Alex Jones has been floating this story that the Secret Service says there will be breaking news soon about Hillary’s health problems. Joe Biden has suddenly become very visible in the Clinton campaign. Her visit to Biden’s house looked to me like they built a railing for her to cling to in the front yard
In the event there is something seriously wrong and she holds a press conference and withdraws, there is no certainty Kaine would replace her. Hillary kept Sanders off the ticket. That may be as much as she was capable of doing.
Given the universal hatred of Hillary (and Trump), any reasonable Democratic replacement would probably upset Trump’s path to victory.
Hold on to your cowboy hats…
Two things can derail the Clinton train. Her health and an “October Surprise” from WikiLeaks. Otherwise, she will be our next president, sadly.
Trump is a buffoon who stumbles like an idiot every single time he moves away from the script. Additionally, I am so tired of listening to him address the crowds with a Third Grade vocabulary.
And yet, I will have to hold my nose and vote for this idiot. Really, I find it depressing at our choices. Seems that Republicans are the designated losers by the powers that be. 2008 could have been ours, 2012 was definitely ours, as 2016 is, but…we do this to ourselves. Maybe I should stop flying Old Glory and fly the hammer and sickle instead. I have no hope at all. I am really scared.
A third possibility is President Obama declaring martial law and having no election while they round up 300 million guns.
I’m really puzzled by reality at the moment. The strongest theory is the attraction to Trump is at its heart opposition to Barack Obama, much of it fueled by BLM. People younger than me (60) don’t remember the race riots of the 1960s and have had decades of Hollywood and government propoganda that promote the image of blacks as authority figures, honest, smart, and innately superior to other races. Some are. Many are not. One of my ah-hah moments for my niece was when she started her primary care physician job was she was surprised that so many of her older white Christian females patients had been monogamous their entire lives – “people out here are nothing like I learned from Hollywood”. Well, duh.
A second weaker theory is the 40% who seem to say they’ll vote for Trump regardless of how stupid he is or what he does – are not real. This is the extension of the theory it was Democrats voting in the Republican primaries who selected him. Let Trump become overconfident and mysteriously he loses by 20% on Election Day.
There isn’t a lot of evidence that down ticket races are being affected much one way or the other.
Bloomberg is reporting the Russians now have 40,000 troops on the Eastern Ukraine border (Crimea kind of dangles from the middle of the country). If Russia invades Eastern Ukraine with backing from Iran and Turkey, Trump is in a box.
Putin is in box. He wants to act while we have an inept Secretary of State and President…. yet he prefers Trump to win now that it is clear he can not blackmail Hillary, only bribe her.
> “,,,He wants to act while we have an inept Secretary of State …” <
LOL ! So true CC , 'Boltneck' as Chris Plante calls him. Today Chris said, " Kerry does showings at birthday and 'Herman Munster' look-a-like parties"
we use to call him shoe-face and 'Horseface' It all fits,
parrott
“Life is real! Life is earnest!
If you’re cold, turn up the furnace!” – Herman Munster
The Supreme Court is the bigger significance of the election, but I’m not going to help you sleep better. Electing Republicans for that reason hasn’t turned out well. Republicans making nominees have 60 votes had short term value, but long term damage. There is no way President Trump gets 60 sympathetic Senators – so we wind up with David Souter rather than Robert Bork.
Not to beat it into the ground, but roughly 50% of Americans are Protestant Christians, but none of the 9 Supreme Court justices is. That’s the fruit of this Republican fight over abortion. Even with the majority of the court being Catholic, Abortion law has stayed mostly intact.
It got worse. It used to be illegal to use federal funding for abortions. Obamacare not only made it legal but required everyone to pay into a slushfund (“premium tax or penalty tax”) that is used to pay for abortions.
>”A third possibility is President Obama declaring martial law and having no election while they round up 300 million guns.”<
Yes I agree Fred 1 That will surely set off a civil war. The 3% that fought the British, they probably have 3% that will fight obo. But all he does is watch sports center, I don't think he's to motivated for the martial law thing. Hilliary I think more so, or her minions, they may take on the 'bitter clingers' .
Her campaign says if elected they are going to destroy Brietbart.com .
Is this handover of naming internet sites to the UN, is this something we should worry about or just Alex-speak ?
parrott
Re: turning the Internet control over to the world
This is a topic I know very well.
I considered writing about it again, but figure eyes will roll very quickly.
Let me measure interest by asking this question.
If a person in India wants to visit a web site in South Africa, should the US government have the power to prevent that?
If people in India, South Aferica, the UK and the US want to visit a web site in international waters, like Radio Caroline in the 1960s, should anyone have the power to prevent that?
BTW – Radio Caroline is now sending out multiple music streams on the internet, but it is no longer in international waters.
Bottom line is – someone needs to decide whether to grant them a domain and to grant the domain an IP address. Who decides? And who decides who decides? And once decided, should there the others that decide to block as the Great Wall of China does for many web sites? Start writing, Fred! lol
Well, that’s one. Give me a specific topic. My three examples would be a starting point.
Already we have things to clean up – assigning Domain names and IP addresses are two entirely different processes with rules created by two different organizations.
the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) does all the really detailed decision making about implementation. It was cut loose from the US government in 1993 and is now part of the Internet Society. It has 80,000 members around the world
http://www.internetsociety.org/
One of the important fairly recent changes was to provide the ability for domain names to contain Unicode characters – like for websites in Asia that want to have glyph based characters in their domain name. The United States doesn’t own the world. We can’t make everyone use Engrish.
W3C is another standards organization. “The web” is only one thing the Internet does. The W3C decides how the web works
When the phone companies wanted to create LTE to connect your mobile devices to the Internet, there needed to be an international standard. A group was formed to build on the work of the ITU so that devices from all companies in every country would work together.
A similar example that I learned about when there was the SWIFT debacle with the central bank of Bangladesh. SWIFT has been around since the 1970s to transmit payment requests around the world. The requests are very sensitive and SWIFT goes to great lengths to protect the confidentiality. Goldman Sachs has no right to know what other banks are doing.
The configuration of their network was the main computers are in the Netherlands and their backup data center was in the United States for a real time hot standby. The US government has no right to monitor those transactions that don’t involve the United States, but we did.
As a consequence, in 2009 SWIFT built a new data center in Switzerland to handle payment orders that don’t involve a US party or denominated in dollars. If Kuwait wants to buy slaves from Pakistan, that is none of the US’s business. The more we want to be global big brother, the more we’ll isolate ourselves.
I never knew about radio Caroline! I listened to them last night, It was album rock not bad at all, pretty good. Thanks CC.
where did the last twenty years go ?
parrott
Since things constantly change, I read up to make sure my understanding is current. The United Nations is not involved in this change.
The details are the functions currently performed by ICANN are under contract to the US Department of Commerce are being moved to a sub function within ICANN. The PTI (Post Transition IANI) will be located in California, run by a five person board, three of whom will be appointed by ICANN.
ICANN is run by an 18 member board
https://www.icann.org/resources/pages/board-of-directors
From a practical standpoint, the main things ICANN gets involved in are policies on protection of trademarks. Domain names other than the original top level domains (.com, .org, .net, .mil) are already controlled by individual countries (.uk, .ca, .mx, etc) and more recently the generic top level domains (.info, .museum, .radio). ICANN sets the rules how those registrars operate, but doesn’t run them.
Let’s walk through a few examples:
– let’s say the registrar for Tokelau sets up a domain nytimes.tk that has nothing to do with the New York Times. I just pulled that example out of thin air, but it turns out it exists. It hasn’t been updated since 2012. Tokelau Are some islands in the South Pacific. Should the New York Times have a right to shut it down? Who decides?
– let’s say the government of Gaza – the Palestinian authority – wants a top level domain for its government web sites. Who decides? What is the process? [.ps is their TLD]
– let’s say there is a web service in China that offers copyrighted movies for download. The MPAA demands the China registrar remove stealUSmovies.cn from the Internet. Who decides? What is the process?
“stealUSmovies.cn” as a domain name would not be violating any copyrights or trademarks to my knowledge (I did not research)….
so now the issue is do they get involved in the content of the site itself and what it sells.
Taking it out of theory, I believe there is an active process to take down sites that distribute child pornography, launder money, sell illegal services such as hiring people to kill other people, and even prevent gambling of US citizens.
To a lesser extent, they may take down phishing sites but I think a lot of that is due to DNS servers blocking as a service.
The more recent discussion is regarding sites promoting terrorism. Is it better to take the sites down so the terrorists can hide somewhere else, or is it better to spy on the the terrorists and learn who and where they are physically?
Or the 235,000 Twitter accounts
Most of what you described is things the US government can do to US citizens. There are ways to block you as an American from accessing that theoretical web site, but a person in China accessing a .cn website is largely immune to US pressure. The .cn registrar controls the domain, the Chinese telecoms control their own DNS and BGP routing tables. The ability of a Berne Convention copyright holder is basically at the mercy of the whims of the government where the content is hosted.
https://theipexporter.com/2013/03/25/enforcing-online-copyright-protections-abroad-understanding-foreign-takedown-notice-requirements/
Much of the push for globalization like the TPP is getting governments to agree to uniform intellectual property rules.
Getting governments involved in content available beyond the country or origin is a huge can of worms that is starting to wriggle, like the EU and “right to be forgotten” laws.
The guiding principle of the Internet organizations is to stay out of cross national disputes unless they break the Internet. If the Palestinian Authority (or Taiwan) want a top level domain, they get it as long as they agree to the rules. Israel can’t kick .ps off the Internet and the United States can’t kick Iran or Russia off the Internet. That’s just the way it is.
Steve Crocker runs ICANN
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Crocker
He is in his early 70s and his involvement goes all the way back to the earliest days, before it was even called the Internet
If Mr Crocker wakes up dead, this is the vice chair who takes over
https://www.icann.org/profiles/cherine-chalaby
He is an Egyptian who worked for 20+ years for Accenture (previously Arthur Anderson Consulting)