How Dare Devin Nunes Kwestin His Bettors At The Brookings...,

strategic-culture |  As investigative journalist Paul Sperry rigorously lays out in his report, a major piece of the Russiagate puzzle was revealed when it became known that the primary source used by Christopher Steele in shaping his dodgy dossier was not the high level Kremlin insider which the world was told, but rather a former Brookings Institute employee named Igor Danchenko.

This young Russian-born analyst who hadn’t been to Russia in decades admitted to the FBI in January 2017 that he had no contacts with any notable Russian operatives anywhere near the Kremlin (or even Russia itself it seems), and was totally confused when he was asked why he believed Steele hired him to put together an intelligence dossier on Trump in the first place!

Such admissions didn’t seem to bother the FBI at this time, who ignored the evidence of the dossier’s fraudulent foundations and proceeded to use the Steele/Danchenko material to acquire FISA warrants on Carter Page. This dossier also fueled the fires of the Russiagate inquisition and first gave voice to the narrative that Russia “hacked” the DNC emails (which have been completely refuted by former NSA insider Bill Binney).

The firestorm of revelations surrounding the Brookings Institute, have induced Rep. Devin Nunes to announce a long-awaited probe on the powerful liberal think tank which has acted as a controlling force in America’s deep state for decades and the powerful figure of the Institute’s former president Strobe Talbott.

Nunes stated:

“You may remember that the State Department was involved and there were additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier- except that they mirrored the Steele dossier. And we think there is a connection between the [former] president of Brookings and those dossiers that were given to the State Department.”\

Strobe Talbott not only led Brookings for years, but served as former Deputy Secretary of State of the Clinton White House, former director of the Council on Foreign Relations, was a member of the Trilateral Commissions executive committee and also acted as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Policy Board of the Obama White House. It was Talbott who deployed Danchenko’s Brookings Institute mentor Fiona Hill to acquire a job at the National Security Council in 2017 where she not only advanced an anti-Russian war plan but testified in Trump’s impeachment trial in 2019.

Hill, who had known Christopher Steele since 2006 and were in frequent discussion since 2016, co-authored two Brookings Institute intelligence reports with Danchenko and endorsed him as a “creative and accomplished analyst and researcher” which was posted on his Linkedin account.

The “additional dossiers that weren’t the Steele dossier” addressed by Nunes is a reference to a lesser known dodgy dossier produced by Brookings-affiliated journalist Cody Shearer (brother-in-law of Strobe Talbott) which was crafted explicitly to validate the wildly unsupported claims found in Steele’s dossier.

So What Is The Role Of The Christian In All This?!?!

medium |  Bernie Sanders thinks that we need a political revolution. I think that we are going to get one whether we want one or not. And not the nicey nicey 1932 kind where we get health care and education. I want a full scale revolution as much as I want a category five hurricane, but here we are.

The sad fact is that our corporate elites are deliberately sabotaging our political system in the hope of bringing about a Pinochet style dictatorship. They have been working at this for a long time.

We live in a society where people die of easily treatable diseases and others are driven to bankruptcy by the high cost of for-profit health care. Before 1982 homelessness was so rare you needed a trained eye to see it. Now we see armies of homeless people, half of whom are employed but who cannot afford the rent in the city where they live. We live in a society where people are murdered everyday because we value guns more than human life.

Now coronavirus is heightening all the contradictions of American finance capitalism. It is no longer possible to deny that our society has become dysfunctional, almost a failed state. Coronavirus promises to do for American finance capitalism what World War One did for royal autocracy.

So what is the role of the Christian in all this? First of all we must commit to the lessons of the Sermon on the Mount. No one can live up to all that, but if we are honest with ourselves, we are not even trying. I am referring to that part of the Christian community that is serious about their faith, and exclude the greedy televangelists and their delusional followers. We have been letting ourselves off too easily. What is coming down from the pulpit that makes us OK with baby prisons, endless war, and armies of homeless people? Why do we keep reelecting politicians who enable these things? 

Why do we keep making excuses for ourselves? Our moral crisis goes way beyond electoral politics (although I would be the first to agree that we are called to participate in electoral politics).

Christians must recommit to the values of the Sermon on the Mount. No more nobody can do that, so I will just continue with business as usual and throw myself on the mercy of Christ. We have to at least try. We must put aside delusional thinking and, as a minister of mine once said, live fearlessly in truth.

So what would that look like? What would it look like if we really committed to living out the values of the Sermon on the Mount?

No Lives Matter: SecDEF Esper Wants To Cut $2.2 Billion From Military Healthcare Budget

politico |  Esper rolled out the results of the first iteration of the defense-wide review in February, revealing $5.7 billion in cost savings that he said would be put toward preparing the Pentagon to better compete with Russia and China, including research into hypersonic weapons, artificial intelligence, missile defense and more.

But the proposed health cuts, in the second iteration of the defense-wide review, would degrade military hospitals to the point that they will no longer be able to sustain the current training pipeline for the military’s medical force, potentially necessitating something akin to a draft of civilian medical workers into the military, the two defense officials said.

The second official noted the challenge in finding outside doctors given longstanding complaints from some U.S. hospitals and researchers that there aren’t enough physicians to serve civilians.

“How’s a 'draft' even going to work?” the official said “The U.S. is dealing with a doctor shortage.”

As a result, the proposed reductions would hurt combat medical capability without actually saving money, the officials argued. The Pentagon is already significantly overspending on private sector care and TRICARE because patients are being pushed out of undermanned military health facilities to the private health care network, they said. The cuts also would follow nearly a decade of the Pentagon holding military health spending flat, even as spending on care for veterans and civilians has ballooned.

The officials blamed the Pentagon’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, or CAPE, under the leadership of John Whitley, who has been acting director since August 2019, for the cuts. CAPE conducts analysis and provides advice to the secretary of defense on potential cuts to the defense budget.

During Whitley's confirmation hearing to be the permanent CAPE director last week, Sen. Doug Jones (D-Ala.) pressed him on the health cuts.

“Folks in my state have expressed some concern and opposition to some of the policies, which allow only active-duty service members to visit military treatment facilities,” Jones said. “What do I tell those folks?”

“The department does have work to do on expanding choice and access to beneficiaries,” Whitley responded. “Sometimes that’s in an MTF, sometimes that’s in the civilian health care setting.”

Whitley has specifically tried to eliminate the Murtha Cancer Center as an unnecessary expense, said one senior official.

Last fall, Whitley and CAPE also sought to close the Uniformed Services University of the Health Sciences, which prepares graduates for the medical corps, as part of the defense-wide review, the people said. Although at the time Esper denied the proposal, CAPE is now seeking major cuts to USU as part of the $2.2 billion. The reductions include eliminating all basic research dollars for combat casualty care, infectious disease and military medicine for USU, as well as slicing operational funds.

Rapid Testing - An Amenity Reserved For Lives That Matter

NYTimes |  Hosts are hiring doctors to screen guests before they attend their gatherings, or children coming in from out of town for sleepovers. Other people are getting tests to provide peace of mind after a particularly wild night. Event companies are offering rapid testing as a service to clients alongside catering and music. Instagram influencers are even touting the service.

Still, these rapid tests aren’t totally reliable, said Dr. Demetre Daskalakis, New York City’s deputy commissioner of disease control. “Negatives are not definitive,” he said. (And there certainly have been false positives.)

“No test is 100 percent,” Dr. Rashid said. “A negative test does not preclude one to not be carrying the virus.”

Indeed, one reason rapid tests aren’t in widespread use is that they require additional testing to confirm. “We have to retest all of our negatives, so you’re doing two tests for everyone who is negative,” said Dr. Daskalakis. “It’s a resource issue.”

He also warned that the virus can take some time to show up in a test result; though some test positive 48 hours after exposure, the two-week possible incubation period that has dictated quarantine is generally accepted. So if you were exposed to the virus even 10 days before your test, the outcome is still uncertain. “You can’t go to a house party the week before you see Grandma,” Dr. Daskalakis said. “That test doesn’t matter.”

Ryan Choura, the founder of Choura, an event and experience production company in Torrance, Calif., that arranges the tenting and furniture for the U.S. Open golf tournament and the BeachLife Festival, believes so strongly that all events should incorporate rapid testing that he created an arm of his company to do it.

 But as any public-health expert will tell you, individual test results are not an all-access pass to Life as It Was Before. “There is a false confidence you get when you use a test for social decisions,” Dr. Daskalakis said. “This is one of those things I lose sleep over.”

Nonetheless. receiving rapid testing for the virus has become a mark of status and, ergo, a trending topic on social media.

Tasha Todd, 40, is a medical assistant in Dallas. When her former office, a concierge medical group, first received the rapid testing kit, she posted about it on Instagram, where she has nearly 28,000 followers, to hype up the service. “I wanted to try to bring more business into the company,” Ms. Todd said. “Not that we could have handled much more volume. We were seeing 30 people a day, 25 of which were in for Covid testing.”

“I got a lot of feedback,” she said. “A lot of people were messaging about the prices, where the office was, what the difference was between that and a regular test, and how quickly the results come in.” 

Her office charges $150 for a test, but she knows of other clinics in Dallas that charge $500 or more.

Ms. Todd said she felt frustrated that many of her followers wouldn’t be able to afford one. “I would say rapid testing right now is for the rich. It’s too expensive,” she said. “Who has 150 to 500 dollars just lying around in the middle of the recession?”

If You Have Enough Money To Endow Foundations Why Not Pay More Wages And Taxes?

tabletmag |  Big Philanthropy. Today’s Silicon Valley and Wall Street tycoons who endow foundations bearing their names—Gates, Bloomberg, Milken—are little different from Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller a century ago.

In his 1889 essay “The Gospel of Wealth,” Andrew Carnegie, the immigrant Scottish American steel magnate who built his fortune on brutal treatment of American workers and the suppression of organized labor, declared that society was better off when the benevolent rich were allowed to spend their fortunes on charitable causes than when they were taxed to pay for public spending directed by politicians. Recently Bill Gates made a nearly identical argument, claiming that governments are so incompetent that large-scale spending decisions are best entrusted to enlightened billionaires like himself: “Philanthropy is there because the government is not very innovative, doesn’t try risky things and particularly people with a private-sector background—in terms of measurement, picking great teams of people to try out new approaches. Philanthropy does that.”

For a century labor leaders and populists have replied to such self-serving arguments by asking arrogant plutocrats like Carnegie and Gates an obvious question: “If you have enough money to endow a foundation, why don’t you pay your employees more?”

Theodore Roosevelt, who despised Carnegie, observed privately: “All the suffering from Spanish war comes far short of the suffering, preventable and non-preventable, among the operators of the Carnegie steel works, and among the small investors, during the time that Carnegie was making his fortune ...”

Modernism in the arts. Even in matters of art and fashion, American business elites and the working-class majority have been at odds for a century. America’s 20th-century managers and capitalists as a rule have been more avant-garde in their tastes than most of their fellow citizens. The Rockefellers and other plutocrats patronized the Museum of Modern Art, which during and after WWII dismissed the kinds of figurative art and traditional architecture that the working class liked as “kitsch” (trash) and smeared it by comparing it to Nazi and Soviet propaganda. Despising popular figurative painters like Norman Rockwell and later Thomas Kinkade has been a marker of ruling class membership for nearly a century. Vulgar, rich arrivistes like Donald Trump may favor traditional architectural ornament, but the taste-makers in the business community for decades promoted sterile glass-box International Style architecture and abstract painting and sculpture as the more or less official style of corporate America and the Free World.

Now more than a century old, the modern style long ago ceased to be modern. Herbert Hoover’s ultramodern house, now owned by Stanford University, was built in 1919-20. The ambition of many corporate executives and professionals of the mid-20th century was to live in a home inspired by the Glass House of Philip Johnson, the court architect of the Rockefeller dynasty. The protoplasmic blob in an abstract painting on the wall would gaze lovingly at a Noguchi coffee table, a glass amoeba with two wooden pseudopods that bore The Joy of Sex on its back next to the latest issue of the New Yorker.

The post-New Deal new normal, then, is very similar to the pre-New Deal old normal. The present is not a rerun of the age of the age of robber barons after the Civil War, but of the subsequent age in which university-credentialed corporate elites have usually favored free markets and free love and freedom from organized labor, while working-class populations, white and nonwhite, have typically favored a mix of moral traditionalism with pro-labor protectionism in economic policy.

This is not the second Gilded Age. It is the second Jazz Age. And from the perspective of America’s disfranchised and alienated working-class majority of all races, that is bad enough.

Coronavirus Is A Poor Person's Virus

vanityfair |  “All these rich people can’t stop themselves,” one person who is close to a number of wealthy tech CEOs and venture capitalists told me. “They just can’t stop themselves from throwing parties and going on their jets and socializing as if everything was normal.”

In many respects, to them, things are better than normal. Those on the top billionaire lists have only grown richer over the past five months, as tech has soared on the S&P and NASDAQ, helping push the markets back to their pre-COVID numbers, and adding double-digit billions to some tech CEOs’ personal net worths in a single day. Look no further than Apple or Amazon as a prime example. While 16.3 million Americans are unemployed, Apple is now nearing a $2 trillion market cap and Amazon just posted record profits of $5.2 billion in the last quarter—double last year’s goal.

So what are these elite tech founders doing with their wealth? Mostly living life as they did before coronavirus. I’ve spoken to numerous people who’ve described countless billionaires hitting the road, flying around the country to wherever case numbers are lowest. One investor worth several billion who has several homes told a friend—who then parlayed the information to me in tones of shock and awe and more than a tinge of jealousy—that he was in Miami when the numbers were lowest at the start of the pandemic; hopped over to Los Angeles when Florida got a bit dicey; and now that California is a hotbed, is in New York enjoying the season’s outdoor dining. Another billionaire in Los Angeles has been hosting lavish dinner parties (no social media allowed) where an on-site nurse administers 15-minute coronavirus tests outside as guests drink cocktails, and allows them in to dine once their test comes back negative. And yet another investor told me about some of his colleagues who chipped in for a massive $50,000-a-month compound in Palm Springs that’s being used as a group party house. (I’ve heard about similar setups in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley.)

For those who don’t want to be in America (and let’s be frank, who really wants to be in America right now?), there’s an easy solution. A report last week found that the superrich are paying as much as $2.6 million for international citizenships, then zipping out to said country on their private jets. Not everyone owns their own jet, or “P.J.,” as they’re called. As a result, jet rentals are skyrocketing. A spokeswoman for NetJets, a private-jet rental company, told me that inquiries for flights shot up from the previous year, and have only continued to grow as the pandemic has stretched on. In April, for example, calls to NetJets was up 60% for the year prior, as of June, it was 195%, the spokeswoman said.

Cancel Adolph Reed? Many On The Left Have A Militant Objection To Thinking Analytically

NYTimes |  “An obsession with disparities of race has colonized the thinking of left and liberal types,” Professor Reed told me. “There’s this insistence that race and racism are fundamental determinants of all Black people’s existence.”

These battles are not new: In the late 19th century, Socialists wrestled with their own racism and debated the extent to which they should try to build a multiracial organization. Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times, was muscular in his insistence that his party advocate racial equality. Similar questions roiled the civil rights and Black power movements of the 1960s.

But the debate has been reignited by the spread of the deadly virus and the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. And it has taken on a generational tone, as Socialism — in the 1980s largely the redoubt of aging leftists — now attracts many younger people eager to reshape organizations like the Democratic Socialists of America, which has existed in various permutations since the 1920s. (A Gallup poll late last year found that Socialism is now as popular as capitalism among people aged 18 to 39.)

The D.S.A. now has more than 70,000 members nationally and 5,800 in New York — and their average age now hovers in the early 30s. While the party is much smaller than, say, Democrats and Republicans, it has become an unlikely kingmaker, helping fuel the victories of Democratic Party candidates such as Ms. Ocasio-Cortez and Jamaal Bowman, who beat a longtime Democratic incumbent in a June primary.

In years past, the D.S.A. had welcomed Professor Reed as a speaker. But younger members, chafing at their Covid-19 isolation and throwing themselves into “Defund the Police” and anti-Trump protests, were angered to learn of the invitation extended to him.

“People have very strong concerns,” Chi Anunwa, co-chair of D.S.A.’s New York chapter, said on a Zoom call. They said “the talk was too dismissive of racial disparities at a very tense point in American life.”

Professor Taylor of Princeton said Professor Reed should have known his planned talk on Covid-19 and the dangers of obsessing about racial disparities would register as “a provocation. It was quite incendiary.”

They Just Want You To Hurry Up And Die Already - CAN YOU DIG IT?!?!?!

newrepublic |  For a variety of completely unacceptable reasons, federal and state governments have proven unwilling to provide adequate relief that would have allowed more Americans to avoid the more severe impacts of the pandemic. Lawmakers could have paid workers to stay home, provided ongoing support to industries that cannot safely open, or offered financial assistance to parents for child care instead of rushing them back to school. These sensible options weren’t on the table. After the first round of paltry relief expired at the end of July, nothing has happened. Like someone breaking their diet with one extra cookie and deciding they might as well go HAM on a whole sleeve of Milanos, the nation’s leaders have blown past their deadline and have thrown up their hands. 

They’ve tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas, man.

 

As many have observed, the United States is broken, barely a country anymore. Tens of millions of people are in truly desperate need of help. Some need protection from eviction. Others require a rescue from the dangerous conditions of nursing homes and prisons. Many more just need the unemployment money that the state owes them. A portion of this country larger than many European nations has been abandoned to life-ruining chaos. Less than two weeks since the extra unemployment benefit expired, lawmakers have quit the scene and the media has largely moved on to covering Kamala Harris. 

 

The question of why there are not widespread, large-scale protests or riots specifically about this is worth considering. Perhaps it should be surprising that no one has burned down an unemployment office. The elusive detail is that we’re talking about people who have long been left to wither; many were left abandoned during the last financial crisis and its aftermath. Millions of ordinary Americans have lived their lives as the frogs boiling in the water of austerity and neoliberal neglect. Instead of channeling their rage into a broken political system that has been unresponsive to their needs, they post about committing suicide on Reddit. 

 

There is obviously a major problem in our political system, where the ongoing disaster unfolding does not necessarily translate into an electoral threat for the Republicans. As my colleague Osita Nwanevu noted recently, the Republican Party is insulated from its own mistakes by the absurdity of the Senate as an institution and their general success in structuring the political system around their continued victory. Like the rich boss’s nephew who gets an internship and spends it fucking around on the internet and harassing his coworkers, the party knows what it can get away with and by how much. Our democracy has been warped such that one of the parties in charge in Washington can flamboyantly embrace the mass death of impoverished Americans, knowing that the consequences will be too minor to be of any real concern.

Po Folk Best Behave Themselves If They Want Any Of This Food!!!

theweek  |  Over the last week, just under 1 million people filed for ordinary unemployment benefits, plus another half-million under the special pandemic unemployment program for people who don't ordinarily qualify, a substantial decline from some of the numbers seen since the beginning of the pandemic. At this rate, by mid-September or so, new unemployment claims will be merely as bad as they were during the worst of the Great Recession.

Those unemployment benefits, however, because this country has systematically stripped and sabotaged its safety net, are extremely meager and often nearly impossible to actually get. Hundreds of thousands of private citizens who have lost their jobs are flocking to Reddit for help and advice, as state unemployment bureaucracies are so janky and swamped they often can't deal with the flood of applications.

In the past week, the r/unemployment subreddit has taken a dark turn with the expiration of the CARES Act's super-unemployment and the failure of Republicans to even come to an agreement about what they want in the next round of pandemic relief. It's become a de facto support group for people whose lives are collapsing around them for simple lack of income or jobs, and talk of suicide is common.

One wonders: Is America about to see bread protests, or even riots?

People around the country have been testifying how they are down to their last dollar or flat broke, facing eviction or living on the street, unable to afford vital prescriptions or even food. "I've got $18.91 in my bank account this morning. My cupboards are getting low, my dog will have to eat whatever me and my kids eat and my gas light will be back on shortly," wrote one Redditor recently. 

"My car payment was due today and I'm still $200 short, 500 counting last month's. My phone bill is due in a few days. I'm a month behind on the electric bill. I have about $60 to my name, I'm not going to make rent and my [landlords] have already said they will not be giving any allowances," wrote another. "Well I've waited and now my power turns off at the end of today, in a house where my entire family has moved in with me … worst of all I have two toddlers and virtually nowhere to go. 

'Rona and the government have picked off my family one by one and this seems to be the final nail in the coffin," wrote a third.

Soft White Underbelly: Hidden Realms Of American Squalor

WaPo |  “I’m just one guy with a camera,” Laita said. He monetized his YouTube channels days ago.

Laita will give between $20 and $40 to people who are willing to tell their stories, he said. Those who are more at risk of being exposed, such as pimps, drug dealers or prostitutes, sometimes want more, costing him up to $100.

On any given day, up to eight people line up willing to share a personal history that Laita uses only his gut to check, he said.

“I am certain that not every dollar I’ve given to somebody on the street has been spent on a blanket or a tent or shoes. What I’m doing is not foolproof,” he said, considering his work to be a tool for awareness and education.

Compensating his subjects shows a sign of respect for their time and the intimate details they’re willing to share, said Amy Turk, chief executive for Downtown Women’s Center in Los Angeles, the main service provider for women who live on Skid Row.

The line of exploitation can be a thin one to balance if not done well, and it can be “emotionally dangerous to have someone reveal so much deep complexity about their life and walk away,” she said.

Turk, a licensed clinical social worker, said the best way for someone to get involved is to find an organization that’s aligned with their desire to help and that matches their skills with a need.

“It’s about understanding that something has happened to them,” she said, adding that some people on her staff have heard of Laita’s channel and saw a video of a woman the organization has assisted in the past. “Sounds like [that’s] what Mark is tapping into.”

Stephany Powell, executive director for the Van Nuys, Calif.-based nonprofit Journey Out, which helps women who have survived sexual exploitation, watched Kelly’s story after the video popped up on her Facebook feed. She was instantly concerned for Kelly’s safety because of her identity being known and the amount of money raised for her.

“If she’s vulnerable enough to be trafficked, she might be vulnerable enough for a guy to befriend her,” she said.

People are growing more aware about human trafficking, and Kelly seemed like a likable person whom people perceived as undeserving of what had allegedly happened to her, Powell said, contemplating why Kelly’s story resonated with so many people compared with others on Laita’s channel.

The retired Los Angeles Police Department sergeant said she’s heard stories like Kelly’s too often in her years of service and now as leader of Journey Out.

“A lot of times it is not unusual for victims to not depict themselves as victims or how some people think victims should present themselves,” she said.

Money isn’t curative for the type of trauma someone like Kelly experienced, Powell said. She needs assistance with finding housing, securing employment and attending counseling to help her cope with pain. People like Kelly need a community that consists of professionals and former sex-trafficking survivors to pull her forward, she said.

“You can give her that $30,000. If she blows through it, then what?” Powell asked.

Kamala Devi Is "Evolving" - Especially Toward Money And Power...,

Career Sugar Babies Are The Emptiest Suits And The Snuggest Sock Puppets

lamag  |  Influential California politician Willie Brown inserted himself into Kamala Harris’s presidential campaign this week, penning an op-ed for the San Francisco Chronicle detailing his romantic relationship with her in the 1990s. The relationship was never a secret, but the public acknowledgement ignited new criticisms of Harris. Commentators began to imply she benefitted professionally from the personal relationship, possibly even only getting to where she is today because of their liaison.

Willie Brown was a fixture in California politics for years, serving as speaker of the state assembly for 15 years, and known as something of an unofficial deal-maker and influencer. He first met Harris in 1994, when she was an assistant district attorney in Alameda County. He was 60 years old at the time, and had been estranged from his wife, Blanche Brown, since 1981.

In his capacity as speaker, Brown appointed Harris to two political positions. The first was a six-month appointment to the California Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board; the second was a role on the Medical Assistance Commission, a body tasked with negotiating contracts to control Medi-Cal costs. At the time, Brown had a reputation for filling many openings with his personal associates and inner circle; when Harris vacated the Appeals Board gig, he replaced her with his longtime buddy Philip S. Ryan.

Harris ended the relationship–which was conducted in the open and frequently reported on at the time–in late 1995, shortly before Brown was sworn in for his first of two terms as mayor of San Francisco.

Eric Weinstein Is Peter Thiel's Sugar Baby Public Intellectual...,

art-19 |  One of the pillars of the American Dream has been that of seeing your children go to college. And, for the many families that can't afford the cost of soaring university tuitions, a new controversial institution has arisen to address the problem. That institution is Sugar Baby University, a tuition assistance campaign that attempts to allow attractive young women, and a smaller number of handsome young men, find generous older men to date in the quest to complete a new version of the American Dream by graduating debt free in an era which has made it all but impossible to discharge student debt even in personal bankruptcy since 2005.

This year, Sugar Baby University is 'graduating' it's fifth class with thousands of alumni in its network that stretches from coast to coast and includes institutions of higher education from local community colleges to research universities and ivy league colleges. If you know many young graduates, the chances have been increasing that one of them has quietly matriculated in response to the crisis of crushing debt payments. Yet despite widespread awareness of the program on campuses by students and financial aid advisors via word of mouth, the world of Universities and mainstream media news outlets have tacitly given their approval to the campaign by remaining strangely silent as tuitions have continued to climb an unbelievable average of 8-9% per year.

In this episode we do not pass judgement on Sugar Baby University, it's parent company 'Seeking Arrangement' or it's spokesperson Kimberly De La Cruz, who is our guest. Rather, we celebrate their openness to discuss the situation, and question, instead, the universities, politicians, media, and the lending industry, who have quietly created the desperate need for this program which they do not openly discuss and prefer not to address at all. 

Even With Rose-Tinted Coverage By The Media, Kamala Harris Can ONLY Hurt Biden...,

thehill |  Biden broke the cardinal rule in selecting Kamala Harris as his vice-presidential running mate.

The selection first and foremost should “do no harm.”

Harris is not able from day one to be President of the United States.

She barely got to the U.S. Senate in 2017 when she began running for president. Before serving in the Senate, she was the attorney general of California, and before that district attorney in San Francisco. 

She has zero foreign policy experience and no economic gravitas.

At a time when even some Democrats are questioning Biden’s competence to be president in light of his advanced age and cognitive abilities — the vice-presidential running mate becomes even more important to voters. Before you even get to her policies, Harris doesn’t pass the qualifications test.

The other rule Biden violated was that a running mate should bring something to the table other than gender, race or ethnicity. The running mate should bring Electoral College appeal. Harris is from the bluest of blue states: California — a state that Trump has no shot of winning. Harris will not appeal to swing states because she is from California, and her record — and those of California Democrats generally — is abysmal on taxes, immigration, law and order, climate, energy… and the list goes on.

California is a liberal laboratory of bad governance and incompetence.

A Biden-Harris ticket is very good news for the Trump-Pence campaign. The contrast between Pence and Harris will be stark in resume, ability and record.

Cautionary Submission In The Context Of The Vulnerable World Hypothesis Predictive Panopticon Proposal

I don't believe it's controversial to state that President Donald John Trump is one of THE WHYTEST WHYDTE MEN IN AMERICA. He's like an exemplar. Whatever else one might opine about the man, he's also a low-level baller, something at least approaching billionaire, and not a No Lives Matter, Left Behind, Little Man like you and I.  That said, these 9% muhuggahs here done put DJT through the ringer and then some, seriously.  The level of sustained, public ni****ization to which he has been subject is unprecedented in U.S. history. If what has been done to Trump is any indication of what the panopticon is willing to do to a political adversary, then TRUST and BELIEVE that you and I don't have even the barest iota of a prayer.

Sally Yates, Rod Rosenstein, Jim Comey and everyone who signed the Carter Page FISA application also be indicted for perjury? They signed a FISA application and made representations to the secret FISC on the basis of false information. Shouldn't representations to FISC need double verification since the accused has no opportunity to defend themselves or confront their accuser?

An average American doesn't get the option of saying I signed under penalty of perjury but I didn't know what I was signing.

What about James Clapper who lied under oath to Congress? The same crime for which Roger Stone was indicted and convicted.

And the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had no idea that they were involved in anything out of the ordinary? As long as they crossed the i's and dotted the t's this was just a routine case like hundreds of others and how could they have known the thing was a fix? Poor trusting souls, misled so badly by such bad people. 

Utter bullshit. They were only dealing with what must have been the most explosively sensitive issue ever to come before them. We're expected to believe they were innocents misled? 

Sometimes not asking the right questions, and searching questions too in such a high profile case as this, shows complicity just as much as if they'd been assisting.

McCabe's wife was an out-of-the-blue candidate who ran for public office (VA State Senator) in 2015, during which she reportedly received over $650,000 in support from Clinton crony, then VA Gov. Terry McAuliffe. Her candidacy was suspicious in that she had no previous political experience (she's a physician who was on record as having voted in a Republican primary!) and it was promoted over the local VA Democratic Party's recommended candidate, a well-known retired Army colonel, attorney and party activist.

And yet McCabe, during this same time, was rapidly promoted to #3 in the FBI and didn't recuse himself from the Hillary Clinton email scandal investigation until one week before the 2016 election (and months after the infamous Comey press briefing in July when he declared Clinton would not be prosecuted), after the $650,000 donation came to light.

It's obvious why there are some who would think the very generous political contribution to McCabe's wife was in fact a backdoor bribe to her husband.

turcopelier |  I will be very clear up front--I have no inside information about what John Durham is going to do. But if he is simply following the facts and the evidence, Andrew McCabe will be one of the first to fall in the probe into the failed coup to destroy the Presidency of Donald Trump. The record on this is indisputable. He lied in three separate instances--1) He lied to FBI investigators, according to Michael Horowitz, 2) He lied to the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and 3) He lied to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.

McCabe's record of lying starts with questions put to him by FBI investigators about leaks of sensitive FBI evidence to the media in the fall of 2016:

Former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe faced scorching criticism and potential criminal prosecution for changing his story about a conversation he had with a Wall Street Journal reporter. Now newly released interview transcripts show McCabe expressed remorse to internal FBI investigators when they pressed him on the about-face. 

In the final weeks of the 2016 presidential campaign, the Journal broke news about an FBI investigation involving then-candidate Hillary Clinton, describing internal discussions among senior FBI officials.

The apparent leak drew scrutiny from the bureau’s internal investigation team, which interviewed McCabe on May 9, 2017, the day President Donald Trump fired James Comey from his post as FBI director. The agents interviewed him as part of an investigation regarding a different media leak to the online publication Circa, and also asked him about the Journal story. 

In that interview, McCabe said he did not know how the Journal story came to be. But a few months later, his story changed after he reviewed his answer. 

McCabe's actions as an Artful Liar did not result in a prosecution. The Trump Justice Department reportedly decided to take a pass on that front, conceding that McCabe might prevail by insisting he just misremembered.

But subsequent statements by McCabe before the House and Senate Intelligence Committees expose him as a terminal liar.

The September Surprise Must Happen For Trump To Win

justthenews |  A powerful Senate committee chairman has subpoenaed FBI Director Chris Wray and a former State Department official in an intensifying investigation into possible U.S. corruption in Russia and Ukraine and declared there is evidence Joe Biden's family engaged in a "glaring conflict of interest."

Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson announced the actions Monday, strongly accusing Democrats of levying false allegations against him and other GOP investigators to distract from the evidence his committee has gathered about Joe and Hunter Biden's dealings in Ukraine.

"We didn't target Joe and Hunter Biden for investigation; their previous actions had put them in the middle of it," Johnson wrote in a letter released Monday that provided a detailed timeline of Joe Biden's Ukraine policy actions and his son's hiring with the Ukraine natural gas company Burisma Holdings.

"Many in the media, in an ongoing attempt to provide cover for former Vice President Biden, continue to repeat the mantra that there is 'no evidence of wrongdoing or illegal activity' related to Hunter Biden's position on Burisma's board," the senator wrote. "I could not disagree more."

Johnson noted evidence gathered by his committee showed Joe Biden met with his son's business partner, Devon Archer, in April 2014 and within a month the vice president then visited Ukraine and both his son Hunter and the business partner were put on the Burisma board as the firm faced multiple corruption investigations.

"Isn't it obvious what message Hunter's position on Burisma's board sent to Ukrainian officials?" Johnson asked. "The answer: If you want U.S. support, don't touch Burisma. It also raised a host of questions, including: 1) How could former Vice President Biden look any Ukrainian official (or any other world leader) in the face and demand action to fight corruption? 2) Did this glaring conflict of interest affect the work and efforts of other U.S. officials who worked on anti-corruption measures?"

Hopkins Peddling Reset - MIT Truthing Herd Immunity Limiting Coronavirus Spread In The U.S.

technologyreview |  The large number of people already infected with the coronavirus in the US has begun to act as a brake on the spread of the disease in hard-hit states.

Millions of US residents have been infected by the virus that causes covid-19, and at least 160,000 are dead. One effect is that the pool of susceptible individuals has been depleted in many areas. After infection, it’s believed, people become immune (at least for months), so they don’t transmit the virus to others. This slows the pandemic down. 

“I believe the substantial epidemics in Arizona, Florida and Texas will leave enough immunity to assist in keeping COVID-19 controlled,” Trevor Bedford, a pandemic analyst at the University of Washington, said on Friday, in a series of tweets. “However, this level of immunity is not compatible with a full return to societal behavior as existed before the pandemic.”

The exact extent to which acquired immunity is slowing the rate of transmission is unknown, but major questions like school reopening and air travel may eventually hinge on the answer.

What is known is that after rising at an alarming pace starting in May, new cases of covid-19 in Sun Belt states like Florida have started to fall. Some of that may be due to social distancing behavior, but rising rates of immunity are also a factor, according to Youyang Gu, a computer scientist whose Covid-19 Projections is among 34 pandemic models tracked by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“Immunity may play a significant part in the regions that are declining,” says Gu. At least until the fall, which is how far his models look forward, he says, “I don’t think there is going to be another spike” of infections in southern states. 

California Covid Numbers All Wrong...,

justthenews |  Dr. Sonia Angell, California's director of the Department of Public Health, abruptly resigned on Sunday. Angell, who had been in the position for less than a year, reportedly resigned via an email sent to the California Health and Human Services Agency. 

Angell has, among others, been leading the state's battle against the novel coronavirus. More than 10,000 Californians have died of the illness, and most of the state remains on shutdown following a brief reopening period in early summer. 

"Our department has been front and center in what has become an all-of-government response of unprecedented proportions to COVID-19. In the final calculation, all of our work, in aggregate, makes the difference," Angell reportedly wrote in her resignation letter.

Angell's departure comes as the state government reckons with a data glitch that failed to log nearly 300,000 infectious disease testing records, resulting in hindered decision-making at the highest levels of the California government. 

The secretary of California Health and Human Services, Mark Ghaly, recently apologized to state residents for the error. "Bottom line, our data system failed," said Ghaly. With more than half a million reported cases of the virus, California tops the nation for positive diagnoses. The data blunder, however, has impeded state authorities' ability to determine policies moving forward, specifically the decision on whether to reopen schools for in-person learning as the new school year is set to begin.

U.K. Covid Numbers All Wrong....,

dailymail |  Thousands of coronavirus deaths are set to be wiped from the government's official count, it was claimed today.

Health Secretary Matt Hancock last month ordered an urgent review into how daily death counts are calculated in England because of a 'statistical flaw'.

Academics found Public Health England's methods meant ministers count victims as anyone who died after ever testing positive for Covid-19 — even if they were hit by a bus after beating the disease months later.

It would've meant that, technically, no-one could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to the disease. 

The blunder could see up to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749, according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.

It would've meant that, technically, no-one could ever recover from the virus and all 265,000 of England's confirmed patients would eventually have had their deaths attributed to the disease.

The blunder could see up to 4,000 deaths removed from England's official toll of 41,749, according to reports. One of the leading experts who uncovered the flaw told MailOnline his 'best guess' was that more than 1,000 people have had their deaths wrongly recorded as caused by Covid-19.

Florida Covid Numbers All Wrong...,

turcopelier |  Florida is home to 21,933,000 people (see here). How many have succumbed to Covid since March 6, when Florida's Government started keeping tabs on the disease? 7,084.  That means 0.032% of the population have died from Covid in the last six months. To put this into perspective, the CDC reports for 2017 that 46,044 Floridians died from heart disease. I do not recall nightly news broadcasts wailing hysterically about fat Floridians eating double cheeseburgers and clogging their arteries. But less than 8,000 deaths in six months and we are supposed to put on masks and hide in our closets? Nonsense.

Let's take a closer look at Sarasota County over the last 30 days. According to the US Census, Sarasota County was inhabited by 433,742 souls as of July 1, 2019.  Here are the numbers according to the Florida Covid 19 "Dashboard." Just follow this link and click on Sarasota County. Five thousand nine hundred seventy four Sarasotans tested positive since the first of July (July 7 to be precise). That is 1.3% of the total county population. Hospitalized? 360, which represents 0.08%. How about deaths? 160. That is roughly consistent with the number of deaths recorded state-wide--0.036%.

What about neighboring Manatee County (seat of the city of Bradenton and winter home of the Pittsburgh Pirates)? Manatee has a slightly smaller population than Sarsota, weighing in with 413,655 happy inhabitants. Eight thousand nine hundred fifty six Manatee maniacs tested positive for Covid--i.e., 2.1%. More have been hospitalized--589, which represents 0.14%. The death count is 189 or 0.045%. Ever hear of the concept of "perspective?"  I am sure that the families of those whose kith and kin perished from Covid and/or co-morbidities exacerbated by Covid don't care a whit about the stats. But the truth is the disease is not spreading like wildfire. People are not flooding the hospitals.

Nick Bostrom Proposed A Preposterously Butt-Licking Design On Your Future Little Man...,

Have one AI with godlike powers monitor everyone at all times but only interfere if a little man commits a thought crime that poses an existential risk. Bostrom imagines that you little men could easily get used to living in such a world, particularly once you  realize that it doesn't make any noticeable difference. 

Many little men already believe that there is literally a conscious being who watches everything they do - and - they're cool with that. All Bostrom is suggesting is that the status quo establishment implement an unconscious mechanism that monitors everything that you little men think, express, and potentially do. 

Think about it, FOR YOUR OWN GOOD, that doesn't seem like it's worse, does it?

Here's Bostrom in conversation with Chris Anderson, the head of TED. Bostrom suggests implementation of a system of mass government surveillance in which each little man is fitted with necklace-like “freedom tags” with multi-directional cameras. 

Information gathered by these “freedom tags” would be sent to “freedom centers”, where artificial intelligence monitors the data, alerting human officers if they detect signs of a possible “black ball” idea. 

We are at greater risk from societal collapse arising from poorly functioning social systems.  We are at VASTLY greater risk from our subjugation to the corporate profit seeking egregoric structure and the specific extractive interaction with the environment that this demonic construct demands. (our economizating virtual reality)  than from some sort of Pandora's box technological black ball. 

We seem spastically incapable of eliminating fission and fusion weapons while struggling to implement and benefit from superior and safer thorium fission power generation technology. Rather than using improvements in photovoltaics and batteries to raise the resilience of individuals and small communities to natural disasters, we are using them to make the overall electrical power distribution system less resilient. 

Fermi's Paradox doesn't pivot on black ball technologies, rather, it pivots on primitive status seeking within a perversely incentivized archaic material culture. Intelligent species self-destruct because they fail to achieve their own possible psychological development.  Fist tap Dorcas Dad.

Short Of Individual Autarky What Kind Of Waking-Up Can There Be?

caitlinjohnstone |  From 2021 until nuclear armageddon Biden will be sitting off to the side mumbling to himself as his brain turns to chowder while holdovers from the Obama administration orchestrate cold war escalations against China in retaliation for its 2020 “election meddling”.

~

You will never, ever hate China enough to bring manufacturing jobs back to the US. Playing along with bullshit narrative spin hoping it will bring your jobs back will never work. You’re just helping opaque government agencies advance their new cold war.

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The dumbest thing about believing foreign countries attacked American democracy is believing America has any democracy to attack.

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Thought experiment: If you looked out the window right now and saw a mushroom cloud growing on the horizon, how would you feel about the way you’ve been spending your mental energy lately? Be honest with yourself.

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If we win this thing it won’t be because conspiracy analysts showed everyone a bunch of complex financial connections or because Marxists put a bunch of theory in everyone’s heads, it will be because clear, simple pointing helped everyone notice the fact that they’ve been duped.

This fight isn’t a game of addition, it’s a game of subtraction. You’re not trying to get the mainstream rank-and-file public to understand a bunch of complicated new information, you’re trying to remove the blindfold so they can see something for themselves that they kind of already suspected was the case.

Cripple public trust in the establishment narrative control apparatus and you remove the only obstacle that’s been stopping the people from using the power of their numbers to force real change. They don’t need anything new, they need to exorcise the lies that have blinded them and stop trusting in the words of liars.

Corporate Economization Is Complete Little Man - You Cannot Escape - No Lives Matter!

counterpunch  |  It is a truism to suggest that the public has now been replaced by the consumer; that the public good has been replaced by individual desire; that public space has been reduced to the private visions of the individual; that democracy has been sacrificed on the altar of economics. As Wendy Brown writes, in, Undoing the Demos, 2012, “Neoliberal reason, ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, culture, and a vast range of quotidian activity, is converting the distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements into economic ones.”. Thus, the Left’s traditional urge to build a bureaucracy that restrains predatory commerce in the interest of the public good is subverted by the growth of a corporate state designed to suppress its vestigial caring dimension.

This neoliberal attribute fatally weakens the viability of the obvious ‘Alternative’ to which Thatcher was so averse, that of democratic socialism, which thrived in post-war Western Europe as it emerged from the worldwide crisis. Those governments were driven by a mission: to embrace responsibility for the health of all of their citizens – rather than let it be controlled by black marketeers or corporate looters; to ensure that elder care, youth services and childcare be freely available – not powered by profit; to provide good, free education to all – not restricted by its expense to the privileged few; to declare that housing and adequate nutrition are a human right – not resources to be leveraged by the financially strong; to assert that homelessness has no place in an enlightened state – not accepted as a necessary alternative to the supposed evils of welfare; to declare that the mentally ill, together with the anxious and alienated, find a haven in adequate social services – not left to swell the ranks of mendicant street people; and to ensure that public order is maintained without a militarized police force supporting the criminalization of poverty, the presumption of Black and minority criminality and the thuggish treatment of those it arrests. All these beneficent outcomes must now be sought elsewhere. As Bruno Latour points out in his recent essay, ‘Are you ready to extract yourself from the Economy?’, “After a hundred years devoted to socialism limited just to the redistribution of the benefits of the economy, it might now be more a matter of inventing a socialism that contests production itself”.

Latour makes the point that in the miraculous COVID-inspired halting of production, travel and pollution, the world discovered a hitherto unsuspected superpower – the power of interruption. We have the ability, collectively, it now seems, to become globalization interrupters, neoliberalism interrupters and interrupters of all those modes of production that are destroying the habitability of the earth for humans and our neighboring species. He suggests we have an opportunity of, “Getting away from production as the overriding principle of our relationship to the world.” This constitutes a retreat from the very principle that informed the colonization of the Americas and continues to inform its despoliation.

No DISC - Only Ass-Kissing Lackeys Of The Status Quo Establishment

medium |  I wondered if maybe I had been totally wrong from the start. Maybe I deserved what I got. Maybe I had been too ambitious and competitive in the party. Late in 2018, I had a conversation with the president of the original Wake progressives. He began to discuss the work of that chapter, before there had been a Caucus, from 2004 to 2016. He explained how they had worked to organize precincts in the county, so they could get progressive chairs and vice chairs who would thus be entitled to votes in Wake’s county party meetings. He told me how they organized themselves at county conventions to ensure that progressives would be elected from Wake to have a vote in the state party. He explained similar efforts for similar offices in the party. In other words, he told me that, for twelve whole years, progressives in Wake, whom I had never met, were implementing the exact same strategy, to a tee, that I had developed and written for my own chapter in Orange.

And this was my next Weinstein moment. It was that “Eureka” moment with negative undertones, which I guess can be called a “Dysreka.” Just as Bret and Eric, years later, saw their advancements being used and pushed by someone else, I was getting the exact same confirmation about my strategy (although he had not stolen it from me). This guy who had been at it longer, whose chapter was the inspiration for the Caucus itself, told me that I had stumbled upon the exact plan I was supposed to have for my chapter.

I don’t think this elected official from Hillsborough or this gentleman from Wake have ever met each other. Nevertheless, they quickly moved to shut down threats to the establishment of the Democratic Party here in North Carolina, as soon as they detected it, in manner much like what Weinstein has described. They were manifestations of the DISC, of an autoimmune response in the Democratic Party, and they moved through indirect, defamatory manners that played upon uninformed and ignorant crowds to derail those in their paths.

---

These events and others that I could tell really hurt. The chapter I had organized was like a baby of mine or a work of art (and you guys can see some of my art here on Medium to know what I mean by that). All the work I did to make the Democratic Party more accountable, while also trying to plant seeds to make it more electable, just blew up in my face because actors who want to defend the system acted swiftly. The corruption and abuse of power in the Democratic Party exists beyond the DNC. It manifests itself through brutal patronage relationships at the grassroots level as well that allow for decentralized policing and, frankly, sabotage.

I still think the Democratic Party can fix this country, but it needs a lot of home repairs before it can do so. We need something to break the Gated Institutional Narrative (another Weinstein term) that enables this. At the moment I am mostly out of ideas, but I am attempting another run for the NC House, here in Chapel Hill.

I hope this story informs you all decently and that it motivates you to do something good and productive, even though I know something like this is likely to produce more anger. We really do not need more anger. We need people who are more excited about the utopia and less about the revolution. I also hope it inspires you to share your own encounters with the DISC.

I also hope Eric comes across this and can get a few ideas on what to do. He is a Democrat like me, however begrudgingly, and he does have a role to play in reforming it. For those of you Republicans out there, I hope you are also noticing where the DISC exists in your party and are thinking of how to counter it. Fixing America is going to be a bi-partisan job, after all.