#Who exactly is George P. Bush again?

[zhanqe]

#Who exactly is George P. Bush again?

[helnjk]

In a Crowd of Thousands - Part 1 // F.W.

Fred Weasley x fem!reader

Word Count: 3.3k

Summary: You never really forget your childhood love. For Princess Y/N of Diagon, hers came in the form of a boy whose dream it was to start a business and support his family. As it goes, life–and her duty to her kingdom–had gotten in the way. She longed to see him again, to see the success she was sure he had achieved. Luckily, fate was on her side.

Warnings: food mention

A/N: yay she’s finally here ! i hope you enjoy part 1, i’d love to hear what you think ! xx 

Prologue

At seven years old, Princess Y/N of Diagon loved how limitless the castle seemed to be. In fact, most of what she knew about the world she lived in came from the different parts of the castle. 

Flowing dresses and shining jewels belonged in the ballrooms, where many adults often mingled to the soft music of a four piece orchestra. Table manners were strictly followed in the grand dining hall, where the difference of a utensil came in the form of its placement beside the plate. Lessons on etiquette and too many sweets from Minnie were taken in the library, where afternoons were spent basking in the sunlight that filtered through the high windows and highlighted the dust that floated around the room. 

But what Y/N loved most about the place she lived and grew up in was that it was limitless in its hiding places. 

Today, she had taken a trip to the lower floors of the castle and was immediately taken by the hustle and bustle going on around her. What garnered her interest the most, though, was the tantalizing smell wafting through the hallways. Stumbling through the many bodies that littered the busy space, Y/N made her way towards where she assumed the smell was coming from. 

She could feel the curious–and somewhat concerned–gaze of the servants she passed, but there were more important things keeping her attention. 

“Bill, love, I’m going to need you to go out and chop some wood for the fires, the stock is cutting a little bit low today. Charlie, you need to go gather some more eggs from the chickens today,” a strong voice called out from one of the rooms. 

Y/N’s head peeked through the doorframe to see the organized chaos that she assumed was the kitchens. At the center of it all was a woman with fiercely red hair all tied up on top of her head and an apron wrapped around her waist, giving out orders left and right. 

The princess nearly jumped out of her skin when she realized that the woman had stopped talking and was looking in her direction with a raised eyebrow. 

“Hello there, darling,” she smiled softly, “You’ve wandered a little far from your afternoon lessons, haven’t you?” 

Y/N felt the tips of her ears heat up at being caught, but nonetheless she stepped into the kitchen and said, “I’m sorry. It just smells so good in here, I couldn’t help it.” 

The lady beamed with pride at the compliment and beckoned the princess over, “Come, you can help me cook this afternoon. I have reason to believe that I’m making the princess’ favorite meal today.” 

Throughout her stay at the kitchens, Princess Y/N learned quite a few things. One, Molly Weasley was quite possibly the best cook in the whole kingdom. Two, she knew that the red hair and pale skin seemed so familiar, and now she could finally put a face to the name whenever Fred would mention his mother. And three, the kitchens would always be a sanctuary for the young princess if she so desired to skip her lessons with Minerva. 

Speaking of Y/N’s lovely governess, she appeared at the lower floors of the castle just as the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon. 

“Y/N!” Minerva chastised as she crossed the threshold into the kitchens. 

Her young ward froze up at the sound of her voice and she slowly turned around to face the older woman, “Oh, hello Minnie!” 

Molly looked on at the interaction with amusement shining in her eyes, but did not interfere. Instead, she continued on with plating the dishes she and Y/N had made, humming a soft tune under her breath. 

“Dear child, you have no idea what has been going on in your absence,” Minnie sighed, pulling the young princess into her arms and Y/N thought she heard a tinge of relief in her voice, “The Queen almost sent out a search party for you!” 

“Well that would’ve been awfully silly of them to do,” Y/N mused, “Why would I ever leave the castle if it’s full of nice people and good food?” 

“Yes, well, that’s exactly what I told her.” 

An amused sound escaped Molly’s otherwise unbothered facade and both the princess and her governess turned to look at her. 

“I can see now why my dear Freddie’s taken quite a liking to you, princess,” the cook explained, a small smile gracing her gentle face. 

“Yes, she is quite a character, isn’t she?” Minnie rolled her eyes playfully. 

–

At nine years old, Princess Y/N thought she had a good grasp on the inner workings of her home. 

With the help of her best friend and favorite redhead, she discovered secrets and passages in the royal grounds that she never dreamt of finding. Because of her unlikely friendship with him, she knew her way around most of the places she wasn’t really supposed to be making her rounds in.

The morning she was up before her chambermaid arrived, she had the crack in the curtains to thank. Rubbing the sleep out of her eyes, Y/N went to shut the drapes closed just so that she could get some more sleep in, but the sight of outside her window gave her pause. The misty fog that shrouded the grounds and the slowly rising sun peeking through the clouds created such a beautiful sight that the young princess couldn’t help but want to be a part of the beauty. 

Making a snap decision, Y/N threw on one of her coats over her nightgown and donned a pair of her sturdier boots before slipping out of her room. 

If the palace grounds looked stunning from her bedroom window two floors up, it was even more magical up close. As she trudged through the perfectly trimmed grass and moved between the manicured flower bushes, she admired how the fog seemed to glide with her. 

Eventually, she found herself unconsciously walking towards the stables. Ever since her friendship with Fred Weasley began there, it had held a special place in her heart. That morning was no different. 

“Hello gorgeous,” she whispered to one of the chestnut haired mares, stroking her nose gently. The creature gave a soft huff as if in reply and the young girl grinned widely. 

Some shuffling towards the end of the stables caught her attention and she made her way down the stalls. A smile immediately made its way onto Y/N’s face when she spotted the familiar head of red hair. Fred’s back faced her as he worked on stacking the piles of hay. 

“Freddie!” she exclaimed, her feet rushing up to meet him, “I can’t believe you’re up this early! Well, I can’t believe I’m up this early but–”

At the sound of her voice, Fred had spun around quickly to face her. His expression was that of someone who had just been caught misbehaving and it confused the princess. Fred’s eyes looked her up and down and he visibly gulped. 

“P-princess!” he stammered. He bent down into a low bow–something Y/N had never seen him do before–and said, “To what do I owe the honor of speaking with you this morning?”

“The honor?” Y/N laughed, “Freddie are you alright? You’re acting weird. You’ve never bowed to me before, you don’t need to! It’s just me.” 

“Mother always said to bow in the presence of royalty,” he shrugged. 

Before Y/N could reply, Fred simply went back to methodically stacking the bales of hay. She could see the tension in his shoulders as he did so, though, and she was left absolutely puzzled. She tried to think of anything she had done recently for him to be this frigid around her, but her mind came up blank. 

“Fred?” she asked tentatively, stepping toward him slowly, “Are you alright? Did I do something?” 

“Everything is alright, princess.” He sent a tentative smile over his shoulder. 

With a huff, Y/N turned on her heel and made the decision to just spend some more time with the horses. At least they had the courtesy of acting like they enjoyed her company. Granted, she gave them carrots to snack on and they naturally drifted towards food, but that wasn’t the point. 

By the time the sun was fully up in the sky and leaking through the small cracks in the walls, Y/N knew it was time to trudge back up into the castle. They were surely looking for her by now. Sighing, she clutched her coat tighter around herself and made one last glance at the redheaded boy who was supposed to be her best friend. 

“I’m going now, Freddie,” she called out, hoping to get some sort of reaction from him, “Minnie’ll be looking for me soon and I can’t miss this morning’s lessons.” 

“Leaving so soon? When I just got here?” 

The shriek that left the princess’ mouth when she saw Fred standing right behind her, by the entrance and simultaneously near the stacks of hay, made him jump. Her head whipped back and forth between the identical redheads at either ends of the stables. 

“What in the world is going on?” she demanded. 

“Well, it looks like you just met my twin,” Fred shrugged nonchalantly, “His name’s George and I don’t think he’s quite used to being in the presence of a royal.” 

“And it never crossed your mind to tell me that you had an identical twin?” Y/N asked, exasperated, “Here I thought you woke up on the wrong side of the bed today.” 

The cheeky grin Fred sent her nearly made her roll her eyes, but he draped an arm around her shoulders, squeezed lightly and said, “Maybe I just wanted to be your favorite redhead in the whole kingdom. Didn’t know if I could take sharing you with my less-handsome twin.” 

With a playful shove, Y/N replied, “Well too bad for you because Molly is definitely my favorite redhead in the whole kingdom.” 

That reply got a reaction from George, who snorted while trying to keep the piles from falling down on him and the princess grinned. She knew he was of a good sort and she would crack his shell eventually. 

–

At 11 years old, Princess Y/N had never been so nervous in her life. 

She felt as if her feet were physically glued to her place in the middle of the grand hallway as she stared at the doors that led to the library. 

There wasn’t anything particularly terrifying about the library. No, the library was a place for her lessons with Minnie and for spending afternoons getting lost in a good book. However, what the princess was about to do was definitely something that sparked a little fear and trepidation in her. 

Still, she was going to be late for her morning lessons if she wasted anymore time dawdling in the hallway. With a deep breath, she pushed open the heavy oak doors and stepped inside. 

Minnie was already seated at one of the center tables, a few pieces of paper spread out in front of her. Her eyes met with Y/N’s and she gave a nod of acknowledgement. 

“Good morning, Princess,” she said. 

“Morning Minnie.” 

Lessons went about as usual, if not slightly tense from the younger girl’s perspective. By the time they had finished for the morning, Y/N was practically shaking in her seat. 

“Are you going to tell me what’s been keeping you preoccupied this morning?” Minerva quirked an eyebrow at her. 

“I didn’t think you’d notice,” the princess admitted. 

“Now dear, I’ve known you since you were in diapers. I think I can tell when something’s on your mind.” 

Y/N thought of the way she and Fred had planned everything out meticulously, how decided on exactly what to say to Minnie so that she would say yes. Still, her mind ended up blanking and she silently cursed herself. 

“Oh, out with it, Y/N.” 

“Please could I go horseback riding with Fred this afternoon,” she said in one breath. Before Minerva could open her mouth to reply, the princess continued, “I’ve been really good with my lessons this week and Fred’s already checked that no one’s riding the horses this afternoon and he said he was going to teach me how to ride without being on side-saddle!” 

“Okay dear, take a breath,” her governess chuckled, “As long as you finish your coursework before the sun sets, I’m sure you could go riding with Mr. Weasley.” 

At her statement, Minerva was rewarded with a beaming smile and a multitude of ‘thank yous’. 

By the time the afternoon rolled around, Y/N was a bundle of excited nerves. Being a princess, she had been taught how to ride horses on side saddle, as it was the proper thing to do, but that meant she couldn’t go any faster than a trot. The idea of being able to go racing, feeling the cool breeze on her face and her hair whipping around her, it brought about a giddiness she couldn’t explain. 

Fred was already at the stables by the time she arrived, panting and resting her hands on her knees as she caught her breath. 

“Well don’t you look excited,” he teased as he fiddled with the saddle of one of the smaller horses. 

“Came here as fast as I could, the moment Minnie said I was free to go,” she said breathily. 

He replied with a grin and patted the horse after he was finished saddling up, “Well you’re in luck because Poseidon here is all geared up for you. Whenever you’re ready, Princess.” 

It took a few tries, but when Y/N was successfully on the horse, she beamed. 

Fred stepped back for a moment and she could see his arms were far from relaxed, almost as if he was anticipating an accident. He raised an eyebrow, “Are you alright there or do you need me to stay nearby in case you fall?”

“I can take care of myself, thank you very much,” she rolled her eyes, “Just get on your own horse.” 

The redhead sent her a mock salute and skillfully mounted his own horse– a chestnut brown stallion that stood tall and proud. The pair of them began a slow trot around the paddock just so that the princess could get used to things before Fred sent her a wink then nudged his horse to pick up the speed.

Fred often sent her words of encouragement and advice, making sure that she was comfortable with the speed that they were going and that her horse was alright. It warmed her heart to see him so careful and protective. It didn’t take long for her to get the hang of things and convince him that she was fine. 

Soon, Y/N was letting out laughs of delight, adrenaline pumping through her veins as Poseidon galloped gracefully through the vast expanse of the estate. Fred let out whoops out joy every once in a while beside her and she felt as if she was on top of the world. 

Time passed by in the blink of an eye and soon the sun was beginning to dip below the horizon. The orange hue that it left in its wake was stunning and it highlighted the gorgeous curves and dips of the landscape.

They spent a moment appreciating the view, horses side by side. It was the cherry on top of a perfect day, Y/N thought. 

–

At 13 years old, Princess Y/N of Diagon truly felt like her world was crashing down around her. 

Her hands shook as she sat on the front steps of the palace, elbows pressed against her knees. Eyes locked ahead, she tried to take steadying breaths but all she could focus on was the small dot on the horizon that became increasingly larger as it approached. 

A pair of carriages were coming to pick up the Weasleys. Arthur had been offered a baronship–a feat that would provide the family enough funds to live comfortably for the rest of their lives–and today was the day they chose to make the move. The entire family stood at the bottom of the stairs, a line of fiery red hair and excited energy, complete all except for one. 

Fred Weasley sat beside his princess, silent and contemplative. 

They both knew this moment was coming, and Fred had tried his best to spend the remaining time he had with her. They had spent hours upon hours doing things that they loved to do together. 

Afternoons were spent out riding, feeling the sun warm their skin and the breeze cool them again. Late nights were for nicking food from the kitchens and right under Molly’s nose. Minnie had even lessened the amount of time she and the princess had with their lessons, knowing fully well that Y/N needed it. 

Still, knowing something was going to happen and actually experiencing it are two separate things. The knowledge that Fred was going to leave her all alone didn’t quell the tightness in Y/N’s chest when the day finally came. 

The moment the carriages passed through the gates to the castle, her lip trembled and her breaths shortened. 

“Y/N,” Fred mumbled, turning his entire body to face her. 

A choked sob escaped the princess and she shook her head. 

Before she could reply, the young girl felt the familiar arms of her best friend wrap around her. His scent enveloped her and suddenly her tears were freely falling. 

They stayed in that position for a long moment; the princess sniffling and attempting to gather herself while Fred held her. Strong and steady. 

“You know how much this means to my family and me,” he whispered, his hands rubbing up and down her back, “I’ll be able to go to school, to finally do what I’ve always dreamed of doing.” 

“You’re not allowed to forget about me, alright?” she choked out as her palms went to swipe at the wetness on her cheeks, “When you’re a successful businessman and you’ve travelled the world, you have to remember little old me.” 

With a slightly skeptical shake of the head, Fred cracked a small smile and said, “How could I ever forget my favorite princess?” 

“Just making sure,” she whispered. 

“Now, you have to promise me that you’re going to make your dreams come true too,” he said, looking into her eyes. 

“I promise.” 

Y/N took a deep breath, eyes closed. She savored the last few moments she had with her best friend, and she squeezed him tightly before moving out of his grasp. 

“I love you loads, Freddie,” she said. 

“You know I love you too, Princess,” he grinned back at her. 

It wasn’t long before Molly was calling for Fred. 

With one last squeeze of the hand, Fred stood. “We’ll find each other again, Y/N. I’ll make sure of it.” 

All the Weasleys turned to face their Princess, some sending radiant smiles and others waving enthusiastically at her. She couldn’t help but smile and wave back, her eyes drifting towards her favorite redhead as he descended the steps. 

As the family began to sort themselves into the carriages, Fred looked back at his best friend one last time and sent her his signature charming smile. She gave him a small wave and then he was out of her sight. 

Y/N’s eyes stayed locked on the pair of carriages until they disappeared past the horizon. She remained seated on the steps of the palace until the sun had set and someone had come to tell her that supper was ready. 

That night, Y/N fell asleep with the feeling of dried tears on her skin and Minnie’s hands brushing through her hair. 

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[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 11, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On the twentieth anniversary of the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, the weather was eerily similar to the bright, clear blue sky of what has come to be known as 9/11. George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who, on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.

Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”

Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know.”

“On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”

Today’s commemorations of that tragic day almost a generation ago seemed to celebrate exactly what Bush did: the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.

That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

It is this America we commemorate today.

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy today’s events commemorated. Those people, concentrated in the Republican Party, worried that permitting all Americans to have a say in their government would lead to “socialism”: minorities and women would demand government programs paid for with tax dollars collected from hardworking people—usually, white men. They wanted to slash taxes and government regulations, giving individuals the “freedom” to do as they wished.

In 1986, they had begun to talk about purifying the vote; when the Democrats in 1993 passed the so-called Motor Voter law permitting people to register to vote at certain government offices, they claimed that Democrats were buying votes. The next year, Republicans began to claim that Democrats won elections through fraud, and in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a voter ID law that led to a purge of as many as 100,000 voters from the system before the election of 2000, resulting in what the United States Commission on Civil Rights called “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” particularly of African American voters.

It was that election that put George W. Bush in the White House, despite his losing the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than a half a million votes.

Bush had run on the promise he would be “a uniter, not a divider,” but as soon as he took office, he advanced the worldview of those who distrusted democracy. He slashed government programs and in June pushed a $1.3 trillion cut through Congress. These measures increased the deficit without spurring the economy, and voters were beginning to sour on a presidency that had been precarious since its controversial beginnings.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hours before the planes hit the Twin Towers, a New York Times editorial announced: “There is a whiff of panic in the air.”

And then the planes hit.

“In our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment,” Bush said. America had seemed to drift since the Cold War had ended twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced.

Immediately, the administration focused on strengthening business. It shored up the airline industry and, at the advice of oil industry executives, deregulated the oil industry and increased drilling. By the end of the year, Congress had appropriated more than $350 billion for the military and homeland security, but that money would not go to established state and local organizations; it would go to new federal programs run by administration loyalists. Bush’s proposed $2.13 trillion 2003 budget increased military spending by $48 billion while slashing highway funding, environmental initiatives, job training, and other domestic spending. It would throw the budget $401 billion in the red. Republicans attacked any opposition as an attack on “the homeland.”

The military response to the attacks also turned ideological quickly. As soon as he heard about the attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides to see if there was enough evidence to “hit” Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as well as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In fact, Saddam had not been involved in the attack on America: the al-Qaeda terrorists of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.

Rumsfeld was trying to fit the events of 911 into the worldview of the so-called neocons who had come together in 1997 to complain that President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy was “incoherent” and to demand that the U.S. take international preeminence in the wake of the Cold War. They demanded significantly increased defense spending and American-backed “regime change” in countries that did not have “political and economic freedom.” They wanted to see a world order “friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

After 9/11, Bush launched rocket attacks on the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda, successfully overthrowing it before the end of the year. But then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America's image. In 2002, it announced that the U.S. would no longer simply try to contain our enemies as President Harry S. Truman had planned, or to fund their opponents as President Ronald Reagan had done, but to strike nations suspected of planning attacks on the U.S. preemptively: the so-called Bush Doctrine. In 2003, after setting up a pro-American government in Afghanistan, the administration invaded Iraq.

By 2004, the administration was so deeply entrenched in its own ideology that a senior adviser to Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The 9/11 attacks enabled Republicans to tar those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American: either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Surely, such people should not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions. In 2010, the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013, it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021, it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional.

And now we grapple with the logical extension of that argument as a former Republican president claims he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.

Today, former president Bush called out the similarities between today’s domestic terrorists who attacked our Capitol to overthrow our government on January 6 and the terrorists of 9/11. “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, “he said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such an ideology means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they all took a vote.

---

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/11/politics/transcript-george-w-bush-speech-09-11-2021/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20050205041635/http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=project_for_the_new_american_century

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#9/11 #September 11th #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #GWOT #G.W. Bush #forever wars #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP

[theculturedmarxist]

It’s been a full month since Election Day, and Donald Trump still refuses to concede to Joe Biden. Instead, he continues to insist that he won, making baseless accusations of widespread election fraud and enlisting the aid of a comical crew of sycophants to press legal challenges to the vote totals in swing states—all of which have been laughed out of court. Trump’s ongoing efforts to overturn millions of votes have prompted a public debate over whether to describe his actions as a “coup” or something similar. This is just the most recent phase of a wider debate dating back to the beginning of Trump’s presidency over whether Trump represents a “fascist” or “authoritarian” rupture with the Republican Party pre-2016.

One of the leading critics of that interpretation has been Corey Robin, a professor of political science at the CUNY Graduate Center and the author of an influential and controversial 2011 book on the history of conservative thought, The Reactionary Mind. This week, I spoke to Robin about the Trump presidency as it enters its final months. In contrast to the popular conception of Trump as an incipient fascist dictator and a break with American liberal institutions and norms, for Robin, Trump threatens liberalism only to the extent that movement conservatism in general has over many decades, and is otherwise a weak leader whose power is largely constrained by broader political conditions. Whether or not one fully agrees with every point, Robin offers a provocative alternative to some of the more unhinged reactions to the Trump era from the self-proclaimed Resistance.

This interview has been lightly edited. It originally appeared in yesterday’s email newsletter, to which you can subscribe here.

David Klion: It’s pretty clear at this point that we are not going through an actual coup and that Biden is going to be inaugurated as president on January 20th, whether Trump wants to admit it or not. At the same time, nothing quite like what’s happening now has ever happened before in the United States. How would you describe what Trump and his dead-enders are doing, and how concerned should we be in terms of the stability of US political institutions?

Corey Robin: You can’t understand what’s happening now without a historical perspective on conservatism and the right. The right was born in response to the French Revolution, as a reaction against the democratic emancipation of the commoner. Across more than two centuries and many continents, the right has never lost that reactionary ethos.

But what the right learned, slowly, over time, was that to mobilize against a democratic and democratizing left, it could not simply assert a traditional, static, and familiar defense of hierarchy; instead, it had to mobilize a dynamic movement of the masses, a populist politics of the right to counter the masses of the left. That populism was never democratic, but it knew how to draw from the tropes of democracy to push back against democracy. It learned how to use the languages of racism, nationalism, imperialism, and sexism to give a broad circle of the masses a taste of privilege over their subordinates. The fruition of that long learning process—of using populist vernaculars against democracy—was the American right that emerged in response to the 1960s and the New Deal.

For all the talk of Trump’s populism and racism and nationalism, the fact is that he was far less successful at using those vernaculars to mobilize the masses than his predecessors on the right—Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush. Nixon and Reagan were re-elected with large popular majorities. Trump, like Bush, lost the popular majority the first time around, and unlike Bush, lost it a second time around.

What Trump and the Republican Party have grown increasingly dependent upon are not populism or mass politics of any sort, but rather the Electoral College, the Senate, and the courts. Historically speaking, this is a great—and terrible—reversion for the right, a return to the time when it depended not on its popular touch but on its control over anti-democratic state institutions. It makes today’s right a lot weaker than the right of the Reagan era, and makes it seem much more like the Tories of early 19th-century Britain.

This is why you now see Trump doing what he’s trying to do with the vote. The Republicans can’t win presidential campaigns the way they once did: Since 1992, they have won the popular vote exactly once. Their only hope now is a combination of the Electoral College and the courts.

Far from being concerned about US institutions being insufficiently stable or resilient enough to contain Trump or a similar figure, I’m far more concerned about the stifling stability and resilience of institutions like the Electoral College, the courts, and the Senate, and their ability to prop up Trump and the GOP.

DK: You’ve maintained from the beginning that Trump is actually a historically weak president, in spite of his authoritarian bluster. Can you elaborate on why you thought so back in 2017, how those predictions have been borne out since, and what makes Trump weaker than other recent presidents?

CR: I thought Trump was weak for two reasons, neither having anything to do with his skill or character, but with larger political forces and structures.

The first is that conservatism is an inherently reactionary politics that depends on the real threat of an active, emancipatory left: not the specter of a threat, not the discourse on Twitter, but an actual social movement that has taken state power and is engaged in a project of dispossession of elites. When the left is defeated or disappears, the right’s power ebbs. That is what has happened in the US. The left is, historically speaking, relatively weak, so it’s difficult for the right to get the juice it needs.

Trump’s presidency reflected that: Compared to the Republican presidencies of Nixon, Reagan, and George W. Bush, Trump’s was significantly less transformational, and its legacy is far less assured. Next to “law and order” and “the silent majority” (which Nixon made part of our political grammar), next to “the era of big government is over” (which Reagan bequeathed to Clinton as the ruling doctrine of the age), next to Bush’s war on terror and the Department of Homeland Security and the Patriot Act, none of Trump’s attempts to permanently transform the political climate—not of the Republican Party but of the whole political culture—seems even remotely comparable. With the exception of the tax cuts, Trump was hardly able to get much legislation through Congress; many of his executive orders will be undone by Biden; the only custodian of his legacy, ironically, will be the courts, which many had seen as the antidote to Trumpism and caretaker of the rule of law.

The second reason I thought Trump would be weak is that all presidents are elected to oppose or defend a larger political regime. A regime, in US political history, is the combination of ideology, interests, and policies that govern over an extended period of time. In American history, we had the Jeffersonian Democratic-Republican regime, Jackson’s Democratic regime, Lincoln’s Republican regime, FDR’s New Deal regime, and now Reagan’s free market regime. Whatever the party of a specific president elected may be, he will be forced to operate under the larger regime’s assumptions and expectations of good governance. Bill Clinton was a Democrat, but he had to govern like a Republican; Eisenhower was a Republican, but he had to govern like a Democrat.

There are some presidents who are affiliated with a dominant regime, but the regime is vulnerable. Herbert Hoover and Jimmy Carter were those kinds of presidents, and they are considered to be among the weakest. From the moment Trump was elected, I thought he belonged in that Hoover/Carter category. The Reagan regime is increasingly unable to provide the answers and policies to govern the country, much in the same way that the New Deal seemed unable to offer answers during the 1970s. The fact of that weakness made Trump quite weak. Again, the fact that he was so unable to push through legislation, that his budgets were more liberal, in some ways, than Barack Obama’s, and that the Republicans, when they controlled all the elected branches of government, were not able to implement big parts of their program—all that suggests how weak the Republican regime is.

In the coming years, once the emotional context of Trump’s presidency fades away, I think more and more people will see just how weak he really was.

DK: The historian Timothy Snyder, among other prominent public intellectuals, has argued that Trump’s approach to the presidency resembles that of 20th-century dictators like Hitler or Mussolini. The obvious counter is that Trump is going to submit to the election result, but are people like Snyder completely off-base? Trump may be lazy and incompetent, and US institutions may be stronger than some predicted, but is it fair to characterize Trump and his hardcore supporters as far-right, illiberal, even fascist, and at the very least a test of how much strain the Constitution can endure?

CR: There is no question, in my mind, that Trump and his supporters are far-right and illiberal. I’ve said so from the beginning. One of my differences with Snyder and people who subscribe to the view that Trump is a fascist or authoritarian is that their desire to call Trump that often arises from a failure to understand conservatism more generally, which has always been a far-right and illiberal and anti-liberal form of politics. Many of the attributes people decry in Trump and his followers were primary features of the conservatism I was describing in The Reactionary Mind (and got a lot of flak from liberals for so describing). To my mind, the comparisons between Trump and Hitler or Mussolini come from people who only began thinking about American conservatism and the Republican Party when Trump came along.

I would also reject some of the premises of your question. The issue is not that Trump is lazy or incompetent, though he is. As I said in my previous answer, the real reason for Trump’s ineffectiveness has virtually nothing to do with Trump and everything to do with the larger forces on the right that I discussed. Virtually any Republican president elected in 2016 (and I’m not sure anyone but Trump could have been elected) would have been as constrained in their effectiveness as Trump has been.

Conversely, I also think it’s wrong to say that the reason Trump didn’t prevail is that the institutions were stronger than people feared. This is part of an argument that is often falsely posed by liberals and the left: If you assert that Trump is weak and will fail, as I have said from the beginning, people assume that means that the institutions will constrain him. That’s nonsense: American institutions have often been the friend of the most authoritarian projects, as I argued in my first book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea. And in fact, to the extent that Trump’s politics had any juice at all, it was precisely because the institutions support that politics. Where would Trump be without the Electoral College or the Senate confirming his judges and justices—and where would Trumpism be under a Biden administration without the Senate and the courts?

It’s ironic to me that people would choose this moment, and Trump’s presidency, to assign the label “fascist” to the right, for what fascism is about, above all else, is a politics of strength and will. That’s why fascists traditionally loathe the constitutional order: because they think it constrains the assertion of political will. The irony of Trumpist/GOP politics is that it is completely dependent upon the constitutional order. In that regard, it’s almost the complete opposite of fascism.

DK: Okay, we’ve made it through the Trump era, almost, probably. But are we really out of the woods? How strong a president do you expect Biden to be, and is the US at any risk of drifting toward illiberalism in the foreseeable future?

CR: We’re definitely not out of the woods, but not for the reason I think you mean. What we’ve learned over the last decade—and what Trump’s bombast allowed many liberals and the left to avoid—is how much our political institutions constrain action. Assuming the Democrats don’t win the Senate seats in Georgia, we are going to reach the end of 2022 having endured 12 years of political immobility. That is, from Obama’s time in office after the midterms of 2010 to Biden’s time after the midterms of 2022, we’ll have had virtually no legislation dealing with any of the challenges of the day and a lot of executive orders that temporarily change things and then get undone by the next president. It seems so strange to me that people spoke so much of authoritarianism under Trump when what we’ve been seeing for years now, including the Trump years, is political impotence, the absence of political will. And without the left getting its act together, I don’t see that changing any time soon. That is something to be very worried about.

David Klion is the newsletter editor for Jewish Currents.

#jewish currents #fascism #trump #biden #history

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Last month the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in a case challenging state laws that bind Electoral College electors to vote for the presidential candidate they are selected to support. The case was brought in response to four 2016 electors — three from Washington and one from Colorado — who tried to vote against their state’s popular vote winner, and, in the case of the Washington electors, faced fines for having broken their pledges.

These so-called “faithless electors” have long been a feature of American presidential elections, but it’s possible that the Supreme Court could shake up the Electoral College system, striking down state laws that try to guarantee electors’ votes by replacing or punishing those who don’t vote as they promised to. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the overall lack of enforcement of electors’ pledge to vote for the winner of their state troubled her, saying, “I made a promise to do something, but that promise is unenforceable.” But Justice Samuel Alito said that overturning the state laws could “lead to chaos where the popular vote is close.”

There is some truth to that. In a system where a close national popular vote can produce a close-but-different Electoral College outcome, a handful of electors refusing to uphold their pledges could indeed sow chaos. There is already controversy surrounding the Electoral College and its election of George W. Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 — neither won the popular vote. Adding in a few faithless electors who could flip the outcome of the election might pose a significant threat to the Electoral College’s continued legitimacy. Yet, the history of presidential elections is not exactly littered with faithless electors.

In fact, during the presidential elections of the 20th century just 15 electors broke their pledge and voted for someone other than their party’s nominee.1 That means, on average, there was less than one faithless elector per election during this period, and none of them altered the course of any one election. This trend continued into the 21st century as well, with just one faithless elector in the 2000 presidential election and one in 2004; however, in the 2016 presidential election, there was a sharp uptick. Ten electors from six different states attempted to break ranks.2 That’s still not enough to have changed the outcome of the 2016 election, but it is nonetheless a significant jump in the number of defections.

So perhaps this is a sign that something has changed in our era of hyper-partisan politics and faithless electors will become more common. Then again, Hillary Clinton and Trump both faced long, drawn-out nomination battles,3 and they were the two most unpopular nominees in modern history. Those factors alone could have been the impetus behind some of the faithless electors’ moves in 2016.

But let’s say the Supreme Court does rule in favor of the 2016 electors and says faithless electors can’t be penalized. Would chaos ensue?

First of all, not every state has laws in place to hold Electoral College electors to their pledges. In fact, just 29 states and the District of Columbia had any type of rule on the books in 2016. The rules are inconsistent, too. In some states, like Washington, a penalty is levied, and all of the faithless electors were made to pay a $1,000 fine. And in other states, like Michigan, the votes of faithless electors are not counted; instead, those electors are replaced with someone who will vote for the nominee. That provision obviously has more teeth to it, but again, many states don’t have any such provisions at all, and yet there aren’t countless faithless electors.

And that may be because the state parties are already selecting activists who are likely to be loyal to their presidential nominee, so electors are motivated to vote as instructed even without a law punishing or removing them if they don’t. But the national parties are not powerless in this process. The Democratic National Committee, in particular, ramped up its efforts to fend off faithless electors after 2016, adding a new requirement to its convention rules that state parties’ delegate selection plans not only include their process for selecting electors, but also the steps the state will take to ensure that those electors vote for the Democratic nominee. Those measures, like the rest of the delegate selection process, had to be approved by the Democratic National Committee’s Rules and Bylaws Committee as part of the delegate selection plan.

The elector selection process still differs from state to state, but ultimately, it’s fairly centralized under the party, which helps ensure faithful electors are selected. In states like Florida and Pennsylvania, for example, the presidential nominee and their campaign select the Democratic electors. And in states with smaller Electoral College delegations, like Oregon and Utah, state party officers like the state party chair, vice chair and treasurer automatically serve as the electors from those states. There are, however, a number of states where the elector selection process is a bit more free-range. And, perhaps unsurprisingly, it was the states that selected their electors by more decentralized means that had faithless electors in 2016.

The six states where an elector tried to cast a faithless vote in 2016 — Colorado, Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Texas and Washington — all selected electors using congressional district and state conventions, which don’t receive as much oversight as other selection methods and can be dominated by supporters of candidates other than the eventual nominee. And unlike the process for selecting delegates to the Democratic convention, the elector selection process does not give the candidate the right to review electors.4

In Washington, where the faithless elector problem was the most acute in 2016 — there were four defectors — state Democrats made the process much more centralized for 2020, moving the selection process from state and congressional district conventions to the party’s state central committee. But 17 state parties will still select electors via conventions in 2020, with 154 electors at stake in those meetings. And only seven of these 17 states (worth 53 electors) voted Democratic in 2016.5 So it’s possible that if there were enough defections and the vote was close, it could matter.

That said, few electors chosen this way are actually faithless. Few electors are faithless, period. It’s true we don’t know if 2016 signaled a change in norms around faithless electors and if, therefore, we might see more defections in 2020. But the bottom line is that even if the Supreme Court were to strike down state-level laws, chaos is unlikely to erupt. The guidelines put in place by parties to ensure most electors are faithful serve as a backstop.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Josh Putnam

[dandymeowth]

Many of the landholders are newcomers from out of state, though some old-timers remain—families that earned their deeds generations ago, the principal paid by ancestors who shivered through pitiless winters in tar-paper shacks. Wilson has been hiking and hunting the Crazies since he was a little kid, but only in the past year or so, he says, have the private ranchers seemed more like obstacles than neighbors. “They could shut down pretty much the whole interior of the Crazy Mountains, as far as I can see,” he says.                

He trudges up a rooty slope and, after a blind bend, sees something straddling the trail that stops him cold. It’s a padlocked metal gate. He hiked this trail a couple of weeks before, and the fence wasn’t there. A sign on it reads, “Private Property: No Forest Service Access, No Trespassing.” It’s exactly the kind of sign he’d been bad-mouthing a few minutes earlier, but he wasn’t expecting to see one here. The locked gate feels like an escalation, a new weapon in an improvised war.                

................

A debate is taking place across the country over preserving land for recreational public use, but most of the attention is focused on vast swaths of historically or scientifically significant terrain that Presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and to a lesser extent George W. Bush protected under the national monument designation—for example, Bears Ears in Utah and Katahdin Woods and Waters in Maine. These disputed trails leading into the Crazy Mountains represent another front in the escalating battle over control of federal territory, and the fighting here is just as contentious as over the monuments. Historic settlement patterns in the American West created a checkerboard pattern of landownership: Public properties are often broken-up plots, resulting in numerous access disputes. According to a 2013 study by the Center for Western Priorities, that dynamic has effectively locked the public out of about 4 million acres of land in Western states; almost half of that blocked public land, or about 2 million acres, is in Montana, according to the study. The push to end public thoroughfare is either an overdue reassertion of private property rights or an openly cynical land snatch, depending which side of the gate you’re standing on.       

................

In late October 2-16, in the dying days of the Obama era, a U.S. district judge issued a verdict that seemed to set a precedent for paths like this one. The Texas-based owners of a Montana property called Wonder Ranch, about 100 miles southeast of the Crazy Mountains, had sued the Forest Service after the government filed a statement of interest claiming an easement—a legal agreement to use a portion of someone’s land for a specific purpose—on a trail that ran across the ranch’s property before reaching the Lee Metcalf Wilderness. The Forest Service said the trail had been routinely used as an access route to the forest by the government and the public for decades, and therefore it should be considered public because of historical use. The owners’ suit argued that the government had no right to an easement. The Department of Justice countersued, producing evidence dating back more than a century showing that the public and the government consistently used the trail for packhorses and hike-ins. The Forest Service won the case.                       

Had the landowners been able to show that the trail had been used for at least five consecutive years only by those who’d received their permission, their claims of private control might have held. That helps explain why Alex Sienkiewicz, the forest ranger overseeing the district that includes the Crazy Mountains, every year sends an email to his staff reminding them never to ask landowners’ permission to use trails that the government already considers public. “By asking permission,” he wrote in 2016’s reminder, “one undermines the public access rights and plays into their lawyers’ trap of establishing a history of permissive access.” That didn’t mean anyone could veer off the trail and slip onto the private property—that’s trespassing, no question about it—it just meant the trail itself should be considered a public throughway.      

....................

For a while, it seemed that attitude might be one of the rare Obama positions that President Donald Trump could live with. In a pre-election interview, Trump told the magazine Field & Stream he didn’t like the idea of transferring the land to the states, suggesting such transfers could erode public oversight of them: “I want to keep the lands great, and you don’t know what the state is going to do,” he said. “I mean, are they going to sell if they get into a little bit of trouble? And I don’t think it’s something that should be sold. We have to be great stewards of this land. This is magnificent land.”                                       

Public land advocates smelled a contradiction, since the new president was positioning himself elsewhere as a champion of private property rights. And regardless of what he said, Trump’s campaign had tapped into a very deep well of antigovernment sentiment, the sort that Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy appealed to when he occupied public territories and led armed standoffs against federal agents in 2014 and again in 2016. The co-chair of a state group called Veterans for Trump pleaded guilty to helping organize the ad hoc rebel militia, and Roger Stone, a longtime Trump adviser, has been one of Bundy’s most vocal supporters. Immediately after the election, whether or not the results had anything to do with their actions, the Crazy Mountains landowners launched a collective blitz to take control of the trails leading to Forest Service property.                

.................

Gregoire decided to go for it. When the trail veered through a private plot called the Hailstone Ranch, he spotted a No Trespassing sign that read, “The Forest Service Has No Easement Here.” He ignored it, consulting his GPS to make sure he never strayed from the path onto the private ranch land. The landowner somehow detected that he was using the trail (“I think he had an alarm or something,” Gregoire later speculated) and called a sheriff’s deputy, who was waiting for Gregoire to return at the end of the day. The deputy charged him with criminal trespassing.                                       

Shortly after that, the owners of nine ranches neighboring the Hailstone went after Sienkiewicz. Back on July 20, 2017, a volunteer at Public Land/Water Access Association Inc., a Montana nonprofit that supports open public access to federal lands and waterways, had gotten hold of, then posted on its Facebook page, Sienkiewicz’s most recent annual email reminder to his staff advising them never to sign visitor logs for trail access or ask permission. The property owners apparently assumed that Sienkiewicz had posted the item himself—proof that he was behaving as a political activist, not a public servant. The ranch owners sent a letter to U.S. Senator Steve Daines, a Republican representing Montana, saying in part, “As a direct result of this inflammatory Facebook post, we have many questions about the FS position regarding access across our private property.” Several of the ranchers who signed the letter have also been listed as contributors to Daines’s political campaigns in the past five years.                                       

In May 2017, Daines echoed the landowners’ complaints—and forwarded a screen shot of the Facebook post—in a letter to Thomas Tidwell, then the chief of the Forest Service, and to Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, whose agency oversees the Forest Service. Less than two weeks later, Representative Pete Sessions (R-Texas) got involved, firing off a similar complaint to Perdue and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who has a long history in Montana. An avid hunter and fisherman, he was born in Bozeman, about 40 miles from the Crazies. He was also a Montana congressman, filling the seat Daines had occupied before he moved to the Senate. (At least one of the ranchers donated to Zinke’s campaign.)

In his letter, Sessions described the Forest Service’s approach to public access as part of “the war on private property owners conducted by the Obama administration.” The Wonder Ranch owners hadn’t been among the nine who signed the initial letter, but they were the link that got Sessions involved. One of the co-owners, a Texan named Chris Hudson, lives in Sessions’ district, and Sessions proposed that Hudson and Perdue meet. Sessions also recommended that the Forest Service issue a nationwide directive to prevent rangers or individual districts from declaring paths and roads public based on historic use.                

.................

Defenders of Sienkiewicz and Gregoire—a group that included land access advocates, proprietors of recreation businesses, wildlife groups, and individuals—cast the developments as evidence of an under-the-table assault on public lands that the Trump administration appeared to endorse, if not initiate. In spring 2017, Trump requested that Zinke’s Department of the Interior review national monuments, designated or enlarged since 1996, and possibly downsize them, a step he said could rectify what he considered a “massive federal land grab.” Several politicians from Utah, such as Orrin Hatch, Rob Bishop, and Jason Chaffetz, had led the downsizing push, and for years they’d been advocating turning such lands over to the states—the strategy Trump had earlier declared would result in a selloff to the highest bidder. The department eventually suggested downsizing six of the 27 monuments under review, but the ultimate fate of those lands and waters remains in limbo; the matter will go to Congress, and the conservationists have said they will fight the new boundaries in court.              

................

Anderson has carved out a field for himself in something called free-market environmentalism. Along with his job at PERC, he’s a professor emeritus at Montana State University and a senior fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, a libertarian-leaning think tank. In op-eds published across the country, he’s an evangelist for limited government and private property rights. He views many environmentalists with undisguised contempt, and they generally return the favor.                                       

Like many nonprofits, PERC doesn’t disclose its funding sources, but Greenpeace International has posted records showing that they’ve included Exxon Mobil Corp. and the industrialists Charles and David Koch. Anderson probably wouldn’t worry too much about how that looks: He believes the private sector, in most cases, is a better steward of nature than the government.                

...........

Quilici’s plan was seat-of-the-pants. He thought he might spend three or four days hiking to an exit point on the far side of the mountains, but he didn’t realize that the most direct trail was blocked by the gate Wilson had confronted. Other possible paths were also contested. When I told him this, he redirected his criticism away from the parking lot and toward the landowners. “I bet they have some lobbying power,” he said. “They just want to keep everything like it’s their own private reserve.”        

Herein lies the big challenge for the landowners and their defenders: Survey after survey has shown that the public hates the idea that someone can lock taxpayers out of public land, and that they’re suspicious of transferring control of such tracts to private enterprise. Nevertheless, Anderson and PERC deny that their position is out of step with public opinion, even casting it as pro-access. Their rationale is oblique: If the Forest Service insists the public has a right to use the trails, they say, private landowners will naturally rebel; numerous court battles will ensue, tying up the trails in years of litigation and costing the government millions of dollars. And as the cases proceed, the landowners will take steps to secure their property rights, blocking traffic on the trails until the mess is sorted out.                                       

“In the places where now there are signs,” Anderson predicts, “you’ll see a locked gate.” His comment is an informed one. He counts several of the landowners involved in the Crazy Mountains disputes as friends, including the owners of the Rein Anchor Outfitting and Ranch, who operate a hunting lodge and signed the letter against Sienkiewicz. PERC’s affiliation with politically connected outfitters that stand to profit if trails are closed bolsters the sense, to Wilson and others confronting locked gates, that a void in coherent policy about public land management is being filled by cronyism that rewards wealth and connections above all else. Another co-owner of the Wonder Ranch, Frank-Paul King, a friend and former student of Anderson’s, served on PERC’s board. Hudson, the man who got Representative Sessions involved, is King’s brother-in-law, and he’s also a board member and the former president of the Dallas Safari Club, a group that made national headlines in 2014 when it auctioned off a trip to Africa to hunt an endangered rhinoceros. (The winning bidder, who paid $350,000, traveled to Namibia and shot a black rhino bull, an animal the club said had threatened the rest of the herd.) The Dallas Safari Club has granted PERC funding for, among other things, a study on “private conservation in the public interest.”                                       

In 2016 the Dallas Safari Club hosted a fundraiser featuring the big-game hunting enthusiast Donald Trump Jr. that netted $60,000 in campaign donations to the Republican National Committee. “The candidate’s family connection to hunting and its legacy gives DSC a huge opportunity to have the right people in place as advocates for our mission,” the club’s newsletter stated. After Trump was elected, Hudson was listed as an organizer for a post-inaugural fundraiser called “Opening Day 45,” which featured Eric and Donald Trump Jr. as co-chairs. It was canceled after TMZ published an early draft of the invitation in December 2016, promising personal access to President Trump, along with a multiday hunting excursion with his sons, to anyone who donated more than $500,000, sparking criticism that the sons planned to peddle access to their father.                

...............

The trail access issue was extremely sensitive inside the Forest Service, she explained, and potentially costly, too. The Trump administration was proposing a 73 percent cut in the Forest Service’s capital improvement and maintenance budget and an 84 percent reduction, from $77 million to $12 million, in its trail program budget. The Wonder Ranch case, she observed, had cost the government “in the millions of dollars,” and it wasn’t over yet—the landowners were appealing the decision, and it now sat with an appellate judge. “I’m not saying we’re never going to go to court, but the Forest Service is going to be careful about when we go to court and make sure we’re going to court on cases we can win,” she said.                

...............

The agency in mid-October announced it was giving Sienkiewicz his job back. But Gevock’s frustrations spoke to an unresolved question underlying all of the disputes: Who, exactly, is the Forest Service supposed to serve? On the agency’s website, former Director Thomas Tidwell wrote that its guiding principles were clearly established by Gifford Pinchot, the service’s founding chief, during the Gilded Age—“a time when the nation’s resources were being exploited for the benefit of the wealthy few,” Tidwell stated. “The national forests were based on a notion that was just the opposite—that these lands belong to everyone.”                                       

The public access advocates say they’re not sure they trust the spirit of Pinchot’s original message has survived intact. The mixed signals coming from the Trump administration mean everything rests on how those sometimes conflicting messages are interpreted. Zinke has repeatedly insisted, without offering specifics, that he is pro-access, and on his first day in office he pledged to fight against the “dramatic decreases in access to public lands across the board” that he said were plaguing America. “It worries me to think about hunting and fishing becoming activities for the landowning elite,” he said.                                       

But in July 2017, while public land advocates were protesting the Interior Department’s pending move to downsize the national monuments and hikers were cursing the new No Trespassing signs in the Crazies, Zinke traveled to Denver to speak at the annual conference of the American Legislative Exchange Council, or ALEC. The group, a conservative lobbying coalition that helps lawmakers draft legislative proposals, has energetically pushed for the potential transfer of federal lands to the states. Whether Zinke’s speech clarified the government’s general, overarching philosophy on public-vs.-private control of lands that are currently federal, only members of the lobbying group can say for sure. Unlike several other speeches delivered at the conference, Zinke’s wasn’t transcribed or published, and it was closed to the general public.                

#environmentalism #conservation #national parks #long post - #public lands #republicans #classism #capitalism #eat the rich

[alystayr]

Playlist musicale 2020 (1/2)

Liste des chansons (playlist 2020 - part. 1)

Mise à jour : 30 juin 2020

playlist 2020 (part.2), playlist 2020 (part. 1)

playlist 2019 (part.2), playlist 2019 (part. 1)

playlist 2018 (part. 2), playlist 2018 (part. 1)

playlist 2017 (part. 2), playlist 2017 (part. 1)

playlist 2016 (part. 2), playlist 2016 (part. 1)

playlist 2015

0-9 #

2Pac (Feat. Talent) - Changes (1998)

A

AC/DC - Who Made Who (1986)

Jeanne Added - Before The Sun (2018)

Aerosmith -  Janie's Got A Gun (1989)

The Afghan Whigs - Debonair (1993)

Damon Albarn - Everyday Robots (2014)

Alice In Chains - Would? (1992)

Arcade Fire - Rebellion (Lies) (2004)

Archive - Bullets (2009)

Arno - Putain Putain (1983)

Asaf Avidan - Lost Horse (2020)

B

the B52’s - Rock Lobster (1979)

Axel Bauer - Eteins La Lumière (1990)

Bauhaus - She's In Parties (1983)

The Beach Boys - Darlin’ (1967)

Beck - Wow (2016)

Bénabar - Dis-lui oui (2003)

Louis Bertignac - C'est fini (2018)

Björk - Oceania (2004)

Neal Black & The Healers - Before daylight (2014)

The Black Crowes - Remedy (1992)

The Black Keys - Psychotic Girl (2008)

Black Rebel Motorcycle Club - Let the Day Begin (2013)

blink-182 - First Date (2001)

Blur - Out Of Time (2003)

David Bowie - Modern Love (1983)

Georges Brassens - La non-demande en mariage (1966)

The Breeders - Glorious (1990)

James Brown - Living in America (from Rocky IV) (1986)

Kate Bush - Running Up That Hill (1985)

The Byrds - Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is A Season) (1965)

C

Cage The Elephant (Feat. Iggy Pop) - Broken Boy (2019)

Cake - Commissioning a Symphony in C (2001)

J.J. Cale - After Midnight (1972)

Cali - Elle M'a Dit (2003)

Johnny Cash (cover Merle Travis) - Sixteen Tons (1987)

Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds - Dig, Lazarus, Dig!!! (2008)

Ray Charles - Georgia On My Mind (1960)

Cigarettes After Sex - You're All I Want (2020)

CocoRosie - Restless (2020)

Leonard Cohen - Happens to the Heart (2019)

Coolio (feat. L.V.) - Gangsta's Paradise (from Dangerous Minds) (1995)

The Coral - The Operator (2005)

Creedence Clearwater Revival - I Heard It Through The Grapevine (1970)

The Crimea - Opposite Ends (2005)

Christine and the Queens - La vita nuova (2020)

Crosby, Stills & Nash - Long Time Gone (1969)

D

Death In Vegas - Hands Around My Throat (2002)

Deftones - Be Quiet And Drive (Far Away) (1997)

Depeche Mode - Never Let Me Down Again (1987)

dEUS - Roses (1996)

Dirty Pretty Things - Gin and Milk (2006)

Dope Lemon - Hey You (2019)

Baxter Dury - Slumlord (2019)

Jacques Dutronc - L'opportuniste (1969)

Bob Dylan - False Prophet (2020)

E

Echo & The Bunnymen - The Killing Moon (1984)

Eels - Blinking Lights (For Me) (2005)

Billie Eilish - No Time To Die (2020)

Electric Light Orchestra - Mr. Blue Sky (1977)

Eminem - Darkness (2020)

Eurythmics - Sexcrime (Nineteen Eighty-Four) (1984)

F

Faith No More - Falling to Pieces (1989)

Mylène Farmer - Ainsi Soit Je (1988)

Feu! Chatterton - La Malinche (2015)

Izo FitzRoy - Red Line (2020)

Foals - Neptune (2019)

G

Peter Gabriel - Red Rain (1986)

Serge Gainsbourg - Elisa (1969)

Liam Gallagher - Once (2019)

Gorillaz - Feel Good Inc. (2005)

Grand Corps Malade - Je Viens De Là (2008)

La Grande Sophie - Une vie (2019)

Green Day - Father of All... (2020)

H

Johnny Hallyday (cover The Animals) - Le Pénitencier (1964)

George Harrison - My Sweet Lord (1970)

Murray Head - One Night In Bangkok (1984)

Heartless Bastards - Hold Your Head High (2009)

Hole - Malibu (1998)

How to Destroy Angels - The Space in Between (2010)

I

IAM (feat. Kalash) - Eldorado (2019)

Idir - A vava inouva (1976)

Interpol - Everything Is Wrong (2014)

Izïa - Trop vite (2019)

J

Jack The Ripper - I was born a cancer (2005)

The Jesus And Mary Chain - Just Like Honey (1985)

Janis Joplin - Me And Bobby McGee (1971)

Joy Division - Decades (1980)

K

Gene Kelly  - Singing In The Rain (1952)

The Kills - Tape Song (2008)

B.B. King - Sweet Little Angel (1956)

Eric Kinny (Feat. Danica Dora)  - Last Goodbye (2019)

L

Mark Lanegan - Bleed All Over (2020)

Led Zeppelin - The Ocean (1973)

Life - Bum Hour (2019)

Limp Bizkit - Nookie (1999)

Little Richard  Long Tall Sally (1955)

Lofofora - Les Gens (1999)

Emily Loizeau - Coconut Madam (2009)

Clara Luciani - La grenade (2018)

M

Stephen Malkmus - Shadowbanned (2020)

Manu - Entre deux eaux (2019)

Mesparrow - The Symphony (2013)

Metallica - Sad But True (1991)

Pat Metheny (cover The Beatles) - And I Love Her (2011/1964)

Joni Mitchell - Blue (1971)

Moloko - The Time Is Now (2000)

Barry Moore - The Tide (2019)

Morcheeba - Part of the Process (1998)

Ennio Morricone -  Et pour quelques dollars de plus (1965)

Morrissey - The Truth About Ruth (2020)

Alison Mosshart - Rise (2020)

Jean-Louis Murat - Si je m'attendais / Troie (2020)

Muse - Time Is Running Out (2003)

N

Yael Naim - Daddy (2020)

Willie Nelson - On The Road Again (1980)

Nine Inch Nails - Every Day is Exactly the Same (2005)

Noir Désir - Joey Part I (1989)

Nothing But Thieves - Forever & Ever More (2018)

Natalia Nykiel - Volcano (2019)

O

Agnes Obel - The Curse (2013)

Ozzy Osbourne (Feat. Elton John) - Ordinary Man (2020)

P

Paz - Ta peau (2020)

Pearl Jam - Dance Of The Clairvoyants (2020)

Pierre Perret - Lily (1977)

Lucky Peterson (cover Prince) - Purple Rain (1997)

Tom Petty - Runnin’ Down A Dream (1989)

Pink Floyd - Young Lust (1979)

Pixies - Catfish Kate (2019)

Pomme - Je sais pas danser (2019)

Iggy Pop - Loves Missing (2019)

Popa Chubby - Life Is a Beatdown (2004)

Elvis Presley - Jailhouse Rock (1957)

Eddy de Pretto - Kid (2018)

Puscifer - The Green Valley (2011)

Q

Queen - The Show Must Go On (1991)

R

R.E.M. - Man On The Moon (1992)

Radiohead - House of Cards (2007)

Rage Against The Machine - Testify (1999)

Red Hot Chili Peppers - Snow (Hey Oh) (2006)

Lou Reed - Vicious (1972)

Catherine Ringer & Iggy Pop (cover Screamin' Jay Hawkins) - I Put A Spell On You (2018/1956)

Rival Sons - Jordan (2012)

The Rolling Stones - Jumpin' Jack Flash (1968)

S

Saez - J'accuse (2010)

Santana (cover Tito Puente) - Oye Como Va (1956/1970)

Siouxsie And The Banshees - Happy House (1980)

Slipknot - Psychosocial (2008)

The Smashing Pumpkins - Rhinoceros (1991)

Patti Smith - Because the Night (1978)

The Smiths - Stretch out and Wait (1986)

Soan - Emily (2009)

MC Solaar - Nouveau Western (1994)

Alain Souchon - C'est déjà ça (1993)

Soundgarden - Outshined (1991)

Spoon - Can I Sit Next To You (2017)

Bruce Springsteen - Streets of Philadelphia (from Philadelphia) (1993)

Steelers Wheel - Stuck In The Middle With You (from Reservoir Dogs) (1992)

Sting - Fragile (1987)

Joss Stone - Right To Be Wrong (2004)

The Stranglers - Skin Deep (1984)

The Strokes - At The Door (2020)

System Of A Down - Forest (2001)

T

Tame Impala - Breathe Deeper (2020)

Têtes Raides - Le phare (1992)

Hubert-Félix Thiéfaine - La fille du coupeur de joints (2015/1978)

Tool - Vicarious (2006)

Tricky -  Nothing’s Changed (2013)

The Twilight Singers - On The Corner (2011)

Twin Peaks - Making Breakfast (2014)

U

U2 - I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For (1987)

V

Stevie Ray Vaughan - Crossfire (1989)

W

Tom Waits - Gun Street Girl (1985)

Muddy Waters - Rolling Stone (Catfish Blues) (1950)

Roger Waters (cover Pïnk Floyd) - Mother (1979/2020)

Weezer - Hero (2020)

Erika Wennerstrom - Extraordinary Love (2018)

Jack White - Lazaretto (2014)

Emily Jane White - Washed Away (2019)

The White Stripes - The Denial Twist (2005)

Woodkid - Goliath (2020)

X

Y

Neil Young - Down by the River (1969)

Z

Hans Zimmer - S.T.A.Y. (Interstellar theme song) (2014)

#Listes #Musique #Playlist #2020 #Music #Rock #OST #Pop #Electro #Blues #Soundtrack

[orbemnews]

Afghanistan: Why the US is there, why it's leaving, what will happen when it's gone The deadline for Biden’s withdrawal is significant — September 11, 2021, is 20 years after the 9/11 terror attacks in New York, Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania that led the US to target Afghanistan in the first place. Those two decades have seen more than 2,300 US military lives lost, tens of thousands of US wounded, countless Afghan casualties and more than $2 trillion in taxpayer money spent. After all that, the last US troops to depart — some of them surely born after the 9/11 attacks — will leave parts of Afghanistan under the control of the same oppressive Taliban leaders who were there in 2001. Here is a brief attempt to bring those 20 years of war into perspective. Where did the Taliban come from? The Soviets occupied Afghanistan during the 1980s and ultimately withdrew after resistance from fighters, collectively known as mujahadeen. Among them was Osama bin Laden. The US funneled arms and help to these anti-Soviet forces. But in the post-Soviet power vacuum, the Taliban was formed under the leadership of Mullah Mohammed Omar, who wanted to create an Islamic society, expel foreign influences like TV and music from the country and impose a repressive version of Islamic law that is particularly harsh on women. By 2001, they controlled nearly all of the country. Why did the US invade Afghanistan in the first place? It was al Qaeda, the international terror network, not Afghanistan’s Taliban — a regional Islamic political and military force — that attacked the US on 9/11. But the masterminds of the attack, including Osama bin Laden, had been operating out of under the cover of the Taliban, which refused to give up bin Laden in the wake of the attack. Was there bipartisan support for invading Afghanistan in 2001? Support was nearly unanimous. The military effort was begun on authority from an “authorization for the use of military force” resolution passed one week after 9/11. Only one lawmaker, Rep. Barbara Lee of California, opposed it. That resolution was first used to authorize action in Afghanistan, but presidents since have leaned on it for action in at least 37 different countries, according to the Congressional Research Service. What did the President George W. Bush say when the US invaded Afghanistan? The invasion, led by US forces with help from NATO allies, was framed specifically as a step in a war on terrorism. “These carefully targeted actions are designed to disrupt the use of Afghanistan as a terrorist base of operations and to attack the military capability of the Taliban regime,” he said, pointing out the name of the operation was “Enduring Freedom,” although in hindsight it might be enduring war. “Since September 11, an entire generation of young Americans has gained new understanding of the value of freedom and its cost and duty and its sacrifice,” he later said. Since then, a new generation of Americans has been born and come of age while the war that started that day carried on, often in the background with little focus from most of the public. How many troops have been in Afghanistan in the past 20 years? The number has fluctuated quite a bit. President Barack Obama came to office promising to refocus the US military there over Iraq, where Bush also invaded. At times during the Obama administration there were about 100,000 US troops deployed to Afghanistan. Obama tried to end US combat operations in Afghanistan in 2014, but left more troops in the country than he planned. His successor — President Donald Trump — sent new US troops there before largely drawing them down and engaging in peace talks with the Taliban. How many US troops died each year in Afghanistan? The most deadly years were after Obama’s surge of troops in 2009. The most deadly year for both the US and its NATO allies was 2010. There have been much fewer US deaths since major US and NATO combat operations ended in 2014. When did this transform from an effort to target al Qaeda? By late 2001, bin Laden had moved through parts of Afghanistan and had crossed into Pakistan, where he would stay in hiding for nearly a decade until Navy SEALs killed him there in May 2011. What’s it like in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan today? CNN’s Nick Paton Walsh visited Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan that were the scene of US and British casualties a decade ago. He and his CNN team found women unable to go outside. Paton Walsh writes: While Kabul and the center of most main cities remain mostly under government control, vast swathes of rural Afghanistan are ruled by the fractious and varied units of the Taliban. For more than five years now in Musa Qala, they have imposed their rules despite still being in regular conflict with Afghan security forces further south in Helmand province. “At the end of the day the Taliban have the power,” said one resident. “It is not really possible to go against their will.” See images from his report What exactly is the US trying to accomplish in Afghanistan? The stated goal of the US involvement is not to liberate women repressed by the Taliban or to end that regime. In fact, the US has been involved in peace talks between the Taliban and the Afghan government for years. The simplest explanation of the US goal in Afghanistan is to keep it from again becoming a hotbed for terror groups like al Qaeda. When the US left Iraq, for instance, the power vaccum helped lead to the rise of ISIS there. But what the US has been trying to accomplish in Afghanistan, and the strategy to do it, has changed with each president. That aimlessness comes through in an internal government study — The Afghansitan Papers — from 2015 that was uncovered and published by The Washington Post in 2019. It suggests government leaders have long misled Americans about what was achievable in Afghanistan. In unvarnished interviews they never thought would become public, American military leaders told government viewers the US was unprepared for Afghanistan and that the American people did not know the “magnitude of dysfunction” in carrying out the war. Will any US troops be left in Afghanistan after September 11, 2021? Very few US forces will be there and they will be focused on helping US diplomats. An exact number is unclear. It’s not exactly clear, for instance, what role, if any, US special operations troops would play in Afghanistan. What if conditions in Afghanistan worsen between now and September? Biden’s decision is said to be final and not “conditions-based.” This is happening. What is the reaction to Biden’s decision? There is bipartisan opposition. “Apparently, we’re to help our adversaries ring in the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks by gift-wrapping the country and handing it right back to them,” said Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell on the Senate floor Wednesday. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, a Democrat of New Hampshire, tweeted when word of Biden’s plans began circulating: “It undermines our commitment to the Afghan people, particularly Afghan women.” Related opinion: Biden is making a huge mistake on Afghanistan Who supports Biden’s decision? There is support, particularly from progressives and Democrats. “I think President Biden has come up with a careful and thought-out plan,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer told John Berman on CNN’s “New Day.” “Look, John, the President doesn’t want endless wars. I don’t want endless wars. And neither do the American people.” “Year after year, military leaders told Congress and the American people that we were finally turning the corner in Afghanistan, but ultimately we were only turning in a vicious circle,” said Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren in a statement. It’s also in line with Trump’s aim of withdrawing from Afghanistan, although the former President has not weighed in. What will happen after the US and NATO forces leave? While the US will continue to try to broker a peace agreement between the Afghan government and the Taliban, September may now be the de facto deadline for those talks. Biden is overruling military commanders who worry the Taliban will overrun the Afghan government once American firepower is gone. A US intelligence community assessment released Tuesday shares those concerns. “The Taliban is likely to make gains on the battlefield, and the Afghan Government will struggle to hold the Taliban at bay if the coalition withdraws support,” according to the official assessment of worldwide threats. Why is Biden bent on removing the remaining 2,500 US troops? Biden said in his speech Wednesday that no amount of US forces on the ground can deter the Taliban or end the war. “It was not true when we had 98,000 US troops on the ground, and it won’t be true keeping [the current] 2,500 troops on the ground… We don’t think they are a game changer,” a source told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. The US will still use diplomatic and monetary leverage. What’s not at all clear is if those tools will get results where two decades of American military might have not. Source link Orbem News #Afghanistan #happen #Leaving

[marksarmel]

What I’m Consuming 07/14/20

I haven’t done one of these mainly because I didn’t feel like talking about frivolous media consumption while the world is on fire, but we still here. Let’s get on with it. 

TV

George Floyd video -  I didn’t want to watch this because I just didn’t want to see a black man die. Again. If you haven’t watched it you should. To see and hear a grown man call for his dead mother is heart wrenching. It’s terrible. It’s disgusting. It’s merciless and it’s absolutely necessary. We must not turn away from this horror because it makes it too easy to ignore. This is what happens just down the street, on the “wrong” side of the road, and right next door. In the video one witness makes the comment, “He is human bro.” This says it all, but allow me to pile on. George Floyd is human. The cops are blithely inhuman.

George Floyd witnesses - Witnesses ask/beg officers to stop kneeling on George Floyd’s neck. They are casually ignored. That very nature is the terror here. A man’s life is slipping away and the guy could be casually eating ice cream, texting someone, or waiting for the light to change.

Dave Chapelle - 8:46 - Dave dropped this on Netflix. It’s worth watching. It’s not funny as much as it’s one man’s exasperated commentary on things he’s been talking about his entire career; fear of cops, inequality, racism. If you’ve watched any of Dave Chapelle you probably know this. If you don’t you’re just not listening.

BLM Protest Videos - Watch as many of them as you can. These protests are the gesticulations of a people long ignored struggling to write themselves into their own story that has, up until now, been written by someone else.

MOVIES

I haven’t watched many new movies for obvious pandemic reasons. I think during this time it’s important to educate ourselves on what’s happening with race in America today. There are plenty of lists on things to watch and read and listen to, but I want to try to do something a little different and pair movies up with another piece of media that I think compliments it in some way.

I Am Not Your Negro - James Baldwin (2016) - To Pimp a Butterfly - Kendrick Lamar (2015) - At the beginning of I Am Not Your Negro James Baldwin is asked if things are, “at once getting much better, but still hopeless”. His response is that the real question is, “what’s going to happen to this country.” 50 years later we are still asking these same questions. There is a shot at 37:12 in I Am Not Your Negro of a white cop standing with his knee on a woman’s neck. 50 years later we are still seeing these same things. In the past 50 years we have landed on the moon, mapped the human genome, invented the internet, cloned animals, built the iPhone, gone from records, to 8-tracks, to tapes, to cds, to streaming music, elected 11 different presidents and still, today African Americans walk through the world linked to their past by the chains of racism. 

Amy Cooper video (2020) and Get Out - Jordan Peele (2017) - This movie was a huge hit, but I think the ending is all the more terrifying and shows the real world horror of life in America for a black man when watched with the video of Amy Cooper. In the video Amy calls the cops and in order to get the response she feels entitled to, she tells the cops that Christian Cooper, a black man, is threatening her. Never have I seen a more clear example of life imitating art, intentionally or not.  Watch the movie first then watch the video.

Hurricane - Bob Dylan (1976) - The Hurricane - Norman Jewison (1999) - Just Mercy - Destin Daniel Cretton (2019) The arrest of Rubin “Hurricane” Carter in the late 60’s led to the protest song by Dylan in 1976 which led to the movie with Denzel Washington in 1999. The movie Just Mercy from 2019 is not about Rubin Carter, but it’s about the same thing. A black man is arrested, tried and convicted of a crime with very little evidence and is later found to be innocent. It’s the song, it’s the movie, it’s the movie again. Black people are living in a real life racist horror movie version of Groundhog Day.

 13th - Ava Duvernay (2016) - Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs speech (1986)

You can watch 13th for free on YouTube.

Reagan’s speech you can watch here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gj8gAQ_cQ7Q

The film goes into great detail about the issues with America and the prison industrial complex and Reagan’s speech is just a small part of it. I see Reagan’s speech though, as something I remember in my early life. Not the speech itself, but the the War on Drugs and the “Just Say No” campaign. The War on Drugs has terrorized black and minority communities and has led to mass incarceration on a scale so large that as of 2019 there are 2.3 million people in jail. Nixon began the war on crime that laid the foundation of the prison industrial complex, Reagan built the jails, Bush filled them and Clinton created the three strikes rule which was a shot of adrenaline to this system.

The following is not something I’ve come up with myself, but it is based on facts and it is true.The US criminal justice system is NOT failing black and brown people. It is working exactly as it was designed. This system was created to destroy black and brown communities. It was created to continue the system of slavery after slavery was outlawed. It is a FOR PROFIT industry. Those who profit from it are the modern day slave owners.

MUSIC

I feel the need to articulate current events with some music. Some old. Some new.

“Strange Fruit” - Nina Simone (1965) - There has been a spate of Black and Hispanic men and women found hanging recently. From May to June there have been 6 hangings, all ruled a suicide. If you want a horrifying description of these modern day lynchings listen to this song. 

Black on Both Sides - Mos Def (1999)- A honest and raw description of life for a modern black man. It is honest, boastful, and beautiful. The black man is simply put, a man. As a man he strives for love, success, and happiness. As a man he also sometimes fails. You and I are no different than a black man. In Umi Says, Mos Def repeats the refrain, “I want black people to be free.” We must all sing this same refrain.

“Changes” - 2pac (1998). Just listen to it. Then listen to again. This song was released in 1992. It could have come out right now.

R.A.P. Music - Killer Mike (2012)- Before there was Run the Jewels there was Killer Mike and El-P in the studio whipping out this AK-47 of an album. Follow this up with Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet. Follow that up with some action.

RTJ4 - Run the Jewels (2020)- A 2020 soundtrack. Or is it 2000? Or 1960?

RANDOM NOTES

I’ve also recently discovered the work of Tobe Nwigwe on Instagram. Check it out @Tobenwigwe

Gil Scott Heron said the revolution will not be televised. Heron, no doubt, did not foresee a world where everyone could be a camera, or that their voices could be amplified to such a degree, but the world is being forced to examine its own disfigured self. All through the mirror in our pockets and backpacks and living rooms. One thing Gil Scott Heron was right about in his song is this, “black people will be in the street looking for a brighter day.” We must join them.

[goldcoins0]

The Only 'Bubble' That Counts

Source: Michael Ballanger for Streetwise Reports   01/20/2020

Sector expert Michael Ballanger considers the last week in the stock and precious metals markets.

Ever since Sept. 19, 2008, when Hammerin' Hank Paulson appeared in front of the U.S. Congress on bended knee and begged those clueless politicians for a bailout—which he did successfully—the spread of moral hazard throughout the world has been a contagion that makes the Bubonic plague appear as harmless as the common cold.

That was, in fact, the day that shall go down in fiscal infamy as a most dangerous precedent was etched into the fabric and soul of the U.S. financial system. Not only did it set the behavioral course for the banker-politico alliance, it laid out as an insidious blueprint the operation manual for treasury departments and central banks around the world, the result being where we are today, a global economy teetering on an Mount Everest of debt with no solution on any horizon.

This week the investor class has seen the continuation of an advance in that began with the first whispering of the phrase "repo operations" in September, the realization of which did not manifest itself until late October, when I penned the missive "Q4 Guesstimates."

As I wrote in September, "I have the feeling that the PPT, with DJT at the helm, is going to go all-out in making damn sure that we have a booming stock market going into 2020, so that his re-election chances don't suffer from the 'It's the economy, stupid' misfortune suffered by George Bush in his re-election run against Bill Clinton."

That was written on Oct. 20, 2019, with the S&P 500 at 2,986, and with investor sentiment completely undeterred by the Fed liquidity binge. Fast forward a paltry ninety days and $400 billion in repo injections, and here we sit now, at 3,316. Upon reflection, the only words that come to mind are "mission accomplished", a phrase used all too lightly by our leaders these days.

I was sitting in the big bay window overlooking the frozen expanse that is now Lake Scugog last night and was immediately reminded of just how much difference a year can make. This time last year, there were dozens of fishing huts standing all over the lake as temperatures were well below freezing for three solid weeks. This year, the lake is vacant of all fishing, snowmobiling and walking, but quite amenable to swimming should you be brave enough to venture out.

January 2019 (left); January 2020 (right)

This time last year, stock investors were stunned, like deer caught in the headlights, with bullish consensus around 20-something, and the CNN Fear-Greed index at a highly traumatized 26.

With the greed "needle" now at 97, it is truly amazing just what a difference an "accommodative Fed" means to investor psychology, price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples and bubbles. It is also important to remember that the bears have been pummeled like rented mules since March 2009, and only during one brief period in late 2019 have they enjoyed the warm glow of being "right." They have sold a great many books and newsletters crying "Wolf!" as we all too well know.

The chart you see above is a classic illustration of how these charlatans sell the unsuspecting investor using fear over greed as their hook. Do you ever wonder why Harry Dent is constantly writing about the "upcoming deflationary collapse?" It is because "doom and gloom" sells way more books than "good times are here again."

My beloved precious metals are doing their utmost to stave off the villainous attacks by the banker-politico alliance, but I am forced to respect history, despite the protests of dozens upon dozens are quasi-expert bloggers who point fingers and snigger maniacally at my seemingly unfounded caution. What the trolls fail to "get" is that I am actually 70% invested in physical gold and silver and a bunch of juniors—as in, I'm not exactly "short" or "out," just cautious.

Gold remains in an uncontested bull market and its price action is even more impressive given the "risk-on" status of the equities crowd. If you had told me in November that the S&P would be above 3,300 and the Dow 700 points from 30,000, I would have pegged gold in the mid $1,300s. But its resiliency is a testimonial to the reflationary actions of the Fed. The Fed needs velocity to kick in, and is prepared to let the economy run "hot" to secure it.

Silver remains locked in a consolidation pattern, with US$18.50 as a near-term cap and the 50-day moving average (dma) as the near-term support. As a trader I am comfortable being long physical and selected silver equities but uncomfortable with leveraged positions until we break out of the pattern. Stated another way, there is no reason to sell that which I own, but no reason to either add more or own futures, options, or leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

That said, the longer we consolidate within this elongated pennant formation, the bigger the advance once it is resolved. I must confess that silver's performance since I resumed my bullish stance in November has been a mild disappointment. The gold-to-silver ratio is mired in the mid-80s (86.33), unable to give the entire metals complex that much-needed adrenaline boost to clear the logjam in the HUI and in the Junior and Senior Gold Miners ETFs, which still reside well below my exit points from the Jan. 8 key reversal day.

COT Report (Jan. 14)

This week's COT was largely a non-event, with Commercials covering a modest 6,262 contracts in gold but adding 1,183 contracts in silver. Both aggregate positions held by Commercials remain bearish, which is yet another reason for caution in my trade setups.

Note the chart below that depicts the history of Commercial/Large Spec positioning versus price behavior dating back until 2017. It is so obvious to even an amateur technician how the aggressive Commercial shorting has capped price.

However, note the yellow arrows depicting the most recent price decline but virtually no change in the aggregate shorts held by the bullion banks. Is this because we are simply in a new bull market, or is it because the banks are desperate to keep a lid on price due to central bank repo activity? Whatever the explanation you choose, it is strange behavior and an aberration, certainly since 2011.

The S&P weekly chart goes back to 2017, and clearly shows a pattern of how corrections are born from elevated relative strength index (RSI) readings. I said that the gold chart looked "a tad overbought," but the S&P chart is more overbought than last summer, just before it took a Q4 20% haircut. . .until, of course, Smilin' Stevie Mnuchin mobilized the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) and saved Wall Street bonuses for 2019.

I have initiated a small put position on the S&P by way of the SPY March $300s. I started with a small position and am attempting to scale in to a larger one. The dilemma I have is that I hate adding to a losing position, which I lectured you all about in Email Alert 2020-09. (It is just so tempting to try to time this pending correction. . .)

Final Notes

To repeat for clarity purposes, I am trying to buy physical gold and silver below the market to secure a better entry point for all subscribers. (Voice from the back of the room: "Yeah, you and 20,000,000 other guys too!") Having said that, rest very unassured that there is no guarantee I'll be successful. But at the same time, missing a trade is better than doing a trade that winds up losing.

Next week will be important in that there are several items of interest on the news blotter, and if there are changes that need to be made, you will receive my instructions through the Email Alerts. As I sign off, an often-used quote that gets thrown around a great deal is, "May we live in interesting times," and it is usually a segue to one's opinion on geopolitics, religion or controversy. Lately, financial pundits have been using it as a way of obfuscating their current outlook for the global financial markets, so when I hear it uttered with brazen disregard for history, I am forced to laugh.

Why, pray tell? It is actually a Chinese curse. . .

Originally trained during the inflationary 1970s, Michael Ballanger is a graduate of Saint Louis University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in finance and a Bachelor of Art in marketing before completing post-graduate work at the Wharton School of Finance. With more than 30 years of experience as a junior mining and exploration specialist, as well as a solid background in corporate finance, Ballanger's adherence to the concept of "Hard Assets" allows him to focus the practice on selecting opportunities in the global resource sector with emphasis on the precious metals exploration and development sector. Ballanger takes great pleasure in visiting mineral properties around the globe in the never-ending hunt for early-stage opportunities.

Sign up for our FREE newsletter at: www.streetwisereports.com/get-news

Disclosure: 1) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of Michael Ballanger and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. Michael Ballanger is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. Streetwise Reports was not involved in any aspect of the article preparation. Michael Ballanger was not paid by Streetwise Reports LLC for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. 2) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 3) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases.

Charts provided by the author.

Michael Ballanger Disclaimer: This letter makes no guarantee or warranty on the accuracy or completeness of the data provided. Nothing contained herein is intended or shall be deemed to be investment advice, implied or otherwise. This letter represents my views and replicates trades that I am making but nothing more than that. Always consult your registered advisor to assist you with your investments. I accept no liability for any loss arising from the use of the data contained on this letter. Options and junior mining stocks contain a high level of risk that may result in the loss of part or all invested capital and therefore are suitable for experienced and professional investors and traders only. One should be familiar with the risks involved in junior mining and options trading and we recommend consulting a financial adviser if you feel you do not understand the risks involved.

from https://www.streetwisereports.com/article/2020/01/20/the-only-bubble-that-counts.html

[internetsmoothie]

The Only 'Bubble' That Counts

Source: Michael Ballanger for Streetwise Reports   01/20/2020

Sector expert Michael Ballanger considers the last week in the stock and precious metals markets.

Ever since Sept. 19, 2008, when Hammerin' Hank Paulson appeared in front of the U.S. Congress on bended knee and begged those clueless politicians for a bailout—which he did successfully—the spread of moral hazard throughout the world has been a contagion that makes the Bubonic plague appear as harmless as the common cold.

That was, in fact, the day that shall go down in fiscal infamy as a most dangerous precedent was etched into the fabric and soul of the U.S. financial system. Not only did it set the behavioral course for the banker-politico alliance, it laid out as an insidious blueprint the operation manual for treasury departments and central banks around the world, the result being where we are today, a global economy teetering on an Mount Everest of debt with no solution on any horizon.

This week the investor class has seen the continuation of an advance in that began with the first whispering of the phrase "repo operations" in September, the realization of which did not manifest itself until late October, when I penned the missive "Q4 Guesstimates."

As I wrote in September, "I have the feeling that the PPT, with DJT at the helm, is going to go all-out in making damn sure that we have a booming stock market going into 2020, so that his re-election chances don't suffer from the 'It's the economy, stupid' misfortune suffered by George Bush in his re-election run against Bill Clinton."

That was written on Oct. 20, 2019, with the S&P 500 at 2,986, and with investor sentiment completely undeterred by the Fed liquidity binge. Fast forward a paltry ninety days and $400 billion in repo injections, and here we sit now, at 3,316. Upon reflection, the only words that come to mind are "mission accomplished", a phrase used all too lightly by our leaders these days.

I was sitting in the big bay window overlooking the frozen expanse that is now Lake Scugog last night and was immediately reminded of just how much difference a year can make. This time last year, there were dozens of fishing huts standing all over the lake as temperatures were well below freezing for three solid weeks. This year, the lake is vacant of all fishing, snowmobiling and walking, but quite amenable to swimming should you be brave enough to venture out.

January 2019 (left); January 2020 (right)

This time last year, stock investors were stunned, like deer caught in the headlights, with bullish consensus around 20-something, and the CNN Fear-Greed index at a highly traumatized 26.

With the greed "needle" now at 97, it is truly amazing just what a difference an "accommodative Fed" means to investor psychology, price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples and bubbles. It is also important to remember that the bears have been pummeled like rented mules since March 2009, and only during one brief period in late 2019 have they enjoyed the warm glow of being "right." They have sold a great many books and newsletters crying "Wolf!" as we all too well know.

The chart you see above is a classic illustration of how these charlatans sell the unsuspecting investor using fear over greed as their hook. Do you ever wonder why Harry Dent is constantly writing about the "upcoming deflationary collapse?" It is because "doom and gloom" sells way more books than "good times are here again."

My beloved precious metals are doing their utmost to stave off the villainous attacks by the banker-politico alliance, but I am forced to respect history, despite the protests of dozens upon dozens are quasi-expert bloggers who point fingers and snigger maniacally at my seemingly unfounded caution. What the trolls fail to "get" is that I am actually 70% invested in physical gold and silver and a bunch of juniors—as in, I'm not exactly "short" or "out," just cautious.

Gold remains in an uncontested bull market and its price action is even more impressive given the "risk-on" status of the equities crowd. If you had told me in November that the S&P would be above 3,300 and the Dow 700 points from 30,000, I would have pegged gold in the mid $1,300s. But its resiliency is a testimonial to the reflationary actions of the Fed. The Fed needs velocity to kick in, and is prepared to let the economy run "hot" to secure it.

Silver remains locked in a consolidation pattern, with US$18.50 as a near-term cap and the 50-day moving average (dma) as the near-term support. As a trader I am comfortable being long physical and selected silver equities but uncomfortable with leveraged positions until we break out of the pattern. Stated another way, there is no reason to sell that which I own, but no reason to either add more or own futures, options, or leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

That said, the longer we consolidate within this elongated pennant formation, the bigger the advance once it is resolved. I must confess that silver's performance since I resumed my bullish stance in November has been a mild disappointment. The gold-to-silver ratio is mired in the mid-80s (86.33), unable to give the entire metals complex that much-needed adrenaline boost to clear the logjam in the HUI and in the Junior and Senior Gold Miners ETFs, which still reside well below my exit points from the Jan. 8 key reversal day.

COT Report (Jan. 14)

This week's COT was largely a non-event, with Commercials covering a modest 6,262 contracts in gold but adding 1,183 contracts in silver. Both aggregate positions held by Commercials remain bearish, which is yet another reason for caution in my trade setups.

Note the chart below that depicts the history of Commercial/Large Spec positioning versus price behavior dating back until 2017. It is so obvious to even an amateur technician how the aggressive Commercial shorting has capped price.

However, note the yellow arrows depicting the most recent price decline but virtually no change in the aggregate shorts held by the bullion banks. Is this because we are simply in a new bull market, or is it because the banks are desperate to keep a lid on price due to central bank repo activity? Whatever the explanation you choose, it is strange behavior and an aberration, certainly since 2011.

The S&P weekly chart goes back to 2017, and clearly shows a pattern of how corrections are born from elevated relative strength index (RSI) readings. I said that the gold chart looked "a tad overbought," but the S&P chart is more overbought than last summer, just before it took a Q4 20% haircut. . .until, of course, Smilin' Stevie Mnuchin mobilized the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) and saved Wall Street bonuses for 2019.

I have initiated a small put position on the S&P by way of the SPY March $300s. I started with a small position and am attempting to scale in to a larger one. The dilemma I have is that I hate adding to a losing position, which I lectured you all about in Email Alert 2020-09. (It is just so tempting to try to time this pending correction. . .)

Final Notes

To repeat for clarity purposes, I am trying to buy physical gold and silver below the market to secure a better entry point for all subscribers. (Voice from the back of the room: "Yeah, you and 20,000,000 other guys too!") Having said that, rest very unassured that there is no guarantee I'll be successful. But at the same time, missing a trade is better than doing a trade that winds up losing.

Next week will be important in that there are several items of interest on the news blotter, and if there are changes that need to be made, you will receive my instructions through the Email Alerts. As I sign off, an often-used quote that gets thrown around a great deal is, "May we live in interesting times," and it is usually a segue to one's opinion on geopolitics, religion or controversy. Lately, financial pundits have been using it as a way of obfuscating their current outlook for the global financial markets, so when I hear it uttered with brazen disregard for history, I am forced to laugh.

Why, pray tell? It is actually a Chinese curse. . .

Originally trained during the inflationary 1970s, Michael Ballanger is a graduate of Saint Louis University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in finance and a Bachelor of Art in marketing before completing post-graduate work at the Wharton School of Finance. With more than 30 years of experience as a junior mining and exploration specialist, as well as a solid background in corporate finance, Ballanger's adherence to the concept of "Hard Assets" allows him to focus the practice on selecting opportunities in the global resource sector with emphasis on the precious metals exploration and development sector. Ballanger takes great pleasure in visiting mineral properties around the globe in the never-ending hunt for early-stage opportunities.

Sign up for our FREE newsletter at: www.streetwisereports.com/get-news

Disclosure: 1) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of Michael Ballanger and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. Michael Ballanger is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. Streetwise Reports was not involved in any aspect of the article preparation. Michael Ballanger was not paid by Streetwise Reports LLC for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. 2) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 3) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases.

Charts provided by the author.

Michael Ballanger Disclaimer: This letter makes no guarantee or warranty on the accuracy or completeness of the data provided. Nothing contained herein is intended or shall be deemed to be investment advice, implied or otherwise. This letter represents my views and replicates trades that I am making but nothing more than that. Always consult your registered advisor to assist you with your investments. I accept no liability for any loss arising from the use of the data contained on this letter. Options and junior mining stocks contain a high level of risk that may result in the loss of part or all invested capital and therefore are suitable for experienced and professional investors and traders only. One should be familiar with the risks involved in junior mining and options trading and we recommend consulting a financial adviser if you feel you do not understand the risks involved.

from The Gold Report - Streetwise Exclusive Articles Full Text https://ift.tt/2TJfwUz

#The Gold Report - Streetwise Exclusive Articles Full Text

[andreagillmer]

The Only 'Bubble' That Counts

Source: Michael Ballanger for Streetwise Reports   01/20/2020

Sector expert Michael Ballanger considers the last week in the stock and precious metals markets.

Ever since Sept. 19, 2008, when Hammerin' Hank Paulson appeared in front of the U.S. Congress on bended knee and begged those clueless politicians for a bailout—which he did successfully—the spread of moral hazard throughout the world has been a contagion that makes the Bubonic plague appear as harmless as the common cold.

That was, in fact, the day that shall go down in fiscal infamy as a most dangerous precedent was etched into the fabric and soul of the U.S. financial system. Not only did it set the behavioral course for the banker-politico alliance, it laid out as an insidious blueprint the operation manual for treasury departments and central banks around the world, the result being where we are today, a global economy teetering on an Mount Everest of debt with no solution on any horizon.

This week the investor class has seen the continuation of an advance in that began with the first whispering of the phrase "repo operations" in September, the realization of which did not manifest itself until late October, when I penned the missive "Q4 Guesstimates."

As I wrote in September, "I have the feeling that the PPT, with DJT at the helm, is going to go all-out in making damn sure that we have a booming stock market going into 2020, so that his re-election chances don't suffer from the 'It's the economy, stupid' misfortune suffered by George Bush in his re-election run against Bill Clinton."

That was written on Oct. 20, 2019, with the S&P 500 at 2,986, and with investor sentiment completely undeterred by the Fed liquidity binge. Fast forward a paltry ninety days and $400 billion in repo injections, and here we sit now, at 3,316. Upon reflection, the only words that come to mind are "mission accomplished", a phrase used all too lightly by our leaders these days.

I was sitting in the big bay window overlooking the frozen expanse that is now Lake Scugog last night and was immediately reminded of just how much difference a year can make. This time last year, there were dozens of fishing huts standing all over the lake as temperatures were well below freezing for three solid weeks. This year, the lake is vacant of all fishing, snowmobiling and walking, but quite amenable to swimming should you be brave enough to venture out.

January 2019 (left); January 2020 (right)

This time last year, stock investors were stunned, like deer caught in the headlights, with bullish consensus around 20-something, and the CNN Fear-Greed index at a highly traumatized 26.

With the greed "needle" now at 97, it is truly amazing just what a difference an "accommodative Fed" means to investor psychology, price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples and bubbles. It is also important to remember that the bears have been pummeled like rented mules since March 2009, and only during one brief period in late 2019 have they enjoyed the warm glow of being "right." They have sold a great many books and newsletters crying "Wolf!" as we all too well know.

The chart you see above is a classic illustration of how these charlatans sell the unsuspecting investor using fear over greed as their hook. Do you ever wonder why Harry Dent is constantly writing about the "upcoming deflationary collapse?" It is because "doom and gloom" sells way more books than "good times are here again."

My beloved precious metals are doing their utmost to stave off the villainous attacks by the banker-politico alliance, but I am forced to respect history, despite the protests of dozens upon dozens are quasi-expert bloggers who point fingers and snigger maniacally at my seemingly unfounded caution. What the trolls fail to "get" is that I am actually 70% invested in physical gold and silver and a bunch of juniors—as in, I'm not exactly "short" or "out," just cautious.

Gold remains in an uncontested bull market and its price action is even more impressive given the "risk-on" status of the equities crowd. If you had told me in November that the S&P would be above 3,300 and the Dow 700 points from 30,000, I would have pegged gold in the mid $1,300s. But its resiliency is a testimonial to the reflationary actions of the Fed. The Fed needs velocity to kick in, and is prepared to let the economy run "hot" to secure it.

Silver remains locked in a consolidation pattern, with US$18.50 as a near-term cap and the 50-day moving average (dma) as the near-term support. As a trader I am comfortable being long physical and selected silver equities but uncomfortable with leveraged positions until we break out of the pattern. Stated another way, there is no reason to sell that which I own, but no reason to either add more or own futures, options, or leveraged exchange-traded funds (ETFs).

That said, the longer we consolidate within this elongated pennant formation, the bigger the advance once it is resolved. I must confess that silver's performance since I resumed my bullish stance in November has been a mild disappointment. The gold-to-silver ratio is mired in the mid-80s (86.33), unable to give the entire metals complex that much-needed adrenaline boost to clear the logjam in the HUI and in the Junior and Senior Gold Miners ETFs, which still reside well below my exit points from the Jan. 8 key reversal day.

COT Report (Jan. 14)

This week's COT was largely a non-event, with Commercials covering a modest 6,262 contracts in gold but adding 1,183 contracts in silver. Both aggregate positions held by Commercials remain bearish, which is yet another reason for caution in my trade setups.

Note the chart below that depicts the history of Commercial/Large Spec positioning versus price behavior dating back until 2017. It is so obvious to even an amateur technician how the aggressive Commercial shorting has capped price.

However, note the yellow arrows depicting the most recent price decline but virtually no change in the aggregate shorts held by the bullion banks. Is this because we are simply in a new bull market, or is it because the banks are desperate to keep a lid on price due to central bank repo activity? Whatever the explanation you choose, it is strange behavior and an aberration, certainly since 2011.

The S&P weekly chart goes back to 2017, and clearly shows a pattern of how corrections are born from elevated relative strength index (RSI) readings. I said that the gold chart looked "a tad overbought," but the S&P chart is more overbought than last summer, just before it took a Q4 20% haircut. . .until, of course, Smilin' Stevie Mnuchin mobilized the Plunge Protection Team (PPT) and saved Wall Street bonuses for 2019.

I have initiated a small put position on the S&P by way of the SPY March $300s. I started with a small position and am attempting to scale in to a larger one. The dilemma I have is that I hate adding to a losing position, which I lectured you all about in Email Alert 2020-09. (It is just so tempting to try to time this pending correction. . .)

Final Notes

To repeat for clarity purposes, I am trying to buy physical gold and silver below the market to secure a better entry point for all subscribers. (Voice from the back of the room: "Yeah, you and 20,000,000 other guys too!") Having said that, rest very unassured that there is no guarantee I'll be successful. But at the same time, missing a trade is better than doing a trade that winds up losing.

Next week will be important in that there are several items of interest on the news blotter, and if there are changes that need to be made, you will receive my instructions through the Email Alerts. As I sign off, an often-used quote that gets thrown around a great deal is, "May we live in interesting times," and it is usually a segue to one's opinion on geopolitics, religion or controversy. Lately, financial pundits have been using it as a way of obfuscating their current outlook for the global financial markets, so when I hear it uttered with brazen disregard for history, I am forced to laugh.

Why, pray tell? It is actually a Chinese curse. . .

Originally trained during the inflationary 1970s, Michael Ballanger is a graduate of Saint Louis University where he earned a Bachelor of Science in finance and a Bachelor of Art in marketing before completing post-graduate work at the Wharton School of Finance. With more than 30 years of experience as a junior mining and exploration specialist, as well as a solid background in corporate finance, Ballanger's adherence to the concept of "Hard Assets" allows him to focus the practice on selecting opportunities in the global resource sector with emphasis on the precious metals exploration and development sector. Ballanger takes great pleasure in visiting mineral properties around the globe in the never-ending hunt for early-stage opportunities.

Sign up for our FREE newsletter at: www.streetwisereports.com/get-news

Disclosure: 1) Statements and opinions expressed are the opinions of Michael Ballanger and not of Streetwise Reports or its officers. Michael Ballanger is wholly responsible for the validity of the statements. Streetwise Reports was not involved in any aspect of the article preparation. Michael Ballanger was not paid by Streetwise Reports LLC for this article. Streetwise Reports was not paid by the author to publish or syndicate this article. 2) This article does not constitute investment advice. Each reader is encouraged to consult with his or her individual financial professional and any action a reader takes as a result of information presented here is his or her own responsibility. By opening this page, each reader accepts and agrees to Streetwise Reports' terms of use and full legal disclaimer. This article is not a solicitation for investment. Streetwise Reports does not render general or specific investment advice and the information on Streetwise Reports should not be considered a recommendation to buy or sell any security. Streetwise Reports does not endorse or recommend the business, products, services or securities of any company mentioned on Streetwise Reports. 3) From time to time, Streetwise Reports LLC and its directors, officers, employees or members of their families, as well as persons interviewed for articles and interviews on the site, may have a long or short position in securities mentioned. Directors, officers, employees or members of their immediate families are prohibited from making purchases and/or sales of those securities in the open market or otherwise from the time of the interview or the decision to write an article until three business days after the publication of the interview or article. The foregoing prohibition does not apply to articles that in substance only restate previously published company releases.

Charts provided by the author.

Michael Ballanger Disclaimer: This letter makes no guarantee or warranty on the accuracy or completeness of the data provided. Nothing contained herein is intended or shall be deemed to be investment advice, implied or otherwise. This letter represents my views and replicates trades that I am making but nothing more than that. Always consult your registered advisor to assist you with your investments. I accept no liability for any loss arising from the use of the data contained on this letter. Options and junior mining stocks contain a high level of risk that may result in the loss of part or all invested capital and therefore are suitable for experienced and professional investors and traders only. One should be familiar with the risks involved in junior mining and options trading and we recommend consulting a financial adviser if you feel you do not understand the risks involved.

from The Gold Report - Streetwise Exclusive Articles Full Text https://ift.tt/2TJfwUz

#The Gold Report - Streetwise Exclusive Articles Full Text

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

The first Democratic primary debate is almost here. We’ve heard a lot about the rules for who makes the stage, but will these debates actually affect how Democratic primary voters make their decision who to vote for, or how they evaluate the candidates?

Political science tends to be skeptical of general election debates. The people who are most likely to tune into debates tend to be highly informed and already engaged in politics — and thus already likely to have formed an opinion. This has become especially true in recent years as partisanship has grown stronger.

Nevertheless, there is evidence that debates can still affect voters’ impressions of candidates, especially in primaries. It’s all about the context in which a debate is taking place. And we happen to be at a point in the 2020 cycle when debates tend to be most effective.

Here’s a look at what political science has told us about debates over the years and what that could mean for 2020.

Debates help voters evaluate candidates, and can change minds — under the right circumstances

A debate’s main purpose is to help voters decide which candidate they want to support. And there is evidence that primary debates can change people’s minds. Research by University of Missouri communication professors Mitchell McKinney and Benjamin Warner found that nearly 60 percent of study participants experienced a shift in their candidate choices after watching a debate.

But the circumstances matter. First, debates are more important in primaries, as voters can’t rely on their party identification in selecting a candidate. While vote choices in general elections are mostly shaped by partisanship — and thus debates have a limited effect — primary voters are looking for other differences, such as whether candidates are likable, electable or compatible with them on issues. Studies show that debates affect these perceptions.

Generally, the academic research also agrees that debates have the most impact when voters have relatively little information about the candidates and it’s still early in the election cycle (that is, where we are now).

Debates are also most useful when the field is crowded (again, like now) because they can help lesser-known candidates appear electable. One study from the 1996 Republican primary found, for example, that watching the primary debates had a substantial effect on candidates’ perceived viability. In that study, debate viewers rated businessman Steve Forbes’s chances of winning the nomination and beating Bill Clinton in the general election more highly after the debate. By contrast, the debate hurt former Education Secretary Lamar Alexander’s perceived electability.1

But those potential effects are limited — particularly by the rules and structure of the debate. A study of the 2012 Republican primary debates noted that candidates who were already doing well in early polls were afforded more speaking time; so, depending on the format, debates might not actually do that much to boost minor candidates.

How debates are covered in the media also matters

Debates don’t just affect those who watch them; they can also influence the political environment by how they are covered in the media. Candidates don’t have the final say on how their debate performances are portrayed, but that portrayal matters: not everyone will watch the debate, but there’s evidence that voters are responsive to how the media reports on the candidates’ performances. For instance, a study from the 2004 general election found that media coverage immediately following the 2004 general-election debates favored then-President George W. Bush over then-Sen. John Kerry, and that that coverage “persuaded potential voters to alter their attitudes regarding the competing candidates.” Voters were more likely to have a favorable opinion of Bush after the post-debate spin and analysis.

Which naturally raises a question: How do news media outlets decide who “won” a debate, or how to portray what happened? Well, that’s not really clear. But it’s not exactly a perfect reflection of what the candidates say. Researchers found that news coverage of both the Republican and Democratic primary debates in 2000 focused more on sniping between the candidates than on the candidates’ positions.2 Instead of engaging with the candidates’ statements on issues such as homeland security or healthcare, news analyses focused on campaign strategy and election chances.

Additionally, some candidates may receive a more favorable portrayal based on factors outside their control. In the 2020 cycle, the media has already faced criticism for portraying male candidates differently from female candidates, and for emphasizing ill-defined characteristics such as likability over policy ideas.

What this means for 2020

As we’ve discussed, primary debates are a way for voters to evaluate candidates — with, that is, the media also playing a big role in how they are perceived. Something to watch in the 2020 Democratic primary debates is whether candidates hovering around 1 percent in the polls will be able to garner more support, or if the field will winnow as momentum builds around a few front-runners.

How minor candidates do is particularly relevant for 2020 because the field is so crowded. While most of the strongest candidates — based on their current polling averages — will be in Thursday’s debate, the first night will feature Sen. Elizabeth Warren alongside a few candidates who have struggled to hit more than 2 percent in the polls and six more who barely cracked 1 percent. The research is inconclusive as to whether being the front-runner is a built-in advantage in a debate. It’s possible that being the polling leader — at least, on that night’s debate stage — may give Warren an advantage, such as by earning her additional speaking time. Or, a more level playing field might be an opportunity for someone like Beto O’Rourke or Amy Klobuchar to have a breakout moment.

The other 2020-relevant lesson from the research: A breakout moment is more likely to happen if the news media agrees that it happened. (If a tree falls in the forest … .) If Kamala Harris or Warren — who have both hovered around third place in the polls — were to be crowned the “winner” of a primary debate, it could shake up the race and threaten Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders’s polling leads. If the post-debate media narrative is more muddled, we’re less likely to see a big shift in the race.

Finally, beyond the horse-race, the debates might serve simply to add to the interest in the presidential primary, drawing voters into the process — as research has shown debates can. If the high turnout in the 2018 midterms is any indicator, political engagement is high right now. It’s also possible that the debates will help to focus the discussion, highlighting critical differences in beliefs, policies and approaches among candidates.

Or, we may just end up talking about Pete Buttigieg answering a question in Norwegian. Stay tuned.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #Julia Azari

[annajell-blog]

 Dexter C. Santos

 This blog is about the Marcos Wealth that has been circulating online for a few years now and many believe that this rumor is true.

MARCOS Wealth/Gold!

The Cojuangco-Aquino Family envy Ferdinand Marcos because of Ferdinand Marcos's personal wealth given by his former client the Tallano royal family of the Philippines who is the real owner of our country. The tallano was the richest royal family in the history of man. Richer than any ancient empires/kingdoms, they hired Marcos as their family lawyer and pay him hundred thousand tons of gold bars. About the so called ill-gotten wealth that the Aquino administration accuses the Marcoses is a lie. FEM has a major role in the world and it is the Monetary-1.

Take Note: MONETARY-1

Actually, the Aquino’s are puppets by those who wanted to bring Marcos down ‘coz they wanted to have the wealth that belongs to mankind who's been under FEM hands. Search about MONETARY-1 and the answer were out there!

Q: Bakit may nag mamay-ari ba na isang pamilya sa bansang Pilipinas? Paano po nangyari iyon?

A: Our country was a kingdom before, called the Maharlika kingdom, ruled by the great DATU's such as Datu Puti and Lapu Lapu. Parts of our country was Brunei, South Borneo, Hawaii, Spratly Island and Saba. Our country was a rich kingdom and even the Ming dynasty of China respect our kingdom, no other empires and kingdoms in Asia can matched our wealth. The DATU's who ruled the kingdom was the Tagean/Tallano royal famil. They owned our country until the midst 18th century. JOSE P. RIZAL was a direct descendants of the Tallano's. His great grandfather was Prince Julian Macleod Tallano who is been half European royalty "Macleod and half Maharlikan Tallano.

192 thousand tons of golds paid by the Tallano's family to Marcos yet too damn smart. He got the WW2 2 loots which is the YAMASHITA GOLDS who's been guarded by the imbecile General Yamashita and out smarted by Ferdinand Marcos. That is why there is a monetary-1. Due to WW2 loots belongs to humanity, Marcos wanted us to have that and not ended up to the hands of the REPTILIANS/ the world elite/ the one eyed/ the illuminati/ who wanted to enslave humanity, that is why they do everything to bring Marcos down. But Marcos is so smart, they can't find ways how. Then they saw a little hole and used it to manipulate the minds of FEM's own people, then used it to bring him down. They may succeed to bring Marcos out of power in this country but still Out smarted by the late great Ferdinand Marcos because they were not able to get the golds.

The real enemy of Ferdinand Marcos was also the enemy of mankind. They're like a pyramid on top of them was a silent but powerful country. America and Vatican was working for the interest of that powerful country controlled by a single and powerful family called the Rothschild’s!

We have the right to know the truth about us Filipinos. School never teach our ancient past, our real origins, our long lost kingdom. We are the people of MAHARLIKA kingdom ruled by the DATU's. Our kingdom was a peaceful and respected kingdom until the Spaniards invaded us under the flag of King Phillip.

They call our kingdom Philippines! They claim that they discover our country but in reality our kingdom was far richer than the 4 major empires in Europe. The Roman Italians, the Gothic Spaniards, the Celtic England, and the Vandal France. Combine all of their imperial wealth can't matched our wealth! That was the truth that's been hidden from us. The U.N. knows it. U.S.A. knows that. China and Russia knows that.

I remember George W. Bush morning interview in 2001 and he's been ask who's the richest country on the planet he smiled and says "The Philippines"- Marcos knew that but he didn't talk!

Yes, Marcos didn't talk how rich we are ‘coz he carefully doing his plans away from the eyes of the enemies who wanted to claim all our wealth. Then he decided to create an Asian dollar, so that Asia wills never barrow money to European Union with sky rocket interests. Did anyone know that Marcos represents Asia and he is the head of Asian Union. Napaka daming magagandang plano ni Marcos not only for our country pero sa buong Asia. But the dark forces did everything they can to prevent Marcos! They manipulates the minds of the youths about truth and make Marcos a bad man while they pretend to be a good one, they use the church like Cory did! They made the terrorist a hero like what they did to Ninoy! And now they wanted to install Cory Aquino as a saint! They used a yellow ribbon instead of a swastika! Pero the force that manipulates the midst of the Filipinos was only a puppet of the true force who wanted to enslave humanity pero hindi pa nila magawa all the way dahil Marcos locked the Monetary-1, so it will never ended up in the hands of the dark side reptilian illuminati. The monetary-1 represented by Marcos was for all humanity.

CARLO GAMBINO said…. My great great grandfather was Salvador Tagean, he is a direct descendant of the Tagean, and the Tagean is a close relative of the Tallano royal family. My grandfather who is war veteran keep telling us that the most important thing for us to know is to know the truth about our history, the truth about Marcos ‘coz it was all connected. I manage to connect all the dots and I figured out who was the force behind Marcos downfall and it's not the people power and the Aquinos. They are just instrument or puppets. My grandfather tells us many things including important and highly sensitive topics or events. There is too much lies in school and even in major religion.

School teaches the young ones wrong information like Ninoy was the hero and Marcos minimal lang ang appearance saga books. They never mention the Tagean/tallano royal family who owned our country the Maharlika kingdom! Kaya what I do to my children is what my grandfather did he educated us everyday by telling tales, and those tales was the reality that never been told or teach by those who wanted to poison our intelligence they fear we found out the truth ‘coz if we find it out no one can command anyone! Means we all equal in life! There is no poor anymore, and there is no rich! The word elite will never be used again!

We are familiar to General Antonio Luna… the greatest general in the history of the Philippines but the school never said that, Antonio Luna has an affair with YSIDRA COJUANGCO the grandmother of Cory Aquino! YSIDRA and Emilio AGUINALDO plotted the death of Antonio Luna, Antonio Luna has a thousand tons of gold’s… gagamitin sana to fund the war against invading UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, pero the AGUINALDO regime was corrupt and under the influence of America, kaya they plotted the death of the great General Luna. Gregorio Del Pilar and Manuel Quezon can't do anything about it ‘coz that time they are powerless to prevent it, but they knew it’s going to happen sooner than later! Apolinario Mabini who's also the adviser of AGUINALDO wanted to prevent it, pero dahil lumpo siya na dapat talaga siya din ang presidente wala din nagawa para mapigilan pa ang naka ambang kamatayan ng magiting na Antonio Luna.

Emilio AGUINALDO also killed the true and first president of our republic and it is the great Andres Bonifacio… killed by the order of Emilio AGUINALDO and claimed the first presidency! Did anyone hear this in school?! I've heard this to my grandfather… At first I'm confused ‘coz iba ang teachings sa school pero why would our grandfather tell us lies? Then we grew up and connect all the dots then it makes sense, the truth cannot be hidden for a long time! And it's our right to know it! Marcos didn't do anything bad for us! Instead he loves us more than himself. Lahat ng pinakikinabangan natin ngayon sa bansa produkto ng pag mamahal ni FEM. Pero ninanakaw sa atin ng mga yellow ribbon army! They can't let Bongbong Marcos become a president dahil pag nangyari yan people will know the truth! Not just the truth but we will have the things that belong to us! Like what I've said before we are rich! Richer than any country! The world leaders know that! But they also know we've been manipulated by corrupt government China and Russia respects Marcos they treat him as a king ‘coz Marcos was a good leader with brilliant mind! Vladimir Putin's Russia opposed American rule, China too! Then America keep telling’ the world that Russia and China is a major threat! Pero mali kabaliktaran! When U.S. invades Middle East and put the 9-11 to Osama that's a lie! They just wanted to invade Middle East, Iraq and Iran ‘coz Iraq is the ancient empire of Babylon, mayaman sa oil! Gusto nila yung oil business! They keep making movies na ang terrorist ay Muslims, Russians, Chinese pero those countries didn't engage to war like U.S. did. Napansin niyo ba na halos lahat ng giyera may partisipasyon ang U.S.?!

U.S government destroyed Marcos dahil baon sila sa utang kay Marcos personal na pera ni Marcos ang ipinautang sa kanila. Marcos lends them gold bars hidden under the twin towers with interest yan. The contract expires exactly the same time the twin tower was been attacked, ika nga ng America! But it's not been attacked; it's been a part of the deal! The gold’s was under the twin towers and twin towers also were part of it! The towers must be destroyed and the gold bars must be returned to the owners! Marcos owns the gold’s! After that American economy collapse dahil wala na silang gold reserves!

Q: how is that happened na ang U.S. ay malaki ang utang sa pilipinas? Sabi tayo ang lubog sa utang nung panahon ni Marcos… kamuntik na nga daw tayo mabankrupt dahil panay utang daw po ni Marcos.. kung hindi lang sana nag edsa1..di ba 1986 ang maturity ng mga PAUTANG ni Marcos sa ibat ibang bansa? Is this true?!

A: The past government hide it and never told anyone except to those who lived at the time na nangyayari ang mga yun, they know the truth… ang mga bata ngayon hindi nila alam, kaya ano man ang itinuro sakanila sa school they believe it agad!

ISYDRA CUJUANGCO, yes she get 60% of the gold’s held by General Luna dahil she played major role to assassinate the great general! The rest kaya mayaman ang COJUANGCO, pero they can't matched the Marcos wealth even the Rothschild’s and the Rockefellers envied Ferdinand Marcos wealth that is why they do everything they can to get that wealth pinalabas nila na ill- gotten wealth samantalang may sariling papeles ang yaman ni Marcos, before pa siya maging pwresident gave by the royal family tallano!

Yes, America has a huge dept to Marcos and it’s paid already after the collapse of twin towers U.S. Government pays all the gold’s that they barrowed to Marcos with interest! Kaya American economic bagsak na! And yes Marcos lends all major country na nag boom today like Dubai and other countries. Kasi nga sa Monetary-1, si Marcos and holder ng yaman ng tao at bansa sa buong planeta it's kinda hard to explain! It is better for us to know things the truth and the liars.

1976 maturity humingi ng 10 years extension para mapag planuhan nila na after that out of power na si Marcos sa mata ng madla, pero he's never been out of power dahil until now they prevented the Marcos not having absolute power like maging Vice President or maging President dahil it will become their downfall! Kaya they keep telling the young ones na si Marcos bad man

Napakadami ng may utang Kay Marcos and they all envy him dahil he is the Monetary-1… can you see how Ronald Reagan respects Ferdinand Marcos…. Reagan acted like his the biggest fan of Ferdinand Marcos dahil reality lang, Marcos is more powerful than the pope! He is a good man with good heart!

[transssexualheart]

Hey b I know you like asks so answer all 200 because I'm just that nice :^)

FUCK THATS SO MANY 

200: my crush’s name is:as if you all don’t know at this point. it’s sarah

199: i was born in:2002

198: i am really:gay

197: my cellphone company is: i’m so fuckin stupid i’m not sure what the question is asking

196: my eye color is: brown

195: my shoe size is:eight and a half/nine

194: my ring size is:i don’t wear rings

193: my height is:5′5

192: i am allergic to:nothing

191: my first car was:never had a car

190: my first job was:never had a job

189: last book you read:hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy

188: my bed is:small

187: my pet:is a beautiful orange cat named danny and i love her

186: my best friend:is lovely

185: my favorite shampoo is:i don’t care 

184: xbox or ps3:i’ve never played a ps3 so i guess xbox

183: piggy banks are:ok??? why are we trying to start piggy bank discourse

182: in my pockets:are trash

181: on my calendar:i don’t use a calendar

180: marriage is:alright?? i’d get married if my partner wanted to

179: spongebob can:?? exist??

178: my mom:is not very nice

177: the last three songs i bought were?uhhh i havent bought music in a while idk

176: last yt video i watched:for him.

175: how many cousins do you have?fuck dude. so many. i don’t know.

174: do you have any siblings?two, a brother and a sister

173: are your parents divorced?well my parents tried to get divorced but my dad died before it actually got worked out and my mom and my stepdad aren’t married and have never been so

172: are you taller than your mom?i believe so  

171: do you play an instrument?yeah, piano

170: what did you do yesterday?not much, just sat around and then walked in circles around my house for hours and then hung out with my siblings in the yard

[do you believe in]

169: love at first site:no, what if that pretty girl u saw on the street is an asshole?? what if she’s racist and homophobic dude u don’t know her

168: luck:sure

167: fate:yeah i guess

166: yourself:haha no

165: aliens:ya

164: heaven:idk

163: hell:idk

162: god:idk!! 

161: horoscopes:idk they’re fun to look at 

160: soul mates: i’d like to believe in soul mates

159: ghosts:idk

158: gay marriage:gay marriage isn’t a fuckinhg cryptid, yes i believe in it i’m gay and i’m gonna probably get married

157: war:god fuck i don’t know

156: orbs:??????????

155: magic:could be real, might not be, who knows

[this or that]

154: hugs or kisses:kisses

153: drunk or high:never been either so

152: phone or online:phone, can text my friends whom i lov

151: red heads or black haired:black haired i guess

150: blondes or brunettes:someone’s gonna get sad when i answer this but brunettes

149: hot or cold:i don’t know actually

148: summer or winter:summer, it’s better than having seasonal depression added onto my normal depression

147: autumn or spring: spring

146: chocolate or vanilla:vanilla

145: night or day:night

144: oranges or apples:apples

143: curly or straight hair:curly!!!!!!!!!!!!!

142: mcdonalds or burger king:don’t really eat at either but if i had to choose, mcdonalds

141: white chocolate or milk chocolate?white chocolate

140: mac or pc:pc

139: flip flops or high heels:high heels

138: ugly and rich OR sweet and poor:wtf 

137: coke or pepsi:don’t really drink soda

136: hillary or obama:man i don’t know too much about politics all i know is that i’d choose hillary over trump any day

135: buried or cremated:man i’m not sure,, i guess i’d prefer to be cremated Please Rid The World Of My Horrible Body

134: singing or dancing:singing

133: coach or chanel:i have like fifty cents do you think i can afford that shit

132: kat mcphee or taylor hicks:who

131: small town or big city:i love the city, maybe that’s because i live in a small town but i love the city

130: wal mart or target:target

129: ben stiller or adam sandler: idk

128: manicure or pedicure:well i don’t want anyone touching my feet i don’t even like taking my socks off around friends unless i very much trust them

127: east coast or west coast:well i live on the east coast so

126: your birthday or christmas:my bday bc we go on vacation for it bc it’s over the summer

125: chocolate or flowers:flowers

124: disney or six flags:never been to disney so six flags

123: yankees or red sox:sport???

[here’s what i think about]

122: war:didn’t another question p much ask the same thing

121: george bush:idk??

120: gay marriage:p much already been asked bud

119: the presidential election:not my president can’t believe u fuckers let trump win

118: abortion:if someone wants an abortion, they should be able to get it. no one else should have a monopoly over that, not even the father, because their body does not belong to him.

117: myspace:never used it

116: reality tv:eh

115: parents:some are good, mine i am not fans of

114: back stabbers:i don’t think i’ve ever really been backstabbed

113: ebay:it’s ok?

112: facebook:don’t really use it

111: work:don’t have a job

110: my neighbors:i don’t talk to them much but everytime we go near their dogs on the otherside of the fence they call the dogs back or pull them away one of the kids went “haha you can’t touch our dogs” and?? idk why??

109: gas prices:i don’t drive

108: designer clothes:can’t afford them

107: college:haven’t been 

106: sports:Throw Ball

105: my family:my sister is lovely, my brother is really mean, and my parents are also p mean like i don’t realize sometimes until i tell something they said and they’re like “??? that’s really not ok??”

104: the future:hasn’t happened yet how would i know

[last time i]

103: hugged someone:earlier today i hugged my aunt because she’s over for easter

102: last time you ate:just ate a tootsie roll a lil bit ago

101: saw someone i haven’t seen in a while:i guess the only person i haven’t seen very recently is spence and the last time i saw him was a few weeks ago

100: cried in front of someone:long time ago

99: went to a movie theater: went to see beauty and the beast a while back but i don’t remember exactly when that was

98: took a vacation: last summer

97: swam in a pool:last summer at my aunt’s probably 

96: changed a diaper:many years

95: got my nails done:i painted a clear coat on them a lil while back does that count

94: went to a wedding:year or so ago?

93: broke a bone:never broken any bones

92: got a piercing:when i was like five

91: broke the law:idk

90: texted:a few mins ago

[misc]

89: who makes you laugh the most:hahah. u

88: something i will really miss when i leave home is:oh man. all my friends, hubbard hall, the school playground, as much as i wanna leave this town i’ll probably cry leaving it behind

87: the last movie i saw:moana!

86: the thing that i’m looking forward to the most:death

85: the thing i’m not looking forward to:school starting again

83: the most difficult thing to do is:tell someone you’re in love with them

82: i have gotten a speeding ticket:never??

81: my zodiac sign is:leo

80: the first person i talked to today was:probably my mom

79: first time you had a crush:seventh grade

78: the one person u can’t hide anything from:apparently you because u always figure me out

77: last time someone said something you were thinking: yesterday, spence was talking about how his bf had big hands and i said “u know what they say” and i was about to say “big gloves” but he beat me to it

76: right now i am talking to:i’m not talking i’m typing

75: what are you going to do when you grow up:idk

 74: i have/will get a job:i don’t?? know??

73: tomorrow:is easter

72: today:is not easter

71: next summer:??

70: next weekend:idk man??

69: i have these pets:one cat, two fish

68: the worst sound in the world:chEWING

67: the person that makes me cry the most is:haha

66: people that make you happy:my friends

65: last time i cried:about a month ago

64: my friends are:the best!!!

63: my computer is:alright

62: my school:is the fucking worse

61: my car:is non existent

60: i lose all respect for people who:support trump

59: the movie i cried at was:i cried over the shitty mario movie when i was seven

58: your hair color is: dark brown

57: tv shows you watch:i don’t really watch tv

56: fav website:i dont kno

55: your dream vacation:to go to the beach with friends

54: the worst pain i was ever in was:emotional

53: how do you like your steak cooked:well not burnt

52: my room is:alright

51: my fav celebrity is:does dan avidan count? he still holds a special place in my heart

50: where would you like to be:my answers for these kinds of qs are always so gay 

49: do you want children:used to not want them, but i guess depending on the person i’d have them with i MIGHT

48: ever been in love:ya

47: who’s your best friend:asdgkjgf

46: more guy friends or more girl friends:many of us are nb

45: one thing that makes you feel great is:being loved

44: one person you wish you could see right now:u know, u all know who

43: do you have a five year plan:???????

42: have you made a list of the things to do before u die:1. kiss a girlthat’s it

41: have you prenamed your children:no

40: last person i got mad at:probably my brother

39: i would like to move to:nyc

38: i wish i was a professional:animator

[my favs]

37: candy:sweedish fish and jolly ranchers

36: vehicle:idk

35: president:i only remember obama

34: state visited:idk

33: cellphone provider:also idk

32: athlete:don’t pay attention to sports

31: actor:i don’t freakin know

30: actress:well,

29: singer:wELL,,

28: band:not sure

27: clothing store:idk

26: grocery store:hannaford??

25: tv show:no idea

24: movie:so many good movies

23: website:i think this was already asked??

22: animal:not sure

21: theme park:only ever been to like one

20: holiday:xmas

19: sport to watch:uhh i guess soccer?? i’ll actually understand whats happening so

18: sport to play:also soccer

17: magazine:don’t read them

16: book:carry on

15: day of the week:saturday

14: beach:no specific one i just like the beach

13: concert attended:only ever been to one, it was a top concert

12: thing to cook:grilled cheese

11: food:not sure

10: restaurant:idk

9: radio station:don’t really listen to the radio

8: yankee candle scent:??? idk???

7: perfume:don’t really wear it

6: flower:roses or tiger lillies

5: color:blue

4: talk show host:i don’t know??

3: comedian:bo burnham

2: dog breed:shiba inu

1: did you answer all of these truthfully?ya

i didn’t move the whole time i answered all 200 help me

#ask tag

[orbemnews]

NASA’s Last Rocket Eleven years in the making, the most powerful NASA-built rocket since the Apollo program at last stands upright. Framed by the industrial test platform to which it is mounted, the Space Launch System’s core section is a gleaming, apricot-colored column cast into relief by twisting pipes and steel latticework. The rocket is taller than the Statue of Liberty, pedestal and all, and is the cornerstone of NASA’s astronaut ambitions. The launch vehicle is central to the agency’s Artemis program to return humans to the lunar surface, and later, land them on Mars. On Thursday, NASA will try for a second time to prove that the Space Launch System is ready to take flight, aiming for a continuous “hot fire” of its engines for as long as eight minutes. If the test goes well, the rocket’s next stop would be Kennedy Space Center in Florida, and as early as November, the launchpad. It is expected to lift a capsule called Orion on a path around the moon and back. Its first crewed mission is planned for 2023. That flight will be the first to lift astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit since 1972. Indeed, it will send astronauts farther into space than any human has gone before. And yet far from being a bold statement about the future of human spaceflight, the Space Launch System rocket represents something else: the past, and the end. This is the last class of rocket that NASA is ever likely to build. Seeing it launch, though, will actually mean something. While NASA has long desired to return astronauts to deep space, it could not. The agency lacked a vehicle designed, tested and validated as safe to lift humans more than a couple of hundred miles from the ground. If this week’s test succeeds and the rocket later flies, the United States will be able to say that it does. But the course has not run smooth. The Space Launch System was born not on the drafting tables of engineers, but on the desks of senators. In 2010, Congress legislated into existence a launch vehicle for firing heavy things to deep space. What things? TBD. And where, exactly? No one could say for sure. Members of Congress had no particular design in mind, but they demanded that NASA rummage through crates of old space shuttle parts whenever possible to build this thing, and required that it launch by 2016. Mandated to build the big rocket, NASA cobbled together exploration programs that would use it. First, it was an asteroid rocket. Then a Mars rocket. Now, it is an Artemis moon rocket. In any event, the Space Launch System is billions of dollars over budget and five years beyond its compulsory launch date. A hot fire test in January disappointed NASA engineers hoping to prove it was worth the wait. Instead of simulating eight minutes of the stresses and events of an actual launch, however, the engines shut down after just 67.2 seconds. NASA blames “test parameters that were intentionally conservative” for the failure. Engineers have since repaired a valve and replaced a faulty electrical harness that had signaled a “major component failure” during the test. The setbacks that have plagued the Space Launch System stand in stark contrast to what else has happened in rocketry in the past decade. If you’ve logged on to the internet in the past five years, you’ve probably seen the spectacular launches of rockets built by SpaceX. Elon Musk’s private aerospace outfit has fired hundreds of satellites into space, and even a Tesla sports car. Its rocket boosters then return to Earth and land elegantly upright for reuse. On Sunday, one made the round trip for the ninth time. This private space program was nurtured by NASA and accelerated after the space shuttles stopped flying in 2011. Last year, SpaceX began carrying the agency’s astronauts to the International Space Station. Now the company has set its sights on landing people on the moon and Mars. But SpaceX’s rockets aren’t ready to carry astronauts beyond low-Earth orbit, and few other companies have expressed interest in this truly long-distance travel market. The Space Launch System is not NASA’s first post-Apollo attempt to build a deep space rocket for the astronaut corps. On July 20, 1989, 20 years after the Apollo 11 moon landing, President George H.W. Bush committed humankind to becoming a multiplanetary species. Later he offered a timetable: that by 2019, the 50th anniversary of that “one giant leap,” astronauts would salute the stars and stripes from Mars. Obviously, that didn’t happen. In 2004, George W. Bush made a commitment similar to his father’s. Much of the engineering that went into the Space Launch System and the Orion capsule can be traced to that now-canceled program, Constellation. In 2010, Barack Obama made his own declaration, asking NASA to use the rocket to journey to Mars. The hardware has since been absorbed by Artemis, the NASA program started by the Trump administration to land the next man and first woman on the moon before heading to the red planet. Despite the lofty ambitions of so many presidents, humans have remained mired in orbit. The ability to reach the moon is not as simple as going a little farther. The space station operates about 250 miles above Earth’s surface. The moon is about 250,000 miles away. Accordingly, after 32 years of false starts and failed programs, a successful launch of the Space Launch System will at last reopen old frontiers of human spaceflight. NASA will again have the hardware to transport humankind to other worlds. No other American rocket can send astronauts to the moon in a single launch. The Falcon Heavy, a large rocket built by SpaceX that has flown three times, is not certified to launch humans. SpaceX has instead focused its crewed deep space ambitions on Starship, a sleek, ambitious spacecraft that is under development and possibly years away from flying humans. Right now, if NASA wants to return astronauts to the moon, the Space Launch System is the only game in town, even if it costs $2 billion per launch and cannot be reused. SpaceX and Blue Origin, another private rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos of Amazon, are solving very difficult problems: how to build versatile rockets and crew vehicles that land so gently that they are reusable even with astronauts aboard. By contrast, the NASA rocket does not look like anyone’s vision of the future. That is part of what makes the Space Launch System a useful transitional product. It has no unusual engineering hurdles to leap. There is every reason to believe that once these rockets demonstrate their flight worthiness, they will work well and reliably. Until Starship or some other rocket is flying safely and regularly, NASA can continue its interplanetary endeavors knowing that in the interim, it has a working giant rocket. There is great value in that. The big rocket won’t be needed forever. It might be needed only long enough to get the first woman on the lunar surface. The commercial launch sector may be ready to take it from there. It is highly unlikely that NASA will ever again rely on rockets it has built on its own. The Space Launch System is the end of the line. If the only purpose it serves is giving the nation the time and confidence to get a private, reusable vessel spaceborne, it will have been a success. Whether the Space Launch System program ends next year or next decade, unlike the end of the space shuttle or Saturn 5, it will not be the end of a chapter, but the end of a book. NASA will be out of the rocket business. When the next generation goes to Kennedy Space Center and sees a giant old Space Launch System booster on display, the tour guide will say, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore,” and that will be true — literally. David W. Brown is a journalist who writes about spaceflight. He is the author of “The Mission,” an examination of NASA’s long bid to build a spacecraft to explore Jupiter’s moon Europa. Source link Orbem News #NASAs #rocket