Poor Symone Sanders - Lying, Sweating, Sold Out for a Nickel...,

npr |  Right now we're going to hear from the campaign of former Vice President Joe Biden. Symone Sanders is a senior adviser to Biden, and she joins me now from New Hampshire.

KELLY: Glad to have you with us. So you have been sharing some of your campaign's projections on Twitter today. I've been following along. You said you're thrilled with Joe Biden's performance in Iowa. The other candidates are citing different projections, ones that make them look good, that don't look so good for Biden. So are you confident that when the numbers eventually come out, Joe Biden will be a front-runner in Iowa?

SANDERS: Look - we are very confident about our internal data. But I'd also like to caution folks to understand that any data any campaign is sharing is based on internal data. These are not the final numbers.

SANDERS: The reality is, we don't know the final numbers, which is why our campaign sent a letter to the Iowa Democratic Party last night urging and imploring that they check the data, check again and triple-check the data before releasing anything. So I know that there are reports that there is some type of data coming today, shortly, soon, in the coming hour.

KELLY: Right.

SANDERS: But the reality is, we need total numbers from precincts all across the state. There was a real breakdown in the process last night, from what was happening at precincts on the ground in Iowa to the app that the Iowa Democratic Party was using to the backup phone system and even with the collecting and recording and filling out a presidential preference card.

KELLY: Right. To your point...

SANDERS: So we really need to make sure we get this right.

KELLY: ...They're telling us that when they do put out results about an hour or so from now, we still won't get all of them. These will be partial results. So we still won't have full clarity about what exactly happened in Iowa and what it means going forward in the race.

SANDERS: And I think that's unfortunate. I think the voters are owed clarity, frankly, but - and the caucusgoers in Iowa. But, you know, we left Iowa last night, again, as I've said on Twitter and all day today, proud of our organization. We're in New Hampshire today. We have a full day of campaign events. We will be campaigning here aggressively over the next week. And we're looking forward to the primary on Tuesday. We've always thought...

KELLY: May I just press you on this for a minute...

SANDERS: I would just say, we've always thought...

KELLY: If I may, may I just press you on this? Because you said this is a shame for the voters. What about for candidates? Does the delay in results steal momentum from whoever ultimately comes out on top in Iowa?

SANDERS: I mean, I think that's a hypothetical. The reality is, this process has never just been about Iowa. It's not just about New Hampshire. And it's not just about Nevada or South Carolina. These first four nominating contests, we have always said, should be viewed as individual parts of one whole. They should be viewed as a package. And you don't get the full depth and breadth of anyone's strength or the lack thereof with just the Iowa results or just the New Hampshire results, frankly.

Since 1992, the Democratic nominee - no Democratic nominee has been the nominee without a substantial amount of votes from the African American community. You don't get that coming out of Iowa or New Hampshire.

House Kneegrow Busted Unselfconsciously AssKissing and Bootlicking

nakedcapitalism | On one level, this is an illustration of America’s descent into banana republic status. Pundits and the media keep reinforcing American exceptionalist fantasies, our brand fumes of vaunted democracy, yet we can’t even run elections competently. Is is just the grifting, that introducing more tech creates more opportunities for vendor enrichment? Or is it yet more proof that a lot of people in charge really hate democracy and are at best indifferent to doing things right?

It’s not hard to see the Iowa fiasco as an illustration of an even more deeply-seated pathology: elite incompetence. Too many people with the right resumes get to fail upwards or at worst sideways. And remember, unlike our older WASP-y leaders who were a combination of people from the right clubs and self-made men, our current crop of people in charge pride themselves on being the end products of a meritocratic system, as in their claim to legitimacy stems from the claim that they are more talented (gah) than mere mortals and therefore obviously should be in the top slots because they’ll do oh so much better than everyone else.

And it’s the Democratic party, as the representative of the 10% professional managerial classes, that really owns this disease. Recall in Thomas Frank’s Listen Liberal how he set forth, without irony, a conference that was treacly with the self-regard, with the way every participant was lavished with embarrassing exaggerations of their accomplishments. No one had the slightest sense of how narcissistic and pampered they seemed. And it wasn’t hard to imagine they’d all collapse in a heap if presented with a real challenge, like suddenly becoming destitute or being dumped in a remote area with neither a water bottle nor GPS.

And we keep seeing this leadership class succeed in rent extraction and not much else. Go down the list: The post-crisis failure to reform the banks or even go through the motions by incarcerating a few execs and turfing out some board members. Our grossly over-priced, underperforming health care system. Our student-impoverishing higher education system. The F-35. The botched Obamacare rollout. Our Middle-East nation-breaking, which has scored geopolitical own goals like destabilizing Europe, facilitating Russia asserting itself a geopolitical power despite having an economy the size of South Korea and in the face of our economic sanctions, and making us deservedly disliked around the world. Hillary Clinton losing to of all people Donald Trump despite spending twice as much as his campaign spend because her team was enamored of Robby Mook’s models and somehow forgot about the Electoral College. 

And if you believe, as Team Dem does, that every problem can be solved with better PR, the corollary is you never admit to failure, you never do post mortems, and you keep incompetents around who you allow to fail and fail again.

Which of the Rules Actually Apply to Bloomberg?

PNAS |  Seven studies using experimental and naturalistic methods reveal that upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals. In studies 1 and 2, upper-class individuals were more likely to break the law while driving, relative to lower-class individuals. In follow-up laboratory studies, upper-class individuals were more likely to exhibit unethical decision-making tendencies (study 3), take valued goods from others (study 4), lie in a negotiation (study 5), cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize (study 6), and endorse unethical behavior at work (study 7) than were lower-class individuals. Mediator and moderator data demonstrated that upper-class individuals’ unethical tendencies are accounted for, in part, by their more favorable attitudes toward greed.

Which social class is the more likely provenance of unethical behavior, the upper class or the lower class? Examining how social class is associated with unethical behavior, or actions that harm others and are illegal or morally objectionable to one's community (1), would shed light on behaviors such as cheating, deception, or breaking the law that have important consequences for society. On the one hand, lower-class individuals live in environments defined by fewer resources, greater threat, and more uncertainty (2, 3). It stands to reason, therefore, that lower-class individuals may be more motivated to behave unethically to increase their resources or overcome their disadvantage.

A second line of reasoning, however, suggests the opposite prediction: namely, that the upper class may be more disposed to the unethical. Greater resources, freedom, and independence from others among the upper class give rise to self-focused social-cognitive tendencies (3⇓⇓⇓–7), which we predict will facilitate unethical behavior. Historical observation lends credence to this idea. For example, the recent economic crisis has been attributed in part to the unethical actions of the wealthy (8). Religious teachings extol the poor and admonish the rich with claims like, “It will be hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven” (9). Building upon past findings, in the present investigation we tested whether upper-class individuals—relative to lower-class individuals—are more likely to engage in unethical behavior, and whether their attitudes toward greed might help explain this tendency.

Social class, or socioeconomic status (SES), refers to an individual's rank vis-à-vis others in society in terms of wealth, occupational prestige, and education (2, 3). Abundant resources and elevated rank allow upper-class individuals increased freedom and independence (4), giving rise to self-focused patterns of social cognition and behavior (3). Relative to lower-class individuals, upper-class individuals have been shown to be less cognizant of others (4) and worse at identifying the emotions that others feel (5). Furthermore, upper-class individuals are more disengaged during social interactions—for example, checking their cell phones or doodling on a questionnaire—compared with their lower-class peers (6).

Does Anybody Seriously Believe That Cheat Bootyplug Beat Bernie in Iowa?!?!?!

Caucus numbers per Sanders camp pic.twitter.com/6XUmX0Fkbn

— Ken Klippenstein (@kenklippenstein) February 4, 2020

Real Reason Obama Heir Apparent Cheat Bootyplug Claimed to Have Iowa in the Bag...,

thegrayzone |  Behind the app that delayed Iowa’s voting results is a dark money operation funded by anti-Bernie Sanders billionaires. Its top donor Seth Klarman is a Buttigieg backer who has dumped money into pro-settler Israel lobby groups. 

At the time of publication, 12 hours after voting in the Democratic Party’s Iowa caucuses ended, the results have not been announced. The delay in reporting is the result of a failed app developed by a company appropriately named Shadow Inc.

This firm was staffed by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama campaign veterans and created by a Democratic dark money nonprofit backed by hedge fund billionaires including Seth Klarman. A prolific funder of pro-settler Israel lobby organizations, Klarman has also contributed directly to Pete Buttigieg’s campaign.

The delay in the vote reporting denied a victory speech to Senator Bernie Sanders, the presumptive winner of the opening contest in the Democratic presidential primary. Though not one exit poll indicated that Buttigieg would have won, the South Bend, Indiana mayor took to Twitter to confidently proclaim himself the victor.

The bizarre scenario was made possible by a mysterious voting app whose origins had been kept secret by Democratic National Committee officials. For hours, it was unclear who created the failed technology, or how it wound up in the hands of Iowa party officials.

Though a dark money Democratic operation turned out to be the source of the disastrous app, suspicion initially centered on former Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook and his Russiagate-related elections integrity initiative.

MSM Coverage: Oh Woe Is We! Meeting Bernie's Requirements, the App is to Blame!!!

LATimes |  On a tense, chaotic night, with the eyes of the nation trained on the Iowa caucuses, that state’s Democratic Party was counting on a slick new smartphone app to make everything go smoothly. 

The app was coded by a tech firm run by veterans of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign, one of them a former Google engineer. It was designed to meet new requirements instituted after that year’s contentious Iowa caucuses, in which Clinton narrowly edged out Bernie Sanders. To provide more transparency this time around, the state party promised to report not just the final results but voters’ initial and second choices as well.

With so much more data to tabulate than in previous years, party leaders feared that the established system of reporting numbers by phone would be too slow. A proposal for a “tele-caucus” system enabling virtual voting was rejected as too vulnerable to hacking. An app that could instantaneously relay the numbers as soon as precinct chairs input them, developed by Democratic Party loyalists, looked like the perfect solution.

It turned out to be a crushing failure. 

The firm behind the app is Shadow, an affiliate of ACRONYM, a Democratic nonprofit founded in 2017 “to educate, inspire, register, and mobilize voters,” according to its website. Shadow started out as Groundbase, a tech developer co-founded by Gerard Niemira and Krista Davis, who worked for the tech team on Clinton’s campaign for the 2016 Democratic nomination.

Niemira had previously worked at kiva.org, a nonprofit that makes loans to entrepreneurs and others in the developing world, and Davis had spent eight years as an engineer at Google. ACRONYM’s founder and CEO is Tara McGowan, a former journalist and digital producer with President Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign.

In the days leading up to caucus night, Shadow’s app was seen as “a potential target for early election interference,” according to the Des Moines Register.

Instead, a different problem arose.

Modi-BJP-Sangh Start Weighing In On the nCoV Wee Phuk Yu SNAFU

TheHindu |  The government has ordered an inquiry into a study conducted in Nagaland by researchers from the U.S., China and India on bats and humans carrying antibodies to deadly viruses like Ebola, officials confirmed to The Hindu.

The inquiry comes as officials worldwide grapple with the spread of novel coronavirus 2019, from Wuhan, China, to 20 countries, that has resulted in over 300 deaths.

The study came under the scanner as two of the 12 researchers belonged to the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s Department of Emerging Infectious Diseases, and it was funded by the United States Department of Defense’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA). They would have required special permissions as foreign entities.

The study, conducted by scientists of the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences in the U.S. and the Duke-National University in Singapore, is now being investigated for how the scientists were allowed to access live samples of bats and bat hunters (humans) without due permissions. The results of the study were published in October last in the PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases journal, originally established by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) sent a five-member committee to investigate. The inquiry is complete, and a report has been submitted to the Health Ministry,” a senior government official told The Hindu.

The U.S. Embassy and the Union Health Ministry declined to comment on the inquiry. In a written reply to questions from The Hindu, the U.S. Centre for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta said it “did not commission this study and had not received any enquiries [from the Indian government] on it.” An American official, however, suggested that the U.S. Department of Defense might not have coordinated the study through the CDC.

The study, ‘Filovirus-reactive antibodies in humans and bats in Northeast India imply Zoonotic spillover’, published in PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases states the researchers found “the presence of filovirus (e.g. ebolavirus, marburgvirus and dianlovirus) reactive antibodies in both human (e.g. bat hunters) and bat populations in Northeast India, a region with no historical record of Ebola virus disease.”

Bats often carry ebola, rabies, marburg and the SARS coronavirus.

Han Elite to the U.S. "Can't We All Just Get Along?"

Reuters |  Beijing on Monday accused the United States of spreading fear over a coronavirus outbreak by pulling nationals out and restricting travel instead of offering significant aid. 

The United States was the first nation to begin evacuations, issued a travel warning against going to China, and from Sunday barred entry to foreigners recently in China. 

Washington has “unceasingly manufactured and spread panic”, Chinese foreign ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying told reporters, noting that the World Health Organization (WHO) had advised against trade and travel curbs.  

“It is precisely developed countries like the United States with strong epidemic prevention capabilities and facilities that have taken the lead in imposing excessive restrictions contrary to WHO recommendations,” she added, saying countries should make reasonable, calm and science-based judgements. 

In China, 361 people have died with more than 17,000 infected from the virus, which originated in the central city of Wuhan. At least another 171 cases have been reported in more than two dozen other countries and regions, from the United States to Japan. 

Conducting her daily news briefing via the WeChat app rather than in person, Hua also chided the United States for lack of help. “So far, the U.S. government has yet to provide any substantial assistance to China,” she said.

By Their Nature Han Elites (CCP) are Exceptionally Vulnerable to Information Warfare

theautomaticearth |  If the Party is allowed to get away with this behavior aimed at self-preservation above anything else, including human lives of both Chinese and foreigners, something bad is sure to happen. Maybe not this time, maybe this one will fizzle out. But the next one, or the one after that, will not.

It is obvious how dangerous this is, putting the interests of the Party, or the economy, above the risk of spreading global pandemic. But is is also obvious why it happens. And it wouldn’t or couldn’t happen only in China. Though the country in its present state is a ideal breeding ground.

Flights are halted. Hundreds of millions will soon be in lockdown. Exports will plunge, because production will. Which will hit the west as much as China. Just so the Party can say it did what had to be done, and so it will stay in power. Xi Jinping knows his power depends on the economy, but he thinks he has what it takes to hold on to power even when the economy tanks.

He can simply declare force majeure, he can tell his people how much worse things would have been had he not decided to lock down everything.

We’ve been following the numbers of infections and fatalities now for 2 weeks or so, even as we know they don’t mean much, they’re just Party propaganda. The Party will release what it thinks it must, but no more. Perhaps we need other sources; these will come if and when things get out of hand. Not that we know they will.

Xi can claim today that he has control. He can say things are not too bad, but we don’t really know, he’s issuing the numbers. What we do know, and there’s the crux, is that he was 6 weeks late in starting to acknowledge the epidemic, in contacting the outside world, in acknowledging his mistakes, and in acknowledging that such mistakes are baked into the model that keeps him in power.

Phase 1 is complete denial, not a word. Phase 2 is damage control, massaging the numbers downward. Phase 3 is “close all the doors, not to worry, nothing to see here, we got this, no you can’t come in, too risky!”

No, #2019-nCoV Is Not a Bioweapon

nakedcapitalism |  At least one finance-adjacent blog (not this one) promoted a bioRxiv pre-print entitled “Uncanny similarity of unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV spike protein to HIV-1 gp120 and Gag”, containing the inflammatory passage “The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity/similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature.” That paper has now been withdrawn. From Richard Sever, Assistant Director of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, Editor of CSH Perspectives, bioRxiv Co-Founder:

Authors of disputed “uncanny” 2019-nCoV preprint to voluntarily withdraw preprint:
"It was not our intention to feed into the conspiracy theories...we appreciate the criticisms...and will get back with a revised version” https://t.co/zGcT1440D0

— Richard Sever Ⓤ (@cshperspectives) February 1, 2020

 

Here is what one bioinformatics research had to say about the now-withdrawn paper:

The 2019-nCoV genome does not contain remarkable genomic properties which need explaining, and for which we’d look to some kind of bioengineering as a cause.
The virus has a close 96% sequence overlap to a naturally occurring bat coronavirus, and coronaviruses have been known to jump from bats to humans by way of intermediates before, like the SARS coronavirus. The differences between the genome sequences, including the ones identified by the Indian study, are in variable regions of the genome that we’d expect to differ, and the 4% difference in the genomes is hard to call as “high” or “low,” given that we don’t know exactly which bats the 2019-nCoV strain came from or when it diverged from its closest known ancestor.

Nor is it surprising that the known 2019-nCoV sequences all contain the same genomic changes relative to a known relative. They all came from the same outbreak from the same animal reservoir, i.e. they only diverged from each other a few months ago at most. It’s not surprising that they haven’t evolved very much away from each other.

Nor does the clinical presentation of 2019-nCoV have novel features which need explaining. Its symptom profile, degree of transmissibility, severity, mortality rate, duration, incubation and latent period, ability to jump from animals to humans, and ability to transmit asymptomatically and by skin contact are all within the precedents established by other human coronaviruses.

That is, the 2019-nCoV genome and the way it affects humans have, by themselves, no special anomaly which needs explaining.

(More on 2019-nCoV and bat corona viruses here.) Further, from Infection, Genetics and Evolution, “Full-genome evolutionary analysis of the novel corona virus (2019-nCoV) rejects the hypothesis of emergence as a result of a recent recombination event“:

The levels of genetic similarity between the 2019-nCoV and [BatCoV] RaTG13 suggest that the latter does not provide the exact variant that caused the outbreak in humans, but the hypothesis that 2019-nCoV has originated from bats is very likely. We show evidence that the novel coronavirus (2019-nCov) is not-mosaic consisting in almost half of its genome of a distinct lineage within the betacoronavirus.

Tyler Durden, You Know You Done F'd Up, Right?!?!

zerohedge |  So did we have a right to ask the question if there is an alternative version for the emergence of the Coronavirus pandemic, especially with hundreds if not thousands of lives at stake? Absolutely.

As for Broderick's statement that Peng was "accused falsely" we wonder how he knows this: did he speak to Peng? Did he get any comments? Did he get an official denial? No, he did not: as he writes, "BuzzFeed News has reached out to the scientist, whom it is declining to name." So, it actually turns out that it is Buzzfeed that is once again presenting a false statement as fact, something Buzzfeed has been accused of doing over and over and over.

Meanwhile, those who wonder if Dr. Zhou has any link to the possible emergence of the Coronavirus following years of experimenting with bats, we urge you to read our full article instead of relying on the hearsay of ideologically biased journalists.

Second, and contrary to the claims presented by Buzzfeed, we did not release any "personal information": Peng Zhou (周鹏) is a public figure, and all the contact information that we presented was pulled from his publicly posted bio found on a website at the Wuhan Institute of Virology which anyone with access to the internet can pull from the following URL: http://sourcedb.whiov.cas.cn/zw/rck/201705/t20170505_4783973.html, which is also the information we used.

So about Buzzfeed's allegation, which was adopted by Twitter, that somehow we incited "targeted abuse", here is what we said:

Something tells us, if anyone wants to find out what really caused the coronavirus pandemic that has infected thousands of people in China and around the globe, they should probably pay Dr. Peng a visit.

To which we then added the information obtained from his own bio page on the Institute's website:

Twitter Shut Down ZeroHedge Because___________________________?

theverge  |  Twitter says it has permanently suspended markets blog Zero Hedge’s Twitter account, @zerohedge, for violating the company’s platform manipulation policy. On Wednesday, Zero Hedge posted a blog that doxxed a Chinese scientist and strongly suggested without evidence that the scientist created the strain of coronavirus that’s currently spreading around the world.

That blog lists a name, photo, email, and phone number that are reportedly tied to the scientist, and suggested that readers “pay [him] a visit” if they wanted to know “what really caused the coronavirus pandemic.” BuzzFeed News reported on Zero Hedge’s blog that doxxed the scientist earlier this evening, ahead of the Twitter suspension. 

The Verge is not publishing a link to Zero Hedge’s blog post or information about the scientist to avoid spreading misinformation.

Subrealism Posts That MuhPhuggin Link With The Quickness 

Twitter says it has permanently suspended markets blog Zero Hedge’s Twitter account, @zerohedge, for violating the company’s platform manipulation policy. On Wednesday, Zero Hedge posted a blog that doxxed a Chinese scientist and strongly suggested without evidence that the scientist created the strain of coronavirus that’s currently spreading around the world.

That blog lists a name, photo, email, and phone number that are reportedly tied to the scientist, and suggested that readers “pay [him] a visit” if they wanted to know “what really caused the coronavirus pandemic.” BuzzFeed News reported on Zero Hedge’s blog that doxxed the scientist earlier this evening, ahead of the Twitter suspension. 

The Verge is not publishing a link to Zero Hedge’s blog post or information about the scientist to avoid spreading misinformation.

May Have to Rethink nCOV If This Isht is Human-Human Respiratory AIDS

biorxiv |  We are currently witnessing a major epidemic caused by the 2019 novel coronavirus (2019- nCoV). The evolution of 2019-nCoV remains elusive. We found 4 insertions in the spike glycoprotein (S) which are unique to the 2019-nCoV and are not present in other coronaviruses. Importantly, amino acid residues in all the 4 inserts have identity or similarity to those in the HIV-1 gp120 or HIV-1 Gag. Interestingly, despite the inserts being discontinuous on the primary amino acid sequence, 3D-modelling of the 2019-nCoV suggests that they converge to constitute the receptor binding site. The finding of 4 unique inserts in the 2019-nCoV, all of which have identity /similarity to amino acid residues in key structural proteins of HIV-1 is unlikely to be fortuitous in nature. This work provides yet unknown insights on 2019-nCoV and sheds light on the evolution and pathogenicity of this virus with important implications for diagnosis of this virus. Fist tap Rohan.

biospace |  More than 80 people have died from the coronavirus in China. The Chinese government is turning to a drug developed by AbbVie for HIV patients as a potential treatment for the outbreak that has reached the shores of the United States.

AbbVie said it was donating more than one million dollars’ worth of Aluvia, a combination of lopinavir and ritonavir as an ad-hoc treatment for pneumonia that is associated with the outbreak. The Chinese government suggested last week that taking two lopinavir/ritonavir pills and inhaling a dose of nebulized alpha-interferon twice a day could benefit these patients, Reuters reported. There are more than 2,000 known cases of the coronavirus in China. The illness has caused parts of China to grind to a halt as health officials seek to contain the spread of the virus.

The decision to use AbbVie’s medicine came after a noted respiratory expert at Peking University First Hospital in Beijing said he was given the HIV drugs to fight the virus after he contracted it following a visit to Wuhan, the capital of Hubei province in central China where the virus is thought to have originated. Wan Guangfa came down with the virus after interacting with coronavirus patients. He told China News Week that the HIV treatments worked for him.

The coronavirus family includes the common cold as well as viruses that cause more serious illnesses, such as SARS that spread from China to more than a dozen countries in 2002-03 and killed about 800 people. Also, the virus is similar to Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), which developed from camels. The virus infects the lungs, and symptoms start with a fever and cough. It can progress to shortness of breath and breathing difficulties leading to pneumonia.

Need to Remind Myself "The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good!"

counterpunch |  I wrote six articles (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) about the Bernie Sanders campaign during the 2016 primary. As everyone keeps saying, Bernie is a paragon of consistency, so my understanding of him stands unchanged. The political situation in 2020 is, however, significantly different, and has opened up new possibilities for the Sanders campaign. On the eve of the first primary vote in Iowa, let’s consider what those possibilities are and where this campaign is taking its constituents and the Democratic Party.

Bernie himself is the same as he ever was. A moderate welfare-state Social Democrat, not a socialist or even anti-capitalist; anti-war with an historically anti-imperialist, but now imperialist-accommodating, tinge; nominally independent but functionally an auxiliary Democrat; fiercely critical of Republicans but stubbornly shy about criticizing Democratic colleagues. He is also, I think, honest and trustworthy. You can see that he takes and fights for the positions he does because he believes in them, not because he is opportunistically pandering to a specific audience segment or to the donor class.

To be clear, even though, from my decidedly more leftist, socialist point of view, I have no illusions about Bernie’s faults (and was pretty ruthless about them in those 2016 essays), I hope he wins and will vote for him. Indeed, I changed my registration in New York to vote for him in the Democratic primary, and I would certainly vote for him in the general. He would be the first Democratic presidential candidate I have voted for in decades.

That’s because there is a difference in kind between Bernie and the other Democratic candidates, a difference unlike the differences among them. It’s the difference between a principled Social Democratic program to meet human needs, based on and supported by a mass movement, and a program of neoliberal tinkering to protect profit-making possibilities, based on and supported by capitalist donors/the donor class.

His nomination would be a radical departure and would radically disrupt the Democratic Party and the whole political game, and he would have a great chance to win, opening new and substantively different and left, social-democratic possibilities in the U.S.

Nowhere is this more evident than in his Medicare-for-All program, and nothing has been more revelatory then watching fauxgressives like Warren and Buttigieg moonwalk away from it. Bernie’s universal coverage single-payer program establishes healthcare as a human right, not a commodity. It concretely benefits the lives and enhances the social power of the great majority of citizens by taking public control of an essential service, and eliminating a predatory capitalist industry. That is why all the other Democratic candidates (save perhaps Tulsi, who has been unfairly but effectively rendered moot) reject it: they prefer maintaining health care as a commodity sold to consumers for a profit, just adding a generic version on the supermarket shelf; their “public option” is all about preserving the “profit option.”

Po Folk (98%) Got NMFTG About Party Infighting and Corporatist Bullshit

RollingStone |  No other 2020 candidate for president, including Donald Trump, can come close to matching Bernie Sanders’ level of support among members of the U.S. military, to go by the most recent campaign finance data from the Federal Election Commission.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines have donated a total of $185,625 to Sen. Sanders’ 2020 campaign. By comparison, they have given $113,012 to Trump, $80,250 to Pete Buttigieg, $64,604 to Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and a relatively paltry $33,045 to former Vice President Joe Biden, according to Doug Weber, a senior researcher at the Center for Responsive Politics.

For every candidate in the 2020 race, the CRP maintains a list of the 20 companies or institutions whose employees have given the most money to his or her campaign. Remarkably, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Navy, the U.S. Air Force, the Department of Defense, and the Department of Veterans Affairs all separately appear on Sanders’ list, comprising 5 of his top 20. The largest service branch, the U.S. Army, comes in at number 11, with $65,395 in total donations. That’s just behind Walmart, whose employees gave $69,523.

Sanders’ support from employees of Walmart, Amazon, Microsoft, and the U.S. Postal Service has been reported, but the strength of his appeal to the armed forces has gone largely unnoticed.

If Sanders wins the nomination and his financial support from service members translates into votes, it would represent a significant shift from 2016, when active-duty personnel were twice as likely to choose Trump over Hillary Clinton. In 2016, the Military Times sent a confidential survey to its 59,000 subscribers in the armed forces. The respondents preferred Trump to Hillary Clinton by a “huge margin,” and were nearly three times more likely to identify as Republican than Democrat.

How Has Joe Rogan Effortlessly Mastered What So Confuses This Old Racist Queen?

NYMag |  I do not recommend reading the new books by Ezra Klein and Christopher Caldwell one after the other. Klein’s Why We’re Polarized and Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement come from very different perspectives, but convey a near-paralyzing and plausible pessimism. Klein’s is a political-science explanation of our intensifying cultural and political tribalism, and its incompatibility with functional liberal democracy (a theme I explored here). Caldwell’s is a deeper, wider cultural and constitutional narrative of the last half-century. If Klein is trying to explain why polarization fucks everything up, Caldwell is intent on telling us how this state of affairs came to be. Both are well worth reading (though Caldwell’s vibrant, mordant prose makes his a more unusual and enjoyable ride).

Some might say that the two are among the best and the brightest of left and right, respectively. On the left, Klein is a near-archetypal member of the new elite class: progressive but still struggling to be fair-minded, a liberal who has tactically deferred to wokeness. On the right, Caldwell swaggers around as the cranky-cool professor articulating the frustrations of the less articulate, throwing barbs here and there, gleefully challenging and scorning the elite orthodoxies that culminated in the election of Barack Obama.

But both books agree on one central thing: Our fate was almost certainly cast as long ago as 1964 and 1965. Those years, in the wake of the Kennedy assassination, saw the Civil Rights Act upend the Constitution of a uniquely liberal country in order to tackle the legacy of slavery and racism, and the Immigration and Nationality Act set in motion the creation of a far more racially and ethnically diverse and integrated society than anyone in human history had previously thought possible. Still, at the time, few believed that either shift would have huge, deep consequences in the long term. They were merely a modernization of American ideals: inclusivity, expansiveness, hope.

As someone who was born just before these two changes were instigated, I regarded those tectonic shifts as simply part of the landscape — something that seemed always to have been here. And what could be questioned about either? One was reversing a profound moral evil; the other was banishing racism from the immigration laws. No-brainers. The strongest resistance to civil rights came from former segregationists or obvious racists, and there was little resistance to the Immigration Act, because most in the congressional debate seemed to think it wouldn’t change anything much at all. (The House sponsor of the Immigration Act, as Caldwell notes, promised that “quota immigration under the bill is likely to be more than 80 percent European,” while Ted Kennedy insisted: “The ethnic mix of this country will not be upset.”) There were a few dissenters to the 1964 Act, such as Robert Bork, who identified a significant erosion in the freedom of association. And there were southern senators who worried about immigrants from the developing world. But the resisters were easily dismissed on both counts, in the wake of LBJ’s 1964 landslide.

Globalization: Make It Plain

thesaker |  Consider the hypothetical case of an economy with annual GDP of 5 trillion US dollars, the broad economic dynamics of which are the subject matter of this exploration.

The hypothetical country whose economy we analyse here is named AB, because its internal economy is composed of two distinct components A and B. The total population of AB is 100 million, but only about 2% of it belongs to B; the rest of it belongs to A. For the ease of dealing with round numbers, we shall say that A and B have populations of 100 million and 2 million respectively.

To a large extent, A and B are geographically separated within AB, but the separation is not total. Intermingling does occur. Main roads and highways, for example, carry cars belonging to members of both A and B. Commercial airlines also carry members of both A and B, whereas private and chartered airplanes carry mostly the members of B. Schools, residences, shops, recreation et cetera are largely segregated, since the members of B see themselves as being a class apart.

From the point of view of governance, the members of B have almost total control over how the country AB is legislated and governed. Any attempt by members of A to have their voice heard is met with hysterical and shrill denunciations by members of B – using terms such as “nationalism”, “populism”, “socialism”, “deplorable” and so on.

From the point of view of economic prosperity, the members of B are doing far, far better than those of A. In fact the total GDP of AB is about equally divided between A and B, which means that an average member of B earns about fifty times more per year than the average member of A.

Who Did 4 Million Jobs Worth of Damage to America?

nakedcapitalism |  A newly released study by the Economic Policy Institute reaches a devastating but not surprising conclusion: globalization has screwed American workers. However, putting numbers on how much sustained trade deficits with China translate into lost American jobs, and those numbers turning out to be large, gives free trade cheerleaders a lot less wriggle room.

EPI estimates that American sacrificed 3.7 million jobs as a result of US-China trade deficits since China joined the WTO in 2001, with 3/4 of the losses taking place in manufacturing positions. They also point out that job losses to China have increased since Trump took office.

The EPI estimates are consistent with earlier studies. From a 2017 Wall Street Journal article, How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump:

What happened with Chinese imports is an example of how much of the conventional wisdom about economics that held sway in the late 1990s, including the role of trade, technology and central banking, has since slowly unraveled….

Both presidential candidates aimed much of their criticism at 1994’s North American Free Trade Agreement, which boosted imports from Mexico. Even then, though, the real culprit was China, economists now say.

Many U.S. factories that moved to Mexico did so to match prices from China. Some of the new Mexican factories helped support U.S. jobs. For example, fabrics made in the U.S. are turned into clothing in Mexico for sale globally by U.S. companies….
A group of economists that includes Messrs. Hanson and Autor estimates that Chinese competition was responsible for 2.4 million jobs lost in the U.S. between 1999 and 2011. Total U.S. employment rose 2.1 million to 132.9 million in the same period.

Recall that the much-touted NAFTA was supposed to deliver one million American jobs, but instead resulted in job destruction, with studies estimating anywhere from nearly 800,000 jobs to over a million.

Now to the executive summary of the EPI report:

U.S. jobs lost are spread throughout the country but are concentrated in manufacturing, including in industries in which the United States has traditionally held a competitive advantage.

Why Doesn't America Protect Its Children From Predators?

rutherford |  “Children are being targeted and sold for sex in America every day.”—John Ryan, National Center for Missing & Exploited Children

There can only be one winner emerging from this year’s Super Bowl LIV showdown between the San Francisco 49ers and the Kansas City Chiefs, but the biggest losers will be the hundreds of young girls and boys—some as young as 9 years old—who will be bought and sold for sex during the course of the big game.

It’s common to refer to this evil practice, which has become the fastest growing business in organized crime and the second most-lucrative commodity traded illegally after drugs and guns as child sex trafficking, but what we’re really talking about is rape.

Adults purchase children for sex at least 2.5 million times a year in the United States.

It’s not just young girls who are vulnerable to these predators, either.

According to a USA Today investigative report, “boys make up about 36% of children caught up in the U.S. sex industry (about 60% are female and less than 5% are transgender males and females).”

Consider this: every two minutes, a child is exploited in the sex industry.

In Georgia alone, it is estimated that 7,200 men (half of them in their 30s) seek to purchase sex with adolescent girls each month, averaging roughly 300 a day.

On average, a child might be raped by 6,000 men during a five-year period.

It is estimated that at least 100,000 children—girls and boys—are bought and sold for sex in the U.S. every year, with as many as 300,000 children in danger of being trafficked each year. Some of these children are forcefully abducted, others are runaways, and still others are sold into the system by relatives and acquaintances.

Child rape has become Big Business in America.

This is an industry that revolves around cheap sex on the fly, with young girls and women who are sold to 50 men each day for $25 apiece, while their handlers make $150,000 to $200,000 per child each year.

Taking a Page Out of Project Blue Book "Move Along Folks, Nothing to See Over Here!"

vice | The Colorado Mystery Drones Weren’t Real\

The mysterious drone sightings that captured national attention were a classic case of mass hysteria. 

On the night of December 30, Sergeant Vince Iovinella of the Morgan County Sheriff's Department in rural Colorado was on patrol when the calls started coming in about drones.

“Residents began calling in reports of drones of unknown origin moving above houses and farms,” Iovinella wrote in a statement obtained by Motherboard via a public records request. “The numbers would range from 4 to 10 drones in an area at a time. Some were reported to be low and at least 6 ft. long.”

Iovinella further reported the drones had white and red flashing lights as he and other deputies made “several attempts” to follow the drones. The drones were moving “very fast at times” but could also “sustain a hover over an area for long periods of time.”

“There were many sighting’s [sic] coming in and at the same time,” Iovinella continued. “It is believed that there could have been up to 30 drones moving around the county if not more and appeared to be working in a search pattern across the county.”

This was yet another night on eastern Colorado’s new drone patrol, following a slate of reports on mysterious fixed-wing drones in the area. They’d come out at night between approximately 7 to 10 p.m. The story, which was first reported by the Denver Post, got international press attention.

Matters kicked into high gear after a medical helicopter reported on January 8 to have flown dangerously close to a drone in the same general area. More than 70 local, state, federal, and military officials jumped into action, convened in a small town called Brush, Colorado, and formed a joint drone task force of 10 to 15 different government agencies to solve the mystery.

“In all of these cases,” Iovinella wrote in this statement, “it is unknown who owns the drone or what their purpose is.”

That’s because the drones never existed.