The Real News Network has the interview Norman Solomon and Paul Jay discuss the Struggle in the Democratic Party.

We’re down in the hole, we do not have a lever to pull that can move the Democratic Party in a progressive direction, and yet there’s tremendous organizing going on.

Norman Soloman is still holding on to the crackpot reality he decries. Toward the end of the first part he explains why it is a waste of time to form a third party. However, for most of the hour he makes a darn good case that the Democratic Party cannot be rescued. (See the quote above that I have taken from the interview.)

The Duran has the story BREAKING: Russia was told about North Korean plans to launch nuclear strike against the US.

3. The most recent major weapons test in North Korea came on 15 September of this year, when North Korea tested a ballistic missile. Since then, there have been no missile tests or nuclear tests. It is entirely possible, given this new information that Russia has used its diplomatic channels to de-escalate the situation unilaterally as the US refuses to engage directly with Pyongyang and China’s relations with the DPRK are incredibly strained at this time.

If the DNC has its way, we can generate enough Russia hysteria, that Russia will no longer feel inclined to save our bacon. Who wins if the DNC succeeds?

Psychology Today has the article Meet the Teen Who Discovered the Secret of Social Capital.

Brainteaser: Two children are being bullied.
One child breaks down crying.
The other child kicks her tormenter in the shin.
Which one continues to be bullied?
Hint: it’s simpler than you think.*

The answer to this brainteaser is at the end of the article. I have read a few comments that some people were bothered by the question and the answer. I thought it was somewhat profound, myself. I wondered if the people who were bothered really got the point of the article. See what you think.

As an adult, I have known children who have suffered with this type of problem, and I have never found a satisfactory answer to give them. This article gives me some new avenues to think about.

The article also has a link to the TEDx Teen talk Natalie Hampton.

Truthdig has the Chris Hedges article The Silencing of Dissent.

My show on RT America, “On Contact,” like my columns at Truthdig, amplifies the voices of these dissidents—Tariq Ali, Kshama Sawant, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Medea Benjamin, Ajamu Baraka, Noam Chomsky, Dr. Margaret Flowers, Rania Khalek, Amira Hass, Miko Peled, Abby Martin, Glen Ford, Max Blumenthal, Pam Africa, Linh Dinh, Ben Norton, Eugene Puryear, Allan Nairn, Jill Stein, Kevin Zeese and others. These dissidents, if we had a functioning public broadcasting system or a commercial press free of corporate control, would be included in the mainstream discourse. They are not bought and paid for. They have integrity, courage and often brilliance. They are honest. For these reasons, in the eyes of the corporate state, they are very dangerous.

I have started following Chris Hedges long before he was on RT. This is a real serious threat we are facing. The dissident voice had many outlets a couple of years ago, but almost all of them have been shut down. RT is almost the only outlet left. That is why almost all the dissidents have been forced to use RT as the only possible outlet.

The endless wars, fought largely to enrich the arms industry and swell the power of the military, are futile and counterproductive to national interests. Deindustrialization and austerity programs have impoverished the working class and fatally damaged the economy.

I am just hoping that because I earned mine before the economy was fatally damaged, I will be able to skate through as long as I am alive. I know that seems like the philosophy that Elizabeth Warren used to decry – “I’ve got mine, the rest of you are on your own.” The difference I claim is that on my blog and elsewhere, I am trying to help others who have not got theirs yet, but if the others refuse to help themselves, I have to at least protect myself and my immediate family.

This is a war of ideas. The corporate state cannot compete honestly in this contest. It will do what all despotic regimes do—govern through wholesale surveillance, lies, blacklists, false accusations of treason, heavy-handed censorship and, eventually, violence.

I noticed that lately I have come under attack for reminding people of historical facts that were news worthy only a few years ago. Not only have people forgotten, but they just don’t want to hear about it either.

YouTube has the RT video Democratic Party ‘responsible for Trump’ – activist.

How will progressives make their voices heard in 2020? It may not be through the Democratic Party, after the fallout from the 2016 primary. Nick Brana, founder of Movement for a People’s Party, blames the DNC for President Donald Trump’s election. He tells RT they not only intentionally boosted Trump, but also abandoned the middle class.

View this video now before YouTube decides or is forced to take this down. Our current fearless leaders are afraid to touch the Second Amendment, but they are starting to attack the First Amendment. Because this interview took place on RT, they don’t think you are qualified to judge it yourself.

Politico has the Bernie Sanders article How to Fix the Democratic Party.

Independent voters are critical to general election victories. Locking them out of primaries is a pathway to failure.

What was infuriating during the primaries was that so many Democrats thought that they could win with a candidate that Democratic Party insiders loved, but the general public hated. They didn’t seem to understand that in the general election, all people get to vote, not just Democrats as in the Democratic Primaries.

The Atlantic has the article What Happens If China Makes First Contact?

We may be humbled to one day find ourselves joined, across the distance of stars, to a more ancient web of minds, fellow travelers in the long journey of time. We may receive from them an education in the real history of civilizations, young, old, and extinct. We may be introduced to galactic-scale artworks, borne of million-year traditions. We may be asked to participate in scientific observations that can be carried out only by multiple civilizations, separated by hundreds of light-years. Observations of this scope may disclose aspects of nature that we cannot now fathom. We may come to know a new metaphysics. If we’re lucky, we will come to know a new ethics. We’ll emerge from our existential shock feeling newly alive to our shared humanity. The first light to reach us in this dark forest may illuminate our home world too.

I would consider the headline to be a pretty trivial aspect of what is discussed in this article. This is science/fiction that I find fascinating enough to look deeper into.

YouTube has the RT interview video ‘Zero evidence’ for claims Russia hacked DNC – NSA whistleblower.

Previously, I had posted about this analysis and had criticized one aspect of it. My previous posts were A Leak or a Hack? A Forum on the VIPS Memo and Intel Vets Challenge ‘Russia Hack’ Evidence.

In this video William Binney gives out some information that I had not heard before. In my critiques I said that the calculations VIPS made about the theoretically possible speed were not definitive. This interview is the first time I have heard that they made actual tests to see what speed could be achieved. Before that, all I had heard was theoretical calculations as to what would be possible. My calculations showed that the speeds were theoretically possible. I did not say that I knew those speeds could be achieved in practice. All I meant to say was that the calculations did not prove that those speeds were impossible theoretically. Experiments don’t prove that the data couldn’t have been downloaded off site in this amount of time if the original downloaders might have had some technology that the VIPS didn’t have. However, I will grant that it is less likely that there was some secret technology that could have been used to carry out the speedy download. The speed of the original transfer also depends on the speed of the DNC server and the speed of its connection to the internet. All of these speeds are probably unknown to the VIPS, but it is at least likely that VIPS were able to use fairly high speed technology on both ends of their experiments. There are also other factors that might limit the speed one can achieve in practice, but I am not about to write a technical book on the matter in this blog.

April 28, 2018

The VIPS experiments involved transfers of data from this side of the Atlantic to the other side of the Atlantic. There is no telling how many hops it required to make the trip. On the other hand, if the downloaders of the data used a receiving computer that was close to the DNC’s computer, then the number of hops could have been minimized. Thus the transfer speed could have been higher than the transfer speed from a computer on this side of the Atlantic to some place in Europe that the VIPS experimented with.

July 10, 2019

In my subsequent post Mueller Repeatedly Contradicts Himself & Undermines Russiagate, Robert Mueller seems to have thought of the same hole in Binney’s “proof” that I found.

In order to get a corporation to locate a new facility in a given location, it has become the habit of major corporations to extort tax breaks from those localities. It is a no-win situation for the localities who either have to forego taxes that they cannot afford to forego, or they have to forego the chance for economic development.

This competition between localities in different states would seem to me to be a definition if interstate commerce.

There is the commerce clause in The USA Consitution.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 3:[3]

[The Congress shall have Power] To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes;

This gives me an idea for a new federal tax on corporations. If a corporation negotiates a tax break by pitting localities in one state against localities in other states, the new federal tax should equal the size of the tax break that the corporation received from the winning locality. The amount of the tax collected could be distributed to all the states whose localities did not win the competition. Usually much of the tax break comes from real-estate taxes that will not be collected over some extended period of time. The sum of all taxes foregone by the “winning” locality over this extended period of time should be collected immediately by the federal government and redistributed to the “losers”.

Since the Federal government can only regulate interstate commerce, I suppose that any corporation that limits the competition to a single state might be legally able to avoid the federal tax. It would be up to each state to enact a tax for competitions that occur solely in its state.

New Economic Perspectives has the article Wouldn’t it be great if America had a fiat-money system?

Think of how many of our seemingly intractable local and national problems could be solved if only America had its own sovereign fiat-money system! Unfortunately, most Americans can’t even think about that question because they’ve never heard a proper explanation of what “fiat-money” actually is. Here, then, is quick solution to that problem:

Just click the above link to see the solution. Warning, you must have a modicum of imagination to understand this.