If you vote for Trump, then you the voter, you, not Donald Trump, are standing at the border like Nazis going 'you here, you here'.
- Donny Deutsch on MSNBC last week
Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Allowing government to arbitrarily determine which substances human beings can put into their own bodies is one of the most idiotic things a society can do. As such, its no surprise Congress is salivating at the prospect of furthering this travesty by giving additional discretion on the matter to drug war-crazed loon, Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
Adam Andrzejewski, CEO of OpenTheBooks, has written a interesting article at Forbes detailing what happened when the non-profit government transparency organization tried to get details about Wyoming state spending.
Here's what we learned from the piece, Wyoming State Auditor Charged Us $8,000 And We'll Finally Receive The State Checkbook By 2048:
"We hang the petty thieves and appoint the great ones to public office."
Your average mass media pundit regularly decries the fact Americans no longer have trust in the country's institutions, yet simultaneously refuse to take any sort of responsibility for the situation. Government bureaucrats and other assorted supporters of our decrepit status quo tend to do the same thing. As is typically the case, I'll take the other side.
When it comes to U.S. presidents, experience has taught me to always assume the worst. Irrespective of what the winning candidate said on the campaign trail, a few things things tend to happen once they're sworn into office. To name a few, we almost always end up with a further expansion of the imperial presidency, more pointless wars, growth in the surveillance state and continued unaccountable pillaging by Wall Street. The worst trends and elements of society tend to grow no matter who sits in the oval office.
I’m not the only one of course. The financial crisis of 2008/09 similarly shattered the worldview of tens, if not hundreds of millions of people across the globe. I believe that the old manner of doing things as far as organizing an economy and society died for good during that crisis and its aftermath. Sure it’s been shadily and undemocratically propped up ever since, and we haven’t yet transitioned to what’s next, but for all intents and purposes it’s dead. It’s dead because it has no credibility.
The employees who are resigning in protest, several of whom discussed their decision to leave with Gizmodo, say that executives have become less transparent with their workforce about controversial business decisions and seem less interested in listening to workers’ objections than they once did. In the case of Maven, Google is helping the Defense Department implement machine learning to classify images gathered by drones.
In the old days, America’s top spies would complete their tenures at the CIA or one of the other Washington puzzle palaces and segue to more ordinary pursuits. Some wrote their memoirs. One ran for president. Another died a few months after surrendering his post. But today’s national-security establishment retiree has a different game plan. After so many years of brawling in the shadows, he yearns for a second, lucrative career in the public eye. He takes a crash course in speaking in soundbites, refreshes his wardrobe and signs a TV news contract.
And we recently discovered, if it was not known before, that no amount of power can withstand the hatred of the many.
- Marcus Tullius Cicero
Let me cut to the chase. Every single world leader knows Trump's full of shit. Even more importantly, the citizens of their nations also know it. Everyone with a functioning brain understands that pulling out of the Iran deal has nothing to do with terrorism, nuclear bombs or any other fairytale propagated by U.S. neocons. This is simply about the existence of a non-U.S. client state in a key strategic region sitting on massive oil reserves. It's about empire -- global games of power and money fueled by a desperate attempt to hold on to a unipolar world where the U.S.
