Anti-Trump Resistance Played By Russia

The Daily Caller:

As more information comes out on Russian influence operations in the United States, evidence is building that the dominant anti-Trump movement, the self-described “resistance,” has been used by Russia to stoke division and undermine the White House.

After Trump’s electoral victory, Russian cyber operations began focusing on “fomenting discord about the validity of [Trump’s] election,” Facebook general counsel Colin Stretch told a Senate Judiciary panel on Tuesday. Sean Edgett, general counsel for Twitter, offered a similar assessment.

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How the US Aristocracy Deceive the US Public

Strategic Culture:

The progressive former Democratic US Senator Ted Kaufman wrote at Forbes, on 22 July 2014:

Another year has passed with no one from a Wall Street bank going to jail for the criminal behavior everyone knows helped cause the financial crisis. Fines against Wall Street banks are reaching $100 billion, but all will be paid by stockholders. Bank CEOs and managers pay no fines and face no prison.

There has been no reform — zilch, nada — of the credit-rating agencies. They are right back rating securities from issuers who pay them for their ratings.

If you still can’t trust the credit-rating on a bond, and if Wall Street’s bigs still stand immune from the law even after the 2008 crash they had played a huge role to cause, then in what way can the US Government itself be called a ‘democracy’?

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How the DPRK riddle is freaking out the US establishment

The Vineyard of the Saker:

by Pepe Escobar for the Saker blog

The 19th Party Congress has made it very clear that “socialism with Chinese characteristics” – as codified by President Xi Jinping – is China’s road map ahead. Not only the strategy graphically eschews those much-lauded “Western values”; it will, in Xi’s own words, offer “a new option for other countries and nations who want to speed up their development while preserving their independence.”

Xinhua even dared to venture, “the 21st century is likely to see capitalism lose its appeal while the socialist movement, led by China, rapidly catches up”.

To say this won’t go down very well in the West, especially in the US, may be the understatement of the century – even considering that the Chinese system is more like “neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics.”

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A Foundation of Nonsense

The Z Blog:

Math and science are built upon axioms. Very simply, an axiom is something that is always true and assumed to be true. An example is the reflexive property in algebra. A number is always equal to itself. Axioms are the building blocks, from which new truths are discovered. A proof is an inferential argument for a mathematical statement, using other previously established statements. That means a proof can be traced back to the original, assumed truths, those axioms that are the foundation of mathematics.

This is how we accumulate knowledge about the physical world over generations. The proofs based on those building blocks are eventually incorporated into the building blocks of math. The theorems and proofs multiply, slowly building up the stock of things that are known to be true. Calculus was built upon algebra and physics was built upon calculus and so on. It why a student can quickly go from zero to trying to discover new truths about the world. They inherit a supply of things assumed to be true.

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Analysis of GOP Tax Plan: The Basics, Early Concerns, and Inaccurate Attacks

Town Hall - Guy Benson:

At long last, Republicans have rolled out their detailed tax reform proposal(extensive summary here), which the House Ways and Means Committee will begin marking up next week.  As expected, the package lowers rates for families and businesses, simplifies the code.  According to the GOP's initial numbers, "a typical middle-income family of four, earning $59,000 (the median household income), will receive a $1,182 tax cut."  Democrats have falsely argued that this bill would raise taxes on middle class families, but that claim has been shredded by the Washington Post fact-checker, awarding a popular liberal attack 'Four Pinocchios' for dishonesty: 



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Eight Catalonia Ministers Jailed, Madrid Seeks European Arrest Warrant for Catalan Leader

Mish Talk:

Spain, a country that supports a two-state solution in Palestine, detained eight Catalan ministers on trumped up charges of sedition. Prosecutors also seek an arrest warrant for ousted Catalan leader Carles Puigdemont.

We all knew it would come down to this: Sacked Catalonia Ministers Held by Madrid Court.

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St. Benedict & The Dark Mountain

The American Conservative:

I have been quite taken lately with the essays of Paul Kingsnorth, the co-founder of the Dark Mountain Project. I bought his recent essay collection, Confessions Of A Recovering Environmentalist, And Other Essays, on Amazon Kindle. By “recovering environmentalist,” Kingsnorth, a former activist, doesn’t mean that he has ceased to care about conservation and environmental causes. Rather, he has come to believe that environmental activism is futile. Kingsnorth and others involved in the Dark Mountain Project



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