But they should be.
Even Ingmar Bergman, who is better known for his brooding films directed a very good comedy, Smiles of a Summer Night which I rather liked, even with subtitles.
The humor definitely has been effected by the dark cold winters of Scandanavia, but unlike, for example, Russian humor, which tends to be dark, Swedish humor is more wry and playful.
This Swedish pilot's walk around of the Saab Gripen is very funny.
After an entire career of failing up, and the immiseration of millions of people, it looks like Larry Summers is seeing some incredibly well deserved karma.
First, the American Economic Association has banned Larry Summers for life.
Personally, I hope that this ban continues for its full term, and that the actual length of this sanction will be brief. (If Mr. Summers could dine on excrement while shortening the ban duration it would be sweet)
The American Economic Association (AEA) has accepted Lawrence H. Summers' voluntary resignation from membership and, pursuant to the AEA's Policies, Procedures, and Code of Professional Conduct, has imposed a lifetime ban on his membership. In addition, effective immediately, the AEA has imposed a lifetime prohibition on Mr. Summers' attending, speaking at, or otherwise participating in AEA-sponsored events or activities, including serving in any editorial or refereeing capacity for AEA journals. The AEA condemns Mr. Summers' conduct, as reflected in publicly reported communications, as fundamentally inconsistent with its standards of professional integrity and with the trust placed in mentors within the economics profession. Consistent with longstanding AEA practices and to protect the integrity and confidentiality of AEA processes, the AEA will not comment further on individual matters or the specific considerations underlying this determination.
The AEA is committed to upholding the highest standards of professional conduct and to fostering a safe, respectful, and inclusive environment for all members of the economics community. The AEA affirms its expectation that all members adhere to the AEA Code of Professional Conduct and the AEA Policy on Harassment, Discrimination, and Retaliation, and remains dedicated to maintaining professional environments in which economists of all backgrounds can participate fully, and with dignity and respect.
Meanwhile, writing in The Crimson, the Roy L. Furman Professor of Law at Harvard Law School and Harvard alumnus states the obvious, that the Cambridge, Massachusetts school activelhy and aggressively covered up its eager involvement with Jeffrey Epstein, particularly the involvement of Summers:
In 2019, Jeffrey E. Epstein was charged with the sex trafficking of minors. That charge triggered a wave of recriminations across the nation, including at some of America’s most elite universities. In the decade since his first arrest in 2006 for soliciting prostitution with a child, Epstein had nurtured close connections with some of the most prominent academics in the country.
Those recriminations also reached Harvard. While Harvard President Drew G. Faust had forbidden the University from directly accepting his money after a 2008 child-sex conviction, between 2010 and 2015, Epstein facilitated over $9 million in donations from associates like Leon Black to support work at Harvard — with the knowledge and encouragement of Harvard development staff.………
Almost a year after that first report, the University concluded its investigation, and took formal action against just one member of the Harvard faculty: Martin A. Nowak. Nowak was “disciplined” for his ongoing professional relationship with Epstein. His Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, funded with the help of Epstein, was shuttered, and he was banned from serving as a principal investigator on any academic research for two years.
………
From 2003 through 2019, Summers had been a central figure in Epstein’s relationship to Harvard. He had attended events hosted by Epstein and planned private meetings. Besides Epstein’s lawyer, and now-professor emeritus, Alan M. Dershowitz, he was by far the most prominent of the Harvard elite at the center of Harvard’s Epstein relationship.
Yet Summers is essentially invisible in the official accounts. A gift to support the work of Summers’s wife was mentioned in a footnote to the 2020 report, though obscurely, since she does not share Summers’s name. And never subsequently has Harvard disclosed anything more about his ongoing relationship with Epstein, which continued, as we’ve now learned through the published Epstein emails, until Epstein’s 2019 arrest.
………
There’s little need to reform Larry Summers. He will, I suspect, pass quickly from Harvard’s orbit. But it is the culture that would have allowed Larry Summers to be protected that must now be called to account. How could Harvard have allowed this production of Hamlet without the Prince? And will it now commit to a practice that will not protect the elite among us, while shaming those not quite elite enough?
No,Mr. Lessig they will not commit to such a practice.
Harvard's entire brand is built on elite privilege.
People want to go to Harvard because it is the closest thing US higher education to being a "Made Man" by the Mafia, only the scope of criminal activity by Harvard alumni is vastly greater than organized crime syndicates could ever dream of.
So the White House is shutting down Elon Musk's DOGE initiative.
I'm stunned that they are doing this, after all the success that Elon has had running twitter, creating autonomous driving for the masses, creating a supersonic underrground transit system, his success in creating home solar energy comoany, creating a non-Nazi artificial intelligence bot, his uncanny asbility to play the video game Diablo IV, graduating with a bachelors degree in physics, his accomplishments as a spouse and father………
I'm shocked that he failed at DOGE as well.
Less than a year after Elon Musk took the stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference in February, brandishing a bedazzled chainsaw to showcase the Department of Government Efficiency’s cost-cutting spree, the most significant cut was the agency itself.
Donald Trump’s DOGE disbanded eight months earlier than scheduled, Reuters first reported on Sunday.
“That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor told the outlet when asked about DOGE. “There is no target around reductions,” he added.
………
Tens of thousands of federal employees fired under Musk’s leadership were offered their jobs back in September after what amounted to monthslong paid vacations. Millions were reportedly lost in interest and fees after government projects were frozen, and some woefully underqualified DOGE staffers were reportedly pocketing six-figure salaries.
I'm shocked that the Apartheid Era Emerald Heir Pedo Guy™ has not been delivering on his promises.
I mean, he's ALWAYS delivered on his promises in the past.
It turns out that the FBI was so busy covering up Donald Trump's role in the Epstein files that they had to stop fighting crime.
Newly released internal emails show the FBI mounting a costly overtime-fueled sprint to analyze the Epstein files as political pressure grew to release them—in a project dubbed the “Special Redaction Project,” Bloomberg reports.
………
A conspiracy theory still thrives among some in Trump’s base that Epstein knew the names of other rich or powerful pedophiles.
Epstein knew, because he was the US oligarchs pimp. There's a pretty good chance that Trump was not just a client, but a partner, as he owned the organization that ran the Miss Universe, Miss USA, and Miss Teen USA pageants from 1996 until 2015.
Correspondence obtained and detailed by Bloomberg’s FOIA Files lays out how FBI Director Kash Patel sent about 1,000 special agents to the bureau’s Central Records Complex in Winchester, Virginia, for crash-course redaction training on the “Epstein Transparency Project,” also called the “Special Redaction Project.”
That's 1,000 special agents for an agency that has, according to its website, about 38,000 total employees with about ⅓ of those being special agents, so we are talking about 8% of the field agents being pulled in to cover Donald Trump's pale flabby ass.
Good to know that this is where out tax dollars are going.
I just read this essay on the shooting of the two National Guardsmen in Washington, DC, and you should do.
The thesis is that the shooting was not about terrorism, nor was it about immigration.
Rather it was about a kid who was recruited by the CIA into a death squad, and that this came over to the United States with him.
………
The shooter was a 29-year-old Afghan national named Rahmanullah Lakanwal. He worked for us. For a decade. He was part of what the CIA calls a “Zero Unit”—paramilitary forces trained and backed by American intelligence. Human rights groups have another name for these units: death squads.
According to the New York Times, a childhood friend of Lakanwal’s said he “suffered from mental health issues and was disturbed by the casualties his unit had caused.” His family told investigators he has PTSD from the fighting he did on our behalf.
We trained him to kill. We pointed him at targets. We made him part of a unit known for brutality. And then when the war ended and the Taliban took over, we brought him here—and apparently did nothing to address what we’d done to his mind.………
Lakanwal served in a death squad. American veterans were sent to Iraq to kick down doors, raid homes, and kill people’s families. They were sent to Afghanistan to call in drone strikes on wedding parties. They served at checkpoints where the rules of engagement meant shooting first and asking questions never. We ask human beings to do inhuman things, and then we act surprised when they can’t just switch it off.
The evidence is overwhelming: what we make people do in these wars destroys them. And destroyed people do violence. Doesn’t matter if they were born in Kandahar or Kentucky—the damage is the same.
Remember when I said that the obligation of servicemen to refuse illegal orders required that the order be, "Manifestly Illegal?"
The classic example of a war crime, both in US military training materials and in international protocols is machine gunning survivors of a ship sinking, whether floating in the water or on a life boat.
This is manifestly illegal, and Hesketh ordered it, SOCOM commander Admiral Frank Bradley relayed the order to command officers in the area, and everyone in the chain of this command, including whoever pulled the trigger, is guilty of a war crime.
So is anyone who had the opportunity to protest these manifestly illegal orders and did nothing .
This is not up for dispute.
We executed German U-Boat sailors following WWII for doing this.
Officials in Congress and the Pentagon said Monday they are increasingly concerned that the Trump administration intends to scapegoat the military officer who directed U.S. forces to kill two survivors of a targeted strike on suspected drug smugglers in Latin America, as lawmakers made initial moves to investigate whether the attack constituted a war crime.
The Washington Post reported exclusively Friday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill the entire crew of a vessel thought to be ferrying narcotics in the Caribbean Sea, the first of nearly 20 such strikes directed by the administration since early September.
When two survivors were detected, the military commander overseeing the operation, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, directed another strike to comply with Hegseth’s order that no one be left alive, people with direct knowledge of the matter told The Post. The Trump administration has said 11 people were killed as a result of the operation.
In addition to prosecuting everyone even remotely in the decision chain for this, perhaps breaking up SOCOM, which has had a spate of criminality in its ranks in the past few years would be advisable.
The Guardian is shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that Donald Trump and his family is aggressively profiteering over his being President.
He started doing this in 2016 before he was inaugurated the first time.
This sh%$ ain't rocket science.
A crusading prosecutor in the Balkans comes under pressure to drop a big case. Vietnamese villagers learn they are to be evicted. A convicted crypto kingpin in the Gulf receives a pardon.
All have one thing in common: they appear to be connected to the Trump family’s campaign to amass riches around the world. Since Donald Trump’s re-election a year ago, warnings that his use of presidential power to advance personal interests is corroding American democracy have grown ever louder. What is less understood – and perhaps even more dangerous – is the damage this is doing everywhere else.
Trump’s eldest sons, Don Jr and Eric, formally the custodians of the family business, are conducting a global dealmaking blitz. They have broken ground on new golf courses, received permission for new skyscrapers, rented out the Trump brand, and in cryptocurrency they have embraced a venture with the capacity to bring in more than everything that has gone before.
They insist, in Eric’s words, that there is a “huge wall” between this moneymaking and their father’s position as the most powerful man alive. “Nothing I do has anything to do with the White House,” Eric told CNN recently.
But Kristofer Harrison, a senior foreign policy official under President George W Bush who now runs an anti-corruption organisation called the Dekleptocracy Project, is among those accusing the Trumps of operating a “pay to play” system that benefits those who do business with the president’s family. Such an approach could be manipulated, he said, especially by rival powers such as China. He said: “Trump has made authoritarians’ wildest dreams come true.”
Despite allegations – denied by the White House – of conflicts of interest, no explicit quid pro quos have been proven. But the Trumps’ business interests are raising questions about convictions that have been quashed, sensitive technologies transferred, tariffs eased, alliances forged. Should any of this give the appearance of abuse of public office for private gain – commonly known as corruption – ethics experts fear it invites other rulers to do the same.
There are no explicit quid pro quos under the pro-corruption rulings of the Supreme Court.
Gee, I wonder why Thomas and Alito and the rest of the corrupt 6 are so dedicated to creating an explicit road map to legal corruption?
It couldn't be that they are corrupt rat-f%$#s too..
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A member of the Democratic wing of the Democratic party, and a fan of Bernie who thinks Neoliberal (DLC/New Dem) trickle down conomics sucks.Mechanical Engineer with a background in defense, electronics packaging, medical & food equipment, transportation, and manufacturing.
In my spare time (Hah!), I am the developer of the Firefox addon, bbCode for Web Extensions (bbCodeWebEx).
I have two cats, a black cat, and a gray and white long hair cat, who keep me on my toes. (Because he keeps attacking my feet)
I am a Jew and a Zionist, who is married to a woman with exquisitely bad taste in men, and I have two remarkable children with her.
