I’ll be live tonight on The Ochelli Effect at 8:00 PM EST.
After me JP Sotille of newsvandal.com will be on at 9:00 PM and he is always interesting.
To listen live go to http://www.ochelli.com
May talk about the recent dollar rally and the yuan…and gold…
Some stories that have caught my eye:
The 20th century has ended, 16 years late – Axios:
The big picture: Historians call these “long decades” and “long centuries” — super useful constructs for grasping big, prolonged events outside of mere time, and seeing them as eras, zeitgeists and social phenomena.
- So it is with the 20th century, which as an era appears to have pushed straight through to 2016, when it came to a visible close with the financial crisis, Brexit and the election of Trump, experts tell Axios.
- Now we are experiencing the foggy, dust-filled interregnum before a still-undefined 21st century, in which all that seems certain is that powerful forces are deliberately working to pull apart what was built.
…..
Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, tells Axios that this epochal break actually precedes Trump, whom he calls a function of the age rather than its impetus.
- The new age “was coming no matter who the Americans elected,” Bremmer says. “It’s more about the rise of China, the divisions in the trans-Atlantic relationship and within liberal democracies themselves, [and] the willingness of the Russians to try to exacerbate those divisions.”
- Bremmer thinks the new order won’t begin to be decipherable for another decade.
- That is “in part because these U.S. and European issues need to play out. And perhaps in larger part because, [Chinese President] Xi Jinping notwithstanding, China isn’t really ready yet for the global stage.”
Angry and under seige…..and at war…
“Adviser to the Trump faction of the Republican Party, Roger Stone, outlines the fight in the U.S. is for the survival of the republic, not a fight between the two parties.”
neocons??? who? Graham? new party.
Brett Kavanaugh Is Lying. So Are You. – Politico.com:
The question of truth and lies in politics is further clouded by the reality that public debate, in my experience, often touches only glancingly at the kind of things people really think and argue in private.
Many Kavanaugh supporters, reading between the lines, have a larger truth that goes something like this: “Who knows for sure what happened? Probably something bad, but maybe not exactly like she remembers. Most people could not withstand an inquisition into decades-old behavior, and, in any event, Democrats don’t really care about the truth, they care about beating him.”
Many Kavanaugh opponents have a larger truth that goes something like this: “No serious person could doubt that Christine Ford was speaking the truth. We don’t need to show that he is Harvey Weinstein to prove that he doesn’t belong on the Supreme Court. It is precisely the instinct to look away from bad behavior that allows the Weinsteins and Matt Lauers to fester. The hearing made clear that the smug and entitled young man of 1982 has grown into the smug and entitled middle-aged man of 2018 in ways that go far in explaining his conservative worldview.”
Surely there are some people who are immune to the phenomenon—people whose notions of truth and virtue are so fixed that they hew to these values even when they lead to a destination they don’t prefer. But not too many, in my experience.
But who/what does the judge really stand for?
JFK FACTS – In his last decision before his Supreme Court nomination, Brett Kavanaugh sided with the CIA
Kavanaugh’s opinion disparaged my reporting and vouched for the very “reasonable” actions of the CIA.” ( The word appears 23 times in the decision; “reasonably,” and unreasonably,” another 23 times.) It is reasonable to conclude that Kavanaugh is deferential to the CIA.
American Bar Association 2006 concerns on Kavanaugh on page 8:
https://www.americanbar.org/content/dam/aba/migrated/scfedjud/statements/kavanaugh.authcheckdam.pdf
Kavanaugh White House Counsel: PATRIOT Act, “measured, careful, responsible, and constitutional approach”
The documents show that Kavanaugh assisted in the effort to pass the Patriot Act and drafted a statement that President Bush incorporated in the bill signing. Kavanaugh wrote that the PATRIOT Act will “update laws authorizing government surveillance,” which he claimed, and President Bush then restated, were from an era of “rotary phones.” In fact, the PATRIOT Act weakened numerous U.S. privacy laws, including the subscriber privacy provisions in the Cable Act and the email safeguards in the Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Both laws were enacted after the era of rotary phones.
