On Ol' Joe And His Boy Hunter

NYPost:

WASHINGTON – Ukraine’s top prosecutor said he hasn’t seen any evidence of wrongdoing by former Vice President Joe Biden nor his son Hunter Biden in dealings with the country.

Prosecutor General Yuriy Lutsenko said Hunter Biden and Burisma, a Ukrainian private gas company of which the younger Biden served on the board, were not the targets of investigations by his office.

He also said the former vice president, and current Democratic 2020 hopeful, didn’t act improperly when he called for the dismissal of Ukraine’s former prosecutor general, Victor Shoki, who had been investigating the company.

“I do not want Ukraine to again be the subject of U.S. presidential elections,” Lutsenko said in an interview with Bloomberg. “Hunter Biden did not violate any Ukrainian laws – at least as of now, we do not see any wrongdoing. A company can pay however much it wants to its board.”

President Trump’s allies – including Donald Trump Jr. – have suggested the Bidens acted inappropriately. The president’s outside lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, had threatened to travel to Ukraine to investigate things on his own, but has since canceled those plans.

“All the reports indicated that not a single, solitary thing was inappropriate about what my son did,” Biden told WMUR in an interview this week.

First, knowing a little something about how fucked up everything is where Ukraine and Crimea and Russia are concerned, we can't assume there's nothing going on that's maybe a little funky.

Second, Hunter Biden was probably benefited simply because of his dad's name and position. And that's not good.

But third, we also know how strictly the Obama administration adhered to ethical guidelines.

If anything, they overreacted and came down on the side of extreme caution, always taking steps to make sure there was as little cause as possible to be worried about shenanigans.

This was, after all, the "black man's behavior having to be orders of magnitude better than the average in a white man's world".

So while I'm not willing to dismiss entirely the prospects of some insider shit going on, the whole thing passed muster with Obama's ethics watch dogs, and when Joe announced his candidacy, Hunter bowed out of his board membership so there'd be no room for criticism.

Of course, as usual, that means nothing to Cult45, and so we're seeing all the same Republican shit we always see from the crowd that brought us such political high points as Willie Horton, John McCain's illegitimate black baby, Swift Boat, The Kenyan Usurper, Death Panels, Pizzagate, etc etc etc.

With the big tell being: Don Jr making lots of dirty noise about nepotism and trading on the family name - because that's exactly what the Trump kids do all the fucking time. They can't imagine Hunter Biden not taking the easy path because of his dad's prominence.

Daddy State Awareness - rule 1:
Every accusation is a confession.

BTW - this brings to mind the word "entitlement" as a great example of how the Daddy State has twisted and over-turned the language (rule 4). 

Entitlement, as currently understood in our political environment, means I'm entitled because of the happy accidents of my birth - my parents, my neighborhood, my advantages etc. But you can't claim "entitlement" to respect or fairness or equal opportunity, or anything else if I feel it threatens my superior position by forcing me to compete on a level field.

One Day

...you will grow up, and you'll realize that you can leave all of this.

The one truth cults can't admit to is that they might not be the only way.

How You Do It

I've seen this phenomenon play out in a coupla different ways in my experience. And in one very important instance, it came into very sharp focus for me.

I don't need to recount the details here, but it involved my sales-y struggles with a very powerful clinical academic who was always busting my chops about my product and my company's founder "trading on his standing in the medical community, trying to leverage money out of his colleagues..." 

My partner/assistant - a strong-willed woman - just looked at him with a slightly cocked eyebrow at the end of one of his rants, and said - "Oh c'mon, Steve". And that was kinda the end of the fight - actually it was the end of the war, as the good doctor became very cooperative thereafter.

She "mommed" him.

Sometimes, it's basically as "simple" as a woman just standing up and saying, "Stop - what you're doing is bullshit - get real".

Sometimes, it has to be pretty forceful.

And I don't know why it seems like it works for a woman when it almost never works for a man.

But I'll say it again: Women will help us save ourselves if we can figure out how to keep our mouths shut and stay the fuck outa their way.

Podcast

New platform - Blue Gal & Driftglass get paid by the listen - so do that if you can instead of listening here. 

Yes - I just told you to leave your favorite blog and got to RadioPublic.com 

...so you can support the ideals of resistance.

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The 2AM Dread

415 ppm

Bill McKibben in New Yorker: (beware the pay wall)

I’m skilled at eluding the fetal crouch of despair—because I’ve been working on climate change for thirty years, I’ve learned to parcel out my angst, to keep my distress under control. But, in the past few months, I’ve more often found myself awake at night with true fear-for-your-kids anguish. This spring, we set another high mark for carbon dioxide in the atmosphere: four hundred and fifteen parts per million, higher than it has been in many millions of years. The summer began with the hottest June ever recorded, and then July became the hottest month ever recorded. The United Kingdom, France, and Germany, which have some of the world’s oldest weather records, all hit new high temperatures, and then the heat moved north, until most of Greenland was melting and immense Siberian wildfires were sending great clouds of carbon skyward. At the beginning of September, Hurricane Dorian stalled above the Bahamas, where it unleashed what one meteorologist called “the longest siege of violent, destructive weather ever observed” on our planet. The scientific warnings of three decades ago are the deadly heat advisories and flash-flood alerts of the present, and, as for the future, we have hard deadlines. Last fall, the world’s climate scientists said that, if we are to meet the goals we set in the 2015 Paris climate accord—which would still raise the mercury fifty per cent higher than it has already climbed—we’ll essentially need to cut our use of fossil fuels in half by 2030 and eliminate them altogether by mid-century. In a world of Trumps and Putins and Bolsonaros and the fossil-fuel companies that back them, that seems nearly impossible. It’s not technologically impossible: in the past decade, the world’s engineers have dropped the price of solar and wind power by ninety and seventy per cent, respectively. But we’re moving far too slowly to exploit the opening for rapid change that this feat of engineering offers. Hence the 2 a.m. dread.

- and -

Following the money isn’t a new idea. Seven years ago, 350.org (the climate campaign that I co-founded, a decade ago, and still serve as a senior adviser) helped launch a global movement to persuade the managers of college endowments, pension funds, and other large pots of money to sell their stock in fossil-fuel companies. It has become the largest such campaign in history: funds worth more than eleven trillion dollars have divested some or all of their fossil-fuel holdings. And it has been effective: when Peabody Energy, the largest American coal company, filed for bankruptcy, in 2016, it cited divestment as one of the pressures weighing on its business, and, this year, Shell called divestment a “material adverse effect” on its performance. The divestment campaign has brought home the starkest fact of the global-warming era: that the industry has in its reserves five times as much carbon as the scientific consensus thinks we can safely burn. The pressure has helped cost the industry much of its social license; one religious institution after another has divested from oil and gas, and Pope Francis has summoned industry executives to the Vatican to tell them that they must leave carbon underground. But this, too, seems to be happening in too-slow motion. The fossil-fuel industry may be going down, but it’s going down fighting. Which makes sense, because it’s the fossil-fuel industry—it really only knows how to do one thing.

So now consider extending the logic of the divestment fight one ring out, from the fossil-fuel companies to the financial system that supports them. Consider a bank like, say, JPMorgan Chase, which is America’s largest bank and the world’s most valuable by market capitalization. In the three years since the end of the Paris climate talks, Chase has reportedly committed a hundred and ninety-six billion dollars in financing for the fossil-fuel industry, much of it to fund extreme new ventures: ultra-deep-sea drilling, Arctic oil extraction, and so on. In each of those years, ExxonMobil, by contrast, spent less than three billion dollars on exploration, research, and development. A hundred and ninety-six billion dollars is larger than the market value of BP; it dwarfs that of the coal companies or the frackers. By this measure, Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, is an oil, coal, and gas baron almost without peer.
There are good ideas on how to retool capitalism to make it work for us again instead of allowing it always to look for the Rent-Seeking opportunities that the "unfettered market-based" version always leads to.

There may be some nasty hardball tactics involved, but we'd better get used to the idea of having to wrestle in the mud with the pigs - or at least show a willingness to do it - if we expect any chance to get our asses outa this mess.

The director of the Rockefeller Family Fund, Lee Wasserman, says that it’s time to take on the reputations of the bankers, in much the same way that the Sackler family has increasingly been shunned for its role in the opioid crisis. “When the neighborhood tavern serves up several rounds to an already drunken patron, and the inebriated person rams into a minivan loaded with Little Leaguers, it’s not only a tragedy—the bar may be sued out of business, and the bartender could face jail time,” he said. “How much morally worse is it to enable the expansion of a deadly fossil-fuel industry, whose business model is certain to cause the death and suffering of millions of people and the loss of much of the earth’s diversity? Big, sophisticated banks such as Chase and Wells Fargo understand climate science and know that our current path is leading towards climate catastrophe. Yet their machine of finance cranks along.”
McKibben expresses some hope for these efforts, and that's a pretty good sign.

A Closer Look

Seth Meyers

Today's Image Rehab

Further confirmation of how far gone "conservatives" are. When they venerate someone who's done nothing but lie to the press.

Today's Tweet

I can hear it now: 
"Don't overplay your hand"
"Make sure you have public opinion on your side"
"Don't do anything that upsets the big squishy middle" ...

Bullshit. If this is a nation of laws, then we'd better start acting like it.

People respond to leadership - to the bold stroke. If you know it's right, then get off your fuckin' ass and do it.

We've got veterans who feel they have to chase after a congress critter (a comrade in arms), trying to get him to own up to his responsibility as a representative of the people.

If this turns out to be what the whistleblower complaint is about & it’s accurate, Trump must leave office immediately. A president can’t offer US aid to a foreign country in exchange for prosecution of a political opponent. Heaven help us if we can’t all agree on that. https://t.co/NjfGU2SQgQ

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) September 20, 2019

We Can Do Something

But we'll have to figure out how to get people to calm down enough not to assume the absolute worst of whatever side they're not on.