Ukraine war: Boris Johnson sparks fury after comparison to BrexTWIT: Boris [Buffoon] Johnson has been criticised for comparing the struggle of Ukrainians fighting Russia's invasion to people in Britain voting for BrexTWIT. In a speech he said Britons, like Ukrainians, had the instinct "to choose freedom" and cited the 2016 vote to leave the EU as a "recent example".
The comments have caused anger among politicians both in the UK and Europe. Donald Tusk, the former president of the European Council, called the comments offensive. Conservative peer Lord Barwell said voting in a referendum was not "in any way comparable with risking your life" in a war, while Liberal Democrat leader Sir Ed Davey said it was an "insult" to Ukrainians.
The row comes as the prime minister strongly urged China to condemn the Russian invasion in an interview with the Sunday Times. He suggested Beijing was having "second thoughts" about its neutral stance.
[BoJo is an utter waste of an expensive education.]
For years tRUMP 'rallied' his belligerent dupes (aka "supporters") to default to armed insurrection, so some version of January 6th, 2021 appeared INEVITABLE ...
Gen. Mark Milley worried about what the president might do to maintain power after losing reelection, according to new reporting in Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker's book 'I Alone Can Fix It.'
Biden knew all about her political shortcomings after watching her implode during the campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination — but went on to select her as his running mate, regardless. The optics of having the first woman, first black and first Asian vice-president at his side were too good to resist. And then, as President, he handed her twounwinnable assignments — solving the “root causes” of the migrant crisis (created by his own open door to families with children), and fending off RepublicanRepuGNican attempts to reform statewide voting systems (over which she has no power).
...
Inside the White House, it doesn’t help that Harris has a strained relationship with Jill Biden. The President is said to be the forgiving type, but the first lady isn’t. According to Battle for the Soul, a new book on the Democratic campaign by Edward-Isaac Dovere, Jill Biden fumed “go fuck yourself” about Harris after the latter accused her husband, then a rival for the nomination, of cosying up to racist senators and opposing school bussing in a televised debate.
“A functioning, robust democracy requires a healthy, educated, participatory followership, and an educated, morally grounded leadership.” -- Chinua Achebe
2. “Everybody counts in applying democracy. And there will never be a true democracy until every responsible and law-abiding adult in it, without regard to race, sex, color or creed has his or her own inalienable and unpurchasable voice in government.” -- Carrie Chapman Catt
3. “Dictatorships are one-way streets. Democracy boasts two-way traffic.” -- Alberto Moravia
A new study on the January 6 Capitol insurrection finds that of the nearly 400 rioters arrested or charged, 93% are white and 86% are male. [Mostly xenophobic, employed, middle-aged tRUMPsuckers from counties where Biden won = paranoid fear of "the Great Replacement". 45% are CEOs, business owners, doctors, lawyers, accountants, mid-level managers, a state department official. 7% are unemployed. Only 3% (leading from the front and coordinating) belong to notorious ultra-wrong militias, several are ex-military.] Michel Martin speaks to the study’s principal investigator, Professor Robert Pape, to discuss these findings and some surprising revelations about the attackers and their motives.
Every ten years, there’s a census. That decennial count is long and tedious and arduous…and important. Because it confirms who lives where so the Federal Government properly allocates resources, so services go to the places that need them most and - yes - so states gain or lose seats in congress and have the opportunity to redraw all their state and Congressional lines.
That means, every 10 years, states start what has famously been one of the most partisan and divisive processes in politics. Because one strategic line can mean the difference in party control in not just the state legislatures but also in congress.
"Ever since the [disastrous] 2016 election, observers like Timothy Snyder, Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt speculated that t-RUMP could undermine American democracy and move the country in an overtly authoritarian direction. That possibility grew more plausible over the years of the t-RUMP Badministration, as he sought to undermine a growing list of American institutions that stood in his way, including the intelligence community, the F.B.I. and Justice Department, the courts, the mainstream media (which he branded “enemies of the American people”) and of course the integrity of elections themselves. t-RUMP made his authoritarian instincts clear by refusing to commit to a peaceful transfer of power should he lose the 2020 election [both of which he very definitely did].
.......
t-RUMP really does deserve more careful comparison with other leaders. There are indeed certain parallels between him and contemporary populists like Hungary’s Orban, Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Poland’s Jaroslaw Kaczynski, insofar as they all rely on a similar rural social base for their support. On the other hand, there are unexplained differences: Orban, Duterte and El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele, for example, used the COVID pandemic to vastly expand executive authority, while t-RUMP did the opposite, abdicating responsibility and shifting authority to the governors. Most strongmen are ruthlessly efficient and Machiavellian; t-RUMP demonstrated incredible incompetence in failing to build his border wall, repeal Obamacare or expand his voter base. And, of course, he failed to win re-election to a second term. Revelations in The New York Times of t-RUMP’s tax returns suggest he ran for president not out of a mad desire for power, but simply to avoid bankruptcy in his failed hotel business. And yet, despite myriad revelations, he exerted a magnetic pull on his core followers. Why? Perhaps it might be more useful to understand the ways that t-RUMP is sui generis, and how he could set a pattern for strongmen of the future, rather than reprising familiar precedents from the past."
Entryism (also called entrism, enterism, infiltration, a French Turn, boring from within, or boring-from-within) is a political strategy in which an organization or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. If the organization being "entered" is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge and subversion to hide the fact that they are an organization in their own right.
Stochastic (στόχος (stókhos) 'aim, guess') refers to the property of being well-described by a randomprobability distribution. Although stochasticity and randomness are distinct in that the former refers to a modeling approach and the latter refers to phenomena themselves, these two terms are often used synonymously. Furthermore, in probability theory, the formal concept of a stochastic process is also referred to as a random process.
Since Crook-in-Cheat is the diametric opposite of all that Pence purports to believe, I suspect that Vice-UNpresident Pence loathes the malignant narcissist:
Former Vice President Mike Pence defended himself against Insurrectionist-in-Cheat's allegations that he could have overturned the election. And the RNC censures Representatives Cheney and Kinzinger for participating in the Jan. 6 committee.
The best known system is the French Ancien Régime (Old Regime), a three-estate system used until the French Revolution (1789–1799). The monarchy included the king and the queen, while the system was made up of clergy (the First Estate), nobles (Second Estate), peasants and bourgeoisie (Third Estate).
In some regions, notably Scandinavia and Russia, burghers (the urban merchant class) and rural commoners were split into separate estates, creating a four-estate system with rural commoners ranking the lowest as the Fourth Estate. Furthermore, the non-landowning poor could be left outside the estates, leaving them without political rights.
In England, a two-estate system evolved that combined nobility and clergy into one lordly estate with "commons" as the second estate. This system produced the two houses of parliament, the House of Commons and the House of Lords. In southern Germany, a three-estate system of nobility (princes and high clergy), knights, and burghers was used. In Scotland, the Three Estates were the Clergy (First Estate), Nobility (Second Estate), and Shire Commissioners, or "burghers" (Third Estate), representing the bourgeois, middle class, and lower class. The Estates made up a Scottish Parliament.
Separation of Powers: Today the terms three estates and estates of the realm may sometimes be re-interpreted to refer to the modern separation of powers in government into the legislature, administration, and the judiciary. Additionally the modern term of the fourth estate usually refers to forces outside the established power structure (evoking medieval three-estate systems), most commonly in reference to the independent press or media. Historically, in Northern and Eastern Europe, the Fourth Estate meant rural commoners.Robert Morrison MacIverFRS (April 17, 1882 – June 15, 1970) was a sociologist. He received degrees from the University of Edinburgh (M.A. 1903; D.Ph. 1915), the University of Oxford (B.A. 1907), and Columbia University (Litt.E. 1929) and Harvard (1936). He lectured in Political Science (1907) and Social Science. His work in sociology was distinguished by his acumen, his philosophical understanding, and extensive study of the major pioneering works of Durkheim, Levy-Bruhl, Simmel and others. (Works read in the British Museum Library in London, whilst resident as a student in Oxford.)
Hans Jürgen Eysenck (4 March 1916 – 4 September 1997) was a German-born British psychologist who spent his professional career in Great Britain.
In this book, Eysenck suggests that political behavior may be analysed in terms of two independent dimensions: the traditional left-right distinction, and how 'tenderminded' or 'toughminded' a person is. Eysenck suggests that the latter is a result of a person's introversion or extraversion respectively.
Colleagues critiqued the research that formed the basis of this book, on a number of grounds, including the following:
Eysenck claims that his findings can be applied to the British middle class as a whole, but the people in his sample were far younger and better educated than the British middle class as a whole.
Supporters of different parties were recruited in different ways: Communists were recruited through party branches, fascists in an unspecified manner, and supporters of other parties by giving copies of the questionnaire to his students and telling them to apply it to friends and acquaintances.
Scores were obtained by applying the same weight to groups of different sizes. For example, the responses of 250 middle-class supporters of the Liberal Party were given the same weight as those of 27 working-class Liberals.
Scores were rounded without explanation, in directions that supported Eysenck's theories.
Eysenck was accused of being a supporter of political causes on the extreme right. Connecting arguments were that Eysenck had articles published in the German newspaper National-Zeitung, which called him a contributor, and in Nation und Europa, and that he wrote the preface to a book by a far-right French writer named Pierre Krebs, Das unvergängliche Erbe, that was published by Krebs' Thule Seminar. Linguist Siegfried Jäger [de] interpreted the preface to Krebs' book as having "railed against the equality of people, presenting it as an untenable ideological doctrine." In the National Zeitung Eysenck reproached Sigmund Freud for alleged trickiness and lack of frankness. Other incidents that fuelled Eysenck's critics like Michael Billig and Steven Rose include the appearance of Eysenck's books on the UK National Front's list of recommended readings and an interview with Eysenck published by National Front's Beacon (1977) and later republished in the US neo-fascist Steppingstones; a similar interview had been published a year before by Neue Anthropologie, described by Eysenck's biographer Roderick Buchanan as a "sister publication to Mankind Quarterly, having similar contributors and sometimes sharing the same articles." Eysenck also wrote an introduction for Roger Pearson's Race, Intelligence and Bias in Academe. In this introduction to Pearson's book, Eysenck retorts that his critics are "the scattered troops" of the New Left, who have adopted the "psychology of the fascists". Eysenck's book The Inequality of Man, translated in French as L'Inegalite de l'homme, was published by GRECE's publishing house, Éditions Corpernic. In 1974, Eysenck became a member of the academic advisory council of Mankind Quarterly, joining those associated with the journal in attempting to reinvent it as a more mainstream academic vehicle. Billig asserts that in the same year Eysenck also became a member of the comité de patronage of GRECE's Nouvelle École.
Remarking on Eysenck's alleged right-wing connections, Buchanan writes: "For those looking to thoroughly demonize Eysenck, his links with far right groups revealed his true political sympathies." According to Buchanan, these harsh critics interpreted Eysenck's writings as "overtly racist". Furthermore, Buchanan writes that Eysenck's fiercest critics were convinced that Eysenck was "willfully misrepresenting a dark political agenda". Buchanan argued that "There appeared to be no hidden agenda to Hans Eysenck. He was too self-absorbed, too preoccupied with his own aspirations as a great scientist to harbor specific political aims."
Eysenck is best remembered for his work on intelligence and personality, although he worked on other issues in psychology. At the time of his death, Eysenck was the living psychologist most frequently cited in the peer-reviewedscientific journal literature. A 2019 study found him to be the third most controversial of 55 intelligence researchers.
Postrel was editor-in-chief of Reason from July 1989 to January 2000, and remained on the masthead as editor-at-large through 2001. Prior to that, she was a reporter for Inc. and the Wall Street Journal. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE). From 2000 to 2006, she wrote an economics column for the New York Times and from 2006 to 2009 she wrote the "Commerce and Culture" column for The Atlantic. She also appeared on the last episode of the third season of Penn and Teller's Bullshit!.
Postrel wrote the biweekly column "Commerce & Culture" for the Wall Street Journal until April 2011. Since May 2011, she has written a biweekly column for Bloomberg View.
She is best known for her non-fiction books including The Future and Its Enemies and The Substance of Style. In the former she explains her philosophy, "dynamism", a forward-looking and change-seeking philosophy that generally favors unregulated organization through "spontaneous order". She contrasts it with "stasis", a philosophy that favors top-down control and regulation and is marked by desire to maintain the present state of affairs. In November 2013, she published a third book, The Power of Glamour, which defined glamour as "nonverbal rhetoric" that “leads us to feel that the life we dream of exists, and to desire it even more.” And, in November 2020, she published her fourth book, The Fabric of Civilization. This book looks at the "history of innovation, science, technology, trade, and human history in general" through the lens of the global development of textiles.
“It is a natural propensity to attribute misfortune to someone’s malignity. When prices rise, it is due to the profiteer; when wages fall, it is due to the capitalist. Why the capitalist is ineffective when wages rise, and the profiteer when prices fall, the man in the street does not inquire. Nor does he notice that wages and prices rise and fall together. If he is a capitalist, he wants wages to fall and prices to rise; if he is a wage earner, he wants the opposite. When a currency expert tries to explain that profiteers and trade unions and ordinary employers have very little to do with the matter, he irritates everybody, like the man who threw doubt on German atrocities. (In World War I) We do not like to be robbed of an enemy; we want someone to have when we suffer. It is so depressing to think that we suffer because we are fools; yet taking mankind in mass, that is the truth. For this reason, no political party can acquire any driving force except through hatred; it must hold someone to obloquy. If so-and-so’s wickedness is the sole cause of our misery, let us punish so-and-so and we shall be happy. The supreme example of this kind of political thought was the Treaty of Versailles. Yet most people are only seeking some new scapegoat to replace the Germans.” ― Bertrand Russell, Sceptical Essays
Disasters are inherently hard to predict. Pandemics, like earthquakes, wildfires, financial crises, and wars, are not normally distributed; there is no cycle of history to help us anticipate the next catastrophe. In this episode, Michael Shermer speaks with one of the world’s most renowned historians, Niall Ferguson, who explains why our ever more bureaucratic and complex systems are making us worse, not better, at handling disasters.
You are a ruler of the largest country You're ruthless King of KGB killers You're lying Tsar of misinformation You are a Tyrant with a tiny penis
You had appeared from a secret spy lair As a sidekick of a drunkard leader You brown nosed sneaky way to the top chair Waged dirty wars with proud highland people
You played the system screwing it over Your friend Winnie the Pooh bear kept your throne warm You killed or jailed all worthy opponents Then you began this gore Ukrainian war
Chorus You are a ruler of the largest country You're ruthless King of KGB killers You're lying Tsar of misinformation You are a Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Ты тиран с маленькой писькой Тиран с маленькой писькой Ты тиран с маленькой писькой Тиран с маленькой писькой Your missiles are your penis extensions Look at these mighty and sexy shapes Tanks, cannons and jets are your viagra pills Without them it's small and down in shames You are high on your doom nuclear weapons You're drunk on sweet blood of your victims Still, it won't help with your limp tiny thing And you are hated just like Adolph Hitler
You will be judged by your own saddest people You've sent great country back to the dark ages Burn in hot Hell you bloodthirsty dictator This is what on your grave will be written:
Chorus You were a ruler of the largest country You're ruthless King of KGB killers You're lying Tsar of misinformation You were a Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Tiny Tyrant with a tiny penis Ты тиран с маленькой писькой Тиран с маленькой писькой Ты тиран с маленькой писькой Тиран с маленькой писькой
notābene, notāte bene: RepuGNican refers to the extremist modern cadre of self-serving t-RUMP-espousing politicians and their derangement syndrome supporters.
notābene, notāte bene: RepuGNican refers to the extremist modern cadre of self-serving t-RUMP-espousing politicians and their derangement syndrome supporters.
Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich presents the reader's digest of his latest book, The System: Who Rigged It, How We Fix It. He explores the system of power in America that bails out corporations instead of people, even in times of crisis, and breaks down how we have socialism for corporations and the rich, and harsh capitalism for everybody else.
As power has concentrated in the hands of corporations and the wealthy few, those few have grabbed nearly all the economic gains — and political power — for themselves.
Meanwhile, workers have been shafted.
This isn’t a democracy, where all power is shared. It’s an oligarchy, where those at the top have the power to grab everything for themselves.
But history shows that oligarchies cannot hold on to power forever. They are inherently unstable. When a vast majority of people come to view an oligarchy as illegitimate and an obstacle to their wellbeing — which is happening before our very eyes as this crisis exacerbates — oligarchies become vulnerable.
