The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2019-71

December 1, 2019

The MoA Week In Review – Open Thread 2019-71

Last week's posts at Moon of Alabama:

November 25 – It Is True That Corruption Caused The 737 MAX Accidents. But It Was Not Foreign.

>Meanwhile, Congress, following a hearing last month where it grilled Boeing’s chief executive, Dennis A. Muilenburg, is planning to hold a hearing next month at which it expects F.A.A. officials to testify about whether there are other problems with the Max that Boeing hasn’t yet addressed.<

There are at least three issues where the 737 MAX does not conform to current or even older regulation:
– A turbine disk rupture could cut the unprotected rudder cables.
– The manual trim can not be moved at higher speeds to correct stabilizer position problems.
– The cockpit misses an integrated crew alert system (EICAS) and can confuse the pilots with a multitude of dubious alarms.

November 26 – The House Will Not Vote On Impeachment. It Will Censure Trump.

November 27 – New Study: "Russian Trolls" Did Not "Sow Discord" – They Influenced No One

Related:
U.S. Dems’ dangerous demagoguing on Russia – Helena Cobban – Just World News

November 29 – OPCW Manufactured A Pretext For War By Suppressing Its Own Scientists' Research
November 30 – OPCW Manipulation Of Its Douma Report Requires A Fresh Look At The Skripal 'Novichok' Case

—
Other issues:

This should be a huge scandal:

ICE arrests 90 more students at fake university in Michigan – Detroit Free Press

>About 90 additional foreign students of a fake university in metro Detroit created by the Department of Homeland Security have been arrested in recent months.

A total of about 250 students have now been arrested since January on immigration violations by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as part of a sting operation by federal agents who enticed foreign-born students, mostly from India, to attend the school that marketed itself as offering graduate programs in technology and computer studies, according to ICE officials.<

Hong Kong:

Hong Kong protests: battered Polytechnic University faces six months of repairs as police say more than 10,000 petrol bombs seized from campuses across city – SCMP
>University president Teng Jin-guang reveals that of more than 1,100 people arrested over campus siege, only 46 were PolyU students<

Assange:

The US trail of the man whose security firm spied on Julian Assange – El Pais
The last paragraph points to a cooperation between the spy company UC Global and the Guardian which published the false claim that Trump campaign manager Manafort visited Assange.

Adam Schiff now finally learns who the "go-between" from Assange to Trump was. /snark
Assange to Testify on Being Recorded in Embassy in London – New York Times

>The prosecutor and Mr. Assange’s allies argue that the C.I.A. was behind the spying. A spokesman for the agency declined to comment. After President Trump took office in 2017, the C.I.A. began espionage aimed at Mr. Assange, WikiLeaks and their ties to Russian intelligence, and the Justice Department began building a criminal case against him.
…
[The head of UC Global] signed a contract with Las Vegas Sands, the casino and resort company of Sheldon Adelson, and the prosecution contends that Mr. Morales passed information about Mr. Assange to security officials at the company, saying it acted as a go-between with the C.I.A.<

Sanctions:

What happens when big powers misuse trade and finances to hurt other powers:
Poland repatriates 100 tons from London – Business Insider
U.S.-based chip-tech group moving to Switzerland over trade curb fears – Reuters

Use as open thread …

Posted by b on December 1, 2019 at 15:16 UTC | Permalink

Comments

@ karlof1 | Dec 6 2019 22:52 utc | 194
I think ‘work’ may be too strong a word to use, maybe effort, possibly agency provide a broader scope that separates mere goods from economic goods. All economic goods require either human agency, effort or work to be produced. Economic goods are those that satisfy either needs, wants or desires and are consumed in meeting satisfaction and value is derived from the capacity of economic goods to satisfy needs, wants or desires. In a nutshell that is the core of all economics. A pleasant way to define economics might be well stated as the study of the species ecological niche and the superstructures developed to enhance utility or efficiency in obtaining economic goods from the environment and their use and distribution. All else is idle, pretentious blather in comparison.
It is only a short step from this definition to see that economic goods in excess of needs, wants and desires are not consumed but retained as unconsumed income (income is the product of producing economic goods for consumption) that can be either stored and consumed at a later date, or exchanged for other economic goods, also giving rise to value. Wealth is nothing more than unconsumed, stored economic goods. Please note, no moral, legal or ethical principle has been transgressed, trespassed or damaged in these definitions and they remain valid for whatever political economic system under consideration. Furthermore they can be fungible between political economic systems without change of definition with the minimum of care taken. YMMV

Posted by: Formerly T-Bear | Dec 7 2019 9:17 utc | 201

@ Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 7 2019 4:45 utc | 199
Paper money did exist before the rise of capitalism, but it was not the dominant form of money and it didn’t act as reserve of value as it does in capitalism — they were just “promisory notes” so you can avoid the dangerous and cumbersome activity of transporting large amounts of gold through long distances.

Posted by: vk | Dec 7 2019 12:42 utc | 202

About econ.
No system flows unless there is disequilibrium, a “delta”. In electronics we use insulators and energy sources, loads, and networks to make flow, the economics of electrical circuits.
In the flow of goods people want the “insulation” is the cop or the fear of the cop who will bang you up in chokee (or shoot you) if you simply take what you want.
In the example of gold under my house, I would naturally call the sheriff, and his man with a gun would stop the digging.
This fact is evident as the sun in the heavens, and I am both astonished and pleased to see that learned and thoughtful people are unable to see it. Pleased? Yes, I am studying how blindness, the suspension of disbelief, is essential to a “church” or “club”.
> A learned judge of the Los Angeles Superior Court once remarked to me that the power of her court was entirely imaginary, non-existent, except for the bailiff and his gun. Stanford Law School, 1952 I believe.
……………….
In sunny news, Corbett does a 45 minute on FF and Douma “attack”.

Posted by: Walter | Dec 7 2019 12:46 utc | 203

@ Posted by: Formerly T-Bear | Dec 7 2019 9:17 utc | 201
Value is socially necessary human labor measured in average social time.
If a pair of shoes takes, on average, one hour to produce, then one hour of human labor is the value of one pair of shoes (in a given point of time of the capitalist development).

Posted by: vk | Dec 7 2019 12:47 utc | 204

vk repeats the Marxist idea that a thing is worth the labor that goes into making it. It’s an attractive idea.
But if no one wants the shoes the value of the labor and the shoes is zero.
If somebody wants the shoes and simply takes them from their maker the value changes hands with zero economic exchange. The makers get zero value.
We call that theft, because it is not economic activity.
If the maker is a slave being worked to death? Then the shoes value, or most of it, accrues to the owner-thief, who has stolen them. If then he fraudulently sells or wears them they remain stolen shoes.
Slaves are subject to violence, by definition.
Every aspect is accompanied by the looming presence, or the actual presence, of violence.

Posted by: Walter | Dec 7 2019 13:25 utc | 205

@ Posted by: Walter | Dec 7 2019 13:25 utc | 205
Commodities are only commodities when they materially exist. There is no “imaginary commodity” with zero value.
Yes, when you produce something for yourself or for your kids, it’s not capital, it has zero value. But familial economy is not dominant in capitalism, and, when it exists, it is seen by the system as a bad thing, a space that should he occupied by capital. And history shows us capitalism is indeed eliminating aspects of familial economy (e.g. extinction of housewives, automation of domestic work, conversion of family affairs such as dinners into services etc.).
Thieves are unproductive workers: they transfer value from one hand to the other. But said value already exists, it was already produced. That’s why they will always be a small minority of the population: if everybody was a thief, nobody would be a thief.
A slave is not considered human in the capitalist scheme of reproduction, but fixed capital. Slave owners from the southern states of America used depreciation formulas to calculate slave productivity.
It is only wage labor that produces value. This is so because wage labor is abstract labor: the worker receives in money, which is spent in the free market (world market). By this expenditure, it is possible to calculate the minimum amount of capital necessary to relocate to working class subsistence. This is not possible with slave labor – abd that’s why wage labor is the dominant form of labor in capitalism.

Posted by: vk | Dec 7 2019 14:15 utc | 206

Violence, scarcity, and the market system go together like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. I will not trade my labor (in whatever form) for a pair of shoes from a shoemaker if there are shoes lying around everywhere. At least, not until the shoemaker or an associate holds a gun to my head.
Air is free to breathe by everybody until a license to breathe is imposed by violence. But now even the breathing out of evil carbon dioxide by livestock will soon require a license imposed by the threat of state violence, if certain parties prevail.
When scarcity can no longer be imposed by physical limitation then the entire market system collapses, as we have seen with the recorded music industry. It is no longer possible to limit music to physical devices that are only available from “authorized” sources like music stores. Recorded music prices are now near zero, and almost no one can make a living as a musician any more. That is an intangible loss to everyone.
Only musicians and their kids will go hungry if musicians can’t make a living, but what happens if the lack of scarcity of agricultural commodities drives prices near zero and farmers can’t make a living? Mexico happens. NAFTA allowed cheap US corn to drive Mexican farmers off their land and into the cities and into the US. I suspect these same social dislocations had a lot to do with the rise of the drug gangs as well.
Without state violence and scarcity there is no capitalism.
Nation states, being a near-monopoly on violence, can not disappear while violence, coercion, hierarchy, and scarcity are key design features of a society.

Posted by: Trailer Trash | Dec 7 2019 14:44 utc | 207

I do not believe Walter spoke of commodities. ref vk> “Commodities are only commodities when they materially exist. There is no “imaginary commodity” with zero value.” But I shall ask, is a story imaginary? Is, say, Homer, imaginary? Does it have value? Is it a “commodity”? Was my copy free?
@ TT. Yes indeed. TT > “Without state violence and scarcity there is no capitalism.” I would not limit violence to capitalism alone, but neither did you.
I proposed previously that Craig Murray’s current essay on the nature of state violence is worth reading.
……………….
In a related matter, the violence of those brave agents of Peace, the cops, and their curious ways… Kindly, Friends, also consider how those Good Men discover guilt – by “crystal Ball” by scrying.
see ProPublica “Why Are Cops Around the World Using This Outlandish Mind-Reading Tool?”
Seems they ran Comey and others through the “tool”.

Posted by: Walter | Dec 7 2019 15:05 utc | 208

> I would not limit violence to capitalism alone, but neither did you.
Indeed. All systems of enforced hierarchy are built on violence. More rigid hierarchies require more violence, such as the previous US system of chattel slavery and the current US system of prison slavery and wage slavery.
I’d still like to know how life is for Chinese workers. Recently Chinese farmers were forced to slaughter huge numbers of hogs to stop a disease. Were they made whole by the state, or forced to migrate to urban areas with shiny new towers?
In the US, who gets subsidies is very political. Corn and soybeans are important to corporate giants like Cargill, so those crops are supported. If potato prices are too low, that’s too bad. Wish we could help. But we can’t, so we’ll send the Sheriff instead. Leave upright or leave in a body bag. Makes no difference to the State, although there is more paper work when people don’t leave on their own power.
US farmers who borrow operating funds via the Dept of Agriculture are forced to mortgage everything to get the money. If the opaque County Committee decides not to roll over the loans, the farm family loses everything except the clothes on their back. This happened to many of my neighbors in the 1980s when the official policy was “Get Big or Get Out”. Most did not have the resources to get big.

Posted by: Trailer Trash | Dec 7 2019 16:41 utc | 209

@ Posted by: Trailer Trash | Dec 7 2019 14:44 utc | 207
You’re right: scarcity can be natural or artificial. Indeed, capitalism begun by creating scarcity of the most basic good of them all: land (enclosures). This is called “profit upon alienation”: you create the disease to sell the cure. For that, you sure need violence.
The period capitalism resorted mainly to violence to expand its structure Marx called “primitive accumulation”.
In the future, if the capitalist class manages to create a technology capable of artificially depriving humanity of air, they will do it, and air will become a commodity. But that’s not what matters for the scientific investigation of capitalism: what Marx wanted to tell with this is that blessings by nature are the exception, not the rule, of human history. Indeed, if nature gave everything humanity needed from the start, there wouldn’t need to be History: the homo sapiens would behave like a normal animal species for all eternity.
The example you gave of music industry is very interesting.
Music appears to be cheap from the point of view of the individual because there already is a very huge and expensive infrastructure over which the he/she can download the music for an infinitesimal cost. But the cost is there: someone has to pay for the music playing device (the smartphone or mp3 player), the downloading device (the computer or smartphone) and the energy spent to do all this (electricity, housing of the individual, etc.). All this infrastructure is more expensive than a live concert, but the scale of consumption (billions of consumers) makes the unitary cost of downloadable music be almost zero.
The internet only appears to be cheap because a lot of humans use it for a lot of things, bringing the unitary cost of the utilities down to almost zero. But that’s just an illusion, fruit of a civilization that’s still at its apex.
But, at the same time, this internet example is also illustrative of why socialism is, ultimately, viable. Marx clearly stated that socialism would be born from inside, not from the outside, of the capitalist system. There would come a point of capitalist development where labor productivity would be so absurd that unitary costs would be essentially zero; also, organic composition of capital would be so high that profit rates would tend to zero. Capitalism would abolish itself, socialism being its natural civilizational successor.

Posted by: vk | Dec 7 2019 17:01 utc | 210

Thanks to those responding to my ‘morality’ post.
To Walter @ 187 who posits different moralities – I would disagree with that. Even if you go to lower creatures (or what we would class as lower, all life being fundamentally on the same mysterious plane of supporting both itself and others) there is a morality about what they do that is common to all. How do I mean that, in the same sense as the ancient Greek formula: ‘All men desire the good’.
I was reading backward to reach the message of Walter’s post, and the discussion that comes after really pivots on the next point made by William Gruff @ 188:
“…Of course, you can study humans’ transient internal mental states themselves, but doing so strictly relative to other transient internal mental states cannot yield any kind of useful understanding, at least outside of rigorous Zen meditation, and then it is debatable how useful such understanding would be in any scientific sense.”
This is a fancier way of agreeing with Walter’s post. No need then for philosophy, love of wisdom – no need for love at all, as far as science goes. We’ll be experts on the latter; continue to debunk the former as of no scientific value. And that’s what’s got us where we are today.
Thanks to psychohistorian for his support of Occupy donating valued books. Somebody benefited from your generosity. Some young person picked up one of those books and read it. And here’s what you say:
“…I am not sure that the younger generations have the same thirst for book knowledge as did older generations. I fear that they are more victims of the Plato’s Cave Display syndrome of “education” which seriously narrows their world view and skews the optics of the parts…”
Indeed, that was why I specified that learning, education isn’t confined to our sadly deteriorated ivory towers but is revitalized on the streets. Socrates began there, eschewing those who expected payment for so doing. Those were the Sophists of his day, and of ours. I think to relearn what it means to teach we have to go outside of such moribund edifices, but as can be seen by the opinions I’ve pasted in my remarks here, there is a real need to do that. Our edifices have failed us, as they had in Plato’s time also. Our victims of systemic moral assassination are the Julian Assanges; the Greeks had Socrates. And the ultimate victims are our young people, who don’t even know what has been taken from them. The ‘useless’ parts of their own souls.

Posted by: juliania | Dec 7 2019 17:18 utc | 211

@ “This is a fancier way of agreeing with Walter’s post. No need then for philosophy, love of wisdom – no need for love at all, as far as science goes. We’ll be experts on the latter; continue to debunk the former as of no scientific value. And that’s what’s got us where we are today.”
I did also add “logic” as a factor in creating a morality. In man, of course as I though clear, that includes what you opine there’d be no need for. Your conclusion does not seem to be supported. But I freely grant that I might have been more loquacious and thorough.
School, “education” in the multitude of forms, is what we have to work with, this is obvious and is naturally essential to a coordinated community of shared morality. And it’s fast, if imperfect. Over time, if left alone, the more basic genetic factors seem also highly deterministic. Though that’s not a pc thing to say, every horse-breeder and owner of a cattle dog knows it.

Posted by: Walter | Dec 7 2019 19:31 utc | 212

I used to go to various public events and setup the Pyramid of Capitalism on an easel. People get it. They know something is very wrong. And they are eager to discuss it, but there are few opportunities to do so. Class conscious people can make those opportunities.
When I ask someone, “Who knows best how to do your job? You, or your boss?”, they get it.
When I lived in college towns I used to go to various public lectures. It’s great fun to ask some self-important ivory-tower academic questions like, “What’s so Democratic about Capitalism?”
Things are bad and likely to get worse, but there is still much work that can be done.
Educate – Organize – Emancipate
This is still a good strategy. I suspect our young people would like to be told the truth. But really, it needs to be done in person, one person at a time. Any volunteers?

Posted by: Trailer Trash | Dec 7 2019 19:58 utc | 213

@ Posted by: Trailer Trash | Dec 7 2019 19:58 utc | 213 who wrote
”
Educate – Organize – Emancipate
This is still a good strategy. I suspect our young people would like to be told the truth. But really, it needs to be done in person, one person at a time. Any volunteers?
”
I am retiring in a small land grant college town and plan to do that very thing. I do hope to evolve to more than one person at a time….grin

Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 7 2019 22:11 utc | 214

Below is a Wall Street on Parade link that might interest some MoA barflies
The Fed Has Not Rejected One Bank Merger Application Out of 3800 Submitted in Past 11 Years
The take away quote
”
At the end of 1999, the year that the Clinton administration passed legislation to allow Wall Street’s casino investment banks to gobble up Federally-insured, deposit-taking banks, there were 10,220 federally insured banks and savings institutions in the United States. Today, that number stands at 5,213, a decline of 49 percent. Our data comes from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
”
So now we have more TBTF banks instead of less than in 2008….what could go wrong with that?
Anybody got a match?

Posted by: psychohistorian | Dec 7 2019 22:57 utc | 215

Some historical (by no means all-inclusive) history of crypto.
@ Cryptiana: Articles on Historical Cryptography
cool.
thoughts about stego . what’s a picture? How does it look? where is it? does it matter? How discriminate one set of random numbers from another? Which is rr? (really random?) and which is not? Which has meaning? In this universe TURL has a tiny place, just above stupid?
The hypothesis set seems endless.

Posted by: Walter | Dec 8 2019 1:01 utc | 216

Re: Capitalism – Public vs Private banking – Labor vs Value…
The increasing structural dysfunction associated with money and wealth distribution in 2019 isn’t due to “Capitalism” per se. It’s due to UNREGULATED Capitalism.
One only needs to look up the way Taxation, in the West and especially the UK, was mandated in the 1950s and 1960s to see that The Rich have gradually had the Traditional Taxation Thresholds and Categories reduced in order to reduce THEIR own Tax obligations.
The Rich now OWN the Government which we naively call “ours” even though we know Our Government doesn’t listen to us.
Why is no-one talking about that elephant in the room?

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 8 2019 7:17 utc | 217

Would someone like to talk about Tax Havens?
We could discuss who Tax Havens do and don’t benefit.
We could also discuss who does and doesn’t approve of them and why Tax Havens are ‘legal’ instead of ‘criminal’.

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 8 2019 7:32 utc | 218

@ Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 8 2019 7:17 utc | 217
In private correspondence with someone, reference was made to The New Yorker essay-article several years ago (before TDS overwhelmed the organisation) describing the management takeover of the Ford Foundation. I suggested this essay provides ‘proof of concept’ of what has transpired in current banking/financial operations. The deleterious effects of R.M. Nixon’s ‘Borking’ the DoJ through the office of the Judge Advocate General (another superb The New Yorker offering) allowing all effective regulation to cease through capture of the government’s enforcement apparatus. You don’t need any conspiracy theory whatsoever, these are the historical facts. I never had a reply, curiously enough. The process used once restrictions are removed have been field tested by the British Empire back in the days it was gaining hegemony in India; capturing Egypt from the Ottoman Empire; capturing and controlling the Ottoman Empire itself, all before the beginning of The Great War (W.W. I) itself.
Some elephant this.

Posted by: Formerly T-Bear | Dec 8 2019 8:19 utc | 219

I see Saker has a fine book review at UNZ.> Book Review: Andrei Martyanov’s The (Real) Revolution in Military Affairs”
The combined fleet exercises in the Indian Ocean China / Russia / Iran navies everyone knows about, but Saker gives a link to wiki (yeah, I know) said link included the sobering implications conveyed by addendum below>
“In late October 2019, a week before Commander of the Northern Fleet Aleksandr Moiseyev and Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov met their Norwegian counterparts in Kirkenes, Norway, ten submarines of the Russia’s Northern Fleet, among them two diesel-electric and eight non-strategic nuclear, left their homebases in Kola Peninsula to participate in the largest Russian submarine drills since operations Aport and Atrina in 1985 and 1987, respectively, when the Soviets deployed several SSNs near the U.S. coast before Gorbachev-Reagan meeting.[5] The main task of the submarines is reportedly testing Russian ability to breach the GIUK gap undetected and sail into the Atlantic Ocean. The drills are expected to last up to two months.”

Posted by: Walter | Dec 8 2019 12:19 utc | 220

@ Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 8 2019 7:17 utc | 217
No, the problem is with capitalism in general. There are no variants of capitalism.
It is a myth that capitalism is unregulated. Capitalism is regulated, it has a planned economy. The difference is that this regulation and plannification happens under the logic of the profit rates, not a central government.
Taxation and State regulation disappeared over time not because capitalism transmuted into something else, but because the system itself begun to deteriorate. It was only after it begun to deteriorate that it begun to devour the State so to try to recover its previous profit rates.
And this we can demonstrate: profit rates were higher during the post-war miracle (1945-1969) than during the neoliberal era (1980-2006). What is more interesting: During the post-war miracle, profit rates skyrocketed at the beginning of the period, only to fall steeply in the subsequent years, linearly. During the neoliberal era, profits kinda stopped to fall and even begun to infinitesimally rise again — but it never went back to even the worst years of the miracle era. Profit rates then oscillated up and down in a more or less parallel line, but gently tending downwards.
This is very interesting because it clearly shows that the neoliberal era was a era of desperation of capitalism: it trying, at any costs, to save the profit rates of the system. And we now know it failed: the massification of the internet and computers gave neoliberalism a little breathing space in the 1990s, and a housing market speculative bubble gave it a last breath in the early 2000s (from the end of the dotcom bubble burst until 2006). Then 2008 crisis bursted and neoliberalism ended as a viable doctrine.
Now, in the post-2008 era, we have the rebirth of fascism in the First World and much of the Third World. Fascism is a last safety valve the capitalists resort to in times of extreme and unsolvable distress. It is only activated when there’s a threat of revolution. This indicates that the post-war miracle architecture will not come back.

Posted by: vk | Dec 8 2019 13:54 utc | 221

Report on Britain’s agreement with the United States to privatize public health
Allegedly leaked by “The Russians”…according to “Atlantic Council” related “independent experts”, like Ben Nimmo ( Institute for Statecraft/Integrity Inititative ) and Grahan Brookie ( NATO public relations team funded by US and British weapons manufacturers, including Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Raytheon ).
This is what Brexit is about…..
https://twitter.com/ioanmarcjones/status/1201842545724145664
Then, they will come for France, Spain, Italy and so on…after all a report by Morgan banking at the times of 2008 crisis was saying that the Constitutions of some European countries, especially those of the South of Europe, included way too many articles that could be labeled as socialist, if not because they came out from the end of harsh fascist dictatorships….That was seen as an obstacle to the advancement of neoliberalism in Europe…This is why in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis it was needed to introduce a clause in the Spanish Constitution ( which was done with noctural alevosity )to allow that the rescue of the banks prevailed over the welfare and security of Spanish people.
The austerity measures that were implanted at the time, the same that are trying to implant in France now, found a strong contestation in the streets giving place to the 15M movement.
Since the auterity measures were applied even in a harsher way in Catalonia by the then right wing government of Artur Mas, the contestation in the streets there was proportionately stronger, oblying the Generalitat President at a time to access Catalan Parliament by helicopter. All that rage in the streets was then redirected from the original target, the right wing autonomous government and its harsh austerity measures, to another, the central government and those amongst own peers who were less Catalan than others, by the seccesionist movement propulsed by the same right wing government in charge, who, has not only to date achieved dividing the masses of citizens from the common initial objective, but also has contributed greatly to the grow of the new “black beast”, with which to scare the population into accepting them as lesser evil, the extrem far-right, whose program falls in the most extrem neoliberal field, as carbon copy of Trump´s program. This way they get that the peple vote for stability and security, chosinf one from bipartisn system´s options, which, whatever it is, will always fullfill at the letter the mandate from neoliberal dominated Brussels .
This way, the masses forget about their real life grievances, divide and throw against each other, and end voting their own executioners at both, apparently, opposed sides…
To debunk that these are opposed sides, the fact the seccesionists and riotters in Catalonia solidarize through Twitter with those in Hong Kong ( also by holding each other´s symbols at their demonstrations ) while, at the same time, they are joined by Ukrainian neonazi far-right thugs, all of them supported, one way or the other, by the bipartisan system in the US….which, as no other way could be, constitutes two ends of the same hydra, apparently opposed, but united in the same goal, terminate the EU as a competing block in a late capitalism stage, spreading savage neoliberalism and trying to fix it to iron into sovereign constitutions by placing their puppets through manipulation of electoral processes using social media engineering( as we have already seen in Ukraine, Brazil and Bolivia..) to plunder whatever nation still remains unplundered…before the skies are falling…

Posted by: Sasha | Dec 8 2019 14:01 utc | 222

for those, like myself, new to “alevosity” malice premeditation treachery

Posted by: Walter | Dec 8 2019 14:08 utc | 223

@218 Interesting suggestion Hoarse. We could ask everyone to imagine they are billionaires then ask them what they would do with their money. Choices could include…give it to the government, stash it in the Caymans or fund humanitarian projects.

Posted by: dh | Dec 8 2019 14:45 utc | 224

Alevoso => treacherous

Posted by: Formerly T-Bear | Dec 8 2019 14:55 utc | 225

@Posted by: Walter | Dec 8 2019 14:08 utc | 223
It is a judicial figure wich acts as agravatting of crime…if you commit a murder with nocturnidad y alevosía, you will for sure get a harsher condemn….

Posted by: Sasha | Dec 8 2019 15:17 utc | 226

Posted by: dh | Dec 8 2019 14:45 utc | 224
(Imagine we’re Billionaires)
Good suggestion.
Fill a page with ideas on whom to bribe in order to sell the sheeple on the bathos necessary to persuade minimum-wage workers that billionaires “deserve” huge tax breaks for impoverishing (de-unionised) wage slaves..

Posted by: Hoarsewhisperer | Dec 8 2019 15:48 utc | 227

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