A small tax-exempt political group with ties to wealthy liberals like billionaire financier George Soros has quietly helped elect 11 reform-minded progressive Democrats as secretaries of state to oversee the election process in battleground states and keep Republican “political operatives from deciding who can vote and how those votes are counted.”
Known as the Secretary of State Project (SOSP), the organization was formed by liberal activists in 2006 to put Democrats in charge of state election offices, where key decisions often are made in close races on which ballots are counted and which are not.
The group’s website said it wants to stop Republicans from “manipulating” election results.
Soros and liberal groups seeking top election posts in battleground states
Tag: history
FLASHBACK: Trump on Meghan & Harry
Harvard scholar has controversial take on Japan’s “comfort women”
…The entrepreneurs and the women addressed these problems with a multi-year indenture agreement that bundled an up-front advance, additional cash compensation, a maximum term, and the right to quit early if a woman generated enough revenue. In the article that follows, I detail the economic logic to these contracts. I compare the sexual service contracts the entrepreneurs and women negotiated (i) for the comfort stations, with the contracts they negotiated (ii) for domestic Japanese brothels, (iii) for domestic Korean brothels, and (iv) for the non-comfort-station war-time brothels across Japanese-governed East Asia.
Contracting for sex in the Pacific War
Here is an article on the paper: Harvard professor sparks fury after claiming Japan’s ‘comfort women’ CHOSE to be prostitutes, in new paper
How scientific journals make money while also impeding science
It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell
…The way to make money from a scientific article [is]…to duck most of the actual costs. Scientists create work under their own direction – funded largely by governments – and give it to publishers for free; the publisher pays scientific editors who judge whether the work is worth publishing and check its grammar, but the bulk of the editorial burden – checking the scientific validity and evaluating the experiments, a process known as peer review – is done by working scientists on a volunteer basis. The publishers then sell the product back to government-funded institutional and university libraries, to be read by scientists – who, in a collective sense, created the product in the first place.
Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
Three ways Descartes philosophy transformed Europe
Gov Kristi Noem
Lee Smith on US hidden ties to China
Miles Yu on China and US-China relations
Patrick Byrne describes more of why post election plans flopped
He also tells an interesting side-story (below) about Trump being threatened through Melania; JFK’ed if he won the second term.
…I was told something by someone very much in Trump’s inner circle. What I was told was this: Melania had been warned by a government official that if Trump served another term he would be JFK’ed. It may even have been someone in the Secret Service itself, in a “We will not be able to protect him” sense. The threat included another family member as well, per the telling. I find it hard to believe that anyone in the Secret Service itself would ever say that, but the source of the information to me had otherwise been blemishless, and the claim was that whoever (perhaps Secret Service, perhaps someone else) had said this to Melania, it was someone from whom such a claim would be taken seriously. Melania was begging Donald not to fight, and simply to concede and get out of Washington with his family.
How DJT Lost the White House, Chapter 4: The Christmas Doldrums (December 23- noon January 6)
I doubt I am the only one who has had the clear realization that elites—or anyone with any status compared to someone else—can be extremely narrowly confined within the beliefs and mores of their immediate community. Be that supervisors versus workers; white collar versus blue; or the super-rich versus everyone else, people in higher places can be completely blind to what is really happening around them.
Nations, such as this one, fall due to that blindness. The Russian elite of the early 20th Century barely perceived the danger that was fast approaching. And even when they did, they were not prepared to act decisively.
Byrne describes how the January 6 DC rally became an example of just that sort of blindness. It’s a sad chapter to read in the decline and fall of USA, but important nevertheless.
UPDATE Related: They’re admitting it: TIME Mag: “Trump Was Right. There WAS A Conspiracy”… “Well-Funded Cabal, Powerful People Changing Laws, Steering Media And Controlling The Flow Of Information.”
The Waterfowl People (Veelinnurahvas) – English version
Veelinnurahvas – The people of the water bird Directed by Lennart Meri A documentary about the histoy and linguistic ties of the Finno-Ugric, and Samoyedic peoples. Speakers of the Kamassian, Nenets, Khanty, Komi, Mari, and Karelian languages were filmed in their everyday settings 50 years ago. The footage was shot in Altai Krai, the Nenets Okrug, Khantia-Mansia, Uzbekistan, the Komi Republic, Mari el, Karelia, and Estonia. The first documentary in Lennart Meri’s “Encyclopaedia Cinematographica Gentium Fenno – Ugricarum”
Patrick Byrne blows the doors off a massive post-election “shit-show” with more than one clogged hopper
This piece is a must read if you want to know what was happening behind the scenes in the weeks following the November 3 election. Byrne is clear about what he means and engaging in how he says it. It’s actually “fun” to read though the subject matter—incompetence, disorganization, booze, and failure—is depressing. Follow the link below the excerpt for the full story.
…At one point I learned how the President was staying involved. Periodically, Rudy Giuliani and the Mediocrity were going over to the White House to brief him. Really, no kidding: the person who was so bad my colleagues had declared they would quit rather than work another moment with that person, and the 76 year old guy who had trouble sending an email and was spending his days sloshed, were the ones explaining to the President what was going on and what his options were. At first I thought it was some kind of sick joke, but I confirmed it. The Mediocrity and the Mayor were the ultimate point-people on the mission of stopping this world-historic task.
Flynn and I felt sick. A frequent subject of mutter between us ran along the lines, “Why the fuck are we doing this?” The president’s children were off, uninvolved, or planning retirements, or pep-rallying. We could detect no discernible strategy out of the President’s team, no marching orders, just an organization wandering around and melting as it did so. A Mediocrity who was so bad, we had had to make special arrangements such that the Mediocrity did not have direct contact with our people, or they were going to flee. And the whole mess was led by a 76 year old gentleman, a man mujch beloved by his country, but who six weeks into what might be the most sophisticated cybertheft in all of history, could still not have a coherent conversation beyond, “Did you hear that 211 dead people in Philadelphia voted? Dead people?!?!? And they voted! Have you heard?!?”
How DJT Lost the White House, November 3 – December 23: All the President’s Team(s)
The secret of the elites
“The secret of the elites is that they’re not all that smart so they need the deck stacked to continue the illusion that they are elite at all.”
– Rob Peffer
He’s absolutely right. That’s why the fake elite devotes 100 percent of their collective effort to trying to maintain the illusion and keep the deck stacked. It’s also why nationalism and populism terrify them. They know their power and influence could be broken literally overnight by a sufficiently angry populace.
This is no longer about ideology. All the idearrhea about “liberal” and “conservative” and “communism” and “objectivism” is a veil to obscure the realities of the stacked deck. It’s about lawless rule by a small, mostly foreign and self-appointed fake elite. They all have imposter syndrome because they are all imposters.
link to original
This is true. And also elites must have a hierarchy within themselves and must have ways of controlling their own. Power, money, sex are obvious carrots. Slavery, murder, Satanism are less obvious parts of the system. The Satanism does not have to be sincere or it could be. Doesn’t matter; its purpose lies in being a/the hierarchical system that has come to be.
A top elite might argue:
It has ever been thus. We are in control and the people closest to us whom we control lust after power, wealth and the free exercise of their passions. We control them by controlling their passions and desires. Human beings are weak and sinful and those who seek power are almost all corrupted beyond salvation in this life. So we use them.
You cannot change any of this. Destroy us and a similar hierarchy will replace us. Human societies will always be run by the most ruthless, the most lustful, the most daring and immoral.
How can we not seek to control the world? Why would we stop at the borders of any nation? No, power flows naturally to seize everything it can. Nothing can stop this. If you like, you can say it’s God’s Will or Satan’s. It doesn’t matter what you call it or precisely how you control it. It has ever been thus.
The Theravada Buddhist take on this is we can only find ultimate freedom on our own. The Mahayana Buddhist take is the same but also includes proactive moral actions in this world.
UPDATE: My own synthesis of all of the above is both kinds of Buddhism plus it’s better to have a well defined polity that votes in its own interest (typically a nation state with borders). And it’s better to have media that reports honestly. And that those who “Do their best to speak the truth” not be silenced. All of this requires laws based on a constitution and fair courts.
Working to achieve or preserve a viable American system more or less in line with our traditional form of governance is a proactive moral act fit for Buddhists as well as other rational and spiritual systems of understanding human life.
So my answer to the top elite who I imagine above is: “Yes, but you can do better and we other people can and will do out best to make that happen.” I might add that in Buddhism there is the important concept of the powerful Bodhisattva who may appear cruel yet by their actions prompts others to seek release from the confines of this largely ignorant realm.
Triggered by Beethoven: the Cultural Politics of Racial Resentment
2020 was meant to be a year of celebration for Beethoven who was baptized 250 years ago (his exact date of birth is unknown) in Bonn on December 17, 1770. COVID-19 prompted the cancelation of commemorative concerts of Beethoven’s music, but the pandemic didn’t quell efforts by anti-White activists to attack the composer’s reputation and dominant place in the cultural pantheon of the West. Rather than a year full of performances of the great composer’s sonatas, string quartets, concertos and symphonies, 2020 saw repeated attacks on Beethoven for the crime of being a White male genius and for embodying the European musical tradition.
Beethoven is the most-performed composer in the repertoire, and his anniversary year was planned to be no exception. Before the widespread cancellation of concerts, 15 to 20 per cent of the repertoire programmed by leading orchestras was music by Beethoven. Widely regarded as the greatest composer of all time, Beethoven is inescapable because he remade almost every genre of concert music that matters. The concerto and symphony in his hands became driving musical narratives of heroic struggle. His late string quartets open a profound window on to the soul. Unlike his predecessors who were craftsmen who supplied a commodity to a paymaster, Beethoven ushered in the age of Romanticism by insisting on his creative independence and the absolute importance of self-expression: “What is in my heart must come out so I write it down.” This was manifested in his refusal to take a secure, salaried position like his one-time tutor Joseph Haydn who was the master of music for a feudal landowner in what is now Hungary.
Beethoven’s heroism in overcoming the worst thing that can happen to a composer — worsening deafness from young adulthood — to compose some of the greatest music ever has awed generations and become emblematic of triumph over adversity. All the stories of Beethoven’s misanthropy, his eccentricity and wildness, date from the decline in his hearing, which often caused him acute physical pain. Only his art prevented him from taking his own life: “It seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.” While Beethoven’s confidence as a pianist and conductor gradually diminished with his creeping deafness, his imaginative powers as a composer grew stronger and stronger, and he cast a daunting shadow over his successors: Brahms did not feel confident tackling a symphony until he was in his forties.
Beethoven excelled at his trade because he was born with a gift and worked at it as hard as it is possible to work. Swafford notes how his sketches and manuscripts reveal that:
continue reading…
Patrick Byrne on his meeting with Trump and the Nov 3 election
I have a lot of faith in Byrne. I know some have their doubts about his motives and question his having worked for the FBI, but I don’t. I can see how that happened and why he did what he did. I also respect his sometimes awkward retelling of his past as well as his descriptions of Trump. Having lived in China myself, I can relate to that side of him as well. Beyond that, he just seems honest to me. I think he is doing his best to tell difficult truths and using his wealth and status for the good of others.
The excerpt below is the beginning of a series of essays he plans to write on what he saw in and around the November 3 election.
I had a ringside seat to election events from November 3, 2019 to January 6, 2021, and feel a duty to explain to the world what really happened. I will not be regurgitating the headline events anyone can read, but will aim to explain what was going on behind the scenes, and give my best account of why things played out as they did.
Out of an interest in not letting the public suffer any longer from my procrastination and weakness (I tested negative today after a 13-day bout with Covid) , I will be writing and publishing this story in installments, reserving the right to re-edit as I go. Once complete and final, I will let the public know that it is final. Thus, you might think of this exercise as an odd one, where I am drafting a long magazine article for the world but doing so publicly, that the public need not wait to begin having its understandable curiosity addressed.
It will be natural for the reader to question my motives, my background, to wonder if I have some ax to grind or might wish to accomplish something in writing this other than what I claim (that I simply feel a duty to my country and to history to give an honest account of what I saw over those nine weeks). So I will close this preface with four short statements that may clarify to some from where I am coming from philosophically…
DRAFT 1.0 – THE INSIDE STORY OF THE STEAL
Thoughtful piece on what may be coming to DC & USA
I like this kind of thinking; best we can do when facing a future even more uncertain than usual. All rational thought about large subjects is speculative, centered around important possibilities and their probabilities of happening. Clearly, there are many unknowns before us today, including prohibitions against saying what some of them are.
The link below will take you to the right page but you have to scroll down a bit to find the entry for today 01/21/2021. There is more and it is worth reading.
Biden was sworn in. I am surprised it has gone this far, given Biden now has an incredible capability to sell everything to China and damage America for more Renminbi to Hunter. I find it hard to believe a plan could not be conceived that did not require this risk.
But there are still unusual data-points, pointing away from a normal transition of power. 25,000 troops are still in a DC ringed in concertina wire and seven foot tall non-scalable fencing, and they never had to be there in the first place. There was never even supposed to be a crowd of democrat civilians to attend the inauguration. That does not point to normalcy. I have checked FlightAware, and see no signs of planes to take them home approaching DC, nobody is talking about them leaving, and one anon said their orders were to be there for one month. I do find it interesting they have set up checkpoints, and are checking IDs of people leaving, as if they were making sure that during this period, no classified data could be smuggled out by dirty actors.
The interesting aspect of it all is the troops were deployed on President Trump’s watch, and are being kept on under Biden. Possible explanations I see are Biden and Trump agree on something and are working together (highly unlikely, although not impossible if Biden’s blackmail was used by some intelligence/NatSec group to get him to acquiesce to something), or Biden lacks the power to send them home, or possibly the military/NatSec apparatus has been calling the shots all along (and still is) and they called it out and are keeping it. I do not see how Biden can’t immediately send them home, to show himself “restoring normalcy,” but it would appear he cannot or will not.
What the 26,000 Guardsmen are doing, or why 2,000 have been sworn in as Marshals, is also still a mystery, but it does not point to the same old, same old. In addition, Durham is still out there as a Special Prosecutor beyond Biden’s reach, his mandate was expanded to election fraud prior to the most fraudulent election in history, there are a raft of over 200,000 sealed indictments at last count, as shown below election audits are continuing, and there is still an election fraud case about to go before the Supreme Court. It would feel strange even if a Chinese asset, owned by Beijing through both bribes and blackmail did not just waltz into our Presidency under the nose of our National Security machinery. Probabilities have shifted, and it is now anybody’s guess which equally unlikely prediction will prove to be correct.
Anonymous Conservative: News Briefs – 01/21/2021
American Buddhist Net 