TBR News March 10, 2020

The Voice of the White House
Washington, D.C. March 10, 2020:“Working in the White House as a junior staffer is an interesting experience.
When I was younger, I worked as a summer-time job in a clinic for people who had moderate to severe mental problems and the current work closely, at times, echos the earlier one.
I am not an intimate of the President but I have encountered him from time to time and I daily see manifestations of his growing psychological problems.
He insults people, uses foul language, is frantic to see his name mentioned on main-line television and pays absolutely no attention to any advice from his staff that runs counter to his strange ideas.
He lies like a rug to everyone, eats like a hog, makes lewd remarks to female staffers and flies into rages if anyone dares to contradict him.
It is becoming more and more evident to even the least intelligent American voter that Trump is vicious, corrupt and amoral. He has stated often that even if he loses the
election in 2020, he will not leave the White House. I have news for Donald but this is not the place to discuss it.
Commentary for March 10 2020 :”The Comedy Hour, otherwise known at the “Coronavirus Distatsr,” is not resonating as well as its author’s anticipated so it is slowly being cranked down and will soon be replaced with another Disney story to alarm the public. It has kept Trump’s foolish and dangerous behavior in the shade for weeks but soon rants and squeals will again become the beef and beans of the whorish media and we can expect pages of worthless “reporting” until the next election in November.”

The Table of Contents
• Yahoo deleted all my emails – and there’s nothing I can do about it
• Slapton Sands: A German Naval Victory
• Making America Great Again: Trump’s Impossible Challenges
• The Season of Evil
• Encyclopedia of American Loons

Yahoo deleted all my emails – and there’s nothing I can do about it
Many of the digital things we think we own are merely being rented. It is time to accept that we don’t have a master key to the big filing cabinet in the sky
March 10, 2020
by Arwa Mahdawi
The Guardian
At about 4pm on Sunday, a decade of my life disappeared for ever. I logged into my ancient Yahoo email account to try to find an old message from a university friend. A notice curtly informed me that, as I had not used the account for a year, my inbox had been wiped. Yahoo was my first “adult” email account, an upgrade from my halcyon Hotmail years. It chronicled my life from 2000 to 2010; suddenly, all those contacts, conversations and memories were gone – just like that. Yahoo had not warned me, even though I had given it my Gmail details as an alternative address.
Surely there was someone I could talk to about this. There was – but I would have to sign up to a premium service and pay $4.99 (£3.80) a month for the privilege of speaking to a human being. Instead, I contacted the company on Twitter. “This is normal and the emails cannot be restored,” a representative informed me. Yahoo then ignored all my desperate follow-up messages. I was ghosted by a web services provider.
I am not the only person who was blindsided by Yahoo’s clear-out; lots of people are in my position. We have only ourselves to blame, of course: we should have archived anything important; and we should not have trusted a company that styles its name with an exclamation mark. But that doesn’t make the perfunctory deletion of so much personal history any easier. On Twitter, one former Yahoo user noted that their erased inbox included emails from a loved one who had since died; someone else mourned the loss of their angsty teenage conversations.
The moral of this story is: “Back up your stuff.” Many of us treat the internet as if it is a big filing cabinet in the sky, but we forget that we do not have the master key. We forget that most of us have thoughtlessly agreed to terms and conditions that let companies do whatever they see fit with our personal information. Often, we give big tech carte blanche to mine, share and delete our data – and there is nothing we can do about it, because we have given our permission.
The digital economy has fundamentally changed the nature of ownership. Many of the digital things that we think we own are merely being rented: one policy change and our “possessions” become inaccessible or useless. Last year, for example, Microsoft closed its ebook store; all books bought through the service became unreadable. Earlier this year, the wireless speaker maker Sonos announced that it would no longer provide software updates for older equipment, including hardware sold as recently as 2015. This meant that some speakers would become unusable. After an outcry, Sonos backtracked. However, owners of several other internet-connected devices have had their smart products suddenly become dumb. In 2019, the US electronics retailer Best Buy discontinued its line of Insignia Connect products. It offered gift cards to the people who had purchased these gadgets, but not full refunds.
In the grand scheme of things, the loss of a decade’s worth of emails is not the biggest tragedy in the world. But it is a cautionary tale. It is a reminder of how little we own in the digital economy – not even own our memories.
•Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist

Slapton Sands: A German Naval Victory
The 1944 naval tragedy and how it happened

The so-called Slapton Sands incident of April 1944 is important in that it points out many of the problems encountered in joint operations between two basically hostile allies.
This incident has received some attention in the past, but is not widely known. In all the accounts, neither the reasons for the German attack nor its successes have ever been adequately addressed. Given that the Germans undoubtedly obtained very accurate information about the exact disposition of the Allied invasion force months before it took place, their discovery of the area in which their enemies were practicing landing attempts using large numbers of unwieldy and vulnerable landing craft is well within reason.
In late 1943, the British decided that the area at Slapton Sands, a small seaside area located at Slap Bay on the eastern Devon side of the Channel coast, closely replicated the areas of Normandy where the main thrust of the forthcoming invasion was to be directed. This area was cleared of all of its 3,000 inhabitants along with all their worldly possessions, livestock and vehicles as rapidly as possible, and this evacuated area was then occupied by the US V Corps.
Once the area was totally evacuated, British engineers constructed bunkers and other installations along the coast in imitation of German defenses on the French coast.
The first practice amphibious landing took place on December 28, 1943 and was called “Operation Duck.” Among the American Army units involved was the 1st Engineer Special Brigade which had been in combat in Italy. During its transfer to England, all of its special equipment had been left behind and it became urgently necessary to resupply it.
“Operation Duck” in December of 1943 was followed on March 29, 1944, by “Operation Beaver.” This was viewed in retrospect as less than successful; lack of coordination between the various units involved, coupled with command confusion were cited as critical difficulties which had to be overcome. To correct these failings, “Operation Tiger” was scheduled for the end of April.
The American naval units involved were under the command of US Rear Admiral Don Moon, who headed Force U, which was designated to land at Normandy’s Utah Beach.
The British Royal Navy, which oversaw the naval units involved was commanded by British Vice Admiral Letham, stationed at the British naval base at Portsmouth on the Channel.
By April 1, 1944, British Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay had assumed command of the Western Naval Task Force.
“Operation Tiger,” which commenced on April 26, was to simulate the projected landing of the US Army’s Fourth Division on Utah Beach in Normandy.
In Plymouth on April 24, while US troops were moving to board their LSTs (Landing Ship Tanks) which were to transport them to the exercise area, naval officer personnel involved with the exercise were briefed at the Royal Marine Barracks.
The loading of inexperienced troops was badly executed and showed clearly that far more training was necessary if a successful invasion was to be maintained.
On April 24, Admiral Moon and his staff boarded Task Force U flagship, the Bayfield.
This task force was intended to supply support and protection for the ships headed for the Slapton Sands training area. A number of senior US military personnel, including General Eisenhower, CIC SHEAF, British Chief Air Marshal Tedder, Lt. General Omar Bradley and Lt. General Lewis Brereton, commander of the Ninth Air Force would be observing the exercise from a Landing Craft Infantry (LCI) standing just outside the combat zone, while Major General Lawton Collins, commander of the VII Corps, would accompany the men to the beach area.
At 9:50 AM on April 26, the Bayfield moved from her moorings in Plymouth and anchored in Plymouth Sound. At 3:15 PM, General Collins and his staff came on board and at 5:38 PM, Admiral Moon’s command ship raised anchor and headed for the Channel.
During her voyage to the Slapton Sands debarkation area, the Bayfield was escorted by LCH 86 and 95, and at 10;45 PM, joined the USS Barnett, the USS Joseph Dickman and HMS Empire Gauntlet, and sailed in formation with Barnett in the van.
Their destination was an area about twelve miles off the coast and by the time the convoy reached the exercise area, the landing was well under way. At 4:03 AM, the Bayfield sounded General Quarters and a few minutes later dropped anchor in Start Bay. She immediately started lowering her boats and by 5:00 AM, all of these were launched, General Collins and his staff going ashore about 6:00 AM.
The senior officers, including Eisenhower and British General Montgomery, observed the landing exercises from different ships, split up for security reasons. There was considerable confusion; support aircraft never arrived, men landed in the wrong areas and some of the purportedly waterproof tanks proved not to be and quickly sank. Units landed in the area of naval bombardments which had to be halted, and subsequent troop landings were equally disoriented with men wandering around the beach without bothering to take cover.
The entire exercise was executed in a highly unprofessional and slapdash manner which greatly annoyed the senior officers. They would have been far more alarmed than annoyed had they learned that across the Channel, German S- (for “Schnell” or fast) Boats, very fast and deadly motor torpedo boats, of the 5th and 9th S-Boat flotillas were being readied for action in the Lyme Bay area of the British Channel coast.
The German S-Boats were highly effective torpedo boats, over 90 feet long, equipped with four standard torpedoes and armed with 20 and 40 mm guns. These boats were capable of speeds of up to 40 knots and were considered as very dangerous enemies by the Royal Navy. They worked in flotillas and in the Channel areas, used to wait in ambush along known convoy routes. During 1944, their basic tactics changed from passive to active attack and their new tactics were to make hit and run raids against the convoys which the highly efficient German naval radio interception units had located for them.
The 5th Flotilla under Korvettenkapitän Bernd Klug and the 9th Flotilla under Kapitänleutnant Götz Freiherr von Mirbach were stationed at Cherbourg in April 1944, and during that month had conducted a number of sorties against Allied shipping off the southern coast of England. On April 22, the 5th and 9th Flotillas had attacked British Motor Gun Boats in Lyme Bay and on the 24th, S-Boats of the same units successfully attacked shipping, sinking the coastal freighter, Roode Zee of 468 BRT, sinking it, and setting a British MGB on fire.
On April 27-28, both flotillas were ordered out to attack a significant number of Allied ships known to be in the Lyme Bay area. Ships from the 5th Flotilla constituted the S-100, S-136, S-138, S-143, S-140, and S-142. The 9th Flotilla consisted of S-130, S-145 and S-150 making a total of nine boats.
“Operation Tiger” consisted of two days of training. The first landing which was observed by the Allied high command, was to be followed by a second landing early on the morning of April 28. This force was centered in LST Group 32, a newly-constituted group under US Navy Commander B.J. Skahill, who was in the leading LST, LST 515.
None of the ships under his command had been in British waters for more than a month and had undergone no training whatsoever.
Just prior to sailing, Admiral Moon informed his officers about the danger posed by the S-Boat strikes and during his conference, a British naval officer described the highly effective hit and run techniques used by the Germans.
The convoy left Plymouth harbor in the morning of April 27 with a complement of five LSTs. This was termed “T-4” and the bulk of the US troops on board were members of the 1st Engineer Special Brigade along with their newly-acquired replacement equipment. The ships also carried amphibious vehicles and the last ship in the convoy, the LST 58, towed two heavy pontoon bridges which materially slowed the speed of the other units.
The convoy that left Plymouth consisted of LST 58, LST 496, LST 511, LST 515 and LST 531. The British Royal Navy was scheduled to provide the protection for the convoy with the escorts, HMS Azalea, a corvette, and the destroyer HMS Scimitar.
Unfortunately, the Scimitar had sustained minor hull damage on the previous day when an American LCI had rammed her, and the British naval authorities in Plymouth refused to permit the destroyer to sail although her captain told these authorities that he was detailed to protect a convoy now about to sail. The authorities had no knowledge of this convoy and the Scimitar was ordered to remain in harbor and have her minor damage attended to. The captain did not notify Admiral Moon of his situation and assumed that the British authorities at Plymouth would do so. The naval command at Plymouth did nothing whatsoever and Admiral Moon and Commander Skahill were under the impression that their highly vulnerable, lumbering convoy would be adequately protected on its journey through dangerous waters by the Royal Navy.
The commander of the corvette, Lieutenant Commander G. C. Giddes, RN, noted that the Scimitar was still in harbor when he sailed, but made no mention of this to Admiral Moon or Commander Skahill because he did not feel it was his responsibility to do so, and furthermore, had no radio contact with any of the LSTs. The British had neglected to supply the American naval units with their operational frequencies.
The Azalea had three more LSTs behind it as it joined Skahill’s convoy. These were LST 287, LST 499 and LST 507, the latter bringing up the rear
By 7:30 PM, the convoy had increased speed to seven knots as it moved towards the exercise area on a quiet sea illuminated by the moon.
The Germans, who had departed their base at Cherbourg about 10 PM, were moving westward and had passed two British destroyers earlier without incident and shortly after midnight, sighted the lumbering convoy. They sent up signal flares which were seen by the convoy escort, but were assumed to be part of the ongoing exercise.
In spite of the sighting by the Royal Navy of lead elements of the advancing S-Boats and the flares, nothing further was done by the British to protect the convoy, now sailing in an area where the Germans were known to have been active in the recent past, and without its primary defense of a British destroyer.
From just after midnight until approximately 1:30 AM, flares and tracers coming from unknown sources were observed by both the commanders of the corvette and the LST directly behind him, but no steps were taken to warn anyone about a possible German attack.
At 1:30 AM, the S-Boats were coming up on the convoy in Lyme Bay and two of their units, S-136 and S-138 (during attacks, the S-Boats worked in pairs) identified targets and fired torpedoes at them. Im¬mediately, LST 507 exploded. The stores of gasoline on board and in the tanks of its army vehicles ignited turning the big ship into an inferno. The flaming ship could be seen for miles, but the escort took no action and shortly after 2 AM, it was the turn of LST 531 to suffer the same fate. It too caught on fire after being torpedoed, and on both ships there was great panic among the untrained troops, many of whom jumped over the side in full combat gear and were promptly drowned.
About 1:30 AM, the British naval authorities at Plymouth suddenly realized that the American convoy was not properly covered and the destroyer HMS Saladin, the nearest ship, was dispatched to aid the convoy which the British had concluded might be in some danger.
The Saladin was thirty miles away from the LSTs and it was estimated that it would take her at least an hour to make visual contact with her new charges. By that time, the S-Boat attack was well under way, two LSTs had been sunk and another, the LST 289 torpedoed and severely damaged.
Lyme Bay was filled with the bright colors of flaming ships, streaking American and German 20 and 40 mm tracers and the flash of star shells thrown up by the S-Boats to illuminate their targets.
Frantic LST crewmen were firing at other LSTs, but the British were firing at no one. At 2:25 AM, one of the LSTs sent out a distress message to the British base at Portland indicating an enemy attack was in progress. This message was not acknowledged because it was never received. Neither the British or Americans used the same wavelengths that evening.
By 3:00 AM, the Germans broke off the engagement and returned to base leaving the waters of Lyme Bay dotted with floating corpses, wreckage and lifeboats.
When the sun came up, the major rescue efforts moved into full swing with some US and British units engaged in gathering up the survivors. Corpses and fragments of the dead were left in the water by the British to be scooped up by American ships.
A number of bodies washed up on shore and boats brought in many others during the course of the day. The survivors and the wounded were taken to various military hospitals, treated and warned by British and American intelligence officers about speaking to anyone about the disaster. Direct threats were made that anyone revealing the nature of the disaster would be subject to the harshest penalties.
A large, mass grave was dug in the sands of Slap Bay and 749 bodies were hastily dumped into it, accompanied with a quantity of quicklime to hasten decomposition.
The demand for security came from Eisenhower himself and was rigidly enforced, not only in the weeks preceding the invasion in June of that year, but in the decades to come.
Although 749 casualties were buried, at least three hundred more had vanished into the sea or had been carried down to the bottom of the bay in their sinking LSTs or by the weight of their combat gear. The best estimate of the total casualties is slightly over a thousand men lost, more than died during the actual landing over a month later.
The Germans reported their tremendous successes when they returned to base and with them they brought the corpse of a US Army officer on whose body they found waterlogged, but legible plans for the coming invasion. This information, which indicated Normandy as the main target, was sent on to the higher commands, but by the time it was evaluated, D-Day was at hand and the early warnings could not be acted upon.
Muted recrimination on the Allied side began even before dawn on the day of the successful German assault. These comprised a number of salient points among which were:
• The failure of the US naval commanders to establish liaison with their opposite numbers in the Royal Navy;
• The failure of both parties at all levels to establish a coordination of lines of radio communications;
• American troops on the LST had no knowledge of abandon ship methods and had never been informed what to do in the case of an emergency at sea. The ensuing panic resulted in many preventable deaths;
• Prolix operational orders which ran to over a thousand pages and were delivered to the command in Plymouth just as the operation was starting;
• Such radio frequencies as had been given to the Americans were suddenly changed with no notice given to anyone involved;
• British radar in England had picked up the movement of the S-Boats in the Channel about midnight, but this information was not passed to Plymouth Command;
• HMS Azalea had known of the S-Boat activities about midnight, but never informed the rest of the convoy;
• On April 27, British Signals Intelligence intercepted a German message at 10 PM that German S-Boats were to depart Cherbourg for actions in the western Channel. This information was not passed to anyone else until the evening of the 28th, nearly 24 hours after the disaster.
No one was officially reprimanded for these actions which might be best summed up as resulting from typical British carelessness and American inexperience.
There was a saying which was very popular in wartime England relating to a British view of American units stationed in their country. Americans were accused of being “overpaid, oversexed and over here.” The Americans, in turn, responded by saying that their unwilling hosts were “underpaid, undersexed and under Eisenhower.”
Admiral Moon, though not charged, was subjected to a great deal of hostility from both the British and American commands although he was absolutely innocent of any wrongdoing. This scapegoating seems to be prevalent in naval circles as witness the attacks launched by the Admiralty against Captain William Turner of the Lusitania, sunk not by the Captain’s carelessness, but by the machinations of his superiors, and more recently by the shabby treatment meted out to Admiral Husband Kimmel, the Commander of the Pacific Fleet, who was held to blame by the Roosevelt administration for the Pearl Harbor attack which the same administration instigated.
Admiral Moon killed himself on August 5, 1944 because of what was officially termed “combat-related stress,” but which was the result of the campaign of vilification launched against him by those who were, in fact, guilty of the dereliction of duty they passed on to him.

Making America Great Again: Trump’s Impossible Challenges
by Christian Jürs

Once the most powerful nation, the United States is rapidly losing its premier position in the international sphere while at the same time facing a potential serious anti-government political movement developing in that country.
The number of unemployed in the United States today is approximately 97,000,000. Official American sources claim that employment is always improving but in fact it is not. Most official governmental releases reflect wishful thinking or are designed to placate the public
This situation is caused by the movement, by management, of manufacturing businesses to foreign labor markets. While these removals can indeed save the companies a great deal of expenditure on domestic labor, by sharply reducing their former worker bodies to a small number, the companies have reduced the number of prospective purchasers of expensive items like automobiles.
The U.S. government’s total revenue is estimated to be $3.654 trillion for fiscal year 2018.
•Personal income taxes contribute $1.836 trillion, half of the total.
•Another third ($1.224 trillion) comes from payroll taxes.
This includes $892 billion for Social Security, $270 billion for Medicare and $50 billion for unemployment insurance.
•Corporate taxes add $355 billion, only 10 percent.
•Customs excise taxes and tariffs on imports contribute $146 billion, just 4 percent
•The Federal Reserve’s net income adds $70 billion.
•The remaining $23 billion of federal income comes from estate taxes and miscellaneous receipts.
•The use of secret offshore accounts by US citizens to evade U.S. federal taxes costs the U.S. Department of the Treasury well over $100 billion annually.
By moving from a producing to an importing entity, the United States has developed, and is developing, serious sociological and economic problems in a significant number of its citizens, and many suffer from serious health problems that are not treated.
It is estimated that over 500,000 American citizens are without any form of housing. Many of these people either are living on the streets, in public parks, living in cars or in charity shelters. There are at present over 200,000 family groups in America with over 300,000 individuals involved and 25% of the total are minor children.
Over 80,000 individuals are permanently without any residence. Many of these have physical disabilities such as chronic alcoholism or drug addiction. Many are classified as having severe mental disorders.
About 50,000 of these homeless individuals are military veterans, many of whom have serious physical or mental problems. One of the most common mental disorders is Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
Governmental treatment for these individuals is virtually non-existent. Approximately half of this number are either black or Latin American (“Hispanics” in official designation.)
Of the total number of the homeless individuals, approximately 10% are female.
Official but private, estimates are that there over 500,000 youths below the age of 24 in current American society that find themselves homeless for periods lasting from one week to a permanent status.
Over 100,000 of this class are young people who are defined as being homosexual. Those in this class find themselves persecuted to a considerable degree by society in general and their peer groups in specific.
Approximately 50% of this homeless population are over the age of 50, many of whom suffer from chronic, debilitating physical illnesses that are not treated.
Drug deaths in the U.S. in 2017 exceeded 60,000. Nearly half of all opioid overdose deaths involved prescriptions. Opioids are a class of strong painkillers drugs and include Percocet, Vicodin and OxyContin which are synthetic drugs designed to resemble opiates such as opium derived morphine and heroin. The most dangerous opioid is Fentanyl, a synthetic opioid painkiller 50-100 times more powerful than morphine. The increasing demand for these drugs is causing them to be manufactured outside the United States.
Suicide is the primary cause of “injury death” in the United States and more U.S. military personnel on active duty have killed themselves than were killed in combat last year.
The growing instability of American families is manifested by the fact that:
• One out of every three children in America lives in a home without a father.
• More than half of all babies are being born out of wedlock for women under the age of 30 living in the United States
• The United States has the highest child abuse death rate in the developed world.
• The United States has the highest teen pregnancy rate in the world although the numbers have declined in recent years due to the use of contraceptives.
The United States has the highest incarceration rate and the largest total prison population in the entire world. The criminal justice system in the United States holds more than 4,166,000 people in 1,719 state prisons, 102,000 in federal prisons, 901,000 in juvenile correctional facilities, and 3,163,000 in local jails. Additionally, 5,203,400 adults are on probation or on parole.
The number of people on probation or parole has increased the population of the American corrections system to more than 9,369,400 in 2017. Corrections costs the American taxpayer $69 billion a year.
There are a huge number of American domestic and business mortgages, (67 million by conservative estimate) which have been sliced up, put into so-called “investment packages” and sold to customers both domestic and foreign. This problem has been covered up by American authorities by cloaking the facts in something called MERS (Mortgage Electronic Registration System)
This results in the fact that the holders of mortgages, so chopped and packed, are not possible to identify by MERS or anyone else, at any time and by any agency. This means that any property holder, be they a domestic home owner or a business owner, is paying their monthly fees for property they can never own.
Another festering problem consists of the official loans made to students in colleges and universities in the U.S. the predatory nature of the $90 billion student loan industry. These so-called student loans are the most serious economic problem faced today by American university students.
This problem arose due to federal legislation originating in the mid-1990s which effectively removed basic consumer protections from student loans, thus permitting extensive penalties and the methodology for enforced collection.
Because of the highly inflated cost of higher American education, very few students from high school can afford university education. The new college graduate has, on average, a student loan in excess of $20,000 and students attending graduate programs have average debts of over $40,000.
America today has seriously failing public school systems. Upper economic class Americans are able to send their children to expensive private schools and avoid the exceedingly incompetent public systems. The average American lower school graduates are only a step above illiteracy and their lack of knowledge of world affairs is quite unbelievable.
A small number of extremely wealthy men control and operate all of the major American print and television media.
Each of the few very powerful, rich men have their own reasons for deciding what qualifies as news.
But the public in America now gets its news, without cost, from various internet sites and the circulation number of major print news has dropped dramatically. This has forced the internet editions of the print news media to erect what they call “paywalls.” This permits a very limited number of articles to be read or downloaded before the system demands money for the use of additional material.
The major print media in America is faced with imminent bankruptcy and are making frantic efforts at attempts to prevent free news sites from being aired on the internet.
Government surveillance of the American public is very widespread and at the present time, almost every aspect of an American citizen, or resident, is available for official surveillance. This includes mail, television viewing, telephone conversations, computer communications, travel, ownership of property, medical and school records, banking and credit card transactions, inheritances and other aspects of a citizen’s daily life.
This is done to circumvent any possible organization that could contravene official government policy and has its roots in massive civil resistance to governmental policy during the war in Vietnam. The government does not want a reprise of that problem and its growing surveillance is designed to carefully watch any citizen, or groups of citizens, who might, present or future, pose a threat to government policy.
Another factor to be considered is the current American attitudes towards racial issues. There has always been prejudice in the United States against blacks. In 1943 there were bloody riots in Detroit and Los Angeles, the former aimed at blacks and the latter against Mexicans. Since then, there has been chronic racial prejudice but it has been relatively small and very local. Also, there is growing anti-Semitic prejudice in American but this is officially ignored and never is mentioned in the American media. Much of this growing problem is directed at the brutal actions of Israel against Palestinians. Israelis have an undue influence in the American political scene. The very far right so-called neo-cons are almost all Jewish and most are Israeli citizens. Also, the middle-level ranks of American CIA personnel are heavily infiltrated by Israelis and it is said that any secret the CIA has is at once passed to Israel and that countries needs are assuming importance in CIA actions.
The attitudes of the working class Americans were inflamed during the last presidential elections by Mr. Trump who catered to them and encouraged rebellious attitudes. By speaking against Central American illegal immigrants, Mr. Trump has caused a polarization of attitudes and the militant right wing in America, currently small in number but well-organized and potentially very dangerous, has begun to make its views very well known in public demonstrations.

The Season of Evil
by Gregory Douglas

Preface
This is in essence a work of fiction, but the usual disclaimers notwithstanding, many of the horrific incidents related herein are based entirely on factual occurrences.
None of the characters or the events in this telling are invented and at the same time, none are real. And certainly, none of the participants could be considered by any stretch of the imagination to be either noble, self-sacrificing, honest, pure of motive or in any way socially acceptable to anything other than a hungry crocodile, a professional politician or a tax collector.
In fact, the main characters are complex, very often unpleasant, destructive and occasionally, very entertaining.
To those who would say that the majority of humanity has nothing in common with the characters depicted herein, the response is that mirrors only depict the ugly, evil and deformed things that peer into them
There are no heroes here, only different shapes and degrees of villains and if there is a moral to this tale it might well be found in a sentence by Jonathan Swift, a brilliant and misanthropic Irish cleric who wrote in his ‘Gulliver’s Travels,”
“I cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most odious race of little pernicious vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.”
Swift was often unkind in his observations but certainly not inaccuratre.

Frienze, Italy
July 2018-August 2019

Chapter 112
Marcia Huntsman, once executive secretary to Charles Rush and now attempting to shore up the same position with Cyril Rush, had left a large leather briefcase filled with papers at the front gate earlier in the day for her new employer. It contained stock market reports, correspondence from various corporate heads, reports on businesses owned by the family, copies of various governmental papers that might be of interest and a large number of newspaper clippings carefully pasted onto sheets of paper and very often highlighted in bright yellow marker pen ink.
The preparation and filling of these briefcases dated back to the reign of Arthur Rush and had continued to date. The originator needed no commentary on anything from employees but Charles Rush depended on Ms. Huntsman’s suggestions and because of this, she had gained considerable power, and greatly enriched herself. She was careful in dealing with the new head of the house and instead of writing letters for him to sign, merely made discreet suggestions and comments on attached sheets of paper.
The open briefcase sat on Chuck’s wide bed and he was propped up on his pillows, reading over a report when there was a double-knock on the door, announcing the arrival of Alex.
“Come.”
Alex was wearing only a pair of torn and ragged cutoff pajama bottoms and was barefoot.
“Hey, Chuck.”
“Hey, Alex. What’s up? I thought you were going to bed.”
“Too excited. Can I come in?”
“Yes. Close the door behind you.”
Alex sat down on the bottom of the bed.
“Can’t you do the paperwork in the morning, Chuck?”
“It was delivered to me earlier in the day so I made the mistake of opening it. It’s too late now, anyway. I’ll look at it tomorrow,” he shoved some of the files back into the case and closed it. “What can I do for you?”
Alex stretched and yawned.
“I just wanted to talk before I went to bed. No, actually, I wanted to… Never mind.”
Chuck leaned over and put the case on a chair by the bed.
“What?”
“I didn’t mean to punch you, Chuck. Sorry. I guess I was all worked up and I really do hate my mother. OK?”
“OK but I know there will be a bruise there tomorrow. There’s a large red spot there now but I don’t think you broke anything. What were you talking to the security man about?”
“The one by the door or the one in the hall downstairs?”
“I didn’t know about the one at the door. The other one.”
“Oh, just asking why your cousin was allowed past the gate when he wasn’t on the guest list.”
“What cousin?”
“A Tyler something or other.”
“Tyler McKnight. A repulsive suck-ass relative. Haven’t seen him in years. Was he here?”
Alex laughed.
“He was. He was making an ass of himself and swearing at Frederick who wouldn’t let him in so I got rid of him.”
“How?”
“Pretended to shake hands with him, twisted his arm up behind his back and kicked the sucker down the front steps. They told me I broke some ribs when I kicked him a second time.”
“Oh shit, it’s lawsuit time, Alex!”
“No, not actually. I had him arrested for trespass and attempted something or other and he’s in jail now. Attempted assault. That’s it. Anyway, he’s in jail. I told them to do that so he couldn’t sue. So, do you care?”
“Goddam it, Alex, why didn’t someone talk to me about this?”
He punched the mattress.
“Because you were busy getting your royal ass sucked by your guests and I had nothing else to do. Besides, it’s my house too and I won’t put up with shits like that.”
“Alex…”
“Well, I won’t. Anyway, it was a fine evening. I made some nice friends, discovered that I really like good champagne, had a nice religious discussion with the Pope and made a million dollars the easy way. Can we discuss things now?”
Chuck rubbed his eyes.
“Not now, Alex. I am so tired that I’m going to crash. Why don’t you come back here early in the morning and we can go for a walk on the grounds? Then we can find a private place, sit down and have a nice, long and substantive discussion about all kinds of things.”
“Sure, but what about the boat?”
“The boat comes later. We have to step the mast among other things and we can get Claude to help us. In the morning?”
“Sure, in the morning. How early?”
“It’s not supposed to be too hot tomorrow…today, so about eight?”
“Breakfast first?”
“Yes, why not.”
“Do I get Claude up?”
“When we finish our talk. About nine or ten.”
“Gwen?”
“She can sleep. And be sure to lock your door tonight or she’ll creep in and keep you busy until the sun comes up.”
“You could come in and watch if you like. I mean, at your age, isn’t that all you can do?”
“Shut up you asshole! I am twenty seven and in my prime and get your ragged ass back to your rooms so I can sleep.”
Alex grinned and stopped at the bedroom door.
“In the morning. I’ll put some Viagra in your tea…”
A book slammed into the door just as he was closing it behind him.
It was warm in the morning but the sky was hazy and there was a faint hint of possible rain. A small army of servants were moving about the lower floors and the grounds, cleaning up traces of the reception when Alex and Chuck walked out the front door and went down the steps to the terrace in front of the house.
Alex stopped to examine one of the large brass cannons that flanked the entrance.
“What does this say here, Chuck?”
He pointed to a band with a motto that encircled the muzzle.
“That’s Latin, Alex. ‘Ultima ratio Regium.’ Means ‘the final argument of kings.’
In other words the mouth of the cannon is the last word. This piece is French. Louis XIV. Notice the fleur-de-lis and the sun emblem. The Grand Monarch. Some day soon, we can go to France and you can see Versailles.”
They walked slowly towards the northern part of the grounds. There was a brick walkway that cut into the deep woods that fronted the chateau to the west and the trees and brush grew right up to the stone-edged walk. A man wearing a white shirt and dark blue pants came towards them, leading a muzzled German shepherd on a short leash.
The man nodded and the dog growled.
There was a security patrol that used this path regularly and the man stood to one side, holding the dog on an even shorter leash as the two passed him.
“Every catch anybody in here, Chuck?”
“Not that I recall. Claude told me once that this was the one treasure trove he could never get into and coming from him, that’s a pretty sure indication that no one else could either.”
They walked west for a few minutes and the only sound besides their footsteps was the chirping of invisible birds in the thick, leafy canopy.
“How come you don’t keep the bushes cut, Chuck?”
“My grandfather liked it just as it had been for hundreds of years, maybe thousands. He never touched anything and there are standing orders only to keep the paths open. I used to explore in here when I was a kid and I loved it. No noise and no people. Grandfather said it reminded him of the woods around his family home and he liked to walk along path down to the front gate when he wanted to relax. Now somewhere up here is where we leave the path. I think this pavement goes sharp right and when it does, we go left. There, right ahead…”
There was a solid wall of green that Chuck tentatively parted and then he pointed.
“Here, I knew I was right. I made a path here, God knows, fifteen years ago. It’s grown up but we can still go through. Come on, just keep pushing the brush to one side like I’m doing…”
And they rustled their way deeper into the thick woods.
“It thins out a little up ahead and then we go right…”
Alex was growing tired of pushing his way and having branches snap into his face but he kept on until they emerged into a small clearing.
Chuck looked around and then pointed to his right.
“There, go that way and follow the path.”
“Shit, what path? I think you’re imaging a path. How much further? Can’t we just stop here?”
“No, it’s about a hundred feet ahead.”
“It better be worth the hassle, Chuck. There are bugs in here and I got a few of them crawling on my legs.”
“Ticks. Pull them off before they dig in.”
“Gross!”
It was well worth the slow progress when they emerged into a large clearing. The first thing Alex saw was a small lake and then heard the sound of running water. This came from a small waterfall that gurgled and splashed down a rocky shelf into one end of the lake. It was very peaceful and Alex loved it from the beginning.
“Goddam! Can you swim in there?”
“Oh yes, I used to swim there all the time. There are fish and frogs in there, Alex, but no one ever comes here. I found it by accident and of all the places I have ever been in my life, this is the place I missed the most. Sit down on that log and relax.”
The log, the last remnant of a long-toppled tree, was covered with soft, green moss and Alex sat down gingerly while Chuck walked down to the edge of the small lake and stared at it for a few moments.
The canopy overhead was very thin and sunlight shafted down like rays of light through the tall windows of a medieval cathedral. At one edge was a small grove of white-trunked birch trees whose ghostly reflections were mirrored in the dark water.
Chuck walked back and sat down on the log.
“Do you see why I love this place, Alex? Or do you find nature overwhelming or not interesting enough? You come from a generation that likes noise and motion.”
“My degeneration sucks and I love it here. I thought I might like to go swimming but I decided it might mess the place up. Besides, the frogs could attack me. I saw a movie once about killer frogs.”
Chuck picked up a piece of green-crowned bark and tossed it into the water.
“Oh, the frogs are harmless, Alex.”
“Are there wolves in here?”
“No, but foxes, and other small animals. Unless the fox has rabies, you don’t have anything to worry about. There were deer here once but Grandfather had them all shot because they breed like third worlders and ate the shrubs and got into the strawberry frames. We had venison for months and I got very tired of it. No offense to your dear mom intended but roast Bambi is delicious with a cranberry sauce.”
“Nice thought, Dad! Snakes?”
“Giant anacondas, rattlesnakes and boomslangs but nothing to worry about.”
“Shit!”
He looked at the ground with some concern.
“
No, nothing like that. No poisonous snakes here. Alex. Now, shall we talk about things? Here we can say anything. In the house, one never knows….”
“Do you think we might be bugged?”
“Possible. Claude is an expert in electronic bugging and so on and he is going to go over the place in a few days. It pays to be careful, Alex.”
“What did you want to talk about out here that we can’t talk about in the house? Or better still, out on the boat?”
“Ah yes, the boat. When we get through here, we will attend to the boat.”
A large dragonfly darted across the lake, hovered for an instant, siezed a smaller flying insect in its legs and then tore its head off.
Alex watched the murder with interest.
“What do you want to talk about, Chuck?”
“ After your actions last night, I have given serious consideration to letting you take over the day to day management of the family holdings.”
Alex laughed.
“Don’t be stupid! I’m fifteen years old and I know squat about business.”
“You knew squat about the piano until you taught yourself.”
“True, but I like to make music.”
“And you like to make money. I notice you got quite a bit on the Polack deal.”
“I was in the right place at the right time:”
“And with the right connections. All right, Alex, let me tell you what I would like you to do. I am not a detail man. I used to enjoy occasional forays into the secure world of the middle class both to disrupt and enrich but day-to-day paperwork is really a tremendous pain in the ass to me. Do you follow me so far?”
“I do. Go on.”
“I have noticed that you are capable of great concentrations over a long period of time. The piano business is the primary indicator of this. What I would like you to do is to meet with the Huntsman creature on a daily basis, look over what she has dragged in with her, give it some thought and then get together with me, again on a daily basis, and we can decide what to do about specific issues. I don’t much care for the snotty bitch and the less seen of her the better. OK so far?”
“I don’t like her either and I know she doesn’t like me. So then what?”
“Also, you have the printouts of all the various component parts of our little empire. Some of these date back to my Grandfather’s time and some to Uncle Charlie’s and many of them are obsolete or at the least obsolescent. Go through this huge list a little bit at a time and decide if you feel specific companies are worth keeping. I mean some firm in East Jesus, Pennsylvania that makes hula-hoops or buggy whips would be of little use and certainly would entertain no promise for the future. Pick out the losers and give the list to me. If I agree with you, we’ll cut them out.”
“Cut them out?”
“Sell them off.”
“So how do I find out about what each firm does?”
“Make Huntsman earn her obscene salary

Continued…..

This is also an e-book, available from Amazon:

Encyclopedia of American Loons

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, professor at several universities, statistician, and risk analyst, whose (serious) work has primarily focused on problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty, some of which was described in his bestselling book The Black Swan. It is fascinating to observe how it is possible to be all these while also being a deranged conspiracy theorist exhibiting all the critical thinking skills of a commenter on an InfoWars article. Part of the explanation is of course that although Taleb is smart, he is nowhere near as smart as he thinks he is – indeed, it would be impossible for anyone to be as smart as Taleb thinks he is – and his natural reaction to disagreement is to think that those who disagree with him are either vastly inferior in intelligence to himself or (and) paid shills. (Most of the people he disagrees with are apparently also “prostitute[s]”.) On the other hand, Taleb seems to have acquired something of a cult following of people who treat him as a guru. Jon Vos has an excellent summary of how Taleb’s social media activity and the guru dynamics work here. Taleb’s most characteristic social media behavior, by the way, is to block experts who object to his nonsense, delete their comment, and then misrepresent what they said.
It is worth pointing out that even when it comes to the respectable parts of Taleb’s work, questions might be raised about how much can really be counted as his own, original contributions – this exchange is illuminating in so many ways.
Taleb on GMO
Taleb’s contributions to debates over GMOs have become a meme, which does reflect how these debates usually go.
Taleb is in particular notable for his anti-GMO conspiracy theories. Taleb knows very little about genetics or genetic modification, but seems utterly incapable of entertaining the thought that there might be things about genetics and genetic modification that he doesn’t know, and has accordingly great confidence in his own idiotic convictions. Indeed, he seems to be under the delusion that he is somehow doing science when voicing his confusions. As such, however, he also quickly ends up thinking that those who disagree with him are doing so for ulterior motives, and Taleb has claimed that paid shills have been invading his Facebook page as part of a concerted effort to intimidate GMO skeptics with scripted arguments invented by Monsanto. He has accordingly dismissed Kevin Folta, who is in fact a genuine expert on these issues and accordingly disagrees with Taleb’s embarrassing rantings, as a “lowly individual” and a “disgusting fellow” (that exchange is pretty telling). To quote Taleb himself on his critics: “A part man-part animal is vastly more horrifying than a full wild animal. Extremely eerie are monsters who look like humans with small differences. The uncanny resides in the resemblance, not the difference. So I finally figured out why I am gripped with so much revulsion at BS vendors dressed in the garb of high priest of scientists, intellectuals, or logicians, (say Pinker or Shermer or Harris or some scientist under Monsanto’s control), to the point of total maddening anger, and why I do not experience any disgust when I see a fortune teller, a market commentator, or some new age meditation guru such as Deepak Chopra.” When you notice that those who actually know anything about an issue disagree with you on that issue, this is not a reasonable response.
Indeed, Taleb has even published a guide on how to engage with those who disagree with him on GMO-related issues (good discussion of the guide here): “The error is to try to win a public argument against a propagandist. GMO shills will come up with canned responses largely provided by Monsanto, to drown the debate. Just expose shills, do not engage them. You will never convince a propagandist with a financial interest. Remember nobody won the war against the mafia by ‘convincing’ them that what they did was against morality. Typical arguments and programmed scripted responses: ‘we do science’, ‘we have evidence’, ‘you do not have evidence’, ‘naturalistic fallacy’, ‘you take risks to cross the street’, ‘a tomato is the same’, ‘we have been doing so since agriculture’, ‘you are against progress’, ‘we save lives with golden rice or silver apples’, ‘genetic fallacy’, ‘shill gambit’, ‘Monsanto funds did not influence my research’, etc. Do not, I say, do not engage them. We have debunked these arguments as fallacies and catalogued them in our PP paper. – Check the history of how tobacco companies spread disinformation. And note that people who take bribes have historically spun the same stories that ‘there is no connection’. Remember that the GMO shills are going against centuries of the refinement of rules identifying and governing conflicts of interest.” Or, as one commenter put it: “So, essentially the strategy is to rely on name-calling and avoid giving evidence for your argument at all costs. Just ‘expose’ people as ‘shills,’ but ‘do not engage.’ Because if you do, the ‘shills’ will defeat you with some kind of underhanded, dishonest trick such as pointing out that ‘you have no evidence.’ If your argument can be defeated by pointing out that you refuse to substantiate it as evidence, you’re simply wrong, and no amount of ad hominem will make up the difference.” A comment to which Taleb responded “Exactly. The method is to treat people like you as if they were nonthinking animals. What can you do about it?” Then he promoted a screenshot of the exchange with the comment: “Example of how to respond to a GMO Shill trying to harass you: Play with him. Make him feel deeply, insulted. Get him angry. Have fun.”
Taleb himself has coauthored a paper on the precautionary principle and its supposed lethal application to genetically modified foods, in which the authors made several errors. including misunderstanding basic biology, and asserted for instance, without evidence, that genetically modified crops are more dangerous than conventional crops, and failed to consider the benefits of GM crops in preventing vitamin A deficiency, blindness and death – rather, they falsely compared GMOs to letting poor people play Russian roulette to get out of poverty. Despite detailed refutations by critics (a short one outlining some basic errors here) Taleb continued to assert that no “intelligent comment” had been made on the paper (remember that disagreeing with Taleb makes you automatically stupid), saying for instance of the refutation just linked to that it was “not very intelligent”, “full of flaws” and “even downright stupid”. He did not respond to any of the criticisms or point out any of the alleged flaws, of course.
Medicine
Taleb has a general knack for cherrypicking and selectively use anecdotes to make sweeping and unsupported claims, and has made a number of false and misleading claims about medicine: “If you want to accelerate someone’s death, give him a personal doctor. […] This may be the only possible way to murder someone while staying squarely within the law,” claims Taleb, on his way to trying to argue the medical establishment is really uneducated when it comes to risk management, based on selective use of evidence and strawmanning. He relies for instance on the familiar but thoroughly misleading claim that “medical error still currently kills between three times (as accepted by doctors) and ten times as many people as car accidents in the United States” (failing for instance to note that the statistics primarily include cases where a severely sick or injured patient could have been saved (often: for a little bit longer), which is very different from hospitals, as opposed to cars, massively killing perfectly healthy people). Taleb, however, concludes “Did you ever wonder why heads of state and very rich people with access to all this medical care die just as easily as regular persons? Well, it looks like this is because of overmedication and excessive medical care.” It’s almost as if he didn’t understand how evidence and statistics work.
In 2015, Taleb defended homeopathy as harmless placebos that could be useful in diverting hypochondriacs from taking too many real pharmaceutical products – using homeopathy “can be rational”, said Taleb. Cory Doctorow criticized the (very silly) claim, pointing out that Taleb simply ignores the impressive amount of peer-reviewed, published evidence about the real harms of homeopathy – both people with real medical problems who substitute placebos for effective therapies, and those who waste their own or public money on inefficacious remedies for difficult-to-diagnose or imaginary ailments (and often still also overmedicate with real medicines) – such as a 2015 paper that showed that homeopathic treatments “led to more productivity loss, higher outpatient care costs and larger overall cost.” Taleb responded by calling Doctorow “very stupid” and “dishonest”.
Diagnosis: You sometimes suspect, rather strongly, that he’s mostly just thriving on the buzz and enjoying being “edgy” and deliberately juvenile. But his GMO nonsense is pure denialist conspiracy theory, and even selecting the juvenile strategy in this area strongly suggests that he doesn’t really understand how critical thinking works (though I suppose we need to keep the possibility open that he is motivated just by gleeful intellectual destructiveness, like Steve Fuller). But no matter how you interpret him, he’s made sure that – despite the Black Swan book – his contribution to civilization will be a negative one.