I've got some good-news-bad-news for you, courtesy Dave Lindorff at Counterpunch. The good news? Seymour Hersh has exposed the convenient lie that Syrian President Assad attacked his own people with sarin nerve gas in April -- the very thing that prompted President Trump to throw a couple dozen Tomahawks at a Syrian air base. The bad news? He couldn't get an American newspaper to publish it -- only the German daily Die Welt carried Mr. Hersh's exposé. Of course Mr. Trump is again claiming very loudly (with zero pushback from our "liberal" media) that Mr. Assad plans to use chemical weapons on his people again, and if any President was ever in need of a war, it's Mr. Trump.
Now Warren Freaking Buffett thinks we should shift to a single-payer health care system. And he's got an argument that might sway corporate leaders -- that health care costs, not corporate taxes, make corporations less competitive with their foreign counterparts. I've long argued that corporate CEOs would welcome paying less for their employees' health care, though of course the worst of them will want "something in exchange" for agreeing to it, as if reducing labor costs substantially isn't "something." If we're very, very lucky, we won't have some Robert Rubin-picked Democrat to conduct those negotiations.
Judd Legum at Think Progress describes "how TMZ quietly became America’s most potent pro-Trump media outlet." Its "apolitical" (and young) viewers "come for Kanye West, Lady Gaga, and Amber Rose" and then get pro-Trump coverage along with it. Of course, the mere fact that TMZ exists, and can broadcast on over-the-air channels, tells us how sick, immoral, and decadent our society has become, and just as it shouldn't be hard to believe that a President like Donald Trump could emerge from that swamp, it shouldn't be hard to believe that TMZ is his biggest cheerleader.
Former FCC Chair Tom Wheeler and former FCC general counsel Jon Sallet think this whole net neutrality imbroglio will end up in court. I'm inclined to agree, merely based on how many fake comments the FCC has already tolerated and could have prevented, but Mr. Sallet concentrates on what consumers can reasonably expect from their broadband connections -- for example, if your ISP says you can "go anywhere," should consumers reasonably expect legal internet sites to be censored or throttled? If the FCC does what we expect and kills net neutrality, maybe we should simply contact our ISP every time a page doesn't load fast enough.
Finally, security researchers find wind farms shockingly easy to hack. I'm tempted to say this news proves you ought to hire people to watch over things rather than leave every damn thing to computers -- or tumbler locks! But wind farms typically don't secure their computers very well, either -- even though most don't even connect to the internet, they can still be picked from afar. Of course, this is no reason to throw up your hands and accept the pollution of fossil fuels -- it's a reason to demand better security from wind farms.
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