11 hours ago, caroljane said:

No one except Trump , who is amply documented for saying those things as have his spokespeopl;e, in his name.

.That's it for now,  but not to worry, I'm sure more enthusiastic Trump corroborators will be along soon..

 

That's right, Carol, block out and ignore all of the evidence that refutes your hateful predetermined Narrative. Just continue to lie, hate and smear. Edit reality out of my posts that you respond to, just as you edit it out of your mind, and as the leftist activist press edits it out of their reporting.

And it really is amazing to me that you tried again to pull the racist smear right after having been caught saying what you really think about black people! Disgusting.

J

9 hours ago, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

...It's a weird kind of logic where the numbers of Trump supporters supposedly and metaphysically expand and diminish depending on the topic.

Is this accordion activism?

 

Michael

That sounds like a question that should be on the Aristotle's Wheel "Paadox" thread. Galileo's magic "voids" might explain the expanding and contracting Trump numbers.

J

"I'd like a Bubble People Tea, please."

On 7/31/2018 at 12:17 PM, william.scherk said:

Something something suspicion Fake News 'Muh Russia' ... what is an Objectivist response to this story just published by Murray Waas in the New York Review of Books?  

Flynn, Comey, and Mueller: What Trump Knew and When He Knew It

Lawfare has a new updated analysis of the Seven Dwarfs.  I mean, the Seven Scenarios:

To refresh your memory—or if you never read the original post—the seven theories of the case were the following:

• Theory of the Case #1: It’s All a Giant Set of Coincidences and Disconnected Events
• Theory of the Case #2: Trump Attracted Russophiles
• Theory of the Case #3: The Russian Operation Wasn’t Really About Trump at All
• Theory of the Case #4: Russian Intelligence Actively Penetrated the Trump Campaign—But Trump Didn’t Know
• Theory of the Case #5: Russian Intelligence Actively Penetrated the Trump Campaign—And Trump Knew or Should Have Known
• Theory of the Case #6: Kompromat
• Theory of the Case #7: The President of the United States is a Russian Agent

Here is one for the Bubble People.  A couple of Fayes made a podcast for the New York Times.  The cool part is that they quoted Jordan Sather.  Deep!

And Jordan is remarkably low-key about it ...

1:25 "Trust me, Q is absolutely real ..."

Still with Jordan, battling the hordes of non-believers, celebrating a win. A quote in a sympathetic article in the Epoch Times.  A short video extract and link should suffice.  I wish the Q-phenomena had not become a peekaboo thing here.  It's a great example of something. 

‘Q’ Community Responds to Media Attacks

To return to the book and its author, a brief half-hour video from the Center for Inquiry ...

Blurb:

Why do people believe conspiracy theories? What’s the harm if they do? And just what is a conspiracy theory, anyway? Conspiracy theories captured the attention of philosophers and historians decades ago, but it is only within the last few years that psychologists have begun gathering data on these kinds of questions. In this talk, Rob Brotherton provides a psychological perspective on conspiracism, drawing on his own research as well as other insights explored in his book Suspicious Minds: Why We Believe Conspiracy Theories. In particular, research into cognitive biases and heuristics – quirks in the way our brains are wired – suggests that we’re all intuitive conspiracy theorists; some of us just hide it better than others. Rob Brotherton is an academic psychologist. He completed a PhD on the psychology of conspiracy theories with the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. He now lives in New York City and teaches classes on conspiracy theories, social psychology, and science communication at Barnard College. This talk was recorded live at CSICon Las Vegas on Saturday, October 28th 2017. Check out more talks: https://reasonabletalk.tv/

So, conspiracy theories are attractive to all stripes of human beings, according to Brotherton, which means one has a buffet of choices, an over-supply even.

It occurred to me that one could take on an aspect of "Muh Russia" and try to examine a 'theory' for any extant correspondence to reality.

Here's a theory: House Of Trump, House Of Putin: The Untold Story Of Donald Trump And The Russian Mafia

The linked article contains the first chapter of the book cited, from which I take this excerpt.

Quote

Long before the American president’s disgraceful groveling before his Russian counterpart at the Helsinki summit, millions wondered: Just what does Vladimir Putin have on Donald Trump? Now author and journalist Craig Unger reveals decades of hidden history to answer that question in his new book House of Trump, House of Putin: The Untold Story of Donald Trump and the Russian Mafia — which examines Trump’s many connections to the Russian mob, and how those financial dealings resulted in an American presidency that is a Kremlin asset. Below we excerpt the book’s first chapter in full. 

[...]

This book tells the story of one of the greatest intelligence operations in history, an undertaking decades in the making, through which Russian Mafia and Russian intelligence operatives successfully targeted, compromised, and implanted either a willfully ignorant or an inexplicably unaware Russian asset in the White House as the most powerful man on earth. In doing so, without firing a shot, the Russians helped pu in power a man who would immediately begin to undermine the Western Alliance, which has been the foundation of American national security for more than seventy years; who would start massive trade wars with America’s longtime allies; fuel right-wing anti-immigrant popuism; and assault the rule of law in the United States.

 

In short, at a time at which the United States was confronted with a new form of warfare—hybrid war consisting of cyber warfare, hacking, disinformation, and the like—the United States would have at its helma man who would leave the country all but defenseless, and otherwise inadvertently do the bidding of the Kremlin.

It is a story that is difficult to tell even though, in many ways, Donald Trump’s ties to Russia over the last four decades have been an open secret, hiding in plain sight. One reason they went largely unnoticed for so long may be that aspects of them are so unsettling, so transgressive, that Americans are loath to acknowledge the dark realities staring them in the face.

As a result, the exact words for what happened often give way to fierce semantic disputes. Whatever Russia did with regard to the 2016 presidential campaign, was it an assault on America’s sovereignty, or merely meddling? Was it an act of war? Did Russian interference change the results of the 2016 presidential election? Was it treason? Is Donald Trump a traitor? A Russian agent? Or merely a so-called useful idiotwho somehow, through willful blindness or colossal ignorance, does not even know how he has been compromised by Russia?

President Donald Trump, of course, has denied having anything to do with Russia, having tweeted, ten days before his inauguration, “Russia has never tried to use leverage over me. I HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH RUSSIA - NO DEALS, NO LOANS, NO NOTHING!”

But as this book will show, over the last four decades, President Donald Trump and his associates have had significant ties to at least 59 people who facilitated business between Trump and the Russians, including relationships with dozens who have alleged ties to the Russian Mafia.

It will show that President Trump has allowed Trump-branded real estate to be used as a vehicle that likely served to launder enormous amounts of money—perhaps billions of dollars—for the Russian Mafia for more than three decades.

It will show that President Trump provided an operational home for oligarchs close to the Kremlin and some of the most powerful figures in the Russian Mafia in Trump Tower—his personal and professional home, the crown jewel of his real estate empire—and other Trump buildings on and off for much of that period.

It will show that during this period the Russian Mafia has likely been a de facto state actor serving the Russian Federation in much the same way that American intelligence services serve the United States, and that many of the people connected to Trump had strong ties to the Russian FSB, the state security service that is the successor to the feared KGB.

It will show that President Trump has been a person of interest to Soviet and Russian intelligence for more than forty years and was likely the subject of one or more operations that produced kompromat (com- promising materials) on him regarding sexual activities.

It will show that for decades, Russian operatives, including key fig- ures in the Russian Mafia, studiously examined the weak spots in America’s pay-for-play political culture—from gasoline distribution to Wall Street, from campaign finance to how the K Street lobbyists of Washington ply their trade—and, having done so, hired powerful white-shoe lawyers, lobbyists, accountants, and real estate developers by the score, in an effort to compromise America’s electoral system, legal process, and financial institutions.

It will show that President Trump, far from being the only potential “asset” targeted by the Russians, was one of dozens of politicians—most of them Republicans, but some Democrats as well—and businessmen who became indebted to Russia, and that millions of dollars have been flowing from individuals and companies from, or with ties to, Russia to GOP politicians, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell, for more than 20 years. [...]

More on these not-so-secret allegedly morally-squalid bad doings ... wrapped up in:

5 hours ago, william.scherk said:

a buffet of choices

This review of House of Trump, House of Putin is harsh, harsh, almost bitter in tone as regards bad doings.  What kind of propaganda vehicle does this review suggest of the book's authors, hmmm?

Quote

House of Trump, House of Putin starts with Trump’s early days in business, when his lawyer was Roy Cohn, who was also consigliereto two of the five New York Italian crime families and ‘the most evil, twisted, vicious bastard ever to snort coke at Studio 54’. There were mafia figures like ‘Sonny’ Franzese, a hitman who was recorded helpfully explaining how to get rid of the bodies: ‘Dismember victim in kiddie pool. Cook body parts in microwave. Stuff parts in garbage disposal. Be patient.’ When one of these Italian gangsters met Trump to buy an apartment ‘he opened his briefcase and $200,000 in cash spilled out on Trump’s table’.

To the Russians, this was small time. Unger retells a story of Barrett’s that when a Red mafiya boss, David Bogatin, came to Trump Tower, he met Trump himself and immediately bought five apartments for $6 million in cash (about $14.5 million today). Trump didn’t seem to wonder where this money might have come from. He was one of the first developers to discover that you could sell condos to shell companies that concealed the owners’ identities, Unger says. This allowed Russian criminals ‘to launder vast amounts of money’. Trump’s willingness to sell ‘no questions asked’ was so important, Unger believes, that he gave the Russian mafia a foothold in the United States.

The Trump Organization’s reply to this is that money laundering is ‘a problem for the whole real estate industry’. How are we supposed to know where anyone’s money comes from? Fuhgeddaboudit! It is a convenient alibi but not a persuasive one, given the large amount of such business done by the Trump Organization. Anders Åslund, a Swedish expert on Russian money laundering, is quoted in the book: ‘Early on, Trump came to the conclusion that it is better to do business with crooks than with honest people.’ An investigation by the news website BuzzFeed found that 1,300 condos in Trump buildings were bought by shell companies that paid cash, a fifth of his sales since the 1980s. Unger points to the Trump World Tower in Manhattan, where a third of apartments on the highest and most expensive floors were sold this way. And more than Trump’s customers, there are Unger’s other links between Trump and suspect Russians. As Oscar Wilde might have said: ‘To have one Russian mafia connection may be regarded as a misfortune; to have 59 looks like carelessness.’

But how do you get from dodgy real estate deals to the presidential election and the claim by one former CIA officer to Newsweek, which Unger quotes, that ‘Trump is actually working directly for the Russians’? This part of the narrative is familiar, if unproven: after four visits to the bankruptcy court and piling up $4 billion in debt, Trump couldn’t get the US banks to lend to him. Russian buyers and Russian capital were keeping him afloat, says Unger. There was a new joint venture with a company called Bayrock, run by a Russian-American, Felix Sater, who was a former mobster and convicted felon. That short description does not do justice to ‘one of the most enigmatic figures in the entire Trump-Russia saga’ and Unger devotes a long section of the book to him. A source tells him that Sater worked for Semion Mogilevich, reputedly the most powerful – and feared – of Russian mafia bosses. Sater’s lawyer emphatically denies that relationship. One member of Mogilevich’s organization has told me, however, that Sater was Mogilevich’s ‘shamas’ in the United States, a Yiddish term for the clerk who manages a synagogue’s day-to-day affairs.

As a former KGB general and defector, Oleg Kalugin, tells Unger: ‘The Mafia is one of the branches of the Russian government today,’ It is claimed, therefore, that Vladimir Putin could use Trump’s real estate sales to keep an eye on what oligarchs, criminals, and corrupt officials were doing, to know where exactly the ‘flight-capital’ from Russia was going and who had it. This was, allegedly, one side of the ‘exchange of information’ that the former MI6 officer, Christopher Steele, wrote about in his infamous dossier. The relationship was so important to the Kremlin, Steele believes, that they arranged financing for Trump with Deutsche Bank — the German bank secretly indemnified with deals of equal value from Russian banks. This is why the Senate intelligence committee has made such efforts to get hold of records from Deutsche Bank. What, if anything, they have found is not public.

Fun stuff exploring lens streaks and Directed Energy Weapons ... from Mick West of Metabunk.org:

I'd missed this earlier. It looks like Brotherton has done a little bit of digging into the Q phenomena earlier this month ... Fearmongering is fueling QAnon: This is not a dangerous cult, at least yet.  This appears, of all places, in the New York Daily News ...

Follow him at @rob_brotherton

Worthy discussants Scott Adams and four different 'voices' of MSK, all to do with analogy in argument ... fun to make, easy to navigate, makes ya think. "Which version 'sounds' more persuasive?"

Once this video reaches 50 views, you know what I am going to make happen.  I've added distant battlefield sounds from Los Popularos and a strangely non-hypnotic sound-form animation that kind of looks like Angry Macrame. 

I've also added in attractive #Hashtags and four jump-in places in the description, if you click through to Youtube. If you do that I also make two five-millionths of a Venezuelan bolivar, I presume. 

The earlier stuff is germane, but only as a jump-off point back in time, so I put it under a hood:

Styxhexenhammer666 sez the dude was mental. Many digressions, but a few good points and questions ... from Bitchute:

"There is a higher likelihood that this is a deranged right-winger." Which tells us absolutely fuck-all, IMHO.

4 hours ago, william.scherk said:

Name and Shame, brothers and sisters. Name and shame.

William,

That's the way your side rolls. MeToo. Muh racists. Muh Russians. Muh gang rapists. And on and on... What are these movements except name and shame? Hell, you guys chase people you don't like out of restaurants and so on chanting the equivalent of name and shame. And you do it like this:

Our side names, of course, and speculates, but then sends law enforcement, investigates, and, if relevant, prosecutes. All with the legal presumption of innocence until proven guilty.

Which is not the standard your side uses. They demand people be fired and so forth without due process. All based on name and shame alone. (We believe survivors! We believe survivors! We believe survivors! Keep Mueller there until he finds a crime, goddamit! And so on...)

Maybe that's why you are so bothered by what looks like name and shame, even though it isn't? Because you don't believe in presumption of innocence until proven guilty? Most of all, you don't believe anyone else does even when they say they do? And, worse, you know know how it works because, underneath, you know how your side does it because you know what your side has done?

Think about it...

That would scare the hell out of me, too.

Michael

This is one of those things.

New from me + @JasonAbbruzzese: After 'false flag' narrative takes hold (and now loses steam), some conservatives scramble to drown out far right https://t.co/7IJIyRypZj

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) October 26, 2018

Quote

Almost immediately after news broke that explosive devices had been sent to a variety of President Donald Trump’s critics, a “false flag” conspiracy theory began to percolate on the far right, emerging from fringe message boards and gaining traction on social media before edging into the mainstream press.

The theory, as many on the far right posited without evidence, was that the bombs were the work of a Democrat who was hoping to make Republicans and Trump look bad a few days before the 2018 midterm election.

But with the arrest Friday of Cesar Sayoc Jr., a suspect who vehemently supported Trump, some conservatives are calling for a dose of reality.

“There was every reason to doubt that the bomber was a legitimate Trump supporter before we knew anything about him,” tweeted Matt Walsh, a widely followed writer for The Daily Wire, a conservative news outlet. “But now that we do have info on him, it would be kooky conspiracy theory territory to stick with the ‘false flag’ hypothesis. Clearly the guy is just a nut.”

Other popular conservatives echoed those sentiments, including Republican political strategist Rick Wilson, Fox News host Howard Kurtz and Scott Adams, a cartoonist-turned-political commentator.

“My prediction was that the bomber is an older, crazy Republican,” Adams tweeted. “How is the false flag hypothesis looking?”

And then, suddenly ...

Republican Trump-apostate Rick Wilson has a way with words ... this is from his savage Daily Beast article from yesterday: Sorry, Trumpies, this was no false-flag leftie or Unabomber in the woods. He is Trumpism uncut and unplugged. Deal with it.

Quote

For three long days this week, the Republican Party held its breath as a serial bomber sent a dozen devices to CNN’s New York headquarters, two former Democratic presidents, a former Democratic vice president, two former CIA directors, several elected Democrats, and Democratic activists like George Soros and Tom Steyer. After months of rabid attacks on his opponents as enemies of the people, Donald Trump's crop of crazy came to fruition this week and was almost ready for harvest. By either incompetence, luck, design flaws, or providence, none of the bombs in this campaign of political terror cost life or limb.

This hasn't been an easy week for Trump loyalists. They spent the last 72 hours praying that the MAGA Bomber would turn out to be a false flag attack, the product of some dastardly Democratic cabal. The idea, which bubbled up from the fever swamps of Breitbart, Infowars, and the rest of the Trump-right ecosystem like a fart in a bathtub, was as illogical as it was pathetic. It couldn't be this president's penchant for daily political arson, right?

Twitter Javerts like Rush Limbaugh, Alex Jones, Ann Coulter, Frank Gaffney, John Cardillo, Laura Loomer, Jacob Wohl, and alt-right thought leader and Pizzagate promoter Jack Prosobiec all jumped to sell the idea that Trump’s gushing sewer of inflammatory rhetoric could never inspire a serial bomber. Their mirror-world version of Occam’s Razor was that this must be a fiendishly clever leftist plot to disrupt the November elections. Just hours before the arrest of Cesar Sayoc, the president reinforced their fevered belief that this was obviously a left-wing electoral plot.

    Republicans are doing so well in early voting, and at the polls, and now this “Bomb” stuff happens and the momentum greatly slows - news not talking politics. Very unfortunate, what is going on. Republicans, go out and vote!
    — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) October 26, 2018

 

3 minutes ago, william.scherk said:

This is one of those things.

And then, suddenly ...

Republican Trump-apostate Rick Wilson has a way with words ... this is from his savage Daily Beast article from yesterday: Sorry, Trumpies, this was no false-flag leftie or Unabomber in the woods. He is Trumpism uncut and unplugged. Deal with it.

 

 

 

Tee hee hee!!!! Speculations from Them are hilarious! Not so much when from Us.

Thank God that ideologies and policies aren't being discussed and considered. Vote based on your favotire Tee hee hees!

J

This is rather a chilling video ... especially the Soros collection. Witch-doctors, Attilas, (((Globalists))).

33 minutes ago, william.scherk said:

This is rather a chilling video ... especially the Soros collection. Witch-doctors, Attilas, (((Globalists))).

 

Meh.

Pretty mellow compared to the lefties' crazed conspiracy theories about the Koch brothers.

J

Koch Konspiracy!

Dude, they're buying up our political system, bro. They're fucking trying to stop us from taking our share of their wealth. They're using their big rich guy money to try to take away our right to punish them. They're fucking making products and stuff. At least Soros doesn't produce anything and just rips off banks.

3 hours ago, william.scherk said:

This is rather a chilling video...

William,

For who? 

The view stats are not encouraging, so it can't be chilling for many people out there in the general public...

I wonder what we call a small club of very few members who posture as saviors and purport to save the world against widespread evil...

Michael

Vote for democrats, dudes, so we can impeach Trump and the Koch brothers, and indict Rush Limbaugh, and fine MSK, bro! 

Cross-posting from here. We're witnessing a nutty conspiracy theory unfolding right before our eyes:

Billy!

Now there's another "expert" authority who is taking the position that the video that Sanders posted has been "doctored":

https://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/nationworld/ct-jim-acosta-video-cnn-20181108-story.html

https://www.apnews.com/c575bd1cc3b1456cb3057ef670c7fe2a

Unlike your previously cited authority, this dude actually has some knowledge of video, but is either very selectively forgetful of what he knows (or should know in a professional position like his), or is being intentionally dishonest and misleading.

He's looking for, and wanting to find, a conspiracy. He's avoiding the simplest of obvious explanations in favor of forcing ones that are not only much more complex, but don't actually comply with reality or explain the "anomalies" that he thinks that he's seeing. He has taken an online video at a different frame rate and resolution, and is comparing it to a high-resolution original, while ignoring (for someone in his professional position, it seems that it must be intentional) the inevitable effects of converting frame rates and resolutions (and then re-converting back up when making the side-by-side comparison).

Take ANY video, and compress its frame rate and resolution for web, and then compare it to the original, and you'll end up with the exact same "anomalies" (ghosting, blurs, etc.) that this "expert" points out in the "doctored" video, especially in areas which include quick bursts of motion. Doesn't this "expert" know these things? Does he understand that, in bringing the two videos together for comparison, he himself necessarily altered the "doctored" video in certain ways? Does he have the capacity to identify which of the "artifacts" may have been added by his own computer's software in investigating the videos?

The funniest thing to me is that the "expert" doesn't see, or is intentionally avoiding pointing out to viewers, the lag between the videos in their entirety, but wants us to believe that the lag only begins when the slow "karate chop" happens. Heh. Like the previous visual idiot whom you referenced, Billy, this one has failed to properly sync the vids, and apparently hopes that no one has the presence of mind to compare movement prior to the point that he draws attention to, including not just the movements of Acosta and the woman whose arm he aggressively pushed, but also the movements of others in the room.

This stupidity is reminiscent of conspiracy theorists' analyses of the Zapruder film. An "expert" analyzes a 30 frame per second video copy of a 24 frame per second film copy of a 16 frame per second conversion of the original 18.3 frame per second film, and then announces that there are unexplained "anomolies" that must be proof of intentional, nefarious manipulation, when they are simply the logical result of the processes that the copy of the copies went through. "Why, what are these jumps and blurs which are not in the original? Someone is trying to hide something and fool us! We're being manipulated!"

Same thing with footage from 9/11.

Anyhoo, with all of this overzealous effort to downplay the impact of Acosta's slow "karate chop," what does it all amount to? The lag between the videos is three thirtieths of a second -- one tenth of a second? So, in other words, to the left and its "experts," ten percent less force than what everyone thought that Acosta had used against the woman makes Acosta's action completely acceptable! There's apparently a very specific amount of motion per second and pounds of force per square inch that the left has already established as being the cutoff for assault, and it just happens to turn out that Acosta restrained himself just enough -- within fractions of a second and fractions of pounds of force -- to avoid crossing the line! Whew! So, therefore, all of this is just evil nonsense lies that icky Republicans are telling about sweet, innocent, leftist Acosta.

Tee hee hee.

J

On 10/30/2018 at 1:58 PM, Michael Stuart Kelly said:

I wonder what we call a small club of very few members who posture as saviors and purport to save the world against widespread evil...

Objectivist Living ...

William,

Since no one else even hints at this, you just said it, and everyone on OL speaks for himself or herself (did you miss that memo, hmmmm? ), I have to say I am very surprised you admit to posturing as a savior of mankind and trying to save the world against widespread evil from OL. 

But I admire the ambition. It reminds me of an old joke from Brazil.

Quote

A female elephant was walking in the jungle. A monkey was riding on her behind having sex with her and going at it like there was no tomorrow.

The elephant bumped into a coconut tree and a coconut fell on her head.

Elephant: Whaaaaannnhhh...

Monkey (pausing and concerned): Am I hurting you, babe?

Michael