The FBI has announced that it has completed its probe, and that it feels that no charges are justified.
It was a whole lot of nothing from the perspective of a criminal investigation, though some people involved should have their clearances pullec.
The FBI has announced that it has completed its probe, and that it feels that no charges are justified.
It was a whole lot of nothing from the perspective of a criminal investigation, though some people involved should have their clearances pullec.
It appears that the elections called by Malcolm Trumbull just made Australia’s approval of the TPP next to impossible in the near future:
With a new Senate likely to be hostile to free trade deals, the road to signing the Trans-Pacific Partnership just got bumpy, writes Richard Denniss.
One thing that is certain after Saturday’s election, the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) is dead, and along with it the Coalition’s economic agenda and narrative. The free trade agreements that Andrew Robb signed with China, Korea, and Japan were some of Tony Abbott’s proudest achievements, yet they are exactly the sort of deals that Pauline Hanson, Nick Xenophon, and Jacqui Lambie believe cost Australian manufacturing workers jobs.
And thanks to Malcolm Turnbull’s new Senate voting rules and double dissolution election, Hanson, Xenophon, and Lambie are now the block of votes that the Coalition will need to win over to pass their legislation when the ALP and Greens are opposed.
This may not kill the TPP, but it has the effect of making the timetable Obama that wants (he sees it as a presidential legacy issus), where there is a lame duck vote, next to impossible.
It is not clear who will win the election, but it is clear that the Colalition will not have the votes to pass TPP without significant support from smaller parties because the Senate is looking to be a complete mess, and unlike other upper houses in the British Commonwealth, the Australian Senate is much more powerful, being somewhat analogous to the US Senate in power.
Again, good news, because much like CETA and the TPIP, the TPP is a horribly flawed “trade deal.”
The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) between the EU and Canada now must be approved by individual parliaments, and not the European Council and European Parliament:
The European Commission performed a startling U-turn on its landmark trade agreement with Canada on Tuesday, succumbing to pressure from France and Germany by deciding that national parliaments would have to ratify the deal.
The need for approval from almost 40 national and regional assemblies not only threatens to scupper the Canadian deal itself, but delivers an ominous signal to British politicians who insist that the U.K. could negotiate a quick post-Brexit trade accord with the EU.
Speaking in Strasbourg, Trade Commissioner Cecilia Malmström said the EU had decided to call the Canada deal a “mixed agreement.” This means that the bloc’s most significant trade deal to date is now hostage to hostile lawmakers in parliaments ranging from Romania to the Belgian region of Wallonia.
I think that this development is being driven by two things:
I think that this also means that the trade deal, which is a kind of mini-TTIP will not happen in the next 12 months or so, if at all:
The decision, taken during a meeting of the EU’s commissioners in Strasbourg, represented a surprising volte-face because the Commission had hoped to treat the accord as an EU-only deal, meaning it would require approval only from the European Parliament and national governments in the Council.
The Canadian deal has stoked sensitivities across Europe primarily because it is seen as a precursor to the far more contentious Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership with the U.S.
Matthias Fekl, France’s trade minister, said it was “unbelievable” that Brussels had been planning to treat the deal as an exclusively EU competence.
“I find it even more hallucinatory only a few days after the result of the British referendum that one could envisage this type of procedure at the level of the European Commission,” he told the news agency AFP in an interview.
The tortuous path to approve the deal will sound alarms in London, where politicians are pinning their hopes on a quick settlement with the EU after Brexit. Debates in national parliaments could potentially add years of delay to the Canadian accord, which has already taken seven years to finalize.
It isn’t often that you get a diplomat using the adjective hallucinatory.
This also does not bode well for the TTIP.
Considering the impacts of such trade deals, inflated pharmaceutical prices, destructive capital flows, increased financialization of economies, etc. This is a good thing.
The warning signs were there for Team Trump: pic.twitter.com/8Nwc30Ddnl— Matt Ortega (@MattOrtega) July 5, 2016
If you don’t get the reference, just read a f%$3ing newspaper.
A few days ago, I made a comment on a Facebook post in response to the an assertion that the British have no leverage in negotiating the Brexit.
I noted that Britain is by far the most EU migrants of any nation in the organization, and that they could use that as leverage in negotiations.
FWIW, the numbers are pretty stark: 1.2 million Britons living in other EU countries versus 3.3 million EU citizens living in the UK.
I would also argue that a larger proportion of the British expats are pensioners than the EU expats, because people don’t tend to move to England to retire, they move to England to work.
In any case, the Conservative Party has announced that any decision on the status of EU citizens living in the UK would be the product of the negotiating process:
British immigration minister James Brokenshire told the House of Commons Monday that the government cannot make any promises about the future of EU citizens in the U.K.
It would be “unwise” to tell them they can stay before the U.K. has negotiated with other EU countries about the rights of British nationals living elsewhere in Europe.
Brokenshire added that if the government made a promise now, that could trigger more migrants to come to the EU.
He also said that “EU nationals continue to be welcome here in the meantime.”
“EU nationals can have our full reassurance that their right to enter, work and study in the U.K. remains unchanged.”
………
The debate came after Home Secretary Theresa May, who is in the race to become the next Conservative party leader, on Sunday said that the position of EU nationals remains unclear.
The irony here is that May is an opponent of Brexit, while her opponents for party leader, Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom, are both saying that expelling EU nationals in the UK should not be on the table.
Needless to say, the status of EU nationals in the UK has to be on the table, particularly if Article 50 is invokes, as Brussels has no reason to negotiate in good faith otherwise, and every reason to allow the clock to run out, so as to punish the UK for leaving.
People ignore experts because the experts have been systematically misleading them about what the benefits of policies are likely to be.
—Sandwichman at Angry Bear
He is talking about how various “experts” are perplexed by the fact that a majority of the voters in the UK ignored them and voted for Brexit.
As he notes, the experts for years have been saying that structures can be established for the winners to support the losers, but the policies they support not only make 90% of the population worse off, but it diminishes the political, economic, and, social power of the bottom 90%, which means a withdrawal of support.
This leads to more policies that disadvantage a majority of the population, further increase the power and wealth of the elites.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
It appears that in response to the Brexit vote, house prices in London have fallen.
This is actually a good thing. Ordinary people have been priced out of London by overpaid parasites from the City of London (investment banking), and foreigners who are using London real estate to as a way to hide and protect their ill gotten gains:
Thousands of London homes have had their prices slashed since the Brexit vote a week ago amid warnings of a slump in the stunned housing market, the Standard reveals today.
An Evening Standard analysis has found a huge spike in nervous home owners cutting their asking prices after the surprise result of the referendum last Friday morning unleashed what was described as “a perfect storm” by one leading investor.
The impact is expected to be most severe in the new luxury development along the river from Vauxhall to Docklands where falls of as much as 40 per cent are feared.
One central London branch manager at one of the capital’s biggest firms said: ”The whole thing is a disaster. The uncertainty will cause the markets to crumble and who knows when that is going to get better.
This is things getting better.
Rich people lose money, and ordinary people may be able to shorten their commute a bit.
Elie Wiesel, has died at age 87:
Elie Wiesel, the Auschwitz survivor who became an eloquent witness for the six million Jews slaughtered in World War II and who, more than anyone else, seared the memory of the Holocaust on the world’s conscience, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan. He was 87.
Menachem Rosensaft, a longtime friend and the founding chairman of the International Network of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, confirmed the death in a phone call.
Mr. Wiesel, a charismatic lecturer and humanities professor, was the author of several dozen books. In 1986, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. But he was defined not so much by the work he did as by the gaping void he filled. In the aftermath of the Germans’ systematic massacre of Jews, no voice had emerged to drive home the enormity of what had happened and how it had changed mankind’s conception of itself and of God. For almost two decades, the traumatized survivors — and American Jews, guilt-ridden that they had not done more to rescue their brethren — seemed frozen in silence.
He will be missed.
As more political fallout from the Brexit vote accumulates we have another supporter of leaving the EU is calling it quit.
The head of UKIP, Nigel Farage is stepping down as head of the party:
He spent nearly 20 years pushing for Britain to leave the European Union, and having succeeded in his aim, he is now taking his leave.
Nigel Farage, the politician who probably did more than any other to force the referendum on British membership in the European Union, resigned on Monday as leader of the right-wing populist U.K. Independence Party, saying, “I’ve done my bit.”
Mr. Farage, 52, has quit the post before — twice. But on Monday he sounded as if he meant it this time, telling reporters that “my political ambition has been achieved” and that “I want my life back.”
But since the “Brexit” vote he has also been encouraged to quit by Arron Banks, the self-made insurance millionaire who has been a main funder of the party, known as UKIP, and of the unofficial Leave.EU campaign, and who sees the possibility of a more broadly based political party that can appeal to disaffected Labour voters.
………
But his push for a referendum, first as a member of the European Parliament and then as the leader of UKIP, arguing that Britain could manage immigration and regain full sovereignty only from outside the European Union, struck a deep chord with many Britons. It fed into the euroskeptic wing of the Conservative Party and made many Conservative legislators fear that UKIP would deny them an election victory in 2015.
I don’t think that any of them expected to win the referendum, and now they don’t know what to do.
This is rather ironic.
As I mentioned yesterday, I participated in a historical cooking competition Trial by Fire.
The basic rules are that the medieval dishes must be prepared under camping conditions.
Unfortunately, because the prep took longer than I thought, I could only complete one dish (the apple pastys)
in the 4 hours available, though I did complete all the dishes in the 2 hours following.
Note to self: I am never going to do two baked dishes in Trial by Fire again. Camping ovens turn out to be a choke point, and my camp oven was balky, so between the two of these, I ran out of time.
All the recipes turned out well, though.
Recipes are below
Pastys are made with a shortcrust (non-rising) dough, and is the core of any pasty recipe.
Shortcrust Dough
500 g | strong bread flour |
120 g | solid fat (shortening, lard, suet, or schmaltz) |
25 g | unsalted margarine or butter |
5 g | salt |
175 g | cold water (important, because you want little bits of fat to make the dough flaky and tender) |
Mix salt and flour, and then grate the frozen fat and margarine into the flour, and work until it resembles coarse cookie crumbs.
Slowly add the ice cold water, and work the dough until it pulls together enough to pull off the walls of the mixing container.
Place dough in a cold place (cooler or refrigerator) for at least an hour tightly wrapped so that it can come together.
Making multiple batches instead of making larger batches unless you are using an industrial strength stand mixer, it gets unmanagable
Beef Filling
450 g | quality beef (skirt steak is preferred) |
450 g | red potato |
250 g | Swede (Rutabaga) |
4 tsp | chopped garlic |
salt and pepper to taste
Slice ingredients to about a ⅛” thickness by ½” x ½”.
Roll out he dough into 4 equal balls, and then flatten into disks about ⅛”-¼” thick, and then add filling by layering, from bottom to top, with Swede, beef, potato, onion, and garlic, putting salt and pepper on each layer as you lay them out.
Seal with an egg wash , and crimp along the side (Cornish) or along the top (Devonian), cut vent holes, and then paint the top side of the pasty with an egg wash.
Bake at 400°F for hour, until the pastry is a golden brown, and shiny from the egg wash.
Allow to rest for at least 10 minutes before eating. Otherwise, you will likely burn your mouth.
It is traditional to eat with a hot English mustard, both this and a Dijon are next to the pasties.
Chicken Filling
As per the beef filling, except for brining the1 lb of chicken strips for 30 min to 2 hours.
2 cups | water |
1 tbsp | kosher salt (half that if table salt) |
1½ tbsp | brown sugar |
¼ tsp | oragano |
½ tsp | marjoram |
Fruit Dessert Pastys
It’s pretty much the same as the meat pastys, except that you divide the shortcrust dough into 8 rather than 4 to make smaller pasties.
Also, sprinkle granulated sugar on the top of the pastys before cutting vents in the pastys and check at about 45 minutes, as it cooks faster.
Apple filling
1 | Granny Smith apples, peeled and cut thin |
1 tsp | lemon juice |
1 tsp | crushed ginger (can also use 1 cube of the frozen) |
½ tsp | cinnamon |
1 tsp | arrowroot |
1 | small pinch kosher salt |
Mix lemon juice, salt, and arrowroot thoroughly, and then toss with the rest of ingredients and allow to marinate.
Blackberry filling
½ cup | blackberries |
1 tsp | lemon juice |
1 tsp | crushed ginger (can also use 1 cube of the frozen) |
1 tsp | arrowroot |
1 | small pinch kosher salt |
We went to an SCA event today, a historical cooking competition called Trial by Fire.
So, I drove there and back, and spent 5 hours on my feet wrestling with a balky camping oven and dough.
I was making various forms of pastys, both fruit and the Cornish variety.
The dishes went well, but took longer than expected, so only one dish was entered.
But I’ve spent the day in the sun cooking, and I am completely wiped.
I will post recipes tomorrow.
A ruling by the ConstitutionalCourt of Austria means that Austrian presidential election result have been annulled, and a new election must be held.
Last time, the candidate from the right wing Freedom Party came within a fraction of a percent of winning, so what happens in a post Brexit vote is a complete crap shoot:
Austria’s Freedom party will get another go at providing the first far-right president in the European Union, after the country’s constitutional court annulled the result of May’s presidential election.
The court president, Gerhart Holzinger, announced on Friday that the run-off vote, in which Norbert Hofer of the Freedom party (FPÖ) narrowly lost to Green-backed Alexander Van der Bellen, would have to be repeated across the whole country after an investigation revealed irregularities in the count of the vote in several constituencies.
The unprecedented ruling comes a week before Van der Bellen was due to be sworn into office. Hofer had lost out to his rival in a knife-edge election on 22 May by only 30,863 votes.
While the Austrian presidency is a largely ceremonial role, the outcome has been seen as hugely symbolic, with the Freedom party seemingly buoyed by growing anti-refugee sentiment and disaffection with the country’s political establishment.
The Austrian President has one significant power: He can dissolve parliament and force new elections.
The citizens of the EU are living in interesting times.
Anyone who unironically write an article titled, “It’s Time for the Elites to Rise Up Against the Ignorant Masses,” is clearly beyond help.
In this case it’s one James Traub.
This man is a fellow at a “think tank”.
He probably does not get the irony.
I have wondered if former SACEUR (military leader of NATO) Phillip Breedlove is completely nuts.
Well, it appears that someone hacked his email and removed all doubt as to his insanity:
Retired U.S. Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, until recently the supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe, plotted in private to overcome President Barack Obama’s reluctance to escalate military tensions with Russia over the war in Ukraine in 2014, according to apparently hacked emails from Breedlove’s Gmail account that were posted on a new website called DC Leaks.
Obama defied political pressure from hawks in Congress and the military to provide lethal assistance to the Ukrainian government, fearing that doing so would increase the bloodshed and provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with the justification for deeper incursions into the country.
Breedlove, during briefings to Congress, notably contradicted the Obama administration regarding the situation in Ukraine, leading to news stories about conflict between the general and Obama.
But the leaked emails provide an even more dramatic picture of the intense back-channel lobbying for the Obama administration to begin a proxy war with Russia in Ukraine.
In a series of messages in 2014, Breedlove sought meetings with former Secretary of State Colin Powell, asking for advice on how to pressure the Obama administration to take a more aggressive posture toward Russia.
………
Breedlove attempted to influence the administration through several channels, emailing academics and retired military officials, including former NATO supreme commander Wesley Clark, for assistance in building his case for supplying military assistance to Ukrainian forces battling Russian-backed separatists.
………
Phillip Karber, an academic who corresponded regularly with Breedlove — providing him with advice and intelligence on the Ukrainian crisis — verified the authenticity of several of the emails in the leaked cache. He also told The Intercept that Breedlove confirmed to him that the general’s Gmail account was hacked and that the incident had been reported to the government.
………
In the European press, Breedlove has been portrayed as a hawkish figure known for leaning on allied nations to ditch diplomacy and to adopt a more confrontational role again Russian-backed separatists in Ukraine. Breedlove, testifying before Congress earlier in February of this year, called Russia “a long-term existential threat to the United States and to our European allies.”
Der Spiegel reported that Breedlove “stunned” German leaders with a surprise announcement in 2015 claiming that pro-Russian separatists had “upped the ante” in eastern Ukraine with “well over a thousand combat vehicles, Russian combat forces, some of the most sophisticated air defense, battalions of artillery” sent to Donbass, a center of the conflict.
Breedlove’s numbers were “significantly higher” than the figures known to NATO intelligence agencies and seemed exaggerated to German officials. The announcement appeared to be a provocation designed to disrupt mediation efforts led by Chancellor Angela Merkel.
………
The emails, however, depict a desperate search by Breedlove to build his case for escalating the conflict, contacting colleagues and friends for intelligence to illustrate the Russian threat. Karber, who visited Ukrainian politicians and officials in Kiev on several occasions, sent frequent messages to Breedlove — “per your request,” he noted — regarding information he had received about separatist military forces and Russian troop movements. In several updates, Breedlove received military data sourced from Twitter and social media.
Not just a dangerously bellicose general officer, but an insubordinate one as well.
He wanted war with Russia, and he was using tweets in an attempt coerce the President of the United States to go along with his folly.
That is completely nuts.
As near as I can figure out, a bot, and a possibly actual human Google employee, came across this post, which is about a judge dismissing the entire DA’s office from a case where they were prosecuting a mass murderer because of prosecutor misconduct.
In any case, I got a notice from Google™ Adsense™(click image for screenshot) warning me not to post pr0n .
The title of the judicial post was, “This is H a r d C o r e”, and Google India flagged it as sexually explicit.
Of course, there is no way to contact anyone about this, so I re-titled the post, and clicked “resolved”.
Once again, the colossus of the internet proves themselves to be staffed by f%$#ing idiots, both organic and aogorythmic.
My standard disclaimer on any post about the aforementioned service applies:
Also, please note, this should be in no way construed as an inducement or a request for my reader(s) to click on any ad that they would not otherwise be inclined to investigate further. This would be a violation of the terms of service for Google™ Adsense™.
Anyone out there know of another (better) internet advertising firm out there?
I would expect better service from a company that is paying me something less than $0.00035/word.
Google™ Adsense™ sucks wet farts from dead pigeons.
It’s becoming increasingly difficult to distinguish between people talking on their cell phone Bluetooth comma and people who have issues with schizophrenia.
She has now proposed that entitled rich kids who launch startups will get 3 years forbearance on their student loans:
Hillary Clinton has a bold plan to ensure the bright future of every hardworking American who has the considerable resources required to start his or her own company: three years of student debt deferrals, for every single startup founder. Wonderful news for our striving technocrat class—they need all the help they can get.
………
What else do we need? Less debt, obviously. And who are the people most in need of debt forgiveness? The sort of people—overwhelmingly highly educated, white, male people—who launch startups.
Enter Hillary’s plan:Hillary is committed to breaking down barriers and leveling the playing field for entrepreneurs and innovators who are launching their own start-ups. Hillary will allow entrepreneurs to put their federal student loans into a special status while they get their new ventures off the ground. For millions of young Americans, this would mean deferment from having to make any payments on their student loans for up to three years—zero interest and zero principal—as they work through the critical start-up phase of new enterprises. Hillary will explore a similar deferment incentive not just to founders of enterprises, but to early joiners – such as the first 10 or 20 employees.
What’s more, the economic benefits will trickle down to those of us who don’t have the courage or inheritance (“more than 80% of funding for new businesses comes from personal savings and friends and family”) to start our own hovercraft-sharing services and toothpaste disruption ventures. Startups, with their famously long lifespans and reliable revenue models, will eventually provide jobs (well, independent contractor agreements) for all of us down the road, as long as they don’t shutter due to lack of users, like Washboard did, or succumb to an overwhelming tide of warranted criticism, like SketchFactor.
This is, of course, absurd, but it is a window into who Hillary Clinton’s views on society and virtue, and as Lambert Strether pithily notes, it ain’t a pretty picture:
Exactly as with health care (“never, ever”), Clinton seeks to destroy education as a public good. Therefore, she seeks, like a Victorian, to sort the worthy creditors, from the unworthy (and to create another complex administrative apparatus filed with credentialed 10%-ers (her base (ka-ching)) to do the sorting for her.
Her statements on single payer mirror this, as does her comments on Sanders’ tuition proposal, where she wanted to establish a whole new bureaucracy, and the attendant costs, and humiliation to the recipients.
Hillary Clinton in her teens supported Barry Goldwater. She has described herself as a former “Goldwater Girl.”
It looks like you can get the girl out of the Goldwater, but you can’t get the Goldwater out of the girl.
I am so glad that I live in Maryland, where my vote does not count.
I was at my doctor for a check up, and he told me a Russian proverb that says, “A Husband is a head of the family, but the wife is the neck of the family.”
The head is in charge, but the neck moves the head right, and the neck moves the head left, and the neck moves the head up, and the neck moves the head down.
Clinton confidant, likely selection for Secretary of Defense, and full time psychopath, Michele Flournoy has announced that she does not want to send ground troops into Syria, she just wants to drop bombs on children:
Former Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy said Wednesday that she does not advocate sending U.S. ground troops to Syria to fight President Bashar al-Assad’s forces.
On Monday, Defense One, the national security and defense news outlet of Atlantic Media, reported that Flournoy had “called for ‘limited military coercion’ to help remove Assad from power in Syria, including a ‘no bombing’ zone over parts of Syria held by U.S.-backed rebels.”
Reporter Patrick Tucker interpreted those comments, which Flournoy made at a Center for New American Security conference, to mean that she “said she would direct U.S. troops to push President Bashar al-Assad’s forces out of southern Syria and would send more American boots to fight the Islamic State in the region.”
………
After publication, Flournoy wrote a letter to the editor of Defense One denying that she advocates “putting U.S. combat troops on the ground to take territory from Assad’s forces or remove Assad from power.”
Tucker told The Intercept that Defense One did not issue a correction because they felt they accurately reported Flournoy’s policy position. “Strike weapons at standoff distance is troops,” said Tucker. “Those are military personnel. That is U.S. military power — at war with the Assad regime. There is just no way around it.”
He added, “We took a very inclusive use of the word ‘troops,’ one that matched the literal definition of ‘troops,’ but nowhere do we ever suggest or say ‘ground troops.’”
Flournoy did not deny the entire report that she favors increased U.S. intervention; for instance, she acknowledged her support for U.S. “strikes using standoff weapons — to retaliate against Syrian military targets” to enforce the no-bomb zone.
………
Flournoy’s stated foreign policy position would still increase U.S. involvement in the Syrian civil war beyond what President Obama and top military officials have been willing to commit.
Yes, blowing up schools and children, and women, and the elderly is wonderful, because it’s American bombs.
That worked so well in Libya.
Generally, I think that Supreme Court justices should not be impeached for their legal opinions, but this is bad enough that he needs to be fired ……… out of a cannon ……… and into the sun:
“It imposes a lifetime ban on gun ownership for a single intentional nonconsensual touching of a family member…the majority seeks to expand that already broad rule to any reckless physical injury or nonconsensual touch. I would not extend the statute into that constitutionally problematic territory.”
“Non-consensual touching” is nice, I think. Sonny Liston once engaged in that professionally, I believe.
What a contemptible excuse for a human being.