The weekend, besides the attacks, was excellent. Well, sort of. In the end I had fun and learned a whole lot.

My ex-roommate's husband had his 50th birthday party on Saturday night. That, along with all of the college football, and the buzz about the UFC fight...meant that there was no way I was going to watch or catch anyone liveblogging the debate. I'm sure DWS will be greatly rewarded for her efforts. My best friend and I had to find a last minute gift, and we decided to split a $100 bottle of scotch at Total Wine & More. I honestly don't remember the brand.

The party was awesome. It was like a Pine Street Bar & Grill reunion. I mean, there were people there who I hadn't seen since that bar closed (everyone scattered to the four winds when that happened, and lost touch with everyone else). Lots of scotch drinking (the birthday boy loves his scotch), cigar smoking, and everyone just bouncing off of each other in interesting ways. During the party a gaggle of my Republican friends were sitting in a circle and talking about their crazy primary. I decided to jump in and see what they thought. They know I'm a Leftist but we all get along even when talking politics.

Some observations from that conservation:

• They LOVE Ben Carson. It's weird, I don't get it, and I didn't pretend to get it.
• They hate Marco Rubio. They think he's smooth, but they hate him for it. They thought he was too young and should wait a few years.
• I brought up Donald Trump. They didn't think he wanted to be president, only that he wanted to appoint the president. They think he's a bored rich carnival barker.
• They despise Clinton and anything Clinton. I mean, it was funny when I mentioned her...instant anger.
• They were resigned to the fact that Ted Cruz was their guy in the end. They like him a lot. That kind of scared me.
• They love Bernie Sanders because he, and I quote, "Doesn't BS around and says the truth."

I got a little too tipsy and my old buddies let me crash out in the spare bedroom. Thank goodness, because I was in no condition to drive.

Looked at the GOS for debate reaction, and it was all too predictable. But Clinton's Wall Street, 9/11, and women thing was a serious WTF moment in my opinion. I mean, that was just a straight up stupid thing to say. If you're going to break out with a non sequitur because you're about to get ganked, use something else besides that. I think she pulled that answer out of her ass and hoped no one would notice. Hillary seems to forget that Twitter never forgets. And it was a perfect example as to why the DNC is keeping her away from the public eye. The more she speaks, the more stupid things she says.

Sunday afternoon I headed over to a dive bar named Nice & Easy. It's on Hoffner Road, about a good 20 minutes from downtown, and less than 10 minutes to Orlando International Airport. Bikers, dive bar fans, and their regulars pop in daily, besides my fellow poker players. It's a nicely run joint for a dive--and the food is actually pretty good. I did pretty well in the game, even though I had two major screw-ups when I got caught chasing a flush and missed it, losing half of my stack of chips. The other screw-up was me just not betting aggressively enough to the point where my opponent caught his full house on the river.

But I recovered and survived to the end in a heads up situation because the woman I was up against didn't want to chop. I didn't mind, because her chip stack was substantially larger than mine. Heads up poker is fun, fast, and can go either way. I got lucky and ganked more than half her stack and we went back and forth for a while. She couldn't make a dent in my stack, and whenever I needed a winning hand, it somehow appeared. Love being on a heater at the right time. I ended up wearing her down when I had 9-5 offsuit and she called. She had a deuce-four. I hit a nine on the flop, the turn and river turned up busts for her, and I won the whole enchilada. $100 cold hard cash.

Two stories to add to your day. Both are about bombs - ha, ha...

U.S. State Department has approved the sale of thousands of smart bombs worth a total of $1.29 billion to Saudi Arabia to help replenish supplies used in its battle against insurgents in Yemen and air strikes against the Islamic State in Syria, U.S. officials familiar with the deal said on Monday.

BREAKING: HRC Latest Presidential & 1st Dem Candidate To Be Afflicted w 9/11 Tourette's Syndrome

We just got an upgrade to our internet line from DSL to cable. The local company that controls the internet has been foot dragging on converting the customers over. According to the contractor who installed the new line said that the company had been avoiding notifying the customers that it was available. Anyway, things are a lot faster here now.

A little Cat Stevens for us all this morning
[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ5iHgcPnHA]

She told Wall Street, “Cut it out!” and took their millions because 9/11

link

Nowhere is that more evident than in the U.S., where lending to the government should be far safer than speculating on the direction of interest rates with Wall Street banks. But these days, it’s just the opposite as a growing number of Treasuries yield more than interest-rate swaps. The same phenomenon has emerged in the U.K., while the “swap spread” as it’s known among bond-market types, has shrunk to the smallest on record in Australia.
...
It’s hard to overstate how illogical it is when swap spreads are inverted. That’s because it suggests that governments are less creditworthy than the very financial institutions they bailed out during the credit crisis just seven years ago. And as the Fed prepares to end its near-zero rate policy, those distortions are coming to the fore.

still don't know how to address you as a group. Bluester? c99%-ers? How about friends?

I thought this article in the Nation might open some eyes a bit about the "ISIS jihadist fighters". I didn't expect something much different than what they described, so it was not much a surprise to me, but at least this article confirms things I already believed in. The article says it was from October 21rst, but I got it in my mailbox today. May be they thought it's worth reposting it.

 What I Discovered From Interviewing Imprisoned ISIS Fighters - They’re drawn to the movement for reasons that have little to do with belief in extremist Islam.

I think it's worth a read if you have time. This paragraph I wished all those political wiz-kids, believers in smart wars, should recite daily five times a day like a good muslim does. May be it would actually help....

 Eventually he decides that he is almost, but not entirely, fused with Iraq and with Islam, completely separate from the Islamic State (again, to be expected), barely connected to friends (“I have no friends”), and fully fused with his family. In fact, his family is the only group he was fully fused with, a decision that took no time at all. During more informal questioning about his family and tribe comes this telling statement: “We need the war to be over, we need security, we are tired of so much war…. all I want is to be with my family, my children.”
...
"Do you have any questions for us?” For the first time since he came into the room he smiles—in surprise—and finally tells us what really motivated him, without any prompting. He knows there is an American in the room, and can perhaps guess, from his demeanor and his questions, that this American is ex-military, and directs his “question,” in the form of an enraged statement, straight at him. “The Americans came,” he said. “They took away Saddam, but they also took away our security. I didn’t like Saddam, we were starving then, but at least we didn’t have war. When you came here, the civil war started.”

ISIS is the first group since Al Qaeda to offer these young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe.

This whole experience has been very familiar indeed to Doug Stone, the American general on the receiving end of this diatribe. “He fits the absolutely typical profile,” Stone said afterward. “The average age of all the prisoners in Iraq when I was here was 27; they were married; they had two children; had got to sixth to eighth grade. He has exactly the same profile as 80 percent of the prisoners then…and his number-one complaint about the security and against all American forces was the exact same complaint from every single detainee.”

These boys came of age under the disastrous American occupation after 2003, in the chaotic and violent Arab part of Iraq, ruled by the viciously sectarian Shia government of Nouri al-Maliki. Growing up Sunni Arab was no fun. A later interviewee described his life growing up under American occupation: He couldn’t go out, he didn’t have a life, and he specifically mentioned that he didn’t have girlfriends. An Islamic State fighter’s biggest resentment was the lack of an adolescence. Another of the interviewees was displaced at the critical age of 13, when his family fled to Kirkuk from Diyala province at the height of Iraq’s sectarian civil war. They are children of the occupation, many with missing fathers at crucial periods (through jail, death from execution, or fighting in the insurgency), filled with rage against America and their own government. They are not fueled by the idea of an Islamic caliphate without borders; rather, ISIS is the first group since the crushed Al Qaeda to offer these humiliated and enraged young men a way to defend their dignity, family, and tribe. This is not radicalization to the ISIS way of life, but the promise of a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.

Who wouldn't want to live in dignity, within their culture and tribe and homeland?

[video:https://youtu.be/BAUZnDIWu2I]

I have not cared to find out if Anonymous does more good than bad. When I try to understand it, I am lost. What is it?

Iraq claims to have warned France of imminent IS attacks the day before the most recent attacks in Paris.

BAGHDAD (AP) -- Senior Iraqi intelligence officials warned members of the U.S.-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group of imminent assaults by the militant organization just one day before last week's deadly attacks in Paris killed 129 people, The Associated Press has learned.

Iraqi intelligence sent a dispatch saying the group's leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, had ordered an attack on coalition countries fighting against them in Iraq and Syria, as well as on Iran and Russia, through bombings or other attacks in the days ahead.
. . .
Six senior Iraqi officials confirmed the information in the dispatch, a copy of which was obtained by the AP, and four of these intelligence officials said they also warned France specifically of a potential attack. Two officials told the AP that France was warned beforehand of details that French authorities have yet to make public.

"We have recovered information from our direct sources in the Islamic State terrorist organization about the orders issued by terrorist 'Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi' directing all members of the organization to implement an international attack that includes all coalition countries, in addition to Iran and the Russian Federation, through bombings or assassinations or hostage taking in the coming days. We do not have information on the date and place for implementing these terrorist operations at this time," the Iraqi dispatch read in part.

Among the other warnings cited by Iraqi officials: that the Paris attacks appear to have been planned in Raqqa, Syria - the Islamic State's de-facto capital - where the attackers were trained specifically for this operation and with the intention of sending them to France.

The officials also said a sleeper cell in France then met with the attackers after their training and helped them execute the plan.

There were 24 people involved in the operation, they said: 19 attackers and five others in charge of logistics and planning.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/M/ML_IRAQ_PARIS_ATTACKS?SITE=AP&SEC...

I can't be the only one who hears in this an echo of ignored warnings of imminent attacks some 14 years ago.

I [Paul Craig Roberts] have received a report from European security that there was a massive cyber attack on French systems 48 hours prior to and during the Paris attacks.

Amongst other things, the attack took down the French mobile data network and blinded police surveillance. The attack was not a straightforward DDOS attack but a sophisticated attack that targeted a weakness in infrastructure hardware.

Such an attack is beyond the capability of most organizations and requires capability that is unlikely to be in ISIL’s arsenal. An attack on this scale is difficult to pull off without authorities getting wind of it. The coordination required suggests state involvement.

http://www.globalresearch.ca/french-security-left-blind-during-november-...

Congratulations! Americans Are Pretty Honest Folks.

Let's switch the subject to pop sociology. Or maybe it's pop anthropology. I can never quite keep them separate. Anyway, this post is about a recent study that investigates which countries are most honest.

Here are the three groups that cheated significantly more than others:
Chinese
Men
Churchgoers

So there you go. The Chinese are the least honest and Greeks are the most honest ... Does this mean anything? It might, assuming you think this methodology actually tells us anything meaningful about national attitudes toward honesty. I pretty much don't, for a whole bunch of reasons. But I was feeling kind of desperate to write about something other than ISIS, so here you go.

Good Night.