Politics & Stuff

[cosmicway 1,323]

4 minutes ago, Fulham Broadway said:

Bizarre and reckless of Biden to do this -there was/is no way of knowing how Russia would respond. And the UK govt is just as bad - no vote by MPs as to whether its sensible to ifre British made Storm Shadow missiles into Russia.

Though not surprising as Kier Starmer is the first and only MP out of 650 to be inaugurated into an American Neo Con group Tripartite Commission

One thing you don't do in war is become shy towards the enemy.
So if I was a Japanese admiral could I say to the emperor "I 'm not going to Guadalcanal because the Americans are too strong there" ?
That kind of excuse would be sheer military nonsense.
Some excuse based on logistics maybe but to say in so many words "... because the Americans are too strong there" is sheer nonsense.
So therefore Ukraine are going to use the new weapons and use them again.

[KEVINAA 97]

 

[Vesper 28,803]

big loss for Trump

I guess a teen sex trafficker as the US top law enforcement officer was a bridge too far even for some MAGAts in the Senate

Edited Thursday at 17:48 by Vesper

[Fulham Broadway 16,848]

51 minutes ago, Vesper said:

big loss for Trump

I guess a teen sex trafficker as the US top law enforcement officer was a bridge too far even for some MAGAts in the Senate

Another one about to bite the dust ?

''Audio has been released of Donald Trump’s pick for secretary of Health and Human Services, Robert F Kennedy Jr, comparing the president-elect to Hitler and suggesting some of his supporters were “outright Nazis” and “bootlickers”.

Clips were uncovered by CNN from Kennedy’s radio show “Ring of Fire”, when in 2016 the anti-vaccine activist applauded descriptions of Trump’s base as “belligerent idiots”

[cosmicway 1,323]

11 hours ago, KEVINAA said:

 

Eisenhower, General Zhukov ? Would those have been arrested as well ?

[Fulham Broadway 16,848]

There are yet to be any talks between Russia and the US as the situation continues to deteriorate and unravel.

The Kremlin dropped its deadly new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Dnipro yesterday, as Ukraine continues to brace for further attacks. With Russia moving on the offensive, it was revealed on the country’s Telegram channel a meeting has been called for tonight amid fears of a new war which is dragging the world closer to the end.

Reuters

Happy days

[Fernando 6,462]

1 hour ago, Fulham Broadway said:

There are yet to be any talks between Russia and the US as the situation continues to deteriorate and unravel.

The Kremlin dropped its deadly new Oreshnik hypersonic missile on Dnipro yesterday, as Ukraine continues to brace for further attacks. With Russia moving on the offensive, it was revealed on the country’s Telegram channel a meeting has been called for tonight amid fears of a new war which is dragging the world closer to the end.

Reuters

Happy days

He will wait for Trump and do the deal. 

[Vesper 28,803]

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-11-22-trump-cabinet-sexual-assault-gaza/

Pete Hegseth, the nominee for Secretary of Defense.

 

The presumptive Secretary of Education is married to a man whose former employee alleges he forced her to perform sex acts with his friend for an hour and a half after he defecated on her head. The presumptive Commerce Secretary preemptively sued his former assistant in 2018, after her lawyer threatened to publicize “not pretty” 2 a.m. text messages she’d received from him and his wife. The presumptive Health and Human Services director’s explanation for forcibly groping a former nanny’s breasts while holding her hostage in a kitchen pantry was that he “had a very, very rambunctious youth”; he was 46 at the time. The White House efficiency czar, currently a defendant in a putative class-action lawsuit filed by eight former employees who accuse him of perpetrating an “Animal House” work environment of “rampant sexual harassment,” and paid a quarter of a million dollars to a flight attendant who says he got naked and asked her to touch his erect penis in exchange for the gift of a horse. 

And of course the presumptive Defense Secretary was accused of raping a woman who was tasked with monitoring what she described to police as his “creeper vibes” after a Republican women’s conference at which he was a keynote speaker, just a month and change after the birth of his fourth child with a woman who was not his wife at the time. (Reader, she married him.)

The aggressive rapeyness of the second Donald Trump administration is so tyrannical it’s almost enough to make a girl wistful for Matt Gaetz, the Florida congressman who withdrew his name from attorney general contention yesterday (to make way for the despicable Pam Bondi) amid an orgy of leaks from two investigations into his sexploits with a 17-year-old procured by a convicted sex trafficker friend. Multiple witnesses testified that Gaetz did not actually know the 17-year-old was underage, you see, and that he ceased having sex with her when he found out. 

I don’t have a lot of warmth in my heart for Barack Obama, but America will always have the fact that he was never a world-renowned horndog. When he took office, as I remarked a year ago in an essay about founding Jezebel, the entire culture was dominated by networks of organized sex abuse. The coolest clothing brand was run by an unabashed sex predator. The second-coolest clothing brand was run by a recently indicted sex trafficker. The predominant underwear retailer was a front for Jeffrey Epstein, who was propositioning young women while literally serving a supposed “prison sentence” for sex crimes. The Vatican was helmed by a guy who spent his entire career covering up sex abuse accusations. Republicans had just lost control of Congress to revelations over their complicity in the systematic teenage intern abuse of a prominent Florida congressman and others; the Speaker of the House at the time quietly stepped down and would later be revealed as a systematic child sex abuser while he was a high school wrestling coach in the 1970s. The Abu Ghraib scandal showcased ritual sexual humiliation as a top American export. One-fifth of female veterans were diagnosed with disorders stemming from sexual trauma. Insatiable serial rapists ran the movie business and the music business; children's television was dominated by an accused pedophile, and so we would learn was the Penn State football program, USA Gymnastics, organized cheerleading, and of course just about every sector and obscure subsector of high and low finance.

During the Obama years millions of manufacturing jobs were wiped out, income inequality gaped, opioids consumed whole communities, and the titans of finance who collapsed the economy through fraud went unprosecuted, but “rape culture” retreated. Kid Cudi stole Diddy’s girlfriend, Kendrick Lamar made rap poetry again, the star of the era’s top-grossing movie franchise spent her down time in the Dakotas getting arrested for protesting oil pipelines. “Wokeness” in those early days conveyed a kind of vigilant neo-wholesomeness. It seemed in those days self-evident that sexual abuse was just a subset of dehumanization and exploitation that helpfully, unlike most forms of exploitation, happened to be illegal. 

And the moral core of resistance liberalism was a rejection of dehumanization in all forms. Where both Hillary and Trump had tried semi-successfully to redirect rape culture backlash against one another and other enemy tribes—the apocryphal “Bernie Bros” for Hillary, immigrants for Trump—the Pussy Hats found the apex of their cultural cachet fighting for someone they didn’t know: mothers whose babies had been seized at the border and warehoused in massive colorless child prisons, per a policy that had been somehow initially enacted under Barack Obama. It is so easy to forget now how the success of that movement led Ivanka Trump to lobby her father to issue an executive order 18 months into his presidency that ended the separations. During the pandemic again, resistance outrage on behalf of the invisible “essential workers” brought immediate material gains to nursing home aides, delivery drivers and meatpacking plant staffers in the form of hazard pay, government checks and a new sense of their importance within the broader community. 

But powerful forces wanted desperately to absorb the “resistance” into the profitable realm of insular partisan tribalism we know as “identity politics.” A random moment lodged for whatever reason in my hippocampus was the afternoon a gaggle of female attorneys with “I believe Christine Blasey Ford” pins on their handbags filed into happy hour at my obscenely expensive restaurant. I believed her too, one thousand percent, but the pins were… just a bit much. Years later I’d watch Brett Kavanaugh, in all his heinous glory, pompously inveighing against opponents of the deal that enabled the Sackler family to abuse the bankruptcy code to keep their multibillion-dollar fortune legally off-limits to the hundreds of thousands of families their opioid empire’s deliberate conspiracy had torn apart. Clearly his high school boorishness had been merely a harbinger of a legacy that would ultimately prove much darker. But as long as the affluent teenagers who’d been victimized by his like grew up to become corporate lawyers and lobbyists, no one was really incentivized to spell out those connections. 

When some genius at Kamala HQ concocted “We are not going back,” every woman who believed Christine Blasey Ford knew in a visceral sense exactly what that meant. After raking DJT over the coals for schtupping Stormy Daniels 18 years ago and attacking E. Jean Carroll in the Bergdorf dressing room the same year Bill attacked Monica with that cigar, "back" is exactly where the elites wanted to go. In Pete Hegseth, with his crusader tattoos and membership in the Erik Prince groupchat and entire post-military career bankrolled by the Koch network, with his 2002 article in the Princeton Tory arguing that sex with an unconscious person does not constitute “rape” and his two-year lobbying campaign to pardon accused war criminal Eddie Gallagher—a man described by a Navy SEAL colleague as “perfectly ok with killing anybody that was moving” who had been turned in by six members of his platoon because he was that “freaking evil”—we might have perhaps the purest distillation of right-wing rape culture in all its arrogant, white nationalist glory.

Except, of course, it is now November 2024, and so for the past 412 days since the Israeli defense minister announced he was cutting off all food and water to 2.5 million largely innocent refugees, I have watched the forces of a thousand Eddie Gallaghers unleashed each day in the effort to dehumanize Palestinians into extinction. From November and December when we watched the IDF bomb every hospital and school in Gaza, to January when we saw the first large-scale protests to stop the entry of aid trucks into the territory, to the slaughter of more than 100 Gazans lined up for flour and the surgical assassination of foreign aid workers in the spring, to the emphatic and self-righteous calls by journalists for the IDF to adopt an explicit pro-sexual assault policy after ten prison guards were punished for sodomizing Palestinian detainees with hot metal rods. By the end of October, Gaza as a place cannot be said to exist, and all that defined the lives of the 2.5 million who once lived there has been obliterated, but the continued drive to destroy has only swollen, expanded to encompass Beirut and Damascus and even Amsterdam.

This week Ha'aretz reported an “alarming rise” in rape inside Israel, especially among people under 18 who had been displaced from the south after October 7; forgive me if I am not alarmed.

Throughout all of this Joe Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken and their whole coterie of indistinguishably robotic flacks have stood unflailingly behind Netanyahu and his genocidal band of Jewish supremacist freaks, even as they openly plotted to sabotage his presidency in favor of one that might funnel the same tens of billions with more explicit enthusiasm and I guess, cooler tattoos. This week, when the International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Netanyahu and his former defense secretary and Bernie Sanders rallied around a dozen and a half of his Senate colleagues in three ceremonial votes against sending any more offensive weapons to Israel, President Biden slammed the court as “outrageous,” labored behind the scenes to smear the senators as treasonous saboteurs and issued a formal statement consisting of little more than an unabashed dog whistle to Jewish supremacy: “Whatever the ICC might imply, there is no equivalence—none—between Israel and Hamas.” For thirteen months now, a Democratic presidential administration has been toiling to remind Palestinians and anyone who might sympathize with them that they are not by the standards of the ruling class fully human: “Your body, my choice,” as the Trumpists would say.

Which brings me to the challenge ahead. Trump and his cabinet of sickos are about to spend the next four years doing some sadistic, heinous things. And yet the fact remains that the bar has been set by bankrolling a brand-new ICC-certified genocide; that’s the achievement of Joe Biden. And if we want our countrymen to unite in rejection of the cruelty around which Trump has built his brand, we cannot pretend the Democratic Party of 2024 represents a spotless alternative. We are not going back.

[Vesper 28,803]

 

real-time top 50 billionaires' net worth

Musk is just exploding, Ellison now a firm number two.

Arnault is now worth 70B or so less than his high, and Google co-founders (Page and Brin) are tumbling (and will probably continue to do so as the US likely rips Google apart over the next year or so).

 

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/#591aee713d78

	1	Elon Musk	$321.7 B	▶ $7.3 B | 2.31%	53	Tesla, SpaceX	United States
	2	Larry Ellison	$235.3 B	▶ $373 M | 0.16%	80	Oracle	United States
	3	Jeff Bezos	$213.5 B	▶ $1.1 B | -0.53%	60	Amazon	United States
	4	Mark Zuckerberg	$193.5 B	▶ $1.3 B | -0.69%	40	Facebook	United States
	5	Bernard Arnault & family	$157.0 B	▶ $2.1 B | 1.36%	75	LVMH	France
	6	Warren Buffett	$149.7 B	▶ $1.5 B | 0.99%	94	Berkshire Hathaway	United States
	7	Larry Page	$137.2 B	▶ $2.2 B | -1.54%	51	Google	United States
	8	Sergey Brin	$131.4 B	▶ $2 B | -1.51%	51	Google	United States
	9	Amancio Ortega	$124.7 B	▶ $2.3 B | 1.84%	88	Zara	Spain
	10	Jensen Huang	$123.8 B	▶ $4.1 B | -3.18%	61	Semiconductors	United States
	11	Steve Ballmer	$123.3 B	▶ $920 M | 0.75%	68	Microsoft	United States
	12	Michael Dell	$111.6 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.74%	59	Dell Technologies	United States
	13	Rob Walton & family	$109.0 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.80%	80	Walmart	United States
	14	Jim Walton & family	$107.7 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.81%	76	Walmart	United States
	15	Bill Gates	$105.9 B	▶ $931 M | 0.89%	69	Microsoft	United States
	16	Michael Bloomberg	$104.7 B	$0	82	Bloomberg LP	United States
	17	Alice Walton	$100.0 B	▶ $1.9 B | 1.91%	75	Walmart	United States
	18	Mukesh Ambani	$99.3 B	▶ $2.9 B | 2.98%	67	Diversified	India
	19	Carlos Slim Helu & family	$80.9 B	▶ $80 M | 0.10%	84	Telecom	Mexico
	20	Julia Koch & family	$74.2 B	$0	62	Koch, Inc.	United States
	21	Francoise Bettencourt Meyers & family	$72.0 B	▶ $1.2 B | 1.69%	71	L'Oréal	France
	22	David Thomson & family	$69.1 B	▶ $200 M | -0.29%	67	Media	Canada
	23	Charles Koch & family	$67.5 B	$0	89	Koch, Inc.	United States
	24	Changpeng Zhao	$62.2 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	47	Cryptocurrency exchange	Canada
	25	Thomas Peterffy	$57.2 B	▶ $25 M | -0.04%	80	Discount brokerage	United States
	26	Stephen Schwarzman	$57.0 B	▶ $1.2 B | 2.12%	77	Investments	United States
	27	Gautam Adani	$56.7 B	▶ $910 M | -1.58%	62	Infrastructure, commodities	India
	28	Zhong Shanshan	$51.5 B	▶ $935 M | 1.85%	69	Beverages, pharmaceuticals	China
	29	Jeff Yass	$49.6 B	$0	66	Trading, investments	United States
	30	Ken Griffin	$46.7 B	$0	56	Hedge funds	United States
	31	Prajogo Pangestu	$46.6 B	▶ $606 M | 1.32%	80	Petrochemicals, energy	Indonesia
	32	Zhang Yiming	$45.6 B	$0	40	TikTok	China
	33	Jacqueline Mars	$45.3 B	$0	85	Candy, pet food	United States
	33	John Mars	$45.3 B	$0	89	Candy, pet food	United States
	35	Tadashi Yanai & family	$45.1 B	▶ $450 M | 1.01%	75	Fashion retail	Japan
	36	Ma Huateng	$43.6 B	▶ $713 M | -1.61%	53	Online games	China
	37	Giovanni Ferrero	$42.0 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	60	Nutella, chocolates	Italy
	38	Shiv Nadar	$41.6 B	▶ $1.2 B | 3.05%	79	Software services	India
	39	Gerard Wertheimer	$40.7 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	73	Chanel	France
	39	Alain Wertheimer	$40.7 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	76	Chanel	France
	41	Savitri Jindal & family	$39.3 B	▶ $503 M | 1.30%	74	Steel	India
	42	Mark Mateschitz	$38.0 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	32	Red Bull	Austria
	43	Lukas Walton	$37.8 B	▶ $640 M | 1.73%	38	Walmart	United States
	44	Robin Zeng	$37.7 B	▶ $1.3 B | -3.32%	55	Batteries	Hong Kong
	45	Abigail Johnson	$37.5 B	$0	62	Fidelity	United States
	46	Klaus-Michael Kuehne	$37.3 B	▶ $126 M | 0.34%	87	Shipping	Germany
	47	Reinhold Wuerth & family	$36.2 B	▶ $0M | 0.00%	89	Fasteners	Germany
	48	Li Ka-shing	$35.7 B	▶ $62 M | -0.17%	96	Diversified	Hong Kong
	49	Colin Huang	$35.3 B	▶ $1.4 B | -3.86%	44	E-commerce	China
	50	Phil Knight & family	$35.0 B	▶ $701 M | 2.04%	86	Nike	United States