Umm… I recognize the auditorium. No, seriously, I’ve been in that exact spot.

Not where my people are from, Yooper meets Detroit (Richard and Emily have their moments, but don’t we all). I was born in one of those car name towns, I forget which actually, and by virtue of my ‘Ganderness can apply for French Citizenship!

Notre révolution m’a fait sentir tout le sens de l’axiome qui dit que l’histoire est un roman ; et je suis convaincu que la fortune et l’intrigue ont fait plus de héros, que le génie et la vertu.

But I’ve been in Grand Rapids and, while known even among ‘Ganders as snooty Republican Bigots, it’s in a country club kind of way.

Which means they hate Jews too.

You know, I thank goodness every day that Richard and Emily had the sense to flee to the coast (Oh, if it was Left Coast I’d be waaay spacier than this) because it’s wacky. A trivial example- on one extended trip my companion was Jewish and I pretty much baggage on a liaison mission to… Grand Rapids. Curiously interactions were directed through me, the clueless one, and I can only assume it’s because of my Ben Franklin Whiteness.

Don’t get me wrong, we were treated with dignity and respect and most of the people were cool enough but my downstate relatives’ ruminations about how I shouldn’t visit my Great Grandmother’s house (literally a Golf Course Condo before the concept was invented) because the wrong sort have moved in as they swill their Flint/Lead water…

Lots of things happen in Peyton Place, glad I don’t live there.

But they’re not all idiots (I like the water theory myself) and my prediction is that, unless the RNC and the Unindicted Co-conspirator it’s beholden to dump a ton of money on an essentially fratricidal mission, Amash has nothing to fear.

I think it’s really important that we do our job as a Congress, that we not allow misconduct to go undeterred. That we not just say, someone can violate the public trust and that there are no consequences to it.

And if you get a chance, I encourage you all to read the tweet where it lays all of this out. Mueller’s report lays all of this out. And I’m confident that if you read Volume II, you’ll be appalled at much of the conduct. And I was appalled by it. And that’s why I stated what I stated. That’s why I came to that conclusion, because I think we can’t go — we can’t let conduct like that go unchecked.

Congress has a duty to keep the president in check, and it is a difficult process. For those who are worried about, you know, Congress intruding on the president’s powers consistently, it is a difficult process to remove someone from office. It’s not easy. So no one’s suggesting that just because you start some inquiry or process that a person’s removed from office.

Nonetheless, we have a job to do. And I think we owe it to the American people to represent them, to ensure that the people we have in office are doing the right thing, are of good character. Aren’t violating the public trust.

Check Out The Hook

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay become the first to scale Mt. Everest’s peak; President John F. Kennedy born; Patrick Henry gives his “If this be treason” speech; Comedian Bob Hope born.

Your own personal health is your own personal choice, all the way down the line.

Melissa Etheridge

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Australia’s ‘Egg Boy’ gives donations to NZ attack survivors

An Australian teenager who broke an egg on a controversial far-right senator’s head says he has given almost A$100,000 (£55,000; $69,000) to survivors of the Christchurch mosque attacks.

Will Connolly egged Fraser Anning in March – prompting people to flood him with donations to pay his legal costs.

Mr Anning had caused fury a day earlier when he said, on the day of the shootings, Muslim migration was to blame for them.

Fifty-one people died in the attacks.

Myanmar police hunt ‘Buddhist bin Laden’ over Suu Kyi comments

Ashin Wirathu has long been blamed for inciting hatred against Muslims, in particular the Rohingya minority

Hannah Ellis-Petersen in Bangkok

Wed 29 May 2019 06.26 BST

Myanmar police have issued an arrest warrant for Ashin Wirathu, a firebrand monk known as the “Buddist Bin Laden”, over alleged incendiary remarks about Aung San Suu Kyi.

Wirathu has long been accused of inciting sectarian violence against Myanmar’s Muslims, in particular the Rohingya community, through hate-filled, Islamaphobic speeches.

The monk, who is at the forefront of Myanmar’s radical nationalist movement, supported the military crackdown on the Rohingya in August 2017 in Rahkine state. The UN has since defined the military violence as ethnic cleansing which was carried out with “genocidal intent”.

Schwarzenegger teams up with activist Greta Thunberg at climate summit

A top climate summit organized by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s environmental organization has opened in Vienna. Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg spoke at the opening of a failure by the leaders in attendance to act.

Swedish youth activist Greta Thunberg on Tuesday called on leaders to inform the public about climate change without sugarcoating “the biggest crisis humanity has ever faced.”

Most people have no clue about the scale of the climate emergency because they “have not been told, or more importantly, told by the right people,” said Thunberg, who has inspired millions of young people across the globe to participate in the Fridays for the Future school strikes.

Over 400 IS group-linked French nationals detained in Syria, Paris says

Did you know you can make a phonograph (an analog sound recording and playback device for you millennials and beyond) with Dirt, Water, a Wheel, a Pointy Stick, and a Membrane to attach it to?

In analog recording what you want to do is create an analogue (homophone meaning similar as opposed to continuously variable) of the air pressure involved in its transmission. So you focus it at a the membrane you have the pointy stick attached to, mix up your dirt and water into clay, toss it on the wheel so you can make a cylinder (kinda, doesn’t matter much) and while it’s still soft enough scratch it with the pointy stick.

Bingo. Voice of the Pharaoh s. You can add bells and whistles like Wax recording medium, metal needles instead of sticks, and amplifying cones, but the fundamentals are really that simple. Took Thomas Edison to put it together though.

So for years and years Aircraft Carriers were basically holes in the Ocean with flat spots on top and if you needed a bit of wind pressure to lift your brick off the deck the Captain would point the ship into it and crank the engines up to ramming speed. With the advent of Jet power (which goes fast but starts slow) that was no longer sufficient and so the Steam Powered Catapult was invented. It’s a huge monster of a beast and can fairly be said to be the spine of a modern Carrier.

Now with Nuclear Power you have as much steam as you want, but you also have electricity which is more digital and controllable (Steam is explosive and if you don’t believe me read any history of the Mississippi) and you can launch planes with it (Railguns with the Plane as Projectile), even land them (Magnetics), and our Navy decided this was the next big thing.

Other countries are going with Ski Jumps and STOL but you know, USA!, USA!

Now like other digital things version 1.0 is a piece of crap and I’m certainly not one to advocate helter skelter replacement of things that work, but I’m not quite the Luddite Unindicted Co-conspirator Bottomless Pinocchio is.

Trump tells troops that future US supercarriers are ‘going to use steam’ in a weird rant about an obsession he can’t seem to shake
by Ryan Pickrell, Business Insider
5/28/19

President Donald Trump suddenly and inexplicably returned to a persistent obsession — the aircraft launch systems on the new Ford-class supercarriers — while talking with US troops stationed in Japan on Tuesday.

At one point, Trump told the troops that future carriers would return to using steam to launch aircraft.

The US Navy’s Nimitz-class aircraft carriers have used steam launchers for decades to catapult aircraft off the flight deck, but the service is investing heavily in an Electromagnetic Aircraft Launch System for the newer Ford-class supercarriers.

Development setbacks have driven up costs, delayed deliveries, and repeatedly drawn the president’s ire.

The troops overwhelmingly supported the use of steam; however, there were some who cheered for the newer system.

Trump — a staunch proponent of traditional steam catapults that are less complex than the alternatives, which he believes a person must be “Albert Einstein” to fully understand and operate — quipped that service members who supported the use of electromagnetic catapults were working for the enemy.

As he has done many times throughout his presidency, Trump championed the use of steam catapults to launch aircraft from the Navy’s new carriers.

“Steam’s only worked for about 65 years perfectly,” the president said. “They have a $900 million cost overrun on this crazy electric catapult. I said, ‘What was wrong with steam?'”

“We want to go with steam,” he further remarked. “They are always coming up with new ideas.” He added: “They want to show next, next, next. And we all want innovation, but it’s too much. There’s never been anything like the steam catapult.”

He argued that the “delicate” electromagnetic catapults were more expensive, less likely to hold up in battle, and no more efficient than the steam catapults.

“I think I’m going to put an order — when we build a new aircraft carrier, we’re going to use steam,” he said, suggesting a radical overhaul to a key Navy research-and-development project.

A return to steam would require a significant redesign of the new Ford-class carriers should the president decide to follow through on his statements in Japan.

Ah, but those top hats and bowlers with the round Dwayne Wayne welder’s glasses are so cool looking.

Forking Philosophy! Get a job hippie!

Utilitarianism

Or, to summarize Proust-

Foreshadow much?

What Utilitarianism does not recognize is that ethical behavior includes personal growth. In the trolley problem self sacrifice is a given, a coven of Nuns represents conventional virtue and a baby represents the unknown.

Am I going to chose the future? Of course I am. I’ll figure out problem two when I do, surfing my way out… Kismet.

Some people think it’s just a stupid show.

Welcome to The Breakfast Club! We’re a disorganized group of rebel lefties who hang out and chat if and when we’re not too hungover we’ve been bailed out we’re not too exhausted from last night’s (CENSORED) the caffeine kicks in. Join us every weekday morning at 9am (ET) and weekend morning at 10:00am (ET) (or whenever we get around to it) to talk about current news and our boring lives and to make fun of LaEscapee! If we are ever running late, it’s PhilJD’s fault.

Novelist Ian Fleming is born. Baseball’s National League approves moving the Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles. Duke of Windsor dies.

You must be the change you wish to see in the world.

Mahatma Gandhi

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Japan attack: Child among three dead in Kawasaki stabbing

A knife-wielding man has attacked a group of schoolchildren waiting for a bus in a Japanese city near Tokyo.

At least 18 people were injured on a residential street in Kawasaki. Two of them, a 12-year-old girl and a 39-year-old man, are dead.

A suspect, a man in his 50s, stabbed himself in the neck after his rampage and later died in hospital.

Violent crime is rare in Japan and the motive for the attack is unknown.

The suspect was holding knives in both hands as he attacked the victims – sixteen of whom were schoolgirls.

European elections: triumphant Greens demand more radical climate action

Europe’s Greens, big winners in Sunday’s European elections, will use their newfound leverage in a fractured parliament to push an agenda of urgent climate action, social justice and civil liberties, the movement’s leaders say.

“This was a great outcome for us – but we now also have a great responsibility, because voters have given us their trust,” Bas Eickhout, a Dutch MEP and the Greens’ co-lead candidate for commission president, told the Guardian.

“Our voters, especially the younger generation, for many of whom we are now their first choice, are deeply concerned about the climate crisis, and they are pro-European – but they feel the EU is not delivering. They want us to change the course of Europe.”

Democracy ten years after the financial crash

Not the world order we wanted

The globalised economy was just about saved in 2008 by state interventions, at the cost of impoverishing most of their citizens. The ensuing resentment, then anger, has since reshaped national politics.

by Serge Halimi & Pierre Rimbert

Budapest, 23 May 2018. Wearing a jacket a bit big for him and a purple shirt, Steve Bannon addressed an audience of prominent and starchy Hungarians: ‘The fuse that lit the Trump revolution started September 15 at nine in the morning [in 2008, when] Lehman Brothers was kicked into bankruptcy.’ Bannon, former chief strategist to Donald Trump, had also been an investment banker at Goldman Sachs, and knew that the crisis had hit Hungary hard: ‘The elites bailed themselves out, totally socialised the risk. Did the average person get a bail-out like that?’ Even though many of his current political activities have been paid for by hedge funds, he berates a ‘socialism for the rich’ that provoked ‘a really populist revolt’ around the world. ‘In 2010 Viktor Orbán was voted back into power in Hungary’: Orbán was ‘Trump before Trump.’

Libya: Flight data places mysterious planes in Haftar territory

Al Jazeera Arabic investigation tracks suspicious cargo flights into military bases controlled by Khalifa Haftar.

Cargo planes were discovered flying clandestinely into bases controlled by renegade Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar and dropping off unidentifed payloads at the time his forces attacked Tripoli last month, an Al Jazeera Arabic TV investigation found.

Satellite images and flight data show two Russian-made Ilyushin 76 aircraft registered to a joint Emirati-Kazakh company called Reem Travel made several trips between Egypt, Israel, and Jordanbefore landing at military bases controlled by Haftar’s Libyan National Army (LNA) in early April, just as it attempted to seize the capital.

Facebook says Zuckerberg and Sandberg will defy Canadian subpoena, risking contempt vote

By Donie O’Sullivan and Paula Newton, CNN Business

Trump expects Japan’s military to reinforce U.S. in Asia and beyond

U.S. President Donald Trump said he expects that Japan’s military will reinforce U.S. forces throughout Asia and elsewhere, he said on Tuesday, as the key U.S. ally upgrades the ability of its forces to operate further from its shores.

Trump’s comments followed his inspection of Japan’s largest warship, the Kaga, a helicopter carrier designed to carry submarine-hunting helicopters to distant waters.

The vessel, which will soon be upgraded to handle F-35B short take-off and vertical landing (STOVL) jets, sailed to India on a flag-flying mission last year, going through the contested South China Sea, much of which is claimed by Beijing.

I understand what an Existential Crisis is.

(A) central proposition of Existentialism is that existence precedes essence, which means that the most important consideration for individuals is that they are individuals- independently acting and responsible, conscious beings (“existence”)- rather than what labels, roles, stereotypes, definitions, or other preconceived categories the individuals fit (“essence”). The actual life of the individuals is what constitutes what could be called their “true essence” instead of there being an arbitrarily attributed essence others use to define them. Thus, human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own values and determine a meaning to their life. Researching on how to get over an existential crisis can be the first step in helping yourself through this.

We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.

This is not it.

Hope Hicks Left the White House. Now She Must Decide Whether to Talk to Congress.
By Maggie Haberman, The New York Times
May 23, 2019

Like few others in the White House, Ms. Hicks was witness to some of the president’s angriest moments and most pointed directives about the investigations into the Trump campaign and its contacts with Russians in 2016. Her dilemma now is how to respond to House Democrats, who have grown frustrated and increasingly aggressive in the face of a sweeping decision by the Trump administration, and the Trump Organization, to oppose such subpoenas.

Ms. Hicks was instructed by the House Judiciary Committee to turn over documents by June 4 and to appear in person on June 19. She and another former West Wing aide, Annie Donaldson, who was the chief of staff to Donald F. McGahn II, the White House counsel at the time, were subpoenaed to testify.

Mr. McGahn also received a subpoena, and declined to appear. He said that he viewed the White House as his client, and that after the White House instructed him not to comply, he had to follow his client’s wishes.
…
Witnesses have generally followed the White House lead, in part because of institutional concerns about areas that could be viewed as covered by executive privilege. But if Ms. Hicks does not cooperate, she would potentially be in legal jeopardy with the House.

The likeliest possibility would be a compromise, where she would submit to an interview as long as certain topics are off limits. More recently, Mr. Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., reached a deal with the Senate Intelligence Committee to come in for a limited interview, after he balked at a subpoena.

Ms. Hicks declined to comment, as did her lawyer.
…
Ms. Hicks was mentioned on 28 pages in the (Mueller) report. Three of those are related to possible conspiracy between Russian officials and the Trump campaign, and the rest to the obstruction investigation. They paint a picture of an adviser who was more of a witness to the president’s frustrations with the investigations into his campaign and his own conduct, rather than someone who was an active participant in any discussions of what to do about them.

Ms. Hicks comes across in her interviews with the F.B.I. as trying to alert Mr. Trump to the possible news media reaction he might face to any new information about what took place in the campaign.

For instance, she is described telling Mr. Trump that emails existed related to Mr. Kushner and a meeting with a Kremlin-linked lawyer that took place in June 2016 at Trump Tower. The report describes Ms. Hicks looking at the emails at Mr. Kushner’s lawyer’s office, and being “shocked by the emails because they looked ‘really bad.'”

“The next day, Hicks spoke privately with the president to mention her concern about the emails, which she understood were soon going to be shared with Congress,” the report says.

“The next day, Hicks spoke privately with the president to mention her concern about the emails, which she understood were soon going to be shared with Congress,” the report says.

Mr. Trump, Ms. Hicks told investigators, “seemed upset because too many people knew about the emails and he told Hicks that just one lawyer should deal with the matter. The president indicated that he did not think the emails would leak, but said they would leak if everyone had access to them.”

At other points, the report described her recollections of a statement she issued shortly after Election Day in 2016, in which she said there was never contact between the campaign and foreign entities, and a conversation she had with the president after he had fired James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director.

Ms. Hicks was also there when the president learned of Mr. Mueller’s appointment as special prosecutor by Jeff Sessions, then the attorney general.

“Hicks saw the president shortly after Sessions departed and described the president as being extremely upset by the special counsel’s appointment,” the report says, adding “that she had only seen the president like that one other time, when the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape came out during the campaign.”

Existential? I think not. What it does indicate is that Maggie Haberman has no idea at all what the word means.

Haberman was born to a Jewish family on October 30, 1973, in New York City, the daughter of Clyde Haberman, who became a longtime journalist for The New York Times, and Nancy Haberman (née Spies), a media communications executive at Rubenstein Associates. At the firm, a “publicity powerhouse” whose eponymous founder has been called “the dean of damage control” by Rudy Giuliani, Haberman’s mother has done work for a client list of influential New Yorkers including Donald Trump. A singer, in 3rd grade Haberman played the title role in a performance of the musical Annie at the P.S 75 Emily Dickinson School. She is a 1991 graduate of Ethical Culture Fieldston School, an independent preparatory school in New York City, followed by Sarah Lawrence College, a private liberal arts college in Yonkers, New York, where she obtained a bachelor’s degree in 1995.

I did not suspect Sarah Lawrence would be so lax in its instruction. Perhaps an introduction to Philosophy was not among her degree requirements or electives.

Alabama- Share The Wonder