ShamefurDispray

In other news, China does something that's almost satire
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-launches-worlds-first-all-electric-bulk-cargo-ship-to-supply-coal-to-power-plant
 

In other news, China does something that's almost satire
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-launches-worlds-first-all-electric-bulk-cargo-ship-to-supply-coal-to-power-plant
 

In other news, China does something that's almost satire
http://nationalpost.com/news/world/china-launches-worlds-first-all-electric-bulk-cargo-ship-to-supply-coal-to-power-plant
 

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/new-zimbabwe-president-seeks-reconciliation-with-west/news-story/795bafa30cae986be9ce631854daea59
 
New president of Zimbabwe wants to repay whites for driving them off their land.
 
This is a very smart move even if none of the whites return.
First, he shows that he actually wants to reform Zimbabwe economically, unlike Mugabe. If Zimbabwe gets richer, he can make some money in the process, either through corruption or more legitimate means. Good results would likely lead him to legitimately win the next election, solidifying his position.
Second, it's not a terribly high amount of money since it's only being paid to 5000 people. Even if he decides to give out a good sum, he can probably get it from other sources (aid money).
Third, it improves Zimbabwe's image to the west, who may be more willing to give him more aid money.
Fourth, it restores some confidence for investors looking to invest into Zimbabwe, especially reassuring the Chinese that he probably wouldn't pull something like nationalizing their investments.

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/new-zimbabwe-president-seeks-reconciliation-with-west/news-story/795bafa30cae986be9ce631854daea59
 
New president of Zimbabwe wants to repay whites for driving them off their land.
 
This is a very smart move even if none of the whites return.
First, he shows that he actually wants to reform Zimbabwe economically, unlike Mugabe. If Zimbabwe gets richer, he can make some money in the process, either through corruption or more legitimate means. Good results would likely lead him to legitimately win the next election, solidifying his position.
Second, it's not a terribly high amount of money since it's only being paid to 5000 people. Even if he decides to give out a good sum, he can probably get it from other sources (aid money).
Third, it improves Zimbabwe's image to the west, who may be more willing to give him more aid money.
Fourth, it restores some confidence for investors looking to invest into Zimbabwe, especially reassuring the Chinese that he probably wouldn't pull something like nationalizing their investments.

Well, you would have to try really hard to manage to be worse than Mugabe at running a country. This coup is likely going to be the 1st coup in a series of coups to follow in Zimbabwe.
Developing nations generally face a cycle in regards to coups that can end in a spiral of civilian governments and coups against them. Militaries in developing countries are almost always politicized, usually the best organized and with the highest concentration of skilled people in those countries. Unlike developed nations, coups are not always seen as unsavory and unpromising as the people usually have little faith in their civilian governments due to poverty; politics don't mean much as long as it gets them out of poverty. Very often, coups are supported in these countries if it means that an inept or corrupt ruler is gotten rid of, especially for countries with limited democratic institutions, where the military acts as the final balance or check. The military is often seen as patriotic by the people, especially if they remove a corrupt and incompetent ruler like Mugabe.
 
The usual cycle is that the civilian government loses the backing of the military for whatever reason, through incompetence, corruption or in this case trying to get rid of military influence in government. Military throws coup and administers for a short period of time before returning power to a civilian government with very few exceptions. Militaries have recognized that they are generally not very good at governing and the international community frowns upon military governments, making trade and loans much harder to obtain. The new civilian government will get into the swamp and likely be overthrown by the military for being too inept or corrupt and the cycle continues. The only way out of the cycle is to develop political consciousness within the country, eventually making coups frowned upon and unsavory for the populace; the only way to achieve that is to develop and lift people out of destitute poverty.
 
I am optimistic about this coup since it is a relatively bloodless coup to remove Mugabe from office and get someone that likely has more opposition into power, making the new leader more likely to compromise with opposition for the future development of Zimbabwe, especially with the threat of the possibility of a coup. Furthermore, removing someone like Mugabe may give Zimbabwe a relatively clean slate and attract some foreign investment into the country, which it is desperately lacking in Zimbabwe.

Well, you would have to try really hard to manage to be worse than Mugabe at running a country. This coup is likely going to be the 1st coup in a series of coups to follow in Zimbabwe.
Developing nations generally face a cycle in regards to coups that can end in a spiral of civilian governments and coups against them. Militaries in developing countries are almost always politicized, usually the best organized and with the highest concentration of skilled people in those countries. Unlike developed nations, coups are not always seen as unsavory and unpromising as the people usually have little faith in their civilian governments due to poverty; politics don't mean much as long as it gets them out of poverty. Very often, coups are supported in these countries if it means that an inept or corrupt ruler is gotten rid of, especially for countries with limited democratic institutions, where the military acts as the final balance or check. The military is often seen as patriotic by the people, especially if they remove a corrupt and incompetent ruler like Mugabe.
 
The usual cycle is that the civilian government loses the backing of the military for whatever reason, through incompetence, corruption or in this case trying to get rid of military influence in government. Military throws coup and administers for a short period of time before returning power to a civilian government with very few exceptions. Militaries have recognized that they are generally not very good at governing and the international community frowns upon military governments, making trade and loans much harder to obtain. The new civilian government will get into the swamp and likely be overthrown by the military for being too inept or corrupt and the cycle continues. The only way out of the cycle is to develop political consciousness within the country, eventually making coups frowned upon and unsavory for the populace; the only way to achieve that is to develop and lift people out of destitute poverty.
 
I am optimistic about this coup since it is a relatively bloodless coup to remove Mugabe from office and get someone that likely has more opposition into power, making the new leader more likely to compromise with opposition for the future development of Zimbabwe, especially with the threat of the possibility of a coup. Furthermore, removing someone like Mugabe may give Zimbabwe a relatively clean slate and attract some foreign investment into the country, which it is desperately lacking in Zimbabwe.

They are generally business school majors that don't realize the purpose of business school (getting business connections), thinking that they can climb corporate with a shitty business degree and end up going to a shitty business school. These people are usually some of the worst people on campus, with some of the most severe Dunning-Kruger syndrome in regards to their "future success" possibly only after pre-meds. After entering the workforce, they become two types of people. The first type being those who work super hard and doing whatever they can to climb corporate but they don't have the pre-requisites for climbing corporate. The second type being formerly the first type, except reality hit them and they pretty much work to not get fired as their dreams of climbing corporate ladders get crushed brutally in front of them as they work. Which is why they end up being pretty much braindead and doing stupid things, both types of marketers but in different ways.
 
Marketers are basically salesmen without actual sales skills.

They are generally business school majors that don't realize the purpose of business school (getting business connections), thinking that they can climb corporate with a shitty business degree and end up going to a shitty business school. These people are usually some of the worst people on campus, with some of the most severe Dunning-Kruger syndrome in regards to their "future success" possibly only after pre-meds. After entering the workforce, they become two types of people. The first type being those who work super hard and doing whatever they can to climb corporate but they don't have the pre-requisites for climbing corporate. The second type being formerly the first type, except reality hit them and they pretty much work to not get fired as their dreams of climbing corporate ladders get crushed brutally in front of them as they work. Which is why they end up being pretty much braindead and doing stupid things, both types of marketers but in different ways.
 
Marketers are basically salesmen without actual sales skills.

OK, I guess I'll get to this now, since new information has since come out that fills in some of the blanks.  I think that you can consider this my review/summary of Shattered, which I realize has taken me forever to get done.

Shattered is a lot like a biopic on a rock band as written by a groupie.  You wouldn't expect a groupie to be totally objective about the roadies, managers and musicians who are passing her around (along with chlamydia), I mean, she's so in their thrall that she couldn't possibly have anything bad to say, right?

But if you were looking for prurient details, of course you'd ask a groupie.  Cult mentalities are weird that way.  You see, the groupie is so completely convinced of the greatness of the musicians that they're banging, that the mere fact that they are grungy drug addicts doesn't phase her.  The groupie is so sure of the unassailable stature of the object of their infatuation that they're free to develop a sort of detached objectivity.  So she's free to mention that the drummer always hogs all the heroin to himself and that the bassist has crabs because tee hee, aren't they the greatest?  Everyone has their own little eccentricities!
 
That's basically the vibe I get from Shattered.  It's written by two journalists or correspondents or whatever who have followed the Clintons around for years.  They're both very pro-Clinton, and both fairly familiar with the workings of Clintonworld.  In fact, they refer to the orbit of sycophants, money launderers, and various other operatives as "Clintonworld."  I really get the impression that the authors have drunk so deep of the kool-aid that they've actually come all the way around and become quite equitable in their treatment of the whole affair.

So, if you're interested in a (mostly) fact-based, blow-by-blow of the 2016 Clinton campaign, Shattered is the book for you.  Does that actually sound sort of boring and painful to read?  Well, you're right.  You'll note that the price of the book plummeted only months after release.  It turns out that even salacious details about the Hillary campaign are still fucking boring.  When I tried to read it I got maybe three chapters in, and then skipped to the end which is all about the election night Gotterdamerung.  Pretty much that one is the only chapter worth reading because it's really funny.

So, here's my executive summary of what we know now about the glorious 2016 shitshow:

1)  Hillary Clinton's campaign was a mess because Hillary Clinton is not a good leader.  Shattered actually says in the forward that the authors expect that the book will humanize Hillary Clinton to people who dislike her (presumably they mean Sanders supporters).  It does not.  Shattered actually has very little to say about Hillary Clinton, simply because she didn't do very much.  Right-wing radio talk show host are wrong; Hillary Clinton is not a fire-breathing bulldyke.  She would be a lot more effective if that were the case.  Clinton is consistently portrayed as passive, distant and indecisive.  All of the exciting backstabbing and skulduggery was committed by her underlings.  Clinton lacked the energy and ability to sort her employees out and make them work as a cohesive team.

2)  Most of the energy of the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign was taken up by Hillary Clinton's underlings attempting to sabotage each other.  The authors identified four major factions in the Clinton campaign that were constantly feuding.  One of the largest divisions was between Robbie Mook, the campaign manager, and almost everyone else.  Mook was seen as a young, energetic and savvy rising star in the Democratic Party apparatus, which he was, but he was also pathologically distrustful and obsessed with personal power.  He went so far as to dismember a pro-Hillary grassroots organization called Ready for Hillary, because he would methodically attack and undermine anyone in the Hillary campaign that he did not have direct, personal authority over.  There were a few exceptions; apparently he didn't try to fuck with Huma Abedin because he knew better, but even if Mook grudgingly respected someone, he would still jealously hoard information and see any questions about what he was doing as an attack on his power base.

3)  Robbie Mook was an early champion of computer-driven analytics in place of traditional polling.  He saw it as being much cheaper, and Hillary was very interested in running a more streamlined campaign than she did in 2008.  Nevermind that she outspent Trump something like 7:5, the point was that she intended to run a streamlined campaign, so Mook's ideas about how a campaign ought to be operated were very interesting to her.  The problem was that any time that the analytics conflicted with polling or other data, Mook would double down and insist that his analytics-driven system was the best.  Again, he was a newcomer to Clintonworld, so any questions about the methodology he saw as questions about his competence, and he saw questions about his competence as a prelude to his ouster, since there were plenty of other ambitious people around him who wouldn't mind his job.

4)  On top of Mook enforcing a sort of blind faith in new ways of predicting voter behavior, not a single person in the Clinton campaign wanted to listen to Bill Clinton.  Bill Clinton's story, as related in Shattered, is actually pretty funny.  Every consultant and operator in Clintonworld saw Bill as a potential liability that needed to be contained.  Maybe let him off his leash to do a brief endorsement or interview or something.  Hillary's underlings saw Bill Clinton as a loose cannon who would not think twice before accidentally sabotaging the campaign.  In fairness to them, they weren't wrong about that.  The impromptu meeting between Bill Clinton and Loretta Lynch at an airport probably wasn't an attempt at sneaky, underhanded influence of the investigation into Hillary's email server.  The leaked DNC emails all seem to indicated that Clinton insiders were shocked and had not expected the event at all.  Bill Clinton just does whatever the fuck he wants all the time, and Hillary's people spent a lot of time worrying about what idiotic stunt he might perform next.

... Thing of it was though, Bill Clinton in his prime had absolutely unmatched political instincts, and even by 2016 they were still quite sharp.  Mook and other big shots always ignored Bill's advice, but events would prove Bill right again and again.  Bill Clinton apparently found the Brexit decision particularly shocking, and spent a lot of time after that darkly muttering about a worldwide populist backlash.  More specifically, Bill Clinton asked to know why his wife's campaign wasn't spending more time and money on the Midwest, and near the end of the campaign he even went off script and started campaigning to blue-collar union workers on his own initiative.  So Bill Clinton basically got to be part Cassandra, part poorly-trained golden retriever that wants to get into the trash and sniff everyone's crotch.
 
5)  The DNC was seriously fucked up, and all the big players knew it.  Donna Brazile mentions that Obama had left the organization severely in debt.  She did not mention that Obama created a parallel, competing organization.  Obama had very little faith in the effectiveness of the DNC even before then.  It's not clear why the Clinton campaign forcibly took over the DNC, but I suspect that Mook saw it as another potential personal fiefdom.  During the time that Obama was president, he had the personal clout to reorganize things like this, but now it appears that there is a serious vacuum in the Democratic Party's leadership.
 
6)  All of the dysfunctional dynamics listed came to a head on election night.  Mook and Conway had made a deal that their respective candidate would make a statement conceding within fifteen minutes of the Associated Press declaring an overall winner.  Naturally, Hillary's people reneged on this agreement because they were an absolute mess and couldn't do anything right.  A number of her people argued that she should concede, but some others opposed since they believed that the situation was like the 2000 election, and conceding could put them in a bad position if it came down to a legal battle (nevermind that it was obvious that they had lost by a wide margin by that point).  The debate stretched on long after the AP had called the race.  Hillary Clinton didn't say anything because Hillary Clinton is indecisive.  Eventually, Barack Obama had a surrogate call and heavily imply that Hillary needed to concede.  This was enough to get John Podesta to make a statement that wasn't really a concession, and Hillary's people thought that would be enough.  Obama wasn't having any of their shit and personally called Clinton to tell her that she needed to concede.  Then he personally called John Podesta to make sure that he told Hillary that she needed to concede, pronto.  Barack Obama was the only adult in the room, and he wasn't even in the room.

According to Shattered, Bill knew what the fuck was up well before then.  Several hours before the AP called the race, Bill had telephoned a number of his friends and told them not to bother coming to the victory party.  Then he started muttering about Brexit and populist backlash again.

This is the same party that managed to lose a rigged election against one of the most disliked people in America.

TIL: Harvey Weinstein's surname is inspired by his love for Rick and Morty- 'W' is the first lettter of Rick's iconic catchphrase, while Einstein is the first person to have ever understood the show.

TIL: Harvey Weinstein's surname is inspired by his love for Rick and Morty- 'W' is the first lettter of Rick's iconic catchphrase, while Einstein is the first person to have ever understood the show.

Pick your wall.
 

I think I understand Trump's Twitter offense strategy.  It's fairly simple.
 
Step 1:  Identify a position that's actually fairly un-controversial, and say it in the most Trump-like way on Twitter.  Like, say, "Kim Jong Un is low energy!  He is a terrible despot and his people starve!  Many such cases!  Sad!"
 
Step 2:  Indulge in maniacal laughter as contrarians come out of the woodwork to say that, no, North Korea is actually just fine!

 
 
 
And yes, I am aware that Linda Sarsour is a special kind of idiot, and not representative at all of the people who for various reasons oppose Trump and his policies.  That fact acts in Trump's favor, because Linda Sarsour is a very loud idiot who craves attention.  Linda Sarsour (and other loud idiots) taking a stand against Trump is wonderful PR for Trump.  And all he needs to do to get it is warm up his texting thumbs each morning.

I think I understand Trump's Twitter offense strategy.  It's fairly simple.
 
Step 1:  Identify a position that's actually fairly un-controversial, and say it in the most Trump-like way on Twitter.  Like, say, "Kim Jong Un is low energy!  He is a terrible despot and his people starve!  Many such cases!  Sad!"
 
Step 2:  Indulge in maniacal laughter as contrarians come out of the woodwork to say that, no, North Korea is actually just fine!

 
 
 
And yes, I am aware that Linda Sarsour is a special kind of idiot, and not representative at all of the people who for various reasons oppose Trump and his policies.  That fact acts in Trump's favor, because Linda Sarsour is a very loud idiot who craves attention.  Linda Sarsour (and other loud idiots) taking a stand against Trump is wonderful PR for Trump.  And all he needs to do to get it is warm up his texting thumbs each morning.

People want to watch football, not have politics shoved down their throats. The advice that I've gotten for business is to remain as apolitical as possible. Even in the firearms industry, you really need to keep it in check. Not everyone is going to think what you think, and if you aren't a political commentator, people probably aren't coming to you for political commentary.

I'm just waiting for us to declare war on the EU too since they rigged our election by saying they don't like Trump.

I figure this would be a good time to bring this back.
 

 
Though, I might need to go from 4 to 6 armed Shiva to add some of DRDO more recent *creations*
 
 

Guantanamo bay is now known as a 'one way trip to flavortown'.