Trump to win?

[Chris Coles]

Re: Trump to win?

The guy actually accused me of being a spook.....seriously?

Having been on this site since its re-inception I can only say that I certainly had, some time ago, from reading your posts; long ago come to the conclusion that you are, or certainly were once; a spook. Yes, certainly, I am often wrong about such matters. It is simply that to my mind, you do seem to have so much knowledge of the genre; that you, (certainly seem to), give the game away without realising it.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Trump to win?

Having been on this site since its re-inception I can only say that I certainly had, some time ago, from reading your posts; long ago come to the conclusion that you are, or certainly were once; a spook. Yes, certainly, I am often wrong about such matters. It is simply that to my mind, you do seem to have so much knowledge of the genre; that you, (certainly seem to), give the game away without realising it.

Wow. So exactly which of the comedy troupe are you and Woodsman in the video?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sglyFwTjfDU

I think this is the exact point where iTulip has officially jumped the shark:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WvGopsM1G9g

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

vt, the article you posted was not about demographics. it was a poll showing a plurality of people unhappy with both parties. let me remind you: demographics-statistical data relating to the population and particular groups within it.
the bit i posted above discussed various demographic groups - e.g. whites with college educations, african-americans, suburban women - to try to think how they might reshuffle from their present alignment. your gallup poll was not germane.

lake - you have made clear that you at times act in a military or military-advisory capacity. at no time did it occur to me that you had hidden agendas. perhaps i am naive [per woodsman or chris coles] but that is still what i think.

woodsman- i think you are blinded by your rage and disappointment. i have great respect for your knowledge and have continually tried to draw you into civil and interesting discourse in order to learn from you. instead, since the end of the sanders campaign and your choice to make your agenda maximal destruction, i experience your posts as metaphorically spitting in my face. i think this was clearest when you said that i had intimated you were a racist, when in my mind i had done no such thing. i asked you to point out where i had done so and you told me to kiss your white ass. perhaps i should have given up right then but as i said, i have great respect for your knowledge and hoped to somehow bring our discourse - between you and me, and more broadly as well - back to some productive value.

the destruction you are wishing on our country's political system is attractive to me, too, but i fear trump would destroy much else, including things that i and - i suspect you - value. and i think your anger is wreaking destruction here, a place that i and - i suspect you - value. but perhaps you value it no more, i don't know.

i do know your animus is very unpleasant and comes out in a variety of ways. for example. your repeated need to address me as "doctor" - i can hear a snarl i think - when my profession is completely irrelevant to the topic under discussion. i have mentioned being a doctor when medical issues are discussed, but at no other times. but i guess you feel i somehow "pulled rank" by doing so and are angry at me for doing so. perhaps there is some other reason, but it is beyond me.

it's a sad thing, and a great loss for us all. one of the things i have long valued about itulip was the community's ability to have productive discussions among people who disagreed, whether about politics or economics. i remember banging my head repeatedly against finster and bart [remember bart?] in the early days in our discussions about the economy. but everyone hung in and was civil, and the discussion was ultimately quite productive, at least for me. i invite you once more to posit good will among the members here.

[Chris Coles]

Re: Trump to win?

Wow. So exactly which of the comedy troupe are you and Woodsman in the video?

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=sglyFwTjfDU

I think this is the exact point where iTulip has officially jumped the shark:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WvGopsM1G9g

I was not trying to be disrespectful; simply stating what I feel is the truth as I have come to see it; while at one and the same moment admitting that I may well be wrong. How does an honest comment "Jump the shark"?

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

Call me Captain Kirk, going where no man has gone before.

You have no evidence, just thousands of words of hearsay and unattributed quotes. And then you subtly change the subject from allegations that the Russian Federation is targeting the Democratic Party so as to help Trump win to "Russian trolling." A big nothingburger is what you serve on this Lake and you keep bringing out even though we send it back to the kitchen every time.

If they had something, we would have seen it after the investigation was wrapped up. The FBI Director - curiously missing in this picture when CI is his job, how odd - and the Attorney General (or at the least a most senior DOJ official) would be at that cramped little press room giving their presser on how the bad guys were caught. They'd hand out detailed documentation on the case and an indictment with all the evidence they could share without revealing sources and methods.

Or, it would all happen in the dark and none of us would hear anything about anything. But instead, we have curiously timed press conferences delivering no new information and regurgitating the same old evidence free claims. We have fact free allegations from the subjects of those emails that "The Russkies did it" but nothing more. It does not pass the smell test.

As for your ad hominems, can you see the tears running down my face?

[Milton Kuo]

Re: Trump to win?

1. Unlike Japan, cultural wise, China has no problems letting in foreigners to work or live in China, the way the UK does. It doesn't do that now because there's no need to - there's simply too many people in major Chinese cities and many Chinese fresh college graduates are unemployed. Unless you highly connected or a well known business man, you can't even get a permanent residence permit in China, all foreigners need to be employed and must be authorized by the government to stay and work in China. If China relaxes the regulations and becomes more pro-migration, it won't be difficult to see a million people migrating from Europe and America to work in China within a couple years.

2. China is starting to relax the one child policy - it is still not too late if you consider the huge population.

3. Medical care in major Chinese cities are already more advanced than in the West, combining TCM, healthy lifestyle like taichi and modern medicine. China isn't held hostage to the healthcare industry, at least at this moment.

1. It remains to be seen if the most productive immigrant workers go to China to work. China has to figure out a way to produce higher-value goods for this to occur but it appears to be a chicken-egg problem to me.

2. I'm not convinced relaxing the one-child policy is going to do anything for China other than make things even worse. Encouraging a population increase in an already overpopulated country to address China's demographic "problem" sounds very similar to the idiotic economic policies of the past few decades in the developed world.

3. As China becomes wealthier, it is also going to develop a lot more first world problems: obesity and all of the nasty problems that come from obesity. Also, it remains to be seen if good medical care in China is going to be affordable. I seriously doubt it'll become as insanely expensive as the U.S. (I don't think any country on the planet can beat the U.S. on outrageous medical costs) but I also seriously doubt good medical care will be available to any but a very few 5% or so of the population.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

this morning on npr a journalist was interviewed who had some time back written a 10,000 word piece for newsweek on libya, benghazi, etc. trump at a rally last night read a couple of line from what he said was an email by sidney blumenthal to podesta, which said hillary was indeed vulnerable to criticism about benghazi. the journalist heard trump speaking and recognized that those lines were his, from his newsweek article, and of course were lifted out of context. he also wondered how they'd gotten to trump with the blumenthal attribution. it turns out that blumenthal had forwarded the newsweek article to podesta, and it was part of the wikileaks podesta archive that was just released. the only place in public media where those lines had been quickly posted, again out of context, was at sputniknews.com, a russian source. doesn't prove anything, but the timing, the speed with which it reached trump, was remarkable.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

this morning on npr a journalist was interviewed who had some time back written a 10,000 word piece for newsweek on libya, benghazi, etc. trump at a rally last night read a couple of line from what he said was an email by sidney blumenthal to podesta, which said hillary was indeed vulnerable to criticism about benghazi. the journalist heard trump speaking and recognized that those lines were his, from his newsweek article, and of course were lifted out of context. he also wondered how they'd gotten to trump with the blumenthal attribution. it turns out that blumenthal had forwarded the newsweek article to podesta, and it was part of the wikileaks podesta archive that was just released. the only place in public media where those lines had been quickly posted, again out of context, was at sputniknews.com, a russian source. doesn't prove anything, but the timing, the speed with which it reached trump, was remarkable.

And now the Clinton party line is to ignore the contents of the emails and advance the no-evidence lie that Trump is getting the leaks ahead of everyone else and that means he's a Russian agent. As I am fond of saying, the best propaganda is one that we already believe.

This story you advance has already been addressed by Greenwald in one of my earlier posts. There's no there there, as with everything else in this Trump as Russian Agent canard.

More insidious and subtle, but even worse, was what Newsweek and its Clinton-adoring writer Kurt Eichenwald did last night. What happened — in reality, in the world of facts — was extremely trivial. One of the emails in the second installment of the WikiLeaks/Podesta archive — posted yesterday — was from Sidney Blumenthal to Podesta. The sole purpose of Blumenthal’s email was to show Podesta one of Eichenwald’s endless series of Clinton-exonerating articles, this one about Benghazi. So in the body of the email to Podesta, Blumenthal simply pasted the link and the full contents of the article. Although the purpose of Eichenwald’s article (like everything he says and does) was to defend Clinton, one paragraph in the middle acknowledged that one minor criticism of Clinton on Benghazi was possibly rational.

Once WikiLeaks announced that this second email batch was online, many news organizations (including The Intercept, along with the NYT and AP) began combing through them to find relevant information and then published articles about them. One such story was published by Sputnik, the Russian government’s international outlet similar to RT, which highlighted that Blumenthal email. But the Sputnik story inaccurately attributed the text of the Newsweek article to Blumenthal, thus suggesting that one of Clinton’s closest advisers had expressed criticism of her on Benghazi. Sputnik quickly removed the article once Eichenwald pointed out that the words were his, not Blumenthal’s. Then, in his campaign speech last night, Trump made reference to the Sputnik article (hours after it was published and spread on social media), claiming (obviously inaccurately) that even Blumenthal had criticized Clinton on Benghazi.

That’s all that happened. There is zero suggestion in the article, let alone evidence, that any WikiLeaks email was doctored: It wasn’t. It was just Sputnik misreporting the email. Once Sputnik realized that its article misattributed the text to Blumenthal, it took it down. It’s not hard to imagine how a rushed, careless Sputnik staffer could glance at that email and fail to realize that Blumenthal was forwarding Eichenwald’s article rather than writing it himself. And while nobody knows how this erroneous Sputnik story made its way to Trump for him to reference in his speech, it’s very easy to imagine how a Trump staffer on a shoddy, inept campaign — which has previously cited InfoWars and white supremacist sites, among others — would have stumbled into a widely shared Sputnik story that had been published hours earlier on the internet and then passed it along to Trump for him to highlight, without realizing the reasons to be skeptical.

In any event, based on the available evidence, this is a small embarrassment for Trump: He cited an erroneous story from a non-credible Russian outlet, so it’s worth noting. But that’s not what happened. Eichenwald, with increasing levels of hysteria, manically posted no fewer than three dozen tweets last night about his story, each time escalating his claims of what it proved. By the time he was done, he had misled large numbers of people into believing that he found proof that: 1) the documents in the WikiLeaks archive were altered; 2) Russia put forgeries into the WikiLeaks archive; 3) Sputnik knew about the WikiLeaks archive ahead of time, before it was posted online; 4) WikiLeaks coordinated the release of the documents with the Russian government; and 5) the Russian government and the Trump campaign coordinated to falsely attribute Eichenwald’s words to Blumenthal.

In fact, Eichenwald literally has zero evidence for any of that. The point is not that his evidence for these propositions is inconclusive or unpersuasive; the point is that there is zero evidence for any of it. It’s all just conspiracy theorizing and speculation that he invented. Worse, the article, while hinting at these claims and encouraging readers to believe them, does not even expressly claim any of those things. Instead, Eichenwald’s increasingly unhinged tweets repeatedly inflated his insignificant story from what it was — a misattribution of an email by Sputnik that Trump repeated — into a five-alarm warning that an insidious Russian plot to subvert U.S. elections had been proven, with Trump and fake WikiLeaks documents at the center.

What is remarkable is the collusion and coordination among the WH, the DNC and the media to bury the mountain of evidence coming forth in these damning leaks before there is enough time for folks to start putting two and two together. If you folks think these clowns are going back to business as usual once the election is over, think again. Welcome to the new normal.

MAGA! GO TRUMP! JAIL HILLARY! GO TRUMP! MAGA!

MAGA! GO TRUMP! JAIL HILLARY! GO TRUMP! MAGA!

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

woodsman, i find it interesting to note which posts you choose to respond to, and which you choose to ignore.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

woodsman, i find it interesting to note which posts you choose to respond to, and which you choose to ignore.

Glad I can still be interesting. Didn't think I was obligated to respond to every post. If I'm curious or have something I think I can contribute, then I just might respond. If not, then I don't. Other times I'm fatigued or distracted or there's something else that has my attention. Simple as that. Hope that's not a problem, doctor.

Maybe you can generate some sort of chi-squared distribution and graph out all of my posts and see if there are any interesting patterns you can discern. Then trace those back to the individual posts and do a textual and content analysis, word frequencies, etc. See if you can come up with anything interesting.

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

Glad I can still be interesting. Didn't think I was obligated to respond to every post. If I'm curious or have something I think I can contribute, then I just might respond. If not, then I don't. Other times I'm fatigued or distracted or there's something else that has my attention. Simple as that. Hope that's not a problem, doctor.

Maybe you can generate some sort of chi-squared distribution and graph out all of my posts and see if there are any interesting patterns you can discern. Then trace those back to the individual posts and do a textual and content analysis, word frequencies, etc. See if you can come up with anything interesting.

no need. the only observation i have is that you don't want to discuss any issues beyond the superficial horse race epithet trading. no interest in the demographics of party realignment, for example, or in responding to the questions about comity, or the lack thereof in this thread, or in stepping back a bit from your own hostility.

[Woodsman]

Re: Trump to win?

no need. the only observation i have is that you don't want to discuss any issues beyond the superficial horse race epithet trading. no interest in the demographics of party realignment, for example, or in responding to the questions about comity, or the lack thereof in this thread, or in stepping back a bit from your own hostility.

Apologies doctor, no hostility intended. It seems to me our interests do not align at the moment.

I don't have sufficient information to discuss the demographics of party realignment and as such have nothing interesting to say about it. And since we are in the last stretch of the proverbial horse race, forgive me if that gets more of my interest.

Comity is a two-way street and one of those streets has been so strewn with garbage and other forms of filth thrown by hostile and unreasoning residents, I try to keep on the cleaner side. So you can understand why I might be on guard for the next piece of flying debris, can't you?

Then again, it's been what, a whole two days passed since someone here has called me a racist. Maybe the street cleaners have made their rounds and the hooligans have moved on to the next block?

[jk]

Re: Trump to win?

Apologies doctor, no hostility intended. It seems to me our interests do not align at the moment.

I don't have sufficient information to discuss the demographics of party realignment and as such have nothing interesting to say about it. And since we are in the last stretch of the proverbial horse race, forgive me if that gets more of my interest.

Comity is a two-way street and one of those streets has been so strewn with garbage and other forms of filth thrown by hostile and unreasoning residents, I try to keep on the cleaner side. So you can understand why I might be on guard for the next piece of flying debris, can't you?

Then again, it's been what, a whole two days passed since someone here has called me a racist. Maybe the street cleaners have made their rounds and the hooligans have moved on to the next block?

thanks for that response. i try to be courteous here. [i guess i try to be courteous elsewhere, too.] if i'm not, i appreciate it being pointed out as specifically as possible.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Trump to win?

I was not trying to be disrespectful; simply stating what I feel is the truth as I have come to see it; while at one and the same moment admitting that I may well be wrong. How does an honest comment "Jump the shark"?

To the former, achieving clarity on or testing a hypothesis would only require the asking of a direct question or two.

To the latter, it's referring to a popular lexicon milestone in the diminishing value of a medium.

[lakedaemonian]

Re: Trump to win?

Then again, it's been what, a whole two days passed since someone here has called me a racist. Maybe the street cleaners have made their rounds and the hooligans have moved on to the next block?

So you're saying that you have been inappropriately accused of something that is untrue?

That sounds familiar.