Help
y66, on 2016-April-05, 07:35, said:
Unless it is on Fox News.
Official BBO Hijacked Thread Thread No, it's not about that
#2881
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 17,195
- Joined: 2005-January-08
- Gender:Male
- Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
- Interests:Art, music
Posted 2016-April-05, 08:47
Unless it is on Fox News.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
#2882
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,496
- Joined: 2006-February-24
Posted 2016-April-11, 07:17
In California, Marijuana Is Smelling More Like Big Business
Don't we all.
Quote
“All I want it to do is bring some jobs,” Ms. Harris-Johnson said.
Don't we all.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
#2883
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,496
- Joined: 2006-February-24
Posted 2016-April-11, 17:46
Dennis Skinner, a Labour member of Parliament, was ejected from a Panama Papers discussion with Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain for referring to him as Dodgy Dave.
Quote
“Aspiration and wealth creation are not dirty words,” said Mr. Cameron, a Conservative, attacking the Labour Party for “wanting to tax” anyone who wanted to pass on their home or their wealth while still alive to their children, calling that “the real lesson of today.”
The Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, assailed Mr. Cameron for presenting “a master class in the art of distraction,” and accused him of “losing the trust” of ordinary Britons.
The Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, assailed Mr. Cameron for presenting “a master class in the art of distraction,” and accused him of “losing the trust” of ordinary Britons.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
#2884
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 17,195
- Joined: 2005-January-08
- Gender:Male
- Location:Tulsa, Oklahoma
- Interests:Art, music
Posted 2016-April-15, 11:57
My home state, Oklahoma, pays out 100 million dollars a year as subsidies to businesses under a law that was supposed to encourage job creation. Due to a budget crisis, the state recently cut 100 million dollars from its education budget, but Gov. Mary Fallon's new budget does not trim any of the corporate giveaways.
"Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." Black Lives Matter. / "I need ammunition, not a ride." Zelensky
#2885
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 3,525
- Joined: 2009-March-30
- Gender:Male
Posted 2016-April-16, 15:02
to be fair, the state of education in america is pretty hopeless, so that seems pretty reasonable.
OK
bed
bed
#2886
- Vugrapholic
-
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 2,018
- Joined: 2004-January-06
- Gender:Male
- Location:At the Rhine River km 772,1
Posted 2016-April-21, 15:41
Winstonm, on 2010-January-12, 18:59, said:
Please restrain yourself and try to keep off topic.
AGREE.
Quote
Bacon Cocktails
Is everything really better with bacon? We headed over to NYC's Beauty & Essex, a local hotspot that is infusing liquors with the pork product and mixing up the end result into some interesting cocktails
Is everything really better with bacon? We headed over to NYC's Beauty & Essex, a local hotspot that is infusing liquors with the pork product and mixing up the end result into some interesting cocktails
Preempts are Aberlour's best bridge friends
#2887
- Csaba the Hutt
-
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 13,027
- Joined: 2006-June-16
- Gender:Male
- Location:Göttingen, Germany
- Interests:bye
Posted 2016-April-25, 18:23
I've probably done more than my fair share of hijacking lately so let me put this video in its proper place:
https://www.youtube....h?v=EUbjpwyesk0
https://www.youtube....h?v=EUbjpwyesk0
... and I can prove it with my usual, flawless logic.
George Carlin
George Carlin
#2888
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,496
- Joined: 2006-February-24
Posted 2016-May-05, 13:05
The Aspiring Novelist Who Became Obama’s Foreign-Policy Guru
Quote
The nerve center for the selling of the Iran deal to Congress, which took place in a concentrated three-month period between July and September of last year, was located inside the White House, and is referred to by its former denizens as “the war room.” Chad Kreikemeier, a Nebraskan who had worked in the White House Office of Legislative Affairs, helped run the team, which included three to six people from each of several agencies, he says, which were the State Department, Treasury, the American delegation to the United Nations (i.e., Samantha Power), “at times D.O.D.” (the Department of Defense) and also the Department of Energy and the National Security Council. Rhodes “was kind of like the quarterback,” running the daily video conferences and coming up with lines of attack and parry. “He was extremely good about immediately getting to a phrase or a way of getting the message out that just made more sense,” Kreikemeier remembers. Framing the deal as a choice between peace and war was Rhodes’s go-to move — and proved to be a winning argument.
The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.
Rhodes’s messaging campaign was so effective not simply because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved in guiding the deal itself. In July 2012, Jake Sullivan, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Muscat, Oman, for the first meeting with the Iranians, taking a message from the White House. “It was, ‘We’re prepared to open a direct channel to resolve the nuclear agreement if you are prepared to do the same thing and authorize it at the highest levels and engage in a serious discussion on these issues,’ ” Sullivan remembers. “Once that was agreed to, it was quickly decided that we resolve the nuclear agreement in two steps, the interim agreement and the final agreement.” Subsequent meetings with the Iranians followed, during which he was joined by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. “Bill and I had a huge amount of license to explore what the terms would look like, within the negotiating parameters,” Sullivan says. “What the precise trade-offs would be, between forms of sanctions relief and forms of restraints on their programs, that was left to us to feel out.”
The fact that the president largely let his surrogates do the talking and the selling of the Iran deal — and even now, rarely talks about it in public — does not reflect his level of direct engagement. Sullivan and Burns spent hours before and after every session in Oman with the president and his closest advisers in the White House. When the president wasn’t present, Rhodes always was. “Ben and I, in particular, the two of us, spent a lot of time thinking through all the angles,” Sullivan says. “We spent three, four, five hours together in Washington talking things through before the meetings.” In March 2013, a full three months before the elections that elevated Hassan Rouhani to the office of president, Sullivan and Burns finalized their proposal for an interim agreement, which became the basis for the J.C.P.O.A.
The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”
Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art of political communication; his father, Simon Malley, who was born in Cairo, edited the politics magazine Afrique Asie and proudly provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the days when the leaders’ words might take weeks to travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. “The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.”
As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive about the way that the agreement itself was sold. “Look, with Iran, in a weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They’re agreements between governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
In fact, Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”
The person whom Kreikemeier credits with running the digital side of the campaign was Tanya Somanader, 31, the director of digital response for the White House Office of Digital Strategy, who became known in the war room and on Twitter as @TheIranDeal. Early on, Rhodes asked her to create a rapid-response account that fact-checked everything related to the Iran deal. “So, we developed a plan that was like: The Iran deal is literally going to be the tip of everything that we stand up online,” Somanader says. “And we’re going to map it onto what we know about the different audiences we’re dealing with: the public, pundits, experts, the right wing, Congress.” By applying 21st-century data and networking tools to the white-glove world of foreign affairs, the White House was able to track what United States senators and the people who worked for them, and influenced them, were seeing online — and make sure that no potential negative comment passed without a tweet.
Rhodes’s messaging campaign was so effective not simply because it was a perfectly planned and executed example of digital strategy, but also because he was personally involved in guiding the deal itself. In July 2012, Jake Sullivan, a close aide to Hillary Clinton, traveled to Muscat, Oman, for the first meeting with the Iranians, taking a message from the White House. “It was, ‘We’re prepared to open a direct channel to resolve the nuclear agreement if you are prepared to do the same thing and authorize it at the highest levels and engage in a serious discussion on these issues,’ ” Sullivan remembers. “Once that was agreed to, it was quickly decided that we resolve the nuclear agreement in two steps, the interim agreement and the final agreement.” Subsequent meetings with the Iranians followed, during which he was joined by Deputy Secretary of State Bill Burns. “Bill and I had a huge amount of license to explore what the terms would look like, within the negotiating parameters,” Sullivan says. “What the precise trade-offs would be, between forms of sanctions relief and forms of restraints on their programs, that was left to us to feel out.”
The fact that the president largely let his surrogates do the talking and the selling of the Iran deal — and even now, rarely talks about it in public — does not reflect his level of direct engagement. Sullivan and Burns spent hours before and after every session in Oman with the president and his closest advisers in the White House. When the president wasn’t present, Rhodes always was. “Ben and I, in particular, the two of us, spent a lot of time thinking through all the angles,” Sullivan says. “We spent three, four, five hours together in Washington talking things through before the meetings.” In March 2013, a full three months before the elections that elevated Hassan Rouhani to the office of president, Sullivan and Burns finalized their proposal for an interim agreement, which became the basis for the J.C.P.O.A.
The White House point person during the later stage of the negotiations was Rob Malley, a favored troubleshooter who is currently running negotiations that could keep the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in power. During the course of the Iran talks, Malley told me, he always kept in close contact with Rhodes. “I would often just call him and say, ‘Give me a reality check,’ ” Malley explained. “He could say, ‘Here is where I think the president is, and here is where I think he will be.’ ” He continued, “Ben would try to anticipate: Does it make sense policywise? But then he would also ask himself: How do we sell it to Congress? How do we sell it to the public? What is it going to do to our narrative?”
Malley is a particularly keen observer of the changing art of political communication; his father, Simon Malley, who was born in Cairo, edited the politics magazine Afrique Asie and proudly provided a platform for Fidel Castro and Yasir Arafat, in the days when the leaders’ words might take weeks to travel from Cuba or Cairo to Paris. “The Iran experience was the place where I saw firsthand how policy, politics and messaging all had to be brought together, and I think that Ben is really at the intersection of all three,” Malley says. “He reflects and he shapes at the same time.”
As Malley and representatives of the State Department, including Wendy Sherman and Secretary of State John Kerry, engaged in formal negotiations with the Iranians, to ratify details of a framework that had already been agreed upon, Rhodes’s war room did its work on Capitol Hill and with reporters. In the spring of last year, legions of arms-control experts began popping up at think tanks and on social media, and then became key sources for hundreds of often-clueless reporters. “We created an echo chamber,” he admitted, when I asked him to explain the onslaught of freshly minted experts cheerleading for the deal. “They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.”
When I suggested that all this dark metafictional play seemed a bit removed from rational debate over America’s future role in the world, Rhodes nodded. “In the absence of rational discourse, we are going to discourse the [expletive] out of this,” he said. “We had test drives to know who was going to be able to carry our message effectively, and how to use outside groups like Ploughshares, the Iran Project and whomever else. So we knew the tactics that worked.” He is proud of the way he sold the Iran deal. “We drove them crazy,” he said of the deal’s opponents.
Yet Rhodes bridled at the suggestion that there has been anything deceptive about the way that the agreement itself was sold. “Look, with Iran, in a weird way, these are state-to-state issues. They’re agreements between governments. Yes, I would prefer that it turns out that Rouhani and Zarif” — Mohammad Javad Zarif, Iran’s foreign minister — “are real reformers who are going to be steering this country into the direction that I believe it can go in, because their public is educated and, in some respects, pro-American. But we are not betting on that.”
In fact, Rhodes’s passion seems to derive not from any investment in the technical specifics of sanctions or centrifuge arrays, or any particular optimism about the future course of Iranian politics and society. Those are matters for the negotiators and area specialists. Rather, it derived from his own sense of the urgency of radically reorienting American policy in the Middle East in order to make the prospect of American involvement in the region’s future wars a lot less likely. When I asked whether the prospect of this same kind of far-reaching spin campaign being run by a different administration is something that scares him, he admitted that it does. “I mean, I’d prefer a sober, reasoned public debate, after which members of Congress reflect and take a vote,” he said, shrugging. “But that’s impossible.”
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
#2889
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 3,662
- Joined: 2006-February-21
- Location:Upper Michigan
- Interests:Music, films, computer programming, politics, bridge
Posted 2016-May-06, 10:52
Just want to say that we're thinking about the folks in Alberta today, hoping for containment of the fires and for successful convoys to safety.
The growth of wisdom may be gauged exactly by the diminution of ill temper. — Friedrich Nietzsche
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
The infliction of cruelty with a good conscience is a delight to moralists — that is why they invented hell. — Bertrand Russell
#2890
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,080
- Joined: 2005-May-16
- Gender:Male
Posted 2016-May-07, 17:26
Nice sentiment. We live in a "forested" area and expect to have insurance rates hiked next year.
Back in 2012, the Alberta government commissioned a study to evaluate their fire suppression practices. The conclusion? Too much fire suppression, inadequate controlled burns of "congested" areas. Imminent disaster looming if they did not change their practices.
Results? We are seeing them now.
Back in 2012, the Alberta government commissioned a study to evaluate their fire suppression practices. The conclusion? Too much fire suppression, inadequate controlled burns of "congested" areas. Imminent disaster looming if they did not change their practices.
Results? We are seeing them now.
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
#2891
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 10,667
- Joined: 2006-May-18
- Gender:Not Telling
Posted 2016-May-07, 17:32
Al_U_Card, on 2016-May-07, 17:26, said:
Nice sentiment. We live in a "forested" area and expect to have insurance rates hiked next year.
I guess the insurance companies believe in the big climate change conspiracy too. Perhaps you should move to their forums to educate them properly on why there will not be warmer summers in the future.
(-: Zel :-)
#2892
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,080
- Joined: 2005-May-16
- Gender:Male
Posted 2016-May-08, 05:34
Zelandakh, on 2016-May-07, 17:32, said:
I guess the insurance companies believe in the big climate change conspiracy too. Perhaps you should move to their forums to educate them properly on why there will not be warmer summers in the future.
Oh dear, perhaps 9-11 didn't have any effect on insurance rates either?
As for Mr. Buffet, he did come out and refuse to knuckle-under to that attempt to install the other kind of green (non-monetary) in his insurance biz, correct?
Other than the observed fact that warmer is wetter (droughts are caused in cooler climate times) fire losses are trending lower in the US over the last couple of decades as the weather patterns got warmer.
Oh the inconvenient truth of it all.
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
#2893
- Vugrapholic
-
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 2,018
- Joined: 2004-January-06
- Gender:Male
- Location:At the Rhine River km 772,1
Posted 2016-May-08, 14:31
Strong advice:: Dont solve differential equations on board of the US airplanes. You may be treated as a terrorist.
http://www.dailymail...-terrorist.html
http://www.dailymail...-terrorist.html
Preempts are Aberlour's best bridge friends
#2894
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,080
- Joined: 2005-May-16
- Gender:Male
Posted 2016-May-08, 15:26
Aberlour10, on 2016-May-08, 14:31, said:
Strong advice:: Dont solve differential equations on board of the US airplanes. You may be treated as a terrorist.
http://www.dailymail...-terrorist.html
http://www.dailymail...-terrorist.html
Back during my school daze, diffy-q's certainly terrorized me...lol
The Grand Design, reflected in the face of Chaos...it's a fluke!
#2895
- Csaba the Hutt
-
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 13,027
- Joined: 2006-June-16
- Gender:Male
- Location:Göttingen, Germany
- Interests:bye
Posted 2016-May-09, 02:57
I feel like I chose the wrong design for my new Amazon credit card. (for hackers, sorry, that's a photo of a similar card, not mine, but I hope you find some money on it nonetheless)
... and I can prove it with my usual, flawless logic.
George Carlin
George Carlin
#2896
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 11,056
- Joined: 2004-September-22
- Location:Northern Maryland
Posted 2016-May-09, 06:43
My wife had shown me an article in the Wash Post describing the same event. I find it hilarious. In the comments there was a discussion of the dangers of al-qualculus.
I imagine that the other passengers did not see the humor in the two hour delay.
I imagine that the other passengers did not see the humor in the two hour delay.
Ken
#2898
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 6,496
- Joined: 2006-February-24
Posted 2016-May-22, 09:18
Quote
Good dawning to thee, friends. (That's Oswald saying, "sup," in Shakespeare's "King Lear." What's your favorite greeting?
From Sam Sifton's What to Cook This Week. Fun read.
If you lose all hope, you can always find it again -- Richard Ford in The Sportswriter
#2899
- Csaba the Hutt
-
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 13,027
- Joined: 2006-June-16
- Gender:Male
- Location:Göttingen, Germany
- Interests:bye
Posted 2016-May-23, 00:52
A reasonably heartwarming story about a Romanian cop's Facebook following:
http://www.wsj.com/a...rise-1463934539
http://www.wsj.com/a...rise-1463934539
... and I can prove it with my usual, flawless logic.
George Carlin
George Carlin
#2900
- Csaba the Hutt
-
- Group: Advanced Members
- Posts: 13,027
- Joined: 2006-June-16
- Gender:Male
- Location:Göttingen, Germany
- Interests:bye
Posted 2016-May-28, 05:40
... and I can prove it with my usual, flawless logic.
George Carlin
George Carlin