“We're facing mass starvation in the next 10 years, social collapse and the possible extinction of the human race. It couldn't be worse. So that situation has come about over 30 years of failure-- failure by the elites, failure by the governments, and failure by campaigners....The public Is now aware that the elites are taking them to their death!”
--Roger Hallam
Long before there was a Doomstead Diner, long before 9-11, there was Milton William Cooper. Cooper was the greatest conspiracist of this generation and a man you may not have heard of. His book Behold A Pale Horse was an underground sensation and the ur-source for many later conspiracy theorists. Cooper's "Hour of the Time" radio program was also broadcast on short wave, circulated and downloaded long before podcasts existed. Cooper was right about many things, wrong about others, Yet he predicted future events and trends accurately, and knew that by telling the truth, TPTB would come for him. Which they did.
Behold A Pale Horse is what's called a "prison book" because it's one of the most read books in prison, passed from hand to hand until the spines break. This book is kept behind shelves in bookstores because it is also one of the most stolen books in history. More than any other single influence, encountering this book led me to distrust the so-called "official story," and which eventually put me on a path to the Diner.
I'm currently reading Cooper's biography, Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the Fall of Trust in America, by Mark Jacobson. Cooper was a complicated man with a mercurial temper; he was also a black-helicopter paranoid who provided some of the ideology for the right-wing militia movement and mother's milk for Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh and many others like him. From thre flyleaf:
"We are living in a time of unprecedented distrust in America: Faith in the government is at an all-time low, and political groups on both sides of the aisle are able to tout preposterous conspiracy theories as gospel, without much opposition. "Fake news" is the order of the day... A former U.S. naval intelligence worker, Milton William Cooper published his manifesto Behold a Pale Horse in 1991. Since then it has gone on to sell hundreds of thousands of copies, becoming the number-one bestseller in the American prison system.
Decades before QAnon, false flags, “crisis actors” and Alex Jones, there was William Cooper. Some call Cooper the father of the so-called Patriot movement and the spiritual godfather to the Alex Joneses and QAnons of the world. My politics could not be farther frm those people, but Cooper had some deep insight into the sickness of our times. Every story we treat on this week has running through it the pervasive and overwhelming lack of trust that afflicts our times, which Cooper, however great his flaws, pointed out early and repeatedly.
An unpleasant alcoholic and perhaps bi-polar to boot, Cooper died in a shootout with Apache County, AZ police in 2001, one month after September 11, the same year in which he had predicted the coming catastrophe. He leaves a complicated legacy, but the distrust of "official stories" he advanced permeates the following stories. Here's this week in doom.
On August 15, an autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings. This raised questions regarding the mystery about the circumstances around his death. Specifically, his hyoid bone was broken,
"...which in men is near the Adam’s apple. Such breaks can occur in those who hang themselves, particularly if they are older, according to forensics experts and studies on the subject. But they are more common in victims of homicide by strangulation, the experts said.
The office of New York City’s chief medical examiner, Barbara Sampson, completed an autopsy of Epstein’s body Sunday... Asked about the neck injuries, Sampson said in a statement that no single factor in an autopsy can alone provide a conclusive answer about what happened."
Nevertheless, the ME presented findings that Epstein's death was a suicide. Fair enough, except that according to some anecdotal sources, Epstein couldn't empty a bag of garbage without staff help, so one can consider how he was able to "hang himself" from the top bunk on a room with seven foot ceilings, yet somehow sustain injuries consistent with strangulation. His cellmate, a former state trooper, was supposedly excused from his cell. Epstein's brother has supposedly ID'd the body, an identification as relaibler as the location of JFK's brain.
And Jeffrey Epstein’s autopsy concluded with there medical examiner declaring his death was a suicide by hanging. So see, written evidence. Conclusions. Case closed. No need for a messy and troublesome murder investigation, the results of which might outrage the proles before the entire matter disappears down the memory hole.
Chief Medical Examiner Dr. Barbara Sampson said in a statement that she made the suicide determination “after careful review of all investigative information, including complete autopsy findings.”
Sampson’s announcement came as a Justice Department official told The Associated Press that some prison staffers believed to have relevant information aren’t cooperating with investigators.
Epstein’s lawyers said they were “not satisfied” with Sampson’s conclusions and that they would conduct their own investigation, including seeking to obtain any video of the area around Epstein’s cell from the time leading to his death.
Approximately three weeks before a series of damning articles hit in the Miami Herald, Jeffrey Epstein paid up front to have a $100,000 cement mixer express-shipped to his infamous Little St. James 'pedo island' at great expense, according to the Daily Mail.
The ****, who was found dead by apparent suicide on Saturday while awaiting trial for sex trafficking, got the Carmix 5.5 XL self loading concrete mixer delivered to Little St. James on November 7 last year.
Epstein was in such a hurry that he paid for the machine up front so it would arrive sooner - even though it meant being responsible if it got damaged in transit.
Three weeks later the Miami Herald published a series of articles called 'Perversion of Justice' on November 28, which eventually led to Epstein being arrested in July.
Shipping experts told DailyMailTV that the possibility that it was 'used to literally cover up evidence cannot be discounted'.
Zero Hedge notes that
On Monday, the FBI and NYPD raided Little St. James island last week, packing up evidence, although videos reveal some of it had already been moved prior to the raid. Perhaps they should have raided the island the same day he was arrested?
One might well ask the above question, as did the redoubtable Charles Hugh Smith. Smith notes, " 'Epstein was an intelligence asset' is just a tissue-thin cover for a much more destructive reality: those at the top of the American state have no moral compass at all."
The rot goes much deeper. As Smith poses the question, he gestures at an answer:
There are several explanations floating around for the why: those in power enjoyed their diabolically exploitive visits to Lolita Island and wanted to continue their criminal gratifications.
The second explanation is that Epstein was a spy for a "friendly" foreign intelligence agency and therefore off-limits. ("Friendly" is in quotes because when it comes to intelligence, one's "friends" can do more damage than one's worst enemies.)
Let's say this turns out to be true. Wouldn't the NSA, CIA and FBI know of Epstein's activities and connections to a foreign intelligence service? Of course they would. So at a minimum, we can infer the NSA, CIA and FBI enabled Epstein's operation to continue for some benefit, perhaps relating to "honeypot" blackmail and control of "assets," unwilling or willing.
Explaining the wrist-slap sentence of a decade ago and the subsequent promotions, praise and honors for the enablers. The entire Epstein affair, roping in as it did royals, presidents and high rollers of every sort, feeds the narrative that you can't believe anything the government says.
...corruption and debauchery undermine the legitimacy of the state, and so doing nothing while Epstein et al. gratified the desires of the rich and powerful for degenerate debauchery was treasonous: the American state will collapse not from military conflict but from moral decay, and every individual who enabled (or made use of) that moral decay is guilty of treason.
The Epstein affair and the "official stories" that will emerge therefrom will arrive pre-disbelieved. No one will trust the word of any official source. We've already seen speculation that Epstein was switched out in the wee small hours and a dead body was left behind. And even if the cadaver is Epstein's, no part of the official story accounts for the shrieking reportedly heard from his cell. Such widespread cynicism fits like a hand in glove the agenda of those with a 50-year plan to make people despise government so that they will no longer see it as the guarantor of last resort for their rights. It serves the agenda of those who wish to shrink the size of government so that they can drown it in a bathtub. And of Tangerine Twitler, who wants to blame Bill Clinton or Obama for his own sins of commission..
If you want to be fully read in on all matters Epstein, I strongly recommend following Mint Press' Whitney Webb. She connects the dots. Which is difficult, because if you read this, the roots of Epstein's touch a Mossad blackmail op reaching back decades...
The picture painted by the evidence is not that of a direct Epstein tie to a single intelligence agency, but a of a web linking key members of the Mega Group, politicians, and officials in both the U.S. and Israel, and an organized-crime network with deep business and intelligence ties in both nations.
Cooking the Arctic
We know everything we need to know about the climate crises and the causes, but, in the face of all the warning signs, are pressing the accelerator to the floor. It's almost as if the one percent who possess bunkers, hired security and all the money siphoned from working people over the last 40 years (ever since Dutch declared "Morning in America") were intent on exterminating the proles while waiting out the maelstrom in air conditioned bunkers. It is abundantly self-evident that we we know what is happening and know what needs to be done, but refuse to do it because to do might cost some oil company profits. Here are some stories that moved this week.
A report published this week by Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) today release a new report on what governments can do to understand and inform policy around these risks, which could threaten the global population. It is straightforward and decidedly unpretty, unless your take is that "threaten(ing) the global population" is the point of current policy. Nothing else makes sense.
The likelihood that a global catastrophe will occur in the next 20 years is uncertain, say the researchers, but the potential severity means that national governments have a responsibility to their citizens to manage these types of risks.
Des Browne, former UK Secretary of State for Defence, said: “National governments struggle with understanding and developing policy for the elimination or mitigation of extreme risks, including global catastrophic risks. Effective policies may compel fundamental structural reform of political systems, but we do not need, nor do we have the time, to wait for such change.
Governments must sufficiently understand the risks to design mitigation, preparation and response measures. But political systems often do not provide sufficient incentives for policy-makers to think about emerging or long-term issues, especially where vested interests and tough trade-offs are at play.
Scientists say they are bidding farewell to Okjökull, the first Icelandic glacier lost to climate change, in a funeral of sorts. Researchers will gather Sunday in Borgarfjörður, Iceland, to memorialize Okjökull, known as Ok for short, after it lost its status as a glacier in 2014. The inscription, titled "A letter to the future," on the monument paints a bleak picture. "Ok is the first Icelandic glacier to lose its status as a glacier. In the next 200 years, all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and know what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it," the plaque reads in English and Icelandic.
After months of record temperatures, scientists say Greenland's ice sheet experienced its biggest melt of the summer on Thursday, losing 11 billion tons of surface ice to the ocean -- equivalent to 4.4 million Olympic swimming pools.
Greenland's ice sheet usually melts during the summer, but the melt season typically begins around the end of May; this year it began at the start. It has been melting "persistently" over the past four months, which have recorded all time temperature highs...
Greenland's ice sheet is the second biggest in the world and this season's ice melt has already contributed around half a millimeter to global sea levels. It comes in a summer where the Arctic has experienced "unprecedented" wildfires, which scientists say have been facilitated by high temperatures.
Amid the hottest month in recorded history, some records still stand out as absolutely jaw dropping. That’s definitely true of a measurement made in the Arctic this July.
According to data released in the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) monthly climate analysis, a weather station in Sweden north of the Arctic Circle hit a stunning 94.6 Fahrenheit (34.8 degrees Celsius) last month. As an isolated data point, it would be shocking. But coupled with a host of other maladies, from no sea ice within 125 miles of Alaska to the unruly fires ravaging Siberia, it’s an exclamation point on the climate crisis.
A stubborn blue spot of cool ocean temperatures stands out like the proverbial sore thumb in a recent NASA image of the warming world – a circle of cool blue on a planet increasingly shaded in hot red.
A region of the North Atlantic south of Greenland has experienced some of its coldest temperatures on record in recent years, a cooling unprecedented in the past thousand years. What explains that anomaly?
Climatologist Michael Mann of Penn State University, in this month’s “This is Not Cool” video, explains that this phenomenon may be an indication that the North Atlantic current, part of a larger global ocean circulation, is slowing down.
After reading the above cluster of related climate change articles, a reasonable person has little option. other than to conclude what one of the founders of Extinction Rebellion ,Roger Hallam, has concluded:
This interview would have never seen the light of day in the US. They'd have Tucker Carlsoned this segment quicker than you could say Rutger Bregman, and would have had Hallam's children murdered before letting this see the light of day. The interviewer for BBC HardTalk is Stephen Sackur, a choice Asshat Elite prostitute who does his Ken Dilanian best to discredit his guest and marginalize his POV. His guest Roger Hallam, one of the co-founders of Extinction Rebellion, is simply not having any of Sackur's marginalizations, and insists on telling the truth as it is, rather than the way the elites want it massaged.
Excerpt:
Stephen Sackur: So on the science there's no disagreement but are you saying that groups like Greenpeace and many many others have fundamentally failed in their mission to convince the world that things need to change?
Roger Hallam: Yes. We fundamentally failed. I mean I failed, other activists have failed, campaigners have failed, we've all failed. The fact of the matter is were facing mass starvation in the next 10 years, social collapse and the possible extinction of the human race. It couldn't be worse. So that situation has come about over 30 years of failure failure by the elites, failure by the governments, and failure by campaigners.
Stephen Sackur: Your message is entirely about failure, it's about negativity. It is in a way I suppose a howl of rage and despair.
Roger Hallam: That's right it is and you think that is a message that the people of the world and the political leaders of the world are going to respond to ,yes and the reason why is because when people go through depression and rage they come out and decide to do things- Extinction Rebellion is the most successful climate change movement in the UK...
Amid the speculation and disbelief about Trump's trial balloon about buying Greenland, one might wonder why a US President would want to purchase an island that is 80% covered by an ice sheet, and where fewer than 60,000 people live?
The second is for geopolitical reasons. The United States already has a foothold in the country -- Thule Air Base- and, as The Wall Street Journal, which broke the Greenland purchase story, notes:
"Located 750 miles north of the Arctic Circle, it includes a radar station that is part of a U.S. ballistic missile early-warning system. The base is also used by the U.S. Air Force Space Command and the North American Aerospace Defense Command."
In actuality the idea is not as insane as the ravings of an unhinged lunatic might make it seem. In 1946, Truman's Secretary of State broached the idea with the Danish foreign minister at a United Nations meeting in New York to no avail. And almost 100 years before that, Secretary of State William Seward -- he of the "Seward's Folly" purchase of Alaska -- apparently looked into buying Greenland from the Danes. Likewise, no sale.
Hong Kong protesters may be in for an electrifying experience after Chinese riot police were pictured training with 'terrifying giant fork devices' designed to subdue humans and pin them to the ground, according to the Mirror.
While unconfirmed, the 8-foot poles with U-shaped prongs are believed to be able to deliver an electric shock.
The protests, now in their 11th week, have been alternating between the streets, subways, and airports of Hong Kong. While largely peaceful, there is a growing contingent of activists using violence and property destruction to protest the government, resulting in police tear gassings and beatings.
On Thursday, AFP published photos showing more military buildup unfolding in Shenzen. The photos revealed what Reuters reports are hundreds of members of the People's Armed Police, a pro-regime paramilitary organization, carrying out military exercises in a stadium in Shenzen. They could be preparing to carry out demonstrations of its own in Hong Kong.
On Saturday, businesses shuttered their doors and windows in anticipation of more mayhem, however cloudy skies put an early damper on the demonstrations.
Short Takes
Since we're already over 3000 words, I'll just leave you with the assorted stories and links I collected over the week for you to follow for your amusement.
Every now and then in the hellacious 24-hour news cycle that is the Trump presidency, there comes a story that is so absurd and yet utterly predictable it stops me in my tracks. This is one of those stories.
At first glance, it looks like hard candy laced with flecks of fake fruit, or a third grader's art project confected from recycled debris. In reality, it's a sliver of Arctic Ocean sea ice riddled with microplastics, extracted by scientists from deep inside an ice block that likely drifted southward past Greenland into Canada's increasingly navigable Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans...
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary.Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone.
Title: After reading (Catastrophic) climate change articles, a reasonable person has little option.
Post by: AGelbert on August 19, 2019, 02:41:29 pm
This Week In Doom 8/18/19 (http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/general-discussion/this-week-in-doom-81819/msg13286/#msg13286)
👍 EXCELLENT summary of the dismal situation we find ourselves saddled with. Although you covered that quite well in discussing the reality of how untrustworthy our government crooks and liars, and the news media lackeys that carry BULLSHIT water for them, are, the article on the questions about Greenland and Trump's 🦀 interest displays this disingenuous BULLSHIT media technique.
Among those five questions about Trump's 🦀 interest in Greenland, the glaringly obvious GIGANTIC ELEPHANT IN THE ROOM (NOT INCLUDED) QUESTION IS: If Global Warming, AS TRUMP HAS CLAIMED, is a "hoax cooked up by the Chinese or Climate Scientists looking for funding", WhyTF is Trump 🦀 interested in CASHING IN ON THE MELTING OF THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET FROM 🦕🦖 HYDROCARBON BURNING CAUSED CLIMATE CHANGE❓❓⁉️(https://www.subaruforester.org/vbulletin/images/smilies/furious.gif)
ANSWER: Because 😈 Trump KNOWS that BURNING HYDROCARBONS IS CAUSING THE GREENLAND ICE SHEET TO MELT.
And furthermore, the news media DOES NOT want we-the-people to CALL TRUMP ON HIS BULLSHIT, so they cook up a clever five question DISTRACTION from the FACT that Trump and his 🦕🦖 HYDROCARBON HELLSPAWN OWNERS are doing EVERYTHING IN THEIR POWER to accelerateCatastrophic Climate Change through global warming, PERIOD.
Precedent for Impeachment – Burying the True Crime: Daniel Sheehan 2019 Class #8 (http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/climate-change/u-s-history-politics-climate-change-trump-impeachment-standing-rock-context/msg12393/#msg12393)
A world of trouble is no longer at our doorstep; it's in what has been transformed from the living room to the dying room. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-041115022304.png&hash=cd8cb8e28ab8f7fc78c1ea00d30a661bd937aed5)
The 🦕🦖 Hydrocarbon 👹 Hellspawn Fossil Fuelers DID THE Clean Energy Inventions suppressing, Climate Trashing, human health depleting CRIME, but since they have ALWAYS BEEN liars and conscience free crooks 🦀, they are trying to AVOID DOING THE TIME or PAYING THE FINE! Don't let them get away with it! Pass it on!
Title: Re: This Week In Doom 8/18/19
Post by: Surly1 on August 20, 2019, 09:03:06 am
I read in the Palmer Report that Trumplethinskin tried to make a joke about his interest in Greenland by claiming he was not planning on building a Trump Tower there. Well, for one of those few times in Mr. Trump's life, he was actually telling the truth. He 🦀 and his 🦕🦖 hydrocarbon industry & 🐉 minerals mining polluters 'R' US OWNERS were never planning to build a Trump tower there. Below, please find, what his plans, which have not changed, regardless of his baloney rhetoric about "no longer being interested in Greenland", ARE:
Denmark may have a plan to deal with Trump's 🐉🦕🦖 plan (see below).
Tue, 08/20/2019 - 15:20
Submitted by Michael Every of Rabobank
SNIPPET:
If you already saw that one coming too then kick back and relax with this short article suggesting that Denmark buy the US: ‘If Denmark’s bid for the United States is accepted, the Scandinavian nation has ambitious plans for its new acquisition. “We believe that, by giving the U.S. an educational system and national health care, it could be transformed from a vast land mass into a great nation,” the spokesperson said.’ (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-250817121649.png&hash=4554f7e59701d12857946aece16bceb973c997b3)(https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F1%2F3-210818163124-1669950.gif&hash=3136c3f2021d13cacae8b9488d005fe8231d2df6)
read more:
This Is Neither The Empire Strikes Back, Nor The Crying Game, Or The Red Wedding (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-20/neither-empire-strikes-back-nor-crying-game-or-red-wedding)
Title: The Lyin' King
Post by: Surly1 on August 28, 2019, 09:10:22 am
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on August 26, 2019
“The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others. And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.” ― Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Madness occasionally asserts itself on the world stage.
"The Madness of King George" is a stage and film production about Britain's George III, known through history as "the mad king who lost America." George III was king of Great Britain during some of the nation’s most challenging and tumultuous years, including those of the American Revolution. By accounts he was a dutiful, steady monarch who guided Britain through the French revolution and later Napoleon's rise and fall. In 1788, illness brought on his mental breakdown, but he briefly recovered for a time. His later escalating bouts of insanity led Parliament to pass a Regency Act, by which the fate of the empire devolved to his oldest son, Prince George. This young man was faced with the unenviable position of having to govern according to the increasingly erratic whims of his batty father. It is thought by some that George's erraric behavior had its roots in disease, but this assessment is by no means unanimous.
Do a search for, "the Madness of King Donald" and you'll find a number of articles speculating that the so-called Leader of the Free World appears to be batshit crazy, a speculation not necessarily recent, but brought into sharp relief by statements that the Burnt-umber Buffoon made this week. The record is filled with what appears to be Trumpian signs of cognitive disorder, pre-dementia or even sheer delirium, whether it is the series of incoherent tweets, the ranting and unhinged raving at media briefings, or taking off on rabbit-hole tangents at public rallies to the applause and adoration of his bobblehead followers.
Some might think that such speculation is baldly partisan, and as a nearly-bald partisan I might agree. But the level of barking-mad, batshit-crazy reached a fever pitch this week...
King Lear is one of our most popular exemplars of power and madness. Like Trump, Lear is susceptible to the flattery of daughters, who fawningly profess their love, and Lear rewards them in kind. His youngest daughter, Cordelia, does not play that game, and is disinherited by her erratic and petulant father. They are eventually reconciled, but the peace comes too late in the arc of the story for it to end in anything but tragedy. It is too soon to know whether Lear and Trump equate, but the tragedy that unfolds is more for the American people than a mad king.
So people are actively asking this question. The problem is that those people are not among his ironclad supporters, who still believe every word he says. The fact that Trump's penchant for pathological lying is now under being examined in the context of his sanity is explained away as, "fake news."
Among many eye-catching anecdotes, he cites caddies at a New York golf club nicknaming Trump “Pelé”, after the Brazilian soccer legend, because of the president’s habit of kicking his ball out of the rough and up the fairway to win at all costs.
Increasingly, mental health experts have been getting increasingly vocal in crossing that Rubicon known as the "Goldwater Rule," enacted by the American Psychiatric Association in 1973 to avoid armchair diagnoses by mental health pros expressing their own political biases in psychiatric terms. This was enacted in the wake of the 1964 presidential campaign between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, in reaction to a magazine survey of psychiatrists which attempted to question Barry Goldwater’s mental fitness.
[I]t is unethical for a psychiatrist to offer a professional opinion unless he or she has conducted an examination and has been granted proper authorization for such a statement”
The president is sick of “disloyal” American Jews, who apparently don’t know what’s good for them or how to properly vote. But “Jewish people in Israel love him,” according to the crazed conspiracy theorist Trump quoted on Twitter.
It all started with a classic Trump humblebrag. “Thank you to Wayne Allyn Root for the very nice words,” Trump said before quoting something the evangelical Christian Root had said.
“President Trump is the greatest President for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world, not just America, he is the best President for Israel in the history of the world … and the Jewish people in Israel love him … like he’s the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God,” the quote said.
Root, who lives in Las Vegas, says he founded the Republican Jewish Coalition chapter in Nevada. He had also previously been hired by Sheldon Adelson (the casino magnate and a major funder of the RJC and Republican candidates along with Jewish causes,)to write a column for the Las Vegas Review-Journal after buying the newspaper in 2015. Root is also the author of the book “Angry White Male: How the Donald Trump Phenomenon is Changing America,” also published in that year.
Wayne Allyn Root—a self-described “Jew turned evangelical Christian”—is an unhinged conspiracy theorist who believes the 2017 Las Vegas shooting was a “coordinated Muslim terror attack” by ISIS and that George Soros paid actors to stage the “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville that included Nazi chants like “Jews will not replace us.”
Quoting Wayne Allyn Root is quite a feat. For the non-initiate, Root has been snout-to-rear end with trump for years. Root, the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2008, announced a devoted (and some moight say slavish) support for the failed businessman nearly as soon as Trump announced he was running in June 2015.
(The last time "King of the Jews" trended, things did not end well.)
Trump, incredibly, seems to believe that he’s going to win over Jewish voters by telling them they don’t know what’s good for them. Perhaps he's been influenced by the fact that Jews went for Hillary Clinton. in 2016.
Biographer Tony Schwartz, who ghost-wrote Trump’s The Art of the Deal puts it, the fact that most of us are “constrained by the truth” gives Trump a “strange advantage” through his complete disregard for it. It certainly works with his supporters, as he polls at a consistent 90 per cent approval among republicans...
Between the day of his inauguration (Jan. 20, 2017) and Aug. 5, 2019, Trump has made 12,019 statements that were either false or misleading, according to the Washington Post. While that averages out to 13 such statements a day since Trump assumed office, the number has increased recently. Since April 26, when Trump made his 10,000th false or misleading statement, he has averaged 20 such statements every day, or one every 72 minutes.
One example breaking this week was this Pied Piper fantasy:
Speaking to reporters on the White House’s South Lawn on Wednesday, President Trump claimed he was warmly welcomed at hospitals in the wake of recent mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, Ohio, and intimated that surgeons had even deserted their patients to meet him.
“The doctors were coming out of the operating rooms,” Trump said. “There were hundreds and hundreds of people all over the floor. You couldn’t even walk on it.”
But the hospitals he visited say that isn’t what happened — and that doctors would never pause surgery to greet the president.
“That was a big day, Medal of Honor. Nothing like the Medal of Honor,” he continued. “I wanted one, but they told me I don't qualify, Woody. I said, 'Can I give it to myself anyway?' They said, 'I don't think that's a good idea.'” 💡
Amid scattered chuckles, Trump concluded: “Great, great people. These are great, great men and women that get congressional Medal of Honor. Thank you, Woody.”
The president’s assessment that he should receive the nation’s highest award for acts of military valor followed his statement earlier Wednesday afternoon that he is “the chosen one” in relation to his administration’s trade conflict with China — a proclamation he turned to the sky to deliver.
Trump never served in the military and was granted five draft deferments — four for college and one for bone spurs in his heel.
Why does Trump continue to lie, with the lies becoming more baroque and more frequent? Salon offers one theory:
One possible explanation for the increase in the number of Trump's lies is that as the president has continued to lie with relative political impunity, he has grown desensitized to the instinctive reluctance most people feel about saying that which they know to be severely exaggerated or flat-out untrue.
People become inured to lies in the same way they do to perfume or medications. Whatever you may think of him, Trump has been a shatterer of norms, an upender of precedent, a flouter of both law and established procedure. Our collective purchase on reality may just be another norm shattered, There are true believers, those who think his continual gaffes, lies and blunders are part of a grand plan, like the Q-Anon people who believe that Trump and Robert Mueller are collaborating on a plan to take down the "deep state" and the pedo ring being run out of the non-existent basement of Comet Pizza by Hillary Clinton.
Trump's real effect is to exact a massive toll on us all, in terms of time, attention and energy stolen from decent souls obliged to pay attention to rage tweets, helicopter-wash press gaggles, and on-again, off-again policy pronouncements. "Trump fatigue syndrome" is a real thing, and perhaps the point; while most of us find ourselves mentally and spiritually exhausted by the serial idiocy of the Tweeter-in-Chief, and turn away from the news in disgust, the better for his appointed foxes to loot every henhouse.
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary.Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.
Title: Re: The Lyin' (mostly for Big 🦖 Oil and 🦕 Gas) King
Post by: AGelbert on August 28, 2019, 07:52:57 pm
"Trump's real effect is to exact a massive toll on us all, in terms of time, attention and energy stolen from decent souls ..."
The Lyin' King (http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/general-discussion/the-lyin'-king/msg13423/#msg13423)
True, that. :(
Considering the nature of his mission on behalf of the Hydrocarbon Hellspawn that OWN him, it is a wonder he hasn't gone totally bonkers already. Remember that Trump's main task is to front for the polluters in the USA, particularly those Big oil and gas BASTARDS in Texas, North Dakota, Pennsylvania and Oklahoma that are doing their damnest to melt all that ice in the Arctic and Greenland because it is in the way of gettin' MORE oil and gas.
His handlers know that Catastrophic Climate Change is now in our faces almost daily, so their bought and paid for POTUS has to engage in daily pretzel logic to "justify" the incredibly stupid and obviously destructive nature of his mission.
Yeah, he is the epitome of Ugly Americanism. However, that, unfortunately, is not really that uncommon in this country. Anyone that reads Zero Hedge, a web site supposedly about financial matters, not NAZI racist crap, learns quickly how completely divorced from any sense of moral responsibility to fellow humans, and the other life forms in our biosphere, MOST of the posters there are. Instead of showing concern for the CLIMATE 💣 ShitSTORM 💥 that burning 🔥hydrocarbons is causing, too many Americans CELEBRATE this EMPATHY DEFICIT DISORDERED BEHAVIOR as "individualism" and "freedom". Trump is part of that group of unethical arrogant pissants who do not care who they hurt or what they trash as long as they can grab some money along the way. They really ARE a dime a dozen in the USA. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-311013201604.png&hash=3793102f2f335b7a8fe106d54eac4db31f2674eb)
Trump's racism and serial mendacity are abhorrent and dangerous, but that isn't the worst of it.
The most destructive aspect of Trump's Planetary Predation Policy is his goosing of the giveaways to oil and gas corporations. The 🦕🦖 Oil and Gas Corporations in those four states I mentioned above are quite literally KILLINGus. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-250817134648.gif&hash=d24c66a26329a19150a175d576b631d10f631ee8) Trump has to go and all this Hydrocarbon Hellspawn Welfare Queenery flipped to strong punitve action or we are ☠️ TOAST.
Title: Re: The Lyin' King
Post by: AGelbert on August 29, 2019, 08:33:09 pm
Quote
Isaac Peres 👍 One of the most despicable and insensitive things I have witnessed in 60 years of watching the American political scene was when that colossal orange POS was throwing rolls of glorified napkins at Puerto Rican citizens fighting biblical level floods from Hurricane Maria. It was Trumpo's "let them eat cake" moment.
It would ironic indeed if this weekend's hurricane mowed down that gaudy, overpriced, golden toilet in Palm Beach that he calls "Mar-a-Lago".
James Sullivan | 12:01 pm EDT August 29, 2019 Palmer Report » Analysis
Donald (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-301216165623.jpeg&hash=1ccfee6aaf9d939cca294a849774cff11e462e59) Trump just made an even bigger mess (https://www.palmerreport.com/analysis/even-bigger-mess-made-just-donal/20442/)
Title: Re: The Lyin' King
Post by: AGelbert on August 29, 2019, 08:56:28 pm
The long awaited DESPERATELY NEEDED sigh of relief
Ron Leshnower | 4:30 pm EDT August 29, 2019 Palmer Report » Analysis
You don’t need to be an expert on Donald Trump’s speech patterns to know that when this raving egotist claims superiority in a subject, it almost certainly means the opposite—that he’s at the other extreme of whatever it is he is claiming to be. Trump sometimes follows up such ludicrous assertions with an offer of “proof” that is laughably inapplicable and only helps further expose Trump’s fraud.
This tired linguistic exercise happened Monday on the world stage concerning a topic of no less importance than the wellbeing of our physical world.
In a joint press conference with French President Emmanuel Macron after the G7 summit in Biarritz, France, Trump declared his alleged commitment to our planet, boasting, “I’m an environmentalist (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F2%2F3-080419191019.png&hash=a449294ee6fe2dfdea44c1c501f4439b9ac69c26). I lot of people don’t understand that.” (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-220216203149.gif&hash=bd184b6edccce4045e246847a0c84e89bd5a18b6)
Next, Trump offered the basis for his claim: “I have done more environmental impact statements probably than anybody, that’s, I guess—I can say, definitely—because I’ve done many, many, many of them—more than anybody that’s ever been President, or Vice President, or anything even close to President.” (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-250817121829.png&hash=035f25ddb6d065f1533ce03c1c07f5fddcbbc83c) Although that sentence was garbled, even for Trump, he was no doubt referring to the environmental impact statements that are required by law to show a real estate project’s potential effects on the environment. The thing is, Trump would not have been personally involved in crafting any environmental impact statement in connection with any of his deals. More importantly, the presence of environmental impact statements in Trump’s deals is merely a sign of legal compliance, not some act of love for our planet.
Before ending the press conference with Macron, Trump added, “I think I know more about the environment than most people.” (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-030815183114.gif&hash=2bf1553e87e8605311feb874231953d5fb88ee9c) If Trump really knows and cares so much, then why did he skip the G7 working session on climate, oceans, and biodiversity on Monday, lie about it, then dismiss the whole topic as a “niche issue”? Of course, it’s for the same reason that Trump pulled the United States out of the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which is that he cares nothing about the environment. Trump just loves pretending while watching others cringe as he takes 🦕🦖 steps to cause additional harm. No one knows when Trump’s last day in office will be, but when that day comes (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-221017161839.png&hash=7d34712243960aa20883775dad728bc2115ed6fe), Earth will breathe a long-awaited sigh of relief.
Isaac Peres 👍 One of the most despicable and insensitive things I have witnessed in 60 years of watching the American political scene was when that colossal orange POS was throwing rolls of glorified napkins at Puerto Rican citizens fighting biblical level floods from Hurricane Maria. It was Trumpo's "let them eat cake" moment.
It would ironic indeed if this weekend's hurricane mowed down that gaudy, overpriced, golden toilet in Palm Beach that he calls "Mar-a-Lago".
Hurricane Dorian Totally Misses Puerto Rico and is Heading Straight for Mar-a-Lago (https://www.politicalflare.com/2019/08/hurricane-dorian-totally-misses-puerto-rico-and-is-heading-straight-for-mar-a-lago/)
Quote
Mar-a-Lago remains in the “cone of uncertainty” — the range of potential paths the hurricane could take as it strengthens in the Caribbean. Previous hurricane models suggested Dorian could pass right through the so-called Winter White House, a frequent destination for Trump’s working vacations.
Title: Karma never forgets an address. 😀
Post by: AGelbert on August 30, 2019, 01:41:15 pm
Isaac Peres 👍 One of the most despicable and insensitive things I have witnessed in 60 years of watching the American political scene was when that colossal orange POS was throwing rolls of glorified napkins at Puerto Rican citizens fighting biblical level floods from Hurricane Maria. It was Trumpo's "let them eat cake" moment.
It would ironic indeed if this weekend's hurricane mowed down that gaudy, overpriced, golden toilet in Palm Beach that he calls "Mar-a-Lago".
Hurricane Dorian Totally Misses Puerto Rico and is Heading Straight for Mar-a-Lago (https://www.politicalflare.com/2019/08/hurricane-dorian-totally-misses-puerto-rico-and-is-heading-straight-for-mar-a-lago/)
Quote
Mar-a-Lago remains in the “cone of uncertainty” — the range of potential paths the hurricane could take as it strengthens in the Caribbean.
Previous hurricane models suggested Dorian could pass right through the so-called Winter White House, a frequent destination for Trump’s working vacations.
At least 10 teenagers were injured when a shooting broke out after a high school football game in Mobile, Alabama, on Friday night, authorities said. Nine of the victims suffered gunshot wounds.
Well, it's Alabama, and it's FOOTBAW, so thus perhaps reason enough. But ';m old enough to remember going to high school football games without fearing for my life.
"Why are the young people bringing this type of violence to public events?" Mobile Police Chief Lawrence Battiste asked in a news conference Friday. "They're bringing their beefs that they have with each other in their neighborhoods and they're putting other people in harm's way."
GOP front-runner Donald Trump encouraged a crowd of supporters Monday to "knock the hell" out of anyone who looked like they might throw fruits and vegetables at him, and promised to pay the legal fees for anyone who took him up on his suggestion.
Even though Trump bade his supporters to practice rough justice, some will find it hard to lay the pervasive strain of American violence at his feet. Aside from giving aid and succor to violent white nationalists, and voice to the prion disease that afflicts his most rabid supporters, that is. Back to the news:
At least five people died after more than 20 people were shot Saturday when a gunman hijacked a postal truck and began shooting randomly in the Odessa area of West Texas, authorities say.
At least three law enforcement officers — a state trooper, an Odessa police officer and a Midland police officer — were among those shot. They were in stable condition Saturday night, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Another weekend, another shooting. Or two. Sandy Hook, Charleston, Orlando, Pittsburgh, El Paso, Dayton, Virginia Beach, and now in Texas. Again.
American history is written in blood. American violence has its roots in the wars of extermination fought against native peoples, chattel slavery that built the wealth of a planter class (the enforcement for which was enshrined in the Second Amendment), wars against one another expanding the "frontier" (who doesn't love a good western?) and now the endless economic competition of all against all. We have normalized the mass slaughter of our fellow citizens to the extent that weekend mass shootings barely raise an eyebrow. Even though 90 per cent of our fellow citizens (and gun owners) welcome mandatory background checks for gun purchases, the NRA and its hireling legislators (aslosh in laundered rubles) won't allow such a bill to come to a vote.
Meanwhile, out here in flyover country, where tariffs bite, where soybeans molder in silos, where Joe Sixpack and his wife both work two jobs to make ends meet, where minimum wage doesn't cover the rent anywhere in the country, the stresses mount.
“No small part of this ugly barbarization has been due to sheer physical congestion: a diagnosis now partly confirmed with scientific experiments with rats – for when they are placed in equally congested quarters, they exhibit the same symptoms of stress, alienation, hostility, sexual perversion, parental incompetence, and rabid violence that we now find in the Megalopolis.”
― Lewis Mumford, The City in History
Rats in a box. We all know that under enough stress, rodents turn on one another. We know this because scientists tested and measured this phenomenon, back in the day when the earth was still a sphere and science counted for something. EthologistJohn B. Calhoun studied population density and its effects on behavior, and coined the term "behavioral sink" to describe the collapse in behavior which resulted from overcrowding. Over a number of years, Calhoun conducted over-population experiments on Norway rats and mice.
In his 1962 study, Calhoun described the behavior of the rodents:
Many [female rats] were unable to carry pregnancy to full term or to survive delivery of their litters if they did... Among the males the behavior disturbances ranged from sexual deviation to cannibalism and from frenetic overactivity to a pathological withdrawal from which individuals would emerge to eat, drink and move about only when other members of the community were asleep. The social organization of the animals showed equal disruption. ...
The common source of these disturbances became most dramatically apparent in the populations of our first series of three experiments, in which we observed the development of what we called a behavioral sink. The animals would crowd together in greatest number in one of the four interconnecting pens in which the colony was maintained...as a result extreme population densities developed in the pen adopted for eating, leaving the others with sparse populations.
... In the experiments in which the behavioral sink developed, infant mortality ran as high as 96 percent among the most disoriented groups in the population.
As the rat population grew to 2200 rodents in what was described as a "rat utopia," they subsequently exhibited abnormal, often destructive behaviors. By the 600th day, the population was on its way to extinction. Calhoun himself saw the fate of the rodent population as a metaphor for the potential fate of man. Now rats aren't people, although as we will see, some people are rats.
Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist, arrived in New York City via an emission-free sailboat trip to dramatize her message for the urgency for state actors to take climate change seriously. She gives a speech next month at the United Nations Climate Action Summit. This at a time when
the Amazon rain forest was on fire; glaciers were calving into the sea; Tropical Storm Dorian was gathering strength in the Caribbean; scientists were trying to artificially inseminate the last two northern white rhinos on earth; there was lead in the water in Newark. The Endangered Species Act had been gutted, and the E.P.A. had announced new protections not for air or water but for marine diesel engines.
Thunberg arrived without the benefit of any official delegation or ceremony. She stepped off her boat and onto a floating dock, climbed a ramp to a stage, and faced rows of news cameras and handheld phones transmitting the arrival of the symbol of global climate resistance. She has been cheered by supporters, fellow climate activists, and mocked by critics. I promised you rats.
Even though officialdom may have greeted Thunberg with a yawn, the alt-right was certainly paying attention. Climate change does not seem to present as a gendered issue, but leave it to conservatives to inject sexism into their generalized contempt for anything not "blood and soil." This week the right-wing Media Research Center tweeted out a video of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., addressing the need for rapid decarbonization to prevent catastrophic environmental changes. The video, labeled "Shallow Thoughts" and backed by treacly music, is supposed to be read as an indictment of Ocasio-Cortez's intelligence.
Fail. It's clear the Media Research Center doesn't expect its conservative audience to actually listen to what AOC is saying (which is actually cogent, despite the treacle), and instead write her off as an airhead. But AOC is a social media adept, and in a bit of social media jujitsu, tweeted out the video herself, stealing a march on the MRC. And in a nice bit of trolling, thanked MRC for helping spread her message.
Unfortunately, Thunberg was also greeted by a wave of misogynist nastiness, largely coming from allegedly grown men in both Europe and the United States. The attacks on Thunberg were in the same vein as those on Ocasio-Cortez, accusing her of being too stupid to know what she's talking about and denying that her voice is one worth honoring. A writer for the conservative Washington Examiner claimed that Thunberg is a victim of "child abuse" and that her mother "pimps their kid out," explicitly drawing a line between forced sex work and climate activism.
As usual with the alt-right gaggle of Goebbels cosplayers, it's all about "owning the libs." Uh-huh. AOC and Thunberg both appear to be energized by opposition. But the main reason that climate-change deniers so readily turn to misogyny is that otherwise, they got nuthin'. The scientific evidence is in, and it's black and white: the climate crisis is real, and mostly caused by human activity. Their moral position is even more tenuous, since their options--doing nothing, or increasing greenhouse gas output — will harm not just future generations, but innocents around the world currently enduring extreme weather events like Hurricane Dorian or a burning Amazon.
So right wing trollboys have to rely on personal attacks aimed at environmental activists, dragging the debate away from evidence and into a rat's nest of culture war resentments.
Yet for all of the above, the article that spurred the direction of this week's rats-under-stress rant was this one, just in time for back-to-school.
Judi Zirin speaks for an entire generation of American parents, who have to deal with issues that frankly never occurred to previous generations of parents planning back-to-school:
I have always loved the end of summer’s lazy promise of infinite possibility, the late August back to school buzz of limitless potential. Instead of shopping for school supplies and first day of school outfits, though, I’m online looking at Kevlar hoodies and bulletproof backpacks. This year, I’m not worried my kid won’t fit in – I’m praying he won’t be carried out.
After so many school shootings, I’m scared. Scared of what happens when that student who seems a little off or angry or cruel, whose parents don’t notice or take it seriously, whose issues the school is “dealing with”, finds access to a gun. Terrified because I know I can’t protect my child – and the government won’t. Confused because these students need help and not stigma, and it’s oddly the guns who have the stronger lobby.
Perhaps the greatest indictment future generations will level at our own is our unwillingness to protect our own children in the face of an intransigent NRA and its Russian money-trough. Nearly every American industry and product is subject to civil liability as a check on the irresponsibility of manufacturers and sellers—but not the gun industry. Congress made sure of that: when it passed the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act in 2005, they exempted the gun industry from nearly all lawsuits, leaving families of gun violence victims without recourse.
Thus do the NRA and their hirelings insure a steady supply of child human sacrifices to Moloch each year. And Moloch remains hungry.
And we have the nerve to call the human sacrifice of the Mayans and Aztecs barbaric.
Short takes:
Here's a summary of doom-related news that moved this week.
Trump is so eager to complete hundreds of miles of border fence ahead of the 2020 presidential election that he has directed aides to fast-track billions of dollars’ worth of construction contracts, aggressively seize private land and disregard environmental rules, according to current and former officials involved with the project.
He also has told worried subordinates that he will pardon them of any potential wrongdoing should they have to break laws to get the barriers built quickly, those officials said.
TWO BRAZILIAN FIRMS owned by a top donor to President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell are significantly responsible for the ongoing destruction of the Amazon rainforest, carnage that has developed into raging fires that have captivated global attention.
In 1830 Congress passed the Indian Removal Act, designed to appropriate to the United States lands occupied by aboriginal Americans... the result of this land grab and ethnic cleansing was the Trail of Tears, a highway of the dispossessed, en route from their homelands to less favorable situations away from the population centers of the European-Americans and their recently created nation. Those with the means self-deported; those who moved late moved in large numbers and suffered terrible losses.
Nearly two centuries later, we face the prospect of forced relocations on a scale that is difficult to fathom. This New Trail of Tears will involve humans on every inhabited continent, and it will impact countless other species as well. This time, the driving force is all humanity, agents of climate change through our greenhouse gas emissions.
Author Brian Stewart notes that sea level rise, coupled with more violent storms powered by the warmer atmosphere, will have a profound impact on coastal areas. The dispossessed will place great stress on the remaining livable space, competition for such livable space will be fierce, and may become extinction traps for some. Note this with certainty:
Barriers to movement, both inadvertent and intentional, can be death sentences to those migrating.
It will be a piquant irony if those who are among the most ardent warriors against the dispossessed today find themselves on the other side of a razor wire fence tomorrow.
The Sackler family, which grew into one of the nation’s wealthiest dynasties through sales of the widely abused painkiller OxyContin, could emerge from a legal settlement under negotiation with its personal fortunes largely intact, according to an analysis reviewed by The Washington Post and people familiar with the discussions.
All the Sacklers want is what any of us would want: to be left alone in our Fortress of Insolence counting our billions.
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary.Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.
Title: Aren't the sentient termites "hard boiled real world business people"?
Post by: AGelbert on September 02, 2019, 06:17:17 pm
The Sackler family, which grew into one of the nation’s wealthiest dynasties through sales of the widely abused painkiller OxyContin, could emerge from a legal settlement under negotiation with its personal fortunes largely intact, according to an analysis reviewed by The Washington Post and people familiar with the discussions.
All the Sacklers want is what any of us would want: to be left alone in our Fortress of Insolence counting our billions.
This Week in Doom 9/1: Rat Bastards (http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/general-discussion/this-week-in-doom-91-rat-bastards/msg13482/#msg13482)
The oligarchs that run this travesty called human civilization can be best described as sentient termites. They, like the Sacklers and the millions of Sackler wannabes who are slaves to both greed and ambition, lack even the most rudimentary concept of ethics.
Even though they are methodical, calculating and quite devoted to metabolizing all that metaphorical "wood" out there, they are cognitively unable to see the inevitably destructive result of their termite activity.
You see, these sentient termites have never, in their wildest imaginations, considered the downside of their penchant for eating "wood" (i.e. finite amount of "wood" means limiting "wood" eating). Eat wood, now and forever, is their mission in life. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-130418193910.gif&hash=633dd399cd6006279afd7efb5ef953673b96bd78) Eating more wood equals "good". Eating less wood equals "bad".
The cohesiveness in the societal framework that is undermined/corrupted by sentient termite activity, to the point that guarantees catastrophic failure to provide some equity and stability to human society, is not a "cause and effect" issue for these termites.
That said, it is important to make a distinction between sentient and non-sentient termites. The non-sentient termites are governed by instinct. The sentient ("greed is good" Oligarchs) termites are governed by irrational hubris.
What do I mean by that? Aren't the sentient termites "hard boiled real world business people"? NOT REALLY.
Yes, it is true that the sentient termites, while quite skilled at seeking material goods and services to feed their boundless Narcissism for their own pleasure, are very much aware of threats to their physical well being. That is fairly typical rational (predator) behavior.
YET, they have well paid teams of lying lawyers and (s)think tank propagandist mouth pieces continuously pushing irrational memes like "Creative Destruction", "The rich are job creators", "Those who work owe their living to the rich who hired them", etc.
A cursory analysis of this amazing inability to feel any empathy whatsoever for the workers that made these sentient termites rich, to the point of demonizing the workers as "parasites", while glorifying sentient termite, obviously parasitic behavior, is simply irrational, as well as Orwellian.
It seems that the "sentience" of these Oligarchic Termites, at some level, involves carefully thought out malice aforethought "blame the victim" strategy for the purpose of keeping the exploited workers in the dark about who is REALLY eating all that metaphorical wood out there.
On further analysis of the modus operandi of these 'too clever by a half' sentient termites, we find something quite surprising; they really, honestly believe that the long term effect of their profit over people and planet "business model" is every bit as wealth and power enhancing as the short term effect continues to be.
At this point, a rational person would question the sanity of these sentient termites, it being that, in science, 4 minus 5 always equals a negative number.
Let me explain what their problem is. Sentient termites have been eating their own Orwellian propaganda BULLSHIT. They have swallowed it whole. They have demonized ethical behavior and glorified unethical destructive behavior.
Their sentience has been corrupted by their serially mendacious happy talk. These true believers in a positive result from negative numbers are now firmly committed to their civilzation destroying trajectory (i.e. economic growth through profit over people and planet).
The sentient termites are, and always have been, their own worst enemy. Do not expect any solutions designed to mitigate, and then reverse, Catastrophic Climate Change from them. They don't just ignore ethics; they DEFINE "successful behavior" as UNETHICAL BEHAVIOR.
This screenshot is quite good. We have known everything we needed to know for some years, and have just not cared. Somewhere in my reading today I came across the assertion that in order to make a difference, people in the developed world will have to live on one sixth of their current income/standard of living.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the collective "fat chance" from the wealthy, and "You first" from the rest of us.
Title: Re: This Week in Doom 9/1: Rat Bastards
Post by: AGelbert on September 03, 2019, 01:46:29 pm
This screenshot is quite good. We have known everything we needed to know for some years, and have just not cared. Somewhere in my reading today I came across the assertion that in order to make a difference, people in the developed world will have to live on one sixth of their current income/standard of living.
If you listen carefully, you can hear the collective "fat chance" from the wealthy, and "You first" from the rest of us.
True that about the sentient termites (i.e. the ethically bankrupt = wealthy).
Please do not include me in the rest of us. I have publicly advocated for living with the power cut off from my house for 12 hours a day (not "you first", but all of us, including businesses, at once) in summer (AND winter) for well over a decade, for the purpose of reducing polluting energy use. Yeah, I have not actually hit the main power panel switch 12 hours a day (see: ALL of us together). I haven't turned it off at all. Still, my use is WAY BELOW what the average American wastrel considers "necessary". On top of that. Green Mountain Power is moving fast to 100% renewable energy.
I have been frugal to a fault for at least 20 years. Though my "life style" may be considered too far above that of a slave in Africa to be "sustainable" by the hairsplitters (and hydrocarbon hellspawn out there, of course), I am 100% certain that if everyone on this planet had not bought any clothing, including shoes, for the last 12 years, gone without a water heater for the last four years (4 gallon "showers" - once a week or less frequent, period ;D), gone without a microwave oven for the last two years, driven less than 2000 miles a year for the last 13 years, despite saving 30% of my small pension a year, stayed OUT of the stock market in general (and hydrocarbon corporation stocks in particular), the biosphere would have a fighting chance AND the mammon worshippers would be a lot less popular and planet killing "prosperous" than they are now. I am not part of the Age of Stupid.
I learned of a bit of good news today. We take what we can. Reality is slowly (perhaps too slowly, but it's better than nothing), overcoming 🐵 Wall Street (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-040718162655-14231561.gif&hash=98b427175ee380f6d3c313520cc8668c10f2172a) Hydrocarbon Hellspawn worship.
🦖 👹 Exxon Mobil Corp (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F2%2F3-190419235756.png&hash=ddd7a71acf6ff0420a63e797c27fdcad27734e3e) is poised to drop out of the S&P 500 Index’s 10 biggest companies for the first time since the index’s inception some 90 years ago. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-141113185047.png&hash=384024358ff8d5e7133d19b6e6638da4584a8154) (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-08-30/exxon-poised-to-drop-from-s-p-500-s-top-10-for-first-time-ever)
The article has some "supply and demand" BULLSHIT happy talk about "the abundance of fossil fuels out there now," as if this was a temporary thing. It's NOT. For proof of that, just look at a hydrocarbon stock I warned the fossil fueler MKing to drop about four years ago. I told him it was going to tank (http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/renewables/profiting-from-renewable-energy-place-your-mock-or-real-porfolios-here/msg2539/#msg2539)and WHY it was going to tank (http://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/fossil-fuel-folly/fossil-fuel-profits-getting-eaten-alive-by-renewable-energy!/msg2398/#msg2398).
He laughed it off. I hope he kept lots of SLB (Schlumberger) stock in his portfolio. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F2%2F3-010519192158-2201430.jpeg&hash=e912e1f5bdc041c35e217478b14ba3f7960e2037)
SLB was around $86 a share when I issued the warning. It's been all downhill since then. This year the hill turned into a cliff.
Title: Re: The Lyin' King
Post by: AGelbert on September 27, 2019, 05:27:39 pm
Anyone who believes what a liar says is a fool.Trump (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-301216165623.jpeg&hash=1ccfee6aaf9d939cca294a849774cff11e462e59) is an INVETERATE, CONFIRMED, CHRONIC LIAR.
INVETERATE, CONFIRMED, CHRONIC mean firmly established.
INVETERATE applies to a habit, attitude, or feeling of such long existence as to be practically ineradicable or unalterable. - an inveterate smoker
CONFIRMEDimplies a growing stronger and firmer with time so as to resist change or reform. a confirmed bachelor
CHRONIC suggests something that is persistent or endlessly recurrent and troublesome. a chronic complainer https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inveterate
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on October 27, 2019
“If the facts are against you, argue the law. If the law is against you, argue the facts. If the law and the facts are against you, pound the table and yell like hell” ― Carl Sandburg
Last night, Trump tweeted "…." An ellipsis. Later a message that "Something very big has just happened!" Today, Trump says that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of the Islamic State, has been killed after a U.S. special operations mission targeted him in northwestern Syria. Trump claimed credit, declaring that U.S. forces have brought "the world's No. 1 terrorist leader to justice."
This latest announcement is part of a diversion to hijack the narrative of the past week, and change the subject from a devastating confirmation of his misdeeds, corruptions and felonies while in office. After several weeks of having both the facts and the law go against #TeamTreason, Trump and his gaggle of dead-enders are reduced to hijacking the narrative, pounding the table and stealing the valor of American servicemen. Because the facts are in, and Trump's impeachment is a certainty.
During this week's closed-door testimony of William Taylor, the top US diplomat in Ukraine, the so-called “quid pro quo“ was defined point by point. Taylor illustrated how Trump withheld military aid from Ukraine in the hope of pressuring president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce investigations into a thoroughly discredited conspiracy theory about the 2016 election, in the hopes of reversing the “Russia did it“ narrative and smearing the candidacy of Joe Biden. Thus did he effectively bring down the teetering remains of the Trump administration, even though Trumpsuckers and nearly 40% of the population will have never heard of Amb. Taylor or his testimony.
When you can make John Bolton look like the Voice of Restraint, you’ve really gone far afield. Yet here we are. Taylor reported that when Bolton got wind of a meeting with Ukrainian officials at which Gordon Sundland, the US ambassador to the EU, brought up the investigations, he shut it down, and later referred to the scheme as an “drug deal."
The extent to which the House investigation has uncovered one aspect of the criminal Ukraine grift after another stems from actions taken after Trump's first year. When Trump named a government, he put a number of people in place no longer working for a notably high-turnover administration. Names like Tillerson, Mattis, McMaster, even Flynn, Bannon, et all have come and gone. Even the acerbic John Kelly, who replaced the ill-fated Reince Priebus, had to go.
Trump made repeated attempts to rein in or fire Mueller during the investigation, and was saved from that misconduct only by the refusal of people around him to incriminate themselves (including former White House counsel Don McGahn; Rob Porter, his staff secretary; and even Corey Lewandowski, who was otherwise eager to punch a female reporter in his zeal to obey Fat Orange. Even Kirstjen Nielsen, executrix of some of the most heinous American human rights violations ever perpetrated on the helpless since the genocide of native peoples, proved neither compliant nor extreme enough.
During the first year to 18 months, rumors leaked to the White House that Trump was chafing at being told "no" so often by his advisers. Reportedly he wanted to “let Trump be Trump,“ and that he was restive at those telling him he couldn’t do something because of the “Law.” Like most petty autocrats, Trump has no use for the law aside from bankruptcy law or stiffing contractors, or for those who traffic in it, (except for pet Attorneys General and hand nominated supreme court judges.)
As a result, during the worst crisis of this “administration,” (which might more properly described as opera bouffe about a bumbling, mid-level mafia crew if the stakes for the rest of us weren't so high) Fat Orange has no staff depth, and makes it up as he goes along.
Trump has run this administration as if it was a reality TV show; this illustrates that he understands the psyche of the average American pretty well, since most people figure if they haven’t seen it on TV, it doesn’t exist. A generation that has either given up on or reading newspapers as they shrink their way to irrelevance, has fewer sources of information. And after three years of multiple-times-a-day confrontation with vulgarity and brazen mendacity, most prefer to tune out rather than have their precious spare time soiled by T-Rex. Yet the law and the courts operate outside of the range of the television cameras and grind away according to the dictates of black letter law. This is where Trump will be up against it, not matter how furiously he pounds his tiny orange fists on the table.
Returning to the testimony of William B. Taylor: NBC News reported Taylor told the committee about the order to withhold military funding to Ukraine: Taylor said that an unnamed Office of Management and Budget official told him that “the directive had come from the president to the chief of staff to OMB.” This makes clear that the order came from Trump himself. This means Trump can’t claim that he didn’t know what Acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney was doing and can't simply scapegoat Mulvaney or others for the Ukraine quid pro quo, because it’s clear that people within OMB were well aware that the order came from the top.
What you might call a "smoking howitzer."
For all of this, Trump bet the house on getting a CNN soundbite from Zelensky.
These ass hats were concocting a Q Anon-level fiction to prosecute a conspiracy theory which holds that Ukraine hacked Democrats emails and set up Russia to get blamed for it during 2016. For this, we are all fortunate that Trump has such a fragile ego, and is so desperate for redress and validation. A better politician would’ve told Democrats and critics to go **** themselves.
Notice how Barr keeps popping up, Zelig like, in many of the stories. First in Ukraine, then in Italy, chasing down various threads intended to go into the conspiracy theory voodoo doll. Taylor also ratified the fact that Bill Barr is up to his beefy jowls in the entire mess, since the Justice Department has tried to keep this entire crockpot buried, by advising the acting director of national intelligence to not transmit the whistleblower complaint sounding the alarm about it to Congress. I’m not an attorney, but that looks like obstruction of justice to me. Barr would do well to measure for curtains in John Mitchell's old cell.
If you look forward to what comes ahead, it’s pretty clear the Trump (and was left of his team) realize that this is all going to play out in a court of public opinion, everything that Trump has done in terms of propagandized ring this, including his execrable “lynching“ tweet several days after the passing of Elijah Cummings, has been about distracting from the evidence emerging from hearing rooms by casting doubt on the process, discrediting the whistleblower, serial tweeting, and so on. Looks very much like when Trump goes down, Barr is going with him.
"Conservatives who for eight years sowed the dragon's teeth of partisan politics are horrified to discover they have grown an actual dragon." -- Stephen King
Why are Ukraine and Russia story one story? After the Russia-backed government falls in Kiev, Russia invades and annexes Crimea, which had been part of Ukraine. The world community cries foul. The US and others ultimately sanction Russia for the invasion. the sanctions bite. Putin tries to get them lifted. Think back tom 2016, and recall not on ly the trump Tower phone call organized by Fredo Jr. and attended by Kushner and Russian proxies, but also recall that the only point of interest for #TeamTreason in the Republican party platform was the change relative to Ukraine.
In July 2016, WaPo reported:
The Trump campaign worked behind the scenes last week to make sure the new Republican platform won’t call for giving weapons to Ukraine to fight Russian and rebel forces, contradicting the view of almost all Republican foreign policy leaders in Washington.
Throughout the campaign, Trump has been dismissive of calls for supporting the Ukraine government as it fights an ongoing Russian-led intervention. Trump’s campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, worked as a lobbyist for the Russian-backed former Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych for more than a decade.
Manafort exited the campaign shortly thereafter, but his work had been done. This change confused many, and was greeted with incongruity by others. But for those who possess memory, the liberal superpower, October, 2019 is when a number of other shoes dropped.
“All roads lead to Putin.” ― House Speaker Nancy Pelosi
On October 18, Trump met with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Dems in a Cabinet meeting, ostensibly to talk about Trump’s widely opposed pullout of U.S. forces from northern Syria, clearing the way for Turkey’s bloody attack.. The resultant picture was tweeted by Trump as evidence of Pelosi’s weakness. Pelosi posted the image across the top of her Twitter page. It's been downhill for Trump ever since, at least in the court of legitimate public opinion.
The resultant picture (caricaturized at top) has been subject to as many alternative, self-serving, and contradictory interpretations as Rashomon.
The dramatic official White House photograph shows Pelosi standing and pointing at the seated president across the Cabinet Room table. Although the two are separated by only a few feet, the space illustrated a yawning divide and chronicled in a flash the state of a nation convulsed by impeachment, the prominence of women in politics and the 2020 election.
The reaction to the image, from the top down, also reflected the Rohrschach-type reality that even an image can be narrated in vastly different ways...
The photo shows Pelosi standing, finger pointed at Trump, who is saying something back.
“I think I was excusing myself from the room,” Pelosi said. “At that moment I was probably saying, ‘All roads lead to Putin.”
All of which comes after "Get Over It, " in which: Mick Mulvaney admits, then denies, quid pro quo. The acting White House chief of staff said on Thursday last that the U.S. had withheld nearly $400 million in aid to Ukraine to further President Trump’s political interests, effectively confirming a key premise of the impeachment inquiry. Mulvaney later tried to reverse his comments, saying that “there was absolutely no quid pro quo.” Read his conflicting statements. By this time the toothpaste had left the tube. A White House spokesman had not made such a public ass of themselves since Ron Ziegler in 1973 saying that"a prior statement was "inoperative."
It's not opera bouffe without elements of farce. Bringing us to Rudy Giuliani.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman, associates of Rudy Giuliani, were arrested on October 10 trying to board an international flight with one-way tickets at Dulles International. They were headed to Vienna, the home of Ukrainian oligarch Dmitry Firtash, who reported ly has been bankrolling their schemes, which include illegal political donations. Parnas and Fruman, have been indicted on campaign finance charges. They were part of the pressure campaign on Ukraine to investigate President Trump’s political rivals, including Joe Biden.
Prosecutors in the Southern District of New York said. Parnas and. Fruman “conspired to circumvent the federal laws against foreign influence by engaging in a scheme to funnel foreign money to candidates for federal and state office,” including by making donations to a pro-Trump super PAC. Read the indictment.
The indictment refers to a “Congressman-1” — identified as former Representative Pete Sessions, Republican of Texas — who was the lucky beneficiary of approximately $3 million that the super PAC spent during the 2018 cycle. The men sought Sessions’s help in removing the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, “at least in part at the request of one or more Ukrainian government officials,” according to the indictment.
Parnas and Fruman were arrested on a four-count indictment that includes charges of conspiracy, making false statements to the Federal Election Commission and falsification of records. The men had key roles in Giuliani’s efforts to launch a Ukrainian corruption investigation against Democratic presidential contender Joe Biden and his son Hunter.
After Rudy announced that he no longer had a lawyer and didn’t need one, yet another person tied to his Ukraine scandal was arrested. This came amid news that Rudy tried to get Donald Trump to take a guy in Pennsylvania and sell him off to Turkey. Now the news has somehow got even worse for Giuliani.
It’s not just that the SDNY is deep into investigating Rudy Giuliani’s criminal finances, which we’ve all known for a few days. It’s that the FBI is also running a counterintelligence probe into Rudy’s international antics, according to a CNN bombshell this afternoon.
This means the Feds aren’t just looking to nail Rudy for having committed financial crimes by taking payoffs from foreign governments and entities. They’re pursuing Rudy for the crimes he committed against the United States, on behalf of the nations that were paying him off.
And of course, Trump said he had no idea who Rosencranz and Guildenstern were, nor had he ever met them. Not so much.
Rudy Giuliani was carrying out his Ukraine antics at Trump’s instruction, while Rudy was being bankrolled by Parnas’ hilariously named company Fraud Guarantee. We’re supposed to believe that Trump didn’t know Rudy was relying on Parnas, even though Trump has spent years posing for pictures with Parnas?
Vienna is where wealthy Ukrainian businessman Dmitry Firtash is currently being held under house arrest. Now it all makes perfect sense.
Rudy’s associates weren’t just trying to flee the country because they were trying to avoid arrest. Rudy and his associates were planning to go to Vienna so they could huddle with Firtash, who has long been suspected of being knee deep in the Trump-Rudy criminal conspiracy in Ukraine.
Recently the acting White House chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, met with a small group of Republicans at Camp David.This after Gen. William McRaven’s Op-Ed: “Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President”
Had enough yet?
The testimonies of William Taylor, Fiona Hill, and others have confirmed that while official American policy was to encourage democracy in Ukraine to help it fight off Russia, the Trump administration ran a shadow foreign policy team, headed by Rudy Guiliani, and including special envoy to Ukraine Kurt Volker, the Ambassador to the EU Gordon Sondland, and acting Chief of Staff Mick Mulvaney. Trump did not want "to provide any assistance at all" to Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. Trump personally intervened to withhold money that Congress had appropriated for that struggle until Ukraine leaders promised to state publicly that they were opening an investigation into the company for which Joe Biden's son Hunter worked.
Trump's position that there was "no quid pro quo" is in the shredder. Taylor kept proof in the form of a paper trail: what the young people call, "the receipts." This. Is. Huge. White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham tried calling leaks from Taylor's testimony "a coordinated smear campaign from far-left lawmakers and radical unelected bureaucrats waging war on the Constitution," but Taylor's statement was explosive even without hearing what he said behind closed doors.
Note, though, what Taylor said Trump wanted in exchange for the release of military aid. He didn't demand actual dirt on Hunter Biden (again, there is no evidence that Biden did anything illegal), but rather he wanted a public declaration that Ukraine was investigating the company for which Biden worked. This all came down to getting a soundbite on CNN with which he could compromise the candidacy of a political opponent. An announcement that Ukraine was investigating the company, dumped into the media, would swamp Joe Biden's presidential candidacy.
This is important. Trump understood that the idea that Ukraine was investigating corruption was the story, not that actual corruption existed or could be foujnd, let alone proved. This is 2016 redux with the story of Clinton's emails, which continually dominated 2016 election coverage, and which we now know was a complete non-story. Trump wanted to skew the public narrative before the 2020 election, and he pressured a foreign government to help him do that. Look for the coming impeachment battle to be waged on television.
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary.Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.
Title: Re: This Week In Doom, October 27: "Get Over It"
Post by: AGelbert on October 29, 2019, 04:34:30 pm
Trump and his Wrecking Crew of crooks and liars get more brazen all the time. Unless the U.S. military backs Trump going (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F2%2F3-010319144633.png&hash=290b550d0c55f2244e94fdab3349beb3452bec0f) full Head Banana of the U.S. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F1%2F3-120818184306-16302042.png&hash=b32964f6121cd80269354273700cf61fabc97dae) Banana "Republic", I just don't see how most of them can avoid the big house. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smiley-lol.com%2Fsmiley%2Fexagerent%2Fpolice%2Fenprison.gif&hash=4912c6e4685052e7a6084b2d6740020437d7dae4)
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on December 29, 2019
"Violence is as American as cherry pie." --H. Rap Brown
2019 has been a year of notable accomplishments and disasters: China became the first country to gain access to the far side of the moon, thus announcing itself in the space race, the Ebola epidemic continued in the Congo, birds and insects continue to die at alarming rates, upsetting natural ecosystems everywhere, drought continued in southern Africa and, more recently, Australia, in combination with ruinous bush fires. California continue to burn during the autumn months.
War continued in Yemen, with millions on the brink of famine and starvation. Protests swept the world, from Haiti to Hong Kong, also making appearances in Chile, Ecuador, and Bolivia. (It seems some folks don’t like neocolonialism as much as the west does.) Migrants continue to flee from the Middle East and Africa, and Central America, to places with more hospitable climate and arable soil; Nationalists shrieked in horror, rushed to build walls and whip up furor against potential newcomers. Brazil’s Boisonaro continued to burn the Amazon rainforest; people around the world wringing their hands. United States declared a trade war with China, beginning with the US charging Huawei with fraud. Suicide attacks sparked Indian conflict with Pakistan, which seems like a headline which could be reported every year. India made bold to enact new nationality laws which would exclude Muslims. Terror attacks continued, As a white nationalist killed 50 in New Zealand in March. The first image of a black hole was created. California had earthquakes. Trump shut the government down in January and reopened it several weeks later.
A man killed 22 people In a mass shooting at a Walmart in El Paso. Enthusiast planned a “raid“ on area 51, which started as a joke but later went viral. It fizzled. Julian Assange was arrested in the UK and held for extradition. Fire broke out at Notre Dame cathedral, A comedian was elected president of Ukraine, and would find that his dealings with United States were anything but funny, and Trump met with Kim Jong-Un after they “fell in love.“ Kim Jong-Un later met with Vladimir Putin, sending a message that he was not prepared to go steady. The US attempted to foment a coup in Venezuela against President Nicolas Maduro, but failed, but managed to foment one in Bolivia to oust Evo Morales, and succeeded. Narendra Modi won a landslide victory in the Indian general election. Theresa May resigned, unable to wrangle Brexit, but Boris Johnson succeeded her, and won an election with enough of a mandate to put Brexit on a path to becoming reality.
Robert Mueller testified, and was a snooze, but Fiona Hill testified and was riveting. Millions thought Mueller was going to emerge from his prosecutor's office and slap a pair of cuffs on Trump, but forgot that he reports to Bill Barr, Trumps Roy Cohn, and the most corrupt Attorney General of a lifetime, and this includes John Mitchell. Perhaps the biggest political news was a shifting power dynamic in Washington DC, as the consequences of the 2018 elections came to bear in the house brought articles of impeachment against Fat Orange, and at years end they sat on the edge of Nancy Pelosi‘s desk, awaiting Mitch McConnell‘s next move. Trump‘s approval fell to 39% during January‘s partial government shut down, and support for impeachment and removal rose to 55% at years end.
The ordeal of Trump and his impeachment has been dealt with to death by other sailors with better maps. So this Year end review will not deal in depth with the many depravities of the Trump Crime Family, or with the cottage industry of racists, opportunists buffoons, failkids and grifters who have seen their profiles undeservedly elevated as a result of the Trump presidency: pardoned war criminal Edward Gallagher, Ben Shapiro, Matt Gaetz, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, Milo, Candace Owens, Stephanie Grisham, Jordan Peterson, Diamond and Silk, Joseph-Goebbels-cosplayer Stephen Miller, Jim Jordan, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, that chattering set of dentures Rudy Colludy, Meghan McCain, Scott Baio, and the entire extended Trump family.
There is plenty to consider apart from our politics as we lift our gaze from our black mirrors, blinded by normalcy bias and unable to imagine changing any of our carefully-calibrated plans to consider harbingers of doom and collapse. I have reviewed a year's worth of postings within the Doomstead Diner Forum and the Doomstead Diner Daily to compile the stories that marked our slow and steady descent. One thing is certain: no one will be able to say "they didn't know" as we spin down from a high-energy post capitalist civilization to an uncertain, uncharted future where there will be less of everything for everyone.
William Kunstler, in a break from his usual obsequious Trumpsucking, paints the picture as well as anyone in, "There Is No Normal."
We landed in the New World five hundred years ago. It was full of good things that human beings had barely begun to exploit, laid out like a banquet. There was plenty of good virgin soil for growing food, the best timber in the world, clean rivers and great lakes, ores full of iron, gold, and silver, and down deep a bonanza of coal and oil to drive the wheel through very flush times. The past century was particularly supercharged, the oil years.
Imagine living through the very start of all that, the blinding, fantastic newness of modernity...An emergent cavalcade of wonders: electricity, telephones, railroads, subways, skyscrapers! And in a few more years movies, cars, airplanes, radio. Even the backstage wonders of the day were astonishments: household plumbing for all, running hot water, municipal water and sewer systems, refrigeration, tractors! It’s hard to conceive how much these developments changed the human experience of daily life.
Even the traumas of the 20th century’s world wars did not crush that sense of amazing progress, at least not in North America, spared the wars’ mighty wreckage. The post-war confidence of American society achieved a level of in-your-face laughable hubris — see the USA in your Chevrolet! — until John Kennedy was shot down, and after that the delirious moonshot euphoria steadily gave way to corrosive skepticism, anxiety, acrimony, and enmity. My generation, booming into adulthood, naively thought they could fix all that with Earth Day, tofu, and computers, and keep the great wheel rolling down into an even more glorious cybernetic nirvana.
Fakeout. That’s not where the wheel is going. We borrowed all we possibly could from the future to pretend that the system was still working, and now the future is at the door like a re-po man come to take away both the car and the house. The financial scene is an excellent analog to our collective psychology. Its workings depend on the simple faith that its workings work. So, it is easy to imagine what happens when that faith wavers.
We’re on the verge of a lot of things coming apart: supply lines, revenue streams, international agreements, political assumptions, promises to do this and that. We have no idea how to keep it together on the downside. We don’t even want to think about it. The best we can do for the moment is pretend that the downside doesn’t exist.
This is where we are. If you are reading this, you know it. The following sections and articles document what's happening to us. Some of the stories have some exposition. Others do not. Follow the link if the headline interests you.
Breaking Apart
Some years ago a Russian, former KGB operative Igor Panarin, predicted that the US would break up into separate countries. Panarin is aRussianprofessor and political scientist best known for predicting that the United States would disintegrate within the next few years.
The Wall Street Journal reports: "Panarin is not a fringe figure. A former KGB analyst, he is dean of the Russian Foreign Ministry's academy for future diplomats. He is invited to Kremlin receptions, lectures students, publishes books, and appears in the media as an expert on U.S.-Russia relations."
Lately other writers are expanding on this concept of Balkanization of the US. According to author Colin Woodard, the United States can be divided into 11 distinct sub-nations (see the above map). Woodard takes Panarin's idea to another level, and is far more granular. Panarin posited that parts of the balkanized former US would affiliate with other countries; Woodard does not.
"The country has been arguing about a lot of fundamental things lately, including state roles and individual liberty," Woodard, a Maine native, told Business Insider... In order to have any productive conversation on these issues, you need to know where you come from. Once you know where you are coming from, it will help move the conversation forward."
Whether fact or metaphor, the image of a country coming apart is useful in order to understand what follows.
As partisans have drifted apart geographically and ideologically, they’ve become more hostile toward each other. In 1960, less than 5 percent of Democrats and Republicans said they’d be unhappy if their children married someone from the other party; today, 35 percent of Republicans and 45 percent of Democrats would be, according to a recent Public Religion Research Institute/Atlantic poll—far higher than the percentages that object to marriages crossing the boundaries of race and religion. As hostility rises, Americans’ trust in political institutions, and in one another, is declining. A study released by the Pew Research Center in July found that only about half of respondents believed their fellow citizens would accept election results no matter who won. At the fringes, distrust has become centrifugal: Right-wing activists in Texas and left-wing activists in California have revived talk of secession.
Secession notwithstanding, demographic shifts seem to fueling the white rage and nationalism that ignites the pyre of our current politics. ("You...will NOT replace us!") The theme of her article is that moderate Republicans can "save America." The fatal flaw in this argument is that there are no longer any "moderate Republicans," and that the Republican party is the party of Trump, meaning the party of Atwater, Rove, and ascendant white nationalism, who having tasted power are loath to give it up. The Rs have the power to nominate and approve unqualified right wing ideologies to pollute the federal bench for generations, and if they have to resort to right wing paramilitaries to keep it that way, so be it. Stories that moved this year that illustrate this:
The commander in chief is impulsive, disdains expertise, and gets his intelligence briefings from Fox News. What does this mean for those on the front lines?
This article was timely given Trump's announcement regarding removing American troops from Syria. Since they should not have been there in the first place, this seems a good thing. Except that we left the Kurds (who have fought wars for the Empire in pursuit of their own autonomy and based on American promises) in the lurch and to the tender mercies of Erdogan. I am old enough to remember how the Americans recruited the Hmong in Vietnam and Laos, then abandoned them after their utility in the US's "secret" wars was spent.
As we speculate on next steps for what the military will do when Trump refuses to leave, I found this article instructive. On the other hand, I wish Mad Dog Mattis were still part of Pud's cabinet, as I deemed him most likely offer him the vigorous backhand of common sense.
The moment may come when soldiers have to choose between the Constitution and Donald Trump. No doubt most will embrace the Constitution. But some will see that as a tough call.
Forces that Donald Trump, American president, is actively stoking. Welcome the harvest sown in the wake the USA PATRIOT Act and follow-on legislation, by those who want to offer aid and succor to white supremacists while criminalizing opposition to them. The families of Eric Garner, tamer rice, Sandra Bland, et al were not asked for comment.
The lack of a central governing system for antifa creates the risk of wrongly applying the label to all counterprotesters of white supremacists, according to the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that opposes anti-Semitism. This kind of mislabeling, the ADL said, could cause police to violate the civil rights of peaceful activists.
The ADL said antifa activists’ violent tactics are wrong, but that antifa and white supremacists are not equivalent. Far-right extremists have killed hundreds of people in the past decade, the ADL said, while there have been no known antifa-related killings.
If the Republiconfederates thought about it, they would be attempting to insure that this was a nation of laws rather than men so that their descendants would be treated equitably. But no one in this country engages in thinking about anything except making the quarter, so it is probably unfair to single outright wingers for being guilty of short-term thinking. Instead, they line up in unthinking support of El Jefe, because they are terrified of opposing him, and getting primaried from the right.
More people are better educated than ever before, and knowledge is easier to come by. So why do we so often scorn those who plainly know more than we do? File under, "The Death of Expertise."
Unrest Everywhere
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
W.B Yeats
This oft-quoted poem is a relevant today as it was when written 100 years ago. Protests raging on the streets of cities around the world in the past months have triggers that vary with the locale. But what fuels them are common themes: stagnating middle classes, stifled democracy, economic inequality and the bone-deep conviction that things can be different – even if the way forward is uncertain.
In Hong Kong, the police fired tear gas and anti-government protesters lit fires as tens of thousands of people marched today despite an official ban and attacks on the march promoters.
Chile declared a state of emergency after a transportation fare increase set off violence and looting. Subway stations, banks, buses and the headquarters of the country’s largest electricity provider were burned. Lebanese protesters enraged by corruption and dysfunction marched in Beirut and other cities, calling for the government’s overthrow.
Knowing about what happened to Allende was one of the ends of my innocence, and one of my way-stations on the road to collapse. Learning this story drove home what US foreign policy REALLY meant to a 23 year old with **** for brains, as well as the important lesson that Henry Kissinger was the spawn of Satan. The US was not going to tolerate a Marxist in Chile; but a fascist was just fine. Pinochet was Nixon's man. So they sponsored a coup.
The most prevalent forms of state-sponsored torture that Chilean prisoners endured were electric shocks, waterboarding, beatings, and sexual abuse. Another common mechanism of torture employed was "disappearing" those who were deemed to be potentially subversive because they adhered to leftist political doctrines. The tactic of "disappearing" the enemies of the Pinochet regime was systematically carried out during the first four years of military rule. The "disappeared" were held in secret, subjected to torture and were often never seen again.
We'd later learn that coup plotting, torture and wet work were the curriculum at the School of the Americas (now rebranded a la Blackwater, "The Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation." Your tax dollars at work.
And an added bonus, Chile got the classical unrestrained “free market” policies of Milton Friedman, enforced by the military junta, which yielded a bumper crop of human rights violations, institutionalized brutality, and drastic control and suppression of every form of meaningful dissent. The fact is, the truth of what happened in Chile was not that hard to find inside the US. Another fact is that no one cared.
And Haiti is on the brink of collapse because of a power struggle between its president and a surging opposition movement that has led to weeks of violent demonstrations and left streets across the country barricaded. Related stories from 2019:
Larry Hopkins, the leader of an extremist militia group known as the United Constitutional Patriots was arrested by the FBI in April after videos emerged of the group rounding up and detaining migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border in New Mexico. According to the New York Times, the FBI first became aware of Hopkins activities in 2017, when they received reports that his group was “training to assassinate George Soros, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama because of these individuals’ support of Antifa,” according to newly unsealed court documents.
A self-proclaimed white nationalist planned a mass terrorist attack, the government says
Imagine what we have to look forward to in an election year.
Environmental Collapse
“A society’s fate lies in its own hands and depends substantially on its own choices.” ― Jared Diamond
Few know what COP25 stands for (COP means Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.) The 25 stands for the 25th year that such an annual conferences has taken place, each year in different country, a tourist bonanza for the thousands travel but light on results and bereft of action steps.The COP 25 Failure in Madrid this fall encapsulates the impotence of governments around the world to acknowledge there is a problem with climate change, much less summon the will to do anything about it.
It is an illusion to believe that Big Business, Big Industry, Big Finance - and Big Growth-driven Profit - will yield to environmental or climate concerns. In spite of attracting 27,000 attendees, including Time Magazine's Person of the Year Greta Thunberg, the conference achieved alomst nothing.
Ultimately, however, the talks were unable to reach consensus in many areas, pushing decisions into next year under “Rule 16” of the UN climate process. Matters including Article 6, reporting requirements for transparency and “common timeframes” for climate pledges were all punted into 2020, when countries are also due to raise the ambition of their efforts.
UN secretary general António Guterres said he was “disappointed” with the results of COP25 and that “the international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation & finance to tackle the climate crisis.”
This section has many links. The headlines tell a story of their own, with news that is almost unremittingly bad.
Speculative maps showing the changes to our world from an 80m sea level rise. Effectively all ice on earth having melted. Created with a variety of climate science reference, digital elevation models, and Photoshop.
Cooler years mask the underlying behaviour of the system. As natural variations move in the other direction, they can unleash a period of supercharged heating
Vast stretches of Earth’s northern latitudes are on fire right now. Hot weather has engulfed a huge portion of the Arctic, from Alaska to Greenland to Siberia. That’s helped create conditions ripe for wildfires, including some truly massive ones burning in remote parts of the region that are being seen by satellites.
Release of a government report means that even the last to know, know. regardless of their public posturing. Research details how human-caused climate change is contributing to record heat, more-intense storms, more-severe flooding and other events.
Rajendra Singh, also known as the “Waterman of India”, says over 70 percent of the country has dried up, and this may lead to climatic migration to other countries.
The Great Culling: They Don't Give a Flying **** About You
“If people feel lost and alone and helpless and broken and hopeless today, what will it be like if the world really begins to come apart at the hinges?” ― Brandon Andress
If you’ve made it this far, you had an opportunity to contemplate the many vectors of environmental ruin headed our way, at a time when collectively we are at one another’s throats with an enthusiasm and sense of purpose rarely seen since the last Civil War.
The current world population is estimated to have reached 7.7 billion people as of April 2019. It took over 200,000 years of human history for the world's population to reach 1 billion; and only 200 years more to reach 7 billion. We are now faced with automation and AI, at a time of profound income (and thus power) inequality. connect the dots to see that robots and algorithms can replace a lot of labor, which is occurring as we speak. And what happens when any private industry takes over a public one? They slash payroll, loot pensions, and rid themselves of "useless eaters," and redistribute the savings to "investors." Wash, rinse, repeat. Thus, whether by design or default, the Great Culling is Coming To a Theater Near You. "The Great Culling" is not about putting fluoride in your drinking water so much as a plan to reduce earth's population over generations.
RationalWiki calls this a conspiracy theory. And you won't easily find much credibly written on the subject. Yet it is difficult to consider the toxic hellbroth of the rise of ethno-nationalism, climate emergency, the increasingly oppressive tone and tenor of life under increasingly straightened circumstances, the ethics of investment banks and the logic of the spreadsheet, and conclude that such a plan is not in effect as a practical matter. If this hurts, you can always get some Oxycontin from kids at your local middle school. Here are stories that moved in 20019 that illustrate the point.
Welcome to Coffeyville, Kansas, where the judge has no law degree, debt collectors get a cut of the bail, and Americans are watching their lives — and liberty — disappear in the pursuit of medical debt collection.
I am among those who think that launching a gratuitous, meat-grinder war in spring of 2020 to self-anoint as a "wartime president™" is completely within Fat Orange's capability. It may already be part of his campaign plan, given the sheer evil of his administration.
For me here is the money shot:
If The Donald gets us into a big shooting war over in the Middle East or in the South China Sea, the mandatory servitude of conscription will be required. It won’t be a turkey shoot like Iraq or Libya. It will be an existential threat, so all males —criminally inclined or not — between 16 and 45 will be inducted, same as they were after FDR tricked the Japanese into invading Pearl Harbor, or Johnson said the North Vietnamese attacked our warships in the Gulf of Tonkin.
Anyone who thinks that Iran is going to do an "el foldo" like Saddam Hussein did in Iraq is sadly mistaken. Unlike Iraq, which was cobbled together via the Balfour declaration and held together by Saddam's brutality, Iran has a long, continuous history as a people and are not going to be exterminated quietly. Since Iran is surrounded by American bases, the outcome will never be much in doubt, but the costs will be extreme and the fighting scorched earth. Victory will be had, at the cost of your last grandson or granddaughter, so there is little doubt that Uncle Cracker will be looking for fresh meat.
A new report by Stanford scholars lays out the problems U.S. millennials face as a result of decades-long rising inequality. Problems they experience include rising mortality rates and increased poverty among those without college degrees.
I mean, 1,500 private jets flown in to hear David Attenborough speak about how we're wrecking the planet.
"I hear people talking the language of participation and justice and equality and transparency.
"But then almost no-one raises the real issue of tax avoidance, right, and of the rich just not paying their fair share.
"It feels like I'm at a firefighters' conference and no-one's allowed to speak about water."
"Beef trimmings are easily contaminated with bacteria such as E. coli or salmonella, so they need to be sterilized with "a puff" of ammonia..."
Bon appetit.
Lying Corporate Media
"Freedom of the press is limited to those who own one."
-A. J. Liebling
The news media in this country is under assault both from the political establishment and from the same market and technology forces that have disrupted other business sectors. Newspapers are shrinking, press jobs lost, and many towns are without a daily paper in print. And for those that remain are a hollow, shrunken version of their former selves. Smaller, fewer sections, reliance on wire service content: "yesterday's news tomorrow." Accelerating their demise is their adherence to a radically false doctrine, that of "Both Sides Do It" and thus "both sides" deserve to be treated with fairness and balance. But that doesn't work when one side works in relentless bad faith.
The bad faith works as follows: "We are not bound by what you call facts. We have our own, and we will proceed to put them out regardless of the evidence. We’re not trying to 'win the news cycle,' or curry favor with you. We’re trying to demonstrate independence from and power over you people, and stick your own rules up your nose. Your program is a theater of resentment in which you play a crucial part, and since our base hates your guts, we get to score points with them by displaying our contempt for you."
Here's an excellent analysis of the failures of Chuck Todd (and by extension, the rest of the corporate media opinion-manufacturing industry) by one of the country's best observers of the press, Jay Rosen.
After the better part of a career of allowing republican politicians to posit falsehoods as divinely-received wisdom, Chuck Todd had an epiphany:
Three years after Kellyanne Conway introduced the doctrine of “alternative facts” on his own program, a light went on for Chuck Todd. Republican strategy, he now realized, was to make stuff up, spread it on social media, repeat it in your answers to journalists — even when you know it’s a lie with crumbs of truth mixed in — and then convert whatever controversy arises into go-get-em points with the base, while pocketing for the party a juicy dividend: additional mistrust of the news media to help insulate President Trump among loyalists when his increasingly brazen actions are reported as news.
Note that the very guy who has made a living inviting pathological Republican liars to be on his TV show continues to feign shock at the discovery that they pathologically lie when they're on his TV show. Since taking over the Meet the Press chair from David Gregory, Chuck Todd has displayed the sense of "both sides" faux balance that has made him one of the Republican party's favorite towel boys. This it would be amusing to see ol' Chuck protesting and trying to push back with his atrophied, baby arms now that the Republican grifters and Trumpsuckers who come on his show for the purpose of extruding the propaganda do so with the same impunity that he has provided them.
Since 2007 Todd has been NBC’s political director, which means he has influence over all coverage the in-house expert and decision-maker. You don’t get to claim you are naive about politics in such a role. Well, that’s the job. The truth is It’s not naiveté. It’s a willful blindness to what the Republican Party has become.
As such Todd provides a template for most the mass media, whose behavior can be observed (and predicted) though the filter of a quote by Noam Chomsky:
The major media-particularly, the elite media that set the agenda that others generally follow-are corporations “selling” privileged audiences to other businesses. It would hardly come as a surprise if the picture of the world they present were to reflect the perspectives and interests of the sellers, the buyers, and the product. Concentration of ownership of the media is high and increasing. Furthermore, those who occupy managerial positions in the media, or gain status within them as commentators, belong to the same privileged elites, and might be expected to share the perceptions, aspirations, and attitudes of their associates, reflecting their own class interests as well. Journalists entering the system are unlikely to make their way unless they conform to these ideological pressures, generally by internalizing the values; it is not easy to say one thing and believe another, and those who fail to conform will tend to be weeded out by familiar mechanisms."
Oc course, none of this is new. It was observed by muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair in The Brass Check, a book few of us have ever read, let alone heard of. For those of us who virulently distrust corporate media, it's good to know that one of the pillars of the muckraking era exposed it all a century ago and despite being on elf the literary lions of the era, had his book constructively buried and erased from history.
A brass check was the token purchased by a customer in a brothel and given to the woman of his choice. Sinclair implies that, in a similar fashion, the owners of the mass media purchase journalists' services in supporting the owners' political and financial interests.
Sinclair criticizes newspapers and the Associated Press (owned by newspapers) as ultra-conservative and supporting the political and economic powers that be, or as sensational tabloids practicing yellowjournalism, such as newspapers run by William Randolph Hearst. In both cases, their purpose is to promote the business interests of the paper's owners, the owner's bankers, and/or the paper's advertisers. Clearly, some things never change.
For his trouble, Sinclair challenged those who charged him with inaccuracy to review his published facts and to sue him for libel if they found him wrong. None did. But because Sinclair was denied access to the mainstream media to refute such charges, they assumed an aura of truth and gave the book a reputation for inaccuracy that have caused it to be largely forgotten.
Those who reviewed the book found The Brass Check's analysis of the media accurate and valuable, "astonishingly prescient in its critique of the coziness of big media and other corporate interests."
A former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad.
This is long; you may want to pack a lunch, but it is well reported, and I'll bet you've never heard a bit of it. By design.
Economic Fix is In
"The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing."
--Frank Zappa
“If you sit in on a poker game and don’t see a sucker, get up. You’re the sucker.” Crony capitalism that in which businesses thrive not as a result of risk, but rather as a return on money amassed through a nexus between a business class and the political class. Typical tools include permits, government grants, taxbreaks, or other forms of stateintervention, especially where the state can confer public goods. Think "looting of the commons."
America's economy was a success in the 19th century due the plunder of a pristine environment and abundant natural resources. Before the frontier was closed, all one had to show up and build wealth using what was at hand. The world wars finished off Europe as an economic dynamo, bankrupted the British empire, and put economic and financial supremacy in Washington’s hands. The US dollar became the world reserve currency, enabling the US to pay its bills by printing money. And enabling the US to plunder foreign resources the way vanishing American resources had once been plundered. We plunder in a more sophisticated way now; see John Perkins in Confessions of an Economic Hit Man for how that works.
As it gets harder and harder for corporations to make an honest buck, they have to go "where the money is," much like bank robbers did before credit card fraud. And tht means you: your pension, your Social Security, your 401K. They want it, and they'll get it. Meanwhile, economic life in the "Home of the Brave, Land of the Free" means death by a thousand cuts for too many people. Here are 2019 stories that make the point:
This is (just another) absolutely terrific by the Martens. If you read nothing about money, read this.
The timeline is particularly telling, especially this gem:
May 19, 2019: The New York Times’ David Enrich writes the bombshell report describing how a Deutsche Bank whistleblower, Tammy McFadden, and four of her colleagues, had their efforts blocked by the bank when they tried to file suspicious activity reports on bank accounts affiliated with Donald Trump and his son-in-law/advisor Jared Kushner. The suspicious activity reports (SARs) should have been filed with the Federal agency known as FinCEN (Financial Crimes Enforcement Network) but were quashed by a unit of the bank that manages money for the super wealthy. The article appeared in the print edition of the New York Times on Monday, May 20, 2019. The stock closes that day at $7.43.
We're back to counting dead bankers. It may be that having HIV is safer than working for Deutsche Bank
Found this article on Scientific American this morning while compiling the paper. Gives a glimpse at the sort of tools already in use to track us, sift and resell our preferences, for purposes unknown. What could possibly go wrong? The traces we leave on the Web and on our digital devices can give advertisers and others surprising, and sometimes disturbing, insights into our psychology
Even among people who observe and measure how the wheels are coming off the wagon, plenty of disagreement. An old Diner friend Ugo Bardi makes an appearance in this article.
Personal data is routinely harvested from the most vulnerable populations, without transparency, regulation, or principles—and this should concern us all.
Decades before QAnon, false flags, “crisis actors” and Alex Jones, there was Milton William Cooper. An exclusive excerpt from ‘Pale Horse Rider’
Long before there was a Diner, long before 9-11, there was Milton William Cooper. His book was an underground sensation. The Hour of the Time radio program was also circulated and downloaded long before podcasts existed; I have them all. He was right about so many things, including 9-11, and the fact that he knew that by telling the truth, they would come for him and kill him. Which they did.
And that's a year's worth of doom. As we head into a pivital year of impeachment, elections and the usual schemes, here's hoping we're together back here next year "pretending that the downside doesn’t exist." Enjoy your new year!
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary. Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.
Title: The American Dream
Post by: Surly1 on January 27, 2020, 09:39:36 am
[caption id="attachment_41749" align="aligncenter" width="700"]Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone[/caption]
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on January 26, 2020
"People who claim guns make America safer are currently threatening violence and are openly threatening to use their guns to kill Americans they disagree with and shoot down the democratically elected government. This rally is a perfect example of why these murderous fanatics shouldn't be allowed to have guns, ever, or carry them anywhere near the rest of us." –Jim Wright
The most important doom-related story from my perspective this week was the so-called "gun rally" in Richmond, Virginia on Monday. Richmond had not seen so many armed men downtown since it fell to Grant in 1865.
Since my daughter lives and works in Richmond, and reported meeting some of the attendees out on the town on Sunday night, I took a more than casual interest in the proceedings. The response of many Richmond natives to the arrival of heavily-armed mob was to close their downtown businesses, including the entirety of Virginia Commonwealth University, which suspended all activities for the day, including internships and clinical placements; a university statement made clear that this was in response to the threat, not the federal holiday. NBC reported that some residents of a historically black neighborhood left town entirely for the day—which was Martin Luther King Jr. Day. So much for their rights.
And the grievance? After decades of a 20-year Republican choke hold, the Virginia state legislature reverted to Democrat control in the wake of Novembers' elections and were planning to enact common sense gun legislation. Thus the “tyrants” who had earned the rally-goers' opprobrium had been democratically elected.
One of the major issues that propelled Democrats to victory was the promise of gun-control legislation, particularly after a mass shooting in Virginia Beach left 12 city residents dead and four others wounded in May 2019. For all their loud objection to “tyranny,” the purpose of the armed crowd was to thwart the will of an electorate that had outvoted them. Virginians’ overall enthusiasm for gun control measures has not waned since last year’s election; a poll conducted in December revealed that Virginia voters strongly support requiring background checks on all gun sales, 86% to 13%, and passing a “red flag” law to remove guns from someone who may harm someone, 73% to 23%
Join me in another chorus of, "trying to overturn the results of an election."
Gun enthusiasts and their fellow-traveler race warriors had been planning for their so-called "boogaloo" for MLK Day. Fat Orange did his part by using his stubby fingers to get Uncle Fud to climb off his niece (or his nephew) and come to Richmond for the party. Trump Times Scare-Mongering Tweet for Maximum Impact as White Supremacists Prep for Richmond Rally. Trump’s social-media eruption warned Virginians that their 2nd Amendment rights are “under attack,” and offered a sarcastic “thank you” to Virginia Democrats who will “take your guns away.”
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
Your 2nd Amendment is under very serious attack in the Great Commonwealth of Virginia. That’s what happens when you vote for Democrats, they will take your guns away. Republicans will win Virginia in 2020. Thank you Dems!
Earlier in the week prior to the demonstration, the FBI arrested six alleged members of a white-supremacist group on gun charges, in part out of concern that they planned to attend the Richmond rally and incite violence.
In the runup to the event, Stewart Rhodes, founder of the Oath Keepers, an anti-government far-right organization associated with the militia movement, purportedly published a message, a copy of which came into my hands. (The group describes itself as a non-partisan association of current and former military, police, and first responders, who pledge to fulfill the oath that all military and police take in order to "defend the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic." They are immune to irony.) Some excerpts:
We need LEO [law-enforcement officers] and military veterans to volunteer to help us on the ground at the ARMED rally in the streets of Richmond, VA on Monday, Jan. 20, 2020 (not in Gov. Northam’s absurd disarmed slave pen – out in the streets with the **** patriots who will NOT be disarmed).
You do NOT have to be an Oath Keepers member to help. Just be a qualified and trained LEO or military veteran who can keep your head and is physically capable of defending others. If you are in driving range of Richmond, VA, please come help…
Oath Keepers will NOT be entering Northam’s absurd slave pen, and we urge all other patriots to likewise refuse to disarm and go through metal detectors just to attend a “gun rights rally.” A disarmed gun rights rally in VA is an absurdity and an abomination. As Patrick Henry would say, “Forbid it almighty God!” Tens of thousands of American patriots agree, and we will all be outside of Northam’s sheep pen/slave pen in the streets of Richmond, standing in defiance and protest...
Unfortunately, VCDL has chosen to ask that 10,000 gun owners disarm and go inside Northam’s sheep pen/slave pen, with the rest remaining armed out in the streets. We disagree with this decision. It sends entirely the wrong message. It lets Northam and his fellow-traveler oath breaking domestic enemies of the Constitution in the VA legislature know that they CAN disarm at least some Virginians, because they already did on Jan 20, 2020. …
Defiance and refusal, not compliance and submission are the proper responses. As the founders said, resistance to tyrants is obedience to God.
The communication goes on and on in this vein, at absurd length. The point being that any attempt at gun legislation is not only illegitimate but tantamount to fascism, and the only moral choice for patriots is an armed refusal to comply with the proposed laws of a duly-elected legislature. This sounds less like a "well-regulated militia" than an armed insurrection looking for a command structure via email in the days before it assembles to muster.
So precisely what is the complaint of these heavily-strapped members of the Church of Perpetual Grievance? Was King Northam planning to confiscate their weapons and their hands? What "tree of liberty" needed watering with the blood of tyrants?
Virginia gun laws have been notoriously lax. Under Republican control, Virginia lawmakers successfully made the commonwealth the place that illegal gun traffickers boasted was the absolute best place for them to do business. Virginia had a law on the books for 19 years limiting gun purchases to one a month, but — despite its success in helping to curtail the illicit gun trade and an appeal from Virginia Tech families — it was repealed in 2012. Efforts to restore the limit, as well as enact other common-sense measures with popular support, such as universal background checks, were killed by a General Assembly captive to the gun lobby. Many of the Dems who won election in November ran on passing common sense gun legislation.
Here are the Draconian measures advanced in the Virginia House of delegates this week:
Limiting handgun purchases to once a month
Universal background checks on gun purchases
Allowing localities to ban guns in public buildings, parks and other areas
A red flag bill that would allow authorities to temporarily take guns away from anyone deemed to be dangerous to themselves or others.
By any measure, these are pretty anodyne, common sense measures and are popular with upwards of 85 per cent of the electorate. The House did NOT take up an assault weapon ban. In an era when any gun rights legislation is styled as a "power grab" by the vigilantly paranoid, it becomes increasingly difficult to take their arguments seriously.
Fearing a repeat of the deadly violence that had gripped the city of Charlottesville, Virginia, three years earlier, governor Ralph Northam declared a state of emergency and barred weapons from the Capitol grounds. Some 6,000 protesters grumblingly abided. But just outside the legions of police barricades, twice that number of people roamed the streets of Richmond bearing a bristling mass of rifles, from AR-15s to massive Barrett sniper rifles. Some wore skull masks; others waved Confederate flags. Members of hate groups like the League of the South and the American Guard, as well as the Proud Boys, mingled openly; some of the latter were wearing patches that said “RWDS”—an acronym for “Right-Wing Death Squad.” Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones gave a speech from a Terradyne battle tank. Adding to the bellicose mood, some attendees paraded with a massive guillotine as a prop, and others held up an effigy strung on a noose, emblazoned with the slogan, “Thus always to tyrants.”
Earlier the previous week, the FBI detained three members of neo-Nazi terror group The Base, who had planned to attend the Virginia rally, armed with a home-built, functioning fully-automatic rifle capable of firing several rounds at a time, survival gear, and 1,500 rounds of ammunition. They had planned to open fire into the crowd. The threat of violence in Richmond, coupled with the arrest of these neo-Nazis, sent other groups into hiding. Thus,
what abounded, in that armed and insurrectionist sea of humanity, was the promise that bloodshed might happen at any time, should the will of the mob be thwarted. America’s exceptional tolerance towards armed white gunmen—its brooking of gun-toting militias around the country, and the po-faced seriousness with which the media takes claims of “freedom” when it comes to the right to own weapons of mass slaughter—is entirely restricted to this demographic.
Imagine the response if 22,000 heavily armed black Americans descended on, say Atlanta? We've seen this movie before. When Black Panthers started showing up armed and en masse in California on the 1960s, then-Governor Ronald Reagan proposed gun control.
Any attempt to assert that the presence of 22,000 heavily armed men is NOT an attempt to intimidate is simply laughable. What was it intended to be? A prayer meeting? No, it was a white supremacy cycle jerk and bro-fest. Mission accomplished. And the Democratic-controlled General Assembly disposed of the Republican gun bills the following day via legislative procedure.
Open-carry cultists notwithstanding, it seems to me that openly brandishing a weapon on, say an early morning convenience store run is just sending a message of intimidation. Unless you are making a night bank deposit from a club, or live in a wilderness area with bears, there is little need to carry a weapon that enables you to injure or end a life on demand. I wrote about this several years ago when my wife went to a convenience store and encountered a male shopper strapped for his shopping occasion. (The Open-Carry Cargo Cult)
Scaring the **** out of a middle-aged woman trying to buy cigarettes at eight on a Sunday morning is PRECISELY the point of open carry, in the same way as is the presence of 22,000 heavily armed people to protest gun control laws.
So then you start to wonder why; why the need to intimidate? Any amateur psychologist/Monday Morning quarterback can pull together the same half-dozen reasons as I. Refer to the article referenced below for at least one set of reasons: "I have nothing going in my life, few prospects, and less of a future– but I'm filled with rage and I can afford a knockoff AR-15 and a Halloween outfit."
Americans have the right to own guns. And no one– anywhere– is proposing otherwise. But ownership of a gun does not confer permission to intimidate others, overthrow the government whenever you please, or even win all the arguments. The Second Amendment is for defense of the Republic, NOT nullification of democracy. We've already had the "nullification" argument in this country, and the bad guys lost, decisively, first at Gettysburg, and later at Appomattox.
The Second Amendment also calls for "a well-regulated militia." The gathering in Richmond was not a "militia" so much as an armed mob, the purpose of which was to intimidate. What the armed mob either failed to understand or ignored was that if it weren't for their fanatical obsession with guns, their endless threats of violence and their attempts to intimidate, there would be little reason for the very laws they oppose.
Getting rid of Trump means taking seriously “****-life syndrome”—and its resulting misery, which includes suicide, drug overdose death, and trauma for surviving communities.
Ohio is home to many ****-life syndrome sufferers. In the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton lost Ohio’s 18 electoral votes to Trump. She got clobbered by over 400,000 votes (more than 8%). She lost 80 of Ohio’s 88 counties. Trump won rural poorer counties, several by whopping margins. Trump got the ****-life syndrome vote.
Will Hutton in his 2018 Guardian piece, “The Bad News is We’re Dying Early in Britain – and It’s All Down to ‘****-Life Syndrome’” describes ****-life syndrome in both Britain and the United States: “Poor working-age Americans of all races are locked in a cycle of poverty and neglect, amid wider affluence. They are ill educated and ill trained. The jobs available are drudge work paying the minimum wage, with minimal or no job security.”
When you have little sense of agency in your life, one or several McJobs, and fewer prospects for improvement, walking around with your manhood strapped to your hip or slung over your shoulder, escapism from the realities of day to day life is appealing. For some it's comic books or video games; for others drugs and opiods; and for others, perhaps, guns.
Doomsday Clock Closer to Midnight
“It is now 100 seconds to midnight.” Such was the ominous headline Thursday from the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists after moving its Doomsday Clock ahead 20 seconds.
The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists makes the decision to move (or to leave in place) the minute hand of the Doomsday Clock is made each year in consultation with its Board of Sponsors, which includes 13 Nobel laureates. The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies in other domains.
Areas cited by Rachel Bronson, this year's President & CEO, include: how a retreat from arms control creates a dangerous nuclear reality, an insufficient response to an increasingly threatened climate, increased threat of information warfare and other disruptive technologies, and suggestions for how the world should respond.
"We move the Clock toward midnight because the means by which political leaders had previously managed these potentially civilization-ending dangers are themselves being dismantled or undermined, without a realistic effort to replace them with new or better management regimes. In effect, the international political infrastructure for controlling existential risk is degrading, leaving the world in a situation of high and rising threat."
But Fat Orange still expects his Nobel Peace Prize for not launching a reign of nuclear-tipped terror on Tehran.
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary.Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.
Title: The Trumpian technique
Post by: AGelbert on January 27, 2020, 01:37:35 pm
Well said, Surly. 👍
Trump's spirited baloney about "defending" people's "2nd Amendment rights" (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F_9HT4xZyDmh4%2FTOHhxzA0wLI%2FAAAAAAAAEUk%2FoeHDS2cfxWQ%2Fs200%2FSmiley_Angel_Wings_Halo.jpg&hash=13281f1944b60773bf12b29387b70be77cc1fe16) is a deliberate distraction worthy of the most cynical Soviet Union style propaganda efforts. It is an intrinsic part of the Orwellian method used to convince people you are ruthlesly exploiting that you are their "best friend and protector". (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-311013200859.png&hash=a7aaaa9f04c1e3e2c948723b5f8c13fe814dacd4)
😈 Trump knows the police and military can machine gun mow down any of these AR-15 toting MAGA suckers any time the police state considers them a "Brown Shirt nuisance" (SEE: what Hitler did ☠️ to his very well armed Brown Shirt supporters). The MAGA gun toting crowd are being used by Trump for Trump, period. Anyone believing (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-270117175421.png&hash=cf39e823dd9156833bfa885808a876bf518bd0d6) Trump gives a rat's ass about Constitutionally protected rights and/or freedoms for anyone not part of the wealthy parasitical class is worthy of pity.
You know, I'm not sure whether the big corporate move to rebrand corporate malfeasance as "principled behavior" began in the 1980's or earlier, but this Orwellian method of deliberate brazen mindfuck, boldly pushed in order to overcome any pesky obstacles to 'business as usual', certainly became the norm during the Reagan asssault on logic, common sense, common decency and the Constitutionally Mandated Government Obligation to provide for the welfare of we-the-people.
It is true that Newt Gingrich with his "Never admit fault, never back down, but instead double down" fascistoid mantra came a decade or so later, but the pattern for this Government level legerdemain seemed to have been set during the Reagan years.
The ironic thing about this Orwellian method is that, even as the Soviet Union, infamous for its "everything is just peachy" pitch to the downtrodden in slave labor jobs, dissolved, the U.S. was embracing this government legitimacy destroying technique. The (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-130418203402.gif&hash=b2691028ba683a0039a5811f5775c68d7ccae01c) corporate leaders in the U.S., sometime during the 1980s, had already decided that if their abusive behavior was becoming public, the "solution" was to hire an ad agency to do some perception management, rather than stop the abusive practices that provided handsome profits (over people and planet).
The (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fstyles%2Frenewablerevolution%2Ffiles%2F809_84688966.jpeg&hash=7f3e84eea23fef901b7df618784dc2005290f591) Trumpian (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F2%2F3-080419191019.png&hash=a449294ee6fe2dfdea44c1c501f4439b9ac69c26) technique is the (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-250817135149.gif&hash=b4a8748d7cf56a31dd0a6aae5828ed2c1ac2815c) latest iteration of this (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2Fthumb_3-070115205550.bmp&hash=954ecd048188876741ab48a48f4eee644baa39ec) CRAP. It destroyed the Soviet Union. It is well on the way to destroying the United States.
But, due to CatastrophicClimate change, there are bigger stakes here.
Title: Vexit?
Post by: Surly1 on January 30, 2020, 06:53:49 am
The rest of the country has likely not heard of this. But state conservatards who have had things their own way for the last 30 years, knuckling the cities for revenues while building four lane roads through the middle of nowhere because they could, are restive about the future of life in a now-blue state. As you read some of the quotes, the spluttering hysteria is palpable.
I say, let them go. Let them get a taste of self-sufficiency and public service, West Virginia-style. I lived in WV for five years; the state is broke, and things have only done downhill in the last 40 years. Those four lane roads will be the last they see.
(https://i.ytimg.com/vi/9u_L0aWMby0/hqdefault.jpg) When you drive across Virginia, you generally travel Rt. 522. It is four lanes in Virginia, and immediately narrows to two lanes when it hits the WV state line. Get used to it, Vexiteers!
What the Hell Is Vexit? (http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/01/get-to-know-vexit-a-really-bad-idea.html)
(https://pixel.nymag.com/imgs/daily/intelligencer/2020/01/29/29-jim-justice.w700.h467.2x.jpg) West Virginia governor Jim Johnson. Photo: Chris Jackson/AP/Shutterstock
Sarah Jones Jan. 29, 2020
In a partnership that befits our deeply stupid time, Governor Jim Justice of West Virginia has teamed up with Jerry Falwell Jr., Liberty University president and Florida hotelier, to advance a new project. Both men have come out in support of Vexit, an effort to expand the state of West Virginia by convincing some parts of Virginia to secede. According to Justice, Virginians unhappy with their Democratic state government ought to join their counties to West Virginia, where the GOP still holds sway. “If you are out there, no matter where you may be, Virginia or wherever you may be, as an individual or as a business or whatever, West Virginia is waiting for you with open arms,” he said. A charming proposal!
Falwell, meanwhile, mostly seems concerned about his university’s bottom line. In his remarks, he singled out a legislative proposal that would, in his words, end public aid to “thousands of online students attending private colleges, while increasing aid for more affluent resident students.” As Religion News Service noted in a piece on the press conference, online students make up a massive portion of Liberty’s overall student body, and a reduction to their numbers would have significant financial consequences for the university, and for Falwell himself.
Obviously, there is a lot going on here, and it is all bad. As a product of southwestern Virginia, I do not regard our brothers and sisters across the border with any sort of hostility. West Virginia is a beautiful state with a proud history of militant labor action — a lot to celebrate! But Vexit itself is best understood as the symptom of a broader reactionary backlash to Virginia’s new status as a blue state. I’ll explain:
Why Is This Happening Now? Republicans in the West Virginia legislature have introduced two separate resolutions encouraging Virginians to secede. As reported by the Richmond Times-Dispatch, one resolution resurrects a 158-year-old invitation to Frederick County in northwestern Virginia. Another, which awaits further action by the House of Delegates, encourages Virginians at large to vote to make their counties West Virginian territory.
Vexit draws on real history. Before the Civil War, the two states were actually one. After Virginia seceded, West Virginia split off in order to remain in the Union. But now West Virginia Republicans are capitalizing on pockets of regional hostility to the Virginia’s Democratic-controlled state government. In rural, predominantly white areas of Virginia, President Trump remains extremely popular, and recent proposals to tighten state gun laws have provoked outrage. In an interview with Glenn Beck recounted by the West Virginia MetroNews, Gary Howell, a West Virginia delegate who backs Vexit, described these areas as natural extensions of his state. “If you look at a lot of the people in the Shenandoah and the Blue Ridge and even the south side of Virginia, they’re very similar culturally, demographically, and a lot of the geography is the same,” Howell said. Put more directly, Vexit is a plea for Herrenvolk democracy, a territory where one ethnic group and one ethnic group alone holds power unchallenged.
Do West Virginians Want This? Obviously some of them do, but most Vexit supporters seem to serve in the state legislature or occupy the governor’s mansion. West Virginia is not home to a mass movement calling for the expansion of its borders. The last time West Virginians organized en masse, it was to demand fair pay and better benefits for public school teachers. The priorities of the voting public thus appear to be at odds with those of Governor Justice.
Do Virginians Want This? At least two: Falwell, and right-wing activist Rick Boyer, described by the Times-Dispatch as an attorney and former elected official. But support hasn’t spread to the state Republican party. Emmett Hanger, a Republican state senator, asked the Richmond paper if Vexit supporters were performing “a comedy routine.”
The idea could be popular with some voters. The sense of alienation some Virginians feel in relation to state government is not new, and there is some validity to the sentiment. Communities in western Virginia — like the one I grew up in — are often markedly poorer than those in northern Virginia. The decline of the coal industry left the state’s westernmost counties, which border West Virginia and Kentucky, in particularly dire shape. But that doesn’t mean the people who live there are ready for Vexit. Though there is no polling on the matter, the lack of any mass movement again indicates that most people prefer to remain part of Virginia. A few may want separation of some kind, but they tend to have more creative suggestions. As one gentleman commented on the Facebook page of my hometown news station, “I’d make the cut off line right up to the outskirts of Roanoke County and push the rest of the state boundaries into parts of DC and parts of Maryland and there you go, a 51st state to govern as Demo-comunistic [sic] as you please! Leave Virginia and the original laws and amendments alone!”
Vexit may yet catch on in some extremist circles, especially online. We’ve seen something similar with Calexit, a proposal to make California its own independent country, and with the New California movement, which the Guardian recently described as “a far-fetched initiative to have rural conservative counties declare independence from the rest of the state.” Neither effort can boast much popular support. Virginia’s urban-rural divide is significant, and Democrats should be worried about bridging it. But there’s no reason right now to think that rural Virginians are ready for a clean break.
Is Vexit a Good Idea? Absolutely not. I could get down with, say, the People’s Republic of Greater Appalachia. But that project requires some consultation with our friends in Kentucky, Tennessee, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Georgia. And it shouldn’t be a white homeland, which is what goblins like Gary Howell seemingly want. A thumbs down for Vexit. Goblins out!
Title: Vexit is a Tea Party (desperation) Gambit
Post by: AGelbert on January 30, 2020, 11:58:46 am
It sounds like an act of desperation by the Fascist Republican Reactionaries now that Virginiia has sane government. 8)
Title: The American Dream
Post by: Surly1 on February 11, 2020, 08:40:48 am
Not sure Yves Smith is "naive."
Developing Countries Showing America Up (https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2020/02/developing-countries-showing-america-up.html)
Posted on February 11, 2020 by Yves Smith
A cynical school of thought holds that one reason America makes borders so unpleasant is to deter US citizens from traveling so as to preserve our sense of exceptionalism in the face of countervailing evidence. For instance, one colleague, a former city planner, came back from a vacation in the south of France and raved about how terrific the roads were. The Gilet Janues would assure him that in rural areas, they were neglected, but my contact’s point was that even in affluent parts of the US, you couldn’t find ones on a par with the ones he drove on his holiday. And I suspect that even the roads that are impediments to safe, fast driving in the depopulating parts of France are still better than those in Michigan.
But America is slipping even further. It used to be that it would come up short in infrastructure and social well being indicators compared to most European countries. We now have readers who are looking at what they see in the better parts of the developing world and are finding America coming up short.
Costa Rica has admittedly long been depicted as the Switzerland of Central America. It has become more and more popular with expats for at least the last 15 years. I visited there briefly on a client project in 1997. While the downtown section of San José looked worn, even there, the people on the street were neatly if modestly dressed. And when you went out to the suburbs, the country looked comfortable to prosperous, and it seemed as if citizens made an effort to keep their neighborhoods well kept, even in non-tourist sections. Oh, and the food was terrific, particularly the fish.
A more recent sighting from Eureka Springs:
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Just returned from deep southern rural Costa Rica to rural N.W. Arkansas. Peace and quiet almost everywhere I go now. Unless it’s my own noise (music) which could not bother another.
The entire trip was quite the reminder of just how third world we the peeps are nowadays.
Internet was so much better there. No satellite dishes, except as modifications to them for use as roadside trash receptacles. Still no rural wired net in the U.S.. Cell signals were strong everywhere, yet I never saw people glued to a phone.
Public trans, brand new buses all up and down the countryside. Even many miles down dirt roads. Fantastic bus stops. No such thing as public transit in rural U.S.
A lot of people drive efficient 150cc motorcycles. The large bus stops seem intentionally oversized by design to co-serve as a place to pull under during rain. How civilized.
Grocery stores with real food everywhere. No chain stores best I can tell. Unless in larger cities. And a shockingly smaller amount of trash packaging. I would say for the same amount of weekly grocery consumption I generate at least three if not five times more trash in the U.S. Seemingly every few hundred people, never more than a mile, usually much less, have a store with produce and meats. I’m seven miles from a dollar store, two more miles to actual groceries. About the same population density in both places.
And then there is health care for all vs give me all you got, we don’t give a fk.
Don’t know but would wager their water tests much better across the board as well. Nobody consumes plastic water bottles. Even very remote beaches had little shards of plastic all along the water line though. No escaping it.
Schools did not look like prison at all. Kids were kids, with cookie stands, a work ethic, bicycles, laughter, no apparent phones, lots of soccer, some dirt on their fingers and toes. And laughter.
Poor to middle working class people did not look miserable, unhealthy, guarded and or afraid.
The chickens, dogs and cats were abundant though not overly so, well fed, healthy, roaming free.
Police were calm, not dressed to kill with body language fitting the peace officer description. CR has no military.
We have a choice and we are making so many bad ones. I feel like so many of my fellow US citizens don’t get this fact. And it’s a shortcoming of Sanders types by failing to paint this vision/picture. Even they are trapped in the downward spiral, knowing no other way from experience.
And Expat2uruguay seems to have adapted well to her big relocation. Ironically her big lament seems to be the cuisine isn’t terribly inspired and fish is hard to come by, but other advantages of living there seem to more than make up for it. From a recent report:
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Since relocating to Uruguay I was diagnosed with Stage 2B breast cancer. There was no bill whatsoever for the surgery. The entire cost of my entire treatment, including my monthly membership fee of $60 a month, was under $2,700.
That total includes 16 months of the monthly fee and all of my treatments, including six months of chemotherapy, 6 weeks of daily radiation, co-pays for medications and tests, $7 co-pays for doctor visits, and additional testing and consultation for heart damage caused by the chemotherapy. I also had a couple of problems during the chemotherapy that required visits to the emergency room, a four day hospital stay because of ultra-low defenses, and consultation in my home a couple times. They did a really good job, and they’re very good at cancer treatment here.
But the very best thing about Uruguay is the peacefulness, the tranquility, the laid-back approach to life. My stress levels are way down from when I lived in the US.
Several factors are likely at work. One is, as we’ve pointed out from the very outset of this site, that unequal societies are unhappy and unhealthy societies. Even those at the top pay a longevity cost due to having shallower social networks, having a nagging awareness that most if not all of their supposed friends would dump them if they took a serious income hit (can’t mix with the same crowd if you can’t fly private class, can’t support the right charities, can’t throw posh parties) and having to think about or even building panic rooms.
Another is the precarity even at high but below top 1% levels: job insecurity, the difficulty of getting kids into good colleges and then paying for it when they do, along with attempting to save enough for retirement. Even with steering clear of costly divorces and medical emergencies, the supposed basics of a middle or upper middle income lifestyle add up in light of escalating medical, education, and housing costs. And then some feel they are entitled to or need to give their kids perks in line with their self image of their status, like fancy vacations.
And we don’t need to elaborate on how hard it is for people who are struggling to get by. But it’s not hard to see that the status and sometimes money anxiety at the top too readily translates into abuses of those further down the food chain to buck up their faltering sense of power and self worth. Anglo-style capitalism is often mean-spirited and that tendency seems particularly strong now.
Specifically, which developing countries that readers know well give the US a lifestyle run for the money? And I don’t mean for for US expats bearing strong dollars but for ordinary people. And where do they fall short?
Title: Happiness and The American Dream
Post by: Surly1 on February 11, 2020, 08:44:35 am
Originally published on the Doomstead Diner on February 9, 2020
“It’s not primarily a measure of whether one laughed or smiled yesterday, but how one feels about the course of one’s life."
― Jeffrey Sachs, co-creator, World Happiness Survey
What is happiness? Like the judge who couldn't define **** but said he'd know itn when he saw it, most of us don't have a specific definition of happiness; we know it when we feel it, and often use the term to describe a range of positive emotions, including joy, pride, contentment, and gratitude. If someone asks you on a scale of one to ten how happy you are in six different areas, would you be able to accurately respond? That's what we're discussing this week. We're not talking about global temperature measurements, or oil exports, GNP, P&L, or anything that can be measured, mapped and plotted on a spreadsheet; we're talking about how people report satisfaction in their lives.
You wouldn't think a subject like "happiness" could be contentious. Happiness might seem an elusive concept to quantify, but there is a science to it backed by thousands of individual assessments and statistical analysis.
“I feel that the American Dream can be achieved best in the Nordic countries, where every child no matter their background or the background of their families can become anything, because we have a very good education system,” she said. “We have a good health-care and social welfare system that allows anybody to become anything. This is probably one of the reasons why Finland gets ranked the happiest country in the world.”
She is justifiably proud, as this is the second year in a row Finland has claimed the top spot in this UN survey, followed by Denmark, Norway and Iceland. These assertions caused as minor uproar in the Diner Forum. One respondent harrumphed,
Doesn't know **** about the American dream.
Finland is a country with a population smaller than Greater Houston……..and……. a lot of recent immigrants……and…… a birth rate for native Finns that is falling through the floor. Let's see how they look in 30 years.
Well, it's true that Finland doesn't have a military that consumes 58 percent of their national budget to defend the prerogatives of a crust of global profiteers, munitions-exporters and bloodsuckers. Let's see what WE look like in 30 years.
Mr. Carlin would like a word:
The mass of Americans are two-three paychecks away from an economic abyss, which may have something to do with the fact that in the same survey, since 2013 Americans have plummeted from 13th to 19th place. It would be convenient to lay this at the feet of Trump, because, as the study's authors note, "unhappier people seem to hold more populist and authoritarian attitudes." But it also corresponds with an increasing amount of time US adolescents spend interacting with electronic devices, contributing to increased anxiety and declines in happiness, as well as increasing rates of addiction (more on that below.)
The report states that from 1946 to 1970, the U.S. was quite literally the world's model for happiness, with gross domestic product ranking climbed steadilyand a burgeoning American middle class.
Testifying to Congress in the Clinton years, which now seem as remote as medieval China, Fed Chair Alan Greenspan explained the success of the boom economy he gratefully took credit for as being based on “growing worker insecurity.” Thus was born "the precariat." In Greenspan's terms, insecure working people are unlikely to make demands. Cowed, compliant workers are good for business, good for investors. For happiness? Not so much.
… If working people are insecure, if they’re part of the precariat, living precarious existences, they’re not going to make demands, they’re not going to try to get better wages, they won’t get improved benefits. We can kick ’em out, if we don’t need ’em. And that’s what’s called a “healthy” economy, technically speaking.
Not much of a recipe for happiness. Results of the World Happiness Report fly right in the face of the "Team America: **** Yeah" crowd because they put the lie to the myth of American exceptionalism.
The World Happiness Report 2019 is an annual publication of the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It grades 156 countries in categories including generosity, social programs, freedom, corruption and income. The Report contains articles, and rankings of national happiness based on respondent's ratings of their own lives.
The most commonly cited economic statistics — GDP, household income and unemployment — focus on work product economic output, and consumption: their output, what they spend, how much they make and whether they have a job. None of these metrics tell us anything about people's happiness.
The Report is a survey of the state of global happiness that ranks countries by how happy their citizens perceive themselves to be. This year’s World Happiness Report focuses on happiness and the community: how happiness has evolved over the past dozen years, with a focus on the technologies, social norms, conflicts and government policies that have driven those changes.
Leaders can no longer assume that the lives of those in their countries improve with a rise in GDP, as was shown in the Arab Uprising countries where GDP was increasing but the ratings of their lives trended downward ahead of the unrest.
Leaders need to follow much more traditional metrics to effectively track and lead the progress of their nation. The World Happiness Report is the first report to rank countries by how their populations feel.
Of course, if you are in charge of a country and you tendency runs towards the authoritarian, calling on your domestic, heavily armed freicorps to intimidate your domestic opponents, none of this will matter.
The rankings are based on answers to the main life evaluation question asked in the poll. This is called the Cantril ladder: it asks respondents to think of a ladder, with the best possible life for them being a 10, and the worst possible life being a 0. They are then asked to rate their own current lives on that 0 to 10 scale.
The UN uses a sample size of 2,000 to 3,000 per country, and claim it is large enough to give a good estimate at the national level. The scores are instead based on individuals’ own assessments of their lives, and a reasponable person should assume people by the tens of thousands can report accurately about the happiness in their own lives. Jeffrey Sachs, co-creator of the World Happiness Report and a professor at Columbia University, writes
The surge of interest in happiness and public policy owes much to the case of the United States. Professor Richard Easterlin (1974) famously noted 45 years ago that happiness in the US had remained unchanged from 1946 to 1970 despite the significant rise of GDP per person. This finding became known as the "Easterlin Paradox." It has continued to hold true until today. Indeed, the average life evaluation in the United States, as measured by the Cantril ladder, has declined during the past dozen years, from 7.2 in 2006 to 6.9 in 2018, despite ongoing U.S. economic growth.
As I noted in last year’s World Happiness Report (Sachs, 2018), the long-term rise in US income per person has been accompanied by several trends adverse to subjective well-being (SWB): worsening health conditions for much of the population; declining social trust; and declining confidence in government. Whatever benefits in SWB might have accrued as the result of rising incomes seem to have been offset by these adverse trends. This year, I propose a common driver of many of America’s social maladies: a mass-addiction society…
This year's report provides sobering evidence of how addictions are causing considerable unhappiness and depression in the U.S…. Addictions come in many forms, from substance abuse to gambling to digital media. The compulsive pursuit of substance abuse and addictive behaviors is causing severe unhappiness. Government, business, and communities should use these indicators to set new policies aimed at overcoming these sources of unhappiness.
There is more, much more to this report, and the curious should follow the links below to explore the report and its methodology, the full analysis of which will require a far better statistician than me.
But it is important to remember that, in the words of Abraham Lincoln, "People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
Surly1 is an administrator and contributing author to Doomstead Diner. He is the author of numerous rants, screeds and spittle-flecked invective here and elsewhere. He lives a quiet domestic existence in Southeastern Virginia with his wife Contrary.Descended from a long line of people to whom one could never tell anything, all opinions are his and his alone, because he paid full retail for everything he has managed to learn.
Title: Re: The American Dream
Post by: AGelbert on February 11, 2020, 05:14:59 pm
As your post correctly exposes, the so-called "American Dream" has hitherto been a pro-Capitalism propaganda device cleverly disguised as a "social justice motivated promise of society wide reduction of harmful inequality in a democracy" (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2F2.bp.blogspot.com%2F_9HT4xZyDmh4%2FTOHhxzA0wLI%2FAAAAAAAAEUk%2FoeHDS2cfxWQ%2Fs200%2FSmiley_Angel_Wings_Halo.jpg&hash=13281f1944b60773bf12b29387b70be77cc1fe16).
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... Abraham Lincoln, "People are about as happy as they make up their minds to be."
Lincoln's quote is interesting. Upon reading it I thought of the fact that he was an excellent lawyer that knew quite well how to make the best of a bad case.
For too many who, despite their honest and sincere hard working efforts to improve their lot in life, have experienced nearly (and often totally) insurmountable difficulties due to being the victims of work place tyranny in an unjust, greedy and uncaring Capitalist system, Lincoln's words sound too much like 'blame the victim" sophistry.
I will give Lincoln the benefit of the doubt and hope that he would not have included slaves and other abused individuals in society in the group who could could be happy or not by the "force of their will".
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This year's report provides sobering evidence of how addictions are causing considerable unhappiness and depression in the U.S….
The above statement makes the assumption that addictions are a CAUSE of considerable unhappiness and depression without recognizing the fact that considerable unhappiness and depression is the major CAUSE of addiction.
Of course addicts make life miserable for themselves and those around them. The major underlying cause of addiction (and many other social woes) is a society that values greed more than altruism. American society is generally uncaring by Capitalist DESIGN.
Greed is the CAUSE. The American epidemic of diseases of despair are all part of the EFFECT. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-040718162656-14241872.gif&hash=6c39a3206e2b2a3d652adee626b5eee8ab5b15bf)
Title: The American Dream
Post by: AGelbert on June 17, 2021, 02:04:44 pm
(https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-191017143841.jpeg&hash=21f142befe4ed82f10ef0bdba11c22bbd3051289) Agelbert NOTE: This important population demographics data, originally posted by Surly on May 16, 2019, has been moved to this topic because it has greater relevance here. The information provided is even more pertinent now than it was two years ago. (https://renewablerevolution.createaforum.com/proxy.php?request=http%3A%2F%2Frenewablerevolution.createaforum.com%2Fgallery%2Frenewablerevolution%2F3-250817121424.gif&hash=384c17a4d2be4831084933b91808f8a60f73f7f5)
Snapping the Spine of Uncle Cracker
The furious white nationalism of the Trumpist right in this country is the attempt to forestall demographic destiny, which is unlikely, as the article demonstrates. Various schemes for voter suppression, census intimidation, near-random execution. of nonwhites by uniformed police (as a matter of state-sponsored terror sanctioned by a nod, a wink and almost never any consequences for killer cops), will shore up white dominance for a generation, but won't do it forever.
If the Republiconfederates thought about it, they would be attempting to insure that this was a nation of laws rather than men so that their descendants would be treated equitably. But no one in this country engages in thinking about anything except making the quarter, so it is probably unfair to single outright wingers for being guilty of short-term thinking. Instead, they line up in unthinking support of El Jefe, because they are terrified of opposing him, the getting primaried from the right.
The US white majority will soon disappear forever (https://theconversation.com/the-us-white-majority-will-soon-disappear-forever-115894)
Dudley Poston, Professor of Sociology, Texas A&M University
Rogelio Sáenz, Professor of Demography, The University of Texas at San Antonio
*****
Since the settlement of Jamestown in 1607 and the start of the Colonial period, the U.S. has been predominantly white.
But the white share of the U.S. population has been dropping, from a little under 90% in 1950 to 60% in 2018. It will likely drop below 50% in another 25 years.
White nationalists want America to be white again. But this will never happen. America is on its way to becoming predominantly nonwhite.
Who is white?
The U.S. federal government uses two questions to measure a person’s race and ethnicity. One asks if the person is of Hispanic origin, and the other asks about the person’s race.
Whites were not the first people to settle in what is now the U.S. The first immigrants were a people known today as American Indians and Alaskan natives, also commonly referred to as Native Americans. They arrived in North America around 14,000 years ago.
When Christopher Columbus arrived in America in 1492, there were around 10 million American Indians living in the lands north of Mexico. But by the 1800s their numbers had dwindled to about 1 million. They are now the smallest race group in the U.S.
The first sizable stream of immigrants to what is now the U.S. were whites from England. Their arrival at Plymouth in 1620 in search of religious freedom marked the start of large waves of whites coming to this land.
When the U.S. was established as a country in 1776, whites comprised roughly 80% of the population. The white share rose to 90% in 1920, where it stayed until 1950.
Declining numbers
The proportion of whites in the U.S. population started to decline in 1950. It fell to gradually over the years, eventually reaching just over 60% in 2018 – the lowest percentage ever recorded.
Although the majority of the U.S. population today is still white, nonwhites account for more than half of the populations of Hawaii, the District of Columbia, California, New Mexico, Texas and Nevada. And, in the next 10 to 15 years, these half dozen “majority-minority” states will likely be joined by as many as eight other states where whites now make up less than 60% of the population.
Census Bureau projections show that the U.S. population will be “majority-minority”sometime between 2040 and 2050. Our research suggests that this will happen around 2044. Indeed, in 2020, there are projected to be more nonwhite children than white children in the U.S.
The nonwhite population is growing more rapidly than the white population. Minorities accounted for 92% of the U.S. population growth between 2010 and 2018, with Latinos comprising just under half of the nation’s overall growth.
Behind the trends
Why are the numbers of white people declining, and why are nonwhite numbers increasing? The answer is basic demography: births, deaths and immigration.
White women have an average of 1.7 children over their lifetimes, while Latina women average 2.2. The total fertility rates of blacks, Asians and American Indians are in between. So whites have fewer births than all nonwhite groups.
There are also big differences in age structure. Sixty-two percent of Latinas 15 years of age or older are of childbearing age. Only 42% of white women fall into this group. Latinos also have lower mortality rates than whites. Demographers call this the “epidemiological paradox.”
In 2015, for the first time, there were more white deaths in the U.S. than white births. Indeed, as of 2016, in 26 states, whites were dying faster than they were being born. The states with more white deaths than white births include California, Florida, Pennsylvania and Michigan.
How about immigration to the U.S.? Of the more than 43 million foreign-born people living in the U.S. in 2015, 82% originated in Latin America and Asia. Only 11% were born in Europe. So whites don’t increase their representation in the U.S. via immigration.
The future of whiteness
The aging white population, alongside a more youthful minority population, especially in the case of Latinos, will result in the U.S. becoming a majority-minority country in around 2044.
In her research on working-class whites in rural Louisiana, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild observes that many whites feel frustrated and betrayed, like they are now strangers in their own land. In Trump, they saw a white man who brought them together to take their country back. Hochschild points out that at a Trump campaign rally, whites held signs with slogans such as “TRUMP: MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN” and “SILENT MAJORITY STANDS WITH TRUMP.”
The decline of the white share of the U.S. population could result in the shifting of racial boundaries to assign whiteness to some people of color so as to bolster the white numbers.
This has happened before. Groups that were initially seen as very different from whites, such as the Irish and Italians, once sought to distance themselves from blacks, and eventually were accepted as white.
In addition, although persons of Mexican origin largely identified racially as white, in the 1930 census “Mexican” was used as a racial category, at a time when there was heightened hostility against Mexicans due to their growing population size and the Great Depression.
But any future changes cannot override demography. The U.S. will never be a white country again.
On August 15, an autopsy found that financier Jeffrey Epstein suffered multiple breaks in his neck bones, according to two people familiar with the findings. This raised questions regarding the mystery about the circumstances around his death. Specifically, his hyoid bone was broken,
Hong Kong protesters may be in for an electrifying experience after Chinese riot police were pictured training with 'terrifying giant fork devices' designed to subdue humans and pin them to the ground, according to the 
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t's Not Just the News That's Fake--Everything's Fake
Photo Illustration by Alicia Tatone[/caption]
Fascist Republican Reactionaries now that Virginiia has sane government. 8)
