caucus99percent

free-range politics, organic community

Do teachers hurt students on purpose? Never! Educators join the profession because they want to help children learn and grow up to be well-adjusted, happy, and healthy citizens of planet earth.

Yesterday Trump embraced torture, despite its long standing reputation of failure.

The "Iraq has WMDs" level of hysteria being whipped up about the Skripal poisonings by the Empire's propagandists is bad news. Ignoring it will not work; but "proving a negative" is the classical dilemma created by a false flag attack. Nevertheless, there must be constant pushback against constant propaganda.

I offer the following conversational gambit for dealing with the Kool Aid Drinkers you may encounter: means, motive, and opportunity.

Knowing that many of you have a similar sort of (cough) regard for Gates and other philanthrocapitalists (alternately called by the Wrong Kind of Green collective: the non-profit industrial complex) as mine, when I’d stumbled upon this more readable, searchable format of this work by Jacob Levich, it seemed that posting it as a PSA would be a good thing to do.

I knew this would happen. The longer the Müller probe continued the more dirt would emerge about Democratic misdeeds, which are legion. In particular, we have the infamous piss portfolio, known as the Steele dossier.

Most people are unaware of just how evil Google is.
Consider that Google is the only company in history that literally had to remove “Don’t Be Evil” mantra from its code of conduct.

Google was a very successful CIA start-up.

Moon of Alabama has the latest, very thorough debunking of this steaming pile of nonsense.

I think StevenD has given the main story. I just want to add a few more details.

You may have heard that former spy, Sergey Skripal, a was poisoned in UK with “a military-grade nerve agent of a type developed by Russia” known as ‘Novichok.’ Naturally, everyone blames Putin, including every major US media outlet, despite the failure to produce any evidence that Russia is responsible. But who cares about proof, right? Well, the OPCW does.

How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts

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How does a sane person deal with the insanity that is America today? The party line on just about every topic one might mention is the wrong side of stupid. The media zeitgeist is to ignore our falling apart ecology, economy, infrastructure, educational system, political system, and foreign policy. Our duty is to worship the crooks on Wall St. and the warmongers in the Pentagon, both of whom are robbing the citizenry blind while providing negative value to the 99% with their "services".

How corrupt is the Trump Administration? To answer that, one could start by digging into a topic such as foreign emoluments or regulatory capture. Or one could just follow the news of the day. For example, let's take the news of just yesterday, March 13, 2018:

Top-rated opinion piece on WaPo right now from Kathleen Parker (admittedly, self-described "mostly right of center").

"She can’t let go.

She can’t stop talking about what happened. She wrote an entire book about it. Now she’s telling people in other countries about why she should have won. In India last weekend, she told an audience that she won in all the smart, cool places — and then hit a pandering low that puts a catalogue of others to shame.

You gotta give Trump credit, he isn't going to let little things like criminal behavior get in the way of what he wants. In this case he's making a big deal of having the first woman Torturer/CIA director.

Here are articles I wrote about Hillary's brain deterioration. A non-medical way would be to call it brain rot--the meaning's the same. I am not going to cite from these articles for today's essay but there is plenty of material for both novice and expert to learn.

I happened across this absolutely horrible Buzzfeed article about Markos' new polling project.
It's a bootlicking, brownnosing, sycophantic article that you shouldn't read on a full stomach.

That being said, way down deep in the article I found this gem.

While the news media is fixated on more turmoil in the White House, Defense Secretary Mad Dog Mattis was in Afghanistan.

The Democratic Party favorability hit a new all-time low. Gee, maybe they aren't talking about Russia enough?

It's no surprise that Republicans hate Democrats, but it's a problem that only 23% of Independents like Democrats. The only good news in this poll is that people hate Republicans even more.

It should come as no surprise to anyone with walking around sense that there is something terribly wrong with the USA. It is broken and broken at a deep level. I think perhaps it always has been.

If you impartially pay attention to the processes within you, and long enough, I’m pretty sure that you will notice that Expressions of Contempt have a pay-off that is far more substantial than “letting off steam.” And certainly more reality-based than expecting the target to change whatever it is you hold contemptible in them.

What’s the real pay-off; the actual motive force for such expression? It’s that mighty rush of adrenaline flooding the system. End of story.

The downside of complete media corruption is that you (as a non-elite, average person) realize that you cannot evaluate the truth of reporting about anything that happens inside "the bubble". Cases in point, the serial implosion of the bona fides of people charged with helping Trump "collude" with Russia.

1) Carter Page

Immediately upon the announcement that as a result of the diplomatic efforts by South Korean leader Moon Jae-in having sent a delegation to the White House with the message that Kim Jong-un was willing to talk to Trump and his people,   and Trump’s agreeing, the pundit class had gone full-tilt flip city/duck panic.  Now South Korea’s national security advisor had also said that Kim would halt all nuclear or missile tests, and would effectively turn a blind eye to the provocative ongoing joint US/Rep. of Korea military exercises since he’d like to meet with the US Twitterer-in-Chief as soon as possible.

A Kuwaiti newspaper made a dramatic claim over the weekend that got zero attention in the U.S. media.

Nothing new for us here at c99p, but a well written analysis by Bob Urie over at Counterpunch:

In 2016 the national Democrats demonstrated that they were utterly indifferent to the political disaffection plaguing both duopoly Parties. How could they lose 20% of their affiliated voters in the preceding years and not be in a panic over their electoral prospects?

What exactly constitutes "meddling"? And when did "meddling" become something to fear?
Did you ever hear anyone use the term outside of Scooby-Doo before 2016?
And the fact that they use the term "meddling" instead of "hacking" or "rigging" speaks volumes.

On Tuesday, the U.S. Senate voted to begin floor debate on a bill (S. 2155) that would weaken regulations of banks, large and small, and grease the skids for the next bank crash. After the severe bank crash of 2008, in order to guard against future such crashes, Congress passed the Dodd-Frank law, which enacted the regulations the bill would now weaken. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) scored the bill for budget costs, and figured $671 million over ten years. But the CBO said its estimate was "subject to considerable uncertainty" due to a "slightly greater" "probability in any year that a systemically important financial institution (SIFI) will fail or that there will be a financial crisis." However, in 2008, we saw what some of the real cost to the country could be: $821 billion to the federal government, plus $3.4 trillion in real estate wealth and 5.5 million jobs lost.

Listen to Mother!
Why we can't learn?
Dune Gone Son of a Beach

We are attracted to the shore. Some say it hearkens back to the womb...our mother's heartbeat and sounds of amniotic fluid. One thing is for sure. We are loving our beaches to death...at least here on the Gulf Coast. Last week we made it to the river delta. Join me as we continue our journey along Alabama's small strip of beaches and into the wilds of the Mississippi coast.