Remembering History: Cognition not cancer is the question

 the kerfuffle if Biden knew he had prostate cancer ignores the fact that people with prostate cancer often live for years with it, or can be cured. Mayor Guilliani comes to mind.

There are reasons that the president might conceal such a diagnosis from the public who might in their ignorance think having cancer is the same as being incompetent, and of course allowing his political enemies to use the diagnosis to harm his policies and the nation.

Grover Cleveland comes to mind:

////

notice he lost his first reelection due to the electoral college? Nothing new under the sun. 

But he was seen as the one who could reform the country from the powerful who were corrupting the country. So he won the next election.

So why the big argument now if Biden knew he had cancer?

I suspect it is to silence the real question:  if President Biden was incompetent and others were running the country. 

This was considered a conspiracy theory until Tapper decided to become a whistleblower and release a book documenting President Biden's cognitive disability at times, and also admitting a lot of people were lying about it, or conveniently not seeing what was going on.

and this too has a historical precedent:

......

and some of us are old enough to remember when Eisenhower had a heart attack from which he recovered nicely, but more seriously, in 1957 he had a minor stroke....

The statement emphasized that Eisenhower's  ...Vice President Nixon expressed confidence that the president "is fully capable of making" any major decision, although he stated that he didn't expect any major decisions to come up within "the next few days." He made his statement after speaking with Attorney General William P. Rogers, following the latter's conference with White House physicians.

one result of this was the 25th amendment that passed in 1967.

Sections 3 and 4 deal with scenarios where the president may suffer an “inability” or a “disability.”

Starting with George Washington, who had a serious health scare as president, there have been numerous situations where the chief executive may have been “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.” For example, Woodrow Wilson and Grover Cleveland had serious health problems while in office before the 25th Amendment went into effect. James Garfield was incapacitated for months after he was shot by an assassin and later died in office. Franklin Pierce, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Dwight D. Eisenhower also dealt with health issues.

and since that time, President Reagan (after being shot), President Bush (while under anesthesia) and President Trump (When hospitalized with covid) were temporarily unable to work as president, but this was not invoked.

In such cases, the 25th Amendment’s Section 3 allows the president to notify Congress that he has designated the vice president to act as president until the president is able to resume work. This has happened briefly in three instances in modern times when Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush notified Congress before they went under general anesthesia for medical procedures.

so how does this affect President Biden? 

One suspects he would have resigned if it was put to him bluntly that his health made him incompetent (as was done after the debates and a health scare in Los Vegas, where Democrats pressured him not to run for reelection).

But the procedure to remove a president is more complicated:

Section 4 is the most controversial part of the 25th Amendment: It allows the vice president and either the Cabinet or a body approved “by law” formed by Congress, to jointly agree that “the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

In theory, this clause was designed to deal with a situation where an incapacitated president couldn’t tell Congress that the vice president needed to act as president. Senator Birch Bayh, who played a critical role in championing the 25th Amendment, explained Section 4 was designed to deal with “an impairment of the President’s faculties, meaning that he is unable either to make or communicate his decisions as to his own competency to execute the powers and duties of his office.”

but this part might explain why the 25th amendment was not invoked: President Biden, and/or those who actually were helping him run the country would have fought such a move, and it would have been messy.

Section 4 also allows the president to protest such a decision, and for two-thirds of Congress to decide in the end if the president is unable to serve due to a condition perceived by the vice president, and either the Cabinet or a body approved by Congress.

so if that was done, one suspects there would have been a fight over the removal of the president against his will and the will of his party.

Of course, if the politicians were honest and more worried about the state of the country rather than politics, they would have arranged Biden to resign, but as I have pointed out earlier, when the only Democrat who was willing to go on record in the NYT editorial that he should not run for reelection was an actor, George Clooney, not an elected official or someone working for the Democratic party, it makes the coverup of Biden's incapacity even more serious.

And that, not the fact that President Biden had cancer is what should be discussed. 

Sargent Schultz call your office. Lots of people agree with you:

Let it snow let it snow let it snow

I have no opinion on the craziness in Washington DC, but like a lot of people, am afraid of a terrorist (domestic or foreign) attack at the inauguration, especially as the President walks up Pennsylvania Avenue. 

 However, as one wag wrote: God apparently was worried too, so he sent in a cold wave, and voila, the inauguration will be held indoors as it was when Reagan took office. 

this is good, not only for security reasons but because crowds and dignitaries are at risk standing around in the cold for hours just for a photo op.

Indeed, one might argue that the cold rainy weather indirectly led to the death of President Harrison from Pneumonia a month later.

the weather also led to Reagan's inauguration being indoors, so there is a precedent.

 the first inauguration I ever watched (on TV) was that of JFK, where it was snowing and the wind was so bad that Robert Frost couldn't read the poem he had written, so instead he recited one of his other poems: the Gift Outright: (fast forward to two minutes):

Send in the drones

 What do both attempts to assassinate Trump have in common?

Lack of surveilance of the peripheries. Yes, I get it: Not enough men to walk the perimeters and check such things, even when the audience is shouting shooter shooter.

What makes it worse was that in Butler PA, the USSS was offered a drone to help them check things out, but turned down the offer.

A reporter asked Rowe if the agency used a drone to enhance surveillance at the rally, specifically a drone that local law enforcement offered to loan them. Rowe said he’s aware of reports that local law enforcement had offered a drone, but the Secret Service declined. Rowe said the Secret Service is now working to add drones and other unmanned aerial surveillance to its security protocols.

LOL. Italics mine.

maybe we need to start a "Go Fund Me" page to buy drones for the USSS so they can use them while the paper pushers are busy doing their thing.

And this action might need to be done quickly: Because the guy who tried to shoot Trump in Florida was right outside the fence. Luckily a guy on foot spotted him even though he was hidden by bushes, but in the future they might not be that lucky.

I haven't seen any MSM articles on why the USSS is lacking such basic equipment.  Maybe their plan for "diversity" doesn't include any deer hunters or veterans who would be aware that they aren't using basic equipment like drones with cameras to protect America's VIPs.

Oh but he was hiding behind a bush and probably wouldn't have been spotted by a drone, I can imagine them (and the MSM) saying. 

Attention shoppers: as any Deer Hunter can tell you, you can buy a drone with a thermal imaging camera for less than 100 USD from Amazon

Indeed, the use of drone by hunters has become common in recent years. From Autel:

Modern hunters don't need to stalk or ambush hunting targets in one place for long periods of time, and can easily pinpoint the animal's location using a camera. A quadcopter drone with an aerial view makes it easy to determine where prey hides and moves. Drones with night vision and thermal cameras are primarily used in enterprise-level applications such as search and rescue, power line inspection, wildlife monitoring, and hunting. If you're in Texas, you'll find that wild hogs are infested here, and hunting has become a pastime with a populace.

of course, this takes the fun out of hunting, so some states have banned their use to spy where the deer are hiding, a practice that is so common that it is banned in some states, although you can use a drone to follow the wounded deer into the bush to retrieve the body when he collapses.

Now, you notice I am not talking about sophisticated drone, but those available to the average good old boy hunter.

yet as the Ukraine war revealed: Even those drones can be used by the military to spy on who is coming for you.

StrategyPage has a long essay here on how drone warfare has changed the way war is fought: not just by the big expensive ones, but by the civilian ones that Ukrainians are upgrading in their garages to find where the bad guys and their weapons were, but also using them as small flying bombs to take the bad guys out.

More about the use of drones in modern warfare can be found via the SmallWarJournal does a book review on the recently published De Gruyter Handbook of Drone Warfare.

all of this is not new technology. So what if the technology behind this display is used to attack important politicians?

Tom Clancy, call your office. Washington DC needs Jack Ryan to help them protect the president.

US News: Guns Guns Guns

Don't ask me what is going on in the USA. I had the TV on in the background when they were interrogating the Secret Service director, and she was so bad that even the Democrats were blasting her for not answering the questions. But someone pointed out that the silence and lack of answers just led to conspiracy theories, which are getting crazier every day...

As for Biden: he should resign and let President Kamala run the place. His weakness is a real worry, and Kamela can't be worse. But someone should have seen this coming and let an open primary so Hillary could have another shot at the presidency. True she is just as corrupt as Trumpieboy, but like Trumpieboy she is competent, and Biden and Kamela are not.

Sigh.

Two things about the hearings: again talking about getting rid of assault rifles. But you know, these rifles are used to hunt, and in rural western Pennsylvania everyone owns one or two, and the schools shut the first day of deer season. 

And the dirty littles secret is that most gun violence is gang related and from handguns, not rifles:  mainly in the black inner city community. Doing spot checks and arresting anyone without a closed carry permit who has a gun might help.

and a lot is related to drugs. Duh.

Kamela has a bad reputation for prosecuting drug crimes, and the propaganda is that she jailed a lot of innocent black men for simple marijuana possession. But the dirty little secret is that a lot of these cases were plea bargains: instead of going to trial for a more serious crime like selling drugs, robbery, or rape (where often the victims would be afraid to testify), they would have the guy plea bargain for simple possession and that would get them off the street for awhile.

But ironically, something not reported: half of deaths from guns are suicides, mainly in older white man (suicide is also a huge problem in the AmerIndian community).

Long article here if you want the statistics on all of this.

When we lived in Pennsylvania, I had a deer rifle, a 22 and a shotgun for birds. I let my sons use them to hunt: They took a mandatory gun safety course to get a hunting license. However, I didn't shoot anything (I even had a waiver not to carry a handgun in the Nat Guard) because my father wouldn't have guns in the house because his father was a cop and knew that they were a danger for kids who would find an play with them. On the other hand, my mother had brothers and was in the rifle club in high school and had a sharp shooter medal.

The problem with having a gun for protection is that if you are not trained it is a danger: the robber will take it from you and shoot you. Better to use pepper spray and yell loudly. 

Putting the country ahead of politics

Hillary raised the question years ago:

 

from Legal Insurrection: 

Can you imagine an emergency situation where immediate military decisions that only a president can make need to be made in seconds or minutes, and the military having to go to diminished Joe for a decision?....

 

 It’s time to put America first. This situation of a cognitively diminished president cannot continue. There is a solution, the 25th Amendment.

he then goes on to discuss the legal way this is done.

Sigh. 

,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

This morning, Jeh Johnson, the former Secretary of Homeland Security under Obama, went on MSNBC to make the case for Joe Biden to stay in the race.

"A presidency is more than just one man… I would take Joe Biden at his worst day at age 86 so long as he has people around him… pic.twitter.com/1nWI3CCHci

— Michael Shellenberger (@shellenberger) July 2, 2024

will the internet discussions change the way US elections are fought?

 Usually in the morning, I listen to youtube music or talks or headlines.

Yes, talks. 

You know I did not watch the debates of Republican candidates, mainly because I am a Democrat. But there are rumors of independents and Democrats also wanting to run, but don't expect the headlines to get into what they say.

So anyway, this talk popped up on my video stream today

...hmm.... He actually sounds like he knows what he is talking about.

and he is discussing how as governor he fought the teachers union to try to improve the very lousy schools in New Jersey, and notes he supports school choice.

left out: that when the Catholic immigrants were denied a decent education and taught protestantism in the public schools, the bishops started an idependent school system: many prominent Catholics were educated at these schools, and not just Catholics: Bill Clinton comes to mind.

so school choice for parents who want to teach their children their values in schools, and to have an alternative to public schools is not a new issue. 

but then he discusses the problems of the Ukraine war in some details, and I was delighted that he noted the Chinese connection here (backing down in the Ukaine, especially after leaving Afghanistan, sends a message that they can steal the fishing and petroleum assets from the Philippines in the West Philippine sea, not to mention that if they stop freedom of navigation in this area they can pressure other countries by blocking the sea lanes, and the internet while they are at it).

Well, anyway, in past elections usually the so called news just pushed cliches and reported it as a horse race, spending more time reporting on polls than about issues.

So will things change?

Well, this talk is with Canadian Jordan Peterson, but there are other influential people who do this: Joe Rogan's interview almost single handedly upset the monopoly of information about problems with the covid shots.

Since I live in the Philippines I don't especially follow this stuff, but I am glad that ordinary folk can listen to these nuanced talks, especially since mainstream media places like the NYT, WaPo, Atlantic etc. are behind pay walls, and on my small pension there is no way that I can read this nuanced information.

That's a nice power grid you got... it''d be a shame if something bad happens to it

 Right now I am watching an ANC talk show discussing that China pretty well runs the electric grid here. They are wondering why why there has been a lot of brownouts recently. 

The franchise ends 2058 and they are discussingif the gov't can get out of the agreement because of all the brownouts recently. The alternative is to have the gov't run the electric grid, as they did in the past.

the problem? China owns a large percentage  of the franchise, the rest being owned by local businessmen

GMANEWS:

The 40 percent ownership of State Grid Corporation of China in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) won’t pose a national security threat, the NGCP assistant corporate secretary told the Senate energy committee Wednesday.

.

Watch the whole thing. 

Wikipedia on the franchise.

and a lot of senators (May 21 2023) want Chinese investors to be removed from owning the power grid.

the power company says no threat at all, and insists that the technicians running the grid are local Filipinos.

Problem? the manuals on how to do this are written in Chinese. (other reports say no, they have been translated into English or tagalog).

And although the corporation insists that China couldn't turn off the grid remotely, reports from a few years ago said actually they could.

BBC Nov 2019

China's State Grid Corp has a 40% stake in the National Grid Corporation of the Philippines (NGCP) - which runs the country's lone power transmission line. It transmits electricity all the way from Luzon - the northern end of the country - down to Mindanao in the south.

On Tuesday, Senator Risa Hontiveros asked - given Chinese control of the NGCP - "Is it possible for our power grid to be taken down remotely?" ...(answer:)  "Given the technological advancement right now in the telecommunications as well as in software, that is possible," he said.

another problem: a lot of the technical manuals are written in Chinese (although this BBC article claims they have been translated).

many of the technicians back in 2015 were Chinese, but now we are assured that they have all left the country. 

what is going on right now is a lot of brownouts, so the politicians are busy blowviating that this is due to evil China. 

Except brownouts in May are normal, and may be getting worse, not beecause of evil China but because people are a lot richer than they were 20 years ago when I moved her. People are now more affluent and can buy airconditioners and the poor can afford electric fans and tvs and computers, and of course the population is growing. So there is a need for more electricity.

 And since 20 percent of our electricity is hydroelectric power, which means they can't produce as much electricity when the water level is low, such as now, the end of TagInit, the dry hot season from Feb to May,  before the monsoon starts in June.

But the backstory is that some politicians are seeing this as China sort of threatening the Philippines to stop them from helping Taiwan, and trying to intimidate the Philippines when we dare to defend our islands and fishermen in the West Philippine Sea as China becomes increasingly aggressive there.

and all of this is a minor footnote to the G7 meeting in Japan this week. 

restoring democracy in the USA?

 Newsweek has a long editorial by Jonathan Tobin discussing the implications of the Supreme Court's 6-3 ruling in West Virginia v. Environmental Protection Agency.

He puts it into the context of stopping the power grab by the unelected administrative state that has been overstepping the law. Read the whole thing:

If the USA is not to sink into a civil war, the first step might be to actually allow input by it's citizens instead of special interest groups who have an agenda. 

This means stopping courts (as in RvW) and the bureaucrats (in the latest EPA expansion by unelected bureaucrats) from making laws without the messy input of democratic discussion and input. 

Yes, there is a need for expertise (which is why the US is a republic, like ancient Rome (which lasted 500 years) and not a democracy like Athens, where demagogues took it over by manipulating public opinion within a century).

What is interesting in the Newsweek editorial is why it was opposed by some justices in the SC and of course most of the MSM: the idea that climate change is too important to be left to the voter.

...With respect to the EPA, the Left is fully convinced that the urgency of climate change means that the Constitution and democracy can be thrown out the window.

As even Justice Elena Kagan wrote in her dissent after a lengthy dissertation on the horrors of global warming and the theories about it leading to planetary doom, "Whatever else this court may know about, it does not have a clue about how to address climate change." She's right about that, but the Supreme Court's purpose isn't to make or approve environmental policy.

italics mine. 

Hmm... this argument sounds more like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, or other right wing conspiracy nuts who see both covid and Climate change as either hoaxes or as real problems that are being exaggerated so the New World Order can take over....

As in the Great Reset... link2.

... 

Ironically, although most of the whistleblowers on the WEF tend to be right wing nuts, I am so old that I remember when such theories were believed by the Left. 

Maters of Mankind indeed...

Professor Chomsky, call your office. They are still at it, but under a different name...

Stories not covered in the media:

 Michael Yon, whose reports on Hong Kong told the inside story of their protests, has now gone to report the antifa "peaceful protests" aka riots.

This dispatch points to one of the biggest problems no one seems to be reporting on: That the homeless problem is due to drugs. and it resembles the revenge of China for the Opium wars.

and during the pandemic, overdoses and suicides (which often are in those who have abuse problems) have skyrocketed.

Of course, if someone tries to do something about it, like Duterte is trying to do here, the "human rights" types will protest, because the lives destroyed by drugs and the people killed by druggies robbing them (as several older folks in our town were killed), well they don't care. 

I remember when things changed: Before the Beatles popularized drug taking, such things were not normalized in society. Then suddenly those of us who refused to go along with taking drugs were ridiculed and marginalized.

So yes, go mourn John Lennon. But remember: The guy who killed him scrambled his brains into psychotic delusions due to drug taking. In the east, this is known as Karma...

and the question no one is asking: Where the H### are the churches on this issue? Afraid to preach against drug taking because they might lose their congregations?

-----------------------------------

Joe Biden is being brought low by his kids. But hey, Twitter and Facebook etc. are trying to censor that story.

But the question no one is asking:

A lot of this is "legal" since giving money to a son/spouse/family member for political influence is not considered bribery. Ditto for family members who get lucrative business deals. But there are a lot of politicians in Washington who have become rich and no one wants to talk about it.

Which is why the well known shenanigans of Trumpieboy before he became president are shrugged off by the deplorables: 

As my husband would say: They're all crooks. 

and we know lots about Trumpieboy's business deals, (lots of "best sellers" full of these claims are out there) but not how other politicians became millionaires while serving in congress.

So where are the reporters in all of this? Well, given the death of Daphne Caruana, and the lack of interest in things like the Panama papers etc., you can see why these things are not covered very well in the press.

----------------------------------

I ran across this photo on Powerline blog.

what hit me was not the contrast between the photos, but that there are crowds at airports where Trumpieboy has landed. LINK LINK2 LINK3 LINK4

apparently he is making a lot of stops at small airports to campaign, and by calling these gathering "peaceful protests" he can point out that Antifa, feminists, BLM etc. protests are going on all the time without much outcry about the virus spread, implying that if you condemn one gathering you have to do the same for the other side.

This bring in mind another President hated by the establishment who did the same thing: Give'm hell Harry's whistle stop campaign, where Truman crossed the country on a train and gave speeches.

Whistle-Stop Campaign July - October 1948

THE TRAIN CAMPAIGN PROVED TO BE AN UNEXPECTED SUCCESS. During the tour, a new relaxed and confident Harry Truman was presented to the people — a candidate who spoke their language and understood their needs...

For his part, Truman relentlessly accused the "do-nothing" Republican Congress of failing to meet the needs of the American people, a tirade that served him well with the common voter.

" Give 'em hell, Harry " became a battle-cry for the hard-fought, uphill battle of the campaign.

The church of green

Since I'm trolling the Pope, here's another article from a right wing blog: that translates an article from a Brazilian newspaper that is behind their new populist president (populist as in "extreme right wing fascist", or "Trump like" and says the upcoming "Amazon" meeting is to push married priests and liberation theology/green religion.

The "priest" part is because priests are few in that area (true) but excuse my cynicism if I think this is mainly a "wedge" to get married and eventually women priests. Personally, deacons and lay catechists already do a lot of the work of priests in both the US and the third world. So ordaining them after so many years? I wouldn't have a problem (the Eastern Catholics allow married men to become priests, but do not allow priests to marry).

But this is not really their agenda: It is to modernize the church into Anglican lite, to make it a NWO religion of mush by replacing Jesus with the green religion and the religion of radical gender theory.

but in Brazil they face a small problem: The people may not be with them.

The Amazon Synod is pushing, as the intelligence report shows, the intention of the world Church to install a new "other", "second" priesthood, the secular political dimension to score also by social and environmental statements in the left-liberal mainstream, but also an intra-Brazilian dimension of political explosiveness.

it was organized by leftist bishops who loved ex president Lula (who was convicted of stealing a lot of money but never mind).

This is how it works:

first it points out the problem of outsiders who push the meme "indigenous people of the Amazon" distorts who lives there, in order to preserve all the mineral and agricultural resources in the Amazon back into what they see is a pristine garden of Eden (it wasn't by the way: Before disease killed most of the people there, it was a highly populated agricultural breadbasket.. those who live there now are essentially the "preppers" who survived the epidemics).

second, it ignores who actually lives there:

The state of Amazon spreads over a gigantic expanse of more than 1.5 million square kilometers, but is inhabited by only four million people. According to the Brazilian statistics office, only 0.1 percent of them refer to themselves as members of indigenous peoples.

ah but the "greens" envision an Eden like environment and lifestyle and insist we listen to the wisdom of the elders.

Well, partly true, except one suspects the elders/shamans sometimes become bullying tyrants who lord over their small clans... as to their "wisdom": true, harmony is stressed, but when their wisdom includes infanticide and kidnapping women and children so they can have extra wives so one needs to realize that not everything is wonderful.

The alternative? Join the main society, but that leads to alcoholism and depression, and "loss" of the cultures, something that overlooks that most of the actual people involved manage to assimilate.

so who "owns" the Amazon? The small tribes who are dying and being pushed out or assimilated, or the great majority of people in the country, many of whom are hard working poor of mixed race who want to support their families?

We have this problem in Mindanao: The indigenous were pushed out into the mountains by the Muslims and now the Christians have migrated into the empty areas and are outnumbering the Muslims: So who owns the land? And here, priests and ministers trying to protect the land and the traditional people are sometimes killed too, just like those doing this in the Amazon.

 but the key point is something that I stress is happening in South America, and the Philippines (and among Hispanics in the USA): That people are leaving the church of the political left to join a church where Jesus is Lord.

Bolsonaro is a Catholic, his wife is a free-church member. In the election campaign, the new president has relied mainly on the Protestant free churches. Behind it is a massive emigration movement from the Catholic Church to the Free Churches. The reason is the massive political and theological left pressure in the nation’s Catholic Church which has been developing for decades and has led to an alienation of the faithful from their Church.

actually, there is a need for environmentalist to push against greedy exploiters of the Amazon: For example, a major dam burst there a week or so ago and killed a lot of people and is poisoning the local water supply.  The same company had a dam collapse a few years ago: And both dams failed due to "liquifaction" meaning they shouldn't have been built there.

presumably the dam was substandard, meaning no one was keeping an eye on it, and in poor countries, this often means someone was gifted so they wouldn't insist in checking those expensive safety regulations.

or maybe they were just careless:

On the other hand, even the EPA carelessness allowed a major toxic spill in Colorado.

and earthquakes and flooding can cause dams to collapse too: a worry here in the Philippines after every typhoon that our irrigation dams will collapse (and the small ones often do).

but making environmentalism/keeping people living the old fashioned "green" lifestyle (aka keeping the poor in poverty) the core content of religion without balancing it with the idea that God gave resources for people to use is nonsense: the need is for wise use of resources, and stop corruption that lets the greedy get away with destroying the environment/ producing shoddy goods.

But apparently no one bothers to read all those bible verses condemning the corrupt/ those who take bribes/ those who steal land from the poor to get rich.

other stuff being ignored: Facebook, the moon, and of course Mama Mary

the UK is supposed to be "secular", but in the BBC, a recent poll showed  3 in 5 of the population believes in miracles.

but then they quote a PC Catholic priest to say, hey the miracles didn't really occur: people just shared their soggy 2 day old pita bread.

 Which says a lot about the PC politics over morals church there.

or should I say "anti church"?
---------------------------------------------------
 the pope says calm down and pray the rosary.

He's better watch it: a million Pinoys praying the rosary overthrew Marcos, and you don't want to get Mama Mary mad at you. (/s)

-------------------------------

an election is coming up in Mexico, and the Diplomad2.0 discusses.
He notes Mexico's traditional anti Americanism, and says learn about their revolution to find out why.

Mike Duncan is podcasting the Mexican Revolution on his Revolutions podcast, so go and download some history.

related item: from PhysOrg: BP reached a settlement with Mexico after the 2010 Deepwater  spill.

According to PODER, a corporate transparency group, BP secretly negotiated to pay Mexico $25.5 million—a fraction what it paid in the United States—even as it invested hundreds of millions in President Enrique Pena Nieto's prized project, the reopening of the Mexican energy sector to foreign firms. 

Gee, do you think all of that is a coincidence?(/s)

On the other hand, (UKTelegraph) a lot of BP compensation in the US went into corrupt pockets.

---------------------------------------

NASA's space plans: to the moon and beyond.

-
related item: Marketing the moon:





----------------------------

First my Federal OPM personnel file, and now this: Facebook hacked.

several scandals have popped up recently. 

=======================
from Drudge:

Tim Berners Lee (who actually invented the internet) has a new plan for a new internet.

This week, Berners-Lee will launch Inrupt, a startup that he has been building, in stealth mode, for the past nine months.

Backed by Glasswing Ventures, its mission is to turbocharge a broader movement afoot, among developers around the world, to decentralize the web and take back power from the forces that have profited from centralizing it. In other words, it’s game on for Facebook, Google, Amazon.

For years now, Berners-Lee and other internet activists have been dreaming of a digital utopia where individuals control their own data and the internet remains free and open. But for Berners-Lee, the time for dreaming is over. “We have to do it now,” he says, displaying an intensity and urgency that is uncharacteristic for this soft-spoken academic. “It’s a historical moment.”

Ever since revelations emerged that Facebook had allowed people’s data to be misused by political operatives, Berners-Lee has felt an imperative to get this digital idyll into the real world. In a post published this weekend, Berners-Lee explains that he is taking a sabbatical from MIT to work full time on Inrupt. The company will be the first major commercial venture built off of Solid, a decentralized web platform he and others at MIT have spent years building.

for later reading: Drudge also linked to WND (right wing) that has a three part series  that interviews the author of Life After Google.

Be Afraid... be very afraid

This is the scariest thing I have heard in a long time: because this is not a conspiracy, alt/r site of paranoia but a mainstream podcast that is discussing open threats by the previous leader of the CIA.

very scary, because this is not "infowars" or "coast to coast am"  but a mainstream podcast.

And the (progressive) Nation magazine had a similar warning in February.

It is one thing to tar Donald Trump with a groundless campaign, Nixon-style, so as to insinuate without evidence that he entertains objectionable ties to Russia. That is mere politics....

  It is another matter altogether when the descendants of Dulles... mount what looks awfully like a coup operation against the president of our republic. That is a strong phrase, but it belongs on the table far more than the “complete garbage” you can read in any day’s edition of The New York Times. There I will put it for now, awaiting a historically informed argument for taking it off.

read the whole thing, because it relates what is happening now to the story of the CIA/Military opposition to JFK.

Now, unlike most bloggers, I am old enough to remember reading an interview with Kennedy (in an ordinary women's magazine, that my mom bought for the recipes etc), where Kennedy said he actually was happy with the anti nuke/ peacenik groups because they helped to counter the pressure on him by some in the military to start a war.

(Place JFK assassination conspiracy theory here.)

Back in the early 1990s, there was a military paper called the Military Coup of 2012 (that is a Scribd link, but googling will find it elsewhere on line), but in that paper, it posited a paralyzed Congress that had lost public trust, but a military that still had the public's trust.

Is that true today? Yes.

But that assumes the military is a monolith and would "obey" the CIA/politicized Generals.

 Especially since their oath is not to their generals or to the President but to the Constitution? And any coup would be a threat agasint the constitution...

Here is one satire on the coup scenerio:

General Mattis to the rescue?

The back story of this is the elite/modernist vs the outliers, as explained in an article by Professor Bulliet that I posted a few days ago that warns of opposition to the wonderful world that the elite are building for all of us.

The world has boarded the globalization express and is hell-bent on a WTO paradise. But what if the counternarrative of yahoo-hinterlands-pushing-back-hard-against-the-modernizers has substance?

Glen Reynolds of Instapundit had published a legal paper n the subject, in theory (as if he didn't really take it seriously) a couple of months ago, LINK and he notes that if a coup took over the presidency, they could only be legitimate if Congress and the courts went along.

But even then, they would face resistance from the states including governors who have control of their local National Guard units.

He also points out the importance of the second amendment here:

The Second Amendment,29 which plays a major anti-coup role in popular lore, may also come into play. The armed citizenry of the United States forms a potentially enormous military force: Tens or hundreds of millions of people with weapons.Some of those people are quite expert, and some of the civilian-owned weapons are quite sophisticated.

 He also points out that just owning a gun is not enough against trained soldiers, but again, many of us have had some military training.

which brings us to all those kids marching in Washington.

Are the kids being manipulated to join a cause that is supposed to be for something good (gun control, and maybe even mental illness control), but is actually about something else: Getting rid of Trump.

Why do I say that?

Because President Obama had eight years to do gun control, and he didn't.

and because there are well funded Democratic operatives behind the marches.

from an email from Democrats abroad:

Please join with Democrats Abroad as we rise and organize this Saturday in marches around the world. And then help us vote out the politicians who are holding America back from common sense gun laws.

So has anyone asked who paid the kid's plane tickets? Their parents? I heard local political activists were arranging for kids to stay with local families, which again suggests some grass roots support, but what are the numbers here? or is someone paying for their hotel and meals too?

the press will use the photos as examples of grass roots protests against the president, as propaganda.

But I am really paranoid about the timing.

No one marched after previous shootings during Obama's administration.

But you know, if there is a threat of a coup, getting guns out of the hands of civilians under the guise of "it's for the children's safety" would make it easier to confiscate weapons.

That is why Marcos confiscated all the firearms in the Philippines in 1972, under the guise that any opposition to him was communist.

I don't know.

I haven't lived in the US for a decade, but I do think that if the CIA attempts a coup, it could easily morph into a civil war.

and then, why worry?

 because it would be a green light for China to march in to take over the Philippines something they already have mentioned in their press... (and VietNam and Taiwan and maybe North Korea and eventually Siberia).

Sigh.