npr | House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced in a letter to Democrats on
Monday that the House will vote to formalize the procedures in the
ongoing impeachment inquiry of President Trump.
The resolution
will outline the terms for public hearings, the disclosure of deposition
transcripts, procedures to transfer evidence to the House Judiciary
Committee and due process rights for Trump.
Senior Democratic aides said the resolution will be released on Wednesday, with a House vote on Thursday.
"We
are taking this step to eliminate any doubt as to whether the Trump
Administration may withhold documents, prevent witness testimony,
disregard duly authorized subpoenas, or continue obstructing the House
of Representatives," Pelosi wrote.
House Intelligence Committee Chair Adam Schiff confirmed that the resolution will establish a format for open hearings.
"The American people will hear firsthand about the President's misconduct," Schiff said in a statement.
politico | Democrats are accusing Attorney
General William Barr of using the Justice Department to do President
Donald Trump's political bidding.
Democratic criticism of the attorney general comes amid media reports
that a department probe into the FBI's investigation connections
between Russia and the Trump 2016 campaign has now become a criminal
investigation. Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), the chairman of the House
Intelligence Committee, accused Barr on Sunday of “weaponizing” the
Justice Department. Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have called on Barr to
recuse himself from the department's investigation.
"Bill
Barr, on the president’s behalf, is weaponizing the Justice Department
to go after the president’s enemies,” Schiff said on ABC‘s “This Week
with George Stephanopoulos.” “He’s demonstrating once again that he is
merely a tool of the president, the president’s hand, not the
representative of the American people.”
Trump
has repeatedly called on Barr to investigate how the FBI began its
Russia probe. John Durham, the U.S. attorney for Connecticut, is leading
that effort. The Justice Department’s Office of the Inspector General
has also been conducting an investigation into aspects of the FBI's
Russia probe. That report is expected to be released in the near future.
thefederalist | Last weekend, NBC News reported
that the Justice Department’s probe into the origins of the Russia
collusion investigation is now focusing on the CIA and the intelligence
community. NBC News soft-peddled this significant development by giving
former CIA Director John Brennan a platform (a pen?) to call the probe “bizarre,” and question “the legal basis for” the investigation. Politico soon joined the spin effort, branding the investigation Attorney General William Barr assigned to Connecticut U.S. Attorney John Durham “Trump’s vengeance.”
However, if the media reports are true, and Barr and Durham have turned
their focus to Brennan and the intelligence community, it is not a
matter of vengeance; it is a matter of connecting the dots in
congressional testimony and reports, leaks, and media spin, and facts
exposed during the three years of panting about supposed Russia
collusion. And it all started with Brennan.
That’s not how the story went, of course. The company story ran
that the FBI launched its Crossfire Hurricane surveillance of the Trump
campaign on July 31, 2016, after learning that a young Trump advisor,
George Papadopoulos, had bragged to an Australian diplomat, Alexander
Downer, that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton. This tip from
Downer, when coupled with WikiLeaks’s release of the hacked Democratic
National Committee emails and evidence of Russian efforts to influence
the 2016 presidential election, supposedly triggered the FBI’s decision
to target the Trump campaign.
thefederalist | Earlier this week, Michael Flynn’s star attorney, Sidney Powell,
filed under seal a brief in reply to federal prosecutors’ claims that
they have already given Flynn’s defense team all the evidence they are
required by law to provide. A minimally redacted copy of the reply brief has just been made public, and with it shocking details of the deep state’s plot to destroy Flynn.
While the briefing at issue concerns Powell’s motion to compel the government to hand over evidence required by Brady and
presiding Judge Emmett Sullivan’s standing order, Powell’s 37-page
brief pivots between showcasing the prosecution’s penchant for
withholding evidence and exposing significant new evidence the defense
team uncovered that establishes a concerted effort to entrap Flynn.
Along the way, Powell drops half-a-dozen problems with Flynn’s plea and
an equal number of justifications for outright dismissal of the criminal
charges against Flynn.
What is most striking, though, is the timeline Powell pieced together
from publicly reported text messages withheld from the defense team and
excerpts from documents still sealed from public view. The sequence
Powell lays out shows that a team of “high-ranking FBI officials
orchestrated an ambush-interview of the new president’s National
Security Advisor, not for the purpose of discovering any evidence of
criminal activity—they already had tapes of all the relevant
conversations about which they questioned Mr. Flynn—but for the purpose
of trapping him into making statements they could allege as false.”
counterpunch | With Bernie Sanders the people’s choice
for winner of the Democratic primary in terms of political organizing
and campaign contributions, the powers-that-be in the DNC are putting out a call for establishment figures
like Hillary Clinton or Michael Bloomberg to join the race. Not being
‘reported’ by the establishment press is that these same kingmakers 1)
weighted the Democrat’s choice against Mr. Sander’s and towards Ms.
Clinton in 2016 and lost and 2) chose Joe Biden as their ‘heavyweight’
candidate for 2020.
The idea, popular on the American left, that winning against Donald
Trump is all that matters, runs up against the fact that these DNC
kingmakers have a less than stellar track record when it comes to
winning elections. Not only is Ms. Clinton one of the most enthusiastically despised people on the planet— more so than Donald Trump
even after his impeachment was announced, but Michael Bloomberg was a
Republican for the entirety of the wildly misguided American war against
Iraq. Why isn’t he running as a Republican?
The rationale for the reappearance of the ‘grownups’ from the DNC
appears to be that Joe Biden’s political prospects are sinking faster
than Bill Clinton’s libido in the presence of women over the age of consent.
That Mr. Biden’s failure comes as a surprise to DNC insiders
illustrates the political ineptitude mentioned above. In fact, this
practice of perpetually failing upward— of being wrong about absolutely
everything while maintaining leadership positions in quasi-public
institutions like the DNC, suggests that winning elections isn’t the
objective.
According to the political campaign funding website opensecrets.org,
Bernie Sanders is second only to Donald Trump in terms of campaign
contributions raised toward his 2020 presidential campaign. And given
the source of Mr. Sanders’ contributions— small donors, a.k.a. ’the
people,’ he is quite conspicuously the people’s choice for President
amongst Democrats. This leaves the rich, business executives and their
bourgeois aspirants— the richer 10% of the country, with a choice of Mr.
Trump or the Democratic Party equivalent.
The question of where Elizabeth Warren is in all this gets to the
issue of motives. Ms. Warren is both brighter and more competent in a
performative sense than Joe Biden. And she signaled early on that she will drop her entire political program
if doing so gets her the nod from donors and DNC insiders. This
willingness to ‘compromise’ sets her apart from Mr. Sanders. The
question ‘can she win,’ the seeming pragmatic question of the day, is
proved a farce through the first insider choice of Joe Biden, and then
with the call for more ‘heavyweight’ losers.
Gotta imagine AOC’s response here to Lawrence O’Donnell’s condescending question is rattling a few establishment cages. pic.twitter.com/OB3WHMnb7h
theconservativetreehouse | The reaction from CNN to news that U.S.
Attorney John Durham is now conducting a criminal investigation is
actually quite funny when contrast against their positions in 2017 and
2018. Jeffrey Toobin doesn’t have any idea about the background of
Joseph Mifsud, and his narration is a jumbled mess of dissonance:
“clearly no evidence” he proclaims.
When Weissman and Mueller were traveling
the world to investigate Trump-Russia it was an example of prudent and
thorough investigative approaches. However, Durham and Barr doing the
same thing is an example of the most horrific investigation imaginable.
When Mueller sent a subpoena it held a seriousness that could not be
ignored; however, if Durham sends a subpoena, everyone can just
shrug-it-off and “take the fifth”.
Accordingly, Weissmann & Mueller
opened investigations, the targets were automatically guilty and should
be alarmed. However, when Durham & Barr open investigations, it
means nothing to the targets and not even the possibility of guilt.
Meanwhile, former ODNI James Clapper’s muttering responses are, well,
also quite humorous.
tablet |A
very, very interesting interview — you can skip past the lengthy intro —
with an old school national security mandarin, Angelo Codevilla. Here
is the important nugget:
INTERVIEWER:
I have some close personal friends who are more on the left, and I said
to them: OK. Where’s the evidence?
Who did what when to whom? Where are the quids and where are the quos?
What’s going on here? And all they could say is, “Well, the
investigation is going on.”
Whose fault is this?
[CODEVILLA:]
The fault here is not of Democrats on the left. The fault here is of
Donald Trump and his friends who
have refused to enforce the most basic laws here. The most obvious one
is Section 798, (18 U.S. Code), the simple comment statute. Now anybody
in the intelligence business knows that this is the live wire of
security law. It is a strict liability statute.
It states that any revelation, regardless of circumstance or intent,
any revelation period, of anything having to do with U.S. communications
intelligence is punishable by the 10 and 10. Ten years in the slammer,
and $10,000 fine. Per count.
Now the
folks who went to The Washington Post and The New York Times in
November and December of 2016 and peddled
this story of the intelligence community’s conclusion that Trump and
the Trump campaign had colluded with Russia, these people ipso facto
violated §798.
Considering
these matters are highly classified, and that the number of the people
involved is necessarily very small, identifying them
is child’s play. But no effort to do that has been made.
I’m not a lawyer, but Codevilla seems like an authoritative source (e.g., “directly involved in the drafting of the
original FISA law in 1978”).
Is an independent and non-partisan research organization. Its purpose
is to evaluate the clinical and economic value of prescription drugs,
medical tests, and health care and health care delivery innovations.
ICER conducts rigorous analyses of all clinical data with key
stakeholders to include patients, doctors, life science companies,
private insurers, and the government and translate the evidence into
policy decisions that lead to a more effective, efficient, and just
health care system.
As explained by their site information, ICER is known as the nation’s independent watchdog
on drug pricing. It’s drug assessment reports include a full analysis
of how well each new drug works and the resulting “clinical value,
quality of life, benefit to the health-care system and society” used to
establish a price. Using the drug assessment report, a “value-based
price benchmark” is established reflecting how each drug should be
priced addressing all four factors. Reports also evaluate the potential
short-term budget impact of new drugs to alert policymakers to
situations when short-term costs may strain health system budgets and
lead to restrictions on patient access. Ensuring objectivity in its
work, all ICER reports are produced with funding from non-profit
foundations and other sources that are free of conflicts of interest
from the life science industry or insurers.
What I have seen in the past is the ICER establishing pricing for new
drugs taking into consideration these factors; “the patient’s quality
of life, and the resulting benefits to the health-care system, and
society.” This is the first time I am seeing the ICER looking at price
increases and determining whether the value delivered substantiates a
price increase. By the numbers: Here are the drugs (and manufacturers)
highlighted in a recent ICER’s report, with the increase in net spending
attributable to each drug’s price increase, and citing the increases
could not be justified by the value delivered.
nakedcapitalism | Yves here. Reader Christopher J sent a contribution from Down Under,
with a long note about his treatment for his first major medical
treatment. I thought I would run it as a long-form example of how health
care works in other advanced economies. Admittedly, my personal data
points are stale, but when I was in Sydney (2002-2004), the caliber of
health care was on a par with the US, and even with my paying out of
pocket, the charges were about a third of what they would have been in
the US. A couple I knew who had the option of the wife giving childbirth
in New York City or Sydney chose Sydney because they deemed the care to
be better.
One of the big things that allows for America’s health care looting
to go well beyond what ought to have been its sell by date is our
provincialism.
You can read about the Australian scheme here;
the short version is citizens and permanent residents pay 2% of their
annual income over a threshold for Medicare; they can then either buy
private insurance or pay a surcharge for the balance of their coverage.
Christopher J lives in Cairns, which is a remote city of 150,000 near the Great Barrier Reef.
By Christopher J
I follow your blog most days and have been a part time commenter for
well over 10 years now, since I worked for the Bureau of Transport
Economics in Canberra.
Here is a story about my first medical emergency. I was born in the
UK in 1961 and now live in Cairns after working in the public sector for
30 plus years in the finance and treasury sectors. I currently work for
self as handyman and have a partner who also works.
Last September 2018, I gave up smoking cigarettes due to the expense.
Heavily taxed to ‘discourage use’, a 20 pack of Marlboros now costs
around A$30 – $20 US. And, I reckon my habit was costing around $750 a
month, or the cost of an annual river cruise in Europe! I’d given up
several times for months or even years, but this was the first time I’d
given up arising from anger at how the Federal Government was tackling
the problem with a huge tax on, mostly, working people.
After that first month, I withdrew the money I’d saved in cash and
bought myself a flash wallet to put it in. Smug I was at the pub around
my smoking friends. I found huge improvements in my health. For many
years sleeping on my side led to my arms going to sleep as my
circulation was constricted by all that smoke residue. After a month or
so of not smoking, my blood circulation improved and I found I could
sleep again on my side. I told partner we were going to extend all our
run circuits by about 800 m and we started to hike up Mount Whitfield,
and jog down, about an 8km round trip with an up and down of around
350m, with the trail along the ridge line. I was feeling very fit for my
age and was feeling generally positive about my health and well being.
At the end of May, or so, and out of the blue, I found a lump as I
was sitting on the bed one morning. This was a Monday about 4 months
ago. At the top of my right thigh and groiu area was a lump, not
painful, about the size of a small egg.’
counterpunch | Something very unusual happened on Thursday, Oct. 17. The New York
Times suddenly ran an article on its opinion page explaining how to cut
$300 billion from the $1-trillion military budget — enough, the article
explained, to fund Bernie Sanders’ proposed program for an expanded
Medicare program to cover all Americans without raising a dime in new
taxes.
The article, written by Lindsay Koshgarian, director of the Institute
for Policy Studies’ National Priorities Project, explained that by
shifting the US diplomatic and military strategy from one of
confrontation, endless wars, expansive overseas basing, and
unilateralism to one of diplomacy, a pull-back from foreign bases and
global deployments, with a concomitant reduction in the nation’s 2.4
million-person military could be accomplished with no threat to US
national security.
Koshgarian’s opinion article actually listed the cuts that could be made, attaching a dollar value to each one. Examples were:
* End the practice of supplemental appropriations for war funding,
much of which is actually used for more spending on other unintended
military programs and which have only led to unending wars that have
done nothing to make the US safer, for example in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Savings: $66 billion per year.
* End funding for other nations’ militaries. Savings $14 billion a year.
* Close foreign bases (Almost one-third of all uniformed US military
personnel serve abroad, most of them in non-crisis-zone locations or
combat zones). Savings: $90 billion
businessinmexico | If you’ve ever considered a move across the southern border, you may
wonder what healthcare in Mexico is like for expats. While in many ways,
the Mexican system is much friendlier than the U.S. healthcare system —
so much so that Americans cross the border to get healthcare — there
are still a lot of things you need to know.
What kind of healthcare system does Mexico have? Can you get
insurance there as a resident, or while doing business in Mexico? What
is the IMSS, or Seguro Popular, and how do those apply to you
as a non-citizen? When it comes to medical care, south of the border,
understanding your options is essential.
When many Americans think of Mexico, they think of a poverty-stricken
country that people are trying to escape. While that might be true in
some cases, primarily because of corruption, Mexico is a cosmopolitan
21st-century country and its healthcare system reflects that.
There are thousands of healthcare facilities throughout the country,
about one-third of which belong to the taxpayers. Most healthcare
providers in Mexico received at least part of their education in the
United States, Canada or Europe. Finding an English speaking doctor
should not be a problem.
kctv5 | As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking
Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.
“About
100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug
train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings
said.
Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.
A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.
“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.
Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.
Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.
Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.
reuters | The mug shot-style photo of Ovidio Guzman that appeared as he was
apprehended oozed defiance. Chin jutting out, eyes trained on the
camera, the handsome youth bore a strong resemblance to his infamous
father, jailed drug lord Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman.
He had reason to be cocksure. In response to his capture in an
upscale neighborhood, hundreds of heavily-armed Sinaloa Cartel henchmen,
guns blazing, were pouring into Culiacan, briefly taking the modern
city of about a million people near Mexico’s Pacific coast hostage.
Within hours they had pried him loose from authorities.
It
was like nothing Mexico had seen before, a military-style operation
that outfoxed and outnumbered security forces, leaving the city shocked
and smoldering. The show of strength dashed hopes the cartel was
seriously weakened by the life sentence the elder Guzman received in the
United States this year.
Not only were the new generation of
Guzmans, collectively known as Los Chapitos, keeping alive their
family’s near-mythical outlaw reputation, they were doing it with a
brazenness akin to open warfare.
“We’re facing a new generation
of organized crime that doesn’t respect civilians,” Cristobal Castaneda,
head of Sinaloa state security, told Reuters after the attacks.
Four
surviving sons of El Chapo were already regulars in Culiacan’s
nightclubs and restaurants, despite U.S. indictments against them,
before last Thursday’s dramatic act of armed insurrection.
NEW: “We got a QUEER running for President... the white man has very few rights.” Watch @SevierCounty Commissioner Warren Hurst’s homophobic, bigoted outburst Monday, telling folks to “wake up”. Mayor’s office: 865-453-6136 Hurst: 865-453-8513 WVLT: https://t.co/GFwJLqehUfpic.twitter.com/bfXrAACfPh
sicsempertyrannis | Any fair reporter with half a brain would see these events as
pointing to a conspiracy. But not the liars at the New York Times. But
the Times does tip us off to the upcoming mad scramble for life boats.
It will it the FBI and DOJ against the DNI, the CIA and NSA. According
to the Times:
It is not clear how many people Mr.
Durham’s team has interviewed outside of the F.B.I. His investigators
have questioned officials in the Office of the Director of National
Intelligence but apparently have yet to interview C.I.A. personnel,
people familiar with the review said. Mr. Durham would probably want to
speak with Gina Haspel, the agency’s director, who ran its London
station when the Australians passed along the explosive information
about Russia’s offer of political dirt.
There is no abiding affection between the FBI and the CIA. They mix
like oil and water. In theory the FBI only traffics in "evidence." The
CIA deals primarily with well-sourced rumors. But the CIA will argue
they were offering their best judgement, not a factual conclusion.
Brennan and Clapper will insist they were not in a position to determine
the "truth" of what they were reporting. It is "intel" not evidence.
The Horowitz report will not deal with the CIA and NSA directly.
Horowitz can only point out that the FBI folks insisted that they were
relying on the intel community and had no reason not to trust them. This
is likely to get ugly and do not be surprised to see the intel folks
try to throw the FBI under the bus and vice versa. Grab the popcorn.
sicsempertyrannis | U.S. officials had been
concerned that Russian sources could be at risk of exposure as early as
the fall of 2016, when the Obama administration first confirmed that
Russia had stolen and publicly disclosed emails from the Democratic
National Committee and the account of Hillary Clinton’s campaign
chairman, John Podesta.
In October 2016, the
Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of
National Intelligence said in a joint statement that intelligence
agencies were “confident that the Russian Government directed” the
hacking campaign. . . .
In January 2017, the Obama administration
published a detailed assessment that unambiguously laid the blame on
the Kremlin, concluding that “Putin ordered an influence campaign” and
that Russia’s goal was to undermine faith in the U.S. democratic process
and harm Clinton’s chances of winning.
“That’s a pretty remarkable intelligence
community product — much more specific than what you normally see,” one
U.S. official said. “It’s very expected that potential U.S. intelligence
assets in Russia would be under a higher level of scrutiny by their own
intelligence services.”
Sounds official. But there is no actual forensic or documentary
evidence (by that I mean actual corroborating intelligence reports) to
back up these claims by our oxymoronically christened intelligence
community.
Vladimir Putin ordered the hack? Where is the report? It is either in
a piece of intercepted electronics communication and/or in a report
derived from information provided by Mr. Smolenkov. Where is it? Why has
that not been shared in public? Don't have to worry about exposing the
source now. He is already in the open. What did he report? Answer--no
direct evidence.
Then there is the lie that the Russians hacked the DNC. They did not.
Bill Binney, a former Technical Director of the NSA, and I have written
on this subject previously (see here)
and there is no truth to this claim. Let me put it simply--if the DNC
had been hacked by the Russians using spearphising (this is claimed in
the Robert Mueller report) then the NSA would have collected those
messages and would be able to show they were transferred to the
Russians. That did not happen.
This kind of chaotic leaking about an old intel op is symptomatic of
panic. CIA is already officially denying key parts of the story. My
money is on John Brennan and Jim Clapper as the likely impetus for these
reports. They are hoping to paint Trump as a national security threat
and distract from the upcoming revelations from the DOJ Inspector
General report on the FISA warrants and, more threatening, the decisions
that Prosecutor John Durham will take in deciding to indict those who
attempted to launch a coup against Donald Trump, a legitimately elected
President of the United States.
asiatimes | Trump’s real liability isn’t impeachment. It’s China and the economy.
What the Trump administration has been doing so far, vis-à-vis China,
is an own goal — ein Eigentor [“an owner”].
Why is it an eigentor?
Because the effect of the tariffs on the US economy is at least as
bad as the effect of the tariffs on the Chinese economy. American export
orders are collapsing. We have the weakest industrial reading since
June of 2009. We are in a manufacturing recession, according to the
Federal Reserve. Factory output is contracting. Trump won in 2016 by
carrying key manufacturing states like Pennsylvania,
Ohio, Michigan, and
Wisconsin. This blunder could lose him the election. This is much more
dangerous than the impeachment masquerade. China’s also suffering, but
appears to be suffering less.
And the big difference is Xi Jinping
[China’s president] doesn’t have a presidential election in 2020 and
Trump does.
In fact, President Xi will never face an election. He is elected for life.
That is true. But all that can change if he fails to succeed.
You have compared the situation that the US is facing toward China to the siege and conquest of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258.
The Mongols, by themselves, did not have the capability to penetrate
the twelve-foot-thick walls of the city of Baghdad. But they hired a
thousand Chinese siege engineers. Within three weeks, the Chinese
mercenaries breached the walls, at which point the Mongol horsemen went
in and killed the entire population of Baghdad.
Who are today’s Chinese siege engineers who are breaching the American fortress?
Huawei very much is the spearhead, because in the Chinese model of
economic expansion and the development of world economic power,
broadband is the opener to everything else.
It’s a company with a lot of very talented people. Ten years ago – if
you asked people, “What Chinese products do you buy?” – you wouldn’t
mention a single brand name. But everyone now knows Huawei. They produce
the world’s best smartphones. They certainly dominate 5G internet. But
Huawei is not a Chinese company. It is an imperial company.
The Chinese empire is doing better than us because it’s absorbed the talent of a very large number of others.
oftwominds | If you're truly interested in finding solutions to humanity's pressing problems, then start helping us pry open the Overton Window.
The Overton Window describes the spectrum of concepts, policies and approaches that can be publicly discussed without being ridiculed or marginalized as "too radical," "unworkable," "crazy," etc. The narrower the Overton Window, the greater the impoverishment of public dialog and the fewer the solutions available.
Those holding power in a socio-economic-political system that's unraveling devote their remaining energy to closing the Overton Window so that only "approved" narratives and policies that support the status quo are "allowed" into the public sphere.
Everything outside this narrow band of status-quo-supportive narratives is immediately disparaged as "fake news," "Kremlin talking points," or other highly charged accusations designed to close the Overton Window--a process Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman called manufacturing consent: if no "outside" ideas are allowed, people accept the status quo as "all there is and all there can possibly be."
This narrow Overton Window benefits those in power who are "legally looting" the system.
There is another source of a narrow Overton Window: the cultural, social and political elites have no new ideas and so they cling to doing more of what's failed, relying on the past successes of now-failing strategies to cement their power.
Michael Grant described how this failure of imagination and devotion to the past leads inevitably to decline and collapse in his excellent account The Fall of the Roman Empire, a short book I have been recommending since 2009:
NYTimes | Speaker Nancy Pelosi has traveled to
Jordan to meet with the Jordanian king for “vital” discussions about the
Turkish incursion into Syria and other regional challenges, amid uncertainty about whether an American-brokered cease-fire with Turkey in northern Syria was holding.
The
visit by senior United States officials came as sporadic clashes
continued on Sunday morning along the Turkish-Syrian border, where,
according to the Turkish Defense Ministry, a Turkish soldier was killed
by Kurdish fighters in the Syrian border town of Tel Abyad.
Confusion and continued shelling have marred the cease-fire deal
announced by Vice President Mike Pence last week, with both Turkey and
Kurdish leaders accusing each other of violating the truce.
Ms.
Pelosi, a California Democrat, led a nine-member bipartisan
congressional delegation to Jordan that included Representatives Adam
Schiff, Democrat of California; Eliot L. Engel, Democrat of New York;
and Mac Thornberry, Republican of Texas. The group met with King
Abdullah II of Jordan on Saturday evening.
tomluongo | Tulsi Gabbard has stones. She has the kind of stones born of a life dedicated to the cause of serving others.
She is the direct opposite of Hillary Clinton, for whom all causes serve herself and her enormous narcissism and pathology.
So seeing Gabbard go directly after Hillary Clinton after her debate
performance the other evening where she explicitly called out both the New York Times and CNN (the hosts of the debate) for the hit jobs on her puts to rest any idea she’s someone else’s stalking horse.
Great! Thank you @HillaryClinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a ...
Tulsi Gabbard calls The New York Times and CNN — the hosts of the debate — "completely despicable" for alleging she is a Russian asset and Assad apologist. pic.twitter.com/0pzpA4nvRo
But perhaps the highlight was her directly calling out the very
sponsors of the debate, CNN and the New York Times, for their
“despicable” and baseless attacks.
“Just two days ago, the New York Times put out an article saying that
I’m a Russian asset and an Assad apologist and all these different
smears. This morning, a CNN commentator said on national television that I’m an asset of Russia. Completely despicable,” she said.
The CNN charge specifically referenced comments made by Bakari Sellers on New Day on
the morning of the debate. He said Gabbard is the “antithesis” of what
the Democratic Party and the other candidates stand for, adding, “There is no question that Tulsi Gabbard, of all the 12, is a puppet for the Russian government.”
ineteconomics | Under the shadow of a future darkened by climate crises, political
instability, inequality, and super-human machines, how to best proceed?
For some, the answer is more technology and scientific advancement; for
others, better policies and political arrangements. Or some combination
of these.
To get at that something, Lent traces a “cognitive history” of the
human species in a book delivering big, sweeping ideas and a
discipline-hopping approach drawing from neuroscience, archaeology,
linguistics, and systems theory, the study of complex living systems.
Lent argues that how we view the world arises out of language,
specifically core metaphors that shape our values and culture, which in
turn mold history in a reciprocal feedback loop. Cultural templates are
often long lasting, but can also shift dramatically, sometimes in a
generation or two. The process of cultural evolution, Lent observes,
determines how well humans fare as much as the genes we inherit (there’s
a feedback loop between culture and genes, too).
As Lent sees it, you and I are in the midst one of history’s great
transitions — a process which could lead to conditions far less
hospitable for most, or even a total collapse of global civilization. To
avoid these dire fates, we can train our brains to adopt alternative
metaphors that allow us to live less destructively.
So which metaphors are causing the trouble? For one, Lent faults a
tendency to conceive a dualistic universe of binary categories, like
mind and matter, reason and emotion, self and other. This framework, as
the postmoderns observed, drives us to favor one category over the other
and to build societies based on hierarchy and separation.
The pattern is not universal: Lent presents evidence that early
hunter-gatherers emphasized connectivity rather than separation, a
mindset that engendered a more egalitarian social structure.
(Unfortunately, they also lived by a metaphor of nature as an endlessly
giving parent, resulting in problems like overhunting, which illustrates
that even seemingly harmless metaphors can eventually lead to
catastrophe).
bbc | Depending on what language you speak, your eye perceives colours – and the world – differently than someone else. The human eye can physically perceive millions of colours. But we don’t all recognise these colours in the same way.
Some people can’t see differences in colours – so called colour blindness – due to a defect or absence of the cells in the retina that are sensitive to high levels of light: the cones. But the distribution and density of these cells also varies across people with ‘normal vision’, causing us all to experience the same colour in slightly different ways.
Besides our individual biological make up, colour perception is less about seeing what is actually out there and more about how our brain interprets colours to create something meaningful. The perception of colour mainly occurs inside our heads and so is subjective – and prone to personal experience.
Take for instance people with synaesthesia,
who are able to experience the perception of colour with letters and
numbers. Synaesthesia is often described as a joining of the senses –
where a person can see sounds or hear colours. But the colours they hear
also differ from case to case.
Another example is the classic Adelson’s checker-shadow illusion. Here, although two marked squares are exactly the same colour, our brains don’t perceive them this way.
Since
the day we were born we have learnt to categorise objects, colours,
emotions, and pretty much everything meaningful using language. And
although our eyes can perceive thousands of colours, the way we
communicate about colour – and the way we use colour in our everyday
lives – means we have to carve this huge variety up into identifiable,
meaningful categories.
Painters and fashion experts, for example, use colour terminology to
refer to and discriminate hues and shades that to all intents and
purposes may all be described with one term by a non-expert.
wikipedia |Preference falsification is the act of communicating a preference
that differs from one's true preference. Individuals frequently convey,
especially to researchers or pollsters, preferences that differ from
what they genuinely want, often because they believe the conveyed
preference is more socially acceptable than their actual preference. The
idea of preference falsification was put forth by the social scientist Timur Kuran in his book Private Truth, Public Lies
as part of his theory of how people's stated preferences are responsive
to social influences. It laid the foundation for his theory of why
unanticipated revolutions can occur. It is related to ideas of social proof as well as choice blindness.
wikipedia |Dean Karnazes (English: /kɑːrˈnɛˈzɪs/car-NEH-zis; born Constantine Karnazes; August 23, 1962), is an Americanultramarathon runner, and author of Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, which details ultra endurance running for the general public.[3][4]
wired | On Saturday morning in Vienna, Austria, Eliud Kipchoge, the world's finest marathoner, became the first person in history to run 26.2 miles in under two hours.
His time of 1:59:40 required him to maintain an average pace of just
under 4:35 per mile. That is, to put it mildly, soul-searing speed. Even
a supremely fit person would struggle to run at so aggressive a clip
for more than five or six minutes in a row. On Saturday, Kipchoge held
it for just shy of 120.
But
Kipchoge's performance will not be recognized as an official world
record. The event was not an open competition; it was held for Kipchoge
and Kipchoge alone. What's more, a rotating cast of pacers shielded him
from wind throughout the run, and a bicycle-riding support team was on
hand at all times to deliver him water and fuel. It was not so much a
race, in other words, as an exhibition event designed for speed. A
one-man, all-or-nothing time trial.
healthline | A no-carb diet is a way of eating that eliminates digestible carbs as much as possible.
Carbs
are your body’s primary source of energy. They’re found in grains,
beans, legumes, fruits, vegetables, milk, yogurt, pasta, bread, and
baked goods.
Therefore, someone on a no-carb diet must avoid most
of these foods and instead eat foods that contain primarily protein or
fat, such as meats, fish, eggs, cheese, oils, and butter.
There is no strict rubric for a no-carb diet. Some people who follow it eat nuts and seeds, non-starchy vegetables, and high-fat fruits like avocado and coconut.
Even
though these foods have some carbs, they’re high in fiber. Therefore,
they have only a minuscule number of digestible or net carbs, which is
calculated by subtracting the amount of fiber from the total number of
carbs (1).
A no-carb diet resembles a ketogenic diet,
which limits your carb intake to fewer than 30 grams per day and
encourages you to get 70% or more of your daily calories from fat (2Trusted Source).
Depending on what you choose to eat, a no-carb diet can be more restrictive than keto.
technologyreview |My bitterness peaked midway through day four
of the “Fast-Mimicking Diet,” when a parent arrived at my daughter’s
softball game with doughnuts. As little girls and fellow coaches crowded
around the box, I stood apart, glumly sipping out of my special water
bottle with its “proprietary” blend of nutrients.
For breakfast, I’d consumed a nut bar the size of a small cracker and a couple of vitamins. Lunch was five olives from Seville.
Frankly, I’d begun to resent Valter Longo, the inventor of Prolon,
the five-day, $250 fad diet causing my misery. True, the Italian-born
biochemist had seemed perfectly nice when I’d reached him at his office
at the University of Southern California’s Longevity
Institute a few days before to speak with him about the science behind
the diet and what it might do for my general health and longevity. He
had patiently explained how the diet would temporarily shift my body
into a starvation state that would prompt my cells to consume years of
accumulated cellular garbage before unleashing a surge of restorative
regeneration. Getting rid of garbage had sounded like just what I
needed. But now I blamed him for my predicament. I wanted a doughnut.
My
Prolon “meal kit” had arrived in a white cardboard container a little
bigger than a shoebox. Inside I’d found a meal program card spelling out
the menu, a large empty water bottle emblazoned with the word “Prolon,”
and five smaller cardboard boxes, each labeled with a corresponding
day. I opened the box for day one, billed as a higher-calorie
“transition day,” and was pleasantly surprised. It didn’t look so bad.
I’d be sampling many of the diet’s highlights: a small packet of kale
crackers, powdered tomato soup blend, algae oil supplements, a bag of
olives, herbal tea, and not one but two nut-based bars (albeit
distressingly small).
When
I opened up day two, however, I began to get a better sense of what I
was in for. One of the puny nut bars had been replaced by a
glycerin-based “energy” drink, which I was instructed to add water to
and sip on throughout the day. There was more herbal tea—hibiscus, mint,
and lemon (I don’t even like herbal tea)—plus a couple more
powdered-soup packs and two tiny packets of olives. Where was the rest of it?
technologyreview |Izpisúa Belmonte believes epigenetic
reprogramming may prove to be an “elixir of life” that will extend human
life span significantly. Life expectancy has increased more than
twofold in the developed world over the past two centuries. Thanks to
childhood vaccines, seat belts, and so on, more people than ever reach
natural old age. But there is a limit to how long anyone lives, which
Izpisúa Belmonte says is because our bodies wear down through inevitable
decay and deterioration. “Aging,” he writes, “is nothing other than
molecular aberrations that occur at the cellular level.” It is, he says,
a war with entropy that no individual has ever won.
But each generation
brings new possibilities, as the epigenome gets reset during
reproduction when a new embryo is formed. Cloning takes advantage of
reprogramming, too: a calf cloned from an adult bull contains the same
DNA as the parent, just refreshed. In both cases, the offspring is born
without the accumulated “aberrations” that Izpisúa Belmonte refers to.
What
Izpisúa Belmonte is proposing is to go one step better still, and
reverse aging-related aberrations without having to create a new
individual. Among these are changes to our epigenetic marks—chemical
groups called histones and methylation marks, which wrap around a cell’s
DNA and function as on/off switches for genes. The accumulation of
these changes causes the cells to function less efficiently as we get
older, and some scientists, Izpisúa Belmonte included, think they could
be part of why we age in the first place. If so, then reversing these
epigenetic changes through reprogramming may enable us to turn back
aging itself.
Izpisúa Belmonte cautions
that epigenetic tweaks won’t “make you live forever,” but they might
delay your expiration date. As he sees it, there is no reason to think
we cannot extend human life span by another 30 to 50 years, at least. “I
think the kid that will be living to 130 is already with us,” Izpisúa
Belmonte says. “He has already been born. I’m convinced.”
Forbes | NASA is preparing to explore a world made of metal. Confirming that the
exciting Arizona State University School of Earth and Space
Exploration-led Psyche mission
is now entering the build phase, NASA’s probe is now set to visit a
mysterious asteroid between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. It could be
nothing less than the exposed core of a dead planet, with some
suggesting that it could be worth a staggering $10,000 quadrillion.
What is asteroid Psyche?
While most asteroids are rocky or icy bodies, Psyche is thought to be
a stripped planetary core, a very rare object in the solar system.
While NASA missions like InSight drill into Mars
to discover the origins of planets, Psyche offers an opportunity to
inspect and study a planetary core up close. It appears to be the
exposed iron-nickel core (just like Earth’s) of a proto-planet, a small
world that formed early in the solar system's history, but never reached
planetary size—much like Vesta and Ceres, which NASA's Dawn spacecraft explored.
Could asteroid Psyche be the heart of an early planet as big as Mars
that lost its rocky outer layers? Was it involved in violent collisions?
NASA will help planetary scientists find out, and so tease-out lessons
for how the solar system’s planets likely formed.
energy.gov | NNSA and the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration (NASA) joined forces to address a unique challenge:
developing a power source able to support deep space travel and outlast
existing fuel sources. NNSA came through with the technical expertise required to achieve this goal.
“The
relationship between NNSA and NASA is a ‘win-win’ partnership,” said
Patrick Cahalane, NNSA’s Principal Deputy Associate Administrator for
Safety, Infrastructure and Operations. “NASA gets a prototype
demonstration for a kilowatt-range fission power source, and NNSA gets a
benchmark-quality experiment that provides new nuclear data in support
of our Nuclear Criticality Safety Program.”
The experiment, nicknamed KRUSTY (Kilowatt Reactor Using Stirling TechnologY), was part of NASA’s larger Kilopower project. KRUSTY was designed to test a prototype fission reactor coupled to a Stirling engine. Stirling technology is efficient, doesn’t require significant maintenance, and does not degrade in performance over time.
Researchers
designed and performed initial testing of the KRUSTY reactor design
using a surrogate, or non-fissile, reactor core and resistive heating
elements. Experts from NNSA’s Y-12 National Security Complex manufactured the uranium reactor core, which was delivered to the NCERC in the fall of 2017.
thedrive |The War Zone has been reporting on a set of bizarre patents
assigned to the U.S. Navy that describe radical new technologies that
could absolutely revolutionize the aerospace field, and frankly, the
very way we live our lives. These include high-energy electromagnetic
fields used to create force fields and outlandish new methods of
aerospace propulsion and vehicle design that basically read as UFO-like
technology. You can learn all about these patents, their viability, and
the issues surrounding them in these exclusive features of ours.
Now, the same mysterious Naval Air Warfare Center Aircraft Division
engineer behind those patents has produced another patent—one for a
compact fusion reactor that could pump out absolutely incredible amounts
of power in a small space—maybe even in a craft.
Energy
dominance has become a cornerstone of American military policy as
laboratories seek to develop the ‘Holy Grail’ of power generation:
nuclear fusion. These attempts at developing stable fusion reactors
utilize incredibly powerful magnetic fields in order to contain the
nuclear reactions occurring inside. Creating a stable fusion reaction is
difficult enough, but some laboratories are going even further by
attempting to create compact reactors small enough to fit inside
shipping containers or even possibly vehicles.
While Lockheed Martin’s CFR designs have garnered quite a bit of
media attention and internet buzz in recent years, it appears one of the
Skunk Works' major clients is also hard at work in this field. The U.S.
Navy has filed a potentially revolutionary patent application
for a radical new compact fusion reactor that claims to improve upon
the shortcomings of the Skunk Works CFR, and judging from the identity
of the reactor’s inventor, it's sure to raise eyebrows in the scientific
community.
This latest design is the brainchild of the elusive Salvatore Cezar Pais, the inventor of the Navy’s bizarre and controversial room temperature superconductors, high energy electromagnetic field generators, and sci-fi-sounding propulsion technologies that The War Zone
has previously reported on. The patent for Pais’ “Plasma Compression
Fusion Device” was applied for on March 22, 2018, and was just published
on September 26, 2019.
"The fact that my predecessor had a son who was paid $50,000 a month to
be on a Ukrainian board, at the time that vice president Biden was
leading the Obama Administration’s efforts in Ukraine, I think is worth
looking into." - VP @mike_pence
theintercept |The problem for Democrats is that a review of Hunter Biden’s career
shows clearly that he, along with Joe Biden’s brother James, has been
trading on their family name for decades, cashing in on the implication —
and sometimes the explicit argument — that giving money to a member of
Joe Biden’s family wins the favor of Joe Biden. Democrats have been
loath to give any credibility to the wild rantings of Trump or his
bagman Rudy Giuliani, leaving them to sidestep the question of Hunter
Biden’s ethics or decision-making, and how much responsibility Joe Biden
deserves. Republicans, though, have no such qualms, and have made clear
that smearing the Bidens as corrupt will be central to Trump’s
reelection campaign. The Trump approach is utterly without shame or
irony, with attacks even coming from failson Eric Trump.
Biden has been taking political hits over of the intersection of his
family’s financial dealings and his own political career for some four
decades. Yet he has done nothing publicly to inoculate himself from the
charge that his career is corruptly enriching his family, and now that
is a serious liability. By contrast, one of his opponents in the
presidential primary, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., went so far as to
refuse to endorse his son Levi Sanders when he ran for Congress, saying
that he does not believe in political dynasties. In defending the
Biden’s nepotistic relationship, Democrats would be forced to argue
that, to be fair, such soft corruption is common among the families of
senior-level politicians. But that’s a risky general-election argument
in a political moment when voters are no longer willing to accept
business-as-usual. For now, Biden’s opponents in the presidential
campaign appear to all hope that somebody else will make the argument,
while congressional Democrats don’t want to do anything to undermine
their impeachment probe. And so Biden skates.
9/29 again
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