having a sad because they are going to miss the best president since FDR who has ended two wars and hasn't started any new ones.
Besides his bombings of weddings and then double tapping and killing the people who come to the rescue, his worse act was allowing the CIA and the state department to give sarin nerve gas to his terrorists which are Al Quada to use on the Syrian civilians in order to have an excuse to overthrow Assad.
Over 1,000 people were killed in the attack.
How callous does one have to be to do that?
Hillary of course knew about this because she was the Secretary of State.
Has anyone heard her ever have an ounce of sympathy for the Women and Children that her policies have killed?
Remember what she said about sending the Honduran children back to Hondorus to send a message to their parents to not risk their children's lives escaping from the violence she helped create
These are some of the Syrian children she and Obama killed in the sarin gas attack.

This little girl is what Obama calls Collateral Damage

Thank you Steven for saying this so eloquently.

I'd be curious to hear him articulate what he thinks his legacy is. His two terms have been a huge letdown. I completely understand how much he was hampered by the Republicans, but it is what it is.

It is that -- largely because:

He created a dysfunctional and unaffordable healthcare system whose existence is in doubt because he didn't have the fortitude to fight for a real one and pretty much just let the industry write the legislation.

Had he simply left healthcare alone in his first term, and stuck to delivering on his principal campaign promises:

• closing Guantanamo Bay
• getting us completely and permanently out of Iraq
• getting us completely and permanently out of Afghanistan

the 2010 elections would have returned a Democratic Senate and House to power and he would have had a refreshed store of political capital to pass real healthcare reform (read: single public payer no opt-out).

Instead, we know what had actually taken place: he flushed his accumulated political capital down the toilet on a less-than-worthless healthcare non-reform bill, the completely justified nationwide hatred of which triggered massive Republican victories in the 2010, 2012, and 2014 Congressional and Senate elections. Meanwhile, Guantanamo's still open for business, and we're going back into Iraq and Afghanistan, with Syria assuredly not far behind.

And Perpetual Goldwater Girl Hillary Clinton as the "Democrat" running to succeed him.

Some legacy.

http://qz.com/715765/hes-kind-of-perfect-for-the-job-obama-hints-at-a-fu...

INVESTOR IN CHIEF
“He’s kind of perfect for the job”: Obama hints at a future in VC, and Silicon Valley is salivating

Written by
Michael J. Coren
June 27, 2016

In seven months, Barack Obama will leave the White House as president of the United States. He’s going to need a job. In an interview with Bloomberg on June 13, he hinted at the possibility of joining entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in Silicon Valley.

Obama said “had I not gone into politics, I’d probably be starting some kind of business,” said Obama. “The skill set of starting my presidential campaigns—and building the kinds of teams that we did and marketing ideas—I think would be the same kinds of skills that I would enjoy exercising in the private sector. … The conversations I have with Silicon Valley and with venture capital pull together my interests in science and organization in a way I find really satisfying.”

On hearing the news, Valley investors were quick to save the president a spot on Sand Hill Road. Obama, of course, wouldn’t be the first Washington power player to make such a move. Former secretary of defense Colin Powell joined Kleiner Perkins Caufield Byers in 2005, followed by former vice president Al Gore in 2007. Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state under George W. Bush, teamed up with Khosla Ventures in 2012. Numerous Congressional representatives and government officials have found homes at venture firms in the Bay Area. ...

... Obama will invest in people who don’t fit Silicon Valley stereotypes. ...

http://www.recode.net/2016/4/26/11586424/google-white-house-visits

A chart of lobbyists' White House visits reveals its close ties with Google
The Campaign for Accountability found more than 125 meetings between Google and White House staff.
by Dawn Chmielewski Apr 26, 2016

In a town where proximity to power is a measure of clout, Google’s ties with the Obama administration in Washington, D.C., are unrivaled among its tech and telecom peers. At least in sheer quantity.

Google’s head of public policy has met with White House officials 128 times over the course of the Obama administration* — more visits than the telecom and cable industries combined, according to the nonpartisan watchdog group Campaign for Accountability.

Johanna Shelton visited with White House representatives nearly twice as often as the next most frequent visitor, Alissa Fox of Blue Cross/Blue Shield, who met with White House officials 75 times, the group found. ...

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/feb/22/robots-google-ray-kur...

Are the robots about to rise? Google's new director of engineering thinks so…
Ray Kurzweil popularised the Teminator-like moment he called the 'singularity', when artificial intelligence overtakes human thinking. But now the man who hopes to be immortal is involved in the very same quest – on behalf of the tech behemoth

Robot from The Terminator
The Terminator films envisage a future in which robots have become sentient and are at war with humankind. Ray Kurzweil thinks that machines could become ‘conscious’ by 2029 but is optimistic about the implications for humans.

Carole Cadwalladr
Saturday 22 February 2014

... Now, he works at Google. Ray Kurzweil who believes that we can live for ever and that computers will gain what looks like a lot like consciousness in a little over a decade is now Google's director of engineering. The announcement of this, last year, was extraordinary enough. To people who work with tech or who are interested in tech and who are familiar with the idea that Kurzweil has popularised of "the singularity" – the moment in the future when men and machines will supposedly converge – and know him as either a brilliant maverick and visionary futurist, or a narcissistic crackpot obsessed with longevity, this was headline news in itself.

But it's what came next that puts this into context. It's since been revealed that Google has gone on an unprecedented shopping spree and is in the throes of assembling what looks like the greatest artificial intelligence laboratory on Earth; a laboratory designed to feast upon a resource of a kind that the world has never seen before: truly massive data. Our data. From the minutiae of our lives.

Google has bought almost every machine-learning and robotics company it can find, or at least, rates. It made headlines two months ago, when it bought Boston Dynamics, the firm that produces spectacular, terrifyingly life-like military robots, for an "undisclosed" but undoubtedly massive sum. It spent $3.2bn (£1.9bn) on smart thermostat maker Nest Labs. And this month, it bought the secretive and cutting-edge British artificial intelligence startup DeepMind for £242m.

And those are just the big deals. It also bought Bot & Dolly, Meka Robotics, Holomni, Redwood Robotics and Schaft, and another AI startup, DNNresearch. It hired Geoff Hinton, a British computer scientist who's probably the world's leading expert on neural networks. And it has embarked upon what one DeepMind investor told the technology publication Re/code two weeks ago was "a Manhattan project of AI". If artificial intelligence was really possible, and if anybody could do it, he said, "this will be the team". The future, in ways we can't even begin to imagine, will be Google's. ...

... But then he predicts that by 2045 computers will be a billion times more powerful than all of the human brains on Earth. And the characters' creation of an avatar of a dead person based on their writings, in Jonze's film, is an idea that he's been banging on about for years. He's gathered all of his father's writings and ephemera in an archive and believes it will be possible to retro-engineer him at some point in the future. ...

... And it's the Google-scale resources that are beyond anything the world has seen before. Such as the huge data sets that result from 1 billion people using Google ever single day. And the Google knowledge graph, which consists of 800m concepts and the billions of relationships between them. This is already a neural network, a massive, distributed global "brain". Can it learn? Can it think? It's what some of the smartest people on the planet are working on next.

Peter Norvig, Google's research director, said recently that the company employs "less than 50% but certainly more than 5%" of the world's leading experts on machine learning. And that was before it bought DeepMind which, it should be noted, agreed to the deal with the proviso that Google set up an ethics board to look at the question of what machine learning will actually mean when it's in the hands of what has become the most powerful company on the planet. Of what machine learning might look like when the machines have learned to make their own decisions. Or gained, what we humans call, "consciousness". ...

... I first saw Boston Dynamics' robots in action at a presentation at the Singularity University, the university that Ray Kurzweil co-founded and that Google helped fund and which is devoted to exploring exponential technologies. And it was the Singularity University's own robotics faculty member Dan Barry who sounded a note of alarm about what the technology might mean: "I don't see any end point here," he said when talking about the use of military robots. "At some point humans aren't going to be fast enough. So what you do is that you make them autonomous. And where does that end? Terminator?"

And the woman who headed the Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (Darpa), the secretive US military agency that funded the development of BigDog? Regina Dugan. Guess where she works now? ...

... Google will know the answer to your question before you have asked it, he says. It will have read every email you've ever written, every document, every idle thought you've ever tapped into a search-engine box. It will know you better than your intimate partner does. Better, perhaps, than even yourself. ...

... And once the computers can read their own instructions, well… gaining domination over the rest of the universe will surely be easy pickings. Though Kurzweil, being a techno-optimist, doesn't worry about the prospect of being enslaved by a master race of newly liberated iPhones with ideas above their station. He believes technology will augment us. Make us better, smarter, fitter. That just as we've already outsourced our ability to remember telephone numbers to their electronic embrace, so we will welcome nanotechnologies that thin our blood and boost our brain cells. His mind-reading search engine will be a "cybernetic friend". He is unimpressed by Google Glass because he doesn't want any technological filter between us and reality. He just wants reality to be that much better. ...

... And what about her father's idea of living for ever? What did she make of that? "What I think is interesting is that all kids think they are going to live for ever so actually it wasn't that much of a disconnect for me. I think it made perfect sense. Now it makes less sense."

Well, yes. But there's not a scintilla of doubt in Kurzweil's mind about this. My arguments slide off what looks like his carefully moisturised skin. "My health regime is a wake-up call to my baby-boomer peers," he says. "Most of whom are accepting the normal cycle of life and accepting they are getting to the end of their productive years. That's not my view. Now that health and medicine is in information technology it is going to expand exponentially. We will see very dramatic changes ahead. According to my model it's only 10-15 years away from where we'll be adding more than a year every year to life expectancy because of progress. It's kind of a tipping point in longevity."

He does, at moments like these, have something of a mad glint in his eye. Or at least the profound certitude of a fundamentalist cleric. Newsweek, a few years back, quoted an anonymous colleague claiming that, "Ray is going through the single most public midlife crisis that any male has ever gone through." ...

... "We are talking about making ourselves millions of times more intelligent and being able to have virtually reality environments which are as fantastic as our imagination."

Although possibly this is what Kurzweil's critics, such as the biologist PZ Myers, mean when they say that the problem with Kurzweil's theories is that "it's a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It's as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad." Or Jaron Lanier, who calls him "a genius" but "a product of a narcissistic age". ...

Luckily, even if life expectancy wasn't already plunging among us poors and we weren't slated to have our health and lives ruined by unlimited polluting and other industry control over the world, there's a good chance of us being nuked in the near future, so we probably don't really have to worry about dealing with this Brave New 1984 World scenario, as designed by corporations with no human capacities, such as understanding and empathy, for robots with no human capacities, such as understanding and empathy.

Plus, they'd probably be grammar nazis and get snarky about typos in our emails or even in our minds.

He's sure helped to expose some corruption and greed, hasn't he? He's sure done nothing to persuade anyone that he's not just one more Corporate shill, and he's done much to feed Repugnant ire with the Rump. What a legacy.

You're right, he'll be scrutinized no matter what he does. Good. I've said it before, but I hope one day his own daughters look at him and ask why. Climate change alone may ensure they do ask that question one day, they'll see far worse than he will in his lifetime. I almost hope he just slinks away as I can't really even listen to him speak anymore, and that grin that I used to think was so very attractive looks predatory now to me. Predatory and smug.

Thank you for this beautiful comment. It is something I echo completely. Get well Steven!

I agree so much with the above - pharma-trained physicians tend to leave biology out of the equation and attempt to treat healing complex systems as though some isolated single-action chemical experiment within it was even possible. And they do not take our continual subjection to household/industrial toxins/pollutants into account at all.

I was stuck for some time on a diet of cheap processed crap, which was what was available at the time, after a life-time of pedominately fruit and veggies. I ate whatever, on the grounds that even if it made me sicker, it was better than nothing - and have improved tremendously after gaining the ability to cut out commercially processed flour and meats and, some time after this (as organic is not possible) corn, which is nearly always now GMO and created worsening and ultimately very bad gut pain, worsening with time and frequency of corn consumption - a problem I'd never had before with that, (although previously bought and ate a lot of organic/sustainably raised corn in more affluent times) which pain is now finally gone.

Unfortunately, that means no frozen 5-veggie mixed which I used to rely on, which means I'm now typically eating either only one or two kinds of frozen veggies every month, as well as potatoes, which in some cases (GMO is on the market now, can't tell until after you eat some) also cause problems. I find I can eat Basmati rice but not most other kinds - you have to test and see how you feel after eating something, generally problems are most identifiable after consuming them several days running.

You have to keep track of what does or doesn't cause problems for you, and test several times. Unfortunately, we are not allowed to know what's in the food we buy because we'd have the chance to avoid anything unwanted/unhealthy, which makes it difficult, as some batches of a food you have no problem with (such as apples, GMO versions of which have been grown for some time in Washington State and British Columbia and will also be contaminating other apples,) may give you an upset stomach or worse, as they seem to do me. (I can't prove it's GMO or a specific pesticide, though. But apples which are usually round and show up in a Delicious apple shape or all identically distorted are now suspect to me, and my room-mate, who shops after work on the way home, can't tell these things, so apples will be out for me now, once the ones from the tree out back are gone. Bananas - which I gather have mostly shifted to GMO, which would explain a lot - have been out for some time. Shop carefully and look at what you buy; avoid GMOs, as genes and what they express cannot have different genetic material added to change characteristics without also altering the biochemistry, often randomly. Not that all effects will show in the near term...)

Despite being on a very limited diet which I know is short of important nutrients, and being unable to afford supplements, (and still having a sleep disorder) I'm doing incredibly much better than I was, although I still have to avoid other exposures to various chemicals.

The less-expensive garbage being passed off as food is horrendously toxic and nutrient-deficient and diet is, of course, a major factor in your body functions functioning from the cellular level up. (This toxicity in the food supply and elsewhere will drastically increase once the TPP and Fast-Tracked others are passed and corporate/billionaire profit becomes the only legal concern of those regulating us to suit them.)

The difference made in inflammation levels and most often foot/leg cramping is, at least in my case, that of not having these when various processed foods and other chemical exposures are avoided, although organic flours, especially ancient grains, would probably be alight for you; I get them on sale now and then and they typically do not have the same inflammatory effects of the typical commercial breads.

Please try, if you haven't already, what's been suggested - it may make a world of difference to you!