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  1. #196
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    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/buyers-remorse/

    Buyer’s Remorse


    The Narrative is dead! Long live The Narrative!

    That’s what played on CNN, NBC, and The New York Times yesterday as they struggled to digest the parting meal Robert Mueller served to the RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger with a side of crow-flavored fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison cherry on top with his statement that “…while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

    Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better, could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official finding that no crime was committed is, ipso facto, an exoneration, and to impute otherwise is a serious breach of his role in this legal melodrama. Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to traffic in defamation, aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal charges. So, it will be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say when Jerrold Nadler reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably he will, to do to some ‘splainin.’

    What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.

    The Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living shit out of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank dishonesty. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN, went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower Meeting in which the president’s son, Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton’s “oppo” research contractor. In other words, Trump Junior was set up.

    That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK’s MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show star, and to disable him afterwards — also of the news media’s role in the whole interminable scam of RussiaGate. Their fury and despair were as vivid the night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.

    Rachel Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years playing Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of Mr. Trump getting raked over the coals by the DOJ’s Southern District of NY prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted — really, whatever they might find if they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she doesn’t know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons. In places like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, you first choose a person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one is easily manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you can launch a prosecution. Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will advise the avid staff of the Southern District of NY how this works.

    There remains also, the rather sweeping panorama of misconduct and probable crime among the government (and former government) players in the agencies mentioned above. Does the full Mueller Report mention, for instance, that the animating document claiming that Trump colluded with Russia was manufactured by Mrs. Clinton’s employees? And that this document was used time and again improperly and illegally to prolong the inquisition? How could Mr. Mueller not acknowledge that? And if not, what sort of investigation was this?

    You are forced to ask: did Mr. Mueller play an honorable role in this epic, multilayered scandal? And is Mr. Mueller himself an honorable character, or something less than that? I believe we’ll find out. The other team is coming to bat now — and just in time for MLB’s opening day, too. The Mueller report has been a shocking disappointment to the so-called “resistance,” but what about the as-yet-unreleased DOJ Inspector General’s report on these very matters? Or the parallel investigation of federal prosecutor John Huber, who is charged specifically with looking into the malfeasance of the RussiaGate investigators? Or whatever action the Attorney General himself launches in the wake of all this? Or whether Mr. Trump finally declassifies the mountains of documents behind the simple failure to find him guilty of any crime?

    My favorite college professor and mentor, David Hamilton, once put a curious question to us when we were vexing him for some reason now forgotten: “Why,” he asked, “Did Achilles drag Hector around the city of Troy three times?”
    We twiddled our cigarettes and pulled our chins.
    “Because he was just that pissed,” he said.

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  3. #197
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    This is a ridiculous response by Kunstler...he must be much dumber than his station in life would normally require...just kidding but really it's a true statement

    I should point out that Mueller DOES know better...he could not in clear conscience walk away from this without a guarded caveat stating, in effect, that Trump is quite the dubious character.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  5. #198
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    It's weird watching the media play out the drama. It's almost like I can see the script.

    It's disturbing watching so many people blatantly lie to the American peoples' face. It used to be they couched stuff.

    It's disturbing to see how many people ignore the actual facts which are actually available and have been all along.

    People want to pretend opinions and beliefs are facts.

    There are very few who stand out as both seeing and saying the truth for what it is.

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  7. #199
    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by Dreamtimer View Post
    People want to pretend opinions and beliefs are facts.
    As well as the opposite. It has been my experience that many US Americans consider proven facts to merely be somebody's belief system. The cognitive dissonance is great.
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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  9. #200
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    Trump himself is the liar in chief. It has been said that when one lies they are demonstrating contempt for the recipient. In this case, Trump is showing contempt for the American public.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  11. #201
    Administrator Aragorn's Avatar
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    Quote Originally posted by NotAPretender View Post
    Trump himself is the liar in chief. It has been said that when one lies they are demonstrating contempt for the recipient. In this case, Trump is showing contempt for the American public.
    What else would you expect from a clinical narcissist?
    = DEATH BEFORE DISHONOR =

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  13. #202
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    Honest to God, they get no lower than that animal. Now he wants to turn over the Affordable Care Act. What creature would be capable of that.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  15. #203
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    Around 45 million are now enrolled. We have 350 million people. That's a big chunk. That's a nutso thing to propose. Trump has no alternate plan.

    As a matter of fact, Obamacare was based on Romneycare which was originally created and promoted by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

    See how weirdly things come full circle sometimes?

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  17. #204
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    it isn't political for Trump...it is something deeper in his black heart and soul
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  19. #205
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    That's the scary part. He doesn't care if he wrecks what he plans on leaving behind. Even America. As long as he's rich. And maybe also a dictator. He clearly cares little about the Constitution.

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  21. #206
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    A hilarious assessment of the current state of the Brexit Omnishambles / Clusterfuck / National disaster (choose your own metaphor, none of them are adequate in any case):

    https://www.independent.co.uk/voices...-a8843091.html

    Theresa May is reduced to begging someone - anyone - to take back control from her, but nobody will

    The briefest flash of the ankle of power, and Boris Johnson's principles left him as fast as one of his families

    Where can you even start? What can you possibly say? Farce doesn’t do it justice. It has too many layers, too many faces for that. In the House of Commons on Wednesday morning, afternoon and late into the night, Inception crashed into Fawlty Towers at such high speed they carried the nation into a new dimension of the ridiculous.

    If the guy who wrote House of Cards had been there, he’d have laughed at the sheer preposterousness of it all. Which, naturally, he was. As Theresa May wandered into a grand committee room in the bowels of the Palace of Westminster, to offer her own party her own political suicide as a way of keeping her political dignity on life support for another twenty four hours, there was Michael, or more accurately, Lord, Dobbs, joking that he was “auditioning for his next series,” to anyone who’d listen.

    What he saw was not so much a House of Cards as a great Tower of Bullshit, falling suddenly away under the gentlest of nudges and smothering everyone inside under its deathly weight.

    “You’re tired. You want this to end.” They were the words with which the Prime Minister tried to hypno-bully the country and the nation into supporting her, just a week ago. Well it turns out, no. They don’t want it to end. On this “day of history”, the day that “parliament took back control” of Brexit, parliament found out just as quick as everybody else who’s ever been anywhere near it, that they don’t actually want control of it at all.

    That, at the end, of six hours debate and two hours of voting, Westminster’s 650 MPs rejected every single one of the eight ways out of Brexit that had been put before them, is the climax to which we will return later.

    Before then, came Theresa May’s last roll of the dice, which was to fire the gun on the Tory leadership contest, mainly in the hope that it might prove enough of a distraction that her MPs might pass her deal, almost by accident.

    It was in its way, a Sixth Sense style plot twist. With Theresa May’s conditional offer of resignation, nothing actually changed, other than to show in startling clarity what had been there all along. Brexit was never about Brexit. It was, is, now and ever shall be, the 10,000 mile an hour clown car vehicle for the latest Tory party power struggle. And this was the moment a naive nation looked suddenly into Bruce Willis’s eyes. I see shit people.

    You do indeed, and none more so than Boris Johnson, who confronted with only the briefest flash of the ankle of power, found his principles yet again walking out on him as fast as one of his families.

    For anyone even a fraction less shameful, which is to say the rest of the human race in its entirety, it might be just a tiny bit awkward if all you’ve been doing for the last year is writing the same newspaper column over and over again, finding new, exciting and ideally Latin ways to say how terrible Theresa May’s deal is. And then, when it looks like backing it might steal you a couple of inches in the march to 10 Downing Street, you don’t even hesitate for so much as a nanosecond.

    Quite bizarrely, when, at around, 6pm, he told a meeting of the European Research Group that, you know, that’s me done lads, thanks for the research eh, some of them seemed surprised. Jacob Rees-Mogg had already backed the deal by this point, deciding via a column in the morning’s Daily Mail that a UK reduced to what he had recently called a “slave state” was where he wanted to live after all.

    Mark Francois slammed a door. Steve Baker told them all he was “so angry he could bulldoze the whole place into the river”. Poor mites. For the bigger boys, it had always been a little game. But no one told the little ones. They really believed.
    As Boris Johnson emerged, his friends, his beliefs but never himself sold out yet again, and a journalist shouted at him: “Boris, have you just put the UK in a suicide vest and handed Michel Barnier the trigger?”

    This, you see, is one of around a hundred such hilarious descriptions of the deal he now supports, written by one Boris Johnson in the Daily Telegraph, when having resigned as foreign secretary (over the deal he now backs, obviously) he found himself with nothing better to do than return to life of a columnist, with a carefully honed specialism in castigating the achievements of an astonishingly bad government of which he had been by some margin the worst member.

    Not that any of it is going to matter. For the early signs are that Theresa May, in a rare synergy of both her invincibility and performance art levels of incompetence, may very well have tried to end her political career, but failed.

    “Back my deal and I’ll stand down.” They were the clear instructions. Not so much a “back me or sack me” plea as a back me then sack me. But they’ve refused to sack her. At around 9pm, the Democratic Unionist Party decided they couldn’t back the deal. The numbers she needed were never going to be there. And, in any case, in the House of Commons, Speaker Bercow had already made abundantly clear that he’s got no intention of allowing a third vote on her withdrawal deal, and unless that changes, even her own self-inflicted end appears to be off limits.
    I have written many times that Theresa May has ascended to the superhero level. She is immortal. She cannot be defeated. She always finds a way to survive. But rare, perhaps non-existent are the comic book characters invincible even to their own powers. Here was Theresa the Terminator, descending into the open flames and still not melting.

    In the meantime, as Tories marched in and out of committee rooms, another six hours of Brexit debate rattled around the Commons. The “historic” indicative votes took place and every single option was rejected. No to a second referendum, no to a customs union, no to revoking Article 50, no to no deal, no to unicorns, no to everything.

    The only way out of the mess, now is to vote for Theresa May’s deal in a vote the speaker won’t let her hold. Nothing, in its own terrifying way, has changed. Nothing ever will. Nothing ever can. A nation buried alive by Brexit.

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  23. #207
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    Bill Maher makes an excellent point about why people living in European-style social democracies with Universal Healthcare, Free College, A proper Social Safety net, etc... are so much happier than those that live in countries with unfettered capitalism, all about corporate greed. The USA is certainly one, but most third-world countries, such as India, and Ironically, China, are in this latter category. I personally think that social solidarity of this kind makes societies much more collapse-proof and survivable if the Shit Really Hits the Fan.


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  25. #208
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    Thanks for posting this, Chris. I saw it, but hadn't watched yet.

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  27. #209
    Senior Member Emil El Zapato's Avatar
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    enforced social solidarity? Isn't that something other than unfettered Capitalism.

    We are looking at a social structure as it exists in the here and now. Anything that is functional today will not be in a hundred years. We can be flexible and go with the flow for a time, but eventually, a new and improved paradigm will have to manifest or we will find ourselves in the equatorial jungles and forests sitting and chanting to Quetzalcoatl for daily sustenance. Not exactly the fruition of higher man.
    Last edited by Emil El Zapato, 31st March 2019 at 17:58.
    “El revolucionario: te meteré la bota en el culo"

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  29. #210
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    Kunstler trying to scare the Bejesus out of everyone, but North Americans in particular. I personally feel that 2019-2020 is going to see some major catastrophic events, even earth changes, so he may yet be proven right. I still remember reading the Long Emergency back in 2007-2008, just after the Lehman Brothers collapse (which hit Singapore, the country I was living in at the time, particularly hard) and I was amazed at how many things Kunstler's gotten right with his predictions of doom. He even predicted the rise of piracy and the rise of pirate states, such as Somalia, which wasn't yet a thing at the time.

    http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nati...cal-anxieties/

    Biblical Anxieties

    The sore beset people of this land may be good and goddam sick of politics, RussiaGate, and Trump-inspired social strife, but they may soon have something more down-to-earth to worry about: Biblical floods and plagues.

    Media hysteria around the Mueller Report has nearly eclipsed news of historic flooding in the midwest that has already caused $3 billion in damage to farms, homes, livestock, and infrastructure. With spring rainfall already at 200 percent of normal levels, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) issued a statement in late March saying, “This is shaping up to be a potentially unprecedented flood season, with more than 200 million people at risk for flooding in their communities.”

    More to the point, two major western dams show disturbing signs of potential failure that may bring on unprecedented disasters. The Oroville Dam on the Feather River north of Sacramento — the highest earthen dam in the US — nearly blew out in February 2017 when record rains damaged the main spillway, threatening to send a 30-foot wall of water downstream towards California’s capital and towns along the way. When that spillway was closed to assess the damage, which was significant, the secondary emergency spillway was opened for the first time since the dam was built in 1968. It too started disintegrating and before long Lake Oroville began flowing over the top of the dam itself. The state had to order evacuation of 188,000 people in three counties. Frantic efforts to drop sandbags from helicopters stabilized the damage and, luckily, the rain stopped.

    Subsequent lawsuits against the state’s Department of Water Resources revealed shoddy maintenance, theft of equipment, and poor record keeping. Now, two years later, new cracks have appeared in the repaired Oroville Dam main spillway. The Sierra Nevada snowpack stands at 153 percent above average, and the National Weather Service predicts that weak El Nino conditions with above-average Pacific Ocean temperatures are likely to produce above-average rainfall this spring along with the snowpack melt.

    The Fort Peck Dam on the upper Missouri River in Montana is likewise troubling experts watching a record snowpack in the Rocky Mountains. It too is an earthen dam — the world’s largest by volume — filled with hydraulic slurry. Because it is located on the flat high plains, the dam is extremely long, running 21,000 feet — about four miles — from end to end. Behind it is a reservoir that is the fifth-largest man-made lake in the nation.

    Concern is rising because the coming snow melt coincides with unusually active seismic activity around the Yellowstone Caldera, one of the world’s super-volcanos. The slurry construction of the dam inclines it to liquification when the ground shakes. Failure of the Fort Peck dam would send the equivalent of a whole year’s flow of the Missouri River downstream in one release that could potentially wash away the other five downstream dams in the Missouri River Mainstem Reservoir System, along with every bridge from Montana to St. Louis, an unimaginable amount of farm and town infrastructure, and several nuclear power installations. It would be the greatest national disaster in US history. Just sayin’.

    A shy, science-nerd correspondent writes: “Epidemiologists speculate that a flooding event in Central Asia steppes triggered the 1347 Eurasian plague outbreak. Rumors of a mass human die-off in India reached Europe in the mid-1340’s. The Mongols besieging the coastal city of Trebizond on the shore of the Black Sea catapulted plague infested corpses over the city walls and Italian merchant ships fleeing Trebizond carried the infestation to Genoa which foolishly permitted the dying crew to land…. Rodents hosting plague spreading fleas typically inhabit arid grassland regions such as the Great Plains of America and the semi deserts of California and New Mexico. The current flooding of the American Mid-West and the mass dumping of flood tainted wheat, corn and soybeans will likely spark a rodent population explosion in the region, which in the context of rat-swarming homeless encampments may yield a 1347 repeat event in North America during the 2020s. What happened before can happen again.”

    The homeless camps around Los Angeles have turned up cases of other medieval-type diseases typical of human settlements before public sanitation became a standard feature of civilized life: Many are spread through feces (as well as drug use): Hepatitis A, Typhus, shigellosis (or trench fever, spread through body lice), and tuberculosis. Gawd knows what is coming across the border into America’s proudly leading “sanctuary state.” Wait for it. Just sayin’.

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