The "Deep State" demonstrates its contempt for the law

Two events last week should make anyone sit up and take notice who upholds the constitution and laws of the United States.  They led me to do an extended analysis of what the so-called "Deep State" and its allies are apparently trying to accomplish.

First, the NSA deleted data that a court had ordered it to preserve.

Since 2007, the NSA has been under court orders to preserve data about certain of its surveillance efforts that came under legal attack following disclosures that President George W. Bush ordered warrantless wiretapping of international communications after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. In addition, the agency has made a series of representations in court over the years about how it is complying with its duties.

However, the NSA told U.S. District Court Judge Jeffrey White in a filing on Thursday night and another little-noticed submission last year that the agency did not preserve the content of internet communications intercepted between 2001 and 2007 under the program Bush ordered. To make matters worse, backup tapes that might have mitigated the failure were erased in 2009, 2011 and 2016, the NSA said.

. . .

“We don't know exactly how bad it is,” the lawyer said, adding: “Even if you take them at their word that this was just an honest mistake, what it shows is despite your best intention to comply with important restrictions, it can be really difficult to implement ... It shows that with the really tremendous volume of information they’re vacuuming up, it is impossible to be meticulous.”

There's more at the link.

Note the last paragraph in the above excerpt.  To my mind, that's a cop-out.  If you collect so much data that you can't guarantee you'll comply with a court order, because you can't keep track of it all, it's your duty to inform the court about that at the time the order is made - not years later, when it's too late to do anything about it!

Next, the FBI has also failed to preserve information it was legally required to retain.

The FBI “failed to preserve” five months worth of text messages exchanged between Peter Strzok and Lisa Page, the two FBI employees who made pro-Clinton and anti-Trump comments while working on the Clinton email and the Russia collusion investigations.

The disclosure was made Friday in a letter sent by the Justice Department to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee (HSGAC).

“The Department wants to bring to your attention that the FBI’s technical system for retaining text messages sent and received on FBI mobile devices failed to preserve text messages for Mr. Strzok and Ms. Page,” Stephen Boyd, the assistant attorney general for legislative affairs at the Justice Department, wrote to Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson, the chairman of HSGAC.

He said that texts are missing for the period between Dec. 14, 2016 and May 17, 2017.

Boyd attributed the failure to “misconfiguration issues related to rollouts, provisioning, and software upgrades that conflicted with the FBI’s collection capabilities.”

Again, more at the link.

If anyone actually believes that either or both agencies were guilty of a mere slip of the tongue, or a flick of a finger, I have a bridge in Brooklyn, NYC that I'd like to sell you.  Cash only, please, and in small bills.  There's just no way that this data was lost 'accidentally' - particularly when other data from the same period has apparently survived with no trouble at all.  I can't believe this was anything other than deliberate defiance of the law and the courts, from both agencies.  Those responsible are cocking a snook at the law - and they expect to get away with it.  Since the actual perpetrators can't be identified, they can't be punished.  Those responsible fully expect to get off scot-free.

Philip Giraldi points out:

There is a growing consensus among many observers in Washington that the national security agencies have become completely politicized over the past seventeen years and are now pursuing selfish agendas that actually endanger what remains of American democracy. Up until recently it has been habitual to refer to such activity as the Deep State, which is perhaps equivalent to the Establishment in that it includes financial services, the media, major foundations and constituencies, as well as lobbying groups, but we are now witnessing an evolutionary process in which the national security regime is exercising power independently.

. . .

Formerly intelligence and law enforcement agencies acted under the direction of the White House but without any political bias. Transitions from Democratic to Republican administrations were consequently seamless for the employees of CIA, FBI, DIA and the NSA, but this has changed. In the 2016 election a line-up of retired senior officers from those organizations openly supported the Clinton campaign and even went so far as to construct elaborate conspiracy theories regarding Trump and his associates, including the claim that Donald Trump is actually an agent of Russia.

The desire to discredit and ultimately delegitimize Trump even involved some active duty senior officers, including John Brennan, Director of CIA, who exploited Agency relationships with foreign intelligence services to develop information on Trump, and James Comey of the FBI who initiated an investigation of Trump’s associates. Both were involved in the later surfacing of the notorious Steele Dossier, a collection of fact mixed with fiction that sought to destroy the Trump presidency even before it began.

. . .

Antiwar activist Justin Raimondo ... concludes that “Our intelligence agencies are at war with the executive branch of government…to reverse the [2016] election results.” Raimondo believes that Trump is being particularly targeted because his unpredictability and populism threaten the wealth and power of the elites and he notes “If you think they’ve ruled out assassination you’re being naïve.”

Raimondo believes that something like a civil war is coming, with the war party Establishment fighting to defend its privileged global order while many other Americans seek a return to normal nationhood with all that implies. If true, the next few years will see a major internal conflict that will determine what kind of country the United States will be.

More at the link.

A very interesting article in New York magazine's online edition examines the views of Glenn Greenwald, who broke the Snowden story and has been an acerbic observer of Washington D.C. for many years.  He's criticized the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations impartially whenever he felt it necessary, which argues for his journalistic independence.  New York magazine is most emphatically not a conservative source - rather the opposite - so its willingness to publish so searching an article (even though it doesn't endorse Greenwald's views) is praiseworthy, IMHO.  Here's an extended excerpt, but you really should click through to read the entire article for yourself.  It's worth your time.

For the better part of two years, Greenwald has resisted the nagging bipartisan suspicion that Trumpworld is in one way or another compromised by a meddling foreign power. If there’s a conspiracy, he suspects, it’s one against the president; where others see collusion, he sees “McCarthyism.” Greenwald is predisposed to righteous posturing and contrarian eye-poking — and reflexively more skeptical of the U.S. intelligence community than of those it tells us to see as “enemies.”

And even if claims about Russian meddling are corroborated by Robert Mueller’s investigation, Greenwald’s not sure it adds up to much — some hacked emails changing hands, none all that damaging in their content, maybe some malevolent Twitter bots. In his eyes, the Russia-Trump story is a shiny red herring — one that distracts from the failures, corruption, and malice of the very Establishment so invested in promoting it.

. . .

“When Trump becomes the starting point and ending point for how we talk about American politics, [we] don’t end up talking about the fundamental ways the American political and economic and cultural system are completely ****** for huge numbers of Americans who voted for Trump for that reason,” he says. “We don’t talk about all the ways the Democratic Party is a complete ******* disaster and a corrupt, sleazy sewer, and not an adequate alternative to this far-right movement that’s taking over American politics.”

. . .

Thanks to this never-ending hot take, Greenwald has been excommunicated from the liberal salons that celebrated him in the Snowden era; anybody who questions the Russia consensus, he says, “becomes a blasphemer. Becomes a heretic. I think that’s what they see me as.” Greenwald is no longer invited on MSNBC, and he’s portrayed in the Twitter fever swamp as a leading villain of the self-styled Resistance. “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he says. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.” His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)

. . .

Rather than see Trump as a product of a rotten power structure, as Greenwald does, and the 2016 election as a wild reaction against that power structure, as Greenwald also does, it was easier for most American liberals to frame his victory as an accident. And rather than look within to eradicate the conditions that wrought Trump, it was more comforting to pin his rise on an external foe.

The Russian scandal proved ideal. “Across the political aisle, American elites are preoccupied with rejuvenating a Cold War in the name of believing that all of our problems are traceable to the Kremlin,” Greenwald argued. The notion that “Putin is not some fumbling dictator but some kind of an omnipotent mastermind,” he went on, “stems very much from this human desire to believe that when things go wrong, it can’t be our fault.”

Put another way: If you believe the 2016 election was a populist uprising against complacent elites, the Russia preoccupation can seem like an effort to ignore what Trump voters — and Sanders voters — were trying to say. Alternatively, if you believe Trump’s victory was a Russia-perpetrated fraud, normalcy is restored simply by removing him from office. Which, conveniently, is what many hope Mueller’s Russia probe will do.

. . .

These critics note the irony that many who were critical of national-security abuses during the Bush and Obama years have now, in the name of defending the republic, put their faith in opaque intelligence agencies and retired generals. That uncomfortable alliance between liberals and the “deep state” is the Greenwald-Trumpworld relationship inverted; on Russia, the America Firsters in the White House share more with dovish lefties than with Washington’s centrist power elite. To borrow from the language of Brexit, the ideological split on the Russia question may be more “Leave” versus “Remain” than Republican versus Democrat. In other words, Establishment insiders versus skeptical outsiders.

“For me, the fundamental question is: How satisfied are you with the prevailing order, with the status quo?” By this, Greenwald does not mean life in the Trump era but the behavior of American elites over the past several generations. “How benevolent do you regard American power and American institutions?” The answer to that question says a lot about how you rate the Trump threat.

More at the link.

When you put together all those perspectives, I submit that there's a pattern of criminal activity, perhaps even amounting to high treason in some senior personnel.  I suggest that all the circumstantial evidence points to an underlying conspiracy.  It's become a cliche to say that "there's no smoke without fire", but in this case, the smoke is so damned thick - and there's so damned much of it - that I see no other possible conclusion.  I'm surprised those in Washington D.C. can see through the murk!

Tom Luongo suggests that the "Deep State", in which he includes the military-industrial complex, is actually at war with what he calls the "Shadow Government" of intelligence agencies.  I'm not sure he's right . . . but I'm not sure he's wrong, either.  Go read his article, and decide for yourself.

I don't have any answers to this conundrum, but I believe the evidence is clear.  The security and law enforcement agencies of the US government have apparently become a law unto themselves.  They don't see their primary loyalty as being to the elected Administration, but to their own priorities and vision of what their role should be in an America of their creation.

This is frightening - and it's more than enough reason for all Americans, whatever their political affiliation, to get behind efforts to bring these organizations under control.  If that takes criminal indictments with regard to the Comey affair, or Uranium One, or the Mueller pseudo-investigation, or the seemingly illegal activities of the Obama administration in "weaponizing" departments of state against its political opponents, then so be it.  It's long overdue.

Peter

Sunday morning music - government shutdown edition

I'm sure you won't be surprised to learn that some musicians have used government shutdowns as inspiration for their compositions.  Here's one example.

Since many US government workers are furloughed during a shutdown, here's one for them.

There are more government shutdown songs on YouTube, if you look for them - not always very good, but sometimes funny.

Oh - in case anyone thinks I'm not taking this catastrophic event seriously, I'll let the Diplomad speak for me.

I must first remark that this, the first day of the #SchumerShutdown, dawned cold and bleak; the sun struggled to make itself felt, and its weak light cast long, sinister shadows throughout the woods surrounding my house. Those shadows, of course, come from the dying trees and the gasping fauna, unable to survive without the EPA having a full budget. The streets, too, are now almost impassable from the stacks of dead bodies, and from those millions of zombie-like Americans and immigrants left helpless and hopeless from the government shutdown, wandering the avenues and boulevards, crying, pleading, begging, all to no avail . . . I write in the full knowledge that by the time I post this piece, there will be no survivors to read it. I, therefore, leave it as a testament which might be read by alien visitors hundreds of years from now. Aliens in the sense of folks from the planet Xenon, not Mexico, you understand . . . Well, actually, I guess I will be OK as long as the people who write those Foreign Service retirement checks are deemed essential . . . 

Quite so!

Peter

An "emotional support chicken"???

I think I've heard it all now.

The day of the service duck and emotional support chicken on airlines may be drawing to a close.

Delta Air Lines Inc. said Friday it will more thoroughly vet passengers’ efforts to fly with all manner of unusual animals, which often board U.S. airlines under the guise of psychological or medical support.

“Customers have attempted to fly with comfort turkeys, gliding possums known as sugar gliders, snakes, spiders and more,” the airline said Friday in a news release. “Ignoring the true intent of existing rules governing the transport of service and support animals can be a disservice to customers who have real and documented needs.”

There's more at the link.

The only sort of "emotional support" I need from a chicken is in the form of comfort food.  That's why my emotional support chicken's initials are "KFC"!




Peter

That thing could take your leg off!

If this isn't the biggest snapping turtle ever, it'll do until a bigger one comes along.

It's swimming beneath the ice in an Arkansas lake.  It was spotted last week.  The article has a picture of another big one after the text.

That image should make anyone think twice about swimming in some Arkansas lakes . . . you could lose some vital assets, up to and including a leg!




Peter

He needs to buy a lottery ticket!

With luck like that, this Chinese motorcyclist is sure to win . . . unless he's just used it all up.

Peter

When money becomes worthless

I was reminded of my younger years when reading this article about inflation in Venezuela.

A friend recently sent me a photograph ... [of] the detritus left behind after a store was looted last week in San Felix, a city in the country’s southeast ... strewn about in the trash are at least a dozen 20-bolivar bills, small-denomination currency now so worthless even looters didn’t think it was worth their time to stop and pick them up.

. . .

Hyperinflation is disorienting. Five or six years ago, the 500 bolivars on the floor would’ve bought you a meal for two with wine at the best restaurant in Caracas. As late as early last year, they would’ve bought you at least a cup of coffee. At the end of 2016, they still bought you a cup of café con leche, at least. Today, they buy you essentially nothing ... Prices are now rising more than 80 percent per month, according to the opposition-led National Assembly’s Finance Committee. (The government itself stopped publishing official inflation data long ago.) At that rate, prices double every 34 days or so. Salaries lag far behind, leaving more and more of the country to face outright hunger. Thus, the looting.

Rule No. 1 of surviving hyperinflation is simple: Get rid of your money. Given the speed with which money is shedding its value, holding on to it means you’re losing out. The second you’re paid you run out as fast as you can to buy something – anything – while you can still afford it. It’s better to hold almost any asset than money, because assets hold their value and money doesn’t.

. . .

Under hyperinflation, money no longer works. It doesn’t store value. It just stops doing the basic things people expect money to do. It stops being something you want to have and turns into something you’ll do anything to avoid having: something so worthless you won’t even bend down and scoop it up off the floor while you’re looting.

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

In South Africa, during my formative and young adult years, inflation was running at a steady 10%-20% per year.  As a result, one's wealth eroded steadily, but in a way that was more or less manageable.  One's salary increases every year had two components;  one to compensate for inflation, and the other to reward performance.  It wasn't unusual for people to get at least a 10% increase every year (at least, in the commercial sector).  Top performers might double that, and get a bonus on top.  Workers in the mines or in agriculture, occupations largely reserved for races other than white, were worse off, getting little or no increase to compensate them for inflation.  As a result, their already appallingly poor standard of living eroded steadily, adding to the social and political unrest sweeping the country.  It was one of the factors that brought an end to apartheid.  Those policies had simply become unaffordable.

Just to our north, in Zimbabwe, hyperinflation arrived during the late 1990's.  It's a well-known story, so I won't go into it here.  Suffice it to say that "Zimbabwe's peak month of inflation is estimated at 79.6 billion percent in mid-November 2008".  Those figures are, of course, meaningless.  Once one's dealing with billions of percent, one's basically guessing, sucking the numbers out of one's thumb.  There are no economic measurement systems adequate to come up with hard and fast numbers, and monetary systems become meaningless.  To illustrate, the banknote below is from the third series of Zimbabwean dollar bills, issued in January 2009.  It has a face value of one hundred trillion Zimbabwe dollars, but was equivalent, at the time of issue, to only about thirty US dollars at the official exchange rate - and only $1.40 on the black market.  This, in a currency that in 1983 traded at par with the US dollar (i.e. one-for-one).

Another well-known example of hyperinflation is Weimar Germany.  Venezuela is merely the latest country to go down that path.  It likely won't be the last.

The frightening thing, to me, is the number of governments (including our own) that are deliberately understating the rate of inflation for their own purposes.  If the US government accurately calculated the rate of inflation, it would have had to raise inflation-linked payouts such as Social Security, etc. by up to 10% every year since the 1980's.  That's why it doesn't calculate it accurately, of course.  It can't afford to pay out that much - so it deceives the electorate by lying to it.  Don't let anyone tell you otherwise.  The facts speak for themselves.  I discussed them in a two part article in 2016.  Follow those two links to learn more.  It really is worth your time to do so.  The second part of that article discusses how to cope in a high-inflation environment.  It dovetails neatly with what's happening at present in Venezuela.

Hyperinflation creeps up on us unawares.  I'm sure those currently experiencing it in Venezuela would never have dreamed, ten years ago, that they'd be in this situation today.  I'm equally sure that in Zimbabwe, no-one saw it coming - certainly not my friends and former comrades-in-arms.  In South Africa during the 1970's and 1980's, we all complained about double-digit inflation, but no-one thought much about what it would mean if that continued over an extended period.  Today, it's all too clear.  To illustrate:

• My monthly starting salary when I entered the workforce in the 1970's - a salary on which, at the time, I could afford to own a motorcycle, and pay all my routine expenses - would today be sufficient (but only just) to buy me four entry-level burgers and fries at a South African restaurant, with a soda - nothing special, just cheap burgers without toppings.  Call it one meal per week.  There'd be nothing left over for other expenses.
• In my top earning year in South Africa, in the late 1980's, when I'd just been appointed as a director of the small company I worked for, I made a little over one hundred times more than that 1970's entry-level salary.  Today, that same amount, in the same country, would be considered a lower-middle-class level income - probably a supervisor-level salary.

Inflation that bad hasn't struck here, yet, but it might.  It's bad enough as it is.  To take just one example, let's price the Ford F150 XL regular-cab pickup - the entry-level base model, to compare "apples to apples" - over the past 20 years.  According to Motor Trend, in 1998 the manufacturer's suggested retail price was $15,865.  Ten years later, in 2008, it had increased to $17,900 - a rise of just 12.8% from 1998.  However, this year, 2018, the manufacturer's suggested retail price is no less than $27,380 - an increase of 53% from 2008, and of 72.6% from 1998.  That illustrates how inflation in vehicle prices over the past 10 years has become significantly worse than during the previous decade.  The rate of increase is accelerating (you should pardon the expression).

I've challenged my readers before to compare the cost of your typical weekly grocery shopping bill in (say) 1998, and in 2008, and today in 2018.  If you kept accurate records, I think you'll find that grocery and household goods prices doubled every decade.  If your expenditure didn't go up that much, it was probably because you became more frugal in your buying habits, and bought less of what you really wanted, because you could no longer afford as much.  Go on, try that price test for yourself, and let us know in Comments what you found out.  The results should be interesting!

Peter

Lawdog has a voice!

Last year, my buddy Lawdog published two volumes of his memoirs.  The first, "The Lawdog Files", dealt with his law enforcement experiences.  I wrote about it at the time, here and here.  The second, "The Lawdog Files:  African Adventures", dealt with his upbringing in Africa, and added a few more modern stories to his tally.  I had the honor of writing the foreword for that volume.  I discussed it here.

Now an audiobook version of "The Lawdog Files" has been released - and it's gone straight to #1 in Amazon.com's "Business & Professional Humor" category.

I repeat what I said about this book last year:

I can't recommend 'The Lawdog Files' too highly.  Miss D. and I have been part of the friends-and-editors process in bringing it to life, and we've found ourselves howling with mirth at frequent intervals while reading excerpts.  Be careful where you read it.  As many early reviewers have pointed out, explosive bursts of laughter are guaranteed!

If you're looking for an easy-listening audiobook with lots of laughter, you won't do much better than this.

Peter

All together, now: Aaawwwww!

Shamelessly stolen borrowed from Wirecutter:

They're just too darned cute, aren't they?




Peter

"Shoddy" in more ways than one

The term "shoddy" originally referred to wool salvaged from used clothing.  Wikipedia describes it as follows:

Benjamin Law invented shoddy and mungo, as such, in England in 1813. He was the first to organise, on a larger scale, the activity of taking old clothes and grinding them down into a fibrous state that could be re-spun into yarn. The shoddy industry was centred on the towns of Batley, Morley, Dewsbury and Ossett in West Yorkshire, and concentrated on the recovery of wool from rags. The importance of the industry can be gauged by the fact that even in 1860 the town of Batley was producing over 7,000 tonnes of shoddy. At the time there were 80 firms employing a total of 550 people sorting the rags. These were then sold to shoddy manufacturers of which there were about 130 in the West Riding. Shoddy is inferior to the original wool; "shoddy" has come to mean "of poor quality" in general (not related to clothing), and the original meaning is largely obsolete.

In the 19th century, it was unusual for anyone except rich people to have more than one or two changes of clothes.  Middle-class families might have three or four.  However, as clothing costs came down in the 20th century, thanks to the invention of artificial cloth made from nylon and polyester, clothes became more and more affordable.  Nowadays it's unusual to find anyone in the First World with less than a dozen changes of clothing, and most have a lot more than that.  Many homes have built-in closets to make it possible to store so many clothes - and many of them are overflowing.

As usual, with abundance and affluence comes excess supply.  A lot of us have far more clothes than we need, and the fashion industry is eager to make us buy more every year - but what do we do with the old ones?  The answer, for many of us, is to donate them to charities such as Goodwill, the Salvation Army, or other organizations.  However, we seldom think about what happens to them from then onward.  It can be a blessing - or a curse.

According to various estimates, here's what happens to your clothing giveaways. In most cases, a small amount of the items, the best quality castoffs -- less than 10 percent of donations -- are kept by the charitable institutions and sold in their thrift shops to other Americans looking for a bargain ... The remaining 90 percent or more of what you give away is sold by the charitable institution to textile recycling firms.

. . .

Most of the clothes are recycled into cleaning cloths and other industrial items, for which the recyclers say they make a modest profit.

Twenty-five percent, however, of what the recycling companies purchase from charities is used not as rags, but as a commodity in an international trading economy that many American may not even know about. Brill, from the textile association, picked up the story. "This clothing is processed, sorted and distributed around the world to developing countries," he said.

Take that pair of bluejeans you may have recently donated. Your jeans are stuffed with others into tightly sealed plastic bales weighing about 120 pounds and containing about 100 pairs of jeans.

The bales are loaded into huge containers and sold to international shippers who put them on ships bound for Africa and other developing regions. Again, the price of your old jeans has increased a bit because the shipper had to buy them.

By the time the bale of jeans is unloaded from a container here in Accra, Ghana, it is worth around $144. That's $1.30 per pair of jeans. But when the bale is opened up and the jeans are laid out for sale in the so-called "bend over" markets, customers bend over and select their purchases from the ground for an average price of $6.66 per pair of jeans. That's a 500 percent increase in value just by opening up the bale of clothes.

. . .

There are two ways to look at all this. One view is that ... African textile industries are closing their factories and laying people off because they cannot make clothes as cheaply as those American items found in the bend over markets.

. . .

Neil Kearney, general secretary of the Brussels based International Textile, Garment and Leather Workers Federation says the practice is exploitative, "It is neo colonialism in its purest form. It's exporting poverty to Africa, a continent that is already exceedingly poor."

. . .

The other view is that the donated clothing market is actually the American way, that your old clothing is used at every step to create new wealth and to help people who are less fortunate.

There's more at the link.

Two things have now begun to disrupt this trade.  One is that newly manufactured cloth has become so cheap as to make it uneconomical to recycle older clothes into the modern equivalent of "shoddy".  The other is that new clothing has become so cheap that it undermines the sale of used clothing.  The result may be an environmental nightmare.  Bloomberg reports:

For decades, the donation bin has offered consumers in rich countries a guilt-free way to unload their old clothing. In a virtuous and profitable cycle, a global network of traders would collect these garments, grade them, and transport them around the world to be recycled, worn again, or turned into rags and stuffing.

Now that cycle is breaking down. Fashion trends are accelerating, new clothes are becoming as cheap as used ones, and poor countries are turning their backs on the secondhand trade. Without significant changes in the way that clothes are made and marketed, this could add up to an environmental disaster in the making.

. . .

Between 2000 and 2015, global clothing production doubled, while the average number of times that a garment was worn before disposal declined by 36 percent. In China, it declined by 70 percent.

The rise of "fast fashion" is thus creating a bleak scenario: The tide of secondhand clothes keeps growing even as the markets to reuse them are disappearing. From an environmental standpoint, that's a big problem. Already, the textile industry accounts for more greenhouse-gas emissions than all international flights and maritime shipping combined; as recycling markets break down, its contribution could soar.

. . .

The question is what to do about it. Some brands ... are experimenting with new fibers made from recycled material, which could help. But longer-term, the industry will have to try to refocus consumers on durability and quality -- and charge accordingly. Ways to do this include offering warranties on clothing and making tags that inform consumers of a product's expected lifespan. To satiate the hunger for fast fashion, meanwhile, brands might also explore subscription-based fashion rental businesses -- such as China's YCloset -- or other more sustainable models.

Again, more at the link.

I've seen at first hand the impact of used clothing on Third World economies.  In Africa, many who depended on making or fitting clothing to make a living have lost their jobs.  Other jobs, sorting and selling used clothing, have replaced them - but what will replace them in their turn, if used clothing becomes less freely available?  A sophisticated economy may be able to absorb such shocks, but a primitive one is far less resilient.  Many nations have no support networks like welfare or social security.  The loss of a job can literally lead to starvation.

There's also the question of our own consumption habits.  Some say that if we can afford them, that's all that matters - anything else is not our problem.  Those "downstream", who are affected by those problems, might disagree.  With some sources claiming that clothes are worn as few as seven times before being discarded, it's no wonder that the "affluent society" is producing a downstream "effluent society", where everything must be either reprocessed or recycled, or discarded altogether.  We already export a large proportion of our garbage to the Third World.  Our used clothes may become part of that garbage in due course, rather than being resold or recycled.  Even the modern equivalent of "shoddy", until recently used to make things like disaster relief blankets or moving blankets, has to a large extent been replaced by new synthetic fabrics mass-produced in modern factories.  Fleece fabric relief blankets are now manufactured by the tens of thousands for aid agencies and organizations.

As I said earlier, I've seen this dilemma playing out in the Third World.  I don't have any answers, except to be responsible in my own purchasing and disposal of clothes.  I think it at least helps if we're aware of the problem.

Peter

More about those "Third World s***holes"

Last week I pointed out that many so-called "Third World s***holes" were perfectly accurately described by that label.  They were, and are, s***holes - literally as well as figuratively.

Now a former Peace Corps volunteer adds her perspective.

In plain English: s--- is everywhere.  People defecate on the open ground, and the feces is blown with the dust – onto you, your clothes, your food, the water.  He warned us the first day of training: do not even touch water.  Human feces carries parasites that bore through your skin and cause organ failure.

Never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that a few decades later, liberals would be pushing the lie that Western civilization is no better than a third-world country.  Or would teach two generations of our kids that loving your own culture and wanting to preserve it are racism.

Last time I was in Paris, I saw a beautiful African woman in a grand boubou have her child defecate on the sidewalk next to Notre Dame Cathedral.  The French police officer, ten steps from her, turned his head not to see.

I have seen.  I am not turning my head and pretending unpleasant things are not true.

Senegal was not a hellhole.  Very poor people can lead happy, meaningful lives in their own cultures' terms.  But they are not our terms.  The excrement is the least of it.  Our basic ideas of human relations, right and wrong, are incompatible.

As a twenty-one-year-old starting out in the Peace Corps, I loved Senegal.  In fact, I was euphoric.  I quickly made friends and had an adopted family.  I relished the feeling of the brotherhood of man.  People were open, willing to share their lives and, after they knew you, their innermost thoughts.

The longer I lived there, the more I understood: it became blindingly obvious that the Senegalese are not the same as us.  The truths we hold to be self-evident are not evident to the Senegalese.  How could they be?  Their reality is totally different.  You can't understand anything in Senegal using American terms.

There's more at the link.

Those of us who've been there, know what such places are like.  When President Trump (allegedly) describes them as "s***holes", he's speaking nothing more or less than the truth.  They are precisely that.  Anyone trying to deny that is living in cloud cuckoo land - or deliberately lying to you.

I stand by what I said last week:

I think President Trump's point may have been unfortunately phrased;  but I think it is nevertheless accurate.  The USA does not need to be overrun by people who are not capable of becoming Americans.  It needs immigrants who are able to make that adjustment.  For those who are not, by all means let us help them;  but let us do so in their own countries or regions, and help them to improve the quality of life there for everybody.  That's the only practical solution that's fair to everyone, IMHO.

Peter

Pick your fights carefully . . .

. . . because you may lose.

Peter

Saving Rosa Parks' house - by moving it to Europe???

This happened some time ago, but I only just read about it in this article.

The project came about [in 2016], when Rhea McCauley, Ms. Parks’s niece, met Mr. Mendoza in Detroit. As part of an art project that explored his own sense of home, as well as the American subprime mortgage crisis, Mr. Mendoza successfully transported an abandoned house from Detroit to Europe, winning the trust of Detroit community members along the way. Ms. McCauley told him she had managed to buy back the family house for $500, but she could not find anyone interested in saving it from demolition.

Mr. Mendoza, who makes his living as a fine-arts painter, agreed to help. He raised a little over $100,000 by selling some of his paintings, and set out for Detroit. There, he worked with a local team to take apart the house, which had fallen into extreme disrepair.

He then shipped the wooden exterior to Berlin, where he spent the winter painstakingly rebuilding it, mostly alone, by hand. “It was an act of love,” he said.

That the house had to be shipped to Berlin to be saved is extraordinary, said Daniel Geary, a professor of American history at Trinity College Dublin, given that, “in general, in the U.S., with public heroes, there is an attempt to preserve anywhere they lived.”

Mr. Geary said that to him, the neglect of a house like this one speaks to a contemporary American unwillingness to deal with racism’s legacy.

“People like to remember Rosa Parks for one moment, when she wouldn’t stand up on a bus,” he said. “They don’t really want to grapple with the rest of her life. The death threats, the fact that she had to leave Alabama and go to Detroit. It’s a more complicated story with a less happy ending. She suffered for her decision.”

There's more at the link.

It's a pretty shameful thing that the home of such an icon of the civil rights movement should have to be disassembled and shipped across the Atlantic Ocean in order to save it for posterity.  She worked as the secretary and receptionist for Detroit congressman John Conyers.  Could his colleagues and/or successors in office, and/or the Democratic Party organization in Detroit, not have done something to save a building like this?

It was reported late last year that the house would be returned to America.  I hope it happens soon.  You can read more about the house, and the effort to save it, here.

Peter

I'm not a fan

I was more than a little mind-boggled to learn that Alien Gear plans to introduce an inside-the-waistband holster with a fan in it.

I can only assume this is some sort of advertising gimmick.  For a start, the fan couldn't push cooling air through the holes at the rear of the holster, because your body will block them!  It'll just push air uselessly against your skin, then blow it out the top or bottom of the holster.

There's also the question of security.  If you're carrying inside-the-waistband, presumably covering the gun with an outer garment, you don't want it to be noticed.  However, if there's the constant whine of a fan coming from your holster . . . doesn't that defeat the object of the exercise?

On the other hand, taking up a 'bladed' stance with your firearm now takes on a whole new meaning - and I suppose it makes it easier to plead self-de-fan-se . . .




Peter

How about this in the hands of terrorists?

We had some spirited discussions in these pages a few days ago (follow those three links to find the articles), concerning terrorist attacks on a Russian airbase in Syria, using 'hobbyist'-style quadcopter drones as well as some homemade larger models.  Some people are still unconvinced that the former pose any realistic threat.

Now Boeing has announced the development - in just three months from 'clean-sheet' concept to a flying prototype - of an octocopter that can carry payloads of up to 500 pounds.

Octocopters big enough to carry a human passenger have already been announced.  If Boeing can build something like that shown above in three months, using off-the-shelf components, I'm willing to bet a backyard mechanic team can do something similar in a year or so.  Given that sort of payload capability - 500 pounds is the weight of a standard USAF Mark 82 bomb - there are all sorts of nasty weapon and target combinations that come to mind.

Amazon.com is already talking about using UAV's to deliver parcels and packages.  UPS and FedEx are doing the same.  We'll soon be seeing something like this drone in the skies around our homes.  Terrorists are sure to figure out that by painting their drone in familiar colors, and sticking a couple of commercial logos on it, and wrapping its payload in cardboard or plastic to resemble a commercial delivery, they can operate their drones with virtual impunity.  I damn well guarantee it.  This genie is well and truly out of the bottle.

Peter

Hypocrisy, thy name is politician

The latest political hypocrite (but by no means the only one):

It's becoming something of a miracle to find any politician, from either side of the aisle, who isn't a hypocrite.  I'd love to see a law that says any politician caught in such duplicity would not be permitted to run for re-election during the next term of office.  It's a pipe-dream, I know, but it's a pleasant one . . .




Peter

Looks like Puerto Rico's endemic corruption has struck again

For decades, it's been alleged that Puerto Rico's government is at least as corrupt as any other third world nation, if not more so - despite its US government oversight.  For example, in 2001 corruption scandals led to indictments against about 40 officials.  In 2010, 89 Puerto Rican law enforcement officers were among about 130 people charged.  Global Security claims that the seemingly endemic corruption is largely rooted in the drug trade, as drugs from South America are smuggled into the USA via Puerto Rico.

Last year, famed investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson produced this report on corruption in the island, noting that even before Hurricane Maria's devastation, the economy there was in tatters.

Last week came news that the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority might be involved in a new corruption scandal.

On Saturday, a day after becoming aware of a massive store of rebuilding materials being held by the Puerto Rico Electric Power Authority, the U.S. federal government — the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, along with their security detail — entered a Palo Seco warehouse owned by the public utility to claim and distribute the equipment, according to a spokesperson for the Corps.

Rumors of a tense standoff had been circulating on the island, but the encounter was confirmed to The Intercept in a statement from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Asked if the federal officers were armed when they entered the warehouse, USACE spokesperson Luciano Vera said they were indeed accompanied by security detail and quickly began distributing the material after seizing it.

. . .

“Warehouse 5” — the one which USACE and FEMA entered Saturday — “falls under the control of the [PREPA] transmission division and has lacked transparency in inventory and accountability,” the email from Vera continued. Carlos Torres, appointed by Puerto Rico Gov. Ricardo Rosselló to oversee power restoration, was on site as well.

“Due to the size of the warehouse,” Vera said, accounting for everything contained therein is still underway days later. Among the materials recovered so far are “2,875 pieces of critical material to contractors” along with the sleeves of full-tension steel, a component of Puerto Rican electrical infrastructure required to erect new power lines. PREPA did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment, though in a statement to the Associated Press, it rejected allegations that it had failed to distribute the warehouse’s contents. The AP only reported that “officials over the weekend also discovered some needed materials in a previously overlooked warehouse owned by Puerto Rico’s Electric Power Authority.” How they discovered them and how they were obtained is a story that has not been fully told.

There's more at the link.

The island's governor has 'ordered an investigation' into the discovery of the materials.  However, one possible reason for their existence being hidden has been advanced by a former Puerto Rican Secretary of State.

Kenneth McClintock, Puerto Rico’s Secretary of State from 2009 to 2013 and president of the island’s senate from 2005 to 2008 told Mother Jones on Wednesday that PREPA, the US Attorney’s Office, and the FBI should investigate the incident as evidence of corruption.

“If the US Attorney and the FBI are not currently investigating corruption at PREPA, which has been going on for 70 years, this incident—with such a huge amount of materials has been kept away from plain view for so long—would be a good point to begin,” he said. “This was not a mistake. This is corruption.”

. . .

“What they’ve been doing is creating a huge hidden cache of the materials that are needed to do repairs. And then for lack of access to repair materials, the outside crews from the states have been waiting at the hotels with their trucks parked,” McClintock says, adding that the power authority’s local employees and their unions do not want outside crews “doing the job that they can do with triple-pay overtime.”

Again, more at the link.

President Trump allegedly referred to certain Third World nations in uncomplimentary terms last week.  I wonder whether he might not wish to employ the same language about Puerto Rico, and its clearly inept, irresponsible, incompetent government?  Seems to me we need to 'clean house' there even before we worry about immigrants from elsewhere.  I wonder how many Puerto Ricans currently moving to the mainland will bring with them a culture tolerant of such corruption?  Will we see it spread to Florida and elsewhere?

I'm not being racist in the least - I'm being realistic.  The color of the skin of those involved, or the language they speak, is irrelevant.  Once you allow corruption to become so entrenched in society - any society - it's almost impossible to uproot it.  As evidence, I submit New York City, Chicago, Detroit, or New Orleans.  Examples there are so immense in number and in scope that there's really no reason to say more, is there?

Peter

Sunday morning music

Let's have a change of pace.  So-called 'spirituals' or 'negro spirituals' grew out of the experience of slaves in America, and have become a recognized music genre in their own right.  They also informed and influenced the folk music revival of the 1950's and 1960's, to such an extent that there's hardly a single folk music 'great' who didn't also record spirituals.  There are so many of them it's impossible to do them justice in a short blog post, but here are half a dozen classics, plus an updated one.

Let's start with a 1920's recording from Paul Robeson of 'Go Down Moses'.

Here's Bob Gibson and Joan Baez in a remastered 1959 recording of 'We Are Crossing That Jordan River'.

And who can forget the great Louis Armstrong with 'Ezekiel Saw de Wheel'?

The Weavers were one of the earliest groups in the folk music revival, and leaned heavily on spirituals for their repertoire.  Here they are in 1963 with 'Sinner Man'.

Patsy Cline and a young Willie Nelson collaborate in this rendition of 'Just A Closer Walk With Thee'.

Here's Australian group The Seekers with 'Come The Day'.  It's an original composition, but heavily influenced by the many spirituals the group performed.  I've included it as an interesting example of how spirituals influenced the new folk music of the 1960's.

Finally, the old classic spirituals have lent themselves to some reinterpretation down the years.  Here's Pete Seeger with a humorous, tongue-in-cheek look at 'Old Time Religion'.

I'm not sure how many of the original singers of spirituals would have reacted to that version!




Peter

You never know where you'll run into those pesky polar bears . . .

Norway is giggling at Australia's expense.  The Telegraph reports:

Norwegian diplomats have poked fun at official Australian travel advice on how to avoid a polar bear attack in the Scandinavian country.

Norway’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) softly dismissed tips from Australia's Smartraveller advisory and consular information service with a light-hearted Twitter response.

“Thank you Australia for your concern,” Norway’s MFA posted. “We can assure you that in mainland Norway all polar bears are stuffed and poses only limited risk.”

Officials followed up the sarcastic response with a photo of a stuffed polar bear on display in the office of Norway’s prime minister Erna Solberg.

The Australian advisory’s Twitter post had failed to clarify that the warning was actually for travellers visiting Svalbard, an archipelago between mainland Norway and the North Pole, which has a population of around 2,000 polar bears.

There's more at the link.

Oh, well.  I suppose it's a natural enough mistake for an Australian to make, from the far side of the globe!  "Down under" indeed!




Peter

The "fake news" people are getting desperate, aren't they?

Just in the last 24 hours:

• The US ambassador to Panama was claimed to have resigned because of President Trump's alleged "third-world s***holes" comment.  Unfortunately, that's not true.  He resigned two weeks before that;  and his resignation was announced about 24 hours before the President allegedly made the comment.
• A porn star was alleged to have been "paid off" by the Trump campaign, to the tune of $130,000, to keep silent about an alleged "affair" or "sexual encounter" with Trump the year after he married his present wife.  That's not true either.  The porn star concerned has issued, in writing, a vehement denial that anything of the sort ever took place - affair, sexual encounter, or payoff.

One wonders why the mainstream media appear to have gone into meltdown, and why the "fake news" people are getting so desperate for material.  Could it be they're terrified of the real reasons behind the tapping of then-candidate Trump's communications, and the truth behind the so-called "Trump dossier", getting out at last?  Are they trying to find anything that might distract attention from what's increasingly looking like meeting the definition of "high crimes and misdemeanors" - if not actual high treason - on the part of some FBI and other Obama administration officials?

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Peter

An abandoned patient? Not so fast . . .

I'm sure many readers have been horrified by headlines blaring that a Baltimore hospital allegedly "abandoned" an older and/or indigent patient at a bus stop in freezing weather.  Unfortunately, the reality is likely to be very different to what's being presented by the news media.

Under the 1986 Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, popularly known as EMTALA, any hospital accepting Medicare funding must provide emergency medical assessment to anyone, irrespective of their ability to pay.  The law is very specific in its requirements - but it makes no provision for funding those requirements.  Basically, hospitals are on their own.  If they don't provide the required facilities and/or investigations, they can be stripped of Medicare funding.  If they do provide those things, it's on their own dime - which is one reason why hospital charges have skyrocketed since EMTALA was introduced.  They're not charities.  They've got to cover those costs somehow - and our politicians weaseled out of paying them out of government funds, by forcing the hospitals to recover them from all their other patients.  In so many words, EMTALA is blackmail, forcing hospitals - i.e. you and I, their other paying customers - to pay for what the government is not willing to fund.

As inevitably happens, indigent people have learned to "game the system".  I've been on duty as a pastor and a volunteer in emergency rooms when such people come in, loudly complaining of this or that or the other imaginary ailment - usually something that's hard to quantify or assess.  When tests are inconclusive, they demand to be admitted, fed, and treated like guests at a hotel, without paying a penny for it.  Sometimes hospitals are forced to comply, particularly in cities where social justice warriors make it very difficult for them if they don't.  In other cases, particularly when they're swamped with truly ill people, hospitals simply can't cope.  They're forced to turn away such people - and if they won't leave voluntarily, they have to be evicted.  That's one of the functions of hospital security staff.  It happens on a daily basis, across the country.  There's nothing unusual about it.

In the case in question, we don't know exactly what happened;  but I'm willing to bet the lady's "symptoms" could not be adequately assessed, and medical staff had concluded that there was basically nothing they could do to help her.  If she then refused to leave, because it was cold and nasty outside, what was the hospital supposed to do?  Allow her to take up space and facilities required for someone who truly needed them?  That's not on - so they probably tried to move her on in the most human manner open to them.  The hospital is not a charity, and not a shelter for the homeless.  It can't be.  It has to serve its primary customers - patients - not the indigent.  This makes a lot of people uncomfortable.  I'm sorry about that . . . but it remains the truth.

Aesop, who works in an ER, points out (rather profanely - I've had to censor his post to reproduce it here):

This only happens about daily to weekly in every ER I've worked in, going back a mere twenty years, especially from October to March.

And the ****wits that complain about this kind of bull**** without knowing their ***** from a hole in the ground can't figure out why they're still sitting their fat ***** in my waiting room 6-8 hours later, because I can't get a fat troll like this to put on her clothes, gather her forty-seven shopping bags of ****, and GTFO so I can decon her room and see a real patient, until three security guards and two techs "help" her hit the bricks.

And if she had met the criteria for a mental health hold, the same ***holes would be bitching that she was incarcerated against her will and her civil rights violated for keeping her in the hospital.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't ... Thank your congress ****weasel for voting EMTALA into law.

Discharged?

She should be chained up in leg irons, and forced to shovel snow on the public roads to pay her bill and fine and cover the cost of green bologna sandwiches, in lieu of six months' jail time.

There's more at the link.  He's largely right.  I've been there, and seen it for myself.

Whenever you see a hullabaloo about hospitals allegedly "dumping" patients, ask yourself why any sane, normal person would do that.  A sane, normal person wouldn't.  Neither would a sane, normal hospital.  They're doing it because they're caught between a rock and a hard place, thanks to EMTALA and the refusal of our politicians to pay for care for the indigent.  They'd rather blackmail hospitals into doing it "free" - meaning, at our expense, because we're the ones ultimately picking up the tab.

Peter