I got the date of the Brexit vote correct when I gave my prediction as to the outcome, but I got today’s date wrong.
Today is the 22nd, not the 23rd the day of the vote.
My prediction still stands though.
Category: Stupid
F%$# the Teabaggers
I understand how the Teabagger wing of Republican Party gave us Donald Trump.
I also understand how Trump has done the nearly impossible, which is to make what is arguably the least electable candidate for President since Michael Dukakis the front runner, which must seriously roast Teabagger chestnuts:
………
This, then, is the ultimate outcome from the tea party takeover of the Republican Party by people like Wendy Day. She contributed to Trump’s ascent by blowing up the party and is now upset that it’s not her own candidate Ted Cruz who was the victor.
Cry me a river, Ms. Day.
And welcome to your worst nightmare: President Hillary Clinton.
I under the that is a schadenfreude moment, but what about the rest of us?
The rest of use are going to have to live with the consequences of this: More war, more sucking up to Wall Street, more neoliberal economics, more privatization of essential government services, and more job destroying trade deals.
Thanks, Teabaggers.
This Reminds Me of the Railroad Industry
I worked at GE Transportation System in the early 1990s aas a locomotive systems engineer.
After years of contraction and decay, they were recapitalizing.
Standard line was that they had gotten to the point where they had to recapitalize, but it was something more basic: The Wall Street types who believed that railroads were dying had finally looted all they could, and they had been replaced by management that actually believed in railroads.
Freight rail in the Us has been on a generally upward path since.
Well, we are seeing the same thing in the newspaper business these days, with the jargon of the official launch of Tronc, formerly Tribune Publishing being a particularly egregious example.
As Allison Hantschel observes, “Media Companies Hate News, the Internet, Employees and their Own Customers:
CasSelle: We produce tons of great content every single day. We’re really focused on how we we deliver it to people in a way they want to consume it more and more.
Vasquez: One of the key ways we’re going to harness the power of our journalism is to have an optimization group. This Tronc team, will work with all of the local markets, to harness the power of our local journalism, feed it into a funnel, and then optimize it so we reach the biggest global audience possible.
Yes, Tronc shall take the corn feed of journalism and funnel it into the optimization-group goose, to make delicious foie gras that will be consumed by the digital natives.It arguably gets worse from there. And what’s genuinely sad is that people who talk like this typically don’t understand how the internet actually works—that’s why they lean on buzzwords—or have any notion of how to communicate with journalists, who tend to bristle at this stuff.
These are internal employee videos designed to PUMP YOU UP about your newfound place not at Tribune Publishing, a recognizable name that at least still sounded impressive, but at Tronc, which sounds like you stepped on a duck.
I understand that conventional journalism in general, and the newspaper business in particular, faces challenges, but the bigger problem is that upper management does not believe in the product: Journalism. (Of course, there is also the fact that Sam Zell ran the company into the ground).
Our MBA/Wall Street/Private Equity management “Culture” does nothing but loot.
This Fetish with “Freedumb Bomz” Is Becoming Tiresome
It turns that for much of the State Department, the lesson to be learned from the disaster that is Iraq, where we used violence to institute regime change, and the disaster that is Libya, where we used violence to institute regime change, and the disaster that is Syria, where our support for Saudi and Turkish use of violence to institute regime change, is yet more violence to institute regime change:
Robert S. Ford, a former ambassador to Syria, said, “Many people working on Syria for the State Department have long urged a tougher policy with the Assad government as a means of facilitating arrival at a negotiated political deal to set up a new Syrian government.”
Mr. Ford, who is now a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, resigned from the Foreign Service in 2014 out of frustration with the administration’s hands-off policy toward the conflict.
In the memo, the State Department officials wrote that the Assad government’s continuing violations of the partial cease-fire, known as a cessation of hostilities, will doom efforts to broker a political settlement because Mr. Assad will feel no pressure to negotiate with the moderate opposition or other factions fighting him. The government’s barrel bombing of civilians, it said, is the “root cause of the instability that continues to grip Syria and the broader region.”
“The moral rationale for taking steps to end the deaths and suffering in Syria, after five years of brutal war, is evident and unquestionable,” it said. “The status quo in Syria will continue to present increasingly dire, if not disastrous, humanitarian, diplomatic and terrorism-related challenges.”
The memo acknowledged that military action would have risks, not the least further tensions with Russia, which has intervened in the war on Mr. Assad’s behalf and helped negotiate a cease-fire. Those tensions increased on Thursday when, according to a senior Pentagon official, Russia conducted airstrikes in southern Syria against American-backed forces fighting the Islamic State.
The State Department officials insisted in their memo that they were not “advocating for a slippery slope that ends in a military confrontation with Russia,” but rather a credible threat of military action to keep Mr. Assad in line.
Because declaring war on the Assad regime, and their Russian allies is clearly the road to peace.
In this case, the memo mainly confirms what has been clear for some time: The State Department’s rank and file have chafed at the White House’s refusal to be drawn into the conflict in Syria.
Because there is something clearly wrong about not going to war in a country with little or no strategic significance because we do not like the guy in charge.
Hey, it doesn’t matter that all the military forces, excepting the Kurds, who oppose Assad are affiliated with either ISIS or al Qaeda, or that the Kurds are being bombed by our “allies” the Turks, who are supporting ISIS, the solution to the problem is clearly more war.
Let’s also be clear that this sort of unilateral action, which absent a security council resolution would be illegal under international law, would likely entail a response from the Syrians with significant Russian aid, which is their right under international law.
The “Moar Bomz” crowd have a 3 decade long record of failure. Perhaps it is time to tell them to shut the f%$# up and get another job in a different industry.
They need to be asking, “Do you want fries with that,” for a living.
Deep Thought
I’ll Take Self Entitled Clueless Assholes for $500, Alex
Bill Gates has a solution for world hunger that is almost as brilliant as Windows Vista®.
He’s going to be sending chickens to the poor people of the world.
Brilliant.
And he has chosen Bolivia as one of the first recipients of his largess.
One problem: Bolivia is a major exporter of chicken, and they told him to go cluck himself:
The Bolivian government has rejected a donation of hens offered by the US billionaire Bill Gates………
“How can he think we are living 500 years ago, in the middle of the jungle not knowing how to produce?” the Bolivian development minister, César Cocarico, told journalists. “Respectfully, he should stop talking about Bolivia.”
………Bolivia produces 197m chickens annually and has the capacity to export 36m, the local poultry producing association said.
This is the charitable equivalent of the blue screen of death, which is amazingly apropos.
Operation Ridiculous Clusterf%$#
Speaking of US military, intelligence, and foreign policy failures, it appears that our efforts to overthrow Assad are failing, in part because CIA’s and the Pentagon’s proxies are literally at war with each other:
Two Department of Defense officials told The Daily Beast that they are not eager to support the rebels in the city of Aleppo because they’re seen as being affiliated with al Qaeda in Syria, or Jabhat al Nusra. The CIA, which supports those rebel groups, rejects that claim, saying alliances of convenience in the face of a mounting Russian-led offensive have created marriages of battlefield necessity, not ideology.
“It is a strange thing that DoD hall chatter mimics Russian propaganda,” one U.S. official, who supports the intelligence community position, wryly noted to Pentagon claims that the opposition and Nusra are one in the same.
But even if the rebels were completely separated from Nusra, there would still be something of a strategic conflict with U.S. military goals. The rebels in Aleppo, these Pentagon officials note, are fighting the Bashar al-Assad regime; the American military effort, on the other hand, is primarily about defeating the self-proclaimed Islamic State.
………
The intelligence community, which backed opposition forces in Aleppo, believes ISIS cannot be defeated as long as Assad is in power. The terror group, they say, thrives in unstable territories. And only local forces—like the ones backed by the CIA—can mitigate that threat.
………
“The U.S. has two isolated programs that are not mutually supporting each other and are actually sometimes at odds with each other,” said Jennifer Cafarella, a Syria analyst at the Washington-based Institute for the Study of War.
Following the lead of the House of Saud, and allowing the CIA to engage in its regime change fantasies are no way to run a foreign policy.
I Really Want to Move to a Cave
After the phony story about Bernie Sanders skydiving, now we have this:
Hillary’s Foreign Policy Speech: Queen Galadriel Before Her Magic Mirror
The silly season is upon us.
Insanity Is Defined as Doing the Same Thing over and over Again and Expecting Different Results
Barack Obama has decided that terrorizing the population of Yemen with drones, and allowing the House of Saud to indiscriminately bomb civilians is a successful antiterrorism strategy.
The net effect has been to quadrupling the size of al Qaeda in Yemen:
On September 10, 2014, President Obama gave a speech advocating for the same kind of approach to counterterrorism against ISIL his Administration had been using with Yemen (and Somalia).
………
Today, the Soufan Group wrote up an alarming detail from the State Department Country Report on Terrorism for last year: AQAP has quadrupled in size since Obama’s speech.
This is what happens you have a failed policy, and you stick with the conventional wisdom.
It is a failure of intellect.
It is a failure of imagination.
It is an unalloyed failure.
Today In Idiocy
1,014 Miles Distance Might Explain the Coverage
Over at Tablet Magazine,Yair Rosenberg wonders what sort of liberal antisemitism makes The New York Times condemn single sex hours at a Brooklyn swimming pool for Orthodox Jews, but say nothing at all about a similar program for Muslims in Minneapolis.
Ummmm….Here is a clue: One happened in Minneapolis, the other in Brooklyn. Why would the New York Times would take more interest in one than the other?
Perhaps because one is happening in New York, the Times home town and the other is happening a about 1,014 miles away as the crow flies?
Mr. Rosenberg, were you dropped on your head as a youth?
I Have an Irresistable Urge to Live in a Cave for the Next 5 Months
It appears that a low level Bernie Sanders staffer was doing advance work for a rally in California, and was looking at holding the event at an airport.
It turns out that there was a sky diving concern there, and said staffer name dropped to get a chance at doing a tandem jump with the proprietor of NorCal Skydiving, Jimmy Haliday.
This ended up with (I’m not joking here) international coverage about Bernie Sanders skydiving:
Bernie Sanders will not be skydiving into a California rally, as was briefly, but widely speculated on Friday.
Yet remarkably, it does seem that the Democratic presidential candidate’s campaign team explored the idea of parachuting the 74-year-old candidate into the event.
The unlikely rumor was widely shared on social media after a story in the Press Democrat, a local paper in northern California, suggested the Vermont senator might skydive at an evening rally hosted by a skydiving company at the Cloverdale Municipal airport, about 90 miles north of San Francisco.
The campaign was swift to shoot down the rumor. “Ha I wouldn’t count on it,” Sanders spokeswoman Sarah Ford texted the Guardian when asked for confirmation.
………
On Thursday, Halliday, whose business is renting out airport space to the campaign, even did a trial jump with a member of the Sanders team. “They tested me out … I kind of showed them what Bernie might expect.”
It appears that the staffer who jumped with Halliday was a (possibly overzealous) member of the campaign’s “advance team”, which scouts locations and prepares for rallies. It is unclear if queries about the senator jumping out of an aircraft were sanctioned by his campaign headquarters.
If you had any doubt, we are officially in the silly season, and it’s only going to get worse.
I just want to get away from it all until the damn election is over?
Anyone know of any AirBNB vacancies in Pyongyang?
I’m sick of this crap.
The Clintons Really Do Hate the Working Man
Yesterday in Cranford, NJ, Bill Clinton discussing Donald Trump’s surprising political success noted that “Non-college-educated Americans need to be brought along to the future.”
I shouldn’t be surpriaed. After 40 years in politics, demonizing the poor, diminishing labor unions, embracing the powerful, helping send decent middle class jobs to Mexico and China, I guess the fact that they hold the ordinary working American in disdain should have been obvious.
The Clintons think that people who work on their feet, “need to be brought into the future.”
They are avatars of the professional class in the Democratic Party, and smug condescension drips from them.
And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme
What a surprise. The US policy of assassination makes extremest groups more extreme and more dangerous:
The elimination of Taliban leader Mansour will only increase the danger to Afghan civilians, a US terrorism analyst, whose research focuses on the impact of targeted killings, predicts.
Dr Max Abrahms, from Northeastern University in Boston, said the US Government does not look carefully enough at the strategic implications of its strikes on extremist leaders.
He said he had done a number of studies on leadership decapitation of a militant group and he had not found a statistically significant reduction in the amount of violence perpetrated by the group after a leader was removed.
“In fact these decapitation strikes can actually be counter-productive, because one of the assumptions of the targeted killing campaigns is that the replacement of the leader that you killed will be more moderate,” Dr Abrahms said.
“And yet I find just the opposite to be true. The replacement is even more extreme.
“So for that reason, in the immediate aftermath of a successful targeted killing, like over this weekend, the group’s violence tends to become even more extreme, in the sense that it’s even more likely to attack civilian targets.”
………
“What I’ve seen is that the younger people to emerge in the Taliban are actually even crazier, if you will, than the old guard.”
And then Abrams says that, “He did not think the US Government very carefully studied the strategic implications of taking out Mansour.”
Gee, you think?
The problem here is that there are way too many people out there who think that our “Freedumb Bomz” will make the world a better place because they are our weapons.
Like the bite of a dog into a stone, it is a stupidity.
H/t Empty Wheel.
Tweet of the Day
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Washington Post. pic.twitter.com/D3R2bixdzT— Rob Beschizza (@Beschizza) May 22, 2016
The Washington Post OP/ED pages: Making the Wall Street Journal editorials look sane and coherent for 16 years.
H/t naked capitalism.
Why Not Both?
Angry Bear wonders if, “Economists Idiots or Just Delusional?”
If reducing the value of the policies If held by those who are continuously employed, either by taxing them or forcing those people to move to a less comprehensive plan than their risk-aversion preferences, is going to “reduce costly distortions in U.S. health care,” the only possible conclusion is that total health care spending is going to get costlier on average.
Yes, you might argue this will reduce “distortion.” But you would have to be an idiot—or, apparently, Alan Auerbach (Strongly) or Austan Goolsbee—to believe that is a good thing.
Note that Goolsbee has been a senior economic advisor to Obama, and his predilection for so-called market efficiencies at the expense of the poor and powerless has been common knowledge for quite some time.
It does explain many of the policy shortcomings of the Obama animation.
Posted via mobile.
Quit Drawing Targets on Your Shoes, Morons
The useless meat sacks known as “Senate Moderates” are now prostrating themselves before the possibility of President Trump:
As Democrats portray Donald Trump as a dangerous leader for his party, most of them barely acknowledge he could be president. But some centrist Democrats say they’re ready and willing to work with the business mogul should he defeat their party’s nominee.
“The people will have a chance to vote. If Donald Trump is elected president there will be a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation about what that agenda looks like,” explained Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who has long backed Hillary Clinton. “If he’s president, we’re going to have disagreement. But we’d better all figure out how to come up with an agenda for the American people.”
Getting ready for a potential Trump presidency in their home states may just be good politics for moderate senators such as Heitkamp, Jon Tester of Montana and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. They’ll be top targets for Republicans in 2018, a midterm year that could favor the GOP if recent trends of lower turnouts in nonpresidential elections continue. And it’s a good bet that they’ll need Trump voters to keep their jobs.
Seriously?
These cheese eating surrender monkeys are panicking over the midterms, and so they are engaging in activities calculated to demoralize the base.
It’s stupid on a policy level, it’s stupid, on a political level, it’s even worse.
This is blind unreasoning panic.
I’ve seen zebras chased by cheetahs that carry themselves with more grace and dignity.
So Does Blowing Up Innocent Civilians, You Over Pampered Sack of Sh%$
David Petraeus makes the point that anti-Muslim bigotry helps terrorists.
While it is an obvious point coached as deep meaning, which is kind of what Petraeus does, it misses the obvious point, which is that our mindless drone war, of which Petraeus was its most aggressive advocate, was an even more effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and Daesh.
We have been reigning down death from the skies on wedding parties, children, and first responders (“double tap” strikes), and this creates people who want revenge on the west in general and the US in particular.
There is a special place for you in hell.
This is Mindbogglingly Stupid
At the Nevada state convention, it appears that the (Hillary supporting) convention chair decided to put her thumb on the scales even though her side had already won:
Organizers of the Nevada State Democratic Convention said they had to rush to wrap up the “unruly and unpredictable” event on Saturday after security became an issue and objects, including chairs, were being thrown.
State party officials said authorities at the Paris casino in Las Vegas informed them around 10 p.m. that they could no longer provide the necessary security for the event, where tensions between Bernie Sanders supporters and party leaders flared up. The convention was scheduled to end at 7 p.m.
………
Sanders supporters have accused state party leaders of rigging the process against them, and they objected to procedural votes to approve the rules of the event. They also questioned a credentials committee’s disqualification of 58 would-be Sanders delegates, who state party officials said didn’t provide evidence about their identities or weren’t registered to vote as Democrats by a May 1 deadline.
………
After casino officials told convention organizers to wrap up the event Saturday night, party chairwoman Roberta Lange accepted a motion to appoint delegates pre-approved by the Hillary Clinton and Sanders campaigns, organizers said. She also accepted a motion to elect the state central committee according to rules submitted by county party chairs.
Sanders supporters upset with the proceedings staged a protest outside the Nevada State Democratic Party headquarters on Sunday, writing in sidewalk chalk “Roberta Lange murdered democracy” and “Fire Roberta.” Officials also said Lange had received hundreds of phone calls and text messages, including death threats, after her cellphone number was posted on social media.
Sanders issued a statement Friday, as tensions simmered before the convention, saying all Democrats shared the common goals of defeating Donald Trump and electing Democrats to office. “Working together respectfully and constructively on Saturday at the Nevada Democratic convention will move us closer to those essential goals,” he said.
Hillary Clinton really has two things going for her in the race for the nomination, her “inevitability”, and her claimed ability to unify the party in November.
The actions in Nevada mitigate against these perceived advantages.
If the Clinton campaign is as sure as they claim about her victory in the nomination, they aren’t, (and neither am I) they need to stop going scorched earth.
Just Give them to Mexico
Texan ‘Phants are back on the secession binge:
If the nationalists get their way, this November might be the last time Texans vote for a US president.
On Wednesday, the Platform Committee of the Texas Republican Party voted to put a Texas independence resolution up for a vote at this week’s GOP convention, according to a press release from the pro-secession Texas Nationalist Movement. The resolution calls for allowing voters to decide whether the Lone Star State should become an independent nation.
File this under, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”
Al-Gebra Terrorist Operative Uncovered on American Airlines Flight
My bad, not Al-Gebra, Algebra.
It turns that an award winning economist of Italian descent was ethnically profiled for doing mathematics for a talk that he was going to give:
On Thursday evening, a 40-year-old man — with dark, curly hair, olive skin and an exotic foreign accent — boarded a plane. It was a regional jet making a short, uneventful hop from Philadelphia to nearby Syracuse.
Or so dozens of unsuspecting passengers thought.
The curly-haired man tried to keep to himself, intently if inscrutably scribbling on a notepad he’d brought aboard. His seatmate, a blond-haired, 30-something woman sporting flip-flops and a red tote bag, looked him over. He was wearing navy Diesel jeans and a red Lacoste sweater – a look he would later describe as “simple elegance” – but something about him didn’t seem right to her.
………
Then, for unknown reasons, the plane turned around and headed back to the gate. The woman was soon escorted off the plane. On the intercom a crew member announced that there was paperwork to fill out, or fuel to refill, or some other flimsy excuse; the curly-haired passenger could not later recall exactly what it was.
The wait continued.
Finally the pilot came by, and approached the real culprit behind the delay: that darkly-complected foreign man. He was now escorted off the plane, too, and taken to meet some sort of agent, though he wasn’t entirely sure of the agent’s affiliation, he would later say.
And then the big reveal: The woman wasn’t really sick at all! Instead this quick-thinking traveler had Seen Something, and so she had Said Something.
That Something she’d seen had been her seatmate’s cryptic notes, scrawled in a script she didn’t recognize. Maybe it was code, or some foreign lettering, possibly the details of a plot to destroy the dozens of innocent lives aboard American Airlines Flight 3950. She may have felt it her duty to alert the authorities just to be safe. The curly-haired man was, the agent informed him politely, suspected of terrorism.
The curly-haired man laughed.
He laughed because those scribbles weren’t Arabic, or another foreign language, or even some special secret terrorist code. They were math.
Yes, math. A differential equation, to be exact.
Had the crew or security members perhaps quickly googled this good-natured, bespectacled passenger before waylaying everyone for several hours, they might have learned that he — Guido Menzio — is a young but decorated Ivy League economist. And that he’s best known for his relatively technical work on search theory, which helped earn him a tenured associate professorship at the University of Pennsylvania as well as stints at Princeton and Stanford’s Hoover Institution.
We are a nation of panicked cowards, soiling ourselves at the smallest provocation.