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August 16, 2017 at 2:08 pm in reply to: WV, did you see the Nation article by Patrick Lawrence? #72642
Billy_TParticipantSorry, just noticed I screwed up the formatting in my reply to you, WV, and with the excerpt.
I should have checked back after posting.
August 16, 2017 at 2:07 pm in reply to: WV, did you see the Nation article by Patrick Lawrence? #72641Billy_TParticipantOn your point number two:
2) I dont really give a shit if it was a leak or a hack — I’m WAAAAAY more interested in the SUBSTANCE OF THE EMAILS.
Ie, what they show about the amerikan corporotacracy. To ‘me’ the important story is about WHAT THE EMAILS SHOW, and not how the emails got published. The way i see it, the DEMS (brilliantly) were able to distract the public from the substance of the emails with their “Russians did it!” strategy.Were they really brilliant, though? Cuz no other subject was in the media as much as her emails. They dominated, even more so than Trump’s Hollywood tapes. And the coverage of those emails was very negative. I don’t think the Dems succeeded in distracting the country at all.
In fact, I think the email scandal was a big part of her downfall. I also don’t think they showed the Dems being anything more than your run of the mill political party. The actual emails. I found nothing particularly, uniquely awful about them, though the attempts by the GOP to exaggerate their substance, via distortion and paraphrase, made them sound like the worst thing evah. To me, they were business as usual, and I would be shocked if email chains from the GOP weren’t at least as bad.
No defense of the Dems. Or the GOP. I detest both parties and honestly wish they’d go away. I don’t see either as legitimate, as we’ve discussed before. Chomsky’s concept of power needing to justify itself. They haven’t. Quite the opposite. The duopoly has proven it’s incapable of governing in a way that represents all of us. I agree with Thomas Frank that the Dems basically are all in for the richest 10%, at their best, and the GOP for the richest 1%.
So, yeah, both parties are disgusting, with a long, long history of being disgusting. Which is why I’m kind of baffled at the anger regarding those emails. I also don’t want wikileaks choosing sides like it did. If they want to shine a light on our political system, point it on both parties or stay out of it. It paints a false picture to do just one, IMO. Even worse, to point it on our politics and not the folks who pull the strings: the plutocratic class.
August 16, 2017 at 1:49 pm in reply to: WV, did you see the Nation article by Patrick Lawrence? #72638Billy_TParticipantI cant read it BT, because the Nation sez I’ve read 3 articles and thats all they will allow me to read without…doin somethin.
If you clear your browser cache, cookies, etc. etc. you should be able to read it.
I’d repost the whole thing here but it’s really long.
Here’s an excerpt, though:
It is not yet clear whether documents now shown to have been leaked locally on July 5 were tainted to suggest Russian hacking in the same way the June 15 Guccifer release was. This is among several outstanding questions awaiting answers, and the forensic scientists active on the DNC case are now investigating it. In a note Adam Carter sent to Folden and McGovern last week and copied to me, he reconfirmed the corruption of the June 15 documents, while indicating that his initial work on the July 5 documents—of which much more is to be done—had not yet turned up evidence of doctoring.
In the meantime, VIPS has assembled a chronology that imposes a persuasive logic on the complex succession of events just reviewed. It is this:
On June 12 last year, Julian Assange announced that WikiLeaks had and would publish documents pertinent to Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.
On June 14, CrowdStrike, a cyber-security firm hired by the DNC, announced, without providing evidence, that it had found malware on DNC servers and had evidence that Russians were responsible for planting it.
On June 15, Guccifer 2.0 first appeared, took responsibility for the “hack” reported on June 14 and claimed to be a WikiLeaks source. It then posted the adulterated documents just described.
On July 5, Guccifer again claimed he had remotely hacked DNC servers, and the operation was instantly described as another intrusion attributable to Russia. Virtually no media questioned this account.It does not require too much thought to read into this sequence. With his June 12 announcement, Assange effectively put the DNC on notice that it had a little time, probably not much, to act preemptively against the imminent publication of damaging documents. Did the DNC quickly conjure Guccifer from thin air to create a cyber-saboteur whose fingers point to Russia? There is no evidence of this one way or the other, but emphatically it is legitimate to pose the question in the context of the VIPS chronology. WikiLeaks began publishing on July 22. By that time, the case alleging Russian interference in the 2016 elections process was taking firm root. In short order Assange would be written down as a “Russian agent.”
By any balanced reckoning, the official case purporting to assign a systematic hacking effort to Russia, the events of mid-June and July 5 last year being the foundation of this case, is shabby to the point taxpayers should ask for their money back. The Intelligence Community Assessment, the supposedly definitive report featuring the “high confidence” dodge, was greeted as farcically flimsy when issued January 6. Ray McGovern calls it a disgrace to the intelligence profession. It is spotlessly free of evidence, front to back, pertaining to any events in which Russia is implicated. James Clapper, the former director of national intelligence, admitted in May that “hand-picked” analysts from three agencies (not the 17 previously reported) drafted the ICA. There is a way to understand “hand-picked” that is less obvious than meets the eye: The report was sequestered from rigorous agency-wide reviews. This is the way these people have spoken to us for the past year.
Behind the ICA lie other indefensible realities. The FBI has never examined the DNC’s computer servers—an omission that is beyond preposterous. It has instead relied on the reports produced by Crowdstrike, a firm that drips with conflicting interests well beyond the fact that it is in the DNC’s employ. Dmitri Alperovitch, its co-founder and chief technology officer, is on the record as vigorously anti-Russian. He is a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, which suffers the same prejudice. Problems such as this are many.
“We continue to stand by our report,” CrowdStrike said, upon seeing the VIPS blueprint of the investigation. CrowdStrike argues that by July 5 all malware had been removed from the DNC’s computers. But the presence or absence of malware by that time is entirely immaterial, because the event of July 5 is proven to have been a leak and not a hack. Given that malware has nothing to do with leaks, CrowdStrike’s logic appears to be circular.
In effect, the new forensic evidence considered here lands in a vacuum. We now enter a period when an official reply should be forthcoming. What the forensic people are now producing constitutes evidence, however one may view it, and it is the first scientifically derived evidence we have into any of the events in which Russia has been implicated. The investigators deserve a response, the betrayed professionals who formed VIPS as the WMD scandal unfolded in 2003 deserve it, and so do the rest of us. The cost of duplicity has rarely been so high.
I concluded each of the interviews conducted for this column by asking for a degree of confidence in the new findings. These are careful, exacting people as a matter of professional training and standards, and I got careful, exacting replies.
All those interviewed came in between 90 percent and 100 percent certain that the forensics prove out. I have already quoted Skip Folden’s answer: impossible based on the data. “The laws of physics don’t lie,” Ray McGovern volunteered at one point. “It’s QED, theorem demonstrated,” William Binney said in response to my question. “There’s no evidence out there to get me to change my mind.” When I asked Edward Loomis, a 90 percent man, about the 10 percent he held out, he replied, “I’ve looked at the work and it shows there was no Russian hack. But I didn’t do the work. That’s the 10 percent. I’m a scientist.”
August 16, 2017 at 10:36 am in reply to: car drives into counter-protestors in charlottesville #72632Billy_TParticipantAnother way to look at it, which is where I usually sit on this issue . . . 99% of time:
Those statues have no place on public land, because they indicate a kind of tacit endorsement by the state when they do exist there. They also have two major strikes against them:
1. They represent an attack on the United States, by what was, ironically, a “foreign power.”
2. That foreign power was a slaveocracy. Yes, the North made massive fortunes on the slave trade too, and capitalism, which was primarily financed out of Boston and New York at the time, extended the life of slavery in America long past its likely sell-by date. But the system of the South was basically an ur-fascist state, with slavery supporting it.
The third strike is this:
History is always being rewritten. What was important to one generation isn’t to another. We get into major trouble when we just sleep on the past, accept it as an inevitable part of the present and the future, and don’t put our own stamp on it . . . When we don’t decide how we want our world to be in the here and now, we capitulate to evil from the get go.
Those statues aren’t and shouldn’t be important to us now. They hold no relevance, and we should condemn them in no uncertain terms because of 1 and 2. In my view, letting them remain on public land is akin to Germany having statues and symbols of the Nazis on public land.
Btw, Baltimore tore its four monuments down last night and this morning. I think that’s pretty awesome, especially in the wake of C’ville.
August 16, 2017 at 10:20 am in reply to: car drives into counter-protestors in charlottesville #72630Billy_TParticipantWell, it’s not so easy in the South. Public sector workers received death threats when word went out they were going to remove statues in Louisiana, and they had to do so at night, with snipers on tops of buildings to protect them.
And in some Southern states, GOP legislators have made it illegal to remove them. They actually went out of their way to write laws saying you couldn’t.
I was cheered to hear that Baltimore got rid of their four monuments last night and into this morning. Even in Blue State Maryland, it appeared they had to work at night, too.
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Well i just mean knocking down a statue doesn’t change things. Its symbolic and maybe it feels good, but it doesnt do anything to change the policies of corporate-capitalism. Ya know.
I wont go as far as calling it a ‘distraction’ but its close.
And anyway, even at the symbolic level i think it would be way better to LEAVE the statue and build another plaque or something next to it, that has some accurate information about the ‘hero’ in question. Educate.
w
vI can see that, WV. It is certainly an issue of “symbolism.” But we see and hear a lot of people who take those symbols very personally, and they’re powerful reminders to both “sides” of a world they either want to bring back, or a world they think should never rise again.
It’s a tough one. I’m also conflicted on the tactics of counter-protest, too. I bumped into this article on bookforum.com, a very good aggregator of web articles.
I don’t agree with all of it, by any means, but I think the author makes some very good points — food for thought, etc. And he wrote it roughly a week before the tragedy in C’ville.
excerpt:
On the second Saturday in July, more than 1,000 people showed up in a small Southern city to shout down the Ku Klux Klan. That very same afternoon, up North, left-wing counter-protesters chased a band of alt-right Proud Boys out of a public park where they’d tried to rally. It’s been like that throughout this Summer of Hate, fifty years removed from the so-called Summer of Love. Wherever they’ve tried to assemble, both old and new-school white supremacists have found themselves routinely outnumbered, outshouted, out-organized, and out-brawled by the left.
It’s been a long time—almost half a century, in fact—since liberal America has been in a proper street-fighting mood. Peaceful nonviolence and “engaging in dialogue” are approximately as relevant in 2017 as LSD and Jefferson Airplane. And in many ways that’s a glorious thing. Liberal passivity—tolerating intolerance, reasoning with insanity—has unquestionably played a role in the rise of Donald Trump and the new, increasingly dangerous form of white supremacy that he’s inspired. It’s thrilling to meet force with force when the assholes come to town. Hell, it’s thrilling just to read the headlines. “KKK rally in Charlottesville met with throng of protesters” has an undeniably gleeful ring to it, especially when you’re reading it in USA Today.
But there’s a downside, and a dark side, to the way we’re fighting back. By confronting both the various breeds of white supremacists with fury and violence, we’re giving them better media attention and recruitment tools than the worst of the worst could ever hope to muster for themselves.
Charlottesville is a case in point. A largely liberal university town in central Virginia, it has mounted the single most impressive show of resistance in the country. A pitched battle over removing Confederate monuments and renaming Robert E. Lee Park had been raging for years before the city council voted in February to finally rid the city of the statues and rename the park. But even when the dispute was seemingly settled, it wasn’t; the haters wouldn’t let it die. Several dozen white nationalists led by self-promoting, Hitler-saluting dandy Richard Spencer and The Daily Caller’s resident fascist contributor, Jason Kessler, organized a torch-lit procession to the park in May, while the city was holding a multicultural festival nearby—a perfect opportunity for trolling IRL.
August 16, 2017 at 9:34 am in reply to: car drives into counter-protestors in charlottesville #72627Billy_TParticipantTrump has a point about the statues. The statue issue is interesting to me. I ‘hope’ people are not focusing on statues. I ‘hope’ they are focusing on drug laws, health care, inequality-POLICIES, education, etc.
Knocking down statues is easy though. Maybe its the only thing people feel they can do.
w
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link:http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/08/trump-says-there-were-very-fine-people-on-both-sides-in-charlottesville/Trump Says There Were “Very Fine People on Both Sides” in Charlottesville
At a press conference, the president refused to blame the violence on white nationalists and Nazis.….“What about the alt-left that came charging at the, as you say, alt-right?” Trump also remarked. “Do they have any semblance of guilt?”
The president appeared to criticize the movement to remove Confederate statues—wondering aloud how far proponents of the removals would go. “Was George Washington a slave owner?” he asked. “Are we going to take down statues to George Washington? What about Thomas Jefferson?”
Well, it’s not so easy in the South. Public sector workers received death threats when word went out they were going to remove statues in Louisiana, and they had to do so at night, with snipers on tops of buildings to protect them.
And in some Southern states, GOP legislators have made it illegal to remove them. They actually went out of their way to write laws saying you couldn’t.
I was cheered to hear that Baltimore got rid of their four monuments last night and into this morning. Even in Blue State Maryland, it appeared they had to work at night, too.
August 16, 2017 at 9:31 am in reply to: car drives into counter-protestors in charlottesville #72626Billy_TParticipantThe “alt-left” slur is being used more and more by mainstream Dems, it appears. It’s an umbrella term, kinda like “Bernie Bros.”
I also found this article helpful with some other terms, far right, especially, which I didn’t know:
Alt-Right, Alt-Left, Antifa: A Glossary of Extremist Language
An excerpt:
Alt-Left
Researchers who study extremist groups in the United States say there is no such thing as the “alt-left.” Mark Pitcavage, an analyst at the Anti-Defamation League, said the word had been made up to create a false equivalence between the far right and “anything vaguely left-seeming that they didn’t like.”
Some centrist liberals have taken to using this term.
“It did not arise organically, and it refers to no actual group or movement or network,” Mr. Pitcavage said in an email. “It’s just a made-up epithet, similar to certain people calling any news they don’t like ‘fake news.’”
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump said the “alt-left” was partly to blame for the Charlottesville violence, during which a counterprotester, Heather D. Heyer, was killed.
Billy_TParticipantAs for finding a way to lure one white walker down south . . . Yeah, that’s pretty crazy. Cersei won’t believe it anyway.
And I hope the writers aren’t going to try to follow the “Last Hero” prophecy to the bitter end, cuz, while it has a lot of ambiguity about it, it may well mean the end of everyone in that troop beyond the wall but one.
No not a walker, a wight.
And you call yourself a GOT fan.
Well, I could spin my way out of that foe-paw by saying they’re going after one of the Others, not one of their foot soldiers. You know, a head honcho instead of a headless non-honcho . . . oh, heck with it!!
Okay, then. Do you know why some wights are still kinda fleshy and some are just skeletons? And I don’t want to hear any of the usual anti-vegan lectures, or pro-paleo-diet talk. This is a much bigger issue that that, and skeleton-shaming is so 2011!
Billy_TParticipantAs for finding a way to lure one white walker down south . . . Yeah, that’s pretty crazy. Cersei won’t believe it anyway.
And I hope the writers aren’t going to try to follow the “Last Hero” prophecy to the bitter end, cuz, while it has a lot of ambiguity about it, it may well mean the end of everyone in that troop beyond the wall but one.
Billy_TParticipantSame mantra — things move to fast, not enough development.
And…i thought it was lame that Jamie and his buddy were able to get out of the river and escape capture. That place was crawling with Dothraki’s, and the just pop up out of the river and no-one is around?
I also thought it was lame that Tyrian would be able to waltz into Lannister-land and meet with Jamie.
And what happened with the big spear that was stuck in the Dragon?
Shouldnt there have been a scene where he got some medical treatment or somethin? He’s just all better now?I thought it would have made for a better scene if Tyrian had NOT tried to save the Tarleys from getting Burnt. Remember when Tyrian was just fine with killing a couple of the ‘masters’ after they came in warships and attacked dragon-lady? Well why would he get all sentimental about the Tarley-example?
I thought it was a bit lame that Snow and company think they can kidnap a whitewalker and one white-walker is going to convince Cersei that there is an army of the dead coming. More likely she would just believe they had created a zombie to fool her.
I could go on :>)
Cant wait for the next show :>)
w
vWell, as you know, the premise of the show involves a great deal of willing suspension of disbelief. So it’s difficult to escape from the “lame” stuff. Though I would have thought it harder to believe Jaime didn’t drown due to his armor, as opposed to being able to avoid Dothrakis. The final scene from the previous show kinda indicated he was sinking fast. Bron must be a lot stronger than we thought, and a world class swimmer/diver/lifesavior.
Which reminds me of my first lesson for a Red Cross life-savings badge at age 15. I had to save this rather large woman who was hiding in the James River. Couldn’t see a thing — the water is murky — and she pounced from behind and nearly drowned me. That’s one of the things they teach ya. When you go to save someone in the throes of drowning, they’re quite possibly going to try to drown you out of total and complete panic.
Maybe Jaime and Bron had practiced rescue stuff along with their swordplay.
Billy_TParticipantInteresting article. As bad as their system was in many regards, it was better for women in several ways.
A coupla generalized responses: To me, one of the biggest mistakes they made in the Soviet Union was to feel the need to do that “rapid industrialization.” If they had really read their Marx, they would have noted his (late in life) embrace of 19th century Russian small farms, communal culture, and his belief that a communist society would enable massive amounts of leisure time, impossible under capitalism.
In a sense, there was a “work dividend,” like the concept of peace dividend, that the leaders of the Soviet Union (and China, and Cuba, etc.) threw away in the rush to keep up with the Joneses (the West).
What kind of world could they have built if they had just said, “To hell with the capitalist west. We don’t want to be like them in any way. We have the largest nation on earth, with enormous natural resources, and we will cultivate them in such a way that we sustain them, provide for everyone, and do it at a pace we choose, a slow, natural pace, one that enables everyone to pursue their dreams!”?
Ironically, one of the biggest reasons they failed was they wanted to be too much like the rest of the world — that and their refusal to install real democracy, which the West has never had, either.
Billy_TParticipantIn short, we got brand new info tonight that may mean he actually has rights to the throne before Daenarys. That could be a problem down the road.
Yeah yer right. This was the first indication that he is a legal born Targaryen. If that;s true btw, and it absolutely no doubt is, then that puts Robert Baratheon’s war against the Targaryens in a different light. That war was based on Robert’s misplaced sense that Rhaegar had kidnapped Lyanna and held her against her will.
Which is why it’s important to announce a wedding in the papers. Every single battle fought since Robert declared war, from his time to the present, was just based on a misunderstanding.
And there’s just no excuse for that. I mean, how many apps are there for that sort of thing? Come on!! And, of course, if they don’t want to use the Net and would rather go old-school, there are plenty of wedding planners who do the registry stuff, the reception, multi-cultural ceremonies even a Dothraki could love. You don’t think King’s Landing has its share those?
And if they had chosen this guy as their priest? No more wars. There would be peace in the valley, for sure.
From Four Weddings and a Funeral. He’s gets going after a minute or so.Billy_TParticipantAlso, I would have thought Arya would be less easy to fool. She’s very stealthy. Yeah, so is Littlefinger, of course. But she has the advantage, I would think, of being woefully underestimated. Instead, it appears she did that to him. So, turning the sisters against each other so Littlefinger can take Winterfell from both of them and Jon?
The other potential bombshell is maybe, just maybe, Jon isn’t a Snow after all. His parents may have been secretly married, so that means he’s the true heir.
Jon is definitely a Targaryen. That’s why the dragon settled down after sniffing him. He’s Daenerys’s nephew.
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Yes, but we knew that before tonight. The new info, coming from Sam, is that Jon’s parents may have been secretly married, so he’s not a bastard Targaryan. My bad for not being clear, but when I said he may not be a “Snow,” I meant bastard. That’s the designation for any northern bastard, if memory serves. “Sand” for Dorne. Can’t remember what it is for other regions.
In short, we got brand new info tonight that may mean he actually has rights to the throne before Daenarys. That could be a problem down the road.
Billy_TParticipantAlso, I would have thought Arya would be less easy to fool. She’s very stealthy. Yeah, so is Littlefinger, of course. But she has the advantage, I would think, of being woefully underestimated. Instead, it appears she did that to him. So, turning the sisters against each other so Littlefinger can take Winterfell from both of them and Jon?
The other potential bombshell is maybe, just maybe, Jon isn’t a Snow after all. His parents may have been secretly married, so that means he’s the true heir.
Billy_TParticipantIt was okay.
I keep wondering about the Dothraki who act as Daenyris’s body guard. Once the wild rulers of the open plains, some of them now follow her around doing servant duties.
It’s kind of like having a 12th century mongol warrior as your butler.
I liked it. But it was another one of those “set up” episodes. Next week’s should be the real “winter is here” deal. Though, when I watched Jon and company go out into the cold, from the Wall, I’m thinking, you guys are completely out of your minds . . . which is probably what the writers were shooting for. Roughly equivalent to the girl who goes down into the dark basement, alone, even though everyone knows the monster’s there.
I’ve written a coupla thrillers meself, and it’s not easy to push things along if you can’t do at least a little of that.
;>)
Anyway . . . another thing that interested me. Why would some think it was more “barbaric” to be burned alive by a dragon than cut to shreds by a sword — in battle or later, as a prisoner? I haven’t experienced either death yet, but I’m guessing being sliced up by a sword isn’t much fun. Is dragon-fire really that much more “beyond the pale”? Or, as Nabokov might ask, pale fire?
August 13, 2017 at 8:09 pm in reply to: car drives into counter-protestors in charlottesville #72463Billy_TParticipantWV,
I noticed that “clash” thing too. The right has been pushing that meme for a long time, trying to frame Occupy, for instance, as violently clashing with the police, when it was almost, without exception, peaceful, non-violent, and beaten up by police while being so.
Same thing with BLM. I read a lot of right-wingers trying to equate BLM with neo-nazis, etc. And this Sunday, catching one of those horrible political talk shows via the rabbit ears, one guest was trying to argue that antifa should be condemned for its fascism.
Yeah, that makes sense. Not. A disparate, widely scattered group of mostly young people who believe passionately in fighting against fascism are fascists? Fighting against racism is as bad as racism itself?
Sheesh, this country is just beyond belief, and I wish I could afford to leave. Next best thing, escape into a crazed, Medieval world for an hour or so, coming up soon.
August 13, 2017 at 8:01 pm in reply to: car drives into counter-protestors in charlottesville #72462Billy_TParticipantFrom Facebook.
It’s a comment that accompanies a picture of the person being discussed, but I just didn’t feel like posting the picture.
Bruce DeSilva
A son of a bitch named Andrew Anglin, founder of the neo-Nazi website Daily Stormer, posted a photo of the smashed car that had rammed into a crowd in Charlottesville and said this about it: “The real tragedy is what happened to the car. It was a very nice car, worth much more than the life of whoever died.” Here he is, and of course, he is wearing a Trump cap.
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Yeah, I think if one looks at the totality of circumstances, one sees:
1) One of Trump’s core factions is indeed, the White-supremacists/Hard-core-Racists.
2) There are other non-racist factions that also make up Trump’s Core.My question would be, is that any different than Nixon, Reagan, Bush, McCain?
I dont know, I’m just askin.It ‘feels’ different but I think that might just be because Trump is more brash and vulgar about all of it. I dunno. I wonder if anyone has actually studied the numbers in some way that reveals whether ‘more racists’ voted for trump than Nixon or Reagan?
w
vI haven’t read any comparative analyses yet — between the various presidential elections. But I do know that this one, in survey after survey, showed the number one common denominator for the Trump voter was white grievance and the belief that white people are discriminated against more than blacks. No other factor, economic, social, geographic, etc. etc. seems as determinative.
That said, it is true that the GOP has marshaled the forces of racism and bigotry now for roughly the last two generations. Nixon was probably the first Republican to make it a key part of his attempt to win the presidency, though he was far more subtle about it than Donald “Many sides” Trump. Nothing ever works in history in some perfect linear progression, but it does seem that subsequent GOP efforts have gotten more and more overt in their wooing of the white nationalist sentiment, going from dog whistles to openly retweeting neo-nazi propaganda.
Perhaps Trump added a right-wing fringe that previously sat out electoral politics, hoping he was their champion, and the Internet weaponized this. Perhaps a previous champion with the help of the Internet, or his celebrity, would have done as well with that group. Impossible to say. But I do think it’s dangerous, and double dangerous because Sessions is himself a suspect. He’s not as openly “white nationalist” as a Bannon, a Gorka, or a Miller, but he’s rather liked in those quarters.
It’s one more case of the wolf guarding the hen house, and it’s not going to end well.
Billy_TParticipantI switched to duckduckgo awhile ago, but for different reasons. They don’t keep your browsing history — at least they say they don’t. Google keeps it forever. Which means they may sell it to advertisers, or give it to the government.
Because of that, I used to use a search engine called scroogle, but google managed to kill it. It basically piggy-backed off of google, but promised to scrub your history clean every two days.
Now, of course, thanks to Trump and the GOP, your ISP can sell your history to whomever. So you have zero control. At least with google, you can go into your account and delete your various histories. As far as I know, there’s no way to do that with any ISP. No “account” for that.
As for the blocking of leftist sites — that really pisses me off. But I knew about Apple (through the Ipod library) and Google doing this in different forms for years. Both used hard-right sites to “define” things like socialism, Marxism, etc. etc. I think they still do.
This is not the Web as conceived by its earlier pioneers. The best of those pioneers saw it as a great way to exchange scholarship between universities and non-profs worldwide. Basically, public research for the public, kept in the public domain.
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This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by
Billy_T.
Billy_TParticipantI used to live in C’Ville, and live not too far away from it now. A terrible couple of days for an otherwise really good place to live.
Trump’s response was despicable. He’s even being called out for it by Republican senators like Corey Gardner and Rubio.
He condemned “many sides” for their hate and bigotry. He refuses to name the perpetrators, the white nationalists who marched on the town and one who killed a protestor. He can’t, really, of course. He won the presidency because of them. He won because of the white supremacist, racist, bigoted vote, and he has several white nationalists in his administration, like Gorka, Miller and Bannon.
But he should. He should also condemn the political right. The march was tagged as “unite the right,” and it’s time to call the political right out for this. Neo-nazis, neo-fascists, the KKK, white supremacy in general — they all proudly claim the political right as their home. Too many people left of center shy away from coming out and saying these are right-wingers, and they shouldn’t.
The political right never returns the favor when it condemns the left. It’s never been afraid of tagging the left for people like Stalin. Why should the left shy away from telling the truth about nazis and fascists, neo and otherwise, identifying with the political right? And they always have.
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This reply was modified 7 years, 3 months ago by Billy_T.
Billy_TParticipantGood follow-up article to all of that. Direct, to the point, a kind of “just the facts” article from Jacobin:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2017/08/wealth-inequality-united-states-capital-income
The Problem Is Capital
Matt Bruenig
If we want to create a fair and egalitarian society, we must confront capital directly.
The United States is an enormously wealthy country. In 2015, total household wealth stood at $71.3 trillion.
This is equal to $220,000 per person, or $880,000 for every family of four, if the wealth was distributed evenly throughout society.
The owners of this wealth, or capital, capture around 30 percent of the income produced by the country every year. This income flows to them, not because they work for it, but merely because they own income-generating assets like real estate, equity, and debt. In 2015, total US capital income was around $4.8 trillion.
If this unearned portion of the national income was distributed equally to every individual in society, then each person would receive around $15,000 of income per year in addition to whatever else they receive from working. For a family of four, this dividend alone would bring their household income to $60,000 per year.
The problem is that wealth and capital income are not distributed evenly. In 2014, the average wealth of the bottom half was $349. For the top 1 percent, it was over $16 million.
This extraordinarily unequal distribution of wealth causes the nation’s capital income to also be distributed in a very uneven manner. In 2014, the bottom half had an average capital income of $826. For the top 1 percent, it was over $750,000.
Rich people in our society don’t just have high capital income levels. They also have high capital income shares. That is, a large portion of the income collected at the top of our society comes from capital rather than from labor. In 2014, just 5.1 percent of the bottom half’s income came from capital. For the top 1 percent, around 58.6 percent of income came from capital.
It is worth emphasizing just how much income at the top of society comes from passive ownership of investments rather than from working. The top 0.01 percent of individuals in society have an average income of $28 million. Three-fourths of that income, or $21 million, came from capital in 2014.
If we want to get serious about creating a fair and egalitarian society, we must confront capital directly. Wage levels are important. Benefit levels are important. But getting those things right will not be enough so long as nearly one-third of the national income flows out passively to a handful of people at the top of society.
Current liberal efforts to tackle wealth inequality are woefully inadequate. Policies aimed at building the assets of low-income families, the typical approach to this issue, rarely succeed on their own terms and even if they did succeed, would only be an insignificant drop in the bucket. For wealth and capital income to become more fairly distributed throughout society, the ownership of existing assets must be reordered towards that end.
August 10, 2017 at 12:15 pm in reply to: is Google censoring info about left/socialist sites? #72180Billy_TParticipantSilicon Valley has long done its best, covertly, overtly, subtly, or brazenly, to suppress leftist ideas.
I noticed early on that if you want to find courses on Marx and socialism in, say, Apple’s university, you’re going to find them as taught by far-right sources like mises.org.
And if you sign up to one of those customized news aggregators, and choose “socialism,” the most prevalent articles will also come from right-wing sites — condemnation of leftist philosophy, etc. That’s not going to be what happens when you choose your other categories. You’re not going to get anti-travel articles for travel, or anti-sports articles for sports, or anticapitalist articles for capitalism or economics.
Marx, socialism, the left in general — that stuff usually generates negative articles.
It’s, well, rigged.
Billy_TParticipantAnd after four years of Trump one would ‘guess’ that a lot of working-class voters wont be any better off and they might not be so prone to drink the Trump koolaid next time around.
But who knows.
w
vI dunno. We’ve seen Americans vote against their economic interests again and again. I think what we have here is a Culture War. And the feelings are pretty strong about what America is.
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Well it doesn’t matter to me what you Americans do, because
I’ve seceded from America.I dont have a flag yet though. I’m working on some ideas though. Maybe two Ram horns coming out of a Chomsky-head, with two pieces of toast in the background.
Blue and white, of course.
w
vSpeaking of Chomsky. I watched Captain Fantastic last night. Loved it. A leftist-centered movie, which is rare these days. The brilliant Snowpiercer was another. Loved that too.
They have a Noam Chomsky day in the movie. I’ll have to watch it again to be sure, but I think it was meant to replace Christmas. So cool. I give it five out of five stars.
Billy_TParticipantI think his “base” is a lot smaller than most people think, and it’s shrinking.
Remember, he won just 26% of the electorate, and Clinton, perhaps the most disliked Dem nominee in history, running one of the worst campaigns, evah, received three million more votes.
His approval rates have been at historic lows from Day One, and they’re still dropping.
Also, his entire “base” would vote Republican, regardless. I think it’s far more a tribal thing than a Trump thing. He didn’t expand his party’s national reach at all, and he turned off plenty of those “traditional” Republicans enough to vote Clinton, and once in office, that only got worse.
A recent study showed that the “Trump Democrat” was basically a myth. It wasn’t that some Dems switched to Trump after voting for Obama. It was that some Republicans had switched to Obama after voting for Bush. They were “coming home” when they voted for Trump.
Billy_TParticipantInjuries. They had a wave of injuries before the battle, especially along the offensive line.
August 8, 2017 at 9:44 am in reply to: Sy Hersh — DNC wasnt hacked, Seth Rich sold info to wiki #72089Billy_TParticipantSomething to keep in mind about Wikileaks and Assange: They promise anonymity to all their sources. It’s pretty much the only reason they receive info in the first place. That ironclad promise of complete anonymity and confidentiality. They promise not to even look at who sends them X, Y and Z info. They promise absolute confidentiality.
So they’re lying when they divulge their sources. Either they’re lying that they know who sent them the info, that the Russians didn’t, that Seth Rich did, or they lie about confidentiality and anonymity of their sources.
They can’t be telling the truth throughout the process.
Billy_TParticipantSo i guess Jamie will be captured now? And that sets up the meeting between the King-slayer and the Slayed-King’s daughter?
w
vI think what we’ll see next week is the intro of the Game of Thrones/DC Cinematic Universe. The former Khal Drogo is now Aquaman and will rescue Jaime. The Dothraki turned on him. He’ll turn on the Dothraki.
Billy_TParticipantZN,
That was good. But he missed an opening. It’s actually another lie to say people used to be able to buy insurance on the individual markets for less. Never happened. Not. Ever. In fact, it was far more money to go out on your own and purchase insurance before the ACA, and I say that as someone who isn’t a big fan of it and buys from the exchanges now — with no subsidies.
Prior to the ACA, if you were self-employed, you paid more for an individual policy. The ACA basically gave/gives people “group rates,” primarily cuz of those taxpayer subsidies. And if you also have pre-existing conditions, your insurance rate now is a fraction of what it was before, if you could even find insurance outside of work. I know this too as a cancer survivor. If I didn’t have it through work in the early years, I was told by Blue Cross and Blue Shield, back in 2003, it would be more than a thousand a month for just me. No ACA and it would be in the thousands right now, if you could even get it.
Single Payer — Medicare for all makes the most sense, IMO – is waaaay better than the ACA. But Republicans want to talk about the system prior to the ACA as if it were nirvana, and it sucked. It was far worse for the vast majority of Americans, especially anyone with pre-existing conditions and/or self-employed. The so-called “free market” never worked for them, and it never will. The conflict of interest between insurance exec and patient is too massive.
Billy_TParticipantWell, my complaint is the same. Basically it all seemed a bit rushed.
Maybe they are planning on selling DVD’s with an ‘extended version’. Ya know.
Not enough, slow, subtle character development anymore. Its all action-movie this season. Which is ok. Its still GOT. But it coulda been special. Instead its just good.
The Tyrian character seems a bit wasted this season. Hes only had one memorable scene and that was the one zn pointed out when he was trying to get J.Snow and Dragon-Lady to understand each other.
I suppose the scene i enjoyed most was Arya vs The Big-Lady. That made me smile.
If i had a mortal dragon, btw, i would make it wear armor and a helmet.
w
vI can see the complaint about it being rushed. But it seemed like they tried to set up the battle a bit more this time. And I just loved the art work. Danaerys is a very cool biker chick, on that dragon. The protagonist in my latest novel, the ghost — she rode a Harley Dynaglide when she was alive, and may in death, too. But it would be so much cooler if it were a dragon. Just not sure if that works in context . . . .
Great point about the armor. I have no idea why that didn’t occur to me earlier. But it’s so obvious. Make all three of them armor. They have to know now that they’re vulnerable to Cersei’s endless wiles.
Speaking of that, I always wondered why the DC and Marvel superheroes didn’t all wear special suits like Iron Man’s. Take it up a thousand notches and put the Hulk, Thor, Wonder Woman, Spidey and the like in those special suits and who’s gonna stop ’em? Certainly not Lex Luthor.
I shouldn’t have to explain this stuff to them. They should just know, ya know?
Billy_TParticipantEpisode 4 was a good one I thought. Best of season 7 so far?
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Agreed. Excellent. Spoiler alert, for those who haven’t seen it yet:
That was a fantastic battle scene with Danaerys and the dragon. Loved it. Loved the art work, the pacing, the flow. Very exciting, and the slower parts with Arya and Sansa helped set it up. I also really, really liked the scene in the cave with Jon and Danaerys, and the Children of the Corn, or whatever they’re called.
;>)
Well done. I think the showrunners redeemed themselves this week. Now, next week? So who do you think saved Jaime’s life at the last second?
August 6, 2017 at 11:01 pm in reply to: Sy Hersh — DNC wasnt hacked, Seth Rich sold info to wiki #72003Billy_TParticipant“….But I also reject and detest and find despicable right-wing efforts to demonize opponents, and the escalation of those efforts that increasingly seem more and more unhinged. The bogus Seth Rich story is a part of that…”
Except Sy Hersh is hardly a rightwing nutjob pushing a rightwing conspiracy theory.
w
vThis issue . . . It’s one of those “no dog in this race” kinds of things for me. I don’t take it personally. I don’t feel any personal animosity toward anyone with a different view. It’s okay. As the young kids used to say, whatever.
That said, yeah. I think Hersch is falling hook, line and sinker for a far-right fake news conspiracy, straight out of the Alex Jones school of trumped up idiocy. He should know better. And I know he’s not a RWNJ. But, IMO, he’s fallen for a RWNJ fake news story.
Anyway, hope we can just agree to disagree, etc. And with that, I’m bowing out of this one.
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