Exxon-Mobil May Be Going Down the Tubes
A new Huffington Post article explains that Exxon-Mobil is saddled with excessive debt because of mistakes they have made over the last few years, especially when the price of oil was over $100 a barrel. The huge oil company made erroneous bets on trying to tap extremely expensive oil in the Arctic, deep under the Gulf of Mexico, and in the tar sands of Canada– attempts which, even when successful, only made available oil which costs more than it is worth to pump. Now that oil is less than $50 a barrel and likely to remain so for some years, the company is wallowing in red ink. Recently, they lost their top credit rating at Standard and Poor’s, yet they increased their dividend by 2 cents the next day.
The article goes on to detail Exxon-Mobil’s legal fights, including investigations by some state attorneys general into the charge that the company tried to cover up its knowledge of fossil fuel’s role in exacerbating climate change. The company has also failed to invest in alternative energy sources and its CEO has mocked the green energy field.
In sum, Exxon-Mobil is in trouble. In fact, they may be headed the same way as the coal industry, which rates a mention in the article for the bankruptcies of four major coal companies on the heels of China’s 3.7% drop in coal use last year. It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.
Clarence Thomas Groped Me, Says White Woman
A young lawyer says that in 1999, while she was setting the dinner table at Clarence Thomas’ house preparatory to a dinner party that he was hosting, he grabbed her by the buttocks and made suggestive comments. See this article on the Slate blog “Slatest” for further details.
Thomas naturally denied the accusation, as he could hardly be expected to admit to being a Donald wannabe. The woman’s three former room-mates and her ex-husband confirmed that she had told them privately about the incident at the time that it occurred, not making it a certainty but helping her credibility considerably.
Clarence Thomas is well-known for being the Supreme Court Justice who barely received confirmation from a bitterly divided Senate after Anita Hill made her famous allegations that he had sexually harassed her when she was one of his law clerks. What is not as widely known is that two other women stood ready to testify that they had been recipients of his attentions– but the Judiciary Committee recessed without bothering to call them to testify.
Naturally, Thomas has been the worst Supreme Court Justice in recent memory, failing to ask questions during oral arguments and voting reliably conservative and anti-civil rights in every case. There are no active movements to impeach him or force his resignation on grounds of incompetence.
Harry Hits the Road
quote from the above book, published in 2010 by Harry Hurt III:
“Man is the only creature who refuses to be what he is,” Camus wrote. “The problem is to know whether this refusal can only lead to the destruction of himself and others, whether all rebellion must end in the justification of universal murder, or whether, on the contrary, without laying claim to an innocence that is impossible, it can discover the principle of reasonable culpability.”
NB: this was discovered as a result of the New York Times (NYT) article on “The 282 people Donald Trump has insulted on Twitter”– this quote from that article:
Harry Hurt IIIAUTHOR, “LOST TYCOON: THE MANY LIVES OF DONALD J. TRUMP”
In the past few days, I was informed by email that two different “bloggers” were following my “blog.” They are “doggies that take selfies” or doggieselfies and catslivepics. Both have “About” pages that are just stubs and both have rather generic looking pictures, the first of dogs and their owners and the second just of cats. No text entries. Both blogs have a significant number of pictures, but as I said, those pictures could have come from anywhere.
There are some other “followers” who are somewhat sketchy but this is the first time I have noticed that the blogs of these “followers” are extremely sketchy. What is this? Possibly an advertising effort by wordpress itself, I don’t know. Any ideas?
Here is a personal note about the charges for my spinal surgery: I received a Medicare Explanation of Benefits (EOB) form a few days ago that listed a number of charges from University of California San Francisco. The amount that the hospital charged altogether, not including surgeon’s fees, was $770, 000 approximately. This includes $256,000 for the spinal implant (two titanium rods and screws) and $119,537 for the operating room. In addition, there was a $2264 fee for two units of blood which were administered to me; the blood itself is not charged, but processing, typing and cross-matching was charged.
These fees, which are known as “book” charges, are only charged to patients with no insurance; insurance companies pay only a small percentage of these amounts.
I have complained about astronomical medical prices in the past, so I have little more to say. It just shocks me more when I see it applied to my personal situation.
The Washington Post published an article on Friday about ten former nuclear launch control officers who have signed an open letter stating that Donald should not be trusted with the keys to command the launch of nuclear ballistic missiles and airplanes carrying nuclear weapons. The “keys” referred to are the emergency systems that allow the President (and a few others) to command launching a nuclear war in the last extremity when all other systems have failed, for example when a first strike by enemy powers (originally the Soviet Union) has disabled our command-and-control apparatus. That pretty well sums up the story, and no other “former nuclear launch control officers” have come forward to support Donald.
Just to be certain that you don’t think I am letting Hillary off lightly: after thirty or more years of Judicial Watch lawsuits and other unwanted scrutiny by the “vast right wing conspiracy”, no one has been able to indict Hillary for anything. Her husband Bill lost his law license over the impeachment and had a heart attack which probably ended his ability to sexually harass anyone, but Hillary is still hanging in there.
Hillary’s most recent problems, the Wikileaks disclosures of her hacked emails, have been trivial in comparison to Donald’s peccadillos. Wikileaks has had some emails published, but they have not been the “smoking guns” that they have hoped for. Everything they have disclosed is either ambiguous, distorted, or completely unfounded. There is a possibility that they are saving something really nasty for the last few days of the campaign, but we will have to wait to see if they can come up with anything worse.
The New York Times has published the tales of two women who were sexually assaulted by Donald, 35 yr ago and just recently. The stories are fairly brief and clear, and the women swear they are telling the truth. Donald has threatened to sue over these stories, which is amusing because Donald doesn’t seem to care that the law is quite clear on the freedom of the press in cases where the truth is being told about public figures like himself.
These stories join numerous other apparently truthful accounts of Donald’s sexually aggressive behavior, including his rape of a thirteen-year-old who was impressed into sexual slavery and had her life destroyed as a result: she has filed a civil suit which is finally progressing to pretrial status, as described here.
More comments on the New York Times story:
It is unfortunate, and certainly deliberate on Donald’s part, that there are no third parties who are willing to declare that they have witnessed most of these sexual assaults (there must be hundreds of similar cases; some have called Gloria Allred…)
Donald has always been a bully, pure and simple, rich enough to get away with it. We don’t want this role model for our children.
Donald’s reaction to the reporter who called him for “comment” is the real capper: He completely lost his cool, not only shouting at the reporter, but saying the Times was “making up the allegations to hurt him and he would sue…”
Apparently Donald is unaware or does not care that the truth is an absolute defense to tort claims of libel and slander against public figures like presidential candidates. What makes him think that a reporter from the Times would be intimidated by such statements? Doesn’t he remember how many times he has repeated the same threats, with no effect?
Donald has no self-control and no imagination. He repeats the same insults and ridiculous threats over and over, without even any variety in them– everyone who displeases him is a “disgusting human being”.
Anyone who would vote for this pig is deeply deluded. For those who cannot bring themselves to vote for Hillary, there is another “libertarian/conservative” on the ballot in all fifty states.
I have complete confidence in stating that Donald is going to lose if the RNC doesn’t pay him to withdraw before November 8.
Here’s a report that describes how EpiPen, which costs over $700 at CVS, can be manufactured for less than ten dollars: http://usuncut.com/class-war/epipen-sells-for-700-only-costs-8-to-make/
By the way, the Mylan CEO’s salary has gone up by 460 percent in the last nine years, and the price of EpiPen has gone up by 671 percent, in line with most other popular and/or essential drugs.
Now I know the true meaning of the saying: “cocaine is G-d’s way of telling you you have too much money.” Naturally, Donald has enough money so that he need not ever be concerned about a) ever running out of cocaine or b) ever having his dealer snitch on him. I never used enough of the stuff to recognize the visible signs of cocaine use when I see them: sniffling, acute elevation of mood, hyperactivity, and irritability, all subsiding within an hour or so and followed by acute depression and fatigue, with a distinct desire to repeat the dose. The fact that he sniffled repeatedly (with a frequency that decreased during the debate) during the first debate was attributed by one famous ex-cocaine user (a famous movie star known to most as Princess Leia) to his use of cocaine, and we have no obvious reason to think otherwise.
As to debates, I was impressed by the number of times Donald interrupted Hillary, as well as the body language he displayed when he was not interrupting her. He wandered about the stage, clutched his chair and swayed, stood behind her menacingly, or sniffled repeatedly (ninety times by one count.)
Donald’s chances of winning the presidential election have deteriorated from 17 to 13%, according to the New York Times assessment of polls and their effect on the Electoral College. These chances are not due to the latest debate, but related to polls conducted by CBS and the Wall Street Journal before the debate.
The New York Times assesses Hillary’s chances of winning the presidential election at 83%. The reason: the 2005 “hot mike” recording of Donald’s lewd and misogynistic comments about groping and “moving” on women who could not resist his advances because of his wealth. Republican Congressmen and women as well as governors are abandoning his candidacy in larger and larger numbers; here is a quote from a NYT story about the fallout from release of the recording:
But it was not until a pair of conservative women, Representatives Barbara Comstock of Virginia and Martha Roby of Alabama, implored Mr. Trump to withdraw that previously hesitant Republicans stepped forward to reject Mr. Trump’s candidacy.
Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire was the first Republican senator facing a competitive re-election to say she would no longer back Mr. Trump, announcing in a statement that she would write in Mr. Pence for president instead.
Note that it is conservative Republican women who are leading the defections from Donald’s camp. The situation in American politics has changed drastically since the days in 1999 that Republicans could impeach a Democratic president for his very private sexual behavior, and the president could easily survive the assault. In less than twenty years, women have turned the corner and are reaching for their rightful place as the 51% majority of the people. No longer is it possible for men to treat women with this kind of domination, to use an anodyne word for sexual harassment and debasement, and expect to be elected to political office.
It does not matter now that this recording was made eleven years ago. A man can NEVER live down this kind of talk, no matter how long he lives. Women have finally dug in their heels and said no, loudly and repeatedly.
According to sources with inside knowledge, there are recordings of Donald saying worse things: if you’re a masochist, you can read about it on complex.com.
Conrad Theodore Seitz 