The Evening Blues - 8-14-18



eb1pt12


The day's news roundup + tonight's musical feature: Cripple Clarence Lofton

Hey! Good Evening!

This evening's music features boogie woogie piano player Cripple Clarence Lofton. Enjoy!

Cripple Clarence Lofton - Strut That Thing

"Capitalism tends to destroy its two sources of wealth: nature and human beings."

-- Karl Marx


News and Opinion

I Don't Remember Voting For U.S. Bombs to Murder Little Kids in Yemen, Do You?

It must have been a moment of unspeakable shock, terror and pain. But it’s hard to know exactly what it was like at the moment last Thursday when a school bus packed with Yemeni schoolchildren — summer campers coming back from a picnic — was struck from the skies by a powerful bomb, because so few of these innocent kids survived to tell about it, and because those who did are mostly clinging to life, maimed or badly burned by the blast. ...

The merciless Saudi-led war in Yemen — which has not only claimed 13,500 lives but triggered a humanitarian crisis in which some 20 million Yemenis, out of a nation of just 29 million, are scrambling for food and other basic necessities and as many as 900,000 people are suffering from cholera — is what it is today because of help from the United States. America offers the Saudis and its allies in the region the intelligence used to carry out the nonstop airstrikes and other military operations. The planes that conduct the bombing runs are refueled by American forces in the region. And many of the bombs that have been dropped on Yemen — including those that have struck hospitals and other civilian targets — were manufactured and supplied by the United States.

It’s very likely the bomb that obliterated the school bus last week was an American bomb; a Pentagon spokesman conceded that, because of the lengths to which U.S. forces go to avoid operational knowledge of the war for which we otherwise provide such critical support, it officially doesn’t know whether we supplied these particular munitions. “We may never know if the munition [used] was one that the U.S. sold to them,” Army Maj. Josh Jacques, a spokesperson for U.S. Central Command, told Vox — a classic case of American plausible deniability. But people on the ground in Yemen say they can link American-made bombs to Thursday’s airstrike and other attacks on innocent civilians.


Thursday’s school bus bombing did accomplish one thing: The unavoidable carnage forced American media — which has all but ignored the conflict in Yemen, and our role in supporting it — to pay at least a little bit of attention, cramming a few minutes of coverage into the end of the hour, after all the latest inane tweets from the Madman Across the Fairway had been regurgitated and dissected. It shouldn’t have taken so long. ...

This blood is on America’s hands, as long as we keep sending the bombs that kill so many Yemenis, and as long as we give the Saudis our unqualified diplomatic support in a messy regional conflict. And yet there’s been no public debate about the murky U.S. role out of this, and no clarification from the White House or the Pentagon over what we hope to accomplish by our support of the mayhem. There are, however, a few members of Congress demanding answers. But efforts by Congress to end America’s role in the seemingly endless conflict have gone nowhere. ... America’s entanglement in Yemen is so emblematic of the broader debacle that was once known as “the war on terror” but now has simply become the “forever war,” spanning the globe from Africa to the Middle East to Asia, with America firing missiles from drones or going on secret raids or lining up with butchering autocrats like the Saudis for nebulous and sometimes shifting aims. This all happens without legal authorization from Congress, or anything resembling an open democratic debate, and with seemingly no expiration date.

Laundering a Massacre By Labeling It a ‘Clash’

As FAIR has noted before (e.g., Extra!, 1/17; FAIR.org, 4/2/18), the term “clash” is almost always used to launder power asymmetry and give the reader the impression of two equal warring sides. It obscures power dynamics and the nature of the conflict itself, e.g., who instigated it and what weapons if any were used. “Clash” is a reporter’s best friend when they want to describe violence without offending anyone in power—in the words of George Orwell, “to name things without calling up mental pictures of them.”

It’s predictable, then, that in coverage of Israel’s recent mass shootings in Gaza—which have killed over 30 Palestinians and injured more than 1,100—the word “clashes” is used to euphemize snipers in fortified positions firing on unarmed protesters 100 meters away:

  • Journalist Among 9 Dead in Latest Gaza Clashes, Palestinian Health Officials Say (CNN, 4/7/18)
  • Burning Tires, Tear Gas and Live Fire: Gaza Clashes Turn Deadly (Washington Post, 4/6/18)
  • Demonstrators Wounded as Gaza Clashes Resume (Reuters, 4/7/18)
  • After Gaza Clash, Israel and Palestinians Fight With Videos and Words (New York Times, 4/1/18)

... Israel has a state-of-the-art military: F35s, Sa’ar corvettes, Merkava tanks and Hellfire missiles, not to mention the most intrusive surveillance apparatus in the world; total control over the air, sea and land. In the Great March of Return protests, the Palestinians have employed rocks, tires and, according to the IDF, the occasional Molotov cocktail, though no independent evidence has emerged of the latter being used. The power asymmetry is one of the largest of any conflict in the world, yet Western media still cling on an institutional level to a “cycle of violence” frame, with “both sides” depicted as equal parties. The term “clashes” permits them to do this in perpetuity, no matter how one-sided the violence becomes.

One Million Muslim Uighurs Have Been Detained by China, the U.N. Says. Where’s the Global Outrage?

It was on September 16, 2001, five days after the 9/11 attacks, that President George W. Bush declared his now-infamous “war on terrorism.” Other governments around the world followed suit — but few matched the speed, intensity, and sheer cynicism with which the autocrats in Beijing aligned themselves with the Bush administration.

Dogged by protests and revolts from a Turkic-speaking Muslim minority called the Uighurs in the vast and autonomous Central Asian border region of Xinjiang — or East Turkestan, as it is historically referred to by the Uighurs — the Chinese spotted an opportunity. In the weeks and months after 9/11, Beijing began submitting documents to the United Nations alleging that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, or ETIM — a group that few people had ever heard of, or could even confirm the existence of — was a “major component of the terrorist network headed by Osama bin Laden” and “an important part of his terrorist forces.” By September 2002, both the U.N. and the United States had listed ETIM as a “terrorist organization” — throwing the Uighurs under the geopolitical bus.

Fast forward 17 years: On Friday, a panel of U.N. human rights experts said Uighurs in Xinjiang were being treated as “enemies of the state” and announced that it had received credible reports about the “arbitrary and mass detention of almost 1 million Uighurs” in “counter-extremism centers.” One. Million. People. It’s an astonishingly high number. In the context of the Uighur population as a whole, it’s even more shocking: There are around 11 million Uighurs living in Xinjiang, which means that almost one in 10 of them has been detained, according to the U.N. How is this not anything other than one of the biggest, and most underreported, human rights crises in the world today? ...

As with the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, China’s war on terror in Xinjiang risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy. But the Chinese — like the Americans and the Israelis — don’t really give a damn about alleged terrorist threats. This has much less to do with security and much more to with politics. Beijing is asserting control over a restless province that borders eight countries — including Pakistan and Afghanistan. Other economic factors come into play, too: Xinjiang is home to the country’s largest reserves of coal and natural gas.

Fighting terrorism, though, has become a useful cover for authoritarian governments around the world. Nicholas Bequelin, who is the East Asia director at Amnesty International and a former visiting scholar at Yale Law School’s China Center, draws a “direct line” from the Bush declaration of a war on terror in 2001 to the repression of the Uighurs in 2018. “The war on terror rhetoric immensely benefitted the Chinese,” said Bequelin. “It was a 180-degree turn for the discourse of the Chinese state with respect to its ability in Xinjiang: from minimizing and trying to hide it to casting its efforts and suppression of any form of dissent as ‘counterterrorism.’

China denies detaining one million Uighurs in internment camps

Psychologists Vote Not to Return to Guantánamo Amid Heated Debate Over Torture Legacy

The governing council of the American Psychological Association voted Wednesday against a proposal to allow military psychologists to return to Guantánamo Bay, after a fraught debate that had reopened controversy over the organization’s involvement in the early days of the war on terror.

The proposal would have amended the ethics policy of a 2015 resolution by the association, which banned psychologists from working at detention sites that are in violation of international human rights law, such as Guantánamo. Current policy allows for independent psychologists to treat both military personnel and detainees in illegal settings, but only if they work directly for the detainee or a human rights organization, which precludes offering their services at Guantánamo, because the military does not allow civilian psychologists access to the prison.

The proposal inserted language that would allow psychologists to work in national security settings “in a health care role” — raising concerns about the profession once again working under the command of the military. “The vote is a decision to remain steady with the current policy that keeps psychologists out of illegal detention facilities. It keeps APA consistent with the human rights community and international law,” said Stephen Soldz, a psychologist and representative on the association’s council.

The 2015 resolution came on the heels of a report from former federal prosecutor David Hoffman, commissioned by the APA, which concluded that members of the organization’s leadership had collaborated with officials in the George W. Bush administration to ensure that psychologists could participate in national security interrogations under APA policies, even as evidence of CIA torture and military abuses at Abu Ghraib emerged. The reform realigned the APA’s ethics policy according to international human rights law and conventions against torture.

When the Resistance is Really the Assistance

We all learned in school that some countries have a single governing party. If you’re not in that party, you can’t be part of the government. The US has two government parties, Republicans and Democrats, both funded by the corporations and wealthy individuals who make up this country’s capitalist elite. If you’re not in either one of the government parties, you’re denied access to media and in many states, laws are passed specifically to keep you off the ballot. ... Since the election of Donald Trump Democrats have branded themselves “the resistance.”

This month the House and Senate passed the reconciled version of the 2019 Pentagon budget on to the White House. On TV and establishment media they call it a defense budget, but that’s branding too. ... Early this month, the House and Senate passed the reconciled version of the US war budget to the president for signatgure. It’s the earliest in the budget cycle Congress has done a military budget since 1996 or 1997, when a Democrat in the White House and Democrats in Congress were anxious to assure Republicans that they were all on the same side. They call this year’s atrocity the John McCain National Defense Authorization Act, worth a record $716 billion. This total doesn’t include the budget of the Afghan war, which lives somewhere else, or the budgets of several other known programs, and there are secret budgets for more or less secret programs as well. Nobody really doubts that actual US military spending has hovered around a trillion a year for several years now.

So how did the resistance perform? In the Senate the vote was 87 to 10, three not voting. Only 8 Democrats resisted. Among them Liz Warren, Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris and Kirsten Gillibrand. Dick Durbin of Illinois also voted against the Pentagon bill. This is purest theater, because Durbin since 2005 has been Democratic Whip in the Senate, the man responsible for lining up the votes of his fellow senators. If this meant anything to him, why did only 7 other Democrats vote with their supposed leader? In the House the vote was 351 to 66, with 139 Democrats voting yes, 49 voting no, and 5 not voting. So the resistance was really the assistance, voting almost 2 to 1 to continue spending as much on US wars around the world as the next nine or ten countries put together.

For Second Time This Year, Facebook Suspends Left-Leaning teleSUR English Without Explanation

For the second time this year, Facebook has suspended teleSUR English's page, claiming the left-leaning Latin American news network violated the social media platform's terms of service without any further explanation—a move that provoked outrage and concern among journalists, free speech advocates, and Big Tech critics.

In a short article posted on teleSUR's website on Monday, the regional news network—which is based in Venezuela but also has received funding from Argentina, Bolivia, Cuba, Ecuador, and Nicaragua—explained:

teleSUR English's page has been removed from Facebook for the second time this year without any specific reason being provided. It should be noted that the first time this occurred back in January 2018, Facebook did NOT provide any explanation in spite of our best efforts to understand their rationale. This is an alarming development in light of the recent shutting down of pages that don't fit a mainstream narrative.

According to the outlet, "the only communication" teleSUR has received from Facebook was the following message:

Your Page "teleSUR English" has been removed for violating our Terms of Use. A Facebook Page is a distinct presence used solely for business or promotional purposes. Among other things, Pages that are hateful, threatening or obscene are not allowed. We also take down Pages that attack an individual or group, or that are set up by an unauthorized individual. If your Page was removed for any of the above reasons, it will not be reinstated. Continued misuse of Facebook's features could result in the permanent loss of your account.

Max Blumenthal, editor of The Grayzone Project, called Facebook's decision "deeply disturbing." He also noted that the platform recently banned Venezuelanalysis.com, which like teleSUR offers a leftist perspective on Latin America, and raised alarm about Facebook's work with the Digital Forensic Research Lab, a project of the Atlantic Council, a NATO-backed, D.C.-based think tank.


Russiagate Crusaders Don’t Want Democracy, Just War

The corporate media paid only scant attention to recent protests in Russia led by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. It was reported that tens of thousands of Russianstook to the streets in late July to protest a proposed raise in the pension retirement age for both men and women. One would have suspected that Russiagate crusaders s would have jumped at the opportunity to exploit the protests as an opportunity to denounce “Putin’s Russia.” However, the corporate media did no such thing. That’s because the leaders of Russiagate in the US and Western ruling class don’t give a damn about democracy or the people. Their main objectives are war and austerity.

Furthermore, protests gave little for Russiagate loyalists to exploit. Protesters were not besieged by the state as would be expected from an “authoritarian” regime. Instead, Putin announced that he would listen to “all sides” of the issue. The Duma’s proposal to raise the retirement age for men to sixty-five and women to sixty-three comes amid several contradictions that have been developing in Russia for some time now. On the one hand, Russia has spent the last decade and a half crawling back from the disaster that was the fall of the Soviet Union. Over this period, Russia has raised the life expectancy and standard of livingfor millions of people to make up for the steep decline in living conditions that characterized the “shock therapy” austerity reforms of the Yeltsin era.

However, Russia is no socialist paradise. Capitalism remains the dominant system in Russia despite the very real progress that has been made under Putin. But the US ruling class’ addiction to Russiagate is not the product of some concern for “democracy” or the condition of workers in Russia. Russiagate is the ideological bedrock of US imperialist aggression toward Russia. Putin has become the scapegoat that masks the insidious interests of US finance capital and the Deep State. These forces desperately want to intimidate Russian leaders into reviving the wholesale theft of the country that took place from 1991-2000.

The proof isn’t too difficult to find. US-imposed sanctions on Russiahave only intensified since the Russiagate narrative emerged over two years ago. If Russiagate enthusiasts were interested in “democracy,” they would demand an end to the sanctions and a scale back of the US military’s presence along the Russian border. Instead, Russiagate crusaders have gone “all in” with the FBI, CIA, and the Deep State to promote regime change in Russia. The conditions of workers in Russia mean nothing to those who saddle up behind the repressive agents of the Deep State.

Russia says will ditch U.S. securities amid sanctions

Russia will further decrease its holdings of U.S. securities in response to new sanctions against Moscow but has no plans to shut down U.S. companies in Russia, Finance Minister Anton Siluanov said on state TV on Sunday, RIA news agency reported.

On Friday, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev said Russia would regard any U.S. move to curb the activities of its banks as a “declaration of economic war” and would take retaliatory action. ...

“We have lowered to the minimum level and will further decrease our investment in the U.S. economy, in the U.S. securities,” Siluanov said, shedding light on the nature of an unexpected drop in Russia’s holdings of U.S. Treasury bonds. Russia has ditched its holdings of U.S. Treasuries in the past few months as relations between Moscow and Washington have deteriorated, data showed last month.

Russia will also have more settlement in roubles and other currencies, such as the euro, than in dollars, Siluanov said.

Turkish lira record low ripples through global currency markets

A fresh plunge in the Turkish lira sent tremors through global currency markets on Monday, amid fears that the failure of Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government to tackle its worsening financial crisis would have a domino effect on other vulnerable countries.

Argentina’s central bank raised its key interest rate by five percentage points to 45% following a fall in the peso, and the South African rand was also hit in a day of turbulence that saw the lira fall 8% against the dollar.

Erdogan lashed out at “economic terrorists on social media” as he accused Donald Trump of stabbing Turkey in the back. But the Turkish president’s insistence that his country would survive an economic siege failed to reassure financial markets alarmed at the possible collapse of the strategically vital emerging market country.

Concerns that the 45% drop in the value of the lira this year would prove ruinous for companies that had borrowed heavily in foreign currencies prompted the renewed sell off of the lira and pushed up the cost of servicing Turkey’s budget deficit. ...

Although Turkey’s $300bn of dollar-denominated corporate debt makes it particularly vulnerable, currency speculators have started to assess the potential damage to Europe and to identify other emerging market countries that have also taken advantage of low global interest rates to accumulate foreign currency debts during the post-financial crisis period.

Yves Smith on Why We Didn’t See the 2008 Crash Coming

There was a critical meeting where Obama met with a bunch of senior bankers. And he said basically, “I’m all that’s standing between you and the pitchforks.” And that was when everybody knew he was going to be on their side. He made it official he was on the bankers side. And what really shocked me was in 2009, when the banks decided to pay their staff higher bonuses than they had gotten in 2007.

I lost it. The fact that they couldn’t even have the decency to tone it down for appearances’ sake and pay themselves less and rebuild their balance sheets … They’ve just been bailed out, and they slapped the public in the face. And they paid themselves even higher bonuses in 2010. They slapped the public in the face by taking the bailout money and then paying themselves even more than they’ve ever made.

While there were all these unnecessary foreclosures. There were 9 million foreclosures. Basically about a sixth of the houses with mortgages in the U.S. were foreclosed on. That’s just a stunning and disgraceful figure. And the reason it’s stunning and disgraceful is that before you had securitization, when a borrower got in trouble the mortgage borrower got in trouble. ...

Trump is crowing about this 4.1 percent GDP growth, right? Yet if you look at the statistics, real worker wages have continued to be flat for this period. The crisis itself was the greatest looting of the public purse in history. The crisis itself was a huge wealth transfer. The Obama administration should have forced a lot more recognition of the losses. These losses were real. They should have forced more loan write-downs. And recognition of the loss to the financial system. And they should have had a huge stimulus to offset the downdraft of recognizing those losses. ...

Why do you think we have Trump? I mean, even though he did a big bait-and-switch, as we all know, there were a lot of people that lost their homes, their community wasn’t what it used to be, particularly if they lived in the Rust Belt. And then you have these people on the coast saying, “Oh, they should go get training. It’s disgusting.” I mean, let them eat cake is let them get training. What you hear from these coastal elites: People over 40, even over 35, are basically unhirable. Are you gonna train them? They’re gonna waste their time thinking they can get a new job? I mean, that’s just lunacy. ... This is one of my criticisms of the Obama administration, but now appears to be true of the Democratic Party generally, that they think the solution for every problem is better PR.



the horse race



Mueller’s Indictments Debunked By NSA Whistle-blower. w/Bill Binney



the evening greens


With Merger Pending, Bayer Shares Plunge After Court Orders Monsanto to Pay $289 Million to Cancer Victim

Shares in Bayer took a nosedive on Monday—just days after newly-acquired Monsanto was ordered to pay $289 million in damages to a man who alleged that the company's glyphosate-based herbicides, including the widely used weedkiller Roundup, caused his cancer. At one point the German pharmaceutical giant's shares fell by as much as 14 percent, Reuters reported, marking a loss in value of roughly $14 billion.

It capped off the U.S. trading day as one of the "biggest losers," ending at a 10-percent loss. Friday was also a losing day for Monsanto, which Bayer AG controversially acquired for $62.5 billion in June. In a landmark trial, a San Francisco jury unanimously found that the company failed to warn school groundskeeper Dewayne Johnson, who's suffering from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, and other consumers of the cancer risks from its weed killers, and said the company acted "with malice or oppression."

Historic Ruling Against Monsanto Finds Company Acted with “Malice” Against Groundskeeper with Cancer

What Happens When a Pipeline Runs Afoul of Government Rules? Authorities Change the Rules.

A week ago, the federal government halted work on a massive pipeline project that runs from Northern West Virginia through Southern Virginia. The government said it had no choice but to order work on the multibillion-dollar Mountain Valley Pipeline stopped after a federal appeals court ruled that two federal agencies had neglected to follow important environmental protections when they approved the project.

The court had found that the U.S. Forest Service had suddenly dropped — without any explanation — its longstanding concerns that soil erosion from the pipeline would harm rivers, streams and aquatic life. It also found that the Bureau of Land Management approved a new construction path through the Jefferson National Forest, ignoring rules that favor sticking to existing utility rights-of-way. “American citizens understandably place their trust in the Forest Service to protect and preserve this country’s forests, and they deserve more than silent acquiescence to a pipeline company’s justification for upending large swaths of national forestlands,” Judge Stephanie Thacker wrote for a unanimous ruling from a three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “Citizens also trust the Bureau of Land Management to prevent undue degradation to public lands by following the dictates” of federal law.

It turns out, those weren’t the only times state and federal regulators bent environmental standards for the project, which began construction in February. A review by the Charleston Gazette-Mail, in collaboration with ProPublica, shows that, over the past two years, federal and state agencies tasked with enforcing the nation’s environmental laws have moved repeatedly to clear roadblocks and expedite the pipeline, even changing the rules at times to ease the project’s approvals.

Projects like the Mountain Valley Pipeline, known as MVP, require a variety of approvals before being built. Developers and regulators must study various alternatives, describe a clear need for the project, and show that steps will be taken to minimize damage to the environment and reduce negative effects on valuable resources like public lands and the water supply. But in numerous instances, officials greenlit the pipeline despite serious unanswered questions, records show.

Bank of the West’s anti-fossil fuel stance sets off firestorm in Western Slope, energy states

Bank of the West’s decision to divest from certain fossil fuel investments has run headlong into threats of retaliation in Colorado, Wyoming and other states that rely heavily on coal, oil and natural gas extraction for revenues. The San Francisco-based bank recently made it known that it would be “investing where we feel we can make the most impact” and withdrawing support for companies and business activities that are “detrimental to our environment and our health.”

That includes no longer doing business with companies whose main activity is tied to oil and gas from shale or tar sands or financing oil and gas exploration or production projects in the Arctic. Nor will it finance coal mines or coal-fired power plants not actively involved in the energy transition. And the company also is cutting ties to tobacco-related businesses. ...

Bank of the West is Colorado’s fifth largest bank with $4.5 billion in deposits as of June 30, 2017.  It has 75 locations in Colorado, the bank’s second largest concentration of any state after California with 235 locations, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.

Moffat County officials were so upset with Bank of the West that they responded by announcing plans to shift about $25 million worth of county transactions to one of its rivals, and a similar move is planned by officials in Sweetwater County, Wyo., according to a story in The Daily Sentinel. ... Wyoming Treasurer Mark Gordon threatened Thursday to stop depositing state funds for a local lending program that has generated about $63 million in deposits with the bank over the years. Gordon and Wyoming Gov. Matt Mead said they will ask state banking regulators to review the bank’s status as a public depository for the state, which could prohibit all state agencies from using the bank for petty cash accounts.


Also of Interest

Here are some articles of interest, some which defied fair-use abstraction.

So, How’s That Major-Party Election Madness Working for Us?

Senator Richard Burr: a Longtime Fan of Torture

‘The Vast Majority of Tipped Workers in America Suffer from Three Times the Poverty Rate of the Rest of the US Workforce’

Keith Ellison accuser says she won't release video of alleged abuse incident

Dreamers


A Little Night Music

Cripple Clarence Lofton - Monkey Man Blues

Cripple Clarence Lofton - Streamline Train

Cripple Clarence Lofton - In The Mornin'

Cripple Clarence Lofton - I Don't Know

Cripple Clarence Lofton (Adam Wilcox) - Policy Blues

Cripple Clarence Lofton - Pine Top's Boogie Woogie

Cripple Clarence Lofton - Brown Skin Girls

Cripple Clarence Lofton - You Done Tore Your Playhouse Down

Cripple Clarence Lofton - Pitchin' Boogie


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joe shikspack's picture

yep, it's early. i have a bunch of stuff to do this afternoon and early evening, so i'll catch up with you guys tonight.

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@joe shikspack

during the noon hour than it does at dusk.

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joe shikspack's picture

@HenryAWallace

thanks!

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ggersh's picture

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

snoopydawg's picture

@ggersh

honkin SCSI connections for printers and other external devices? I still have a draw full of them because I have two of my 20+ year old computers. I don't know how to get rid of them or just their hardware and especially the hard drives that have tons of financial information on them. What do people here do with theirs? Boy times have changed since the days when computer geaks said that one day computers would be small enough to fit in just one room. Heh. Can you imagine the look on their faces if they saw the iPhone and Iwatch?

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

@snoopydawg but I pry out the hard drive and recycle the rest. Throw the drive in a drawer for a keepsake (with my lost teeth and memory sticks) and my identity is safe, or

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ggersh's picture

@snoopydawg start thinking like Fred Sandford

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

WoodsDweller's picture

@snoopydawg
You should still be able to get a SCSI port PCI card and mount the drives (use Linux if Windows can't read them), copy the data off (make a disk image on Linux using dd, there's probably a way to do it in Windows), or copy individual files if they are readable.

If you're asking how to safely dispose of the drives themselves, there are two options. The first is to securely wipe it. Again, get a SCSI port PCI card, mount the drive, then use any number of free programs to overwrite the entire drive with all ones, then all zeros, etc. multiple times until the data is unrecoverable. The second is to physically destroy the drive. There are such things as hard drive shredders, but they are too expensive to buy one to just shred a couple of drives. Failing that, put on some eye protection and get a big hammer and smash the shit out of the drive. If you can dismantle it enough to expose the platters, a very modest hammer will shatter them. All the king' horses and all the king's men won't put those platters together again.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

snoopydawg's picture

@WoodsDweller

One is a PC and the other is a Mac. The PC has doom on it which is a fun game and the Mac has marathon on it which is one of the first first shooter games for Macs. Man I spent so many hours playing marathon and I got a cheater for it so I'd have unlimited weapons, health, etc and play it on the total destruction level. Blast the Hell out of aliens. I'm not sure if it still works and it has the old classic OS on it. OS 8 I think so I don't know if I can connect the hard drive to my new Mac. Guess I'll have to call the Apple Store and talk to someone there.

I have my friend's older laptop that has windows 5-7 on it I think. Can I connect the hard drive to it somehow? I'm very PC illiterate because I've been a Mac geek since Apple sold the first computers.

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Which AIPAC/MIC/pharma/bank bought politician are you going to vote for? Don’t be surprised when nothing changes.

WoodsDweller's picture

@snoopydawg
Different problems, different solutions.
To play Doom or any DOS game or program on a modern computer, use DosBox, which is an emulator which runs on modern Windows, Mac, or Linux. That's right, you don't even need an X86 CPU underneath it.
https://www.dosbox.com/
I remember Marathon, but my old Mac was too slow to play it decently (the company that made it was bought out by Microsoft and became an XBox only studio, making the Halo games).
Running OS8 (which was the Motorola 68000 CPU) or earlier you can use another emulator called Basilisk 2. If your Mac still boots (all you need to do is insert a floppy, the external hard drive is optional) you can extract an ID for the onboard ROM which is needed to prove that your emulator is legit.
https://basilisk.cebix.net/
OS9 was the PowerPC CPU and requires a different emulator called SheepShaver.
Get your emulators working on your modern system, move your files over one time, and you are good to play those retro games FOREVAH.
To connect your SCSI drives you will need a SCSI port, which means you need to open up the machine and install a card, which means a desktop machine not a laptop (there might be some USB dongle solution or something).
I don't have any recommendations, but a quick search shows me cards in the $100 range.
You only need to do that once, though, to grab an image of your drives or at least a copy of the files. The card will need drivers for the operating system of the machine you put the card in. My recommendation would be to reach out to a mom and pop computer shop, tell them what you're trying to do, and they should be able to fix you up. Or find a 12 year old and trade him some sugar and a copy of some game his parents don't want him to have.
There's also the option of buying new copies of the old games rather than trying to recover them from old drives. Do you really need your save games? Do you really need your mods? There's a whole new crop of mods available, I'm sure.

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

WoodsDweller's picture

@snoopydawg
I see that gog has Doom for $6.

https://www.gog.com/game/the_ultimate_doom

They list XP as the lowest supported OS, but the first comment is about how to configure DosBox, so it probably just runs there.

Another option for retro games is open source game engines that play the old game files. You have to buy or otherwise find the original files, but there is a new program that actually runs the game and runs natively on multiple platforms.

Here's one for Marathon:

https://alephone.lhowon.org/

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

joe shikspack's picture

@ggersh

heh, when we used to have some apples at work, i was always amazed at the array of adapter cables that one needed to do things - all of which were pretty expensive. i was also amazed at how quickly apple users wanted to turn over their machines for a shiny new (apple) toy.

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ggersh's picture

@joe shikspack I imagine apple is a huge part of
the planet being in this shape

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

Have listened only to your first selection so far, but I think I'm in love. (Alas, I often fall in love with men and women I've encountered only long after they'd passed. James Dean was my first, upon seeing East of Eden on TV.) Having heard Clarence, I better understand the origins of Jerry Lee Lewis, whose music I admire, despite his bio.

Lots of great insights today, too. As always, the Evening Blues is incredible. Thank you.

I am never sure if capitalism per se is as big a problem as corporate welfare and government's being in the service of big business. The conflict there once was that, while legislators served the wealthy, legislators had to depend upon everyone else to get elected.

I think that's why God (or Whomever) created things like voting machines, the Republicrat uniparty, rigged primaries, etc. Not to mention benevolent and grateful shrewd corporatists ensuring that politicians enjoyed high paying power jobs and/or lavish speaking fees after their constituents could no longer stand them. They had to make as certain as they could politicians did not fear losing elections, or politicians might not do their bidding. Politicians not only serve the wealthy, but are the wealthy. Yes, it's good to be the king, but being an elected/selected official ain't nothing, either.

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@HenryAWallace is getting squibbly ( a word I just made up ). Young folks running against the establishment, older folks holding signs, nobody fooled by legislative fraud. US petrodollar pinching itself to death. It is revolting to watch.

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@QMS

in this nation and many others.

"Squibbly" is a fine neologism. Thank you.

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@HenryAWallace

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@QMS

principles. BTW, I loved your typo. There has to be an abdication joke in there somewhere, but I'm too tired to think of one. Think I need to power down--the laptop and I, both.

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joe shikspack's picture

@HenryAWallace

you might want to check back thursday for another incredible blues piano player, big maceo merriweather. blues piano players tend not to get the acclaim that blues guitar players do, which seems a shame.

seems to me that the dilemma about capitalism vs. corrupt politicians is really more of a chicken and the egg problem.

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mimi's picture

Easy to understand? Right? Thank you, Bill Binney and Jimmy Dore. I wished there were a transcript.
I hope Bill Binney will stay healthy and have a long life to help us understand stuff that's difficult to know and hard to express in clear words.

Thank you Joe for your EB. Can't live without it and barely can live with it.

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joe shikspack's picture

@mimi

i'm glad that binney is out there bearing witness in plain language for all to hear. his audience is far too small, but at least the information that he has to impart is getting out there.

good to see you!

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in black and white, love it, Pine Top's Boogie Woogie. Thanks Joe! Oh, BTW. they finally popped the opaque Yemen masquerade bubble. Hell to pay the masses figure that one out.

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joe shikspack's picture

@QMS

i'm glad that the evil crap that the u.s. government is doing (started by obama) in yemen has finally gotten a moment in the mainstream media. it needs a lot more attention.

here's the 1928 original "pine top's boogie woogie" by clarence "pine top" smith:

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@joe shikspack boogie woogie shake that thang!

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Raggedy Ann's picture

I am very disturbed by that bus bombing in Yemen. I have friends who are russiarussiarussia all the time that are going to get a copy of that article in their in-box. I'm also going to send them a copy of the article titled "Russiagate Crusaders Don’t Want Democracy, Just War" another eye-opener. Hopefully they actually read the articles and educate themselves. I'm getting pretty tired of the sheeple ignorance they are exhibiting. Okay, rant over.

I get my cast off Thursday. finally. I hope my foot is healed otherwise they will re-brake it and I'll be debilitated for another 2 months. I broke this foot in April and I'm pretty tired of it not healing, although I really don't know how to slow down, which is why I have the cast - to force me. Anyway. I'll let you all know how it came out.

Enjoying the tunes, joe - I love that old music!!!

Have a beautiful evening, folks! Pleasantry

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"The “jumpers” reminded us that one day we will all face only one choice and that is how we will die, not how we will live." Chris Hedges on 9/11

@Raggedy Ann @Raggedy Ann before you break it Wink

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joe shikspack's picture

@Raggedy Ann

glad to hear that you are making progress with your healing and that a pleasant milestone is in sight. take it easy!

good luck with the education project for your liberal friends.

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MarilynW's picture

My island is on fire. Vancouver Island, that is. We live in Victoria, a beautiful city, one of the world's friendliest cities. But we can hardly breathe for the smoke. The sun is an orange ball in the sky, we can look straight at it. I can't even think of the wild animals losing their habitat. I met a friend when I walked my dog. All I could say was "we did this, we did this." And the cars keep whizzing by, We will drive our fossil fuel machines right into the jaws of death.

Hope the air is good where you live.

B.C. Wildfires 2018: 462 fires burning across province
https://vancouversun.com/news/local-news/wildfires-2018-462-fires-burnin...

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To thine own self be true.

@MarilynW glad you found a friend, we're going to need a big bunch of 'em to help get thru this *--* just starting, oh my.

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smiley7's picture

@MarilynW

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@MarilynW area and it looks and smells like LA to me today. It was supposedly going to clear out some but it looks worse today than yesterday. I look at the birds in the trees behind me and feel guilty about all the ones being killed by human greed and try hard not to just cry. Then I gaze at the picture of my climate change denying father, long dead, and flip him off just for the hell of it.

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Only a fool lets someone else tell him who his enemy is. Assata Shakur

snoopydawg's picture

@MarilynW

or clouds. Hopefully this was just a description of how smokey your air is? Solar retinopathy happens quickly and is untreatable.

Utah's air has been like that for two weeks and still no idea when it's leaving. Most of the smoke is coming from the big fires in California and one of them is going to burn through September. Sorry to hear that you're experiencing this too. The wildlife deserves better stewards of their habitat. Humans have failed them.

This was our sunset a few days ago. It smells like a campfire some days.

IMG_2441.JPG

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joe shikspack's picture

@MarilynW

i'm so sorry to hear that vancouver has become a fire zone, too. i hope that you are able to stay out of the smoke and breathe reasonably fresh air.

take care!

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smiley7's picture

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smiley7's picture

@smiley7
virtual hugs to the little one. Smile

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joe shikspack's picture

@smiley7

thanks! i spent part of the afternoon with her, it's just amazing watching them grow.

have a great evening!

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

to say 'hi,' and hope that you have a nice time running errands. (Ugh!)

Pleasantry

Seriously, got so discombobulated last night, posted my EB comment at one of Amanda's essay--whew! I'm hoping to get back (here) to post a couple of Tweets this evening, since we'll be traveling tomorrow (because of Mr M's medical treatment/appointment on Friday).

Anyhoo, I'm really blown away by more of what I've found out about a Tier 5 so-called designer drug (Keytruda) this afternoon. It's the drug that was recently credited with saving Jimmy Carter. So, I'm trying to work up a couple of Tweets with attachments on this topic. The increase in cost to us, and I suspect for millions of other Medicare beneficiaries, would be exponential.

For example, Mr M and I will go from paying 'zero' dollars for Part B drugs, to paying 26% of the cost of Tier 5 drugs--under our 2018 Part D RX plan. BTW, Keytruda is quoted at costing $12,500 per month. Yikes!

Whereas, that's bad--what's worse is,

"What will happen to the 27% of Medicare beneficiaries who don't have any Part D RX coverage, and will be left hung out to dry once the hugely expensive Tier 5/Designer Drugs are switched over to Part D plan formularies?"

It will be catastrophic for them, I would imagine.

If anyone is interested in Tweeting/Retweeting on this topic, here's my Twitter logo/avatar and account feed, below. Any help would be much appreciated! (Thanks, DK. Pleasantry )

Large Avatar - BlueOnxyBloggger_0_0.JPG

BlueOnyxBlogger

Will probably make this part of my signature line for a few weeks. I'm really anxious about this devastating Medicare Part B 'reform.'

Hey, gotta run and make a couple of phone payments, before I get back to 'Twittering.' Wink If I miss you later this evening, Joe, thanks for tonight's excellent edition of EB!

Later . . .

[Edited: Clarified that Medicare beneficiaries who don't carry Part D RX coverage will be left hung out to dry, when it comes to being covered for many of the super expensive Tier 5/designer drugs, especially those given by transfusion, etc.]

Bye

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

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snoopydawg's picture

@Unabashed Liberal

The increase in cost to us, and I suspect for millions of other Medicare beneficiaries, would be exponential.

This drug looks to be a great one for dealing with cancer treatment and if it works better than the ones that people have to take for weeks then they will charge more for it. I've wondered if there is a cure for cancer and that they don't want us to know about it because it'd cut into their profits? Yup. I'm being cynical, but can you blame me?

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@snoopydawg all the kazillions donated to cancer research over the years have probably solved the whole mess a thousand times over. Apparently there are no laws to require hidden solutions be shared with the afflicted. Whole lotta money made in grief donations. Think it is time to take the profit motive out of health care.

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janis b's picture

@QMS

said something to me 5 years ago that was shockingly revealing, and I had never thought about before; and he is not at all a conspiracy theorist type. He said, “Janis, I believe that there are more effective cures for cancer known, but the pharmaceutical companies suppress them because there is more profit in treating cancer than curing it”.

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joe shikspack's picture

@snoopydawg

if you are a pharma corp that makes billions from treating the symptoms?

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@joe shikspack are at loggerheads for investors. Even short term solutions, like self immolation, don't make financial sense. If congress were to legalize natural medicines like peyote, psilocybin and cannabis; big pharma would somehow make it unavailable without a script. Greedy bastids.

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snoopydawg's picture

@QMS

I'm thinking that's why marijuana is still a class one drug. Big pharma won't let congress change its classification because it'd take away their profits. Anyone want to bet that there is a cure for 'the common cold'?
Geez, how many millions of people have died because of their greed? Generic drugs should cost pennies these days, but they have gone up hundreds of percent in recent years. One reason is because Israel bought a lot of the patents on generic companies and ..... something. I read about that quite some time ago.

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

@snoopydawg

as Keytruda is, it doesn't necessarily cure cancer. Appears to often cause complete remission, which is the next best thing, I suppose. For instance, Jimmy Carter is still taking this drug. See below,

In a statement, Carter talked about his ongoing medical plan, "I will continue to receive regular 3-week immunotherapy treatments of pembrolizumab." The drug goes by the name Keytruda commercially.

Not to begrudge him excellent health care, but I'm 'guessing' that no matter what happens to Medicare Part B, Carter will be able to have total coverage, even if he has to pay for the Keytruda, outright.

One more excerpt,

The medication Carter is taking is currently FDA-approved for use in certain lung cancers. There are ongoing trials in a number of other diseases, too.

"This is good science -- realizing that the therapies we have available are not optimal and creatively looking for new ways to treat cancers," said Shepard.

He said Carter's news underlies the importance of the need for continued basic scientific research and clinical trials.

"You can actually see that it can have benefits -- this particular case with the former president puts a face to this -- and how people can really benefit from this," Shepard said

Making the drugs affordable needs to be addressed, too, he added. "This therapy costs tens of thousands of dollars a month."

Talk about an understatement! Dash 1

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

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snoopydawg's picture

@Unabashed Liberal

They deny so many medications because they would kill their profits. Take ketamine for example. Infusions of it can help a lot of conditions and costs less than $500 per treatment, but they won't pay for it.

It helps with disorders like ADD, ADHD, depression and a lot of disorders like chronic fatigue syndrome and others like that. Plus it helps with chronic regional pain syndrome. The drug resets the way the brain interprets things. My doctor wants me to try it and I'm waiting to see if Medicaid will cover it. It's a hell of a lot safer than opioids so you would think that insurance companies would want people to stop using them because of their dangerous side effects and their costs. But I'm thinking it's those other disorders that people spend tons of money on that is their reason for not paying for it.

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

@snoopydawg

us know how it comes out.

BTW, thanks for the Retweets/Likes. Thought I recognized that handsome Springer, and knew for sure, when I saw your beautiful photography.

Pleasantry

Saw that you noticed the video about Andy and Bailey. I was flat-out boohooing (at parts of it) the first time I saw it. Makes me think of many of the prison programs (that I've read about) where inmates are instructed on how to train therapy and/or service dogs. Everyone's a winner in those programs!

Wink

Have a good one!

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

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joe shikspack's picture

@Unabashed Liberal

i wonder what portion of that 27% of medicare beneficiaries without part d are also part of the 46% of americans who can't afford a $400 emergency. my bet is on most of them.

i also have a particularly unpleasant feeling about what will happen to them should the tier 5 drugs switch over.

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

@joe shikspack @joe shikspack @joe shikspack

I feel rather bad about complaining about going to a 26% payout (under our 2018 Part D Plan--could change next year) compared to those folks. Bottom line, we're all in this together.

This 'rule' is nothing more than a massive cost shift--got to try to fight back, although I'm clear-eyed enough to realize that it probably won't do any good.

Here's a Tweet that's meant to be a clarion call to all Medicare beneficiaries. I'm not particularly proficient at Tweeting, and could really use more characters. Not sure that I clarified the reason that I've attached the Keytruda excerpt. Hopefully, it'll be relatively self-explanatory.

Here's a redo--either left off the attachment, or, it failed to post, for a reason that I don't understand.

Wink

Everyone have a nice evening!

Bye

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

@Unabashed Liberal

@Unabashed Liberal

check the 'media' box.

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

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ggersh's picture

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I never knew that the term "Never Again" only pertained to
those born Jewish

"Antisemite used to be someone who didn't like Jews
now it's someone who Jews don't like"

Heard from Margaret Kimberley

snoopydawg's picture

@ggersh

that said "we aren't building your wall!"

Ha! 191 charges and indictments have been filed against 32 ..... what? Russians? Russian bots? Russian trolls?

Say, didn't Mueller have to drop the charges against one Russian company after he refused to share his information with their lawyers?

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joe shikspack's picture

@ggersh

fascists in space! just what the universe needs, more space garbage.

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Unabashed Liberal's picture

@ggersh

Blue Onyx

"Everyone thinks they have the best dog, and none of them are wrong."
~~W. R. Purche

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WoodsDweller's picture

Manafort is being tried on tax evasion and bank fraud, matters unrelated to the Trump campaign. I don't take issue with that, the prosecutor isn't obligated to ignore crimes he discovers while he's looking for something else, and $16 million in unreported income is worth raising a stink over.
For whatever reason, Manafort didn't or couldn't cut a deal with Mueller before this went to trial. Maybe he doesn't know anything about the Trump campaign that Mueller can't get from other sources. Maybe he's a principled fascist (hahahaha, couldn't do that with a straight face) who just doesn't want to roll over on El Trumpo.
The prosecution didn't even call all the witnesses they had said they might.

After announcing that they were resting their case, Downing told reporters outside the courthouse that “he did so because he and his legal team believe that the government has not met its burden of proof.”

Also Tuesday, Ellis rejected a defense motion that the case should be dismissed on those same grounds.

Really? That's the entire defense? "Your honor, please dismiss all charges because the prosecutor is a poopy head". "No.", "The defense rests."
Who would take their case to trial if they have exactly nothing to present? Don't you make a plea bargain and take whatever sentence they offer? Or maybe the case was so open-and-shut that they wouldn't accept a plea bargain.
Is Manafort expecting a pardon from Trump? If you evade Federal taxes, you almost certainly evade the state taxes as well, and Trump can't pardon for that. Aren't bank fraud charges state level as well?
Is Mueller using Manafort to send a message to other people in Trump's orbit? Play ball or rot in jail?
Manafort seems like a shady character in his own right, and may not have been a Trump minion long enough to get involved with much.
I can't say it looks fishy, but I don't really see what's going on.
Anyone have any thoughts?

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"The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function." -- Albert Bartlett
"A species that is hurtling toward extinction has no business promoting slow incremental change." -- Caitlin Johnstone

MarilynW's picture

@WoodsDweller
Heavy case against Manafort, bank fraud, tax evasion, an all round creep. He made his millions lobbying for the worst people in the world. Brutal dictators, torturers, complete scoundrels, from Africa to the Ukraine. He's going to jail, maybe he can make deals with the other inmates.

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To thine own self be true.

joe shikspack's picture

@WoodsDweller

i haven't been following the ins and outs of the manafort case, but my guess is that he intends to appeal any sort of guilty verdict on grounds that challenge the prosecution's reasons for bringing the case and get the verdict thrown out on the basis that it was a prosecution for an improper reason.

i can't say that it's a great strategy, but it might be all he's got.

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snoopydawg's picture

@WoodsDweller

I've written about how many administrations Mueller has been involved with and how he has covered up so many people's and organizations crimes. Mueller is one of the worst snakes in the intelligence agencies and I'm hoping that one day the truth about him will come out.

Manafort is going to be found not guilty IMO. He probably knows so many secrets about untold numbers of people who have been in government that the PTB are afraid that he will spill the beans on them if he is found guilty.

This is a complicated article that's about the Steele dossier, fusion GPS, who funded it and many other stuff. Recently Bruce Ohr who was an assistant AG in the Obama administration and his involvement with Steele and others. If you want some links to his let me know.
But here's some history on Manafort that goes back to the Reagan administration, his work and involvement in Ukraine and his ties to people in Russia.

DID PRESIDENT OBAMA READ THE ‘STEELE DOSSIER’ IN THE WHITE HOUSE LAST AUGUST?

In any case, the history of the “Steele dossier” doesn’t begin with Christopher Steele or Nellie Ohr in the summer of 2016; it begins with a story that Glenn Simpson and Mary Jacoby co-wrote for The Wall Street Journal dated April 17, 2007. “How Lobbyists Help Ex-Soviets Woo Washington” details how prominent Republicans, including the 1996 Republican presidential candidate Robert Dole, opened doors in the American capital for Kremlin-affiliated oligarchs and other friends of Vladimir Putin. Among those friends of Putin was Viktor Yanukovich, who would become president of Ukraine in 2010. According to the article, one of Yanukovich’s wealthy patrons paid a political fixer named Paul Manafort to introduce Yanukovich to powerful Washington, D.C., figures, including former Vice President Dick Cheney. Manafort figures prominently throughout the piece.

A year later, when Simpson and Jacoby discovered that a consultant to John McCain’s 2008 presidential run was working with Yanukovich, they could hardly have been surprised to find Paul Manafort in the middle of a new scandal. As they reported in another Wall Street Journal article, dated May 14, 2008, Davis Manafort, Manafort’s lobbying firm, was escorting Yanukovich around Washington. For instance, in 2006, Manafort accompanied him at a breakfast for journalists at the Willard Hotel.

Simpson and Jacoby had ID’d Manafort as a world-class sleazeball and they were right. A slick Georgetown Law grad running in GOP circles since the Reagan campaign, Manafort used his talents and connections to get paid by some very bad people. I would only add here that, in my personal experience, journalists are not in the habit of forgetting major stories they’ve written, especially stories with a character like Manafort at the center.

So when the Trump campaign named Paul Manafort as its campaign convention manager on March 28, 2016, you can bet that Simpson and Jacoby’s eyes lit up. And as it happened, at the exact same time that Trump hired Manafort, Fusion GPS was in negotiations with Perkins Coie, the law firm representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC, to see if there was interest in the firm continuing the opposition research on the Trump campaign they had started for the Washington Free Beacon. In addition to whatever sales pitch Simpson might have offered about Manafort, the Clinton campaign had independent reason to believe that research into Manafort’s connections might pay some real political dividends: A Democratic consultant and Ukrainian-American activist named Alexandra Chalupa, told the Clinton campaign about Manafort’s work for Yanukovich. “I flagged for the DNC the significance of his hire,” Chalupa told CNN in July of this year.

Lots of links in this excerpt, but you can read the article and follow them if you're interested. I suggest following the many links to get more information about this sordid Russia Gate saga and the players involved with it.

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Big Al's picture

in America, but there is no party of principle."
Tocqueville, 1831

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@Big Al

Local, state or federal?

1831 was, of course, prior to formation of a strong abolitionist party, which did not happen until formation of the Republican Party in 1854.

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Big Al's picture

@HenryAWallace was a fault in his logic. The point I get from the quote however (almost 200 years ago) like quotes from Debs, Dubois, Twain, and many others from the past is the lament about the two party system.

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divineorder's picture

And wanted, and maybe had a few laughs to boot!

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A truth of the nuclear age/climate change: we can no longer have endless war and survive on this planet. Oh sh*t.