Home · News · News Feb 2019 · Feb 11 2019
Monday February 11, 2019
And you wonder why it is so hard to get universal Health Care (single payer)

Health insurance is as big as Big Tech
Axios | Bob Herman | 02/11/19

The 5 largest conglomerates combining health insurance and pharmacy benefits are on track this year to be bigger than the 5 preeminent tech companies.

The big picture: Anthem, Cigna, CVS Health, Humana and UnitedHealth Group cumulatively expect to collect almost $787 billion in 2019, compared with $783 billion of projected revenue for Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google. ... Read more

Oh good, Donald Trump is back: A rally near the border and bizarre new "facts" on immigration
Salon | Heather Digby Parton | 02/11/19

I'm sure everyone will be relieved to know that the long three-month drought is over. President Trump is getting back in the saddle and will be giving his first rally of 2019 on Monday. Feel the magic!

He'll be visiting El Paso, Texas, the border city he erroneously claimed in the State of the Union was one of the most dangerous cities in the country until they put up a "wall" (which is actually a fence.) In reality, it was one of the safest cities in the country before the fence and remains one of the safest today. But he's going to go there and tell his local fans that they can believe him or they can believe their lyin' eyes. Local officials don't seem inclined to go along. ... Read more

*AOC Exposes Dark Side of Politics | Bloomberg | 02/05/19 | 4:36
*Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez STUNS Congress | TYT | 02/05/19 | 8:42

The Saudi connection: Was Enquirer blackmail of Jeff Bezos meant to protect Crown Prince Mohammed?
Salon | Igor Derysh | 02/11/19

Was David Pecker working to protect Donald Trump, or someone much richer and more powerful than that?

In Amazon founder Jeff Bezos' extraordinary letter revealing the National Enquirer's apparent attempt to blackmail him, one detail has led to intense speculation: Bezos linked the effort to the tabloid paper's ties to the Saudi Arabian government.

Bezos noted that David Pecker, the head of AMI and a longtime associate of President Trump, "recently entered into an immunity deal with the Department of Justice related to their role in the so-called 'Catch and Kill' process on behalf of President Trump and his election campaign."

AMI bought the story of former Playboy model Karen McDougal's alleged affair with Trump and killed the story before the election, the company admitted.

"Mr. Pecker and his company have also been investigated for various actions they've taken on behalf of the Saudi Government," Bezos added. ... Read more

Jeff Bezos' Extortion Claim And The 'Saudi Angle' | The Last Word | MSNBC | 02/08/19 | 18:09
Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer Owner Of Blackmail | The Last Word | MSNBC | 02/07/19 | 15:49
*Saudi Media Blitz Could Explain Devotion Of National Enquirer/AMI | Rachel Maddow | MSNBC | 02/08/19 | 10:35
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, February 11 [13:26]
*Glenn Greenwald: As Bezos Protests Invasion of His Privacy, Amazon Builds Global Surveillance State | DN | 02/11/19 | 3:40
*Glenn Greenwald Defends Rep. Ilhan Omar: Criticizing Israeli Lobby & AIPAC Is Not Anti-Semitic | DN | 02/11/19 | 5:28
*Greenwald: How Can Democrats Support Trump's Push for Regime Change to Seize Venezuela's Oil? | DN | 02/11/19 | 4:36
Democracy Now! U.S. and World News Headlines for Monday, February 11 (FULL) | 59:02
Note: on the full 59:02 video look for small white (or black) circles on the Progressbar they denote the different news stories. You can move the pointer on the Progressbar to jump to each story, and around the video.
  1. Headlines
  2. Glenn Greenwald: As Bezos Protests Invasion of His Privacy, Amazon Builds Global Surveillance State
  3. Glenn Greenwald Defends Rep. Ilhan Omar: Criticizing Israeli Lobby & AIPAC Is Not Anti-Semitic
  4. "This Is Just the Beginning": Greenwald on Rising State Violence & Homophobia in Bolsonaro's Brazil
  5. Greenwald: How Can Democrats Support Trump's Push for Regime Change to Seize Venezuela's Oil?
*Elliott Abrams: The War Criminal Running US Policy in Venezuela | TRNN | 02/11/19 | 6:40
The recently named US Special Envoy on Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, is back in the halls of power after a career of supporting dictators, violence and genocide around the world.
Trump Admin. Fighting Tooth And Nail To HIDE Tax Returns | TYT | 02/05/19 | 8:15
Whitaker Makes A Fool Of Himself For Trump | TYT | 20/05/19 | 8:15
The1a.org
Burning Pants And Bottomless Pinocchios: Fact-Checking In 2019 | 1a.org | 02/11/19 | 1hr
Do facts matter when the president of the United States regularly ignores them?

(The Washington Post says, President Donald Trump averaged 15 false claims a day in 2018).

That's the question at the heart of the work PolitiFact and other fact-checking organizations are doing these days.

Washington Post: Trump's willingness to constantly repeat false claims has posed a unique challenge to fact-checkers. Most politicians quickly drop a Four-Pinocchio claim, either out of a duty to be accurate or concern that spreading false information could be politically damaging.

Not Trump. The president keeps going long after the facts are clear, in what appears to be a deliberate effort to replace the truth with his own, far more favorable, version of it. He is not merely making gaffes or misstating things, he is purposely injecting false information into the national conversation.

To accurately reflect this phenomenon, The Washington Post Fact Checker is introducing a new category -- the Bottomless Pinocchio. That dubious distinction will be awarded to politicians who repeat a false claim so many times that they are, in effect, engaging in campaigns of disinformation.

Storm Clouds And Sunshine: How Florida Prepares For Climate Change | 1a.org | 02/11/19 | 1hr
The Washington Post reports: The sea in Tampa Bay has risen naturally throughout time, about an inch per decade. But in the early 1990s, scientists say, it accelerated to several inches above normal, so much that recent projections have the bay rising between six inches and more than two feet by the middle of the century and up to nearly seven feet when it ends. On top of that, natural settling is causing land to slowly sink.

Sea-level rise worsens the severity of even small storms, adding to the water that can be pushed ashore. Hard rains now regularly flood neighborhoods in St. Petersburg, Tampa and Clearwater.

Miami Herald reports: South Florida was name-checked repeatedly, for the heat that already enables year-round transmission of mosquito-borne diseases and the hundreds of thousands of people with "extreme" or "high" vulnerability to sea level rise.

The Herald reported: By 2045, nearly 64,000 homes in Florida face flooding every other week. Half of those are in South Florida.
Border Talks Hit Snag Headed Into New Week | Morning Joe | MSNBC | 02/11/19 | 15:19
Ex-DOJ Official: Whitaker Testimony 'An Embarrassment To The DOJ' | The Last Word | MSNBC | 02/08/19 | 11:43
The Late Show with Stephen Colbert
Will Trump Be '239 Pounds' At This Year's Physical? | stephen Colbert | 02/08/19 | 4:36
Stephen Can't Ignore A Story About Fuks | stephen Colbert | 02/08/19 | 2:09

02.11.2019. 11:41



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Lindsey Graham Mashups
Lindsey Graham

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said the quiet part aloud on why he’s still so close to former President Donald Trump: because we can use him for our goals. "President Trump has gotten people who wouldn't give me or Romney or anybody else the time of day. They believe he is on their side," the senator told the America First Agenda Summit crowd on Tuesday in Washington, D.C.

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Environment & Climate Change
Environment

The term "climate change" is often used to refer specifically to anthropogenic climate change (also known as global warming). Anthropogenic climate change is caused by human activity, as opposed to changes in climate that may have resulted as part of Earth's natural processes.

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AI - Artificial Intelligence | Machine Learning | Deep Learning
AI - Artificial Intelligence

AIArtificial intelligence (AI) is intelligence demonstrated by machines, as opposed to the natural intelligence displayed by animals including humans. AI research has been defined as the field of study of intelligent agents, which refers to any system that perceives its environment and takes actions that maximize its chance of achieving its goals.

The term "artificial intelligence" had previously been used to describe machines that mimic and display "human" cognitive skills that are associated with the human mind, such as "learning" and "problem-solving". This definition has since been rejected by major AI researchers who now describe AI in terms of rationality and acting rationally, which does not limit how intelligence can be articulated.
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Quantum mechanics | AI - Artificial Intelligence
Quantum mechanics

Quantum mechanics is a fundamental theory in physics that provides a description of the physical properties of nature at the scale of atoms and subatomic particles.  It is the foundation of all quantum physics including quantum chemistry, quantum field theory, quantum technology, and quantum information science.
Classical physics, the collection of theories that existed before the advent of quantum mechanics, describes many aspects of nature at an ordinary (macroscopic) scale, but is not sufficient for describing them at small (atomic and subatomic) scales. Most theories in classical physics can be derived from quantum mechanics as an approximation valid at large (macroscopic) scale.
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Economy, Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street and Banksters

Wall Street is an eight-block-long street running roughly northwest to southeast from Broadway to South Street, at the East River, in the Financial District of Lower Manhattan in New York City. Over time, the term has become a metonym for the financial markets of the United States as a whole, the American financial services industry (even if financial firms are not physically located there), or New York-based financial interests.

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Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

Intelligence Agencies/Deep State?

An intelligence agency is a government agency responsible for the collection, analysis, and exploitation of information in support of law enforcement, national security, military, and foreign policy objectives. Means of information gathering are both overt and covert and may include espionage, communication interception, cryptanalysis,.

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Daniel Ellsberg | Pentagon Papers
Daniel Ellsberg

Daniel Ellsberg and Paul Jay explore Ellsberg's latest book, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner. In the introduction to the book, Ellsberg writes: "No policies in human history have more deserved to be recognized as immoral or insane. The story of how this calamitous predicament came about and how and why it has persisted over a half a century is a chronicle of human madness".

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Nukes
Nukes

Nuclear weapons have come a long way and come in all types of different sizes. Some are relatively small while others are enormous, so big they boggle the mind at what they can be capable of, i.e. the Soviet 'Tsar Bomba' is/was 3,000 times greater than the Hiroshima bomb.

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Rana Foroohar and Fall of American Business
Rana Foroohar

Ms. Foroohar says financialization delivers stagnant wages, inequality and economic crisis; the Financial Times columnist and author of "Makers and Takers" says the financial sector represents only 7 percent of the U.S. economy, but takes around 25 percent of all corporate profit while creating only 4 percent of all jobs.

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The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick

The Untold History of the United States by Oliver Stone & Petere Kuznick | 2014 | 10 Episodes

Oliver Stone and American University historian Peter J. Kuznick began working on the project in 2008. Stone, Kuznick and British screenwriter Matt Graham cowrote the script. It covers "the reasons behind the Cold War with the Soviet Union, U.S. President Harry Truman's decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan, and changes in America's global role since the fall of Communism." Stone is the director and narrator of all ten episodes.

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Kuznick Interviews

Kuznick Interviews

Historian Peter Kuznick says Eisenhower called for decreased militarization, then Dulles reversed the policy; the Soviets tried to end the cold war after the death of Stalin; crazy schemes involving nuclear weapons and the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba put the world of the eve of destruction - with host Paul Jay

The Untold History of the United States by Kuznick, Peter.mobi | Book | 6.99 MB

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China Valley of Tunnels

China Valley of Tunnels

A report written by a Georgetown University team led by Phillip Karber conducted a three-year study to map out China’s complex tunnel system, which stretches 5,000 km (3,000 miles). The report determined that the stated Chinese nuclear arsenal is understated and as many as 3,000 nuclear warheads may be stored in the underground tunnel network.

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911
911

On September 11, 2001, 19 terrorists attacked the Unites States. They hijacked four airplanes in mid-flight. The terrorists flew two of the planes into two skyscrapers at the World Trade Center in New York City. The impact caused the buildings to catch fire and collapse. Another plane destroyed part of the Pentagon (the U.S. military headquarters) in Arlington, Virginia. The fourth plane crashed in Shanksville, Pennsylvania. Officials believe that the terrorists on that plane intended to destroy either the White House or the U.S. Capitol. Passengers on the plane fought the terrorists and prevented them from reaching their goal. In all, nearly 3,000 people were killed in the 9/11 attacks.

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The Vietnam War

The Vietnam War

Ken Burns and Lynn Novick's ten-part, 18-hour documentary series, THE VIETNAM WAR, tells the epic story of one of the most consequential, divisive, and controversial events in American history as it has never before been told on film. Visceral and immersive, the series explores the human dimensions of the war through revelatory testimony of nearly 80 witnesses from all sides--Americans who fought in the war and others who opposed it, as well as combatants and civilians from North and South Vietnam. Ten years in the making, the series includes rarely seen and digitally re-mastered archival footage from sources around the globe, photographs taken by some of the most celebrated photojournalists of the 20th Century, historic television broadcasts, evocative home movies, and secret audio recordings from inside the Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations.

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Trump's Mashups
Trump's Mashups

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? VICE News' "Trump Talk" mashup series tries to answer that. And, we're happy to say, it was just nominated for two Webby Awards. Now you can watch all the nominated videos.

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Trump's Sexcapades
Trump's Sexcapades.

Jessica Leeds (1980s)
Kristin Anderson (1990s)
E. Jean Carroll (1995 or 1996)
Lisa Boyne (1996)
Cathy Heller (1997)
Temple Taggart McDowell (1997)
Karena Virginia (1998)
Mindy McGillivray (2003)
Jennifer Murphy (2005)
Rachel Crooks (2005)
Natasha Stoynoff (2005)
Juliet Huddy (2005 or 2006)
Jessica Drake (2006)
Ninni Laaksonen (2006)
Cassandra Searles (2013)
Allegations of pageant dressing room visits(1997)
Mariah Billado,
Victoria Hughes,
and three other Miss Teen USA contestants
Bridget Sullivan (2000)
Tasha Dixon (2001)
Unnamed contestants (2001)
Samantha Holvey (2006)

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Trump's Speeches | Rallys |Interviews
Trump's Speeches | Rallys

Donald Trump talks a lot, but what is he actually saying? Watch Trump at some of his rallys and see what you think.

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