jayhanson | Organisms evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power.
With greater power, there is greater opportunity to allocate energy to
reproduction and survival, and therefore, an organism that captures and
utilizes more energy than another organism in a population will have a
fitness advantage.
Individual organisms cooperate to form social groups
and generate more power. Differential power generation and accumulation
result in a hierarchical group structure.
“Politics” is power used by social organisms to
control others. Not only are human groups never alone, they cannot
control their neighbors’ behavior. Each group must confront the real
possibility that its neighbors will grow its numbers and attempt to take
resources from them. Therefore, the best political tactic
for groups to survive in such a milieu is not to live in ecological
balance with slow growth, but to grow rapidly and be able to fend off
and take resources from others[5].
The inevitable “overshoot”
eventually leads to decreasing power attainable for the group with
lower-ranking members suffering first. Low-rank members will form
subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power from
higher-ranking individuals who will resist by forming their own
coalitions to maintain it. Meanwhile, social conflict will intensify as
available power continues to fall.
Eventually, members of the weakest group (high or low rank) are forced to “disperse.”[6] Those members of the weak group who do not disperse are killed,[7]
enslaved, or in modern times imprisoned. By most estimates, 10 to 20
percent of all the people who lived in Stone-Age societies died at the
hands of other humans.[8] The process of overshoot, followed by forced dispersal, may be seen as a sort of repetitive pumping action — a collective behavioral loop — that drove humans into every inhabitable niche of our planet.
Here is a synopsis of the behavioral loop described above:
Step 1. Individuals and groups evolved a bias to maximize fitness by maximizing power,
which requires over-reproduction and/or over-consumption of natural
resources (overshoot), whenever systemic constraints allow it.
Differential power generation and accumulation result in a hierarchical
group structure.
Step 2. Energy is always limited, so overshoot eventually leads to decreasing power available to the group, with lower-ranking members suffering first.
Step 3. Diminishing power availability
creates divisive subgroups within the original group. Low-rank members
will form subgroups and coalitions to demand a greater share of power
from higher-ranking individuals, who will resist by forming their own
coalitions to maintain power.
Step 4. Violent social strife eventually occurs among subgroups who demand a greater share of the remaining power.
Step 5. The weakest subgroups (high or
low rank) are either forced to disperse to a new territory, are killed,
enslaved, or imprisoned.
Step 6. Go back to step 1.
The above loop was repeated countless thousands of times during the millions of years that we were evolving[9].
This behavior is inherent in the architecture of our minds — is
entrained in our biological material — and will be repeated until we go
extinct. Carrying capacity will decline[10]
with each future iteration of the overshoot loop, and this will cause
human numbers to decline until they reach levels not seen since the
Pleistocene.
medium | What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking “clerks” and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.
But the problem is the one-eyed following the blind: these self-described members of the “intelligentsia” can’t find a coconut in Coconut Island, meaning they aren’t intelligent enough to define intelligence hence fall into circularities — but their main skill is capacity to pass exams written by people like them. With psychology papers replicating less than 40%, dietary advice reversing after 30 years of fatphobia, macroeconomic analysis working worse than astrology, the appointment of Bernanke who was less than clueless of the risks, and pharmaceutical trials replicating at best only 1/3 of the time, people are perfectly entitled to rely on their own ancestral instinct and listen to their grandmothers (or Montaigne and such filtered classical knowledge) with a better track record than these policymaking goons.
Indeed one can see that these academico-bureaucrats who feel entitled to run our lives aren’t even rigorous, whether in medical statistics or policymaking. They cant tell science from scientism — in fact in their eyes scientism looks more scientific than real science. (For instance it is trivial to show the following: much of what the Cass-Sunstein-Richard Thaler types — those who want to “nudge” us into some behavior — much of what they would classify as “rational” or “irrational” (or some such categories indicating deviation from a desired or prescribed protocol) comes from their misunderstanding of probability theory and cosmetic use of first-order models.) They are also prone to mistake the ensemble for the linear aggregation of its components as we saw in the chapter extending the minority rule.
The Intellectual Yet Idiot is a production of modernity hence has been accelerating since the mid twentieth century, to reach its local supremum today, along with the broad category of people without skin-in-the-game who have been invading many walks of life. Why? Simply, in most countries, the government’s role is between five and ten times what it was a century ago (expressed in percentage of GDP). The IYI seems ubiquitous in our lives but is still a small minority and is rarely seen outside specialized outlets, think tanks, the media, and universities — most people have proper jobs and there are not many openings for the IYI.
Beware the semi-erudite who thinks he is an erudite. He fails to naturally detect sophistry.
WaPo | There are lots of media stories revolving around campaign 2016. We
can thank CNN for many of them, including the drawbacks of placing
political hacks on the payroll of prominent news outlets and of spending
too much time airing Trump rallies. Fake news stories also have had a
glorious run, as have the ethics of reporting on the FBI and the Justice
Department; fact-checking organizations are entitled to a long
post-election vacation; and journalism professors will be referring for
decades to Election 2016 as a crucible of false equivalence.
The
media story of the 2016 campaign, however, is the anti-Semitic backlash
against journalists critical of Donald Trump. Political hacks at cable
networks, after all, aren’t exactly a new thing; nor are fake news
stories or overworked fact-checkers; and people have been griping about
false equivalence before Donald Trump came along and invalidated all
political comparisons. The horrific and voluminous anti-Semitic attacks
against journalists writing about Trump, however, are new and very
frightening. “I myself have never experienced something like this,” says
Eisner, 60, whose resume includes more than two decades at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“This” is the subject of a recent exhaustive report by the Anti-Defamation League under the title, “Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign.”
The study focused on the playground for this rash of hatred — Twitter,
that is. Between August 2015 and July 2016, it found that 800
journalists were targeted in almost 20,000 anti-Semitic tweets. The top
10 targets got it the worst, receiving 83 percent of the Twitter-born
anti-Semitism. As to the provenance of this madness, the ADL report
chooses its words with precision: “There is evidence that a considerable
number of the anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists originate with
people identifying themselves as Trump supporters, ‘conservatives’ or
extreme right-wing elements.”
buchanan | “If I don’t win, this will be the greatest waste of time, money and energy in my lifetime,” says Donald Trump.
Herewith, a dissent. Whatever happens Tuesday, Trump has made history and has forever changed American politics.
Though a novice in politics, he captured the Party of Lincoln with the largest turnout of primary voters ever, and he has inflicted wounds on the nation’s ruling class from which it may not soon recover.
Bush I and II, Mitt Romney, the neocons and the GOP commentariat all denounced Trump as morally and temperamentally unfit. Yet, seven of eight Republicans are voting for Trump, and he drew the largest and most enthusiastic crowds of any GOP nominee.
Not only did he rout the Republican elites, he ash-canned their agenda and repudiated the wars into which they plunged the country.
Trump did not create the forces that propelled his candidacy. But he recognized them, tapped into them, and unleashed a gusher of nationalism and populism that will not soon dissipate.
Whatever happens Tuesday, there is no going back now.
How could the Republican establishment advance anew the trade and immigration policies that their base has so thunderously rejected?
How can the GOP establishment credibly claim to speak for a party that spent the last year cheering a candidate who repudiated the last two Republican presidents and the last two Republican nominees?
Do mainstream Republicans think that should Trump lose a Bush Restoration lies ahead? The dynasty is as dead as the Romanovs.
The media, whose reputation has sunk to Congressional depths, has also suffered a blow to its credibility.
Its hatred of Trump has been almost manic, and WikiLeaks revelations of the collusion between major media and Clintonites have convinced skeptics that the system is rigged and the referees of democracy are in the tank.
But it is the national establishment that has suffered most.
The Trump candidacy exposed what seems an unbridgeable gulf between this political class and the nation in whose name it purports to speak.
aspendailynews | Building a wall between Mexico and the United States has been a
controversial issue in America's current election cycle, but in India,
it's a moot point. That's because the country has nearly completed a
2,500-mile, double barbed-wire fence all the way around its border with
Bangladesh and instituted a shoot-on-sight policy.
Indian officials say the wall was primarily built to prevent the
smuggling of narcotics, but it should also be noted that illegal
migration over the past two decades is a major issue. As Bangladesh
continues to be an epicenter for climate change refugees — with tens of
millions of people to be displaced by rising sea levels, drought and
famine — India's concern about a flood of immigrants into its country is
also a catalyst, points out "The Age of Consequences," a documentary
screening in Aspen on Monday, Nov. 7.
The film, which hit the festival circuit in the spring and is set to be
released theatrically in early 2017, looks at climate change through a
lens of global security, featuring interviews with several military
leaders and experts. It starts by examining the history of Syrian civil
war, which undoubtedly is rooted in centuries o conflict, yet
accelerated by a severe three-year drought in the mid-2000s which forced
1.5 million people from the agricultural countryside into major cities.
"A bunch of unemployed young men in a major city is not a recipe for
stability," says Brig. Gen. Stephen Curry, of the U.S. Marine Corps.
Today, Syria is the headquarters for the Islamic State, and they're
using resource scarcity to their advantage, the movie explains. With
less water, extremists leverage the resource to take over local
populations, as seen with ISIS' withholding of water storage facilities
in Syria.
Its findings have reverberated around the world, with the bleak news
that the 3,706 wildlife populations that are actively monitored by
scientists have declined by an average of 58% since 1970.
To blame? Agriculture, fisheries, mining and other human activities.
The report's authors predict that this figure will reach 67% by the end
of the decade.
How on earth has this happened? The answer that's often put forward
is that wildlife protection laws in the 'lawless' regions of the world
(meaning large swathes of Africa and Asia) are woefully inadequate.
But the true root of the problem is that nature is being monetized in
order to generate profits for investors and corporations in a process
that's facilitated by changes in the structure of global governance -
and it's about to get much worse.
Unless we get to grips with the real issues at stake, the destruction
of nature is all-but guaranteed, except in those few parts of the world
that are set aside as reserves for the enjoyment of wealthy visitors.
In 2011, for example, oil, gas and mineral exports from Africa were worth US$382 billion - more than eight times the value of development aid received by African countries in that year.
This money streams through mechanisms for cross-border accounting,
tax evasion and the repatriation of profits that are designed and
maintained by wealthy countries; facilitated by the institutional secrecy that is built into the global financial system; and controlled by corporate elites.
In a shadow economy that flows alongside the economy we see, commercial tax dodgers and criminals shift vast amounts
of money across international borders quickly, easily and largely
undetected. Hundreds of billions of dollars pour into western coffers
each year, from both streams, leaving little behind for those whose
lands and wildlife have been plundered.
1. Healthcare: a failed system doomed to bankrupt the nation.
2. Defense: a failed system of cartels and Pentagon fiefdoms that have saddled the nation with enormously costly failed weapons systems like the F-35 and the LCS.
4. Foreign policy: Iraq: a disaster. Afghanistan: a disaster. Libya: a disaster. Syria: a disaster. Need I go on?
5. Political governance: a corrupt system of self-serving elites, lobbyists, pay-to-play, corporate puppet-masters, and sociopaths who see themselves as above the law.
The sole output of America's Establishment/Ruling Elite is self-serving hubris.
In the open market, failed leadership has consequences.Customers vanish and the enterprise goes bankrupt, or shareholders and employees rally to fire the failed leadership.
In our state-cartel system, failed leadership only tightens its grip on the nation's throat.The Deep State can't be fired, nor does it ever stand for election. The two political parties are interchangeable, as are the politicos who race from fund-raiser to fund-raiser.
It's tempting to blame the individuals who inhale the wealth and power of our failed system, but it's the system, not the individuals, though a more corrupt, craven, self-serving lot cannot easily be assembled.
In broad brush, the Establishment and its Ruling Elite are still fighting World War II.The solution to the Great Depression and fascism was to cede complete control of the economy, the media and the social order to the central state.
Tens of millions of people were aggregated into vast industrial corporations or the Armed Forces. Everyone heard the same "news" and had the same limited choices of work and consumption.
It was easier for the federal government to control a handful of cartel-corporations and unions, and this cemented the state-cartel system that remains dominant today.
zerohedge | So what do pension fund managers do when perpetually declining interest rates continue to drive their funded status lower and lower despite one's return profile?
Well, there is little choice: one has to move further and further out
the yield curve in an attempt to match asset duration with that of one's liabilities. That, or
reach for the skies by buying the riskiest assets possible, and pray
for a home run.
Unfortunately, most pension fund managers better known as "dumb
money", are hardly star stockpickers. One such example is the fast
imploding Dallas Police & Fire Pension (DPFP), which covers nearly
10,000 police and firefighters, and whose troubles we first covered back in August,
is on the verge of collapse as its board and the City of Dallas
struggle to pitch benefit cuts to save the plan from complete failure.
According the the National Real Estate Investor, DPFP was once applauded
for it's "diverse investment portfolio" but turns out it may have all
been a fraud as the pension's former real estate investment manager, CDK
Realy Advisors, was raided by the FBI in April 2016 and the fund was
subsequently forced to mark down their entire real estate book by 32%,
thereby exposing just how great the risk truly is when pension funds
swing for the fence... and miss.
Thing only got worse, when news of the fund's woes spread, and as we reported in September,
Dallas police officers caught on to the ponzi and rushed to withdraw
retirement funds as quickly as possible before the whole system goes
bust. As reported by a local ABC affiliate, Dallas police officers are retiring at a record rate and opting for full cash withdrawals of their pension benefits as opposed to equal monthly distributions for life (apparently they don't think the fund will be around long enough to pay them for very long).
Through the first two weeks of September, there have been 21 Dallas
police officers who retired. Multiple sources told NBC 5 that commanders
are bracing for many more retirements over the next two weeks as well.
The Dallas Police Department did not foresee the volume of
retirements this month. In early August, Deputy Chiefs told city council
members in a presentation that they projected 14 retirements between
Aug. 9 and Oct. 1.
In short, declining returns, a mismatched asset-liability book, and a
surge in redemptions: the three things that no fund managers wants to
hear, let alone at the same time.
Unfortunately, for the Dallas Police & Fire Pension, it is now
too late, as none other than Dallas mayor Mike Rawlings appears to have
discovered. As ABC reports,
Mayor Rawlings told the state's Pension Review Board that recklessness
led to the financial crisis of the Dallas Police and Fire Pension Fund.
"This is much like a Bernie Madoff scheme, if you ask me," he said.
counterpunch | No matter which candidate wins the presidential election, this shadow
government is here to stay. Indeed, as recent documents by the FBI
reveal, this shadow government—also referred to as “The 7th Floor Group”—may well have played a part in who will win the White House this year.
To be precise, however, the future president will actually inherit not one but two shadow governments.
The first
shadow government, referred to as COG or Continuity of Government, is
made up of unelected individuals who have been appointed to run the
government in the event of a “catastrophe.” COG is a phantom menace
waiting for the right circumstances—a terrorist attack, a natural
disaster, an economic meltdown—to bring it out of the shadows, where it
operates even now. When and if COG takes over, the police state will
transition to martial law.
Yet it is the second shadow government—also
referred to as the Deep State—that poses the greater threat to freedom
right now. Comprised of unelected government bureaucrats, corporations,
contractors, paper-pushers, and button-pushers who are actually calling
the shots behind the scenes, this government within a government is the real reason “we the people” have no real control over our government.
The Deep State, which “operates according to its own compass heading
regardless of who is formally in power,” makes a mockery of elections
and the entire concept of a representative government.
So who or what is the Deep State?
It’s the militarized police, which have joined forces with state and
federal law enforcement agencies in order to establish themselves as a
standing army. It’s the fusion centers and spy agencies that have
created a surveillance state and turned all of us into suspects. It’s
the courthouses and prisons that have allowed corporate profits to take
precedence over due process and justice. It’s the military empire with
its private contractors and defense industry that is bankrupting the
nation. It’s the private sector with its 854,000 contract personnel
with top-secret clearances, “a number greater than that of
top-secret-cleared civilian employees of the government.” It’s what
former congressional staffer Mike Lofgren refers to as “a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies”:
the Department of Defense, the State Department, Homeland Security, the
CIA, the Justice Department, the Treasury, the Executive Office of the
President via the National Security Council, the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court, a handful of vital federal trial courts, and members
of the defense and intelligence committees.
aljazeera | Then there is the essential criminalisation of incoming migrants, a
result of the apparent US opinion that only American people, products,
and armies should be able to penetrate global borders at will.
This arrangement ensures high returns on human-smuggling operations that also contribute to cartel coffers.
Finally, as The Intercept explained
last year, billions of dollars in drug war assistance continue to flow
"with few exceptions" to Mexico despite "US government documents …
demonstrat[ing] that the United States is well aware that its support is
going to Mexican authorities connected to abuses".
The article went on to comment on the fact that Mexico had
"recently surpassed Colombia to become the largest customer for US
weapons in Latin America."
Objectively, if you are looking to protect rather than kill
people, the last thing you do is inject a bunch of money and weapons
into a landscape of lethally corrupt impunity.
petras-lahaine | Seven is a winning throw of the dice. But in our civil society, seven
now signifies the multi-thong scourge, the whip used by the Western
world as its instrument of punishment and, in response; seven signifies
Nemesis and her sisters, the inescapable agents of the West’s downfall.
The seven scourges of the Western world are used against the people
of Asia, Africa, Latin and North America. These whips are constructed,
wielded and unleashed especially by the US and the UK.
The seven sisters of Nemesis, the Erinyes, are the Furies who pursue
the injustices committed by the Western world against Asia, Latin
America, Africa and Europe. Those holding the scourge detest and fear
Nemesis and the Furies, but are incapable of destroying them. Try as
they might, their whip is in corrupt and feeble hands and, of course, it
can only follow their orders: Otherwise, it just twitches and remains
immobile, while Nemesis pursues the scourgers of humanity.
The Seven-Tailed Scourge of the Western World
The ‘whip’ wielded by the Western world, is used to punish
disobedient, ‘rebellious’ people, movements and states. Their multiple
lashes have bloodied countless generations and buried millions.
The seven scourges against humanity are unrepentant in their
promotion of ‘Western values’ – visible to the terrified world on the
red raw backs of oppressed people, their wounds flayed open by the
faceless drones proclaiming their gifts of … freedom and democracy.
Let us go forward now and describe the pillars holding up the Western empire, the seven-tailed scourge of humanity.
energyskeptic |no matter who is elected, we are going to enter hard times as
energy and natural resources decline at the same time as population is
still growing. If the carrying capacity of the U.S. is about 100 million
people without fossil fuels according to several scientists, and half
of Americans own guns, millions have military training, 80% of people
live within 200 miles of the coasts but 80% of calories come from the
corn and wheat belts of the interior: that doesn’t bode well.
In a collapse, just about everyone will wish their leaders and
culture were more like Fidel Castro and Cuba, because in a collapse,
only the most brutal and the most cooperative survive.
There are already three examples of what happens when oil is suddenly cut off:
Japan (brutal). This is why they started started WW II
North Korea (brutal)
Cuba (cooperative). Castro helped
in many ways, such as preventing middle-men from profiting off of the
disaster (i.e. truckers who tried to sell produce in Havana at 10 times
what they paid farmers had their trucks confiscated). Oxen were quickly
bred to replace tractors, organic farming instigated on a massive basis
not only in the country but in cities too, and so on. Yes there was
suffering, but not the millions of deaths as happened in North Korea.
Venezuela now seems to be in collapse with their own unique descent from a mix of bad leadership and culture.
Russia also had a downturn, and an article by Dmitry Orlov called “How Russians survived the collapse of the Soviet Union” explains why the Soviet culture was far better prepared than American culture to cope in a collapse.
If your local and state leaders have been bought and paid for by
the right-wing, they are enabling their rich psychopathic selfish
libertarian owners achieve their goal of no taxes and no regulations to
grow richer. How do you think that will end up? Stalin, Hitler, Mao and
Pol Pot come to mind.
After reading “White Trash” I learned that many of the rich see
most of us as disposable white trash (and have since America was founded
and on beyond to Europe). And that very few of us have ever had a
chance of getting rich, not even the first settlers who came to America.
This is because early on, wealthy Americans already owned most of the
land and had economies of scale that soon put middle-class and poor
farmers out of business, especially if they had free slave labor, and so
their property continued to grow.Now just 3% of Americans
own 85% of the land, the true source of wealth, and the 7 million farms
that existed in 1920 have dropped to 2 million farms, with just a few
percent of them that own thousands of acres producing most of the food
using economies of scale industrial techniques and equipment dependent
on fossil fuels, and continue to drive smaller farms bankrupt. Care for a
feudal society anyone?
It really will matter who is in power as collapse
accelerates. It wouldn’t surprise me if the goal of the right-wing rich
is to continue to live their lives as before by keeping the lion’s share
of energy and natural resources that’s still left, just as North Korean
leaders have done. And like Japan, start WW III and invade the Middle
East and Central/South America, where 3/4 of the remaining oil reserves
are, to steal their remaining oil.
petras-lahaine |Introduction: Wall Street and the Pentagon greeted
the onset of 2016 as a ‘banner year’, a glorious turning point in the
quest for malleable regimes willing to sell-off the most lucrative
economic resources, to sign off on onerous new debt to Wall Street and
to grant use of their strategic military bases to the Pentagon.
Brazil and Argentina, the most powerful and richest countries in
South America and the Philippines, Washington’s most strategic military
platform in Southeast Asia, were the objects of intense US political
operations in the run-up to 2016.
In each instance, Wall Street and the Pentagon secured smashing
successes leading to premature ejaculations over the ‘new golden era’ of
financial pillage and unfettered military adventures. Unfortunately,
the early ecstasy has turned to agony: Wall Street made easy entries and
even faster departures once the ‘honeymoon’ gave way to reality. ; The
political procurers persecuted center-left incumbents but, were soon to
have their turn facing prosecution. The political prostitutes, who had
decreed the sale of sovereignty, were replaced by nationalists who would
turn the bordello back into a sovereign nation state.
This essay outlines the rapid rise and dramatic demise of these
erstwhile ‘progeny’ of Wall Street and the Pentagon in Argentina and
Brazil, and then reviews Washington’s shock and awe as the newly elected
Philippines President Rodrigo Duterte embraced new ties with China
while proclaiming, ‘We are no one’s ‘tuta’ (puppy dog)!’
Time | In many ways this is the job Podesta has dreamed about for 20 years, though his first interaction with Hillary Clinton in her husband’s White House didn’t suggest it would ever happen. When Podesta was staff secretary, the then White House Chief of Staff Mack McLarty gave Podesta an extra job: handling the scandals of Bill Clinton’s first term. “You needed to isolate those as much as you can and keep the staff focused on the president and his agenda,” McLarty said. “I asked John to spear head that. He was superb.”
As part of that job, Podesta headed up the internal investigation on Travelgate, a scandal started when Hillary Clinton in May 1993 helped direct the firing of seven people from the travel office—usually non-political staff who continue through changes of Administrations. Ultimately, several investigations found the firings were inappropriate and most of the staff was reinstated. Podesta’s report was surprisingly critical of the First Lady’s role. Though no charges ever came of the scandal, the affair left Podesta in her doghouse. But the two policy wonks weren’t estranged for long. “When he left the White House he said to me he’d only go back for one job: Hillary’s chief of staff,” John’s brother Tony Podesta recalls. John Podesta declined to comment on the record for this story.
Podesta did eventually go back for other jobs, becoming Bill’s chief of staff in the final years—weathering Monica Lewinsky and impeachment with his friendships with both Clintons still in tact, that in itself a marvel. Though Podesta wouldn’t directly work for the Clintons again for years, he remained a key player in their orbit, publicly encouraging her to run for the Senate; helping raise money with his brother, with whom he co-founded Washington’s fourth largest lobbying firm, the Podesta Group; and then with the blessings and support of both Clintons launching his think tank, the Center for American Progress in 2003.
Guardian | The emails currently roiling the US presidential campaign
are part of some unknown digital collection amassed by the troublesome
Anthony Weiner, but if your purpose is to understand the clique of
people who dominate Washington today, the emails that really matter are
the ones being slowly released by WikiLeaks
from the hacked account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair John
Podesta. They are last week’s scandal in a year running over with
scandals, but in truth their significance goes far beyond mere scandal:
they are a window into the soul of the Democratic party and into the
dreams and thoughts of the class to whom the party answers.
The class to which I refer is not rising in angry protest; they are
by and large pretty satisfied, pretty contented. Nobody takes road trips
to exotic West Virginia to see what the members of this class looks
like or how they live; on the contrary, they are the ones for whom such
stories are written. This bunch doesn’t have to make do with a comb-over
TV mountebank for a leader; for this class, the choices are always
pretty good, and this year they happen to be excellent.
They are the comfortable and well-educated mainstay of our modern
Democratic party. They are also the grandees of our national media; the
architects of our software; the designers of our streets; the high
officials of our banking system; the authors of just about every plan to
fix social security or fine-tune the Middle East with precision
droning. They are, they think, not a class at all but rather the
enlightened ones, the people who must be answered to but who need never
explain themselves.
Let us turn the magnifying glass on them for a change, by sorting
through the hacked personal emails of John Podesta, who has been a
Washington power broker for decades. I admit that I feel uncomfortable
digging through this hoard; stealing someone’s email is a crime, after
all, and it is outrageous that people’s personal information has been
exposed, since WikiLeaks
doesn’t seem to have redacted the emails in any way. There is also the
issue of authenticity to contend with: we don’t know absolutely and for
sure that these emails were not tampered with by whoever stole them from
John Podesta. The supposed authors of the messages are refusing to
confirm or deny their authenticity, and though they seem to be real,
there is a small possibility they aren’t.
With all that taken into consideration, I think the WikiLeaks releases
furnish us with an opportunity to observe the upper reaches of the
American status hierarchy in all its righteousness and majesty.
truthdig | Thomas Frank’s writing about electoral politics and its impact on
American culture has been published for decades in such venues as
Harper’s Magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and in his 2004 book,
“What’s the Matter with Kansas?” In his latest book, “Listen Liberal:
Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?,” the journalist and
political analyst tackles the question of what changed within the
Democratic Party to make it become a “liberalism of the rich.”
“The Democratic Party itself has changed,” Frank told Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer during an episode of “Scheer Intelligence”
earlier this year. “What’s changed about them is the social class that
they answer to, that they respect, that they come from.”
The trend has gotten worse.
“Democrats look at Wall Street, and they see people like themselves,” he said in an interview with Scheer during the Democratic National Convention in July.
On Tuesday night, Frank joined Scheer at the University of Southern
California to discuss “Listen, Liberal” and his analysis of Hillary
Clinton during this election cycle, from her public views on inequality
in United States to her promises to tamp down greed on Wall Street.
Frank offered critiques of the Democratic Party’s abandonment of the
average working-class American, the Clintons—who signed off on welfare
reform that proved discriminatory—and the two-party system. He said:
Hillary has changed her position on issues many, many
times over the years, and some of the things she’s done that her husband
did that she had a hand in—she was a close adviser to her husband as
president—have been disastrous, had catastrophic effects on
people—welfare reform, for example. Every time Hillary says—and she says
it a lot—that her whole life has been about protecting children,
there’s an enormous counterexample, which is welfare reform, or what
they called reform. They abolished the welfare system in this country,
Hillary and her husband did. This is one of the cruelest things [...] It
was a New Deal program that they abolished. It was a cruel thing, it
was more or less an overtly racist thing, and to do that to the poorest
and weakest members of society—at the time, it just turned my stomach.
And it’s a little creepy that Hillary sees fit to represent herself as
the great defender of poor women and children because she manifestly is
not. And that’s one of many contradictions in Hillary Clinton’s record.
If you read the biographies of Hillary Clinton, if you watch a speech
by Hillary Clinton, if you watch the presentation of her life story
that they had at the Democratic National Convention, Hillary’s story is
all about virtue. She is good with a capital G. When she gave her
acceptance speech at the convention, she was wearing all white. She
likes to dress in all white; she is Joan of Arc. That is how she sees
herself. Her favorite saying that she quoted at the convention, it’s
this Methodist thing: Do all the good you can, all the ways you can, to
all the people you can, for as long as ever you can. She’s good, she’s
so good, she’s so virtuous, her heart’s in the right place, and every
biography of her emphasizes this intense sense of her goodness, her
virtues—her overpowering, 100-proof virtue. ... She is intensely good.
And yet, look at Libya, look at the welfare system in this country.
RT | In the second excerpt from the John Pilger Special, to be
exclusively broadcast by RT on Saturday, courtesy of Dartmouth Films,
Julian Assange accuses Hillary Clinton of misleading Americans about the
true scope of Islamic State’s support from Washington’s Middle East
allies.
In a 2014 email made
public by Assange’s WikiLeaks last month, Hillary Clinton, who had
served as secretary of state until the year before, urges John Podesta,
then an advisor to Barack Obama, to “bring pressure” on Qatar and Saudi Arabia,
“which are providing clandestine financial and logistic support to ISIL
[Islamic State, IS, ISIS] and other radical Sunni groups.”
Pilger also questioned Assange over increasingly frequent accusations
from the Clinton camp, and Western media, that WikiLeaks is looking to
swing next week’s US presidential election in favor of Donald Trump –
perhaps at Russia’s behest.
But Assange dismissed the prospect of
Trump, who is behind in the polls, winning as unlikely – and not
necessarily due to his standing with the electorate.
“My
analysis is that Trump would not be permitted to win. Why do I say that?
Because he has had every establishment off his side. Trump does not
have one establishment, maybe with the exception of the Evangelicals, if
you can call them an establishment,” said Assange. “Banks,
intelligence, arms companies, foreign money, etc. are all united behind
Hillary Clinton. And the media as well. Media owners, and the
journalists themselves.”
RT | Last July, the DOJ – under Clinton/Obama asset Loretta Lynch -
decided not to prosecute anyone on Emailgate. And yet FBI director Comey
– who nonetheless stressed Hillary’s “extreme carelessness” – turbo-charged his no-denial mode on another investigation, as in the FBI “sought to refocus the Clinton Foundation probe.”
Soon we had Clinton Foundation FBI investigators trying to get access
to all the emails turned over in the Emailgate investigation. The East
District of New York refused it. Very important point; up to 2015, guess
who was the US attorney at the East District; Clinton/Obama asset
Lynch.
Enter an extra layer of legalese. Less than two months ago,
the Clinton Foundation FBI investigators discovered they could not have
access to any Emailgate material that was connected to immunity
agreements.
But then, roughly a month ago, another FBI team captured the by now
famous laptop shared by Huma and Wiener - using a warrant allowing only a
probe on Weiner’s sexting of a 15-year-old girl. Subsequently they
found Huma Abedin emails at all her accounts – from Humaabedin@yahoo.com to the crucial huma@clintonemail.com.
This meant not only that Huma was forwarding State Dept. emails to her
private accounts, but also that Hillary was sending emails from the “secret” clintonemail.com to Huma at yahoo.com.
No one knew for sure, but some of these emails might be duplicates of
those the Clinton Foundation FBI investigators could not access because
of the pesky immunity agreements.
What’s established by now is that the metadata in the Huma/Wiener
laptop was duly examined. Now picture both teams of FBI investigators –
Clinton Foundation and pervert Wiener – comparing notes. And then they
decide Huma’s emails are “relevant”.
Key questions apply; and the most pressing is how the emails were deemed “relevant”
if the investigators could only examine the metadata. What matters is
that Comey certainly was made aware of the content of the emails – a
potential game-changer. That’s why one of my sources insists his decision to go public came from above.
The other key question now is whether the DOJ – via Kadzik? -
will once again thwart another investigation, this time on the Clinton
Foundation. Senior, serious FBI agents won’t take that – massive
euphemism – kindly.
The FBI has been on the Clinton Foundation for over a year. Now, arguably, they are loaded with evidence – and they won’t quit. Winning the presidency now seems to be the least of Hillary Clinton’s Bonfire of Scandals’ problems.
thefederalist | Why is Hillary Clinton likely to be our next president, rather than the next inmate at FCI Aliceville? A big part of the answer involves a corrupt, compromised, politicized federal government that protects powerful lawbreakers like Hillary from being imprisoned or even prosecuted. If you or I had committed even one-tenth of the crimes Clinton committed in her tenure as secretary of State alone, we’d be watching the sun rise through a set of bars for the next few decades.
As it stands, Hillary will likely be watching the sun rise and set over Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four to eight years. You can thank your government for that. Another part, though—maybe the larger part, and surely the more practically consequential part—is that Hillary Clinton, and the Clinton political machine itself, is really, really good at lying. There is really a kind of genius to it all—a conniving, narrow-eyed genius, to be sure, but one which requires a considerable amount of talent and investment.
The Hillary Lie Machine Meets Her Email Scandal
Consider, for example, what we know about Hillary Clinton’s e-mail scandal alone, and the skill it must take to avoid prison time for it. We know that Hillary Clinton’s secret e-mail server was highly illegal because it processed and stored classified government information on an unsecure system. We know that much of this classified information originated with Clinton herself.
Given this staggering level of criminal behavior, one might ask: how has Clinton been able to defend herself? The answer is: lying. For much more than a year Clinton has lied repeatedly and ceaselessly about her e-mail woes. She has lied about the classified information on the server, she has lied about her recordkeeping, she has lied about the very lies she has previously told, she has lied so frequently that it is entirely possible she has come to believe some of her own lies.
Therein lies the unrivaled brilliance of the Clinton Lie Machine: it’s therelentlessnessof it all, the utter refusal to tell the truth, the determination to lie long after other self-respecting people would have given up and just admitted the facts.
WSJ | Secret recordings of a suspect talking about the Clinton Foundation fueled an internal battle between FBI agents who wanted to pursue the case and corruption prosecutors who viewed the statements as worthless hearsay, people familiar with the matter said.
Agents, using informants and recordings from unrelated corruption investigations, thought they had found enough material to merit aggressively pursuing the investigation into the foundation that started in summer 2015 based on claims made in a book by a conservative author called “Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich,” these people said.
The account of the case and resulting dispute comes from interviews with officials at multiple agencies.
Starting in February and continuing today, investigators from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and public-corruption prosecutors became increasingly frustrated with each other, as often happens within and between departments. At the center of the tension stood the U.S. attorney for Brooklyn,Robert Capers,who some at the FBI came to view as exacerbating the problems by telling each side what it wanted to hear, these people said. Through a spokeswoman, Mr. Capers declined to comment.
The roots of the dispute lie in a disagreement over the strength of the case, these people said, which broadly centered on whether Clinton Foundation contributors received favorable treatment from the State Department under Hillary Clinton.
Senior officials in the Justice Department and the FBI didn’t think much of the evidence, while investigators believed they had promising leads their bosses wouldn’t let them pursue, they said.
These details on the probe are emerging amid the continuing furor surrounding FBI DirectorJames Comey’s disclosure to Congress that new emails had emergedthat could be relevant to a separate, previously closed FBI investigation of Mrs. Clinton’s email arrangement while she was secretary of state.
Much of the skepticism toward the case came from how it started—with the publication of a book suggesting possible financial misconduct and self-dealing surrounding the Clinton charity. The author of that book, Peter Schweizer—a former speechwriting consultant for President George W. Bush—was interviewed multiple times by FBI agents, people familiar with the matter said.
The Clinton campaign has long derided the book as a poorly researched collection of false claims and unsubstantiated assertions. The Clinton Foundation has denied any wrongdoing, saying it does immense good throughout the world.
Mr. Schweizer said in an interview that the book was never meant to be a legal document, but set out to describe “patterns of financial transactions that circled around decisions Hillary Clinton was making as secretary of state.”
NYPost | Anthony Weiner’s alleged underage sexting gal
is “upset” with the director of the FBI after she found out her case
had been tied to the use of Hillary Clinton’s private email server.
“The FBI asked for me to speak to the media as little as possible. I
have tried to stay quiet, but [FBI Director James] Comey has upset me,”
the 15-year-old North Carolina girl told BuzzFeed.
“The last thing that I wanted was to have this become political propaganda,” she added.
The girl, whose name is not being released because of her age, said she had an hours-long interview Friday with the FBI.
The randy former congressman allegedly sent her a slew of naughty messages, even asking her to undress on Skype.
Her father said he had voted early for Hillary Clinton but was regretting his decision.
“With the recent developments with my daughter, I can say that I
would likely not have voted for either of these clowns if I had it to do
over again,” he said.
“How do you not know who works for you? How could you have so many sleazeballs close to you?”
sputnik | "The source of these emails and leaks has nothing to do with Russia at
all. I discovered what the source was when I attended the Sam Adam's
whistleblower award in Washington. The source of these emails comes from within official circles in Washington DC. You should look to Washington not to Moscow."
Asked about whether or not WikiLeaks have ever published information
at the behest of Moscow, Murray said that "WikiLeaks has never published
any material received from the Russian government or from any proxy of
the Russian government. It's simply a completely untrue claim designed
to divert attention from the content of the material."
While blasted by Washington, first by Republicans several years ago,
and most recently by Democrats, the WikiLeaks revelations have often
been hailed as a champion of accountability.
"I think whistleblowers have become extremely important in the West
because the propaganda model — as Chomsky puts it — has been reinforced
to the extent that people don't get any true information out of the
media at all. It's worth saying that Julian Assange and WikiLeaks are
publishers; they publish what whistleblowers leak to them," Mr. Murrary
told Sputnik.
Yet, whistleblowers in the US continue to be subject to lengthy
prison sentences. A key example is Chelsea Manning, who was sentenced on
August 21, 2013 to a thirty five year sentence for providing WikiLeaks
with sensitive military and diplomatic documents highlighting, among
other things, US military conduct in Iraq. Murray also mentions the case
of John Kiriakou, a former investigator of international terrorism with
the CIA who turned whistleblower.
"The people who did the torture have suffered no comeback at all," adds Mr. Murray.
Taking a step back and discussing the risk of geopolitical escalation
between Russia and the US, Murray told Sputnik that "there is no chance
whatsoever that Russia is going to ever attack the United States, that
simply isn't going to happen."
"Just as Russia is not going to attack the United Kingdom. There
never has been a chance that Russia would ever attack either of these
two countries. But of course the narrative is all to do with power and
funneling huge amounts of American taxpayer money into the defense
industry and the security industry and these people are both from the
class that benefits."
It's an extremely dangerous game, says Mr. Murray, and it feeds into a foreign policy that is completely mad.
unz | The first logical way the American-invented cognitive game of
Scrabble settles the score against radical hereditarians in the racial
(Black-White) IQ gap debate is through a two step process: how do white
female players compare to white male players in top-level elite
Scrabble? Since many mainstream cognitive psychologists tell us that
white women (like white men) have much higher tested intelligence than
blacks, whether you measure this as “general intelligence” or you just
limit it to visuospatial intelligence or mathematical ability, we should
expect white women to perform better than black men in any activity
that depends on these abilities (since a slight deficiency in such
abilities is also the reason white women perform lower than white men,
according to the same hereditarians). What we have in Scrabble is an
emphatic refutation of this hereditarian expectation of Black cognitive
under-performance, especially when the full picture of African
achievement in such mental games is examined, as I attempt to do in this
article. I also refute any suggestions that such games are insufficient
for this analysis.
Hereditarian Science
When I oppose “hereditarians,” I am really concerned with only one
specific aspect that many self-described hereditarians seem to share:
their intriguingly confident belief that they have already found some
kind of proof for a genetic cognitive gap between racial groups that has
a certain magnitude and direction, which consequently explains
scholastic and IQ test score differences among different ethnic groups. I
will call this the “racial hypothesis” in this article, even though it
is officially called the “genetic hypothesis,” because I do not want to
leave the impression that I reject any genetically transmitted
differences in mental (or any other) ability between any two
populations. (I have previously theorized
that the American black-white IQ gap could simply be a reflection of a
high incidence of functionally mild neurological disorders among native
black Americans, which tend to affect
many more males than females: such a gender IQ gap reversal is less
acute in black Caribbeans than black Americans, and absent in Africans,
which could suggest that the disorder may have been inherited from
mating with similarly affected poor whites during the time of slavery;
it has nothing to do with race or evolution per se.)
Although I am therefore also skeptical about a radical global
“environmental hypothesis” as the universal explanation for every single
time there are any significant performance differences between
populations or genders, I think that it should be obvious that the
drastically inferior environment of Africa, especially the learning or
educational environment (the training factor), is a sufficient
explanation for any inferior intellectual performance or IQ of Africans
living in Africa (which is why African school children born in Western
countries perform as well as white European children, if not better).
This article tests that proposition by examining the performance of
Sub-Saharan Africans on contests that are much less hindered by the
artificial lack of educational (training) resources while simultaneously
requiring the application of high natural cognitive resources.
cambridge | In this review, we are pitting two theories against each other: the more
accepted theory—the ‘number sense’ theory—suggesting that a sense of
number is innate and non-symbolic numerosity is being processed
independently of continuous magnitudes (e.g., size, area, density); and
the newly emerging theory suggesting that (1) both numerosities and
continuous magnitudes are processed holistically when comparing
numerosities, and (2) a sense of number might not be innate. In the
first part of this review, we discuss the ‘number sense’ theory. Against
this background, we demonstrate how the natural correlation between
numerosities and continuous magnitudes makes it nearly impossible to
study non-symbolic numerosity processing in isolation from continuous
magnitudes, and therefore the results of behavioral and imaging studies
with infants, adults and animals can be explained, at least in part, by
relying on continuous magnitudes. In the second part, we explain the
‘sense of magnitude’ theory and review studies that directly demonstrate
that continuous magnitudes are more automatic and basic than
numerosities. Finally, we present outstanding questions. Our conclusion
is that there is not enough convincing evidence to support the number
sense theory anymore. Therefore, we encourage researchers not to assume
that number sense is simply innate, but to put this hypothesis to the
test, and to consider if such an assumption is even testable in light of
the correlation of numerosity and continuous magnitudes.
kunstler | What was with James Comey’s Friday letter to congress? It looks to me like the FBI Director had to go nuclear against his parent agency, the Department of Justice, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch, his boss, in particular. Why? Because the Attorney General refused to pursue the Clinton email case when more evidence turned up in the underage sexting case against Anthony Weiner, husband of Hillary’s chief of staff, Huma Abedin.
Over the weekend, the astounding news story broke that the FBI had not obtained a warrant to examine the emails on Weiner’s computer and other devices after three weeks of getting stonewalled by DOJ attorneys. What does it mean when the Director of the FBI can’t get a warrant in a New York minute? It must mean that the DOJ is at war with the FBI. Watergate is looking like thin gruel compared to this fantastic Bouillabaisse of a presidential campaign fiasco.
One way you can tell is thatThe New York Timesis playing down the story Monday morning. ColumnistPaul Krugmancalls the Comey letter “cryptic.” Krugman’s personal cryptograph insinuates that Comey is trying to squash an investigation of “Russian meddling in American elections.” Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid chimed in with a statement that “it has become clear that you [Comey] possess explosive information about close ties and coordination between Donald Trump, his top advisers and the Russian government.” How’s that for stupid and ugly? It’s the Russian’s fault that Hillary finds herself in trouble again?
Earlier this week, lawyers at the DOJ attempted to quash a parallel investigation of the Clinton Foundation. They must be out of their minds to think that story will go away. Isn’t it about time that a House or Senate committee subpoenaed Bill Clinton to testify under oath about his June airport meeting with Loretta Lynch. He doesn’t enjoy any special immunity in this case.
TheNation |For in almost every way that matters,
Hillary Clinton is nothing more and nothing less than a successful
professional woman like most successful professional women we all know
and that we often like, and that indeed many of us are.
* She preaches and practices a kind of “lean-in” feminism that
valorizes meritocracy and the professional success of elite women like
herself and her daughter.
Is this really different from the way most professional women,
including left academic women, proceed? The university is as much a
corporate institution as is a corporate business or a government
bureaucracy. Do we fault our colleagues, our friends, for
seeking prestigious research grants that give them course release, and
for asking their famous friends to write letters of recommendation or to
organize book panels promoting their work? Do we fault our colleagues
for being preoccupied with publication in the officially sanctioned
journals, so that they can build records of accomplishment sufficient to
earn tenure and promotion, and the privileges these involve, privileges
that are not available to most women in the work force? Do we cast
suspicion on our friends who do everything possible to promote the
educational performance of their children so that they can be admitted
into elite universities? In her pursuit of movement up the career
ladder, and her valorization of this approach to success, is Clinton
that different than most of us who, honestly, belong to the
“professional managerial class” as much as she does, and who work
through its institutions in the same way she does?
* She has achieved positions of leadership in hierarchical
corporate institutions, where she has traded on connections, and has
mixed with members of a power elite with access to money and power.
In this, is she any different than other colleagues, women and
men, who become Distinguished Professors, and department chairs, and
Deans and Provosts and College Presidents? I have many
friends—feminists, leftists—who have achieved such positions, and who
have embraced them. These positions are obtained by “playing the
academic game,” by cooperating with others in positions of institutional
authority, by compromising on ideals in order to get something done in a
conservative bureaucracy, by agreeing to manage programs and personnel,
i.e, colleagues, by agreeing to fundraise from wealthy alumni and
corporate donors, and to participate in events that please such alumni
and donors so that they will support you and your institution. Is
Clinton’s “game” really that different?
* She uses her professional connections for personal advantage,
making connections that can benefit her in the future, accepting side
payments in exchange for her services.
Is this that different than colleagues in the academic
bureaucracy, who accept the salary increases and bonuses and research
and travel accounts and course release that come with this kind of work?
I am a Distinguished Professor at Indiana University. I enjoy these
things. Many of us do, including many wonderful scholars to my left who
really dislike Clinton. But is she really so different than the rest of
us? Really?
In some ways, the differences are obvious. Clinton has succeeded
largely through public institutions. She has succeeded on a much larger
scale. She has benefited financially on a much larger scale. She is a
woman of great power and influence and wealth, who has sought out a
degree of power and influence and wealth that greatly exceeds the norm
for anyone and especially for any woman. And she is on the
public stage, so that every aspect of her action, and her
self-promotion—and her e-mailing—is potentially subject to public
scrutiny. But is this a sign of her personal corruption, or simply a
sign that she has learned how to play the establishment political game
and to win at the highest levels?
Quickie
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Hi folks,
At this stage my blogger entries feel like I'm talking on a barbwire
network over a party line, like on Green Acres. I haven't put out a signal
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April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...