Sexism and Hillary's Emails Led Us to Trump

Good points here:

When one looks down the lengthening list of prominent male journalists who have been credibly accused of sexual harassment, one thing that sticks out is that they were all obsessed with those godforsaken emails.

Charlie Rose, Glenn Thrush, Mark Halperin, Bill O'Reilly: Besides being apparent sleazeballs, they were all big fans of the idea that the thousands of Democratic emails, some released by Clinton herself and some stolen by presumed Russian agents and leaked on WikiLeaks, would somehow turn into an earth-shattering scandal.

WikiLeaks is, of course, an operation run by Julian Assange, an accused rapist who spent the election leaking emails that somehow never had the shocking revelations he insinuated readers would find.

Rose went after Clinton on emails like a dog after a bone. O'Reilly seemed certain that all these emails would somehow prove Clinton was guilty of something. Halperin could barely wipe the drool off his face, so certain was he that emails would be the end of Clinton. Thrush spent years of his career making sure that the public believed that "Clinton emails" was a scandal, despite the fact that all that work produced no actual information of value.

All this faith that Clinton had some deep, dark secret that her emails would eventually reveal proved for naught. Lots of chatter in the emails about TV shows and pasta sauces, but no scandals. Some grousing about Bernie Sanders dragging out the primary, but no evidence of illegal or unethical behavior. It was a big nothing-burger, but the relentless media drumbeat about "emails" meant that the American public was convinced there was a scandal — even as many were entirely unaware of the many corruption scandals surrounding Trump.

Now we find out that many of these journalists who seemed convinced that Clinton had a deep, dark secret were likely harboring guilty secrets of their own. Their baseless campaign of persecution led, directly or otherwise, to the election of a man so full of deep, dark secrets that he's under federal investigation and still won't release his tax returns.

It may not be obvious at first glance, but the email non-scandal was fueled by sexism, which was evident even before these sexual harassment accusations. At its heart, the whole story -- which often verged on conspiracy theory -- was rooted in misogynist myths about the inherently deceitful nature of women.

This paranoia is why women are usually subject to more chaperoning and control than men. It's why religious conservatives have spent four decades in a rage because the Supreme Court found in Roe v. Wade that women have a right to privacy. In the 19th century, fear about what women might get up to if shielded from prying eyes led to widespread condemnation of letting women use the postal system.

Because of their sexist obsession, we have President Trump, a clearly unhinged racist in office.  You might even call him a madman.

Someone Is Trying to Keep Us from Having an Open Internet

and the Trump administration is doing nothing about it. (Is it Big Corporations? Republicans? Russia? Probably all of them.)

Definitely we know Russian bots are trying to influence public opinion in the US, in all kinds of ways, and probably helped elect Trump.

But certainly anyone who favors the open uncensored internet -- definitely anyone reading this blog!-- should be in favor of net neutrality rules.

Americans do not want internet service providers (ISPs) like Comcast and Verizon controlling what websites they can see, or how quickly they can load them. When pollsters ask U.S. voters whether they support net neutrality — regulations that require ISPs to treat all web traffic equally — a large bipartisan majority answers in the affirmative.

Among Americans who care deeply about the issue, support for net neutrality is even more overwhelming. When the Federal Communications Commission considered unwinding those regulations in 2015, so many Americans posted pro-net-neutrality messages to the FCC’s webpage for public comments, the site crashed.

The ISPs, however, are quite keen on accruing more power to curate your internet experience (a.k.a. extort content creators into paying for competitive broadband speeds). And the Trump administration’s regulatory philosophy is, ostensibly, that powerful corporations should be able to do whatever unpopular thing they want (so long as they purchase an indulgence from a Republican campaign committee).

Thus, it wasn’t surprising when the GOP-controlled FCC began the process of ending net neutrality earlier this year by once again soliciting public comments on the policy. But the responses that the commission received were quite surprising, indeed: A solid majority of Americans who posted comments to the FCC’s website favored scrapping net neutrality. 

(snip)

You will be shocked to learn that 1.2 million Americans did not actually, individually, submit this lamentation of “Obama Title II power grab,” interspersed with random strings of “\n.”

In October, the data analytics company Gravwell found that only about 17 percent of the comments submitted to the FCC on net neutrality were written by individual humans.

Ninety-five percent of these were in favor of net neutrality. The rest of the comments were “submitted in bulk and many come in batches with obviously incorrect information — over 1,000,000 comments in July claimed to have a pornhub.com email address.” These were overwhelmingly supportive of the Trump administration’s position.

(snip)

For some strange reason, the Trump administration has evinced zero interest in finding out how this happened. Schneiderman claims that his office contacted the FCC nine separate times about the investigation, without ever receiving a response. The attorney general wrote that this was a major headache for his team, since “successfully investigating this sort of illegal conduct requires the participation of the agency whose system was attacked.”

While bots were drowning out majoritarian opposition to ending net neutrality, Trump’s team was plotting to neutralize that opposition in the States.

Earlier this year, Republicans killed an Obama-era rule that restricted the ability of ISPs to collect and sell their users’ data without explicit permission.

Nearly two dozen states responded by proposing legislation that would impose similar restrictions on internet providers within their borders. FCC chair Ajit Pai is trying to preempt similar state-level subversion of his net-neutrality rollback, by stipulating in his “Restoring Internet Freedom” order that the federal rules change would override state and local regulations. Pai’s legal argument is that broadband qualifies as an “interstate” information service, and thus Uncle Sam has the power to block internet regulations that subvert federal policy.

If nothing else, this Ajit Pai is one evil asshole, as are Trump and Republicans in general.

Life After Death-- the Ultimate Conspiracy?

Of course, "life after death" -- the concept that some aspect of us (soul/conscience/spirit) lives on after our biological form ceases to live-- is the basis of many religions.

However, generally, if you have studied religion, much of their basis is illogical bullshit and rests on unproven mythology, so it's all hard to accept, particularly when there are so many different religions claiming they are the true religion. Indeed, I've been a solid atheist for many years because of this. I define "atheist" as not being religious in any way and not having any belief in god. I think to a high probability that no god exists in the tradition of any of the major religions, however, it's possible there is some sort of "god" out there, depending on exactly how you define god.

In any case, as an atheist, I have tended to not believe in "life after death", and certainly, in terms of our standard understanding of the universe, it's hard to know how "life after death"could occur.

But still, I do have an open mind on all topics (to wit this blog) and I am interested in claims of "life after death".

Thus, I have recently read this book "Surviving Death" by Leslie Kean.

It's possible the most amazing non-fiction book I have ever read, as basically Kean puts together a fairly compelling case for some aspect of our soul/conscience/spirit living on after death of our corporeal body.

The book has 4 basic types of evidence for "life after death", and each type is reasonably convincing in its own right as presented in the book:
1) cases of "re-incarnation", where a soul from a dead person has taken up residence in a new body.
2) accounts of out of body experiences after near death experiences (clinical or medical accounts) of people, indicating an intelligence can survive outside the body.
3) well-documented cases of specific ghost personalities or manifestations.
4) the ability of "mediums" to channel information and even spirits from the afterlife.

I am assuming what Kean says is true, as she does seem down-to-earth and believable and honest. Importantly for me, everything she presents is free from religion and religious connotations and is presented in a detached, journalistic and even scientific manner. In fact, as she writes, there are a lot of scientists who are studying this amazing subject of life after death.

I'll also bring up this interesting case of visitation after death, involving Forry Ackerman and Paul David's, that I had posted about over a year ago. And I have not checked these out to any extent, but there are a shitload of videos on Youtube talking about "life after death". Many of these have a religious take, so I avoid those.

In nay case, without going into the specific cases and evidence, the key question if we assume everything she says is true, is HOW???? What is going on that allow our spirit to survive death?

Recently, I posted an idea I had about "Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence on the Electromagnetic Spectrum = "ETIES", which actually was based partly on an interview I heard with Kean (as well as some other interviews on paranormal cases). I think there still may be something to the ETIES hypothesis. However, what is happening as presented in this book seems to go way beyond that.

Specifically, I had speculated that there were a select number of these ETIES that only infected a relatively few humans, but in the case of "surviving death", it seems as though every person ever born has a spirit that can go to the afterlife. The idea then is that there is something very special about the human brain/human consciousness that allows for our spirit to survive outside our bodies. So this happens to all of us (in theory, though I can't rule out that just a fraction of us can actually survive death based on some unknown variable).

What is it then that allows us to "survive" after death?

Some possibilities:

1) we live in a type of computer simulation, in which everything we see and experience is not "real" but an amazing, massive, advanced electronic simulation. So we can never truly die, as our virtual memory can survive after we die as computer code. I have never liked this idea for a variety of reasons, but it is hard to completely rule out.

2) our consciences are an energy (e.g. brainwaves) that can exist in independent of our body in some way, and that can manifest under the right circumstances.

3) our consciences exist in an alternate dimension of reality, even while we are living, and survive on there after we die.

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From what I read about mediums in Kean's book, there are some interesting clues to what is going on.

-- there are only a few "real" "bona fide" non-fake mediums who are able to channel spirits, so it takes a special skill

-- the ability to channel spirits takes a lot of time to develop and a lot of patience; the person needs to be in a special state, have the right state of mind

-- typically mediums aren't able to just summon anyone but work through a spirit intermediary that they regularly can tap into, and that spirit can find other specific deceased people in the spirit world.

-- some spirits can manifest physically in this world, but again, this seems to be a special ability and not easy for even the strongest spirits

-- the spirit communication is difficult and transient, not always fruitful; it is hard to get extensive answers

-- there is no talk about god or heaven or hell, but the deceased always seems to be in a better place

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So my take on this is that:

1) there are a few strong "spirits" who can more easily span this world and the "afterlife realm", for whatever reason. Maybe they have their own special ability or are higher energy souls or just prefer to stay connected to our world.

2) it is not clear that these spirits are immortal. People who go to a medium to find a deceased loved one have had that person die within 50 years, typically much less than that. I didn't see any evidence that mediums could channel spirits from hundreds of years ago. So it's possible that most spirits are somewhat short-lived phenomenon... perhaps the energy dissipates after a while for most spirits.

3) this phenomenon does seem real-- there are some completely mind-based personal memories that survive after death that can be tapped into by the right type of spirit or living human.

4) it's a nice thought of course, that we can live after death, even though it's all so vague what exactly this means, what kind of existence that would be and how long-lasting it is.

5) this spirit world is likely connected to other bizarre paranormal phenomena and may explain certain types of UFOs and alien presences, though I don't think explains all UFO activity by any means.

6) clearly our current science and understanding of physics and the universe can't explain this phenomenon, but that doesn't mean it isn't real.

7) Is there an actual conspiracy to cover up this phenomenon? Mediumship is widely thought to be debunked, and viewed by conventional science and society as bogus. So it's all viewed much like UFOs or alien abductions or 9/11 conspiracies or the fake moon-landing. But there is a standard template used by the powers that be-- debunk an obviously bogus example or piece of evidence for each of these topics and use it to discredit the whole field.

8) religions have apparently hijacked this life after death phenomenon for their own ends, as ways to control people and to make money.

9) One example I like is for artists, how at times they can tap into a "muse" for inspiration or for great performance. Is this a related phenomenon of tapping into the spirit world?

Releasing Demons

Each US presidential election seems to release certain types of demons.

Bill Clinton 1992-- rightwing revenge and conspiracy theory demons

George W. Bush 2000--  demons of war and death

Barack Obama 2008-- demons of racism

Donald Trump 2016-- demons of sexual abuse

Not that each kind of demon didn't exist previously, but that each demon flourished after that election. And after each new election, the previous demons kept growing as new demons were added; all these demons are still floating out in the American mind, wreaking havoc on our politics and wreaking real damage to people.

All this time, the Republicans have become progressively more insane and idiotic-- demons of mental illness have increased.

How many demons can we handle before we completely fall apart?

Chaos accompanies these demons too, and we are currently beset by chaos: news chaos, political chaos, climate chaos, environmental chaos, military chaos.

Guns, Not Mental Health

“the only variable that can explain the high rate of mass shootings in America is its astronomical number of guns.”

Saudi Arabia Is Liaterally Killing Yemen

United Nations officials say Yemen will face the world’s largest famine in decades if the Saudi-led coalition refuses to lift its blockade on deliveries of aid. On Monday, the coalition shut air, land and sea routes into Yemen after Houthi rebels fired a missile that was intercepted near the Saudi capital, Riyadh. Saudi Arabia says its blockade is needed to stop Iran from sending weapons to the rebels. The U.N. says aid agencies were given no prior notice of the Saudi decision to shut down all land, air and seaports in Yemen. Meanwhile, medical experts warn the clampdown will worsen Yemen’s cholera epidemic, which has sickened more than 900,000 people.

Why is this fucking war still going? Where is any evidence that Yemeni rebels are doing ANYTHING to Saudi Arabia?

Also there's a discussion of the political dynamic in play in Saudi Arabia, and the apparent recent consolidation of power by the prince Mohammed bin Salman perpetrating this horrific war.

It's pure evil and the Trump administration is either aiding it or turning a blind eye.

33 of the Day

"Saudi Corruption Purge Snares $33 Billion of Net Worth in Riyadh -- Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s crackdown on some of Saudi Arabia’s richest and most powerful men has put $33 billion of personal wealth at risk."

 More 3's in the piece here:

The stunning series of arrests has implicated three of the country’s richest people, including Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who’s No. 50 on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index ranking of the world’s 500 richest people, with $19 billion. Also being held are the kingdom’s second- and fifth-wealthiest people, as well as a travel-agency mogul and Bakr Binladin, a scion of a one of the country’s biggest construction empires. The arrests, which the crown prince said are part of a fight against corruption, reportedly have led the government to freeze the accounts of the more than three dozen men detained and believed to be held at the Riyadh Ritz-Carlton.

More Evidence of Bogus Islamic Terrorism

So... another day, another horrible mass shooting in the US.... in Texas, in a church, by a white guy with a semi-automatic weapon.

Isn't it clear that these domestic shootings represent a larger threat to the US than Islamic terrorism? Why exactly hasn't ISIS figured out that the best way to kill lots of people in the US is to use readily available semi-automatic weaponry???

As far as I know, there is no law saying guns can only be sold to WASPs.

The ready availability of guns in the US has been known since forever, and Muslim terrorists don't know this? Does this make any sense?

My guess would be the PTB don't want Islamic terrorists using guns, since that would make a better argument to ban guns, which the NRA does not want.

So Islamic terrorists run stupid attacks like using a truck to run down pedestrians and cyclists. Still terrible, but clearly a far lower body count than recent mass shootings.