Yves here. You have a LOT of links today because there were SO MANY election links, and I still wanted to do a reasonable job of covering the other bases.
Baby elephant which saved a British schoolgirl from tsunami has been found Thai PBS (furzy)
Is it time to rethink the lab mouse? St. Louis scientists say yes St. Louis Public Radio
Dogs were domesticated not once, but twice… in different parts of the world, research shows PhysOrg (Chuck L)
Existential Therapy from the Universe: Physicist Sean Carroll on How Poetic Naturalism Illuminates Our Human Search for Meaning Brain Pickings (Chuck L)
The world is about to install 700 million air conditioners. Here’s what that means for the climate Washington Post. I once stayed in a friend’s apartment in NYC on some hot days and his a/c died. I found that sleeping with the Vornado (very powerful fans for their size) close to me was cooler than having the a/c on, and I would assume used less energy. But there still was an energy cost.
Scotland Bans Fracking, Forever OilPrice
Internet Boom Times Are Over, Says Mary Meeker’s Influential Report Bloomberg (resilc)
Sketchy genetic algorithms are the worst Cathy O’Neil
Samsung: Don’t install Windows 10. REALLY The Register (furzy)
“Noncoding” RNA molecules found to create micropeptides SOTT (Wat)
I Had to Leave the U.S. to Stop Pretending to Be an Extrovert Salon
Negative-yield debt breaks $10tn level for first time Financial Times. Madness.
THE QUALITY OF EUROPEAN UNION JUSTICE – HOW TO DISMISS ROSNEFT’S CHALLENGE TO THE LEGALITY OF SANCTIONS John Helmer
Refugee Crisis
Greek detention centre burns in riot between Afghans and Pakistanis euronews (furzy)
Netherlands Is the Tax Haven of Choice for Global Arms Dealers teleSUR (guurst)
France is protesting against Europe Defend Democracy
Paris floodwaters set to peak as more rain forecast BBC
Brexit?
Brexit fears loom large for Fed meeting Financial Times
Support for Brexit is no longer a minority viewpoint on the British left British Politics and Policy at LSE
How Will ‘Brexit’ Vote Go? Monty Python May Offer Clue New York Times
Syraqiatan
Reuters – U.N. adds Saudi coalition to blacklist for killing children in Yemen euronews (furzy)
Imperial Collapse Watch
Memorial Day Crocodile Tears from Those Who Create Wars by Walter Brasch Dandelion Salad (Judy B)
How U.S. Invasions and War Have Exacerbated Slavery in 3 Countries Alternet
The Truth About Populism and Foreign Policy Foreign Affairs (furzy). What I find remarkable is that the insiders find it necessary to straw man Trump when he has handed them plenty of poorly worked out and even batshit ideas to attack. For instance, this article cites poll data saying 77% of Americans think staying in NATO is a good idea and therefore a President needs to respect that. First, presidents can and do move opinion. But second, Trump has not said the US should leave NATO. He wants the other members to carry more of the costs.
Trade Traitors
Jeremy Corbyn: I Would Kill TTIP Common Dreams (furzy)
2016
20,000 Commit To Anti-Hillary Occupy DNC Daily Caller (martha r)
Sanders picks up more superdelegates Politico (Bill C)
Why Bernie Sanders Is the Best Candidate for Senior Citizens Hollywood Reporter (martha r)
Why the Latest California Poll Should Make Clinton Worry Vanity Fair (martha r). Sanders comes close to even with Clinton among Latino voters.
Sanders Takes LEAD Over Clinton In California George Washington. But look at detail. And that’s before you get to vote suppression.
A Sanders win in California could mean ‘summer of agony’ for Clinton USA Today (martha r)
Jerry Brown’s Misleading Clinton Endorsement Medium (martha r)
Placebo Ballots: Stealing California From Bernie Using an Old GOP Vote-Snatching Trick Greg Palast (martha r)
The Real Numbers: New Jersey! John Laurits (martha r)
Why New Jersey Needs Bernie Sanders Common Dreams (Judy B)
is hillary owned by the large corporations? UNU Martha r: “This is a bit of fun–a hive mind exercise. Click if you are curious to see how this question was answered.”
ANCA-Western Region Endorses Sanders for the upcoming Calif. Primary Mirror Spectator (martha r)
Trump risks US nuclear war, claims Clinton Financial Times. Huh? She is the one who wants to escalate in the Middle East and is considering Victoria Nuland for Secretary of State, which virtually guarantees a hot war with Russia. This is sheer projection. She accuses of him of risking a nuclear war…by alienating England, Mexico, and the Pope?
Clinton’s Foreign Policy Speech Marred by Inherent Contradictions Common Dream (furzy)
Waiting for California and the FBI Common Dream. (furzy). Watching the Clinton decay path.
I felt a shudder down my spine yesterday watching Donald Trump’s fusilade against the press. Dan Rather, Facebook (furzy). The press create Trump and they need to stare him down. The courts are so insistent on free speech for corps that they can’t restrict it for the press. But yes, this is ugly and the press needs to nip this in the bud.
Republicans Stunned After Trump Reveals That His Presidential Campaign Is Broke PoliticusUSA (furzy). Not sure the Dems running attack ads between now and the R convention will make a lasting impact, since the undecided don’t make up their minds till after Labor Day.
Chuck Todd: Donald Trump’s behavior at presser ‘borderline irresponsible’ Today. I said earlier that the biggest event risk for Trump is Trump. He continues to attack Republicans and thus alienate donors. Does he really want to win?
Protestors and Supporters Brawl Outside Donald Trump Rally in San Jose Gawker. Seriously not good. Crowd attacked Trump supporters. Notice, when there was actual violence, it does not appear that the press is calling it “violence”?
Win another one for The Gipper? Newspaper endorses Reagan for president CNN (furzy)
Wasserman Schultz’s Challenger, Tim Canova, is Even More “Pro-Israel” Than She Is Counterpunch (martha r). *Sigh* So he as a wart. He actually favors a Palestinian state. Support for Israel is fading regardless. Younger Jews don’t identify with it.
Thanks to Activism And Sanders, Obama Changes Course on Social Security Common Dreams (furzy)
The Occupy movement has grown up — and looks to inflict real pain on big banks Washington Post. I’m dubious, given that Trumka of AFL-CIO is involved. Wonder if this is to suck the air supply out of the Sanders activists who also intend to target down-ticket races in 2018. As a long-standing observer of the political scene told me, “Never trust the American labor movement” meaning the leadership.
SEIU Endorses Single Payer (Kevin C)
Getting federal stimulus money turned blue U.S. counties bluer, and red counties redder. How can that be? Washington Post (furzy)
Lunch with the FT: James Baker Financial Times. If nothing else, read penultimate paragraph.
Corruption
Taxpayers wasted billions of dollars on a war on cocaine that didn’t work, economists say Washington Post (guurst)
Connecticut Groups Call For Dan Malloy To Remove Insurance Regulator In Anthem-Cigna Merger International Business Times
Fed
Federal Reserve to toughen stress tests for big US banks Financial Times. This claim is bullshit: “Fed governor Jerome Powell said the central bank’s move — which is likely to take effect in the 2018 stress tests — would make big banks ‘fully internalise the risk’ they pose to the economy.” Andrew Haldane demonstrated in his 2010 Bank of England paper, The $100 Billion Question, which we’ve cited repeatedly, that banks cannot begin to pay for the damage they do to innocent bystanders via periodic crises. And Haldane argued that the implication was that they needed to be prohibited from doing crisis-inducing things.
UC paid billions in fees to hedge funds that only mirrored stock market San Francisco Business Times
New Payday-Loan Rules Won’t Stop Predatory Lenders Dave Dayen, Intercept
Jamie Dimon says there’s stress in the auto-loan market — but there’s a problem with that Business Insider. Notice the argument does not obviate Dimon’s point.
Evidence of hidden protectionism in the US in the Great Recession VoxEU
Shocking Downturn in New York ISM, Chicago ISM Merely Pathetic Michael Shedlock
Billionaire Steve Schwarzman just went off on the Dodd-Frank Act Business Insider. After his firm was fined $39 million under Dodd Frank, which is couch lint for him (particularly since Blackstone is public and I can’t imagine the fine had any impact on the share price).
A ‘tsunami’ is about to overwhelm the debt market Business Insider
Class Warfare
To Pay for Subsidies to Massive Corporations, States Are Waging War on Poor Families Common Dreams (furzy)
L.A. County Is Proposing To Tax Millionaires In Order To End Homelessness LAist (Qyrs). Someone needs to send the memo to San Francisco and New York City.
Nonprofit Hospital Stops Suing So Many Poor Patients: Will Others Follow? ProPublica (furzy)
Antidote du jour. Chet G sent several fine butterfly photos. This one is a painted lady:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
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Re. the domestication of dogs, nothing I’ve read rules out the possibility that wolfs decided to join humans rather than humans domesticating wolfs into dogs. For example smart wolfs accustomed to follow hunting humans might have left cubs around human camps to be raised by humans.
Yes, domestication seems to have been a two way street for many animals. Certainly humans were domesticated by cats who found use useful creatures for providing food and rodents on tap, as well as nice warm fires. There is some evidence I think that cows may have moved into a sort of symbiosis with humans – we ate the older ones, but also protected them from predators.
Yes, my cat uses me as her doorman – I have adjusted and grown to like arising at 3 am…
I spent 20 yrs scraping up assorted vomited mouse parts (and other ejecta) in, … and out of the house! …. so yeah..my sympathies to you f d ;'(
Wolves domesticating humans? Sounds like “The Carnivore’s Dilemma”… he he he
do remember that it was the mice that created Earth 1 and 2.
I see what you’re getting at in a colloquial sense, but what you’re describing is not domestication, and what Ruben is describing is part and parcel with domestication. It is certainly the case that dogs (and probably all other animal domesticates) first adapted to a commensal relationship with humans before being domesticated. In the case of wolves, that probably meant following mobile human populations and/or frequently visiting sedentary camps to supplement their diets with human refuse. Humans were unaffected, except by incidental conflict, while the wolves benefited significantly from a regular, low energy-investment source of calories (even if it was low value scraps). Similarly, the symbiotic wild herd management you’re describing is probably the precursor of domestication in social mammals like cows, pigs, sheep, etc. and a component of domestication for e.g. fowl and honeybees.
The typical definition of domestication, however, is multi-generational direct reproductive involvement. Dogs and cats have not domesticated humans because they aren’t involved in our reproductive cycle (insert joke about pets interrupting sex here). Cats and dogs thus probably began as human commensals, benefiting from human scraps and human altered environments, then entered into symbiosis by killing pests, barking at/attacking trespassing strangers, and participating in inter-species play. Some of these wild animals became tame, and eventually humans began to interject themselves into the reproductive cycle of tame animals to reinforce desirable traits (decreased aggressiveness, one imagines, was probably first for wolves). This breeding behavior is the definition of domestication, NOT receiving benefit from a relationship.
Yes. This. There was a fox domestication project in Russia a few years ago (begun in 1959) – selective breeding didn’t take long to produce both physical and behavioral changes. Evolution can be very fast.
Healthcare and education should be paid by tax dollars and not debt slavery.
American taxes pay for killing civilians in foreign lands.
The U.S. has already killed 20 million civilians since WW2.
Killing foreigners is not how you grow the economy.
Killary Hissinger’s foreign policy speech is a farce.
Killary is the number one danger to the planet earth.
Question: How fast can I go stupid?
Answer: You don’t really want to know.
https://lokisrevengeblog.wordpress.com/2016/05/25/how-fast-can-i-go-stupid/
Re the Waiting for California and the FBI article:
I love how the dem establishment is looking for “someone” to take the steering wheel if Hillary is indicted. Hmm, now who could we possibly find to replace her highness as the nominee if/when she gets indicted…? Well, obviously someone who hasn’t even run for the nomination. Brain dead much? That would literally be a totalitarian action to take and would be impossible for any pundit with even the faintest hint of being rational to ignore.
If this happens, I think that all of the efforts behind the planned protests should instead go into encouraging Bernie to join Jill Stein on the Green ticket. Why even bother with the radioactive dems and risk getting tear-gased at the convention?
“I had to leave the US to Stop Pretending to be an Extravert” – On a similar note, I don’t appreciate 5 or more employees asking how I’m doing every time I walk into Home Depot and acting like they’re my friend and we know each other, or Citizens Bank robotically reciting time wasting programmed lines that dehuman the experience instead of humanizing like “Are you completely satisfied with your transaction?” When all that was done is a simple deposit, or cash register checkout staff saying vacuously more one once “have a good afternoon.” Or the time wasting scripts Comcast & other “customer service” phone reps recite adnosiem. To me this is the OPPOSITE of human interaction. Its IN-humane interaction. It’s DE-humanizing and robotical and says “We really DON’T care about you.”
Agree completely, and it is uncomfortable for many staff too. I really liked the “pretending to be an extrovert” article, and most of it felt very familiar.
A long time ago, I worked in a small (physically) computer store where once in a while someone from corporate would turn up and basically watch us (the salespeople) interacting with customers. I made a lot of sales, yet because I was not a certain type of salesperson I was continually told to interact in ways that I was uncomfortable with, even though it was clear to me that many of the customers were uncomfortable when I would approach sales this way. In the end one day I just decided I’d had enough, and walked out.
Nowadays, everytime I am subjected the sort of treatment that you wrote about by sales staff I feel obliged to play along, lest the salesperson’s manager be watching the interaction and blame my lack of interest in listening to their empty words on something the salesperson did. The situation ends up as one in which the only people who are happy are the managers, who are lost in their misguided world of business dogma and meaningless kpi’s.
Re: 700mn New Air Conditioners
There is increasing evidence (but still underresearched) that increased prevalence of air conditioners reduces human natural ability to acclimatise:
This certainly mirrors my own experience. Heat in South East England is rarely extreme (certainly compared to a typical U.S. heatwave) but the ubiquity of air conditioners (certainly now compared to when I was a kid in the 1970s) means I notice it far more. And installed air conditioners begat more air conditioning — you cannot sell or let commercial buildings unless you install A/C (apart from the lowest end of the market) and it’s become a must-have for prime, not just super prime residential property.
Yes – there is surely a cultural aspect to it, not to mention the question of building stock. In France, for example, air con is surprisingly rare – a large part of this I suspect is that France has a lot of older building stock which was designed and built to be naturally cool during the summer. For houses like that, its an unnecessary expense. A surprising amount of commercial buildings also seem to be if not air con free, at least designed to be naturally quite cool, with lots of mass, and small windows which can open, etc. I’ve noticed that in China, most new build assumes that there will be functioning air con (although keeping a building naturally cool is much harder in humid climates).
The death toll in France from the heat wave of August, 2003 was nearly 15,000. There are limits to the human natural ability to acclimatize.
When I got out of the air force and got a job in Fresno at the IRS service center, I carried a sweater to work like everyone else did. 110 degrees outside, uncomfortably cold inside…
Of course, every large commercial establishment did the same thing
“we got air conditioning, and we’re gonna prove it”
Countries I have visited that have hotter climates such as Jamaica, Thailand, Malaysia, etc invariably seem to have their air conditioning set freezing cold, whether it’s an office or public transportation. While living in Chiangmai for several months we had a 4th floor apartment with a weak air conditioner, but we mostly used windows for a good cross-draft, and a fan. We lived there during the hottest time of the year and did just fine.
A/C is not optional for computers in most climates. There are a lot of implications in a lot of directions for this sentence.
Actually it is optipnsl for computers, water cooling is much more effective.
Especially immersive cooling in deionized water.
Air is a poor heat transfer fluid.
I think if you are specifically talking about banks of servers, then yes, climate control is absolutely necessary.
Just like Dew is necessary to fuel your IT team…
You realize that no matter what intermediary fluid is used in the cooling system of a personal computer the ultimate heat sink is the air around it right? Unless you run pipes from the cooling system outside the building the heat generated in the computer is still going to be transferred to the air in the room. You’re not likely to find a setup like that on anything smaller than a supercomputer.
“Wasserman Schultz’s Challenger, Tim Canova, is Even More “Pro-Israel” Than She”
Support for Israel is not the issue. The issue is whether or not it is in the interest of the US to unilaterally, well actually in concert with many nations, recognize a Palestinian state on the West Bank and call for Israeli withdrawl.
… after having set up the Palestinian state to fail, by depriving it of sovereign control of its borders, finances, internal roads, water supply, defense, trade, etc.
Decades of illegal Israeli settlement have rendered a Palestinian state as non-viable as the former South African bantustans, which suffered from the same absence of functional sovereignty.
Canova invokes the hokey old code phrase “Israel’s right to exist” [as an ethnic supremacist state], but that’s the nub of the problem. South Africa’s white-privilege apartheid state didn’t survive, and neither will Israel’s J-privilege one.
You can’t be “progressive” and advocate for a country that treats 20 percent of its citizens as second-class citizens with Jim Crow laws, sending to them to “separate but equal” Arab schools located in their segregated neighborhoods, excusing them from military service (and benefits) because they are distrusted as an internal fifth column, and depriving them entirely of the subsidized immigration and family reunification privileges extended to the ruling ethnocracy.
Israel is 1962 Alabama, with Netanyahu playing the role of ol’ George Wallace. “Here’s five billion dollars, y’all, to keep Jig-Abdul in the back of the bus.”
Jim
I would put water supply at the head of that list.. “Support” of Israel and a (temporary) Palestine State could be done in an enlightened and productive/ peaceful manner for all the treasure that is thrown in that fire.. Of course it isnt as yet because the wrong Government/corporate Complex and reactionary zionist with political influence define the failed status quo policy strategy.
Ultimately shifting the political policy tectonic plates toward equitable rights investment and education of Palestinians is necessary. The reality may have to be a Palestinian state which is eventually unified with the present geography called Israel- a multi generational approach which unfortunately is not so attractive to those interested in maintaining the failed status quo.
Generally people need to see their opportunity in a alternative direction, thats the tough nut to crack
The far deeper issue here is whether monotheism is a logical spiritual model, given a spiritual absolute would necessarily be the essence from which we rise, not an ideal from which we fell.
Or whether it is essentially a political model. In that if you have a religious system where one old guy rules, having a political system where one old guy rules is natural.
Consider that both Democratic Athens and Republican Rome originated under pantheistic/polytheistic systems. When the Gods argue over the details, then having a political system where the people argue over the details makes sense.
Ancient Israel was an ethnic monarchy. Trying to reinstall that in a world where government has been accepted as a public trust is problematic. Yet trying to have a functioning democracy that favors one ethnicity, based on religious belief, is not a recipe for social stability.
Not to mention that Islam is the more doctrinaire monotheism, rather than primarily ethnic.
When you view your cultural norms and beliefs as absolutist, it invites conflict with the neighbors, especially when the neighbors feel the same about their culture.
Well said! Sounds a lot like Alan Watts. He said many times that the most unusual thing about the US is that it’s entirely contradictory, to believe the universe is the construct of a cosmic tyrant-engineer, who rules over it like a king, and also to believe that a democratic republic is the best form of social order.
In keeping with the idea of poetic naturalism, I’ll paste an extract from Watts’s lecture, “Democracy in the Kingdom,” that features three different poetic interpretations of being in the world.
The political model of the universe even influences our science, eg, in the form of that strange phrase, “the animal kingdom.” The “queen” bee is said to rule over her “subjects.” In fact, they’re her sister-daughters (except for the odd son, who’s only around for his gametes). And all those “worker bees,” humming along in a honey “factory.” That’s just absurd, but it reinforces our top-down social order as if it were only “natural.”
The political model of the cosmos won’t do — for anyone seeking a direct experience of the transcendent. It will do very nicely, though, for anyone seeking power. It’s immensely useful for politicians to imply, or in some cases (Ted Cruz), to outright claim divine favor for your politics. I’d be surprised if Netanyahu has been different. Then there’s the contrast between “I’m with Her” and “Not Him, Us.”
I think it has a lot to do with our Special Relationship with Israel. It’s assumed, by damn near all American politicians and pretty much the entire public at large, that the ruler of Israel stands in a closer relationship to the King of Kings than any other political leader could possibly stand. It’s assumed that their access to heaven is to be found in Israel and nowhere else. It, and only it, is the one and only true Holy Land. The rest of the earth is literally just god-forsaken dirt.
Your last point is spot on. Such exclusive claims make for terrible neighbors. The existence of others may be tolerated, but only so long as they know and stay in their place. In fact, as God’s Own Exclusive Landlords, we’d be in breach of contract if we didn’t do everything in our power to advance His/Our interests, right?
Such a shame about all those heathens and infidels getting themselves killed by not acknowledging our Divine Right to Exist as God’s Own Most Favored Nation, doncha know. Praise the Lord and pass the depleted uranium ammunition. It’s right there, next to the white phosphorous….
Watts had another analogy that I like. In physics forums I keep trying to point out our perception of time is backward. It isn’t the point of the present moving past to future, which physics codifies as measures of duration, but change turning future to past. To wit, tomorrow becomes yesterday because the earth turns. Duration is just the state of the present, as events form and dissolve.
Watts used the example of a boat and its wake to argue this, in that the wake, the past, doesn’t steer the boat, the boat creates the wake. In other words, events are first in the present, then in the past. They have to occur, in order to be determined.
Which goes to lots of issues scientists like to argue, from the ‘fabric of spacetime,” to determinism.
Though I have to admit its been some decades since I’ve read him.
I would say by definition no ‘spiritual model’ is logical.
it’s all logical and it’s not.
A few signposts are handy on occasion. Our minds like maps and if we don’t have useful ones, we tend to fall for poor ones.
Many gods…
The Romans at one time had 4 co-emperors.
Will we see 4 co-presidents, if not more?
Is it coincidental that every 4 years, more often than not, we see the arrival of a new savior?
I think we should look more toward biology and thermodynamics for useful analogies.
For instance, government functions as the central nervous system of society, while finance functions as its circulation system.
So just as we need a central nervous system to mediate our nature and its context, we need effective economic circulation mechanisms to carry value to where society needs it, not where those managing it wish to pool it.
The reason we got rid of monarchy wasn’t due to any great philosophic insight, but because they eventually proved so ineffective and incompetent that even “mob rule” was better. Now we are at the same stage with private financial systems.
Speak for yourself; “we” have done nothing of the sort.
Here’s a list of us :
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0775675.html
No less than 43 countries in this world yet have a Monarch, with a wide range of styles, from Sweden to Saudi Arabia, from Cambodia to Canada.
Which thought leads me to add this reflection as to the main point of your comment:
Perhaps a model based on ecology – that is, reflecting a multiplicity of distinguishable biological genera interacting both with each other and with their environment, and by those very interactions constituting and creating a dynamic yet quasi-stable system capable of description – may serve as a more fruitful analogy for modeling international and domestic political economy, rather than any model based on an analogy to the biology of but a single organism (no matter how large the unitary “Leviathan” thus analogized may be).
And further, as to the Romans and their occasionally multiple Rulers, various single and joint despots, and triumvirates: well after all they DID make up the “rules” for changing their Rulers as they went along, didn’t they? So very very unlike the modern American Presidency in that respect ( there is nothing “coincidental” about the US Constitution and its requirements for holding periodic elections at clearly stated, set and defined times), or indeed ANY of the Monarchies that now exist in the world, that I would hesitate to draw any “lessons” whatsoever from that ancient political entity as being applicable to our world, a thousand years or more after the last of the Roman Emperors has been reduced to dust.
Well, the specifically appointed times rot is more for THEIR benefit, so that they can finish their special projects before the people have a chance to stop them. Representative democracy is a placebo. A paper monarch is still a monarch.
Sorry, Merryman, you may have some historical justification for saying “Ancient Israel was an ethnic monarchy,” but you have to overlook the period before the Kings–the Judges–if you do that. These were non-hereditary charismatic rulers (e.g. Samson) who gave way to monarchy, but the Judges period is one of the first recorded instances of that kind of system.
The archaeology of the Judges period shows no monumental architecture, and distributed food storage (rather than a palace/temple complex). The Kings, on the other hand, built Canaanite temples (without idols at their center), and had temple/palace complexes with grain storage to match.
The Bible is oral tradition. The Kings are the ones who wrote it down, though. Guess who comes off very, very well (hint: Kings).
Even so, Leviticus still forbids usury, covetousness and permanent land ownership…hardly typical for the kind of “absolutism” you suggest is part of Judaism. Oh yes, and there’s that commandment forbidding taking some interim item as ultimate (no idolatry). I’d say those things undermine the case you’re attempting to make.
One more thing: even Kings had prophets, so the Hebrew Bible legitimized dissent.
Adam,
History is messy. Data just interferes with a strong opinion.
If I was to point the finger at which is really messed up, it would be Islam, as they tend to be the most absolutist about it. For the Jews it seems far more organic and tribal, than political, as it is with Christianity and Islam.
Suffice to say, ‘the devil is in the details’ and historically it is a subject that would be endless. My argument is that, as knowbuddhau quotes Watts above, there are interesting conceptual aspects which need further examination, if we really want to create a more knowledgable and functional society. The foundations are getting rickety and the coming upheaval would be a good time for real house cleaning.
Another thing about the ceramic model – it is all in accordance with a plan, and the order of the cosmos is thought of as a planned order. Hence the Roman Catholic Church´s longstanding preference for global institutions (and plans).
New ways of thinking are needed for sure, but new ways of living together too.
Funny how it all started with Canaanite refugees after it blew up, something about Machiavellian Family dramas….
Disheveled Marsupial… the anthro on the houses is interesting, quite egalitarian to start with and then they had a population explosion then stuff changed…
Last I checked the academic consensus was that the Judges, like the earlier Patriarchs, never actually existed. The stories of the Old Testament/Tanakh are oral traditions compiled and redacted to form a coherent ethnic/religious origin story for a unified Jewish state in the Levant. And the editors did a pretty poor job of it; the thing is filled with holes and leftover bits revealing things like early Jewish polytheism. The Bible is literally an artificial creation cynically devised to serve a political purpose, ie solidify a unified national identity for a fragile state. Consensus has narrowed down the monarch who ordered its initial creation to a guy in the 6th century BC, IIRC, whose name currently escapes me.
“The Israelites were never in Egypt, did not wander in the desert, did not conquer the land in a military campaign and did not pass it on to the 12 tribes of Israel. Perhaps even harder to swallow is the fact that the united monarchy of David and Solomon, which is described by the Bible as a regional power, was at most a small tribal kingdom. And it will come as an unpleasant shock to many that the god of Israel, Jehovah, had a female consort and that the early Israelite religion adopted monotheism only in the waning period of the monarchy and not at Mount Sinai.” – Ze’ev Herzog, Professor of Archaeology at The Department of Archaeology and Ancient Near Eastern Cultures at Tel Aviv University, Deconstructing the Walls of Jericho
My sources are academic as well. And they agree: there is no archaeological evidence for any of the Bible before Moses. However, the archaeology for the period of the Judges indicates a revolt (slaves? serfs? outlaws?) of people called “Appayru” in the documents of the Canaanite rulers, who ran a typical Egyptian client state with the day-to-day tyranny that crushed subsistence farmers under the weight of their opulence.
The ruling class’s weapons (chariot, compound bows) required international trade. Samson’s jawbone of an ass, or David’s slingshot, do not (Malcom Gladwell points out that slings were typical of weapons of the day, too).
The archaeology indicates the rebels defeated this superior weaponry, as evident in the fate of monumental architecture (destroyed) and in grain storage (distributed, not centralized). Whether the story of Samson is historically true, or for that matter Saul, the ascendency of David, etc…. Who knows? Those writing then didn’t have the current concept of historical accuracy, anyway.
The Judges may have been metaphorical, but the law of Leviticus forbidding usury, permanent land ownership, and even debt jubilees was not exclusive to the Jews. Babylon forbade usury and practiced debt jubilees with the accession of new rulers. Even the ancient world knew that the real economy couldn’t possibly keep up with compound interest. (“…the most powerful force in the world”–Albert Einstein)
This bit of history is significant to me, if only because I learned it when the U.S. empire was trying to manipulate its client state Vietnam to crush a successful revolt of the debt peons.
If you take a look at Jeffrey Race’s War Comes to Long An, you’ll see that trying to maintain the French colonial social structure / economy and trying to continue to collect debts that held that in place was one of the primary motivators and enablers of the Viet Cong. Because the U.S. offered nothing beyond more colonialism, their opposition remained motivated, and that motivation defeated all their advanced weaponry.
I learned more recently that an instance of such a crushing debt burden motivating resentment occurred in the post-Civil War Confederacy.
Not only had the flower of Confederate youth been killed in that war, but their manufacturing was gone (what little they had), all their banks failed, their currency was useless, and their largest asset (slaves) was gone. The account I’ve read (Lawrence Goodwyn’s The Populist Moment) says the State of Connecticut had more currency than the entire Confederate South.
To address this, the Northern banks set up a system of “Furnishing Men” (colloquially: “the Man”) who sold goods on credit at rates payday lenders would recognize, secured by the crop lien. They colluded with grain / cotton storage and transport to slowly crush the Southern farmers, turning them into tenants, rather than land owners, effectively creating a system of debt peonage.
…So history may not repeat, but it looks like it at least rhymes.
Sounds like it’s worse than 1962 Alabama if some are not trusted to serve in the military.
What is Canova’s or (his endorser) Sanders’ position on that? Probably not too different from many others’.
There’s a good piece at CounterPunch by Andrew Levine on the (positive) effects Trump and Sanders are having on the Israel lobby and US views. A few excerpts below but the post is definitely worth reading, and some rare good news:
–Andrew Levine: Hard Times Ahead for the Israel Lobby (Thank Sanders and Trump)
Sanders runs a $27 per person campaign.
In theory, no one can intimate him.
Is disproportionate use of force a decade ago all he is able to say under pressure, or is it all he wants to say?
My link to the article about the domestication of dogs doesn’t work, My computer at fault?
Works for me using Firefox. Try a different browser?
Ken Houghton at Angry Bear pointed me to this blog post by Lance Mannion: http://lancemannion.typepad.com/lance_mannion/2011/06/working-until-we-drop.html
The only way this “fable for our times” differs from a factual accounting of everyday life in the Fortune 500 corporation where I (still) work is that the execs aren’t thinking about hiring the un and underemployed kids of the fired. They only want H1-Bs.
Once again, the Politico piece lumps superdelegates in with delegates to come up with their respective “pledged delegate” totals showing Clinton leading by a large margin. Actually she is about 250 pledged delegates ahead. Thought the superdelegates don’t vote until the convention and aren’t supposed to be counted prior per the DNC?
So a piece that purports to be favorable to Sanders actually reinforces the MSM lie of Clinton inevitability. The ongoing dishonest and partisan coverage of this primary is like watching a slow-motion train wreck.
Throw out those super delegates.
Do away with them.
Without them, Clinton is 259 pledged delegates short.
That’s not a sure thing (and nothing is unless the fat lady sings), but pretty invincible.
Commander-In-Chief Hillary and President Bill, Director-Of-The-Economy (aka Beavis and Butthead)
There is excitement brewing in the DNC camp and twittering amongst the Hillboughts. Some leaks of the President Bill’s Economic Plan For America are beginning to circulate the internet. Possibly even starting here.
In a word, piñatas. After considerable brainstorming, President Bill’s economic team had a voilà moment and realized that piñatas are a product very much under consumed in America. They reasoned if consumption could be increased, the resulting economic activity would be wholly accretive to GDP and help renew economic growth in America.
Upon further investigation of resource needs, labor skills, capital formation and financing needs, the team concluded just about anybody could make piñatas and it was almost uncanny how well the piñata product lent itself to widespread adoption by a new and growing cottage industry in America. Common consumer waste products can be used in the manufacture of piñatas. Toilet paper rolls, pizza boxes, NY Times, Washington Post, or even cheaper newspaper can be used. Glue can be made by mixing flour and plain old tap water. Paint it and you have a piñata!
The team then addressed marketing issues. The piñata needed to be a likeness of something, and that likeness would have a major bearing on how well the piñatas sell. A questionnaire was circulated around State Dept. Should the piñata be Putin or ISIS?
The suggestions came back split nearly 50-50. The team had to conclude both Putin and ISIS piñatas would be a big hit. haha. But at this point the team ran into some technical difficulty. They had pictures of Putin for potential piñata manufacturers, but realized no one at State really knows what ISIS looks like. They do sort of look alike, but so does everyone over there in the Middle East. It’s a wonder they’re not all shooting each other. The team came to realize the ISIS piñata needed a uniform and a flag!
The team took an action item to subcontract out the design of a ISIS piñata military uniform and ISIS flag. If anyone would like to bid on the contract please contact Vicky Nuland – State Dept.
How about pinatas of Bill and Hill?
Vote For Pedro!
https://www.google.com/search?q=vote+for+pedro&sourceid=ie7&rls=com.microsoft:en-US:IE-Address&ie=&oe=#q=vote+for+pedro&tbm=shop
Pertinent clip:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJLY7qlUpRc
Great idea crazyboy!
I think one under appreciated aspect is that pinatas lend themselves to each economic strata.
The poor could fill their’s with aluminum cans and recyclable plastic. The 0.1% with jewels and rolexs.
And the 0.001% with muni’s….
I did read somewhere that pinatas of His Hairness are doing a brisk business in the Latino community
Here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3a5JBxZICas
I must admit, that’s where I got the idea. Er, I mean the President Bill Economic Team got the idea.
fill HRC’s with thumb drives and ampoules of vitriol
she’ll have to have somebody show her how to use a thumb drive.
This is happening in our area, and the guy has plans/has been buying up land in other states that he would not name.
“Royalton — On Thursday, a man who has been buying hundreds of acres in the Upper Valley revealed new details about his plans to found an eco-friendly community of 20,000 in Strafford, Sharon, Tunbridge and Royalton.
David Hall’s proposed massive development is notable both for its boldness, and for its unusual pedigree — the community’s design is based on the detailed instructions of Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, who said he received them in a spiritual vision 186 years ago.
Hall, an oil industry inventor who has become an environmentalist, has put more than $100 million into NewVista Foundation, and says he hopes that, over the next few decades, it will be the first in a network of 50 such communities, with a total population of a million people.”
Philanthorpist-funded utopian (or rather, eutopian) villages have a shite track-record. You want to see the real deal in action? Check out Dancing Rabbit Ecovillage in MS, or the Twin Oaks and Acorn communities in Virginia.
There is nothing revolutionary or transformative about some rich white dude thinking he knows how everybody else should live…just sayin’
And why am I not surprised that this “innovative” new solution to all our problems is having to be shoved down the throats of the people most effected? What a shock:
Cares more about groovy tech than about people…typical…
They are tiny towns set in rolling hills. This high density, multi-storey development would stick out like a sore thumb and ruin the towns-would essentially be plopping a city right in there. It makes me sick to think about it. I just wonder where else he’s buying up land, and how many people around the land buys have no idea what’s coming.
Central planning is bad!…except when some rich guy’s doing it.
This is what bugs me about so much of the liberal impetus to systemic change: they think they’re going to come up with the answer and impose it on the rest of us – on the assumption that they’re the smartest people around – rather than engaging in a democratic decision-making process that actually includes everyone and gives them an equal say on the basis of their humanity, rather than denying them any say at all on the basis of their poverty…you know, like a democracy is supposed to do.
Sorry, if you don’t centrally plan an economy, someone else will do it. Currently, the banks and military are doing it.
The notion that there’s no possibility of a good outcome from planning (“the invisible hand”) is a quasi-religious superstition. Really great city plans are possible (Paris), but we don’t do that. Current city planning is designed to fail, and working as designed. It thwarts popular dissent and hands an enormous paycheck to land speculators.
Jane Jacobs says “The pseudo science of planning seems almost neurotic in its determination to imitate empiric failure and ignore empiric success….to put it bluntly, [sprawl planners] are all in the same stage of elaborately learned superstition as medical science was early in the last century, when physicians put their faith in bloodletting.”
Hey man, just don’t be jealous when The Worthy™ are living it up in their floating city, worshiping the Founding Fathers and hanging out with Glenn Beck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4fPJjVSW9I
Just what VT needs – more flatlanders coming in and driving up the price of real estate.
If they screw up the World’s Fair there will be hell to pay.
Love the World’s Fair! Can’t wait!
That Clinton is allowed to get away with criticizing anyone on foreign policy- especially with accusations of warmongering- is as clear an indictment of the MSM in this country as one will find.
It has been evident for a long time that the MSM confers foreign policy cred on those who consistently advocate force and conflict. Not to long ago, I heard a talking head on CNN say that John McCain had impressive ‘foreign policy chops’. The basis for that judgment seemed to be that McCain wants to bomb just about every country with whom we disagree. It is the same with Hillary. The talking heads are constantly proclaiming her expertise on foreign policy for pretty much the same reasons.
It has been evident for a long time that the MSM confers foreign policy cred on those who consistently advocate force and conflict and unnecessary complexity
Trump risks US nuclear war, claims Clinton Financial Times. Huh? She is the one who wants to escalate in the Middle East and is considering Victoria Nuland for Secretary of State, which virtually guarantees a hot war with Russia. This is sheer projection. She accuses of him of risking a nuclear war…by alienating England, Mexico, and the Pope?
==================================================
First, Trump is a bad, intemperate, rude, immature, not all that bright guy. He is probably the best example of someone, who if he is ACTUALLY a billionaire, is the very BEST evidence that there is something profoundly wrong with capitalism, free enterprise, or whatever you want to call it.
HOWEVER, it is a prefect example of how nonobjective, limited, and blinkered the MSM is in this country. I think a very serious and dispassionate analysis could be made that nuclear war is much, much more possible under a Clinton administration than a Trump presidency.
Hillary has shown time and time again that she can’t understand the intelligence she is provided with, she has proven that she believes the bull about the US being the “indispensable nation,” she is a recalcitrant and unapologetic interventionist, and she is willing to vote for war for purely political reasons. Clinton’s temperament, and flagrant rule bending shows a disturbing contempt for the restraints most people abide by.
In my view, I can see Hillary making some “red line” but being so obstinate that she would not back down – say what you will, but Obama at least made a strategic retreat when he had to. Like BUSH, Hillary is not stupid (or is at least KNOWLEDGEABLE about how Washington works and the way things are PHRASED to make them APPEAR reasonable and OH so serious****)and has PARTY backing, that compels people, ((just like people completely unthinkingly root for their own sports team only because they always have)), to support her ill conceived notions even if they are stupid because otherwise it “would weaken the party” or they “wouldn’t be a team player”
One possible reason to support Trump is that hopefully he will alienate enough repubs that Trump won’t be effective at foreign adventures should he actually want to be macho and get us into a military action.
****Orwell: In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defence of the indefensible.
Thanks much for the Brain Pickings article on poetic naturalism. Really enjoy finding a way of talking about the seemingly incommensurate realms of scientific versus personal meaning.
And I see a pic of my favorite self-described philosophical entertainer, Alan Watts, in the left margin. I’ll have to visit that site more often.
Ditto, that we are given the world and charged with paying attention really resonates.
Forest bathing, anyone?
Save water, bathe in a forest :)
Goes very well with the Salon article on moving to Switzerland to quit pretending to be an extrovert. That’s me in a nutshell.
From an early age I’ve had a habit of just looking at people when I know you’re not supposed to do that. When you’re with someone, you’re supposed to stay in the frame of the conversation or the mutual purpose of being together. When they turn away for a moment, you’re not supposed to just look at them in a phenomenological way and just marvel. But I do.
And like the author, I used to get bad marks for being too quiet. I used to sit in the back of the class with my head inside my shirt, looking at the world through the colorful stripes and so on. It was also thought that I wasn’t paying attention because I was always staring out the window. I was, too, paying attention, just not in the normal way.
I also like her emphasis on not saying anything when you don’t have anything to say, instead of saying anything for the sake of saying something. That’s me, here, all the time.
From an early age I’ve had a habit of…
As I organize my parents retained records, I came across all of my grade-school, HS report cards.
My fifth grade math teacher wrote on my reportcard
“**** likes to sit with his feet up watching the world go by” Feet up was a bit of a metaphorical stretch, and I presume this was not meant as a complementary comment. Not withstanding, I would have if I could have. And now I have reached the station in life where I can indulge myself doing exactly that if I wish, So I giver prescient vision points.
Same year my science teacher wrote:
“**** has many wide ranging interests, but needs to focus more on the subject study plan” HAHHAA.. didn’t work.
Bottom line: imo personality and behavior traits are hardwired early on.
From my grade school cohorts, the kid that became a mortician, yeah I can see that. Same goes for the Pediatrician, the kid w/ the abusive cop father who became a Lawyer, the Theater Director, the one who went to Joliet Prison and died young..
Nemesis confronts the Yellenites:
Bless their little pointed heads, they keep trying to hike them rates. But reality just whacks their ass every time.
Dixie (DXY, the dollar index) has plunged, while our lovely pet rock (IAU) has soared nigh on 3 percent.
That is bad news for the incumbent party.
And good news for the other one.
But but but…the Earth IS the center of the universe, as the latest calculations by Bishop Yellen and Deacon Bernanke (combined with the other 102 acolyte Ph.Ds at the Federal Church of the Reserve) have definitively proven! Now you couldn’t possibly be smart enough to understand these latest calculations, and we apologize that 100% of our prior projections have been wildly incorrect…but our precise tabulations as of today show that in Q4 of 2018 the exact number of monetary consumers that will fit on the head of our economic pin is 3,248.58, therefore we will ensure that the pinhead surface area will be changed to .00003455 sq. meters to accommodate them.
RE: Internet Boom Times Are Over….
Of course they are! You can spend hours fobbing off ads from slimy effing giigle and other yuppie-nurds. Turn on any tv and look at the same thing. If one is not
very selective you can be overwhelmed. The worst part of the scam is when they don’t allow you to turn it off! GOODBYE!
Robot Boom Times are just getting started though.
Beef, you need to start a robot civil rights organization not for profit, set up a webpage and start taking donations
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SLwmlMezS3U&index=16&list=FLJbTzUssQTnqKru6feT3e2w
Blade Runner – The Aquarelle Edition
The darker side of me is attempted to go for a ‘for profit’ internet dating service for lonely male humans who desire beautiful, compliant female robots for platonic relationships.
“A gorgeous woman robot for every unloved man.”
Some may argue that it’s not dark at all..that it’s actually helping to bring happiness into this dark world.
That’s not for me to say, due to potential conflict of interest.
Careful what you ask for!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYGzRB4Pnq8
Getting federal stimulus money turned blue U.S. counties bluer, and red counties redder. How can that be? Washington Post (furzy)
I have an unemployed friend. I am very sympathetic – as I have expressed here many times, I am very cynical about the unemployment statistics and I note the number of people not counted because it is just a waste of time and money for many people to even continue to search for a job.
He can give me every reason in the world why he can’t get a job – such as being older, over qualified, all the competition for every job, etc.
But talk about millennials, and of course they are all lazy, basement dwelling marijuana smoking i-phone tapping hipsters who just won’t make an effort.
It didn’t occur to me until I was much older that expanding hard times, makes people harder and less sympathetic to people who are in the VERY SAME CIRCUMSTANCES. Which seems paradoxical to me.
Humans – what a bunch…
The violent attacks on Trump supporters by anti-Trump protesters at San Jose last night was helpful to Trump’s campaign–that’s the bottom line. Also curious how some people claim violence against those who support Trump is justified because Trump is a fascist. From viewing videos of the attacks it does make the Trump supporters appear to victims of a mob action.
TRUMP is gonna be President. People are acting in despair.
I think that you are right on this. Waving Mexican flags and flashing gang signs?
Is this idiocy? Are those false flags? Irredentism?
Conor Friedersdorf has a piece up on the anti-Trump violence:
—By using the preferred approach of the Donald Trump supporter who infamously sucker punched a peaceful protester, another execrable actor who ought to serve jail time for his inexcusable thuggery, San Jose’s violent anti-Trump protesters offered a reminder that beyond left and right, conservative and liberal, pro-Trump and anti-Trump, there is a broad majority of Americans who intuitively understand the peril of abiding violence in politics—who understand that it would ultimately empower the most thuggish, ruthless, impulsive sociopaths—and that it is vital to stand together on that point, now and forever after, if on nothing else.—
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/06/anti-trump-protesters-attacked-all-of-us-in-san-jose/485444/
Pretty good article. But Friedersdorf left out “deport” in his list of what is to be done to the “bad actors” — if they are not citizens, of course.
(As a sidenote: Why La Raza is not on the SPLC’s watchlist is something I have never understood.)
Nonviolence requires a religious foundation and spiritual discipline. All its major proponents have agreed on this. Most of the “spiritual-not-religious” activists on the left simply don’t want to hear that. Nonviolence is, within the context of belief, a rational and not merely tactical act. The activist left too often derives its energy from emotion and seems allergic to discipline.
Nonviolence requires ethical discipline, which a few among the religious practice and many others don’t.
I suspect you don’t know all that much about the activist left.
Moreover, the bits I’ve seen show quite a few Latinos in these protests. Just say that, then, don’t go sideways about citizenship.
“Ethical discipline”? Please. Who’s going sideways now?
You can’t deport citizens. Why don’t you just call me a racist? It might make you feel better.
Ok, here’s religious language: you believe that only Christians can honestly and faithfully live out the golden rule.
Perhaps this assumption makes it easier for you to demean the activist left? It isn’t true, though.
I have no idea why you dog-whistled. I don’t like it, something to do with the golden rule.
This meeting between Sanders and CA farm workers is startling/amazing. Worth your time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6mvDpLiUeE
Non-violence on it’s own will achieve very little, a closer look at history clearly shows this. In order to be successful it needs a violent counterpart to shift the Overton window, a non-violent movement without the contrast of violence is doomed to achieve nothing. The Civil rights movement would not have achieved what it did non-violently without the contrast of the large and violent protests that regularly occured. “but ghandi” This is the greatest Non-violence myth ever, 1. Their was violence and unrest 2. The British could not maintain their colonial obligations and the necessary pressures to maintain control after being militarily and economically gutted after ww2, ghandi provided the perfect way to exit while saving face and appearing to exit out of imperial deference, rather than be expelled and have their true impotence exposed. Had this need not existed, ghandi would not have gotten anywhere, (again, there were a large number of violent incidents to contrast his non-violent movement.)
Non-violence without a contrast will achieve nothing. If tptb have been eviserating you for decades your show of Non-violence will do nothing to sway them, a contrasting violent movement or the very real threat of one must exist.
That is not to say non-violent movements don’t play an important role and help to slowly change the discourse and generate awareness, I am just saying the require a contrast to be effective in generating any moderately swift change (and even this doesn’t mean tptb won’t just double down either though.)
This is besides the fact that most (not all)people I have talked to protesting seem to be in it more for the “sense of community” than for any concrete loyalty to any particular cause and working long term to achieve it
Yes, and Gandhi refused to condemn the violence. He said he understood it. He never spoke in favor of it, but he didn’t condemn it either. He was following a different path.
He was criticized for that, but given the actions of the British over the centuries, to expect nonviolence from every single person on the subcontinent would be to expect 100% angelic compliance to an impossible ideal. Humans have never been able to achieve that kind of perfection.
If someone is a fascist, the priority is to defeat that candidate and even violence would be an appropriate response. Here Friedersdorf is using thug, ruthless, and sociopath to describe Trump. If Trump is all of those things, the priority is to end his campaign and even violence is a legitimate response.
Just so I have this straight: Most of the great socialist icons (Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Tito, Castro) could be described using “thug, ruthless and sociopath” too. Is violence thus a legitimate response against a socialist?
You’re using the word “socialist” as a snarl word, a category you don’t like. The leaders you listed are all totalitarians. To call them socialist would be like someone else calling Hitler a capitalist and pretending it’s meaningful to the word capitalism.
He was a capitalist and a totalitarian.
That is wrong.
In fact, that will probably put Trump in the White House, if people take violence into their own hands to try to stop Trump.
You really haven’t thought this through.
Either you accept that the use of violence in politics is legitimate or you don’t. The argument that it is legitimate only against certain individuals or movements – specifically, the ones to which you most strongly object – is base special pleading.
At the level of practical politics this is a terrible idea. Trump supporters aren’t going to be intimidated into abandoning him, quite the opposite. They are the products of a culture that venerates violence, many of them own guns, and they’ve had more than their fill of pansy assed do gooders vilifying them for failing to sing from the social liberal hymn book. Do the math. This isn’t going anywhere you want to be.
Worse, the biggest casualty could be what is left of democracy in America. If the elites decide that the time is ripe to finally end the charade of mass political participation -and with unauthorized candidates like Sanders and Trump suddenly commanding the support of huge swaths of the electorate you best believe it has never been better – what better pretext than the left and right engaging in running street battles, just like Germany in the death throes of the Weimar Republic.
They have already removed any shred democracy in America, at best we will get a president selected by subterfuge and media complicity, at worst we will get one selected by elders in smoke-filled rooms at the convention.
And like war is diplomacy by other means, violence is politics by other means. Read the Constitution sometime about our duty to remove leaders who do not reflect the will of the people.
If you don’t think violence is a tool being liberally used by the billionaire war elite already I suggest you go back for a closer read of world headlines for the last 15-40 years.
The protests at Trump rallies remind me of the protests in Miami after the 2000 election. False flags, all
http://www.krcrtv.com/news/local/donald-trump-rally-scheduled-for-friday-afternoon-in-redding/39866532
I live in Redding now (probably a mistake, maybe I will move back to Fresno one day)
Anyway, I have never been to a political rally, so I thought about it….for 1.3 seconds
The weather forecast is 102 degrees today (either my thermometer is off, or there is a big conspiracy to make it appear delightfully cooler than it usually turns out to be….)
Traffic will be miserable….parking will be miserable…..so we stand outside…in the sun.
If anyone shows up, it will prove Trump supporters are certifiably insane…
yeah, ……….but it’s a dry heat!
The lesser of two evils(Trump or Clinton)…
Is still evil.
And there seems to be a law of diminishing returns, too.
He who is not evil can cast the first stone.
In that sense, it’s always the less of many evils.
The paradox– only evil people would cast stones.
In a way, i can make a case for trumps lizard brain telling him he doesnt want to be potus but events have overrun him and he is now trapped in a inverse control loop.. As if he were to endorse HRC on electioneve only for it to seal his unprecedented land slide victory!
This would have been a great screenplay for peter sellers or alec guinness
Prime Minster Count Rupert Mountjoy: My idea was sound. Only an idiot could have won this war, and he did.
–the mouse that roared
http://m.imdb.com/title/tt0053084/quotes?ref_=m_tt_trv_qu
A lot of MSM articles today about the Democrat elite pushing Bernie to pack it in now.
There is no recognition or discussion that:
a) Bernie is the stronger candidate
b) he has momentum
c) this push to end the race completely subverts the democratic process i.e. voting by citizens in six states and Puerto Rico and then the July convention.
The implicit framing by TPTB is: “democratic processes be damned”, all that really matters is defeating the latest bogey-man, currently Donald Trump.
This election has been so eye-opening, the endless manipulation and lying. (The Guardian has zero articles on Bernie today as he picks up momentum in California). The TPTB are trying to roll us out, we the people, like pastry.
Jerry Brown/Tom Liccardo …….. what a happy couple (of losers) !!
Of course, the most galling part of this: Bernie WOULD defeat Trump.
This can’t be repeated often enough.
argh! we’re all strapped into this trainwreck. Disgusting.
If you believe the GOP can rig an election better than Hillary, and if Bernie can’t even beat Clinton, what chance do we have under that scenario?
he doesn’t have to deal with the dnc which is running the primary system, he isn’t starting from scratch, as he did against clinton, and he polls better. the gop had trouble rigging close elections against gore and kerry, and they failed against obama.
I see them a little differently. Alongside the “pack it in” articles are ones like Bernie’s Wrecking Crew, over at Politico, which give the impression that there are loose bowels across the spectrum of Democratic Apparatchikdom right now. I see a balance there that is encouraging.
It looks to me like the boiler room approach Sanders is taking toward the Superdelegates is being noticed in the MSM, so it must be working.
Can you amplify on the “boiler room approach”? Meaning that Bernie and his staff are keeping up a constant round of calls to the supers?
Just kind of a generalization; Sanders and his “Sandernistas” are putting pressure on the Party at every level using whatever is to hand.
Take, for example, the Bernie or Bust movement; people with little power banding together, organizing to do what they can to make an impression on the establishment the only way they can. The story cited above; delegates to the national convention pledging to make things uncomfortable for the party if they do not get their needs met, along with the 20,000 people who have pledged to be in Philly demonstrating outside. Even Yves, here, writing op-eds for Politico; commenters here going onto the story’s comments section and pointing out the fallacies of their normal commentariat for all of Washington’s intelligentsia to see. Add on to that the Sanders campaign sending in people like Cornell West for the platform committee and being very public when they dismiss his suggestions for labor representation on the rules committee whilst pointing out that people like Barney Frank should not be there at all.
Everyone involved bringing whatever pressure they can, however they can, is a direct response to Sanders’ main point: “us, not him”. O never really wanted it, “Be the change you want to see” was just a slogan for him, so it never had the same impact. It appears to be working, Sanders just polled ahead of Clinton for the first time In California today.
The Party is worried it will be embarrassed for months, thus eliminating any opportunity it may have to regroup before the convention, much less the general. They are feeling the heat that Sanders has always advocated for, and it shows.
The Democrat Primary is designed to mimic democratic competition, not to actually be competitive and democratic.
It is was supposed last a few states with different, but very similar talking heads. After that a clear winner is “decided” and only one remains.
Bernie didn’t get the memo… and thank Bogart*.
*I had been searching for a secular version of the “Oh My God” phrase for sometime. After not finding any established alternative (and watching some Bogey films) I decided the perfect substitute for God in this phrase (and related) was “Bogart”.
I like “Thank Bogart”. George Carlin decided on Joe Pesci, “For Pesci’s sake” has a nice ring to it.
Implies one or both of 2 things. (1) The Dem machine has seen private polling numbers in the six states that are bad, very bad, for the Billary machine. (2) The separate but interacting email server investigations by the IG, JW, and FBI are reaching some kind of endpoint that’s terminal for Hillary.
They desperately need the time to strap a parachute on Biden’s (or whoever’s) back *before* the convention.
I’m such a cynic that the ‘if Clinton loses CA’ meme means she is favored in internal polling and when she wins no matter how small the margin, it will be spun as a huge finish.
Agree, it’s amazing for me to hear from otherwise sentient and intelligent voters in CA who plan on voting for her/it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqYJRc0TJkQ
It is annoying as can be. A bit over one week and all the primaries are over even if the superdelegates still have to vote (actually only DC is left after this Tuesday, but DC deserves a vote as well). Why can’t those idiots just shut the F up until then and let us have our election.
If they want to call the superdelegates before they are hatched so be it, but at least let the people vote first.
Hillary: go die.
Agreed.
Let people vote.
Too soon to pack it in now (as in today), would be too soon.
When it’s over, hopefully it’s over. By that, I mean, if Hillary has got 50%+1 of the total available pledged delegates, Sanders will not try to win by having super delegates overturn that.
That is, he will not try to get the super delegates to switch, if, let me say it again, Hillary gets 50% +1 pledged delegates.
Fraud or no fraud, it should be over (if that is what it turns out to be). And fix whatever needs to be fixed for the next time.
The hyper-push to get Bernie to quit is because of Hillary’s FBI problem. The party wants the option to dump her, but can’t do it as long as Bernie is still in the game as that would hand the nomination to him, something the party simply will not allow (and never had any intention of allowing).
The Democratic Party Primary has been a fraud from the very start. We need our money back.
This is a doozy:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-06-03/as-koch-brothers-cling-to-madoff-cash-a-new-legal-battle-arises
The Pallast article has me worried about the California primary. So far, exit polling has uncovered a consistent statistical anomaly – Sanders exit poll numbers have skewed consistently outside the standard deviation. And now, with exit polling abandoned entirely, the use of placebo ballots will go virtually undetected. Given the high stakes in this contest, and what we’ve seen so far, am I crazy to believe vote suppression is part of the Clinton machine’s game plan?
In any case, I surely hope Sanders has eyes and ears in every polling place on June 7th to make sure election judges do the right thing.
Hillary suggesting Trump risks nuclear war…the reality based on, well, reality (Hillary’s past actions, her past statements) is SHE is almost certain to start World War 3: https://consortiumnews.com/2016/06/02/the-bigger-nuclear-risk-trump-or-clinton/
The Occupy movement has grown up — and looks to inflict real pain on big banks Washington Post. I’m dubious, given that Trumka of AFL-CIO is involved. Wonder if this is to suck the air supply out of the Sanders activists who also intend to target down-ticket races in 2018. As a long-standing observer of the political scene told me, “Never trust the American labor movement” meaning the leadership.
WI Sen Tammy Baldwin front and center is another tell – she who very publicly introduces single-payer into Congress every session but has mysteriously dropped all mention as she is aboard the HRC train. Savvy political operator but literally accomplishes nothing.
Then I went to the website: https://takeonwallst.com to poke around. Another tell: no “Who We Are” section, just a “Who Is With Us.” I had guessed that this was a project of BerlinRosen or one of the other PR firms that seems to run the “progressive” agenda these days. Lo and behold, the website itself was created by Rootstrikers about which (from their own web page):
That said, Demand Progress apparently has some connection to Aaron Swartz, so maybe not all bad. About this David Segal: “David Segal is a former Democratic Rhode Island State Representative, and served on the Providence City Council as a member of the Green Party.” Maybe others know more about him.
And the coalition itself, while full of the typical DC/NY players (you knew Working Families would be there), does contain a few populists (Warren, Ellison, EPI). But if this is “grown up Occupy,” I think I like the kid version better.
SEIU Endorses Single Payer (Kevin C) Kind of. Here is the “resolved” part of the actual resolution:
For what it’s worth, I installed Windows 10 on a Samsung SSD and have had no problems. But then this is also a self-built desktop, not some factory assembled premade. Sounds to me like Samsung laptops have some hardware idiosyncrasy other manufacturers don’t have that the software upgrade doesn’t like. And yes, I know Microsoft wants everyone to get Windows 10 so they can spy on us. Tough luck; I disabled all the features I could straight away and then ran a third-party program to force all the remaining telemetry reporting off (there are about a dozen such programs).
And before anyone suggests alternatives, OS X is a toy that gets ever more locked-down as time goes on, and the Linux community remains eternally obsessed with churning out shiny new distros rather than developing good software to run on those distros or pushing for companies to give it more attention (ever tried running an ATI/AMD graphics card card on Linux? The drivers are sooooo bad). Linux support by developers has improved in recent years, but still has a long way to go. Wine does goes a long way towards making Linux viable however. Microsoft is the monopoly standard, and as far as I can see that isn’t likely to change anytime soon. And because it’s been that way for so long, any alternative pretty much by necessity will need to support the massive catalog of Windows programs.
For the record I’ve had no problems with Windows 10; it’s effectively a snappier Windows 7, an OS I also had no problems with (I skipped 8 and its awful touchscreen-centric UI).
Some of the changes they’ve made in the user interface (like the new browser) are kind of chicken crap (and it some cases lessen functionality), but overall, I’m finding Windows 10 to be a pretty stable platform. Several ongoing problems I had with 7 got cleaned up with the upgrade, and my older machine now has a few more kicks in its steps. Also, some of the integration between (their own!) Office and the rest of the user interface has disappeared, which makes absolutely no sense, but it’s fairly minimal.
Do you mean the internet browser, Edge? That’s one of those things where it doesn’t actually matter if they’ve improved it or not; I used it for about 30 seconds, long enough to go and download the browser I actually wanted to use. Which, in case anyone cares, is Pale Moon; a fork of Firefox that still accepts Firefox add-ons. Google has been trying to woo me with Chrome by giving it a bunch of exclusive gimmicks, like 60fps YouTube playback, but I don’t feel like giving them my business.
As an aside about Windows 10, there are a few features from past versions they’ve removed access to through the UI, but which remain in the OS. Like the ability to individually set separate permanent desktop wallpapers for each monitor on a multimonitor setup. But you can still access the Control Panel section for that function through a Run command. They also removed sidebar gadgets, but someone quickly made a program to add that functionality back. Silly Microsoft.
My upgrade to Windows 10 freezes a lot. You can hear the hard drive clicking away continually. Firefox will freeze if I have more than a few tabs open. I upgraded from Windows 7 which worked perfectly. Not working out. :-(
There’s plenty of reports of Windows 10 upgrade installs having problems. I installed it from scratch. As I rule I never bother with OS upgrades, always do fresh installs.