Will big booze succced in becoming big buzz?

This list included Lagunitas.  We were wrong that big Tobacco would take over weed -- its Big Alcohol!  Nonetheless my argument holds.  Weed should be illegal to sell but legal to grow thus eliminating crime and violence associated with it.  Now with big money and big advertising in the violence will be perfectly legal. The body count from alcohol is not concided a crime.

Earlier this month, Constellation Brands, maker of Corona, Svedka, and Robert Mondavi wines, invested $4 billion in the largest pot corporation in the world, by market cap. The deal expands Constellation’s ownership stake in Canadian Canopy Growth Corp from 9.9 percent to 38 percent and includes warrants to eventually own over 50 percent. 

“To see one company getting $4 billion, it’s historic,” says Morgan Paxhia, co-founder of Poseidon Asset Management, a cannabis hedge fund. “It certainly is symbolic of the alcohol industry’s interest in the space.” 

While this is the largest-ever investment in legal weed, Constellation is not the first alcohol company to lay claim on cannabis. On August 1st, Molson Coors announced a new joint venture with The Hydropothecary Corporation to produce non-alcoholic cannabis-infused drinks for the Canadian market, and Diageo, the maker of Smirnoff and Guinness, is in discussion with three cannabis companies about doing the same. In the U.S., Heineken-owned Lagunitas Brewing Co. plans to introduce a cannabis-infused sparkling water in California, and the founder of Blue Moon will launch a similar product in Colorado.

http://www.foodandpower.net/2018/08/30/will-big-booze-succeed-in-becoming-big-buzz/

No, The World Isn’t Getting Better For Everyone

Contrary to what Gates Foundation may say, real poverty is increasing. This is a good assessment of the bullshit served up by the neoliberal establishment that  unhinges most discussions about poverty, food, and solutions..

According to Peter Edwards of Newcastle University, if people are to achieve normal life expectancy, they need roughly double the current IPL, or a minimum of $2.50 per day. But adopting this higher standard would seriously undermine the poverty reduction narrative. An IPL of $2.50 shows a poverty headcount of around 3.1 billion, almost triple what the World Bank and the Millennium Campaign would have us believe. It also shows that poverty is getting worse, not better, with nearly 353 million more people impoverished today than in 1981. With China taken out of the equation, that number shoots up to 852 million.

http://www.ianwelsh.net/no-the-world-isnt-getting-better-for-everyone/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IanWelsh+%28Ian+Welsh%29

Offended by the news coverage of your dirty war? Hack it, discredit it, Bomb it!

You would think that reputable international news organizations would be off the list of bombing targets -- you would be wrong. Trump did not invent antagonism to news media.  This article highlights the NSA's illegal hacking of news media but US military bombing of offending news organizations started many years ago.

The document is dated March 23, 2006, a time during which Al Jazeera was repeatedly criticised by then-US President George W Bush for its coverage of the Iraq war and the war in Afghanistan. 

Two years earlier, in 2004, Bush allegedly discussed bombing Al Jazeera's headquarters in Doha with then-British Prime Minister Tony Blair, according to British media reports.
Officials in Washington, DC have dismissed that story. 

Al Jazeera has been targeted multiple times by the US government, most notably several bombings of its offices. 

In 2001, a bomb from a US air force plane hit the Al Jazeera bureau in Kabul, Afghanistan, destroying the building, despite the US being aware of the exact coordinates of the offices. 

Then, in April 2006, a US bomb hit the Al Jazeera bureau in Baghdad, Iraq, killing journalist Tareq Ayyoub and injuring one other person. US forces were again aware of the exact coordinates of the office.

https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/51785-nsa-broke-into-secure-network-of-al-jazeera-and-others-report

Documents Reveal Successful Cyberattack in California Congressional Race

Well this will just get worse.  There of course was a day when most people got the information they needed to vote intelligently for better or worse from newspapers, and endorsements of civic organizations and unions and work and trade organizations they were affiliated with and of course actual public forums and debates and from door to door canvassers.  Then of course it became mostly television and an assortment of direct mail and then attack ads and then issue ads and attack ads by AstroTurf groups and now finally social media

The FBI investigated hacking attempts targeting a Democrat who ran against “Putin’s favorite congressman” 

FBI agents in California and Washington, D.C., have investigated a series of cyberattacks over the past year that targeted a Democratic opponent of Rep. Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). Rohrabacher is a 15-term incumbent who is widely seen as the most pro-Russia and pro-Putin member of Congress and is a staunch supporter of President Trump. 

The hacking attempts and the FBI’s involvement are described in dozens of emails and forensic records obtained by Rolling Stone. 

The timing of the attacks is significant. Last month, Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats said the warning lights for future cyberattacks aimed at the U.S. were “blinking red.” A week later, a senior Microsoft executive said that Microsoft had identified and helped block hacking attempts aimed at three congressional candidates during the 2018 midterms. The executive declined to name those candidates, but the Daily Beast reported that the Russian intelligence agency responsible for the cyberattacks in 2016 had attempted to hack the office of Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO), who is running for reelection this year. (A Microsoft spokesperson declined to say if Keirstead was one of three people targeted by hackers, citing “customer privacy.”) Just last week, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said that Russian hackers had “penetrated”county voting systems in Florida.

As I said this does not look good for democracy. At each turn of the technological communications screw the whole process go incrementally more deceptive and manipulative.  I have to say I see no way to fix this besides going back to door to door and silencing what has become of media.  At least the promise of a chicken in every pot was an honest bribe.



https://readersupportednews.org/news-section2/318-66/51761-documents-reveal-successful-cyberattack-in-california-congressional-race

Seeing Red? Think Blue

Bill McKibben, The New York Review of Books

"On Friday evening, the Democratic National Committee reversed a decision it had made two months ago: the committee would now welcome money from fossil-fuel corporate PACS.

Bad? Yes. Predictable?  Well two months of heightened fundraising getting more money and support from those who thought the DNC had turned over a new leaf and could be trusted is better than nothing for the DNC anyway.  Most people will not hear the news and be none the wiser and now the corporate money can flood in too.  Nice dirty trick if you can get away with it.  Since Oil Pac money is given  equally to Republican and Democrats (of a blue dog ilk) I for one never believed the earlier pledge, The duplicitous DNC simply can't breath without it.  But only two months to ditch the pledge -- this stinks of hubris.  There is no blue wave.  Dems will go down big in 2020.  To quote our chief "very, very sad."

DNC Chairman Tom Perez's "proud" comment announcing the reversal is a jewel in the lexicon of double speak.

"We have to draw the line that we are indeed a party of a big tent where all working people are welcome. We’re not a party that punishes workers simply based on how they make ends meet. ... At the same time, we remain committed to the Democratic Party platform, which states unequivocally our support for combating climate change."
— Tom Perez

While taking their money of course.



https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/51745-focus-seeing-red-think-blue

What's with White Helmets?

I will not comment any further than this.  I have in the past in the middle of the fray regarding chemical weapons and other crimes of war etc, seen the White Helmets as running dogs for imperial powers.  What was I to think given the intentional obfuscation of the debate?  I can however accept this compromising point of view and admit I was wrong. White helmet although not perfect are not the bad guys.  Full content below:



The Assad regime in Syria is ghastly, and I have no truck with the sort of leftism or anti-imperialism that lionizes it as some kind of grand resistance against imperialism — it is of the same sort of moral absurdity that attempts to paint Russia as anything other than a weaker rival imperialist competing with the USA, as though it were a kind of moral paragon. You can make a case for or against a multipolar world in utilitarian terms (more stable or prosperous in some sense?), you can have ideological content preferences among the different imperialism flavours, but ghastly regimes are still ghastly and military imperialism always involves mass suffering. Whose catspaw the Assad regime is does not make it more or less criminal. Someone who wants its overthrow is not automatically an ideological fellow-traveller of ISIS.

On the other hand, I also have no patience for the neoconservative/liberal hawk tomfoolery that uses the ghastliness of the Assad regime (and the horror show that encompasses its victory for anyone who is seen as an enemy of the regime) as a reason to wash away the utter failure and downright evil of the intervention in Iraq. (Is this “virtue-signalling”? I’m under the impression that in some quarters, if you’re anti-Assad, you must be an interventionist.) I am not a pacifist, so in principle I accept that there is a case to be made, under very abstracted conditions, for a stronger military power to intervene to prevent suffering in another country. In practice, the conditions under which this leads to a better outcome are very rare if they ever occur at all. The risks of creating a worse situation in Syria, given the experience in Iraq, are extremely high. The vested interests are strong, the risk of making a bad situation worse from a direct overthrow of the Assad government are overwhelming for that and other reasons.

Which leads me to the question of the White Helmets. I gather that a lot of people on the “anti-imperialist” side view them as propaganda catspaws of imperialists. The reason for this seems largely to be that they operate in areas held by forces opposed to the regime (this to me is perfectly legitimate — how could a rebel trust the government to conduct rescues?), organizational and media help is offered by foreign entities with vested interests in the overthrow of the Assad government (again, to me legitimate — I would accept such help if I were opposed to the regime and in dire straits), and they receive foreign funding (ditto). None of these indict the organization to me — victims of Assad’s attempt to retake forces held by opposition groups are going to need rescue from someone and frankly, publicity.

Now it appears that a large number of them have been given asylum by Israel en route to being distributed to other countries, as Assad looks to retake most of all of Syria. If they stayed, surely they would face criminal proceedings (or, probably, much worse) from the Syrian government. But a lot of anti-imperialist (pro-Assad?) commentators, including/especially on the left, seem to view this as a further indictment of the White Helmets. Naturally, there is considerable moral inconsistency in Israel’s action, to say the least, but that is not an ethical quandary for those who are fleeing Assad.

What are they supposed to do? Stay and face Assad’s torturers (which he definitely uses)?

It should generally be possible to accept the legitimacy of opposition to Assad, including (especially!), rescue of his enemies, while criticizing the vested interests that might seek to take advantage of his overthrow.

One closing comment. Assad as with Saddam Hussein in Iraq as bad as such dictatorships were, prevented for many years the even greater crimes that has happened since under the rubric of "humanitarian intervention" at the hands of imperialist power.
http://www.ianwelsh.net/white-helmet/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+IanWelsh+%28Ian+Welsh%29

When Twitter Decides Who Speaks, By John Kiriakou

In a ironic twist of fate, Twitter has now come to the aid of democracy by silencing Alex Jones of InfoWars on their privately owned platform, but look behind this mainstreaming of twitter and you will see that it will be applied even more widely to the left.  I saw this coming and you can expect more in the very near future.  As Kiriakous documents from his personal experience, it is in motion now and is a very dangerous trend.  Progressive I know have for years relied heavily on social media and in fact from getting people out for demonstrations to educating our own the reliance on platforms like Twitter is almost universal.

Twitter is not alone of course, Google, Facebook, Apple as reported in the Washington Post, are all in the act and it bode ill for progressives.  My recommendation -- Start now, save your work offline for starters and then look to building a much more reliable mouse trap if we are to be effective in communicating our ideas moving forward.



https://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/51620-rsn-when-twitter-decides-who-speaks

For profit monitoring

Very sad local story of government/corporate complicity in preying on the vulnerable.

Its current agreement with the county, signed in 2013, captures electronic monitoring clients from both the Superior Court and the Probation Department. LCA’s business model is simple: providing electronic monitoring service and supervision of the monitored for the county at no cost to the state. In fact, all of the costs as well as the profits for this multimillion-dollar company are covered by payments from the people with shackles strapped to their ankles — individuals who are often already struggling to make ends meet.

It gets worse read story here.

For-profit Leaders in Community Alternatives (LCA) company.


A trip to this companies web site will blow your mind.  Having read the story first you will think you've been transported to a perverse dystopian universe where help is harm and love is hate.

https://truthout.org/articles/lawsuit-confronts-extortion-of-prisoners-by-electronic-monitoring-firm/