@gulfgal98 to be told how to think, how to act.
The last tv weekly show I watched faithfully was "House". When the show ended, I cut cable off, no regrets. I had gotten tired of Maddow and Hayes a year or so before The End.
I am sort of keeping up with movies to watch, although I haven't driven that 80 mile round trip to the nearest theater in years. I watch them on planes when I travel. When I can't sleep, I will watch a movie. I can usually get strapped into the seat, and fall asleep within an hour or so.

#2 We cut the cable ten years ago and I cut out all tv at the same time. Hub still watches Netflix and videos he gets from the library. Neither of us has watched local tv and I do not watch any tv any more, even videos. Life is quieter, calmer and I am better off as a result.

@on the cusp I am both encouraged and distressed from my conversations with local friends. Few see the hook in the IMF worm. This is a conflict averse people in Cuenca. They are somewhat sympathetic to the unfairness of suddenly eliminating the gas subsidy but the violence, the disruption of order, and the many inconveniences are personal to most. This is good old self interest. They’re relatively comfortable and can only see the promises of more and better paying jobs helping the economy. They see the rising tide lifting all boats. Few know fuck all about the pillaging of the people that the IMF and World Bank orchestrated in the ‘90s. My American friends don’t care or know the history either. It’s all a lie buoyed by a myth.

Even the indigenous people are most concerned with their day to day hardships. Orchestrated by Russia my ass. This is people with hard lives trying to keep what little they have.

I sincerely hope I see this all wrong.

#6 I love your home country with all my heart and soul, want positive outcomes, and hope they can teach us here what socialism really looks like, what freedom from want really looks like.
The USA has absolutely no redeemable qualities. I also flirt with becoming an ex-pat. And I just might be able to do it.

@snoopydawg Trump is but a symptom of what is horribly wrong in the US. Worse, the US is patient zero.

#6

but too many people think it will. Trump is just the current figurehead for what is wrong with this country and that he follows in Obama's wake makes it all the more clearer for many of us that haven't fallen down the Russian rabbit hole.

Like CNN and MSNBC have become the new Fox News, Orange State has become everything they hated about Red State. They refuse to see the democrats for who they are. Lots of the problems happening now were problems during Bush's presidency and Obama's, but they skip right over the role Obama played when it was his turn. Especially the talks about MFA and single payer vs the ACA. No one connects the democrats selling us out to the current problems with people not having affordable health insurance. Nope it's just the GOP's fault that people are going bankrupt and every other problem. Blindness pure and simple.

@Reverend Jane Ignatowski but I believe before inauguration my old boss, a Liberal who I of course used to agree with wholeheartedly, told me I sounded just like my FOX addled Tea Party Repug parents when I disparaged Hillary and by extension Barack. When I forcefully reminded him of Obama's bailout of banks while millions lost homes he quieted down. When I pointed out Obama also made the Bush tax cuts permanent that got crickets. When I reminded him to take a good hard look at that ACA and tell me just how well that was working for working people he got a bit quieter and finally sighed, yeah, you're right.

That said, we have not spoken since, he's retired now and has always been bad about getting back in touch once he moves somewhere. But I have a feeling he's probably right back in the MSDNC mode as well as full blown TDS. I guess I am just as glad we don't talk anymore because in a way it breaks my heart to see that someone I once thought of as a mentor and the father I never really had could be so brainwashed as to refuse to see. It is the outright refusal that is hardest to take, I mean talk about FOX like? Just who really sounded like my RWNJ parents? That is a big reason I will never be on FB or any of those other idiot sites, I do not want to really know just how far down the rabbit hole people I know are. And I know for a fact I WOULD piss most of them off when I point out facts they do not want to hear. Impeach Trump, get Mike Pence, just that one alone usually gets a heavy sigh and/or a pissed off tone. Truth hurts, especially in the Land of The Free.

#6

This past week I told my best friend of 25 years that she had effectively become the liberal/Democratic version of her FOX News watching Republican father. It was not an easy conversation.

We've mostly agreed about politics since the early 90s; a few policy disagreements but nothing really all that major, and differences almost always easily discussed. Since 2016, though, we've been arguing about all of it, with only brief spates of relief whenever she turns the goddamned news off. We'll go back to having some interesting conversations about policy, history, electoral politics...then she'll turn the news back on and come at me with crazy bullshit again.

The arguments have come because she won't actually fact-check anything, so she'll start telling me about some story of the day and I'll have a different take on it than the corporate news and we'll disagree about a point. Then I'll explain why I believe whatever I believe (this usually is more about explaining why I DON'T believe something) and ask why she believes whatever she believes. This used to go forward in the expected manner, exchanging points of view and informing each other of different facts, information, and/or perspectives, no power struggle over who believes what, just curiosity and exchange. But ever since 2016, she does not explain why she believes what she believes, and she seems to either ignore or belittle whatever I'm explaining. Almost immediately, she jumps straight to insulting my point of view, then insulting my fucking character. I gave her some time to work it through but it's been 3 fucking years and instead of burning itself out it's been picking up speed and intensity, so I finally had to put a stop to it.

"If you don't want to fact check information, don't. If you are unwilling to fact check your information sources at the exact same time as you are blasting your father for being unwilling to fact check his, you should expect me to call your behavior hypocritical and dismiss your opinions. I understand that you do not like to be dismissed so I strongly recommend you instead fact-check your information. While I do not and will never respect a fact-free political opinion, I do respect people, categorically speaking, so I will always treat YOU with respect whether we agree on an issue or not, but you have been very far the fuck out of line about respecting me for 3 solid years so I am shutting the entire fucking thing down. Go get your shit together and either come back with respect whether we agree on a matter or not or else never raise this subject, or any other contentious subject, with me ever again."

I know this is going on all over the country but I absolutely hate that it's come to this.

@Lookout
The fact that basically all you get, even on Duckduckgo, makes me suspicious of his ties. Kos is pretty much the same. And both have ties to the CIA, so there's that. Make of it what you will.

I did find this blog post from an Indiana blogger after he deployed to Afghanistan. (Page 2 of ddg search results.)

http://advanceindiana.blogspot.com/2014/06/buttigieg-tells-newspaper-his...

South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg has provided his first on-record interview for a reporter since arriving for his military intelligence assignment in Afghanistan as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Reserve in March. Although he told the South Bend Tribune's Erin Blasko he was limited in what he could say because his work involved intelligence, he gave her as specific of a response as you could expect: "I can tell you that I'm working on the intersection of drugs, finance and terrorism," Buttigieg said, commenting for the first time in any detail on his work in the country. "I'm assigned to a counterterrorism organization called the Afghan Threat Finance Cell, he continued. "My missiion is to protect the homeland and target the most dangerous drug trafficking organizations in Afghanistan."

Blasko's story doesn't elaborate a whole lot on what the Afghan Threat Finance Cell does. It's a multi-intelligence organization that is the brainchild of Gen. David Petraeus when he commanded the Afghan War. The ATFC is comprised of about 30 specialists on loan from the Department of Drug Enforcement, the Department of Treasury, the Department of Justice, the Department of Defense’s CENTCOM, the CIA, and the FBI, who try to identify and disrupt sources of Taliban funding according to Time magazine. Buttigieg is likely working there in a role as a CIA asset. His mother graciously reminds us in Blasko's story of her son's prior work in Afghanistan for a CIA front company. "[Anne] Montgomery, a Notre Dame graduate and retired professor at the university, noted that her son has been to Afghanistan before," Blasko writes. "He traveled there as a consultant with McKinsey & Co., a global management consulting firm based in the U.S., before becoming mayor." "His work is classified, so we know absolutely nothing about it," Montgomery added. He mother said he's "very interested" in the work he does there, but when she asks what he's doing "there's dead air."

Bold, mine.

There are citations from a couple of books regarding the US involvement in the Afghan drug trade in the blog post as well, but not naming him in particular.

#9
the CIA represents one of the largest drug dealing organizations in history
http://www.thesleuthjournal.com/cia-drug-smuggling-heroin-911-connection/
An Afghan is the worlds largest producer...
https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/aotp.html

But I can't seem to find the article. Anyone know a source or have info? I found the info below in an ABC interview...

Buttigieg, his superior officers in Afghanistan, and others paint a portrait of a six-month deployment during which he drafted intelligence reports from inside a shipping container, ate midnight rations of breakfast for dinner and shuttled officers around Kabul or, occasionally, further afield.
....
Rather than deploying with the troops with whom he trained, he was sent to Afghanistan to join what was called the Afghanistan Threat Finance Cell, a multi-agency task force led by the Drug Enforcement Administration along with the military that also included representatives from departments including the FBI and Treasury.

...the information could include anything from cables from the Central Intelligence Agency, to intercepts from the National Security Agency to open press reporting. The challenge was sorting through it all to pull out the important parts.

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intel-analyst-military-uber-inside-mayor...