News Factoid Report: Trump Owns 19% of Russian Oil Company?

On Wednesday, Reuters reported (in great detail) how 19.5% of Rosneft, Russia’s state oil company, has been sold to parties unknown. This was done through a dizzying array of Cayman Islands shell companies, so that the most that can be said with certainty now is that the money in play was originally loaned out to the shell layers by V.T.B., the Russian government’s official bank.

Why is this interesting or important to Americans? Let's connect a few dots here.

The much-maligned recent 35-page Steele Dossier included at least three topics of concern: damaging sexual allegations that, if true, would be potential cause of blackmail against President Trump; financial allegations that, if true, would also be possible cause for blackmail against President Trump; and allegations of treasonous communication and payments between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. The document's contents have enough veracity that U.S. intelligence officials delivered a 2-page analysis brief on the matter last Summer to then-candidate Trump, VP Biden, and President Obama.

James Clapper, former Director of National Intelligence (2010-2017), described the leaks as damaging to U.S. national security but said that the intelligence community had as yet made no judgment on the truth or falsity of the information.

The Steele Dossier reports that Vladimir Putin offered Donald Trump 19% of Rosneft if Trump became America's president and removed sanctions. The dossier said this in July, and the sale didn’t happen until early December. And 19.5% surely is a match for '19% plus a brokerage commission'.

So Emperor Trump is in a bind: if he removes or reduces the sanctions against Putin and other Russian oligarchs, then he proves the allegations of the Steele Dossier true; and NOT reducing those sanctions is likely to make Putin very, very mad.

Copyright 2017 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

Working Minds Essay #111: "Told You So, 2021"

Back during the 2012 election cycle before Barack Obama was re-elected, I kept being confronted with the Republican meme that 'no one could have predicted' the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown of 2008, still very real. Well, economist Paul Krugman had and economist Nouriel Roubini had, and so had I, the intuitive economist. So I looked over my prior WMail Ezine and Dateline Chamesa blogposts and found a bunch of my predictions slash warnings, which began in 2004. I put them together as a blog post called "Patting Myself On The Back" that was posted on Sunday 9 September 2012.

Here we are again. The blind and propagandized rabble have elected (more or less) idiot billionaire and fascist Emperor Donald J. Trump to occupy the White House for the next four years. OMG, right?

Donald has no clue, the Republicans control both houses of Congress, things are going to get much worse very quickly. (It's really very simple: Take what the fascist kleptocrats want to do and predict what will result when they do it.)

VERY PREDICTABLE

The banks will be deregulated and either the inflated rental home mortgage market will collapse or too many citizens will be unable to pay their outrageous student loans, and the student loan derivatives market will collapse. Or both.

E.P.A. regulations will be rolled back and oil companies and other polluters will destroy the rivers and lakes and aquifers and farmland of America, transforming Middle America into Third World economic hellholes.

Scientists have named 2016 as the hottest year on record, which makes three in a row. Together with devastations from pollution, food crops will shrink and groceries will become scarce, as will potable water in extended areas.

Ruptures occur on existing pipelines every day due to fiscal irresponsibility, as do railroad tankcar wrecks. ('Hell, repairs and maintenence cost money!'). There will be several major pipeline and-or railcar failures that leave large landscapes poisoned forever.

When Barack Obama took office as President, the unemployment rate that he inherited from George Dubya Bush was ten percent - America was losing as many as 770,000 jobs per month. When Barack Obama left office, the unemployment rate was around 4.5%, and his policies created as many as 250,000 new jobs each month. With or without a repeat of the G.O.P. Economic Meltdown of 2008, expect the policies of Emperor Trump and the troglodytes in Congress to return America to 10% unemployment, possibly within his first year. For example, cancelling Obamacare will eliminate as many as 3 million jobs in the health sector alone.

UNCLEAR BUT LIKELY

George W. Bush was warned about al Qaida in Summer of 2001, but he blew it off and the terrorists crashed four hijacked passenger planes in Pennsylvania and Virginia and New York City on September 11th. Trump cares even less about national security or being briefed on military intelligence than Bush, so Trump is going to miss something or other and hundreds of non-combatant Americans will die.

The Women Against Trump rallies were surprisingly peaceful. Even though Washington, DC cops had to deal with the anarchist (not liberals) rioting on Inauguration Day, only a handful of TV reporters and print journalists were rounded up 'by mistake' over the weekend. As the economy gets worse and demonstrations get larger and more intense, the civil rights violations that were unleashed against the Occupy Movement will reappear. TV pseudo-news will be showing weather maps and also riot maps every evening. Airports and commuter rail centers will be closed, further directly messing with lives of the innocent.

There is already grounds for impeaching Trump, since he refuses to transfer his businesses to blind trusts in conformance with the Emoluments Clauses. Not a good plan, however, because impeachment of Trump makes Mike Pence the President. Impeach Pence (no reason yet known) and you get Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, who campaigns on the destruction of Social Security and of Medicare, as the new President. And the already unhappy sexist, racist, fascist rabble won't like any such events one bit.

WORST CASE SCENARIO

Emperor Trump's ego really, really wants to suspend all civil liberties. He truly believes that he deserves to declare martial law, the problem will be how long his handlers can prevent him from doing so. He can't stand the low turnout for his inauguration and parade (empty stands!) and his team has worked hard to lie into existence 'alternative facts'. Any little riots here and there can be used as the excuse for autocratic counter measures, no doubt termed as acts of 'anti-terrorism'.

The military will have to make a choice: obey the Supreme Commander or obey the Constitution. Truly, it could go either way, essentially by region or city. Civil war is entirely possible with Emperor Trump in the Oval Office.

* *          * *          * *          * *I also predict that sales of Nyquil and prescription opioids will go thru the roof as these events become real.

Predictions are now in place. We will know how right I am by 2021 or before.

My preference is that I am wrong on every single item, but that result is surely a fantasy.

Copyright 2017 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved

2016 Year-End Website Statistics

Total page count on my various domains is now 1,508 (up 47), total coded Amazon-link book, DVD, et cetera covers now 25,849 (up 1,900); now 593 connections on LinkedIn; now 199 friends on two Facebook accounts (up 88); and 30 postings this year to my Dateline Chamesa weblog [est. 2005] {all-time total now 358}.

Part of this task is adding the details on a webstats page: anyone who wants to know the details can go to http://www.genordell.com/webstats.htm.

That's it, gotta get back to work updating even more stuff . . .

January 2017 Quotations (51)

"I finally found some affordable health insurance. Unfortunately, the annual deductible is four hundred thousand dollars."
~~ G.E. Nordell

“The white working class is about to be betrayed.”
~~ Paul Krugman, New York Times columnist

"The ability to quote is a servicable substitute for wit."
~~ W. Somerset Maugham [1874-1965]

"Du lieber Gott! was so ein Mann / Nicht alles, alles denken kann!"
"Dear God! The things that such a man / Can think of! Nothing! Everything!"
~~ {Johann Wolfgang von} Goethe [1749-1832] - in "Faust Part 1, Chapter 16" [1809]

"Your [Working Minds] website has always had the best collection of thoughtful quotations anywhere, ever."
~~ reader and T.E.D. speaker Dan Pallotta

"Doubt everything or believe everything: these are two equally convenient strategies. With either we dispense with the need for reflection."
~~ French polymath Jules Henri Poincaré [1854-1912]

"When even the brightest mind in our world has been trained up from childhood in a superstition of any kind, it will never be possible for that mind, in its maturity, to examine sincerely, dispassionately, and conscientiously any evidence or any circumstance which shall seem to cast a doubt upon the validity of that superstition. I doubt if I could do it myself."
~~ Mark Twain [1835-1910]

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance – that principle is contempt prior to investigation."
~~ British philosopher Herbert Spencer [1820-1903]

"If a man is in too big a hurry to give up an error he is liable to give up some truth with it."
~~ Wilbur Wright [1867-1912], in 1902

"It's like religion. Heresy [in science] is thought of as a bad thing, whereas it should be just the opposite."
~~ astrophysicist Dr. Thomas Gold [1920-2004]

"Nothing is thoroughly approved but mediocrity. The majority has established this, and it fixes its fangs on whatever gets beyond it either way."
~~ Blaise Pascal [1623-62]

"The good is slow because going uphill; evil is fast because going downhill."
~~ Alexander Dumas, fils [1824-95]

"A woman is like an artichoke, you must work hard to get to her heart."
~~ Inspector Jacques Clouseau, star of "The Pink Panther" Movies

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow.”
~~ Albert Einstein [1879-1955]

“Always do what you are afraid to do.”
~~ Ralph Waldo Emerson [1803-82]

"There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those we spent with a favorite book."
~~ Marcel Proust [1871-1922]

"I cannot live without books."
~~ Thomas Jefferson [1743-1826]

"Change is not merely necessary to life – it is Life."
~~ futurist Alvin Toffler [1928-2016]

“Nothing that comes easy is worth a dime.”
~~ Wayne Woodrow 'Woody' Hayes [1913-87], football coach at Ohio State University

“When you win, say nothing. When you lose, say less.”
~~ Paul Brown [1908-91], coached the Cincinnati Bengals and Cleveland Browns football teams

"If you can't stay sober to write, who will stay sober to read you?"
~~ advice to young Ernest Hemingway [1899-1961] while in Paris

"The right to vote is a consequence, not a primary cause, of a free social system – and its value depends on the constitutional structure implementing and strictly delimiting the voters' power; unlimited majority rule is an instance of the principle of tyranny."
~~ philosopher Ayn Rand [1905-82]

"It is amazing how lovely common things become, if one only knows how to look at them."
~~ Louisa May Alcott [1832-88]

"Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing."
~~ Wikimedia founder Jimmy Wales, in July 2004

"some books should be tasted, some devoured, but only a few should be chewed and digested thoroughly."
~~ Sir Francis Bacon [1561-1626]

"Trump [is] a fascist. Not in the sense of an all-purpose bad guy, but in the sense of somebody who sincerely believes that the toxic combination of strong government and strong corporations should run the nation and the world."
~~ columnist Michael Kinsley

"If I want your opinion, I'll give it to you."
~~ line in the movie "The Last Word" [2017], also gangster Al Capone [1899-1947]

"Farting is such sweet sorrow."
~~ 'Billy Bob' Shakespeare

“The nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing waist deep in gasoline, one with three matches, the other with five.”
~~ Carl Sagan [1934-96]

“Perhaps home is not a place but simply an irrevocable condition.“
~~ James Baldwin [1924-87] , in "Giovanni's Room" (1956 novel)

“There is no comfort anywhere for anyone who dreads to go home.“
~~ Laura Ingalls Wilder [1867-1957], in "Little Town On The Prairie" (1941 novel)

“You can go home again, the General Temporal Theory asserts, so long as you understand that home is a place where you have never been.“
~~ Ursula K. Le Guin, in "The Dispossessed" (1974 novel)

“Procrastination most often arises from a sense that there is too much to do, and hence no single aspect of the to-do worth doing. Underneath this rather antic form of action-as-inaction is the much more unsettling question whether anything is worth doing at all.”
~~ Canadian philosopher Mark Kingwell

"Cultivate your curves – they may be dangerous but they won't be avoided."
~~ entertainer Mae West [1893-1980]

"One must think like a hero to behave like a merely decent human being."
~~ poet May Sarton [1912-95]

“Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying [that] you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say."
~~ Jason Schaefer, computer consultant in Santa Fe, New Mexico

"Never does not exist for the human mind . . . only Not yet"
~~ opening title of 1929 silent movie "Woman In The Moon" by Fritz Lang [1890-1976]

"Nobody deserves Donald Trump, not even his supporters."
~~ Wisconsin journalist Bill Leuders

"We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel [within] ourselves, poetry."
~~ Irish poet William Butler Yeats [1865-1939]

"All good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings."
~~ William Wordsworth [1750-1850], in 1802

"We're all alone in a meaningless world."
~~ Joy Williams

"That's the real trouble with the world. Too many people grow up."
~~ Walt Disney [1901-66]

"Revolutionary justice is not based on legal precepts, but on moral conviction."
~~ Fidel Castro [1926-2016], in 1959

"Write a short story every week. It's not possible to write 52 bad short stories in a row."
~~ Ray Bradbury [1920-2012]

"Conformity is that jailer of freedom and the enemy of growth."
~~ John F. Kennedy [1917-63]

"The only way to do great work is to love what you do."
~~ Steve Jobs [1955-2011]

"When you truly love your journey, the destination is just a bonus."
~~ motivational speaker Katrina Mayer

"Politicians are the lowest form of life on earth. Liberal democrats are the lowest form of politicians."
~~ Gen. George S. Patton [1885-1945]

"All artists are egotistical maniacs with inferiority complexes."
~~ singer-songwriter Lionel Ritchie

"The first principle of architectural beauty is that the essential lines of a construction be determined by a perfect appropriateness to its use."
~~ Gustave Eiffel [1832-1923]

"Honk if you love Jesus. Text while driving if you want to meet Him."
~~ roadside church marquee

{each set of posted quotations are then posted at the Working Minds website, alphabetical by author}