That’s how editor, Sam Thielman, is describing Congress at NBC News after watching the House Judiciary Committee grilling Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, and questioning him about who was responsible for the media bias against conservatives on the Internet. On Tuesday, Republican ignorance was front and center by virtue of the fact that they head the committee and they are calling the shots. The Democratic brain-trust will be on display in January 2019, if this committee reforms.

The technical illiteracy in both parties is a danger to the nation. Their inquiry strategy is reminiscent a blindfolded man with a long stick trying to land a blow on a pinata that he cannot see. The current Congress simply does not fully grasp the technology enough to see where it is headed in order to ask a competent question. The spectacle is at once humorous and terrifying. Any attempt to regulate or legislate the technologies involved is beyond their comprehension. They are clearly unable to judge the meaning and proper context of the information they were handed by their "advisors" in preparation for this hearing.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai had to explain to Congress why Googling the word "idiot" brings back a picture of President Trump.

This, according to author Paul Craig Roberts. In his urgent and compelling essay, he breaks the discovery down piece by piece. You'll want to follow the link below and read it yourself for the full effect of the logic in action. Here are a few of his key assertions:

The op-ed is a forgery. As a former senior official in a presidential administration, I can state with certainty that no senior official would express disagreement anonymously. Anonymous dissent has no credibility. Moreover, the dishonor of it undermines the character of the writer.

The New York Times’ claim to have vetted the writer lacks credibility, as the New York Times has consistently printed extreme accusations against Trump and against Vladimir Putin without supplying a bit of evidence. The New York Times has consistently misrepresented unsubstantiated allegations as proven fact. There is no reason whatsoever to believe the New York Times about anything.

The monopolies that own the elected Federal Government were always a known-known in America. That hasn't changed.

Yesterday, in the (Must Read if You Hope to be Informed in the US) Evening Blues, our news curator, joe shikspack, directed us with a simple link to an attempted interview with Chris Hedges, which was posted at Naked Capitalism.

Parts of the interview, by John Siman, are a study in "sentence fragment syndrome" as a sign that a finger in the dike is all that is standing between you and a deluge of uncanny clarity pouring forth from one of the foremost towering minds in American culture today — Chris Hedges.

Here we are, late in the Trump/Russia Collusion Investigation, and the evidence is still as thin and weak as watery milk. The media monopolies are the ever-present mouthpieces of last resort when you absolutely, positively need to misinform and confuse the American public, and they performed as expected. For them, it's no longer about proving that Vladimir Putin has seized control of the United States from his sinister Kremlin office. In recent weeks, they've been talking a mile a minute just to obscure their own perfidy. Watching them, one gets the impression that if they stop to take a breath their pants will fall down.

(It’s a little late in the day for that, I’d say.)

Since the end of July, Lanny Davis (Michael Cohen’s attorney) has been sneaking around as an “unnamed source” passing insider news to "easy" media like CNN. In this latest narrative, we are told that Michael Cohen is going to drop the dime on his client, Donald Trump. It seems that Cohen witnessed Trump engaged in *actual* Russian collusion.

In January 2017, US District Court Judge Amit Mehta sided with the FBI on their decision to ignore FOIA requests concerning their efforts to verify the controversial Steele Dossier, before it was used as the foundation of their application for a FISA surveillance warrant. The Judge ruled that Trump's tweets about the dossier didn't require the FBI and other intelligence agencies to act on records requests.

But by the end of the week on Friday, August 17th, Judge Mehta changed his mind. He said that President Trump's release of two House Intelligence Committee documents (the "Nunes" and "Schiff" memos) changed everything. He now wants to see the actual corroborations that the FBI said they had at that time, that confirmed the outrageous allegations that were made in the Steele dossier. "The ground shifted," writes Mehta of Trump declassifying the House memos. "As a result of the Nunes and Schiff Memos, there is now in the public domain meaningful information about how the FBI acquired the Dossier and how the agency used it to investigate Russian meddling."

I think all of us would all like to see the proof that those corroborations were made.

I've been following the 2020 Presidential campaign of Andrew Yang fairly closely because he has a political vision that solves so many of America's problems. He delivers on all of Bernie's inspiring promises and puts the country on a constructive path. Like Bernie, he too will be running on the Democratic Party ticket, however, his political philosophy transcends their neoliberal corruption. If you're not familiar with Andrew Yang, this is how the New York Times describes him:

Among the many, many Democrats who will seek the party’s presidential nomination in 2020, most probably agree on a handful of core issues: protecting DACA, rejoining the Paris climate agreement, unraveling President Trump’s tax breaks for the wealthy.

Only one of them will be focused on the robot apocalypse.

The Global Times is a news daily that caters to China’s ruling Communist Party. The paper announces cultural and social events and tracks of China's achievements in its space program, and in the sciences, education, technology, and business. China's unique form of communism is one that likes to plan ahead, driven by an ever-evolving social vision. Their goals can be very long and ambitious, like stabilizing the size of the population (the one-child program), in order to lift tens of millions out of poverty and into a sustainable consumer class. The Party's goals can also be shorter and more targeted, such as the current anti-corruption sweep and systems-reform that will be designed to avert recurrence, similar to the New Deal era banking regulations that did the same.

The Sleeping Dragon Wakes Up

Everyone here has seen this happen. It's an experience we have all shared.

Every community has an elaborate drama they cloak around the bedrock-destructiveness of down-voting. The belief is that the community must be armed with a weapon to defend against a line that must not be crossed. In the end, down-voting is pawned off as "democratic." The community manager says, "Let the users decide." But it is really nothing more than cheapness and laziness that results in negligence toward the entire community.

Let's look at how this works.