Vladimir Putin is Blackmailing Donald
CNN’s story says it all: the classified intelligence briefing was reported by multiple people in the know to have said that the Russians have damaging personal and professional (business) knowledge about Donald and they are obviously willing to use it if he doesn’t do things the way they like it– especially if he allows NATO to defend itself against a Russian takeover of the Baltics and maybe even Poland.
This conclusion is so obvious and so logical that it surprises me that it hasn’t come up before. Donald did some bad things because he thought he could get away with them. You name the bad things– it doesn’t really matter whether it was wife-beating, dog-beating, or masturbating because we know that if it got out, it would be grounds for impeachment that even the Republicans couldn’t deny.
It’s not emails that he wrote because Donald never wrote any emails. It is things he did, personally and business-related, and especially business, in which he was in bed with people connected with organized crime. He took money from criminals to build his hotels and golf courses, and he cashed in on those projects and left other people, innocent naive people holding the bag for the bankruptcies. The Russians have all the details– Donald tried to keep these things secret, but you can’t keep secrets from the criminals who gave you the money.
The CNN story is here.
For further details, see this Mother Jones story that ran in October but failed to influence anyone. Apparently a British former spy has been investigating Trump in the pay of Republicans who don’t like Donald and Democrats as well. He provided his information to the FBI starting in June and more fully in August. Unfortunately none of this was front page news and everything is, of course, denied by Donald and his friends (what makes anyone think that Donald would admit any of this? Why bother to ask him unless you think his denials are somehow credible? You know he’s been shown to lie repeatedly and obviously in the past so why listen to him now?)
What is worst is that the story is so totally credible in terms of who Donald is and who Vladimir Putin is that no one should doubt it for a moment.
Gordo in a Tree
This is old, but here it is. They proved, with a ten year direct observation study that the carbon-dioxide caused greenhouse effect is real and climate change is getting worse due to increasing carbon-dioxide: physics dot org article published February 25, 2015 says so.
Michael Mann Proceeds in Court
Michael Mann has sued his defamers in court, and his lawsuit is winning the right to proceed to present his case before a jury. Not a final victory, but a great advance in his fight to regain his good name. Read about it here, in the scienceblogs website. Lawyers, take notice: you may be able to help in this fight to level the playing field against people who have repeatedly defamed the climate “alarmists.”
Earth and Moon: From Mars Orbiter
Donald’s Russian Connections: A Run-Down
Apparently Donald, our new president, has numerous connections to Russian and Russian-American kleptocrats and gangsters, and has depended upon them for a huge quantity of loans to finance his capital projects (buildings, mostly hotels). The details are too complex and entangled to even begin to list here, but there are obvious motivations for his work with Putin in stealing our most recent presidential election. A long article has just been published in The American Interest, and is available for your free perusal at this address (it’s your only free article this month in this magazine, so read it carefully before closing the page.) It was written by a lawyer who specializes in investigating crooked banking interests named James S. Henry. If you have time (at least two hours to read this article through), it will benefit you to discover just how heavily entangled Donald is with the Russian-American mob and Russia’s gangster-in-chief, Vladimir Putin.
This is a re-post because I’m not happy with the way Facebok treated my first try.
Donald’s Russian Connections: A Rundown
Apparently Donald, our new president, has numerous connections to Russian and Russian-American kleptocrats and gangsters, and has depended upon them for a huge quantity of loans to finance his capital projects (buildings, mostly hotels). The details are too complex and entangled to even begin to list here, but there are obvious motivations for his work with Putin in stealing our most recent presidential election. A long article has just been published in The American Interest, and is available for your free perusal at this address (it’s your only free article this month in this magazine, so read it carefully before closing the page.) It was written by a lawyer who specializes in investigating crooked banking interests named James S. Henry. If you have time (at least two hours to read this article through), it will benefit you to discover just how heavily entangled Donald is with the Russian-American mob and Russia’s gangster-in-chief, Vladimir Putin.
Beautiful Earth Views
Check out the views of Earth by this astronaut who spent over 500 days in space:
Here’s a quote from a New York Times (NYT) article (an op-ed) about the Republican attempt to abolish “Obamacare”:
Americans spend two or three times as much on health care as a share of G.D.P. as other industrialized countries but get worse outcomes. American children are 75 percent more likely to die in the first five years of life than British or German children, according to World Bank data, and American women are twice as likely to die in pregnancy as Canadian women. The reasons have to do partly with American poverty, and partly with the high number of uninsured.
Drug Overdose Deaths Nearly Tripled in the last fifteen years- Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report
An early release on December 16, 2016, by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced that “drug overdose deaths have nearly tripled in the last fifteen years” [paraphrase]–almost 61% (three-fifths) of the 47,000 drug overdose deaths in 2014 “involved an opioid” (were at least partially due to consumption of an opiate-like drug.) In 2015, of 52,404 drug overdose deaths, 63.1% involved an opioid, an increase of 5,000 deaths from drug overdoses in one year. The age-adjusted opioid-related death rate increased by 15.6% from 2014-2015. The death rate from synthetic opioids other than methadone increased by 72.2%, while death rates from methadone decreased by 9.1%.
From the MMWR/CDC report:
The largest absolute rate change in deaths from synthetic opioids other than methadone occurred in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Ohio, Rhode Island and West Virginia. The largest percentage increases in rates occurred in New York (135.7%), Connecticut (125.9%) and Illinois (120%) … Connecticut, Massachusetts, Ohio, and West Virginia experienced the largest absolute rate changes in heroin deaths, while the largest percentage increases in rates occurred in South Carolina (57.1%), North Carolina (46.4%), and Tennessee (43.5%.)
[The large increases in these states reflect the spread of distribution of fentanyl-enhanced heroin.]
Researchers attribute the increased death rates from opioids to the recent introduction of illicitly manufactured fentanyl, which is used to enhance the potency of heroin sold on the street (fentanyl is approximately fifty times as potent as heroin.) Heroin is so cheap on the street (despite the best efforts of the Drug Enforcement Agency or DEA) that even pure heroin is “a drug on the market.” Thus, fentanyl-enhanced heroin is a popular value-added product. Drug users who are unaware that the heroin that they purchase contains fentanyl frequently overdose because they do not expect an enhanced-potency product (especially because the product they purchase is not labelled as to potency or actual drug content.) Such overdose deaths have become increasingly common, first in New York and with time across the United States.
Thus we see that drug overdose deaths are often due to the illicit nature of the product used– the accidental overdose is related to the fact that it is not labelled as to potency, and the lack of labelling is related to the fact that there are no regulations controlling the way the drug is sold since it is illegal in the first place. What is even more deadly is that there are no ready treatments available for individuals who have overdosed, even if the cause of an apneic collapse (a person who stops breathing and appears unresponsive) is known.
In fact, there is a specific and reliable antidote to opioid overdoses, in the form of the opioid antagonist naloxone (Narcan)– when injected intravenously or even simply subcutaneously, naloxone rapidly reverses the stupor and apnea characteristic of overdose. Naloxone frequently doesn’t last long enough to prevent relapse but at least the dose can be repeated and provides a clear diagnosis when it is effective.
Autoinjectors containing naloxone are a lifesaving treatment for opioid overdoses that can be successfully administered by untrained persons, and have been distributed to many big-city paramedic ambulances as well as to fire department personnel. There is little reason not to distribute autoinjectors to people who may be at risk of accidental overdoses other than closed-minded conservative attitudes that have simultaneously prevented clean needle distributions and street medics who offer AIDS tests and additional medical assistance. The failure of the DEA to prevent cheap heroin from being sold on the street is already plain; other methods to reduce deaths from drug overdose are needed urgently.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 