Year: 2016

Oh Snap!

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Despite a veto threat from the Obama administration, the Senate passed a bill allowing 911 victims to sue them for their ties to the terrorists:

A bill that would let the families of those killed in the Sept. 11 attacks sue Saudi Arabia for any role in the terrorist plot passed the Senate unanimously on Tuesday, bringing Congress closer to a showdown with the White House, which has threatened to veto the legislation.

The Senate’s passage of the bill, which will now be taken up in the House, is another sign of escalating tensions in a relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia that once received little scrutiny from lawmakers.

Administration officials have lobbied against the bill, a view that the White House spokesman Josh Earnest reiterated after the vote. And the Saudi government has warned that if the legislation passes, it might begin selling off up to $750 billion in Treasury securities and other assets in the United States before they face a danger of being frozen by American courts. Adel al-Jubeir, the Saudi foreign minister, delivered the warning to lawmakers and the administration while in Washington in March.

The House of Saud is claiming that if this passes, they will dump their Treasuries on the market, which will cause the dollar to tumble.

So the dollar falls, making imports more expensive, and our exports more expensive.

This would have the effect of reinforcing our manufacturing economy and improving our balance of trade.*

The Senate bill carves out an exception to the [1976] law [which grants immunity to foreign governments] if foreign countries are found culpable for terrorist attacks that kill American citizens within the United States. If the bill were to pass both houses and be signed by the president, it could clear a path for the role of the Saudi government to be examined in the Sept. 11 suits.

………

Mr. Schumer said he believed that Democrats would override a veto from Mr. Obama. ………

So, if the House follows suit, and Obama vetoes the bill, this is going be a major sh%$ storm, and it’s going to jam up the Democrats something fierce.

It plays into one of Trump’s narratives, and it’s a very popular idea among the American public.

What’s more, Republicans would love to override an Obama veto.

The simple solution would be for Obama not to veto the bill, but because the foreign policy establishment continues to view the House of Saud to be an invaluable ally, as opposed to the medieval terrorism supporters that they actually are, so the ever establishment Obama will follow through on his veto.

*Only please, Brer Fox, please don’t throw me into the briar patch.

Quit Drawing Targets on Your Shoes, Morons

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The useless meat sacks known as “Senate Moderates” are now prostrating themselves before the possibility of President Trump:

As Democrats portray Donald Trump as a dangerous leader for his party, most of them barely acknowledge he could be president. But some centrist Democrats say they’re ready and willing to work with the business mogul should he defeat their party’s nominee.

 “The people will have a chance to vote. If Donald Trump is elected president there will be a great opportunity to sit down and have a conversation about what that agenda looks like,” explained Sen. Heidi Heitkamp (D-N.D.), who has long backed Hillary Clinton. “If he’s president, we’re going to have disagreement. But we’d better all figure out how to come up with an agenda for the American people.”

 Getting ready for a potential Trump presidency in their home states may just be good politics for moderate senators such as Heitkamp, Jon Tester of Montana and West Virginia’s Joe Manchin. They’ll be top targets for Republicans in 2018, a midterm year that could favor the GOP if recent trends of lower turnouts in nonpresidential elections continue. And it’s a good bet that they’ll need Trump voters to keep their jobs.

Seriously?

These cheese eating surrender monkeys are panicking over the midterms, and so they are engaging in activities calculated to demoralize the base.

It’s stupid on a policy level, it’s stupid, on a political level, it’s even worse.

This is blind unreasoning panic.

I’ve seen zebras chased by cheetahs that carry themselves with more grace and dignity.

Why Ignoring CIA Torture Was a Bad Idea

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Some how or other, the CIA “accidentally” deleted the Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report, though there appears to be another copy “safe”:

……

Yeah, good luck with those files, especially given the spectacular news from this side of the pond regarding one of the CIA’s most recent escapades in international thooleramawnery. Once again, the dedicated worker bees of our intelligence community have proven themselves tragically accident prone. As Michael Isikoff of Yahoo News reports:

Although other copies of the report exist, the erasure of the controversial document by the CIA office charged with policing agency conduct has alarmed the U.S. senator who oversaw the torture investigation and reignited a behind-the-scenes battle over whether the full unabridged report should ever be released, according to multiple intelligence community sources familiar with the incident. The deletion of the document has been portrayed by agency officials to Senate investigators as an “inadvertent” foul-up by the inspector general. In what one intelligence community source described as a series of errors straight “out of the Keystone Cops,” CIA inspector general officials deleted an uploaded computer file with the report and then accidentally destroyed a disk that also contained the document, filled with thousands of secret files about the CIA’s use of “enhanced” interrogation methods.

And I am the Tsar of all the Russias.

It is a good thing that the Congressional oversight panels have been right on the ball in informing we suckers who foot the bill about this flagrant disregard for security protocols and spectacular bungling by the relevant authorities in The Company. No, wait.

The incident was privately disclosed to the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Justice Department last summer, the sources said. But the destruction of a copy of the sensitive report has never been made public. Nor was it reported to the federal judge who, at the time, was overseeing a lawsuit seeking access to the still classified document under the Freedom of Information Act, according to a review of court files in the case. A CIA spokesman, while not publicly commenting on the circumstances of the erasure, emphasized that another unopened computer disk with the full report has been, and still is, locked in a vault at agency headquarters. “I can assure you that the CIA has retained a copy,” wrote Dean Boyd, the agency’s chief of public affairs, in an email.

Well, I’m certainly reassured. They’re probably using the disc to play floor hockey at Langley.

But Senator Dianne Feinstein is still a trusting soul.

The functions of our state security apparatus are important.

The enormous intelligence industrial complex that we have created is not.

It is out of control, wasteful, and incompetent.

Cuomo Has to be Sh%$ting Bullets Now

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It’s pretty clear that US Attorney U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s investigations of corruption in Albany have not ended with the convictions of the speaker of the assembly and the majority leader of the state senate:

As U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara’s office issues a storm of subpoenas to the administration of Governor Andrew Cuomo and his close associates in relation to the state’s Buffalo Billion economic development program, the governor and his aides have delivered a consistent message: the investigation targets the dealings of a few bad apples, the governor wasn’t aware of any wrongdoing and he wants to get to the bottom of the situation as quickly as possible.

“I’ve said to all my people, and I’ve said to the U.S. attorney, any way we can find out and be helpful and be cooperative, we will be,” Cuomo told reporters during a press conference in the Adirondacks on Tuesday. “Nobody wants the facts more than us. That’s why we started our own private investigation. We know the questions: did two people act improperly? Did they represent companies they shouldn’t have? Was there undue influence for those companies? Those are the questions, we now need the answers and we don’t have the answers.”

The message rings as spin to a number of expert observers who insist Cuomo has long overseen a system that allows, at the very least, for the appearance of pay-to-play to flourish as mini-economies have popped up around the state where connected consultants work with both state government entities and those looking to win state contracts, and where the state funnels money through non-profits, allowing them to avoid scrutiny and standard state contracting procedures.

Bharara’s probe appears to have also spurred inquiries into surrounding issues by Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli – all of whom, like Cuomo, are Democrats.

It is unclear whether the two men who have been reported to be at the center of the probe – longtime Cuomo aide Joe Percoco and Cuomo family associate and lobbyist Todd Howe – violated the law or how Bharara’s many subpoenas that have targeted the executive chamber, former Cuomo aides, consultants, and businesses involved in the Buffalo Billion all fit together. However, the scope of the investigation and the deep layers of connections between and among some of the players involved makes it fairly clear that the target of Bharara’s investigation is not simply two Cuomo associates.

………

“The governor is looking at it in terms of the mistakes, or poor behavior of a couple aides that he seems to be disassociating himself with,” said John Kaehny, executive director of Reinvent Albany. “But what the subpoenas are targeting seems to be the corruption risk and bid-rigging favoring the governor’s campaign contributors. No one cares Todd Howe did something dumb. This is not what this is about – the governor sidestepped the larger issues.”

At least six current or former members of the Cuomo administration have been targeted by subpoenas. The administration has defended some of them.

A review of a number of businesses targeted by Bharara’s subpoenas shows that most of them are regular contributors to Cuomo’s campaigns. That leads some observers, including Kaehny, to believe that Bharara is interested in the state’s economic development subsidy programs as a whole.

“The Buffalo Billion is just a microcosm of the pay-to-play racket that has engulfed economic development under Governor Cuomo,” said Kaehny. “It is just a giant machine that takes in donations and doles out grants to donors. It is remarkable in its scope, consistency, and is dramatic in how it all leads back to the same people. What caught Bharara’s interest in this is a system – not a rogue agent, not a bad apple, it’s a system.”

………

Gerald Benjamin, a professor of political science at SUNY New Paltz noted that the fact SUNY Polytechnic President Alain Kaloyeros has been subpoenaed and appears to have been a target of the probe since the fall, “makes it a much bigger matter that could be focused on systemic practices.”

Kaloyeros has overseen much of the Buffalo Billion contracting and has become a major figure in the Cuomo administration as the governor has ramped up his economic development programs.

“The issue we have is confidentiality,” Kaloyeros told Gotham Gazette by Facebook messenger last fall when being asked about the Buffalo Billion investigation. “We were instructed in no uncertain terms not to comment on the inquiry from down South with the threat of jail which is being interpreted as we are the target of an investigation. So that part we cannot comment on beyond what we were authorized to say publicly.”

………

Aside from the red flags sent up by donations and dealings with the air of conflict of interest, watchdog groups say they believe Bharara may be examining the Buffalo Billion because it is clear that up until now on one on the state level has been.

Cuomo and the Legislature crippled the Comptroller’s ability to audit deals made regarding the Buffalo Billion in 2011, [New York Comptroller Thomas] DiNapoli and others say, by passing legislation that prevented auditing of SUNY, CUNY, hospital or construction funds. That is important to the Buffalo Billion because the state funnels cash for Buffalo Billion contracts through two non-profits controlled by SUNY.

The question at this point whether Cuomo was merely willfully blind or complicit.

My money is on the former.  He’s a former prosecutor, and he knows how to walk that line.

It’s a pity.  He is an evil rat-bastard.

Yep. This is a Woman of the People

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If Hillary were serious about inequality, she wouldn’t be hosting $100,000.00 a head fundraisers:

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton is ramping up her fundraising schedule, attending a number of fundraisers this week that cost donors six-figures to attend.

The former secretary of state attended a pair of small, intimate gatherings in New York City on Thursday evening that cost donors a minimum of $100,000 to attend, according to a campaign official. On Wednesday, she attended two $100,000-a-head events in Englewood, N.J., and New York City.

Maureen White and Steven Rattner, two prominent Democratic fundraisers, hosted one of the Thursday fundraisers at their home in Manhattan. Mr. Rattner also was a prominent businessman and served in the Obama administration. The second Thursday event was at the home of Lynn Forester de Rothschild, a prominent New York businesswoman and supporter of Mrs. Clinton and Democratic candidates. On Wednesday, architect Jon Stryker and hedge fund manager Orin Kramer played host.

Rattner settled with the SEC and the New York State Attorney General over kickbacks.

Lynn Forester de Rothschild is one of Those Rothschilds, the original multinational banksters.

And $100,000.00 a head for the contributors.

Does this sound like a woman who has the slightest interest in addressing the parasitic finance that is at the heart of Wall Street?

Does the former board member for Walmart sound like someone who would support labor unions?

Win or lose, this little foray into dynastic politics will not end well.

Linkage

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I love old school machine tools, so I loved this:

Oceania Had Always Been at War with Eastasia

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I don’t know about you, but this sure sounds like boots on the ground:

  • More special forces to Iraq.
  • Troops on the ground in Yemen.
  • The US is running an airfield in Syria:
    The U.S. military has all-but confirmed it’s in control of an airstrip in northern Syria. For months, reports in Arabic have described the base near Rmaylan, Syria, with Americans helping expand the runway as low-flying, unmarked helicopters make daily trips to and from Turkey.

    On May 6, U.S. Army Col. Steve Warren, a spokesman for Operation Inherent Resolve, didn’t exactly deny the existence of the airstrip when asked about it. “The soon to be 300 American forces working in Syria need to be resupplied,” Warren wrote. “Aerial resupply only makes good sense.”

Obama ran as a peace candidate.

Hillary Clinton, the next likely president, is about as bellicose as Dick Cheney.

Our policy of military interventions, and followup interventions to fix our first interventions has made us less safe, killed thousands of our soldiers, and around ¼ million civilians.

We have destabilized these societies, and strengthened terrorist organizations and made us far less safe, but our solution is more war.

This is insane.

So Does Blowing Up Innocent Civilians, You Over Pampered Sack of Sh%$

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David Petraeus makes the point that anti-Muslim bigotry helps terrorists.

While it is an obvious point coached as deep meaning, which is kind of what Petraeus does, it misses the obvious point, which is that our mindless drone war, of which Petraeus was its most aggressive advocate, was an even more effective recruiting tool for Al Qaeda and Daesh.

We have been reigning down death from the skies on wedding parties, children, and first responders (“double tap” strikes), and this creates people who want revenge on the west in general and the US in particular.

There is a special place for you in hell.

This is Mindbogglingly Stupid

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At the Nevada state convention, it appears that the (Hillary supporting) convention chair decided to put her thumb on the scales even though her side had already won:

Organizers of the Nevada State Democratic Convention said they had to rush to wrap up the “unruly and unpredictable” event on Saturday after security became an issue and objects, including chairs, were being thrown.

State party officials said authorities at the Paris casino in Las Vegas informed them around 10 p.m. that they could no longer provide the necessary security for the event, where tensions between Bernie Sanders supporters and party leaders flared up. The convention was scheduled to end at 7 p.m.
………

Sanders supporters have accused state party leaders of rigging the process against them, and they objected to procedural votes to approve the rules of the event. They also questioned a credentials committee’s disqualification of 58 would-be Sanders delegates, who state party officials said didn’t provide evidence about their identities or weren’t registered to vote as Democrats by a May 1 deadline.

………

After casino officials told convention organizers to wrap up the event Saturday night, party chairwoman Roberta Lange accepted a motion to appoint delegates pre-approved by the Hillary Clinton and Sanders campaigns, organizers said. She also accepted a motion to elect the state central committee according to rules submitted by county party chairs.

Sanders supporters upset with the proceedings staged a protest outside the Nevada State Democratic Party headquarters on Sunday, writing in sidewalk chalk “Roberta Lange murdered democracy” and “Fire Roberta.” Officials also said Lange had received hundreds of phone calls and text messages, including death threats, after her cellphone number was posted on social media.

Sanders issued a statement Friday, as tensions simmered before the convention, saying all Democrats shared the common goals of defeating Donald Trump and electing Democrats to office. “Working together respectfully and constructively on Saturday at the Nevada Democratic convention will move us closer to those essential goals,” he said.

Hillary Clinton really has two things going for her in the race for the nomination, her “inevitability”, and her claimed ability to unify the party in November.

The actions in Nevada mitigate against these perceived advantages.

If the Clinton campaign is as sure as they claim about her victory in the nomination, they aren’t, (and neither am I) they need to stop going scorched earth.

Unsurprising News

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Leaked documents show that Turkey provided tacit support to Daesh:

These 422 pages of classified documents contain blood-chilling information regarding terrorist activities in Turkey.

These documents classified as ‘secret’ material, contain huge amounts of information regarding the activities of Daesh militants in Kilis and Gaziantep.

Erdem, commenting on this information, said that in Kilis, Gaziantep and across Turkey dangerous processes are taking place to which the government turns a blind eye. “I am speaking here as a deputy, whose duty is to control what is happening. The documents that I present to you, is a living proof of what kind of dirty games the AKP government is involved in.”

He showed the documents containing the phone records of one of the organizers of the terrorist attacks in Turkey, İlhami Balı, known in the ranks of the jihadists, as Abu Bakr

“These entries recorded comprehensive information such as which hotel the terrorists are going to stay in, where they will wait for their car, which gas station they will use for refueling in a mosque in Kilis, how many people and who exactly would be responsible for the preparation of a terrorist attack.”

“Despite the fact that all this information was in the hands of the authorities, the security forces had not carried out any operations to detain terrorists. I ask one very simple question: why were these terrorists not arrested?” Erdem pointed out.

The deputy further spoke about how the Safety Authority tapped and recorded all phone conversations of the terrorists.

This is not a surprise.  About the only people who don’t acknowledge that the Turks (and the House of Saud) are the US State Department, Angela Merkel, and the Turks and the House of Saud.

Getting my History Geek On

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I’ve always had a bit of interest in the Black Death.

One of the things that I’ve always thought that it was not the Bubonic Plague (Y. Pestis) as we see it today.

Specifically, the spread of the Plague was blisteringly fast (5-8 km a day) for the transportation systems of the day, which mitigates against the modern plague.

There are variants of the disease that are more likely to move at this speed, most notably the marmot variant that are far more likely to infect lung tissue.

Because they allow for direct human to human (HtH) transmission, the spread is accelerated.

Now an analysis of the disease in Eyam in Derbyshire indicates that the spread of the disease was largely HtH:

Without a doubt, the bubonic plague has been one of the deadliest and most devastating infectious diseases in all of human history. The bacterial infection—caused by Yersinia pestis—has sparked dozens of outbreaks and three massive pandemics, killing hundreds of millions of people. The Justinian Plague from 541 to 767 is estimated to have killed up to 50 percent of the population at the time and spurred the demise of the Roman Empire. Likewise, the fourteenth century Black Death, which circumnavigated Europe in just a few years, ended up slaughtering as much as 60 percent of the continent’s population.

But despite the indelible mark the dark disease has left on humanity, researchers still aren’t certain how exactly Yersinia sweeps through cities and countries. The highly infectious disease has historically been linked to rodents, in which the bacteria can fester, and rat fleas, which take in and then vomit out the bacteria in subsequent bites. Thus, booming vermin populations have long been assumed to spark and sustain outbreaks. But a fresh analysis of a tiny village in England—made famous for its handling of a plague outbreak from 1665 to 1666—stands to challenge the view.

The Derbyshire village of Eyam, estimated to have a population of around 700 at the time of the outbreak, took the remarkable step of imposing a quarantine on itself—a move almost unheard of at the time. While the villagers aimed to spare neighboring parishes—which they did—the quarantine and the villagers’ detailed death records also provided a perfect opportunity for studying plague transmission dynamics.

In a new analysis of the outbreak, researchers estimate that rodent-to-human transmission accounted for only a quarter of all infections, while human-to-human transmission made up the rest. The finding, published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, adds fuel to a hot debate among academics about how plague spreads. And more importantly, it has the potential to inform public health responses to modern-day plague outbreaks, which still occur around the world, particularly in Africa and South America (albeit on much smaller scales than historical outbreaks).

………

They arrived at the point by first digging into historic population and death records of Eyam—now known as “plague village.” The researchers looked at factors such as age, wealth, household structure, and gender of the 257 people who died of plague. The deaths, which began after the delivery of flea-infested cloth from London, lasted from September 1665 to October 1666.

Next, the researchers used a stochastic compartmental model and Bayesian analytical methods to recreate the pattern of deaths and trajectory of the outbreak revealed by the records. The model included rodent-to-human transmission and human-to-human transmission, which was estimated to occur within a fixed window of 11 days between exposure, infection, and death. (While there were oral reports that three villagers recovered from the plague, those weren’t recorded in documents so the researchers tossed them out of their main analysis. However, when they did try including them, it didn’t alter their overall findings.)

The researchers found that human-to-human transmission accounted for 75 percent of all infections, with age, wealth, and household structure playing big roles in who got sick. Kids and family members of victims were the groups most affected by the plague. The village’s wealthy were less likely to get the plague, possibly due to less contact with general village folk and vermin.

I would expect more results to support the differences between the current and historical versions will become clearer as more genetic data is collected from graves and more epidemiological studies like this one are conducted..

Thanks, Liz

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The CFPB just moved to end arbitration on consumer loans and credit cards:

Richard Cordray, director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, pointed out what a major change his agency was poised to bring about. “Many banks and financial companies avoid accountability by putting arbitration clauses in their contracts that block groups of their customers from suing them,” he said in a statement.

The rule would apply only to the consumer financial companies that the agency regulates. It would not apply to arbitration clauses tucked into contracts for cellphone service, car rentals, nursing homes or employment.

“It is a good start,” said Berle M. Schiller, a federal judge in Philadelphia who has been critical of arbitration clauses that dismantle class actions and tip the scales in favor of companies. “Class actions are the only way that companies can be brought to heel.”

The agency’s proposed rule would be the first significant check on arbitration since a pair of Supreme Court decisions in 2011 and 2013 blessed its widespread use. Those decisions signaled the culmination of an effort by a coalition of credit card companies to stop the tide of class-action lawsuits.

Elizabeth Warren’s vision for the CFPB, which she brought into existence despite opposition from many in the Obama administration is bearing some significant fruit.

H/t Naked Capitalism.

Another Failure as a Parent

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Charlie shared a quote he saw on the internet.

He thought that it was brilliant, but he had no clue where it came from:

CB: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war two great super-armies developed. Us, the Russians and the French on one side, Germany and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea being that each army would act as the other’s deterrent. That way, there could never be a war.

PB: Except, this is sort of a war, isn’t it?

CB: That’s right. There was one tiny flaw in the plan.

LG: O, what was that?

CB: It was bollocks.

I agreed that it was brilliant, and it seemed a bit fmailiar.

I asked it what it was from, and he looked down said, “Something called Blackadder?”

My kids have never seen any of the Blackadder series.

I have failed as a parent.

What a Lovely Family

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Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky, just shuttered a hedge fund after losing 90% of his investor’s money:

Despite having Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein as an investor and being Bill and Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law, Marc Mezvinsky (and two former colleagues from Goldman Sachs who manage Eaglevale Partners hedge fund) told investors in a letter last February they had been “incorrect” on Greece, generating staggering losses for the firm’s main Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity, a/k/a the “Greek recovery” fund during most of its life. By ‘incorrect’ the Clinton heir apparent meant the $25 million Eaglevale Greek fund had lost a stunning 48% in 2014.

Which is not to say the larger fund it was part of is doing any better: as of last February, Eaglevale had spent 27 of its 34 months in operation below its high-water mark. We are confident that 13 months later the numbers are 40 out of 47, respectively.

………

Meanwhile, things went from terrible to abysmal for both the clueless hedge fund manager and his LPs, and as the NYT reports, Hillary Clinton’s son-in-law is finally shutting down the Greece-focused fund, after losing nearly 90% of its value.  Investors were told last month that Eaglevale Hellenic Opportunity would finally be put out of its misery and would shutter.

The closure comes as the worst possible time: we are confident that Donald Trump will be quick to work it into his political attack routine.

While there is no indication of legal or ethical wrong doing, I guarantee that Mezvinsky made his millions in various fees out of this fiasco.

This might be ONE reason why Clinton is so dedicated to preserving the, “Heads I win, tails you lose,” ethos of  Wall Street.

Just Give them to Mexico

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Texan ‘Phants are back on the secession binge:

If the nationalists get their way, this November might be the last time Texans vote for a US president.

On Wednesday, the Platform Committee of the Texas Republican Party voted to put a Texas independence resolution up for a vote at this week’s GOP convention, according to a press release from the pro-secession Texas Nationalist Movement. The resolution calls for allowing voters to decide whether the Lone Star State should become an independent nation.

File this under, “Be careful what you wish for, you might get it.”

The Donald Calls Hillary a War Monger

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It looks like Donald Trump is going to be the anti-war candidate this election:

Donald Trump derided Hillary Clinton’s hawkish foreign policy record over the weekend, a glimpse into a potential general election strategy of casting Clinton as the more likely of the two to take the nation to war.

Just moments after maligning Syrian refugees at a rally in Lynden, Washington, Trump pivoted into a tirade against Clinton as a warmonger.

“On foreign policy, Hillary is trigger happy,” Trump told the crowd. “She is, she’s trigger happy. She’s got a bad temperament,” he said. “Her decisions in Iraq, Syria, Egypt, Libya have cost trillions of dollars, thousands of lives and have totally unleashed ISIS.”

And he expressed a rarely heard appreciation for the “other side to this story,” noting: “Thousands of lives yes, for us, but probably millions of lives in all fairness, folks” for the people of the Middle East.

Trump implied that casualties inflicted by the U.S. military were far higher than reported. “They bomb a city” and “it’s obliterated, obliterated,” he said. “They’ll say nobody was killed. I’ll bet you thousands and thousands of people were killed every time you see that television set.”

I think that Trump is an isolationist, and that is not necessarily a bad thing.

When you look at the history of US military and diplomatic interventions over the past 60 years, overthrowing a democratically elected government in Iran as well as any number of Latin American nations (Chile, Argentina, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, etc), and interventions in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq (1963, 1990, 2003), Lebanon, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), Cambodia, Angola, Grenada, Kuwait, Somalia, Libya, the Ukraine, and Syria, you have a poor record.

At best (Kuwait) you have us propping up a corrupt, reactionary, and totalitarian state. 

At worst, you have the effective destruction of a country and its society, particularly in Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq,  and Cambodia, and the death toll is in the tens of millions.

The only post Korea success that I can think of is in the former Yugoslavia.

The world would be better off if we were more isolationist.

Here is a suggestion for Hillary:  If you are making Donald Trump sound sane about anything, you are on the wrong side of history.

Something to Hide

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Purdue Pharma, best known as the manufacturer of the opiate Oxycontin, has been fighting tooth and nail to keep their marketing tactics from the public, but today a judge ordered those records unsealed:

Purdue Pharma, the maker of OxyContin, lost a legal battle Wednesday to keep records and testimony about its bestselling and widely abused painkiller secret.

A judge in Pike County, Kentucky, a region hard-hit by prescription painkiller abuse, granted a motion by a news outlet to unseal records from a lawsuit by the state accusing the company of fraud, conspiracy and negligence in the development and marketing of the drug.

Purdue settled that suit in December for $24 million without any admission of wrongdoing.

Circuit Judge Steven Combs granted the request of Boston Globe-affiliated investigative health news outlet STAT to unseal the documents, writing: “The Court sees no higher value than the public (via the media) having access to these discovery materials so that the public can see the facts for themselves.”

The judge said the order would not take effect for 32 days, allowing Purdue time to appeal.

Let’s be here:  Purdue has been aware of its potential for abuse and its addictive properties for a very long time, and it is clear that they used these to increase sales.

They are no different from the corner drug pusher, and seeing their marketing exposed to the light of day, with the resulting social pressure and prosecutions, would please me no end.

Not Enough Bullets

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The pay of hedge fund managers, who have underperformed the market forever, and lost money last year, is simply obscene:

The world’s top 25 hedge fund managers earned $13bn last year – more than the entire economies of Namibia, the Bahamas or Nicaragua.

Kenneth Griffin, founder and chief executive of Citadel, and James Simons, founder and chairman of Renaissance Technologies, shared the top spot, taking home $1.7bn each – equivalent to the annual salaries of 112,000 people taking home the US federal minimum wage of $15,080.

The earnings of the best-performing hedge fund managers, published by Institutional Investor’s Alpha magazine on Tuesday, dwarfs the pay of top Wall Street executives who have been under fire for their multimillion-dollar pay deals. The best paid banker last year was JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, who collected $27m.

The huge pay at the top comes despite a tumultuous year on Wall Street that has led many well-known hedge funds to lose billions of dollars and others to close down. Daniel Loeb, CEO of Third Point, a hedge fund that manages $17.5bn, has described market conditions as a “hedge fund killing field”.

The, “Heads I win, tails you lose,” system of remuneration in Wall Street is wrong, and creates a lot of evil in our society.