I have seen the reports of the Marine ?battalion? raiding Langley, the helicopter hovering over Langley for 30 minutes, etc. Certainly different bureaucracies are in charge of different forces and are the funding and thinking behind them, and those thinkings and fundings are not consistent with each other. Thus, some military cooperating with the Russians, others not, some military folding and disappearing with some real attacks and some not real, rescued leaders from beleaguered towns, etc.
Discord among our Deep State is awesome to watch, reminds me of the Rome of Titus Pullo. Finally, the Israeli-Neocons are losing their eternal war, slowly. Trump must have the remaining Israeli-Neocons in government, e.g. the UN, as part of some grand bargain. But who knows? Intelligent doesn’t mean knowledgable, and good judgement in business is often not good judgement in government. Trump may yet be judged worse than most, but this is an extremely corrupt environment he is working in, the threats of impeachment were incessant, the personal attacks on character, intelligence, honesty, … were incessant.
Despite everything things are apparently getting straightened out bit by bit, we heard the stories of ‘refurbishing’ the Oval Office and Trump’s offices in his other residences, translated as ‘got rid of all the bugs and established the security to keep them out’. He doesn’t have it all under control yet, but is now having hour-long discussions with Putin that NSA and the CIA can’t listen in on.
So small progress on ending the wars, not yet a clean loss accepted by all elements of the American government. No progress on immigration or the wall has made it into legislation.
Many more arrests of pedophiles, but I don’t think that is a federal priority, beyond the FBI and other agencies around the world (Australians have been standouts) continuing to operate the various pedophile sites for exchanging photographs so as to arguably-entrap non-innocent pedophiles. I am sure they got some innocents along the way, but they were breaking the law every step of the way in operating those web sites. They were not following the law. You can’t do justice beginning with breaking a law.
But not all of those people, there were quite a few in the Pentagon, for example, all of whose cases disappeared, no charges. No doubt also the cases of the many Pentagon, NSA, CIA, … contractor’s employees. No high-level pedophiles have been arrested, e.g. the Podesta brothers. No arrests of child traffickers, e.g. Bill’s friend Jeffrey Epstein, pedophile and known trafficker of children via Dyncorp planes, the CIA’s public subsidiary.
For the rest of the swamp, I don’t see anything in Session’s background making him so cautious wrt prosecutions of the Clinton’s, but clearly he isn’t up to the job. Fire the man and put someone in there who is clean enough to be honest, clean up the entire department of Justice if that is even conceptually possible and bring charges against the Clintons and their many henchmen. Surely those have been written and only need signed off on by politically-cautious appointees? A politically-cautious employee would certainly to that, all up and down the bureaucracy are the evidence drawers kept secret with some special access code needed, the investigations buried, the evidence of favors repaid. It takes a clean hierarchy to find and reveal that evidence.
I do not yet see evidence of such honest administration in the US government. The Pentagon is obviously hopelessly corrupt, Generals are key in this administration, Pentagon troops are in Syria completely illegally doing what?
I am disappointed in so little progress in sorting this nation out, getting us back into an honest society and government. We need an honestly Honest Party :
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/saudis-going-fight-tehran-last-dead-american.html
The Surveillance State is the death of the American Republic. It is winning every battle, there has been no rollback of any power after Snowden’s revelations. No country can survive with NSA’s blackmail database at the base of the political system, that is instant, deep, builtin corruption :
Economic distortion due to interacting rules and regulations and laws. Yes, exactly as I keep repeating, the most benign and obviously correct regulation interacts with all the other regulations of the world and that allows gaming the system.
This is a good article on what drives rents, and why rents don’t go down just because there are vacancies. TBTF banks are key to the process, it couldn’t work with local knowledge.
This is a system that falls apart all at once, there can be no gradual failure mode because economic loss is concentrated by the system, remote from the local economy that underlies profit and loss of individual properties. Those terms lose meaning because of the financial system funding the property, which is always part of the local economy. So local economic decisions are objectively suboptimal because of TBTF operations.
The system fails when the stories about rents can’t work, the point at which merely owning the building is a cash drain because rents don’t cover operating expenses, which include the interest on the loans. Banks can’t package many of those, investors catch on, normally all at once. That is what a commercial real estate crash is. The loss of that flow of funds puts banks in trouble. Those financial instruments are a major source of bank’s profits, and investments for many other financial firms. The cascade of losses spreads through the financial system and into the main street economy as loans dry up for everything.
Again, wherever I look, I see very bad control systems for major elements of the economy. Systems that are not designed to be fail-safe and well-tested with an accurate set of real-world inputs and combinations of inputs will fail. Not ‘if’, ‘when’.
One view of economic cycles of cycles is they are evolution’s equivalent of environmental cycles testing the quality of thinking and foresight of the individual economic entities. Short-term events such as recessions are weather, longer cycles of depressions are the El Ninos. Very long cycles, ice ages, haven’t been seen since the Middle Ages, the 100-years war. The economic cycles weed out bad thinking and poor foresight as winter eliminates plants and animals and ice ages entire species.
I read these and wrote this in this order, just now the 2nd confirms all of that.
The longer this mal-investment continues before the inevitable crash, the deeper and longer will be the crash. Poor people will suffer the most, around the world because politicians have short-term incentive plans, get past the next election because Congress is the most lucrative place they can be, so many are the opportunities for entirely legal graft. That produces very malleable representatives, votes garner campaign contributions and insider investment information and opportunities to be on boards of directors :
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2017/11/27/the-paradox-of-persistent-vacancies-and-high-prices
The first rule of successful occupation strategy is not to oppress ethnic communities with many unemployed young men :
https://mondediplo.com/2014/09/05sinai
This has to be BS, an attempt to associate Libertarian values with the CIA’s values. Frederich Hayak and Friedman did not have the background to help in running the killings and torture. Yes, Chili got Libertarian advice, and their economy did improve markedly after the revolution. The comments prove my reaction, neither had anything to do with Pinochet except giving economic advice, which they did to all countries who asked, including Communist dictatorships :
https://boingboing.net/2017/11/26/dance-on-friedmans-grave.html
The longest-living vertebrate could be 600 years old, a Greenland Shark :
Normal and average are not the same thing, contrary to mean, median and modal thinking :
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-017-07197-6
The people saving our society from the CIA’s opioid epidemic are mostly women and often religious :
https://newrepublic.com/article/145967/making-opioid-epidemic-visible
This is an interesting paper predicting increased precipitation in Mesoscale Convective Systems based on Anthropogenic Global Warming and thus more flooding. However, I note that the AGW-based and -predicted increase in numbers and intensity of hurricanes or other severe weather types has not occurred, despite the many predictions and studies :
https://www.wunderground.com/cat6/new-study-larger-more-intense-us-storm-complexes-way
No kidding, government funding stultifies science and produces bad science. There have been many people saying this through the years, but nothing ever changes, the hopeless-from-first-principles Tokamak rolls on and Cold Fusion is not funded :
Truckers don’t think much of Tesla’s Semi :
Hitler was his own architect. This is one of NC’s links on the subject, yesterday’s from Western Rifle was more complete. Clearly much ‘news’ is PR-propaganda, bought and paid for :
https://twitter.com/anhistorian/status/934080718816399361
https://twitter.com/mariachong/status/934817023162441728
Most of crime is related to drugs or sexual services :
In fact, 85% of drug-related arrests are for possession, and drug-related arrests are about 14% of all arrests. A great number of other crimes are to obtain money for drugs, or part of drug dealing. A tiny portion of arrests, 47,000 out of about 11 million in 2014, are for prostitution.
So drugs are the big category, and easiest to fix. Just legalize all drugs. It has worked in other countries in modern times, and worked well in the US up until the prohibitionists got control in the 1920s :
https://www.ojjdp.gov/ojstatbb/ezaucr/asp/ucr_display.asp
‘Pound the Frame’ is a standard propaganda technique. This bases the entire long article on ‘the fact’ of low unemployment in the US and what that means for economic theory. But jobs are not freely available in much of the country, and good jobs are scarce everywhere :
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/11/nothing-natural-natural-rate-unemployment.html
The push to revoke the 2nd Amendment continues. Instant revolution, of course, should that somehow come to be :
I have run across several successful multi-cultural societies, successful over 100+ years. Madagascar seems to be one of them, tho I am mostly ignorant of the place. This documentary is interesting, tho pollyannish. There has been very good music coming from Madagascar for 30 years :
thinkpatriot 