BEYOND ANY REASONABLE DOUBT, the official 9/11 story is very very wrong.

(PERMANENT TOP POST)
Please see here for an overview of the 9/11 Frame-Up. Summary: they faked the plane crashes, they faked the videos, and they nuked the towers.

"The powers that be" are very sick, evil creatures.
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Please note that "Anonymous Physicist", who has contributed articles here in the past, is a different person from "Spooked", the owner of this blog. Also please see here for a note regarding the commenting policy on this site.

WTC & Nuclear Waste Cleanup

Interesting find here after I saw a tweet about the "Manafort brothers" being involved in the WTC cleanup after 9/11. I was curious if the Trump/Russian operator Paul Manafort was connected to these guys (turns out he is) but then I found this:

An established reputation has led to us being called upon for unique and first of their kind projects. One occasion that stands out occurred shortly after 9/11 when our involvement was requested at Ground Zero in New York City in 2001 to assist in the demolition and removal of the World Trade Center buildings. Unique and highly specialized also were the decommissioning and demolition of the Connecticut and Maine Yankee Nuclear Power Plants. The Maine Yankee Plant became the first nuclear power plant to be decommissioned in the U.S.

Quite the coincidence that the same demolition firm that cleaned up the WTC is also experienced in cleaning up nuclear waste!  It's also quite odd that they mention the WTC cleanup back-to-back with the decommissioning of two nuclear power plants.

This blog's review of nuclear demolition of the WTC can be seen at WTCdemolition.blogspot.com.

Also, keep in mind Paul Manafort of Trump-Russia fame is a deeply corrupt political mercenary, so it certainly wouldn't be surprising if his family's demolition firm was quite corrupt and mercenary.

All Aboard the Massive Criminality of the Trump Treason Train

From David Rothkopf:

"So we know this, Russian government representatives reached out to the Trump campaign in 2015 and undertook multiple initiatives and had multiple points and series of contacts with Team Trump for the next couple years.

It's not just the Trump Tower meeting. It's not just the interactions with Wikileaks. It's not just the Russian ties to Cambridge Analytica. It's not just Konstantin Kiliminik, a Russian agent working hand in hand with campaign chair Paul Manafort.

It's not just the ties between Flynn and the Russians. it's not just the links between the Russians and Eric Prince through the meeting in the Seychelles and beyond that. It's not just the ties of Wilbur Ross. It's not just the Trump Organization dealings with Russia. It's not just Jared Kushner's dealings with Russia. It's not just Kushner and Flynn's dealing with Kislyak during the campaign. It's not just the candidate Trump asking for Russian help. It's not just the GRU hacking for which indictments have already taken place. We can go on.

But let's not stop before we discuss the many benefits the Russians delivered to Trump via hacking, the dumping of files, the manipulation of social media and other avenues all to support Trump over Clinton.

Nor should we fail to discuss the benefits Trump offered the Russians since he gained power.

There was his covering up their hacking and his efforts to slow investigations of it. There was his denying the conclusions of the intelligence community about the Russians. There were the talks between Flynn and the Russians about waiving sanctions. There were the meetings with Trump when he was president when he handed over classified information to the Russians. There were whatever promises or concessions were made in Helsinki. There was a pattern of placating the Russians or failing to enforce sanctions for months and months.

In other words, there was plenty of quid and plenty of quo ($50 million penthouse apartments and the promise of big deals or financing benefits aside).

From the outreach to Cohen to just the first months of the administration we can count more than a dozen separate avenues of connection at the highest level. In any normal campaign or administration, just one would set off alarm bells and have the president calling the FBI into action.

But instead, in addition to those dozen avenues, the offers that were explicitly or tacitly accepted, benefits to both sides & the overt betrayal of the U.S. to advance the political or economic interests of Trump and those close to him, we have the president obstructing justice.

Actively obstructing. Threatening to fire all those getting closer to the truth. Lying and lying and lying some more and urging staff to lie and witness tampering and so on. This is not a case of possible collusion. This is sweeping, multi-layered, high level conspiracy led by Vladimir Putin and the Russian intelligence community and involving the active cooperation and complicity of a man who was a candidate for president and then president as well as his entire team.

This is the biggest scandal in the history of the American presidency and there is not another that is close to it.

But that is not all we know. The DoJ believes the president of the United States directed the commission of campaign finance felonies as a candidate.

The NYT produced extensive and compelling evidence of serial tax fraud by the Trump family. The state of NY is investigate fraud in their charities. The House will soon begin investigation of Trump money laundering. A case involving his violation of the Constitution's emoluments clause is under way.

In other words, as massive as the Russia scandal is, it might not be the biggest Trump scandal. It might not even be the scandal that brings Trump down.

But what we know is that all of these or any of these scandals must bring him down.

This criminal has no business being the White House.

He has no business walking freely among us.

2019 is going to be the worst year of Donald Trump's life except for all those that will follow it.

These cases will be investigated further and then proven. Some may be prosecuted while he is in office. Some may wait until he leaves office.

But someday this is already certain, no senior American public official--not Richard Nixon, not Andrew Johnson--will go down in more disgrace or be more reviled by history than Donald Trump.

And that is as it should be."

Fuck Trump and his crime family.

10 Reasons To Think Trump Is a Pedophile

Is Donald Trump a pedophile?

There's more evidence for this than you might think:

1) he was good friends with convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and used to hang out at his pedophilia mansion, rode on his "Lolita Express"

2) he was accused in a legal filing of raping a 13 year old at an Epstein party; the now grown woman never came forward due to death threats

3) he continually sexualized Ivanka, even when she was a baby, and publicly said he was sexually attracted to her when she was a teen. He had Ivanka work as a model at a modeling agency that used very young girls and there were rumors of the head of the agency Casablancas being a pedophile.

4) pedophilia is relatively common among rich, powerful people like Trump and is a way to show control and to exert blackmail.

5) It's a common conservative political tactic to accuse the other side of what you are guilty of, and Trump is well known to project his own flaws onto others, and of course Trump's campaign surrogates made a big push to accuse Hillary Clinton of Pedophilia in the 2016 campaign (Pizzagate and rumors of her going off with Epstein).

6) Vladimir Putin is thought to be a pedophile and Trump worships Putin.

7) Trump gave a cushy job to Florida prosecutor Alex Acosta, who helped cover up the Epstein sex ring that included Trump.

8) Trump is amoral and clearly used to flouting the law

9) Besides Epstein, Trump is friends with other accused pedophiles: Casablancas, Arif, Nader, Cohn, which is significant because Trump isn't really known for having a lot of friends

10) Trump defended pedophile Roy Moore and endorsed him for Senate.

-------- Interesting to also note that the GHWB White House was reported to have a pedophile ring (on the front page of the Washington Times)... and then the story disappeared.

 All these corrupt, abusive, sociopathic, pedophilic elites need to finally see justice.

Trump's Labor Secretary Covered Up a Massive Pedophile Ring

Alex Acosta has got to go, due to his corrupt role in letting Jeffrey Epstein getting a super soft plea deal for his massive sex crimes and pedophilia.

It's pretty clear Acosta was covering for the rich and famous who also cavorted for Epstein, including people like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, and Alan Dershowitz.

There are actually serious allegations against Dershowitz and previously there was a woman who said Trump had raped her when she was 13.

This ALL needs to come out and the criminals prosecuted.

GOP Traitors

There's pretty clear evidence now that the last 5 Republican presidents covertly colluded with a hostile foreign power:
 
1) Nixon with North Vietnam before the 1968 election

2) Reagan with Iran before the 1980 election

3) Reagan and Bush Sr with Iran in the mid-80's (Iran-Contra)

4) GWB with Saudi Arabia and al Qaeda (pre- and post-9/11)

5) Trump with Russia before the 2016 election

3 out of 5 times it was to help get elected.

First, it's interesting that Democratic presidents don't need such help, but that's probably because they actually have broadly popular policies and don't have to use sleazy corrupt means to get elected. You could make possibly cases for Clinton and Obama to have made some secret deals with hostile foreign powers, but really, there's nothing like what these last 5 GOP presidents have done.

Second, Nixon, Reagan and Bush Sr basically wriggled out of trouble for this collusion, though Nixon was eventually removed for other corrupt crimes in office.

GWB was let off the hook because clearly this country was not able to confront the truth about 9/11

I do think Trump will have trouble getting out of trouble for his collusion for a few reasons:

1) he's a dumb criminal and just does a lot of corrupt things right out in the open

2) Bob Mueller is as smart and tough of a prosecutor as they come

3) the case against Trump is as serious as you can get-- colluding with a foreign power to get elected where the foreign power actually attacks our election process -- that's way worse than what happened with Nixon and Reagan. It's on par with 9/11 but the thing with Trump is he doesn't have the national security state (aka deep state) behind him as Bush did.

4) what really sets Trump apart from the other Repubs is that Trump is quite obviously in the sway of Russia-- he didn't just make a deal with them, he became their AGENT. He spouts their propaganda even AGAINST the US state. It's clear that Trump is OWNED by Russia. This is simply treasonous in the most dire and intolerable way for a US president.

If the full charges and case against Trump are brought to light, as I think they will, Trump MUST be impeached, removed from office and sent to jail.

RIP Poppy Bush

Rude Pundit does a fantastic job summing him up as president:

Goddamn, we've become such a pathetic nation living under the bovine shadow of Donald Trump that the orgy of corpse worship of dead George H.W. Bush, our 41st president, makes the nostalgia-gasm over dead Ronald Reagan back in 2004 look like a rushed hand job in the back of the historical convertible. Of course, Bush was a better human than Trump. But there are parasitic worms that are better humans than Trump. The bar is not that high.

So, yeah, sure, you can thank Bush for some things he did that genuinely made the nation kinder and gentler, like the Americans with Disabilities Act or his environmental record (putting aside, for obvious reasons, his years as a Texas oil man). But that's the way it's always been: no matter how shitty you think a president might be, he does a few things that you think aren't bad. It's like if you're fucking a porcupine's asshole, and, once every ten thrusts or so, you don't get a quill in your dick. At the end of the day, you're still fucking a porcupine's asshole. (Sure, it's consensual. The porcupine wanted it.)

Besides, one thing that's been left out in this rush to praise Bush as the Greatest Single-Term President in History or whatever other superlatives you wanna toss out there in the encomiums of doom is that he had no fuckin' choice when it came to legislative goals except to do some rational shit. He had a Democratic House and Senate for his entire term.  Everyone wants to talk about the bipartisanship, the "reaching across the aisle" that Bush did, but the fuckin' Democrats did it, too. They didn't just shut the whole fuckin' joint down unless Bush did what they wanted, like the Republicans did with Obama. So spare a thought or two for Tom Foley in the House and George Mitchell in the Senate. Most of what Bush is being praised for are Democratic initiatives he went along with.

So, sorry, tender-hearted liberals and weeping conservatives, I'm not going to spend any more time fluffing this cock. This is gonna be more of a shit-on-his-dead-face type of thing. See, I was there. I remember. I marched against him, against the Persian Gulf "war," which ended with the United States rebuilding the palaces of the oil billionaires in Kuwait; and against his savage anti-choice policies, which empowered the lunatics of Operation Rescue and the Christian terrorist assassins in their war on women.

You wanna understand who Bush was? Look at the shit he vetoed or pocket vetoed. The very first one was for a hike in the minimum wage, which hadn't budged in 8 years from $3.35, because he wanted it at $4.35 and Congress, in a bipartisan vote, wanted it $4.55. He vetoed the Civil Rights Act of 1990 because he claimed it would force hiring quotas on businesses (it wouldn't) and because it didn't cap punitive damages on discrimination lawsuits. He vetoed the National Voter Registration Act because of, no shit, false allegations of possible "fraud." He vetoed the Family and Medical Leave Act because he was a prick.  (snip)

You want to talk about the pardons for the half-dozen Reagan administration officials in the scandal of selling arms to Iran in order to fund the terrorist Contras in Nicaragua, obsructing justice and immunizing him from prosecution? Or his lies that got us into the worthless war in Iraq and set us up for our next worthless war with Iraq, all because of Saddam Hussein, who Bush had had no small role in putting into power? Or his role in getting arms and funds to the mujahideen in Afghanistan to fight a proxy war with the Soviet Union, which, of course, led to al-Qaeda's formation?

Or his terrible family, who continued to damage the nation in ways from which we will never recover? Or his failures in the wake of Hurricane Andrew (like father, like son, eh?)? Or his propping up of the heinous Reagan? Or his role as director of the CIA? Or Clarence fuckin' Thomas? Or his dragging the economy into a recession because he was willing to pass tax hikes but not enough to turn things around?

Ultimately, George Herbert Walker Bush was just another fucking Republican creep, superficially not quite as bad as Reagan, GWB or Trump.

I will grant him his service in WWII, but his long service as a spy and apparent involvement in the JFK assassination made him part of a very ugly history.

War Crimes and Crimes Against Humanity

White House approves broad new powers — including use of deadly force — for U.S. troops on the border.

“It’s not enough that President Trump asked American service members to spend Thanksgiving at the border in furtherance of a partisan agenda,” said Michael Breen, president of Human Rights First. “Now the White House is upping the ante by authorizing those service members to use lethal force against refugees, migrants and others at the border. This legally dubious ‘Cabinet order’ creates confusion, undermines morale, and may very well lead to violence,” Breen said.

The Truman National Security Project, a Washington public policy organization stocked with former Obama administration national security officials, called the White House order “illegal and unconstitutional” and called on Congress to block it. “It is a long-standing policy and undisputed principle that the United States military cannot engage in law enforcement activity at home,” the group said in a statement. “This policy cannot be allowed to stand.”

Shooting at unarmed civilians is a war crime.

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Middle East civilian deaths have soared under Trump. And the media mostly shrug.

2017 was the deadliest year for civilian casualties in Iraq and Syria, with as many as 6,000 people killed in strikes conducted by the U.S.-led coalition, according to the watchdog group Airwars. That is an increase of more than 200 percent over the previous year. It is far more if you add in countries like Yemen, Afghanistan, Somalia and many others. But the subject, considered a stain on President Barack Obama’s legacy even by many of his supporters, has almost dropped off the map.

Indiscriminate bombing of civilians is a war crime. 
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Trump's failure to fight climate change is a crime against humanity

The future of our life on earth it is at stake.

The Jonestown Massacre

This first person account of the Jonestown mass murder in Guyana by Congresswoman Jackie Speier is freaking wild and well worth a read.

Trump Exhibiting "Bunker Behavior" as Democrats Pick Up Biggest House of Representative Gains Since After Watergate

I will make the reckless prediction that “Donald Trump” and “good news” are not fated to appear in the same sentence unless the good news happens to be that his presidency is ending.

Everything about his behavior since the midterms suggests that even he has figured this out. It has belatedly dawned on him that (a) he lost the election he thought he won; (b) the Robert Mueller investigation has moved faster than his efforts to thwart it; (c) any of his legislative fantasies, notably the funding of his border wall, are doomed; and (d) and his pouting in Paris elevated his international image as a buffoon to a whole new level of notoriety. Remember when Republicans attacked Barack Obama (falsely) for allegedly barring Winston Churchill’s bust from the White House? Now the GOP’s hero is a president whom Churchill’s own grandson, the Conservative member of Parliament Nicholas Soames, has labeled “pathetic,” “inadequate,” and “not fit to represent this great country” after Trump failed to show up at the French cemetery rites honoring the fallen of World War I.

That all this makes Trump panic at some gut level is visible not merely in his widely reported spells of rage and bitterness and in his increasingly empty official schedule. He is also stepping up his already impressive efforts to discredit and destroy those democratic institutions that might prevent him from escaping criminal jeopardy. And so he has returned to ridiculing the very lifeblood of America, the electoral process, by declaring elections that don’t go his way a fraud; he has escalated his assault on a free press by barring a CNN reporter and trying to frame him as a fellow misogynistic bully with a deceptively edited video; and, last but not least, he has appointed an acting attorney general, Matthew Whitaker, who has ridiculed the judicial system, been on the board of a fly-by-night company that practiced Trump University–style consumer frauds, and publicly attacked the Mueller probe in Trump’s own language.

This is bunker behavior. Only a desperate man would try to derail Mueller by installing this transparent reprobate at the Department of Justice. Even more revealing is how Trump has become more and more unhinged since making his Whitaker move. The growing fury, most manifest in his latest anti-Mueller tweetstorm this week, suggests that he already realizes that the ploy has backfired. It seems to be finally sinking in, perhaps under the frantic tutelage of his lawyers, that his fate and the fates of his son and son-in-law, among others in his immediate orbit, are tied to the fates of Roger Stone, Michael Cohen, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, and all the other president’s men whose comprehensive narrative Mueller is bound to tell America no matter what Trump and his stooge at Justice do to try to foil or decapitate him.

The end of Trump (cannot come too soon):

How can we be so certain that Trump’s political days are numbered? First, now we can see more clearly that the blue tide kept rising as many of the closest races, especially for the House, flipped to the Democrats as the final votes were counted. Democrats are now set to gain nearly 40 seats in the House — their biggest gain in decades. Second, we have the smart analysis this past weekend from Democratic pollster Stanley B. Greenberg that the shift away from Trump in 2018 was more profound than many initially believed. In fact, Greenberg makes a strong case that the election was “transformative” with Trump losing support, not only with suburban, college-educated women, but all women. And Democrats gained ground in other areas, too, including working-class men and in rural areas.

The likelihood that Democrats will maintain these gains though the 2020 election is very promising. Unlike many incumbent presidents who have retooled their approach in the face of stinging midterm rebukes, Trump has signaled he’s sticking with his risky behavior. The attack tweets, the latest puerile joke about a congressman’s name and indefensible behaviors, such as believing a foreign power instead of the CIA about the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, will continue. Trump will not pass from our politics suddenly from a single dramatic cause, but rather from the accumulation of self-inflicted wounds. It has taken much longer and done more damage than many hoped, but the end of Trump is finally in sight.

Trump of course continues to act like the world's biggest crook and asshole (etc, etc, etc), and it's just hard to imagine a president who so widely loathed as Trump, but he is in fact reviled by over half the country, and for good reason.

I mean, how can anyone so fucking stupid and delusional still be president?

He complained at length that a new Navy ship was using electromagnetic catapults to propel planes off ships. He said steam was better and was incredulous the military would consider otherwise. “Would you go with steam or would you go with electromagnetic? Because steam is very reliable, and the electromagnetic, unfortunately, you have to be Albert Einstein to really work it properly,” he asked. “You have to be Albert Einstein to run the nuclear power plants that we have here, as well. But we’re doing that very well. I would go, sir, with electromagnetic,” the officer responded.

Trump repeatedly asked military commanders what they were seeing in their regions, a conversation not usually held on a televised broadcast. He asked if those serving in Afghanistan were enjoying themselves. (Later, he demurred when asked by reporters whether he would pull troops out of the country.)

He bragged during part of the conversation about sending troops to the Mexico border, a mission that is controversial and seen by many as a waste of time. He expressed no second-guessing about the constitutionality of signing an order giving soldiers the right to use lethal force at the border, although many in his government harbor such concerns.

Russian Fake News, Propaganda, Disinfo & "Active Measures"

This 3 part video series on the Russian fake new operation "Operation Infektion" is worth a watch.

For instance, the conspiracy that HIV was engineered by the US Army as a bioweapon was definitely Russian propaganda. 

I think in the conspiracy realm, it's important to be aware of the influence of foreign propaganda, and particularly for 9/11, we need to wonder about some of the "facts" that are part of the conspiracy lore.

Of course it's a spy game, and the US puts out its own propaganda too, so the truth can be a bit confusing sometimes.

For me the keys are to:

1) have several trusted sources of info
2) never trust any source or one story completely
3) find direct sources if possible, like video
4) highly partisan sources mislead a lot, particularly on the right
5) popular conspiracy sources put out a lot of bullshit
6) be aware of confirmation bias
7) nuance is important

Stess Test for American Democracy

Beautiful passage from Michelle Goldberg:

The last two years have been a stress test for American democracy, and they’ve revealed this country and its worst and at its best. We’ve seen how quickly an entire political party, with shockingly few exceptions, has capitulated to authoritarianism, white-nationalist demagogy and naked cruelty. Trump’s Republican Party has shattered whatever was left of the civic compact binding this country together, abandoning American ideals that transcend blood and soil, and American values that transcend brute power. It’s fitting that the president is closing this political season with an ad so racist that even Fox News has pulled it off the air.

Yet if the past two years have given lie to the myth of American exceptionalism — a system that elevates a person like Trump is by definition not the best in the world — they have also revealed an enduring strain of actual American greatness. Movements like Trump’s thrive on social decay and atomization. Millions of Americans who oppose Trump have responded to him with an enormous civic revival. They have marched, organized Resistance groups, and reinvigorated American politics at every level. In the face of an existential threat to democracy, they’ve rededicated themselves to its practice.

The sheer effort citizens who care had to put into this election to wrest control from a psychotic government was truly remarkable and makes me emotional to contemplate and gives me hope for the future. Believe me, I worked hard on this election too, and we did a lot of great things:

1. The Democrats will take control of the U.S. House of Representatives next year for the first time since January 2011.
2. The Democrats flipped the House and Senate in New Hampshire, and the Senate in Colorado, Maine, and New York.
3. The Democrats won the Trifecta (controlling the governor’s office and both chambers of the legislature) in Colorado, Illinois, Maine, New Mexico, Nevada, and New York. In Oregon and Nevada, they won supermajorities in both chambers.
4. The Republicans lost their Trifectas in Kansas and Michigan.
5. The Republicans lost their supermajorities in the North Carolina legislature.
6. The deep red states of Idaho, Utah, and Nebraska used the ballot to expand Medicaid.
7. Florida voted to restore felons’ voter rights.
8. Paul LePage’s reign of terror in Maine came to a decisive end with the election of Democrat Janet Mills as the new governor.
9. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker was denied a third term in office when he lost to Democrat Tony Evers.
10. Democrat Tom Wolf was decisively reelected as governor of Pennsylvania.
11. Gretchen Whitner was elected governor of Michigan, flipping control to the Democrats.
12. Democrat J.B. Pritzker trounced Governor Bruce Trauner of Illinois, flipping control to the Democrats.
13. Democrat Tim Walz was elected governor of Minnesota.
14. The loathsome Kris Kobach was defeated in the Kansas governor’s race by Democrat Laura Kelly.
15. Democrat Jared Polis, who is openly gay, was elected governor of Colorado.
16. Michelle Lujan Grisham was elected governor of New Mexico, flipping control to the Democrats.
17. Steve Sisolak will become the first Democratic governor of Nevada in twenty years.
18. The Democrats retained the governorships of Rhode Island, Connecticut, New York, Oregon, and California.
19. In addition to winning the governorships of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin (the three key Trump states of 2016), the Democrats also won the U.S. Senate races in those states, too.
20. Russian stooge Rep. Dana Rohrabacher of California was defeated.
21. The Republican chairman of the House Rules Committee and former chairman of the National Republican Congressional Committee, Rep. Pete Sessions of Texas, was defeated.
22. The Democrats won the seat currently held by Mark “Hiking the Appalachian Trail” Sanford of South Carolina.
23. The Democrats won Eric Cantor’s former seat in Virginia, currently held by the loathsome Dave Brat.
24. The Democrats now control ten of New Jersey’s twelve congressional seats, and an eleventh is nearly tied.
25. Democratic women swept the Philly suburbs winning three seats there as well as another in the Lehigh Valley.
26. The Democrats now control seven of Virgina’s eleven congressional seats, driven by the victories of three women.
27. Democratic women flipped two southern Florida congressional seats.
28. Democratic women flipped two of Iowa’s congressional seats.
29. Democratic women flipped a seat in Kansas and a seat in Oklahoma, and a man flipped a seat in Utah.
30. Kim Davis, the Rowan County, Kentucky clerk made famous by her refusal to sign marriage licenses for gay couples, lost her bid for reelection.
31. Missouri voted to hike the minimum wage.
32. There were fifteen House candidates that President Trump went out of his way to endorse who lost.
33. Though Beto O’Rourke narrowly lost his bid to oust Sen. Ted Cruz, the Democrats picked up congressional seats in Texas and made significant gains in the legislature.
34. Democrats Rashida Tlaib in Michigan and Ilhan Omar in Minnesota will become the first Muslim women to serve in the U.S. House of Representatives.
35. Ayanna Pressley was elected and will be the first black woman to serve in Congress from Massachusetts, and perhaps the first in all of New England.
36. Democrats Sharice Davids of Kansas and Deb Haaland of New Mexico were elected and will be the first Native American women to serve in Congress. Davids will also be first openly LGBTQ member of the Kansas congressional delegation.
37. Missouri and Utah legalized marijuana for medical purposes and Michigan legalized recreational use.
38. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on New York, 29, will become the youngest woman to serve in Congress, followed closely by Abby Finkenauer of Iowa, also 29.
39. Texas is sending its first Latinas to Congress: Veronica Escobar of El Paso and Sylvia Garcia of Houston.
40. It’s looking like Lucy McBath will do what Jon Ossoff could not and win Georgia’s suburban 6th District.
41. In a rare Senate pickup, Jacky Rosen defeated Dean Heller in Nevada.
42. Democrat Mike Espy forced a December runoff in one of the two Mississippi Senate elections, though it will be an uphill climb to win it.
43. The Democrats will control one Senate seat in West Virginia and one (hopefully) in Montana for another six years.
44. Michigan changed their Constitution to ban gerrymandering
45. Colorado, Missouri and (I think) Utah also passed redistricting reform.
46. As frustrating and abusive as the Trump administration has been, people didn’t turn to violence but instead put their trust in our representative democracy and turned out to vote in big numbers.
47. (Selfishly) for the first time since I moved out of Philly into the suburbs, I will be represented by a Democratic state Rep, state Senator and U.S. congressperson.
48. If you’re into this type of thing, California voters overwhelmingly required that all eggs sold in the state come from cage-free hens by 2022.
49. The dead pimp won (hat tip to Jon Ralston).
50. Can you say, “Good afternoon, Chairwoman Maxine Waters”?

Hansen Versus Sandow on The Most Unbelievable Yet Well-Documented UFO Claim of All Time

It's probably the Linda Cortile abduction case. 

I blogged about it 3 years ago.

This case came up again as I was reading this book: George Hansen's "The Trickster and the Paranormal"

It's an interesting book for sure-- a scholarly and almost philosophical dive into all sorts of strange histories and paranormal events. There's a lot of important and unique ideas explored at length in the book. Hansen's a bit odd in that he believes in the reality of paranormal events, but he also shows how much (supposed) fraud is associated with paranormal events (is a complicated topic). But what's even more odd is how downplays the idea of UFOs and ETs as being real. In the same vein, Hansen completely dismisses the Cortile case as a hoax.

So it's worth revisiting this excellent Greg Sandow rebuttal to Hansen's criticism. He does a great job in pointing out how strong the Cortile case is and taking down Hansen. And it does seem like Hansen acted unethically in dealing with Cortile by publishing her real name, and it's sad and weird that Hansen does this and it makes me doubt his motives, even though his book is quite good otherwise.

Congress Thinks the Public Is Way More Conservative Than It Actually Is

Interesting piece. They blame this effect on corporate lobbyists influencing Congressional staff, which I'm sure plays an important role. But it also seems obvious that the corporate-controlled media has a huge stake in maintaining the idea that the US is predominantly conservative.

All told, the study paints a picture of a Congress that is out of touch with the American people -- with perceptions of public opinion skewed rightward by the influence of deep-pocketed lobbyists. The authors say that the best way to combat these distortions is by increased civic participation among the general public.

“Political action can’t end on Election Day,” co-author Matto Mildenberger wrote in a tweet on Thursday. “Citizens need to keep writing, calling and meeting with elected officials and their staffs long after the midterms.”