Try as he might to convince the Canadian people that he was merely looking out for the jobs of thousands of Quebecois, the Canadian Press and Parliament keep poking holes in Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s story in a corruption scandal that has tanked his poll numbers and stoked calls for his resignation.
The latest blow landed on Friday when a parliamentary committee published a clandestine recording made by former Canadian Justice Minister and AG Jody Wilson-Raybould of a phone call with former top bureaucrat and Trudeau advisor that clearly substantiates her story that she was “hounded” by Trudeau and his political henchmen, who subjected her to “inappropriate” political pressure over her decision to move ahead with the prosecution of SNC-Lavalin, a Quebec-based engineering firm accused of taking bribes from the Libyan government.
Jody Wilson-Raybould
In the December phone conversation, which Wilson-Raybould said she recorded because nobody was around to take notes, Michael Wernick, a top public servant and senior advisor to Trudeau who resigned over the scandal earlier this month, conveyed Mr. Trudeau’s concerns with her decision on the SNC-Lavalin case, despite Wilson-Raybould’s insistence that any attempt to interfere with prosecutors’ decision would constitute tampering in the judicial process.
During the call, Wernick insisted that if Wilson-Raybould didn’t offer the firm a deferred prosecution agreement, as had recently been allowed by a change in Canadian law, Trudeau would find a way to get it done “one way or another.”
Here’s more from WSJ:
Mr. Wernick suggested Mr. Trudeau wanted the company to get a settlement and was going to “find a way to get it done one way or another.” He also said he was worried, because it wasn’t good for the prime minister and attorney general to be at “loggerheads.”
Ms. Wilson-Raybould said the decision on whether to offer the company a settlement was up to prosecutors and warned that any attempt to reverse it would be seen as interference in the judicial process.
“This goes far beyond saving jobs – this is about the integrity of the prime minister,” she said in the call. “This is about interfering with one of our fundamental institutions.”
In the call, she said several times she was uncomfortable with the entire conversation.
“We are treading on dangerous ground here,” she said in the call. “I cannot act in a partisan way, and I cannot be politically motivated.”
A source close to the PM told WSJ that Trudeau, who has said he wanted to try and avoid job losses in politically vital Quebec (the firm risked going under if it was barred from receiving government contracts), wasn’t briefed on the call. Wilson-Raybould resigned from Trudeau’s cabinet in February after she was abruptly moved to a different role widely seen as a demotion.
Still, as a Parliamentary probe into the scandal ramps up, we wonder how much longer the Liberals, who have mostly closed ranks around Trudeau, can hold out.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2JTiG4J Tyler Durden
Faulty coverage of Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign later made foreign espionage a more plausible explanation for his ascent to power
Last weekend, I published a book chapter criticizing the Russiagate narrative, claiming it was a years-long press error on the scale of the WMD affair heading into the Iraq war.
Obviously (and I said this in detail), the WMD fiasco had a far greater real-world impact, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost and trillions in treasure wasted. Still, I thought Russiagate would do more to damage the reputation of the national news media in the end.
A day after publishing that excerpt, a Attorney General William Barr sent his summary of the report to Congress, containing a quote filed by Special Counsel Robert Mueller: “[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.”
Suddenly, news articles appeared arguing people like myself and Glenn Greenwald of the Intercept were rushing to judgment, calling us bullies whose writings were intended to leave reporters “cowed” and likely to “back down from aggressive coverage of Trump.”
This was baffling. One of the most common criticisms of people like Greenwald, Michael Tracey, Aaron Mate, Rania Khalek, Max Blumenthal, Jordan Chariton and many others is that Russiagate “skeptics” – I hate that term, because it implies skepticism isn’t normal and healthy in this job – were really secret Trump partisans, part of a “horseshoe” pact between far left and far right to focus attention on the minor foibles of the center instead of Trump’s more serious misdeeds. Even I received this label, and I once wrote a book about Trump called Insane Clown President.
A typical social media complaint:
@mtaibbi and all his deplorable followers. The truth will come out and your premature celebrations are embarrassing.
It’s irritating that I even have to address this, because my personal political views shouldn’t have anything to do with how I cover anything. But just to get it out of the way: I’m no fan of Donald Trump.
I had a well-developed opinion about him long before the 2016 race started. I once interned for Trump’s nemesis-biographer, the late, great muckraker Wayne Barrett. The birther campaign of 2011 was all I ever needed to make a voting decision about the man.
I started covering the last presidential race in 2015 just as I was finishing up a book about the death of Eric Garner called I Can’t Breathe. Noting that a birther campaign started by “peripheral political curiosity and reality TV star Donald Trump” led to 41 percent of respondents in one poll believing Barack Obama was “not even American,” I wrote:
If anyone could communicate the frustration black Americans felt over Stop-and-Frisk and other neo-vagrancy laws that made black people feel like they could be arrested anywhere, it should have been Barack Obama. He’d made it all the way to the White House and was still considered to be literally trespassing by a huge plurality of the population.
So I had no illusions about Trump. The Russia story bothered me for other reasons, mostly having to do with a general sense of the public being misled, and not even about Russia.
The problem lay with the precursor tale to Russiagate, i.e. how Trump even got to be president in the first place.
The 2016 campaign season brought to the surface awesome levels of political discontent. After the election, instead of wondering where that anger came from, most of the press quickly pivoted to a new tale about a Russian plot to attack our Democracy. This conveyed the impression that the election season we’d just lived through had been an aberration, thrown off the rails by an extraordinary espionage conspiracy between Trump and a cabal of evil foreigners.
This narrative contradicted everything I’d seen traveling across America in my two years of covering the campaign. The overwhelming theme of that race, long before anyone even thought about Russia, was voter rage at the entire political system.
The anger wasn’t just on the Republican side, where Trump humiliated the Republicans’ chosen $150 million contender, Jeb Bush (who got three delegates, or $50 million per delegate). It was also evident on the Democratic side, where a self-proclaimed “Democratic Socialist” with little money and close to no institutional support became a surprise contender.
Because of a series of press misdiagnoses before the Russiagate stories even began, much of the American public was unprepared for news of a Trump win. A cloak-and-dagger election-fixing conspiracy therefore seemed more likely than it might have otherwise to large parts of the domestic news audience, because they hadn’t been prepared for anything else that would make sense.
This was particularly true of upscale, urban, blue-leaning news consumers, who were not told to take the possibility of a Trump White House seriously.
Priority number-one of the political class after a vulgar, out-of-work game-show host conquered the White House should have been a long period of ruthless self-examination. This story delayed that for at least two years.
It wasn’t even clear Trump whether or not wanted to win. Watching him on the trail, Trump at times went beyond seeming disinterested. There were periods where it looked like South Park’s “Did I offend you?” thesis was true, and he was actively trying to lose, only the polls just wouldn’t let him.
Forget about the gift the end of Russiagate might give Trump by allowing him to spend 2020 peeing from a great height on the national press corps. The more serious issue has to be the failure to face the reality of why he won last time, because we still haven’t done that.
Russian President Vladimir Putin and U.S. President Trump meet in Helsinki.
In the fall of 2015, when I first started covering Trump’s campaign, a few themes popped up:
First, like any good hustler, Trump knew how to work a room. At times, he recalled a comedian trying out new material. If he felt a murmur in the crowd in one speech, he’d hit it harder the next time out.
This is how a few offhand comments about the “bad deal” wars in the Middle East turned into what seemed like more planned shots at “nation building” or overseas wars that left us “flat broke” and unable to build schools at home.
These themes seemed to come from feeling out audiences and noting these lines were scoring with veterans in his crowds. (Studies have since shown Trump did well in areas with returning vets).
As time went on, he made the traveling press part of his act. The standard campaign setup was perfect for him. We were like zoo animals, standing on risers with ropes around us to keep the un-credentialed masses out.
Even that small symbol of VIP-ism Trump turned to his advantage. Behind the ropes we were what national campaign reporters mostly always are: dorky blue-staters with liberal arts degrees from expensive colleges dressed in gingham and khaki, and looking out of place basically anywhere on earth outside a trendy city block or a Starbucks.
Trump, the billionaire, denounced us as the elitists in the room. He’d call us “bloodsuckers,” “dishonest,” and in one line that produced laughs considering who was saying it, “highly-paid.”
He also did something that I immediately recognized as brilliant (or diabolical, depending on how you look at it). He dared cameramen to turn their cameras to show the size of his crowds.
They usually wouldn’t – hey, we don’t work for the guy – which thrilled Trump, who would then say something to the effect of, “See! They’re very dishonest people.” Audiences would turn toward us, and boo and hiss, and even throw little bits of paper and other things our way. This was unpleasant, but it was hard not to see its effectiveness: he’d re-imagined the lifeless, poll-tested format of the stump speech, turning it into menacing, personal, WWE-style theater.
Trump was gunning for votes in both parties. The core story he told on the stump was one of system-wide corruption, in which there was little difference between Republicans and Democrats.
…
Perhaps just by luck, Trump was tuned in to the fact that the triumvirate of ruling political powers in America – the two parties, the big donors and the press – were so unpopular with large parts of the population that he could win in the long haul by attracting their ire, even if he was losing battles on the way.
…
The subtext was always:I may be crude, but these people are phonies, pretending to be upset when they’re making money off my bullshit.
I thought this was all nuts and couldn’t believe it was happening in a real presidential campaign. But, a job is a job. My first feature on candidate Trump was called “How America Made Donald Trump Unstoppable.” The key section read:
In person, you can’t miss it: The same way Sarah Palin can see Russia from her house, Donald on the stump can see his future. The pundits don’t want to admit it, but it’s sitting there in plain view, 12 moves ahead, like a chess game already won:
President Donald Trump…
It turns out we let our electoral process devolve into something so fake and dysfunctional that any half-bright con man with the stones to try it could walk right through the front door and tear it to shreds on the first go.
And Trump is no half-bright con man, either. He’s way better than average.
Traditional Democratic audiences appeared thrilled by the piece and shared it widely. I was invited on scads of cable shows to discuss ad nauseum the “con man” line.
This made me nervous, because it probably meant these people hadn’t read the piece, which among other things posited the failures of America’s current ruling class meant Trump’s insane tactics could actually work.
Trump was selling himself as a traitor to a corrupt class, someone who knew how soulless and greedy the ruling elite was because he was one of them.
…
The only reason most blue-state media audiences had been given for Trump’s poll numbers all along was racism, which was surely part of the story but not the whole picture. A lack of any other explanation meant Democratic audiences, after the shock of election night, were ready to reach for any other data point that might better explain what just happened.
Russiagate became a convenient replacement explanation absolving an incompetent political establishment for its complicity in what happened in 2016, and not just the failure to see it coming. Because of the immediate arrival of the collusion theory, neither Wolf Blitzer nor any politician ever had to look into the camera and say, “I guess people hated us so much they were even willing to vote for Donald Trump.”
Post-election, Russiagate made it all worse. People could turn on their TVs at any hour of the day and see anyone from Rachel Maddow to Chris Cuomo openly reveling in Trump’s troubles. This is what Fox looks like to liberal audiences.
Worse, the “walls are closing in” theme — two years old now — was just a continuation of the campaign mistake, reporters confusing what they wanted to happen with what was happening. The story was always more complicated than was being represented.
Despite the fact that the Bureau of Labor Statistics does not track job creation in the U.S. marijuana industry, a recent report claimed that the sector has created around 300,000 direct and indirect jobs in the states where the drug has been given the green light for recreational use. While job creation has been one of the more noticeable economic benefits of marijuana legalization in the United States, Statista’s Niall McCarthy notes that tax revenue is quite another.
Out of the ten states (and D.C.) where marijuana is legal, seven currently tax and regulate their revenue-producing stores.
Those taxes are typically 10 to 37 percent higher than the local sales tax which has allowed some states to rake in hundreds of millions of dollars.
Last year, Washington had the highest tax revenue according to Leafly with an estimated $319 million, followed by California’s $300 million and Colorado’s $266 million.
When it comes to what that money is used for, the research says it goes towards school construction, drug abuse programs and medical research, among other areas.
A notable example of pot money being put to good use is a center for homelessness in Aurora, Colorado. $900,000 worth of marijuana tax revenue was invested in the Aurora Day Resource Center which was developed in an old police gym and supports the local homeless population with a range of basic but essential services.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2HNafGf Tyler Durden
Artificial Intelligence is widely seen as a strategic technology and has thus engendered national development plans from countries across the globe to promote its progress. For quite some time, the United States has been conspicuously on the sideline. The American AI research community has, by and large, bemoaned the lack of Federal leadership in this space with many calling for a Kennedy-esque “moonshot” plan to come out of Washington to cement American leadership in the AI space. This past month, the Trump White House released the Executive Order on Maintaining American Leadership in Artificial Intelligenceto provide direction and support for technological advancement in this space.
The response to the EO from the research community has been muted at best. Far from receiving the requested moonshot with the requisite funding and supporting agencies, this EO mostly lays out principles for AI development to be followed by Federal departments. It directs agencies towards prioritization of AI by using existing funds and to seek out collaboration efforts. Further, it directs the National Science and Technology Council Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence (among other agencies) to draw up plans and coordinate efforts among Federal agencies to develop grants, project proposals, and reports to be written on areas of development and collaboration within the next 180 days. Beyond that, there is very little concrete action laid out in the EO, which is why it has been criticized so heavily by those in the research community.
In other words, the research community apparently feels the EO doesn’t go far enough.
In truth, however, even this limited EO goes much too far.
Yes, AI has been hailed as a transformative family of technologies that will bring about a radically improved standard of living for people around the globe. On the other hand, there are numerous potential uses of this technology to inflict incredible harm on individuals, and the risk of abuse becomes greater the more AI research is funded or directed by government agencies. Malinvestment (or “malscience,” in this case) is encouraged by political funding of R&D, and the Pentagon has explicitly stated they seek to use this technology in military applications. Rather than not going far enough, Trump’s Executive Order has already gone too far by explicitly bringing this technology into the political realm because the state is simply too dangerous to grant a leading role in AI development.
Citing challenges from an aging population, environmental concerns, and economic growth, the report sees AI as a technology which, “brings new opportunities for social construction.” The report then lays out milestones over the next few years: by 2020 they will be on par with the global leaders in AI development with; 2025 plans to see Chinese companies achieving their own innovative breakthroughs in algorithmic development; 2030 they plan to be the undisputed leader in AI technology. Each milestone contains targets for the core industry and the supporting businesses that comprise the wider, industrial AI ecosystem.
On top of the proposed industrial targets, the Chinese plan lays out a series of research areas such as swarm intelligence, virtual and augmented reality, security, natural language processing, AI hardware and infrastructure among others to focus their efforts on.
The Chinese plan is widely seen as the gold standard in national AI plans; it is comprehensive, lays out specific targets, and discusses ways to accelerate adoption including by forcing enterprises and cities to adopt the technology. Moreover, resources have already been allocated to achieving these goals such as the $15.7 fund earmarked by the city of Tianjin to develop AI and the $500 million lead Chinese AI startups have over US-based startups in receiving VC funding. China’s AI plan and the top-down approach the CCP is pursuing is a major reason why Kai-Fu Lu’s recent book, AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley and the New World Order , sees China steam rolling to success on the global stage.
AI Winters and Government Funding
The calls for more government funding by AI researchers, however, appear to lack historical perspective. Federal funding of AI projects is hardly anything new. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (now known as DARPA) provided $2.2 million grants (equivalent to $18.2 million in 2019) to MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, and Stanford University in 1963.1 These institutions became the pioneers of AI research and had great, early success with new models such as an early precursor to today’s artificial neural networks called the perceptron . Additional optimism came from success in translating Russian to English via machine translation. However, the early optimism of AI dried up quickly when, in 1966, it was reported that machine translation was incapable of sufficiently capturing the nuances of Russian.2Second, Marvin Minksy’s book Perceptrons proved that these simple, early models were incapable of learning very much at all. This killed research into neural networks for the next decade. The vast majority of funding was government related, and once it was pulled, plunged the field into the first AI winter.
A resurgence came later in the 1980’s as companies in the US, Britain, and Japan began to invest in expert systems – rule-based programs that are a precursor to today’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) movement. This led to a rise in AI labs throughout many companies which were able to automate many simple decisions and reap the rewards associated with greater efficiency. Although the private AI market grew to roughly $1 billion by the end of the decade, these systems were shown to be brittle and unable to extend to more challenging domains.
In 1982, the Japanese Ministry of International Trade and Industry funded and established the Fifth Generation Computer Systems based on a 10-year plan to develop new computer systems and set Japan as the international leader. This spawned a series of international competitors and plans to stay ahead of the Japanese most notably the European Strategic Program on Research and Information Technology, the Strategic Computing Initiative and Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation in the US. The Japanese project failed to deliver on its lofty goals of developing a new computing system as it was overtaken by Sun Systems and Intel despite over $400 billion in funding ($730 billion in 2019).
The Fifth Generation’s competing projects ended in similar results. For example, the Strategic Computing Initiative spent $1 billion from 1983-1993 ($2.2 billion in 2019) to achieve machine intelligence.3Although there were some successful spin-off projects (e.g. Carnegie Mellon’s Navlab), the Initiative itself was a failure and was a major contributor to the second AI winter when it collapsed.
If only inefficiency was the only concern of large-scale, government funded AI research! Unfortunately, the White House, Pentagon, Congress, and others have indicated that they have much more destructive ends in mind.
Weaponization of AI
Trump’s Executive Order refers to AI in the context of “national security” nearly a dozen times. The day after the Executive Order was released, the Pentagon released its AI strategy document calling for rapid AI adoption throughout all aspects of the military. The Pentagon had previously contracted with Google to develop Project Maven, a computer vision system to assist object recognition for drone warfare. Google agreed not to renew the contract after dozens of employees resigned in protest and thousands more petitioned the company to refrain from developing weaponized AI tools. This led to Google restricting its defense work , but military projects are still permitted.
For now, the Pentagon has been unable to attract the talent required to develop AI technologies internally and thus has had to resort to partnering with the likes of the big tech firms. In China, the funding and control of these companies is linked directly to the CCP, which has given rise to the Sesame Credit system. At the risk of sounding cliche, Sesame Credit is an Orwellian system of social control predicated on the complicity of big tech companies and AI to track the citizenry’s purchases and behaviors, incentivizing them to behave in party-approved ways and punishing them when they veer away. Punishments include restrictions on travel, loans, housing, business, and banking. The official goal of the program is to encompass all citizens and , “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven, while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Perhaps most insidiously, it encourages social ostracization by reducing your score based on the score of those in your network. Thus you are encouraged to drop friends and family from your life if they aren’t behaving in a party-approved manner.
While the US is not China, we are living in a world where the NSA has obliterated 4th Amendment rights and where US presidents assert the legal authority to kill US citizens without charges or a trial. A national AI strategy that further links the US government with the tech companies and researchers puts us one step closer to China, but not as a leader in AI, rather as a country that leverages this technology to suppress people. One can only hope that backlash associated with Project Maven grows with respect to other Pentagon projects leaving the Department of Defense without the capabilities to weaponize AI as they seek.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2TJwMoX Tyler Durden
One week after the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the organization’s legal director resigned, more employees are coming forward to tell CNN that the nonprofit group suffers from a “systemic culture of sexism within its workplace.”
This comes after two dozen employees signed a letter of concern over “allegations of mistreatment, sexual harassment, gender discrimination, and racism following the ouster of co-founder Morris Dees over sexual misconduct claims.
CNN spoke with three current employees of the organization who talked on condition of anonymity because of fears over possible retribution.
It was one of those employees who cited the systemic problems with racism and sexism, and a second employee agreed with that assessment.
…
But one of the employees who spoke to CNN alleged the organization suffers from a “pervasive racist culture” and an environment in which a woman is not seen or heard. She also said qualified African-American employees were regularly passed over for promotions — including one African-American colleague she describes as brilliant. She added, “My boss only hires white people.” –CNN
Sounds like conservative pundit Gavin McInnes was right when he said the SPLC is “frothing with bigots.” McInnes is suing the nonprofit for labeling his fraternal organization, the Proud Boys, a hate group.
Earlier this month, the SPLC board of directors appointed Michelle Obama’s former chief of staff, Tina Tchen to head up the inquiry into the sexual misconduct claims. In an unrelated matter, Tchen was apparently was able to pull strings and have the Jussie Smollett case dropped.
***
Inside the SPLC “Scam”
As the Washington Examiner‘s Beckett Adams wrote last week, the Southern Poverty Law Center is a “scam,” which has taken “no care whatsoever for the reputational and personal harm it causes by lumping Christians and anti-extremist activists with actual neo-Nazis.”
As it turns out, the SPLC is a cynical money-making scheme, according to a former staffer’s blistering tell-all, published this week in the New Yorker. The center’s chief goal is to bilk naive and wealthy donors who believe it’s an earnest effort to combat bigotry.
The only thing worse than a snarling partisan activist is a slimy conman who merely pretends to be one. –Washington Examiner
““Outside of work,” recalls Bob Moser of his days working for the organization, “we spent a lot of time drinking and dishing in Montgomery bars and restaurants about … the hyperbolic fund-raising appeals, and the fact that, though the center claimed to be effective in fighting extremism, ‘hate’ always continued to be on the rise, more dangerous than ever, with each year’s report on hate groups. ‘The S.P.L.C.—making hate pay,’ we’d say.”
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WBoul0 Tyler Durden
Back in the 1990’s, most people knew Bill Clinton was a crook and a degenerate, but people also knew he would never be held to account. An unspoken truth of the age was that a big part of the frustration with the Clinton crime family was really over the unwillingness of the so-called conservatives to get tough. The National Review types carried on like they were too good to get into the outrage over the endless stream of scandals surrounding Team Clinton. They were above that stuff.
As a result, talking about the Clinton shenanigans became a staple of talk radio, mostly because it was amusing, but also as a form of outrage porn. Every time one of them got away with some obvious lie, the phone lines would light up with people ready to talk about how angry they were about it. In other words, a big part of the Clinton hating was over the fact they kept getting away with it, because the political class, particularly the so-called principled conservatives, lacked the stones to do anything about it.
That’s an important thing to keep in mind while watching the Left wrestle with the fact Trump will not be sent to prison for treason. To normal people, the Russian collusion stuff was always a nutty conspiracy theory. It seemed obvious that the point of the Russian collusion narrative was to distract people from the fact the Obama White House was engaged in activity that would have made Nixon blush. If there was a conspiracy, it was the media running cover for the crooks in the Obama administration.
This understanding blinded people to what could be the most important part of the Russian collusion story. The Left really believed it. They really thought there was a secret conspiracy between Trump people and Putin people to work some secret magic to alter the 2016 election. They did not know the nature of this magic. In fact, it was probably supernatural, but the Left was sure it was real. This is something people outside the Progressive hive are just starting to realize. The Left really is that crazy.
The juxtaposition of the Clinton haters and the NeverTrump people is a good way of understanding the vast chasm between the Progressive worldview and that of normal people. The hatred of the Clintons was rooted in a grudging acceptance of the reality of modern politics. It was a lament, more than a set of beliefs. People knew they were crooks, but also knew the so-called conservatives were wimps and liars. Bill Clinton in the White House was the symptom of the disease that had infected the nation’s elite.
The NeverTrump stuff is something different. It’s rooted in a fantasy about how the world is organized and the role the Left plays in it. They really do believe in mysterious forces that operate on the fringes. They not only think there is a man behind the curtain, but that the curtain itself is part of an elaborate conspiracy. Most important, they deeply believe that the arc of history bends toward the Promised Land and that they are on the right side of history, leading the rest of us into the light of salvation. They really do think that.
It’s why their response to the Mueller report has been like the response to the sudden death of a child. They were not convinced some Trump people had some shady dealings with the Russians. They were sure there was an elaborate conspiracy that altered the election. That was the key part of their coping system for the last two plus years. The conspiracy altered the election. The arc of history was not altered. The bad guys were not able to legitimately defeat those on the right side of history. The devil real!
Cults have ways to deal with disconfirmation, but there must be a way to salvage some of the original core belief from the wreckage. If the aliens were supposed to arrive on Tuesday, but failed to show, the cult can explain this by claiming they got the dates wrong or that they failed to perform the proper ritual. In this case, the Left can’t seem to find a way to salvage the core belief from the wreckage, because the core belief had to be completely true in order to confirm their role in the Great Russian collusion narrative.
What we’re seeing with the Left is a child learning that they have not only been adopted, but they have been in a coma their whole life and everything they believe about themselves is a dream. Rachel Maddow right now is someone sure she was a Jewish TV lesbian, but has learned she is really white guy with two kids and an ex-wife, working at the Home Depot. Everything about who she was in the moral sense is not just false, it never existed. As a result, she never really existed. She was part of the fraud.
That’s why the audience has evaporated for these lefty chat shows. Conservatives will try to explain this in the same dimwitted way they explain everything, by focusing on the fact these shows promoted a fake story. In reality, we’re witnessing the collapse of an identity cult, built around the belief in a sinister conspiracy to snatch away the 2016 election from forces of light. The collapse of the central narrative is also the collapse of the core of this identity cult. These are now people without a reason to exist.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2U2NyV0 Tyler Durden
Ahead of broad opposition protests planned for Saturday, Caracas and other large cities across Venezuela were once again plunged into darkness Friday evening, just as the country struggled to fully recover from prior days-long outages.
The latest blackout began just after 7:00pm, leaving most of the capital as well as Valencia, Maracay, San Cristobal and Maracaibo without electricity, again crippling the country’s transport, communication, water, and hospital infrastructures.
Reports this week have described the recent spate of mass outages as taking the already ailing and largely neglected infrastructure back to the Middle Ages, with descriptions of rotting and souring food on supermarket shelves, citizens making oil lamps, and Caracas residents washing dishes in nearby El Avila mountain streams due to lack of electricity to the city’s water pumps.
Venezuelans have also had to traverse long distances on foot to get to work, or complete simple tasks like retrieving food and supplies.
This weekend’s outage marks the fourth power outage this month, which began on March 7. In response to the earlier outages, Venezuela’s Defense Ministry vowed to deploy armed forces to protect the national electricity system.
President Nicolás Maduro blamed Washington for the earlier outages, claiming over Twitter that the Trump administration was engaged in an “electrical war” which was “announced and directed by American imperialism against our people.”
Walking for hours, making oil lamps, bearing water. For Venezuelans today, suffering under a new nationwide blackout that has lasted days, it’s like being thrown back to life centuries ago. — AFP
The US has repeatedly denied the charge while taking increasingly bolder steps to attempt to legitimize self-declared “Interim President” Juan Guaido. Simultaneously Maduro has stripped Guaido of public office, barring him for 15 years.
Previously, Communications Minister Jorge Rodriguez blamed the last blackout on “an attack on the charging and transmission centre” at the Guri dam, which crucially supplies the country of 30 million with 80 percent of the power.
According to early unconfirmed reports, this latest blackout appears also the result of hydroelectric water generators inside the Guri power plant failing.
Likely the newest blackout will fuel and exacerbate the intensity of anti-Maduro protests through the weekend.
Perhaps sensitive to the growing anger and frustration of Venezuelans even among Maduro supporters, Rodriguez had previously boasted of the government’s ability to bring things back online: “What (last time) took days, now has been taken care of in just a few hours,” Rodriguez said, saying the last fix had been made in “record time”.
Meanwhile, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies have announced that they will have unhindered access to bring aid into the increasingly desperate and struggling country, set to begin in April.
Red Cross officials plan to begin delivering aid to “650,000 people within 20 days” —something which both sides, Maduro and Guaido supporters — are claiming as a victory.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2U4HkUT Tyler Durden
Although it was long assumed that the electoral college favored Democrats – and this assumption continued right up to election night 2016 – Democrats in the United States have now decided the electoral college is a bad thing. Thus, we continue to see legislative efforts to do away with the electoral college, accompanied by claims that it’s undemocratic.
Not All Democracy Is Created Equal
In fact, the electoral college is neither more nor less democratic than the electoral college system. It’s unclear by what standard winning the presidency through 50 separate state-level elections is “less democratic” than winning one large national election.
What makes the electoral college different, however, is that it was born out of recognition that the interests, concerns, and values of voters can differ greatly from place to place. Moreover, the system anticipated the phenomenon in which people in large densely populated areas would have different political values from people in other areas. The electoral college was designed to make it less likely that voters from a single region – or small number of regions – could impose their will across the entire nation.
In contrast, one large national election — as envisioned by the critics of the electoral college system — could hand national rule over to a small number of cities and regions.
But even the electoral college system is too much slanted in favor of national politics and large majorities. A far better example of the principle can be found Swiss democracy. Thanks to the presence of a multi-lingual, culturally diverse population, the creators of the Swiss confederation sought to ensure that no single linguistic, religious, or cultural group could impose its will nationwide. Thus, Swiss democracy includes a number of provisions requiring a “double majority.” That is, not only must an overall majority of Swiss voters approve certain measures, a majority of the voters in the majority of Swiss cantons must also approve.
In both cases, it is recognized that not all voters can be assumed to share the same economic, religious, and cultural interests just because they all happen to live within the boundaries of a single nation-state.
Moreover, this assumption becomes all the more untenable the larger a political jurisdiction becomes. Is is unconvincing, for example, when nationalists assert that a protestant working-class Anglo voter in Boston, and a middle-class Catholic Hispanic landowning rancher in southern Texas, have common interests because they are both “American.” In fact, their commonalities are sparse, to say the least. These two groups live thousands of miles apart, experience very different economic realities, and are the product of two very different historical backgrounds. These two groups are unlikely to visit the same places, drive the same roads, or use the same schools.
If these two groups (and countless others) happen to participate in an election, by no realistic standard can we say the outcome reflects “the will of the people.” Although we have been propagandized to think otherwise, the mere suggestion of such a thing should strike us as absurd.
Smaller Is Better
This problem, however, becomes less the smaller a political jurisdiction becomes. In the more ideal situations, the jurisdictions are small indeed. The median size of a Swiss canton, for example, is 234,000 people, which is the size of a small American city. The largest canton has 1.5 million people. Thus, in Switzerland, most public policy is created at a level which affects fewer than a million people. (The entire country of Switzerland has 8.5 million residents.)
At this scale, it easy to see how differences among voters would be far more limited. Switzerland is only 220 miles across, and within a single canton, most voters are likely to share similar concerns about local infrastructure, cities, and institutions. They’re more likely to share a common history, to speak the same language, and to practice the same religion. In other words, they’re more likely to recognize others in their legal jurisdiction as people who truly have common concerns and needs.
This, of course, cannot be said about large jurisdictions like the United States, taken as a whole. With 320 million people across half of a continent, there is no reason to think any sizable number of people are apt to share a common sense of community or see themselves as sharing the same concerns and interests as people thousands of miles away. Certainly politicians and ideologues have long attempted to create a myth that this is possible. This is why we hear about how we all allegedly share a common heritage in the US Constitution. It’s why many attempt to convince Americans to engage in quasi-religious rituals such as revering the national flag, or singing — cap in hand, and hand over heart — the same national songs.
These are all extremely weak reeds on which to hang notions of national and democratic unity. Given a strong enough state, however, unity can be forcibly imposed.
The French Example
After all, coercively imposing notions of national unity and ideological sameness were the bread and butter of the French revolutionaries. It’s not a coincidence that the French revolution ushered in new doctrines of “the general will,” and the notion of “the people” as the lifeblood of a new ideology of the nation-state.
Unlike the liberal democratic notions of a decentralized, varied, and largely autonomous group of independent populations — eventually realized at least partially in the US and in Switzerland — the French revolutionary ideal of mass democracy required a version of democracy that was centralized, authoritarian, and heedless of the needs of various minorities.
This was convenient given the sheer scale of the French nation-state which contained 28 million people.
By contrast, US national democratic institutions were devised at a time when the population totaled no more than four million. Switzerland at the founding of the old Helvetic Republic in 1789 contained approximately 2 million. Moreover, governance in the United States was overwhelmingly local in its first century. The population of the entire state of New York in 1800 was less than 600,000 people.
The French state apparatus necessary to impose a single “general will” on a large national population proved to be problematic. Years of beheadings, financial crisis, factional conflict, and international war followed. Thanks to the centralization of the French state — and thus French democracy — the entire country suffered from the miseries imposed by an elite wielding nationwide power. With a political model based on the ideal of a single, democratic mass, few constitutional provisions survived to check the power of the central state. Elections thus became a high-stakes matter of seizing control of a state apparatus over a single vast territory. This was not a prescription for stability and serenity.
Rousseau’s Model of Mass Democracy
It is a great irony that much of the inspiration for France’s national democracy came from Switzerland itself.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who exerted great influence in French ideas of democracy and the “general will,” formed many of his ideas about democracy from his experiences in the relatively democratic Republic of Geneva.
Born in Geneva to a family with voting rights, Rousseau appears to have internalized a somewhat idealized view of how Genevan democracy worked. Genevan democracy, of course, functioned on a very small scale, and it worked fairly well.
In his essay “The Background of the French Revolution,” Lord Acton discussed how Rousseau’s idealized views of democracy were affected by his positive experiences in Geneva:
Rousseau was the citizen of a small republic, consisting of a single town, and he professed to have applied its example to the government of the world. It was Geneva, not as he saw it, but as he extracted its essential principle … The idea was that the grown men met in the market place, like the peasants of Glarus under their trees, to manage their affairs, making and unmaking officials, conferring and revoking powers. They were equal, because every man had exactly the same right to defend his interest by the guarantee of his vote. The welfare of all was safe in the hands of all, for they had not the separate interests that are bred by the egotism of wealth, nor the exclusive views that come from a distorted education. All being equal in power and similar in purpose, there can be no just cause why some should move apart and break into minorities.
To assume, however, that the same situation is achievable at the scale of the French republic with nearly 30 million is a blunder of impressive size. The reasons for this are well explained by Acton:
Now the most glaring and familiar fact in history shows that the direct self-government of a town cannot be extended over an empire. It is a plan that scarcely reaches beyond the next parish. Either one district will be governed by another, or both by somebody else chosen for the purpose. Either plan contradicts first principles. Subjection is the direct negation of democracy; representation is the indirect. So that an Englishman underwent bondage to parliament as much as Lausanne to Berne or as America to England if it had submitted to taxation, and by law recovered his liberty but once in seven years. Consequently Rousseau, still faithful to Swiss precedent as well as to the logic of his own theory, was a federalist. In Switzerland, when one half of a canton disagrees with the other, or the country with the town, it is deemed natural that hey should break into two, that the general will may not oppress minorities. This multiplication of self-governing communities was admitted by Rousseau as a preservative of unanimity on one hand, and of liberty on the other.
Thus, Acton understood the protection of freedom lies in division, decentralization, and the liberation of minorities. For Rousseau, however, his latent federalism was no match for the idea of a national will of the people and any idea of Swiss-style federalism collapsed under the fervor for a single national legislature that could impose the wishes of all the “French nation” to every corner of the Republic’s jurisdiction.
After all, what need of there is any sort of decentralization if “the people” are never wrong? “Rousseau’s most advanced point was the doctrine that the people are infallible,” Acton wrote. “Jurieu had taught that they can do no wrong: Rousseau added that they are positively in the right.”
Unfortunately, this ideal has never lost its appeal to many, and it continues to plague American politics with the idea that a “will of the people” can be realized in large scale elections across populations of tens of millions. After all, the abandonment of locally-based democracy is not just a problem at the federal level. The state of California today has more people than all of France during the revolution. New York, Texas, and Florida are not far behind. All of these states are controlled by unitary governments lacking provisions that temper democracy and protect minorities. Such a state of affairs would be unrecognizable to the Americans of the nineteenth century. By their standards, the US has become a country of mega-states, mass democracy, and enormous republics that Rousseau might have looked on with approval. On the other hand, the best solution lies in a peaceful embrace of division, secession, decentralization, and disunity. Unfortunately, the electoral college controversy suggests the US is moving in exactly the opposite direction. As a result, division and disunity will still likely come, but in a much more violent way than what might have been.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2V4bCDq Tyler Durden
Facebook ‘accidentally’ deleted old posts by CEO Mark Zuckerberg during pivotal periods in the company’s history, reports Business Insider.
Zuck’s old posts – which were even reported on by news outlets at the time – have vanished, including every comment he made in 2007 and 2008.
The most drastic deletions involved entire years. Throughout both 2006 and 2009, Zuckerberg was regularly active on the social network — but there are no posts visible of any kind for the two full years in between. The spokesperson confirmed that all the posts during 2007 and 2008 were deleted. –Business Insider
The company says the posts were “mistakenly deleted” due to “technical errors.”
“A few years ago some of Mark’s posts were mistakenly deleted due to technical errors. The work required to restore them would have been extensive and not guaranteed to be successful so we didn’t do it,” reads a statement by a spokesperson.
“We agree people should be able to find information about past announcements and major company news, which is why for years we’ve shared and archived this information publicly — first on our blog and in recent years on our Newsroom.”
These disappearances, along with other changes Facebook has made to how it saves its archive of announcements and blog posts, make it much harder to parse the social network’s historical record. This makes it far more difficult to hold the company, and Zuckerberg himself, accountable to past statements — particularly during a period of intense scrutiny of the company in the wake of a string of scandals.
The very nature of the issue means it is extremely challenging to make a full accounting of what exactly what has gone missing over the years. The spokesperson said they didn’t know how many posts in total were deleted. –Business Insider
One such deleted post which was widely reported (and now no longer works) was an important document in Facebook’s history, as Zuckerberg promised during the April 2012 acquisition of Instagram that “we’re committed to building and growing Instagram independently,” – a commitment the company never stuck to, while Instagram’s two co-founders departed last year amid clashes with the 34-year-old billionaire CEO.
Harder to search the archives
According to the report, Facebook has also made it more difficult to navigate its dedicated announcement blog – after launching their new “Newsroom” for key announcements – the ability to search for old posts has all but been disabled.
Now, when you click on a link to a blog post included in an old news story, it redirects you to the Newsroom. The Newsroom doesn’t have copies of many of these old blog posts, meaning there’s no easy way to access them.
They do still exist in one form — as a “note” saved to Facebook’s public “Facebook” page on the social network. But until today there was no centralized archive through which to browse them, like what was available for the Facebook blog, or like what exists today for Newsroom posts.
Instead, to read a specific one, you had to either know about it already and search for keywords on Google, or scroll back through the Facebook page’s thousands of posts over the years. –Business Insider
Facebook added a “notes” tab to the Facebook page to access the old entries after BI contacted them for the story – which notes that “The net effect of this change to the archives was to drastically obfuscate Facebook’s historical record — making it far harder to find past statements and announcements from the company about itself.”
In April 2018, controversy erupted when TechCrunch reported that messages sent by Zuckerberg were being deleted in other people’s inboxes without their knowledge or consent. The feature was not available to other users at the time.
Meanwhile The Verge noted in November 2016 that Zuckerberg’s public posts about the media and Facebook’s role in the 2016 US election had disappeared.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2WAOxZg Tyler Durden
We have never seen anything like this before. According to satellite data that was just released by Reuters, “at least 1 million acres of U.S. farmland” were covered by water for at least seven days this month. That is an agricultural disaster without equal in modern American history, and yet the mainstream media is treating this like it is some sort of second class story. It isn’t. This is the biggest news story of 2019 so far, and people want to know what is going on. A few days ago, I posted a story entitled ‘“As Many As A Million Calves Lost In Nebraska” – Beef Prices In The U.S. To Escalate Dramatically In The Coming Months’, and it has already been shared on social media more than 145,000 times. Farming communities all over the central part of the nation now look like war zones as a result of all this flooding, but the media elites on the east and west coasts don’t want to write about it. And with more flooding on the way for the next two months, this crisis is only going to get worse.
This is the time of year when farmers are gearing up to plant wheat, corn and soybeans, and now a substantial portion of our farmland will not be able to be used at all this year. According to Reuters, at least a million acres of farmland were covered by floodwaters for at least seven days this month, and that “will likely reduce corn, wheat and soy production this year”…
At least 1 million acres (405,000 hectares) of U.S. farmland were flooded after the “bomb cyclone” storm left wide swaths of nine major grain producing states under water this month, satellite data analyzed by Gro Intelligence for Reuters showed.
Farms from the Dakotas to Missouri and beyond have been under water for a week or more, possibly impeding planting and damaging soil. The floods, which came just weeks before planting season starts in the Midwest, will likely reduce corn, wheat and soy production this year.
And with “as many as a million calves” lost to the flooding, a lot less food than anticipated is going to be produced in the United States for the foreseeable future.
Between March 8th and March 21st, almost 1.1 million acres of cropland and over 84,000 acres of pastureland were covered by water for at least a week. With more rain on the way, it is essentially going to be impossible for most of those acres to be usable this year.
In Iowa, 474,271 acres were covered by floodwaters for at least seven days in March, and Iowa farmers are facing some very tough deadlines. Corn must be planted by May 31st and soybeans must be planted by June 15th in order to qualify for flood insurance. For most Iowa farms that were covered by floodwaters, that is going to be impossible.
Overall, the recent flooding caused “at least $3 billion” in economic damage according to authorities, but many believe that the final number will be far higher.
Thousands upon thousands of farms have been completely destroyed, and thousands upon thousands of farmers will not plant any crops at all this year.
In addition to the vast agricultural devastation that we have witnessed, thousands upon thousands of homes have been destroyed as well, and now the National Ground Water Association is warning that “the safety of more than a million private water wells” could be compromised…
Record flooding in the Midwest is now threatening the safety of more than a million private water wells. The National Ground Water Association estimates that people living in more than 300 counties across 10 states have their groundwater threatened from bacterial and industrial contamination carried by flood waters.
If you live in the middle of the country and there is a chance that your well may have been compromised, please don’t take any unnecessary chances. Contaminated water can be really, really bad news.
Unfortunately, this is just the beginning. According to the NOAA, we are entering an “unprecedented flood season” that could potentially “impact an even bigger area of cropland”…
Spring floods could yet impact an even bigger area of cropland. The U.S. government’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has warned of what could be an “unprecedented flood season” as it forecasts heavy spring rains. Rivers may swell further as a deep snow pack in northern growing areas melts.
Unfortunately, there is a tremendous amount of overlap with areas that have already been devastated by flooding.
On Friday and Saturday, there will be “more heavy rains” in the Midwest, and Nebraska is in “the direct path” of the center of the storm…
From the Central Plains to the Midwest, it has been a disastrous spring for river flooding. A weather system slated to bring more heavy rains Friday into Saturday could aggravate the situation along and near the Missouri and Mississippi rivers.
It’s a one-two punch that combines additional rainwater with fresh runoff from snowmelt. Perhaps worst off is Nebraska, in the direct path of Friday’s quick burst of moisture. Barely a week has passed since Gov. Pete Ricketts estimated the cost of ongoing flooding in that state at more than $1 billion.
This is it. America is being hammered by one storm after another, and I very much encourage you to get prepared for a very rough ride ahead.
There is going to be a lot more flooding. Prices for beef, dairy, wheat, corn and soy products are going to rise significantly, and just when you think they are way too high they are going to keep on rising.
This is already the worst agricultural disaster in modern American history, and federal authorities are telling us that we should expect things to continue to get worse for at least two more months.
Perhaps the mainstream media will eventually decide to take this story seriously, but until they do those of us in the alternative media will do our best to keep you updated.
via ZeroHedge News https://ift.tt/2OCh4ey Tyler Durden