newyorker |
If you are reading this post, the likelihood is that you, like me, are
one of the winners. Highly educated, professional people tend to work
in sectors of the economy that have benefitted from the changes in the
international division of labor (e.g., finance, consulting, media,
tech) or have been largely spared the rigors of global competition
(e.g., law, medicine, academia). From a secure perch on the economic
ladder, it is easy to celebrate the gains that technology and
globalization have brought, such as a cornucopia of cheap goods in rich
countries and rising prosperity in poor ones. It’s also tempting to
dismiss the arguments of people who ignore the benefits of this
process, or who can’t see that it is irreversible.
But, as Baker
points out, “it is a bit hypocritical of those who have benefited” from
this economic transformation to be “mocking the poor judgment of its
victims”—especially now that the forces of global competition and
technological progress are reaching into areas that were previously
protected. In a world of self-driving cars and trucks, what is the
future for truck drivers, cab and limo drivers, and delivery men? Not a
very prosperous one, surely. And the creative destruction that the
Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter celebrated won’t stop there. With
software that can transfer money at zero cost, medical robots that can
carry out the most delicate of operations, and smart algorithms that
can diagnose diseases or dispense legal advice, what is the future for
bankers, surgeons, doctors, lawyers, and other professionals?
There
is no straightforward answer to this question, just as there is no easy
answer to the question of what can be done to help those who have
already lost out. One option is to strengthen the social safety net
and, perhaps, to move toward some sort of universal basic income, which
would guarantee a minimum standard of living to everybody, regardless
of employment prospects. The political enactment of such solutions,
however, is contingent on the existence of social solidarity, which the
very process of economic and technological change, by heightening
inequalities and eroding communal institutions, undermines.
theguardian | They used to call it Greek tragedy when the fates wrought their revenge on human folly and weakness. But maybe a better term in the case of the folly and weakness of the modern Tory party is European tragedy. For, as a brokenDavid Cameronannounced his resignation on Friday morning, one question must have been battering his exhausted brain more than any other.
How was it that a modern-minded liberal Conservative leader who long ago told his party to “stop banging on about Europe” if it wanted to get back into power after three successive defeats – and who then delivered two terms in government – has himself been brought down by that same party over that same European question?
Cameron himself played the role of tragic hero as he notified the nation of his intention to step down before the autumn. “There can be no doubt about the result,” he said. “The British people have voted to leave theEuropean Unionand their will must be respected.”
But he added that the tortuous negotiations ahead with the EU would require “strong determined and committed leadership” that he felt he could no longer provide. “The country requires fresh leadership to take it in this direction.”
And there seemed scant consolation in his laconic summary of what he would rather be remembered for. “I believe we’ve made great steps, with more people in work than ever before in our history, with reforms to welfare and education, increasing people’s life chances, building a bigger and stronger society, keeping our promises to the poorest people in the world and enabling those who love each other to get married whatever their sexuality, but above all restoring Britain’s economic strength.”
marketwatch | U.S. stock futures unraveled early Friday morning in New York, after
the U.K. declared its intention to end its four-decade relationship with
the European Union after a so-called Brexit vote.
Investors have
been fretting that such an unprecedented decision to leave Europe’s
trading bloc could destabilize the Europe’s fragile union and rattle
markets.
Futures for the Dow Jones Industrial Average
YMU6, -2.53%
fell as much as 700 points, but losses were paring from that ugly fall.
Most recently, the Dow was down 485 points, or 2.7%, to 17,436. Futures for the S&P 500
ESU6, -3.26%
tumbled 80 points, or 3.7%, to 2,028 and Nasdaq-100 futures
NQU6, -3.24%
cratered 173 points, or 3.9%, to 4,289.
Markets began plunging after U.K. broadcasters BBC and ITV in the early hours of Friday morning local time forecast
that the “leave” campaign had won the Brexit referendum and that the
U.K. will sever its ties with the trading bloc it has been a member of
since 1973.
European stock-market indexes were being punished in the aftermath of the vote, with the Stoxx Europe 600
SXXP, -6.61%
off 8% at 318.81.
But moves in currencies, in particular, the British poundUSDGBP, +6.7519%
were the most pronounced.
Sterling hit a low of $1.3230, a 10% slide from $1.4871 late Thursday in
New York. But it has since pared some of that decline most recently at
$1.3796.
The stunning moves come after global markets rallied,
betting that Britons would vote to reject Brexit, or a British exit from
the EU.
All three U.S. indexes soared into Thursday’s close, with the Dow
DJIA, +1.29%
surging 230.24 points, or 1.3%, to finish at 18,011.07, while the S&P 500
SPX, +1.34%
gained 27.87 points, or 1.3%,
to close at 2,113.32. Meanwhile, the Nasdaq Composite Index
COMP, +1.59%
climbed 76.72 points, or 1.6%, to close at 4,910.04.
Indications
that the “leave” vote has won sets up global markets for the most
volatile and frightening trading day since the market sank last August
on fears about a slowdown in China’s stock market.
wikileaks |UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05794498
Date: 11/30/2015RELEASE IN FULL
The best way to help Israel deal with Iran's growing nuclear capability is to help the people of
Syria overthrow the regime of Bashar Assad.
Negotiations to limit Iran's nuclear program will not solve Israel's security dilemma. Nor will
they stop Iran from improving the crucial part of any nuclear weapons program — the capability
to enrich uranium. At best, the talks between the world's major powers and Iran that began in
Istanbul this April and will continue in Baghdad in May will enable Israel to postpone by a few
months a decision whether to launch an attack on Iran that could provoke a major Mideast war.
Iran's nuclear program and Syria's civil war may seem unconnected, but they are. For Israeli
leaders, the real threat from a nuclear-armed Iran is not the prospect of an insane Iranian leader
launching an unprovoked Iranian nuclear attack on Israel that would lead to the annihilation of
both countries. What Israeli military leaders really worry about -- but cannot talk about -- is
losing their nuclear monopoly. An Iranian nuclear weapons capability would not only end that
nuclear monopoly but could also prompt other adversaries, like Saudi Arabia and Egypt, to go
nuclear as well. The result would be a precarious nuclear balance in which Israel could not
respond to provocations with conventional military strikes on Syria and Lebanon, as it can today.
If Iran were to reach the threshold of a nuclear weapons state, Tehran would find it much easier
to call on its allies in Syria and Hezbollah to strike Israel, knowing that its nuclear weapons
would serve as a deterrent to Israel responding against Iran itself.
Back to Syria. It is the strategic relationship between Iran and the regime of Bashar Assad in
Syria that makes it possible for Iran to undermine Israel's security — not through a direct attack,
which in the thirty years of hostility between Iran and Israel has never occurred, but through its
proxies in Lebanon, like Hezbollah, that are sustained, armed and trained by Iran via Syria. The
end of the Assad regime would end this dangerous alliance. Israel's leadership understands well
why defeating Assad is now in its interests. Speaking on CNN's Amanpour show last week,
Defense Minister Ehud Barak argued that "the toppling down of Assad will be a major blow to
the radical axis, major blow to Iran.... It's the only kind of outpost of the Iranian influence in the
Arab world...and it will weaken dramatically both Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas and Islamic
Jihad in Gaza."
Bringing down Assad would not only be a massive boon to Israel's security, it would also ease
Israel's understandable fear of losing its nuclear monopoly. Then, Israel and the United States
might be able to develop a common view of when the Iranian program is so dangerous that
military action could be warranted. Right now, it is the combination of Iran's strategic alliance
with Syria and the steady progress in Iran's nuclear enrichment program that has led Israeli
leaders to contemplate a surprise attack — if necessary over the objections of Washington. With
Assad gone, and Iran no longer able to threaten Israel through its, proxies, it is possible that the
United States and Israel can agree on red lines for when Iran's program has crossed an
unacceptable threshold. In short, the White House can ease the tension that has developed with
Israel over Iran by doing the right thing in Syria.
The rebellion in Syria has now lasted more than a year. The opposition is not going away, nor is
the regime going to accept a diplomatic solution from the outside. With his life and his family at
risk, only the threat or use of force will change the Syrian dictator Bashar Assad's mind.
UNCLASSIFIED U.S. Department of State Case No. F-2014-20439 Doc No. C05794498 Date: 11/30/2015
The Obama administration has been understandably wary of engaging in an air operation in
Syria like the one conducted in Libya for three main reasons. Unlike the Libyan opposition
forces, the Syrian rebels are not unified and do not hold territory. The Arab League has not
called for outside military intervention as it did in Libya. And the Russians are opposed.
Libya was an easier case. But other than the laudable purpose of saving Libyan civilians from
likely attacks by Qaddafi's regime, the Libyan operation had no long-lasting consequences for
the region. Syria is harder. But success in Syria would be a transformative event for the Middle
East. Not only would another ruthless dictator succumb to mass opposition on the streets, but the
region would be changed for the better as Iran would no longer have a foothold in the Middle
East from which to threaten Israel and undermine stability in the region.
Unlike in Libya, a successful intervention in Syria would require substantial diplomatic and
military leadership from the United States. Washington should start by expressing its
willingness to work with regional allies like Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar to organize, train
and arm Syrian rebel forces. The announcement of such a decision would, by itself, likely cause
substantial defections from the Syrian military. Then, using territory in Turkey and possibly
Jordan, U.S. diplomats and Pentagon officials can start strengthening the opposition. It will take
time. But the rebellion is going to go on for a long time, with or without U.S. involvement.
The second step is to develop international support for a coalition air operation. Russia will
never support such a mission, so there is no point operating through the UN Security Council.
Some argue that U.S. involvement risks a wider war with Russia. But the Kosovo example
shows otherwise. In that case, Russia had genuine ethnic and political ties to the Serbs, which
don't exist between Russia and Syria, and even then Russia did little more than complain.
Russian officials have already acknowledged they won't stand in the way if intervention comes.
Arming the Syrian rebels and using western air power to ground Syrian helicopters and
airplanes is a low-cost high payoff approach. As long as Washington's political leaders stay firm
that no U.S. ground troops will be deployed, as they did in both Kosovo and Libya, the costs to
the United States will be limited. Victory may not come quickly or easily, but it will come. And
the payoff will be substantial. Iran would be strategically isolated, unable to exert its influence
in the Middle East. The resulting regime in Syria will see the United States as a friend, not an
enemy. Washington would gain substantial recognition as fighting for the people in the Arab
world, not the corrupt regimes. For Israel, the rationale for a bolt from the blue attack on Iran's
nuclear facilities would be eased. And a new Syrian regime might well be open to early action
on the frozen peace talks with Israel. Hezbollah in Lebanon would be cut off from its Iranian
sponsor since Syria would no longer be a transit point for Iranian training, assistance and
missiles. All these strategic benefits and the prospect of saving thousands of civilians from
murder at the hands of the Assad regime (10,000 have already been killed in this first year of
civil war).
With the veil of fear lifted from the Syrian people, they seem determine to fight for their
freedom. America can and should help them — and by doing so help Israel and help reduce the
risk of a wider war.
buchanan |
Last week, 31,000 NATO troops conducted exercises in Poland and the Baltic republics, right alongside the border with Russia.
For the first time since 1945, German tanks appeared in Poland.
Now
we are planning to base four NATO battalions — one U.S.-led, one
British, one German, and perhaps one Canadian, as the French and
Italians are balking at being part of a tripwire for war.
How
would we react if 31,000 Russian, Chinese, Cuban, Iranian and North
Korean troops conducted military exercises across from El Paso and
Brownsville, Texas?
How would we react if each of those
countries left behind a battalion of troops to prevent a repeat of
General “Black Jack” Pershing’s intervention in Mexico in 1916?
Americans would be apoplectic.
Nor are some Europeans enthusiastic about confronting Moscow.
German
Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier called the NATO exercises
“warmongering” and “saber-rattling.” He adds, “Anyone who believes that
symbolic tank parades on the alliance’s eastern border will increase
security is wrong. We would be well-advised not to deliver any excuses
for a new, old confrontation.”
Not only is Steinmeier’s Social
Democratic Party leery of any new Cold War with Russia, so, too, is the
German Left Party, and the anti-EU populist party Alternative for
Germany, which wants closer ties to Russia and looser ties to the
United States.
This month, we sent the USS Porter into the Black Sea. Why? Says Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, “to deter potential aggression.”
While there is talk of a NATO Black Sea fleet, Bulgaria, one of the three NATO Black Sea nations, appears to want no part of it.
The European Union also just voted to extend sanctions on Russia for annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Ukraine.
Donald
Trump calls the NATO alliance a rip-off, a tripwire for World War III
and “obsolete.” Hillary Clinton compares Putin’s actions in Ukraine to
Hitler’s actions in Germany in the early 1930s.
theintercept |Michele Flournoy, the former Defense Department official whom Defense One calls
“the woman expected to run the Pentagon under Hillary Clinton,” this
week advocated for “sending more American troops into combat against ISIS and the Assad regime than the Obama administration has been willing to commit.” In an interview with that outlet, Flournoy “said she would direct U.S.
troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria
and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the
region.” She had previously “condemned the Obama administration’s ISIS policy as ineffectual,” denouncing it as “under-resourced.”
This week, Flournoy specifically advocated what she called “limited
military coercion” to oust Assad. In August 2014, Obama announced what
he called “limited airstrikes in Iraq” — and they’re still continuing almost two years later.
Also note the clinical euphemism Flournoy created — “military coercion”
— for creating a “no-bomb zone” that would entail “a declaratory policy
backed up by the threat of force. ‘If you bomb the folks we support, we
will retaliate using standoff means to destroy [Russian] proxy forces,
or, in this case, Syrian assets,’” she said. Despite D.C. conventional
wisdom that Obama is guilty of “inaction” in Syria, he has sent substantial aid, weapons, and training to Syrian rebels while repeatedly bombing ISIS targets in Syria.
Even U.S. military officials have said that these sorts of no-fly or no-bomb guarantees Flournoy is promising — which Hillary Clinton herself has previously advocated — would risk a military confrontation with Russia. Obama’s defense secretary, Ash Carter, told a Senate hearing last December
that the policy Clinton advocates “would require ‘substantial’ ground
forces and would put the U.S. military at risk of a direct confrontation
with the Syrian regime and Russian forces.” Nonetheless, the Pentagon
official highly likely to be Clinton’s defense secretary is clearly
signaling their intention to proceed with escalated military action. The
carnage in Syria is horrifying, but no rational person should think
that U.S. military action will be designed to “help Syrians.”
NYTimes | Paul
D. Ryan and his fellow Republicans reclaimed control long enough to
force through a major spending bill. They then abruptly adjourned and
left the Capitol.
Furious
Democrats remained on the House floor, where they huddled around their
leader, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who praised their
stand as a “discussion heard around the world.”
Ms.
Pelosi expressed bewilderment at the Republican position. “What could
they be thinking?” she asked. “Whatever it is, they don’t want to tell
anybody about it. That’s why they left in the dead of night.”
The
standoff, which began with a Democratic sit-in on the House floor just
before noon on Wednesday, did not end until about 3 a.m. Thursday when
Mr. Ryan — barreling over Democrats’ objections — took the rare and
provocative step of calling a vote on a major appropriations bill in the
wee hours and without any debate. He then adjourned the House, with no
legislative votes scheduled until July 5.
The
House approved the bill, which includes $1.1 billion in emergency
financing to fight the mosquito-borne Zika virus — and more than $80
billion in other government spending — by a vote of 239 to 171 shortly
after 3 a.m.
Republicans
dashed from the chamber into the sticky heat gripping Washington and
were met by protesters who jeered, with some shouting, “Do your job!”
theatlantic | Astonishingly, the 2016 Republican presidential race has been dominated by a candidate who is not, in any meaningful sense, a Republican. According to registration records, since 1987 Donald Trump has been a Republican, then an independent, then a Democrat, then a Republican, then “I do not wish to enroll in a party,” then a Republican; he has donated to both parties; he has shown loyalty to and affinity for neither. The second-place candidate, Republican Senator Ted Cruz, built his brand by tearing down his party’s: slurring the Senate Republican leader, railing against the Republican establishment, and closing the government as a career move.
The Republicans’ noisy breakdown has been echoed eerily, albeit less loudly, on the Democratic side, where, after the early primaries, one of the two remaining contestants for the nomination was not, in any meaningful sense, a Democrat. Senator Bernie Sanders was an independent who switched to nominal Democratic affiliation on the day he filed for the New Hampshire primary, only three months before that election. He surged into second place by winning independents while losing Democrats. If it had been up to Democrats to choose their party’s nominee, Sanders’s bid would have collapsed after Super Tuesday. In their various ways, Trump, Cruz, and Sanders are demonstrating a new principle: The political parties no longer have either intelligible boundaries or enforceable norms, and, as a result, renegade political behavior pays.
Political disintegration plagues Congress, too. House Republicans barely managed to elect a speaker last year. Congress did agree in the fall on a budget framework intended to keep the government open through the election—a signal accomplishment, by today’s low standards—but by April, hard-line conservatives had revoked the deal, thereby humiliating the new speaker and potentially causing another shutdown crisis this fall. As of this writing, it’s not clear whether the hard-liners will push to the brink, but the bigger point is this: If they do, there is not much that party leaders can do about it.
And here is the still bigger point: The very term party leaders has become an anachronism. Although Capitol Hill and the campaign trail are miles apart, the breakdown in order in both places reflects the underlying reality that there no longerisany such thing as a party leader. There are only individual actors, pursuing their own political interests and ideological missions willy-nilly, like excited gas molecules in an overheated balloon.
No wonder Paul Ryan, taking the gavel as the new (and reluctant) House speaker in October, complained that the American people “look at Washington, and all they see is chaos. What a relief to them it would be if we finally got our act together.” No one seemed inclined to disagree. Nor was there much argument two months later when Jeb Bush, his presidential campaign sinking, used the c-word in a different but equally apt context. Donald Trump, he said, is “a chaos candidate, and he’d be a chaos president.” Unfortunately for Bush, Trump’s supporters didn’t mind. Theylikedthat about him. Brookings eBook.
guccifer2 | It’s not a report in one file, it’s a big folder of docs devoted to Hillary Clinton that I found on the DNC server.
The DNC collected all info about the attacks on Hillary Clinton and
prepared the ways of her defense, memos, etc., including the most
sensitive issues like email hacks.
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED DONATIONS FROM INDIVIDUALS TIED TO SAUDI ARABIA WHILE CLINTON SERVED AS SECRETARY OF STATE
AN EMBATTLED BUSINESSMAN WITH “TIES TO BAHRAIN’S STATE-OWNED
ALUMINUM COMPANY” GAVE BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON
FOUNDATION
A VENEZUELAN MEDIA MOGUL WHO WAS ACTIVE IN VENEZUELAN POLITICS
DONATED TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DURING CLINTON’S TENURE AS SECRETARY
OF STATE
GERMAN INVESTOR WHO HAS LOBBIED CHANCELLOR MERKEL’S ADMINISTRATION
GAVE BETWEEN $1 MILLION AND $5 MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, SOME
OF WHICH WAS DURING MRS. CLINTON’S TENURE AT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
THE CEO OF AN AMSTERDAM BASED ENERGY COMPANY DONATED AT LEAST $1
MILLION TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND LATER ANNOUNCED AT THE 2009 CGI
MEETING A $5 BILLION PROJECT TO DEVELOP ENVIRONMENTALLY FRIENDLY POWER
GENERATION IN INDIA AND CHINA
INDIAN POLITICIAN AMAR SINGH, WHO HAD DONATED AT LEAST $1 MILLION TO
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION, MET WITH HILLARY CLINTON IN SEPTEMBER 2008 TO
DISCUSS AN INDIA-U.S. CIVIL NUCLEAR AGREEMENT
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED ADDITIONAL DONATIONS FROM INDIAN BUSINESS INTERESTS PRIOR TO HER BECOMING SECRETARY OF STATE
BILLIONAIRE STEEL EXECUTIVE AND MEMBER OF THE FOREIGN INVESTMENT
COUNCIL IN KAZAKHSTAN LAKSHMI MITTAL GAVE $1 MILLION TO $5 MILLION TO
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION BEFORE CLINTON BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE
SOON AFTER SECRETARY CLINTON LEFT THE STATE DEPARTMENT, THE CLINTON
FOUNDATION “RECEIVED A LARGE DONATION FROM A CONGLOMERATE RUN BY A
MEMBER OF CHINA’S NATIONAL PEOPLE’S CONGRESS”
…AND THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DEFENDED ITS PARTNERSHIPS WITH BOTH FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC CORPORATE INTERESTS
POWERFUL AND CONTROVERSIAL CORPORATE INTERESTS BASED IN THE U.S. ALSO DONATED TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION
AMONG THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DONORS REVEALED IN 2009 WERE SEVERAL FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS WHO HAD GIVEN MILLIONS OF DOLLARS
WHEN HILLARY CLINTON BECAME SECRETARY OF STATE IN 2009, BILL CLINTON
AGREED TO STOP ACCEPTING CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION FROM
MOST FOREIGN COUNTRIES
IN THE PAST, SOME OBSERVERS HAD LINKED FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONATIONS
TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION AND SECRETARY CLINTON’S WORK AT THE STATE
DEPARTMENT
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION CAME UNDER INTENSE SCRUTINY IN FEBRUARY 2015
WHEN IT WAS REVEALED THAT THE FOUNDATION HAD ACCEPTED DONATIONS FROM
FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS AFTER SECRETARY CLINTON LEFT THE STATE DEPARTMENT
THE WALL STREET JOURNAL TIED FOREIGN GOVERNMENT DONORS TO THE CLINTON FOUNDATION’S ENDOWMENT FUNDRAISING UNDER SECRETARY CLINTON
CLINTON FOUNDATION ANNOUNCED THAT SHOULD HILLARY CLINTON DECIDE TO
RUN FOR PRESIDENT, THE FOUNDATION WOULD FOLLOW APPROPRIATE PROCEDURES
FOR ACCEPTING DONATIONS FROM FOREIGN DONATIONS, JUST LIKE IT HAD HAD
UNDER SECRETARY CLINTON…
REPORTS THAT STATE DEPARTMENT LAWYERS DID NOT EXHAUSTIVELY VET BILL
CLINTON’S PAID SPEECHES DURING SECRETARY CLINTON’S TENURE RAISED
QUESTIONS ABOUT THE ROLE CLINTON FOUNDATION DONATIONS MAY HAVE PLAYED IN
ORGANIZING THOSE SPEECHES
SOME CONSERVATIVES USED THE FOREIGN DONATIONS CONTROVERSY TO IMPLY
THAT THE CLINTON FOUNDATION IS NOT A CHARITY AND QUESTION THE
FOUNDATION’S CHARITABLE WORK
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION HAS ACCEPTED DONATIONS FROM INDIVIDUALS, SOME
OF WHOM HAD TIES TO FOREIGN GOVERNMENTS, DURING HER TENURE AS SECRETARY
OF STATE
THE CLINTON FOUNDATION RECEIVED MONEY FROM A FOUNDATION FORMED BY FORMER UKRAINIAN PARLIAMENT MEMBER VICTOR PINCHUK
WALL STREET JOURNAL COLUMNIST MARY O’GRADY CITED A CONTRACT BETWEEN
TWO CLINTON DONORS FOR HAITI AID AS EVIDENCE OF A CONFLICT OF INTEREST
FOR THE CLINTONS
Trump has officially shaken the elite to the core. Never in a million years would I think Bilderberg to stoop SO LOW as to invite Lindsey Graham. Lindsey Graham. I can't even...they usually stick to the rich elite that aren't public officials. Graham is a prop for the US IC to spread the notion that the US is full of war hungry politicians to the Saudis, the Gulf states, and other dictators that respect violence.
Virtually every American they invited has been publicly anti-Trump (Noonan and Ferguson signed the #NeverTrump letter); Thiel is a Trump RNC delegate (he's basically a spy), as is Kissinger (who has been Trump's informal diplomatic liaison during the campaign).
People around Clinton, like Eric Schmidt, are there.
You people that don't know anything about Bilderberg need to get with the program. Go to Sci-hub and search the academic literature.
Here's a quick history of Western diplomacy:
The Round Table, the Inquiry, Chatham House, Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg (Marshall, Schuman, Monnet), Club of Rome, Trilateral Commission...and they've been simmering since.
Too bad the censor happy mods took down the Official Bilderberg 2016 thread. I'm sure they'll take this one down too. Keep living in Oz, people. I'm sure you'll find that brain in your regressions and your "peer reviewed" bulls**t.
alternet | Before Omar Mateen gunned down 49 patrons of the LGBTQ
Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, the FBI attempted to induce his
participation in a terror plot. Sheriff Ken Mascara of Florida’s St.
Lucie County told the Vero Beach Press Journal
that after Mateen threatened a courthouse deputy in 2013 by claiming he
could order Al Qaeda operatives to kill his family, the FBI dispatched
an informant to "lure Omar into some kind of act and Omar did not bite."
While self-styled terror experts and former counter-terror officials have criticized the FBI
for failing to stop Mateen before he committed a massacre, the new
revelation raises the question of whether the FBI played a role in
pushing Mateen towards an act of lethal violence.
Since
9/11, the FBI has relied heavily on informants to entrap scores of
young, often mentally troubled Muslim men and send them to prison for as
long as 25 years. As Aviva Stahl reported
for AlterNet’s Grayzone Project, the FBI recently encouraged an
apparently mentally disturbed recent convert to Islam named James Medina
to bomb a South Florida synagogue and pledge allegiance to ISIS, a
militant group with which he had no prior affiliation. On trial for
planning to commit an act of terror with a weapon of mass destruction,
Medina has insisted through his lawyer that he is mentally ill.
Trevor Aaronson, a journalist and author of “Terror Factory: Inside the FBI’s Manufactured War on Terror,” revealed
that nearly half of terror cases between 9/11/01 and 2010 involved
informants, including some with criminal backgrounds raking in as much
as $100,000 from the FBI. The FBI's assets have often preyed on mentally
ill men with little capacity to resist their provocations. “Is it
possible that the FBI is creating the very enemy we fear?” Aaronson
wondered.
Economic conditions have become so bad that Venezuelans are ransacking grocery stores — even though many are largely empty. A Venezuelan monitoring group, Observatory for Violence, says there are about 10 lootings per day around the country, with food riots sometimes turning deadly.
Four people were killed during separate incidents last week as looters clashed with security forces.More than 400 people were arrestedin the coastal city of Cumaná, which was briefly placed under a de facto curfew after 20 stores were cleaned out.
One of the hardest-hit places is the western city of Maracaibo.
Due to nationwide electricity rationing, some Maracaibo neighborhoods go without power for up to 12 hours a day. An intersection is utter chaos because there's a power outage and the traffic lights don't work.
The power outages knock out fans and air conditioners in a city where the temperature often tops 100 degrees.
econmatters | We outline what went wrong with the Republican Party for the last 20
plus years in this video. Hopefully this is a wake up call for the
Republican Party, to scale down their future Political Platform to some
sound basic economic principles that benefit a large number of
constituencies, are attractive to a broader voter pool, and voters can
really get behind without being offended and alienated in the process
with essentially a bunch of unnecessary ancillary issues which should be
outside the scope of a smaller government involvement anyway.
kunstler | The email issue won’t go away because it entails serious issues of
racketeering in public office, not just niceties of security procedure.
One of the Secretary of State’s duties is to approve weapons sales to
foreign countries. During her three years at State, Hillary signed off
on $165 billion worth of sales by private commercial arms contractors to
Clinton Foundation foreign donors. On top of that was an additional
$151 billion of separate Pentagon-brokered deals for 16 of the countries
that gave to the Clinton Foundation. It also happened that the weapons
contractors themselves and companies connected financially to them made
substantial donations to the Clinton foundation — and paid whopping
speaking fees to Hillary’s husband ex-president Bill, during her years
at State.
Salon Magazine has also reported that in contradiction of a
1995 directive signed by then-president Bill against arms sales to
nations violating human rights, Hillary approved such weapons sales. Salon’s David Sirota writes:
As just one of many examples, in its 2011 Human Rights
Report, Clinton’s State Department slammed Algeria’s government for
imposing “restrictions on freedom of assembly and association,”
tolerating “arbitrary killing,” “widespread corruption” and a “lack of
judicial independence.
That year, the Algerian government donated $500,000 to the Clinton
Foundation and the next year Clinton’s State Department approved a
one-year 70 percent increase in military export authorizations to the
country. The jump included authorizations for almost 50,000 items
classified as “toxicological agents, including chemical agents,
biological agents and associated equipment.” The State Department had
not authorized the export of any of such items to Algeria the year
before.
There’s no way that the shady doings of the Clinton Foundation will
not become a campaign issue whether Trump emerges as the eventual GOP
nominee or not, and of course the other noisome matter of exactly what
Hillary told Too-Big-To-Fail banks in exchange for many quarter-million
dollar “speaking fees” still lurks behind all that. Hillary’s partisans
at the The New York Times and The WashPo have ignored
these stories for months, but the telltale stench remains, like a dead
body under the floorboards.. In contrast to her beaming victory lap
after the California primary, all this stuff promises some serious
frowny-face for Mz. It’s-My-Turn in the months ahead.
politico | Retaining some kind of superdelegate system has been a high priority
for CBC members, said Democratic strategist Doug Thornell, formerly the
group’s communications director.
"Sanders did a lot of things right in this campaign, he did a lot
better than expected. At the same time he seemed to have a lack of
understanding or lack of relationships with black leaders that you saw
ultimately hurt him in South Carolina and other states with big black
electorates," Thornell said. "And this is something that the CBC is
going to be very passionate and push back against. This is a way that
African-American officials can represent their district and have a say
in the process. They're not going to go along with this at all."
Multiple CBC members conceded that the superdelegate system has its
flaws, but also argued it's not worth scrapping. "I've been listening to
both sides, all sides of the debate and I think both sides have made
persuasive arguments," said one CBC member, who asked to not be named.
"The superdelegate system is not perfect but it has worked for us
quite well over the years and frankly the superdelegates have never
needed to cast any superdelegate votes to alter what the voters did
during the primary elections," said Rep. Emanuel Cleaver. "Never. That's
not the case this year either. The concern many of us have, of course,
is that our numbers would shrink in terms of having influence over and
involvement with what happens at the convention."
Cleaver added that the CBC would not be swayed on the superdelegate issue.
"The black caucus is immovable on this subject because our number one
concern is going to be an always be the highest level of minority
participation as possible at the convention," Cleaver said. "You're
going to see the same thing with the Hispanic Congressional Caucus. Mr.
Sanders, if he had met with either or what's called the tri-caucus, he
would have found out there is no flexibility."
economist | A PICTURE is said to be worth a thousand words. That metaphor might be expected to pertain a fortiori
in the case of scientific papers, where a figure can brilliantly
illuminate an idea that might otherwise be baffling. Papers with figures
in them should thus be easier to grasp than those without. They should
therefore reach larger audiences and, in turn, be more influential
simply by virtue of being more widely read. But are they? Bill Howe and
his colleagues at the University of Washington, in Seattle, decided to
find out.
First, they trained a computer algorithm to distinguish between
various sorts of figures—which they defined as diagrams, equations,
photographs, plots (such as bar charts and scatter graphs) and tables.
They exposed their algorithm to between 400 and 600 images of each of
these types of figure until it could distinguish them with an accuracy
greater than 90%. Then they set it loose on the more-than-650,000 papers
(containing more than 10m figures) stored on PubMed Central, an online
archive of biomedical-research articles.
To measure each paper’s influence, they calculated its article-level
Eigenfactor score—a modified version of the PageRank algorithm Google
uses to provide the most relevant results for internet searches.
Eigenfactor scoring gives a better measure than simply noting the number
of times a paper is cited elsewhere, because it weights citations by
their influence. A citation in a paper that is itself highly cited is
worth more than one in a paper that is not.
As the team describe in a paper posted on arXivhttp://viziometrics.org/search/,
they found that figures did indeed matter—but not all in the same way.
An average paper in PubMed Central has about one diagram for every three
pages and gets 1.67 citations. Papers with more diagrams per page and,
to a lesser extent, plots per page tended to be more influential (on
average, a paper accrued two more citations for every extra diagram per
page, and one more for every extra plot per page). By contrast,
including photographs and equations seemed to decrease the chances of a
paper being cited by others. That agrees with a study from 2012, whose
authors counted (by hand) the number of mathematical expressions in over
600 biology papers and found that each additional equation per page
reduced the number of citations a paper received by 22%. viziometrics.org
newyorker | If this place has
done its job—and I suspect it has—you’re all scientists now. Sorry,
English and history graduates, even you are, too. Science is not a major
or a career. It is a commitment to a systematic way of thinking, an
allegiance to a way of building knowledge and explaining the universe
through testing and factual observation. The thing is, that isn’t a
normal way of thinking. It is unnatural and counterintuitive. It has to
be learned. Scientific explanation stands in contrast to the wisdom of
divinity and experience and common sense. Common sense once told us that
the sun moves across the sky and that being out in the cold produced
colds. But a scientific mind recognized that these intuitions were only
hypotheses. They had to be tested.
When
I came to college from my Ohio home town, the most intellectually
unnerving thing I discovered was how wrong many of my assumptions were
about how the world works—whether the natural or the human-made world. I
looked to my professors and fellow-students to supply my replacement
ideas. Then I returned home with some of those ideas and told my parents
everything they’d got wrong (which they just loved). But, even then, I
was just replacing one set of received beliefs for another. It took me a
long time to recognize the particular mind-set that scientists have.
The great physicist Edwin Hubble, speaking at Caltech’s commencement in
1938, said a scientist has “a healthy skepticism, suspended judgement,
and disciplined imagination”—not only about other people’s ideas but
also about his or her own. The scientist has an experimental mind, not a
litigious one.
As a student, this
seemed to me more than a way of thinking. It was a way of being—a weird
way of being. You are supposed to have skepticism and imagination, but
not too much. You are supposed to suspend judgment, yet exercise it.
Ultimately, you hope to observe the world with an open mind, gathering
facts and testing your predictions and expectations against them. Then
you make up your mind and either affirm or reject the ideas at hand. But
you also hope to accept that nothing is ever completely settled, that
all knowledge is just probable knowledge. A contradictory piece of
evidence can always emerge. Hubble said it best when he said, “The
scientist explains the world by successive approximations.”
The
scientific orientation has proved immensely powerful. It has allowed us
to nearly double our lifespan during the past century, to increase our
global abundance, and to deepen our understanding of the nature of the
universe. Yet scientific knowledge is not necessarily trusted. Partly,
that’s because it is incomplete. But even where the knowledge provided
by science is overwhelming, people often resist it—sometimes outright
deny it. Many people continue to believe, for instance, despite massive
evidence to the contrary, that childhood vaccines cause autism (they do
not); that people are safer owning a gun (they are not); that
genetically modified crops are harmful (on balance, they have been
beneficial); that climate change is not happening (it is).
bibliotecapleyades | My name isCarol Rosin. I am an educator who became the first woman corporate manager of an Aerospace Company,Fairchild Industries. I am a Space and Missile Defense Consultant and have consulted to a number of companies, organizations, and government departments, even the intelligence community. I was a consultant toTRWworking on theMX missile, so I was part of that strategy, which turned out to be a role model for how to sell space-based weapons to the public. TheMX missileis yet another weapon system that we didn’t need.
I founded theInstitute for Security and Cooperation in Outer Space, a Washington DC based think tank. I am an author and have testified before Congress and the President’s Commission on Space.
When I was a Corporate Manager ofFairchild Industriesfrom 1974 through 1977, I met the lateDr. Wernher Von Braun. We first met in early 1974. At that time, Von Braun was dying of cancer but he assured me that he would live a few more years to tell me about the game that was being played- that game being the effort toweaponize space, tocontrol the Earth from spaceandspace itself.
Von Braun had a history of working with weapons systems. He escaped from Germany to come to this country and became a Vice President ofFairchild Industrieswhen I had met him. Von Braun’s purpose during the last years of his life, his dying years, was to educate the public and decision-makers about why space-based weapons are dumb, dangerous, destabilizing, too costly, unnecessary, unworkable, and an undesirable idea, and about the alternatives that are available.
As practically a deathbed speech, he educated me about those concepts and who the players were in this game. He gave me the responsibility, since he was dying, of continuing this effort toprevent the weaponization of outer space. When Wernher Von Braun was dying of cancer, he asked me to be his spokesperson, to appear on occasions when he was too ill to speak. I did this.
What was most interesting to me was a repetitive sentence that he said to me over and over again during the approximately four years that I had the opportunity to work with him. He said the strategy that was being used to educate the public and decision makers was to use scare tactics That was how we identify an enemy.
The strategy that Wernher Von Braun taught me was that first theRussiansare going to be considered to be the enemy. In fact, in 1974, they were the enemy, the identified enemy. We were told that they had "killer satellites". We were told that they were coming to get us and control us -- that they were "Commies."
Thenterroristswould be identified, and that was soon to follow. We heard a lot aboutterrorism. Then we were going to identifythird-world country"crazies." We now call themNations of Concern. But he said that would be the third enemy against whom we would build space-based weapons.
The next enemy wasasteroids. Now, at this point he kind of chuckled the first time he said it.Asteroids-against asteroidswe are going to buildspace-based weapons.
And the funniest one of all was what he calledaliens,extraterrestrials. That would bethe final scare.
NYTimes | Wernher von Braun, the master rocket builder and pioneer of space travel, died of cancer Thursday morning. He was 65 years old.
The German‐born scientist, who had been in failing health for two years, died at a hospital in Alexandria, Va. A private funeral service was held later in the day, but no public announcement was made until yesterday. He leaves his wife and three children.
In a statement released by the White House, President Carter eulogized Dr. von Braun as “a man of bold vision” and said:
“To millions of Americans, Wernher von Braun's name was inextricably linked to our exploration of space and to the creative application of technology. Not just the people of our nation, but all the people of the world have profited from his work. We will continue to profit from his example.”
Dr. von Braun was best known for two achievements‐the German V‐2 rocket and the American Saturn 5 moon rocket. One, a dreaded weapon of warfare, was a precursor of the other, a vehicle of magnificent human adventure.
Both sprang from a lifetime commitment to a romantic vision. Long before space travel became a reality, Dr. von Braun committed himself to a vision of rockets breaking the bonds of the Earth's gravity, of men making journeys to the Moon and beyond, of worlds to explore and incorporate in the human experience.
While a student in Berlin, he read an article about an imaginary• trip to the moon that made a lasting impression, which he once recalled:
“It filled me with a romantic urge. Interplanetary travel! Here was a task worth dedicating one's life to. Not just stare through a telescope at the Moon and the planets but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe. I knew how Columbus had felt.”
centauri-dreams |Image: Ernst Stuhlinger’s Umbrella Ship, built around ion propulsion. Notice the size of the radiator, which disperses heat from the reactor at the end of the boom. As Adam notes in his blog piece, the source for this concept was a Stuhlinger paper called “Electrical Propulsion System for Space Ships with Nuclear Power Source,” which ran in theJournal of the Astronautical Sciences2, no. Pt. 1 in 1955, pp. 149-152 (online versionhere). Credit: Winchell Chung.
No chemical rockets for Stuhlinger. While von Braun envisioned his fleet using a nitric acid/hydrazine propellant, Stuhlinger was interested in electrical propulsion, producing thrust by expelling ions and electrons instead of combustion gases. He noted in the paper that using chemical reactions to produce thrust created a high initial mass as compared to the payload. To reduce this mass problem, he saw, it would be necessary to increase the exhaust velocity of the propellant. Accelerating propellant particles by electrical fields made the numbers more attractive, as the paper notes in its summary:
A propulsion system for space ships is described which produces thrust by expelling ions and electrons instead of combustion gases. Equations are derived from the optimum mass ratio, power, and driving voltage of a ship with given payload, travel time, and initial acceleration. A nuclear reactor provides the primary power for a turbo-electric generator; the electric power then accelerates the ions. Cesium is the best propellant available because of its high atomic mass and its low ionization energy. A space ship with 150 tons payload and an initial acceleration of 0.67 x 10-4G, traveling to Mars and back in a total travel time of about 2 years, would have a takeoff mass of 730 tons.
Adam works out the details, drawing from the Stuhlinger paper itself and deriving some quantities through his own work. We get a payload, including landing vehicle and crew habitat, that is about 20.5 percent of launch mass, an impressive figure indeed. We’re also saddled with low acceleration, as you would expect. The Umbrella Ship would take about a year to reach Mars, while a chemically propelled ship as analyzed by Stuhlinger would make the journey in about 260 days. The longer the travel time, the greater the hazard, which was in many ways unknown to Stuhlinger, as Adam comments:
These days we wouldn’t want a crewed vehicle spending weeks crawling through the Van Allen Belts, but back when Stuhlinger computed his trajectory and even when the design aired, the Belts were utterly unknown. Now we’d have to throw in a solar radiation “storm shelter” and I’d feel rather uncomfortable making astronauts spend two years soaking up cosmic-rays in interplanetary space. Even so, the elegance of the design, as compared with the gargantuan Von Braun “Der Mars Projekt” for example, is a testament to Stuhlinger’s advocacy of electric propulsion.
But what an interesting design to emerge in the 1950s, and it’s ironic given the above remark that when Explorer 1 was launched in 1958, Stuhlinger was at the controls of the timer that, in those relatively primitive days of space technology, handled rocket staging. Explorer 1 was the satellite that discovered the Van Allen belts in the first place. A German infantryman (he was wounded outside Moscow and later served at Stalingrad), Stuhlinger joined the German V-2 effort and worked closely with von Braun, later coming to the United States as part of Operation Paperclip. In the 1950s, he actively collaborated with von Braun on the Disney filmsMan in Space,Man and the MoonandMars and Beyond.
Stuhlinger would spend a great deal of time on ion thrusters using either cesium or rubidium vapor, accelerating positively charged ions through a grid of electrodes. Today, he is considered a pioneer of ion propulsion, well known for his bookIon Propulsion for Space Flight(McGraw-Hill, 1964). He would serve as director of Marshall Space Flight Center’s Space Science Laboratory until 1968 and later as MSFC’s associate director for science, going on to become a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and a senior research assistant with Teledyne Brown Engineering. Ernst Stuhlinger died in Huntsville in May of 2008.
A Foundation of Joy
-
Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
on, either beating the fuck out of the tumor, or reattaching that slippery
eel ...
April Three
-
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
...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
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 ...