Due to family medical issues, I'm a
little behind the curve with this, but hey, if you want breaking news,
you probably ain't reading this anyway. My first thought
when the essence of the Mueller Report came out was Trump gets his
second term no matter what. It now doesn't matter who the Democrats run,
Trump wins in a landslide. At this point, I doubt it would even matter
if the economy fell off a cliff; the Democratic Party is dead. My
next thought was, "There goes several American institutions down the
toilet." I can't believe anyone will believe anything the mainstream
media says for at least a couple decades. I lost all faith in the MSM a
long time ago, but even I would have never believed CNN, the New York
Times, etc. would have flat out lied, repeatedly, for years, about
something as completely stupid as Russiagate. Not selective reporting of
facts, not slanting the story, not using weasel words to say one thing
while giving the impression of saying something else. That's what I've
expected from the MSM since delivering copies of the Flint Urinal...
er... Journal when I was twelve. But just flat out lying? And not just
once or twice, or one journalist going off the rails, but rather 24/7,
cover-to-cover lies? Not in my darkest moments would I have ever
believed such a thing would be possible. Then we have the
FBI/CIA/NSA/State Department's efforts to hand the presidential election
to Hillary. Granted, the grandiose veneer has been chipping off these
agencies for decades, but their attempt to stage a soft coup here in the
US, as opposed to the more-typical overseas activities, will wreck any
credibility these agencies had both here at home and abroad for a very
long time, if not permanently. And finally, we have the
DNC. How hard is it for these assclowns to figure out that Hillary lost
because the majority of Americans simply do not like her as a person?
Sure, both of the major political parties have gone tone-deaf to the
voters and live in a self-referential bubble. But just how colossally
stupid do you have to be to a) come up with such a cockamamie story to
begin with, b) keep harping on it non-stop for more than two years, then
c) when it all falls apart, double down and keep yapping about it. I
think Mr. Sanders may soon regret lashing himself to the boat anchor the
DNC has become. The big question is, "Why?" The press, I
actually understand. The media has made a killing off of Trump. I read
yesterday over at Naked Capitalism (or maybe Automatic Earth) that CNN
has increased the fee for a 30-second ad from less than $3,000 to more
than $13,000 since Trump took his infamous escalator ride. That is a lot
of Benjamins, and bottom line, the press is and always has been about
the Benjamins above all else. In the case of the various government
agencies, maybe they felt that their budgets would be under pressure if
the US and Russia normalized relations, but there are plenty of valid
reasons to be cautious, even suspicious, of Russia without inventing
something as dumb, and easily disproven, as Russiagate. And the DNC?
Maybe the people running the show really are just that stupid? Granted,
I've seen plenty of institutions get stuck in a narrative and have
difficulty breaking out of it, but at some point the antibodies kick in
and the ship rights itself. (Excuse me while I madly mix my metaphors.)
Were people working for the party that terrified of the Hillary cabal
that they would rather see their party implode than speak up? That is
some serious dysfunction you got going there. Anyway, enough of my blah, blah, blah. Here is a selection of what others have to say: Matt Taibbi: It's Official: Russiagate Is this Generations WMD
The
[New York Times] was signaling it understood there would now be
questions about whether or not news outlets like themselves made a
galactic error by betting heavily on a new, politicized approach, trying
to be true to “history’s judgment” on top of the hard-enough job of
just being true. Worse, in a brutal irony everyone should have seen
coming, the press has now handed Trump the mother of campaign issues
heading into 2020.
...
Imagine how
tone-deaf you’d have to be to not realize it makes you look bad, when
news does not match audience expectations you raised. To be unaware of
this is mind-boggling, the journalistic equivalent of walking outside
without pants.
Message
to Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Kemala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard and the rest
of the crew: you can stop asking for campaign donations, because you no
longer stand a chance in the 2020 elections. Your own party, and the
media who support you, made sure of that. Or rather, the only chance you
would have is if you guys start another smear campaign against your
president, and I wouldn’t recommend that.
That’s
what played on CNN, NBC, and The New York Times yesterday as they
struggled to digest the parting meal Robert Mueller served to the
RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger with a side of crow-flavored
fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison
cherry on top with his statement that “while this report does not
conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not
exonerate him.”
Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better,
could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official
finding that no crime was committed is, ipso facto, an exoneration, and
to impute otherwise is a serious breach of his role in this legal
melodrama. Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to traffic in defamation,
aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal charges. So, it will
be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say when Jerrold Nadler
reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably he will, to
do to some ‘splainin.’
The
American establishment and mass media not only wasted millions of
taxpayers’ dollars “fomenting and stoking tensions” between world
nuclear superpowers, but also undermining any remaining trust in them,
political analyst Charles Ortel told RT. Americans will have to be
looking elsewhere for alternative news sources to avoid being duped any
further by the chorus of disinformation from the mainstream media, he
added.
After
two years of hearing from haters in politics and the media that
President Donald Trump was “Putin’s poodle,” an agent of the Kremlin,
guilty of treason, an illegitimate president who would leave the White
House in handcuffs and end his days in prison, we learn the truth.
Bob Seger was in Tampa as part of his
farewell tour. He may be pushing 80, but he still knows how to put on a
show. One of Debbie's brothers was there with his wife and son, and one
of my cousins came with us as well. We were laughing that it was a good
thing Debbie's nephew came along so we wouldn't be the youngest people
in the crowd. We had a great time and it was good to see some family we
don't get to see very often. One thing with a crowd made up of old
people is that everyone was pretty mellow. Not a lot of pushing and
shoving, nobody puking, no fights, etc. The layout of the Amalie Arena
makes it easy to get around in and find your seats. We were a little
surprised by the lax security: we never had to show anyone that we had
tickets. I put my ticket in my pocket when we got out of the car and
never took it out until we got home. I used to work for the company that
provides security; we checked tickets at the screening area, again when
you went into the door, then again when you got to your section. It
kinda pissed me off a little; I paid $125 for a ticket that never saw
the light of day. But bottom line; awesome show. As always. Tax
season is in full swing and boy is it swingin'. I've already done more
returns that I did last year and just with the returns I know are coming
my way, I will be doing at least that many more. The phone is ringing
off the hook and there is a steady line of people walking up on our
porch. We always laugh about how nobody ever comes back to our
out-of-the-way corner of the park, but we sure are getting company this
year. In medical news, I've gone from having no insurance
to having two different insurances. I need to go through the foot-thick
file of bills that have been sitting in the file cabinet since January
and try to get some of these people off our backs. My pitch to them will
be simple: No job, no money, whatever Florida Medicaid is willing to
give you is all that you are ever going to get, so take it and be happy.
Anyone want to take bets that will work? Heh. In our continuing series documenting TEOTWAWKI: The
whole Russiagate thing started with Russian hackers supposedly breaking
into the DNC's e-mail server, revealing that the entire Democratic
Party apparatus conspired to ensure Hillary Clinton was the Democrat's
2016 presidential candidate. At the time I and many others said that it
was complete BS; the e-mails had been copied onto a flash drive by
someone working at the DNC who was probably sickened by their chosen
party. Well, we were right:
We
veteran intelligence professionals (VIPS) have done enough detailed
forensic work to prove the speciousness of the prevailing story that the
DNC emails published by WikiLeaks came from Russian hacking. Given the
paucity of evidence to support that story, we believe Mueller may choose
to finesse this key issue and leave everyone hanging. That would help
sustain the widespread belief that Trump owes his victory to President
Vladimir Putin, and strengthen the hand of those who pay little heed to
the unpredictable consequences of an increase in tensions with
nuclear-armed Russia.
The article
goes on at length showing how that conclusion was arrived at. It is
written by geeks, but in non-geek plain English. Long but worth the time
if you care at all about that little thing called "truth". David Holmgren is a permaculture guy from Australia. He recently published an apology from the Baby Boomers to the Millennials and whatever we end up calling GenZ. The entire thing is loaded with good stuff, but this bit caught my eye:
While
our parents’ generation experienced the risks of youth through
adversity and war we used our privilege to tackle challenges of our own
choosing. Although some of us had to struggle to free ourselves from the
cloying cocoon of middle class upbringing, we were the generation that
flew like the birds and hitchhiked around the country and the world. How
strange that on becoming parents (many of us in middle age) we believed
the propaganda that the world was too dangerous for our children to do
the same around the local neighbourhood. Instead we coddled them, got
into the chauffeuring business, and in doing so encouraged their
disconnection from both nature and community. As we see our
grandchildren’s generation raised in a way that makes them an even more
handicapped generation, we must be truly sorry for the path we took and
the disease we created.
Gen Handicapped. I like it; has a certain ring to it. One
of the indications of a nation in decline is loss of faith in its
institutions. For example, every nation in the world has always accepted
that any plane deemed airworthy by the FAA did not need to go through
whatever equivalent system that country has in place. Now, thanks to the
737 MAX debacle, that will surely change:
With
the 737 Max 8 grounded worldwide, the MCAS system is now under
scrutiny. A Boeing spokesman said on Sunday that the system met all of
the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA) certification requirements,
but a group of anonymous Boeing and FAA engineers told the Seattle Times
that the FAA delegated much of the safety analysis to the company
itself, which cut corners to deliver the plane on time.
Typical
corporate short-term thinking; rather than risk being "late to market"
and lose sales, rush the process, kill customers, and lose even more
sales than you ever would have had you just taken the time to do it
right. It's the Flaming Pinto all over again, only this time, both a major corporation and a federal regulatory agency will be gettin' an ass whoopin'. Last
but certainly not least, we have a Matt Taibbi two-fer. I knew he had
something big brewing when he went into radio silence for nearly three
weeks. It was worth the wait. By now, everyone has heard that the
Pentagon failed its first-ever audit. The problem is that they really
didn't fail so much as make such a hash of their books, teams of
accountants were unable to even offer an opinion:
At
the tail end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed
an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into
the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable
to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion,
explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting
silos was too illogical to penetrate.
When
I was a kid, Senator Everett Dirksen allegedly said, "A million here, a
million there; pretty soon, you're talking real money" in reference to
federal spending. This was later inflated to "A billion here, a billion
there...". What Taibbi dug up goes far beyond that:
...the
Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in
administrative waste, a wart that by itself was just under twice the
size of that $74 billion Enron bankruptcy. Inspectors found “at least”
$6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said $15
billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a
portion” of the total lost.
My favorite bit of the entire article:
Meanwhile,
the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t
always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it
has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it
started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary
mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally
loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country,
unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose
cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.
When
I read that, the first thing that popped into my head was an episode of
M*A*S*H with some high-ranking dude explaining that, no the unit could
not have some badly needed piece of medical equipment, but they could
have a popcorn machine. Just use form blah-blah-blah-stroke-J, cross out
"Machine Gun" and write in "Popcorn Machine". I guess whoever wrote
that bit was closer to the mark than they knew, only it was form
blah-blah-blah-stoke-H, and you cross out "Helicopter Batteries" and write in "Nuclear Missile". And we trust these people with essentially unlimited firepower. And a trillion dollars a year. Speaking
of a trillion dollars, some people are trying to say Sanders is full of
it when he talks about the big banks getting a trillion dollars in
bail-outs after nearly wreaking the entire world economy. And it's true
that the number is probably no where near a trillion dollars. Taibbi
shows that more likely, it's somewhere between $7.7 trillion and $29 trillion.
As he points out in the article, the bail-out went far beyond just
TARP. There was TAF, TALF, TSLF, TOP, PDCF, Maiden Lanes, interest on
Fed Reserve balances, and much more. Meanwhile, we got the shaft. And the bill. I
think that I posted this before, but I figure that if you made it this
far, you could use some suicide prevention. I thought of this video
because Debbie is training for her new job, which comes with the
possibility of getting a phone call from someone famous. The trainer was
talking about treating them like anyone else and not squee-ing in their
ear. Sort of the opposite of this: I
think what makes me laugh about that clip more than anything is that in
a poll of the 7.7 billion people on planet earth, more would likely
recognize Mayim Bialik than Mark Hamill. And I will close with Dr. Jerry Pournelle's admonition: Remember that despair is a sin.
