Trump the Disrupter

[Blackthorne]

'Dr. E. Michael Jones returns to Our Interesting Times to discuss Donald Trump's upset victory and what it means economically and geopolitically. He discusses the Trump phenomenon, how his successful campaign was a repudiation of globalism, Trump's cabinet picks, and the president-elect's staffing his incoming administration with the usual crony capitalist, bellicose interventionists and military brass hats.'

[Blackthorne]

Trump's choosing of Tillerson (a Rockefeller creature it seems) as Secretary of State is bothersome.

[Raskolnikov]

The Rockefellers tried to oust him from Exxon-Mobile in 2008 under pseudo-environemntal pretensions but he rebuffed them. He then went against the US government and signed a deal with the Kurds in 2011. Now they're calling him a Russian because he does business around the world. (I am just pulling this off of google.) This is the most powerful position among cabinet members and Trump picked someone who like Trump himself has some power aside from his own post. I feel better about Rex after some of his apparently shittier picks. I am looking forward to seeing how this develops and seeing what is the long-term strategy at play with the picks.

--
E Michael Jones is a good guy.

[Blackthorne]

'Donald Trump Will Ruthlessly Decimate the CIA for Turning on Him'

On Wednesday night, NBC released a report, in collusion with a myriad of anonymous sources reputed to be inside the CIA and other intelligence agencies, claiming that Vladimir Putin personally directed the destruction of Hillary Clinton via hacking hers and the DNC's servers before the US presidential election.

Via NBC:

U.S. intelligence officials now believe with "a high level of confidence" that Russian President Vladimir Putin became personally involved in the covert Russian campaign to interfere in the U.S. presidential election, senior U.S. intelligence officials told NBC News.

Two senior officials with direct access to the information say new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material from Democrats was leaked and otherwise used. The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies, the officials said.

The report does not cite any source by name for its information, other than incorrigible moron Micheal McFaul, one time US ambassador to Russia, as a cheerleader for the report.

I must stress, this is an incredible direct accusation against the President of Russia, which has the potential to provoke both international and domestic crises which could quickly spiral out of control. This is far, far beyond reckless.

Rather than keeping their heads down for the next four years, even trying to exercise some subtle influence on the president's decisions, these infantile flunkies within the CIA and mass media have thrown themselves into the open in this last ditch desperate attack which definitively condemns them to the president-elect's coming wrath.

They apparently have no idea that they have just kicked open a hornets' nest.

Donald J. Trump does not take prisoners. He will not forgive, or forget. And the massacre coming to halls of Langley and to anybody and anywhere else in the executive branch involved in this is going to beggar belief.

Trump, who was a protege of the infamously ruthless attorney Roy Cohn, has made it very clear over the years how he deals with his enemies. In "Think Big" he detailed how to handle traitors:

"I always get even...I go out of my way to make [their] life miserable."

"When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades" and "Go for the jugular so that people watching will not want to mess with you."

In "The Art of the Comeback" Trump wrote:

"I believe in an eye for an eye — like the Old Testament says."

http://russia-insider.com/en/politics/do...im/ri18205

[Aptrgangr]

FBI backs CIA view that Russia intervened to help Trump win election

By Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima December 16 at 2:20 PM
FBI Director James B. Comey and Director of National Intelligence James R. Clapper Jr. are in agreement with a CIA assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election in part to help Donald Trump win the presidency, according to U.S. officials.

Comey’s support for the CIA’s conclusion — and officials say that he never changed his position — suggests that the leaders of the three agencies are in agreement on Russian intentions, contrary to suggestions by some lawmakers that the FBI disagreed with the CIA. (...)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/nat...583a23fc67

[Blackthorne]

'Limbaugh: No one can prove Russia hacked election'

Conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh challenged a CIA report that concluded Russia interfered with the 2016 election to sway results in President-elect Donald Trump’s favor.

"Nobody can provide any evidence that the Russians hacked the election," he said on Wednesday, as reported by the Washington Examiner.

Details of the CIA’s secret assessment were first revealed in a Washington Post story last week. The FBI presented a more “fuzzy” and “ambiguous" judgment about the interference, the Post reported.

Limbaugh was more speculative of the CIA’s report.

"There are two ways to cheat in an election. There are two things that happen in an election involving ballots,” he said. “The first phase is that ballots are cast, i.e., people go out there and they vote. And then the next aspect is that those ballots are counted."

He said he believes the story will become inflated to serve as a way for Democrats to continuously undermine Trump’s presidency.

"So where did the Russians cheat? What did the Russian hack affect when it comes to ballots? Is anybody alleging anything? They aren't. The whole point of the Russian hack is the [Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John] Podesta emails were made public and it's not fair because the Republican emails and whatever the Russians discovered in the hack of the Republicans, even though Priebus says that they weren't hacked, that doesn't matter."

Trump has challenged the CIA conclusion as well, saying in several tweets that if the Russians had helped Hillary Clinton, it would be called a conspiracy.

Bipartisan leadership in the House and Senate has called for a congressional review of the CIA's findings. Intelligence agencies have denied the review so far, citing an ongoing review by President Obama.

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-r...d-election

The allegations of Russian hacking are predicated entirely upon double-speak, innuendo and hearsay. Where's the actual proof?

[Mustapaita]

Quote:This Political Theorist Predicted the Rise of Trumpism. His Name Was Hunter S. Thompson.

In Hell’s Angels, the gonzo journalist wrote about left-behind people motivated only by “an ethic of total retaliation.” Sound familiar?

By Susan McWilliams

In late March, Donald Trump opened a rally in Wisconsin by mocking the state’s governor, Scott Walker, who had just endorsed his Republican opponent, Ted Cruz. “He came in on his Harley,” Trump said of Walker, “but he doesn’t look like a motorcycle guy.”

“The motorcycle guys,” he added, “like Trump.”

It has been 50 years since Hunter S. Thompson published the definitive book on motorcycle guys: Hell’s Angels: The Strange and Terrible Saga of the Outlaw Motorcycle Gangs. It grew out of a piece first published in The Nation one year earlier. My grandfather, Carey McWilliams, editor of the magazine from 1955 to 1975, commissioned the piece from Thompson—it was the gonzo journalist’s first big break, and the beginning of a friendship between the two men that would last until my grandfather died in 1980. Because of that family connection, I had long known that Hell’s Angels was a political book. Even so, I was surprised, when I finally picked it up a few years ago, by how prophetic Thompson is and how eerily he anticipates 21st-century American politics. This year, when people asked me what I thought of the election, I kept telling them to read Hell’s Angels.

Most people read Hell’s Angels for the lurid stories of sex and drugs. But that misses the point entirely. What’s truly shocking about reading the book today is how well Thompson foresaw the retaliatory, right-wing politics that now goes by the name of Trumpism. After following the motorcycle guys around for months, Thompson concluded that the most striking thing about them was not their hedonism but their “ethic of total retaliation” against a technologically advanced and economically changing America in which they felt they’d been counted out and left behind. Thompson saw the appeal of that retaliatory ethic. He claimed that a small part of every human being longs to burn it all down, especially when faced with great and impersonal powers that seem hostile to your very existence. In the United States, a place of ever greater and more impersonal powers, the ethic of total retaliation was likely to catch on.

What made that outcome almost certain, Thompson thought, was the obliviousness of Berkeley, California, types who, from the safety of their cocktail parties, imagined that they understood and represented the downtrodden. The Berkeley types, Thompson thought, were not going to realize how presumptuous they had been until the downtrodden broke into one of those cocktail parties and embarked on a campaign of rape, pillage, and slaughter. For Thompson, the Angels weren’t important because they heralded a new movement of cultural hedonism, but because they were the advance guard for a new kind of right-wing politics. As Thompson presciently wrote in the Nation piece he later expanded on in Hell’s Angels, that kind of politics is “nearly impossible to deal with” using reason or empathy or awareness-raising or any of the other favorite tools of the left.

The rest

[Artturi]

A highly amusing and insightful bit from the comments section of the article:

Quote:Let's see. The Hell's Angels were representative of the alienated white working class. I guess the Heartless Felons street gang of Cleveland are representative of the alienated African American hood. The narcotraficantes are representative of poor Mexicans, as ISIS is of youth of the Islamic world. They are all the outcome of economic despair, and the political failure of their respective societies. In the US situation we have seen the future and it is a Mad Max movie of nihilistic violence. At the end of every article I read I ask if it is telling me to do something. At the end of this article it tells me to max out the credit card at the gun store, make my house look like a forward Army outpost on the Waziristan border, and get ready. "They" are coming for my wine collection, brie and daughter.

As usual, an article by a liberal/left-wing academic mouthpiece only saw people in material terms. America and all the other Western societies have a severe spiritual illness which can not be reduced to socio-economical discontent, as the comment also points out.

This projection of human concerns in terms of disparity of material wealth is there for the leftists to justify their political programs, so it must exist as an ad hoc reference point of all their ongoing narrative. However, this credo effectively also shields them from the responsibility of the moral instability and spiritual vacuum they have continually summoned and fostered. Which is testified in another quote by the way:

Quote:I guess I have to wonder if one reason Thompson got stomped is that he thought he had the whole group of Hell's Angels figured out, defined, categorized. I truly don't think I can understand Trump voters. I've read many analyses and all make intellectual sense. Maybe they are all true. Or not. I just can't understand...

Humans are spiritual and moral creatures first, which is something that may always escape academics who try to reason everything in terms of clear (or devious and inhuman?) calculations.

[Blackthorne]

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/busine....html?_r=0

Japanese Mogul Starts on Vow to Trump to Create 50,000 U.S. Jobs

SAN FRANCISCO — The Japanese business mogul Masayoshi Son pledged to President-elect Donald J. Trump nearly two weeks ago that he would invest in the United States and create about 50,000 jobs.

On Monday, Mr. Son’s conglomerate, SoftBank, took what it described as the first step in fulfilling that commitment.

By leading a $1.2 billion investment in OneWeb, which makes satellites for internet access, SoftBank said it was continuing to invest in new technology and supporting job creation in the United States. In their announcement, SoftBank and OneWeb said the investment would create nearly 3,000 jobs in the United States over four years.

“Earlier this month, I met with President-elect Trump and shared my commitment to investing and creating jobs in the U.S.,” Mr. Son said in a statement. “America has always been at the forefront of innovation and technological development, and we are thrilled to be playing a part in continuing to drive that growth as we work to create a truly globally connected ecosystem.”

Mr. Son, whose technology and telecommunications empire has made him one of Japan’s wealthiest men, has positioned himself as a prospective partner of the coming Trump administration by promising to help spur job growth.

At a meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan this month, Mr. Son pledged to invest $50 billion in the United States, which, by his reckoning, would create about 50,000 jobs. Mr. Trump has cited the pledge as a sign that he could persuade the private sector to lead improvements in the national economy.

Much of the promised investment, however, would come from a previously announced $100 billion investment fund that SoftBank will lead, called the SoftBank Vision Fund in which the conglomerate has joined Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi and others.

The OneWeb investment does not come from the Vision fund, a spokesman for SoftBank said. Instead it will come directly from SoftBank, as yet another investment in technology it views as potentially disruptive. (SoftBank is providing $1 billion of the investment, while the rest is coming from OneWeb investors.)

During its history, SoftBank has struck deals for stakes in companies including the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba Group, the online lender SoFi and the Chinese ride-hailing start-up Didi Chuxing.

The new deal will give SoftBank and its partners nearly half of OneWeb, a four-year-old start-up based in Arlington, Va., that aims to beam internet access to unconnected areas of the world through satellites it intends to launch. Greg Wyler, who founded OneWeb, said in an interview that it wanted to bring the internet to every unconnected school in the world by 2022, then provide reasonably priced internet throughout the world five years later by making about 720 satellites and putting them into orbit.

SoftBank is joining a list of OneWeb partners that includes Airbus, Qualcomm, Richard Branson of the Virgin Group and the satellite company Intelsat.

Mr. Wyler said in the interview that the job creation number came from estimates of jobs that had been or would be created in its ranks and at partners like Qualcomm. Many of the jobs, he said, would be at OneWeb’s satellite manufacturing plant in Exploration Park, Fla., which is a joint venture with Airbus.

[Aptrgangr]

http://boards.4chan.org/pol/thread/10361...oral-votes