From Fox News, the report by the inspector general for the Department of State removes several of Hillary Clinton’s defenses for using a private server for all of her email, making it more likely that the Department of Justice will indict.
The Coffee Shop is an open thread-style discussion forum for human interest news of the day.
From Great Big Story:
To call Lukas Novotny an expert horseback rider paints an incomplete picture. Novotny is one of the world’s leading horseback archers. Yeah, you read that right: he shoots arrows on horseback. Now, Novotny is almost single-handedly keeping the tradition alive.
Even as Trump tried to make canceling a Sanders-Trump debate this week in Caifornia into a positive meme (“I don’t debate second-place candidates”), he lost because his ditching a debate in the Iowa GOP primary using the same philanthropic reason came under scrutiny since his alternative appearance claims of veterans donations were woefully questionable even today as he counter-attacked the press.
This should be Hillary’s tactical reason not to have or limited general election debates with Trump.
The Coffee Shop is an open thread-style discussion forum for human interest news of the day.
From Think Nice:
Harry Frankfurt is an American philosopher and author of the New York Times Best Seller “On Bullshit”. Although first conceived as an essay over 30 years ago, his theory on bullshit is more relevant than ever before.
BULLSHIT! aims to further our understanding of what bullshit is, why there’s so much of it, and how it can be a greater enemy to the truth than lies.
From SteamPunk to Trumpunk’d Americans… a libertarian/GOP social media battle/alliance to come or will Bernie’s youth followers vote their real interests.
It’s more than Hillary’s gaffe about the need to redirect coal producing communities but to make sure that the Democratic message is one that meets the generational, racial, and class diversity that made the last eight years at least unified with ideals of hope and change. This redhat cosplay could happen even if the institutional forces of unhinged Congressional RWNJs in 2010 and 2014 have resisted a 21st Century pluralistic change in the US with the GOP’s banal appeals to 19th Century civil war historical divisiveness based in sexism, slavery, war, and colonialism.
VAPE-WARE OR VAPORWARE AT CLEVELAND — HOW THE LIBERTARIANS HAVE RAISED THE GOP’S ANTE TO DEFEAT HILLARY IN THEIR FLORIDA CONVENTION LAST WEEKEND (plus strip show).
Every election cycle, there are extremist defectors from the GOP who play the Libertarian Party’s members: Ron Paul, Bob Barr and Bob Dornan come to mind among the false consciousness of those looney LP antiabortionist anti-statists who want to use the state’s police power to stop “killing the babies”.
This year even crazier folks including a potential murderer and a stripper displayed their wares on the LP conference stage. But the most interesting folks are those who support NOTA (none of the above as a universal ballot voting option) and 420 deregulation of certain schedule drugs.
freedope and freedopeyer
This cycle’s LP electoral cannon fodder are former GOP governors Gary Johnson (NM) and William Weld (MA), so-called, moderates. They do represent the real failure of the LP to unify the lunatic fringe as Rand Paul has tried to meld the advanced technology culture’s nerdish personality orders with the larger GOP social psychosis represented by tehDonald.
In 1992 Rupert Murdoch fired Steven Chao “as President of Fox for hiring a male model to strip during a speech…on Standards and Practices” This kind of carnivalesque and transgressive stunt is a standard feature of the RW, despite the fear-campaign against transgendered attacks on children’s toilets.
The recent performance spectacle at the LP convention last weekend was more about 19th Century Bear-Baiting as spectacle but still also about making some comment however profane, on the authenticity of gender or at least the need to sanction nudism (recall the Robert Downey Sherlock Holmes sequel).
“Anyone who goes to convention will be able to fund raise enough money off a couple weeks worth of emails to pay for (a killer app)”
Throughout the 2016 cycle, the leading Republican White House hopefuls have leaned on expensive data-driven operations to help volunteers knock on the right doors and spread carefully calibrated messages on television, online and through direct mail…
Another source maintained that what’s necessary is a tracking system akin to what’s used for working big-dollar donors — a fluid script that changes based on a person’s specific interests. The most important thing will be solid data on the delegates, as well as information on alternates who step in if there’s an absence. Estimates for a killer convention app appear to range from five to six figures, and the incentive to spend money on the technology is seen by many as well worth it if it can potentially put someone in the White House.
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On May 30, 1868, General John A. Logan of the Grand Army of the Republic proclaimed the first major observance to honor those who died “in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” Known to some as “Decoration Day,” mourners honored the Civil War dead by decorating their graves with flowers.
On that first wide-spread Decoration Day, Ohio Congressman James A. Garfield, who had served as a Major General in the war, made a speech at Arlington National Cemetery, in which he said:
…With words we make promises, plight faith, praise virtue. Promises may not be kept; plighted faith may be broken; and vaunted virtue be only the cunning mask of vice. We do not know one promise these men made, one pledge they gave, one word they spoke; but we do know they summed up and perfected, by one supreme act, the highest virtues of men and citizens. For love of country they accepted death, and thus resolved all doubts, and made immortal their patriotism and their virtue. For the noblest man that lives, there still remains a conflict. He must still withstand the assaults of time and fortune, must still be assailed with temptations, before which lofty natures have fallen; but with these the conflict ended, the victory was won, when death stamped on them the great seal of heroic character, and closed a record which years can never blot…
A crowd of 5,000 heard him speak, and then decorated the graves of the more than 20,000 Union and Confederate soldiers buried in the cemetery.
By the late 19th century, many communities across America celebrated Memorial Day. After World War I, the dead from all of America’s wars were being honored. In 1971, Congress declared Memorial Day a national holiday to be celebrated the last Monday in May.
Memorial Day is now marked at Arlington National Cemetery by the placing of a small American flag on each grave.
Emily Dickinson
(582)
Inconceivably solemn! Things go gay Pierce — by the very Press Of Imagery —
Their far Parades — order on the eye With a mute Pomp — A pleading Pageantry —
Flags, are a brave sight — But no true Eye Ever went by One — Steadily —
Music’s triumphant — But the fine Ear Winces with delight Are Drums too near —
The Battlefield
They dropped like flakes, they dropped like stars, Like petals from a rose, When suddenly across the June A wind with fingers goes. They perished in the seamless grass, — No eye could find the place; But God on his repealless list Can summon every face.
The ansible can send and receive messages to and from a corresponding device over any distance whatsoever with no delay. Ansibles occur as plot devices in science fiction literature.) Unlike Snapchat, is this the virtual capital metaphor for communication in the 21st Century.
Utopian socialism was a precursor to scientific socialism but often is a residual idea when developing a materialist discourse for labor and class struggle. Just as we have discussed William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement here, the critique of the forces of production as exploitative prompted the artistic revival that signified a return to humanized artisanal production as a vanguard act of revolution. Descaling and deskilling were seen as identical then, much as they are now in terms of redefining postfordist production. The question remains as to whether natural capital(sic) products are less collectively exploitative, and whether that is a prime mover in organizing the overthrow of neoliberal globalization. Ancillary to this is the question of whether exploitation exists under socialism.
“Freedom … can only consist in this, that socialised [humans], the associated producers, govern the human metabolism with nature in a rational way, bringing it under their own collective control rather than being dominated by it as a blind power; accomplishing it with the least expenditure of energy and in conditions most worthy and appropriate for their human nature.”
Elon Musk has been compared with Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs. Doing the impossible—whether creating the Tesla electric car or launching rockets with SpaceX—is second nature to him. He was also the co-founder of PayPal.
His passion for innovation has made him one of the richest men in America, with an estimated worth of $10 billion. At the same time, he has been criticized for his hard-driving methods as a boss and for some of his more outlandish ideas, like establishing a human colony on Mars.
OTOH, what would Tesla’s wage rates be on Mars, much less Fremont California’s NUMMI plant.
The electric car company used roughly 140 workers from eastern Europe, primarily Slovenia and Croatia, to build a paint shop in Fremont in northern California as part of its production of the Model 3 sedan.
Workers hired by subcontractor Eisenmann, a German-based manufacturer, received hourly wages as low as $5, which is a fraction of the prevailing wages for local sheet metal workers – $52 an hour plus $42 an hour in benefits and pensions, according to a report by the Bay Area News Group.
This 2016 national election is a scaled -up version of the celebrity prank program Punk’d. It is a spectacle on the scale of big Dada rather than big data. We’re now stuck with a prairie fire of well-combed Astrorturftm.
The US has been subject to massiveCandid Camera hoaxing where we are confronted with a world inverted as in a camera obscura, an ideological inversion rather than the GOP in camera world of the Koch Brothers and Citizens United.
Reality has been turned upside down as tRump has become the last candidate standing from among a field of mediocre challengers. Mitt Romney had the best summary of tehDonald’s weaknesses:
Here’s what I know. Donald Trump is a phony, a fraud. His promises are as worthless as a degree from Trump University. He’s playing the American public for suckers: He gets a free ride to the White House and all we get is a lousy hat.
His domestic policies would lead to recession. His foreign policies would make America and the world less safe. He has neither the temperament nor the judgment to be president. And his personal qualities would mean that America would cease to be a shining city on a hill.
Indeed, Americans would be the whining suckers of a shill.
BET didn’t reveal whether their Punk’d would feature a full-time host or a revolving door of tricksters..Punk’d‘s MTV original run, hosted by Ashton Kutcher, pranked unsuspecting celebrities from 2003 to 2007, though BET made no mention whether Kutcher would be involved in the series’ reboot.
After five years of celebrities breathing easy, MTV briefly resuscitated Punk’d with a rotation of hosts including Justin Bieber (who pranked Miley Cyrus and Taylor Swift), former Punk’d prankster Dax Shepard and, for the final episode, Kutcher himself.
If only this event could be restaged in the first season of BET’s Punk’d
On November 28, 2008, Plaxico Burress suffered an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound to his right thigh at the nightclub LQ on Lexington Avenue in New York City when his Glock pistol in the pocket of his black-colored jeans began sliding down his leg; apparently in reaching for his gun, he inadvertently pressed the trigger, causing the gun to fire. The Manhattan District Attorney stated Burress was wearing jeans. The injury was not life-threatening and Burress was released from an area hospital the next afternoon. Two days later, Burress turned himself in to police to face charges of criminal possession of a handgun. It was later discovered that New York City police learned about the incident only after seeing it on television and were not called by New York-Presbyterian Hospital as required by law.
Wilfred Owen, one of the great poets of World War 1, was born in England in 1893. He enlisted in 1915, and was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment. By early 1917, he had undergone several traumatic experiences: “He fell into a shell hole and suffered concussion; he was blown high into the air by a trench mortar, and spent several days lying out on an embankment in Savy Wood amongst (or so he thought) the remains of a fellow officer.” He was diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia, i.e. shell shock, and sent to Edinburgh for treatment. His doctor encouraged him to tell his experiences through poetry, especially those that came back to him in his dreams. He wrote “Dulce et Decorum Est” during that time.
The title of his poem is from Horace’s “Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori,” which translates as “It is sweet and right to die for your country.” Owen initially dedicated “Dulce et Decorum Est” to Jessie Pope, a “civilian propagandist” who urged young men to go to war lest they be considered cowards.
In July, 1918, Owen chose to return to war in France, seeing it as his duty to relay the reality of the horror of war. He was killed in action on November, 4 1918, a week before the war ended with signing of the Armistice.
“Dulce et Decorum Est”
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under I green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.
Following are two readings of the poem. The first is by Christopher Eccleston, for the series “Remembering World War 1”:
The second reading has actual footage from the Battle of the Somme. Be forewarned, this one is very painful to watch:
With revisionists spinning tehDonald as the rebirth of Lincoln or Reagan, so much will be made of the early, recent closeness of polling for Hillary versus tRump. And certainly Hillary is no Jimmy Carter, centrism notwithstanding. And even though the general theme has been neoliberalism, it was a Democratic version that improved the economy, not the vaunted Reagan years or the WMD Bush snipe hunt that has given us Daesh. And yet the weary Reaganism’s zombie myth is rewoven like tehDonald’s dome.
“Not one of the elders” got behind candidate Reagan in the beginning, Arthur Laffer said. He joked that when Reagan — perceived by critics as a lightweight, a bigot and a war monger — won the 1980 primaries, the Republican establishment “poured on us like a waterfall of cockroaches.”
This doesn’t mean that Clinton would blow out Trump by 10 points, or even that Trump can’t come back. General election polls at this point are not a reliable indicator of the outcome. But Trump would have to climb a far steeper hill than Reagan did. Indeed, Reagan barely had any hill at all. He was far more popular than Trump is, and the incumbent president, Carter, was far less popular than Obama.
”Supply-side ideologues refuse to accept this most basic reality: Their principles are fundamentally flawed and do not work. To continue to base our economic policy, our regulatory policy and our financial policy on their misguided assumptions makes about as much sense as adopting the governing principles of the CCCP.”
which he said:
“Not one of the elders” got behind candidate Reagan in the beginning, Arthur Laffer said. He joked that when Reagan — perceived by critics as a lightweight, a bigot and a war monger — won the 1980 primaries, the Republican establishment “poured on us like a waterfall of cockroaches.”
”Supply-side ideologues refuse to accept this most basic reality: Their principles are fundamentally flawed and do not work. To continue to base our economic policy, our regulatory policy and our financial policy on their misguided assumptions makes about as much sense as adopting the governing principles of the CCCP.”
Nicole Plyler Fisk
Gene Howington
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Joy of Fishes
Chuck Stanley
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Flowers For Socrates 