Dog Shoots Pheasant Hunter In ‘Freak Accident’ In Iowa International Business Times
Don’t miss this year’s first (and last) supermoon Treehugger
Celebrate 50 years of Apollo with us as our new series blasts off Ars Technica
Policeman clings onto lorry about to fall off bridge with driver trapped inside Metro
A Mother’s Ninth-Century Manual on How to Be a Man Paris Review
‘Persuasion:’ Jane Austen’s greatest novel turns 200 The Conversation. Not sure I would call it the greatest– nor am I sure I wouldn’t. Readers?
History of the little things The Renaissance Mathematicus
Net Neutrality
Net Neutrality: AT&T Court Case Could Let Telecoms Slow Internet Speeds At Will International Business Times
Big Brother IS Watching You Watch
UK consumer advocacy group takes legal action against Google Jurist
Activists occupy Paris Apple store over Europe tax dispute SCMP
Apple iOS 11 security ‘downgrade’ decried as ‘horror show’ The Register (The Rev Kev)
Bitcoin Heads to Wall Street Whether Regulators Are Ready or Not Bloomberg
Bombs in Your Backyard Pro Publica. Some more news to brighten your day.
Exxon’s First Amendment Claims in Climate Fraud Case Draw Judge’s Skepticism Climate Liability News
Class Warfare
Presidents Obama And Clinton Failed To Defend The Middle Class: Robert Reich International Business Times. David Sirota.
Why can’t San Francisco’s tech culture solve the city’s social problems FT
Why marriage is increasingly for the royals – and the rich Spectator
One in five American households have ‘zero or negative’ wealth MarketWatch
Even a $1 million retirement nest egg isn’t enough anymore CNBC
Rural America Is Building High-Speed Internet the Same Way It Built Electricity in the 1930s Motherboard
The Recruiters: Searching For The Next Generation Of Warfighters In A Divided America Task & Purpose. Long, with lots of detail on how dire economic prospects are for so many.
Kill Me Now
The Inevitability of Kamala Harris US News & World Report
The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election NYT (UserFriendly). The sense of victimhood knows no bounds. A year after the election one might think it would be accepted that…wait for it…HRC lost.
Trump Transition
NASA has never gone this long without a formal administrator Ars Technica
5 things Trump did this week while you weren’t looking Politico
If you voted Remain, you’ll never ‘get’ Trump Spectator
DOJ ‘Reviewing’ Harvard’s Offer of Access to Student Records Harvard Crimson
CIA directors past and present spar over President Trump’s tweets LA Times
L’affaire Flynn
Trump claims ‘rigged system’ has ‘destroyed’ Flynn’s life, let Hillary off the hook The Hill. Anyone disagree?
What the Flynn Plea Means National Review. Good summary of Flynn deal as nothingburger.
What’s in Flynn’s plea deal shouldn’t scare the White House. What isn’t should.WaPo Statement for the prosecution.
Brian Ross Suspended After False Michael Flynn Report, ABC Colleagues ‘Furious’ Daily Beast
Sex in Politics… Not!
Lawmakers have carte blanche to cut secret harassment settlements Politico
Three Lessons From How Congress Is Handling Sexual Misconduct Allegations FiveThirtyEight
Tax “Reform”
Tax Havens Lobby To Keep Loopholes That Enrich Insurers, Hedge Fund Managers International Business Times
Tax Bill Offers Last-Minute Breaks for Developers, Banks and Oil Industry NYT
Senate tax measure helps President Trump pivot away from clean energy and back to fossil fuels LA Times
Hours after Senate GOP passes tax bill, Trump says he’ll consider raising corporate rate WaPo
Puerto Rico
Brexit
Brexit: the most fateful mistake EURefendum.com
If Brexit is going badly, it’s the fault of the Brexit elite: stop trying to blame the 48 per cent New Statesman
China?
From the Caucasus to the Balkans, China’s Silk Roads are rising Asia Times
Europe Set to Award China `Holy Grail’ With Tariff-Rules Revamp Bloomberg
For Beijing, the greatest threat to China’s national security is not the Kim regime: it is the US The Conversation
North Korea
North Korea Won’t Be Denuclearized American Conservative
Syraqistan
There’s no such thing as precise air strikes in modern warfare – just look at the civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria Independent. Patrick Cockburn.
Erdogan Says U.S. Sanctions on Iran Weren’t Binding for Turkey Bloomberg
How can the Arab world sidestep the pull of the abyss? Asia Times
Absolute Power in the Hands of a Crown Prince Der Spiegel
Kushner Is Leaving Tillerson in the Dark on Middle East Talks, Sources Say Bloomberg
Yemen – Saudis Throw The Towel – Saleh is Baaack – Russia Wins Moon of Alabama
Saudi Arabia is the Cause of Yemen’s Atrocities Yet The U.S. Continues to Exacerbate the Conflict AlterNet
Sucking Up to the Saudis The Baffler
India
HONG KONG, LIKE INDIA, NEEDS TO REMEMBER THE TRUTH ABOUT BRITISH COLONIALISM SCMP. Shashi Tharoor.
Bankrupt Billionaires: India Inc’s Debt Crisis Sparks Feeding Frenzy Amongst Private Equity Funds The Wire
TIBETANS TO SRI LANKANS, INDIA WELCOMED ALL. WHY NOT ROHINGYA MUSLIMS? SCMP
Antidote du jour:
See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.
204 comments
Comments are closed.
Re: Rural America Is Building High-Speed Internet…
This is happening here in central Vermont. Two years ago we had dialup (which most kids have never heard of). Now we have fiber from a local community-supported company — and no thanks to the local phone monopoly, which did their best to slow things down by delaying their required work on the telephone poles. And no thanks to the state, either, which gave grants to a much larger telecom company that promised wireless service to this area (as if that would ever really work) and still hasn’t delivered.
Good to know.
A lot of people might not be aware that even cable TV is still unavailable in parts of rural VT because just like back in the pre-FDR days, it isn’t profitable for the big companies to provide service.
Funny how these captains of industry can’t be bothered to provide services to rural people that the majority take for granted and yet they still expect the rural people to keep growing them food…
And voting for the politicos who support them.
I’ve noted before the off-putting and insulting nature of some of your headline snark but this one insults both Hilary voters and pretty much all women. “The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election NYT (UserFriendly). The sense of victimhood knows no bounds. A year after the election one might think it would be accepted that…wait for it…HRC lost.”
Suggest you tone down the remarks if you want to keep your readership. This one is gone.
how does it “insult…all women”? it seems to target a segment of clinton supporters, both women and men, and clinton herself, for not accepting blame.
now it’s charlie rose and lauer and halperin (halperin??) who cost clinton the election?
The idea of a Clinton candidacy can’t be the cause of 2016 results at all costs. If HRC was a terrible candidate for the Democratic Party coalition with a disaster of a strategy, what does it say about self professed politicos who couldn’t grasp why Hillary wasn’t up 50 points?
With so many predators serving as allies to HRC, it really only suggests that the idea of a secret liberal Hillary (an important narrative) who was distinct from Bill, his behavior and right wing politics, was complete fiction created and believed by people who should have known better. It’s no different than “OMG Russia” to distract from the usual Clinton campaign incompetence and the toleration of he long term hollow in out of the Democratic Party by the very greatest orator of ever, Obama. The recent revelations underscore the narrative about Hillary’s own actions in regards to Bill’s predatory behavior over the years.
It’s important to remember reviews of the election will attack the identity of Aaron Sorkin/ west wing fans who fancy themselves as very serious people who watch msnbc.
To me this article seems to promote the sexism of these men by focusing only on HRC. That is far more important than all of the other women. Again and again, what someone does to Hillary is the real problem. Yep, agreed, it’s rose, lauer, and halperin who kept HRC out of the oval office. When will this ever end.
Clinton’s focus on herself is what lost her the election. As my son used to say, “Duh.”
I guess the Party Line is now that the MSM didn’t give the Anointed Queen enough softball questions.
That must be why she lost!
What do you find offensive? How does this offend pretty much all women?
Was Hillary Clinton not candidate? Was she not ultimately responsible for whatever happened in the election? Had she won, would you see headlines about “the men that ultimately clinched the election for Hillary?
Are we this thin skinned that a 2 lined comment upsets you? As for me I love the remarks.
Evidently the best qualified candidate EVER actually has no agency.
She couldn’t vote against the Iraq War resolution, even if my Republican Senator did. She couldn’t turn down $600,000 speeches to Goldman Sachs. She had to hire the people who couldn’t advise her to go to the borderline states. No one ever showed her the campaign graphic with the arrow pointing right.
There will be a female president in America soon enough…but hopefully one who has earned it…she wont run, but someone like Elizabeth Holtzman perhaps…
Oh and get over yourself…sooner or later we all turn to dust…until then…pass the popcorn and if you dont mind…next time you’re by the fridge, pour me an iced tea…thanks…now sit down…
That;s a good one in light of Madelaine Albright’s apocryphal judgment that all women who didn’t vote voor Hillary Clinton had a special place in hell reserved for them and Gloria’s Steinman’s equally offensive, sleazy, maybe even twisted, remark, that young women who supported Bernie Sanders were doing so only to snuggle up to the ‘bros’ in the tree house. These two powerful women turned the campaign into a vulgar cat fight and, as far as I know, Clinton just went along with the whole nasty travesty.
To add to my previous comment: it is inconceivable that Albright and Steinman’s remarks weren’t vetted beforehand considering what we now know from Donna Brazile about the Clinton’s campaign’s hands-on management of everything about their candidate, as if they’d even control and micromanage when the sun rose behind her if they could. Both remarks would certainly raise howling accusations of misogyny if they came from men. So are those two women misogynists—haters of women—or just self-hating women or maybe even nothing less the flaming hypocrites? I’m not denying that misogyny would have played a part in Clinton’s loss but so what, to a greater extent she would have been just the victim of her and her associates’ cluelessness about the strong support for Bernie Sanders and the concerns of the US voters at large. I’d simply typify it as a lack of honesty. Plain and simple.
I vote for flaming hypocrites. ” There is a special place in hell for Walmart Women who don’t support Goldman-Sachs feminists in their rise through the Tiffany Glass Ceiling.”
Your comment caused me to read that article. Fillipovic seizes on the sexual harassment scandal to inform us that this is yet another reason, nay, perhaps the primary reason, why HRC lost the election.
Never mind that these same sexual harassers did everything in their power to marginalize the candidacy of Sanders. No, it was this then, finally, that sunk the eminently worthy HRC candidacy. Good to know. Thanks for that.
Or maybe you rather offer a case in point for the comment you find “insulting”.
Probably the Philly Inquirer’s coverage of Hillary’s grand book tour could be characterized as unconscious snark … but you decide:
Asking a woman details about her underwear in a public forum … or talking about the weiner … BAD!
Don’t forget the ‘Little Blue Dress!’
So:
1) Male sexism is pervasive but
2) Nobody could have predicted that sexism would affect electoral outcomes.
Politics ain’t beanbag. Why’d the Democrat Establishment nominate her? Either because (a) they radically underestimated sexism or (b) they wanted to prove a point. Name your poison: Grossly incompetent or wildly irresponsible.
“Name your poison: Grossly incompetent or wildly irresponsible.”
Why not both?
Guess you’d be really ticked off by all the Shelley references. I’ll try to watch my step.
I’m a woman. Doesn’t insult me. It was Clinton who insulted me when she intimated before and after the election that she owned my vote and that I was supporting a misogynist when I supported Sanders. And that others who supported him were by and large hateful, horrible “Bernie Bros” (that bore no resemblance to the people I knew who also supported Sanders).
The election was close enough that there were a plethora of factors which, had they only been different, would have changed the awful, tragic result; and I wish they had. But — as Donna Brazile has pointed out in her entertaining book, the election should not have been close, and that it was close is owing to many bad decisions of HRC. She was capable, well-intentioned, and well-qualified; I very much regret she wasn’t elected; but that is primarily her fault. She was also egoistic, arrogant, and detached; out of touch with what was happening to ordinary people and on the ground in the campaign; wouldn’t listen to her husband’s advice, to Brazile’s advice, to Sanders’ advice after she became the nominee. She & Bill also encouraged Trump to run, early; falsely thinking he’d be easy to beat. That the election was close is yes her fault. And we’re all paying the price.
I wish her well but that she and her supporters are blaming everyone else in sight and still positioning her as a goddess grates — a lot. And Clinton seems to be so focused on herself. Let’s concentrate on the issues like this bad tax bill and continuing to try to defeat it now. Her statement on it looked only to 2018 mid-term elections (http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/hillary-clinton-republican-tax-bill-is-only-going-to-get-worse-as-people-learn-more-about-it/article/2642382 ) whereas the bill is not yet law and people need to work hard to still try to prevent its becoming law even though things look dreadful. All her instincts are politically BAD and she’s not helping.
Compare what Sanders said on the tax bill: “The wealthy and the powerful want you to think you are powerless. But we know that that’s not the truth.” “I say to my Republican colleagues: The American people are catching on. While you may get away with this act of looting tonight, history is not on your side.” “Congressional Republicans and President Trump are waging class warfare. We are going to stand up and fight back! ” “The fight against the tax bill is not over. We need to stand together to protect working families.”
Then, compare the despicable statement of Senator Schumer: “Tonight, I feel mostly regret at what could have been. Tax reform is an issue that is ripe for bipartisan compromise. There is a sincere desire on this side of the aisle to work with the GOP, particularly on tax reform, but we have been rebuffed, time & time again.” With reactions like Schumer’s and Clinton’s (we would have liked to give gifts to corporations too, why didn’t you be bipartisan), there is nothing but losing that can happen. A (rather conservative, so it surprised me) friend suggested that Democrats aren’t that sad about the tax bill as their donors benefit too and they think they can win the 2018 election.
It’s got to be about the policies not about election wins even though yes we need election wins so something can be done about the policies.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment. I agree.
Thank you for this astute comment. It ain’t over til it’s over, and the PTB would like nothing more than for us to give up. We, who have created the current “crisis is opportunity” situation now need to stay the course (as many prominent poli’s will tell you). I’ll take it on faith that vatch would approve of your realisation that you have the power here. The truth is both legacy parties are on the ropes, and as haygood pointed out yesterday the tax bill is going to put a worm in everyone’s (other than the very few super wealthy) apple so expect a wide array of p.o.’d people from all walks of life (other than the super wealthy). This re writing of history the clinton cabal is pushing is pretty irritating. In the spring of 2016 I was in San Diego when bernies legs were chop blocked by the usual suspects (you know, the lauers, the roses, et. al.) and clinton gave a “major foriegn policy speech” …http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/36337-hillary-clinton-s-major-foreign-policy-address-was-anything-but…in front of an uncountable number of american flags. There were like 100 people in attendance. This at the time of birdie sanders, who would have mopped the floor with trump. Instead of these nonsense poor clinton stories we’d have the media wondering why so many republicans voted for bernie. Yes, it would have happened, I know these people personally. We have the whip hand and need to use it.
You write “She was capable, well-intentioned, and well-qualified”.
I do not understand why this is true.
Her votes on Iraq, her actions on Libya, Honduras, the Ukraine, the bankruptcy bill and her friendliness to the financial industry cast doubt on HRC’s “capable, well-intentioned and well-qualified” nature.
Then there is the “we came, we saw, he died” heartless video comment when she had to know that Quadaffi’s son had attempted to contact the State Department to avoid the military operations in Libya (and subsequent failed state).
A reader in the NY Times referred to HRC as a “well-connected mediocrity”, which seems accurate to me.
Maybe that is the nature of why there was little enthusiasm for HRC and she lost while running against the Republican candidate she preferred.
+1 Hillary was neither “capable, well-intentioned, [nor] well-qualified” Her putative qualifications were worse and worse, the closer one looked.
I agree. She’s neither capable, well-intentioned, nor well-qualified. For example, she failed the District of Columbia bar exam (admittedly, this has the reputation of being more difficult than most state bar exams). Well, she is the world’s most astute commodities trader. . . . :-)
However, compared to Donald Trump, I have to reluctantly admit that she is relatively capable, well-intentioned, and well-qualified. Relative to Trump, but not relative to what we expect in a President.
When one prices in the possibility of even deeper military engagement in Syria and the possibility of inflaming Russia via both Syria and the Ukraine under a President HRC, Trump looks somewhat better.
I mention to people that Trump is so bad he may be good as he could force the Democrats to actually DO something in response.
If Trump helps destroy both the Republican and Democratic parties, the common man could be well served.
But I have defended Warren Harding as a good president compared to Woodrow Wilson simply because Harding was more interested in booze, broads and cards than political action while the moralistic Wilson pushed the USA into WWI.
May Trump follow in Harding’s footsteps.
I am going to drop here a suggestive analogy I won’t spell out. Here is the inimitable Dave McGowan (late conspiracy researcher extraordinaire) on the relation between the anti-war movement and the hippie movement in the mid-60’s.
“Peter Coyote, narrating the documentary “Hippies” on The History Channel, added that “Some on the left even theorized that the hippies were the end result of a plot by the CIA to neutralize the anti-war movement with LSD, turning potential protestors into self-absorbed naval-gazers.”
Ah the deep origins of the DNC.
++++++ yes Spring Texan!
+++++1 Spring Texan, aye aye.
Denial and incomprehension. I think.
Hillary Clinton doesn’t understand what made her the supremely wrong candidate for this election—I always comment that Clinton strikes me as much oblivious as she is disingenuous. I think she honestly does not get what is wrong with with taking $225,000 a speech from Goldman Sachs. (I think she gets completely that the public thinks it’s wrong and is disingenuous in shrugging it off with “They paid me” because she can’t say, in essence, “Look, that’s the way our system works.”) I think she and her supporters are so embedded and so constrained by the Washington consensus/neoliberal/establishment view and so in denial about being constrained that the only possible explanations are those outside themselves. They’re obviously venal and self-serving, too, but I think people who were a little more conscious would give some credence to reality: “We were out of step with the electorate.” The most successful self-serving politicians are at least somewhat in touch with what they’re doing and with what the public wants—they manage to be corrupt and aware. Clinton’s not—she’s largely (but not wholly) unaware and her supporters are both in denial and unaware that she is. For them to be making any pronouncements about what happened—when what happened was, largely, on their part, a failure to figure out what was happening—is a further sign, not that any is needed, of their cluelessness.
I dunno, think about the ‘lay of the land’. Regardless of who won the pres we’d still have R majorities in both the House & the Senate. Meaning had HRC won the pres we would now be neck deep in impeachment hearings & innumerable ‘Clinton scandals’ real or imagined.As much as I despise the ‘giant talking yam’ in the white house maybe it’s for the best that he sits in the Oval & not her… Call it ‘food for thought’ or something.
Did you actually read that article? What is does is try to take the outing of a series of serial sexual predators and then hijack it to say that these were the same sort of men that cost Hillary the election. Personally I would call that being misogynistic but perhaps the author of that article would accuse me of mansplaining – which is also being misogynistic! This site can be a battleground of ideas as well as a site to share opinions and information. If opinions offend you, then there is always Facebook.
What is insulting to “pretty much all women” is the notion that Matt Lauer’s Charlie Rose’s, and Glenn Thrush’s alleged sexual harassment of women who are *not* Hillary Clinton is somehow continuous with or exacerbated by their putatively negative coverage of Hillary Clinton. As though she is Woman Itself or some such nonsense.
And by the way, wasn’t Glenn Thrush one of those singled out in the Podesta emails as being a toady in good standing with the HRC campaign from day one?
“Negative coverage of Hilary”?
Of the top 100 newspapers in the country only 2 endorsed her opponent. I guess they feel it should have been 100/100?
*waves* Hello, I’m a woman, and I love naked capitalism’s snark about Hillary Clinton because I’ve developed a healthy, leftist critique of Clinton’s policies and everything else she stands for. And every time someone tries to erase the existence of leftist women like me in order to make a claim on behalf of Womanhood, it pushes me one step further from the sympathy I used to hold for liberal feminism. Please don’t assume that “pretty much all women” think with one mind; that’s way more insulting and paternalistic than anything I’ve read in all my travels across the leftist internet.
HEAR! HEAR!
If only the Sexual Inquisition had took place last year HRC would have won those midwestern states she didn’t campaign in. But she had to lose for it to begin so Catch 22.
A lovely Sunday morning to you all.
It’s insulting to all the women who’ve been making me ashamed to call myself a feminist over the past year, so I’m just fine with that. The election seems to have driven a lot of what I would have previously called decent “feminism 101” type writers like Filipovic completely insane. The utterly tone-deaf “dog ate my homework” whine continuously emitted from the Clinton campaign makes me think we might actually have dodged a bullet that they’re not in power – somehow, they would have found a way to make things even worse.
I found the 2016 campaign refreshingly free of overt sexism (except for the comments from Steinem and Albright!) certainly as compared to, say, the 2008 Democratic primary.
“…….making me ashamed to call myself a feminist over the past year…..”
Agree completely.
The sword cuts both ways. If you truly believe that competence is not gender-specific, you must behave accordingly, in failure as well as success.
Why women refuse to acknowledge that this is the only way, frustrating as it may be, to achieve genuine, lasting parity is confounding. That younger women seem to prefer resentful claims of bias or entitlement over commitment to the struggle is extremely disappointing.
I’m sure steinem and albright recognize this, but what do they care? They’ve already got theirs. Let the younger ladies play the fools. And suffer the fallout.
Yesssss, that hit it on the nose!
As an aside, I have run into a strange experience repeatedly recently where peers or younger women (I am 36) claim to have been extremely shocked, well into adulthood when they started their first career, by the entirely new realization that sexism would stand in their way because they were told over and over growing up that it didn’t exist anymore. …I honestly don’t know what to make of it, and can’t see why anyone would raise their kid that way, but I feel like it must be related, in some way, to the Clinton campaign’s blithely trying to set feminism back 15 years.
or growing up watching too much TV or too much Internet?…. multiple inputs…
> pretty much all women.
I assume you are including the 53% of white women that voted for Trump? No?
Probably a good idea.
Didn’t read the article and probably won’t, but methinks that if one were going to point fingers at men who cost HRC the election, the two biggest candidates for blame are republican-lite WJC and BHO — so the problems go back to the ’90s and are more policy-centric than sexism-related (though WJC is problematic on both counts). And (correct me if I’m mistaken) HRC ran a campaign that claimed to be proud of their achievements, and promised more of the same.
What insults all women is telling women to vote for a candidate solely because she is a woman.
Source for ‘all women are insulted’, please? FYI, I am a woman and I am not insulted by the quoted headline.
Hi Hilary-voter from the Jimmy Dore show! You’re hilarious!
A quote from near the beginning of the article:
Yeah, accusing Clinton of being “dishonest and unlikable” is sexism at its lowest. Let us head our heads in shame. How about we redeem our sexism by nominating Tulsi Gabbard as the next Democratic presidential candidate, w/ Warren as VP? No need for a D primary, right?
Right, as if the idea that Hillary took a $100,000 bribe in 1978 (when that was serious money) in the form of an utterly implausible short-lived fling in commodities was a fabrication. For starters. And as if the press was ignoring Trump’s many improprieties, like keeping blacks out as tenants in his father’s buildings, hiring below-minimum wage workers for one of his major projects, numerous allegations by contractors of having been stiffed by Trump (some with court wins showing they were right). Help me.
As if keeping a private email server was a “nothingburger.” Anyone who works with even moderately sensitive information in a large organization has to know better, and would be at least fired for it, if not prosecuted.
Considering that State Department information is some of the most sensitive in the world, what she did is a flagrant violation of not “best practice” but everyday commonsense practice that literally anybody should know. She knew better, she thought she could get away with it because no one would ever find it in her bathroom. It is yet another example of extremely poor judgement on her part, of which there are many. The fact that she is a woman did not get her held to a higher standard on the email server issue, any man caught doing that in her position would have been held equally accountable.
“You mean wipe, like with a cloth?”
Puh-lease
Beyond the best practice aspect of it, one of the things I have the most problem with about any defense of Hillary Clinton’s choice to do this is that it is part and parcel of Clinton not just avoiding but criminally avoiding public oversight of her work, as she knew this would limit access to her work product for FOIA AND she lied about it and about providing all work product on her required exit documents. She also lied about not wanting to use more than one device (she regularly had more than one), if that was to the FBI, well as Martha Stewart and now Michael Flynn have learned that was a crime in itself.
God forbid the public understand that this PUBLIC EMPLOYEE, who has been on the public payroll either as an employee or owed her livelihood to the public for well over twenty years didn’t think they had the right, regardless of the law, to actually demand to know what she did as their employee. Her ‘privacy’ trumped the law, security, and common practice. And when caught she lied repeatedly about it. Others have gone to jail for less, and holding her to both the spirit and the intent of the law was a conspiracy against her…well let’s call it what it is…entitlement an self-aggrandizing “right” to be President.
It would be nice if we can get to the point that people don’t feel the need to qualify themselves before putting forth their opinion. Should someone’s gender really determine the quality of that person’s opinion?
leave it to a clinton to look at the pain that sexual harassment causes women &, rather than address that pain (especially when an inflicter of that pain is a top dem donor), use it as yet another excuse for her sorry campaign.
This looked like sarcasm to me (playing off the idea that the same people who accuse Hillary’s detractors of sexism would likely be appalled at the idea of a Gabbard/Warren ticket). Possibly a bit too well disguised given the subsequent comments, but that was my impression.
We don’t take well to thought policing, particularly since you appear to have missed that it was a woman, Jerri-Lynn, who wrote that remark, and I, a woman, had said something similar to her via e-mail.
Per several of the remarks above, the idea that women were supposed to vote for Hillary because she is female is insulting. And the article was an embarrassment to any thinking person, in particular women.
It also appears not to occur to you that some key groups (such as blacks) stayed at home in greater numbers than in 2012 due to antipathy for Hillary’s uninspriring policies? Hillary’s message was that the middle and lower classes needed to suck it up and deal with the consequences of living in our best of all possible worlds of neoliberalism. And she and her campaign epitomized the preening self regard of the top 10% that Thomas Frank described in Listen, Liberal.
Moreover, Hillary got a lower proportion of female votes than Obama did in 2012. Per Roper, Obama got 55% of the female votes cast. Hillary got 54%.
I’m a woman. I’m so not insulted. HRC lost because she sucked, but will not take that on, ever, and articles like this one keep enabling her denial, and the denial of establishment Dems more generally.
Truth can be hard but it’s not the same as insulting. If there is any issue discerning the difference it may be the way it was said, but it also lies with the reader as well.
Sorry to see anyone go, but I get the need for reading stuff that doesn’t take you out of your comfort zone.
My heart bleeds.
Unbelievable. This must literally be into triple figures by now. Think about it; over a hundred different excuses why HRC lost the election that all fail to feature her singularly unappealing nature. The worst candidate the Dems have imposed on the people since James Buchanon, the least popular and the least responsive. She lost because of who she’d shown herself to be, and who she’d shown herself happy to work for. Oh, and she’s a hyper-aggressive imperialist as well.
That the crimes of Weinstein and many other rapists should focus attention and launch a movement, that is a great outcome. But we should all immediately call bs on any attempt to coopt it politically. Especially by the shameless Clinton.
I’ll find you a couple more readers, never fear.
Alas, the class ceiling extends deep into the blogosphere. If only NC would put some women in charge.
As a trans woman and intersectional feminist myself I saw no problem with the commenary. Hillary Clinton and her ilk have destroyed the Democratic Party and as long as Democrats fail to convincingly renounce her and her style of politics there’s no hope. From my point of view Jerri-Lynn Scofield was only trying to help with the remark, in that if the Democrat/Clintonite lot don’t manage to pull their heads from their backsides before 2019 we can all look forward to another Trump term in 2020, not to mention both chambers of Congress packed with even more Republicans than they already are. But hey, if you want to be incensed whenever someone helpfully suggests that maybe committing seppuku is a bad idea, more power to you I say.
The snark is totally justified. What part of it exactly is insulting to women and to Hillary voters? I think what you’re asking and what HRC is doing is actually insulting to women’s and all voters’ intelligence. “Victimhood knows no bounds” is totally right. Deal with it.
Your assumption that Yves wants readers so thin skinned about someone so horrendous is amusing.
Yes, Lambert has some pet phrases for readers like this, along the lines of “The Internet is a big place. I hope your find your happiness elsewhere” and ” Daily Kos is over there.”
“The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election NYT”
This was a real eye-opener. I naively went in thinking that it would be about Obama, Holder,
Geithner and Summers. Learn something every day. Thanks for the link.
Let me guess, it isn’t about Mook, Podesta and/or Bill* either.
*Although to give Bill some credit, he apparently did try to tell her and the other two campaign geniuses that she needed to campaign in states they were taking for granted and eventually lost.
Late to this party, but that was my immediate response: Big Data Genius Mook and Podesta…with a bit of BHO and WJC thrown in for seasoning. Those were the men who cost Hillary the election. Although, yes, Bill did warn them about the Upper Midwest. The funniest thing of all is the apocryphal (?) tale that Clinton LLC encouraged The Donald to run, because they thought he would be easiest to beat. Of that gaggle of GOP dips, he was the one candidate she could not beat, and that was clear to anyone not in their bubble.
L’affaire Flynn
I thought the tape from the State Department Briefing that showed up with the State Department officer saying that they had no problem with the Trump transition team talking to foreign governments vastly amusing. In fact, the State Department stood by to assist them if they wanted.
How does this stack up against what the Trump transition team did?
From here:
https://2009-2017.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2017/01/266932.htm
—————————
QUESTION: No, I got just one more. You probably have seen —
MR TONER: Excuse me.
QUESTION: — reports starting yesterday, but then more of them this morning, about contact between the incoming national security advisor and the Russian ambassador. I’m just wondering, from the State Department’s point of view, is this something that’s of concern at all? Or – I’ll just leave it there and then follow up.
MR TONER: Again, not necessarily – I’ve seen the reports. I don’t think they’ve been confirmed or corroborated yet. But that’s – as he’s part of the transition team, that’s really for them to speak to in how they are engaging. I mean —
QUESTION: Right, but —
MR TONER: — the president-elect is also engaged on his own with many world leaders.
QUESTION: Right.
MR TONER: So I don’t want to speculate and I don’t want to —
QUESTION: So there’s nothing – this building doesn’t see anything necessarily inappropriate about contact between members of the incoming administration and foreign officials —
MR TONER: No.
QUESTION: — no matter what country they’re from?
MR TONER: No.
QUESTION: Right?
MR TONER: No. And again, this has been ongoing. I mean, we stand ready if they want to work through the State Department to contact some of these individuals, but we have no comment or no problem with them doing such on their own.
I read Trump said what Flynn did (with respect to contacting the Russians) was legal.
Here, the authority to contact seems to have been given.
And indicting Flynn for later lying to the FBI seems to weaken him as a witness, according to some legal expert.
It was probably a violation of the Logan Act. But I don’t think that anyone has ever been convicted of violating the Logan Act, so the constitutionality of the act has never been determined by appealing to the courts. The Logan Act seems to violate the free speech component of the First Amendment.
If not, it should be amended so that members of the incoming administration should be able to do so, provided they coordinate with the outgoing team. Here, the spokesman seemed to say it was OK with them.
If this is all there was to it, if the topic was to get Russia to delay a UN vote, to fight adversary in the Middle East, a pardon by Trump will be understandable, for a lot of people, even though some will disagree.
We don’t yet know what else is going on. There were improper contacts with the Russian government long before Trump was the President-elect, and Trump and his people repeatedly lied about that. See chapter four of The Despot’s Apprentice: Donald Trump’s Attack on Democracy, by Brian Klaas.
And if Trump pardons someone who was close to him, the comparisons with Nixon’s Watergate scandal will be a tsunami.
If they look hard enough, they will find a despot in almost everyone in DC.
Pardoning Flynn for what he was indicted last Friday, an indictment that actually showed Mueller’s weak hand (lying, and hoping to get him to say something about others) would be understandable for a lot of people wary of the surveillance state.
The only thing Flynn did wrong was to lie to the FBI about things that were not crimes.
This has been a standard feauture on Internet routers for the last ten years. You can’t see it, you can’t measure it and you can’t complain, but it still sits there.
One should imagine the Internet as four layers: access (mobile, fiber, dial-up, ADSL,..), aggregation, transport and interworking. Your ISP provides access, aggregation and transport. And all ISPs (‘autonomous systems’ in internet parlance) exchange data via the big data exchanges.
In the aggregation layer, the ISP can and does apply ‘policies’: fiber subscribers are entitled to more bandwidth, dial-up to very little, and mobile subscribers are rate-limited to avoid congestion in the mobile cell where they are currently roaming. They also apply policies on the type of traffic: video and audio traffic gets through unimpeded (because you get hit with visual or audio artefacts, which degrade your “user experience”), while mail or web traffic can get discarded as it will be retransmitted automatically.
The big operators like Akamai (Windows, Apple, Facebook static data), Google (Youtube) or Netflix have ‘web caches’ in these aggregation layers, so if you want to obtain something (iOS, W10 upgrade, a popular Youtube clip or Netflix episode), it gets served from ‘close by’, so it loads faster & better and improves your user experience. Alternatively, start-ups don’t get such stuff, and so they suffer more data loss, less quality etc. (As an aside, NC gets delivered here in France via such a webcache as well).
So ‘net neutrality’ is just a silly dream as long as you don’t have strict regulations and the will to enforce them. Everything else is just talk.
Thanks for the expertise! While it may be true that the US has plenty of unused broadband infrastructure, that may not be true of mobile and worth noting that the net neutrality debate didn’t come to the fore until everyone started using the internet on their phones (encouraged, of course, by the phone companies). Perhaps we should blame the “death of the internet” on Steve Jobs.whose smartphone famously crashed ATT NYC cell networks when it was first introduced. Plus if President Trump had to sit down in front of a computer to send all those tweets he might not do it so often.
Doubtless the only solution is indeed more, not less, regulation. But it also has to be stated that the internet has changed because of how we, the public, are using it. Whether it is appropriate to use the web for bandwidth heavy applications like Netflix streaming is a debate that has never taken place.
Anybody here remember the Californian electricity crisis back in 2000-2001? And how it came out that Enron was deliberately using BS excuses to jack up the electricity process leading to all those blackouts in that state which cost it billions? And how it all came out on tapes (https://www.democracynow.org/2006/5/26/enron_played_central_role_in_california) what they were doing? Here is a sample as a reminder-
ENRON EMPLOYEE: We want you guys to get a little creative —
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: — and come up with a reason to go down.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Okay.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: Anything you want to do over there? Any cleaning, anything like that?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah. Yeah. There’s some stuff that we could be doing tonight.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: That’s good.
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah, we need to do some — we need to come down and inspect this switch on the steam turbine, this one switch on this induction steam valve that’s been failing us, and we need to be down in order to pull the switch and adjust it.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: No sh—?
POWER PLANT WORKER: Yeah.
ENRON EMPLOYEE: I like that. And, I don’t know, I guess around 11:00 for hour ending 11 —
POWER PLANT WORKER: Right.
Well that is how your internet is going to work without at least an attempt at net neutrality and if you question these companies that will claim ‘commercial confidentiality’.
But, just to continue my point, if you move to an internet that requires lots of capital investment and heavy industrial infrastructure then it’s not too surprising when the money boyz start demanding some return on investment–or gaming the system for excessive return on investment. Back in the good old days the whole thing sat on top of the phone system.
One of my hiking trails winds past the base of a large cell tower. It’s quite the edifice.
if you move to an internet that requires lots of capital investment and heavy industrial infrastructure then it’s not too surprising when the money boyz start demanding….excessive return on investment.
Please, spare me.
[1] The ISPs don’t own most of the fiberoptic backbone where most of the Internet infrastructure costs — lie. They are parasitic middle-men, more than anything else.
[2] For the last decade and a half, the ISPs have been booking about 85 percent profit margins annually by reinvesting as little as they could in new capabilities and capacity. If they’d wanted to invest in innovation and new capabilities, they had plenty of money to do that at any time in the last decade or two.
[3] If you travel overseas, you’ll know that the US Internet — the mass consumer end of it, anyway — is pretty much the slowest and worst in the developed world. I think there are now East European countries that belonged to the former Soviet Union that have faster Internet than the U.S.;
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spectrum_reallocation
You aren’t really addressing my point. I’m suggesting that the ability to make lots of money by controlling the internet pipe only becomes significant when lots of internet is being used via a medium–the broadcast spectrum–which is in fact limited. This is why it is the phone companies like ATT and Verizon who are leading the charge against net neutrality. And while it may or may not be true that Netflix alone creates a third of all internet traffic, it certainly is true that video streaming uses far more internet “pipe” than the relatively trivial amount of traffic that existed before Netflix and other video applications. Therefore, as I said above, we are either going to have to start regulating far more, not less, or start questioning whether mobile in particular is such a great idea.
Whether that’s likely to happen, the cell companies are spending a great deal of money on spectrum and cell infrastructure while gouging the public in return. Of course for cable web providers it’s all gravy.
No, you can make lots of money on the Internet via having an oligopoly. The details of how you do so are not important.
Yes you can make a great deal of money which is why, I believe, traditional ISPs like the cable companies have never shown that much interest in rocking the boat neutrality wise. What I’m contending is that the special circumstances of mobile broadband–that limited radio spectrum–does make their situation different because it is a limited resource and even now television stations are selling some of their allocation for large sums to the phone companies. They are the ones who want neutrality to go. The new FCC chair worked for Verizon.
This theory could be incorrect, but worth discussing imho.
This short book review of a new book by Tim O’Reilly addresses these points. Review is too short for details, but the book’s described comprehensive approach is relevant.
Review from Boingboing:
https://boingboing.net/2017/12/02/love-the-sin-hate-the-sinner.html
Thanks for link. Doctorow always has great insights about the web.
I travel frequently, often to places far off the beaten path. I’m always shocked when I return to the US to find how slow the internet is. And how lacking is the public access to the internet that’s pretty much standard in other parts of the world– at airports, on other public transit, and in rail and bus stations. Why no wifi on the LIRR, for example? Or even in the stations?
Yes, I remember since it was certain Texans who extracted rents($$) from CA homeowners. All the while we passed a law in TX to do the same from our citizens.
People were told that you will be able to get lower rates by letting electric companies compete with each other and you the homeowner will select the company you like. Lots and lots of people were convinced that they could get into the entrepreneurial game by setting up smaller companies and selling the the consumer.
Then Goldman & friends bought out TXU. If the new companies that were formed had not had the price of oil tank, they would have done the same to us. We were sitting ducks. Luckily, oil prices dropped the plan failed.
Even still our rates did not drop. I asked some smaller companies what their experience was with the changes and no one but the very large companies benefited -by about a 40% rate decrease, The rest of us picked up the slack.
Ah, Enron. From a column by the late, very great Molly Ivins:
‘The main problem with Enron is that it has never produced much of anything in the way of either goods or services; it has not added a single widget to the world widget supply. Enron is in the business of “financializing,” making markets, trading in wholesale electricity, water, data storage, fiber-optics, just about anything. One Enron executive told The New York Times the company’s achievement was to create “a regulatory black hole” to suit its “core management philosophy, which was to be the first mover into a market and to make money in the initial chaos and lack of transparency.” ‘
Yes, the comparison with the Big 4 ISPs gunning for net neutrality is apt.
https://www.creators.com/read/molly-ivins/12/01/molly-ivins-december-6-097c7001
In other words, harvesting the pilings of functioning society.
Molly Ivins, boy, do I miss her. I had been a fan long before I moved to TX.
Second that on missing Molly. Throw Mike Royko in there also.
Moi aussi on missing Molly– less familiar with Royko’s work. I also miss Alexander Cockburn.
I’m old enough to remember when moral hazard was a bad thing.
North Korea Won’t Be Denuclearized American Conservative
Just as the Bush administration did when selling its case for war with Iraq, the Trump administration has cited the regime’s cruel and abusive practices inside their own country as evidence of how the regime will behave internationally. These arguments made no sense 15 years ago, and they still make no sense, because they share the same flaw of conflating a regime’s authoritarian behavior at home with aggressive designs abroad. It is a rhetorical sleight of hand to try to trick the public into imagining that a cruel regime must also be a suicidal one, but this doesn’t hold up under scrutiny.
———————–
http://www.cnn.com/2017/12/02/politics/mcmaster-potential-war-north-korea/index.html
White House national security adviser HR McMaster said Saturday that North Korea represents “the greatest immediate threat to the United States” and that the potential for war with the communist nation is growing each day.
==========================================================
Trump, if anything, is consistently inconsistent. Despite spouting how different he (Trump) was from Bush and the republican field, it appears we will get Iraq II – except N Korea is no Iraq.
and remember the hullabaloo regarding “immediate” versus “imminent”?
Most people in this country, I believe, just want to be sure that no North Korean missiles ever reach Hollywood.
I would watch that movie.
The North Koreans are a nuclear power specifically because of Iraq and Libya, who gave up its nukes.
https://theintercept.com/2017/07/29/dan-coats-north-korea-nukes-nuclear-libya-regime-change/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37321686
The lesson they got was to never give up nukes.
American foreign policy has come back to haunt itself. This is a totally self-inflicted problem.
Except North Korea was working on their nuclear bomb plans in the 1990’s. Clinton was thinking about bombing them then. Jimmy Carters trip to North Korea in 1994 was supposed to have stopped their nuclear bomb plans. That was long before Libya and Iraq II.
Not that Trump is helping matters.
We parked our nukes on their borders, aimed at them, from 1958 to 1991. Look it up.
Might have added to their pucker factor just a wee bit, considering that we had flattened the place just a few years prior.
Yes, and then as you point out withdrew them about 1991. But that didn’t stop the North Koreans from their nuclear plans.
All in all I think it is more complicated than Iraq / Libya or nukes on their borders between 1958 and 1991.
Maybe the North Koreans want nukes so the next time they sink a South Korean ship or shell a South Korean island or whatever the South Koreans will think twice before responding?
Who knows what the North Koreans at the top really think.
Maybe the North Koreans want nukes so the next time they sink a South Korean ship or shell a South Korean island or whatever the South Koreans will think twice before responding?
Oh, since Pyongyang has steadily gotten away away with that kind of thing and worse, they’re going to up the affronts to something useful. How about when they demand economic ‘investment’ in North Korea with no repayment involved?
It’s not a big mystery what the folks at the top of the Pyongyang regime want. Whatever they can get. It’s a little like the Mafia capo in the neighborhood getting a nuclear arsenal to wave around. They’re not stupider than our current elites, but they are more brutal. The demands will gradually and steadily increase.
…in deliberate violation of the 1953 convention of armistice that specifically prohibited the introduction of atomic weapons into Korea.
It seems that the USA definitely has a home-made credibility problem.
…but adherents of the IC, that appears to be running a slow-motion putsch, will always take the opportunity to sow fear, uncertainty and doubt, and try to slant the discourse and insert their versions of the salient facts… Remember, always remember, that We Are Exceptional, that We can do whatever We want because We have the power to do so. Because, of course, SOMEbody has to be the world’s policeman.
(Let us not focus on the fact that a whole lot of policemen engage in all kinds of outrageous and “illegal” activity, from extortion and subversion and corruption and drug dealing to blackmail and seizure and “absorption” of law-abiding citizens’ property, and on up to good old murder… and the history of the “policemen” in the US imperial force does not engender a lot of faith that “we” are the good-hearted Irish beat cop that working with the Priests of St. Lively’s is keeping the boys on the straight and narrow, keeping the crime down, rescuing kittens, and maintaining order, and all that stuff you can see in the old black and white feel-good movies from the Heydays of Hollywood, like Officer Bert in “It’s A Wonderful Life”…)
In all honesty, there was a treaty negotiated back in 1994 as you mentioned to put a lid on the North Koreans and allow IAEA inspectors in bu the US did not live up their side of the treaty (https://theconversation.com/why-the-uss-1994-deal-with-north-korea-failed-and-what-trump-can-learn-from-it-80578) and when Bush came in he said to hell with it and classed the North Koreans as part of the axis of evil.
He had nothing to replace it with but did it anyway. Remember too that it is official US policy to not allow South Korea to formalize and official end to the Korean War with North Korea. The North Koreans would be nuts to give up their nukes and replace it with American promises what with what has happened over the past twenty years.
Our internet company was first in our rural slice of heaven to be on the water towers, grain elevators and silos with our rural broadband. That was in the 90’s. We were even invited and spoke in DC about rural broadband(what a joke that was).
Now our rural electric co-ops are catching up 15-20 years later.
There were no subsidies for us at the time since it was so new. But if you needed Internet or any service or business that didn’t exist at the time you just went out and started it yourself. That’s the rural American way. We don’t need no stinkin’ government.
The stinking gov’t came up with the internet, so you might want to consider that…
I think PG’s last line is an inside joke in rural areas. (Sometimes written ‘we don’t need no steenk’een government’. heh) Made me smile. Rural areas get ignored by govt most of the time.
adding: it’s a comic riff on the dramatic “we don’t need no stinking badges” scene in the move The Treasure of Sierra Madre.
Which is an excellent movie about how greed destroys people.
The book is good, too. It adds rootlessness to the greed. The movie does follow the book very faithfully, except near the end when it runs out of time and slides over some events that really deserve to be spelled out. It’s another B.Traven story, for those who are counting.
And crop subsidies and the REA…
Not that the real subsidies aren’t going to the metropolis.
The good Dr Hussman, who used occasionally to cite Dow Theory (a primitive measure of trend uniformity from the 1920s) no longer finds it expedient to do so after last Wednesday’s twin breakouts in the Industrials and Transports which sent stocks ripping higher in an exuberant follow-through. Nope, he’s still psycho raving bearish:
‘We made the only concession that remained‘ — like a last cigarette before being blindfolded for the firing squad, one imagines. But the good doctor never specifies what’s wrong with “market internals” now. Pull up charts of the old-school Dow Industrials, Transports and Utilities — they’re all at record highs.
Go to the more sophisticated sector tracker at sectorspdr.com and call up one-year returns: every S&P 500 sector but commodity-dependent energy is up. And no one thinks moderate energy prices pose a threat to the economy.
An old Wall Street adage says that “They never ring a bell at the top.” But if the embattled Dr Hussman finally capitulates and buys the Bubble, we will know that it’s time to head for the hills.
Sedate Dr H needs to get out more:
In others words, you can’t lose. ;-)
I think “I love pole dancing, but . . .” is a good introduction to almost any comment.
Dee has a way to go. Hopefully, retirement is decades away.
Pole dancers are, by definition, not the retiring type.
MyLessThanPrimeBeef
December 3, 2017 at 12:05 pm
I’m kinda thinking a pole dancing career is not that long…well, I have seen some dancing after their optimal “consume before date” – you can pole dance as long as you want, but how much you get paid for it is another matter…
https://www.redstate.com/sarah-rumpf/2017/11/30/lied-kate-steinle-case/
In a detailed write-up of the verdict, the San Francisco Chronicle describes many details that have rarely or never been mentioned in the vast majority of the media coverage of this case. The main issue is that the defense was able to present a credible case that the shooting was an accident, and the prosecution aggressively overplayed their hand.
——————————————————–
Donald J. TrumpVerified account
@realDonaldTrump
Nov 30
More
A disgraceful verdict in the Kate Steinle case! No wonder the people of our Country are so angry with Illegal Immigration.
=====================================================
First, I was somewhat surprised that “Red State” took such a dispassionate stand with regard to the Kate Steinle case. As the article points out, some of the most important and INDISPUTABLE facts, were not given much notice in the general media, and are ignored by those with an ax to grind.
How far will criminalizing politics and politicizing criminality go?
Perhaps as it ever was….but there didn’t use to be Facebook in everwas…..
I know very little about the case.
Was she a pole dancer?
Was she trying to buy a gun from the guy? How did the gun, the guy and the victim get in the same spot in the space-time continuum?
The Alien and Sedition Acts, speaking of criminalizing politics, and Eugene Debs — old story, ever refreshed. Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, on and on…http://simplebooklet.com/publish.php?wpKey=CsRbcvlDvNKNxwvGZb26qS
Ha! That one made my day – forwarding to my bitcoin mining friend right now. This woman is possibly the exception, but my guess is pole dancers are rarely considered the smart money.
Mos of us are powerless in the face of a growing bubble.
What you can do? You can refrain yourself from buying Bitcoin, but that doesn’t do much, when others rush in where you dare not tread.
Reminds me of the stripper in The Big Short.
Hey, big spender…
‘Pole dancing instructor Dee Heath is riding the Bitcoin surge with her fitness business in western Sydney …“The good thing is when it goes down, you can buy some more, and you know it’s going to go up at some point.‘’
Gee,why does that scene with the stripper in THE BIG SHORT come to my mind?
I hope the good doctor is still sane.
Then, he’d be only guilty of sanity in an insane world.
Being ridiculed way too often should not lessen the penalty for that offense though.
Appreciate many of your comments and your sense of humor, Jim. But I find the ongoing fixation on John Hussman’s market views baffling. Hussman’s observations about stock markets being overvalued seem spot on to me. Hussman has largely ignored the central planning policies and central bank interventions over the past six years that have prevented price discovery and relentlessly elevated financial market prices up to where the central planners desire. So he disagrees with their valuations… so what?
Rather than focusing on Hussman’s views, I suggest time might be better spent on considering whether what has occurred over the past six years is a temporary or permanent distortion of so called “free markets” and whether a long-term structural change has occurred? As former Fed Vice Chair Stanley Fischer said as he walked out the door, it might be useful to consider the question what would happen if central bankers were to go back to the way things were before? Whether a drop in market prices is really a threat to national security, or merely the pocketbooks of some market participants? And what the longer term implications of such a structural shift on productivity, consumer price levels and personal freedom might be?
Just my view.
A recession and steep market decline will occur before he gives up. When? Who knows, but there will be one… and lots of indicators have turned down. He is right that the time for comparisons is after a complete market cycle. Not all will get out at the top… though Goldman is advising out now…
Course, tomorrow probably jumps on tax bill. So not yet…
I think this is the correct link for Bombs in your Backyard
https://www.propublica.org/article/reporting-recipe-bombs-in-your-backyard
Thanks– fixed it!
Re:
Its reported in Ireland that there is ‘progress’ but no agreement yet on the Irish border issue. While tomorrow is the deadline, it looks like there would be at least a week to work on detailed issues before the EU makes a final decision. The noises coming from the Irish government would seem to indicate that they would accept a suitably strongly worded ‘agreement’. However, I suspect that any backsliding would be politically disastrous for them. Reading between the lines, I suspect that there is a ‘solution’ agreed at civil service level between Irish and NI technocrats (there have been quiet discussions on this going on for many months), but its up to the politicians to agree or disagree. I would guess that the form of the agreement would be a sort of hybrid legal status for NI, but this of course means customs agreement on the Irish Sea.
Incidentally, in a report not available online, the Irish government have been in discussions with Sinn Fein (a big surprise) and as a result have used their one power available under the peace agreement to compel the UK government to announce a British-Irish Intergovernmental Council – this effectively means NI would be jointly ruled by the UK and Ireland in the absence of an agreed NI Assembly. It may be that the Irish government sees this as a way to pressure the DUP and possibly also a vehicle for keeping NI within the EU.
But as the link above shows, it seems likely that through sheer ignorance, the London government won’t be able to agree a suitable compromise.
And this is from a Brexiter!
FG consulting with SF. Phew. Politics makes strange sleeping arrangements.
And how fortuitous that Adams has announced he is resigning the leadership of SF so very recently? Makes it a little easier for FG and the optics.
It was reported in The Phoenix so it must be true.
I’d suspect Coveney was behind it. I’ve heard from people who worked with him that he’s surprisingly Non ideological and pragmatic. I’d guess he’s leading Varadkar on negotiations, he’s much more of a details man.
One suggestion on the NI/RoI border I have picked up is that it will be agreed that there be further discussions to try to resolve problems next year but that if these fail the fallback is NI stays in the SM and CU. Arguably that could allow Phase 2 of the talks to start. Time will tell.
From this report in the Observer today it seems the hard Brexiteers are determined to lay down red lines which the EU couldn’t possibly agree to.
Unless May suddenly grows a backbone, it seems unlikely that any sort of agreement can be reached, even with (it seems) the EU agreeing to a number of fudges to help the British along.
Don’t worry! There is Tony Blair to the rescue saying it is absolutely necessary that Brexit doesn’t happen (https://sputniknews.com/analysis/201712031059660732-tony-blair-brexit-should-not-happen/) so that is a relief, right?
Dog shoots pheasant hunter
I’m wondering if this story isn’t a ‘dog ate my homework’ workaround on a Dick Cheney hunting mishap scenario.
Wright County is in Iowa’s 4th Congressional District, Steve King’s district; perhaps that is a Twilight Zone endroit where the apex predators are not really who we think they are.
the apex predators are not really who we think they are.
-Whoah; the doggies?
I thought about Dick Cheney when I saw the article, too! I happen to think that dogs are superior to the former Vice President, so a dog would have better aim than Cheney had.
Re: Austen’s Persuasion:
I don’t know if it’s Austen’s greatest novel, but it is my favorite. The novel doesn’t have quite the same biting wit that the earlier ones do; instead, it seems more deeply felt. That ending scene with the letter left on the table gets me every time.
Agreed. My favorite Austin novel; her most personal.
My favorite segment of Jane Austin is the beginning of Sense and Sensibility. She details the rationalization the son and his wife have for disregarding the wishes of the son’s deceased father that he use a portion of his inheritance to care for the widowed second wife and the son’s half-sisters. The inheriting son and wife are not being grasping or uncaring; it’s just that they feel obliged to look after the best interests of theiy son. Completely unselfishly, of course. Bitingly witty; wittily biting.
Austen. It’s Austen with an ‘e,’ for god’s sake.
Picky picky picky. One talks to text and corrects as much as possible. If I corrected every grammatical, puncutuation and usage error I spot..
Well then I would miss the substance, right?
Well then I would miss the substance, right?
No, you wouldn’t. You’d just have correct grammar, punctuation, and usage.
Think of it this way. We’re now letting malign corporate actors forcibly rewrite and crapify our human conversations via their inadequate texting and dictation tech. I had my phone texts correcting to Russian spelling one day last week. It was intensely annoying: as I’d rewrite the software’s insertion of some entirely wrong Russian word back to the English one I’d wanted, it would rewrite it straight back to the Russian word.
But I beat the bugger after a minute. So fight the power. The fall of Western civilization and the AI Singularity are hastened every time we let machines and software insert wrong words and spellings — garbage — into our communications
Not qualified but I’ve heard those that are argue the merits of her last novel Emma.
I could be wrong, but isn’t “Pride and Prejudice” the only one of her novels that has zombies and ninjas?
I think Persuasion is my favorite but Pride and Prejudice is such a perfect little jewel, and Emma is a great read. Hmmm… guess it’s time to read them again.
It’s the two hundredth anniversary of her death, and I’m part of a group of friends, etc., who are (re)reading them all again. (Last year we (re)read Shakespeare’s complete works, as it was the four hundredth anniversary of his passing.) Refuse to pick a favourite– her writing continues to provide such pleasure.
Stuff’s gettin’ real:
Why do I get the feeling that 2018 is going to be defined by mushrooming scandals and smash-mouth partisan warfare leading to many prominent casualties?
Will there be a special counsel to investigate this special counsel?
Would it be too much to ask each of his staff to swear that he/she is neither anti or pro Trump, neither pro or anti Hillary?
Then, in this case, another special counsel can go after this violator?
Well zero on the morals chart but having an FBI lawyer as your mistress shows some steel balls…
Jim Haygood
December 3, 2017 at 10:01 am
Donald J. TrumpVerified account
@realDonaldTrump
7h7 hours ago
After years of Comey, with the phony and dishonest Clinton investigation (and more), running the FBI, its reputation is in Tatters – worst in History! But fear not, we will bring it back to greatness.
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So….when do they rescind the Martha Stewart insider trading conviction?
I mean, seriously, if Flynn was “perjury trapped” – wasn’t Stewart?
Indeed, if looked at critically and objectively, aren’t any number of FBI investigations the ravishment of due process?
Did Flynn talk to the FBI without counsel? If so, why?
If Nixon behaved like Trump, would Nixon have served out his term?
No one is safe, if he or she is asked to recollect an experience, when the state/police/FBI has the exact transcript (thanks to our hard-working surveillance public employees).
If you have ever had an affinity for tin foil hats or felt an irrational fear for your brother who is large, maybe you’re not insane.
Why do I get the feeling that 2018 is going to be defined by mushrooming scandals and smash-mouth partisan warfare leading to many prominent casualties?
Mr Market being one?
Re: The Men Who Cost Clinton the Election, there were early warning signs that the Democrats were going to lose the presidential election in 2016. Were the Democratic losses at the federal and state level under Obama due to misogyny? I guess the go-to answer there would be racism but that doesn’t explain all of those former Obama voters switching over to the GOP.
On the subject of Clinton being treated badly by men in the media, how can you run for president in this era and not expect to get dragged through the mud? Even if you thought the e-mail issue was overblown you have to expect the modern media to hype issues since they are hungry for views and clicks. Trump was also attacked by the media for being a racist, a nutcase and a pervert. Clinton was branded as corrupt, conniving and willing to say or do anything to get elected. Whether or not you agree with those stereotypes of the candidates that is how many Americans saw them hence why in 2016 you had two of the most unpopular candidates ever running for office. Plus, I am sure that many women held negative opinions about Clinton so it was not just a man problem.
I don’t really see how sexual harassment in the media industry had any impact on the election. Jill Filipovic seems to be arguing that men in the media are pigs and this made them biased against Clinton and easier on Trump because they shared similar piggish behavior and attitudes. I don’t really see any evidence for this. The media is all about money. Man, woman, animal, everyone is a target for sensationalism now. I guess that is a kind of equality.
Gender is not biological.
My question is, Is Hillary male? Where would she be in, say, Thailand’s 18 genders?
Some tinfoil hatters are asking a similar question about Mrs. Obama.
I would argue that gender is biological, but its’ expression is a social genetic hybrid.
From Wikipedia, Sex and Gender Distinction:
Sex is biological. Gender, per above is not. It’s new to me, but I have to update, and I am updating, myself.
Now what is a gender role? What is considered a male gender role?
From Wikipedia, Gender Role:
Where would like to go? Further down in the above article, a more liberal model of gender roles is listed. For example, under total integration,
So, for example, math would be a traditional male gender role thing.
In our world, or our ideal world where we hope to get to, math would be both female and male.
And in everything else.
Basically, then, there will not be male and female gender role activities.
There is no need to be elect a ‘female (gender) president.’ In fact, there is no such a thing, when biological men and biological women are all doing housework, all doing math, all working, etc….in that ideal world, because traditional male and female gender roles no longer exist, and people can no longer establish one’s gender, based on gender roles, if all gender roles are shared equally among biological men and biological women.
My next question, is there something equivalent when it comes to race, one based on biology, and one based on social roles?
Can, for example, Bill Clinton be said to be an African American?
Can Senator Warren said to be totally white?
Yes. All “Identity” is a social construct; what’s really important is what’s in a person’s heart. For eample if a person who society forced into the role of white male oppressor due to arbitrary traits like skin color and testicles, decides in her heart that she is really a black woman then there is no one who can go against that. In fact, I encourage all white male oppressors to stop oppresding others and come out as black women, like I already have–especially when they go to apply for jobs or college, or if they are trying to survive a run in with the family courts.
There are a lot of white men who are Asian…Japanese, Chinese, etc in their souls.
And you see many, for example, Arab playboy princes, who are white in their Weltanshauung.
Senator Warren is basically white, even with passing a certain threshold of the Native American blood purity test.
Well I don’t recommend for anyone to transition to an Asian anything. Go apply for a job or try to get into college as an Asian and you’ll have even worse luck than a white male would. I encourage all superficially Asian people, both those with and without testicles, to transition to black women as soon as possible for better odds at succeeding in America.
This joke is getting old. Yes the identity politics nazi’s are really annoying but their are plenty of people for who gender identity is an actual issue and aren’t nazi’s about it and you have been rhetorically bashing them for no reason for weeks now. Move on already.
“Joke”? The unseen bias in your statement is astonishing. I already have enough oppression to deal with in real life as a masculine-presenting transgendered lesbian, and finding yet more intolerance here, a place I thought would be a tolerant safe space, is very upsetting. Please take care in the future to respect people’s identity without question–otherwise you might trigger them, which would be an oppressive act of aggression.
By the way, I’m completely serious. The quota police are perfectly happy to accept my identity as a black woman wherever I go and it has definitely helped me get ahead in some situations. They accept me, but you won’t? If you are really suggesting that people can be categorized by skin color and bodily organs I think you need to reexamine your progressive credentials. Don’t be a tool of the white male patriarchy.
No I don’t think you can just decide you are a black female lesbian to get the ‘perks’ because it is blatantly obvious you don’t actually think that and are just throwing it out there to troll. I know actual Trans people and it is not a fun life. I can’t imagine having to deal with half the crap they put up with and your condescending smug attitude pretending they would go through life that way just for the ‘perks’ like being 87% more likely to get murdered is just offensive. You made your point that their are some really annoying feminists. Stop pretending that their is nothing of value in feminism.
Speaking of expression of gender, here’s a little video of the Former First Lady (pre-raking-it-in version) demonstrating “assertiveness” in the Oval Office: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=luh9oHTd3xU And I ought to wash that down with a nice sugary chaser: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=njqqFZ4rHK4
That’s the ‘real’ fun about observing ‘power couples.’ Where does the ‘real’ power lie?
Lest I be accused of partizanship, I do remember Elanor Roosevelt. And, to top it off, the spouse of the incapacitated Woodrow Wilson.
Nancy Reagan and her court astrologer.
I linked to that first video clip to point out some evidence that the actual Michelle Obama, so beloved by our liberal brethren and sistern in her guise as a supposedly decent caring human being, is not such a dear, nice person concerned about the welfare of ordinary people (or even the 10%ers) as way too many of us Americans think…
Are man in the media treating trump badly?
Nice picture of a red-bellied woodpecker, makes me homesick! Just have to look out the kitchen window and see various woodpeckers and nuthatches working on a seed cake. Occasionally get a visit by one of these noisy super size woodpeckers. Not as loud as laughing Kookaburras but pretty close.
https://youtu.be/JGYcEyfVzVk
Where we lived before Katrina was at the edge of a large river delta and pine barrens. Pileated woodpeckers would hang out in one of our liveoak trees. Loud is not the word!
I always hoped to catch one of them rapping just twice on a branch. That is a defining characteristic of an Ivory Billed Woodpecker. Thought to be extinct, sightings of it have been claimed over the years. Creatures can survive and carry on out of the sight of we bipedal monkeys.
Thanks for the link to The Recruiters” article. As an Army Vet that volunteered, I was able to read a lot “between the lines”. The author did a good job explaining the problems recruiters have in attempting to sign up people to a difficult and potentially very dangerous occupation. It also, in my opinion, is a good occupation for those willing to take on the obvious risks.
The author did an excellent job of showing a microcosm of overall socioeconomic American life and attitudes between those lines of text as well as the obvious spelled-out attitudes.
Two lines really laid it out, neither of which surprised me:
“The ASVAB is what stops us dead in our tracks,” a recruiter told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “What this job has shown me is that the education system is broken.
and
A 2015 Harvard survey of Americans under the age of 30 found that, while 47% of respondents supported the use of ground troops in the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, 85% said they would “probably not” or “definitely not” join the military. This paradoxical mentality is what Secretary of Defense Robert Gates was referring to when he said during a speech at Duke University in 2010 that “for a growing number of Americans, service in the military, no matter how laudable, has become something for other people to do.”
As for the NYTimes article on HRC, the snark was good enough for me, I didn’t bother reading more of the same. The commentariat here told me all I needed to know, and as usual, it was excellent.
What surprised me was the news that, thanks to the Green Berets the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had been won by the U.S.A.! You would think that events like those would make the headlines rather than being buried in an article about recruiting.
Once upon a time, people traded for things they couldn’t make (silk) or couldn’t source locally (obsidian, for example).
And silk was a luxury item for a long time. Only those with money could afford it.
It was never ‘this T-shirt’ is cheaper from overseas. Silk or T-shirts, does it matter if consumers have to pay a little more, if domestic jobs are saved? They are not essential. No one dies from not being able to afford them.
I usually just re-use, recycle and reduce my T-shirt consumption.
I’m OK with being unfashionable or even unsightly.
Not doing something about N. Korea, under the present circumstances, will make that ‘greatest threat’ more immediate and closer, for China.
Perhaps not so, yesterday or tomorrow. But today, that is where we are.
Go for it.
And keep the estate tax.
The headline is misleading, in the article Trump just says he would kinda sorta be ok if corporate taxes were not cut quite as much as the Senate wants, there is no talk there of *raising* the corporate tax rate at all.
For those interested in the intersectionality of Silicon Valley, science, celebrity culture
and Russian offshore shell companies, this year’s Breakthrough Prizes will be awarded tonight:
Nothing says “science” like red carpet arrivals.
>>Nothing says “science” like red carpet arrivals.
Oooh! I wonder if Elizabeth Holmes will wear a dress or her trademark black turtleneck! She’s such a science thought leader! Or maybe Uber’s self-driving car scientists?
I’m tangentially familiar with the Boston startup scene. When people there talk about “the West Coast” with a twinge of contempt/weariness/dread, this is what they’re talking about about. How are some plucky Harvard and MIT postdocs supposed to compete with Ashton [f bomb removed because comment was held for moderation] Kutchner and meal delivery apps with $300 million dollars in venture capital investment and sycophantic coverage in Techcrunch, NYT, et al?
Fascinating summary of intrigue and violence among Carolingian nobility in the article from the Paris Review, as well as the value they attached to books, reading and writing.
The writer Edward White didn’t proffer detail regarding the specific advice the mother gave her son in her book about how to be a man. But his brief overview of the book together with the background of the era that he provided causes me to consider the question in our time for us ordinary mortals. Thank you for this link.
an interesting read, particularly for those who dont live here.
http://brexitcentral.com/tony-blairs-secret-memo-alastair-campbell-12-point-plan-stopping-brexit/
“it’s difficult to admit that our government allowed manufacturing to shrink so far that Britain can neither pay its way nor support the structures of an advanced society”
This was a direct result of the high pound, as blair must know very well, it was all about banks
after “new labour” blair was elected in 1997, like clinton and “new dems” he deregulated them, bill black pointed out blair went to nyc to lobby hard for us banks to move here, and as michael hudson pointed out
hot money flowed into the financial capital pushing the pound up, but as a result one uk manufacturer/exporter (eg buildingproducts) after another went bust, unable to remotely compete with eurozone competitors anymore, in the end it was mostly german products, we even imported german bricks. A huge and devastating social change here. Labour voters blamed New Labour. (Blair also reneged on his promise for an eu referendum, as well as his promise to reinstate state pensions to wage index). Switzerland spent alot protecting its own engineering manufacturing sector from the high franc, in various ways, not willing to destroy technical skills which take decades to develop or face the other consequences, jobs etc.
Reads like a spoof to me. No?
Bogus, manifestly.
Not a surprise, but Clinton was also being influenced by school privatizers:
https://www.alternet.org/money-talked-leaks-show-input-wealthy-privatizers-clinton-education-policy
Keep in mind that Obama nominated Arne Duncan. Duncan and Trump’s Secretary, Betsy DeVos have more in common that partisans care to admit.
The spiegel article by the Saudi journalist in exile is great. This part jumped out:
Al-Waleed keeping his distance didn’t bother me. His message, sent literally 48 hours before his own arrest, could not have been more supportive of MbS.
When your journalists are reporting from the opposite planet hemisphere your press definitely gets a big flag for being not free.
From “Why can’t San Francisco’s tech culture solve the city’s social problems,” Financial Times, one local activist balks at accepting people living on the streets:
Welcome to San Francisco. Back in 2005, after 12-year-old Nicholas Faibish was killed by the family’s pit bulls, and then-Mayor Gavin Newsom was asked if maybe it wasn’t time for the city to start enforcing its dog leash law, Newsom responded with what some interpreted as a “half-joke,” stating that the City would solve its homelessness problem before it got around to the leash law.
But, of course, this was exactly backwards. A city that can’t even get people to comply with a simple, common-sense public safety measure such as leashing dogs (in a city with hundreds of dog attacks and dog bites every year) is never, ever going to successfully address a big complicated problem like homelessness. It has neither the will nor the competence. Failure has been completely and utterly normalized.
But I thought that San Francisco’s tech culture was solving the city’s social problems. Well, for the people that matter that is.
On the virtue-signaling competition circuit, addressing dog-leashing or homelessness is not as splashy as sanctuary city status. There is a mental list of degree of difficult for each act.
Something like ‘no person shall be homeless’ will go a long way in that rich city.
>Policeman clings onto lorry about to fall off bridge with driver trapped inside Metro
I see the British police still have some sense that they exist to serve the public. A US cop would have just shot the driver.
I got a frantic email message from Daily Kos (most of their email messages are frantic). They are upset by a bill sponsored by Sen. Mike Crapo which will supposedly weaken numerous financial regulations.
S.2155 – Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief, and Consumer Protection Act
It’s co-sponsored by 19 Senators: 9 Republicans, 9 (corporate) Democrats, and independent Angus King. I found this summary of the bill:
https://www.consumerfinancemonitor.com/2017/11/20/senate-banking-committee-schedules-dec-5-markup-of-regulatory-reform-bill/
Can any financially sophisticated members of the commentariat shed some light on this bill? Should we be worried?
The new tax bill…1 million dollars is not enough to retire on…OMG! Frankly the only reason I’m not running down the streets raving mad and pulling my hair out is that I have some really smart millennial nieces and nephews. Today I introduced one of them to Thomas Frank and Stephanie Kelton. This niece is big on income inequality and asked me if I had read Thomas Piketty (really?)…she’s 22 and worried. The stark difference between MY 22 year old mindset and hers blows me away.
So – the only reason I am not freaking and losing my mind is….I’m hoping/thinking/praying that the younger generation is going to help tip the balance to a better place. Hopefully one where people like Paul Ryan aren’t around… and WHY IS he still around?
I loved the bit about how “experts say” the only solution is to make more or spend less… It takes a type of genius to come up with something so bleeding obvious. Lesser minds would be incapable of it.
He’s around because he keeps getting re-elected, and to do the Koch Boys’ bidding. One among many symptoms of a corrupt and dying nation, or is Empire more correct?
How come Bipartisan Schumer is still around?
Funny… my millennial nieces seem to like suicide attempts and Tinder mostly.
So after a late night in the Senate Friday, Sanders was in OH on Saturday and PA on Sunday. Photos:
OH
https://twitter.com/benwikler/status/937126137968414721
PA
https://twitter.com/benwikler/status/937454853445570560
https://twitter.com/taxmarch/status/937424237651996673
…not supposed to wet-blanket, but the Bonus Marchers were going to try to collect on some Congressional promises back in the day…https://zinnedproject.org/materials/the-bonus-army/
Maybe, on reflection, the impetus the Bonus Army and the treatment they got from MacArthur and the PTB maybe helped catalyze something pretty good (not perfect, of course) — what got called the New Deal.
Which of course proved to be just one skirmish, in the long class war that Warren Buffett says his class has already won… “Lay down your arms, come out where we can see you even easier, and nobody will get hurt… We PROMISE, Scout’s Honor!”
Queens man determined to wreak havoc in Utah:
Legislation, litigation to quickly follow Trump’s monument announcement [Deseret News]
The long game for the GOP in the West is to create ongoing chaos on the ground and in the courts to keep the base energized. Feed them red meat, but only a little at a time.
Just when it seems like the tax bill fiasco couldn’t any worse, Chuck Grassley comes out with a tone-deaf argument for eliminating the estate tax.
Re the Inevitability of Kamala Harris: a redditor commissioned a poll for 50 bucks that shows Sanders as an indy winning a three way race with Trump when Harris is the Dem candidate! https://www.reddit.com/r/WayOfTheBern/duplicates/7h5jx9/so_i_commissioned_a_50_poll_on_the_2020/
Glad to see regular coverage of Indian news. Thanks and keep it up! :)