Usher’s News & Analysis, Jan. 22, 2020

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Do you think all of the below magically stops pertaining concerning an impeachment and Senate trial of a US President?

Let me preface wit the established fact that the US Constitution is the highest binding social-contract under secular law.

Now, let’s say you sign a contract. Everything about it is legal and binding. It says the other party can rescind the contract if you commit treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. Then they send you notification per the contract that they are rescinding the contract because you abused your power in their view. Your lawyer responds on your behalf requesting the other party to cite the contract provision allowing them to legally rescind the contract for abuse of power, which is not even mentioned in the contract. The other party responds by citing the “treason or high crimes and misdemeanors” provision. Your lawyer responds by requesting evidence that you committed treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. They respond that they have no evidence you did but that you abused your power and that abuse of power is covered by the provision concerning treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. How far do you think that other party would get in court? To top it off, the other party’s allegation against you that you abused your power is completely ambiguous, as the actions you took they deem abusive were within your legal authority to carry out. In fact, your lawyer maintains that you were legally obligated to carry out the acts you did.

Which federal judge would rule in the other party’s favor even if the other party were to cite the US Constitution as the highest law in the land and claim that treason or high crimes and misdemeanors covers abuse of power in the absence of treason or high crimes and misdemeanors?

Let’s say the other party cites conversations that were had before and/or after the express contract was finalized and executed wherein those conversations someone stated that it was his or her view that treason or high crimes and misdemeanors covers abuse of power in the absence of treason or high crimes and misdemeanors. Do you think the court would then rule that because of that language or position on that person’s part, the contract then means high crimes and misdemeanors covers abuse of power in the absence of treason or high crimes and misdemeanors?

Any judge dumb enough to rule that way certainly should not be on the bench?

This all matters very, very much because certain Democrats are working overtime to set an extremely dangerous and, frankly, illegal precedent that if accepted, established, and utilized going forward concerning this administration and subsequent administrations would constitute a real abuse of power jeopardizing democracy, which is already in a severely weakened state in the US. Any such precedent would be ripe for constant abuse.

Are the American people going to settle for the legislative branch impeaching and removing any President it feels like labeling abusive of Presidential powers regardless of properly enumerated and substantiated Presidential crimes?

Do not put tires in the ocean.

… at the infamous Osborne Reef near Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, where 2 million tires were spread over 35 acres in the Atlantic Ocean, only to end up damaging nearby natural reefs over the years. Restoration work has been underway there for years.

The End is Near For Guam’s Giant Underwater Tire Pile

What was Jeff Bezos doing using WhatsApp in the first place?

U.N. officials press Saudi Arabia on hack of Jeff Bezos’s phone

How sincere is all of this? We’ve been through waves of supposed conscience before only to see new standards rolled back. Of course, those waves were before the Internet gave nearly instant access to information (for those willing and able to dig).

Those waves were before AGW became widely accepted as the fact that it is. Can the plutocrats dupe the people enough so those plutocrats can continue holding all the economic power? We shall see.

Personally, I don’t think the plutocrats will win in the end.

I do hope Marc Benioff, chief executive of Salesforce, is telling the absolute truth about his position.

The idea of stakeholder capitalism has been gaining ground in recent years and last August the US Business Roundtable, which represents some of the country’s top CEOs, said it was abandoning the idea of shareholder primacy and instead defining the purpose of a corporation as “improving our society”.

Billionaire Salesforce founder: ‘Capitalism as we know it is dead’

The irony of those most to blame for the state of the world meeting to discuss how they are a force for good cannot be overlooked. If the past World Economic Forum meetings are anything to go by, this will be a meeting for the richest – mainly men and those from the West – to give each other a pat on the back and discuss how to get richer at our expense. The title of the event might be about sustainability but the backroom deals will be about the bottomline.

Forget the PR: Davos is a union meeting for the super-rich

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is such an all-out fascist.

Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who broke the Snowden story, charged with cybercrimes in Brazil for publishing texts that embarrassed officials

The leaks did a great deal more than simply embarrass them. They proved they were utterly corrupt.

Glenn Greenwald Charged With Same Crime As Julian Assange

Conscience strikes:

Doctors’ groups historically resisted attempts to reform US healthcare, fearing payment cuts, but there is growing awareness that the system’s skyrocketing costs are hurting their patients.

Medicare for All supporters just locked down a huge endorsement within the healthcare industry

My favorite since my teens:

Open Showers

Open showers appear to visually increase the size of your bathroom, while also giving it more space and providing convenience for users. Long gone are the days of worrying about slipping over the edge of the tub while you’re trying to get out and dry off. While some may find this design has a lack of privacy, others enjoy the accessible openness and increased shower space.

14 Bathroom Design Trends For 2020

This article rips Joe Biden to shreds so Bernie and Elizabeth don’t have to. I am positive that Joe Biden would lose to Donald Trump. I think Bernie Sanders would beat Trump. In my view, Elizabeth would have a much harder time than would Bernie.

Why is the mainstream media so gentle to Joe Biden?

Krystal and Saagar call out Bernie’s weak Biden apology

Krystal Ball dismantles NBC News, HRC Bernie Bro lies

Hillary Clinton was literally forced to do what the Justice Democrats called on her to do.

Justice Democrats, the progressive group that supported Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez and other progressive Democrats in their races, launched a petition Tuesday afternoon urging Clinton to support the Democratic nominee.

“Secretary Clinton’s statement is unacceptable, out-of-touch, and dangerous,“ executive director Alexandra Rojas said in a statement. “We’re calling on her to do the right thing and immediately say that she’ll do everything she can to support whoever becomes the Democratic nominee.”

Hillary Clinton on Bernie Sanders: ‘Nobody likes him’ — herself included

The worst thing Bernie Sanders can do right now is to repeat Jeremy Corbyn’s terrible mishandling of all the anti-Semitic accusations: 1) cave in and apologize for things never done and positions never held and 2) not be tough enough to stand up to fight those accusers by turning the tables on them, which means failing to change the subject right back to just how awful those accusers’ policies and practices really have been.

Integrated corporate governance is a departure from the mindset and associated practices of shareholder primacy and corporate social responsibility, both of which treat ESG&D [Environmental, Social, Governance, and Data stewardship] factors as primarily non- or pre-financial matters. By contrast, an integrative approach takes a holistic view of shareholder and stakeholder interests by systematically internalizing ESG&D considerations into the firm’s strategy, resource allocation, risk management, performance evaluation, and reporting policies and processes.

Walking the Talk of Stakeholder Capitalism

Helping to explain the latest renewal trends, markets with higher resident turnover also tend to have more new supply, stronger job growth and younger populations. While these market characteristics influence retention, terms of individual leases themselves also make a difference.

Apartment Lease Renewals Continue to Climb

Best Appliances for Your Rental Property

MLK also believed that a UBI should be high enough to provide dignity for all, and that it should grow as the national economy grows. I too believe this. A UBI should be indexed to GDP per capita, so that as automation increases our productivity, our UBI increases. Such a setup would fully incentivize automation. Unemployment would no longer be a fear but a goal if the more robots we employed, the higher our monthly basic income checks grew.

Two conditions are indispensable if we are to ensure that the guaranteed income operates as a consistently progressive measure. First, it must be pegged to the median income of society, not at the lowest levels of income. To guarantee an income at the floor would simply perpetuate welfare standards and freeze into the society poverty conditions. Second, the guaranteed income must be dynamic; it must automatically increase as the total social income grows. Were it permitted to remain static under growth conditions, the recipients would suffer a relative decline. If periodic reviews disclose that the whole national income has arisen, then the guaranteed income would have to be adjusted upward by the same percentage. Without these safeguards a creeping retrogression would occur, nullifying the gains of security and stability.

Scott Santens – “The time has come for us to civilize ourselves by the total, direct, and immediate abolition of poverty.” — Martin Luther King Jr.

Russia is leading the pack in this field.

The Russian project stands out due to its ambitious plans to cover all product groups, unlike other systems, which mostly monitor excise goods like tobacco and alcohol, and pharmaceuticals. It is entirely unmatched across the world in terms of its scale and capacity to process up to 100 billion unique codes per year.

From medicine to milk, this is Russia’s plan to make every good traceable

It will also help to bring in real-time inflation/deflation controls and also reduce and eliminate environmental damage.

Study: CDC’s Vaccine Schedule May Be Harmful To Children

A new study says that the CDC’s vaccine schedule, a guide for doctors and parents detailing which vaccines to get and when to get them, may have harmful effects. Plus, I explain the systemic bias against those who question the effectiveness and possible health impact of some vaccines.

News & Analysis, Jan. 21, 2020

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The case asserts Trump committed no crime, a benchmark for impeachment that the Constitution’s authors avoided adopting in a well-documented debate.
…
Months after the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, Alexander Hamilton explained in the Federalist Papers that a commonly understood crime need not be the basis of impeachment. Offenses meriting that step “are of a nature which may with peculiar propriety be denominated POLITICAL, as they relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself.”

Hogwash: AP FACT CHECK: Distortions in Trump’s legal defense

The authors of the article make one of the most fundamental errors in asserting that because there was a debate on the issue during the framing of the Constitution, Trump need not have committed an actual crime to be impeached and removed. Anyone was entitled to vote for or against ratification based upon his or her sole interpretation of the wording and how that wording would possibly be later applied. None was held to the views of Alexander Hamilton or anyone else.

If the framers were to have meant black but used the word white and also said at the time they meant black, that would not negate that the document be held to mean what it expressly says: white. If the framers didn’t mean crimes and only crimes, then they should have had the brains to say right in the Constitution that we don’t mean to limit grounds to crimes but also include abuse of power as define by the Congress at the time of impeachment. They didn’t. What Hamilton said doesn’t matter a jot.

Alexander Hamilton is not and never has been the end all and be all concerning the meaning of the words that make up the US Constitution. The Federalist Papers are not the law of the land any more than is the Declaration of Independence. The Declaration of Independence is not used to interpret how the US Constitution should be applied. If the actual words of the Constitution and the Declaration don’t jibe, the Constitution holds sway. The same is the case concerning the Federalist Papers, which were partisan papers and never the consensus view.

In my last post, I explained why the Government Accountability Office was flat wrong. I won’t restate it here.

Poetic justice:

Australian bushfires hit coal output, conditions to worsen

US War Crime:

“The perverse ‘work’ of these psychologists has dramatically set back the global fight against torture. The interrogation methods they championed have had a rippling effect around the world,” said Julia Hall, a human rights lawyer with Amnesty International who is attending the hearings.

The American Psychological Association has disowned Mitchell and Jessen for “violating the ethics of their profession and leaving a stain on the discipline of psychology”.

But both men have insisted they did nothing wrong, arguing they were asked to do things that were declared legal by the George W Bush administration ….

Guantánamo: psychologists who designed CIA torture program to testify

‘Middle Class’ Joe Biden has a corruption problem – it makes him a weak candidate

Douma false “chemical weapon” narrative: Ian Henderson speaks to UN about OPCW report.

Engineer & ballistics expert, Ian Henderson on the #OPCW #Douma corruption of engineering report he submitted questioning the official “chemical attack” narrrative that precipitated FUKUS unlawful aggression against #Syria.

Ian Henderson @ UN Security Council Arria-Formula Meeting – Implementation of UNSCR 2118: OPCW FFM Report on Douma

Transcript of part of Henderson’s statement:

“My concern which is shared by a number of other inspectors relates to the subsequent (OPCW) management lockdown and the practices in the later analysis and compilation of the final report.

There were two teams deployed, one team, which I joined shortly after the start of field deployments, was to Douma in Syria. The other team deployed to country X.

The main concern relates to the announcement, in July 2018, of a new concept, the so-called FFM core team which essentially resulted in the dismissal of all of the inspectors who had been on the team deployed to locations in Douma and had been following up with their findings and analysis.

The findings in the final FFM report were contradictory, were a complete turnaround with what the team had understood collectively during and after the Douma deployments and by the time of release of the interim report, in July 2018, our understanding was that we had serious misgivings that any chemical attack had occurred.

What the final FFM report does not make clear and thus does not reflect the views of the team members who deployed to Douma, in which case I can only really speak for myself at this stage.

The report did not make clear what new findings, facts, information, data or analysis in the fields of witness testimony , toxicology studies, chemical analysis and engineering and or ballistic studies, had resulted in a complete turnaround in the situation from what was understood by the majority of the team and the entire Douma team in July 2018.

In my case, I had followed up with a further six months of engineering and ballistics studies into the cylinders, the result of which had provided further support for the view there had not been a chemical attack.