How do we know that black bloc is run by police informers? Because they break windows and burn cars but leave surveillance cameras unmolested.
—Reported as said by, “A correspondent,” on Naked Capitalism
Considering the numerous times that undercover law enforcement has been the primary motivator in violent protests, I’m not sure if this is a tinfoil hat, or just a Panama hat with a red and black band.
I am the dullest motherf%$#er on the face of the Earth.
I noted a while ago that I had purchased a 2004 Toyota Prius.
I have been driving it for a while, and I noticed that I am enjoying it far more than any car I’ve ever driven.
I just realized something: This is my midlife crisis car, and instead of something like an MG-TD, or an old Triumph, or a Karmann Ghia, or a Jaguar, or Fiat Spider, I bought a 13 year old used hybrid.
They could market me as a sleeping aid.
Donald Trump just officially pulled the US out of the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP):
President Trump formally abandoned the Trans-Pacific Partnership on Monday, pulling away from Asia and scrapping his predecessor’s most significant trade deal on his first full weekday in office, administration officials said.
Mr. Trump sharply criticized the partnership agreement during last year’s campaign, calling it a bad deal for American workers. Although the deal had not been approved by Congress, the decision to withdraw the American signature at the start of Mr. Trump’s administration is a signal that he plans to follow through on promises to take a more aggressive stance against foreign competitors.
In other action on a busy opening day, Mr. Trump ordered a hiring freeze in the federal work force, exempting the military. And he reinstituted limits on nongovernmental organizations that operate overseas and receive American taxpayer money from performing abortions. Republican presidents typically impose those restrictions soon after taking office, and Democratic presidents typically lift them when they take over.
The president’s withdrawal from the Asian-Pacific trade pact amounted to a drastic reversal of decades of economic policy in which presidents of both parties have lowered trade barriers and expanded ties around the world. Although candidates have often criticized trade deals on the campaign trail, those who made it to the White House, including President Barack Obama, ended up extending their reach.
He made the promise, and he kept it.
Bill Clinton promised side agreements, and never tried to get them, and Barack Obama moved heaven and earth in an attempt to pass the TPP and passed CAFTA and similar deals, with their pro big pharma, pro big Ag, pro Wall Street provisions.
Unfortunately, while putting a stake through the heart of the TPP is a good thing, Donald Trump promised a lot of stuff that is simply batsh%$ insane, and it looks like he’s going to keep those promises too.
He’s already at work on NAFTA:
Aides signaled that Mr. Trump may also move quickly on renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement. He is scheduling meetings with the leaders of Canada and Mexico, the two main partners in that pact, first negotiated by the elder President George Bush and pushed through Congress by President Bill Clinton. Nafta has been a major driver of American trade for nearly two decades, but it has long been divisive, with critics blaming it for lost jobs and lower wages.
Do not be heartened that the spray tan orange stopped clock is right once today.
We are, as the Chinese are wont to say, living in interesting times.
Old School Heavy Metal:
Dean Baker makes a point that needs to be made, that the experts have proven themselves to be unable to find their ass with both hands while insisting that they must remain the exclusive font of all policy:
Ivan Krastev, a permanent fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna, had an interesting NYT column on the disenchantment of the European public with the meritocrats who have been largely running governments there for the last three decades. Krastev’s main conclusion is that the public doesn’t identify with an internationally-oriented group of meritocrats who possess skills that are easily transferable from their home country to other countries.
While this lack of sufficient national identity may play a role in the dislike of the meritocrats, there is a much simpler explanation: they have done a horrible job. Much of Europe continues to suffer from high unemployment, or low employment rates, almost a decade after the collapse of housing bubbles sent the continent’s economy in a downward spiral. The meritocrats deserve the blame for both the weak recovery and allowing dangerous bubbles to grow in the first place. In most countries, most of the population has seen declining incomes over the last decade in spite of the substantial technological progress we have seen over this period.
It doesn’t matter if it is the City of London, or Brussels, or Wall Street, or Washington, DC, or Berlin, these people nearly destroyed our world, and continue to promulgate policies that do not work, and still they remain largely in charge of our policy apparatus.
These people need to have a job that involves asking, “Do you want fries with that?”
Russia has just completed an agreement with Syria expanding their access to the Syrian port of Tartus:
Russia and Syria have signed an agreement this week to expand Russia’s sole foreign base – a naval repair facility in Syria – into a larger naval base capable of permanently hosting 11 ships, according to the agreement issued by the Russian government.
The agreement — signed on Wednesday – would allow the Tartus installation to expand to berth larger surface combatants and submarines, according to Russian state-controlled press reports.
“The deal stipulates that 11 Russian vessels can be present in the harbor of Tartus at once, including the ships equipped with nuclear marine propulsion, provided that nuclear and environmental safety guidelines are respected,” read a report in the Kremlin-controlled Sputnik wire.
“Russia promises to send to Syria, at its request, specialists to help restore Syrian warships and will help organize the defense of the harbor of Tartus and help mount search and rescue operations in Syrian waters.”
This is not surprising.
There was always going to be a quid pro quo for Russia’s support of the Assad regime.
In his final Presidential press conference, Barack Obama said that the DNC emails were leaked, not hacked:
Three U.S. Intelligence Agencies (CIA, NSA and FBI) claim that IT-Systems of the Democratic National Committee were “hacked” in an operation related to the Russian government. They assert that emails copied during the “hack” were transferred by Russian government related hackers to Wikileaks which then published them.
President Obama disagrees. He says those emails were “leaked”.
Wikileaks had insisted that the emails it published came from an insider source not from any government. The DNC emails proved that the supposedly neutral Democratic Party committee had manipulated the primary presidential elections in favor of the later candidate Hillary Clinton. This made it impossible for the alternative candidate Bernie Sanders to win the nomination. Hillory Clinton, who had extremely high unfavorable ratings, lost the final elections.
………
Here is President Obama in his final press conference yesterday (vid @8:31):First of all, I haven’t commented on WikiLeaks, generally. The conclusions of the intelligence community with respect to the Russian hacking were not conclusive as to whether Wikileaks was witting or not in being the conduit through which we heard about the DNC emails that were leaked.
The DNC emails “that were leaked” – not “hacked” or “stolen” but “leaked”.
One wonders if this is a parting shot is primarily aimed at the involved Intelligence Agencies led by James Clapper and John Brennan. Or is dissing Hillary Clinton and her narrative the main purpose?
Dissing Hillary is the main purpose.
If Obama weren’t thoroughly in the pocket of Clapper and Brennan, he would have fired them when they lied to and spied on members of Congress.
More importantly, it indicates that the DNC email leaks were an inside job, not the work of the GRU (read the reports, the FSB may have gotten into the DNC, but they did not redistribute the results, basic spycraft).
As a woman with a Trump scarf on climbed into the backseat of a black Suburban — her driver standing by her side, eagerly waiting for her to sit down so he could close the door — she kept lunging out the vehicle to give her commentary on the scene around her. She was clearly disgusted by the marchers surrounding her car. At one point, the woman in the Suburban said to a passerby:
“If you people had jobs, you wouldn’t be out here doing this mess.”
As this happened, another woman walked by and, without pausing to look at the Chevrolet Suburbanite, said:
“Bitch, it’s Saturday.”
Frequently the analysis is about how the winners and losers in an increasingly interconnected and technical worls engage in her.
Using the example of the opoid epidemic, Lambert Strether makes another point, that the professional and credentialed class (Hillary’s base) has benefited from the losses of the working class:
That said, can we think of any reasons beyond despair why rural voters might vote red (and not blue)? I think we can, if we look at the role that urban credentialed professionals and institutions play. In “Credentialism and Corruption: The Opioid Epidemic and ‘the Looting Professional Class’” I wrote:
CEOs, marketing executives, database developers, marketing collateral designers, the sales force, middle managers of all kinds, and doctor: All these professions are highly credentialed. And all have, or should have, different levels of responsibility for the mortality rates from the opoid epidemic; executives have fiduciary responsibility; doctors take the Hippocratic Oath; those highly commissioned sales people knew or should have known what they were selling. Farther down the line, to a database designer, OXYCONTIN_DEATH_RATE might be just another field. Or not! And due to information asymmetries in corporate structures, the different professions once had different levels of knowledge. For some it can be said they did not know. But now they know; the story is out there. As reader Clive wrote:
Increasingly, if you want to get and hang on to a middle class job, that job will involve dishonesty or exploitation of others in some way.
And you’ve got to admit that serving as a transmission vector for an epidemic falls into the category of “exploitation of others.”
And I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to think that red-shift voters would identify Clinton’s base in the urban, professional classes with the very same people responsible for the opioid epidemic that was killing their families. Consciously? I don’t know. Viscerally? I’d bet on it.
It isn’t just the opiod crisis.
You see it in healthcare price increases (Doctors and administrators benefit), the skyrocketing cost of education (Administrators and tenure track professors), finance (’nuff said), etc.
The professional, college educated class needs to understand that they are not spectators to the destruction of working class lives and livelihoods, they actively benefit from this destruction.
To fix this requires sacrifices on our part.
From 1921 to Present
Over at Calculated Risk, they have the numbers for bank failures since the creation of federal deposit insurance:
In 2016, five FDIC insured banks failed. This was the lowest level since 2007.
Most of the great recession / housing bust / financial crisis related failures are behind us.
The first graph shows the number of bank failures per year since the FDIC was founded in 1933.
………
The second graph includes pre-FDIC failures. In a typical year – before the Depression – 500 banks would fail and the depositors would lose a large portion of their savings.
The late 1980s bank failures were caused by corruption and control fraud.
The 1990s bank failures would have been far larger if we hadn’t bailed them all out.
Pre FDIC is just f%$#ing scary.
The pro-corporate anti-people wing of the Democratic party is set to spend $20 million to find someone else to blame:
Hoping to help Democrats recover from what it has dubbed the party’s “worst electoral position since the Civil War,” a centrist think tank is launching a $20 million campaign to study how the party lost its way and offer a new economic agenda for moving forward.
The think tank, Third Way, on Tuesday is set to launch “New Blue,” a campaign to help Democrats reconnect with the voters who have abandoned the party. The money will be spent to conduct extensive research, reporting and polling in Rust Belt states that once formed a Blue Wall, but which voted for president-elect Donald Trump last November.
………
Part of the economic message the group is driving — which is in line with its centrist ideology — is to steer the Democratic Party away from being led into a populist lurch to the left by leaders like Sen. Bernie Sanders or Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
Let me save you $20 million: Relentlessly careerist political operatives, who have never done an honest day’s work in their lives, and loathe those who do honest work, are the problem.
Look in the f$#@ing mirror, and quit sucking up to Wall Street and big Pharma.*
Better yet, why don’t you quit your damn job, and join a monastery, preferably one that has a vow of silence.
*I’m talking to you, Corey Booker.
NATO called ‘obsolete’ by Trump, anyone who saw them fight in Afghanistan
Troof.
The Onion on the inauguration:
I’m not sure if the Biden one or the drone one is the best.
The reports of a plateau in we saw were due to a change in instrumentation and methodology.
Specifically, in the mid 1990s, ocean water temperature reporting moved from ships cooling water intake data to dedicated free-standing buoys.
It turns out that there is significant heating present in the ships that is not present in the newer methods:
Nope, climate change didn’t pause for about 15 years, scientists say – again. But just how did that misunderstanding happen?
From around 1998 to 2012, the rise in global temperatures seemed to plateau, according to NOAA’s Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST) dataset.
To most climate scientists, this so-called hiatus was another puzzle of our complex climate system for them to work out. But to people who were already skeptical of global warming, this data was evidence for the idea that human-induced climate change is a hoax.
But the data itself was unsound, scientists now say. There is no evidence of a hiatus.
………
For decades, sea surface temperatures were measured on ships, using water sucked into a ship’s engine room. But in the mid-1990s, scientists began deploying a new strategy across the world’s oceans: thermometers on buoys. By the late 1990s, this method had taken off, Hausfather says.
But here’s the catch: the buoys bobbing on the surface of the sea take colder measurements than those taken within the warm engine room of a ship. And, in the ERSST version 3b, scientists had just tacked on the buoy data without adjusting for that difference.
When NOAA scientists realized the problem, they calculated that difference and weighted the data differently, resulting in ERSST version 4. And, according to their calculations, version 4 showed more than twice as much warming, on the global scale, as version 3b.
………
Instead of looking at all the data mashed together, Hausfather and his colleagues studied the trends in the data from different sources separately, including data from ships, buoys, satellites, and drifting robots called Argo floats.
“The authors did a great job of inter-comparing independent and semi-independent SST data sets,” Thomas Karl, the lead author on the 2015 NOAA paper and former director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information, writes in an email to the Monitor. “Their results show the importance of independent measurements to clarify observational uncertainties.”
“This paper further allays any qualms that there may have been scientific errors or any non-scientific agendas,” Kevin Trenberth, senior scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, who was not part of either paper, writes to the Monitor. “Lamar Smith owes Tom Karl an apology.”
So from the late ’90s to the early teens, there was a transformation in the sources of the data, and if you view the data filtered by source, you see the ΔT, but if you view it in aggregate, it shows a moderation.
Good science, but bad news. We are in for a world of hurt.
Why we love cats:
Betsy’s DeVos’s response re free college yesterday is nearly identical to John Lewis’s attack on Sanders/defense of Clinton in February. pic.twitter.com/HaGZLYK4Aw— corey robin (@CoreyRobin) January 18, 2017
The argument was bogus when John John Lewis made it, and it is bogus now.
I have no idea what Clinton had on the Democratic Party establishment, they really did sell their soul to her during the primaries.
In Supreme Court arguments, the state of Colorado is arguing that it has no obligation to refund fines collector after a defendant is exonerated:The Supreme Court on Monday seemed deeply skeptical of a Colorado law that makes it hard for criminal defendants whose convictions are overturned to get refunds of the fines and restitution they had been ordered to pay.
The justices were helped by the forthright presentation of the state’s solicitor general, Frederick R. Yarger, who did not shy away from the more extreme implications of his argument. Money taken from defendants after valid convictions belongs to the state, he said.
A Colorado law requires people cleared by the courts to file separate civil suits and prove their innocence with clear and convincing evidence in order to obtain reimbursement. But Mr. Yarger said the state was under no obligation to do even that much. He said the state was not only free to impose onerous procedures, but could also enact a law making exonerated defendants forfeit the money entirely.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. asked if the state could impose a $10,000 fine on everyone convicted of a crime and refuse to return the money if the convictions were later overturned.
Mr. Yarger said yes. Just as there is no need to pay people for the time they spend in prison after their convictions are reversed, he said, there is no need to reimburse them for fines and fees. “The assumption is that the deprivation of both the liberty and the property at the time of conviction is lawful, and that the property passes into public funds,” he said.
………
The Colorado law was challenged by Shannon Nelson and Louis Madden, who had been ordered to pay thousands of dollars in fees and restitution after they were convicted of sex offenses. After their convictions were overturned, they filed motions in their criminal cases seeking refunds of what they had paid.
The Colorado Supreme Court ruled against them, saying that their trial courts lacked authority to compensate them. Under the state’s law, the State Supreme Court said, they had to file a new civil suit and meet a heightened burden of proof.
Stuart Banner, a lawyer for Ms. Nelson and Mr. Madden, said the state’s approach amounted to “charging people money for the privilege of trying them unlawfully.”
This may be stating the obvious, but when the state subverts the administration of justice such that it becomes little more than a protection racket, you have a Mafia state.
Amazingly enough, the story shows the subjects of the story even more self-absorbed and clueless than the headline dows:
Davos Elite Fret About Inequality Over Vintage Wine and Canapés
You morons broke the world.
You were born on 3rd base and though that you hit a triple.
You are not deserving, you are lucky.
Now try and do something to make the world a better place for the rest of us.
Yesterday, I noted that after almost 35 years, I was finally more horrified and disgusted than Palmer was in the 1982 version of the movie The Thing.
Who knew that the mixture of horror and disgust at Betsy Devos would be exceeded in the next day.
Specifically Judith Miller tweeted her horror at the commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence:
Obama commutes sentence of Chelsea Manning. How many people died because of manning’ leak? https://t.co/WrijBtp4fo— Judith Miller (@JMfreespeech) January 17, 2017
This engendered the following observation from Jason Concepcion:
don’t worry, no one can touch your high score https://t.co/2pzkm7dHEz— ☕netw3rk (@netw3rk) January 17, 2017
For those of you who don’t recall, during the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, Judith Miller, then a New York Times reporter was desperately shilling for the Bush administration (Google Judith Miller Curveball) and was typing up anything and everything that she could find, without regard to classification to help them.
So, 4,424 US Soldiers dead, and around 500,000 Iraqis dead, because of her casual handling of classified material, and her even more casual handling of the truth, and suddenly, she’s concerned about the body counts.
Why she isn’t selling perfume one cash register over from Janet Cooke for a living is completely beyond me.
H/t Naked Capitalism.