Tag: us

Racist Louisiana

Louisiana is still extremely racist, to no one’s surprise.

In 2008, John Conyers, the chair of the House Committee on the Judiciary, and Cedric Richmond, a Louisiana state representative, learned about Woodfox and Wallace’s decades of confinement and visited them at C.C.R. A “massive amount of evidence” showed that Woodfox and Wallace were innocent. Brent Miller’s widow, Teenie Rogers, had also begun to question the state’s evidence, after a young investigator on the case, Billie Mizell, befriended her and made charts mapping inconsistencies in the state’s testimony. Rogers wrote Richmond a letter saying that she was “shocked to find out that no real attempt was made to find out who the fingerprint did belong to, which should have been a very simple thing to do.”

Trump Batman Effect

So based on these 2 strategies, we are in for 4 years of sham Trump victories which look really convincing on a first glance. Every couple of weeks, until it gets boring, another company is going to say Trump convinced them to keep jobs in the United States. The total number of jobs saved this way will never be more than a tiny fraction of the jobs that could be saved by (eg) good economic policy, but nobody knows anything about economic policy and Trump will make sure everybody hears about Ford keeping jobs in the US. Every one of these victories will actively make the world worse, in the sense that these big companies will get taxpayer subsidies or favors they can call in later to distort government priorities, but nobody’s going to notice these either.

Electoral College Sabotage

The timing of the CIA’s leak wasn’t random. It was an opening salvo by the CIA to actively influence the Electoral College and stop Donald Trump from becoming President. The CIA is trying to topple Trump. Why? Self preservation. The real reason is that Trump was working with Peter Thiel to corporatize the intelligence gathering of the United States around companies, like Palantir, that can adopt and employ technology much faster and with more efficacy. Trump is planning to turn the CIA and the NSA into peripheral collection systems.

a good night story for you

Offshoring $400M

More even than the laws of the world’s tax havens, the offshore financial system is kept afloat by the legions of professionals — accountants, lawyers, incorporation agents — who are paid well to service it. But the people who work to dismantle that system also have to be paid. If the case Fisher had constructed against Oesterlund was correct, I once proposed to him, then at least some of the money coming to him and Pursglove would seem to be tainted. Fisher disagreed, and unspooled an intricate accounting of his own. When he cracked open the Cook trusts, Fisher argued, the money would come back home. Whatever liabilities Oesterlund had to consumers would be payable by what remained of the businesses. Pursglove and her payout would live in Boca Raton, within easy reach of United States law. “I would always view the $ that I get to be legitimate $”.

Trump, Political Innovator

The next US president, Donald Trump, seems to be a textbook political innovator. During a period when his party was quite up for grabs with many contenders, he worked his crowds, taking a wide range of vague positions that varied over time, and often stepped over taboo lines. In the process, he surprised everyone by discovering a new coalition that others had not tried to represent, a group that likes him more for this representation than his personal features.

Tahrir Square Moment

My worry is that the next one we see won’t operate within the confines of a political campaign. This uptick in insults directed at minorities blamed on Trump, may be the tinder for setting off this next insurgency. Social media amplifies every incident, spreading the anger it evokes like contagion across the country. Just watch. This suggests that the next open source protest we are likely to see will form to force Donald Trump from the Presidency before the next election — a Tahrir square moment in cities all across the US. A massive and diverse open source protest that has one simple goal: the immediate removal of Donald Trump from office. Unfortunately, an open source insurgency that forces a sitting President from office without the benefit of an election could result in the same outcome as Egypt (or worse Syria).

Born to lose

the democrats should ask themselves why they’ve been losing elections & political battles for the last 30 years. even after all these years, they seem surprised that the other side is playing dirty, but they keep bringing sticks and stones to a gun battle. keep up the ineffective techniques and you’ll keep losing.

Remember, no one cares about policy, and politics isn’t about policy.

First Gentleman?

The bigger question is what he should actually do as First Gentleman. He would be “in charge of revitalizing the economy, because, you know, he knows how to do it.” He has “got to come out of retirement” and take on job creation. That struck many people as an awfully broad mandate. Luckily, she seems to have dropped that idea—or, at least, we haven’t heard it lately. It might have been a spur-of-the-moment bid for the hearts and minds of working-class voters in coal country who remember her husband fondly.