If you read through this and have any sense of history, you can’t wonder why we are even bothering with the whole quid-pro-quo debacle. At this point, if the President knew anything of this, he has to go.
Why Giuliani Singled Out 2 Ukrainian Oligarchs to Help Dig Up Dirt
And there are those who swear they’ve seen King Donald (who? who?)
King Donald
(who?)
King Donald
(who?)
King Donald
(who?)
King Donald
(who?)
King Donald
King Donald
King Donald
King Donald (Yeah!)
Beneath that cesspool-Rudigate. Applause
Four more years,
Four more years,
Four more years,
Four more years of THAT
I wrote an in Op-Ed in the Colorado Hometown weekly back in December 2018. On August 21st, CHW printed a follow-up. The website for the Hometown Weekly seems to have stopped updating back in April, so I’ve reproduced it here.
It is, I think, very germain to the November Louisville CO election. There are 3x councillors and a new mayor up for election. I attended the City consultation on the Transportation Master Plan, and there are little to no improvements under discussion for Main St.
Louisville can change and still be historic
If things don’t change, they’ll stay the same, except they won’t.
Back in January this year, the Louisville City Council got the feedback it asked for from the Louisville Revitalization Commission (LRC) on a design and cost for a multi-story parking garage in the heart of downtown. Citizens showed up ‘en masse’ and rejected the concept. The city council agreed not to proceed, everyone was relieved.
Except that’s not what the council actually did. The city council agreed that “this council” would direct staff not to spend any more time working on a parking garage at “that site”, the site being the surface parking lot next to Sweet Cow.
Since then the LRC has had a number of resignations; in November the city will elect a new mayor and two new Councillors. So “this council” will no longer exist, and LRC with a host of new members will be pushing to deliver economic sustainability for downtown Louisville.
Add into the mix that the former ConocoPhillips’ (StorageTec) Campus is finally getting developed over 12-years and based on Daily Camera reporting will create “a new, mixed-use neighborhood featuring a 500,000-square-foot campus designed for a corporate headquarters — which reportedly already has an interested tenant — as well as a 1,500-unit senior living facility, and more than 3.4 million square feet designated for office, retail and hotel space.” and in the words of the developer “connect seamlessly with Historic Downtown Louisville”.
If nothing changes, the parking garage will be back somewhere, sometime soon. There is another way.
Louisville downtown/old town is a small compact area. It is served by much of the town from within 2-miles. The ConocoPhillips campus is less than 3-miles away. The challenge for Louisville is how to continue to enhance downtown while avoiding an $11+ million parking garage and strangling downtown with cars. If the garage was used to its full capacity, that would be hundreds of additional cars per day in downtown at least. Before we go any further, I’m not anti-car, we own two, neither of them is electric or hybrid. I’m pro people, pro a compact, safe, walk-able downtown. We often ride bikes and occasionally walk to downtown from a mile or so away.
We can make that the default for the majority of residents, leaving the parking spaces to those who have no choice. We do though need to go further. The core of downtown doesn’t need to be pedestrianized, but pedestrians do need to be prioritized. If I’m at Sweet Cow, and want to get to the History museum, I shouldn’t need to even think about driving. Once I get back in my car, I’m not limited to going somewhere else locally, I can go to Boulder, Broomfield, Westminster, even Denver. Continually enabling cars doesn’t provide economic viability, it provides traffic and congestion.
I should be able to cross diagonally at intersections, I should be able to cross mid-block, I shouldn’t have to fear cars won’t see me. Instead of shoehorning bike racks in on valuable sidewalk space, we should be dedicating a parking space on every block for bike and micro-mobility parking. We shouldn’t wait for electric scooters, bikes and whatever else to get mysteriously dumped in downtown Louisville and become a problem. We should be embracing and designing for it now as a solution.
Vehicles coming to downtown should be exactly that, coming to downtown. Not driving through it. The Louisville History Museum in their Summer 2019 newsletter revealed that “nearly 10,000 vehicles pass through the Pine and Main intersection each day”. If those vehicles were coming to downtown we’d already have an economically viable downtown. The majority are not. Stand on the corner by Moxie Bread Co in the evening, or on an art walk or street faire night, and try to get to Huckleberry Restaurant and Bakery. You shouldn’t have to wait for traffic to stop twice, to stair with trepidation into the windshield of cars wondering if the drivers see you. Vehicle speeds in the downtown core should be restricted to 10MPH and enforced. People coming to downtown won’t mind the 10MPH speed limit, after all they are less than 1/2 a mile from their destination.
On August 22, the City starts rolling out it’s Transportation Master Plan or TMP. The TMP will be used to prioritize investment over maybe the next 5-10 years. We should ensure that the investment goes into connecting people, not cars, to downtown. Everyone who lives within a 1.5-2-mile radius should know it’s quicker, easier and safer to get downtown without a car than it is with.
Louisville, it doesn’t have to stay the same to stay historic.
The Presidents tariffs continue to be a source of frustration and confusion. Who pays them, where the money goes and if they are even likely to solve the problem Trump thinks they will.
Meanwhile the boycotts on Huawei grow, ultimately threatening to split the technology world in two, everything that works in China and its allies, and technology that works everywhere else.
The software bro’s seem to think that won’t happen, or if it does it’s no biggie, since all the software they use is US based. Apart from the arrogance, it’s also completely ignorant.
I often show the “Social Media” folder of my Huawei Mate 20 Pro 😉 to explain that dependency. All the apps I use are US based except WeChat. The Rest Of the World is simply inexistent.
Not only do the non-US aligned tech countries have their own software and operating systems, and massive customer base, we can’t make hardware without them.
With the upcoming 2020 Presidential elections, I wonder how many of the candidates understand how this would work, and what global bifurcation of the technology world would mean for the US?
right now China is making massive investments in South America, Africa, and large parts of Asia, they are making loans for infrastructure and various ports, and if the loans don’t get repaid, the Chinese end up owning that shipping port or that railroad station.
Long term, twenty, forty years, that will put American businesses, and the jobs of our children and grandchildren at risk
This is a big part of the story, except, China has doing this that I’ve known about since 1995. Add to this their investments in futures contracts and rare minerals and you have the perfect storm. I posted a response to twitter on this back in September(below). The NY Times had a good write-up on the Chinese Belt and Road initiative. It shows the scale and scope of the Chinese project around the world, all industries. Meanwhile, the US President refuses to work with the Democrats on infrastructure.
Futures contracts developing roads and equipment for 12-15 years while the US was busy fighting two unwinnable wars and wasting its money on them. The president, respectfully, is a clueless shill just trying to breakup big businesses he doesn’t understand.
While we might be able to build an iPhone for around $3,000 given US prices, we might even be able to manufacture the components, like cameras, GPS, accelerometers. We won’t be able to do any of that without the raw materials that goes into the components in phones, tablets, motherboards, computer, alexa smartspeakers, and pretty much everything else that drives(2) modern lives, including cars, scooters, trains and planes.
The shoe is off the foot, it’s just a question of when it drops. This was, frankly, bloody obvious. Because the Chinese Government doesn’t have to participate in the media circus western democracy has become, they don’t have to make promises they either don’t want to, or won’t keep, they’ve been able to focus on the long game(1).
I don’t know who will be next US President, but he or she has a big job on their hands, and it’s not a short term one.
More generally, any strategy with a long-term goal of gaining the upper-hand. Often used to describe politicians trying to outwit opponents.
One of the participants in the discussion is, Dr John Waits, who with his colleagues and staff at Centreville Clinic Staff, are doing their best to help their community afford their healthcare.
Dr Waits struggles valiantly in the discussion to avoid using the terms profit and subsidy. This is a mistake in my opinion, while you can talk about healthcare efficiencies, people need to hear that large hospital groups are for profit, yes even the not-for-profit ones. People need to understand that rural hospitals are not affordable without subsidy. Equally, urban communities need to understand that without rural communities, we have an entirely different set of problems.
Photo (c) Daily Yonder
Subsidy isn’t a bad word, nor is tax that ultimately is used to pay for it. You can either levy tax at a state level or at the federal level, preferably on big hospital groups and medical providers revenue(not profit). You can then use that tax money to subsidise rural healthcare. Or you can use general federal taxation, and use the additional money to fund a medicaid hospitals in rural community cities.
Struggling along with no real honesty, and without confronting the elephant in the room, will just mean more rural hospitals closing, leading the to further decline of rural communities and the increased pressure on cities.
New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner John Edwards (@jce_pc), was interviewed this morning on NPR by Rachel Martin. Edwards criticized Facebook after last month’s attacks on two mosques in Christchurch were live-streamed on Facebook.
It was a refreshing interview with a politician who doesn’t have all the answers, and knows it’s not his job to come up with them. He is also not beholden to big tech financing, as a New Zealand politician. Equally Edwards was clear where the blame and responsibility lay. The whole interview is well worth listening to, but Edwards rightly pointed out
we have a platform that has displayed shocking lack of responsibility and accountability for the tools that it has enabled
He [Zuckerberg] kinda conflated that [bad actors], with the live streaming of the atrocity in New Zealand, but that person didn’t go to any lengths, there were no systems. If you are going to offer a service that is capable of such deep and profound harm, then it is incumbent on you to ensure it is safe.
In the USA you have product liability, if a manufacturer makes something, a product, which causes harm, they are liable for that. It’s time we started to look to the social media companies for that.
… the lack of responsibility the company has taken. They should be acting now. If they can’t assure us that the streaming service is safe, then it should be taken down.
I was quite disappointed when I heard Mr Zuckerberg equate the atrocities in Christchurch with childrens birthday parties. He said if you put a delay in the system it might have prevented the uploading that video, but that would have broken the experience of people who use it for childrens parties.
I don’t understand the mathematics there, how many childrens parties, Mr Zuckerberg, equals one murder, one live streamed suicide, one sexual assault live streamed? It’s really incumbent on the platform to take responsibility to make the product safe. Until they ca, to take it down.
Bravo sir, bravo. In many aspects of life we have too easily succumbed to technology allowing us to do things which are not necessary, it’s there just because it can be. Facebook isn’t alone in this, and it’s time that we take a step back.
Remember when conference calls had live moderators? When you couldn’t speak until the lines were open? That wasn’t there just so the speaking presenter/executive could just say “next slide please”, it was there to stop unwanted and unruly interruptions. No one is saying one to one video communication should be outlawed, but live streaming needs to be moderated and regulated.
If the live streaming platforms won’t do that, can’t make it profitable, then so be it, ban it.
You can’t broadcast naked bums, boobs and dicks on American broadcast TV, at any time of the day. Yet, we allow facebook, youtube, twitter and other live streaming platforms to broadcast anything to anyone, anytime. This isn’t a free speech issue, I’d prefer grown-up movies to be broadcast unedited on TV, like streaming services. At least in the UK they have the 9pm ‘watershed‘.
It’s hard to see how anything will change here, until we have more politicians like Mr. Edwards.
Photo: Roberto Machado Noa/LightRocket via Getty ImagesAs predicted, not by the tweeter in chief, but by almost anyone who understands big companies and executive, stock buybacks hit an all time high in 2018 and are likely to be higher again in 2019.
This is a big deal, companies that buyback their stock, are reducing the number of shares available on the market. That generally means the share price goes up. Share prices are often one of the main ways executives are measured, their bonuses are usually dependant on the share price. Also, because the price of each share goes up, it makes it harder for lower and middle class people to get in on the action.
buying your own shares is like eating your own young, a glorified share manipulation gamble
The other reason share buybacks are import to watch, is they effectively use the companies cash to “eat themselves”. That cash is then no longer available for Capital investment, new building, equipment and other necessary expansion expenditure. Citigroup reports that companies buying back their own stock, spent more money doing that, than at any time since 2008.
Home Depot announced a $15-billion buyback in February, as a way to artificially hedge their share price, after they announced they’d miss expectation on revenue. Cynical share price manipulation. I have no idea if they used repatriated tax money, but if they miss earnings again this year, the share price will drop. Of course the executives and board will be ok, they’ll have sold their shares at the newly inflated share price, which is down on it’s 2018 high(212.39), but not nearly as low as it would have been if they’d not bought their own shares.
Next time a big business closes an office near you, and jobs are lost, don’t take their reason at face value. When did they last do a stock buyback, and how much cash was repatriated under the Trump/GOP tax break for 2018?
Sadly, this New York Times Editorial op-ed is factually wrong in a material way that I had to write a letter. I also ripped into Dan Gorenstein on twitter(1) for linking to the article and “guessing” he didn’t think Americans would tolerate #MedicareForAll.
Here is the text I sent to the Times, who knows if they will publish it. My track record of getting corrections to editorial op-eds published is close to zero. It’s like they don’t want to be wrong.
The editorial board seems both confused, and factually inaccurate when it comes to how insurance works in government funded, single payer healthcare systems. It is common place in such systems to have an option of top-up insurance. I was lucky to have had such insurance when I needed serious surgery in the UK, in 1992. It was employer provided insurance.
One of the constraints in the many government single payer systems is the supply of buildings and doctors to treat a patient “on demand”. Urgent cases are as always seen as soon as they can be. Non-urgent cases, not so much. But then, medically, they are non-urgent. Top-up insurance allows patients to schedule both dates and locations, specialists for non-urgent treatment. The single payer system, pays an agreed amount for the treatment or surgery, much like Americas current insurance based system.
The difference is, that in America today there is massive over supply of both facilities and staff, specialists etc. That over supply is costing every one, both the insured and the uninsured, money for nothing. Yes, it’s great if you can walk into your local Dr’s today and get a referral to a specialist this afternoon for that annoying toe bunion that has bothered you for the past 6-months. Should our healthcare system be based on the costs of carrying that burden? Absolutely not.
While single payer systems are not perfect, nor is the current US Insurance based model. Almost everyone of the people that are involved in charging, finance, billing, negotiating, handling disputes, etc. is overhead. That overhead has to get paid for. So called “death panels” are more common in the US based insurance system than they are in single payer systems. In a single payer system there is no out of network, drug prices are controlled, and there is much more transparency. For everything else there is top-up insurance.
The editorial board overlooking this important fact, does a major dis-service to it’s readers and to Americans who continue to pay too much for healthcare.
On a BBC politics, current affairs program, Question time last week had another of it’s heavily #brexit based episodes. This one featured UK Government and Conservative prig, William Rees-Mogg. Mogg is infamous for his lowkey, I’m holier than thou, silver spoon accent. He makes statements with such supposed authority you’d be hard pressed to doubt there were 12 commandments.
This time in a pseudo-educated way, he prognosticated over William Churchill and took other members of the panel to task, “from the comfort of 2019”. “You’ve got to understand the history”. Turns out, as often, Moggs dictats were, as they frequently are, a mix of details and claims pulled literally out of thin air.
Actual historian, Robert Saunders, took Moggs claims to task.
First, some figures. From 1899 to 1902, roughly 48,000 people died in British concentration camps in South Africa. Of the 28,000 white deaths, 22,000 were children under the age of 16. More than 4,000 were women. The 20,000 Black deaths were less clearly recorded – a mark of official indifference – but most estimates suggest that about 80% were children.
Tonight the President will address the nation in his second state of the nation. It’s unclear if he’ll say anything about Afghanistan, he’d be wise not to. Equally, given the President is prone to tackling sacred cows, maybe he should.
President Trump sent more troops and in his words America would stay until the “war is won”. While not as notorious as Vietnam, Afghanistan is Americas longest war, all Presidents from Roosevelt are complicit. America had been involved in/with Afghanistan from 1946 until the late 1970’s, as the Americans left, the Soviets arrived.
Afghanistan is a country that is at the center of the world, almost exactly 10,000 miles from either coast of America. Long before the War on Terror, long before the Russians invaded Afghanistan, the Americans were there. Buoyed by their success in WWII and in an effort to counter the Soviet Union threats of expansion, in 1946 American Engineers, their wives and families started to arrive in Helmand province in unprecedented numbers, they lived in a campus that became known as “Little America“.
They worked for the worlds biggest construction company at the time, Morrison Knutson. The King of Afghanistan had bought them in to replicate what had been done in Nevada, roads, dams, canals and even a new model city. The Kings plan had been to harness the power of the giant Helmand River and turn Afghanistan into a modern society like the west. Thats when everything started to go wrong.
In an era that is long forgotten and projects that were ultimately doomed to fail, it was the first, and possibly the best example of “too big to fail”. It did, we are still paying that price today, even before the Russians invaded, America had sunk $80-million into Afghanistan.
It’s the forever war, will President Trump actually succeed, no.
REFERENCE MATERIAL
The New York Times “The Daily” covered Afghanistan yesterday(Feb 4th), disappointingly they never included anything about the whole “Little America” project. It is still one of the best summaries of what happened since the Russians invaded.
BBC NEWS has a great infographic style documentary on Helmands Golden Age from 2014 by Monica Whitlock. It is a good read and contains many pictures from Morrison Knutson engineer Glenn Fosters films. It also includes many clips of his color films, sadly they are geo-locked and not available in the US. You can though find much of the same material on Youtube. As an accompanying piece, Monica Whitlock also recorded an episode of the BBC World Service “The Documentary Podcast“, also from 2014. In an episode called “Damming Afghanistan: Lost Stories from Helmand” you can download and hear it here.
The US Agency for International Development, bureaus for Program and Policy Coordination, Bureau for the Near East, have a great detail report on Afghanistan, it can be read here, in its original 1983 form.
The American story with Syria is intertwined with almost everything the west has done in the Middle East since the end of the 2nd World War. American was the prime enabler of the Assad family rise to to power, and as everything post war seemed to be, all about fighting the rise of Communism and installing “democracy”.
Syria gained its independence in 1946 and in 1948 engaged in the Arab-Israeli war. Later in 1949, the Americans were party, or if you believe many, responsible via the emergent CIA, for the coup d’état that replaced the Syrian democracy with Husni al-Za’im, who was executed later the same year.
The Syrian story since the 2nd World War is complicated, wars, Hamas, Iran, Hezbollah. Assad senior played key roles in much of the 1980’s terrorism, before the US and especially the UK decided that their actual target in the Middle East was Gaddafi, and that they needed Assad’s Syria as an ally their upcoming war.
So, you can be surprised by President Trump’s actions, you can blame it on his trying to appease Russian leader Putin, or you can just believe that this is yet another of President Trump’s rollbacks of President Obama’s actions. Whatever you do though, don’t think American involvement in Syria is just about the defeat of ISIS.
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A great read is Wilfords 2013 America’s Great Game. You can