributed to Napoleon:
“never interrupt your enemy when she is making a mistake”
The question being whether he has the wit to realise this. An internal battle between vanity, narcissism, and an inability to just STFU on the one side and the “Art of the Deal” on the other.
Tangential memo to Bernie Sanders and campaign crew:
In the (very possible) event that Emailgate blows up in Hilly’s face (or whatever), and then even the apparatchik/political hack Superdelegates have to vote against Her Eminence–ie, if Bernie is the Democratic candidate, please, please, please hire Scott Adams as a consultant. And then…listen to him.
Top reason Americans will vote for Trump: ‘To stop Clinton’
Bad reasoning
100% of Republicans are part of the poll, but only the Democrats who claim they will vote for Hillary.
What’s ignored are the possible majority of Sanders voters who may well vote for Trump if Hillary is forced upon them as an alternate.
Some lunatic Cruzbots may vote for Hillary, but it’s a far smaller number than Sanders’ voters selecting Trump.
Regarding debt collection practices,
If you think your bank account will be seized, take out what you have in cash.
Or, put it in your children’s bank account, minor or adult. Not sure about the sanctity of minor children’s accounts.
Bottom line of the long article and longer comments, demand to see a copy of the original note with a copy of your signature on it and also a chain of title showing that who you are dealing with actually has the right to collect it.
“Awaiting your reply with these requested items to take action on repaying this debt”
is a good closing line in your letter or email. Carry a copy of this with you in case you should ever need to show good faith in dealing with the non-payment of the debt should they fail to come through.
The only thing that can stop a bad toddler with a gun is a good toddler with a gun!
It’s like back to the wild, wild west when the only thing that could stop a trigger-happy cop with a gun was another trigger happy cop with a gun.
And thus, cops with a gun evolved to become smarter.
Yeah, they evolved to shoot people who didnt have guns.
I should have said, ‘evolved to be more lethal.’
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2016/05/06/bush_republicanism_is_dead_and_gone_130497.html
Buchanan does a fine job of skewering the Bushes
and:
Hubert Humphrey closed a 15-point gap in the Gallup poll on Oct. 1 to reach a 43-43 photo finish with Richard Nixon in 1968.
President Gerald Ford was down 33 points to Jimmy Carter in mid-July 1976, but lost by only 2 points on Election Day.
In February 1980, Ronald Reagan was 29 points behind Jimmy Carter, whom he would crush 51-41 in a 44-state landslide.
Gov. Michael Dukakis left his Atlanta convention 17 points ahead of Vice President George H. W. Bush in 1988. Five weeks later, Labor Day, Bush had an eight-point lead he never lost, and swept 40 states.
Just ran into a friend of Kazakh/FSU descent who met her American husband over 30 years ago when he was stationed in Moscow. She just spent a week in Russia, first visit in over 5 years, and was raving at how much she was impressed by the changes there. Described Moscow as “glittering, clean, functional” – lots of new infrastructure since she last visited, everyone up on the latest tech, no third-worldishness (or more aptly, second-worldishness) about the place. She did admit that “of course Moscow is not the rest of Russia”, and that her latest stint did not permit time to travel around more of the country. Said after seeing how everything has been improved – not just for the elites but for the for the larger populace – she can understand why Putin so popular at home. Added that his willingness to stand up to what Russians perceive as a corrupt, empire-delusion-addled West is a similarly large factor in his domestic popularity.
Rather belies the Western MSM propaganda of a corruption-riddled nuclear-armed banana republic on the verge of economic collapse due to low commodities prices, don’t it?
The Western mainstream media has been describing the U.S.A. as “a corruption-riddled nuclear-armed banana republic on the verge of economic collapse due to low commodities prices”? Hey, maybe they’re finally starting to do real journalism! Oh wait, you meant they’ve been describing Russia that way didn’t you?
“AUSTRALIA WILL UNLEASH HERPES ON INVASIVE CARP Newsweek (vlade)”–third link from the top
You can’t make this stuff up. Evidently the Australian Minister for Science has never heard the terms “blowback” or “the law of unintended consequences.” But what’s there to worry about? As the Newsweek article states:
That’s reassuring. And because the research was done by scientists anyone who disagrees risks being branded as “anti-science” by people like Marc Andreessen and Eduardo Porter [1]. (That’s even worse than being called an over-privileged, sexist white liberal by the Clintonistas!).
And don’t get me started on the scheme to dump iron dust into the ocean in order to capture carbon from the atmosphere as part of a cap-and-trade credit system (or, if there’s no market for that, to increase wild salmon stocks). [2]
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/20/business/economy/liberal-biases-too-may-block-progress-on-climate-change.html?_r=0
[2] http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/haida-gwaii-ocean-fertalizing-chile-1.3550783
Apparently the Australian Minister for Science has never heard the term “Cane Toad” before either.
Cryptome: Long about way to say the public and obvious: Omidyar employs Glen Greenwald’s machine.
Snowden could well be an employee of Greenwald’s independent shop, the man does have to eat and have a roof over his head, and it isn’t cheap living in a manner that makes both kidnapping and/or being snuffed in Moscow hard to achieve. If Greenwald is (helping) pay for his up-keep after Snowden already turned over everything before departing Hong Kong, then I’d consider that worthy of kudos.
There is only one thing to like about the two sloppy neo-liberals/libtards running Cryptome, they hate everyone who isn’t them equally.