Wednesday

Life lesson 

• The Billionaire Mindset

It's Our Way or the Highway

• Flow Chart for US Foreign Policy  I'd say this is pretty damned accurate.

Target Marketing

• Injury Lawyer ads on your phone after visiting the ER.

Propaganda

• No More Mister Nice Blog wonders how Right-Wing propaganda will handle the Roseanne firing.

"The right-wing media will need to drop this story altogether or start making it a story about liberal evil soon."

It didn't take long to get the answer.

The Political Turmoil in Italy

• Italy's president calls in former IMF official amid political turmoil.   I don't think there is any political crisis that can't be made worse by calling in the IMF.

• When those in power don't like who the voters chose.

• Twitter thread on the origins of the issue

Wars for Oil

• Our next wars may be fought over Natural Gas. 

• Russian Gas to Europe  

• Israel wants in 

• Iran has a lot of Gas too.

Rogue Nations

On Dec. 21, 2017 the United Nations General Assembly rejected the Trump administration’s decision to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s capital by a 128-9 vote. The only countries to side with Israel and the U.S. were Guatemala, Honduras, Marshall islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, and for good balance, Togo. 

War Crimes?

• War Crimes - Gaza Kites. Is this the best video they have? I mean, it doesn't stand up very well against those Israeli Soldiers firing real bullets at unarmed Palestinians.

Trump

• Trump the Psychic

All through the 2016 election campaign, this story kept coming to my mind. Donald Trump is manifestly not very smart in the sense of understand­ing nuance or being able to discern the truth among many propositions. But he is very good at acting like a machine-learning system that is co-evolving with the attention-maximization systems built into our ad-driven systems. 

Listening to Trump campaign is like listening to a “psychic” perform a cold reading: “Someone here is thinking of a relative; no, it’s a friend; a close friend; a male friend; no, a female friend; an older woman; no, a young woman; a young woman who’s dead; no, she’s in trouble; she’s sick; no, she’s disabled; she’s rich; no, she’s poor; her name is Mary; no, Sara; no, Tanya – who here is thinking about their friend, a disabled young girl named Tanya? 

Trump campaigns like this, a gabble of contradictory statements that is steered by approbation from his crowd: the more they cheer him on, the more of whatever he was just saying he gives them – and Trump is very good at detecting people who are cheering him on (this also works well on Twitter, of course).

Wow

• The Future