REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

TRUMP - Just because.....................Naw, I just can't say it!

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Friday, December 9, 2016 6:57 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary has said machines are cheaper, easier to manage than humans.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/12/08/donald-trumps-pi
ck-for-labor-secretary-has-said-machines-are-cheaper-easier-to-manage-than-humans/

Automation is expected to displace many human workers in low-skilled jobs.

While Trump is campaigning to bring factory jobs back to the USA, his labor secretary will be campaigning to abolish jobs that could never be exported.

Fast food executive Andrew Puzder, who President-elect Donald Trump is expected to tap as labor secretary, has advocated replacing some human workers with machines as a way for businesses to reduce costs associated with rising wages and health-care expenses.

While machines require regular maintenance and can sometimes malfunction, Puzder said, they are also easier to manage than humans and don’t pose the same legal risks. “They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” Puzder told Business Insider in March.

Puzder serves as the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporate parent behind fast food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr. The company counts 3,300 locations in 42 states and 28 countries, according to its website.

CKE Restaurants launched a pilot program with Microsoft last year that brought electronic kiosks into 30 Hardee’s restaurants, allowing customers to place orders without speaking to an employee. A request for comment on the company’s automation initiatives was not returned by the time of publication.

Not all restaurant functions can be automated, however, Puzder explained after the Business Insider piece. In a Los Angeles Times interview later that same month, Puzder said cashiers are still needed because some customers are more comfortable interacting with humans. Other restaurant functions, such as preparing fresh biscuits and hand-breaded chicken, cannot easily be automated, Puzder wrote in a Wall Street Journal editorial in March.

Puzder is critical of government policies that he says drive up labor costs, including legislation to increase the minimum wage and President Obama’s signature health care law. Those policies have forced labor-intensive businesses, such as restaurants, to look for ways to eliminate expenses, he wrote in the Journal.

“Dramatic increases in labor costs have a significant effect on the restaurant industry, where profit margins are pennies on the dollar and labor makes up about a third of total expenses. As a result, restaurants are looking to reduce costs while maintaining service and food quality,” he said.

But Puzder sees automation shaking up industries well beyond his own. Technology has already started to replace workers in airports and grocery stores, he said, blaming the trend on the liberal labor policies advocated by Trump’s former Democratic presidential rivals.

“This is the problem with Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and progressives who push very hard to raise the minimum wage,” Puzder told Business Insider in March. “Does it really help if Sally makes $3 more an hour if Suzie has no job?”

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 1:50 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
Trump voters can show their deep concern for jobless Americans by NOT buying those pants or shoes or sheets NOT made in America.
I invite you to try and find consumer goods made in the USA and to figure out what 'made in the USA' means.

“If someone makes a burrito with beef from Mexico, but it’s made here, it’s still made in America.”


http://www.today.com/parents/one-moms-challenge-buy-only-made-usa-one-
week-857929

One mom's challenge: Buy only "Made in USA" for one week

was challenged, as a blogger with iVillage, to buy nothing but American-made products for my family for an entire week. I jumped at the opportunity. Why not? Buy American and teach my child our values by example? Who wouldn’t want to do it? I thought it really couldn’t be that hard.

Not exactly.

It was actually harder than I expected it to be.

I wasn’t prepared for the blurred lines and sense of confusion I got when I tried to buy the most basic household items.

"Made in America with domestic & imported parts."

That, my friends, was what my toilet paper package said.

Kinda gross, I thought. How many “parts” are in my toilet paper? And which ones are domestic?

I had to stop and really think about what I was doing. Was I breaking the mission? Does that mean that it's still American? Am I willingly contributing to foreign child labor and harsh working conditions every time my family flushes?

Or should I look on the bright side? Did partially American-made mean I was uplifting the economy?

But then I kept thinking, well, there HAS to be some kind of toilet paper completely “Made in USA.”

Nope.

I ended up buying the “Made in USA with domestic and imported parts” Charmin after having no luck finding entirely domestic-made TP. I searched high and low. And I’m sorry, but I, my husband and my 4-year-old can’t live without toilet paper!

On to food, the next essential. ...

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 2:00 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
Let me ask you something: when you shop for "X" and you see the same exact brand and item in several places, do you buy the most expensive one?
I don't shop 'brands', I shop for items with the characteristics I'm looking for. eg: bed linens, 100% cotton, natural, NOT treated to be perma-press or stain resistant. If I'm trying to get something done quickly, I go to the closest store that will probably have it - in my case Target, which is just a few blocks away. IF I'm lucky and the store is actually carrying what I'm looking for, they almost always only only have 1 type anyway, I just buy what they have.

I can't answer your question.

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 2:05 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
But Puzder sees automation shaking up industries well beyond his own.
I hope you're not using somebody's guesses about the future - which may or may not come true - to explain away the analysis that 50% of manufacturing jobs that were lost in recent, real-life, factual history were sent overseas.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 6:35 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Quote:
But Puzder sees automation shaking up industries well beyond his own.
I hope you're not using somebody's guesses about the future - which may or may not come true - to explain away the analysis that 50% of manufacturing jobs that were lost in recent, real-life, factual history were sent overseas.
Factory production was moved because of money. That is not a guess. It is also not a guess that while Trump is campaigning to bring factory jobs back to the USA, his labor secretary will be campaigning to abolish jobs that could never be exported. Donald Trump’s pick for labor secretary has said machines are cheaper, easier to manage than humans.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/innovations/wp/2016/12/08/donald-trumps-pi
ck-for-labor-secretary-has-said-machines-are-cheaper-easier-to-manage-than-humans/

This is not a guess: over the next 8 years the labor secretary and business owners will abolish non-factory jobs at the very same time as Trump is creating jobs by moving factory production from overseas back to the USA. Why am I certain? Money. This is not a guess: Business owners, Trump and the GOP love money more than they love Americans without a job. Technology companies love money and a technical challenge.

If it doesn't happen in the next 8 years, then maybe in the next 16, 24, or 32. In 32 years, we might even know for sure that Trump was right about the greenhouse gas effect. Maybe Trump is correct that global warming is a Chinese hoax. Trump's pick for the head of the EPA, Scott Pruitt, certainly has acted like it is all a hoax. That is not a guess.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 6:37 AM

JO753

rezident owtsidr


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Puzder serves as the chief executive of CKE Restaurants, the corporate parent behind fast food chains Hardee’s and Carl’s Jr.


Another Idiocrasy prediction way ahed uv schedule.



----------------------------
DUZ XaT SEM RiT TQ YQ? - Jubal Early

http://www.nooalf.com

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 7:17 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump really, really doesn't want to hear about how Russia got him elected
www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/donald-trump-really-really-does
nt-want-hear-about-how-russia-got-him-elected

Guess what? It turns out that Vladimir Putin really did think that the best way to cripple America was to get an incompetent buffoon like Donald Trump elected president. Smart man. Here's the Washington Post: "The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter."

The New York Times adds this: "They based that conclusion, in part, on another finding — which they say was also reached with high confidence — that the Russians hacked the Republican National Committee’s computer systems in addition to their attacks on Democratic organizations, but did not release whatever information they gleaned from the Republican networks."

Donald Trump's transition team thinks the intelligence community is full of crap, and we should ignore them and move on. "The election ended a long time ago," they said in a statement, "in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history."

Oh really? Let's interrupt our story about the greatest act of ratfucking in history for an aside about how Trump really did: Electoral Votes of Presidents Since 12th Amendment Passed -- Donald Trump Ranks 44th Out of 54

The good news, I guess, is that Trump has given up on claiming that he won a great victory in the popular vote. The bad news is that he's simply switched to lying about his Electoral College victory.

Now back to Putin. I'd say that given Trump's apparent inability to ever utter the truth—along with the odd coincidence that Trump just happens to be pro-Russia on nearly every issue Russia cares about—it might be smart to at least take a peek at what the intelligence folks have to say. Especially since the Post story also says this:

In September, during a secret briefing for congressional leaders, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) voiced doubts about the veracity of the intelligence...and made clear to the administration that he would consider any effort by the White House to challenge the Russians publicly an act of partisan politics.

So McConnell really did Trump a solid, didn't he? And guess what? It turns out that Trump thinks McConnell's wife is the best qualified person in the whole country to be his Secretary of Transportation! Just another coincidence, I'm sure.

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 7:36 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Tweets portend a scary future

By Rick Casey

Two tweets in the past week have me nervous. One for the near future, the other for the distant future.

One is from Donald Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Gen. Mike Flynn. He has tweeted a link to a story on a website called “True Pundit” that says law enforcement sources found evidence “linking (Hillary) Clinton herself and associates to … sex crimes with minors” and other felonies.

The link didn’t mention the suburban Washington pizza restaurant that other tweets (including from Flynn’s son) falsely specified as the site of Clinton’s alleged child trafficking operation, but it helped feed that outrageous lie.

The restaurant’s owners and staff received hundreds of death threats and then, last week, a North Carolina man walked into the restaurant with what appeared to be an assault rifle; the staff and customers fled as he fired off some shots. At least one was to break a lock as he searched for captive children.

There were none, of course. The whole thing was a hoax widely circulated on the internet. What’s scary is that people such as this hero-wannabe believed it. Even scarier is that the man who will be President Trump’s top adviser on national security issues helped foster it.

And this isn’t, by far, the first wild and weird conspiracy theory Flynn has espoused. Last year in San Antonio, he gave a speech warning that our elected officials were conspiring to help Muslims institute Shariah law in Texas.

Flynn had been in Florida the week before and said that “all 12 Democrats” in the 36-member Florida state Senate “voted to have Shariah law as part of the state judicial system in the state of Florida. You got that going on in this state right here. You have that going on in this state right here. It’s over 100 cases around the country.”

In fact, the Florida state Senate has 40 members, and 14 were Democrats. But never mind the small stuff. The big stuff is that no senators had voted to make Shariah law part of Florida’s state’s judicial system. None.

Then Flynn went up to Dallas and said this: “When you, in the state of Texas, you, in the state of Texas — your legislators, your state representatives, your state senators, there’s a bunch of them that would be willing to have Shariah law imposed in the state of Texas.”

To which the proper response is: Name two. I don’t think I risk contradiction by stating that no member of the Texas Legislature is willing to have Shariah law imposed on his or her family. The Houston Chronicle had already named the notion that Shariah law would be imposed in Texas as the 2015 “Hoax of the Year.”

I find it frightening that in a little more than two months, a man who thinks Texas legislators would subject all of us to Shariah law and that Hillary Clinton may have run a child trafficking ring will be in the White House shaping President Trump’s response to world crises.

The other scary tweet has more distant consequences, and possibly more dire. It came from the House Committee on Science, Space and Technology, headed by San Antonio’s own Rep. Lamar Smith. It read: “Global Temperatures Plunge. Icy Silence from Climate Alarmists.”

Its source: Breitbart News. That’s who the committee tweet linked to with the news. It is very scary that a committee that wields great power over national science policy gets its science news from Breitbart, which doesn’t exactly have a science section, but has run an unseemly number of articles proclaiming that, scientifically speaking, women are no good at science.

Trump has appointed Breitbart’s CEO, Steve Bannon, to be his top policy adviser in the White House. Bannon has described breitbart.com as being “a platform for the alt right,” including the movement’s white nationalists. It has the appearance of combining political coverage to the right of Fox News with the graphic sensibilities of a British tabloid.

Which, actually, is where it got its story on a drop of global temperatures. Not surprisingly, climate scientists have refuted the story. As NASA data show, annual average temperatures go up and down, but on a consistently hotter trajectory.

Climate science is a sober subject. That our political leaders are taking seriously science stories from Breitbart is very scary. If we get climate science wrong, we are putting our children and grandchildren at risks that dwarf that of jihadists.

This commentary first appeared as the “Last Word” on KLRN-TV’s “Texas Week with Rick Casey.”

www.houstonchronicle.com/opinion/outlook/article/Casey-Scary-tweets-po
rtend-scary-future-10786963.php

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 11:13 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by G:

There is this part of me that I admit (somewhat shamefully) is hanging by the edge of my seat waiting to see just what the eff this horror show is going to do once they are in office. In terms of writing a script, the last 3 weeks have been a pretty epic lead in.
I think we need a time travel joke spoken with the voice of George Washington:

"Gentlemen, I do not fully comprehend what we have just witnessed, but one thing is exceedingly clear — we must abandon any inclination we may have held toward a system of direct democracy — and institute a safeguard to ensure that such a dangerous narcissist will never become president of this nation! It shall be known as — the electoral college!
Our posterity will never even know how close they came to utter ruination!"


www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/12/5/1606903/-Cartoon-The-mysterious-str
anger

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 3:12 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
Factory production was moved because of money. That is not a guess.
No, it's just another one of your unsupported bullshit claims quoted from another unsupported bullshit claim.

The manufacturing jobs that were lost were lost due to a voluntary choice by international corporations, not a matter of necessity. As my posts with all their links show.

BTW, I noticed that you abandoned your claims that manufacturing loss was due to technology, and also that people should just 'buy American' (because they can't).

You're making progress.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 5:27 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Quote:
Factory production was moved because of money. That is not a guess.
No, it's just another one of your unsupported bullshit claims quoted from another unsupported bullshit claim.

The manufacturing jobs that were lost were lost due to a voluntary choice by international corporations, not a matter of necessity. As my posts with all their links show.
So you're claiming money is bullshit and it's only "voluntary choice by international corporations". No need to talk about money when it is all about "voluntary choice". I guess you don't know that money motivates factory owners. Just curious: do you think patriotism and love for their American factory workers are as powerful motivations as money for factory owners? If you do, can you prove it?

How do you, Trump, and Bernie propose to get international corporations to involuntarily change their choice back to the USA? Trump's answer is money. Trump with his 35% tariff. V.P. Pence with his $7,000,000 of Ohio tax money for Carrier. Since an American factory worker is paid more than Chinese, the Americans buying a made-in-america product will be paying more, which means, again, money. If 1kiki thinks Americans love American factory workers enough to be willing to pay more, prove it by showing me some examples of these magnanimous American buyers of American goods.

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 6:17 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


President Barack Obama seems to fear that president-elect Donald Trump will ignore US intelligence that Russia used cyber tools to influence the result of the Nov. 8 election. And with good reason: Trump has displayed intense skepticism of what US intelligence agencies regard as a profound risk to the American electoral system.

So Obama is attempting to box Trump in politically—ordering a definitive report on Russia’s cyber-intrusions before he leaves office in six weeks.

In a new briefing to key members of Congress last week, the CIA advanced its long-held conclusion that Russia conducted cyber-intrusions and disseminated fake news in order to disrupt the presidential election. In its latest assessment, the CIA said the attacks were not intended solely to disrupt the election, but specifically to skew it to Trump’s advantage, according to the Washington Post. The newspaper quotes a US official who was in the congressional briefing as saying “It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected.”

The CIA assessment aligns with the discovery of similar cyber-attacks across Europe, including the hacking of sensitive servers, as well as information warfare. In recent days, intelligence officials in both the UK and Germany have said that Russia’s cyber warfare imperils their respective democracies. On Dec. 10, Nicholas Burns, one of the most respected former diplomats in the US, tweeted that the threat is sweeping.

Trump’s team, however, has brushed off the new reports as the work of a tarnished intelligence community. “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again,’” the statement read.

In an interview with Time magazine, Trump had voiced similar sarcasm about the cyberattacks. “It could be Russia. And it could be China. And it could be some guy in his home in New Jersey,” he said. “I believe that it could have been Russia and it could have been any one of many other people. Sources or even individuals.”

Hence Obama’s worry. Broadly speaking, Trump is setting an early trend of treating information he doesn’t like as politicization. For instance, his transition team has suggested that the Energy Information Administration, the much-respected data division of the US Department of Energy, is politicizing its data to support Obama’s climate change agenda. And he is accusing the 17 US intelligence agencies—one of the baselines of US foreign policy—of doctoring the hacking analysis to tarnish him and his presidency. The mindset suggests another dimension to Trump’s penchant for operating in an alternate universe of facts.

With that as the backdrop, Obama is racing against the clock to get the facts on Russia out there prior to Trump’s inauguration.

Much more at http://qz.com/860071/barack-obama-is-racing-for-a-definitive-report-on
-russias-cyber-attacks-on-the-presidential-election-before-trump-takes-office/

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 6:33 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG

The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.


https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-da
ngerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/

Democrats, Trump, and the Ongoing, Dangerous Refusal to Learn the Lesson of Brexit
Glenn Greenwald


The parallels between the U.K.’s shocking approval of the Brexit referendum in June and the U.S.’s even more shocking election of Donald Trump as president Tuesday night are overwhelming. Elites (outside of populist right-wing circles) aggressively unified across ideological lines in opposition to both. Supporters of Brexit and Trump were continually maligned by the dominant media narrative (validly or otherwise) as primitive, stupid, racist, xenophobic, and irrational. In each case, journalists who spend all day chatting with one another on Twitter and congregating in exclusive social circles in national capitals — constantly re-affirming their own wisdom in an endless feedback loop — were certain of victory. Afterward, the elites whose entitlement to prevail was crushed devoted their energies to blaming everyone they could find except for themselves, while doubling down on their unbridled contempt for those who defied them, steadfastly refusing to examine what drove their insubordination.

The indisputable fact is that prevailing institutions of authority in the West, for decades, have relentlessly and with complete indifference stomped on the economic welfare and social security of hundreds of millions of people. While elite circles gorged themselves on globalism, free trade, Wall Street casino gambling, and endless wars (wars that enriched the perpetrators and sent the poorest and most marginalized to bear all their burdens), they completely ignored the victims of their gluttony, except when those victims piped up a bit too much — when they caused a ruckus — and were then scornfully condemned as troglodytes who were the deserved losers in the glorious, global game of meritocracy.

That message was heard loud and clear. The institutions and elite factions that have spent years mocking, maligning, and pillaging large portions of the population — all while compiling their own long record of failure and corruption and destruction — are now shocked that their dictates and decrees go unheeded. But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.

After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”

For those who tried to remove themselves from the self-affirming, vehemently pro-Clinton elite echo chamber of 2016, the warning signs that Brexit screechingly announced were not hard to see. Two short passages from a Slate interview I gave in July summarized those grave dangers: that opinion-making elites were so clustered, so incestuous, so far removed from the people who would decide this election — so contemptuous of them — that they were not only incapable of seeing the trends toward Trump but were unwittingly accelerating those trends with their own condescending, self-glorifying behavior.

Like most everyone else who saw the polling data and predictive models of the media’s self-proclaimed data experts, I long believed Clinton would win, but the reasons why she very well could lose were not hard to see. The warning lights were flashing in neon for a long time, but they were in seedy places that elites studiously avoid. The few people who purposely went to those places and listened, such as Chris Arnade, saw and heard them loud and clear. The ongoing failure to take heed of this intense but invisible resentment and suffering guarantees that it will fester and strengthen. This was the last paragraph of my July article on the Brexit fallout:

Instead of acknowledging and addressing the fundamental flaws within themselves, [elites] are devoting their energies to demonizing the victims of their corruption, all in order to delegitimize those grievances and thus relieve themselves of responsibility to meaningfully address them. That reaction only serves to bolster, if not vindicate, the animating perceptions that these elite institutions are hopelessly self-interested, toxic, and destructive and thus cannot be reformed but rather must be destroyed. That, in turn, only ensures there will be many more Brexits, and Trumps, in our collective future.

Beyond the Brexit analysis, there are three new points from last night’s results that I want to emphasize, as they are unique to the 2016 U.S. election and, more importantly, illustrate the elite pathologies that led to all of this:
1. Democrats have already begun flailing around trying to blame anyone and everyone they can find — everyone except themselves — for last night’s crushing defeat of their party.

You know the drearily predictable list of their scapegoats: Russia, WikiLeaks, James Comey, Jill Stein, Bernie Bros, The Media, news outlets (including, perhaps especially, The Intercept) that sinned by reporting negatively on Hillary Clinton. Anyone who thinks that what happened last night in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Iowa, and Michigan can be blamed on any of that is drowning in self-protective ignorance so deep that it’s impossible to express in words.

When a political party is demolished, the principal responsibility belongs to one entity: the party that got crushed. It’s the job of the party and the candidate, and nobody else, to persuade the citizenry to support them and find ways to do that. Last night, the Democrats failed, resoundingly, to do that, and any autopsy or liberal think piece or pro-Clinton pundit commentary that does not start and finish with their own behavior is one that is inherently worthless.

Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate, especially in this climate — are now the ones being blamed: by the very same people who insisted on ignoring all that data and nominating her anyway.

But that’s just basic blame shifting and self-preservation. Far more significant is what this shows about the mentality of the Democratic Party. Just think about who they nominated: someone who — when she wasn’t dining with Saudi monarchs and being feted in Davos by tyrants who gave million-dollar checks — spent the last several years piggishly running around to Wall Street banks and major corporations cashing in with $250,000 fees for 45-minute secret speeches even though she had already become unimaginably rich with book advances while her husband already made tens of millions playing these same games. She did all that without the slightest apparent concern for how that would feed into all the perceptions and resentments of her and the Democratic Party as corrupt, status quo-protecting, aristocratic tools of the rich and powerful: exactly the worst possible behavior for this post-2008-economic-crisis era of globalism and destroyed industries.

It goes without saying that Trump is a sociopathic con artist obsessed with personal enrichment: the opposite of a genuine warrior for the downtrodden. That’s too obvious to debate. But, just as Obama did so powerfully in 2008, he could credibly run as an enemy of the D.C. and Wall Street system that has steamrolled over so many people, while Hillary Clinton is its loyal guardian, its consummate beneficiary.

Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power. Those are the cynical, self-interested seeds they planted, and now the crop has sprouted.

Of course there are fundamental differences between Obama’s version of “change” and Trump’s. But at a high level of generality — which is where these messages are often ingested — both were perceived as outside forces on a mission to tear down corrupt elite structures, while Clinton was perceived as devoted to their fortification. That is the choice made by Democrats — largely happy with status quo authorities, believing in their basic goodness — and any honest attempt by Democrats to find the prime author of last night’s debacle will begin with a large mirror.
2. That racism, misogyny, and xenophobia are pervasive in all sectors of America is indisputable from even a casual glance at its history, both distant and recent.

There are reasons why all presidents until 2008 were white and all 45 elected presidents have been men. There can be no doubt that those pathologies played a substantial role in last night’s outcome. But that fact answers very few questions and begs many critical ones.

To begin with, one must confront the fact that not only was Barack Obama elected twice, but he is poised to leave office as a highly popular president: now viewed more positively than Reagan. America wasn’t any less racist and xenophobic in 2008 and 2012 than it is now. Even stalwart Democrats fond of casually branding their opponents as bigots are acknowledging that a far more complicated analysis is required to understand last night’s results. As the New York Times’s Nate Cohn put it: “Clinton suffered her biggest losses in the places where Obama was strongest among white voters. It’s not a simple racism story.” Matt Yglesias acknowledged that Obama’s high approval rating is inconsistent with depictions of the U.S. as a country “besotted with racism.”

People often talk about “racism/sexism/xenophobia” vs. “economic suffering” as if they are totally distinct dichotomies. Of course there are substantial elements of both in Trump’s voting base, but the two categories are inextricably linked: The more economic suffering people endure, the angrier and more bitter they get, the easier it is to direct their anger to scapegoats. Economic suffering often fuels ugly bigotry. It is true that many Trump voters are relatively well-off and many of the nation’s poorest voted for Clinton, but, as Michael Moore quite presciently warned, those portions of the country that have been most ravaged by free trade orgies and globalism — Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, Iowa — were filled with rage and “see [Trump] as a chance to be the human Molotov cocktail that they’d like to throw into the system to blow it up.” Those are the places that were decisive in Trump’s victory. As the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney put it:

It has long been, and still is, a central American challenge to rid society of these structural inequalities. But one way to ensure those scapegoating dynamics fester rather than erode is to continue to embrace a system that excludes and ignores a large portion of the population. Hillary Clinton was viewed, reasonably, as a stalwart devotee, beloved agent, and prime beneficiary of that system, and thus could not possibly be viewed as a credible actor against it.
3. Over the last six decades, and particularly over the last 15 years of the endless war on terror, both political parties have joined to construct a frightening and unprecedentedly invasive and destructive system of authoritarian power, accompanied by the unbridled authority vested in the executive branch to use it.

As a result, the president of the United States commands a vast nuclear arsenal that can destroy the planet many times over; the deadliest and most expensive military ever developed in human history; legal authorities that allow him to prosecute numerous secret wars at the same time, imprison people with no due process, and target people (including U.S. citizens) for assassination with no oversight; domestic law enforcement agencies that are constructed to appear and act as standing, para-militarized armies; a sprawling penal state that allows imprisonment far more easily than most Western countries; and a system of electronic surveillance purposely designed to be ubiquitous and limitless, including on U.S. soil.

Those who have been warning of the grave dangers these powers pose have often been dismissed on the ground that the leaders who control this system are benevolent and well-intentioned. They have thus often resorted to the tactic of urging people to imagine what might happen if a president they regarded as less than benevolent one day gained control of it. That day has arrived. One hopes this will at least provide the impetus to unite across ideological and partisan lines to finally impose meaningful limits on these powers that should never have been vested in the first place. That commitment should start now.

* * * * *

For many years, the U.S. — like the U.K. and other Western nations — has embarked on a course that virtually guaranteed a collapse of elite authority and internal implosion. From the invasion of Iraq to the 2008 financial crisis to the all-consuming framework of prisons and endless wars, societal benefits have been directed almost exclusively to the very elite institutions most responsible for failure at the expense of everyone else.

It was only a matter of time before instability, backlash, and disruption resulted. Both Brexit and Trump unmistakably signal its arrival. The only question is whether those two cataclysmic events will be the peak of this process, or just the beginning. And that, in turn, will be determined by whether their crucial lessons are learned — truly internalized — or ignored in favor of self-exonerating campaigns to blame everyone else.



How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 9:21 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG

Obama is the first Democratic president since FDR to be elected and reelected with a majority of the popular vote. He personifies our emerging majority-minority nation, the kaleidoscopic America. He helped to forge a new, potentially growing majority coalition of people of color, single women, millennials, and professionals.

The scope and durability of this coalition, however, have proved uncertain. Obama energized this coalition around his person—but unlike Roosevelt or Reagan, he failed to inspire it with a historic mission, to instill deeper understandings of a new role for government at home and abroad. These voters failed to turn out in the midterm elections, and the Democrats suffered historic reverses. White blue-collar workers felt abandoned in both politics and policy. Hillary Clinton’s stunning defeat in 2016 was caused in part by white working- and middle-class voters rebelling against an establishment that had failed them. Obama will leave office with Republicans in control in Washington and in 25 states to the Democrats’ five. Under Obama, Democrats have lost more than 900 state legislative seats across the country.




https://www.thenation.com/article/was-barack-obama-a-transformational-
president/

Was Barack Obama a Transformational President?
Despite his bold promises, the president put more energy into rescuing, rather than changing, the old system.
By Robert L. Borosage

Obama swept into office with Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress in the midst of the worst economic collapse since the Great Depression. He helped rescue the economy with the largest stimulus in history. He passed the biggest health-care reform in half a century and the most ambitious financial reform since the 1930s, and he slowed America’s rising inequality with the first steps toward progressive tax reform.

(But) Consider these hallmarks of the conservative-era consensus: the assault on government, deregulation and financialization of the economy, corporate-defined globalization, and growing inequality. All of them characterized the status quo when Obama was elected president in 2008, and all of them remain in place as he prepares to leave office.

Obama’s $787 billion stimulus package was unprecedented in size, but still too small to drive a robust recovery. And as Republicans assailed its “failure,” Obama stunningly surrendered the ideological debate. In his first year in office, with unemployment in double digits and Speaker Nancy Pelosi pushing a new jobs bill through the House of Representatives, the president embraced austerity. The opportunity to rebuild America and put people to work was squandered.

The president’s financial reforms were similarly compromised. In 2009, he told 13 major bankers: “My administration is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.” And so it was. After Bush, Obama, and the Federal Reserve bailed out the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis, the banks emerged more concentrated than ever. Only one major banker went to prison for what the FBI called an “epidemic” of fraud. Big banks were required to build up more capital, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created. But Obama leaves office with executive-compensation rules still unwritten and with federal regulators warning about the dangers of banks that are too big to fail and too weak to survive a downturn.

Obama’s historic health-care reform has extended insurance to 20 million Americans and requires coverage of pre-existing conditions. But the White House ducked taking on the pharmaceutical companies and abandoned the public option that might have provided a check on insurance-company abuses. The reforms initially slowed the pace of rising prices, but now double-digit price hikes by insurance companies facing less and less competition in the various exchanges are making adequate health care unaffordable for more and more people.

At the end of his presidency, Obama joined with the business lobby to try to push another corporate trade deal—the Trans-Pacific Partnership—through a lame-duck session of Congress. Even treaty advocates now accept that our corporate globalization policies have devastated American workers and helped hollow out the middle class.

In the run-up to his 2012 reelection campaign, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, Obama declared income inequality to be “the defining challenge of our time.” Obama did raise taxes marginally on the wealthy and decreased them for low-wage earners. But the president’s reforms are a minor correction to decades of upward after-tax redistribution. More important, little was done to alter the economic structures that generate extreme inequality in incomes before taxes.

For example, Obama now argues that unions “should play a critical role” in reducing inequality, but he abandoned campaign pledges to make labor-law reform a priority. He raised the minimum wage for federal employees, but he refused to require preferences in federal contracts for good employers that respect the right to organize. And he remained largely on the sidelines as public-sector unions—the last remaining areas of worker strength—came under furious assault.

Although Obama grew skeptical of the “Washington playbook” on foreign policy, he failed to offer an alternative.

After eight years, Americans are suffering from a second “recovery” in which most lost ground. The wealth gap has grown wider for African Americans, who, targeted by the banks, were the biggest victims of the housing collapse. The new jobs—disproportionately contingent, precarious, and part-time—add to the insecurity. Student debt is soaring. Our trade deficits are ruinous. And our public infrastructure is deteriorating, as the share of GDP devoted to domestic spending has plummeted to levels not seen since the Eisenhower era. It is hard to argue that this constitutes a transformation.

Interventionist Inertia

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in office, largely on the promise that he would transform America’s relations with the world. He vowed to end the war in Iraq, heal the breach with the Islamic world, and reset relations with Russia. He pledged a new commitment to nuclear disarmament while avoiding “dumb wars.” He also pledged to address climate change, forestalling the “rise of the oceans.” Obama, who lectured on constitutional law at the University of Chicago, would bring US policy back in accord with the Constitution and with international norms.

In foreign policy as in economics, Obama achieved some real successes, notably the nuclear agreement with Iran and new relations with Cuba. Most important, he made the clear and present danger of catastrophic climate change more central to US policy at home and abroad. The agreement with China and the subsequent Paris climate accord provide at least the promise of bolder action on global warming.

Yet despite the achievements and alarms, Obama’s administration has not forced a sea change in American policy. His appointments—Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, James Jones, Tom Donilon—ensured continuity, not a new direction. Although Obama grew skeptical of the “Washington playbook” on foreign policy, he failed to offer Americans an alternative vision. “Don’t do stupid shit” was his commonsensical doctrine, which might have served had he followed it.

Obama will leave office having made war longer than any US president in history. Efforts to extract the United States from Afghanistan and Iraq have been frustrated. The misguided intervention in Libya left behind a failed state. The administration became enmeshed in Syria and stood behind the savaging of Yemen by Saudi Arabia. Obama allowed neoconservatives to drag him into rising tensions with Russia over Ukraine, even while moving to confront China in the South China Sea.

If anything, Obama has expanded executive national-security prerogatives. While he sensibly repudiated torture as a national policy, he escalated the back-alley War on Terror, using secret drone strikes in several nations while professing to be “troubled” by the president’s power to “carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.” He has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than any president in US history, and he defended mass surveillance while refusing to hold officials accountable for lying to the American people and to Congress. Guantánamo remains open, a glaring insult to common decency. Obama is also the first president to maintain a “kill list,” and the first to target an American citizen for assassination.

The United States remains committed to defending 80 nations across the world and to patrolling the seas, skies, and outer space. We sustain a global network of over 700 military bases, and US Special Forces were active in more than 100 countries last year. Our military budget—about $600 billion a year—constitutes approximately one-third of all global military spending, more than the next 10 nations combined. Obama has signed off on more than $200 billion in arms sales since 2009, more than three times as much as George W. Bush in his eight years in office. Early progress on nuclear disarmament has ground to a halt, even as the president committed to a $1 trillion program to modernize the US nuclear arsenal.

As foreign-affairs analyst Stephen Walt concludes, for all of his expressed skepticism, Obama embraced the “broad establishment consensus about American exceptionalism and its alleged indispensability as the provider of global order.” Despite its repeated failures, the bipartisan foreign-policy establishment remains securely in place, and Washington has yet to engage in serious debate about America’s proper role in the world.



How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Saturday, December 10, 2016 9:24 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG

http://www.nbcnews.com/meet-the-press/video/gov-jerry-brown-on-clinton
s-emails-its-almost-like-a-vampire-510336579979

Brown on Clinton's Emails: "It's Almost Like a Vampire"

Fri, Aug 21

Governor Jerry Brown said that Hillary Clinton's emails have a "dark energy" and are following her "like a vampire." Watch the full interview with Chuck Todd Sunday on Meet

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 6:50 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Workers at endangered Indiana plant feel forgotten by Trump

www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Workers-at-endangered-Indiana-plant-fee
l-10787688.php

50-hour workweeks belie the anxiety at the United Technologies-owned factory outside a small northeastern Indiana city, where Mike Harmon and co-workers wonder whether they aren't just stockpiling parts for when the company sends their 700 jobs to Mexico.

Their situation has gained scant attention compared to the sister Carrier Corp. factory two hours away in Indianapolis.

"The whole time during the campaign Trump talked Indianapolis, Indianapolis, Indianapolis, never heard one word about Huntington," said Harmon, a 44-year-old Huntington native who's worked at the factory for seven years.

It's a perceived slight by Trump that stings in a county where 72 percent voted for Trump and manufacturing makes up about one-fifth of all jobs.

Employees in Huntington say they've been working mostly seven days a week since late October, making control panels for the furnace, air conditioning and refrigeration industries. Leaders of their union believe the company is doing so ahead of the factory's layoffs expected to start in April and continue into 2018.

It isn't clear whether Trump intends to keep personally intervening in corporate decisions. Three days after the Carrier factory trip, Pence told ABC's "This Week" that Trump will "make those decisions on a day-by-day basis in the course of the transition, in the course of the administration."

Some Huntington workers are upset over the tax incentives for a company that also owns Pratt & Whitney — a big supplier of fighter jet engines that relies in part on U.S. military contracts.

Bob Breedlove, a 60-year-old who's worked at the plant for a decade, voted for Trump and still thinks he's the right person, even though he's "not crazy about this deal."

"My tax dollars are going to save the company, but they aren't going to help save my job," Breedlove said. "I know how much money this company makes, they don't need our help to stay in business and make a profit."

At a downtown diner in Huntington, Lori Guy explained that her vote for Trump already is paying off, even if it didn't help her town. "I'm sure if there was a way, he would have saved more jobs," said Guy.

While Blake Hancock is grateful for the jobs that are staying in Indiana, the 25-year-old believes Trump was trying to buff up his image, not protect workers.

"There are still 1,300 people who are losing their jobs," Hancock said. "I feel like it was a numbers game ... to buy the favor of the American public."

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 8:12 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

After the Brexit vote, I wrote an article comprehensively detailing these dynamics, which I won’t repeat here but hope those interested will read. The title conveys the crux: “Brexit Is Only the Latest Proof of the Insularity and Failure of Western Establishment Institutions.” That analysis was inspired by a short, incredibly insightful, and now more relevant than ever post-Brexit Facebook note by the Los Angeles Times’s Vincent Bevins, who wrote that “both Brexit and Trumpism are the very, very wrong answers to legitimate questions that urban elites have refused to ask for 30 years.” Bevins went on: “Since the 1980s the elites in rich countries have overplayed their hand, taking all the gains for themselves and just covering their ears when anyone else talks, and now they are watching in horror as voters revolt.”
Brexit required only a 50% majority. It got 51.89%. Prime Minister David Cameron must be a fool for setting the decision point at 50%. Why not set it lower? 40%? Or even one-third? Because even Cameron could see 40% and 33.33% are absurd. Why couldn’t Cameron see that 50% is almost as ridiculous? Probably the same reason he can't see that the income distribution in the UK is ridiculous skewed toward the top 1%. He is a mindless robot with no imagination. His kind is a widespread affliction.
http://equitablegrowth.org/research-analysis/economic-growth-in-the-un
ited-states-a-tale-of-two-countries/

If Cameron had not been politically incompetent he should have set the decision point at 60% or even two-thirds. Or Cameron could have set the number at 50% of all registered voters or 50% of all eligible voters. That is 23,250,000 or 25,678,000 votes versus the actual “Leave the European Union” vote of 17,410,742. Cameron was not thinking clearly when he called for a referendum.

Leaving the EU is a big deal with big costs and it should have been decided by a big margin of the voters. But if it was politically impossible for Cameron to imagine any decision point other than 50%, then at least Cameron should have had the wisdom to call a second vote to confirm that the first vote wasn’t just fuck-you-Europe peevishness caused by stagnating incomes, but that the voters were really willing to pay all the costs of Brexit.

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 10:13 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Coulda, Shoulda, Woulda....

Staying in the EU is what George Soros wanted.

Watch as the European Nations, One By One, Exit the EU in the next two years.



The financial problems weren't the straw Second. It was the Unelected Officials ruling over the European nations that were putting thousands of Middle Eastern economic refugees in their neighborhoods that raped their teenage daughters that made them want out.



The silly thing is to assume that "white males" in the world have been so casturated that they will just accept anything from here on out.

Although no White Males have been involved in any massive slaughter of other peoples for nearly 100 years and none that I know of are eager to return to such a thing, it would be a very grave mistake to believe that they are incapable of reverting to their primate brains when their backs are against the wall.



We are at our "ends" here.

We want to play nice, but the game is stacked against us, and has been for at least 15 years.


Paula Cole asked "Where have all the cowboys Gone" back in the late 90's.



They're still right here.

They just went to sleep.

They weren't needed.

I have no desire to start a war.

But if anybody of any color were to touch a single hair on my niece without her permission I would gladly go to prison ending their life in retribution.


And although I might not be black or a woman, I've had sex with anything with a hole when I was younger.

To be completely honest, although I ended up identifying as a heterosexual when it was all over, I have to say that the Tranny's that REALLY try are the most fun to be with. The ones who are completely passable. The ones you can take home to a family party and watch them fool everyone.

If you want a Woman who will do ANYTHING for you, take a beautiful young transsexual to a family party and show Her off as your new GF. Make her feel completely at home with your family and watch her charm them.

When the day is over and night comes, you will NEVER have a more appreciative lover than that night.



Just one more reason to oppose Islam.

If the Girl I'm talking about lived there, she'd be stoned to death or thrown into a fire.

I won't bother telling anyone to wake up. Everyone will eventually.

Just sad how many have to be abused here in the states before it happens is all...

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 11:06 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Education, Not Income, Predicted Who Would Vote For Trump
http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who
-would-vote-for-trump/

Sometimes statistical analysis is tricky, and sometimes a finding just jumps off the page. Here’s one example of the latter.

In the country’s 50 most-well-educated counties, Hillary Clinton improved on President Obama’s 2012 performance by almost 9 percentage points, even though Obama had done well in them to begin with.

The 50 counties (minimum population of 50,000) where the smallest share of the population has bachelor’s degrees, Clinton did worse than Obama by an average of 11 percentage points worse. These are really the places that won Donald Trump the presidency.

How do we know that education levels drove changes in support — as opposed to income levels, for example? It’s tricky because there’s a fairly strong correlation between income and education. Nonetheless, with the whole country to pick from, we can find some places where education levels are high but incomes are average or below average. If education is the key driver of changes in the electorate, we’d expect Clinton to hold steady or gain in these counties compared to Obama in 2012. If income matters more, we might see her numbers decline.

In most places that fit this description, Clinton improved on Obama’s performance. In those magical counties where the population is highly educated and pay is average or less, Clinton improved on Obama’s performance by an average of about 4 percentage points.

There are also some counties where incomes are high but residents aren’t well-educated. Examples: Suffolk County turned into Trump Territory, voting for him by 8 percentage points after Obama had won it by 4 points in 2012. Trump made even larger gains in Staten Island, New York (Richmond County), winning it by 17 points after Obama won it by 3 points in 2012.

Long story in short, educational levels are the critical factor in predicting shifts in the vote between 2012 and 2016.

There is much more at http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/education-not-income-predicted-who
-would-vote-for-trump/

But although this finding is clear in a statistical sense, that doesn’t mean the interpretation of it is straightforward. It seems to me that there a number of competing hypotheses that are compatible with this evidence:

Trump’s approach to the campaign — relying on emotional appeals while glossing over policy details — may have resonated more among people with lower education levels.

Education levels probably have some relationship with racial resentment, although the causality isn’t clear. The act of having attended college itself may be important, insofar as colleges and universities are often more diverse places than students’ hometowns. There’s more research to be done on how exposure to racial minorities affected white voters.

Educational attainment may be a better indicator of long-term economic well-being than household incomes. Unionized jobs in the auto industry often pay reasonably well even if they don’t require college degrees, for instance, but they’re also potentially at risk of being shipped overseas or automated.

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 11:22 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'm going to read the rest of your post after saying this, but I have to say right now I take SERIOUS issue with the whole "Education" demographic thing.

As if to say that I'm a dumb ass hick for voting for trump.

It happens to be true that I'm not "Educated", as in as many times as I tried college it just wasn't for me. I do hope that as many negative things you might say about me, a lack of intelligence is not an attribute I am afflicted with.


Personally, I found that statistic EXTREMELY Offensive during this election cycle.



That being said, I will read the rest of your post now....




WOW....

Your entire Post was extremely offensive.



My only reply to that is the fact that "Educated" kids are Indoctrinated Kids.

The type that burn American Flags and actually get the school administrators at major colleges to refrain from flying the American Flag after Trump was elected.


It has nothing at all to do with Intelligence.

Just Education.

There is a VAST difference between the two, and in most cases there is very little Overlap.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 11:48 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


I'll just P.S. that reply now with this...

Enjoy the Real World, college kids.

There are no "Safe Spaces" for you to run and hide.

Chances are, assuming you are employed in any job that requires human interaction, you're going to be "Triggered" at least once on a daily basis.

If this happens to you, you have two options. Grow a pair and deal with it like an adult...

Or lash out and then go cry in a corner and hope you don't get fired for it.

You're 24 years old now. The days of "Everyone Winning a Trophy for Playing" are over.

It's called "Swimming With Sharks", starring Kevin Spacey.

Step 1: Rent the movie.

Step 2: Learn more in 2 hours than your $200,000 education taught you between Beer Pong matches.

Step 3: Thank me later.


Yes.



I could have shown an important thing Kevin Spacey said that really "Rocked" your world, but this video is more important, given that you are far more likely to have to eat this particular type of Shit Sandwich or something like it.

This is your New Life.

The Good News is, if you eat the asshole out of your bosses for the next 20 years while climbing the ladder and losing part of your soul with every rung you climb, you will one day be able to be just as cruel and evil to the 24 year olds who aren't even born yet that just came out of college in 2050.

Do Right, Be Right. :)

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 1:16 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND: I agree with SIX- educated people are primarily indoctrinated people.

I mean, for chrissake we have colleges and universities now where students are so mentally tender that any little hiccup throws them into a tizzy. "Safe spaces?" Playdoh? Coloring books? Therapy puppies? (I feel sorry for those puppies, being forced into being petted by a gazzilion strangers! It must be terribly unnerving and scary for them!)

The measure of a person's intelligence isn't how much they can be TAUGHT ... lots of people were taught to believe uncritically that the earth was flat .... but how much they look at familiar things in new ways, and perhaps change their own paradigms.

Whatever happened to the concept of "critical thinking"?

I'm a big believer in education. In order to be able to come up with new observations and new ideas you need to learn the old ones first. But right now the schools are just droid-factories: people who never question the way things are, or their role in it, or their own beliefs.

-------

And by the way, for all of the liberals out there crying about "censorship" I have not ever seen a more censoring and censorious group than liberals. The moment anyone falls out of the liberal way of thinking, they are treated to hysterical judgments and insults. And in defense of "their" way of thinking, they're willing to brand anything that doesn't meet their POV as "fake news" and look to big daddy google or big mommy facebook to "curate" "truthiness" for them.

Who the hell wants their life "curated" for them anyway? Sheesh.




-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 1:42 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

Whatever happened to the concept of "critical thinking"?
“I’m, like, a smart person”: Trump doesn’t even listen to facts
http://qz.com/860315/donald-trump-doesnt-even-listen-to-the-facts-from
-his-secret-intelligence-briefings/

Most presidents-to-be spend their precious few months before taking office learning as much as they can from the people tasked with keeping the US safe. Not Donald Trump, whose cabinet pageantry and victory tour has left little time for briefings.

Trump receives one briefing a week. Mike Pence, Trump’s vice-president-elect, is briefed at least six times per week. Does Trump think he is six times smarter than Pence?

To justify not receiving daily intelligence updates, the president-elect claimed on Fox News Sunday today, “I get it when I need it. I’m, like, a smart person. I don’t have to be told the same thing in the same words every single day for the next eight years.”

(N.B. Trump has only been elected for four years. Maybe he needs reminding?)

In the same interview, Trump put himself even more at odds with the intelligence community he will soon inherit and be tasked with leading. Trump skewered a new report by US intelligence agencies, which claimed with “high confidence” that Russia interfered with the election by releasing Democratic National Committee emails through WikiLeaks.

“I think it’s ridiculous,” Trump said on Fox News. “I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it.” Did you notice that Trump has nothing to support his opinions other than it looks bad for him?

The report states that Russian hackers breached both DNC and Republican National Committee servers, but only DNC emails were publicized. Russia is still in possession of potentially-damaging RNC emails.

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 1:50 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
But right now the schools are just droid-factories
Looking at the new hires, I have to agree.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 2:15 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:
Quote:
But right now the schools are just droid-factories
Looking at the new hires, I have to agree.
Maybe your boss should learn behavioral economics. It revolutionized the art of NBA draft picks. It could do the same with your boss’s picks for new employees.
www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/how_daryl_morey_used_behavio
ral_economics_to_revolutionize_the_art_of_nba.html

The worry for 1kiki is would a boss who knew behavioral economics have picked 1kiki as an employee?

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 6:34 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
But right now the schools are just droid-factories- SIGNY

Looking at the new hires, I have to agree. - KIKI

Maybe your boss should learn behavioral economics. It revolutionized the art of NBA draft picks. It could do the same with your boss’s picks for new employees.
www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2016/12/how_daryl_morey_used_behavio
ral_economics_to_revolutionize_the_art_of_nba.html
The worry for 1kiki is would a boss who knew behavioral economics have picked 1kiki as an employee?- SECONDRATE


I read through the whole article carefully, thinking that it MUST have been linked for a reason related to this thread, and all I got out of it was Now there's 12 minutes of my life that I'll never get back! What did it tell me that Moneyball didn't?

You linking that particular article tells me, SECOND, that you've lost the point about the value of people as independent thinkers. Because all of the article tells me is that "they" are working on metrics to pick the best tools out of a lineup of people: Who will never rise above, or fall below, or do anything unexpected, but be very predictable.

In my career, I've probably interviewed over 250 people, either for preliminary screening or final hiring. The new hires are competent ... some of them are excellent computer people, some are phenomenal instrument troubleshooters, others have detailed knowledge of atmospheric chemistry. Many of them are self-starters, who are looking to improve the "efficiency" of our team. And I've got nothing against that! But there is only one person (possibly two) who are willing to look at The Big Picture. In other words, to assess our organizational EFFECTIVENESS, as opposed to efficiency. And only one of them is willing to look at our policies (and the politics behind them). Thinking new thoughts, coming up with new ideas is extremely important, it allows people (and organizations) to be alert to and adapt to new circumstances and unexpected events. I find the scope of most of the new hires' thinking to be far too limited and geared towards social media: they're more worried about being graceful, or coming up with the bon mot, or finding unusual hobbies (like wall climbing) than with thinking about anything real.

So tell me, SECOND, do you think you could pass a screening interview?



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 8:09 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

I read through the whole article carefully, thinking that it MUST have been linked for a reason related to this thread, and all I got out of it was Now there's 12 minutes of my life that I'll never get back! What did it tell me that Moneyball didn't?
Moneyball did not realize the deeper reason for the inefficiencies in the market for players: They sprang directly from the inner workings of the human mind of the “experts”, not the players. The ways in which some basketball expert might misjudge basketball players and the ways in which any expert’s judgments might be warped by the expert’s own mind. That was not in the book Moneyball, but it was definitely a major point of the article you read for 12 minutes, and yet you completely missed that main idea, Signym.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

You linking that particular article tells me, SECOND, that you've lost the point about the value of people as independent thinkers. Because all of the article tells me is that "they" are working on metrics to pick the best tools out of a lineup of people: Who will never rise above, or fall below, or do anything unexpected, but be very predictable.
With a couple of sentences, Signym, you gave a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with how your mind analyzes problems and creates solutions. I predict you can’t understand what you did wrong, but I will give you some clues:

Daryl Morey is the independent thinker, Signym. And you got the article’s lesson backwards: people are NOT very predictable, despite all the data Morey gathers on players. But he can make predictions such as the statistical likelihood that Trump will have conflicts of interests because he and his children are creating, with every new contract they sign, new possible conflicts between what is best for the Trump family fortune and what is best for America. Because Trump keeps his family business a big secret, we don’t know what the conflicts are. Trump and family are pretending that their secretiveness means there can be no significant conflicts, which only a Trump voter would believe.

I predict that, statistically, most conflicts between what is best for the Trump family fortune and best for America, America will actually come out second best, but Trump will insist, loudly with fake sincerity, that is not true. If the Trump family released their tax returns, made all details of each business deal public, told us who they borrowed money from for each deal, how much, what interest rate, that would go a long way toward making sure there are no conflicts that benefit the Trump fortune. Trump won't be doing any of that I predict statistically from his past.
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:

So tell me, SECOND, do you think you could pass a screening interview?
I interviewed twice on the same day in Houston, near the Galleria. Both divisions wanted to hire me and I would have been happy with only one job offer. That was a very memorable day and is what happens when you graduate from UT Austin.

Homer discovers Russia's President Vladimir Putin in disguise.


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Sunday, December 11, 2016 10:06 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
The worry for 1kiki is would a boss who knew behavioral economics have picked 1kiki as an employee?
I'm sure the person who hired me would have been horrified to know that I interviewed sitting on a kitchen floor in an apartment that had no furniture - which is why I was sitting on the floor, wearing a down parka, with snow melting off my shit kicker boots, and drinking beer out of the bottle. But such is life. I passed the interview and was told so right at the end of the interview which was done long-distance over the phone; I was hired, and have done well, and done right, ever since. My days as a student/ itinerant job-adventurer were over. So, all your attempts to try and demean me - really truly - look both mean-spirited and ignorant from my POV. Which is how I'll continue to think of you until you come up with a better version of yourself. But I'm not going to waste any time waiting.

Here are some more selected jobs I did - EKG technician, roadie, assembly-line worker (nasty-dirty assembly line, not clean assembly), waitress, geological field assistant (an instant lesson in rock-climbing!).



But getting back to the students of today ... when I went to school - one of those mega-universities where freshman classes are 350+ students - well, maybe I just hung out with a bunch of brilliant snots. We'd sit at the front of the physics lecture hall and make a game out of pointing out contradictions in the lecture, especially in the proofs. (It was kind of a game of 'stump the professor' where we'd try and out-do each other finding subtle gaps or contradictions in the logic.) We had fun with chemicals we weren't supposed to have. We engaged in what is now called social engineering. And so I was telling one of the newer hires about a particular thing we did, and he asked, wistfully, where that happened. He was shocked as hell to find out we were lowly sophomores at the time. But at THAT time in my life, there was social upheaval, new and better ways of looking at history and society, new technologies to learn ... OUR world was so much bigger than it is today. We grew up knowing not just how, but also what, and why, and where we were in the big picture.

The kids today are perfectly capable of performing even complicated technical tasks with sufficient training. But they don't seem to have mentally extrapolated from those tasks to an understanding of what, essentially, is happening at each step, even though they have more than enough education in theory and practice to do so. That makes them incapable of troubleshooting when things go wrong. Worse, they don't seem to think they SHOULD have to think about what's going wrong. Someone else should just fix it for them. Imagining how to do the same thing but better is something I haven't seen from them yet. And imagining how to get the same data through a completely different route is, so far, out of the question. Just give them a routine and that's what they'll do. As to their view of the world ... it seems to be limited to an exchange of bons mots that passes for conversation, about very limited current 'cultural' topics. So far, they're pretty much droids.



How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 10:53 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


But to get back to a topic I'd prefer to discuss instead of discussing myself, and FAR would prefer to discuss rather than discussing you, SECOND ...

AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG

https://theintercept.com/2016/11/09/democrats-trump-and-the-ongoing-da
ngerous-refusal-to-learn-the-lesson-of-brexit/
I posted this above, and it says what I've been saying all along, which is that people have had it with 'more of the same'.
Quote:
But human beings are not going to follow and obey the exact people they most blame for their suffering. They’re going to do exactly the opposite: purposely defy them and try to impose punishment in retaliation. Their instruments for retaliation are Brexit and Trump. Those are their agents, dispatched on a mission of destruction: aimed at a system and culture they regard — not without reason — as rife with corruption and, above all else, contempt for them and their welfare.
Quote:
Put simply, Democrats knowingly chose to nominate a deeply unpopular, extremely vulnerable, scandal-plagued candidate, who — for very good reason — was widely perceived to be a protector and beneficiary of all the worst components of status quo elite corruption. It’s astonishing that those of us who tried frantically to warn Democrats that nominating Hillary Clinton was a huge and scary gamble — that all empirical evidence showed that she could lose to anyone and Bernie Sanders would be a much stronger candidate ...
To no avail. All of my posts - at least a hundred - pointing out what Hillary was doing wrong compared to Trump went unaddressed. Pointing out Bernie's strengths and pointing out that HILLARY NEEDED TO BE A BETTER CANDIDATE got me the label of Russian troll. And let me point out, turned you all into rabid, partisan ankle-biters.
Well, I'll say it now and with great satisfaction: I TOLD YOU SO.
And I hope you all now feel as stupid as you deserve to feel.
Quote:
Trump vowed to destroy the system that elites love (for good reason) and the masses hate (for equally good reason), while Clinton vowed to manage it more efficiently. That, as Matt Stoller’s indispensable article in The Atlantic three weeks ago documented, is the conniving choice the Democratic Party made decades ago: to abandon populism and become the party of technocratically proficient, mildly benevolent managers of elite power.
And this also reflects what I've said more than once. Ronald Reagan reframed the relationship between our society and our government. THE DEMOCRATS HAVE FAILED TO FIND A CREDIBLE ANSWER IN THE LAST 30 YEARS. And with the advent of Bill-triangulation-style policy setting, have shown they're perfectly willing to sell us to international corporations, as long as they get a comfortable lifestyle afterward as payment.

The only issue where I depart with Greenwald is that he failed to notice that women, minorities and older people have been working in a post-2007 economy for 50+ years.

But those economic problems didn't matter until they hit the white working-class males.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Sunday, December 11, 2016 11:46 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG
Was Barack Obama a Transformational President?
By Robert L. Borosage
https://www.thenation.com/article/was-barack-obama-a-transformational-
president/


Obama's domestic achievements are framed as 'yes ... but' statements.

He swept into office on a tide of reform ... but failed to overcome "the hallmarks of the conservative-era consensus: the assault on government, deregulation and financialization of the economy, corporate-defined globalization, and growing inequality."

He passed the largest ever stimulus package but ... (it) was still too small to drive a robust recovery." But as republicans assailed it, he ... "stunningly surrendered the ideological debate ... and embraced austerity".

"The president’s financial reforms were similarly compromised. Bush, Obama, and the Federal Reserve bailed out the bankers who caused the 2008 financial crisis but the banks emerged more concentrated than ever. Only one major banker went to prison for what the FBI called an “epidemic” of fraud.

Big banks were required to build up more capital, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was created ... But Obama leaves office with executive-compensation rules still unwritten and with federal regulators warning about the dangers of banks that are too big to fail and too weak to survive a downturn."

"Obama’s historic health-care reform has extended insurance to 20 million Americans and requires coverage of pre-existing conditions. But the White House ducked taking on the pharmaceutical companies and abandoned the public option that might have provided a check on insurance-company abuses.

The reforms initially slowed the pace of rising prices, but now double-digit price hikes by insurance companies facing less and less competition in the various exchanges are making adequate health care unaffordable for more and more people."

"Obama declared income inequality to be “the defining challenge of our time.” Obama did raise taxes marginally on the wealthy and decreased them for low-wage earners. But the president’s reforms are a minor correction to decades of upward after-tax redistribution. More important, little was done to alter the economic structures that generate extreme inequality in incomes before taxes.

Obama now argues that unions “should play a critical role” in reducing inequality, but he abandoned campaign pledges to make labor-law reform a priority.

He raised the minimum wage for federal employees, but he refused to require preferences in federal contracts for good employers that respect the right to organize."

"The new jobs—disproportionately contingent, precarious, and part-time—add to the insecurity. Student debt is soaring. Our trade deficits are ruinous. And our public infrastructure is deteriorating, as the share of GDP devoted to domestic spending has plummeted to levels not seen since the Eisenhower era. It is hard to argue that this constitutes a transformation."

Obama promised the most transparent administration ever but "He has prosecuted more whistle-blowers than any president in US history, and he defended mass surveillance while refusing to hold officials accountable for lying to the American people and to Congress."

The foreign policy summary is more uniformly negative.

FOREIGN POLICY

Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize during his first year in office, largely on the promise that he would transform America’s relations with the world. He vowed to end the war in Iraq, heal the breach with the Islamic world, and reset relations with Russia. He pledged a new commitment to nuclear disarmament while avoiding “dumb wars.”
But despite the achievements and alarms, Obama’s administration has not forced a sea change in American policy. His appointments—Robert Gates, Hillary Clinton, James Jones, Tom Donilon—ensured continuity, not a new direction. Although Obama grew skeptical of the “Washington playbook” on foreign policy, he failed to offer Americans an alternative vision.

Obama will leave office having made war longer than any US president in history. Efforts to extract the United States from Afghanistan and Iraq have been frustrated.

The misguided intervention in Libya left behind a failed state.

The administration became enmeshed in Syria and stood behind the savaging of Yemen by Saudi Arabia.

Obama allowed neoconservatives to drag him into rising tensions with Russia over Ukraine, even while moving to confront China in the South China Sea."

(Obama) escalated the back-alley War on Terror, using secret drone strikes in several nations while professing to be “troubled” by the president’s power to “carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate.”

Obama is also the first president to maintain a “kill list,” and the first to target an American citizen for assassination.

"The United States remains committed to defending 80 nations across the world and to patrolling the seas, skies, and outer space. We sustain a global network of over 700 military bases, and US Special Forces were active in more than 100 countries last year. Our military budget—about $600 billion a year—constitutes approximately one-third of all global military spending, more than the next 10 nations combined. Obama has signed off on more than $200 billion in arms sales since 2009, more than three times as much as George W. Bush in his eight years in office. Early progress on nuclear disarmament has ground to a halt, even as the president committed to a $1 trillion program to modernize the US nuclear arsenal."



This is an accounting of facts. I personally don't understand the rationale behind Obama's high approval rating. Maybe not having affairs while married carries a lot of weight with Americans.




How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Monday, December 12, 2016 1:19 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


Why don't we get to the topic at hand...Trump and his infinite wisdom.

...and here we go!

Trump rejects the Intelligence community's finds:

Another source briefed on the intelligence told NBC News that the U.S. government has identified specific Russian actors it believes were involved in computer systems hacks — based on intercepted communications, human tips and computer forensics.

...and then we have this:

Briefings, Trump No Go!

A former senior intelligence official also noted Trump's assertion Sunday on Fox News that he doesn't always take the Presidential Daily Briefing — the top-secret briefing on national security developments — because "I'm, like, a smart person."

(Laughs hysterically, or LOL, whichever you prefer) You can't make this shit up.

"It is curious that someone who refuses to take intelligence briefings has decided that he doesn't agree with the analysis contained in them," the former official said.


(Intelligence and Trump, laughs hysterically x2)

Rep. David Schiff contributed this:

"Perhaps, once he has taken office, Mr. Trump will go to the CIA and look at the rows of memorial stars in the lobby — each representing a fallen officer — and reflect on his disparagement of the intelligence community's work," he said.

Well said.

http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/intelligence-agencies-distresse
d-by-trumps-rejection-of-findings-on-russia/ar-AAlqRcc?li=BBmkt5R&ocid=spartandhp


SGG








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Monday, December 12, 2016 1:28 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.



Why don't we get to the topic at hand...Trump and his infinite wisdom.

I'm sure your endless obsession with Trump will magically fix the problem that DEMOCRATS HAVE NO ORGANIZED PLAN TO OPPOSE TRUMP, AND NO AGENDA THAT PEOPLE WILL RALLY TO.

So, what are you going to do about it? Whine some more? Carp some more? Pout some more? Yeah. That'll work. (not)

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Monday, December 12, 2016 2:05 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


AS CLINTON AND OBAMA LIMP OFF THE STAGE, A LOOK INTO WHAT THEY DID THAT WENT WRONG

There are many articles like the ones I posted, above, and below, about what democrats did wrong. The problem is, they don't come from democrats - not the voters and not the politicians.

Unless democrats can come to grips with what they did wrong, nothing will change the pattern of democrats being marginalized in national, state and local politics.

With that in mind, I hope democrats here will put some thought into what they should be doing differently.



The Democrats Screwed Up
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/13/opinion/the-democrats-screwed-up.htm
l
Despite all the discussion of demographic forces that doomed the G.O.P., it will soon control the presidency as well as both chambers of Congress and two of every three governor’s offices. And that’s not just a function of James Comey, Julian Assange and misogyny. Democrats who believe so are dangerously mistaken.

What’s Wrong With the Democratic Platform
It has good language on many issues, but it lacks an overarching vision.
https://www.thenation.com/article/whats-wrong-with-the-democratic-plat
form/

How did Democrats lose 2016 US Presidential Election
http://viapopuli.com/democrats-lose-2016-us-presidential-election
First, practically stealing the primary on behalf of the preferred corporate candidate, as opposed to the popular candidate who advocated what people cared for.

7 Reasons Donald Trump Won The Presidential Election
http://www.npr.org/2016/11/12/501848636/7-reasons-donald-trump-won-the
-presidential-election
4. Clinton did not fire up the Obama Coalition.
Clinton got nearly 5 million fewer votes overall than Obama



How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Monday, December 12, 2016 7:49 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump sets John Bolton to be #2 at the State Department. Bolton is a neocon still defending President Bush’s decision to invade Iraq, if you forgot. He now defends Trump.

Starting at 2:12 on the video, Bolton is seriously suggesting that the hacks into Democratic Party computers might have been false flag operations, presumably with the goal of making it look like Russia supported Donald Trump. This would ruin Trump's reputation and guarantee a win for Hillary Clinton. But that means Bolton is completely nuts.

And Bolton doesn't even make sense on his own terms. No campaign in its right mind would do this, and certainly not Hillary’s campaign desperately trying to keep the word "email" in any form out of the public discourse.

Dark insinuations of false flag operations are a favorite among conspiracy theorists. They think it makes them sound sophisticated and worldly. This means that either Bolton is a conspiracy theorist or else he doesn't mind sounding like one if that's what it take to defend his side. And soon he'll be the #2 guy at the State Department, the person really running things while Tillerson provides the public face. God help us.



The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at www.mediafire.com/folder/1uwh75oa407q8/Firefly

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Monday, December 12, 2016 8:06 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The authoritarian leaders who are eagerly awaiting a Trump presidency
by Echo Huang
http://qz.com/857918/the-authoritarian-leaders-who-are-eagerly-awaitin
g-a-trump-presidency/

Since Donald Trump won the US presidential elections, he has been receiving congratulations from world leaders.

While that’s to be expected, the enthusiasm for a Trump presidency from leaders with less-than-stellar human rights records has raised some eyebrows. Some of them, such as Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte, seem hopeful for a US president who won’t interfere with how they govern their countries. Others, such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin or Syria’s Bashar al-Assad, believe relations between their countries and the US will improve under Trump.

Here are some authoritarian leaders who have expressed support for Trump:

1. Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte

Duterte, who’s earned a nickname as “Trump of the East,” said he would welcome the opportunity to be friends with Trump. “I can always be a friend to anybody especially to a president, a chief executive of another country,” he said, adding Trump “has not meddled in the human rights.”

That’s a big plus in Duterte’s book, who has made no secret of his feelings around human rights. “If it involves human rights, I don’t give a shit,” he said in October. Since coming into office this year, he’s waged a bloody war on drugs that has killed thousands, including children and innocent people.

In December, Duterte recounted a conversation he had with Trump, in which the US president-elect praised how he was governing the Philippines: “You’re doing great. I know what’s your worry about these Americans criticizing you. You are doing good, go ahead.”

2. Belarus president Alexander Lukashenko

The man dubbed “Europe’s last dictator” reached out to congratulate Trump just hours after his victory (paywall). Lukashenko, who has jailed opponents and crushed opposition marches over the past 21 years, said Trump was helping return the US “to real democracy” and that his victory was “testimony to the American people’s choice in favor of a politics based on honesty, responsibility, and a search of change.”

3. Cambodian prime minister Samdech Hun Sen

The prime minister who has ruled Cambodia with an iron fist for three decades endorsed Trump in November because “Trump is a businessman” who “would not want to have war.”

Hun Sen is known for cracking down on opposition groups and was accused by a political analyst of shooting and killing an activist this July. In November, he congratulated Trump, writing on his Facebook page: “I believe that the policies of the Republican Party, which offered value to the freedom of humanity … would continue to be warm and firm for democracy, rights, and freedom of Khmer people in Cambodia.”

4. Russian president Vladimir Putin

Since Trump won the election in November, Putin has come out to say he is willing to “restore” relations between Russia and the US. “During my recent telephone conversation with Mr. Donald Trump, our opinions coincided that the current, unsatisfactory state of Russia-US relations, undoubtedly must be straightened out,” Putin said at a foreign policy conference in Moscow on Dec. 7.

Indeed, Russia appeared to be so eager for a Trump presidency that it may have intervened with the US presidential election, as some members from the CIA and National Security Administration have recently suggested.

5. Syrian president Bashar al-Assad

To Assad, Trump is a “natural ally.”

“We cannot tell anything about what he’s going to do, but if, let’s say if, he is going to fight the terrorists, of course we are going to be ally, natural ally in that regard with the Russian, with the Iranian, with many other countries,” the Syrian president said in an interview with Portuguese state TV RTP this November. Trump has said the US’s problem is not Assad (paywall), whose brutal war tactics have involved the use of chemical weapons, and that he would prefer to work with Russia, and thus Assad, to defeat ISIL.

6. Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza

After the US election, Burundian president Pierre Nkurunziza tweeted the following to Trump:

Pierre Nkurunziza @pnkurunziza
Mr. @realDonaldTrump, on behalf of the people of Burundi, we warmly congratulate you. Your Victory is the Victory of all Americans.
1:55 AM - 9 Nov 2016
https://twitter.com/pnkurunziza/status/796259957100384256

Nkurunziza has ruled the landlocked East African country for more than 10 years and won a third term in a disputed election in 2015. He has been accused of torturing and murdering government opponents, according to a United Nations report released in September, which found “widespread and systemic patterns of violations” of human rights abuses.

7. Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe

Robert Mugabe, who has been ruling Zimbabwe for 36 years, has long endorsed Trump.

In his congratulation message to Trump, Mugabe said “as a government, we were quite happy listening to Mr. Trump’s acceptance speech.” He also believes a Trump presidency will help restore relations between Zimbabwe and the US. According to the Human Rights Watch, the 92-year-old’s government continues to rely on old laws instead of its new constitution, allowing police to violate basic rights, such as freedom of expression and assembly.

8. North Korea

Kim Jong-un hasn’t gone so far as to publicly endorse Trump, but a May column on North Korea’s state mouthpiece DPRK gave Trump a glowing endorsement, noting he’s “not the rough-talking, screwy, ignorant candidate they say he is.” The piece, allegedly written by a Korean scholar living in China named Han Yong Muk, argued that Trump could free America from “living every minute and second on pins and needles” in fear of a nuclear attack from Pyongyang.

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Monday, December 12, 2016 8:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by 1kiki:

There are many articles like the ones I posted, above, and below, about what democrats did wrong. The problem is, they don't come from democrats - not the voters and not the politicians.

Unless democrats can come to grips with what they did wrong, nothing will change the pattern of democrats being marginalized in national, state and local politics.
What the Democrats did wrong was not to open the field of candidates wider than just Bernie, Hillary & Martin O'Malley. The Dems should have attracted TRUMP! He could have gone to the Democratic side as easily as the Republican side if only the Dems had been more welcoming to his personal eccentricities and his world view. He beat all the Republicans in the primary. He beat one old woman. Trump could be President-Elect with one twist: all his cabinet could be Democrats rather than Republicans, if only the Democrats had been kinder to him . . .

Elections are won by giving the people what they want. They want Trump. The Democratic voters (excluding the party officials) could have recruited him. Instead, the Democratic voters of Manhattan booed Trump when he voted. That is no way for those people to act if they want a rich, famous, boorish, high quality candidate for 2020 to replace Bernie, Hillary & Martin O'Malley.

I saw a serious article about what a Democrat should change about themselves to make them more like Trump if they want to be elected President in 2020. It even gives good advice to Democrats running at the the state and local level. Here is a sample:

Donald Trump loves McDonald’s

Trump, like Bill Clinton of 25 years ago, loves McDonald’s and isn’t afraid to tell you about it.

“The Big Macs are great,” he told Anderson Cooper at a campaign town hall. “The Quarter Pounder. It’s great stuff.”

This isn’t just unhealthy — it’s remarkably outré. Trump isn’t touting the virtues of Danny Meyer’s celebrity chef–infused Shake Shack or the magic of the West Coast’s legendary In-N-Out Burger, which refuses to franchise outside a relatively narrow geographical area to ensure its beef can be distributed fresh. Hillary Clinton snuck off to organic-friendly Chipotle. Trump went for the tried and true: the unfashionable yet ubiquitous simple pleasure of the Big Mac.

Identity politics is everywhere

Something worth noting is that Trump himself is actually not blind to personal health issues. He has a history of alcoholism in his family and consequently abstains from alcohol and other drugs. A great many Americans could improve their health along a number of dimensions, including weight, by emulating Trump and giving up booze.

But even though Trump is a teetotaler, he does not engage in public anti-alcohol messaging or campaign as a temperance advocate.

Working-class people who enjoy both fast-food burgers and beer are well aware that Trump likes Big Macs too, while Democrats think it’s very important to make sure SNAP benefits are redeemable at farmers markets so rich and poor alike can enjoy the benefits of eating local, seasonal produce. Trump doesn’t drink beer, but he doesn’t advertise that fact.

This is identity politics just as much as campaigning with the Mothers of the Movement is. Neither Trump nor Puzder is, obviously, a real working-class person. But there’s an old joke about two barefoot guys in the woods who come across a bear. One starts lacing up his sneakers, and the other asks why, pointing out that he’s never going to outrun the bear.

“I don’t need to outrun the bear,” he explains. “I just need to outrun you.”

A Thickburger or two doesn’t make Trump a member of the white working class. But it’s good enough to outrun the vast majority of Democratic Party elected officials from either of the main factions.

www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/9/13884838/puzder-populism

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Monday, December 12, 2016 9:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump’s ‘Good ol’ days’ also were the bad air days

Climate change is a slow-building, largely invisible threat, hard to explain or demonstrate to the general public — which is one reason lavishly funded climate deniers have been so successful at obfuscating the issue. So it’s worth pointing out that most environmental regulation involves much more obvious, immediate, sometimes deadly threats. And much of that regulation may well be headed for oblivion.

Think about what America was like in 1970, the year the EPA was founded. It was still an industrial nation, with roughly a quarter of the workforce employed in manufacturing, often at relatively high wages, in large part because of a still-strong union movement. (Funny how Trumpist pledges to bring back the good old days never mention that part.)

It was also, however, a very polluted country. Choking smog was quite common in major cities; in the Los Angeles area, extreme pollution alerts, sometimes accompanied by warnings that even healthy adults should stay indoors and move as little as possible, were fairly common.

It’s far better now —not perfect, but much better. These days, to experience the kind of pollution crisis that used to be all too frequent in Los Angeles or Houston, you have to go to places like Beijing or New Delhi. And the improvement in air quality has had clear, measurable benefits. For example, we’re seeing significant improvements in lung function among children in the Los Angeles area, clearly tied to reduced pollution.

The key point is that better air didn’t happen by accident: It was a direct result of regulation — regulation that was bitterly opposed at every step by special interests that attacked the scientific evidence of harm from pollution, meanwhile insisting that limiting their emissions would kill jobs.

These special interests were, as you might guess, wrong about everything. The health benefits of cleaner air are overwhelmingly clear. Meanwhile, experience shows that a growing economy is perfectly consistent with an improving environment. In fact, reducing pollution brings large economic benefits once you take into account health care costs and the effects of lower pollution on productivity.

Meanwhile, claims of huge business costs from environmental programs have been wrong time and time again. This may be no surprise when interest groups are trying to maintain their right to pollute. It turns out, however, that even the EPA itself has a history of overestimating the costs of its regulations.

So the looming degradation of environmental protection will be a bad thing on every level: bad for the economy as well as bad for our health. But don’t expect rational arguments to that effect to sway the people who will soon be running the government. After all, what’s bad for America can still be good for the likes of the Koch brothers. Besides, my correspondents keep telling me that arguing policy on the basis of facts and figures is arrogant and elitist, so there.

The good news, sort of, is that some of the nasty environmental consequences of Trumpism will probably be visible — literally — quite soon. And when bad air days make a comeback, we’ll know exactly whom to blame.

www.nytimes.com/2016/12/09/opinion/trump-and-pruitt-will-make-america-
gasp-again.html

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Monday, December 12, 2016 10:29 AM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
Originally posted by G:
I'm sure your endless obsession with the Democrats will magically fix the problem that DEMOCRATS HAVE NO ORGANIZED PLAN TO OPPOSE TRUMP, AND NO AGENDA THAT PEOPLE WILL RALLY TO.

So, what are you going to do about it? Whine some more? Carp some more? Pout some more? Yeah. That'll work. (not)
I'm using the Trump-obsessed democratic contingent here as an indicator of what it will take for those democratic voters to join reality. http://www.politico.com/story/2016/12/democrats-donald-trump-232491 Democrats fear another Trump trouncing Leaderless and lacking a strategy, top party officials worry they're not ready for Trump's first 100 days. http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/national-party-news/309660-democ
rats-where-the-hell-are-you Democrats: Where the hell are You? http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/democratic-party-future-poll_us_58
4dad0ce4b04c8e2bb04ba1 Democrats Are Not Very Excited About The Future Of Their Party

So far the democratic party is rudderless and foundering, with no one speaking for them, and no direction. They don't look promising as a counter to Trump.

What will it take for the hypnotized to tear their eyes off of Trump and turn to actively supporting a new direction? Or are they so enmeshed in the democratic party's identity politics that they literally can't conceive of any other pov?

And what will happen if the democratic party stands up for them post-Trump about as well as Obama and Hillary have to date? ie not at all

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Monday, December 12, 2016 11:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by G:

Hopefully from the ashes of these 3 something new and better will emerge. It's hard to make progress when you're standing still.
I think there are 4, not 3. There is the left and right, or the Bernie and Hillary, branches of the Democrats. Then there is plutocrat and populist, or the McConnell/Ryan and Trump, branches of the Republicans. For some technical reasons written into the Federal and State Constitutions, there can only be two major political parties. Since 4 parties (or 3) are too many there will be problems in the immediate future of the USA.

See the very short article "Why Only Two Major Parties?"
www.factcheck.org/2008/01/why-only-two-political-parties/

Since the Republicans control all the old Confederate States, one political solution would be for the South to rise again, and the Republicans go their own way. But in short order I'd expect the South to invade the North in a reenactment of the Civil War, using modern weapons rather than black powder rifles and cavalry charges on horseback. That would make thrilling television entertainment, even better than Firefly.

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Monday, December 12, 2016 11:25 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
I read through the whole article carefully, thinking that it MUST have been linked for a reason related to this thread, and all I got out of it was Now there's 12 minutes of my life that I'll never get back! What did it tell me that Moneyball didn't? - SIGNY

Moneyball did not realize the deeper reason for the inefficiencies in the market for players: They sprang directly from the inner workings of the human mind of the “experts”, not the players.- SECOND
Apparently you didn't read your own article.

Quote:
Bill James was then busy popularizing an approach, rooted in statistical reasoning, to thinking about baseball. With some help from the Oakland Athletics...
That means Billy Beane and Moneyball.

Quote:
And yet you completely missed that main idea, Signym.
Quote:
You linking that particular article tells me, SECOND, that you've lost the point about the value of people as independent thinkers. Because all of the article tells me is that "they" are working on metrics to pick the best tools out of a lineup of people: Who will never rise above, or fall below, or do anything unexpected, but be very predictable.

With a couple of sentences, Signym, you gave a perfect demonstration of what is wrong with how your mind analyzes problems and creates solutions. I predict you can’t understand what you did wrong, but I will give you some clues:
Daryl Morey is the independent thinker, Signym. And you got the article’s lesson backwards: people are NOT very predictable, despite all the data Morey gathers on players.
Both Morey and Beane are attempting to build a "model" ... a predictive calculator based on measured qualities and mathematics ... to find "the better ball player". Like ALL models, its success depends on constantly crosschecking the model with actual results, and then "tweaking" the model (adding new parameters or eliminating or downplaying old parameters or adding correction factors).

Models are BASED ON predictability. If there is some source of unpredictability in your model it's useless. Morey is trying to eliminate the unpredictability of human performance by measuring more and better and by doing what most scientific modelers do: "tweaking" his model to eliminate past failures.

Where that logic breaks down is that all models only work in a certain mathematical space .... that is, certain underlying principles have to remain the same, or the model doesn't work any more. Maybe someone comes along who changes the nature of the game itself - a sharpshooter like Curry. Or maybe the economy collapses and the players are suddenly much more motivated than before. Does Morey understand that his model only works in a pre-defined mathematical space? Because the problem is that models are EXCEPTIONALLY good at predicting the past ... you can tweak them based on where they failed .... IN THE PAST ... but in order to make good predictions you need more than statistics.

Quote:
But he can make predictions such as the statistical likelihood that Trump will have conflicts of interests because he and his children are creating, with every new contract they sign, new possible conflicts between what is best for the Trump family fortune and what is best for America.-SEOCND
He can??? How would you know??? Because he didn't. Wow, that are some big balls ya got there, SECOND, borrowing Morey's cloak like that for your own purposes!

And more blah blah blah

Quote:
So tell me, SECOND, do you think you could pass a screening interview? - SIGNY

I interviewed twice on the same day in Houston, near the Galleria. Both divisions wanted to hire me and I would have been happy with only one job offer. That was a very memorable day and is what happens when you graduate from UT Austin.= SECOND
I'm awfully happy for you that you got a job at that hotel, SECOND! Don't let that discourage you, everybody's got to start somewhere!



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"

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Monday, December 12, 2016 12:01 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.

That is not what the data says. But neither 1kiki or Signym understand data. I've been watching you two and I see how your brains malfunction in very predictable patterns. You are perfectly transparent to others, yet your minds are opaque to yourselves. You won't see your own patterns because you cannot see yourself as others do. So sad for you to be so limited yet so verbose. With all your writing, everyone can see what is wrong with you in great detail.

Maybe I should simplify it for you so you can add it to signatures? 1kiki and Signym are standing naked in front of everyone, but they imagine they are fully clothed.

¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤

How Did Trump Win? The FBI and the Russians.

Sam Wang has crunched the data from polls released in October to judge the effect of FBI Director James Comey's letter on the election:

From opinion data alone, it is possible to estimate when a change occurred. This can test between alternative explanations, which include not only the Comey letter (October 28th) but preceding events such as the announcement of a hike in Affordable Care Act premiums (October 24th).

I calculated a day-by-day margin using polling data from the Huffington Post....After the Affordable Care Act premium hike announcement, opinion did not move for days....However, the big change does coincide well with the release of the Comey letter. Opinion swung toward Trump by 4 percentage points, and about half of this was a lasting change.

http://election.princeton.edu/2016/12/10/the-comey-effect/

Hillary Clinton lost four points when the letter was released. She eventually gained back some of that, but it looks like two points were permanent. This jibes well with Nate Silver's estimate that the Comey letter cost Clinton two points.

It is traditional at this point to acknowledge that lots of things affected the election: bad campaign strategy, rural blue-collar whites, etc. etc. This is what you'll read about in all the post-election thumbsuckers, but this kind of stuff happens to all campaigns. The Trump campaign certainly made lots of mistakes, though no one talks about them anymore. The difference here is that things like the Comey letter don't happen to all campaigns. This was an egregious intervention in the campaign by the director of the FBI, who was motivated at least partly by his fear of a rogue group of agents who were dedicated to Clinton's defeat.

This is decidedly not normal. Comey knew exactly what he was doing. He was warned that it would be an unprecedented bit of interference in an election. But he went ahead anyway, and went ahead in a manner perfectly calculated to do the maximum damage. The press played along and the rest is history.

Without Comey's letter, Clinton likely would have won the popular vote by four points and the Electoral College by 300 votes or more. Who knows about the Senate? Maybe Democrats would have won that too. Eliminate the Russian "ratfucking", a technical term ( released Dem emails but not GOP emails that Russia also stole ) and Clinton would have won in a landslide. Instead, a game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and everyone is convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.

This. Is. Not. Normal.

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/how-did-trump-win-fbi-and-russi
ans

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Monday, December 12, 2016 1:07 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Quote:
A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
First of all, I never said that. HOWEVER, it seems to me that the data- which shows a Democratic loss in state legislatures, governorships, Congress and the Presidency, does speak to a level of Democratic weakness in ALL levels of government.

Also, the percent of registered Democrats has dropped dramatically, and registered Independents tend to break more Republican than Democrat. I think the Democrats need to find a new mission (aside from representing a grab-bag of "victim" subgroups) and put the pedal to metal.

Quote:
That is not what the data says-SECOND
That IS what the data says. You can look at the popular vote for President as a source of comfort, if that's what floats your boat, but the Dems are not in the ascendancy right now. I'm sure that you're counting on the "demographic advantage" when the subgroups of Latinos, millenials, and other self-identified "victim" groups will grow, but aside from representing self-identified victims, Dems do not have an overall message of hope.

Quote:
How Did Trump Win? The FBI and the Russians.

... I calculated a day-by-day margin using polling data from the Huffington Post
NOT a reliable indicator! They should have used the IBD/TIPP poll... which I have cited at least five times, which turned out to be far more correct than any of the liberal-biased polls .... as as you know GIGO. (Garbage in, garbage out) Conclusions based on suspect data is immediately irrelevant. Again, so much blah blah blah.







-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"

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Monday, December 12, 2016 5:43 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The United States boasts a deeply conservative economic tradition. From its origins as a colonial, agricultural society, it quickly emerged as a slave holding republic built on the ethnic cleansing and occasional genocide of Indigenous peoples. After the Civil War (1861-65), it reshaped itself in the crucible of unfettered laissez-faire capitalism straight through to the Roaring ‘20s. A post-Depression Keynesian consensus led U.S. leaders to reign in the most conservative impulses during the mid-20th century, but the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s set the stage for the current neo-liberal moment.

Consequently, ever since the industrial revolution, the United States has typically trailed other developed nations in establishing a basic social welfare system. It has never fielded a competitive socialist or labor party. It was the last major nation to implement an old age pension. More recently, ObamaCare made it the last major nation to mandate that all of its citizens receive some sort of healthcare coverage, even if it's quite wanting in many cases.

Amid its overriding conservativism, the United States has had only three presidents with any real socialist tendencies: Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-45), Harry S. Truman (1945-53), and most recently Lyndon Baines Johnson, whose presidency (1963-69) ended before half of current Americans were born (median age 37.9).

The election of Donald Trump as president and, just as important, the impending Republican dominance of Congress, make certain that the United States will not correct its social welfare shortcomings anytime soon. Indeed, the nation may take significant steps backwards.

However, a quick review of America's stunted progressive history suggests that the opportunity for a progressive counter-revolution may be closer than it appears at this dark moment.

And not because Trump’s victory represents the last gasp of an aging generation or the violent undulations of a shrinking white electorate. But rather, because Trump and his Grand Old Posse have the potential to wreak so much damage and engender so much ignominy upon the national consciousness as to generate the kind of rare and extreme circumstances that have previously led the United States to make genuine progress in developing modern social welfare. The chaos and horrors of a Trump presidency may yet produce opportunities for improving the nation.

More at www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2016/12/the-counter-revolution.html

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Monday, December 12, 2016 6:19 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


SECOND, you're just flailing - throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. When one argument fails, you just dredge up another.

This is like the liberals' reaction to a Trump Presidency:

When safe spaces don't work, try demonstrations.
When demonstrations don't work, try riots.
When riots don't work, try recounts.
When recounts don't work, try faithless electors.
And when all else fails ..."But Putin..."

All in the meantime, endlessly slag the President-elect.

Instead of trying to rewrite history ... which never works ... what you SHOULD be doing is figuring out why the Democrats stopped representing Americans, and looking how to get the electorate back in the future. That's an effort I could get behind.







-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"

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Monday, December 12, 2016 9:38 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
SECOND, you're just flailing - throwing shit against the wall to see what sticks. When one argument fails, you just dredge up another.
Will this one stick with you? Or will you be unable to comprehend because of your learning disability?

Trump tweeted and Lockheed Martin stock moved

Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump's tweets?

Here is the tweet (but he has done this before with Sprint and T-Mobile, sending two stocks upward):

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.
8:26 AM-12 Dec 2016
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/808301935728230404

www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/12/donald-trump-once-again-day-tra
der-chief


If Trump let his favorite insiders know a day ahead that he was going to move a stock’s price with his infamous tweets, for example, their stocktrades would get lost in the noise and no one would ever know that Trump did them a favor.


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Monday, December 12, 2016 10:01 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
A game show host is about to be sworn in as president of the United States and 1kiki and Signym are convinced that the Democratic Party is practically on its last legs.
That is not what the data says.


The data says she won 3 populous states with large urban areas: New York, California and Illinois. And she won a dozen or so small states. Overall, she won 17 of 50 states. To put it another way, she lost 33 of 50 states. That's pathetic. And it doesn't indicate broad popular support.

Also, as Signy pointed out, and which I've pointed out multiple times in the past - democrats have lost both houses of Congress, retain only 18 of 50 governorships, have only 15 of 49 state senates and 16 of 49 state houses. https://www.multistate.com/state-resources/governors-legislatures

AND in addition, democrats have lost significant voter share to 'independents', which, as Signy pointed out, tend to break republican.

And now democrats lost the ONE thing they had left to lose: the presidency.



I'd say things are not looking good for democrats.

How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Monday, December 12, 2016 10:06 PM

1KIKI

Goodbye, kind world (George Monbiot) - In common with all those generations which have contemplated catastrophe, we appear to be incapable of understanding what confronts us.


Quote:
Originally posted by second:

If Trump blah blah blah ...
opinion, speculation, innuendo


¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤ø,¸,ø¤°º¤ø,¸¸,ø¤º°`°º¤°º¤ø,¸¸
How did your beloved 'democratic' party fuck up so badly?

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Tuesday, December 13, 2016 3:27 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


Will this one stick with you? Or will you be unable to comprehend because of your learning disability?

Quote:
Trump tweeted and Lockheed Martin stock moved
Good.

Quote:
Do we really want the president of the United States calling out individual corporations and affecting their stock prices? Do we really want to be left wondering if maybe someone had a little advance knowledge of Trump's tweets?
Who the fuck cares? the F-35 is a vastly overpriced and under-performing boondoggle, which we have had to foist off on our "allies" just to make the per-plane costs go down. In Syria, Russian planes fly roughly one mission per day, American planes fly roughly one mission every ten days. The rest of the time, they spend in maintenance. That's no way to build a military.

The contractors have been making a killing for decades, sucking hundreds of billions of dollars out of the government (taxpayer) teat, and "business as usual" has led to more "business as usual". It serves Lockheed Martin right for being a greedy, parasitical company.

Quote:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The F-35 program and cost is out of control. Billions of dollars can and will be saved on military (and other) purchases after January 20th.
8:26 AM-12 Dec 2016
I can't imagine why your panties are in such a twist. This is a GOOD thing.



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

"If I could write inflammatory commentary to scorch the eye brows and lashes off Trump, Signym or 1kiki, I would.- SECOND"

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Tuesday, December 13, 2016 3:54 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


Well, money well spent by the Koch Brothers.


SGG

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Tuesday, December 13, 2016 3:57 AM

SHINYGOODGUY


Go Fuck Yourself!


SGG


Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:
Can we move this to a (new) shorter thread?

Something that applies to Trump as President-elect, and not Trump the candidate? Because I guarantee you NOBODY is going to look at the previous 26 pages ... or even the previous five posts (especially yours, SECOND) no matter HOW blistering you think they are!



-----------

"Pity would be no more,
If we did not MAKE men poor"- William Blake

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