Irrigation Pumps Behind A Razor-Wire Fence
From the NYT today:
A former senior official said Mr. Mueller’s investigation was looking at money laundering by Trump associates. The suspicion is that any cooperation with Russian officials would likely have been done in exchange for some kind of financial payoff, and there would have been an effort to hide the payoffs, most likely by routing them through offshore banking centers.
As the trolls fighting Don the Con’s fall are saying: “There’s no There there.” Well, the reason we haven’t found the There is that people are trying to hide their complicity in this Russia-Trump collusion. You can’t seriously make us think that we haven’t found the There in six months of investigation because it isn’t there– it’s just hidden, carefully disguised as transactions like the estate that Don the Con sold to a Russian cut-out for an enormous profit (tens of millions of dollars) back in 2008, at the same time that other real estate prices were tanking because of the Great Recession. Remember that Don really stepped up his friendly talk about Vlad “the Impaler” Putin back in 2007; this has been going on for a very long time. In fact, the Russians have been cultivating Don the Con ever since American banks stopped lending to him back in the nineties. They saw then an opportunity to tie Don financially to their coat-tails, and he has been on their payroll ever since. This treason has been going on for a very long time.
From an NYT article about an interview that Oliver Stone did in February 2016 of Vlad “the Impaler” Putin:
“We never interfere within the domestic affairs of other countries,” Mr. Putin says.
Quote of the Day: Anxiety is Normal
From the NYT, in an article about Sarah Feder entitled “Prozac Nation is Now United States of Xanax”:
“If you’re a human being living in 2017 and you’re not anxious… there’s something wrong with you.”
From a New York Times article about the resurgence of left-wing political activism among “communities of faith” and even “evangelicals”:
“The fact that one party has strategically used and abused religion, while the other has had a habitually allergic and negative response to religion per se, puts our side in a more difficult position in regard to political influence,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, the evangelical social justice advocate who founded the Sojourners community and magazine in 1971.
“Most progressive religious leaders I talk to, almost all of them, feel dissed by the left,” he said. “The left is really controlled by a lot of secular fundamentalists.”
I have some bad news for Reverend Wallis: the “Left” isn’t controlled by anybody. There is no “Left” per se. There is a “Right” called “The Moral Majority” and led by Don the Con. But there is no one politician, nor any one group, that can claim possession of the soul of the “Left.” Even the Democratic Party doesn’t have the allegiance of left-wingers. They wanted Bernie Sanders, not Hillary Clinton, remember?
So if I wanted to say that a true Left-wing position includes religious people who are willing to tolerate other faiths and even atheists/agnostics, no one could say that I am wrong. Because no-one has the moral authority to claim that exclusion of anyone who wants to be included is right. So there.
Woody Packard
Lewiston, Idaho
I am a patient person, and willing to wait to see how this all sorts out. But the longer we wait, the more normal it all seems. Regardless of who you voted for, please take a look at Linda Greenhouse’s article today. Stop parsing as a lawyer or judge, use and trust your instincts as a smart and concerned citizen. (By all means be open for new information, which is certainly possible.) But,
1. Who won the election, even without the majority of voters voting for him?
2. Who, by all credible accounts, was helped by the efforts of the Russians?
3. Who, even on the day that he fired Comey, has had a jolly relationship with those who helped him in the elections?
4. Who has had on staff those with a continuous relationship for many years with Russians at the top level of their country’s intelligence agencies.[?]Perhaps there is a good explanation, and I am willing to wait for it. In the mean time, please, members of Congress, don’t try to convince us that there is nothing that needs investigating here.
This is new territory. If a presidential campaign cheats to get in office, does the vice president from the cheating party take over? Does a Supreme Court justice, denied to a legitimately elected president but appointed by a cheating President, retain a lifetime appointment?
Can we, citizens of the United States, agree what a democracy is?
Milky Way Found to be In a Void
Astronomers have discovered that the Milky Way Galaxy is sitting in a huge void, a relatively empty area of the Universe that is roughly a billion light years in radius. This void, which has been christened the Keenan-Barger-Cowie (KBC) void, is apparently the largest empty area in the visible Universe. The Milky Way is sitting in the middle of a huge empty spot instead of among the “normal” filaments of matter that make up the Swiss-cheese like consistency of the rest of the Universe.
This observation explains the discrepancy between measurements of the Hubble constant taken by observing “standard candle” stars locally and the measurement found in the Cosmic Wave Background. Local “standard candles” are influenced by the unbalanced gravity of matter outside of the local void area, while the cosmic microwave background is not biased by the presence of the void. This explanation for the discrepancy makes astronomers feel much better about their measurements of the Hubble constant.
All this is explained in a blog post on the wonderful blog The Universe Today (universetoday.com) entitled “At the Largest Scales, Our Milky Way Galaxy is in the Middle of Nowhere.”
Comment of the Day: Propaganda Now Being Disseminated by Right Wing Pro-Trump Agents Against Comey
Christine McM
is a trusted commenter Massachusetts20 hours ago
These prepared remarks are remarkable, no pun intended. The level of detail is astounding.
I was listening to a pundit say that the reason why these remarks were released a full 24 hours before Comey’s appearance is to counter what appears to be a concerted effort by the White House to discredit him.
I’ll say! I could not believe my eyes the other day to watch an ad, from some Trump superPAC, maybe the Mercers, essentially stating that James Comey can’t be trusted. As far as I know, Mr. Comey is not running for office, to spend money in creating an ad–some might see it as a smear campaign–in advance of the testimony is unparalleled.
Trump must be very worried indeed to spend such money on something that, on the surface, doesn’t do his “cause” any good. In fact the more agitated he becomes over all this, the guiltier he looks.
I guess the best I can say is, if I’m shocked by the anti-Comey ad, I have no idea how I’ll feel if Trump live-tweets during tomorrow’s testimony.
I guess there are no limits to how far Trump will go to debase the office he once claimed to feel honor to have won.
my feet.
A report in the Intercept yesterday detailed a leak from the NSA showing that the Russian military hacking apparatus sent phishing emails to VR Systems, a provider of software to US election campaign organizations– not the providers of software for ballot boxes but very close to it. An employee of the NSA was almost immediately arrested for leaking this information. The phishing effort apparently occurred only a week or two before the presidential election, after Obama had warned Putin to stop trying to hack into US campaign organizations.
The significance of this revelation is simply that Putin is intent on subverting or even destroying the US election system and undermining the trust of the US public in their own democratic systems. What little trust is still present– many Americans do not believe that democracy is working, even before they learn that the Russians are trying to undermine it. The American government is barely functioning at present– only the ICE is actually working to harass and delay people trying to enter the US. The Treasury Department is still handing out Social Security checks, and government employees are still being paid.
The web presence of the US government has been purged of all mentions of climate change and of any reference to actions that they might take to alleviate it. Instead, propaganda supporting Don the Con and his erratic behavior has a place of honor on government web sites. There is a yawning chasm in front of us, and without drastic action, the disintegration of government services and government protection for the environment is imminent.
Creating the American Junkie
This textbook by Caroline Jean Acker, published in 2002, combines historical, medical, and sociological points of view to thoroughly dissect the state of the art in addictionology today. This quote from the blurb explains the purpose of the book:
Acker examines how the construction of addiction in the early twentieth century was strongly influenced by the professional concerns of psychiatrists seeking to increase their medical authority; by the disciplinary ambitions of pharmacologists to build a drug development infrastructure; and by the American Medical Association’s campaign to reduce prescriptions of opiates and to absolve physicians in private practice from the necessity of treating difficult addicts as patients.
Creating the American Junkie: Addiction Research in the Classic Era of Narcotic Control
