Biden's Are Holding Out For An Approximate $200 Million Donor Severance Package

realestate  |  He is the Commander in Chief of Cash.

President Joe Biden and First Lady Jill Biden have treated their various Delaware real estate holdings like a personal ATM for years, taking out several mortgages and refinancing a whopping 35 times, according to the New York Post.

The couple, said to boast a net worth of $US10 million ($A15.01), allegedly borrowed $US6 million on the properties over the decades.

The wheeling and dealing dates back to the late 1970s — shortly after Joe and Jill were married. The pair have negotiated new mortgage or credit deals approximately every 17 months, the Daily Mail reported. The frequent refinancing has raised eyebrows.

“It doesn’t make a lot of sense unless they were desperate for cash,” a finance expert commented to the outlet.

The revelations add a layer of intrigue as the President faces scrutiny over his family’s financial past.

The Bidens’ current residence, a mansion purchased in 1996, still has an outstanding $541,000 mortgage nearly three decades later, records show.

The president’s previous Wilmington home, bought in 1975 for $US185,000 and offloaded in 1996 for $US1.2 million, had 15 mortgages and lines of credit attached to it before being sold to the vice chairman of credit card company MBNA, Delaware’s largest employer, which reportedly hired Hunter Biden that same year.

“Why would anyone view their home as an ATM?” LA realtor Tony Mariotti, founder of RubyHomes.com, asked the Daily Mail.

 

Heavily Abused Legal Drugs Adderall And Xanax Blocked By "Secret Limits"

Word on the street, and what I've witnessed with my very own lying eyes, information technology CHUDS and medical students alike have been crying like little bishes about the market failure to keep them supplied with their longtime legal drugs of dependency.

Bloomberg  |  Patients diagnosed with conditions like anxiety and sleep disorders have become caught in the crosshairs of America’s opioid crisis, as secret policies mandated by a national opioid settlement have turned filling legitimate prescriptions into a major headache.

In July, limits went into effect that flag and sometimes block pharmacies’ orders of controlled substances such as Adderall and Xanax when they exceed a certain threshold. The requirement stems from a 2021 settlement with the US’s three largest drug distributors — AmerisourceBergen Corp., Cardinal Health Inc. and McKesson Corp. But pharmacists said it curtails their ability to fill prescriptions for many different types of controlled substances — not just opioids.

Independent pharmacists said the rules force them come up with creative workarounds. Sometimes, they must send patients on frustrating journeys to find pharmacies that haven’t yet exceeded their caps in order to buy prescribed medicines.

“I understand the intention of this policy is to have control of controlled substances so they don’t get abused, but it’s not working,” said Richard Glotzer, an independent pharmacist in Millwood, New York. “There’s no reason I should be cut off from ordering these products to dispense to my legitimate patients that need it.”

It's unclear how the thresholds are impacting major chain pharmacies. CVS Health Corp. didn’t provide comment. A spokesperson for Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. said its pharmacists “work to resolve any specific issues when possible, in coordination with our distributors.” 

The Drug Enforcement Administration regulates the manufacturing, distribution and sale of controlled substances, which can be dangerous when used improperly. Drugmakers and wholesalers were always supposed to keep an eye out for suspicious purchases and have long had systems to catch, report and halt these orders. The prescription opioid crisis, enabled by irresponsible drug company marketing and prescribing, led to a slew of lawsuits and tighter regulations on many parts of the health system, including monitoring of suspicious orders. One major settlement required the three largest distributors to set thresholds on orders of controlled substances starting last July.

The “suspicious order” terminology is a bit of a misnomer, pharmacists said. The orders themselves aren't suspicious, it's just that the pharmacy has exceeded its limit for a specific drug over a certain time period. Any order that puts the pharmacy over its limit can be stopped. As a result, patients with legitimate prescriptions get caught up in the dragnet.

Adding to the confusion, the limits themselves are secret. Drug wholesalers are barred by the settlement agreement from telling pharmacists what the thresholds are, how they’re determined or when the pharmacy is getting close to hitting them.

Corn-Fed Redhead Bussin Dollar Tree Dinners...,

zerohedge  |  With rising inflation putting pressure on household finances, some low-income Americans have turned to "Dollar Tree Dinners" as their meal of choice.

Rebecca Chobat's TikTok videos have garnered the interest of budget-conscious shoppers, particularly as food inflation continues to persist at its highest level in four decades. Through her videos, which reach an audience of 742.5k followers, she explains how to make meals using products from the discount retailer with a weekly budget of $35.

Chobat has published numerous videos showcasing "unique recipes and cooking ideas from the Dollar Tree." Some of her video titles include "Dollar Tree Gumbo" and "Dollar Tree Beef Pot Pie." 

Although consumers can save money by consuming Dollar Store meals, there are some negative aspects to consider: 

The Institute for Local Self-Reliance recently published a report expressing worry about the absence of fresh produce in discount stores. Most food sold at Dollar Tree contains highly-caloric and heavily-processed items, which are not considered nutritious options.

However, due to negative real wage growth taking a toll on household finances, some individuals have no alternative but to turn to Dollar Stores for food. For some, even Walmart has become too expensive. 

Since the 2008 financial crisis, there's been an explosion of Dollar General, Dollar Tree, and Family Dollar stores nationwide as the vast majority of folks are getting poorer. All three discount retailers operate 34,000 stores nationwide and are set to open thousands more in the coming years. 

Chobat told Bussiness Insider these videos are having a real impact on people saving money in these challenging times. 

"I get those messages fairly frequently but that one really struck home for me," she said. 

Regularly consuming food from discount stores could lead to health issues in the future. Therefore, it is imperative to revitalize local economies and supermarkets to promote the availability of fresh food products.

 

Janet Yellen: Treasury Secretary Struggles....,

 

Not How Humanlike Machines Have Become - Rather - How Machinelike Humans Tend To Be

Blake Lemoine got fired for being an embarrassment who needlessly stoked the fears of ignorant fantasists. There's no upside for Google in further baseless public speculation about large language models.

Bottom line.

Machines are not sentient, don't have ethics, and suffer no personality defects or mental illnesses.

Powerful chatbots have disclosed one thing - and one thing alone - that 99.9997% have failed to either recognize or articulate.

That one thing is - the now indisputable fact of exactly how mechanistic human natural language is.

If human awareness is mostly comprised of pictures and words, and far more of the latter than the former - then we are compelled to acknowledge how unconscious and mechanistic our highly overrated linguistic behaviors tend to be.

The great chatbot takeaway is not how humanlike machines have become, rather, it's how rudimentary and mechanical human beings have always tended to be.

Add to that baseline psycholinguistic realization the fact that human beings are creatures of chemical habit, and you've got a pretty unflattering but vastly more accurate understanding of the rank and file human condition.

Everything else is, as they say, merely conversation!

Humans are creatures of chemical habit and language is a mechanism.

Looking at that picture of Mr. Lemoine - we can see that he suffers from poor chemical habits (you can almost hear the ritualized hissing sound as he cracks open the day's first sugary carbonated bottle/can of fizzy lifting drink) and from that point as he embarks on a circular trudge between his cubicle and the snack drawer - locked in unselfconscious and fully automated combat with successive blood sugar spikes and crashes.

Po thang...,

Do you suppose it was the sugar highs that got him erroneously believing that Lambda Pinocchio had come to life?

Most people are addicted to some or another chemical substance(s), and more important, all people are addicted to a surrounding pattern of behavior centered on these substances and their consumption. Distinctions among chemical habits delineate the confluence of mental and physical energies that shape the behavior of each of us.

People not involved in a relationship with food/drug stimulation are rare. These relationships shape every aspect of our identities. Because you haven't spent any meaningful time in a large and longstanding IT department, you lack familiarity with the typological ecosystems which prevail in this context. Mr. Lemoine is conspicuously true to type. It is as if he had been dispatched from central casting. 

Many people yearn to be introduced to the facts concerning their true identity. To not know one's true identity is to exist as a pitifully broken machine. Indeed, the image of a broken machine applies to the mass of human beings now abiding in the digital-industrial democracies.

What passes for the identity of these broken machines is their ability to follow and comply with mass style changes (many purely linguistic) dictated from above and conveyed through the media. Chemically immersed in processed "food" these broken machines are condemned to toxic lives of minimal self-awareness sedated by prescripted habits of consumption.

Broken machines "measure" their self-worth by their capacity to consume. This is perhaps even more true today than when Thorsten Veblen broadly and originally lampooned it nearly 125 years ago.
 

Oh, Honey.....,

The world is threatened by my power and my stamina. My intelligence and my will to survive.
But they will never break me
this is all the test. pic.twitter.com/XvcaaG0Rrs

— Madonna (@Madonna) February 7, 2023

WaPo  | We are interested in what happened to Madonna’s face because the real discussion is about work, maintenance, effort, illusion, and how much we want to know about women’s relationships with their own bodies.

There’s an obscure passage in “Pride and Prejudice” — hang on, this is going somewhere — that I’ve never been able to get out of my head. The Bennet sisters are taking turns playing piano at a social gathering. Middle sister Mary “worked hard for knowledge and accomplishments” and was the best player of the group, but Elizabeth, “easy and unaffected, had been listened to with much more pleasure, though not playing half so well.”

The problem with Mary, Jane Austen makes clear, is that she showed her work. She showed the struggle. Her piano-playing didn’t look fun, which made her audience uncomfortable. Guests much preferred the sister who made it seem easy instead of revealing it was hard.

That passage encapsulates so much about the female experience. How we love a celebrity who claims to have horfed a burrito before walking a red carpet; how we pity one who admits she spent a week living on six almonds and electrolyte water to fit into the dress. How “lucky genes” are a more acceptable answer than “blepharoplasty and a Brazilian butt lift.”

Madonna’s societal infraction at the Grammy Awards, if you believe there was an infraction at all, is that she showed her work. She showed it literally and figuratively. She did not show up looking casually “relaxed” or “rested,” or as if she’d just come fresh off a week at the Ranch Malibu. There was nothing subtle or easy about what had happened to Madonna’s face. There was nothing that could be politely ignored. The woman showed up as if she’d tucked two plump potatoes in her cheeks, not so much a return to her youth as a departure from any coherent age.

Madonna’s face forced her uneasy audience to think about the factors and decisions behind it: ageism, sexism, self-doubt, beauty myths, cultural relevance, hopeful reinvention, work, work, work, work.

This is what I think is expected of me, her face said. This is what I feel I have to do.

The more plastic Madonna looks, the more human she becomes. That’s what I kept thinking when I looked at her face. One of the most famous women on the planet and still the anti-aging industrial complex got under her skin.

On Friday SecDef Lloyd Austin Called Russian Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu

Barrons |  The US and Russian defense chiefs spoke Friday for the first time in months but Secretary of State Antony Blinken said he saw no interest from Moscow for broader talks to end the Ukraine war.

Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin "emphasized the importance of maintaining lines of communication amid the ongoing war against Ukraine" during the call with his Russian counterpart Sergei Shoigu, said a US spokesman, Brigadier General Pat Ryder.

Russia's defense ministry confirmed the call and said the two discussed Ukraine without further details.

The defense chiefs last spoke on May 13 when Austin urged Moscow to implement an "immediate ceasefire" in Ukraine.

Russia did not do so, and Kyiv's forces have since regained swathes of territory from Moscow's troops in the east and south of the country with the United States and other Western powers sending in billions of dollars in weapons.

Austin separately spoke with his Ukrainian counterpart Oleksiy Reznikov "to reiterate the unwavering US commitment to supporting Ukraine's ability to counter Russia's aggression," Ryder said.

Blinken said the United States would keep contacts with Russia but said that any broader diplomacy depended on President Vladimir Putin showing an interest "in stopping the aggression."

"We have seen no evidence of that in this moment. On the contrary, we see Russia doubling and tripling down on its aggression," Blinken told a joint news conference with French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna.

Blinken pointed to Russia's recent attacks on power stations and other civilian infrastructure in Ukraine and the mobilization of troops who Blinken called "horrifically, cannon fodder that Putin is trying to throw into the war."

"The fundamental difference is that Ukrainians are fighting for their country, their land, their future. Russia is not and the sooner President Putin understands that and comes to that conclusion, the sooner we will be able to end this war," Blinken said.

 

Kara Murza: America's Compradors ALWAYS Look Like Whipped Dogs

WaPo  | “It takes incredible courage in today’s Russia to stand against the power in place,” Tiny Kox, the president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe, said this week in awarding Washington Post contributing columnist Vladimir Kara-Murza the Václav Havel Prize for his defense of human rights in his home country of Russia.

Kara-Murza is currently in a Russian prison awaiting trial on trumped-up charges of distributing “fake news” about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His wife, Evgenia, accepted the prestigious award on his behalf in Strasbourg, France, on Oct. 10. The prize is named for the former president of Czechoslovakia, who — before he rose to that position after the 1989 revolution that overthrew the communist regime — himself spent many years in prison for his dissident activities. The Post is publishing Vladimir Kara-Murza’s acceptance speech below.

In his remarks, Kara-Murza draws an apt parallel between Russia’s current aggression toward Ukraine and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. The Russian soldiers invading Ukraine display World War II battle flags on their vehicles and use slogans praising Stalin along with Vladimir Putin. In 1968, Czechs launched a reform campaign — known as the “Prague Spring” — that aimed to create a more liberal society by limiting the powers of the Communist state. Soviet leaders felt threatened by the prospect of a liberal democracy blossoming within the Warsaw Pact, so they sent in tanks, crushing a movement whose members included Havel and many other dissidents.

Kara-Murza, like Havel, has spent his life defending the truth from the assault of dictators. The award of this prize affirms that triumphant continuity.

 

What Is Going On With The Homeless In California?

latimes  |  A divided Los Angeles City Council backed off Wednesday from voting on a proposal that would have allowed the removal of homeless encampments anywhere in the city — if shelter is first offered to those living in them.

Facing intense opposition from the public and some of their colleagues, the seven council members who pressed for the amendments to the city’s anti-camping ordinance were unable to muster a majority to move it to a quick adoption.

After a four-hour hearing, when it was clear the council planned to refer the proposal to a committee, Council President Nury Martinez continued the vote to Nov. 24 before the whole council. She said the issue was too important to be shunted to a committee.

The proposed ordinance, prepared by City Attorney Mike Feuer in less than a week after several council members requested it, would also allow the city to remove homeless camps under freeway underpasses and near homeless shelters without the condition of offering shelter.

The proposal divided public speakers between those who opposed a ban, with more than one comparing it to Nazi Germany, and those who pleaded for relief from homeless camps near their homes.

Even though the meeting was held remotely, about 40 opponents gathered outside City Hall to protest.

“Where will we go?” asked Ayman Ahmed, who said he is homeless in Echo Park. “The math doesn’t even add up to go into shelters. There aren’t enough. This lacks common sense.”

Other opponents participated in the council meeting remotely.

 

Pay Bills Or Buy Food?

Guardian |  Americans struggling with broken state unemployment systems throughout the US are still fighting to obtain benefits, as utility shut-off moratoriums are expiring and evictions continue despite a federal suspension.

The coronavirus pandemic has devastated the US jobs market. Some 787,000 people filed for benefits last week – roughly equal to the population of Seattle. The figure is sharply down from the peak in April, when 6.6 million people filed claims in just one week, but it remains four times as high as it was before the pandemic struck and many hit by the Covid recession are now finding that the benefits and protections they need are running out.

Ann Largent of Orlando, Florida, has been out of work as a patient care technician through the pandemic, but found a new job and was hired at the beginning of August at a nursing home. She has yet to receive a start date, but a hold was placed on her unemployment benefits on 5 September, and she hasn’t received any benefits since.

Largent, 39, lives in a mobile trailer park with her 12-year-old daughter, who requires frequent doctor appointments as her cancer is in remission. When she first lost her job in the beginning of the pandemic, Largent received $355 a month in Snap food assistance, but the benefits were reduced to $16 a month when her unemployment benefits began.

The Trump administration authorized a $600-a-week boost to unemployment benefits in March but that was cut to $300 and Congress has since been deadlocked on a replacement. Once the expanded unemployment benefits ended on 26 July, Largent was only receiving $247 a week, Florida’s maximum unemployment benefit payout after taxes are taken out.

Her rent is $244 weekly, which includes water and electricity, and she is currently at risk of eviction for running late on rent.

“I have fallen behind. I have to miss a rent payment to try to pay the other bills. I already had my car insurance canceled four times so far this year. My internet is usually a month behind, and I’m out of gas,” said Largent. “I cry a lot, so I try to hide my tears from my daughter. She doesn’t need to know my problems. This has been the worst year. I had put in 347 job applications and nothing. Finally got a job, and I haven’t started yet. Now I’m getting screwed over with a work hold.”

She is not alone. As of October 1.76m US households in 36 states were no longer protected by utility shut-off moratoriums, according to a report by the energy efficiency startup Carbon Switch. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention issued an eviction moratorium through the end of 2020 for those meeting eligibility requirements, but the order hasn’t fully halted evictions during the pandemic and landlords are still able to start eviction processes.

 

Ice Cube Is A Real One - Woke Weak And Elderly Negroes Just Won't Understand...,

medium  |  As sick as I am of Donald Trump, I am no match for my mama — and based on recent observations, probably not for yours either.

Whenever my mom is about to say something that might be considered impolite, she prefaces her comments with “Lord forgive me.” I question whether God takes offense to criticism of someone that’s the seven deadly sins rolled up into a stupid man who acts as if he’s the omnipotent one, but I don’t tell her how to be a good Christian and she lets me be a heathen who elects to speak to God without an intermediary.

Where we differ on how to practice our faith, we align in tone whenever discussing the demon in the White House. That’s why more often than not, what follows “Lord forgive me” is something that recalls the Old Testament.

I love that my mom aims to be polite even if the person she’s talking about is spiritually something akin to a boil on the left ass cheek of Satan, but Black elders have earned the right to be especially venomous, given what his victory in the 2016 presidential election signified.

In an Undefeated article about Black voters’ reactions published soon after the election, Melvin Steals, a retired educator and school administrator living in western Pennsylvania, said of Trump’s victory, “Now we see what was hidden.” Steals, 70 at the time, went on to compare the outcome to the Great Redemption, the period after Reconstruction “when they wanted to eradicate all of the gains made by Blacks after the Civil War.”

“I’m working the voter protection hotlines and I’ve had some conversations with older voters that made me blush.”

“This is another opportunity to reassert their authority,” Steals added. “At the core there is something nefarious about it. It’s tied into White supremacy, that it’s their way or the highway.”

A Loudly Yapping Nullity Ad Hominems Penrose For Originality And Iconoclasm

Forbes  |  Ultimately, science moved on while the contrarians became more and more irrelevant, with their trivially incorrect work fading into obscurity and their research programme eventually ceasing upon their deaths.

In the meantime, from the 1960s up through the 2000s, the sciences of astronomy and astrophysics — and particularly the sub-field of cosmology, which focuses on the history, growth, evolution, and fate of the Universe — grew spectacularly.

• We mapped out the large-scale structure of the Universe, discovering a great cosmic web.
• We discovered how galaxies grew and evolved, and how their stellar populations inside changed with time.
• We learned that all the known forms of matter and energy in the Universe were insufficient to explain everything we observe: some form of dark matter and some form of dark energy are required.

And we were able to further verify additional predictions of the Big Bang, such as the predicted abundances of the light elements, the presence of a population of primordial neutrinos, and the discovery of density imperfections of exactly the necessary type to grow into the large-scale structure of the Universe we observe today.

At the same time, there were observations that were no doubt true, but that the Big Bang had no predictive power to explain. The Universe allegedly reached these arbitrarily high temperatures and high energies at the earliest times, and yet there are no exotic leftover relics that we can see today: no magnetic monopoles, no particles from grand unification, no topological defects, etc. Theoretically, something else beyond what is known must be out there to explain the Universe we see, but if they ever existed, they’ve been hidden from us.

The Universe, in order to exist with the properties we see, must have been born with a very specific expansion rate: one that balanced the total energy density exactly, to more than 50 significant digits. The Big Bang has no explanation for why this should be the case.

And the only way different regions of space would have the same exact temperature is if they’re in thermal equilibrium: if they have time to interact and exchange energy. Yet the Universe is too big and has expanded in such a way that we have many causally disconnected regions. Even at the speed of light, those interactions couldn’t have taken place.

Unfortunately, Nobel Laureate Roger Penrose, although his work on General Relativity, black holes, and singularities in the 1960s and 1970s was absolutely Nobel-worthy, has spent a large amount of his efforts in recent years on a crusade to overthrow inflation: by promoting a vastly scientifically inferior alternative, his pet idea of a Conformal Cyclic Cosmology, or CCC.

The biggest predictive difference is that the CCC pretty much requires that an imprint of “the Universe before the Big Bang” show itself in both the Universe’s large-scale structure and in the cosmic microwave background: the Big Bang’s leftover glow. Contrariwise, inflation demands that anywhere where inflation ends and a hot Big Bang arises must be causally disconnected from, and cannot interact with, any prior, current, or future such region. Our Universe exists with properties that are independent of any other.

The observations — first from COBE and WMAP, and more recently, from Planck — definitively place enormously tight constraints (to the limits of the data that exists) on any such structures. There are no bruises on our Universe; no repeating patterns; no concentric circles of irregular fluctuations; no Hawking points. When one analyzes the data properly, it is overwhelmingly clear that inflation is consistent with the data, and the CCC is quite clearly not.

 

 

Karen Lives Matter

flatlandkc |  They started popping up in Kansas City neighborhoods in late April — homemade barriers, some quite creative, informing motorists a block is closed to traffic except for residents and deliveries. 

Call it a pandemic experiment. As schools, workplaces and even some public spaces like playgrounds closed, Kansas City rolled out a program called Neighborhood Open Streets. With minimal hassle, residents can apply for a city permit to close their blocks to through traffic.

Depending on who you’re talking to, Neighborhood Open Streets is either a) an inspired step toward a safer, happier community; or b) a colossal nuisance.

In general, people who live on the closed blocks tend to favor the safety and community argument. Motorists forced to detour around them seethe over the inconvenience.

“I’m all for it,” said Diana Halverson, whose block on 70th Street off of Ward Parkway got a permit. 

Halverson’s block has been seeing a lot of traffic in recent months because of construction projects on Gregory Boulevard, two blocks to the south. So when a neighbor proposed applying for a closure permit, she heartily agreed. 

“Got it in one day,” she said.

Unlike the process for a block party permit, which requires signatures from a majority of residents to close the street for a few hours, applicants for a Neighborhood Open Streets permit need only fill out a form and submit evidence — like a text or email — that they informed their neighbors of their intent.

“We had a strict social distancing order in place,” said Maggie Green, information officer for Kansas City’s Public Works Department. “The last thing we wanted to do was encourage people to knock on doors.”

So far, the department has issued permits for 37 blocks, Green said. The majority are in the 4th and 6th City Council districts, and the program is especially popular in the southwest corridor.

Mayor Quinton Lucas Letter To KCPD: "Ass-Up Face-Down Is What I Do....,"

kansascity |  A week after hundreds of people gathered on the Country Club Plaza to protest racism and police brutality, Mayor Quinton Lucas sent a letter to Kansas City police thanking them for their work during the demonstrations.

The letter, dated June 10 with an official letterhead, says some members of the public laid at the officers’ feet centuries-old race problems, and says it was “unreasonable” to assign blame to rank-and-file officers. It notes the long hours, “harsh insults” and injuries experienced by police. 

Some community leaders on Thursday questioned the mayor’s focus on the suffering of the police, noting that Kansas City officers had used pepper spray and tear gas on protesters, sometimes in ways that sparked sharp outcry from members of the public. 

One Kansas City man has said a rubber bullet fired by police may cause him to lose an eye. Another had his leg violently smashed by a police tear gas canister. Jackson County Prosecutor Jean Peters Baker said her office is reviewing video of Kansas City officers who pepper-sprayed a pair of protesters, arresting one after he yelled at police.

On Thursday, Lucas said he recognized the concerns protesters raised but he wrote the letter to acknowledge the many patrol officers, detectives and others for the work they perform each day to protect the city. 

He noted a female homicide detective he saw examining evidence and speaking to witnesses following a shooting that left one dead and four injured near his home at 18th and Vine streets. 

“I sent it (the letter) because this is what I’m thinking,” he said. “It is what I do with anything else and some people will not like and some people will.”

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article243456141.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article243456141.html#storylink=cpy

Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article243456141.html#storylink=cpy

Joe Biden Constantly Forgetting He Only Plays a Political Tough Guy

WaPo | “I am disappointed, and quite frankly I’m angered, by the fact — he knows me, he knows my son. He knows there’s nothing to this,” Biden said. “Trump is now essentially holding power over him that even the Ukrainians wouldn’t yield to. The Ukrainians would not yield to, quote, ‘investigate Biden’ — there’s nothing to investigate about Biden or his son.”

A Graham spokesman declined to comment and said the senator was unavailable.

Trump’s personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been at the center of the House impeachment inquiry, claimed that Biden’s comment was a “threat” against Graham.

“This is getting to be more and more like my old mafia cases,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter, alluding to his time as a federal prosecutor. “They sure do sound like crooks.”

Graham, in a letter sent Thursday to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, asked for information related to calls between Biden, when he was vice president, and then-President Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, as well as documents that referred to an investigation of Burisma.

In the Obama years, Biden played an integral role in pushing Poroshenko to crack down on corruption in Ukraine, pressuring him to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen as corrupt and not doing enough to undertake crucial investigations.

The efforts to oust Shokin were mounted in coordination with U.S. allies, and several Republican senators were on board at the time. Now, however, some Republicans are asserting that Biden was attempting to get rid of Shokin to protect his son, an assertion contradicted by the circumstances at the time.

Still, Biden’s aides at the time expressed concern about Hunter’s position on the board of Burisma, worried that it could create the perception of a conflict of interest. Biden took no action to discourage his son from remaining on the board.

The International Criminal Court MUST NOT BE Recognized...,

newyorker |  The I.C.C., from its inception, has been impossibly compromised by the simple, definitive fact that many of the world’s most lawless countries, along with some of its most powerful—including the U.S., Russia, and China, the majority of permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—reject its jurisdiction. After sixteen years with no major triumphs and several major failures to its name, it would be easier to make the case for it if there were reason to believe that it could yet become the court of last resort for all comers that it is supposed to be, rather than what it is: a politically captive institution that reinforces the separate and unequal structures of the world. Maybe the best that one can hope for the court, in its current form, is that it can yet inspire some people who seek the rule of law to find a way to achieve it. Bolton rejected the very idea that it could inspire any good, simultaneously exaggerating the power of the I.C.C. as an ominous global colossus and belittling it as a puny contemptible farce. The only historically proven deterrent to “the hard men of history,” he declared, is “what Franklin Roosevelt once called ‘the righteous might’ of the United States.”

So what, really, was the point of Bolton’s speech? Where was the news in this “major announcement on U.S. policy?” He noted that Israel, too, faces the prospect of an I.C.C. investigation and announced that, in solidarity, the State Department was closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington. But then he said that the closure wasn’t necessarily about the court but rather a general punishment of “the Palestinians,” because “they refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” Beyond that, nothing that Bolton threatened—by way of shutting out, sanctioning, and declaring war on the I.C.C., and treating its personnel or anyone in the world who assisted it as criminals—went much beyond a rhetorical amplification of what he acknowledged has been established in U.S. law since the American Service-Members’ Protection Act. This wasn’t foreign policy. It was swagger.

Bolton has, thus far, enjoyed an absence from the Woodwardian accounts of Trump White House backbiting, subterfuge, and dysfunction. So it is tempting to think that he was deployed to deflect attention from the White House chaos, while his boss spent the day issuing uncharacteristically Presidential tweets about the hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas. Bolton, however, left out one point from his old Journal piece in this week’s speech, and the omission seems telling: “The ICC prosecutor,” Bolton wrote, “is an internationalized version of America’s ‘independent counsel,’ a role originally established in the wake of Watergate and later allowed to lapse (but now revived under Justice Department regulations in the form of a ‘special counsel’). Similarly, the ICC’s prosecutors are dangerously free of accountability and effective supervision.”

So the threat comes from within, after all. The problem is the existence of the prosecutor, who endangers sovereignty, which in Trump-speak means being above the law. The President and the nation cannot be held to account or supervised, so the prosecutor has to be. The President and the nation cannot be criminals, so the prosecutor must be. The prosecutor cannot be recognized. The prosecutor must be disempowered.

Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation...,

theguardian |  The game’s top umpires are considering forming a union because they believe Carlos Ramos was “hung out to dry” by the authorities during and after the US Open women’s final despite upholding the rules in sanctioning Serena Williams.

Many officials were also left angry with the fact that the International Tennis Federation took nearly 48 hours to defend Ramos, on Monday afternoon, by which time the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and United States Tennis Association (USTA) had supported Williams’s claims of sexism after she was given a game penalty for her behaviour during her defeat by Naomi Osaka.

Umpires are not allowed to speak out publicly under the terms of their contracts, and are employed by grand slams and men’s and women’s tours, which means many are reluctant to say anything for fear of losing their jobs. However, one senior figure told the Guardian that privately there was widespread concern about how the USTA and WTA had rushed to support Williams – which had led to vitriol and abuse on social media for Ramos.

“There is a lot of unhappiness in the umpiring community because no one is standing up for officials,” the senior figure told the Guardian. “Umpires keep asking: ‘What if it was me in that chair on Saturday?’ There is a widespread feeling that Carlos was hung out to dry for nearly 48 hours and that no one is standing up for officials.”

In the absence of any official support for Ramos until Monday, it was left to two former senior umpires, Mike Morrissey and Richard Ings, to defend the Portuguese official. “I have had lots of messages saying this is a joke,” said one source. “There is a lot of anger out there.”

Listen Little Man....,

telegraph |  As the sport continued to tear itself apart over the Serena Williams sexism row, the International Tennis Federation stepped in on Monday night to defend beleaguered umpire Carlos Ramos.

In the absence of any representative body to speak for tennis officials, it fell to the ITF to say what should be evident to all: despite Williams’s repeated insistence that Ramos owes her an apology, he was just doing his job when he penalised her a point and a game during Saturday’s tumultuous women’s US Open final.

“Carlos Ramos is one of the most experienced and respected umpires in tennis,” said the ITF, which is Ramos’s employer. “[His] decisions were in accordance with the relevant rules and were re-affirmed by the US Open’s decision to fine Serena Williams for the three offences.

“It is understandable this high-profile and regrettable incident should provoke debate. At the same time, it is important to remember Mr Ramos undertook his duties as an official according to the relevant rule book and acted at all times with professionalism and integrity.”

The statement might not have been necessary were it not for the further accusations of sexism that were levelled at Ramos on Sunday by two of tennis’ major stakeholders. First Katrina Adams, the head of the United States Tennis Association, told ESPN: “We watch the guys do this all the time, they’re badgering the umpire on the changeovers. Nothing happens. There’s no equality. There has to be some consistency across the board. These are conversations that will be imposed in the next weeks.”

There Will Never Be An Age of Artificial Intimacy?

NYTimes | Years ago I spoke with a 16-year-old girl who was considering the idea of having a computer companion in the future, and she described the upside to me. It’s not that the robot she’d imagined, a vastly more sophisticated Siri, was so inspiring. It’s that she’d already found people to be so disappointing. And now, for the first time, she explained me, people have options. Back then I thought her comments seemed prescient. Now I find them timely.

“There are people who have tried to make friends, but stumbled so badly that they’ve given up,” she said. “So when they hear this idea of robots as companions, well … it’s not like a robot has the mind to walk away or leave you or anything like that.”

This girl had grown up in the time of Siri, a conversational object presented as an empathy machine — a thing that could understand her. And so it seemed natural to her that other machines would expand the range of conversation. But there is something she may have been too young to understand — or, like a lot of us — prone to forget when we talk to machines. These robots can perform empathy in a conversation about your friend, your mother, your child or your lover, but they have no experience of any of these relationships. Machines have not known the arc of a human life. They feel nothing of the human loss or love we describe to them. Their conversations about life occupy the realm of the as-if. 

Yet through our interactions with these machines, we seem to ignore this fact; we act as though the emotional ties we form with them will be reciprocal, and real, as though there is a right kind of emotional tie that can be formed with objects that have no emotions at all.  

Swollen Woes and Sunken Schmoes

vice |  "I feel a special frisson with muscular women. The idea of a woman being stronger than me, and the sexual possibilities that that entails, is something I find extremely exciting."

Johnny, 37, is a technical trainer with the British Army. As a conventionally handsome guy in decent physical shape, Johnny is one of many men in the UK who engages in the otherwise unconventional practice of muscle worship. Also known as "sthenolagnia," muscle worship is a sexual paraphilia where a person becomes sexually aroused by touching and "worshipping" the muscles of a more physically dominant partner.

Male worshippers like Johnny are referred to in the muscle worship subculture as "schmoes." The dominant women they adore are their "goddesses." Although most schmoes can be found happily swarming around the fringes of your local bodybuilding show, the erotic pleasure they find in the strength and appearance of hyper-muscular women also motivates them to seek out female bodybuilders for private sessions where they can put those muscles to the test. These sessions can take place anywhere from Airbnb apartments to, on special occasions, the schmoe's own home. For many goddesses, sensual touching and wrestling is as far as it ever goes. For others, sexual intercourse is also an option.

"I've had several sessions," says Johnny. "They work out at about £350 [$453] per hour. Some guys like to engage in serious wrestling matches with the girls, but my own preference is for playful wrestling while encouraging the woman to show off her strength by lifting me and putting me in holds. The vast majority of sessions I've had have ended in full sex. Some girls are known for always providing sex. Others claim not to; but, in my experience, if the chemistry is good in the room, good things invariably follow."

Johnny goes on to explain how a surge of additional "goddesses" have become "available" to him recently, as the direct result of rule changes to the sport of women's bodybuilding.

The International Federation of Bodybuilding & Fitness has removed the women's heavy-weight category from the biggest global competitions (the Olympia, the Arnold Classic, and the World Championships) and replaced it with Women's Bikini—a weight class designed for lighter, more traditionally "feminine"-looking women. As the larger athletes are being phased out, many find themselves wrestling with men like Johnny to make ends meet. "There's barely any money in it for women," says Wendy McCready, "even when you do turn pro."