The Cosmic Emporium

[Elen]

Great info Gio! I think this is the next one, as I'm listening:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmeR7bVqow8

[Gio]

Feeding America's Hungry ...
Right out of the box ...



https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Flocaltvwhnt.files.wordpress.com%2F 2016%2F03%2Ftrump-pizza.jpg&f=1

Mr Humble Pie

And he's ...

Lookin’ Out For # 1

Bachman-Turner Overdrive



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIJxo7quAfE

[Dreamtimer]

Doxxing is a serious thing. It's like if I decided to publish someone's address and Social Security Number and other personal stuff.

People like CW and Joe from the Carolinas are doing a lot of footwork and video work to bring light to issues and to analyze events and stories to help people. Doxxing people like that is a sign of great weakness.

I think CW is spot on calling out these people for being in a cult. That's what cults do. All naysayers are enemies and must be brought down.

I'm disappointed in Mr. J.S. who is apparently involved in destroying real people as opposed to 'The Illusion'.

[Dreamtimer]

In the video where CW is talking with Kelly, she mentions how Joe from the Carolinas was referred to as Joe Dirt. Chanter liked the name, although he didn't seem to know where it came from. I don't know for sure, but I'm guessing it relates to his permaculture practices.

[palooka's revenge]

CW referenced food stamps in the video. I haven't researched it.

I think anyone with a little common sense can see how cumbersome and ineffective boxed meals would be. Goodness Gracious.

they had to do something with the left overs from the clemson football team feed. the trump admin is sooooo proactive about waste ya know...

[Dreamtimer]

:lol::lol:

[Gio]

Wondering what Temple Grandin (https://templegrandin.com/)might think ...


Welcome to the new possibilities of ...

Drones, robots, and super sperm - the future of farming | DW Documentary


"The future of farming: Driverless tractors, drones and robots. How is the agriculture industry changing as digital technology develops?

Unmanned tractors controlled via GPS; drones that kill vermin in the fields from above; and highly efficient bull sperm used to produce genetically optimized calves. This is not science fiction. It’s the future of farming, today. "Smart farming" is the agricultural industry's new buzzword. A survey of almost 600 German farmers has revealed that more than one in two now uses digital solutions to optimize their harvests. Fierce regional and global competition, declining subsidies, higher standards of food quality, environmental protection, and increasing demand are forcing farmers to be highly efficient. This documentary looks at three examples of "smart farming" in Germany. Breeding consultant Johanna Schendel creates optimized dairy cows by selecting the right bull semen. Asparagus farmer Heiner Bartels uses a smartphone to calculate the optimum time to harvest. And drone pilot Bernd Meyer is out to fight pests in maize fields from the air. All three are trying to use modern technology to modify nature to fit the needs of our society. But where are the limits?"

DW Documentary
Published on Feb 7, 2019

42:25 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwNVNE83Udo&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Going Hollywood ...


https://images.wsj.net/im-53099/social


Jeff Bezos’ Journey From Private Family Man to Tabloid Sensation (https://www.wsj.com/articles/jeff-bezoss-journey-from-private-family-man-to-tabloid-sensation-11549837862)

[Elen]

C.W. Chanter explains more in this conversation a few hours ago with Natasha Nyxx on her channel. C.W. is on a roll at the moment, exposing the BS behind a lot of the alt media. Personally I've been fooled once or twice, but never for very long...it's just so crazy.

Just a follow up on your original post, Gio.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OhfFFNNnakM

[Gio]

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.pawmygosh.co%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F05%2Freuben-the-bulldog.png&f=1

Making Reuben proud ...



Rudy the Bulldog Dominates the Course With His Amazing Speed and Agility - 2019 Westminster Dog Show

"Few would ever describe bulldogs as agile, but Rudy isn’t your typical bulldog.

A border collie named Verb won the Westminster agility contest on Saturday at 32.05 seconds. Yet, the internet chose its own champion. His name was Rudy.

Rudy, a bulldog, tackled the Westminster course with jaw-dropping agility and endurance for a bulldog. Despite going off course briefly, Rudy recovered for a remarkable showing."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OHhRor1FHYI


Source: usatoday.com (https://ftw.usatoday.com/2019/02/rudy-bulldog-westminster-agility-contest?fbclid=IwAR0WKm0dFxxVEgfh7xTbZSpGLwAk1usuu 49vQ_1LoZH3ga9lnlWTtudAD4k)

[Elen]

He would make Reuben proud...I didn't think Bulldogs could do things like that! :cool::love:

[Gio]

Reminder ~ always check previous page for missed posted items ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Yankee Slicker Al Kooper ...

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Kooper)


https://pastdaily.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/al-kooper-resize.jpg


True story ...


Workin' For MCA

♪ Seven years of hard luck, comin' down on me
From the Florida border, yeah it's up to Nashville Tennessee
I worked in every joint you can name, mister every honky tonk
Along come Mr. Yankee Slicker, said' "Maybe you're what I want"

Want you to sign your contract
Want you to sign today
Gonna give you lots of money
Workin' for MCA

9,000 dollars, that's all we could win
But we smiled at the Yankee Slicker with a big ol' Southern grin
They're gonna take me out to California gonna make me a superstar
Just pay me all of my money, mister maybe you won't get a scar

Want you to sign your contract
Want you to sign today
Gonna give you lots of money
Workin' for MCA

Yankee slickers took my money, since I was 17
If it ain't no pencil pusher, it got to be a honkytonk queen
But I'll sign my contract baby, and I won't you people to know
Every penny that I make, I've gotta see where my money goes

Want you to sign your contract
Want you to sign today
Gonna give you lots of money
Workin' for MCA ♪



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EGpSVDpF4j8

[Gio]

Obviously a damaged yolk inside ...



https://img.wennermedia.com/760-width/trump-f20c0ce5-d8b5-4818-aee3-e2be24341b15.jpg
'He had always sat on walls, it was his way.'

[Gio]

Good Girl !

Check out the video ...


https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/02/10/01/9611602-0-image-a-26_1549762007595.jpg

Hero pit bull saves family by escaping home, alerting cops to gas leak (https://nypost.com/2019/02/11/hero-pit-bull-saves-family-by-escaping-home-alerting-cops-to-gas-leak/)

[Elen]

Good Girl !

Check out the video ...


https://i.dailymail.co.uk/1s/2019/02/10/01/9611602-0-image-a-26_1549762007595.jpg

Hero pit bull saves family by escaping home, alerting cops to gas leak (https://nypost.com/2019/02/11/hero-pit-bull-saves-family-by-escaping-home-alerting-cops-to-gas-leak/)

What is there not to love...GOOD GIRL!

[Gio]

And what an amazing research vessel ... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RV_Petrel)

https://cbsnews1.cbsistatic.com/hub/i/r/2019/02/11/2a9b0958-4d1f-4b40-9280-cedd2b690bb4/thumbnail/1200x630/aba7db30b144be0bd96dece21cd13dc9/uss-hornet-listing-after-attack-by-japanese-the-ship-sank-on-october-27-1942.jpg

Crew hunts for sunken USS Hornet in a graveyard for WWII ships (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/uss-hornet-petrel-vessel-search-aircraft-carrier-world-war-ii-ships/)

[Gio]

The latest ...

Anthony Peake - Consciousness and Grey Aliens

Freeman Fly



This is where the Psychonaut meets the Scientist. Like when Ken Kesey of the Merry Pranksters met with Dr. Timothy Leary, let's explore altered states of consciousness. Does consciousness exist outside of the living body? Can your soul be transferred to a computer?

What beings exist inside the realm of DMT? Is this the place where the Grey Aliens dwell? Why is it that when people traverse the psychedelic worlds, they meet with mantis beings? Insects are the only thing on planet Earth that do not contain DMT.

Published on Feb 11, 2019

1:05:15 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YKX81_6Klw&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

THE MSM EFFECT...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/d8/38/88/d83888d33807633811a874d68492d75a.jpg?b=t

[Gio]

The latest tweets ...

Here's How Trump Spends 60% Of His Day

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Published on Feb 11, 2019

7:14 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NgVxAoteiDw

[Dreamtimer]

A guy named Sims wrote a book called Team of Vipers. The name was a play on Kearns-Goodwin's book Team of Rivals.

Sims worked in the Trump white house. He wrote about how Trump pits his staff against each other and likes the chaos.

So they bite each other and leak like a sieve. It's stunning that a leak like the one about his schedule would happen. He does not have the loyalty of his staffers when that kind of thing is happening.

(I don't have Sims' book, I've seen/heard him interviewed a couple times).

[Gio]

Can you dig it #101 ... https://imgfast.net/users/2911/23/55/04/smiles/360865.gif

12 Tunnels That Will Blow Your Mind

Top Trending

"These are the longest and most impressive tunnels ever made."

Published on Feb 7, 2019

11:36 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7xsGGxvS5AE

[Gio]

Wishing him well ... (https://v1011fm.iheart.com/featured/christie-james/content/2019-02-09-lindsay-buckinghams-wife-posts-surgery-update-stevie-nicks-responds/)


https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/p843x403/51556272_1977550368979927_434126764474630144_o.jpg ?_nc_cat=104&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=28e359201eea517ea633e7f9fed7b0cd&oe=5CEADA0B

Lindsey and wife Kristen

Soul Drifter



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGcjAaPCFUU

[Gio]

He is surely the champion indeed ...

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/flags/smiley-with-us-flag.gif


From President Golfcart & Chief ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fnewpix%2F2 018%2F04%2F24%2F11%2F4B7A80CF00000578-5648133-image-a-34_1524564206695.jpg&f=1



https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/874276197357596672/kUuht00m_bigger.jpg

Donald J. Trump
‏Verified account @realDonaldTrump

I don't mind that @BarackObama plays a lot of golf. I just wish he used it productively to make deals with Congress!

12:59 PM - 18 Jun 2012


President Trump Has $50K 'Golf Simulator' at the White House —
an Upgrade of One That Obama Put In: Report

"The president reportedly installed a "golf simulator" at personal expense in the White House — and it's an upgrade of one President Obama used to have

Adam Carlson
February 13, 2019 03:50 PM

President Donald Trump, a golf enthusiast unafraid of criticizing his predecessors for playing golf, installed a $50,000 “golf simulator” the size of an entire room at the White House, according to the Washington Post.

The game is actually an upgrade of a previous system put in by former President Barack Obama, the Post reported on Wednesday.

The paper describes Trump’s new system as “allow[ing] him to play virtual rounds at courses all over the world by hitting a ball into a large video screen.”

An anonymous administration official told the Post that Trump paid for the golf simulator personally but had yet to use it. The system was installed in recent weeks in the White House’s personal quarters, according to the Post.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE on Wednesday.

A former Obama White House official confirmed to PEOPLE that Obama did have a golf simulator installed but “it wasn’t particularly fancy or high-tech.”

The official did not provide more details about the game or Obama’s use of it.

Trump has golfed often during his downtime while president, despite vocally criticizing Obama for the same. “I play golf to relax. My company is in great shape. @BarackObama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain,” he tweeted in 2011.

According to the Post, Trump has played golf nearly twice as often annually as his predecessor — and at his own properties, fueling concerns from ethics watchdogs about the mixing of personal and business interests.

Last month, in a disarming sign of disloyalty from within the White House, a Trump official official leaked 51 days of the president’s schedules from November to February showing that he spends hours each day in unstructured “executive time,” a concept that is distinct to his administration.

Chafing at tight scheduling, Trump has preferred open-ended periods where he can mix favorite activities including watching cable news, tweeting and talking with friends, aides, reporters and lawmakers.

“He’s always calling people,” an anonymous aide told the political website Axios, which first obtained the schedules.

The aide added, “He’s always up to something; it’s just not what you would consider typical structure.”

In a statement to Axios, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders did not dispute the authenticity of the schedules. She said Trump “has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves.”

Days later, on Twitter, the president defended himself in even bolder terms: “No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!”

As The New York Times reported in 2017, the Trump administration has often obscured the frequency with which Trump plays golf. And despite downplaying his time on the golf course, he has made no secret of it.

Earlier this month, after more than two months away, he shared a photo of a game played with golfing legends Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. “Great morning at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida,” he wrote.

Nearly five years earlier, in a swipe at frequent critic and fellow billionaire Mark Cuban, Trump tweeted: “I’ve won 18 Club Championships including this weekend. @mcuban swings like a little girl with no power or talent.”"


Source: people.com (https://people.com/politics/donald-trump-golf-simulator-game-at-white-house/)

[Gio]

The weather here ...

East of Seattle (and up beyond North Bend) over the Cascades ...

https://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/maison/television/meteo1.gif

Only four hours till Spokane ...

Good Luck !


Snow continues to fall on I-90 Snoqualmie Pass (here's a look at conditions from Tuesday).



151560292402093

[Gio]

He he he he ...

You bet on it !



https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t45.1600-4/cp0/q90/spS444/c0.56.552.552a/p552x414/52487028_23843143574030145_5825938311696351232_n.p ng.jpg?_nc_cat=102&efg=eyJxZV9ncm91cHMiOlsibm9fc2FmZV9pbWFnZV9mb3JfYW RzX2ltYWdlIl19&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=a8b1d4b227b66de64cdc1c8e5d54cd4b&oe=5CE34829

Punxsutawney Phil sees shadow, predicts 6 more weeks of winter.

[Gio]

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Has been a while ... :smiley-dance013:


Pet Shop Boys' On social media

new four-track “Agenda”


3:33 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuNBJkLLnOs


Bonus track !

Give stupidity a chance

2:55 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9jEuHbB0GQ

[Gio]

Straight from the headlines ...
(https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/11/world/europe/russia-polar-bears-emergency.html)



https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c6454c315319c26fa80846a/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC021319.jpg

Polar bears invade a Russian outpost.

[Gio]

Speaking weather in the Northwest ...
Down in the Columbia Gorge (river) area to Portland ...

HITCHHIKING OREGON IN WINTER (Crazy Experience)

Gabriel Traveler

"I had to hitchhike across Oregon (again) because the Greyhound bus was cancelled."

Published on Feb 13, 2019

13:34 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTYmxKbWPaw&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Mr. Sociopath Goes To Washington

Authored by John Hunt MD via InternationalMan.com, (https://internationalman.com/articles/mr-sociopath-goes-to-washington/)

"Natural laws are the laws that, if followed, promote the survival and thriving of humans. Natural laws are like laws of physics. We humans don’t write natural laws: we discover them. These contrast with civil laws that are written by humans. One of the natural laws is don’t initiate force or fraud against another person. Another is do what you agree to do. Adherence to natural law, by definition, promotes thriving of individuals and the human species. In contrast, defying natural law leads to distrust, war and death.


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/sociopath-goes-to-washington-image-small.png?itok=_wrAyHoH

"Sociopaths constitute from 1-3% of the population. Sociopaths are characterized by a disregard for the rights of others, a lack of empathy and lack of remorse, a willingness or eagerness to lie, no conscience, little impulse control or care about cause and effect, a desire to exploit others and to control them. They blame others when the faults are their own. They are narcissistic, defensive, manipulative, callous, hostile.

How do sociopaths survive, then, living as they do in such defiance of natural law? The answer, I propose, is that sociopaths have written so many of the civil laws. They’ve been able to do so by finding an easy niche in the world of politics.

Government holds the monopoly on the legal power to initiate force against the innocent. In other words, government has given itself the legal right to break natural law. Sociopaths live their lives defying natural law. You can see how politics (the control of government) is therefore a safe and attractive home for sociopaths.

Normal people like to control how nature affects them. Normal people fight entropy, keep out the rain, put food in bellies, and by so doing create value in the world for themselves and others. Sociopaths are different. It’s not nature’s effects they try to control. Sociopaths like to control people. Worse, the distorted reward mechanism in their brains cause sociopaths to be neurologically incentivized to cause harm to other people. And how can one cause harm to people and get away with? Again: by gaining political power.

In addition to their magnetic attraction to politics, sociopaths possess a set of strengths that help them be successful politicians. They can be charismatic, and are highly convincing liars. Lie about their political opponent? No problem. Lie about themselves? No problem. Perhaps bribe, extort, blackmail or kill a few people on the way up? No problem.

Sociopaths are great liars who have a desire to control people. Politics is the nexus of both the sociopath’s strength and his desire. Republican or Democrat? Matters not. The sociopath can lie their way through any election.

I wrote recently about the removal of neutral unbiased people from the climate science community through a process of multiple distillation, and how that could lead to laypeople receiving biased information regarding the very important issue of our shared climate. Such distillation and bias occur in many fields. Politics follows a comparable pattern of distillation, but one in which sociopaths become increasingly concentrated (distilled) within the halls of Congress (and state and local government too).

This distillation of the political class into one dripping with sociopathy is accomplished through several layers.

People desire to go into politics for many reasons. I will categorize them into five groups, the first four of which are all jerks:


Category A politicians think they have the best answers. They think they are wiser, smarter, better than you. They seek power in order to institute their fixes. They will use threats of force and actual force (guns) to assure that you comply with their brilliance. In other words, as a matter of course, they are eager to use the very process that starts all wars—the initiation of force—as their way to accomplish their goals. Obama provided a good example with his compulsory medical insurance, but there are many others in the U.S. headlines regularly. Ocasio-Cortez fits into this category along with Bernie Sanders. The morality of these politicians is that their chosen ends justify the means.


Category B politicians are sociopaths. They want to achieve power over others in order to parasitize off society or simply to cause destruction. There are multiple obvious examples like Hitler and Stalin and Pol Pot, and many others who are less blatant but constantly in the news vying for power over you. These people are immoral to the core. Sociopaths are quite at home in the toxic environment of the swamp, and I expect they swim in its lower depths as well—what is called the Deep State. They are chameleons. Wolves in sheep’s clothing. Fascists in socialist’s clothing. Thieves pretending to be concerned for the poor. They literally don’t care.


Category C politicians believe government “service” to be a lucrative career financially, or a stepping stone to one. Such people are a waste of food.


Category D politicians thrive on attention or think they will earn community respect through politics. They may be grandiose and narcissistic. Ideology is relatively unimportant.


Category E politicians are the rarest breed. They seek power only to protect their freedom against the injuries caused by the previous four categories of politicians. They maintain hope that the political process might be useful to stop the bad politicians from wreaking havoc. Ron Paul is a good example.



Most aspiring politicians fall into categories A-D. So the first massive distillation step occurs: most people who choose to run for office are the type of people who should not be given power.

Category A politicians often justify lying, as needed, to accomplish their perceived greater good. In contrast, the sociopaths (category B) lie outright and need no justification to do so. They just do it. Stated with assurance and backed by the media, their lies gain the support of the uninformed, malinformed and ideologically disabled population, which then supports, contributes, and votes for them. Sociopaths out-lie the aspiring politicians from the other politician categories. This improves their election chances and concentrates their ranks further in the political sphere. This is the second distillation step that concentrates sociopaths in politics.

Once successfully elected into the world of politics, the politician is immersed in a group of colleagues who are culled from among the various groups of political wannabes above—cocky narcissists, crony leeches, and sociopaths. They have to mingle and try to make agreements and compromises with these untrustworthy people. This may be a sociopath’s nirvana, but the good Category E politicians usually can’t endure such miasma for very long, and so are more than likely to flee the political swamp once they have maxed out their tolerance for those who live in it. This attrition removes most of the good guys and leaves mostly the jerks in politics.

Although some flies and vermin from category C and D linger, politics becomes predominantly a battleground between Category A and Category B politicians: a battle between those who will force their will upon you vs. those who want to parasitize off you.

Overall, we have a system that attracts and then concentrates the very worst sort of people into positions of power. Yes, we have an opportunity to vote them out of office, but over the decades, these people have been able to rig the system to reinforce their power. They now control the regulatory regimes, the criminal justice system, the medical system, the retirement system, and support the fiat monetary system. They feed the crony-state. Most importantly, they control the education-indoctrination complex. They nurture divisions along racial and class lines. They promote insane economic notions. They start wars. They take away freedom. They make the laws.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s simply what happens when we allow government to grow. Washington has grown until it has become intensely attractive to the worst sort of semi-human scum.

Is it any wonder that Congress is despised? Is it any wonder that it is essentially impossible to obtain justice at the national level? Is it any wonder that government has become a threat to liberty instead of a protector of it? Is it any wonder that government defies the laws of nature?

Government is a system that attracts the worst sort of people. And the effects of it are going to be bad, no matter what political party is running things. Relying on the political process to solve problems makes no sense and doesn’t work. Americans—regardless of party or priority—need to learn to solve each problem, not through the coercive mechanisms of government, but through voluntarycooperation of the people who choose to care about each problem. By using voluntary moral means to solve our problems, instead of relying on government, we will disempower the sociopaths and other jerks.

Disempowering the jerks should be a goal anyone but a jerk can support.

N.B.—In this commentary, I am collectivizing sociopaths into one group. But they are not all alike. We need to judge each sociopath individually, and I apologize in advance to any sociopath who has kept his proclivities in check.

* * *

Clearly, there are many strange things afoot in the world. Distortions of markets, distortions of culture. It’s wise to wonder what’s going to happen, and to take advantage of growth while also being prepared for crisis. How will you protect yourself in the next crisis? See our PDF guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download it now. (https://internationalman.com/special-report/guide-to-surviving-and-thriving-during-an-economic-collapse/)

Source: zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-13/mr-sociopath-goes-washington)

[Gio]

Government by Emergency - #NewWorldNextWeek

"Welcome back to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy
that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news" ...

All news items link listed below youtube show notes

corbettreport
Published on Feb 14, 2019

15:46 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePcvpLl40Tg&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Kinda makes my nipples tingle ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f1/1a/cb/f11acbb0c3409aedd1dfdd8bf0cf8735.jpg?b=t

[Gio]

:Bump: ...


He is surely the champion indeed ...

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/flags/smiley-with-us-flag.gif


From President Golfcart & Chief ...

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fi.dailymail.co.uk%2Fi%2Fnewpix%2F2 018%2F04%2F24%2F11%2F4B7A80CF00000578-5648133-image-a-34_1524564206695.jpg&f=1




President Trump Has $50K 'Golf Simulator' at the White House —
an Upgrade of One That Obama Put In: Report

"The president reportedly installed a "golf simulator" at personal expense in the White House — and it's an upgrade of one President Obama used to have

Adam Carlson
February 13, 2019 03:50 PM

President Donald Trump, a golf enthusiast unafraid of criticizing his predecessors for playing golf, installed a $50,000 “golf simulator” the size of an entire room at the White House, according to the Washington Post.

The game is actually an upgrade of a previous system put in by former President Barack Obama, the Post reported on Wednesday.

The paper describes Trump’s new system as “allow[ing] him to play virtual rounds at courses all over the world by hitting a ball into a large video screen.”

An anonymous administration official told the Post that Trump paid for the golf simulator personally but had yet to use it. The system was installed in recent weeks in the White House’s personal quarters, according to the Post.

A White House spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment from PEOPLE on Wednesday.

A former Obama White House official confirmed to PEOPLE that Obama did have a golf simulator installed but “it wasn’t particularly fancy or high-tech.”

The official did not provide more details about the game or Obama’s use of it.

Trump has golfed often during his downtime while president, despite vocally criticizing Obama for the same. “I play golf to relax. My company is in great shape. @BarackObama plays golf to escape work while America goes down the drain,” he tweeted in 2011.

According to the Post, Trump has played golf nearly twice as often annually as his predecessor — and at his own properties, fueling concerns from ethics watchdogs about the mixing of personal and business interests.

Last month, in a disarming sign of disloyalty from within the White House, a Trump official official leaked 51 days of the president’s schedules from November to February showing that he spends hours each day in unstructured “executive time,” a concept that is distinct to his administration.

Chafing at tight scheduling, Trump has preferred open-ended periods where he can mix favorite activities including watching cable news, tweeting and talking with friends, aides, reporters and lawmakers.

“He’s always calling people,” an anonymous aide told the political website Axios, which first obtained the schedules.

The aide added, “He’s always up to something; it’s just not what you would consider typical structure.”

In a statement to Axios, Press Secretary Sarah Sanders did not dispute the authenticity of the schedules. She said Trump “has a different leadership style than his predecessors and the results speak for themselves.”

Days later, on Twitter, the president defended himself in even bolder terms: “No president ever worked harder than me (cleaning up the mess I inherited)!”

As The New York Times reported in 2017, the Trump administration has often obscured the frequency with which Trump plays golf. And despite downplaying his time on the golf course, he has made no secret of it.

Earlier this month, after more than two months away, he shared a photo of a game played with golfing legends Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. “Great morning at Trump National Golf Club in Jupiter, Florida,” he wrote.

Nearly five years earlier, in a swipe at frequent critic and fellow billionaire Mark Cuban, Trump tweeted: “I’ve won 18 Club Championships including this weekend. @mcuban swings like a little girl with no power or talent.”"


Source: people.com (https://people.com/politics/donald-trump-golf-simulator-game-at-white-house/)

[Gio]

♪ If it seems like a dream ...
They got you ♪ ...


https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/387018_393220420739852_857735489_n.jpg?_nc_cat=109&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=e177ef2e364792ee6a5c7c0f3176df3f&oe=5CE83EAD

♪ Hypnotized ♪


Bob Welch/ Fleetwood Mac




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVzdjJALgKM

[Gio]

Speaking of dreamland ...

American Cosmic (https://www.americancosmic.com/): a Major UFO Breakthrough

Whitley Strieber

"Dr. Diana Walsh Pasulka describes her experiences behind the scenes in the struggle
to understand the UFO phenomenon."



Alien abduction

The terms alien abduction or abduction phenomenon describe "subjectively real memories of being taken secretly against one's will by apparently nonhuman entities and subjected to complex physical and psychological procedures". People claiming to have been abducted are usually called "abductees" or "experiencers" ... More here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_abduction)
Wikipedia


Published on Feb 15, 2019

1:05:41 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5vckNX_ITJU

[Gio]

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/50632829_1982445668475198_5308811265571815424_n.jp g?_nc_cat=106&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=1a435eb16163f73643e7f10792a41db2&oe=5CECDE5D

[Elen]

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/50632829_1982445668475198_5308811265571815424_n.jp g?_nc_cat=106&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=1a435eb16163f73643e7f10792a41db2&oe=5CECDE5D

You don't need words after that...in any language! :cool::grin:

[Dreamtimer]

My husk! Where's my husk? Who moved my husk?!

It's a creepy idyllic scene.

[Elen]

My husk! Where's my husk? Who moved my husk?!

It's a creepy idyllic scene.

Yeah notice how orderly everything is...even the cat...OMG it a Stepford wife!

[palooka's revenge]

Yeah notice how orderly everything is...even the cat...OMG it a Stepford wife!

that's not a cat... it just looks like a cat...

[Gio]

And speaking of wearing a flesh suit ...

Those making 'Cosmic Promises' need to keep and fulfill them ...

And you know who you are -

Don't you ...

http://projectavalon.net/forum4/customavatars/avatar9814_43.gif

[Gio]

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***


Trump Press Conference

Cold Open - SNL
Published on Feb 16, 2019

6:45 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vQlhWBvAwY



Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer

'Gloat'



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rs6zY-ijaQE

[Gio]

Speaking bullshit ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/21/df/59/21df59e92e61f3538e41ff296f84a7c2.jpg

[Gio]

Some weekend getaway entertainment ... https://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/maison/chateau.gif


DARK JOURNALIST & JOSEPH FARRELL:

THE ROOTS OF THE SECRET SPACE PROGRAM & THE SPACE FORCE:
NASA CIA VON BRAUN DORNBERGER JFK & GARRISON!



BLACK BUDGET WALL OF SECRECY In this exciting Part 1 episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Oxford Scholar and Giza Death Star Book Series Author Dr. Joseph Farrell. They explore the extreme black projects that developed into 'X-Tech' as some blending of the UFO File and the Nazi Exotic Technology Program that became the Roots of the Secret Space Program.

Published on Jan 18, 2019

48:59 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lp4eUBKG-gE&feature=em-uploademail


Updated ...

Part 2 ...


DARK JOURNALIST & JOSEPH FARRELL:

SECRET SPACE PROGRAM: JIM GARRISON & BLACK BUDGET AEROSPACE UFOS



BLACK BUDGET AEROSPACE In this exciting Part 2 episode Dark Journalist Daniel Liszt welcomes back Oxford Scholar and Giza Death Star Book Series Author Dr. Joseph Farrell. They go deep on the Jim Garrison Investigation into JFK's murder and the very unusual connections to Fascist organizations and Covert Aerospace contractors that he encountered. These connections were linked to extreme black projects that developed into 'X-Tech' as some blending of the UFO File and the Nazi Exotic Technology Program that became the Roots of the Secret Space Program.

Published on Feb 15, 2019

46:41 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzdSmTr_RIg

[Gio]

The fruit doesn't fall far from the tree ... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eliot_Sumner)



https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn01.buxtonco.com%2Fnews%2F2016% 2Fadobestock_93642693.jpg&f=1

Species

Eliot Sumner (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyqbe2XE_EnRGI2KfjqWn9A)



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nzUgn7TIdz4

[Gio]

Alternative community forums ... :pc:

'So easy a caveman can do it' !


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H02iwWCrXew

[Dreamtimer]

I recall they tried to make a TV series with the caveman but it didn't fly.

https://s15-us2.startpage.com/wikioimage/2640755332aecbce316c3a53cb8a5cd1.jpg

[Aragorn]

I recall they tried to make a TV series with the caveman but it didn't fly.

https://s15-us2.startpage.com/wikioimage/2640755332aecbce316c3a53cb8a5cd1.jpg

That's because cavemen know that there's an easier career to be had in US politics than in Hollywood. :p

[Dreamtimer]

Emergency! Emergency! Gotta go play golf!

[Gio]

Oh the drama ...


Posted by Bill Ryan (http://projectavalon.net/forum4/showthread.php?105992-Cosmic-Exposure-Corey-Goode--s-Secret-Task-Force-Uncovered&p=1275520&viewfull=1#post1275520)

CW Chanter is quite unstable. To say the least. He's neurotic, self-aggrandizing, ungrounded, unfocused, unprofessional and narcissistic. (I'd like to say you heard it here first, but I'm sure you didn't!)


Hey CW ...

And especially all the ladies of Avalon ...



http://projectavalon.net/Amazon/Bill_Ryan_by_waterfall.jpg

Dont Mess With Bill

Marvelettes



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVsW_6AomOQ

[Dreamtimer]

Unstable? Wow. That's quite a judgment. CW has talked openly about lifestyle changes and stopping drinking. He is quite good at self-observation and acknowledges that he can take long to say what he has to say. He knows himself and he knows his stuff. He even addresses the issue of his ego. Few people do that with sincerity.

That statement from Bill is an eyebrow raiser for me.

[Gio]

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/flags/flag-of-uk.gif

♪ Britain come back come to us ...
It's not too late to return to us ♪... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncHAwux70u8)


Brexit III: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

"The UK could officially leave the European Union next month, which would be a huge change
with hugely damaging consequences."

LastWeekTonight
Published on Feb 17, 2019

21:26 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HaBQfSAVt0s&feature=em-uploademail

[Aragorn]

http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/flags/flag-of-uk.gif

♪ Britain come back come to us ...
It's not too late to return to us ♪... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ncHAwux70u8)

I feel a song coming up. :p



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hn-enjcgV1o

[Gio]

Bears repeating ...





"On Social Media"

♪ When you care about the issues of the day
Check your facts on Wikipedia
You can get into an argument right away
If you're on social media

The world is changing everywhere
With a speed that couldn't be speedier
But you feel so ahead of the curve
When you're on social media

When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media

You're part of the conversation
You're there in every debate
From football to religion to contemporary art
You're ready to pontificate

While democracy is losing its way
And greed is getting greedier
Console yourself with a selfie or two
And post them on social media

When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media

My likes are in the thousands
My tweets are being retweeted
My family pics or holiday snaps
With total love are greeted

It's so nice when people like you
You're feeling hashtag blessed
You're part of the conversation
It's like you've passed the test

When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media

And sometimes you can fuel the debate
By biting the hand that feeds ya
Expressing pure anonymous hate
When you're on social media

When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media
When you're on
Social media ♪



On social media

Pet Shop Boys


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UuNBJkLLnOs

[Gio]

He was the standard bearer of the worse till now ...



How President Warren G. Harding's Erotic Letters Altered History | Dark History

"President Harding wrote about oral sex and masturbation in his dirty letters ...

Presidential sex scandals are nothing new. But the dirty deeds of Warren G. Harding make Bill Clinton look like a choirboy.

Thanks to his untimely death and corrupt cabinet, the 29th President of the United States, Warren G. Harding, is arguably America’s least respected POTUS. His damaged legacy, however, would reach beyond politics — and into the bedroom. His erotic letters and a best-selling book would later reveal Harding had steamy extramarital affairs with at least two women during his political career: one, a suspected German spy during World War I; the other, a woman half his age who would bear his secret child. This is “Dark History” by the New York Post."

New York Post
Published on Dec 12, 2018


14:05 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgm3xfwt5ME

[palooka's revenge]

He was the standard bearer of the worse till now ...



How President Warren G. Harding's Erotic Letters Altered History | Dark History

"President Harding wrote about oral sex and masturbation in his dirty letters ...

Presidential sex scandals are nothing new. But the dirty deeds of Warren G. Harding make Bill Clinton look like a choirboy.

Thanks to his untimely death and corrupt cabinet, the 29th President of the United States, Warren G. Harding, is arguably America’s least respected POTUS. His damaged legacy, however, would reach beyond politics — and into the bedroom. His erotic letters and a best-selling book would later reveal Harding had steamy extramarital affairs with at least two women during his political career: one, a suspected German spy during World War I; the other, a woman half his age who would bear his secret child. This is “Dark History” by the New York Post."

New York Post
Published on Dec 12, 2018


14:05 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mgm3xfwt5ME

diggin' up bones... i 'preciate U, you ole hound dog, gio... thank you fer yer nose...

[Gio]

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif



https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Frackjite.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2Frr-3714tt.jpg&f=1


***




Blain: "My Recent US Trip Was An Eye-Opener - Poverty Has Never Been So Visible On The Street"

US President's day

"Another fascinating weekend… It’s a holiday in the US, and much of UK is off for mid-term. I’m still trying to digest the importance of last week’s news about Amazon pulling out of its New York HQ2 deal in light of protests by liberal lefties. I’m thinking it’s a very interesting moment, and rather changes the game.

How much do current events, like Amazon, change the game of Macro Strategy decisions? In the past the role of strategist was to carefully scrutinise, analyse and conceptualise Central Bank interest decisions, input the available economic data into our calculations, spice it up with some expectations about global trade prospects, and make rosy assumptions about growth and consumption to determine (ie; guess) if stock and bond prices will rise or fall, and therefore what to buy.

We assumed we lived in a solid-state political and employment universe where its binary that consumption will rise in line with employment, and that any job is a plus job.

Recent events demonstrate that simple equation may need massive revision. Over the past few years we’ve been forced to factor in the irrational and unpredictable politics of populism, and their effect on markets. Now our expectations about employment and consumption are under pressure.

My heightened interest in the topic might be because I’m a Scot (ie Socialism is part of our DNA), and had an uncle who ran away from Glasgow to America as a kid who became wonderously successful yet remained a Wobbly – a member of the IWW; Industrial Workers of the World – his whole life. (I so admired him I named my first born, Jack, after him!)

Nobody comes out well from the Amazon affair. Jeff Bezos and Amazon look out arrogant and out of touch – as one US chum told me New York’s politicians are idiots: “after its walked out on its current home town without paying a dime in alimony, let’s give a company that doesn’t pay any taxes a couple of billion in bungs to come to the last affordable bit of NYC and price all of AOC’s constituents out of their homes… what’s not to like?”

New York’s political leaders look stupid, confused, disjointed and lost. The young congresswoman AOC (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) might be smiling like a winner today, but strikes me as a child who expects congratulated for throwing her new toys out the pram. How will she explain chasing away 25k well-paid jobs as the core of her presidential strategy and her New Green Deal?

Whatever the rights and wrongs, the faction of the Democratic Party crowing about their victory over the unacceptable face of capitalism have set a new bar in the rising and angry debate about tax, wealth and jobs. Forget Trump and walls – that’s irrelevant. (Declaring an Emergency is more an issue – what can of worms has that opened?)

Where Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has clearly scored is painting Jeff Bezos as the villain - arrogant, threatening, and a serial tax-avoider. That chimes with a large part of the US electorate – and sets some dangerous precedents in terms of populism – Remember how close Bernie Sanders came?"


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/bezos%20aoc.jpg?itok=9yoQfo_o

"The US should be the happiest place in the world these days. Employment among minorities has never been so high. More women than ever before are in the total workforce, which now exceeds 63% in terms of the participation rate. Years of economic growth, and more recently Trump’s tax boost last year, means investment has been strong. Corporates are doing well.

Yet, after 10 years of ultra-low interest rates, tax-giveaways, and a massive increase in the wealth of the richest 0.01% of the US population (who now own a staggering 10% of the wealth!), wages for the rest are only now beginning to show any signs of upwards pressure.

While Bezos and his fellow trillionaires wonder which slice of cake to guzzle next, the facts are the poorest workers in the US are in poverty. Over 60% of the lowests’ incomes go to cover their housing and transport costs, the next 25% on food. The 50% percentile income bracket - definitionally the “middle class” - spend 44% on housing and travel. More than half the population aren’t saving for their retirement, but are scrabbling to put food on the table today.

My recent trip to the USA was an eye-opener - poverty has never been so visible on the street, and it feels the income-inequality debate is bursting out. No wonder populists are calling for the rich to be taxed till the eye’s pop. But the US needs to do two things – create a fair tax and equality system, and fix what’s broken in its society and economy.

The classical models of modern states suppose its role is to provide these indivisible services like law and order, defence and care. All citizens share in the benefits of membership, with the basis the strong should protect the weak. We’ve seen the care function morph into the emergence of education, pensions, healthcare and social services - which are as major costs states now bear. There is the inbuilt reluctance of these who don’t need such services to pay for them. Why should a rich man pay to make the poor comfortable? Because, if you don’t… eventually they will eat you. Simple as – it’s the cost of membership.

The division of income within society is critical. The argument about taxing the rich typically boils down to: “If you tax us more, we’ll take less risk, create fewer jobs, and no one will get richer.” The trick is to persuade entrepreneurs to keep making money, but ensure that money is distributed and lubricates everyone without demotivating these drivers. (I’m trying to work out why we should accept inherited wealth as being worthy of the same protections... )

Historically, the Americans have always done the right thing after exhausting every other possibility first. Roosevelt’s iconic New Deal followed the government’s disastrous non-intervention in the wake of earlier financial crash. The Americans can do it again – some variation on AOC’s Green New Deal that balances growth, consumption, wealth, health, and entrepreneurship is possible. A programme that addresses a re-jig of society in terms of educational relevance, green environmental industries, and a massive-across-the-board infrastructure rebuild, while also balancing care for those in need at the core of a new approach.

That’s a real challenge, but one I’d expect the Americans to find… eventually. If it doesn’t happen… expect more instability and mad decisions like stopping new well paid jobs and increasing economic strain. In which case... where else to invest?"

Blain's Morning Porridge, submitted by Bill Blain
Source:zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-18/blain-my-recent-us-trip-was-eye-opener-poverty-has-never-been-so-visible-street)

[Gio]

Well perhaps just a little bite for now ... https://www.smiley-lol.com/smiley/manger/mange.gif


Aerosmith - Eat The Rich

4:42 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o-0lAhnoDlU

[Gio]

And if eating the rich doesn't do it for you America ...
Perhaps this will temporarily satisfy the craving ...


Pops' Root Beer Bread Pudding

"This Route 66 institution goes the extra mile for soda-based indulgence.

Driving through the tiny town of Arcadia, Oklahoma, just a half-hour north of Oklahoma City, no passenger can miss the sign for Pops. Nestled along Route 66, the roadside restaurant and gas station sells around 700 kinds of soda, arranged by color. Out front, a 66-foot-tall soda bottle statue provides a tip-off regarding what’s in store for customers. At night, LEDs illuminate the structure, turning it into a beacon of light that harkens back to the days when this legendary route was dotted with neon.

Travelers who find themselves drawn in by the splendid display will discover more than just pop inside. Waitresses bustle around in its diner, complete with an old-fashioned soda fountain. Though patrons are welcome to order a proper meal, the diner’s claim to fame is their root beer bread pudding. Pops makes a steaming slice of not-too-sweet, yeasty pudding studded with plump raisins, then douses the creation in house-made root beer and white chocolate sauces. Wash it down with any of their hundreds of sodas (several of which they serve on tap, in bottomless cups) for the ultimate sugar high."


https://assets.atlasobscura.com/media/W1siZiIsInVwbG9hZHMvdGhpbmdfaW1hZ2VzL2U0ZDA3ODJiLT YyZGQtNDhkNC1hY2YzLWZlYjg0MmU2MDE2YmNlM2JjM2M3ZDg4 ZWM0NGVhY19yb290YmVlcmJyZWFkcHVkZGluZ19yYWNoZWxydW 1tZWwuanBnIl0sWyJwIiwiY29udmVydCIsIiJdLFsicCIsImNv bnZlcnQiLCItcXVhbGl0eSA4MSAtYXV0by1vcmllbnQiXSxbIn AiLCJ0aHVtYiIsIjU4MHg1ODAjIl1d/rootbeerbreadpudding_rachelrummel.jpg

Source: atlasobscura.com (https://www.atlasobscura.com/foods/root-beer-bread-pudding?utm_source=Atlas+Obscura+Daily+Newsletter&utm_campaign=028f855a57-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_)

[Gio]

Speaking cheap labor ...



https://i.pinimg.com/564x/8d/24/f1/8d24f1531de5d8ed944fc7f4f97860ce.jpg?b=t

[Gio]

Interesting wash/suds business ... :chrs:

A Secret Pinball World in a Brooklyn Laundromat

Atlas Obscura

"Sunshine Laundromat, located in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, is half laundromat, half pinball bar. In fact, it’s the only laundromat in New York City that’s allowed to serve alcohol. But what actually goes on behind-the-scenes?

In this episode, we ask owner Peter Rose a few questions about this unique laundromat. From the weirdest thing they’ve ever found to the ‘best’ pinball machine in the establishment, Peter patiently answered our many questions and offered an insight into this secret world inside the unassuming laundromat."

Published on Feb 19, 2019

5:39 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9VzEI0n0pcU

[Gio]

"Physicists used to search for the smallest components of the universe. What if that’s not the point?"


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5bfc211a5d58ee2cd3e13a7f/master/w_727,c_limit/Wolchover_Shape-Shifting-Laws_Kok.jpg

What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level,
if it’s bound to be superseded?



A Different Kind of Theory of Everything



By Natalie Wolchover

"In 1964, during a lecture at Cornell University, the physicist Richard Feynman articulated a profound mystery about the physical world. He told his listeners to imagine two objects, each gravitationally attracted to the other. How, he asked, should we predict their movements? Feynman identified three approaches, each invoking a different belief about the world. The first approach used Newton’s law of gravity, according to which the objects exert a pull on each other. The second imagined a gravitational field extending through space, which the objects distort. The third applied the principle of least action, which holds that each object moves by following the path that takes the least energy in the least time. All three approaches produced the same, correct prediction. They were three equally useful descriptions of how gravity works.

“One of the amazing characteristics of nature is this variety of interpretational schemes,” Feynman said. What’s more, this multifariousness applies only to the true laws of nature—it doesn’t work if the laws are misstated. “If you modify the laws much, you find you can only write them in fewer ways,” Feynman said. “I always found that mysterious, and I do not know the reason why it is that the correct laws of physics are expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways. They seem to be able to get through several wickets at the same time.”

Even as physicists work to understand the material content of the universe—the properties of particles, the nature of the big bang, the origins of dark matter and dark energy—their work is shadowed by this Rashomon effect, which raises metaphysical questions about the meaning of physics and the nature of reality. Nima Arkani-Hamed, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, is one of today’s leading theoreticians. “The miraculous shape-shifting property of the laws is the single most amazing thing I know about them,” he told me, this past fall. It “must be a huge clue to the nature of the ultimate truth.”

Traditionally, physicists have been reductionists. They’ve searched for a “theory of everything” that describes reality in terms of its most fundamental components. In this way of thinking, the known laws of physics are provisional, approximating an as-yet-unknown, more detailed description. A table is really a collection of atoms; atoms, upon closer inspection, reveal themselves to be clusters of protons and neutrons; each of these is, more microscopically, a trio of quarks; and quarks, in turn, are presumed to consist of something yet more fundamental. Reductionists think that they are playing a game of telephone: as the message of reality travels upward, from the microscopic to the macroscopic scale, it becomes garbled, and they must work their way downward to recover the truth. Physicists now know that gravity wrecks this naïve scheme, by shaping the universe on both large and small scales. And the Rashomon effect also suggests that reality isn’t structured in such a reductive, bottom-up way.

If anything, Feynman’s example understated the mystery of the Rashomon effect, which is actually twofold. It’s strange that, as Feynman says, there are multiple valid ways of describing so many physical phenomena. But an even stranger fact is that, when there are competing descriptions, one often turns out to be more true than the others, because it extends to a deeper or more general description of reality. Of the three ways of describing objects’ motion, for instance, the approach that turns out to be more true is the underdog: the principle of least action. In everyday reality, it’s strange to imagine that objects move by “choosing” the easiest path. (How does a falling rock know which trajectory to take before it gets going?) But, a century ago, when physicists began to make experimental observations about the strange behavior of elementary particles, only the least-action interpretation of motion proved conceptually compatible. A whole new mathematical language—quantum mechanics—had to be developed to describe particles’ probabilistic ability to play out all possibilities and take the easiest path most frequently. Of the various classical laws of motion—all workable, all useful—only the principle of least action also extends to the quantum world.

It happens again and again that, when there are many possible descriptions of a physical situation—all making equivalent predictions, yet all wildly different in premise—one will turn out to be preferable, because it extends to an underlying reality, seeming to account for more of the universe at once. And yet this new description might, in turn, have multiple formulations—and one of those alternatives may apply even more broadly. It’s as though physicists are playing a modified telephone game in which, with each whisper, the message is translated into a different language. The languages describe different scales or domains of the same reality but aren’t always related etymologically. In this modified game, the objective isn’t—or isn’t only—to seek a bedrock equation governing reality’s smallest bits. The existence of this branching, interconnected web of mathematical languages, each with its own associated picture of the world, is what needs to be understood.

This web of laws creates traps for physicists. Suppose you’re a researcher seeking to understand the universe more deeply. You may get stuck using a dead-end description—clinging to a principle that seems correct but is merely one of nature’s disguises. It’s for this reason that Paul Dirac, a British pioneer of quantum theory, stressed the importance of reformulating existing theories: it’s by finding new ways of describing known phenomena that you can escape the trap of provisional or limited belief. This was the trick that led Dirac to predict antimatter, in 1928. “It is not always so that theories which are equivalent are equally good,” he said, five decades later, “because one of them may be more suitable than the other for future developments.”

Today, various puzzles and paradoxes point to the need to reformulate the theories of modern physics in a new mathematical language. Many physicists feel trapped. They have a hunch that they need to transcend the notion that objects move and interact in space and time. Einstein’s general theory of relativity beautifully weaves space and time together into a four-dimensional fabric, known as space-time, and equates gravity with warps in that fabric. But Einstein’s theory and the space-time concept break down inside black holes and at the moment of the big bang. Space-time, in other words, may be a translation of some other description of reality that, though more abstract or unfamiliar, can have greater explanatory power.

Some researchers are attempting to wean physics off of space-time in order to pave the way toward this deeper theory. Currently, to predict how particles morph and scatter when they collide in space-time, physicists use a complicated diagrammatic scheme invented by Richard Feynman. The so-called Feynman diagrams indicate the probabilities, or “scattering amplitudes,” of different particle-collision outcomes. In 2013, Nima Arkani-Hamed and Jaroslav Trnka discovered a reformulation of scattering amplitudes that makes reference to neither space nor time. They found that the amplitudes of certain particle collisions are encoded in the volume of a jewel-like geometric object, which they dubbed the amplituhedron. Ever since, they and dozens of other researchers have been exploring this new geometric formulation of particle-scattering amplitudes, hoping that it will lead away from our everyday, space-time-bound conception to some grander explanatory structure.

Whether these researchers are on the right track or not, the web of explanations of reality exists. Perhaps the most striking thing about those explanations is that, even as each draws only a partial picture of reality, they are mathematically perfect. Take general relativity. Physicists know that Einstein’s theory is incomplete. Yet it is a spectacular artifice, with a spare, taut mathematical structure. Fiddle with the equations even a little and you lose all of its beauty and simplicity. It turns out that, if you want to discover a deeper way of explaining the universe, you can’t take the equations of the existing description and subtly deform them. Instead, you must make a jump to a totally different, equally perfect mathematical structure. What’s the point, theorists wonder, of the perfection found at every level, if it’s bound to be superseded?

It seems inconceivable that this intricate web of perfect mathematical descriptions is random or happenstance. This mystery must have an explanation. But what might such an explanation look like? One common conception of physics is that its laws are like a machine that humans are building in order to predict what will happen in the future. The “theory of everything” is like the ultimate prediction machine—a single equation from which everything follows. But this outlook ignores the existence of the many different machines, built in all manner of ingenious ways, that give us equivalent predictions.

To Arkani-Hamed, the multifariousness of the laws suggests a different conception of what physics is all about. We’re not building a machine that calculates answers, he says; instead, we’re discovering questions. Nature’s shape-shifting laws seem to be the answer to an unknown mathematical question. This is why Arkani-Hamed and his colleagues find their studies of the amplituhedron so promising. Calculating the volume of the amplituhedron is a question in geometry—one that mathematicians might have pondered, had they discovered the object first. Somehow, the answer to the question of the amplituhedron’s volume describes the behavior of particles—and that answer, in turn, can be rewritten in terms of space and time.

Arkani-Hamed now sees the ultimate goal of physics as figuring out the mathematical question from which all the answers flow. “The ascension to the tenth level of intellectual heaven,” he told me, “would be if we find the question to which the universe is the answer, and the nature of that question in and of itself explains why it was possible to describe it in so many different ways.” It’s as though physics has been turned inside out. It now appears that the answers already surround us. It’s the question we don’t know."




Source: newyorker.com (https://www.newyorker.com/science/elements/a-different-kind-of-theory-of-everything?utm_campaign=aud-dev&utm_source=nl&utm_brand=tny&utm_mailing=TNY_Daily_021919&utm_medium=email&bxid=5bea0b212ddf9c72dc8cc2c3&user_id=52756157&utm_term=TNY_Daily)

[Gio]

Question

Moody Blues


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBsdHoTdOmc

[Gio]

Brexit Britain: Europe's view



Sky News
Published on Feb 19, 2019

The UK has long enjoyed a reputation for its global influence, military power and financial strength.

But the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, recently described Britain as a "waning country", too small to stand alone on the world stage.

So, is Brexit changing the way the rest of Europe views the UK?

Our foreign affairs editor Deborah Haynes has travelled across the continent to find out what impact leaving the European Union is having on Britain's reputation.

12:08 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jZdAlqiLCbY

[Gio]

Meanwhile at the Justice Department ...


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c6c1d3bc316862c9d530cf7/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC021919.jpg

“It has come to our attention that too many of you are paying attention.”

[Gio]

Will share this here ...
A surprisingly fun YouTube share ...


https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/05/dd/7d/47/ultimate-hollywood-tours.jpg


#928 Hollywood Tour of Rare Homes, Graves & Scandals

Daze with Jordan the Lion

Published on Feb 20, 2019

26:46 minutes

Best viewed in full screen



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g-bmyNR05JE

[Gio]

Let's Face It: The U.S. Constitution Has Failed


"Elections provide the bread-and-circuses staged-drama that is passed off as democracy."



https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/Juvenal.jpg?itok=06uxzzTe

"Despite the anything-goes quality of American culture, one thing remains verboten to say publicly: the U.S. Constitution has failed. The reason why this painfully obvious fact cannot be discussed publicly is that it gives the lie to the legitimacy of the entire status quo.

The Constitution was intended to limit 1) the power of government over the citizenry 2) the power of each branch of government and 3) the power of political/financial elites over the government and the citizenry, as the Founders recognized the intrinsic risks of an all-powerful state, an all-powerful state dominated by one branch of government and the risks of a financial elite corrupting the state to serve their interests above those of the citizenry.

The Constitution has failed to place limits on the power of government, on the emergence of unaccountable states-within-a-state agencies and on the political power of financial elites.

How has the Constitution failed? It has failed in three ways:

1. Corporations and the super-wealthy elite control the machinery of governance. The public interest is not represented except as interpreted / filtered through corporate/elite interests.

2. The nation's central bank, the Federal Reserve, has the power to debauch the nation's currency and reward the wealthy via issuing new currency and buying Treasury bonds in whatever sums it deems necessary at the moment. The Fed is only nominally under the control of the elected government. It is in effect an independent state-within-a-state that dominates the financial well-being of the entire nation.

3. The National Security State--the alphabet agencies of the FBI, CIA, NSA et al.--are an independent state-within-a-state, answerable only to themselves, not to the public or their representatives. Congressional oversight is little more than feeble rubber-stamping of the Imperial Project and whatever the unelected National Security leadership deems worthy of pursuit.

The Constitution's core regulatory element--the balancing of executive, legislative and judicial power--has broken down. The judiciary's independence is as nominal as the legislative branch's control of the central bank and National Security state: the gradual encroachment of corporate and state power is rubber-stamped and declared constitutional.

The secret power of the National Security agencies was declared constitutional early in the Cold war, when unleashing unaccountable and secret agencies was deemed necessary.

The bizarre public-private Federal Reserve was deemed constitutional at its founding in 1913, and the Supreme Court famously declared that corporations have the same rights to free speech (including loudspeakers that cost millions of dollars) as living citizens.

The powers of the Imperial Presidency also continue expanding, regardless of which party is in office or the supposed ideological tropisms of Supreme Court justices.

Every step of this erosion of public representation and the elected government's power is declared fully constitutional, in classic boiled-frog fashion. The frog detects the rising temperature of the water but isn't alarmed as the heat is increased so gradually.

Since the rise of unaccountable states-within-a-state are constitutional, as is the dominance of corporate / private-wealth elites, on what grounds can citizens protest their loss of representation?

Elections provide the bread-and-circuses staged drama that is passed off as democracy. The key goal of the corporate/state media coverage, of course, is to foster the illusion that elections really, really, really matter, when the reality is they don't. The National Security State grinds on, the Federal Reserve grinds on and the dominance of corporate-wealth elites grinds on regardless of who's in office.

Every emergency is met by the ceding of more power to unelected elites in positions to serve their own interests. The Cold War, financial panics, Cold War Redux--every crisis is an excuse to expand the powers of the unaccountable, opaque states-within-a-state.

The media is already gearing up with 24/7 coverage of the 2020 elections. The constant churn of drama-trauma serves to mask the impotence and powerlessness of the citizenry and the unaccountability of the states-within-a-state that rule the nation."



https://www.zerohedge.com/s3/files/inline-images/Deep-State5-15.gif?itok=r2h08qlV


Authored by Charles Hugh Smith via OfTwoMinds blog, (http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/02/lets-face-it-us-constitution-has-failed.html)

Source:zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-20/lets-face-it-us-constitution-has-failed)

[Dreamtimer]

Or maybe we have failed the Constitution. We have abused it and we continue to. Imo.

[Gio]

The latest ...


FDA to Rich Old Men: Stop Infusing Children's Blood! - #NewWorldNextWeek

corbettreport

"Welcome back to New World Next Week – the video series from Corbett Report and Media Monarchy
that covers some of the most important developments in open source intelligence news."

Published on Feb 21, 2019

All news items link listed below YouTube show notes

14:41 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wETJJejPC_w&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Conspiracy theorist David Icke banned from entering Australia ahead of speaking tour ... (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-02-20/david-icke-banned-from-entering-australia/10830064)


https://img-aws.ehowcdn.com/560x560p/photos.demandstudios.com/getty/article/94/141/dv2073044.jpg

David Icke Talks To Fade To Black About Being Banned From Australia

David Icke

Published on Feb 21, 2019

23:31 minutes



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3uf7eif_j9E

[Gio]

'Make America Great Again !


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Dz9UYc8W0AAJcz8.jpg

Where Jussie Smollett's Plan Went Wrong

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Published on Feb 21, 2019

7:52 minutes



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csnDILGTmuw

[Gio]

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Somewhere over Eastern Canada ...

Lies the pot of ...

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/44930805_2009211675789484_4930187233886994432_n.jp g?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=361a4bfd10bf414b4527ec15beb302f3&oe=5CE9F16F

[Gio]

In Corinth, Greece the Super Snow Moon rises between the
statues of Diogenes of Sinope and Alexander the Great ...
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diogenes)

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/content/dam/news/2019/02/20/TELEMMGLPICT000189046080_trans_NvBQzQNjv4BqpVlberW d9EgFPZtcLiMQfyf2A9a6I9YchsjMeADBa08.jpeg?imwidth= 1400

Time Of The Season


The Zombies



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_d48ALUVA6Y

[Gio]

Speaking of snow and of cynical
virtuous doggish ways ...



https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c6d8c6e3bea5a06978cc222/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC022019.jpg

The annual mortification of the canines.

[Gio]

Back on the road ... :scooter:


HELLO VIETNAM!
First Impressions of the Country

Gabriel Traveler

"Exploring Da Nang, Vietnam on my first day in the country."

Published on Feb 21, 2019

21:39 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPKPhW1PCC8&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

And he was called Charmin ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/bf/35/47/bf3547b85c9bff8bf2a8351baaf79558.jpg

[Gio]

IMO ... this should be a U.S. federal law ...


NJ Bill Would Ban Trump From 2020 Ballot Unless He Releases Tax Returns

"A bill introduced by New Jersey Democrats would keep President Trump's name off the state's 2020 ballot
unless he releases his tax returns, according to NorthJersey.com. (https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2019/02/21/nj-)" ...


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/trump%20taxes%201_0.jpeg?itok=Zdk6JaXr

"The new legislation, approved Thursday by the state Senate, was passed once before in 2017 only to be vetoed by then-Gov. Chris Christie. It would keep any candidate from appearing on the state ballot unless they make their tax returns public. Of note, New Jersey's current governor, Phil Murphy, is a Democrat.


Similar legislation has been introduced in at least 28 states but has never been enacted, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, meaning New Jersey would be the first to impose such a disclosure requirement if its measure is also approved by the Assembly and signed by Gov. Phil Murphy, a Democrat. -NorthJersey.com (https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2019/02/21/nj-)

New Jersey's bill comes in response to President Trump's longstanding refusal to release his tax returns - which he says he would gladly do if he weren't under an ongoing IRS audit. The president's decision not to disclose information about his personal finances has sparked a heated debate over whether such a bill is even constitutional.

"It is so obvious with this president that had voters known some of what seem to be his business interests, he may not have been elected president," said state Sen. Loretta Weinberg (D), a sponsor of the bill.

The measure would likely be struck down in the courts, according to NorthJersey, and could also lead to more disclosures from candidates in the future.

"Today we require tax returns, but what would be next?" wrote former California Gov. Jerry Brown when he vetoed similar legislation in 2017. "Five years of health records? A certified birth certificate? High school report cards? And will these requirements vary depending on which political party is in power?"

"“It’s just political pandering," said attorney John Carbone, who specializes in election law at Carbone & Fasse.

"They can impose no requirements for a candidate for federal office, let alone president," he said. "They’re thinking like Alabama Democrats during the Civil War: What can we do to get Lincoln?"




Although they are not required to do so by law, presidential candidates in the past have released their tax returns as a matter of transparency so voters could learn about their financial status, business dealings and potential conflicts of interest.

Democrats who now control the U.S. House of Representatives are reportedly studying a century-old provision in the federal tax code (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/16/us/politics/trump-tax-returns-democrats.html) to gain access to Trump’s tax returns and make them public. Separately, Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr., D-Paterson, has introduced legislation to require presidents and presidential candidates to release their 10 most recent federal income tax returns. (https://pascrell.house.gov/issues/president-trumps-tax-returns/)

The Democrats who control New Jersey’s Legislature are eyeing a different mechanism to force the disclosure, threatening to keep off the New Jersey ballot any candidate who does not share his or her five most recent tax returns at least 50 days before the 2020 general election. -NorthJersey.com (https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2019/02/21/nj-bill-trump-2020-ballot-releases-tax-returns/2926652002/)

"Of course, no Republican presidential candidate has won New Jersey since 1988, so the impact to President Trump, should this law pass, would likely be minimal.

In March of 2017, MSNBC host Rachel Maddow embarrassed herself (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2017-03-14/msnbcs-non-story-trump-made-150-million-paid-25-effective-tax-rate) and her network when she published leaked partial copies of Trump's 2005 tax returns - revealing that Trump paid a higher tax rate than Mitt Romney in 2011 and Bernie Sanders in 2014, along with Barack Obama at 18.7% (https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/apr/15/obamas-paid-effective-tax-rate-187-percent-2015/)in 2015 and Warren Buffet at 17.4% (https://www.fool.com/investing/general/2016/02/21/billionaire-warren-buffetts-secret-to-paying-a-low.aspx)."

Source: zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-21/nj-bill-would-ban-trump-2020-ballot-unless-he-releases-tax-returns)

[Dreamtimer]

Wow. First I heard of that, Gio.

Bush started really pushing the unitary executive, or whatever they called it, where the President has much power, i.e. executive orders.

Now the states are starting to reassert themselves, as are the people.

The Congress will get its backbone back and start passing bills and overriding vetos. States will begin to stand up more to the Feds and possibly corporations.

Should be interesting.

[Gio]

Meanwhile...

It's Called 'Nut Juice'

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Published on Feb 23, 2019

5:01 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6V8xsdVdbs

[Gio]

Making it up as they go ...
I'll bite ...


From Randy Maugans | OffPlanet Radio

Shane The Ruiner: Weaponized Sexuality



OffPlanet Media

Published on Feb 23, 2019
This is the first segment of a +2 hour presentation. For full episodes and exclusive features, become a patron for as little as $3/month at:
https://patreon.com/offplanetmedia

Rarely, if ever, seriously discussed in alternative media; the subjects of sexual rituals, the LGBTQ movement, transgenderism, and authentic sexuality is not only hot topical matter, but critica, and usually loaded with biases, half-baked opinions, and deep religious dogma. Shane Bales joins us to open up these subjects with Randy and Emily. Each of us speaks from a place of experience, non-bias, and the goal of discussing this without creating divisions and more false narratives.

Shane's blog on the Illuminati, which sparked huge controversy when it was made public in 2015, is a primer on the order of control from the viewpoint of a kid who was inside it
https://theruiner777.blogspot.com/


1:12:41 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PWd5Gc_FOU

[Gio]

A new travel adventure ...
How fast the world can change ...

What Happened to the Aral Sea? | Travel to Uzbekistan's Worst Disaster

Vagabrothers

"What happened to the Aral Sea? Once the fourth largest inland body of water in the world, it's now nearly gone, leaving shipwrecks in the desert, lives destroyed and poisonous dust clouds spreading across the globe.

Join Alex the Vagabond and Marko Ayling, the Vagabrothers as they travel to the edge of this disappearing Sea to find out exactly what happened. Buckle your seat belts, this is going to be one strange trip!"


Published on Feb 23, 2019

18:00 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCeprlqbneE

[Gio]

Unique - LP



Born March 18, 1981
Birthplace New York
Age 37 years old
Birth Sign Pisces

About

Best known for her single "Into the Wild" and known by the stage name LP, she is a pop/rock singer and
songwriter with a 2014 studio album titled Forever for Now.

Before Fame - She was featured on the hidden Cracker track "Cinderella" from the band's 1998 album Gentleman's Blues.

Trivia - A decade before Forever for Now, she released a 2001 album called Heart-Shaped Scar and a 2004 album
titled Suburban Sprawl & Alcohol.

Family Life - Her father's name is Richard. She is openly gay.

Associated With - She has written songs for Rihanna, Cher Lloyd and Christina Aguilera.



https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gossipetv.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F07%2Flp-fidanzata.jpg&f=1

Laura Pergolizzi
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LP_(singer))
Lost On You



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wDjeBNv6ip0

[Gio]

IMO ...

Putin's ongoing long plan to seed and interject a right wing/wedge into EU unity is most definitely working well and on course ... Just as it was planned and worked here in the U.S. prior to and since the 2016 elections ...



Below

In this Feb. 19, 2019 file photo, a phone box displays a billboard showing Hungarian-American financier George Soros and EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker above the caption "You have a right to know what Brussels is preparing to do!", in Budapest, Hungary. Battle lines are drawn between anti-EU populist forces and traditional parties at the beginning of a three-month election campaign that could turn into a tipping point in postwar European history. The May 2019 EU elections has already produced unprecedented abrasive campaigning.

https://storage.googleapis.com/afs-prod/media/media:c1d785905488497ab347fcdb356e8325/3000.jpeg


EU Parliament election could upend politics across Europe

BRUSSELS (AP) — "EU Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker was so stupefied after Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban attacked his migration policies that he publicly muttered “I cannot believe what I read.” When Orban’s party later targeted him in a virulent election poster campaign, Juncker was again dumbfounded, saying “You can’t really act against lies.”

Enemies from opposing camps? No, they belong to the same EPP Christian Democrat group, the dominant force in the European Parliament, and should in theory be close allies in May’s European Union election.

Instead, this political fratricide is front and center in this massive exercise of democracy, which spans 27 nations and involves close to half a billion people. The May 23-26 European Parliament vote could prove to be a tipping point in post-war European politics.

Some traditional political powerhouses might start to crumble, allowing extremist, populist parties to gain more clout and throw a new wrench into the EU’s political machinery.

“We’ve never seen something like this in EU elections,” said European politics Professor Hendrik Vos of Ghent University about the abrasive election climate.

The EU parliamentary election is run as national ballots in 27 member states. National political parties with common ideology then unite in EU-wide groups like the center-right EPP, the center-left S&D Socialists and the liberal, pro-business ALDE.

Over the years, the major political groups started looking at adding unattached national parties to expand their bases. Even if these newcomers might not be as close to their core values, they still could boost their seat totals in Parliament.

Some factions, however, have developed sharply contrasting agendas within their groups and can vary as widely as the geographic spread from Finland to Hungary to Portugal. Some could now splinter off — like Orban’s staunchly anti-migrant, right-wing Fidesz party — weaken the center and reinforce the fringes.

The EPP, for example, welcomed a populist Italian, Silvio Berlusconi, two decades ago. Orban’s Fidesz party followed soon after. Other groups also face similar internal trouble — the ALDE with populist Czech leader Andrej Babis, who has been accused of misusing EU farm subsidies, and the S&D with Romania’s Social Democrats, who critics say are weakening the judiciary’s fight against corruption.

But nowhere has it produced political fireworks like at the EPP.

Orban was first embraced for his anti-Communist credentials but over the years turned into an anti-immigration populist calling for an “illiberal” society with autocratic leadership, something that increasingly jarred with EPP values.

It came to a boil over the past month when Orban fired up his anti-Brussels rhetoric portraying Juncker as conniving to keep nations like Hungary under their thumb and opening EU borders to all migrants. He plastered Budapest with posters showing Juncker as a gloating force of evil.

“I consider the formulations in the poster campaign in Hungary against Jean-Claude Juncker, which is meeting with incomprehension in large parts of the EPP, unacceptable,” Austrian Chancellor and EPP heavyweight Sebastian Kurz said Friday.

Now the EPP faces a political dilemma: should it jettison Orban over principles, whatever the consequences, or try to keep him in a chokehold so he won’t unite with other anti-EU populists?

“In these new dynamics there are new opportunities,” noted Italian political analyst Alberto Alemanno.

Since the last EU election in 2014, Britain has voted to leave the EU and Italy and Austria have government coalitions that include the far right. Over a dozen EU nations have fragile minority governments and Poland has turned as hostile toward Brussels as Hungary.

“After the fall of London, Rome, Warsaw, Budapest, or Vienna into the hands of anti-European and/or xenophobic forces, we no longer speak of the ‘enemy at the gate’ but of the ‘enemy inside the gates,’” wrote Jose Ignacio Torreblanca for the European Council on Foreign Relations.

And all this comes at a time when the European Parliament now has more powers. All too long a posh retirement post for over-the-hill politicians, the parliament is now an effective decision-maker with a real say on everything from Brexit to anti-pollution regulations.

The first projections for the 705-seat legislature, produced this week by the parliament itself, show the EPP Christian Democrats struggling with 183 seats, the S&D Socialists losing big to land at 135 seats and their grand coalition short of a majority for the first time. Populists would gain more clout during the upcoming five-year session.

The influential VoteWatch Europe think tank said “right-wing nationalists are set to gain, although they are likely to fall short of getting over 25 percent of seats.”

But it said a united group of right-wing nationalists could become the second largest group in the legislature.

So far, populist and extreme parties have added decibels and eyebrow-raising rhetoric to the EU plenary but have had precious little impact on parliament events.

But with higher numbers and better coordination, the anti-EU forces could start weighing in more on decision-making in Europe and battle back against pro-EU French President Emmanuel Macron’s vision of an ever-closer union.

That would be music to Orban’s ears and a massive defeat for Juncker.

Since Juncker is not running for another term as Commission president, the vote in May could be the last round of their fight. That round is not over and Juncker wants to protect his pro-EU legacy.

“I’m not giving in. I’m not like that. I want to be exactly the opposite of that,” Juncker said."

Source: apnews.com (https://apnews.com/1766c107d0d74a69b5edfbeff41e9a25)

[Gio]

The latest ...

Non-Player Character - Dr. Shmuel Asher & Randy Maugans

Freeman Fly

"How do NPCs exist? Why do they exist? Who creates them and what is their main purpose? If they have no soul, HOW is their biological body animated? Why have all of the Arts been so totally attacked and usurped at the top by Drone entity controllers? Do Drones aid Archon’s to capture all souls in the end. – (Everything has always been about the SOUL!)"

Published on Feb 24, 2019

1:05:02 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSIaWMaSHLY&feature=em-uploademail

[Emil El Zapato]

what ever happened to china on the back side of the moon...

[Gio]

what ever happened to china on the back side of the moon...

Apparently ... (https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/chinas-moon-missions-are-anything-pointless-180961633/)


https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/moon-1000-pics.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=644&h=426&crop=1



China says it has grown the first plants on the moon on its historic mission to the far side (https://www.businessinsider.com/china-grows-first-ever-plants-moon-far-side-2019-1)

[Aragorn]

what ever happened to china on the back side of the moon...

They're still sitting there listening to a certain Pink Floyd album while tripping on that dose of acid they took with them. :p

[Dreamtimer]

And playing cards with the Russians. The Russians can't hide their tells. The Chinese have no tells.:ttr:

[Aragorn]

And playing cards with the Russians. The Russians can't hide their tells. The Chinese have no tells.:ttr:

Um, forgive my ignorance, Sister, but why don't the Chinese have any tells? :confused: (Remember, I'm not an Acronymian and this may be a cultural thing. :hmm:)

[Gio]

I see the latest stuff has preceded me ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif

***

Foreigner - Double Vision


Published on Feb 22, 2019

3:57 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azF9zHyXLoE&feature=em-uploademail

[Emil El Zapato]

I bought that album without knowing who they were, I asked the clerk about it and they filled me in...I could hear them saying to each other they couldn't believe someone didn't know who they were... :)


About 20 years later, I saw them in a concert with several other bands including 'Kansas'. (One of my used to be very local favorites.)

Foreigner was still rockin'


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tH2w6Oxx0kQ

[Gio]

Will share her recent video here ...

"Swallow this for me if you can" ...


Kundalini and How to Awaken Your Kundalini

Teal Swan



Published on Feb 23, 2019

How to Awaken Your Kundalini begins with a basic understanding of what Kundalini is. Kundalini is often thought to be lying dormant within our being when it is actually in a state of stillness and often because we are resisting our own life force energy. Awakening your Kundalini begins with the realization that there may be nothing to awaken, just something that needs to be allowed instead of resisted.

Video References:

Urgent: Deal with Your Resistance Before You Do Anything Else:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-90Uv5LKhk

How to Be Authentic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgWBIVQ1qAQ

22:32 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SU25SMyIo-k

[Gio]

Kinda like logging in on the forum today ...


https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2a/f2/b8/2af2b853a013c2b13c1583272ee3a866.jpg

[Dreamtimer]

Toothy Happy. :nails:

[Gio]

Speaking of double vision ...


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0NutDQWoAApXTD.jpg

Oscar's new comb over ...


The Oscars stage this year strongly resembles Donald Trump’s hair (https://nypost.com/2019/02/24/the-oscars-stage-this-year-strongly-resembles-donald-trumps-hair/)

[Aragorn]

And playing cards with the Russians. The Russians can't hide their tells. The Chinese have no tells.:ttr:

Um, forgive my ignorance, Sister, but why don't the Chinese have any tells? :confused: (Remember, I'm not an Acronymian and this may be a cultural thing. :hmm:)


:Bump:

Still waiting for the answer. :p






Kinda like logging in on the forum today ...


https://i.pinimg.com/originals/2a/f2/b8/2af2b853a013c2b13c1583272ee3a866.jpg

Toothy Happy. :nails:

Well, I for one am not toothy happy. I broke off half of a wisdom tooth yesterday. :(





Speaking of double vision ...


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0NutDQWoAApXTD.jpg

Oscar's new comb over ...


The Oscars stage this year strongly resembles Donald Trump’s hair (https://nypost.com/2019/02/24/the-oscars-stage-this-year-strongly-resembles-donald-trumps-hair/)


OOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWWWALLLLLLL! :p :ha:

[Dreamtimer]

Have you seen anything yet about Tucker Carlson telling the Dutch historian, Rutger Bregman, to go F-off?

Tucker gets angry and tries to tell this fellow he doesn't know Fox News because they don't have it where he lives.

Rutger replies by asking him if he's heard of the internet.:hilarious::fpalm::hilarious::fpalm::hila rious::fpalm:


Rutger recorded the interview because he knew he wasn't going to play softball with Tucker and he figured Fox would decide not to run the segment.

And of course, they didn't run the segment. If they had, Tucker's childishness and stupidity would have been on full display.

People on the left often talk about how Tucker is smart. I don't think it's smart to ignore truth for convenience or politics, especially when you have such a large audience and the responsibility of being a news source.

That's not smart in my book. That's just selfish. I don't care what his IQ is. Character matters more, imo.

(and I can't stand his voice so I didn't post any videos though they're worth watching)

[Gio]

Continuing ... :scooter:


Exploring HOI AN, VIETNAM | Tourist Heaven or Hell?

Gabriel Traveler

"Walking through the fascinating streets of touristy Hoi An, Vietnam."

Published on Feb 25, 2019

24:48 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=59XVAvIF6m0&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

A scathing look into ...

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/w-SK8d4boflyGD3LOKRR7d6wsaA=/0x0:2040x1360/1200x675/filters:focal(857x517:1183x843)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63116959/VRG_3246_Hero_Search.0.jpg

The Trauma Floor

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America (https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona)

[Emil El Zapato]

because they are gentle-people...they don't tell...

[Gio]

A rethink...

Labour moves to back second Brexit vote -------

Channel 4 News
Published on Feb 25, 2019

"Delaying Brexit is now a "rational solution", according to the European Council President Donald Tusk ..

But at the EU-Arab summit in Egypt, Theresa May said a delay was not the answer. With the time before the scheduled departure date running out, Mrs May also said it could be possible to ask parliament to vote on the withdrawal agreement before it had been finally approved by the other EU member states. Tonight, Labour are putting more pressure on the government, with a further indication that they could end up backing another public vote on Brexit."

15:52 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hQ06L-XXJ2Y

[Maggie]

Magical people live just beyond the fringes


This is OBSCURA, a look back at the stories of Euphomet (http://www.euphomet.com/) Season One - this time, we attend The Mystery School

On this edition - Tim Rothschild joins a mystery school and begins a mystical journey to become a Nondual Kabbalistic Healer.

Tim’s original appearance can be heard on Euphomet Season One Episode 004 The Healer on this very podcast feed or at the link below. https://audioboom.com/posts/6910158-004-the-healer

https://player.fm/series/euphomet-2321081/obscura-003-the-mystery-school-tim-rothschild

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/51e74127e4b083781296c769/t/571c046686db4318898e633e/1461453944607/?format=1500w


Tim Rothschild
Founder of The Third Thing Network and Co-Founder of The Divine Movement, Tim Rothschild is an explorer, dedicating his life to healing work and finding innovative ways to expand the collective human experience. As a Nondual Kabbalistic Healer, philosopher, numerologist, broadcaster and writer, Tim has ventured through the paranormal, conspiratorial, and mystical realms only to begin to understand what it means to be Human. The core of his healing work integrates a nondual approach to the Tree Of Life and the Kabbalistic Universes, allowing the individual to be in relationship with reality just as it is - kickstarting the process of healing and awakening into freedom. He is a graduate of A Society Of Souls, and is a practitioner of the MAGI process. He is co-host of Mike and Tim Visit Earth, co-host of the Deep Inside The Rabbit Hole podcast out of Stand Up NY Comedy Club, host of The Cosmic Perspective, and co-host of Cosmic Perspective News as well as various other programs. His websites are www.thethirdthing.net, www.thedivinemovement.com, and www.cosmicperspectivenews.com.

[Gio]

Thanks Ms Delight ...

See your working both sides of the track ...

Wink/wink

[Maggie]

I love the infrasound, the long whistle....ahhh, trains passing by


Listen to the jingle, the rumble and the roar
As she glides along the woodland o'er the hills and by the shore
Hear the mighty rush of the engine hear those lonesome hoboes call
Traveling through the jungle on the Wabash Cannonball

aZiQ89_s67Q

[Gio]

Speaking of Bill's place ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/5d/48/19/5d4819d0897c9052c4ccd96c31020c3b.jpg?b=t

INTEGRITY.

[Gio]

:Bump:

This is a long one - But i recommend reading it ...


A scathing look into ...

https://cdn.vox-cdn.com/thumbor/w-SK8d4boflyGD3LOKRR7d6wsaA=/0x0:2040x1360/1200x675/filters:focal(857x517:1183x843)/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_image/image/63116959/VRG_3246_Hero_Search.0.jpg

The Trauma Floor

The secret lives of Facebook moderators in America (https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona)


***


Adding this latest associated/portion to the fray ...


https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/190225-facebook-moderators.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

Traumatized Facebook moderators turn to sex on the job (https://nypost.com/2019/02/25/trauma-a-job-hazard-for-facebook-content-moderators/)

[Dreamtimer]

Um, forgive my ignorance, Sister, but why don't the Chinese have any tells? :confused: (Remember, I'm not an Acronymian and this may be a cultural thing. :hmm:)

It's the whole thing about not showing emotions on your face. The Chinese, as I understand it, see westerners as wearing our emotions on our faces for all to see. They choose to be stoic and not show their feelings.

And so, at a poker table they would be stone-faced.

The Russians have been described as a maelstrom of humanity and I don't think they'd be able to hide their feelings so easily.

[palooka's revenge]

:Bump:

This is a long one - But i recommend reading it ...




***


Adding this latest associated/portion to the fray ...


https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/02/190225-facebook-moderators.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

Traumatized Facebook moderators turn to sex on the job (https://nypost.com/2019/02/25/trauma-a-job-hazard-for-facebook-content-moderators/)

everyone on the planet needs to know this. i don't know how U sniff stuff out geo but thank you for your nose...

[Aragorn]

everyone on the planet needs to know this. i don't know how U sniff stuff out geo but thank you for your nose...

It's probably hot news. It was also posted on Slashdot (https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/2247249/facebook-moderators-are-routinely-high-and-joke-about-suicide-to-cope-with-job-says-report), with references to articles at The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona) and Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/report-facebook-moderators-are-routinely-high-and-joke-1832870719). ;)

[Gio]

#India #Kashmir

This ongoing feud could blow up quickly ...
Keep an eye on this one ...


India launches air strikes on Pakistan at Kashmir border | DW News



DW News
Published on Feb 26, 2019
India says it has destroyed a militant camp in the Pakistani side of Kashmir in an overnight airstrike across the ceasefire border known as the Line of Control. Indian media is reporting 200 casualties. In the raid on the all eged camp in Balakot, Pakistan acknowledged that Indian military aircraft had violated its airspace, but denied reports of casualties. The strike comes amidst heightened tension between the nuclear-armed neighbors after a militant attack killed 40 Indian troops in the disputed region of Kashmir earlier this month.

The Indian foreign secretary accused Pakistan of failing to take concrete action to dismantle camps that arm and train hundreds of jihadis on its soil. He said Delhi acted on "credible intelligence" that Pakistan-based militants were plotting further suicide attacks across India.

4:04 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C3uiLB-7wD8

[palooka's revenge]

It's probably hot news. It was also posted on Slashdot (https://tech.slashdot.org/story/19/02/25/2247249/facebook-moderators-are-routinely-high-and-joke-about-suicide-to-cope-with-job-says-report), with references to articles at The Verge (https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona) and Gizmodo (https://gizmodo.com/report-facebook-moderators-are-routinely-high-and-joke-1832870719). ;)

yup

[Gio]

#India #Kashmir

This ongoing feud could blow up quickly ...
Keep an eye on this one ...


Pakistan-India: Pakistan 'shoots down two Indian jets' over Kashmir (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-47383634?ns_campaign=bbc_breaking&ns_source=twitter&ns_linkname=news_central&ns_mchannel=social)

[Aianawa]

Ghandi was really really annoyed when the weres divided P n I, never going to work he said but am sure he knew the weres did the dividing on purpose.

[Gio]

Speaking of getting bombed ...



https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c76b7ecccd2d84ef45d799e/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC022719.jpg

“The President wants to know if North Korea’s missiles can reach Michael Cohen.”

[Emil El Zapato]

I'm not pretending to be Aragorn BUT... :)

I use to work with a guy named Gandhi...that hated Gandhi...he corrected my spelling once upon time... :)

Engjoy Maggie:

:)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2V2P4iGVNyU

I just really like this song...I hope you're not annoyed Giovonni


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vST6hVRj2A

[Maggie]

For Suspicious Observers
When No One is ever coming again....
Ben Davidson | Pole Shifts, Space Weather, Earth Changes, & The CIA

aHs4c41ecIE

oh well, Until the End of the World, ACHTUNG BABY.

x2kFr-r3L0g

[Gio]

The latest stuff ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif



https://d3i6fh83elv35t.cloudfront.net/static/2019/02/ya-check-bg-1024x576.png

A $35,000 check signed by Donald Trump on Aug. 1, 2017 (after he became president) will be displayed during Michael Cohen's testimony to the House Oversight Committee today, a source close to Cohen tells Axios.

"It was another installment in the illegal hush money 'reimbursed' to Cohen ... for [the Stormy Daniels] hush money payoff," the source said.

source (https://www.axios.com/michael-cohen-house-oversight-hearing-donald-trump-check-ce7e71bd-15fc-4bf5-b50a-8d6e581603fe.html)

[Gio]

Some highlights ...


Michael Cohen Testifies to Congress About Trump: A Closer Look

Late Night with Seth Meyers
Published on Feb 27, 2019

15:10 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ytg29ps2uI

[Gio]

Mr Ryan setting up at the UFO MEGA con ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/b1/ae/1d/b1ae1dd8c52cf245fb5380aad8555cd4.jpg

[Gio]

Truth is truly stranger than fiction ...

'Sometimes what actually happens is more bizarre than anything that could have been imagined' ...



https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.entornointeligente.com%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F02%2Fkim_jong_un_visita ra_vietnam_el_25_de_febrero_previo_a_segunda_cumbr e_con_trump.jpg&f=1

44 years after the War in Southeast Asia ... Meeting up in a thriving Vietnam nation

a sociopath draft dodger U.S. President with a North Korean tyrant psychopath leader ...
Pretending to make peace.

[Gio]

I recommend a listen ...

Dr. Jerry Tennant: Recharge Your Battery and Heal | Electricity of Life

ThunderboltsProject

Published on Feb 27, 2019

15:05 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfA16ff43Kg

Descriptive:

"In part one of this presentation, Dr. Jerry Tennant introduced us to his extraordinary research into the complex electrical circuitry of the human body. Since his own remarkable battle with debilitating ailments, Dr. Tennant has worked to develop a kind of map of this circuitry, to understand its essential connection to physical wellbeing. In the previous episode, Dr. Tennant discussed the particular significance of the circuitry connecting teeth to other regions of the body. The concept of illness arising from electrical imbalances is, of course, unconventional in most modern medicine. However, the application of electromagnetic therapies in healing is not new. In this conclusion, we asked Dr. Tennant to begin by discussing some of the earliest examples of the use of electromagnetism as a physical remedy. Dr. Jerry Tennant is board certified in ophthalmology and ophthalmic plastic surgery (residency, Harvard Medical School and Southwestern Medical School.) He was the director of ophthalmic plastic surgery clinic at Parkland Hospital in Dallas and practiced from 1965 to 1995. He did much of the FDA study for the VISX Excimer laser and performed approximately 1000 surgeries in the United States and Europe. In addition, Dr. Tennant was the founder/director of the Dallas Eye Institute and one of the first surgeons in the US to place intraocular lenses in eyes after cataract surgery and taught these techniques around the world. He holds patents for medical devices including intraocular lenses and several surgical instruments. While licensed in Arizona by the Board of Homeopathic and Alternative Medicine, Dr. Tennant is currently the Director of the Tennant Institute for Integrative Medicine." https://www.tennantinstitute.us

[Dreamtimer]

Trump does like his sharpies. Big Bold and Black.

[Dreamtimer]

From "A Closer Look" at 3:03 Elijah Cummings says "The gentleman is not recognized."

Historically, it's a moment of beauty.

[Gio]

Dear America, There Is No Freedom Fairy

"For some time, it’s been apparent that the former “free world” countries (the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.) have been on a downward progression - socially, politically and economically.

But, in the last ten years, the awareness of this has become increasingly pronounced. With each successive year, more and more people recognise that all facets of life in these formerly great countries are heading in a decidedly negative direction.

At this point, even those who don’t understand the decline intellectually, feel in their gut that this is not going to end well. Further, they feel it all around them and sense that when the condition becomes critical, it won’t just affect others. When it reaches the crisis stage, they’ll find it right on their own doorstep.

The average person in each of these jurisdictions already no longer trusts either the media, big business or the government and feels that, somehow, they’re all in this together and that they, the electorate, will be the ones who will be the ultimate victims.

So, is this a question of “collective imagination” gone haywire?

Not at all, I’m afraid. Their instincts are quite correct. Governments and big business alike have sold out the populace, regarding them as mere fodder in their pursuit of increased power and wealth. Governments in the former “Free World” have for decades become increasingly collectivist, promising ever-greater largesse to the hoi polloi, and the majority of voters, sad to say, have eaten it up.

Yet, as the electorate becomes more worried, they don’t ask the government to go into reverse and stop the economically illogical largesse. Quite the opposite. As their fears grow, they demand morelargesse.

And so, it shouldn’t be surprising that, as we get closer to the collapse of this house of cards, new candidates arrive on the scene, offering to take entitlements to Never-never land, promising universal free health care, free education through university and a guaranteed income without the need to earn it in any way.

Of course, when this happens, those who understand that 2 + 2 = 4, not 8 or 12, recognize that any government that attempts to deliver on such promises will cause the collapse of the system – not just the economic system, but also the social and political systems.

And, so those people who do understand that the numbers simply won’t work, ask themselves where it will all end. Typically they wring their hands, aware that their concern is the minority view. They recognize that they can no longer discuss their concerns freely, as their country is moving in the opposite direction – embracing the new, empty promises, with ever-more determination.

They search around for some form of hope and, in the majority of cases, whether they like to admit it to themselves or not, their hopes fix on the Freedom Fairy."


https://zh-prod-1cc738ca-7d3b-4a72-b792-20bd8d8fa069.storage.googleapis.com/s3fs-public/styles/inline_image_desktop/public/inline-images/2019-02-27_13-46-20.jpg?itok=kNq0ObqU

"They vainly hope that somehow, the average voter will “wake up,” or that sitting politicians will come before the press to reverse the stance that they’ve always maintained – that big government will provide for all.

Unfortunately, that’s a vain hope, isn’t it? Deep in our hearts, we know that sitting politicians are not going to collectively say, “Whoops, we goofed. We’re sending the country into ruin. We’re going to downsize the government, introduce a free market system and then resign and get out of the way.”

Since that won’t happen, the only hope is that a Freedom Fairy will come along – someone who has never held public office before, who says, “You know what? I’m going to buck the system. If I’m elected, I’m just going to jolly well tell Congress that they’re to stop all this collectivist nonsense, stop borrowing money, and turn their backs on all the corrupt deals they’ve made over their political lives.”

Yet, as obvious as it should be that no Freedom Fairy is going to come along, let alone succeed, with each successive election cycle, the more “enlightened” portion of the electorate start to imagine, “Maybe this time it will be different. Maybe we can turn this thing around.”

And, there, in that last sentence, is the key word as to the futility of this wishful thinking – the word, ‘we.’

It seems to be human nature to imagine that if a group of us – maybe even a large group - believe that something is a good idea, it will somehow happen.

Worse, the ‘we’ suggests that the person in question actually believes that his vote has some sort of significance.

As Mark Twain famously said, “If voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it.”

Quite so.

In good times, the electorate gets to vote for the lesser of two evils. In the end, whichever one wins, the running of the country remains as previously planned. There may be changes in the style of the leader, but the same playbook is followed, just as before.

But in volatile times, such as we now face, the electorate gets to vote for the lesser of two nightmares. In the end, whichever one wins, the running of the country will remain as previously planned, but the electorate will be even more polarized than before and the eventual outcome will be that much worse.

And so, for the more ‘advanced’ voter – the one who understands that the political, economic and social system are spiraling downward, the most natural tendency seems to be to irrationally hope that the Freedom Fairy will come along, wave the magic wand, and send the country back to a time when most everyone worked for a living, took responsibility for themselves, paid their own way and built a strong, productive society.

It’s rare indeed for anyone who finds himself in that situation to honestly say to himself, “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore, Toto.”

And that’s the tragic truth. The former free, productive society has been whittled away. It no longer exists and it’s not coming back.

Unfortunately, there is no Freedom Fairy, nor is there a Wizard of Oz, any more than there’s an Easter Bunny or a Santa Claus. When empires collapse, the worst thing that a voter can do is to vainly mark down on the ballot card the name of whoever he thinks the latest Freedom Fairy might be. He should, instead, toss his ballot in the dustbin and leave the polling place, in the knowledge that Mark Twain was absolutely correct.

And what, then? Well, that’s an even tougher question to deal with. Because, at that point, he must accept that if, a) his country has reached its sell-by date and, b) it’s going to take him down with it, his only hope is to bow out of the system that he realizes is on the verge of swallowing him up.

If he doesn’t wish to become collateral damage, his only choice is to pursue the freedom he cherishes in a location where it still exists. Just as the more enlightened German Jews found in 1938; just as savvy Cuban business owners did in 1959, the last opportunity to pursue freedom is just before it ends where you presently reside."



Clearly, there are many strange things afoot in the world. Distortions of markets, distortions of culture. It’s wise to wonder what’s going to happen, and to take advantage of growth while also being prepared for crisis. How will you protect yourself in the next crisis? See our PDF guide that will show you exactly how. Click here to download it now. (https://internationalman.com/special-report/guide-to-surviving-and-thriving-during-an-economic-collapse/)

Authored by Jeff Thomas via InternationalMan.com,
Source: zerohedge.com (https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-27/dear-america-there-no-freedom-fairy)

[Gio]

Who's Crying Now

Journey


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wm8DPpymrs&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c781ffc37f85a2b950d6533/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC022819.jpg

[Dreamtimer]

Here come the shoes:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D0atLRZWwAEQw6_.jpg

[Emil El Zapato]

Dear America, There Is No Freedom Fairy

"For some time, it’s been apparent that the former “free world” countries (the US, EU, Canada, Australia, Japan, etc.) have been on a downward progression - socially, politically and economically.



Here's the caveat though...

This gentleman's philosphy of the way things should be is as counter-productive as 'just give it to us'. Neither polarity offers a balance of what it should be or what it takes for a healthy, productive, compassioate AND practical society to function in the real world of today. We can't just abandon those that are incapable to the wolves (or can we). I don't think we can, but there you have it, there is the real world in a nutshell. Those born to power and privilege have managed through 'free markets' to corner it and have chosen to hoard it for themselves. Nice situation for those in that position, but hell for the rest of us. So the powers that be have THEIR real choice to make, share voluntarily by providing more than subsistence resources for the masses or share by force when the masses with their pitchforks and torches come calling.

[Gio]

Some entertaining weekend fare ...

When the latest alternative spill bores you to death ...
Here's something to nibble on and savor ...

Not for everyone here ...
But most definitely for me ...
He is an extraordinarily interesting kind of guy !



https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.supertopo.com%2Fphotos%2F25%2F 77%2F379234_30229_L.jpg&f=1


Joe Rogan Experience #1256 - David Lee Roth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lee_Roth)

"David Lee Roth is the lead singer of multi-platnium hard rock band from Southern California."

2:55:34 minutes

Best enjoyed in segments



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5ZFKYtHdsM

[Aragorn]

Some entertaining weekend fare ...

When the latest alternative spill bores you to death ...
Here's something to nibble on and savoir ...

Not for everyone here ...
But most definitely for me ...
He is an extraordinarily interesting kind of guy !

He's quite a narcissist, though, and even though he's definitely a born front stage showman, he's only mediocre as a singer.

Personally, I prefer the Van Halen era where they had Sammy Hagar as their lead singer. Sammy was an already accomplished musician, singer and songwriter before he joined Van Halen ─ plus that he's also an excellent guitarist ─ but he never saw himself as anything other than a humble band member while he was working with them, unlike Roth, who considered Van Halen as merely his personal backing band.

But your mileage may vary. :)





The only guitarist on this Van Halen track below ─ rhythm and lead guitar ─ is Sammy Hagar, although Eddie played the lead guitar during (some of) their live performances of the song. :)




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STVcNX7anGU

[Gio]

He's quite a narcissist, though, and even though he's definitely a born front stage showman, he's only mediocre as a singer.

Personally, I prefer the Van Halen era where they had Sammy Hagar as their lead singer. Sammy was an already accomplished musician, singer and songwriter before he joined Van Halen ─ plus that he's also an excellent guitarist ─ but he never saw himself as anything other than a humble band member while he was working with them, unlike Roth, who considered Van Halen as merely his personal backing band.

But your mileage may vary. :)



Thanks for that Aragorn ...

But the interview has very little (if anything) to do with your above statement ...

Again - "He is an extraordinarily interesting kind of guy" !

giggle :)

[Gio]

March 1st and lots of snow here ... http://yoursmiles.org/tsmile/winter/t118020.gif

And one winter i won't soon forget ... Been like this for over a month.

Currently it's 7* Fahrenheit here in Spokane with 2 feet plus ...


Note below ~ Trout Lake, Washington in a full coat of glory from early yesterday morning.


https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53053601_10218269998926144_7517888189160226816_n.j pg?_nc_cat=103&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=ddd71605aebdbb8871a717d05731f72e&oe=5D1AA493

[Gio]

Continuing ... :scooter:

Gabriel Traveler

"Exploring in and around Hoi An, Vietnam including the My Son ancient ruins, shopping in a local market, biking through rice fields and going to an amazing beach."

Published on Mar 1, 2019

21:16 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIDJAgesoeM&feature=em-uploademail

[Aragorn]

March 1st and lots of snow here ... http://yoursmiles.org/tsmile/winter/t118020.gif

And one winter i won't soon forget ... Been like this for over a month.

Currently it's 7* Fahrenheit here in Spokane with 2 feet plus ...

That's bizarre... :belief: It has been more like spring here this past week, with temperatures up to 19.5 °C ─ T-shirt weather ─ from Monday through Wednesday, although it is down at 7 °C (and rainy) again today. Nights are still cold, though ─ somewhere just above freezing. That's a huge difference to where you live, Gio. :hmm:

You know what, let's just blame it on Trump. :p :ttr:

[Elen]

That's bizarre... :belief: It has been more like spring here this past week, with temperatures up to 19.5 °C ─ T-shirt weather ─ from Monday through Wednesday, although it is down at 7 °C (and rainy) again today. Nights are still cold, though ─ somewhere just above freezing. That's a huge difference to where you live, Gio. :hmm:

You know what, let's just blame it on Trump. :p :ttr:

The temps are higher here in Scotland as well. I've invested in a new snow-shovel, but never used this year. I feel for you Gio...hang in there mate!! :love::h5:

[Dreamtimer]

It's still cold here, it snowed overnight. But Spring is also in the air and crocuses are starting to bloom. The turnover of bird species is the real signal of Spring's beginning. We're still waiting for that.

[Aragorn]

It's still cold here, it snowed overnight. But Spring is also in the air and crocuses are starting to bloom. The turnover of bird species is the real signal of Spring's beginning. We're still waiting for that.

Yes, I haven't noticed the little birdies singing in the morning over here yet either, but we've already had mosquitoes again for several weeks now. Weird. :hmm:

[Emil El Zapato]

I sense sympathy for Trump, Aragorn...

I watched his return from Vietnam on the news this morning. He looked horribly alone...I felt for him. Does he deserve what he will get? I don't know, but it isn't as if he didn't play a part in his own fate.

[Gio]

Some catch-up with Max Igan ...

Reflections on Life - L.A. 2019

Surviving the Matrix - Episode 366 - American Voice Radio, March 02, 2019

thecrowhouse
Published on Mar 1, 2019

54:17 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KV_gE1ORxHk&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Rabbit skinning ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/c7/7b/13/c77b13726da728b18ee83850a72ab15c.jpg

[palooka's revenge]

I sense sympathy for Trump, Aragorn...

I watched his return from Vietnam on the news this morning. He looked horribly alone...I felt for him. Does he deserve what he will get? I don't know, but it isn't as if he didn't play a part in his own fate.


If that's meant to be flippant i'll beg forgiveness... in the meanwhile... maybe he's sayin' abby normal weather all over the planet is evidence in real time that climate is changing... something the man denies is happening...

feel for him? Eff-him... and the ignorance he rode in on... I feel for our people and our home over this guy turnin' the sharks loose to prey upon both. I've said it before 'n i'll say it again... U show me a society and a bizness culture that can behave themselves with one another n i'll show U a society and bizness culture that don't need regs...

[Gio]

♪ Now her name is up in lights ♪



https://i.syracuse.com/resizer/VTR9eLIN3EsTm0SZLOFFiBuW9K0=/600x0/arc-anglerfish-arc2-prod-advancelocal/public/EEAGCETGX5CSVNWJ4HYLKZFC6Y.jpg

MoMo (https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2019/02/momo-challenge-hoax/583825/)



Van Halen - Dirty Movies



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l7rS3itMibE

[Gio]

Kingsley Dennis - Fragmented Reality and Fear of the Future

LegaliseFreedom1

"Kingsley Dennis discusses his book 'Bardo Times'. As with so many civilizations of the past, we live in a time of crisis. Contemporary culture is caught in a cul-de-sac, a battle zone of competing ideologies and dogmas. Although the human race has a long history of generating millenarian hype and apocalyptic panics, for many people the state we're in right now really does have an air of gathering gloom and a palpable sense of 'something's got to give' unlike any in the past. Leaving aside religious rapture fantasies and the techno-utopian view which posits a future of immortal human-machine hybrids populating the galaxy, there are two basic schools of thought concerning what lies ahead. The first essentially predicts the extinction of most if not all life on Earth due to environmental collapse. Lights out, game over. The second envisions a sort of slow-motion apocalypse as the natural and man-made systems upon which modern society depends gradually disintegrate making life as we know it, with its endless expansion and perpetual growth, simply impossible. With obstacles lying in every direction, where do we go from here?"

Published on Mar 2, 2019

1:10:23 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mz7QlenSxk&feature=em-uploademail

[palooka's revenge]

The second envisions a sort of slow-motion apocalypse as the natural and man-made systems upon which modern society depends gradually disintegrate making life as we know it, with its endless expansion and perpetual growth, simply impossible. With obstacles lying in every direction, where do we go from here?"



i highly suspect it's something like 100 monkeys watching grains of sand drip, one by one, upon a pile until the whole pile does a massive shift...

[Emil El Zapato]

I'll listen later Giovonni, but I have a solution to the problem of perpetual growth and it has been staring us in the face for over half a century:

Space colonization...it is our only out, notwithstanding those dedicated to Gaia...They will inherit the planet and the rest that want to venture forth, will.

[Aragorn]

I'll listen later Giovonni, but I have a solution to the problem of perpetual growth and it has been staring us in the face for over half a century:

Space colonization...it is our only out, notwithstanding those dedicated to Gaia...They will inherit the planet and the rest that want to venture forth, will.

You're forgetting something, compadre...: mankind's anatomy isn't physically suited for that. A prolonged stay in zero gravity messes with one's bone structure and one's metabolism, and unlike what you see in Star Trek et al, not every planet has the same gravity, the same atmospheric density, the same climate, the same day/night cycle or the same seasonal cycles.

We also don't live long enough for a meaningful journey to another solar system by way of relativistically propelled rockets. The nearest-by star is Alpha Centauri, which is only just over four light-years away. That's four years with the speed of light, albeit that in that case, time would pass more slowly for those on board the ship. Or at least, in theory, because nothing with rest mass can attain the speed of light. With the current publicly known rocket technology, traveling at approximately 13 km/s, it would take us about a hundred years just to get there, and almost nine years before the reply to a signal sent to Earth by the expedition will be received back by the colonists at Alpha Centauri.

[Emil El Zapato]

I guess I'm one of those 'true believers' in technology, genetic manipulation, and plain old evolution...

If we don't, we die...that be what I thinks...

Actually, I heard yesterday on the radio that we (someone) is doing experiments in sending nanotechnology to Alpha Centauri by laser burst...the tech devices make the trip in 20 years. The scientist says the technological know how exists if not the political will. Obviously, nanites are a far cry from human beings but can that be 'that' far behind. I think we got at least a couple of thousand years...to get it right.

[Gio]

Speaking of insights into human evolution ...


From Consciousness To Big Bang - Tom Campbell

Freeman Fly

"We've got it all backwards, consciousness is an information-based system that created the Big Bang to find love. My Big TOE is not only about scientific theory, function, and process – a discovery of Big Picture science – but also speaks to each individual about his or her innate capabilities. You will learn how to evolve your human potential far beyond the limitations of the physical universe."

Published on Mar 3, 2019

1:13:40 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uJKjLFf3FS4&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Nature calls even to the unevolved ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/97/38/4e/97384ecc275559208225533f4f1f9df6.jpg

[Aragorn]

Speaking of insights into human evolution ...


From Consciousness To Big Bang - Tom Campbell

Freeman Fly

"We've got it all backwards, consciousness is an information-based system that created the Big Bang to find love. [...]

Not to find love, but to be able to manifest its full potential and as such, give meaning to everything ─ the creation of order out of chaos, or put in terms of quantum mechanics, the collapse of the wave function. :)

[Gio]

A pair of Bees sleeping in a Globe Mellow flower ...


https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53117683_1789856597785768_6587819059935444992_n.jp g?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=5dc9f9316274cacc8b0a59f2754b3714&oe=5CE4A1AB

I'm Only Sleeping

The Beatles



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BT5j9OQ7Sh0

Photo Credit: Joe Neely

[Gio]

For those so incline ... https://imgfast.net/users/2911/23/55/04/smiles/962334.gif



Richard Syrett's Strange Planet Radio/podcast

E.T. Contacts & Encounters w/ Reinerio (Rey) Hernandez



Descriptive:



LORIEN FENTON: Producer of UFO MegaCon will join Richard in the first half/hour to tell us about the upcoming event. Lorien is many things: talk show host, internet TV personality, researcher, experiencer and presenter in the fields of UFOlogy, Mind Control and JFK – but being an event producer is her passion.

Starts at the 25 minute mark ...

GUEST: REINERIO (REY) HERNANDEZ is one of the 4 Co-Founders of FREE, The Dr. Edgar Mitchell Foundation for Research into Extraterrestrial and Extraordinary Experiences. Rey has published several peer reviewed academic articles on Consciousness and the FREE Experiencer Research Study, was a co-editor of an 820-page book titled Beyond UFOs: The Science of Consciousness and Contact with Non-Human Intelligence ...

Rey is the recipient of a National Science Foundation Ph.D. Fellowship ... Who has discovered a relationship between an increase in Consciousness due to Contact with Non-Human Intelligence via the various Contact Modalities. (Such as UAP Contact, Near Death Experiences, Out of Body Experiences, Remote Viewing, Channeling, communications with ghosts/spirits, Hallucinogenic Shamanic Journeys, Telepathic Contact, sightings of Orbs, PSI, and other types of "Paranormal" Contact)

Recorded March 03, 2019

1:58:51 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip0IL0ztgPs

[Gio]

"So what can one do' ... https://illiweb.com/fa/i/smiles/icon_scratch.png


Automation: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver

"Automation often seems like a scary new problem, but it’s neither entirely scary nor entirely new."

Published on Mar 3, 2019

19:47 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_h1ooyyFkF0&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Reflections of 'Old Man Winter' ...


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c7d58bba3108e6da6888838/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC03041
"Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well."

[Gio]

The latest fix ...


Trump's Historically Long, Epically Weird Speech

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert

"From his opening flag-hug to the closing remarks, Trump's absurd CPAC address was the longest
presidential oration in American history."

Published on Mar 4, 2019

6:43 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tD_EowgE1ec

[Gio]

"Fox News has always been partisan.
But has it become propaganda?"


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c79a7ae85d3c01a0a78942f/1:1/w_1040%2Cc_limit/190311_r33845.jpg

The Making of the Fox News White House

Listen/read here (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/03/11/the-making-of-the-fox-news-white-house)

[Emil El Zapato]

Reflections of 'Old Man Winter' ...


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c7d58bba3108e6da6888838/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC03041
"Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well."

the other day I was seriously wondering how long a snowball would last in hell...

[Gio]

Shades of a 'Blade Runner' future/now weather scenario ...

https://thenypost.files.wordpress.com/2019/03/weather.jpg?quality=90&strip=all&w=1236&h=820&crop=1

S. Korea proposes rain project with China to clean Seoul air

SEOUL, South Korea — "South Korean President Moon Jae-in has proposed a joint project with China to use artificial rain to clean the air in Seoul, where an acute increase in pollution has caused alarm.

Moon also instructed government officials on Wednesday to quicken the retirement of old coal-burning power plants, according to his spokesman, Kim Eui-kyeom.

Seoul has been struggling to tackle the rise in air pollution that experts have linked to China’s massive industrial activity and emissions from South Korean cars. Fine dust levels in South Korea have hit new highs over the past week, prompting people to wear masks while commuting under thick-gray skies that online users have compared to scenes from the movie “Wall-E.”

As of 4 p.m. Wednesday, the fine dust concentration level was 136 micrograms per cubic meter in Seoul, according to the National Institute of Environmental Research, which defines levels above 75 micrograms per cubic meter as “very bad.”

Na Kyung-won, the floor leader of the conservative Liberty Korea Party, called for Moon to designate the air pollution as a national disaster. Ruling and opposition parties held an emergency meeting at which they agreed to swiftly pass bills to cope with the problem.

In a meeting with government officials, Moon noted that China was “much more advanced” than South Korea in rain-making technologies and expressed hope that creating rain over waters between the countries would help mitigate the air pollution, Kim said.

In January, South Korea’s weather agency failed in an experiment to create artificial rain which involved an aircraft releasing chemicals into clouds over the sea.

“China has claimed that South Korea’s dust flies toward Shanghai, so creating artificial rain over the Yellow Sea would help the Chinese side too,” Kim quoted Moon as saying during the meeting. Moon also proposed that South Korea and China develop a joint system for issuing air pollution alerts, Kim said.

Moon instructed government officials to take steps to quickly close coal-burning power plants that have operated for more than 30 years and draw up an extra budget if necessary to install more air purifiers in schools and support possible joint activities with China, Kim said.

In a meeting with top Chinese diplomat Yang Jiechi last year, Moon said China was partially responsible for South Korea’s pollution problem and called for Beijing’s cooperation in efforts to improve air quality."



Source: nypost.com (https://nypost.com/2019/03/06/s-korea-proposes-rain-project-with-china-to-clean-seoul-air/)

[Gio]

James weighing in on our ever-changing new world ...


Financial Survival and the Disappearing Middle Class

Corbett Report Extras



James joins Melody Cedarstrom on the Finanical Survival radio show for their regular, bi-monthly conversation. This time we discuss the disappearance of the middle class, universal basic income, the International Criminal Court, the Trump-Kim summit in Hanoi and the recent flare up between India and Pakistan over Kashmir.

Show notes & mp3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=30366


Published on Mar 7, 2019

34:27 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Im0Lhid6wzI&t=578s

[Gio]

“Facebook is changing. From now on, sharing is private.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.”

https://media.newyorker.com/cartoons/5c813b436531882c97e5c389/master/w_2046,c_limit/DC030719-1500x1500.jpg


Zuckerberg confronts skeptics with plan for privacy-friendly Facebook

SAN FRANCISCO — After building a social network that turned into a surveillance system, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says he’s shifting his company’s focus to messaging services designed to serve as fortresses of privacy.

Instead of just being the network that connects everyone, Facebook wants to encourage small groups of people to carry on encrypted conversations that neither Facebook nor any other outsider can read. It also plans to let messages automatically disappear, a feature pioneered by its rival Snapchat that could limit the risks posed by a trail of social media posts that follow people throughout their lives.

It’s a major bet by Zuckerberg, who sees it as a way to push Facebook more firmly into a messaging market that’s growing faster than its main social networking business. It might also help Facebook ward off government regulators, although the Facebook CEO made clear that he expects the company’s messaging business to complement, not replace, its core businesses.

But there are plenty of obstacles. Facebook has weathered more than two years of turbulence for repeated privacy lapses, spreading disinformation, allowing Russian agents to conduct targeted propaganda campaigns and a rising tide of hate speech and abuse. Zuckerberg submitted to two days of grilling on Capitol Hill last April. All that increases the challenge of convincing users that Facebook really means it about privacy this time.

Encrypted conversations could alleviate some of those problems, but it could make others worse. Security is an “admirable goal,” said Forrester Research analyst Fatemeh Khatibloo. “I’m just not sure it addresses the bigger issues Facebook is facing right now.”

Facebook grew into a colossus by vacuuming up people’s information in every possible way and dissecting it to shoot targeted ads back at them. Anything that jeopardizes that machine could pose a major threat to the company’s share price, which would also affect its ability to attract and retain talented engineers and other employees.

In a Wednesday interview with The Associated Press, Zuckerberg predicted Facebook’s emphasis on privacy will do more to help the company’s business than hurt it. While most of the stock market slipped in Wednesday trading, Facebook’s shares gained $1.25 to close at $172.51.

The Facebook CEO has been telegraphing some of these changes to investors for the past six months, but his Wednesday blog post is the first time he has explained the idea to the more than two billion people that use Facebook’s services and look at its ads. Those ads are expected to generate $67 billion in revenue this year, according to the research firm eMarketer.

If everything falls into place, Facebook will also display similar advertising on the privacy-protected messaging services. Those services are also likely to offer other moneymaking features, such as a digital wallet, as Facebook attempts to build something similar to Tencent’s popular WeChat service in Asia.

“If you think about your life, you probably spend more time communicating privately than publicly,” Zuckerberg said during the AP interview. “The overall opportunity here is a lot larger than what we have built in terms of Facebook and Instagram.”

That’s far from proven. While Facebook has already tried to show ads in the Messenger app, it’s seen only limited success. It hasn’t even tested the concept in WhatsApp since it acquired that service for $22 billion in 2014.

“There are some huge unknowns about how successful Facebook is going to be rolling advertising into a more private messaging environment,” said eMarketer analyst Debra Aho Williamson.

Some critics are convinced that Facebook has become so powerful — even a threat to democracy as well as to people’s privacy — that it needs to be reined in by tougher regulations or even a corporate breakup.

But unraveling Facebook could become more difficult if Zuckerberg can successfully stitch together the messaging services behind an encrypted wall.

“I see that as the goal of this entire thing,” said Blake Reid, a University of Colorado law professor who specializes in technology and policy. He said Facebook could tell antitrust authorities that WhatsApp, Instagram Direct and Facebook Messenger are tied so tightly together that it couldn’t unwind them.

Combining the three services also lets Facebook build more complete data profiles on all of its users. Already, businesses can already target Facebook and Instagram users with the same ads and marketing campaigns are likely coming to WhatsApp eventually.

Facebook’s focus on messaging privacy raises other concerns. Messaging apps have in the past helped fake news and rumors spread fast, sometimes with deadly consequences. A report from University of Oxford researchers last year found evidence of widespread disinformation campaigns on chat applications like WhatsApp. In one particularly brutal example, the Indian government last year accused WhatsApp of fueling rumors that led to lynchings and mob violence that wounded dozens.

Facebook responded by restricting the number of groups to which a message could be forwarded and labeling forwarded messages as such. On Wednesday, Zuckerberg said that Facebook needs to protect both privacy and safety as it encrypted messaging services, although he noted to an “inherent trade-off” between security and safety, simply because Facebook won’t be able to read encrypted conversations.

And in some cases, Facebook could allow some content to automatically disappear in a day or two as if it were a fleeting mirage.

“Some people want to store their messages forever and some people think having large collections of photos or messages is a liability as much as it is an asset,” Zuckerberg told the AP. “Figuring out the balance is a really important one.”

Source: nypost.com (https://nypost.com/2019/03/07/zuckerberg-confronts-skeptics-with-plan-for-privacy-friendly-facebook/)

[Gio]

One step closer ...


https://cdn.theyeshivaworld.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/putin-3.jpg



New Russian bill introduces punishment for insulting state

By VLADIMIR ISACHENKOV

today

MOSCOW (AP) — "Russian lawmakers passed legislation Thursday that imposes restrictions on online media and criminalizes anyone who insults the state.

The bill introduces fines for publishing materials showing disrespect to the state, its symbols and government organs. Repeat offenders could face a 15-day jail sentence.

The Kremlin-controlled lower house, the State Duma, approved the bill in the final, third reading. It also endorsed a separate bill that will block anyone publishing “fake news” online, that is perceived to threaten public health and security.

The bills are expected to quickly pass in the upper house before President Vladimir Putin signs them into laws.

Critics see the legislation as part of Kremlin efforts to stifle criticism and tighten control.

During Thursday’s debates, Communist lawmaker Alexei Kurinnyi warned that the authorities could use the “fake news” bill to punish critics.

Valery Gartung of the Just Russia faction also criticized the legislation, saying its vagueness will open the way for selective interpretation.

The ultranationalist leader Vladimir Zhirinovsky spoke about the need to “fight lies that lead to revolutions and wars,” but added that his faction wouldn’t support what he described as insufficiently prepared legislation.

Communists, the Just Russia and Zhirinovsky’s faction vote along with the Kremlin wishes on key policy issues, so their criticism of the legislation highlights a degree of division.

The bill bans the spread of “unreliable socially-important information” that could “endanger lives and public health, raise the threat of massive violation of public security and order or impede functioning of transport and social infrastructure, energy and communication facilities and banks.”

The bill gives those who publish such information a day to correct or remove it. If they fail to do so, prosecutors will move to block them.

Members of the main Kremlin faction, the United Russia, who drafted the new legislation, argued that they were needed to protect the state.

“There is no talk about censorship,” said Sergei Boyarsky, a deputy head of the Duma’s committee for information policies. “It doesn’t ban criticism of officials or expression of views and opinions that differ from the official line.”

Boyarsky also charged that the bill that criminalizes insulting the state is aimed to protect “society as a whole,” not individual officials or government agencies.

He argued that the bill is needed to block information that could threaten public safety, cause panic and provoke bank runs."



Source: apnews.com/ (https://apnews.com/deee15f58b824168b9491ad068821605)

[Gio]

"Can't we all just get along" ...



https://i.pinimg.com/564x/92/90/ef/9290efb74f3024908b24575039ea06ac.jpg

[Gio]

Continuing ...


The Most Amazing Place in Vietnam | Ha Long Bay

Gabriel Traveler

"A boating day trip on Ha Long Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage Site and one of the most
spectacular places to see in Vietnam."

Published on Mar 7, 2019

22:26 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ivbMywCfSBc&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Hmm ... (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-03-08/manafort-sentenced-to-nearly-four-years-for-bank-tax-fraud?srnd=markets-vp)



https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c8296beba537d02a3b6f055/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC030819.jpg

“On the other hand, four years can feel like a life sentence.”

[Gio]

What Manafort's light sentence says about criminal justice disparities

PBS NewsHour

"A federal judge in Virginia sentenced Paul Manafort to less than four years in prison for tax and bank fraud--far less than the roughly 20 years called for under federal guidelines. The sentence prompted outcry, with critics arguing Manafort’s punishment highlights disparities in our criminal justice system. Judy Woodruff talks to Kevin Sharp, a former federal judge, for an insider’s perspective."

Published on Mar 8, 2019

6:28 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkLFj-u5bes

[Gio]

♪ So any time you're gettin' low
'Stead of lettin' go, just remember that ant ♪


https://images-wixmp-ed30a86b8c4ca887773594c2.wixmp.com/intermediary/f/26b57749-9c7d-4db5-8b49-100c78c681bf/d19va15-0e68835b-71f9-472c-a6d1-2c0cecb54632.jpg

High Hopes (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Hopes_(Frank_Sinatra_song))

Frank Sinatra



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5eiFn7rc1oE

[Aianawa]

Ants give me hope Gio lol

[Dreamtimer]

Ants are amazing. Leaf-cutters cultivate their own food by farming mold. And their nests are designed to take advantage of the slightest breeze to keep the air flow going thus avoiding CO2 asphyxiation.

Nature is amazing.

[Gio]

"Hey what up" ...



https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53145769_294504124567397_5795148159302762496_n.png ?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=292c64ada606658a49e9936f55859574&oe=5D14F53B

True Facts About The Mantis

3:05 minutes



https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=165&v=0aSCPmabRpM

[Aragorn]

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53145769_294504124567397_5795148159302762496_n.png ?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=292c64ada606658a49e9936f55859574&oe=5D14F53B

Oh look, it's Simon Parkes' mommy! :ttr:

[Emil El Zapato]

"Can't we all just get along" ...

McFadden was one of my best childhood friends... :)

[Emil El Zapato]

What Manafort's light sentence says about criminal justice disparities


I was thinking 10 years...but, I have to admit that a 4 year sentence reflects 'white collar crime' not treason which was the general impression of many Trump supporters...BUT, as some have pointed out the charges were not remotely involved with 'collusion'. We shall see...

Ants...spffft. I spit on their graves...ok, not really, but fire ants are mean and they won't go away...

[Dreamtimer]

Border crossings have spiked... Stephen says at 1:21: "Of course they're rushing in now. America is in its final season. Everyone wants to be a guest star."


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QGP-e6y41w

[palooka's revenge]

[B][I] fire ants are mean and they won't go away...

piss on 'em...

[Emil El Zapato]

♪ So any time you're gettin' low
'Stead of lettin' go, just remember that ant ♪

Kind of off the point but...She is just a fabulous performer...


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpiw3cDWmvc

[Gio]

What Manafort's light sentence says about criminal justice disparities


I was thinking 10 years...but, I have to admit that a 4 year sentence reflects 'white collar crime' not treason which was the general impression of many Trump supporters...BUT, as some have pointed out the charges were not remotely involved with 'collusion'. We shall see...


Mr NAP ...

Please ...

You do have a bad habit of repeat/commenting of incorrect information ...

Manafort was charged and found guilty of tax fraud and tax evasion by the East Virginia federal court jury... And he next faces up to 10 years (next week with another federal judge in DC) with witness tampering. Note - it was Trump's unrelated distracting comments yesterday of "no collusion" that has nothing to do with Manafort's current verdicts.

PS ~ but there is still the Mueller report that might implicate Manafort with further.

[Gio]

Continuing ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif


***


Nature Valley Bars ...
'The animal crack of nature' ...



https://i.pinimg.com/564x/1f/8a/56/1f8a560a1aa8d97a57d413514a26f9ac.jpg

[Gio]

The latest ...

SNOWBOARDING HOKKAIDO JAPAN | NISEKO SKI TRAVEL VLOG

Vagabrothers

"Marko goes snowboarding in Hokkaido, the power capital of the world with some of his buddies."

Published on Mar 9, 2019

14:53 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KRttNCOAi8

[Gio]

Xcellent ...

Trump: Live and Unscripted at CPAC | Real Time with Bill Maher

Published on Mar 8, 2019

2:31 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZDfmyXOHOuc

[Gio]

Back in 2010 during September - Henrik Palmgre & Lana Lokteff of Red Ice Radio visited the Eceti Ranch ... That particular weekend i was camping (close to Mt Adams) and missed out on their visit ... Though James filled me in when i got back ... Apparently Henrik was there to check out the ranch and to discuss a future interview with James ... And his then girlfriend (now wife) Lana Lokteff (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lana_Lokteff)(a local native girl from Oregon), oddly decided to wear a very hot skirt with red stilettos - which is very strange attire for staying 'Up at the Ranch' ... giggle :)

I use to (like many in the alternative community) really enjoy the older Red Ice Radio podcast - But later backed off following after the site's shift over to the alt-right white nationalist stance ... Though i still monitor their output - with these new added weekly compilations that are often compelling.

***

Flashback Friday - Ep18 - Anti-Hate Bill, Dissent Crackdown & Anti-White Midsommar Movie




Red Ice TV

Streamed live on Mar 8, 2019
In episode 18 of Flashback Friday, Henrik & Lana cover the latest news, go over the most important headlines and give you an update on the culture war.

2:10:48 minutes

Note long music intro - actually begins at the 5:56 minute mark.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j3tzqe5e7Hw

[Emil El Zapato]

that's what I meant Gio...just general comments...it's painful for me to be specific and/or precise unless the situation actually calls for it...which it rarely does... :) Besides, I have to give Aragorn and it would seem you something to eyeball with that gleam ashine.


Anywho, if you are offended by that, I do apologize...I have a way of driving detail people crazy...

[Gio]

that's what I meant Gio...just general comments...it's painful for me to be specific and/or precise unless the situation actually calls for it...which it rarely does... :) Besides, I have to give Aragorn and it would seem you something to eyeball with that gleam ashine.


Anywho, if you are offended by that, I do apologize...I have a way of driving detail people crazy...

No offense taken ...

And i sense you have a really kind heart, but trying to keep things in continuity on this
ongoing flowing thread is my ideal/desire.

[Emil El Zapato]

I gotcha, understood...

[Gio]

Continuing ... :scooter:


Exploring the Fascinating Streets of Hanoi, Vietnam

Gabriel Traveler

'Exploring Hanoi, the busy and action-packed capital of Vietnam.'

Published on Mar 9, 2019

23:20 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Voffq4RplZk&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Just the facts Jack ...


False Things You've Been Believing About Star Trek

Grunge

"With the ongoing story of the Federation of Planets and at least a couple of ships named Enterprise, the Star Trek franchise has inspired generations of die-hard fans. There are still a few persistent myths that the crew just can’t seem to shake, though, so here are some of the false “facts” that you’ve been believing about Star Trek" ...

Published on Mar 10, 2019

11:53 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7y4C37-s_Y

[Gio]

Under Pressure ...

Tesla and Elon Musk - the future of electric cars | DW Documentary



DW Documentary
Published on Mar 10, 2019

Tesla, Elon Musk’s electric car manufacturing company, initially appeared to leave the rest of the car industry behind. But competition has become tougher.

In the running to establish electric vehicles, Tesla initially appeared to have left the rest of the car industry in the dust. But things have gotten tougher for Elon Musk’s crown jewel company. The race to dominate the market for the car of the future has entered a critical phase.

Tesla has set new standards in the automotive industry. For years, its CEO was as celebrated as any rock star. But both the boss and his company are coming under increased fire from critics. Employees have claimed working conditions at production facilities are chaotic and often questionable. Production on the Tesla assembly lines has often been brought to a standstill. Meanwhile, losses are growing, while Musk’s reputation has also become somewhat dented and scratched. Meanwhile, other major car brands are working at top speed to bump Tesla from its pole position, with Porsche leading the pack. Little is known about the German carmaker’s new electric Taycan model, but this documentary reveals just how dangerous a new electric Porsche could be for Tesla. And major carmakers have another trump card to play. They have decades of experience in the mass production of cars, while Tesla is still a newcomer to the field. The film also shows how much German technology is hidden in Tesla models, and how both Musk and new Chinese competition are betting on German expertise. The race to dominate the market for electric cars is far from over.
_______

42:25 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTZdzFCmIgs

[Gio]

Refreshing the memories ...


Crashes of Convenience: KAL 007


Corbett Report Extras
Published on Mar 11, 2019
ORIGINALLY POSTED MAY 2011

SHOW NOTES AND MP3: https://www.corbettreport.com/?p=2144

On September 1, 1983, Korean Airlines Flight 007 was shot down by a Soviet fighter interceptor as it crossed through Soviet air space. But what was it doing so far off course, flying over Soviet military installations the day of a secret missile test? What happened to the bodies? And what does all of this have to do with Larry McDonald, the sitting US congressman who was on the flight and warning America about the coming of the New World Order? Find out this week on The Corbett Report.


1:10:59 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5kd4BxkK4A&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

I sense humanity has finally caught up with this skit ...

SCTV Half Wits

7:56 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTDsJd1l7Aw

[Gio]

Another snow storm this morning ...

One for the road !


https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.giphy.com%2Fmedia%2FRFMHn9A 3clUsw%2Fgiphy.gif&f=1

Island World

Hiroshima



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PCaUBPs2uk

[Aragorn]

Lorien Fenton of KCOR Radio did an interview with Bill Ryan yesterday ─ about 1 hour and 47 minutes long, including the breaks.

Among some of the subjects spoken about are how Bill and Kerry started Project Camelot, the Serpo affair, Andrew Basiago, Arthur "Henry Deacon" Neumann ─ of whom Lorien seems to think that they are two distinct people, and Bill does not correct her on that, possibly so as to protect Arthur Neumann's identity, given that it was a live radio show ─ as well as Dan "Burisch" Crain, Jordan Maxwell, David Icke and Gordon Novell.

Now, I do not agree with all of Bill's opinions, but regardless of how you feel about the man, he does bring some interesting information to the table that he hadn't spoken of before, so enjoy! ;)





http://kcorradio.com/KCOR/images/Hosts/The-Fenton-Files/The-Fenton-Files-Hosted-By-Lorien-Fenton-KCOR-Digital-Radio-Network-Banner.jpg



:popc:

https://kcorradio.com/KCOR/Podcasts/The-Fenton-Files/2019/march/bill-ryan.mp3




Edit: Here's a second link to the interview, with the ad blocks removed, so at 1 hour and 34 minutes, this one is a bit shorter. The actual interview starts at 13 minutes into the show. ;)




:popc: :swing:

http://avalonlibrary.net/Bill_Ryan_interview_with_Lorien_Fenton_11%20March_ 2019.mp3

[Gio]

Sure Aragorn ...

And yeah it's all entertainment at this point ...

Bill's day has come and gone as far as being relevant. ...

Though he has his minions still enthralled over at PA !

http://avalonlibrary.net/paula/smilies/deer-popcorn.gif

[palooka's revenge]

speakin of the weather... down here in Jo-Ja territory spring is springing 'n all that comes with it....


Spring is here!
And so are the semen trees.


People say Asheville, North Carolina, is a beautiful town, and its beauty lies mostly in the landscape. Nestled deep in the North Carolina hills, Asheville is especially lovely in the spring, as color comes back to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But there is a problem with Asheville in spring: It smells like shit.

Actually, it doesn’t smell like shit, per se. It smells more like the inside of a scrotum that has been trapped in tight pleather shorts for six to 12 months. On a recent visit to my hometown, my girlfriend, meeting my family for the first time, asked if Asheville has a public masturbation problem.

“Why does it smell like semen around here?,” she asked as we walked downtown with my family.

“Oh,” my sister said. “That’s just the Bradford pears.”

Bradford pear trees, also known as the Callery pear, have small, white petals that turn to dark green foliage as the petals drop. They are pretty, but they are also the bane of springtime in Asheville. Urban Dictionary describes it as a “cross between old semen, dirty vagina, and rotting fried shrimp. Common throughout the South,” the linguistic authority continues, “these trees are pleasantly located near eateries and other fine establishments.” This is certainly true in Asheville, where a lovely outdoor lunch is made all the more ripe by the stench of rotting semen.

And Asheville is hardly alone. A native of China, the Bradford pear is now an invasive species, spreading across the world to “almost every city and town to some degree or another,” according to horticulturalist Michael A. Dirr. Dirr also, seemingly without irony, writes that Bradfords “tend to develop rather tight crotches,” although their crotches are unrelated to the smell. According to the 2006 tree census, Bradford pears accounted for over 10 percent of New York City’s nearly 600,000 trees, making it the fifth most popular tree in the city.

Bradfords were introduced to U.S. cities and suburbs in the 1964 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a decorative tree prized for its appearance and fast growth, but quickly spread beyond where they were planted, as invasive species do. Now, these pretty but stinky trees outcompete other plants in many areas, taking valuable resources and edging natives out of their own ecosystems. Despite efforts to replace them from Missouri to Boston, the problem of Bradford pears and other invasive species will only grow worse in the era of climate change, with spring starting earlier and at warmer temperatures. Invasive species intensified by climate change is one of the leading causes of biological diversity loss worldwide, according to the National Park Service. And Bradford pears are now in an estimated 25 states and over 150 countries, stinking up the globe, and taking over land where they aren’t meant to be. “When you see those fields of white flowering trees, please don’t get giddy with excitement over pretty white flowers,” writes the Asheville Citizen-Times. “What you are looking at are Callery pears destroying nature.”

If it hasn’t already, the semen tree problem could soon reach a city near you, just like it has in my hometown. So remember this for the future: The stench of rotten ejaculate that wafts around you each April is just a tree reminding you that after the long winter, spring, finally, has come.

https://grist.org/article/spring-is-here-and-so-are-the-semen-trees/

it wouldn't surprise me that the last word in the last sentence was intended by the author to be a pun! my use of the same word in the opening sentence? nah, not me...

[Gio]

Now that's a real bummer PR ... :swing:


Meanwhile... Mitt Romney Attempts A Birthday


The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Published on Mar 13, 2019

4:10 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdJ61hCPcdg


***

Oh and this little bonus item ... http://yoursmiles.org/tsmile/money/t3902.gif


Celebrities Give Bribery The Old College Try

4:40 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDonHSDF9HI

[Gio]

C W gives his reflections on where the community is heading ... :priest:

Jordan Sather, Linda Moulton Howe, David Wilcock, Edge of Wonder, TTSA Latest Developments

Streamed live - 3/12/2019

1:04:55 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zHQ0OUjn1kI&feature=em-lbcastemail

[Gio]

The Fowl's returning from their winter vacation ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/f9/7a/fa/f97afac0d942d9583984a8d367f3024c.jpg

[Gio]

♪ So tell your mama and your papa ♪



https://www.tampabay.com/storyimage/HI/20170717/ARTICLE/307179465/AR/0/AR-307179465.jpg&MaxW=1200&Q=66

Sometimes Good Guys Don't Wear White

Standells



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbRDM7hJF_8

[Fred Steeves]

Now, I do not agree with all of Bill's opinions, but regardless of how you feel about the man, he does bring some interesting information to the table that he hadn't spoken of before, so enjoy! ;)


http://kcorradio.com/KCOR/images/Hosts/The-Fenton-Files/The-Fenton-Files-Hosted-By-Lorien-Fenton-KCOR-Digital-Radio-Network-Banner.jpg



:popc:

https://kcorradio.com/KCOR/Podcasts/The-Fenton-Files/2019/march/bill-ryan.mp3

True to form that was indeed an interesting interview. Also true to form however, is that for all his insistence the last couple of years on the necessity of evidence for extraordinary claims, from Serpo, through Camelot, through Charles and the rest, evidence has been consistantly lacking.


2337

[Gio]

This interview was simply a warm up for his speaker/talk trip to UFO MEGA Con ...

Still the story teller ... Noting his faltering weak voice is lacking the luster within ...

But That's Entertainment Folks !




http://projectavalon.net/Amazon/Bill_Ryan_by_waterfall.jpg

[Dreamtimer]

I sense humanity has finally caught up with this skit ...

SCTV Half Wits

7:56 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTDsJd1l7Aw

That's some good fun. I recognize John Candy and is that Martin Lawrence at the end? Arthur's nose is hilarious.

When people look me in the eye and say "I don't believe that", and it's happening right in front of them, I'll remember this bit. And laugh. And cry.

[Dreamtimer]

speakin of the weather... down here in Jo-Ja territory spring is springing 'n all that comes with it....


Spring is here!
And so are the semen trees.


People say Asheville, North Carolina, is a beautiful town, and its beauty lies mostly in the landscape. Nestled deep in the North Carolina hills, Asheville is especially lovely in the spring, as color comes back to the Blue Ridge Mountains. But there is a problem with Asheville in spring: It smells like shit.

Actually, it doesn’t smell like shit, per se. It smells more like the inside of a scrotum that has been trapped in tight pleather shorts for six to 12 months. On a recent visit to my hometown, my girlfriend, meeting my family for the first time, asked if Asheville has a public masturbation problem.

“Why does it smell like semen around here?,” she asked as we walked downtown with my family.

“Oh,” my sister said. “That’s just the Bradford pears.”

Bradford pear trees, also known as the Callery pear, have small, white petals that turn to dark green foliage as the petals drop. They are pretty, but they are also the bane of springtime in Asheville. Urban Dictionary describes it as a “cross between old semen, dirty vagina, and rotting fried shrimp. Common throughout the South,” the linguistic authority continues, “these trees are pleasantly located near eateries and other fine establishments.” This is certainly true in Asheville, where a lovely outdoor lunch is made all the more ripe by the stench of rotting semen.

And Asheville is hardly alone. A native of China, the Bradford pear is now an invasive species, spreading across the world to “almost every city and town to some degree or another,” according to horticulturalist Michael A. Dirr. Dirr also, seemingly without irony, writes that Bradfords “tend to develop rather tight crotches,” although their crotches are unrelated to the smell. According to the 2006 tree census, Bradford pears accounted for over 10 percent of New York City’s nearly 600,000 trees, making it the fifth most popular tree in the city.

Bradfords were introduced to U.S. cities and suburbs in the 1964 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture as a decorative tree prized for its appearance and fast growth, but quickly spread beyond where they were planted, as invasive species do. Now, these pretty but stinky trees outcompete other plants in many areas, taking valuable resources and edging natives out of their own ecosystems. Despite efforts to replace them from Missouri to Boston, the problem of Bradford pears and other invasive species will only grow worse in the era of climate change, with spring starting earlier and at warmer temperatures. Invasive species intensified by climate change is one of the leading causes of biological diversity loss worldwide, according to the National Park Service. And Bradford pears are now in an estimated 25 states and over 150 countries, stinking up the globe, and taking over land where they aren’t meant to be. “When you see those fields of white flowering trees, please don’t get giddy with excitement over pretty white flowers,” writes the Asheville Citizen-Times. “What you are looking at are Callery pears destroying nature.”

If it hasn’t already, the semen tree problem could soon reach a city near you, just like it has in my hometown. So remember this for the future: The stench of rotten ejaculate that wafts around you each April is just a tree reminding you that after the long winter, spring, finally, has come.

https://grist.org/article/spring-is-here-and-so-are-the-semen-trees/

it wouldn't surprise me that the last word in the last sentence was intended by the author to be a pun! my use of the same word in the opening sentence? nah, not me...

Wow, I feel kind of lucky. Where I used to live, Bradford Pears were the decorative tree around the buildings. I don't recall the smell. The nice thing is they bloom early and long and so they're pretty in the spring.

The biggest problem with them is that their branches get big and then snap off and they become a hazard. The community we lived in had them all removed after a storm which brought down several branches.

They replaced them with maples. :)

[Aragorn]

The biggest problem with them is that their branches get big and then snap off and they become a hazard. The community we lived in had them all removed after a storm which brought down several branches.

Now that you mention that, the storm we've had here over the past weekend ripped several trees clean out of the ground ─ and they had colossal roots! ─ and snapped several others in the nature preserve behind my brother's house. I saw the fallen trees with my own eyes when I was at my brother's for dinner on Monday, but my brother says he saw them falling over in real-time, one after the other. And here in the town where I live, a brick wall came down at an elementary school only about 80 meters from my apartment ─ the debris was all over the sidewalk and part of the street. That was one huge storm. :belief:

It was still very windy on Monday and Tuesday, but for today, the storm appears to be back for a little encore, albeit not as badly as it was over the weekend, when there were gusts up to 120 km/h inland ─ that's 75 mph for you Acronymians. All railway traffic had been grounded and replaced by buses. There were no ships at sea ─ they had all been called back, because wind speeds at sea would have been around 150 km/h, or about 90 mph. There was one casualty in the country ─ a guy who had decided to go fishing. :rolleyes: There was a lot of collateral damage, though, including a car that got crushed by a tree while it was driving on the highway.

[palooka's revenge]

Wow, I feel kind of lucky. Where I used to live, Bradford Pears were the decorative tree around the buildings. I don't recall the smell. The nice thing is they bloom early and long and so they're pretty in the spring.

The biggest problem with them is that their branches get big and then snap off and they become a hazard. The community we lived in had them all removed after a storm which brought down several branches.

They replaced them with maples. :)

i don't notice an odor here in the ATL 'n they're around. ashville is about 4 hrs northeast. given the rhetoric, i'm kind wonderin' if that piece is a spoof...

[Emil El Zapato]

Thank you C.W. Chanter...

[Aragorn]

Lorien Fenton of KCOR Radio did an interview with Bill Ryan yesterday ─ about 1 hour and 47 minutes long, including the breaks.

[...]




Edit: Here's a second link to the interview, with the ad blocks removed, so at 1 hour and 34 minutes, this one is a bit shorter. The actual interview starts at 13 minutes into the show. ;)




:popc: :swing:

http://avalonlibrary.net/Bill_Ryan_interview_with_Lorien_Fenton_11%20March_ 2019.mp3



:bump2:

I'm bumping this ─ sorry, Gio :smiley hug: ─ because I've added a second link to the original post. This new link is the same radio show, but in the abridged version as it is now hosted at Project Avalon itself, with the ad blocks removed. ;)

[Gio]

http://projectavalon.net/Amazon/Bill_Ryan_by_waterfall.jpg

No problem, but just for the record i do not support Bill Ryan in any way or form.

[Gio]

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53596192_886660388345215_5602767309870465024_n.jpg ?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=049cd60ed52a6a4e61e45e1bcf17d152&oe=5D22D0FF

[Dreamtimer]

Ain't that (https://jandeane81.com/showthread.php/9965-The-Cosmic-Emporium?p=842008339&viewfull=1#post842008339) the truth.

[Gio]

Venezuela Blackout Follows Regime Change Blueprint - #NewWorldNextWeek

corbettreport
Published on Mar 14, 2019


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dF97SoG1Ho&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Going postal/Doggie style ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/a9/81/42/a98142fde668c2348657b479d824a628.jpg

[Gio]

Who really controls the weather ...

Cole Kleen (Seth Rogen) Is Jim's New Pro-Climate Change Weatherman

Published on Mar 12, 2019

7:15 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVIelyaO4r4

[Kathy]

https://scontent-sea1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t1.0-9/53596192_886660388345215_5602767309870465024_n.jpg ?_nc_cat=1&_nc_ht=scontent-sea1-1.xx&oh=049cd60ed52a6a4e61e45e1bcf17d152&oe=5D22D0FF

I feel it would better apply if the word 'almost' was removed, despite fact that it does not apply to the whole world.

[Gio]

Why of course you do Kathy, but unfortunately your moderator 'administrative power'
does not apply to the meme.

[Gio]

What's the Deal With Europe's New Visa Policy?

Gabriel Traveler

Published on Mar 14, 2019

3:27 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IY7pTYVkWbs

[Gio]

So glad they're using some new common sense ...


https://static.standard.co.uk/s3fs-public/thumbnails/image/2019/01/03/08/DEFENCE-Recruitment-06582363.jpg?width=1368&height=912&fit=bounds&format=pjpg&auto=webp&quality=70
British Army: The campaign was controversial for its provocative approach to recruits

Capita hails ‘snowflake’ ads for helping mend army recruitment contract

"Outsourcer Capita said a problem contract to handle British Army recruitment was on the mend after the recent blockbuster “snowflake” ad campaign.

The company said the Recruiting Partnering Project, which was criticised by the National Audit Office in December, was showing signs of improvement after it started working more closely with the Army.

“We fundamentally changed the working relationship,” said chief executive Jon Lewis. “It’s creating a common sense of ownership rather than dare I say it the master and servant relationship that was the picture of old. We’ve got to be in it together.”

Applications for the British Army are at a five-year high and the ad campaign led to a 78% rise in website visits.

The campaign was criticised in the media for its provocative approach to recruits."

Source page: standard.co.uk (https://www.standard.co.uk/business/capita-hails-snowflake-ads-for-helping-mend-army-recruitment-contract-a4091756.html)

[Chris]

The Difference between Catholics and Protestants.

This Derry Girls clip is just hilarious in pointing out the differences and as someone who was born a Catholic, I must say more of these apply to me than I'm comfortable with... There are particularly funny ones on the blackboard, if you pause the clip.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0OF-TlyAY

[Gio]

Note as i was posting my above story, this video notification appeared on my computer screen ...
There are no coincidences folks ...


Common Sense of Cannabis - Daniel Crumpton

Freeman Fly

"CannaSense mission is to educate potential and existing patients on the benefits of medical cannabis and how to safely and legally access it at an affordable price. Seniors, veterans, disabled people and almost anyone seeking pain relief could potentially benefit from medical cannabis."

Published on Mar 14, 2019

1:21:03 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPxqD-Gbheg&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

The Difference between Catholics and Protestants.

This Derry Girls clip is just hilarious in pointing out the differences and as someone who was born a Catholic, I must say more of these apply to me than I'm comfortable with... There are particularly funny ones on the blackboard, if you pause the clip.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0j0OF-TlyAY

I had recently eyeballed this new Netflix series (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derry_Girls), at first glance i thought it was better suited for a younger audience .. But this Catholic/Protestant premise looks entertainingly compelling, and i think i will give the series another closer look ... Some of life experiences never grow old do they ...

Thanks Chris for the heads-up ... :)

[Dreamtimer]

I still run into people who say things like they're not Christian, they're Catholic.

It's so weird to me.

[palooka's revenge]

I still run into people who say things like they're not Christian, they're Catholic.

It's so weird to me.

well now, maybe that's because catholics are taught they are the only ones who are saved. that's the weird part and that's exactly why i excommunicated my self at 5 yrs old...

[Gio]

#3 ...https://illiweb.com/fa/i/smiles/icon_study.png

This Week On Howard: A Special Announcement, an R. Kelly Remix, and “Alex Jones” Returns

The Howard Stern Show

"Howard announces his new book “Howard Stern Comes Again,” the R. Kelly interview with Gayle King gets remixed, and “Alex Jones” and his conspiracies return in this week’s Top Noine moments."

Published on Mar 15, 2019

30:27 minutes

Note contains lots of swear words


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsK8DBJ6bI8

[Gio]

A new video series ...

Hiking with Kevin Nealon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kevin_Nealon)

Matt LeBlanc was broke!



Matt LeBlanc hikes with his co-star Kevin Nealon in a Los Angeles canyon. Matt chats about life before Friends in NYC, being broke, his Friend's audition, dealing with fans, weird stuff that happened on the freeway, dating in high school, rejection, sleeping in a cemetery, their dressing rooms at 'Man With A Plan,' his fancy friends, his love of cars, motorcycles and power tools, his photographic memory, filing his tooth down, himself, for his first head shot, plus more....

Published on Jan 31, 2019

16:22 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0fkh-7rnTI

[Dreamtimer]

The R-Kelly remix is hysterical. :lol::lol::lol::hilarious::ha: :hilarious::lol::lol::lol:

[Gio]

To dally with a Llama ...


https://i.pinimg.com/564x/56/0d/00/560d0036603805503813fb179fbfe3e9.jpg

[Gio]

Meet Nancy ...

The Bolas Spider

And what she does with her butt rope is nobody's business.'

zefrank1
Published on Mar 15, 2019

3:40 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9qw3lkpa5lY&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

Facebook, Google and other big tech giants are about to face a 'reckoning,'
State Attorneys General warn

Tony Romm, The Washington Post Published 8:40 am CDT, Friday, March 15, 2019

https://s.hdnux.com/photos/60/41/13/12718821/3/1024x1024.jpg

"Some of the country's most powerful state attorneys general are signaling they're willing to take action against Facebook, Google and other tech giants, warning that the companies have grown too big and powerful - and that Washington has been too slow to respond.

For many of these top law enforcement officials, the fear is that Silicon Valley has amassed too much personal information about web users and harnessed it in a way that's jeopardized people's privacy and undermined competition, often without much oversight.

"I think what we've found is that big tech has become too big, and that while we may have been asleep at the wheel, they were able to consolidate a tremendous amount of power," Jeff Landry, the Republican attorney general of Louisiana, said in an interview.

Federal regulators have the primary responsibility for keeping watch over Silicon Valley - they can break up monopolies, for example, and penalize companies for privacy abuses. But some state officials feel that Washington bears some of the blame for the tech industry's string of scandals in the first place. Lawmakers in Congress long have struggled to adopt a national law targeting tech giants' data-collection practices, while federal agencies have allowed many of the headline-grabbing mishaps at Facebook and Google to go unpunished.

In response, states like Arizona and Mississippi now are taking aim at Google for the way it collects and monetizes web users' data. The District of Columbia, meanwhile, is challenging Facebook's business practices in court. And there are "numerous bipartisan discussions" among Democrats and Republicans about other areas where attorneys general can coordinate their attention on big tech, Landry said.

"We are in a moment where the federal government's level of effectiveness and engagement on a range of issues, on technology, consumer protection and privacy, is limited," added Phil Weiser, the Democratic attorney general of Colorado. Absent federal intervention, he said, "states in general or state AGs are able to act."

Asked about the criticisms, Will Castleberry, Facebook's vice president of state and local public policy, said the social giant has had "productive conversations" with state AGs. "Many officials have approached us in a constructive manner, focused on solutions that ensure all companies are protecting people's information, and we look forward to working with them," he added in a statement.

Google declined comment for this story.

The appetite for action seemed apparent last week, when state officials gathered in Washington for a series of events including an annual forum with the National Association of Attorneys General, where Landry is president. Concerns about the tech industry's privacy practices were on full display, while a few miles away, the District of Columbia appeared in court to argue that Facebook had deceived its users about its approach to collecting and monetizing their data. The lawsuit stems from Facebook's entanglement with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy that improperly accessed data about roughly 87 million of the social-site's users without their knowledge or permission.

Federal watchdogs have been probing the matter for nearly a year, and they could soon bring a historic fine. But D.C. Attorney General Karl Racine opted not to wait for his federal counterparts, and he filed his case in December, which Facebook has sought to dismiss on grounds that D.C. lacks jurisdiction. Both sides are set to air their next round of arguments in front of a D.C. Superior Court judge on March 22. A slew of additional states, including New York and Pennsylvania, are proceeding with Facebook probes of their own.

Other state attorneys general have set their sights on Google, fearing the search, advertising and mobile giant knows too much about consumers -- and can easily squash its competitors. Some states' calls for stronger antitrust enforcement stand in stark contrast with Washington, where federal regulators investigated Google but ultimately decided in 2013 against breaking apart the company.

The latest to take aim was Arizona's GOP attorney general, Mark Brnovich, who began investigating the tech giant's data-collection practices in 2018. Last week, Brnovich reaffirmed his concerns with Google's use of location data gleaned from Android smartphones during a private event for fellow Republican attorneys general, according to a person who attended the gathering but asked not to be identified because it was off record. Brnovich also raised new questions about Google's search practices, particularly the company's approach to surfacing results to queries about local businesses, the person said.

Asked Thursday if the states needed to open an antitrust probe of Google, Brnovich replied: "Maybe," adding: "I think there are a lot of us in the AG world that are collecting information, trying to get documents, and trying to get to the bottom of whether that's a reasonable step or a reasonable option." He said he could not comment on any open investigations.

Google's challenges could span far beyond Arizona. Before becoming Minnesota's attorney general, Democrat Keith Ellison argued in Congress for the federal government to embark on an antitrust probe of the tech giant. Ellison's office declined comment for this story. In Missouri, meanwhile, the state embarked on a wide-ranging antitrust and privacy investigation into Google under former Attorney General Josh Hawley, who left the office for the U.S. Senate in January. A spokesman for his successor declined to say if it's still under way.

Louisiana's Landry slammed Google last week for being "more and more manipulative" with its search results. And in Mississippi, Democratic Attorney General Jim Hood has sued the company for its handling of students' data. For years, the two sides have warred repeatedly, with Google at one point suggesting that the Democratic attorney general had wrongly targeted the company with the aid of its foes in the movie industry. In an interview, Hood faulted Google for trying to "send a message to other states that we will sue you."

"You cannot allow this power to accumulate in the hands of this few people," Hood said. "At some point, there's going to have to be a reckoning for it."

In these and other probes, state attorneys general are powerful in their own right: They can leverage local laws to fine companies for their misdeeds, and in some cases, their rules are tougher than what the federal government has at its disposal -- especially in California under a landmark privacy statute adopted in 2018.

But they often band together to take aim at common targets, and at their most effective, state attorneys general can prod the federal government to do the same. The tech industry learned that lesson firsthand two decades ago, when state attorneys general helped drive a landmark U.S. antitrust lawsuit against Microsoft -- and sought later to block a settlement out of concern the federal government had been too soft on the company.

The most recent wave of activity began in September, when the Justice Department asked attorneys general to discuss the power of Facebook, Google and online platforms. The session in Washington had been designed to probe claims that some tech companies censor conservatives -- a concern Democrats don't share -- but the conversation proved far more wide ranging, with Mississippi's Hood and others weighing whether to partner in a formal way to study big tech companies.

Roughly six months after that DOJ summit, Xavier Beccera, the Democratic attorney general of California, said their early talks were "perceived as something worthwhile." He acknowledged in an interview there's been "increased discussions among the state AGs" about the privacy challenges and other troubles posed by some of the tech industry's biggest players.

Beccera added: "I think everyone's trying to get a handle on what we can do.""


Source: lmtonline.com (https://www.lmtonline.com/news/article/Facebook-Google-and-other-big-tech-giants-are-13691113.php#photo-12718821)

[Gio]

Our True History Has Been Stolen

Max Igan - Surviving the Matrix - Episode 367 - American Voice Radio, March 15, 2019


thecrowhouse
Published on Mar 15, 2019

54:28 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UXc2OacUZU&feature=em-uploademail

[Gio]

The preview ...


'A Murder in Camelot'

John Lear and His Response To The Captain Mark Richards Story, Whistle Blower For Project Camelot



"On July 6, 1982 Richard Alexander Baldwin, 36 was murdered at the hands of Mark Richards and teenager Crossan David Hoover. Richard Baldwin was Beaten with a baseball bat and Stabbed with knife and screwdriver In Marin County, California. Mark and Crossan were arrested three days later.

The Story made headline news throughout July 1982 and with the convictions of Mark and Crossen Hoover in 1984. In both separate trials they were found guilty of murder. Mark Richards was sentenced to life without parole for the murder of his friend Richard Baldwin. Crossan Hoover was sentenced to twenty-six years with the possibility of parole. Throughout this period, the crime made headlines as a bizarre tale of an Arthurian kingdom called Pendragon began to emerge.

Another teenager present in Mr. Baldwin’s house, who helped dispose of the body, was Andrew Campbell. Campbell later turned and gave state’s evidence against both Mark Richards and Crossan Hoover resulting in immunity from prosecution.

The victim of this horrendous murder was Richard A. Baldwin. Baldwin was the owner of a vintage-auto restoration shop, The Classic Car, on 36B Front Street in San Rafael. At the time of the murder, Richards, Hoover and Andrew were remodeling Baldwin’s home. Hoover stated Richards and he lured their victim, Mr. Baldwin, to the auto shop on the pretext of looking at his inventory of classic cars.

After the murder, Richards purchased a boat used to dump the body of Mr. Richard Baldwin into San Pablo Bay with the help of Crossan Hoover and Andrew Campbell. Baldwin’s body did not stay anchored to the bottom. The body was discovered by the skipper of “The Little Sampson,” floating at the mouth of the San Pablo Bay at 5pm, July 13th, 1982. Mr. Richard Baldwin’s body was then transported to the Solano County Morgue" ... Documentary website here (https://www.thekevinmoore.com/richardbaldwinmovie/)

The Moore Show
Published on Mar 16, 2019

8:46 minutes

Wait for the surprise guest ... :)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9BWhzg31Oo

[Aragorn]

The preview ...


'A Murder in Camelot'

John Lear and His Response To The Captain Mark Richards Story, Whistle Blower For Project Camelot



The Moore Show
Published on Mar 16, 2019

8:46 minutes

Wait for the surprise guest ... :)


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9BWhzg31Oo



Yes!!! Thank you for posting this, Gio. This was long overdue. :h5:

[Gio]

Where the Rainbow Ends http://www.sherv.net/cm/emoticons/nature/rainbow-smiley-emoticon-animation.gif


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c8bbf640c54352cc28c085c/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC031519.jpg

It appears you migration papers have been approved and expedited ...
And I thank you for the campaign donation.

[Gio]

https://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/newpix/2018/07/17/18/4E55882400000578-5962345-Putin_relaxes_on_one_of_his_planes_in_December_201 7_as_he_travel-a-75_1531847626298.jpg

Back In The U.S.S.R



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nS5_EQgbuLc

[Dreamtimer]

Who's the "pen pal to Mark Richards"? I don't recognize her(?).

The recall interviews of Mark by Kerry were what turned me off. I haven't watched anything of hers in quite some time.

[Gio]

A long read/for the record.


***

The Pentagon’s Bottomless Money Pit

When the Defense Department flunked its first-ever fiscal review, one of our government’s greatest mysteries was exposed: Where does the DoD’s $700 billion annual budget go?


https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/pentagon-bottomless-money-pit.jpg?crop=900:600&width=1910

A retired Air Force auditor — we’ll call him Andy — tells a story about a thing that happened at Ogden Air Force Base, Utah. Sometime in early 2001, something went wrong with a base inventory order. Andy thinks it was a simple data-entry error. “Someone ordered five of something,” he says, “and it came out as an order for 999,000.” He laughs. “It was probably just something the machine defaulted to. Type in an order for a part the wrong way, and it comes out all frickin’ nines in every field.” Nobody actually delivered a monster load of parts. But the faulty transaction — the paper trail for a phantom inventory adjustment never made — started moving through the Air Force’s maze of internal accounting systems anyway. A junior-level logistics officer caught it before it went out of house. Andy remembers the incident because, as a souvenir, he kept the June 28th, 2001, email that circulated about it in the Air Force accounting world, in which the dollar value of the error was discussed.

Wanted to keep you all informed of the massive inventory adjustment processed at [Ogden] on Wednesday of this week. It isn’t as bad as we first thought ($8.5 trillion). The hit . . . $3.9 trillion instead of the $8.5 trillion as we first thought.

The Air Force, which had an $85 billion budget that year, nearly created in one stroke an accounting error more than a third the size of the U.S. GDP, which was just over $10 trillion in 2001. Nobody lost money. It was just a paper error, one that was caught.

“Even the Air Force notices a trillion-dollar error,” Andy says with a laugh. “Now, if it had been a billion, it might have gone through.”

Years later, Andy watched as another massive accounting issue made its way into the military bureaucracy. The Air Force changed one of its financial reporting systems, and after the change, the service showed a negative number for inventory — everything from engine cores to landing gear — in transit.

Freaked out, because you can’t have a negative number of things in transit, Air Force accountants went back and tried to reverse the mistake. In doing so, they somehow ended up adding more than $4 billion in value to the Air Force’s overall spare-parts inventory in a single month.

This suspicious number is still there. You can see a sudden spike in the Air Force’s working-capital fund’s stagnant spare-parts numbers. It was $23.2 billion in 2015, $23.3 billion in 2016, $24.4 billion in 2017, and then suddenly $28.8 billion in September 2018.

That doesn’t mean money was lost, or stolen. It does, however, mean the Air Force probably has less inventory on hand than it thinks it does.

Now retired, Andy sometimes visits his neighborhood library, which uses RFID smart labels, or radio frequency identification, allowing it to know where all its books are at all times.

Meanwhile, the Air Force, which has a $156 billion annual budget, still doesn’t always use serial numbers. It has no idea how much of almost anything it has at any given time. Nuclear weapons are the exception, and it started electronically tagging those only after two extraordinary mistakes, in 2006 and 2007. In the first, the Air Force accidentally loaded six nuclear weapons in a B-52 and flew them across the country, unbeknownst to the crew. In the other, the services sent nuclear nose cones by mistake to Taiwan, which had asked for helicopter batteries.

“What kind of an organization,” Andy asks, “doesn’t keep track of $20 billion in inventory?”

Despite being the taxpayers’ greatest investment — more than $700 billion a year — the Department of Defense has remained an organizational black box throughout its history. It’s repelled generations of official inquiries, the latest being an audit three decades in the making, mainly by scrambling its accounting into such a mess that it may never be untangled.

Ahead of misappropriation, fraud, theft, overruns, contracting corruption and other abuses that are almost certainly still going on, the Pentagon’s first problem is its books. It’s the world’s largest producer of wrong numbers, an ingenious bureaucratic defense system that hides all the other rats’ nests underneath. Meet the Gordian knot of legend, brought to life in modern America.

AT THE TAIL end of last year, the Department of Defense finally completed an audit. At a cost of $400 million, some 1,200 auditors charged into the jungle of military finance, but returned in defeat. They were unable to pass the Pentagon or flunk it. They could only offer no opinion, explaining the military’s empire of hundreds of acronymic accounting silos was too illogical to penetrate.

The audit is the last piece in one of the great ass-covering projects ever undertaken, also known as the effort to give the United States government a clean bill of financial health. Twenty-nine years ago, in 1990, Congress ordered all government agencies to begin producing audited financial statements. Others complied. Defense refused from the jump.

It took a Herculean legislative effort lasting 20 years to move the Pentagon off its intransigent starting position. In 2011, it finally agreed to be ready by 2017, which turned into 2018, when the Department of Defense finally complied with part of the law ordering “timely performance reports.”

Last November 15th, when the whiffed audit was announced, Deputy Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan said it was nothing to worry about, because “we never expected to pass it.” Asked by a reporter why taxpayers should keep giving the Pentagon roughly $700 billion a year if it can’t even “get their house in order and count ships right or buildings right,” Shanahan quipped, “We count ships right.”

This was an inside joke. The joke was, the Pentagon isn’t so hot at counting buildings. Just a few years ago, in fact, it admitted to losing track of “478 structures,” in addition to 39 Black Hawk helicopters (whose fully loaded versions list for about $21 million a pop).

That didn’t mean 478 buildings disappeared. But they did vanish from the government’s ledgers at some point. The Pentagon bureaucracy is designed to spend money quickly and deploy troops and material to the field quickly, but it has no reliable method of recording transactions. It designs stealth drones and silent-running submarines, but still hasn’t progressed to bar codes when it comes to tracking inventory. Some of its accounting programs are using the ancient computing language COBOL, which was cutting-edge in 1959.

“These systems,” as one Senate staffer puts it, “were not designed to be audited.”

If and when the defense review is ever completed, we’re likely to find a pile of Enrons, with the military’s losses and liabilities hidden in Enron-like special-purpose vehicles, assets systematically overvalued, monies Congress approved for X feloniously diverted to Program Y, contractors paid twice, parts bought twice, repairs done unnecessarily and at great expense, and so on.

Enron at its core was an accounting maze that systematically hid losses and overstated gains in order to keep investor money flowing in. The Pentagon is an exponentially larger financial bureaucracy whose mark is the taxpayer. Of course, less overtly a criminal scheme, the military still churns out Enron-size losses regularly, and this is only possible because its accounting is a long-tolerated fraud.

We’ve seen glimpses already. The infamous F-35 Joint Strike fighter program is now projected to cost the taxpayers $1.5 trillion, roughly what we spent on the entire Iraq War. Overruns and fraud from that program alone are currently expected to cost taxpayers about 100 times what was spent on Obama’s much-ballyhooed Solyndra solar-energy deal.

Meanwhile, the Defense Department a few years ago found about $125 billion in administrative waste, a wart that by itself was just under twice the size of that $74 billion Enron bankruptcy. Inspectors found “at least” $6 billion to $8 billion in waste in the Iraq campaign, and said $15 billion of waste found in the Afghan theater was probably “only a portion” of the total lost.

Even the military’s top-line budget number is an Enron-esque accounting trick. Congress in 2011 passed the Budget Control Act, which caps the defense budget at roughly 54 percent of discretionary spending. Almost immediately, it began using so-called Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO), a giant second checking account that can be raised without limit.

Therefore, for this year, the Pentagon has secured $617 billion in “base” budget money, which puts it in technical compliance with the Budget Control law. But it also receives $69 billion in OCO money, sometimes described as “war funding,” a euphemistic term for an open slush fund. (Non-defense spending also exceeds caps, but typically for real emergencies like hurricane relief.) Add in the VA ($83 billion), Homeland Security ($46 billion), the National Nuclear Security Administration ($21.9 billion) and roughly $19 billion more in OCO funds for anti-ISIS operations that go to State and DHS, and the actual defense outlay is north of $855 billion, and that’s just what we know about (other programs, like the CIA’s drones, are part of the secret “black budget”).

In a supreme irony, the auditors’ search for boondoggles has itself become a boondoggle. In the early Nineties and 2000s, the Defense Department spent billions hiring private firms in preparation for last year. In many cases, those new outside accountants simply repeated recommendations that had already been raised and ignored by past government auditors like the Defense inspector general.

After last year’s debacle, the services are now spending even more on outside advice to prepare for the next expected flop. The Air Force alone just awarded Deloitte up to $800 million to help the service with future “audit preparation.” The Navy countered with a $980 million audit-readiness contract spread across four companies (Deloitte, Booz Allen Hamilton, Accenture and KPMG).

Taxpayers, in other words, are paying gargantuan sums to private accounting firms to write reports about how previous recommendations were ignored.

It’s all a Catch-22 story about a country trapped in an endless cycle of avoidable financial disaster. Each time we try to fix leaks, we end up back where we started, staring at even bigger numerical representations of failure.

For instance, part of what inspired original investigations into defense finances were infamous stories in the 1980s and early Nineties about the military charging $640 for toilet seats, $436 for hammers, etc. A chief crusader was a young Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, who was so determined to hear such tales from famed military whistle-blower Franklin C. “Chuck” Spinney — one of the first military analysts to go public with accusations of waste and procurement fraud — that early in 1983 Grassley drove to the Pentagon in an orange Chevette to see him.

The DoD refused to let Grassley see Spinney. Grassley got him to testify on the Hill six weeks later.

“The following Monday, his photo was on the cover of Time magazine,” Grassley recalls. The March 1983 cover asked, are billions being wasted?"



https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/pentagon-bottomless-money-pit-grassley.jpg?w=1024
“A long time after I leave the Senate, [Pentagon spending] will be the same problem,” says Senator Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa.


"It seemed like a breakthrough. Spinney’s tales of waste became symbols that aroused the imagination of both the left and the right, who each saw in them their own vision of government run amok.

But 35 years later, Chuck Grassley, now 85, is still sending letters to the Pentagon about overpriced parts, only this time with more zeros added. The Iowan last year asked why we were spending more than $10,000 apiece for 3D printed airborne toilet-seat covers, or $56,000 on 25 reheatable drinking cups at a brisk $1,280 each (apparently an upgrade to earlier iterations of $693 coffee cups, whose handles broke too easily). The DoD has since claimed to have fixed these problems.

Asked if he was frustrated that it’s the same stories decades later, Grassley says, “Absolutely.” He pauses. “And a long time after I leave the Senate, it’ll likely still be the same problem.”

Three decades into the effort to pry open the Pentagon’s books, it’s not clear if we’ve been going somewhere, or we’ve just been spending billions to get nowhere, in one of the most expensive jokes any nation has played on itself. “When everything’s always a mystery,” says Grassley, “nothing ever has to be solved.”

THIS STARTED with an accident.

“The only reason the audit is happening,” says Sheila Weinberg, CEO of the watchdog group Truth in Accounting, “is because an accountant got sent to Congress.”

In 1985, a brusque Italian-Albanian named Joe Dio-Guardi ran as a Republican for a House seat in New York’s 20th District.

DioGuardi was the son of an immigrant grocer. Before he went on to a Jesuit education at Fordham, his schooling came in the aisles of his father’s store. “I was trained in stock,” DioGuardi says today. “You learn value if you end up chasing someone down the streets of the Bronx if they steal a box.”

In his teen years he went on to be a waiter at Westchester country clubs. He’d watch chefs steal steaks out of the kitchen at the end of every year, knowing that “these rich people . . . if there was a deficit, they would just kick it in at the end of the year.”

From waiting tables he went on to spend 22 years as an accountant at Arthur Andersen, among other things diving into New York City’s financial collapse in the Seventies. He recalls the city still listed buildings that had burned down as current assets. “I learned a lot about the difference between public and private accounting,” he remembers.

In the mid-Eighties, he ran as a Republican for Congress in a Westchester district. It was considered a safe blue seat, with Democrats outnumbering Republicans. He calls himself “the accidental congressman,” because “if my party knew I would win, they wouldn’t have put me up. I was a sacrificial lamb.”

But in a preview of cross-party populist currents, he did win, in part by highlighting his working-class ethnic background, trumpeting his accounting credentials, and sounding bipartisan themes about cleaning up corruption. He promised to “illuminate the dark fiscal corners” of the federal bureaucracy.

In Washington, DioGuardi was horrified by the federal government’s “smoke and mirrors” budgeting. He told fellow Republicans the techniques Congress used would get private-sector officers “sent to jail.”

“Joey the Waiter,” who is 78 today, still has the same tough-talking New York personality he had as a candidate. It’s easy to laugh imagining how his insistent Bronx demeanor was received by some of his more upper-crust and genteel colleagues back then. It would explain why he was first ignored when he began writing legislation to force the government to undergo the kind of auditing that’s mandatory in the private sector.

But when the savings-and-loan crisis plunged America into a financial scare in the late Eighties, “fiscal responsibility” became a political catchword. Instantly, “Joey the Waiter” was in demand. “Suddenly, everyone was like, ‘Where’s that bill DioGuardi wrote?’ ” he recalls.

He found diverse allies in a pair of Democrats, Sen. John Glenn and Rep. John Conyers. Together they authored what would ultimately be called the “Chief Financial Officers Act of 1990.”

The legislation forced government agencies to name a CFO, conduct audits and create “modern federal financial management structure.” Twenty-three agencies, from Defense to Labor to State, were ordered to begin submitting “department-wide annual audited financial statements” by 1994.

Although there were regulations over the years requiring various forms of financial reporting, nothing like a full-scale federal audit had ever been attempted. Incredibly, from an accounting perspective, the U.S. government had remained essentially virgin territory for centuries.

As far back as 1787, the Constitution mandated “a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” But no independent examiner had ever fully checked the government’s books. By the late Eighties and early Nineties, hundreds of billions of tax dollars were being spent annually, and no one really knew where. To DioGuardi, the situation was outrageous.

“It’s a constant principle in history, from the Medicis to today,” says DioGuardi. “If no one’s watching the money, there will be bankruptcies.”

THE CFO Act at least introduced the idea that someone was supposed to be watching. By 1997, Cabinet-level departments like Labor, Agriculture and Commerce were submitting financial reports. In the first year, only six were able to pass. Within a few years, however, most were in compliance. By 2013, Defense was the only federal agency that had not submitted a financial statement.

One of the main reasons the military wasn’t submitting numbers was it didn’t have them. The Pentagon every year employs an accounting shortcut that should make more sense to civilians at this time of year, because it’s similar to what the roughly six percent of Americans who cheat on taxes do annually.

Taxpayers who think they’re owed deductions, but don’t have the receipts to back up their expenses, will sometimes take a rough guess, maybe based on what their prior-year deductions were. Then they file returns infected with guesses, “plugged” in to look like deductions counted up honestly.

The Pentagon does basically the same thing, only on a galactic scale. At the end of every year, it submits a “Budget execution request” that includes complete month-by-month statements of that year’s spending.

The White House will then take these numbers and use them to project a defense budget for the following year. The president submits that budget to Congress, which in turn will actually appropriate the money. Almost without exception, the Pentagon ends up getting a raise. For 2019, Donald Trump submitted a budget that asked for $716 billion, or $82 billion more than the Department of Defense received the previous fiscal year.

The system makes sense, except for one problem: The financial reports the Pentagon submits are faked.

The Defense Department, for the most part, does not know how much it spends. It has a handle on some things, like military pay, but in other places it’s clueless. None of its services — Navy, Air Force, Army, Marine Corps — use the same system to record transactions or monitor inventory. Each service has its own operations and management budget, its own payroll system, its own R&D budget and so on. It’s an empire of disconnected budgets, or “fiefdoms,” as one Senate staffer calls them.

Instead of using a single integrated financial accounting system that would maintain a global picture of its finances at all times, the Pentagon built another bureaucracy to pile atop the others, called the Defense Finance and Accounting Service, or DFAS. Created by then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney in 1991, DFAS is in charge of collecting financial reports from all the different fiefdoms at the end of each month. DFAS is like a tribune traveling on horseback at month’s end, collecting a pile of scrolls from each castle.

In 2013, Reuters published a brutal exposé showing how DFAS accountants conducted a mad scramble at the end of each month to try to piece together records of transactions to justify spending. But in thousands of cases a month, no records existed. “We didn’t have the detail,” one accountant explained.

Complicating matters is the fact that money is allocated to the military on different schedules. If Congress gives the Navy $53 billion for operations and maintenance, as it did this year, the service is expected to spend all that money that year. Such expenses — payroll is another — are called “one-year money.” Meanwhile, research and development might be “two-year money,” and contracting might be “five-year money.”"



https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/the-pentagon.jpg?w=1024
There have been multiple cases involving officials taking advantage of flaws in the Pentagon’s system over the years. A civilian secretary bilked the Air Force out of $1.4 million for more than a decade before anyone noticed.


"If the Pentagon doesn’t spend all the money in exactly the amounts Congress says it can spend, in the time ordained by Congress — if it doesn’t spend all its one-year money in one year, all its five-year money in five years and so on — the military is supposed to give its unspent money back to Congress.

But the military is never really on time, and constantly commingles its various pots of money. Grassley in the late Nineties found out the military was using a computer program called MOCAS, or Mechanization of Contract Administration Services, to help speed this commingling. Whenever the Pentagon had bills to pay, instead of just drawing the money from the right account, MOCAS would sometimes try to spend “old money” first, i.e., from whatever funds were about to expire.

It’s illegal for any government agency to spend money appropriated for one purpose on a different program. But the military — either hilariously or horribly, depending on your perspective — created a program that algorithmically produced such violations
of the law. They weren’t minor violations: Grassley has fought for years against such automatic payments, saying bureaucrats use them to “avoid violations of the Antideficiency Act — a felony.” Last year’s audit found the Antideficiency Act was one of five laws the agency violated.

MOCAS still exists, but it’s unclear how or if it’s been updated. In any case, Defense still lacks rec-ords showing that it’s paying for the right programs from the right accounts. Out of terror that it might have to return money as a result, the DoD orders its accountants to make numbers fit.

Those DFAS accountants in the Reuters exposé were told by superiors that if they couldn’t find invoices or contracts to prove the various services spent their one-year money and two-year money and five-year money on time, they should execute “unsubstantiated change actions,” i.e., lie.

The accountants systematically “plugged” in fake numbers to match the payment schedules handed down by the Treasury. These fixes are called “journal voucher adjustments” or “plugs.”

As a result, those year-end financial statements will look like they match congressional intentions. In truth, the statements packed with thousands of plugs are fictions, a form of systematic accounting fraud Congress has quietly tolerated for decades.

The fake-number system is such long-accepted practice that it’s acquired numerous dull-sounding names. You’ll see the invented numbers called “forced-balance entries” by the General Accounting Office (which is run by Congress), “adjustments not adequately supported” by the Defense inspector general, and “journal vouchers” or “JVs” or “workarounds” by the Pentagon’s own comptroller general. On the Hill, everyone refers to “plugs.”

There are innocent explanations for plugs, although even the best excuse is still incompetence. For example, if the Navy buys a helicopter from the Army (which is the “item manager” in charge of monitoring all rotary-wing aircraft), it will show up as an expense on the books of both services. Although the money has been spent only once, both the Army and the Navy will report the expense.

Instead of canceling out such intramural accounting discrepancies, which is what would happen at any chain of doughnut shops, the Department of Defense never bothered to fix its accounting rules. With hundreds of different acronymic systems, a single error might generate bogus numbers exceeding the transactions’ original value.

This is a generous explanation for news of the sort released by the inspector general in 2016 showing the Army — with an annual budget of $122 billion — generated accounting plugs 54 times that amount, a full $6.5 trillion worth, in 2015 alone.

When civilian analysts see these numbers, they always first assume they’re typos, because no company could survive such gargantuan accounting snafus.

“When I saw that 6.5 trillion number for the first time, I thought it had to be a mistake,” says Michigan State University professor Mark Skidmore, who in 2017 led a study that discovered $21 trillion in plugs over a 17-year period. “I thought it was maybe 6 billion. But it’s really 6 trillion.”

As these stories leaked out to the public, the huge numbers became (mostly misunderstood) talking points on social media. New Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, cited Skidmore’s study and tweeted that two-thirds of a $32 trillion proposed price tag for Medicare for All “could have been funded already” by the Pentagon.

Ocasio-Cortez didn’t have it quite right. Skidmore’s $21 trillion figure doesn’t mean that much money was wasted, or is sitting in a Swiss account somewhere. The Pentagon didn’t even receive that much money during the time period in question.

Moreover, some of the plugs are adjustments upward and some downward. If they were ever netted out — no one has ever tried — the size of the accounting hole might be smaller.

However, according to Andy and others, the $21 trillion figure may undercount the accounting errors in the system, as some plugs are both automated and unidentified. What’s clear is that the ubiquitous plugging and quantity of bad numbers in the Pentagon’s books are so massive that it will take a labor of the ages to untangle.

All of this is difficult to follow, but the key is that when a suspicious number pops up anywhere in the military’s multiple accounting silos, it typically isn’t investigated, but simply fixed on paper and sent on its way. In a private company, if inventory numbers suddenly jumped by a few billion dollars in one month, auditors would swarm warehouses in search of the problem.

The military can’t say the same. This was one of the things auditors found last year, that the Pentagon lacked “policies and procedures to confirm the existence of government property in possession of contractors.” This is a fancy way of saying the Pentagon doesn’t send inspectors to make sure Lockheed-Martin or Boeing or whoever still have parts they say they’re repairing or maintaining.

This, ultimately, is the conclusion of the audit. We don’t have anything like a full picture of what waste and abuse might be hidden under those plugs, though we have an idea (see sidebar).

We do, however, know the Pentagon’s books are so choked with bad data that discovering abuses in real time is virtually impossible. Compound that with decades of cuts to the Pentagon’s staff of criminal investigators and you have an open invitation to crime. Invoices could be systematically inflated for decades and no one would know. As Andy the Air Force accountant puts it, the system is “desensitized to fraud.”

IF YOU ASK congressional staffers why the plugging system is permitted, they just shrug. Congress really has only two ways to respond when the DoD breaks the law. Elected officials can shout and criticize the Pentagon, or withhold funds. The former is not terribly effective, and the latter has so far proved politically impossible.

“No other federal agency could get away with this,” is how one Senate staffer puts it.

The military has been told repeatedly to stop plugging and develop more rational accounting systems. In case after case, reforms compounded problems.

One of the first fixes was aimed at the infamous toilet seats and hammers. The General Accounting Office in 1992 issued a report blasting the military for “poor cost estimating” and suggested changes. The result was the invention of a creature called the “prime vendor,” basically a middleman with the power to set prices and choose subcontractors.

This system only inflated prices. By 2004, Defense was spending $7.4 billion annually on prime-vendor purchases, after spending $2.3 billion in 2002.

Knight-Ridder newspapers got wind of this and in 2005 reported the military was now buying 85-cent ice trays from prime vendors for $20 apiece. Within a month, a refrigerator for a C-5 airplane was being dragged on the floor of a House hearing and a Navy admiral named Keith Lippert was being asked by California’s Duncan Hunter — not exactly a pillar of rectitude himself (https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/21/us/politics/duncan-hunter-indicted.html) — to explain why he’d bought nine fridges from a prime vendor for $32,642.

Over the years, this pattern repeated itself. An attempt to standardize the military’s payroll and personnel records system, called DIMHRS, took 12 years and cost more than $1 billion before being scrapped. In 2005, the Air Force set out to buy a standardized computer system from Oracle called the Expeditionary Combat Support System. It took seven years and more than $1 billion for that plan to be scrapped. John McCain joked about ECSS, “At least they got the toilet seat. Out of this, they got nothing.”

This same motif held with regard to the military’s promises about “audit readiness.” The Pentagon initially said it would be ready to be audited by 1997. After that date passed with a yawn, Pentagon officials made a series of bold promises.

In 2003, Defense comptroller Dov Zakheim told the House Budget Committee, “We anticipate having a clean audit by 2007.” Soon after disavowing that promise, he said, “The further we dug . . . the more difficulties turned up.”

In 2005, the Pentagon began supplementing its verbal promises with reports called the Financial Improvement and Audit Readiness (FIAR) plan. This report basically told you every year that we were getting closer to sorting all this stuff out. Some excerpts:

December 2005: “Progress has been achieved.” September 2006: “Progress has been made.” September 2007: “Progress has been made in several areas.” March 2008: “Substantial progress has been made.” March 2009: “Significant progress has been made, but much needs to be done.”"



https://www.rollingstone.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/03/trump-troops.jpg?w=1024
President Donald Trump speaks at a hanger rally at Al Asad Air Base, Iraq.


"The Pentagon had been attempting to conduct department-wide audits dating back to 1996. By the mid-2000s, perhaps 100 auditors from the DoD inspector general, plus a hundred or more from the various services, were annually trying to create a single financial statement, despite an almost complete lack of audit-trail information. They made some helpful recommendations, but would never get very far before concluding an audit was not possible.

“We were trying to make chicken soup out of chicken shit,” says an auditor, with a sad laugh.

After nearly 15 years of such exercises, Grassley grew so furious that he introduced an amendment ordering the Pentagon to stop trying to audit itself until it was capable of doing something useful. The amendment passed and lived on as Section 1003 of the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act.

The 2010 NDAA amendment also ordered the Pentagon to actually be ready by 2017. “It was, ‘Start over and get it done,’ ” says Grassley now.

The Grassley amendment stopped the annual mobilization of hundreds of auditors, but didn’t stop the audits completely. The two competing laws — the CFO Act and the 2010 NDAA — created a literal Catch-22, with the services both ordered and not ordered by law to complete audits of themselves.

The services tried to spend their way out of the problem. Incredibly, they began competing to see how much they could blow on audit-readiness programs. In 1997, the Army splurged at least $4 billion on the Global Combat Support System, which the Center for Public Integrity said was designed to centralize a dozen different outmoded accounting systems. The smaller Marine Corps developed its own system with the same name, and dropped $1 billion.

The GAO in 2009 then issued a report complaining $6 billion had already been spent in audit preparation. According to the GAO, it took that much money to get the Pentagon to a place where it could accurately track incoming appropriations.

In 2011, then-Defense comptroller Robert Hale confessed to Congress, “We don’t really fully understand in the Department of Defense what you have to do to pass an audit for military service, because we have never done it.”

Translation: Despite having 60,000 financial-management employees who’d had 21 years to wrap their heads around the task of producing financial statements, Hale admitted none had taken the plunge: “You can’t learn to swim on the beach.”

Speaking of beaches, Hale said he hoped to use the Marine Corps as an accounting “beachhead,” because it was ahead of the other services in terms of auditability. But a 2011 “trial audit” of the Marines ended in catastrophe. The inspector general found it couldn’t account for $2 billion in expenditures. It sounds worse when you consider they were only auditing a $4 billion portion of the Marines’ budget.

The Marines doubled down. In 2014, the Pentagon announced the Corps passed an audit for 2012. The event was so momentous, they marked the occasion in the Pentagon’s Hall of Heroes. Then-Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel was presented with a framed certification of the “clean” opinion. Hagel, a consistent ally of defense, beamed as he said, “We don’t spend a lot of time using big megaphones to tout our great accomplishments. . . . We get the job done.”

But word began to spread that the Marine audit was again a con job. “It was an intellectual exercise in cheating and deception,” says Grassley, whose office was in the middle of the effort to get the inspector general’s office to re-examine the results. Within a year, the inspector general withdrew its approval. “Our opinion on the FY 2012 United States Marine Corps,” it said, “is not to be relied upon.”

Even worse, it then came out that the inspector general’s office was sending emails down the
chain, pressuring auditors to agree with an outside auditing firm, which already had a record of flawed audits of the Marine Corps. This should have been a red flag, according to retired military auditor Jack Armstrong.

“Why wouldn’t you want to train a very close eye when you’ve already had suspicions about the quality of their work?” says Armstrong.

Then-Defense Department comptroller Mike McCord was philosophical about the Marine fiasco. “It’s a learning experience,” he said.

AFTER ALL OF these false starts, it soon became clear that the only way to get the Pentagon to actually fix itself would be if Congress stopped sending money. Starting in 2012, a succession of legislators in both the House and Senate, including Tom Coburn, R-Okla.; Barbara Lee, D-Calif.; Ron Wyden, D-Ore.; Rand Paul, R-Ky.; Bernie Sanders, I-Vt.; and John McCain, R-Ariz., tried to introduce amendments yanking funding if the Pentagon didn’t correct itself.

“None have made it into law,” says Mandy Smithberger of the Project on Government Oversight.

A major problem is campaign finance reform. Ask Hill staffers why it’s hard to pass any bill that even contemplates withholding funding for the Pentagon, and they say you’ll run smack into a bipartisan batch of refuseniks who’ve been gorging on defense-sector campaign contributions, thanks to their status on committees like Armed Services or Appropriations.

“You can’t get the Pentagon to take an audit seriously unless you threaten to stop funding, and you can’t stop funding without campaign finance reform,” says one Hill staffer.

Unfortunately, the annual audit has now created a secondary cash flow for the accounting firms, which have formally entered the family of permanent high-end military contractors like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing and Raytheon.

The money now flows out in two directions. One estimate puts the annual cost for accounting at about a billion: $400 million a year for the audits by firms like Ernst & Young, and about $600 million for firms like Deloitte to fix problems identified by said audits.

The Pentagon can keep accountants busy forever simply doing the taxonomic job of describing its inauditability. The Defense Department employs 3 million people, has 280 ships, nearly 16,000 planes and 585,000 “facilities” in at least 80 countries. You’ve heard of “too big to fail” — the DoD’s universe is too big to count. “Impossible. . . . We can’t do it. . . . It’s too big,” one exasperated DoD official complained.

“They’re telling us it’s going to get worse before it gets better,” is how one Hill staffer puts it.

If auditors ultimately make sense of all their work, it’s worth it. But they could easily just keep inching toward compliance forever. “For a billion dollars a year,” says Grassley, “you ought to see progress.”

In April 2016, U.S. Comptroller General Gene Dodaro testified before the Senate that the Pentagon had spent up to $10 billion to modernize its accounting systems. Those attempts, he said, had “not yielded positive results.”

Two years later, Sens. Grassley and Sanders, along with Wyden and others, were asking Dodaro in a letter why no progress had been made toward getting those systems in place. “Are you going to finish it in my lifetime?” a Hill staffer is said to have demanded in a meeting with Dodaro. He got no answer.

Sanders last year introduced an amendment to ding the Pentagon for 0.5 percent of its funding until it passes (not takes, but passes) an audit. He failed, but is going to keep trying. For his office, the Pentagon audit issue is as much about misplaced social priorities as it is about waste and mismanagement.

“Over and over again, we’ve been told we cannot afford to guarantee health care as a right, make public colleges tuition-free, or seriously address any of the needs of the working class,” Sanders says. “When it comes to the massive waste, fraud and abuse at the Pentagon, there’s a deafening silence.”

Both Sanders and Grassley have been tilting at the Pentagon windmill for decades now, from opposite ends of the political spectrum. For Grassley, there is a sense of exhaustion.

Asked how much progress has been made toward creating a workable accounting system at the Pentagon, he says, “At my level, I would have to say zero.” He pauses. “Based on the track record, it seems like they don’t want to fix it.”

All this history sums up the conundrum. A Republican waste-hawk like Grassley laments the inability/unwillingness of the Pentagon to implement a modern, corporate-style, unified accounting system, and is convinced there will never be a clean audit until one is developed.

Meanwhile, a progressive like Sanders, who is anxious to dial back Pentagon spending as part of a general rethink of our national priorities, laments the inability/unwillingness of Congress to take the real steps needed to enforce compliance. The system of campaign contributions that keeps key committees captive probably locks this problem in place, until there’s reform on that end.

Both senators, unfortunately, have legitimate concerns. The twin obstacles to a true audit — one logistical, one political — are reasons few on the Hill feel confident a clean opinion is coming anytime soon. As one Hill staffer puts it, “DoD loves to find inefficiencies. It just means more they can spend.” He adds, “Every year, you know they’re going to get that $700 billion. That’s not going to change.”

Until someone passes a law with real teeth, that really threatens cuts of military appropriations, the most likely eventuality is the Department of Defense continuing to take and flunk audits at great expense in perpetuity. At best, each year we may end up getting a conclusion like this one about the 2018 audit, from the Pentagon’s inspector general. “The most important outcome . . . was not the overall opinion,” the IG wrote, “but that . . . the DoD makes progress.”

It’s impossible to overstate the enormity of the problem the DoD’s stalled audit poses. The fact that it can’t pass audit means the entire government is in the same boat. Until the Pentagon gets a passing grade, the whole United States will annually receive what’s called a “disclaimer of opinion” on its finances, which is accounting-ese for “Incomplete.”

DioGuardi, who set all this in motion 30 years ago, says no publicly traded company could issue a bond without passing an audit first. But the U.S. issues hundreds of billions in bonds, despite the gaping hole in its books caused by the endless unresolved problem at the Department of Defense. “From an accounting point of view,” he says, “it’s a horror story.”

“Ernst & Young will eat them alive,” says Andy. “It’s so much worse than people think.”

Just over 50 years ago, Dwight Eisenhower gave his famous farewell address warning of the power of the “military-industrial complex.” The former war commander bemoaned the creation of a “permanent armaments industry of vast proportions,” and said the “potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Eisenhower’s warning is celebrated by the left as a caution against the overweening political power of warmakers, but as we’re now seeing, it was predictive also as a fiscal conservative’s nightmare vision of the future. The military has become an unstoppable mechanism for hoovering up taxpayer dollars and deploying them in the most inefficient manner possible. Schools crumble, hospitals and obstetric centers close all over the country, but the armed services are filling warehouses for some programs with “1,000 years’ worth of inventory,” as one Navy logistics officer recently put it.

It’s the ultimate example of the immutability of the American political system. Even when there’s broad bipartisan consensus, and laws passed, and both money allocated for changes and agencies created to enact them — if the problem is big enough, time bends toward corruption, and chaos always outlasts reform. Eisenhower couldn’t have predicted how right he was."

***



By Matt Taibbi
Source: rollingstone.com (https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/pentagon-budget-mystery-807276/)

[Gio]

Travel video volgs help me get over any desire to leave home ...
Still i really appreciate those who provide the glimpse's into ...


Getting Lost in HONG KONG & Finding a German Pub

Gabriel Traveler

"Exploring the Kowloon district of Hong Kong, China on my first day in the city."

Published on Mar 18, 2019

12:03 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiVvBwfXMo&t=606s

[Gio]

Hey ...


https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fmedia.giphy.com%2Fmedia%2Fg7z9zD7 Im5Y4w%2Fgiphy.gif&f=1

Mr. Spaceman


The Byrds



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3KFTm9vmZDI

[Dreamtimer]

I miss seeing Matt Taibi on the tube. But I'm glad he writes for Rolling Stone. He doesn't mince words.

[Gio]

Next ... (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/deutsche-bank-donald-trump.html)


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c910e89d87bdc5978194f6f/1:1/w_500%2Cc_limit/DC031919.jpg

[Gio]

#300 ... http://www.tiptopglobe.com/skin/smile/kat2/smileys-free-download-2610.gif


***



Next ... (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/18/business/deutsche-bank-donald-trump.html)


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c910e89d87bdc5978194f6f/1:1/w_500%2Cc_limit/DC031919.jpg

[Gio]

♪ The teacher don't know about how to deal
With the student body (huh, huh) ♪ (https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2019-03-18/french-cardinal-meets-pope-after-saying-he-would-offer-resignation)


https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fi.startsatsixty.com.au%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F20170605050935%2Fnun-ruler-170604.jpg&f=1

Adult Education


Daryl Hall and John Oates



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0S-peWLpRUM

[Aragorn]

R.I.P. Dick Dale ─ 04.05.1937 - 16.03.2019




https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZIU0RMV_II8

[Gio]

Yeah some sad new ~ And where would all those white breed Americans have gotten their surfing life soundtracks ... If it weren't for these immigrant 'types' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Dale)

https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fichef.bbci.co.uk%2Fimages%2Fic%2F 960x540%2Fp01bqvc1.jpg&f=1

[Gio]

An introduction ... (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zm8KlumNk1U)


https://proxy.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Fyt3.ggpht.com%2Fa-%2FACSszfGdJr3FomfNHBj0_Nh3V5oLh7N5JmVO6MRQhg%3Ds9 00-mo-c-c0xffffffff-rj-k-no&f=1

Another young video vloger i have been following is Daze with Jordan the Lion (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMC9R6OigawtoVTG_qHFMoQ) ...
For those that enjoy all things Hollywoodland this young man's odd/videos format can be addicting ...

Here is an example for ya, noting though you don't see him (or his little doggie friend) in this particular one ... Here he and others are touring a supposed vortex kind of haunted/place ... kinda like the Eceti ranch phenomena vibe - If you know what i mean ...



Jordan The Lion Vlog (1/30/19)

#907 Inside A FAMOUS Beverly Hills GHOST HOUSE on CIELO Dr.

Published on Jan 30, 2019

30:22 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZ8uoMkWwQo

[Gio]

Meanwhile ~ 'Houston We Have A Problem' ...

Yeah right no health hazard here ...

Via Fox Non/Fake News ...


Fire rages at Texas chemical plant near Houston


Fox News
Published on Mar 18, 2019

2:17 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jvybSpv9kYw

[Gio]

Yeah so it's come down to this ...
From a guy who once said he never had a real UFO experience ...
Who's now marketing his spilll all the way towards Disclosure ...:rolleyes:




https://pbs.twimg.com/profile_images/979884884876513280/zmHzeXfW_bigger.jpg Richard Dolan
‏@RichDolan
Mar 18

Alien Head Disclosure Coffee Mug ☕ http://bit.ly/2FaJ3h4

Black #coffee mug. The cup features Richard Dolan's ������#Alien #disclosure logo painted in detail across the front. The paint is then glazed over, so it will never wear out #UFO Get yours today!

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/D1-GUHHX4AA08Wr.jpg

[Gio]

The obvious truth of the matter ...



https://i.pinimg.com/564x/0c/bb/2d/0cbb2d0d0a7d3eea8b8be7596b1fee66.jpg

[Elen]

The obvious truth of the matter ...



https://i.pinimg.com/564x/0c/bb/2d/0cbb2d0d0a7d3eea8b8be7596b1fee66.jpg

:ha:

[Gio]

"Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" - is an upcoming mystery crime film centered around the Manson Family murders, directed and written by Quentin Tarantino. It features an ensemble cast, including Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio, Margot Robbie, Dakota Fanning, James Marsden, Clifton Collins Jr., Timothy Olyphant, Emile Hirsch, Scoot McNairy, Damian Lewis, Burt Reynolds and Al Pacino. The film will be released on August 9, 2019, coinciding with the 50th anniversary of the Tate–LaBianca murders.... More here (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Once_Upon_a_Time_in_Hollywood)

Official Trailer (2019)

Moviefone
Published on Mar 20, 2019

1:37 minutes

http://yoursmiles.org/psmile/orator/p0901.gif 'Lights Action Camera Roll-em' https://www.amperordirect.com/mm5/website_v3/images/emoticons/movie.gif



https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5MKjC9BEY4&t=0s

[Gio]

'He's pretty brave' ...

Mark Normand: Women On Dating Apps Are Height Supremacists

CONAN on TBS

Team Coco
Published on Mar 20, 2019

4:42 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pIuOhoPB6U8

[Gio]

The Spring & Sun Have Sprung ...

EARTH-DIRECTED SOLAR FLARE/CME: (AR2736) March 20th, 2019.

2:16 minutes


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNnRvYeoQxk&feature=em-uploademail

[Dreamtimer]

I like the music that goes along with the video. Glad it's not X class.

[Gio]

R.I.P. ...


https://media.newyorker.com/photos/5c93b746fd08e8090beac350/4:3/w_446,c_limit/DC032119.jpg

“And another thing . . .”

[Gio]

If
Chaos
is
king ...

The
Kingdom
will
fall.