Ever since childhood, Brian Regan had been made to feel stupid because of his severe dyslexia. So he thought no one would suspect him of stealing secrets

By design gotun is a command line tool which can be called from other scripts, or any larger system. In the world of CI, Jenkins is the biggest name. So, one of the goals was also being able to execute within Jenkins for tests.

Setting up a Jenkins instance for test

vIf you don’t have a setup for Jenkins already, you can just create a new one for staging using the official container. For my example setup, I am using the same at http://status.kushaldas.in

Setting up the first job

My only concern was how to setup the secrets for authentication information on Jenkins (remember I am a newbie in Jenkins). This blog post helped me to get it done. In the first job, I am creating the configuration (if in future we add something dynamic like the image name there). The secrets are coming from the ENV variables as described in the gotun docs. In the job, I am running the Fedora Atomic tests on the image. Here is one example console output.

Running the upstream Atomic host tests in gotun inside Jenkins

My next task was to run the upstream Project Atomic host tests using the similar setup. All the configuration file for the tests are available on this git repo. As explained in a previous post, onevm.py creates the inventory file for Ansible, and then runsetup.sh executes the playbook. You can view the job output here.

For both the jobs, I am executing a Python script to create the job yaml files.

Economists have been worried about the weak productivity growth of the last decade, with some worried it will continue indefinitely. In the last decade, productivity growth has averaged less than 1.0 percent annually. This compares to a rate of close to 3.0 percent a year in the decade from 1995 to 2005 as well as the quarter century from 1947 to 1973. Slower productivity growth limits the extent to which wages can rise, except through redistribution.

However, Thomas Friedman apparently believes that if we end NAFTA, we will bring back manufacturing to the United States. But he argues that the new manufacturing capacity will be far more productive than the industry at present, and therefore mean very few jobs. He told readers:

"And if Trump forces all these U.S.-based multinationals to move operations from Mexico back to the U.S., what will that do? Help tank the Mexican economy so more Mexicans will try to come north, and raise the costs for U.S. manufacturers. What will they do? Move their factories to the U.S. but replace as many humans as possible with robots to contain costs."

Economists usually believe that expanding trade leads to higher productivity, so Friedman is offering a novel thesis with this idea that contracting trade will lead to more rapid productivity growth.

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Democracy Now! 2017-02-10 Friday

• Headlines for February 10, 2017
• Court Refuses to Reinstate Trump's Muslim Ban, Says "No Evidence" of Attacks from 7 Listed Countries
• Trump Launches "Blue Lives Matter Regime" with Three New Executive Orders on Law Enforcement
• ICE Raids Speed into Overdrive: Advocates Say Obama's Deportations Reaching "100 MPH" Under Trump
• In Real Bowling Green Massacre, a White Supremacist Planned Attack Against African Americans & Jews

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Brian DeLay reveals the life & arms deals of the most dangerous man you've never heard of

Robert Service explores the downfall of tsar Nicholas II while John Romer discusses popular misconceptions about life in ancient Egypt

Author (Photo:Paris July 30 1914 Gare de l'Est Mr. Poincaré returns from his trip ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow July 1914: Countdown to War by Sean McMeekin. Part 1 of 2. National Review “[A] gripping and well-researched new book. In prose of admirable clarity, [McMeekin] relates the enormously complex events of that fateful summer.... In his day-by-day and even hour-by-hour account, [McMeekin] brings a sprawling cast of characters to life.” Philadelphia Inquirer “[McMeekin is] a young, talented historian.... [He] is scrupulously fair and judicious in assigning blame.... McMeekin has written a fascinating and original study of the opening stages of World War I, a book that supersedes, in my view, any previous study of that great topic.” Harold Evans, New York Times Book Review “The historiography of World War I is immense, more than 25,000 volumes and articles even before next year’s centenary. Still, ... Sean McMeekin, in July 1914, [offers a] new perspective.... McMeekin has chosen the zoom lens. He opens with a crisp but vivid reconstruction of the double murder in the sunshine of Sarajevo, then concentrates entirely on unraveling the choreography day by day.” Sunday Times (London) “[A] work of meticulous scholarship.... It is McMeekin’s description of the details of life in the European capitals – comparatively small events which influenced great decisions – which make July 1914 irresistible.... It is that sort of intimacy which makes the story come alive – as well as confirming the assiduity with which it has been researched.” New York Review of Books “Sean McMeekin’s chronicle of these weeks in July 1914: Countdown to War is almost impossible to put down.... [McMeekin] delivers a punchy and riveting narrative of high politics and diplomacy over the five weeks after Sarajevo, more or less day by day, dwelling on small groups of decision-makers in and between the various capitals, and their interactions, by turns measured, perplexed, cordial, artful, angry, even tearful.” Times Higher Education (UK) “In this detailed account of the events and decisions that marked the road to war, Sean McMeekin demonstrates how, during what seemed a peaceful summer month, something that might have ended (at worst) in just another bloody Balkan battle led instead to the outbreak of the greatest conflict since the Napoleonic Wars.... [A] startling exercise in revisionism.” Washington Times “Masterful.” Financial Times “Stimulating and enjoyable.... Sean McMeekin’s July 1914 is controversial, arguing that Russia and France were more bent than Germany on war in July 1914.... [A] well-written book.” Commonweal “In July 1914, Sean McMeekin [...] provides a day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour, account of the crisis that began with the assassination in Sarajevo. By keeping his account close to the shifting contours of the crisis, he is able to capture its human dimensions.” On Point Radio “McMeekin makes this old story new. His history reads like a novel. Better, it unfolds like a play.... McMeekin adds dollops of fresh savory fact on every page. More importantly, he sees the whole crisis unclouded by bias for or against his characters or their countries.... July 1914 is superb history and compelling reading.” Columbus Dispatch “Blending scholarly research with a breezy and descriptive writing style, McMeekin makes a reader feel like a firsthand witness to the key events of that fateful summer.... McMeekin’s work is also a primer for today’s diplomats on how not to allow a small event to spiral out of control into a major war.” The Independent (London) “Lucid, convincing and full of rich detail, the book is a triumph for the narrative method and a vivid demonstration that chronology is the logic of history.” Prospect (UK) “McMeekin’s account is particularly worth reading for the weight it puts on the French and Russian contribution in taking the continent to war, drawing on his excellent previous book The Russian Origins of the Frist World War.... [A] refreshingly original counterpoint to the traditional focus on Germany above all.” Sunday Express (London) “Sean McMeekin’s splendid July 1914 unravels all the shenanigans, bluffs and bunglings by which Europe’s leaders and diplomats turned a minor murder in a Balkans backwater into total war.... McMeekin has rendered the complicated events of that fateful month as clearly and vividly as anyone could desire.” Choice “[A] fascinating study of Austrian and German ham-handed diplomacy (bordering on cluelessness) combined with Russian and French duplicity, with a dose of British disengagement added for good measure.” World War One Historical Association Magazine “[McMeekin’s] recounting of the imbroglio of July 1914 reads like a crime novel with personality sketches of the primary actors such as the belligerent Austrian Chief Of Staff von Hötzendoff and the shifty Serbian Premier Nicola Pasic.” Journal of Military History “McMeekin convincingly challenges, as others are now doing, the more usual view of Germany as the driving force behind the war.... [His] explication of the successive diplomatic steps to war makes it easy for any reader to see the missed chances for possible negotiation or a slowing of the momentum to war.” San Antonio Express-News “In an intimate narrative, McMeekin...delves into the five weeks between the assassination and Britain’s declaration of war, shedding new light on the conflict.... From a failed assassination attempt to a world war, McMeekin skillfully dissects the catastrophic events of July 1914.... July 1914 is an eye-opening elucidation on the beginning days of a war that was to end all wars.” Daily News “July 1914 is a carefully-researched diplomatic history of the month leading up to World War I. Well-written, it reconstructs the tensions and turmoil as well as the confusion and blundering of the diplomats who guided Europe into its most destructive war. It concludes with an excellent analysis of the responsibilities and failures of the major figures.” Dallas Morning News “The conventional wisdom of the last 100 years holds that Germany’s desire for empire and cultural hegemony turned Princip’s deed into an excuse for war. Barbara Tuchman’s famed history, The Guns of August, makes the most of this case. Sean McMeekin...argues that ambitions in Russia and France were at least as responsible and traces the foibles of Europe’s major powers in a month that launched a disaster for them all.... McMeekin praises Tuchman’s 1962 epic for inspiring him to write July 1914. What he’s delivered is a strong challenge to The Guns of August.” MHQ: Quarterly Journal of Military History “McMeekin is a wonderful storyteller, with a keen eye for the descriptive act, person, or scene.” Publishers Weekly, Starred Review “[A] superbly researched political history of the weeks between the assassination of Austria’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the beginning of World War I.... McMeekin’s work is a fine diplomatic history of the period, a must-read for serious students of WWI, and a fascinating story for anyone interested in modern history.” Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review “[A] thoroughly rewarding account that spares no nation regarding the causes of World War I.... McMeekin delivers a gripping, almost day-by-day chronicle of the increasingly frantic maneuvers of European civilian leaders who mostly didn’t want war and military leaders who had less objection.” Booklist “Alluding to historical controversies, McMeekin ably delivers what readers demand from a WWI-origins history: a taut rendition of the July 1914 crisis.” Norman Stone, author of World War Two: A Short History “Sean McMeekin is establishing himself as a—or even the—leading young historian of modern Europe. Here he turns his gifts to the outbreak of war in July 1914 and has written another masterpiece.” Michael Neiberg, author of The Blood of Free Men “Sean McMeekin has given us a riveting and fast-paced account of some of the most important diplomatic and military decisions of the 20th century. He depicts with chilling clarity the confusion, the incompetence, and the recklessness with which Europe’s leaders went to war in that fateful summer. Any understanding of the world we inhabit today must begin with an examination of the events of July 1914. McMeekin provides his readers with a balanced and detailed analysis of the events that gave birth to the modern age.” James Sheehan, author of Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?: The Transformation of Modern Europe “This is a meticulously researched and vividly written reconstruction of the decisions that lead to war in July 1914. McMeekin captures the human drama of this fateful month and offers a provocative assessment of the different players’ moral responsibility.” Charles Hill, Diplomat in Residence at Yale University, Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism “Winners write the histories, so wars are misunderstood. Sean McMeekin takes a wider stance to get a fresh angle of vision on The Great War, and casts all war-making in a new light.” --This text refers to the Hardcover edition. https://www.amazon.com/July-1914-Countdown-Sean-McMeekin/dp/0465060749/ref=la_B001JS2ER4_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486252889&sr=1-6

Democracy Now! 2017-02-03 Friday

• Headlines for February 03, 2017
• Does Donald Trump Think Frederick Douglass is Alive? Douglass's Great-Great-Great-Grandson Clarifies
• Yemen: Jeremy Scahill & Advocates Question "Success" of Trump Raid That Killed 24 Civilians
• Jeremy Scahill: Trump CIA Deputy Director Pick Gina Haspel Ran Secret Torture Black Site
• Meet Lewis Wallace: Trans Reporter Fired for Writing About Journalistic Integrity in Trump Era

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It really is amazing how much effort elite types expend denying that trade has cost us manufacturing jobs. The latest entry is from Robert Samuelson who tells us that it isn't true that manufacturing jobs have been lost to trade. Samuelson's main source on this is Brad DeLong, who is actually a very good economist and surely knows better.

Samuelson tells readers:

"Contrary to popular opinion, trade is not a major cause of job loss. It’s true that U.S. manufacturing has suffered a dramatic long-term employment erosion, sliding from roughly one-third of nonfarm jobs in 1950 to a quarter of jobs in the early 1970s to a little less than 9 percent now, according to economist J. Bradford DeLong of the University of California at Berkeley in an essay posted on Vox. But the main cause is automation."

The cheap trick here is going back to 1950. Yes, we have lost lots of manufacturing jobs to automation and over a 70 year period that does swamp the impact of the jobs lost due to trade, but this is really a dishonest way to present the issue. Manufacturing was declining as a share of total employment even in the 1950s and 1960s, but the pace was modest enough and we were creating enough jobs in other sectors that the job loss still allowed for real wage growth in both manufacturing and the economy as a whole.

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Four years ago, we calculated the potential savings to the federal and state governments, as well as beneficiaries, from lower drug prices. In the paper, Reducing Waste with an Efficient Medicare Drug Benefit, we compared how much people in the United States paid for drugs with payments in other wealthy countries. We then calculated how much the federal and state governments, as well as beneficiaries, would save on the Medicare prescription drug benefit if we paid the same amount for drugs as people in other countries.

The calculation had low and high savings scenarios. In the low savings scenario, it was assumed people in the United States would pay as much for prescription drugs as in Canada, the highest country in the group. This involved savings of 27.8 percent on drugs, since Canadians pay on average 72.2 percent as much as people in the United States. The high savings scenario was based on drug payments in Denmark, which are on average 34.5 percent as high as in the United States, implying a savings of 65.5 percent.[1]

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The response to Donald Trump's ban on Muslim immigrants has been reassuring. Millions of people have acted in various ways to express their opposition to this blatant act of bigotry. But as part of this story, we are being told that immigrants everywhere and always benefit all workers.

Far be it from me to criticize this great wisdom, which we can find in this Wonkblog post by Christopher Ingraham. So let's pretend that the people making this assertion have a shred of integrity. How about getting rid of the restrictions that make it extremely difficult for foreign doctors and dentists to practice in the United States?

Currently, foreign doctors are banned from practicing unless they complete a U.S. residency program. Foreign dentists are prohibiting from practicing in the United States unless they graduate a U.S. dental school. (We have allowed graduates of Canadian schools since 2011.) As a result of these protectionist measures our doctors earn on average more than twice as much as doctors in other wealthy countries, netting more than $250,000 a year. Our dentists also get paid twice as much, averaging close to $200,000 a year. This protectionism costs us close to $100 billion a year in higher health care costs.

So we all agree that protectionism is bad and that we want more immigrants, so how about it? Will we tear down the walls barring qualified doctors and dentists, or are all of our open border types not really sincere?

Is whitelash enough of an explainer for the rise of President Donald Trump?

Is it rigorous enough to blame the people who didn’t show up to vote for our impending collective struggle under this administration?

On this edition, we hear from Dr. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, assistant professor in the Department of African American Studies at Princeton University. Dr. Taylor most recently wrote, “From Black Lives Matter to Black Liberation.” We’ll be sharing a talk with Dr. Taylor’s insights on Black Liberation as framed through this most recent election. 

Special thanks to KPFA for hosting and recording Dr. Taylor’s speech.

Like this program? Please show us the love. Click here and support our non-profit journalism. Thanks!

 

Desperate to find somewhere she could live and work as she wished, Xiaolu Guo moved from Beijing to London in 2002. But from the weather to the language and the people, nothing was as she expected

Author (Photo: English: The Great Blasket Island, Co. Kerry, Ireland. Deutsch: Die große Blasket Insel, Grafschaft Kerry, Irland. Français : La grande île de Blasket, comté Kerry, Irlande. Gaeilge: Tá an IAn Blascaod Mór. Italiano: La grande isola di Blasket, contea Kerry, Irlanda. Date 3 July 2007 Source Own work Author Cargoking) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact hitp://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow On an Irish Island by Robert Kaniglel. “Wonderfully vivid . . . A remote setting, a handful of young visitors, a collection of colorful locals, an ancient language and a story that spans half a century: These are but a few of the elements that make Robert Kanigel’s On an Irish Island an exuberant and delightful book. . . . It can be read as an erudite primer to the [literary] works of the islanders; as a beautifully assured ensemble biography; and as a large-scale portrait of a remarkable time in the history of the Great Blasket and the wider world. Yet it is, above all, a compelling tale of ordinary—and often enviable—lives in an extraordinary setting.”—Karin Altenberg, The Wall Street Journal “Deliciously hones in on the ‘singularly severe glory’ of the Blasket Islands off the west coast of county Kerry.”—Katharine Whittemore, The Boston Globe “Tells a fascinating piece of history . . . [Nowadays], what’s gone is the whole concept of village life, without television, iPads or Beyonce. There’s no point in posing questions about where such a life went, or whether we can get it back. But now, at least, we’ve got this lovely book.”—Carolyn See, The Washington Post “It is the interaction of the natives and the visitors that fascinates Kanigel, and he tells the story of the community’s last decades through the succession of visitors, beginning with the playwright John Millington Synge. . . Affection for the place and its culture is something Kanigel first admires and then comes to share, and he makes his reader envy those tough, resourceful islanders.”—Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast “Kanigel avoids pushing any thesis about the advantages of premodern life, and instead points out the glories of the island and its inhabitants.”—Rachel Nolan, The San Francisco Chronicle “Robert Kanigel has written a tender paean to a lost world that called him out of his own time. On a bleak, treeless island, he unearths a buried linguistic treasure.” —Dava Sobel, author of Longitude and Galileo’s Daughter “A mesmerizing interplay of lives and socio-historical contexts . . . The portraits in this book are classic Kanigel: lively, sympathetic and thoroughly engaging. Yet what makes the narrative so affecting is the loss that permeates the text. As cultures like those on Great Blasket continue to be destroyed by the march of progress, so too are our connections to a simpler, more personally fulfilling way of living.” –Kirkus Reviews, (starred) “[An] impressively researched , greatly inviting history of the curious-minded men and women who, in the early twentieth century, came from mainland Ireland and elsewhere to reside on the Great Blasket for a while, to absorb the slower way of Irish customs before the advent of electricity and other aspects of fast-paced contemporary life.”—Brad Hooper, Booklist https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0050DIWFW?_encoding=UTF8&isInIframe=1&n=283155&ref_=dp_proddesc_0&s=books&showDetailProductDesc=1#iframe-wrapper Review “Kanigel avoids pushing any thesis about the advantages of premodern life, and instead points out the glories of the island and its inhabitants.”—Rachel Nolan, The San Francisco Chronicle About the Author ROBERT KANIGEL is the author of six previous books. He has been the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Grady-Stack Award for science writing. His book The Man Who Knew Infinity was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. His work has appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, Harvard Magazine, and Psychology Today. He has just retired as Professor of Science Writing at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now lives in Baltimore. From The Washington Post “Tells a fascinating piece of history . . . [Nowadays], what’s gone is the whole concept of village life, without television, iPads or Beyonce. There’s no point in posing questions about where such a life went, or whether we can get it back. But now, at least, we’ve got this lovely book.”—Carolyn See, The Washington Post

With the New York Times finally agreeing to name politicians’ lies where they belong—in the headlines of the stories where they first occur—it’s time to end the failed experiment of factchecking columns. Not only do these projects give the false impression that checking facts is a sidelight rather than central to the journalistic mission, they are fatally compromised by  corporate media’s interest in maintaining the illusion of impartiality. As FactCheck.org’s Brooks Jackson (Time, 10/9/12) said, in an admission that should have put paid to the whole enterprise:

Even if we could come up with a scholarly and factual way to say that one candidate is being more deceptive than another, I think we probably wouldn’t just because it would look like we were endorsing the other candidate.

Unmoored for commercial reasons from any hard and fast standards for what constitutes a fact, media factologists are free to follow their own political whims (or those of their outlets). Which seems to be what’s going on in a recent Washington Post factchecking effort by Glenn Kessler, “Bernie Sanders’ Claim That ‘36,000 People Will Die Yearly’ if Obamacare Is Repealed” (1/14/17).

The Post, just to set the stage, is a paper with a serious animus against the junior senator from Vermont—once running 16 negative stories on Sanders in 16 hours, and on another occasion squeezing four separate Sanders-bashing articles out of one dubious study. So it isn’t surprising to see Kessler giving “four Pinocchios” (the highest score, reserved for “whoppers”) to Sanders’ warning that “as Republicans try to repeal the Affordable Care Act, they should be reminded every day that 36,000 people will die yearly as a result.”

Sanders’ number came from Think Progress (12/7/16), which in turn derived its forecast of how many people could lose insurance under Obamacare from an Urban Institute report, and its estimate of the effect of insurance on mortality from an Annals of Internal Medicine study (5/6/14). So—a pretty solidly grounded political claim? Ah, sorry, you don’t understand the rules of political speech—as applied by the Washington Post to Bernie Sanders.

You see, Sanders in his tweet didn’t include all the academic qualifiers that occurred in the original Annals study. (It was a study of Massachusetts, not the whole country!) And Sanders’ warning was based on the “pretty big assumption” that the ACA will not be replaced with a brand new GOP-designed program—the barest outlines of which have yet to be described.

This kind of “fuzzy math” generally merits three Pinocchios, Kessler said. What “tips this claim into four-Pinocchio territory,” though, was the fact that Sanders expressed a prediction in the future tense: He said that people “will die” rather than “could die.” I would remind Kessler that every statement about the future is necessarily uncertain, and therefore every use by a politician of the future tense should be awarded an extra Pinocchio.

Fortunately, an antidote to this nonsense appeared in the Washington Post itself, in the form of an op-ed (1/23/17) that appeared under the headline, “Repealing the Affordable Care Act will Kill More Than 43,000 people annually.” It was written by Steffie Woolhandler and David Himmelstein, two doctors who are professors at Hunter College and lecturers at Harvard Med School; “for more than 30 years,” they note, they have “studied how death rates are affected by changes in healthcare coverage.” Their take on ACA repeal:

The biggest and most definitive study of what happens to death rates when Medicaid coverage is expanded, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, found that for every 455 people who gained coverage across several states, one life was saved per year. Applying that figure to even a conservative estimate of 20 million losing coverage in the event of an ACA repeal yields an estimate of 43,956 deaths annually.

They noted, as an example of what looks like “cautious optimism about the effect of a potential repeal,” that “the Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler awarded Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) four Pinocchios for claiming that 36,000 people a year will die if the ACA is repealed,” but said “such optimism is overblown”:

Kessler…chides Sanders for assuming that repeal would leave many millions uninsured, because Kessler presumes that the Republicans would replace the ACA with reforms that preserve coverage. But while repeal seems highly likely (indeed, it’s already underway using a legislative vehicle that requires only 50 Senate votes), replacement (which would require 60 votes) is much less certain.

Kessler’s four-Pinocchio judgment on Sanders still stands. Perhaps he’ll run a follow-up piece awarding some number of Pinocchios to the doctors for daring to question the ruling of a media factchecker on the flimsy basis of 60 combined years of academic research into the question at hand?

---

Jim Naureckas is the editor of FAIR.org. You can find him on Twitter: @JNaureckas.

Messages can be sent to the Washington Post at letters@washpost.com, or via Twitter @washingtonpost. Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.

 

The only known survivor of a far-right group accused of a series of racist killings is now on trial. But the case has put the nation itself in the dock

Corruption in many Pacific countries appears endemic, the Pacific has the world’s fastest growth rate of HIV infection and the Pacific is predicted to surpass Africa as the world’s poorest region in the foreseeable future Is the Pacific not sinking but being sunk?

Have predictions of the "end of history" proven premature?

Author (Photo:When Britain ceded the territory of West Florida— what is now Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—to Spain in 1783, America was still too young to confidently fight in one of Europe’s endless territorial contests. So it was left to the settlers, bristling at Spanish misrule, to establish a foothold in the area. Enter the Kemper brothers, whose vigilante justice culminated in a small band of American residents drafting a constitution and establishing a new government. By the time President Madison sent troops to occupy the territory, assert U.S. authority under the Louisiana Purchase, and restore order, West Florida’s settlers had already announced their independence, becoming our country’s shortest-lived rogue “republic.” Meticulously researched and populated with the colorful characters that make American history a joy, this is the story of a young country testing its power on the global stage and a lost chapter in how the frontier spirit came to define American character. The first treatment of this little-known historical moment, The Rogue Republic shows how hardscrabble frontiersmen and gentleman farmers planted the seeds of civil war, marked the dawn of Manifest Destiny, and laid the groundwork for the American empire. ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow The Rogue Republic: How Would-Be Patriots Waged the Shortest Revolution in American History Apr 20, 2011 by William C. Davis When Britain ceded the territory of West Florida— what is now Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida—to Spain in 1783, America was still too young to confidently fight in one of Europe’s endless territorial contests. So it was left to the settlers, bristling at Spanish misrule, to establish a foothold in the area. Enter the Kemper brothers, whose vigilante justice culminated in a small band of American residents drafting a constitution and establishing a new government. By the time President Madison sent troops to occupy the territory, assert U.S. authority under the Louisiana Purchase, and restore order, West Florida’s settlers had already announced their independence, becoming our country’s shortest-lived rogue “republic.” Meticulously researched and populated with the colorful characters that make American history a joy, this is the story of a young country testing its power on the global stage and a lost chapter in how the frontier spirit came to define American character. The first treatment of this little-known historical moment, The Rogue Republic shows how hardscrabble frontiersmen and gentleman farmers planted the seeds of civil war, marked the dawn of Manifest Destiny, and laid the groundwork for the American empire. https://www.amazon.com/Rogue-Republic-Would-Be-Patriots-Revolution/dp/0151009252/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1484526595&sr=8-1&keywords=rogue+republic

Behind the News, 1/19/17 - guests: Yasha Levine on surveillance; Elayne Tobin on celebrity - Doug Henwood

Aristotle - why is he one of the most influential thinkers of all time?

Democracy Now! 2017-01-18 Wednesday

• Headlines for January 18, 2017
• Chelsea Manning's Attorneys: Obama's Commutation Will Help Save Life of Jailed Army Whistleblower
• Jeremy Scahill on Obama's Commutation of Chelsea Manning & Continued Demonization of Edward Snowden
• Oscar López Rivera to Be Freed as Obama Commutes Sentence of Puerto Rican Independence Activist
• Activists Call on Obama to Pardon Leonard Peltier, Warning He'll Die in Prison Otherwise
• Jeremy Scahill: Did Education Nominee Betsy DeVos Lie to Senate About Ties to Anti-LGBT Foundation?
• Scahill: Blackwater Founder Erik Prince, the Brother of Betsy DeVos, Is Secretly Advising Trump

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Democracy Now! 2017-01-17 Tuesday

• Headlines for January 17, 2017
• Trump Attacks Civil Rights Icon John Lewis on MLK Weekend; Watch Lewis Recall Bloody Sunday 1965
• Insane Clown President: Matt Taibbi Chronicles Election of "Billionaire Hedonist" Donald Trump
• Special Report: Obama's Controversial Policy of Immigrant Family Detention Could Expand Under Trump

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01-16-2017 (Photo:... W. A. Parish Power Plant, Thompsons TX | by roy.luck ) http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/contact http://JohnBatchelorShow.com/schedules http://johnbatchelorshow.com/blog Twitter: @BatchelorShow Coal-Burning Electric Generating Plant Carbon Capture Sequestration Launched as the Arctic is balmy. @JohnSchwarz, @NYT “…When it fires up, the plant, which is attached to one of the power company NRG’s hulking coal-burning units, will draw 90 percent of the CO2 from the emissions produced by 240 megawatts of generated power. That is a fraction of the roughly 3,700 megawatts produced at this gargantuan plant, the largest in the Lone Star State. Still, it is enough to capture 1.6 million tons of carbon dioxide each year — equivalent to the greenhouse gas produced by driving 3.5 billion miles, or the CO2 from generating electricity for 214,338 homes. From a tower hundreds of feet above the Petra Nova operation, the carbon capture system looks like a fever dream of an Erector set fanatic, with mazes of pipes and gleaming tanks set off from the main plant’s skyscraping smokestacks and busy coal conveyors. Petra Nova uses the most common technology for carbon capture. The exhaust stream, pushed down a snaking conduit to the Petra Nova equipment, is exposed to a solution of chemicals known as amines, which bond with the carbon dioxide. That solution is pumped to a regenerator, or stripper, which heats the amine and releases the CO2. The gas is drawn off and compressed for further use, and the amine solution is then cycled back through the system to absorb more CO2 Petra Nova, a billion-dollar joint venture of NRG and JX Nippon Oil and Gas Exploration, will not just grab the CO2, it will use it, pushing compressed CO2 through a new pipeline 81 miles to an oil field. The gas will be injected into wells, a technique known as enhanced oil recovery, that should increase production to 15,000 barrels a day from about 300 barrels a day. And since NRG owns a quarter of the oil recovery project, what comes out of the ground will help pay for the carbon capture operation.. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/02/science/donald-trump-carbon-capture-clean-coal.html?rref=collection%2Fbyline%2Fjohn-schwartz&action=click&contentCollection=undefined&region=stream&module=stream_unit&version=latest&contentPlacement=3&pgtype=collection

Apologies for the late posting this week. I had to dig myself out of a post-holiday pileup of to-dos.

Let me start by saying I consider myself to be somewhat to the left of Bernie. I favor a Scandinavian-style social safety net — heck, I am Scandinavian. And I admire Elizabeth Warren more than just about anyone. So this comic is not coming from the perspective of a milquetoast centrist Democrat, or even a strong Hillary partisan, as I’m guessing some will assume in our world of fun political binaries. What concerns me is that I’m seeing fundamentally right-wing concepts being adopted by those who self-identify as lefties or progressives. You might say I’m criticizing the left from the left.

To address a few points raised in the cartoon: I shouldn’t need to even spell this out, but as a gentle reminder, Russia is an authoritarian regime that crushes free speech, dissidents, LGBT rights, and now, apparently, my own health insurance. This didn’t just happen to Hillary; it happened to all of us. It’s pretty much the definition of what should be a non-partisan concern. Mountains of evidence exist for Putin’s attempt to swing our election (and others), and to minimize the problem is nothing short of laughable. And yes, I do think the interference had a substantial impact.

Hillary has certainly frustrated me at times over the years, but I came to admire her intelligence and poise over the course of this election cycle. Her performance at the debates with Trump was nothing short of heroic. She also ran on the most progressive Democratic platform ever, but since policy has become almost completely divorced from politics, that doesn’t get talked about much. I could go on, but as my husband says, this was not so much an election as an exorcism, the culmination of a decades-long smear campaign by the right.

The term “political correctness” has been the cornerstone of conservative efforts to transform the ideas of civil rights and equality into something frivolous and stupid. The right loves plucking silly examples from obscure, powerless people and blowing them up into huge “culture war” issues that supposedly threaten the nation. “PC” is an insult that plays into their hands.

Along these same lines, “liberal elites” — long a Fox News favorite — is designed to shift attention away from the actual economic elites hoovering up the world’s wealth and resources, such as the Koch Brothers or Trump, and instead make one think of poodle-owning urbanites supposedly looking down their noses at everyone (while in reality voting to raise the minimum wage). It’s a frame, not a fact, and hides a deep anti-intellectual agenda. By definition, I would say a liberal is someone who cares about the less fortunate. So a liberal “elite” would be a liberal with power. However, the term is thrown around as a pejorative to smear just about anyone — feminists, college student activists, etc. — rendering it meaningless, and an effective right-wing language hack that divides the left.

So don’t fall for these con-job concepts! We progressives need to be strategic in our opposition, not Fox News Lefties.