Why are people surprised that a voter’s name, address, email, and party registration is available to the public (including foreign entities as well as domestic terror groups)?
The Proud Boys email issue should have been expected.
WRT the word out of Washington that attempts to point the finger at Iran for the hacking of voter registration data: Why on earth would Iran do something that would, if it has the desired effect, benefit the Trump re-election campaign?
The Atlantic Monthly has endorsed only three presidential candidates in its 163 year history. The first was Abraham Lincoln. The second was Lyndon Johnson 1964. The third was Hillary Clinton in 2016. The fourth, today, is Joe Biden.
Why on earth would Iran do something that would, if it has the desired effect, benefit the Trump re-election campaign?
Most good NatSec analysts I have seen have suggested that, while they might have a preferred candidate, honestly things don’t change much for Iran regardless of who wins the election. What is far better for them is to simply be disruptive and weaken insitutional trust. Which, to a large degree was also the Soviet approach in 2016 as well.
To clarify, “Tony Bobulinski” is the name currently circulating in the right-wing moron morass, with stupidly breathless claims of e-mails detailing “BIDEN’S CHINA DEALINGS!!!!11!!” and other such transparent bullshit.
It is, of course, a total coincidence that “BIDEN’S CHINA DEALINGS!!!!11!!” becomes a thing the day after it’s revealed Trump has a previously-undisclosed bank account in China. Totally.
There’s a depressing article in http://www.thedailybeast.com about how Italy is experiencing a second and worse wave of Covid-19, even though they seem to have done everything correctly during the first wave.
The U.K., France, Germany, Ireland, and the Czech Republic are in increasingly bad shape as well.
In Italy, the authorities think it might be young people having private parties in their homes.
@charon:
Interestingly, the Trump campaign has sent out a message prohibiting “QAnon attire” at any future rallies.
Trump doesn’t want to disavow them, but he doesn’t want to be tied to them, either. I don’t think this will discourage them; they’ll just tell themselves and each other that he has to do this, like when he claimed not to know who David Duke was.
@mattbernius: Internal Iran politics is the ruling hardliners vs moderates who want to open up the country. Moderates were gaining with the Obama/Biden approach of international relief in exchange for nuclear de-escalation. Having Trump in opposition plays into the hardliners hands and strengthens them.
To clarify, “Tony Bobulinski” is the name currently circulating in the right-wing moron morass
What I find interesting in Keef’s original comment is that is just a name, and he expects everyone to just *know* that this means that Biden is corrupt.
He doesn’t explain anything, because the right-wing concoction of a story doesn’t hold up to critical, or really any kind of thought. So in order to avoid thinking, it’s just the name he throws out there.
This is straight out of Orwell’s 1984, in particular the book’s appendix: The Principles of Newspeak:
A few blanket words covered them, and, in covering them, abolished them. All words groupings themselves round the concepts of liberty and equality, for instance, were contained in the single word crimethink, while all words grouping themselves round the concepts of objectivity and rationalism were contained in the single word oldthink. Greater precision would have been dangerous. What was required in a Party member was an outlook similar to that of the ancient Hebrew who knew, without knowing much else, that all nations other than his own worshiped “false gods.” He did not need to know that these gods were called Baal, Osiris, Moloch, Ashtaroth, and the like; probably the less he knew about them the better for his orthodoxy. He knew Jehovah and the commandments of Jehovah; he knew, therefore, that all gods with other names or other attributes were false gods. In somewhat the same way, the Party member knew what constituted right conduct, and in exceedingly vague, generalized terms he knew what kinds of departure from it were possible.
I never thought we’d have these braindead Party members in any meaningful number in a free society. Shows my naivety, I guess.
@drj:
Keef/Drew is a classic example of the sunk costs fallacy as it applies to politics. He started out four years ago playing the role of financial whiz-bang. Mr. High-flying mergers and acquisitions guy. Lots of bwah hah hah bluster. He would advance his positions in reasonably rational, logical arguments. He was wrong but not insane.
But he didn’t jump ship when he should have. He missed the moment where he might have salvaged some shred of credibility. All the market indicators were screaming, ‘Sell, Drew, sell!’ But he’d invested so much of himself in his puerile revenge fantasy of owning libs, that he doubled down. Tripled down. And now, he’s gone full Q-Bot because there is nowhere else to go when reality proves you’ve been a sucker.
Drew bought into Trump’s cult of personality, he surrendered his judgment, he abandoned any attempt at rationality, and now he’s our local avatar of Rudy Giuliani, a man utterly discredited, humiliated, defeated.
‘Keef?’ Hey, loser, don’t take the nickname of a genius. Try, ‘Theon.’ That’d be a good name to appropriate.
So apparently the latest right wing talking point is that the media is treating Biden with kid gloves because they hate Trump that much…”please discuss” indeed…
It appears Mr Bobulinski may have some legal and financial issues of his own.
I have a sneaking suspicion Tony may soon come to regret certain life choices.
Drew bought into Trump’s cult of personality, he surrendered his judgment, he abandoned any attempt at rationality
Yeah, exactly. He wasn’t brainwashed from a young age on as would have happened e.g. in the “Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization” or something similar), he chose this. He opted for insanity out of his own free will.
I don’t always like reality, I get that (I mean, who does?). But, fuck me, at least I have some standards.
But that Keef dude (or “Drew” – I don’t keep track) is just an empty shell.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m really wondering about that “Flee” part. Who would take him? Sure, there are countries that would like to stick a finger in our eye but I can’t imagine they want a loose cannon firing away at whatever catches his attention.
Well that does it; I’m not voting for Hunter Biden now.
All of this raises the question…if you are not going to vote for Biden because of his son…does that mean all Trumpies are A-OK with Don Jr and Eric? Two guys who have never gotten a paycheck without their daddies name on it? Seriously?
Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that an email published in the New York Post’s bombshell exposé is indeed genuine – something the Biden camp hasn’t disputed, and that the “Big Guy” described in one of those emails is none other than Joe Biden himself. Bobulinski also says Joe Biden was lying when he said he and Hunter never discussed business dealings.
“My name is Tony Bobulinski. The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive. I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post, which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.’ -New York Post
Bobulinski issued the statement late Wednesday, affirming that, contrary to Joe Biden’s claims that he never discussed business dealings with Hunter, the former Veep actually profited from his son’s dealings, which were undertaken with the full support of the Biden family.
Bobulinski claims cash and equity positions and 10% stakes in dealings were set aside for “the big guy,” – aka Joe Biden.
I’ll stick to comedy when the president isn’t a joke
@sklarsky
Why is it that comedians need to stick to comedy and athletes need to stick to sports but the real estate agent from my high school can freely spout off on Facebook whenever he feels like?
@MarkedMan:
Well, I don’t like to bet unless the odds are terrible. It’s no fun winning a 50/50 bet. So I put my money on the Philippines early on. Trump has property there, lots of golf, numerous future trophy wives available after Melania dumps him, and Duterte is both corrupt AF, and in a strong bargaining position against the US since he has bases we’d like.
Sadly for Donald, Russia and the Gulf are unavailable – those are the people he owes money to.
Trump is clearly broke. His campaign has less than half the money Biden has. He made noise about writing himself a 100 million dollar check, but we all knew that was bullshit. I don’t think Putin or MBS will front him that kind of money when he’s down 10 points. If he stays in the US, even setting aside the New York AG, he’ll be sued six ways from Sunday. He can’t afford the legal bills. If he stays in the US it’s prison and/or poverty.
His one way to get some cash flow is to go back to TV, to play orange Hannity. The problem there is that Trump’s a bore. He’s no Limbaugh, he’s no Hannity, he’s a stupid man getting stupider by the day. Maybe they’ll reboot the apprentice and he can be reunited with Omarosa. But they’ll have to shoot the whole thing from Manila.
@keef: Shut up, Reek. Nobody is buying this bullshit. No reputable news outlet will touch it. Not even Fox News would touch it. There is no October surprise. You and the traitors you enable are going down. You’re a loser.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve previously been sceptical that Trump could find anyone willing to protect him against an angry US; and that he’d avoid Russia due the potential of some very unforgiving gangsters ending up losing their laundromats in the aftermath of all this. Still think the latter is true…
But, I thought, maybe a new administration would like him overseas rotting away somewhere.
(If they are as nasty minded as I am).
Keeps his case active, causing pain and division for any post-Trump Republican reconstruction attempt. And keeps him out of the courts, so no “Donald the Martyr” mileage for the Trumpkins either.
Win-win?
@Mikey: this bit from Wikipedia is all you need to know about ZeroHedge:
Non-financial views Edit
While Zero Hedge’s financial content is often referred to/quoted in the mainstream financial media (see above), its non-financial content has not been relied on by mainstream media.
The 29 April 2016 unmasking article by Bloomberg, quoted former website staffer Colin Lokey as saying: “I can’t be a 24-hour cheerleader for Hezbollah, Moscow, Tehran, Beijing, and Trump anymore. It’s wrong. Period. I know it gets you views now, but it will kill your brand over the long run. This isn’t a revolution. It’s a joke.” Lokey told Bloomberg that he was pressured to frame issues in a way he felt was “disingenuous,” summarizing its political stances as “Russia=good. Obama=idiot. Bashar al-Assad=benevolent leader. John Kerry=dunce. Vladimir Putin=greatest leader in the history of statecraft.”[26] Lokey provided chat transcripts in which Ivandjiiski refers to America’s “silent majority” as “beastly”, while Backshall acknowledges life in the U.S. is bad “outside of my bubble”.[26]
Wallace-Wells noted that the site demonstrated a pro-Russian bias, stating the site had a “pointed” Russophilia.[29]
In a series of articles in June–July 2017, the Financial Times, covering an event organised by one of the site’s bloggers,[q] said that, “It probably didn’t help that ZeroHedge was also used as a lead-in for a 2016 New Yorker piece about the alt-right, despite its financial focus and a political bent that is more Drudge than Richard Spencer.”[30]
In January 2020, when the site was removed from Twitter, BuzzFeed News described Zero Hedge as “pro-Trump” and “far-right”,[28] while reporting on the removal, The Washington Post said that Zero Hedge “In recent years, the blog has amplified right-wing conspiracy theories on a range of topics”.[14]
In March 2020, American journalist Seth Hettena wrote an opinion-piece in The New Republic titled “Is Zero Hedge a Russian Trojan Horse?”, and provided details on the links between Krassimir Ivandjiiski (the site publisher’s Bulgarian father), and Soviet-era activities in propaganda, revealed during litigation initiated by the father against Hettena in the Bulgarian courts.[1] Hettena commented that Zero Hedge has become “a forum for the hateful, conspiracy-driven voices of the angry white men of the alt-right. Racists, anti-Semites, extreme right-wingers, and conspiracy nuts were an underserved audience, and, as it turns out, a profitable one.”[1]
Oh, you don’t want to go there, Drew: person…woman…man…covfefe…hamberder.
IQ is why Drew/keef so hung up on me. Years ago, back before Dave ‘Good German’ Schuler banned me for playing agnostic to his economics faith, we were talking IQ and Dave opined that of the cast of regulars at his blog, when it came to IQ I was probably the guy with the high score. (You remember that, Drew. Yeah, you do.)
Drew never got over it. It burned, it burned, because he was a big swingin’ dick of an M&A guy, and I was a high school drop-out who wrote children’s books. Pff! The nerve!
Drew’s a man with a high opinion of himself, hence the proliferating screen names referencing various geniuses. It rankled. So, being not half as clever as he thinks he is, he decided to prove to the whole world not just that he was dumber than me, but that he was dumber than lots of people. Lots and lots of people.
You have to admire his commitment. He’s certainly made his point.
For the record, Drew, I’m not the only one smarter than you. Everyone here is smarter than you. (Some are even smarter than me. I know!) You’re the slow kid in the AP class. And now we’re all laughing at you.
I am assuming that if that is indeed the case that the email is genuine, Mr. Bobulinski will make a copy of the original email, with all of the headers and metadata intact, available for forensic review.
The Bidens are all about leveraging their family name for profit which is why I attended Biden University and am having a Biden Steak tonight accompanied by a Biden Wine. Then a Biden Select coffee. I’ve got Biden Home furnishings and I smell great because I use Biden Perfume.
“Dutch security researcher succeeded in logging into the Twitter account of the American President Donald Trump [who] had an extremely weak and easy to guess password [“maga2020!”] and had, according to the researcher, not applied two-step verification.”
@Teve: Don’t forget that you are on a business trip staying in Trump Hotel because your company wants business with the government and you know where the money ends up.
About yesterday’s comments on how the ancients didn’t know the color blue, what color do you suppose we’re not noticing?
Also, I’m reminded of a frequent question from childhood: how do I know that we see the same “red” when we call something “red”?
Later on, by the time Trek TNG was on, I recall a brief argument with a friend who said the security/engineering uniforms were green, and I said they were yellow.
Lastly, humans have three types of color receptors. Most mammals, including cats and dogs, have two. Birds tend to have four*. Some years back there began to appear reports of humans with four such types of receptors.
*birds that fly, especially predators, have the sharpest vision known in nature.
There’s a photo of Joe Biden kissing Hunter Biden on the cheek. Some Trumper talking head shit goblin is insinuating that there’s something perverse going on.
@Teve: The best response I’ve seen so far to that tweet was a juxtaposition of that photo with the photo of Trump with Ivanka and one of his sons meeting Jeffrey Epstein.
He’s not ok with tough questions, he says, because Biden doesn’t get asked tough questions. Like, you know, what he will do about the Supreme Court, or about his support fo the 90s crime bill.
Well, looks like the cat’s out of the pants. Having seen #Borat2 I can now safely tell you #RudyGiuliani is over in a very big way. It’s worse than you think and more uncomfortable than anything I’ve seen in a recent film, documentary or otherwise.
Cersei: You know that you’re not half as clever as you think. Tyrion: That still makes me twice as clever as you.
Claudius: “As for being half-witted: well, what can I say, except that I have survived to middle age with half my wits, while thousands have died with all of theirs intact. Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.”
@JohnSF: I just don’t see how any sane leader wants someone like Trump on the inside, regardless of how much they hate the US. If I’m a mafia don and I see an out of control buffoon in a rivals organization, I’m loving it. But if that global needs to make a run for it, why would I want to bring some crazy, out of control freak into my house? Who the hell knows what he’s going to do? Today he’ll be singing your praises and tomorrow he’ll be wiring up for the FBI.
There are only two types of leaders I can see giving shelter to Trump. Both kinds would need iron fisted control in order to force a bad decision on the country. And then they either need to be penny-ante corrupt and stupid, or they need to be crazy. Or both, I guess. Someone who would sell out their country and risk a mess for Trump’s promises of fabulous wealth and is stupid enough to believe it. Or someone like Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein, crazy and impulsive enough that you can’t be surprised by anything they do.
But for the most part these dictators are Machiavellian and ol’ Machiavelli was right about this: if someone from one principality helps you damage their home, and that person comes under your control, you should kill him without hesitation. You know with absolute certainty that he is capable of harm and he is a betrayer.
I see the word flee being bandied about in this open thread and yes, life for Trump post-election (assuming he loses) is very much on his mind if the story titled The Fear Behind Donald Trump’s Obsession with Immunity on Politico is anything to go by.
If Trump was not so worried about being arrested if he is no longer protected by being the President he would embrace life if he loses in Nov and live the good life. Settle in at Mar A Lago, and just Netflix and chill with his wife.
Most Presidents are pretty pragmatic about being a one term President, they accept that they were not voted back into office and make the best of it. Obama pics were all over the place of him living up the good life when he no longer bore the burden of being the President of the U.S.. Granted he was a two term pres, but I bet if McCain had become president that Obama would have been cordial with McCain and just ended up living the good life 4 years earlier than expected.
Trump should be happy to shake off the stress of being President but nope, instead he is in quite the pickle if he is not re-elected. You would think that would cause him to soften his rough edges, but nope…the rough edges worked in 2016 but Keef really is in denial if he thinks it is working again in 2020.
Plenty of polls from Rasmussen and Fox show that the numbers are against Trump so even if you try to cherry pick polls the ones that are usually most favorable to the GOP do Trump no favors.
Again, if Trump had not set himself up to become the target of a thousand folks who want to nail his hide to the wall when he can no longer hide behind being President he would not be dreading the election results.
Folks are not going to go to war to keep Trump in the White House if he loses, even his Base will be happy to just have Biden move in and get on with life. Not enough folks love Trump to the point where they are willing to plunge the nation into another civil war type conflict, i.e., they love Trump but they do not Love Trump.
About yesterday’s comments on how the ancients didn’t know the color blue, what color do you suppose we’re not noticing?
At the risk of being (even more) pedantic, I don’t think it’s useful or accurate to say that the ancient Greeks “didn’t know” the color blue, or that they were “not noticing” it. They knew it just as well as we do, and could recognize any particular shade of blue as well as we can. They just didn’t feel the need to have a separate name for the particular fuzzy collection of hues and saturations that we lump together under the term “blue”. Just like nobody felt the need for “ecru” as a color term until the mid-19th century. That doesn’t mean we somehow couldn’t perceive ecru, or recognize it, or have opinions about whether it would be a good color for the drapes. We just didn’t feel the need to give a special label to that particular shade of off-white.
Also, I’m reminded of a frequent question from childhood: how do I know that we see the same “red” when we call something “red”?
We don’t know. Chances are, by analogy with other physiological processes, we don’t all have identical sensory experiences when exposed to the same stimulus. We certainly know that taste and smell vary across people; why shouldn’t vision? We can spot extreme cases (e.g. color-blindness), but we have no possible access to understanding variation in subjective experiences that are functionally equivalent. To quote a famous thought experiment, if you and I have identical visual experiences, except that when I say “red” I’m referring to the experience that you refer to as “orange”, and vice versa, we would never be able to discover that.
We just didn’t feel the need to give a special label to that particular shade of off-white.
Curse the missing edit function — I should have said “that particular cluster of shades”, to emphasize that it’s a question of which colors get lumped, not of there being individual colors.
Question: How are you feeling about the new COVID-19 measures that have been put in place to make set life safer? Have you had any experiences dealing with this that concerned you?
Answer by Jeff Lieber: I’m in LA. Set is in Vancouver. All sets are currently only as good as the people running them. Our are fantastic and smart and have a “safety first” mentality. Frankly if Line Producers were put in charge of the country, we’d get shit fixed fast.
“TO ALL TENANTS:
Please understand IF Joe Biden is elected as our next President, everything you do and have to pay for will change completely.
Everything will be increased. Like paying ALOT (sic) more in taxes, utilities, gasoline, groceries, new permits, fees and regulations…everything! This also means YOUR RENT will be increased to cover these expenses. Most likely, rent would DOUBLE in price!
IF the current President is re-elected, WE WILL NOT RAISE THE RENT FOR AT LEAST 2 YEARS!
Voting is your choice and we are not telling you how to vote. We are just informing our tenants what WE will do according to the election results.
If Trump wins, we all win. If Biden wins, we all lose.
VOTE on November 3, 2020.”
But on the weekends, I often experimented with drugs. I recall vividly one episode in which a magical color appeared to me. I had been taught, as a child, that there were seven colors in the spectrum, including indigo (Newton had chosen these, somewhat arbitrarily, by analogy with the seven notes of the musical scale). But some cultures recognize only five or six spectral colors, and few people agree as to what indigo is like.
I had long wanted to see “true” indigo, and thought that drugs might be the way to do this. So one sunny Saturday in 1964, I developed a pharmacologic launchpad consisting of a base of amphetamine (for general arousal), LSD (for hallucinogenic intensity), and a touch of cannabis (for a little added delirium). About twenty minutes after taking this, I faced a white wall and exclaimed, “I want to see indigo now–now!”
And then, as if thrown by a giant paintbrush, there appeared a huge, trembling, pear-shaped blob of the purest indigo. Luminous, numinous, it filled me with rapture: It was the color of heaven, the color, I thought, which Giotto had spent a lifetime trying to get but never achieved–never achieved, perhaps, because the color of heaven is not to be seen on earth. But it had existed once, I thought–it was the color of the Paleozoic sea, the color the ocean used to be. I leaned toward it in a sort of ecstasy. And then it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an overwhelming sense of loss and sadness that it had been snatched away. But I consoled myself: Yes, indigo exists, and it can be conjured up in the brain.
For months afterward, I searched for indigo. I turned over little stones and rocks near my house, looking for it. I examined specimens of azurite in the natural history museum–but even they were infinitely far from the color I had seen. And then, in 1965, when I had moved to New York, I went to a concert in the Egyptology gallery of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the first half, a Monteverdi piece was performed, and I was utterly transported. I had taken no drugs, but I felt a glorious river of music, four hundred years long, flowing from Monteverdi’s mind into my own. In this ecstatic mood, I wandered out during the intermission and looked at the ancient Egyptian objections on display–lapis lazuli amulets, jewelry, and so forth–and I was enchanted to see glints of indigo. I thought: Thank God, it really exists!
During the second half of the concert, I got a bit bored and restless, but I consoled myself, knowing that I could go out and take a “sip” of indigo afterward. It would be there, waiting for me. But when I went out to look at the gallery after the concert was finished, I could see only blue and purple and mauve and puce–no indigo. That was nearly fifty years ago, and I have never seen indigo again.
Just like nobody felt the need for “ecru” as a color term until the mid-19th century. That doesn’t mean we somehow couldn’t perceive ecru, or recognize it, or have opinions about whether it would be a good color for the drapes.
At one job, I had a complete asshole grandboss who was redecorating his home and spent a lot of time in our open office on the phone handling this.
One day, his phone call proceeded to get more and more heated. At the point where people started listening, he was berating someone with “Is it taupe, or beige? If it’s beige, I don’t want it, and when I come over to take a look at it, I’m just going to be pissed and I’m not going to just love it anyway and buy it. What do you mean you don’t know the difference? Are you fucking color-blind? They’re fucking worlds apart, you moron.”
This went on for a while, and culminated with him yelling “Now you think it’s beige? Why did you waste my time if you knew it was beige?”
He slammed the phone down (there were office phones at the time). and then proceeded to complain about how people will just waste your time trying to get you into the showroom, so they can do the hard sell there.
I’m betting the sofa or whatever was taupe, and they just didn’t want to deal with him.
He also painted, terribly. Hung above his desk was a painting of a lump of dog shit. He was a winner.
I keep track of him on LinkedIn so I know to never interview somewhere he works. I have a small list of people like that.
@Teve:
“Paying protection money is is your choice and we’re not telling you how to spend your paycheck. We are just informing our neighbors what WE will do according to the result of next bank statement. If we end up richer, we will not burn down any stores for TWO YEARS!”
FYI this is the kind of thing that makes people vote liberal. This is a government-needs-to-intervene thing and the GOP would tell you they couldn’t possibly tell a businessperson what to do or that was a true threat since they used weasel words and dodges. I wonder how many Biden voters that little letter just created…..
@Kylopod: You remind me of a line about science and religion – that no amount of contemplation or meditation or theological reasoning or prayer was ever going to discover ultraviolet.
My biological grandpa died of COVID today. He’s been on a ventilator since October 4th. The damage to his heart, lungs and kidneys was such that they did not think he was strong enough to survive dialysis once he was off the ventilator. He was a man who had never had any significant health problems in his life, but believed every word Trump said about COVID and masks.
Fuck Trump, and fuck every Republican who’s enabled him the last 4 miserable years, culminating in what will likely be hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.
@Kathy: My oldest son is color blind. Talk about not seeing reds. Once after working on a project out in the woods, we were driving home from camp and I pulled up to a tree where I had tied some bright pink flagging tape to help guide people to our camp. I asked him to get out and grab the tape. He said, “Where is it?” It was 3 feet away from his face, right outside his door.
@Michael Reynolds: “He started out four years ago playing the role of financial whiz-bang. ”
And yet, oddly, even I know know nothing about business could tell that everything he said about business was hopelessly wrong. It still astonishes me that anyone ever bought his schtick. Or maybe they were just humoring him, since at that point he wasn’t toxic yet.
@Michael Reynolds: Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath on the pardon/resign/flee thing–although I wouldn’t be shocked or disappointed if it happened. Trump is too stupid to see that as an option and to arrogant to realize how deep the hole may be.
Additionally, I doubt that either the Feds or the State of NY will go after him once he’s out of office. You can admit that I’m right or not as you prefer when it doesn’t happen. I’m good with either outcome–it’s the American Way.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I could see the State of NY going after the Trump Organization and the family if they think they can prove hundreds of millions of dollars of money laundering.
@MarkedMan:
Yes; I’m only playing around with the idea.
(“John; stop playing with you food!” “Yes, mum.”)
It’s difficult to think of a country that would both shelter him and where he would be safe; unless the US government was saying via back-channel “Please, keep him! We’ll pay costs if you like.”
Maybe Iran? LOL. Iranians can have a wicked sense of humour.
@Michael Reynolds: Because you brought it up, I thought I’d look up “keef” to see what kinds of connections there might be–I didn’t really expect any.
From Wikipedia (Sorry, no hotlink button and that syntax is more complicated than I want to do 🙂 )
Kief (pronounced [keːf, ki(ː)f, kɪf]; from Arabic كيف (kayf) ‘pleasure’), sometimes transliterated as keef, also known as cannabis crystals among other names, refers to the resinous trichomes of cannabis that may accumulate in containers or be sifted from loose, dry cannabis infructescences with a mesh screen or sieve. (Urban Dictionary expands: The powdery substance made up of THC crystals from the bud of cannabis. It’s basically the Cheetos dust that gets left behind on your fingers after finishing a bag of chips, but in this case, with weed.[emphasis added]
Dictionary.com offers
an anxiety disorder in which patients are driven to repeat the same act, such as washing their hands, over and over again, usually for many hours. anxiety caused by a dread of environmental perils
A third option listed keef as the dessicated edges of broadleaf weeds, but that one didn’t come up on my move of the Cortana information to MS EDGE and didn’t show up on a Cortana reload. Aw snap!
Conclusion: He DOES seem to be ill-served by his current screen name.
@Michael Reynolds: Gonna have to disagree with you again. Pat Robertson is easily as stupid and mentally impaired as Trump and he has a successful TV show still.
I have been pushing this on everybody I can lately. I just discovered a youtube channel for a guy named Max Miller called “Tasting History”. He cooks dishes he finds in ancient cookbooks and tries them. This was my first introduction to him and if I can get some garum, I’ll be making it this weekend. It’s for a recipe called “Parthian Chicken” from the Roman Empire. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y&t=2s
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Interesting thing is, the “Bobulinski confirms” story has actually been out in the wild for at least 6 days.
Then today the NY Post headlines it with a (new?) quote; it then gets reported in several other Murdoch outlets, notably The Sun in the UK and the (non-Murdoch but definitely right of centre) The Daily Mail. Then a bunch of Russian and Chinese news sites light up. Then social media detonates.
Worth a better analysis than I can do.
More evidence that Trump is literally just trying to re-create the circumstances from the last election cycle.
He’s invited this Tony Boblinksi guy to the debate tonight. He did this last cycle too, invited one of Bill Clinton’s accusers to his debate with Hillary Clinton.
Ok, I’m a bit confused with this whole Hunter Biden thing. I didn’t spend too much time checking it out, but it appears that the supposedly damning emails were sent in May 2017, right? After Biden left office. I see how the optics may not be great, but how is that illegal? I thought the whole thing was about Biden’s alleged influence peddling while he was in office.
@DrDaveT: He’s entitled to his opinion and protected by the First Amendment in his right to disseminate it. And in balance liberty allows his tenants the right to move if they find the rent too high. See? It’s all equal. /s
@Mike in Arlington:
Whoever’s running this thinks they are being very clever.
They are putting out first “evidence” then “corroboration” (both of which are highly dubious but difficult to fully test without access to the physical(-ish) evidence; the original “Hunter Biden” laptop hard drive plus related email server logs and third party copies; and the testimony under oath of the witnesses, with related examination of their communications etc etc.
And this won’t take place because nothing illegal is being alleged; therefore no such investigation is warranted. (If any legal experts here can correct me on this, please help out!)
Perhaps only if Hunter Biden sued re. invasion of privacy?
Would he have grounds to sue if no crime was being alleged? Dunno.
And I’d be willing to bet that a close look at the evidence will eventually collapse this whole pile.
But the operator thinks that is of no matter so long as the collapse is delayed until after the election.
Thing is, so far the story is NOT getting traction (hence reports of Trump bringing Bobulinski to debate?).
And yet, oddly, even I know know nothing about business could tell that everything he said about business was hopelessly wrong.
This reminds me of Meghan McArdle, who managed to fall up faster than pretty much anyone I’ve come across. I read her for a while when (I think) she was in The Atlantic’s stable of bloggers (when that was a thing). Almost everything she wrote seemed to be lazy and ill-informed, kinda that typical libertarian, “I noticed something that caught my eye so I googled it and I generally think I’m god’s gift to the universe so now I’m an expert. Lemme explain it all to you so you can be impressed by my brilliance.” But what clinched it form me was that she occasionally blogged about something I actually knew about. And she was wrong. Not just wrong, but cringingly, embarrassingly wrong.
I guess she checks the box of “libertarian” on some publisher’s intellectual diversity list and no one expects a libertarian to put out anything useful, but still.
It was my understanding that when the hard drive was first introduced, it was an attempt to implicate Joe Biden in some influence peddling scheme with Ukraine while he was in office. But nobody took the bait (except those in the right wing fever swamps), which is why the right wing went crazy (well, crazier) about Twitter blocking sending links to the story and how they’re being “censored”.
I agree with your assessment, in trying to expand the “scandal” to China, they forgot to allege that Joe Biden did anything illegal. I have read that the data has been provided to Senate committees, so we have nothing to worry about, Senator Ron Johnson is on the case. He’ll get to the bottom of it.
I guess I haven’t made my extreme* distaste for the meat of all creatures that dwell under water known in this forum yet. That’s amazing, as I usually cannot refrain myself from making rather ridiculous analogies and over-exact comparisons.
But I appreciate the thought.
I also cannot stand either the sight or smell of avocado.
*”Extreme” doesn’t go far enough, but I can’t think of another superlative that fits. I’ve had fights over my refusal to taste nausea-inducing so-called food more than once.
In other news, its sure looking like Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron was, shall we say, less than honest in his representation of what charges the Grand Jury was able to consider in the Breonna Taylor case:
A second anonymous grand juror in the Breonna Taylor case has spoken out, confirming not only that Kentucky Attorney General Daniel Cameron’s office never recommended homicide charges—but that the grand jury was not even allowed to consider other charges beyond the wanton endangerment charge recommended against a single officer involved in the March raid. “The Grand Jury was only allowed to consider the three Wanton Endangerment charges against Detective Hankison,” the second grand juror said in a statement via a lawyer. “No opportunity to consider anything else was permitted.”
Stating they are “looking forward to continuing to help set the record straight,” the juror’s statement came a day after another juror spoke out against Cameron. On Tuesday, Judge Annie O’Connell permitted any juror to speak, deeming that that usual secrecy provisions were no longer relevant given that the grand jury proceedings have already been made public. The first grand juror said in a statement that homicide offenses or self-defense justifications were never explained since “prosecutors didn’t feel they could make them stick.” “The grand jury didn’t agree certain actions were justified, nor did it decide the indictment should be the only charges in the Breonna Taylor case,” the first juror said.
The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive.
I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.
This afternoon I received a request from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the Senate Committee on Finance requesting all documents relating to my business affairs with the Biden family as well as various foreign entities and individuals. I have extensive relevant records and communications and I intend to produce those items to both Committees in the immediate future.
I am the grandson of a 37 year Army Intelligence officer, the son of a 20+ year career Naval Officer and the brother of a 28 year career Naval Flight Officer. I myself served our country for 4 years and left the Navy as LT Bobulinski. I held a high level security clearance and was an instructor and then CTO for Naval Nuclear Power Training Command. I take great pride in the time my family and I served this country. I am also not a political person. What few campaign contributions I have made in my life were to Democrats.
If the media and big tech companies had done their jobs over the past several weeks I would be irrelevant in this story. Given my long standing service and devotion to this great country, I could no longer allow my family’s name to be associated or tied to Russian disinformation or implied lies and false narratives dominating the media right now.
After leaving the military I became an institutional investor investing extensively around the world and on every continent. I have traveled to over 50 countries. I believe, hands down, we live in the greatest country in the world.
What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to ‘the Big Guy’ in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other ‘JB’ referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother.
Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.
I realized the Chinese were not really focused on a healthy financial ROI. They were looking at this as a political or influence investment. Once I realized that Hunter wanted to use the company as his personal piggy bank by just taking money out of it as soon as it came from the Chinese, I took steps to prevent that from happening.
The Johnson Report connected some dots in a way that shocked me — it made me realize the Bidens had gone behind my back and gotten paid millions of dollars by the Chinese, even though they told me they hadn’t and wouldn’t do that to their partners.
I would ask the Biden family to address the American people and outline the facts so I can go back to being irrelevant — and so I am not put in a position to have to answer those questions for them.
I don’t have a political ax to grind; I just saw behind the Biden curtain and I grew concerned with what I saw. The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from communist controlled China.
In other news, its sure looking like Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron was, shall we say, less than honest in his representation of what charges the Grand Jury was able to consider in the Breonna Taylor case
I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business.
I don’t actually recall, but did Biden put this statement in the context of his time as VP? I would be a little surprised if Biden would not have provided advice once his time as VP was done. Also, at that point, what influence would Biden have other than as a lobbyist to Democrats in Congress?
@keef: Switch the Biden name with the Trump name and it’s exactly what’s already happened. Which is why nobody cares. See what happens when you lower the bar and allow a corrupt pig to stink up the office of the Presidency? After all of Trump’s stink, and “right out in the open” corruption, you gas bag Republicans having a hissy fit because the Biden’s did some business in China means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. We don’t care. We’re laughing at you because your hissy fit is so obviously contrived, your hypocrisy so glaring to everybody but yourselves, it’s hard to take anything you say seriously.
Ok. What color do we fail to distinguish as not just some shade of another color?
That’s probably not the right general question. In the case of birds with four types of color receptors, the fourth is in near ultraviolet. Where we perceive the world as combinations of RGB, they see combinations of RGBU. So far as I know, there’s no model of how their brains interpret the four color values. But given a specific set of RGB values, we see the same color as U runs from zero to saturation. They see a whole range of something.
A related effect is color sensitivity, the ability to distinguish between RGB shades that are close together. Generally, humans can see more green shades, then red, and we have lots of trouble differentiating blues. Speculation is that this is an evolutionary survival trait. It’s been years since I did work on human vision. Computer display schema typically allocate a 24-bit color value as 8-bit red, 8-bit green, and 8-bit blue. IIRC, the bits would be more effectively allocated as 8-bit red, 10-bit green, and 6-bit blue.
Thanks for your condolences, everyone. I only recently met my bio Grandpa, from about 2009 onwards, so I don’t have any sweet childhood memories of him like my bio sisters and half brother do. I knew him to be a man of honor who was healthy as a horse with the same dry sense of humor as my adopted Dad, and still ranching in his 80’s. His only downfall….was Trump. He’s killing his own supporters.
A former coworker was color blind (I guess he still is). He had the misfortune of working with us when some in the department went color obsessed. One woman in particular used different colors of highlighter on tons of papers. The poor guy couldn’t make out much.
@keef: Funny how Ukraine suddenly morphed into China right after Trump’s secret Chinese bank account was revealed. Imagine that.
Do you really think anyone with an IQ higher than their shoe size is going to buy such transparent nonsense? I mean, it’s just beyond obviously fabricated.
I hope I am not too presumptuous in saying surely we owe Keef a hearty round of congratulations for posting such an enlightening statement from a public spirited citizen?
Some cynical souls might read it as being very carefully worded, even sly, in insinuating without ever directly accusing, and in precisely what evidence is to be provided, of his, and probably a co-operating senatorial inquisitors, choosing.
So some might think; I couldn’t possibly comment.
(LBJ quote re. the use of hogs in campaigns seems relevant, though.)
@Kathy: HA! I have heard that complaint from others.
My Uncle Alex* was color blind too but he managed to cheat his way into the Navy frogmen in WWII. Had super sharp predator bird eyesight otherwise, which is how he got wrote up in a ’60s teenage book called (iirc) Frogmen of WWII that a friend of my mother’s recognized him in and forwarded it to her. She sent it on to Alex’s sons and while I have googled it I’ve yet to see it for sale again so I’m not sure I remember the details correctly anymore.
At any rate, I have referred to him as “my hero Uncle” ever since and I’m pretty sure he rolls in his grave every time. 🙂
*of all my uncles, it is safe to say he was my favorite
I just want to say that Keef and his Tony baba boey post made me laugh out loud (for reals). I love how he takes this guy’s words as if he speaks the gospel truth like he Jesus Christ or one of his Apostles. Too funny, I think even Keef realizes it is a bit late in the game to assume that a dude named Tony babaganoush is all it takes to keep Biden out of the White House. OTB has their own official court jester who sticks around to give us all a good laugh for the day, loving it.
Also, Keef….nearly 50 million(!) and counting have already voted and the election is still 13 days out.
Since I can’t edit my post this Tony B guy was at one point a friend of Hunter Biden, but seriously, if the Senate wants to talk to him this Friday be my guest….a bunch of hearsay from a guy who says he does not have an ax to grind (so of course he has an ax to grind) is not going to stop folks from voting for Biden.
The Senate needs to stop embarrassing themselves but it looks like they are going to hold water for Trump all the way to the end…wow.
and I am sorry you don’t like seafood. My Mallorcan born and raised wife loves them, but her sea faring father always brought home the freshest of seafood. And it really is a very good recipe.
@flat earth luddite:
My word. They are lovable, but hose buggers can barely corner under 70 horsepower.
There’d better be some seriously modified suspension on that thing.
Unless it’s the good old American approach: straight line = zoom; bend = uh, nope.
Ok. What color do we fail to distinguish as not just some shade of another color?
I’m not sure I understand the question.
Let’s distinguish a few meanings of the word “color” to see if that’s the problem.
There’s color_1, the subjective experience you get when you look at something.
There’s color_2, the mix of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation entering an eye. Very different combinations of frequencies can produce identical color_1 experiences — that’s what lets a color TV work despite only being able to emit 3 different frequencies.
There’s color_3, the socially constructed name for a collection of similar color_1s that a particular society uses. You can’t have a different name for every possible combination of perceived hue and saturation; that would be unwieldy. Different societies lump them together in different ways.
Which of those are you asking about?
Note that native Russian speakers feel the same way about us using the same word for light blue and dark blue as we feel about ancient Greeks using the same word for green and yellow…
“Good” and “sea food” don’t make logical sense in the same implication.
One of my high school friends invited me twice to his home for dinner. One time they served paella*, the second time some kind of huge fish cadaver served whole on the table and portioned out. The third time he invited me, I managed not to slap him.
To be fair, I’ll grant some fish don’t make me nauseated. Canned tuna, for example. That’s merely unpleasant. If I were starving (and I mean literally dying of hunger) and there was nothing else available, I could eat it. But I wouldn’t like it.
* I especially hate paella. People who know of my aversion keep telling me to just pick off the bits I don’t like. Now, this is indelicate, but I did say it once: “If you were served a dish with pieces of horses**t and cockroaches, would you be ok picking out those bits and eating the rest?”
Where we perceive the world as combinations of RGB, they see combinations of RGBU.
Actually, it’s worse than that. The three types of color receptors in the standard human eye have overlapping excitation profiles; the same pure frequency of incident light will excite all three of them to different degrees. The perceived color is based on the sum of the three excitations. That’s how you can fool an eye into thinking that it’s seeing purple or yellow by hitting it with a combination of pure red, green, and blue frequencies at different intensities.
So we don’t actually see things as combinations of R, G, and B. We see things that our brain mistakes for a pure single frequency, based on three partially-correlated sensors that can’t distinguish any pure frequencies.
@DrDaveT: supposedly Worcestershire sauce was a British attempt at re-creating an Indian fish sauce.
Colatura di alici may be a more direct descendant. Frankly my pantry contains Vietnamese fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce. Fermented salty glutamate nom nom nom 😀
To be fair, I’ll grant some fish don’t make me nauseated. Canned tuna, for example. That’s merely unpleasant. If I were starving (and I mean literally dying of hunger) and there was nothing else available, I could eat it. But I wouldn’t like it.
Interesting. My wife has exactly the same problem, including the exception for canned tuna (in water, not oil). We recently discovered that a cousin of hers is the same. All seafood tastes like the smell of a working harbor at low tide to them.
I suspect that it’s genetic, like the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap to some people.
@Teve:
Similar: two varieties soy, “proper” Worcester sauce, far Thai fish sauce, shrimp paste, oyster sauce, fermented black bean paste, plus yellow bean if that counts.
umami, baby
Also jar of cranberry sauce which has probably fermented by now, thinking about it. Oops.
@DrDaveT: We had a demonstration of that in one of our physics classes: picture projected in black and white. Same picture projected in red and white. Both filters projected together? Instant colour.
We see things that our brain mistakes for a pure single frequency, based on three partially-correlated sensors that can’t distinguish any pure frequencies.
Yes, and many other things as well. Huge amounts of signal processing going on up there in our heads determine what we actually “see”. High-level historical example: American viewers used to 60 Hz refresh rates on American analog TV who went to Europe “learned” to not see the flicker on 50 Hz displays. From my own research work back in the day: the frame rate at which audio/video sync can be determined is 13-15 frames per second. Below that people simply can’t tell.
So the Wall Street Journal has published more details of the email. For some strange reason they published it in their Editorial Section (for those not in the know, that means they don’t have to go through the newsrooms fact-checking division–I wonder why they opted for that.
Here is noted liberal Conor Friedersdorf’s take:
I’m glad Kimberly Strassel published this. I’ve been waiting for such an account. If accurate it shows:
1) Hunter Biden unethically attempted to profit from his family name.
2) Joe Biden nixed a deal for unknown reasons.
3) This happened after JB was out of office.
(1/2)
Best I can tell, in any comparison of corruption vis-a-vis China, Trump family is far more compromised (see Ivanka trademarks, DJT’s secret bank account, all while DJT was president). Hunter Biden warrants criticism. Not sure about Joe. Weird if this changes many votes.
…
I was referring to the part of the story that says *In one text, Hunter says that “my Chairman gave an emphatic NO” to a version of the deal. Mr. Walker, Hunter’s partner, explains in a text to Mr. Bobulinski that when Hunter “said his chairman he was talking about his dad.”*
you know, I’ve been doing price lists all day, and my brain is suitably mushed. But I thought we were talking linguistics, not optics.
So let’s say the Greeks and some other ancients did not distinguish blue as a color, but rather as a shade of some other color, or so I thought. Therefore we may have some color that in the future will be given a proper name and pride of place, while we call it some shade of something else.
That’s what I meant.
And all this for a snarky response in the form a phrase I find meaningless but happen to like the sound of: wine-dark sea.
@Teve: That’s the fish sauce the guy recommends, but “Asian” (I’m not sure what the proper name is for it) fish sauce is apparently very similar, maybe similar enough to substitute.
@Teve: Wow. He obviously wanted nothing to do with Bobulinski.
I guess that could mean Bobulinski was actually being honest about not having a political axe to grind…but only because he had a personal axe to grind.
@Teve: Oh, forgot, the other uncommon (at least in the US) ingredient is asafoetida, which the girlfriend has just acquired.
And seriously, that video is worth the watch. He goes into the Parthian empire and Roman history is just fantastic (for those of us who like that sort of thing).
@Teve: for Parthian Chicken. There’s a youtube channel called “tasting history”. The guy makes recipes from cookbooks from history. He made a recipe from a cook book from ancient Rome, and here’s the video for it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y&t=2s
A warning, his humor is the moral equivalent to “dad jokes”. But the recipe uses Garum (or fish sauce) and Asafoetida, and his reaction is interesting enough to make me want to make it.
First I want to apologize for my earlier response. Reading it now it seems more than a little hostile.
That said:
Ummmm…. try it with chicken? Or cauliflower?
Honestly, it’s the milk, cheese, and paprika that make it.
I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but thinking of milk plus cheese and paprika tastes wrong.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve veer cooked any meat in milk, either, or added milk to any sort of meat dish (I mix in glaze with ground beef and breadcrumbs when making meatloaf, not milk). Other dairy, sure. Cream and cheese, for sure, but not milk.
So let’s say the Greeks and some other ancients did not distinguish blue as a color, but rather as a shade of some other color, or so I thought. Therefore we may have some color that in the future will be given a proper name and pride of place, while we call it some shade of something else.
Aha! Yes, I understand what question you are asking now. Thanks for taking the time.
So, yes, there might come a time when a language community we belong to (English for me, Spanish or English or ??? for you) starts to not only apply different words to (say) greens more toward the yellow end versus greens toward the blue end of the range, but to no longer see both spring green and kelly green as shades of the same underlying color. Like Russians with blue. Or we might decide that teal is an important enough color that it deserves a space on the rainbow all its own, between green and blue, and that teal is not merely a shade of either blue or green.
The set of colors is defined as much by cultural conventions about which hues are NOT just shades of the same basic color as they are by opinions about which ones are.
I’m not watching the debate but I’m following journalists on Twitter. Apparently Biden is doing pretty well
@jbouie
The thing that is happening here is Biden gives these clean, uncomplicated answers while Trump rambles through the deep lore of the Fox News Cinematic Universe
@gVOR08: there’s supposed to be 6 15-minute segments. At the beginning of each 15 minute segment each candidate gets to talk for two minutes while the other candidate’s microphone is muted. Then the muting is off for the last 11 minutes of that topic.
Something like that. I like to ponder the shortcomings of our era. Sometimes I wonder if our quest for dark matter will end up alongside the luminiferous aether.
Unless you’ve been doing lots of GOTV, you may not be aware that conservatives across the country almost universally believe Trump will win in a landslide.
Trump just told them that the GOP will win the House.
Trump just lost this debate. He’s behind. A big shock is coming.
I read that Biden caught all the debate-watchers and pundits looking to disect the debate performance of each candidate off-guard when he brought up Giuliani and the Hunter Biden issue before Trump. It was apparently a very savvy move by Biden.
Also, as noted in this thread it is now out there on the net that Keef’s lord and savior Tony B does indeed have an ax to grind and was not trusted by Biden so anything Tony B says will be looked at as the words of a person who is bitter that he did not get to worm himself even further to Hunter’s business dealings than he already had.
Try again Keef, Tony B. is not the smoking gun you were looking for. It was pretty quickly revealed that he was straight up lying when he tried to play up that he tried to be the White Knight that was hoping to set Hunter Biden on a more virtuous path.
It feels like today was a horrible day for Trump, Biden was well prepared to deal with Hunter being used as a weapon against him and I bet the GOP slowly tries to walk away from the Laptop story now that their last ditch effort to keep the story alive by trotting out Tony B as the guy who would provide proof that Hunter and by extension his father are corrupt was a big fail.
Giuliani should quit while he is behind, dropping more supposedly juicy nuggets regarding Hunter Biden is just adding to a narrative that now pretty much no one believes so if the GOP is smart they will put a muzzle on him as he is doing Senator’s trying to get re-elected no favors.
I am still waiting for that October Surprise, the GOP better hurry…only 9 more days left so I hope the laptop story was not the surprise because that did not quite play out like they thought it would (perhaps the understatement of the year, Trump clearly thought this would play out like Comey dropping a bomb on Hillary less than 3 weeks before the election in 2016…ooopsie, that did not happen this time around).
I already voted for Biden. As soon as Trump started talking I had to change the channel to Law and Order reruns.
Last appearance of Steven Hill as Adam Schiff.
My grandmother called me recently. She and my grandfather are very up in age and I haven’t been able to see them since Covid started–I usually make at least one visit a year. The sound of her voice made me burn with a hate for Trump that I didn’t realize I was capable of.
@JohnSF:
Apparently he spent lots of his shop time on a personal labor of love for his surfari baby. Still, way too rich & scary for this ole dude who’s from that era.
I think my favourite part is where he refers to dealing with businesses in “communist China” like that’s super sketchy . After first saying he was CEIO of a company involved in a partnership with [checks notes] a Chinese company.
The Florida headline of the day-
State attorney drops objection to releasing secret Epstein documents
The headlines of the day-
Russia, Iran have obtained voter data in election interference campaign: DNI
and
Pope Francis, in Shift for Church, Voices Support for Same-Sex Civil Unions
Why are people surprised that a voter’s name, address, email, and party registration is available to the public (including foreign entities as well as domestic terror groups)?
The Proud Boys email issue should have been expected.
WRT the word out of Washington that attempts to point the finger at Iran for the hacking of voter registration data: Why on earth would Iran do something that would, if it has the desired effect, benefit the Trump re-election campaign?
Tony Bobulinski.
The Atlantic Monthly has endorsed only three presidential candidates in its 163 year history. The first was Abraham Lincoln. The second was Lyndon Johnson 1964. The third was Hillary Clinton in 2016. The fourth, today, is Joe Biden.
http://www.theatlantic.com
@Keef: Bob Dobalina.
@Mikey: Deep cut. Kudos!
@Mikey: Dob Bole.
@SC_Birdflyte:
Most good NatSec analysts I have seen have suggested that, while they might have a preferred candidate, honestly things don’t change much for Iran regardless of who wins the election. What is far better for them is to simply be disruptive and weaken insitutional trust. Which, to a large degree was also the Soviet approach in 2016 as well.
To clarify, “Tony Bobulinski” is the name currently circulating in the right-wing moron morass, with stupidly breathless claims of e-mails detailing “BIDEN’S CHINA DEALINGS!!!!11!!” and other such transparent bullshit.
It is, of course, a total coincidence that “BIDEN’S CHINA DEALINGS!!!!11!!” becomes a thing the day after it’s revealed Trump has a previously-undisclosed bank account in China. Totally.
There’s a depressing article in http://www.thedailybeast.com about how Italy is experiencing a second and worse wave of Covid-19, even though they seem to have done everything correctly during the first wave.
The U.K., France, Germany, Ireland, and the Czech Republic are in increasingly bad shape as well.
In Italy, the authorities think it might be young people having private parties in their homes.
@SC_Birdflyte:
As a false flag to make the Proud Boys and their guy Trump look bad?
@charon:
Interestingly, the Trump campaign has sent out a message prohibiting “QAnon attire” at any future rallies.
Trump doesn’t want to disavow them, but he doesn’t want to be tied to them, either. I don’t think this will discourage them; they’ll just tell themselves and each other that he has to do this, like when he claimed not to know who David Duke was.
@Keef:
Oh, Drew? Are you ready for Pardon, Resign and Flee? Cuz Trump is.
And I know that when it happens – as I predicted four years ago – you’ll man up and admit I was right all along. Right? Won’t be long now.
@mattbernius: Internal Iran politics is the ruling hardliners vs moderates who want to open up the country. Moderates were gaining with the Obama/Biden approach of international relief in exchange for nuclear de-escalation. Having Trump in opposition plays into the hardliners hands and strengthens them.
@Mikey:
What I find interesting in Keef’s original comment is that is just a name, and he expects everyone to just *know* that this means that Biden is corrupt.
He doesn’t explain anything, because the right-wing concoction of a story doesn’t hold up to critical, or really any kind of thought. So in order to avoid thinking, it’s just the name he throws out there.
This is straight out of Orwell’s 1984, in particular the book’s appendix: The Principles of Newspeak:
I never thought we’d have these braindead Party members in any meaningful number in a free society. Shows my naivety, I guess.
@drj:
Keef/Drew is a classic example of the sunk costs fallacy as it applies to politics. He started out four years ago playing the role of financial whiz-bang. Mr. High-flying mergers and acquisitions guy. Lots of bwah hah hah bluster. He would advance his positions in reasonably rational, logical arguments. He was wrong but not insane.
But he didn’t jump ship when he should have. He missed the moment where he might have salvaged some shred of credibility. All the market indicators were screaming, ‘Sell, Drew, sell!’ But he’d invested so much of himself in his puerile revenge fantasy of owning libs, that he doubled down. Tripled down. And now, he’s gone full Q-Bot because there is nowhere else to go when reality proves you’ve been a sucker.
Drew bought into Trump’s cult of personality, he surrendered his judgment, he abandoned any attempt at rationality, and now he’s our local avatar of Rudy Giuliani, a man utterly discredited, humiliated, defeated.
‘Keef?’ Hey, loser, don’t take the nickname of a genius. Try, ‘Theon.’ That’d be a good name to appropriate.
So apparently the latest right wing talking point is that the media is treating Biden with kid gloves because they hate Trump that much…”please discuss” indeed…
It appears Mr Bobulinski may have some legal and financial issues of his own.
I have a sneaking suspicion Tony may soon come to regret certain life choices.
@Michael Reynolds:
Yeah, exactly. He wasn’t brainwashed from a young age on as would have happened e.g. in the “Vladimir Lenin All-Union Pioneer Organization” or something similar), he chose this. He opted for insanity out of his own free will.
I don’t always like reality, I get that (I mean, who does?). But, fuck me, at least I have some standards.
But that Keef dude (or “Drew” – I don’t keep track) is just an empty shell.
@Michael Reynolds: I’m really wondering about that “Flee” part. Who would take him? Sure, there are countries that would like to stick a finger in our eye but I can’t imagine they want a loose cannon firing away at whatever catches his attention.
@Michael Reynolds:
@drj:
Well that does it; I’m not voting for Hunter Biden now.
For that matter, Hillary Clinton isn’t getting my vote either.
If there were no pandemic, I’d host a debate non-watch party and stream a few eps of Rick and Morty.
What may be worth watching is 60 minutes this Sunday. a sneak peek has Biden propose a bipartisan commission for court reform.
Perhaps skittish Democrats just need a good pep talk…
I think perhaps by now Trump’s best chance of winning the election, would be a promise to resign right after the inauguration
@Daryl and his brother Darryl:
All of this raises the question…if you are not going to vote for Biden because of his son…does that mean all Trumpies are A-OK with Don Jr and Eric? Two guys who have never gotten a paycheck without their daddies name on it? Seriously?
Former Hunter Biden business partner Tony Bobulinski has confirmed that an email published in the New York Post’s bombshell exposé is indeed genuine – something the Biden camp hasn’t disputed, and that the “Big Guy” described in one of those emails is none other than Joe Biden himself. Bobulinski also says Joe Biden was lying when he said he and Hunter never discussed business dealings.
“My name is Tony Bobulinski. The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive. I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post, which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.’ -New York Post
Bobulinski issued the statement late Wednesday, affirming that, contrary to Joe Biden’s claims that he never discussed business dealings with Hunter, the former Veep actually profited from his son’s dealings, which were undertaken with the full support of the Biden family.
Bobulinski claims cash and equity positions and 10% stakes in dealings were set aside for “the big guy,” – aka Joe Biden.
TB – The former business partner and CEO, the recipient of the email, a Navy Vet, and in a sworn affidavit.
The opposition? Know nothings, political hacks and, ahem, “anonymous sources.”
Sometimes these are IQ and honesty tests.
@MarkedMan:
Well, I don’t like to bet unless the odds are terrible. It’s no fun winning a 50/50 bet. So I put my money on the Philippines early on. Trump has property there, lots of golf, numerous future trophy wives available after Melania dumps him, and Duterte is both corrupt AF, and in a strong bargaining position against the US since he has bases we’d like.
Sadly for Donald, Russia and the Gulf are unavailable – those are the people he owes money to.
Trump is clearly broke. His campaign has less than half the money Biden has. He made noise about writing himself a 100 million dollar check, but we all knew that was bullshit. I don’t think Putin or MBS will front him that kind of money when he’s down 10 points. If he stays in the US, even setting aside the New York AG, he’ll be sued six ways from Sunday. He can’t afford the legal bills. If he stays in the US it’s prison and/or poverty.
His one way to get some cash flow is to go back to TV, to play orange Hannity. The problem there is that Trump’s a bore. He’s no Limbaugh, he’s no Hannity, he’s a stupid man getting stupider by the day. Maybe they’ll reboot the apprentice and he can be reunited with Omarosa. But they’ll have to shoot the whole thing from Manila.
@keef: Shut up, Reek. Nobody is buying this bullshit. No reputable news outlet will touch it. Not even Fox News would touch it. There is no October surprise. You and the traitors you enable are going down. You’re a loser.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/behind-curtain-biden-biz-partner-confirms-joe-involved-hunters-huge-china-deal
@Teve: Ah, of course. Reek’s favorite Russian propaganda outlet is pushing this “Tony Bobulinski” story. How unsurprising.
@MarkedMan:
I’ve previously been sceptical that Trump could find anyone willing to protect him against an angry US; and that he’d avoid Russia due the potential of some very unforgiving gangsters ending up losing their laundromats in the aftermath of all this. Still think the latter is true…
But, I thought, maybe a new administration would like him overseas rotting away somewhere.
(If they are as nasty minded as I am).
Keeps his case active, causing pain and division for any post-Trump Republican reconstruction attempt. And keeps him out of the courts, so no “Donald the Martyr” mileage for the Trumpkins either.
Win-win?
@Mikey: this bit from Wikipedia is all you need to know about ZeroHedge:
@keef:
Oh, you don’t want to go there, Drew: person…woman…man…covfefe…hamberder.
IQ is why Drew/keef so hung up on me. Years ago, back before Dave ‘Good German’ Schuler banned me for playing agnostic to his economics faith, we were talking IQ and Dave opined that of the cast of regulars at his blog, when it came to IQ I was probably the guy with the high score. (You remember that, Drew. Yeah, you do.)
Drew never got over it. It burned, it burned, because he was a big swingin’ dick of an M&A guy, and I was a high school drop-out who wrote children’s books. Pff! The nerve!
Drew’s a man with a high opinion of himself, hence the proliferating screen names referencing various geniuses. It rankled. So, being not half as clever as he thinks he is, he decided to prove to the whole world not just that he was dumber than me, but that he was dumber than lots of people. Lots and lots of people.
You have to admire his commitment. He’s certainly made his point.
For the record, Drew, I’m not the only one smarter than you. Everyone here is smarter than you. (Some are even smarter than me. I know!) You’re the slow kid in the AP class. And now we’re all laughing at you.
Cersei: You know that you’re not half as clever as you think. Tyrion: That still makes me twice as clever as you.
I am assuming that if that is indeed the case that the email is genuine, Mr. Bobulinski will make a copy of the original email, with all of the headers and metadata intact, available for forensic review.
@Michael Reynolds:
Keef is a very good name for someone Q-adjacent. He’s a tiny shift away from becoming a vaginal fart.
I’ve been snickering at his name for some time now.
@Teve: Don’t forget that you are on a business trip staying in Trump Hotel because your company wants business with the government and you know where the money ends up.
@Teve:
Hey! You want to get his personalized clock.
BidenMyTime…
Nick Kristof says that among health experts
Thabo Mbeki:AIDS::Donald Trump:Covid
A Colossal Failure of Leadership
Just want to point out that Biden has released his taxes. They are on his website for all to see.
About yesterday’s comments on how the ancients didn’t know the color blue, what color do you suppose we’re not noticing?
Also, I’m reminded of a frequent question from childhood: how do I know that we see the same “red” when we call something “red”?
Later on, by the time Trek TNG was on, I recall a brief argument with a friend who said the security/engineering uniforms were green, and I said they were yellow.
Lastly, humans have three types of color receptors. Most mammals, including cats and dogs, have two. Birds tend to have four*. Some years back there began to appear reports of humans with four such types of receptors.
*birds that fly, especially predators, have the sharpest vision known in nature.
There’s a photo of Joe Biden kissing Hunter Biden on the cheek. Some Trumper talking head shit goblin is insinuating that there’s something perverse going on.
https://twitter.com/johncardillo/status/1319077381685055488?s=21
Good thing is, he’s getting ratioed to hell and back.
@Teve: The best response I’ve seen so far to that tweet was a juxtaposition of that photo with the photo of Trump with Ivanka and one of his sons meeting Jeffrey Epstein.
@keef: Ever heard the term “useful idiot”? Look in a mirror and you’ll see one.
And the Russians don’t even have to PAY you! You’re spreading out their fake stories all by your own lonesome! Free!
Trump Minimus posted his version of the 60 minutes interview.
He’s not ok with tough questions, he says, because Biden doesn’t get asked tough questions. Like, you know, what he will do about the Supreme Court, or about his support fo the 90s crime bill.
January 21st 2021 can’t come fast enough.
@Scott: Sure, but I wanna see his long form taxes.
1,225 covid deaths in America yesterday. 63,000 new infections.
@Teve:
Yeah, that ploy did not work out well. They just ended up informing the rest of us that they had lousy fathers. Which we’d already suspected.
@Teve:
Claudius: “As for being half-witted: well, what can I say, except that I have survived to middle age with half my wits, while thousands have died with all of theirs intact. Evidently, quality of wits is more important than quantity.”
@JohnSF: I just don’t see how any sane leader wants someone like Trump on the inside, regardless of how much they hate the US. If I’m a mafia don and I see an out of control buffoon in a rivals organization, I’m loving it. But if that global needs to make a run for it, why would I want to bring some crazy, out of control freak into my house? Who the hell knows what he’s going to do? Today he’ll be singing your praises and tomorrow he’ll be wiring up for the FBI.
There are only two types of leaders I can see giving shelter to Trump. Both kinds would need iron fisted control in order to force a bad decision on the country. And then they either need to be penny-ante corrupt and stupid, or they need to be crazy. Or both, I guess. Someone who would sell out their country and risk a mess for Trump’s promises of fabulous wealth and is stupid enough to believe it. Or someone like Qaddafi or Saddam Hussein, crazy and impulsive enough that you can’t be surprised by anything they do.
But for the most part these dictators are Machiavellian and ol’ Machiavelli was right about this: if someone from one principality helps you damage their home, and that person comes under your control, you should kill him without hesitation. You know with absolute certainty that he is capable of harm and he is a betrayer.
I see the word flee being bandied about in this open thread and yes, life for Trump post-election (assuming he loses) is very much on his mind if the story titled The Fear Behind Donald Trump’s Obsession with Immunity on Politico is anything to go by.
If Trump was not so worried about being arrested if he is no longer protected by being the President he would embrace life if he loses in Nov and live the good life. Settle in at Mar A Lago, and just Netflix and chill with his wife.
Most Presidents are pretty pragmatic about being a one term President, they accept that they were not voted back into office and make the best of it. Obama pics were all over the place of him living up the good life when he no longer bore the burden of being the President of the U.S.. Granted he was a two term pres, but I bet if McCain had become president that Obama would have been cordial with McCain and just ended up living the good life 4 years earlier than expected.
Trump should be happy to shake off the stress of being President but nope, instead he is in quite the pickle if he is not re-elected. You would think that would cause him to soften his rough edges, but nope…the rough edges worked in 2016 but Keef really is in denial if he thinks it is working again in 2020.
Plenty of polls from Rasmussen and Fox show that the numbers are against Trump so even if you try to cherry pick polls the ones that are usually most favorable to the GOP do Trump no favors.
Again, if Trump had not set himself up to become the target of a thousand folks who want to nail his hide to the wall when he can no longer hide behind being President he would not be dreading the election results.
Folks are not going to go to war to keep Trump in the White House if he loses, even his Base will be happy to just have Biden move in and get on with life. Not enough folks love Trump to the point where they are willing to plunge the nation into another civil war type conflict, i.e., they love Trump but they do not Love Trump.
@Kathy:
At the risk of being (even more) pedantic, I don’t think it’s useful or accurate to say that the ancient Greeks “didn’t know” the color blue, or that they were “not noticing” it. They knew it just as well as we do, and could recognize any particular shade of blue as well as we can. They just didn’t feel the need to have a separate name for the particular fuzzy collection of hues and saturations that we lump together under the term “blue”. Just like nobody felt the need for “ecru” as a color term until the mid-19th century. That doesn’t mean we somehow couldn’t perceive ecru, or recognize it, or have opinions about whether it would be a good color for the drapes. We just didn’t feel the need to give a special label to that particular shade of off-white.
We don’t know. Chances are, by analogy with other physiological processes, we don’t all have identical sensory experiences when exposed to the same stimulus. We certainly know that taste and smell vary across people; why shouldn’t vision? We can spot extreme cases (e.g. color-blindness), but we have no possible access to understanding variation in subjective experiences that are functionally equivalent. To quote a famous thought experiment, if you and I have identical visual experiences, except that when I say “red” I’m referring to the experience that you refer to as “orange”, and vice versa, we would never be able to discover that.
@DrDaveT:
Curse the missing edit function — I should have said “that particular cluster of shades”, to emphasize that it’s a question of which colors get lumped, not of there being individual colors.
@Keef:
Rudy Giuliani
@al Ameda:
“Debbie Boone”
I have to give a shout shout out to Jeffrey Leiber, a very talented Television/Feature writer and showrunner:
https://twitter.com/JeffLieber/status/1318398113057402880
For those who don’t/won’t click through:
Question: How are you feeling about the new COVID-19 measures that have been put in place to make set life safer? Have you had any experiences dealing with this that concerned you?
Answer by Jeff Lieber: I’m in LA. Set is in Vancouver. All sets are currently only as good as the people running them. Our are fantastic and smart and have a “safety first” mentality. Frankly if Line Producers were put in charge of the country, we’d get shit fixed fast.
He ain’t wrong.
linky
–Dr. Oliver Sacks, Hallucinations (2012)
@DrDaveT:
At one job, I had a complete asshole grandboss who was redecorating his home and spent a lot of time in our open office on the phone handling this.
One day, his phone call proceeded to get more and more heated. At the point where people started listening, he was berating someone with “Is it taupe, or beige? If it’s beige, I don’t want it, and when I come over to take a look at it, I’m just going to be pissed and I’m not going to just love it anyway and buy it. What do you mean you don’t know the difference? Are you fucking color-blind? They’re fucking worlds apart, you moron.”
This went on for a while, and culminated with him yelling “Now you think it’s beige? Why did you waste my time if you knew it was beige?”
He slammed the phone down (there were office phones at the time). and then proceeded to complain about how people will just waste your time trying to get you into the showroom, so they can do the hard sell there.
I’m betting the sofa or whatever was taupe, and they just didn’t want to deal with him.
He also painted, terribly. Hung above his desk was a painting of a lump of dog shit. He was a winner.
I keep track of him on LinkedIn so I know to never interview somewhere he works. I have a small list of people like that.
@Teve: Can this possibly be legal?
@Teve:
“Paying protection money is is your choice and we’re not telling you how to spend your paycheck. We are just informing our neighbors what WE will do according to the result of next bank statement. If we end up richer, we will not burn down any stores for TWO YEARS!”
FYI this is the kind of thing that makes people vote liberal. This is a government-needs-to-intervene thing and the GOP would tell you they couldn’t possibly tell a businessperson what to do or that was a true threat since they used weasel words and dodges. I wonder how many Biden voters that little letter just created…..
I see Purdue Pharma has pled guilty to three felony counts. People keep telling me corporations are people. When is the company going to be locked up?
@Kylopod: You remind me of a line about science and religion – that no amount of contemplation or meditation or theological reasoning or prayer was ever going to discover ultraviolet.
My biological grandpa died of COVID today. He’s been on a ventilator since October 4th. The damage to his heart, lungs and kidneys was such that they did not think he was strong enough to survive dialysis once he was off the ventilator. He was a man who had never had any significant health problems in his life, but believed every word Trump said about COVID and masks.
Fuck Trump, and fuck every Republican who’s enabled him the last 4 miserable years, culminating in what will likely be hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths.
@Jax: I’m so sorry.
Republicans are liars when they say they are against court packing…they are perfectly fine with court packing as long as they are the ones doing it…
@Teve: I saw this and thought, “I wonder what he would say, if I offered to vote for Trump if he would cut my lease by 50%”.
@Jax: So sorry to hear that. You have our sympathies.
@Jax:
I am so sorry to hear that.
@Kathy: My oldest son is color blind. Talk about not seeing reds. Once after working on a project out in the woods, we were driving home from camp and I pulled up to a tree where I had tied some bright pink flagging tape to help guide people to our camp. I asked him to get out and grab the tape. He said, “Where is it?” It was 3 feet away from his face, right outside his door.
I pulled down the rest of the flagging.
@gVOR08: Nah, he has so little money he uses a 1040 EZ.
@Jax: I am so very sorry to hear of your family’s loss.
And yes, fvck trump with a rusty farm implement.
@Jax: My sincere condolences. Damn.
@Jax:
I’m very sorry to learn this. My deepest sympathies.
@Michael Reynolds: “He started out four years ago playing the role of financial whiz-bang. ”
And yet, oddly, even I know know nothing about business could tell that everything he said about business was hopelessly wrong. It still astonishes me that anyone ever bought his schtick. Or maybe they were just humoring him, since at that point he wasn’t toxic yet.
@Michael Reynolds: Frankly, I wouldn’t hold my breath on the pardon/resign/flee thing–although I wouldn’t be shocked or disappointed if it happened. Trump is too stupid to see that as an option and to arrogant to realize how deep the hole may be.
Additionally, I doubt that either the Feds or the State of NY will go after him once he’s out of office. You can admit that I’m right or not as you prefer when it doesn’t happen. I’m good with either outcome–it’s the American Way.
@Jax: So very sorry to hear this.
@Jax: I’m so sorry. My condolences to you and your family.
@Just nutha ignint cracker: I could see the State of NY going after the Trump Organization and the family if they think they can prove hundreds of millions of dollars of money laundering.
@MarkedMan:
Yes; I’m only playing around with the idea.
(“John; stop playing with you food!” “Yes, mum.”)
It’s difficult to think of a country that would both shelter him and where he would be safe; unless the US government was saying via back-channel “Please, keep him! We’ll pay costs if you like.”
Maybe Iran? LOL. Iranians can have a wicked sense of humour.
@Michael Reynolds: Because you brought it up, I thought I’d look up “keef” to see what kinds of connections there might be–I didn’t really expect any.
From Wikipedia (Sorry, no hotlink button and that syntax is more complicated than I want to do 🙂 )
Dictionary.com offers
A third option listed keef as the dessicated edges of broadleaf weeds, but that one didn’t come up on my move of the Cortana information to MS EDGE and didn’t show up on a Cortana reload. Aw snap!
Conclusion: He DOES seem to be ill-served by his current screen name.
@JohnSF: No, no, no. That’s part of the whole Joe Biden Crime Family thang. Joe’s Xi Jinping’s pawn/cat’s paw. Didn’t you know?
@Michael Reynolds: Gonna have to disagree with you again. Pat Robertson is easily as stupid and mentally impaired as Trump and he has a successful TV show still.
@Kathy:
Just for you:
Ottoman Lobster Soup
* Cod (or haddock) baked in (lots of) butter & garlic
Put into a kettle with
* Milk
* Shredded Mozzarella
* Smoked paprika
* Spicy option of your choice (I went with sweet curry today).
Simmer until warm and fish is broken up into small bits.
They’re “sage”. It’s on the yellow-green spectrum. On the show, I believe they referred to the color as “gold”.
Edit: the comments do not support H tags. 🙂
@Kathy:
I wish I could stand to listen to the interview, but I can’t Apparently it’s posted on Trump’s Facebook page.
Trump says that Kristin Welker is much worse than Lesley Stahl.
Sometimes it’s good to have a weak stomach.
I have been pushing this on everybody I can lately. I just discovered a youtube channel for a guy named Max Miller called “Tasting History”. He cooks dishes he finds in ancient cookbooks and tries them. This was my first introduction to him and if I can get some garum, I’ll be making it this weekend. It’s for a recipe called “Parthian Chicken” from the Roman Empire.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y&t=2s
My condolences @Jax. I’m so sorry for you and your family.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Interesting thing is, the “Bobulinski confirms” story has actually been out in the wild for at least 6 days.
Then today the NY Post headlines it with a (new?) quote; it then gets reported in several other Murdoch outlets, notably The Sun in the UK and the (non-Murdoch but definitely right of centre) The Daily Mail. Then a bunch of Russian and Chinese news sites light up. Then social media detonates.
Worth a better analysis than I can do.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Maybe phonetic for Kiev? 🙂
More evidence that Trump is literally just trying to re-create the circumstances from the last election cycle.
He’s invited this Tony Boblinksi guy to the debate tonight. He did this last cycle too, invited one of Bill Clinton’s accusers to his debate with Hillary Clinton.
Ok, I’m a bit confused with this whole Hunter Biden thing. I didn’t spend too much time checking it out, but it appears that the supposedly damning emails were sent in May 2017, right? After Biden left office. I see how the optics may not be great, but how is that illegal? I thought the whole thing was about Biden’s alleged influence peddling while he was in office.
@DrDaveT: He’s entitled to his opinion and protected by the First Amendment in his right to disseminate it. And in balance liberty allows his tenants the right to move if they find the rent too high. See? It’s all equal. /s
@Mike in Arlington:
Whoever’s running this thinks they are being very clever.
They are putting out first “evidence” then “corroboration” (both of which are highly dubious but difficult to fully test without access to the physical(-ish) evidence; the original “Hunter Biden” laptop hard drive plus related email server logs and third party copies; and the testimony under oath of the witnesses, with related examination of their communications etc etc.
And this won’t take place because nothing illegal is being alleged; therefore no such investigation is warranted. (If any legal experts here can correct me on this, please help out!)
Perhaps only if Hunter Biden sued re. invasion of privacy?
Would he have grounds to sue if no crime was being alleged? Dunno.
And I’d be willing to bet that a close look at the evidence will eventually collapse this whole pile.
But the operator thinks that is of no matter so long as the collapse is delayed until after the election.
Thing is, so far the story is NOT getting traction (hence reports of Trump bringing Bobulinski to debate?).
@DrDaveT:
Ok. What color do we fail to distinguish as not just some shade of another color?
@wr:
This reminds me of Meghan McArdle, who managed to fall up faster than pretty much anyone I’ve come across. I read her for a while when (I think) she was in The Atlantic’s stable of bloggers (when that was a thing). Almost everything she wrote seemed to be lazy and ill-informed, kinda that typical libertarian, “I noticed something that caught my eye so I googled it and I generally think I’m god’s gift to the universe so now I’m an expert. Lemme explain it all to you so you can be impressed by my brilliance.” But what clinched it form me was that she occasionally blogged about something I actually knew about. And she was wrong. Not just wrong, but cringingly, embarrassingly wrong.
I guess she checks the box of “libertarian” on some publisher’s intellectual diversity list and no one expects a libertarian to put out anything useful, but still.
@JohnSF: Thanks.
It was my understanding that when the hard drive was first introduced, it was an attempt to implicate Joe Biden in some influence peddling scheme with Ukraine while he was in office. But nobody took the bait (except those in the right wing fever swamps), which is why the right wing went crazy (well, crazier) about Twitter blocking sending links to the story and how they’re being “censored”.
I agree with your assessment, in trying to expand the “scandal” to China, they forgot to allege that Joe Biden did anything illegal. I have read that the data has been provided to Senate committees, so we have nothing to worry about, Senator Ron Johnson is on the case. He’ll get to the bottom of it.
@Mu Yixiao:
I guess I haven’t made my extreme* distaste for the meat of all creatures that dwell under water known in this forum yet. That’s amazing, as I usually cannot refrain myself from making rather ridiculous analogies and over-exact comparisons.
But I appreciate the thought.
I also cannot stand either the sight or smell of avocado.
*”Extreme” doesn’t go far enough, but I can’t think of another superlative that fits. I’ve had fights over my refusal to taste nausea-inducing so-called food more than once.
@Kathy:
Octarine. 🙂
@Kathy:
I’m sure I’m late to the party, but who’d believe such a promise?
@MarkedMan:
Debbie Boone – You light up my life. You bring me dope, that I can smoke.
In other news, its sure looking like Kentucky AG Daniel Cameron was, shall we say, less than honest in his representation of what charges the Grand Jury was able to consider in the Breonna Taylor case:
Bobulinski’s statement in full
My name is Tony Bobulinski.
The facts set forth below are true and accurate; they are not any form of domestic or foreign disinformation. Any suggestion to the contrary is false and offensive.
I am the recipient of the email published seven days ago by the New York Post which showed a copy to Hunter Biden and Rob Walker. That email is genuine.
This afternoon I received a request from the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs and the Senate Committee on Finance requesting all documents relating to my business affairs with the Biden family as well as various foreign entities and individuals. I have extensive relevant records and communications and I intend to produce those items to both Committees in the immediate future.
I am the grandson of a 37 year Army Intelligence officer, the son of a 20+ year career Naval Officer and the brother of a 28 year career Naval Flight Officer. I myself served our country for 4 years and left the Navy as LT Bobulinski. I held a high level security clearance and was an instructor and then CTO for Naval Nuclear Power Training Command. I take great pride in the time my family and I served this country. I am also not a political person. What few campaign contributions I have made in my life were to Democrats.
If the media and big tech companies had done their jobs over the past several weeks I would be irrelevant in this story. Given my long standing service and devotion to this great country, I could no longer allow my family’s name to be associated or tied to Russian disinformation or implied lies and false narratives dominating the media right now.
After leaving the military I became an institutional investor investing extensively around the world and on every continent. I have traveled to over 50 countries. I believe, hands down, we live in the greatest country in the world.
What I am outlining is fact. I know it is fact because I lived it. I am the CEO of Sinohawk Holdings which was a partnership between the Chinese operating through CEFC/Chairman Ye and the Biden family. I was brought into the company to be the CEO by James Gilliar and Hunter Biden. The reference to ‘the Big Guy’ in the much publicized May 13, 2017 email is in fact a reference to Joe Biden. The other ‘JB’ referenced in that email is Jim Biden, Joe’s brother.
Hunter Biden called his dad ‘the Big Guy’ or ‘my Chairman,’ and frequently referenced asking him for his sign-off or advice on various potential deals that we were discussing. I’ve seen Vice President Biden saying he never talked to Hunter about his business. I’ve seen firsthand that that’s not true, because it wasn’t just Hunter’s business, they said they were putting the Biden family name and its legacy on the line.
I realized the Chinese were not really focused on a healthy financial ROI. They were looking at this as a political or influence investment. Once I realized that Hunter wanted to use the company as his personal piggy bank by just taking money out of it as soon as it came from the Chinese, I took steps to prevent that from happening.
The Johnson Report connected some dots in a way that shocked me — it made me realize the Bidens had gone behind my back and gotten paid millions of dollars by the Chinese, even though they told me they hadn’t and wouldn’t do that to their partners.
I would ask the Biden family to address the American people and outline the facts so I can go back to being irrelevant — and so I am not put in a position to have to answer those questions for them.
I don’t have a political ax to grind; I just saw behind the Biden curtain and I grew concerned with what I saw. The Biden family aggressively leveraged the Biden family name to make millions of dollars from foreign entities even though some were from communist controlled China.
God Bless America!!!!
@Jax:
Sorry to hear that Jax, treasure his memory.
@JohnSF:
Well, that would explain why Pessimus is not seen as having an odd skin tone by his brown-nosers.
@mattbernius:
Definitely a Republican, so most probably a liar…
I don’t actually recall, but did Biden put this statement in the context of his time as VP? I would be a little surprised if Biden would not have provided advice once his time as VP was done. Also, at that point, what influence would Biden have other than as a lobbyist to Democrats in Congress?
@keef: Switch the Biden name with the Trump name and it’s exactly what’s already happened. Which is why nobody cares. See what happens when you lower the bar and allow a corrupt pig to stink up the office of the Presidency? After all of Trump’s stink, and “right out in the open” corruption, you gas bag Republicans having a hissy fit because the Biden’s did some business in China means ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. We don’t care. We’re laughing at you because your hissy fit is so obviously contrived, your hypocrisy so glaring to everybody but yourselves, it’s hard to take anything you say seriously.
@Kathy:
That’s probably not the right general question. In the case of birds with four types of color receptors, the fourth is in near ultraviolet. Where we perceive the world as combinations of RGB, they see combinations of RGBU. So far as I know, there’s no model of how their brains interpret the four color values. But given a specific set of RGB values, we see the same color as U runs from zero to saturation. They see a whole range of something.
A related effect is color sensitivity, the ability to distinguish between RGB shades that are close together. Generally, humans can see more green shades, then red, and we have lots of trouble differentiating blues. Speculation is that this is an evolutionary survival trait. It’s been years since I did work on human vision. Computer display schema typically allocate a 24-bit color value as 8-bit red, 8-bit green, and 8-bit blue. IIRC, the bits would be more effectively allocated as 8-bit red, 10-bit green, and 6-bit blue.
Thanks for your condolences, everyone. I only recently met my bio Grandpa, from about 2009 onwards, so I don’t have any sweet childhood memories of him like my bio sisters and half brother do. I knew him to be a man of honor who was healthy as a horse with the same dry sense of humor as my adopted Dad, and still ranching in his 80’s. His only downfall….was Trump. He’s killing his own supporters.
@OzarkHillbilly:
A former coworker was color blind (I guess he still is). He had the misfortune of working with us when some in the department went color obsessed. One woman in particular used different colors of highlighter on tons of papers. The poor guy couldn’t make out much.
@Kathy: Well in that case, I share my recipe for seafood enchiladas with you.
@keef: Funny how Ukraine suddenly morphed into China right after Trump’s secret Chinese bank account was revealed. Imagine that.
Do you really think anyone with an IQ higher than their shoe size is going to buy such transparent nonsense? I mean, it’s just beyond obviously fabricated.
@Kathy: Well in that case, I WON’T share my recipe for seafood enchiladas with you.
My kingdom for an edit function! My kingdom for an edit function!!!
@keef: It is long past time for you to climb into the rocks and shed your skin because you definitely aren’t seeing too clearly now.
I hope I am not too presumptuous in saying surely we owe Keef a hearty round of congratulations for posting such an enlightening statement from a public spirited citizen?
Some cynical souls might read it as being very carefully worded, even sly, in insinuating without ever directly accusing, and in precisely what evidence is to be provided, of his, and probably a co-operating senatorial inquisitors, choosing.
So some might think; I couldn’t possibly comment.
(LBJ quote re. the use of hogs in campaigns seems relevant, though.)
Man who “[doesn’t] have a political axe” to grind is the “surprise” guest of the President tonight at tonight’s debate.
Clearly, this has nothing to do with politics at all.
@Kathy: HA! I have heard that complaint from others.
My Uncle Alex* was color blind too but he managed to cheat his way into the Navy frogmen in WWII. Had super sharp predator bird eyesight otherwise, which is how he got wrote up in a ’60s teenage book called (iirc) Frogmen of WWII that a friend of my mother’s recognized him in and forwarded it to her. She sent it on to Alex’s sons and while I have googled it I’ve yet to see it for sale again so I’m not sure I remember the details correctly anymore.
At any rate, I have referred to him as “my hero Uncle” ever since and I’m pretty sure he rolls in his grave every time. 🙂
*of all my uncles, it is safe to say he was my favorite
I just want to say that Keef and his Tony baba boey post made me laugh out loud (for reals). I love how he takes this guy’s words as if he speaks the gospel truth like he Jesus Christ or one of his Apostles. Too funny, I think even Keef realizes it is a bit late in the game to assume that a dude named Tony babaganoush is all it takes to keep Biden out of the White House. OTB has their own official court jester who sticks around to give us all a good laugh for the day, loving it.
Also, Keef….nearly 50 million(!) and counting have already voted and the election is still 13 days out.
Since I can’t edit my post this Tony B guy was at one point a friend of Hunter Biden, but seriously, if the Senate wants to talk to him this Friday be my guest….a bunch of hearsay from a guy who says he does not have an ax to grind (so of course he has an ax to grind) is not going to stop folks from voting for Biden.
The Senate needs to stop embarrassing themselves but it looks like they are going to hold water for Trump all the way to the end…wow.
@OzarkHillbilly:
Thank you.
Current bid on BAT $19,500. 19 hours left in the bidding.
Jeeze…
@Kathy: I live to serve. (and most humbly bows)
and I am sorry you don’t like seafood. My Mallorcan born and raised wife loves them, but her sea faring father always brought home the freshest of seafood. And it really is a very good recipe.
@Mike in Arlington:
My understanding is that Worcestershire Sauce is the (unfermented) direct descendant of garum.
(I once won a trivia contest by knowing which condiment’s ingredient list includes anchovy and tamarind…)
@flat earth luddite:
My word. They are lovable, but hose buggers can barely corner under 70 horsepower.
There’d better be some seriously modified suspension on that thing.
Unless it’s the good old American approach: straight line = zoom; bend = uh, nope.
Inside the Campaign to ‘Pizzagate’ Hunter Biden The same shit-for-brains who believe pizzagate will no doubt believe this Hunter Biden stuff.
hose = those
Oh ye elusive edit button!
@Kathy:
I’m not sure I understand the question.
Let’s distinguish a few meanings of the word “color” to see if that’s the problem.
There’s color_1, the subjective experience you get when you look at something.
There’s color_2, the mix of frequencies of electromagnetic radiation entering an eye. Very different combinations of frequencies can produce identical color_1 experiences — that’s what lets a color TV work despite only being able to emit 3 different frequencies.
There’s color_3, the socially constructed name for a collection of similar color_1s that a particular society uses. You can’t have a different name for every possible combination of perceived hue and saturation; that would be unwieldy. Different societies lump them together in different ways.
Which of those are you asking about?
Note that native Russian speakers feel the same way about us using the same word for light blue and dark blue as we feel about ancient Greeks using the same word for green and yellow…
@OzarkHillbilly:
“Good” and “sea food” don’t make logical sense in the same implication.
One of my high school friends invited me twice to his home for dinner. One time they served paella*, the second time some kind of huge fish cadaver served whole on the table and portioned out. The third time he invited me, I managed not to slap him.
To be fair, I’ll grant some fish don’t make me nauseated. Canned tuna, for example. That’s merely unpleasant. If I were starving (and I mean literally dying of hunger) and there was nothing else available, I could eat it. But I wouldn’t like it.
* I especially hate paella. People who know of my aversion keep telling me to just pick off the bits I don’t like. Now, this is indelicate, but I did say it once: “If you were served a dish with pieces of horses**t and cockroaches, would you be ok picking out those bits and eating the rest?”
@Michael Cain:
Actually, it’s worse than that. The three types of color receptors in the standard human eye have overlapping excitation profiles; the same pure frequency of incident light will excite all three of them to different degrees. The perceived color is based on the sum of the three excitations. That’s how you can fool an eye into thinking that it’s seeing purple or yellow by hitting it with a combination of pure red, green, and blue frequencies at different intensities.
So we don’t actually see things as combinations of R, G, and B. We see things that our brain mistakes for a pure single frequency, based on three partially-correlated sensors that can’t distinguish any pure frequencies.
@Kathy:
@DrDaveT:
Did you two eat some peyote and not bring enough for the rest of the class?
@DrDaveT: supposedly Worcestershire sauce was a British attempt at re-creating an Indian fish sauce.
Colatura di alici may be a more direct descendant. Frankly my pantry contains Vietnamese fish sauce, Worcestershire sauce, and soy sauce. Fermented salty glutamate nom nom nom 😀
@Kathy:
Interesting. My wife has exactly the same problem, including the exception for canned tuna (in water, not oil). We recently discovered that a cousin of hers is the same. All seafood tastes like the smell of a working harbor at low tide to them.
I suspect that it’s genetic, like the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap to some people.
@Kathy: My Mother in law’s paella… Pure heaven.
Different folks.
@Teve:
Similar: two varieties soy, “proper” Worcester sauce, far Thai fish sauce, shrimp paste, oyster sauce, fermented black bean paste, plus yellow bean if that counts.
umami, baby
Also jar of cranberry sauce which has probably fermented by now, thinking about it. Oops.
LOL. FoxNews is showing Hunter Biden text messages from June 2017 where Hunter basically says ‘work with Tony Bobulinski? Are you crazy? He’s a POS.’
Exact words here: https://twitter.com/commiegirl1/status/1319419736069844992?s=21
@JohnSF: I keep meaning to get more oyster sauce but I keep forgetting. I also need some eel sauce but I think I’m going to have to order that.
@DrDaveT: We had a demonstration of that in one of our physics classes: picture projected in black and white. Same picture projected in red and white. Both filters projected together? Instant colour.
@Teve:
Eel sauce!
If nobody markets it as “Real Deal Eel Sauce” my faith in humanity will be destroyed. 🙂
@DrDaveT:
But why do you call it a problem?
For one thing, it cuts down major risks of food poisoning, and actual “you’re going to die in minutes” poising in the case of fugu.
Right. So it’s an evolutionary advantage 😉
@DrDaveT:
Yes, and many other things as well. Huge amounts of signal processing going on up there in our heads determine what we actually “see”. High-level historical example: American viewers used to 60 Hz refresh rates on American analog TV who went to Europe “learned” to not see the flicker on 50 Hz displays. From my own research work back in the day: the frame rate at which audio/video sync can be determined is 13-15 frames per second. Below that people simply can’t tell.
@Kathy:
Ah, but on the other hand, no one was ever trampled to death by a herring.
So the Wall Street Journal has published more details of the email. For some strange reason they published it in their Editorial Section (for those not in the know, that means they don’t have to go through the newsrooms fact-checking division–I wonder why they opted for that.
Here is noted liberal Conor Friedersdorf’s take:
This also suggests that one Mr Bobulinski might have an axe to grind with Joe Biden about nixing the deal he was *also* hoping to profit on.
Bobolinsky is the Joe the Plumber of 2020.
@DrDaveT:
you know, I’ve been doing price lists all day, and my brain is suitably mushed. But I thought we were talking linguistics, not optics.
So let’s say the Greeks and some other ancients did not distinguish blue as a color, but rather as a shade of some other color, or so I thought. Therefore we may have some color that in the future will be given a proper name and pride of place, while we call it some shade of something else.
That’s what I meant.
And all this for a snarky response in the form a phrase I find meaningless but happen to like the sound of: wine-dark sea.
@Kathy:
Ummmm…. try it with chicken? Or cauliflower?
Honestly, it’s the milk, cheese, and paprika that make it.
@JohnSF:
True, and no one ever was eaten by a cow.
In any case, I consume the flesh of dead animals, but I don’t participate directly in the slaughter.
@Teve: That’s the fish sauce the guy recommends, but “Asian” (I’m not sure what the proper name is for it) fish sauce is apparently very similar, maybe similar enough to substitute.
@Teve: Wow. He obviously wanted nothing to do with Bobulinski.
I guess that could mean Bobulinski was actually being honest about not having a political axe to grind…but only because he had a personal axe to grind.
@Teve: Oh, forgot, the other uncommon (at least in the US) ingredient is asafoetida, which the girlfriend has just acquired.
And seriously, that video is worth the watch. He goes into the Parthian empire and Roman history is just fantastic (for those of us who like that sort of thing).
@JohnSF: … yet. No one has been stampeded by a herring .. yet.
@Mike in Arlington: asafoetida is an ingredient for what? Garum? Fish sauce?
@Teve:
Don’t you mean “fermented salty glutamate nuoc nuoc mam”?
@Teve: for Parthian Chicken. There’s a youtube channel called “tasting history”. The guy makes recipes from cookbooks from history. He made a recipe from a cook book from ancient Rome, and here’s the video for it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LynenQ5h2Y&t=2s
A warning, his humor is the moral equivalent to “dad jokes”. But the recipe uses Garum (or fish sauce) and Asafoetida, and his reaction is interesting enough to make me want to make it.
Lol seen on the internet:
“all your October surprise are belong to us.”
@Mike in Arlington: I just saved that to my YouTube bookmarks. Thanks.
@Mu Yixiao:
First I want to apologize for my earlier response. Reading it now it seems more than a little hostile.
That said:
I don’t know if this makes sense to you, but thinking of milk plus cheese and paprika tastes wrong.
Come to think of it, I don’t think I’ve veer cooked any meat in milk, either, or added milk to any sort of meat dish (I mix in glaze with ground beef and breadcrumbs when making meatloaf, not milk). Other dairy, sure. Cream and cheese, for sure, but not milk.
@Kathy:
Aha! Yes, I understand what question you are asking now. Thanks for taking the time.
So, yes, there might come a time when a language community we belong to (English for me, Spanish or English or ??? for you) starts to not only apply different words to (say) greens more toward the yellow end versus greens toward the blue end of the range, but to no longer see both spring green and kelly green as shades of the same underlying color. Like Russians with blue. Or we might decide that teal is an important enough color that it deserves a space on the rainbow all its own, between green and blue, and that teal is not merely a shade of either blue or green.
The set of colors is defined as much by cultural conventions about which hues are NOT just shades of the same basic color as they are by opinions about which ones are.
I’m not watching the debate but I’m following journalists on Twitter. Apparently Biden is doing pretty well
@Kathy:
I have no idea why burgandy and violet are both called “purple”. One is a purplish red, the other is blueish purple.
I’m also baffled as to why we have pink rather than light red.
But nothing baffles me as much as why there is no dark yellow. Playing with the color picker, it’s just this hideous greenish brown…
@Teve: I am watching the debate, I thought they said there’d be a mute button. If they do, it ain’t working.
@gVOR08: there’s supposed to be 6 15-minute segments. At the beginning of each 15 minute segment each candidate gets to talk for two minutes while the other candidate’s microphone is muted. Then the muting is off for the last 11 minutes of that topic.
@DrDaveT:
Something like that. I like to ponder the shortcomings of our era. Sometimes I wonder if our quest for dark matter will end up alongside the luminiferous aether.
In an exchange on energy policy, President Trump says
Oh God, just shoot me. Please. I’ll confess. To anything. Just stop, please.
Coming soon: the tears of unfathomable sadness. 😀
@flat earth luddite: Trump thinks wind is extremely expensive???
Scientific American: Wind energy is one of the cheapest sources of electricity and it’s getting cheaper
I will give Trump credit for better makeup tonight. He just looked like a bad fake tan, which is an improvement over reflective bronze.
I read that Biden caught all the debate-watchers and pundits looking to disect the debate performance of each candidate off-guard when he brought up Giuliani and the Hunter Biden issue before Trump. It was apparently a very savvy move by Biden.
Also, as noted in this thread it is now out there on the net that Keef’s lord and savior Tony B does indeed have an ax to grind and was not trusted by Biden so anything Tony B says will be looked at as the words of a person who is bitter that he did not get to worm himself even further to Hunter’s business dealings than he already had.
Try again Keef, Tony B. is not the smoking gun you were looking for. It was pretty quickly revealed that he was straight up lying when he tried to play up that he tried to be the White Knight that was hoping to set Hunter Biden on a more virtuous path.
It feels like today was a horrible day for Trump, Biden was well prepared to deal with Hunter being used as a weapon against him and I bet the GOP slowly tries to walk away from the Laptop story now that their last ditch effort to keep the story alive by trotting out Tony B as the guy who would provide proof that Hunter and by extension his father are corrupt was a big fail.
Giuliani should quit while he is behind, dropping more supposedly juicy nuggets regarding Hunter Biden is just adding to a narrative that now pretty much no one believes so if the GOP is smart they will put a muzzle on him as he is doing Senator’s trying to get re-elected no favors.
I am still waiting for that October Surprise, the GOP better hurry…only 9 more days left so I hope the laptop story was not the surprise because that did not quite play out like they thought it would (perhaps the understatement of the year, Trump clearly thought this would play out like Comey dropping a bomb on Hillary less than 3 weeks before the election in 2016…ooopsie, that did not happen this time around).
I already voted for Biden. As soon as Trump started talking I had to change the channel to Law and Order reruns.
Last appearance of Steven Hill as Adam Schiff.
@Jax: Condolences on your loss.
My grandmother called me recently. She and my grandfather are very up in age and I haven’t been able to see them since Covid started–I usually make at least one visit a year. The sound of her voice made me burn with a hate for Trump that I didn’t realize I was capable of.
Peace and respect to your Grandfather
@JohnSF:
Apparently he spent lots of his shop time on a personal labor of love for his surfari baby. Still, way too rich & scary for this ole dude who’s from that era.
@JohnSF:
I think my favourite part is where he refers to dealing with businesses in “communist China” like that’s super sketchy . After first saying he was CEIO of a company involved in a partnership with [checks notes] a Chinese company.
@mattbernius:
So now it seems like the news desk at the WSJ got their hands on the evidence and reported “gee this is kind of a nothing”.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/hunter-bidens-ex-business-partner-alleges-father-knew-about-venture-11603421247
@Mikey: So, China owning the Biden’s doesn’t matter to you? Got it.