Auf Wiedersehen, Herr Minister! Ihre Kolleginnen und Kollegen im Bundesfinanzministerium. #Schäuble pic.twitter.com/5fODQT9RVG

— BMF (@BMF_Bund) 24. Oktober 2017

La R de «República», la E de «estelada», la S de «sí» en una urna de referéndum o la I de «independència» son algunos de los significados de las letras incluidas en el «Abecedari de la independència», un álbum infantil publicado por la editorial La Galera para niños a partir de cuatro años.

Un libro que forma parte de la colección «Tradicions» de esta editorial, que fue publicado por primera vez en 2014 con ilustraciones de Roser Calafell para que los niños «aprendan las letras del abecedario», explica La Galera en su página web en catalán. «Cada letra tiene un motivo identificable con el proceso soberanista (Assemblea, Burro català, Consulta, etc)», añade la editorial, que explica que el álbum «hará las delicias de los niños y niñas (y los adultos) y les acercará al momento histórico que estamos viviendo».

The battle for Catalonia just got personal. Until now the main protagonists, Carles Puigdemont, the Catalan president, and Mariano Rajoy, Spain's prime minister, have avoided a head-on clash. All that changed at the weekend after the Madrid government decided to impose direct rule. Within minutes, insults were flying, with the opposing sides accusing each other of totalitarianism and rebellion.

Puigdemont had deliberately provoked the secession crisis, Rajoy claimed. The problem was, he lacked the stature to handle such a delicate situation. "This would probably never have happened if a different person with similar ideas had been in charge," Rajoy said. In vowing to sack the Catalan leader, he noticeably declined to rule out charging him with sedition and locking him up.
Analysis Catalan separatists prepare for war of attrition against Madrid
Spain's government will not give way on Catalonia. The next step may ruin the province or boost the rebel cause
Read more

Puigdemont and his vociferous allies were not slow to the counterpunch. Rajoy's actions represented "the worst attack against the institutions and the people of Catalonia since the dictatorship of Franco", he declared. This comparison with the late fascist generalísimo was deeply offensive. Carme Forcadell, the speaker of the Catalan parliament, extended the historical allusion, describing the takeover as a coup.

After Saturday night's passionate, pro-independence demonstration in Barcelona, battle lines are now being drawn and trenches figuratively dug. The senate, which is controlled by the government, is preparing to vote on Rajoy's proposals, probably on Friday. They could be pre-empted if the Catalan assembly formally declares independence this week and calls new elections. In any event, a drawn-out war of attrition looms.

Un referendum sì, ma non per chiedere a Roma maggiori poteri: piuttosto per abolire l'autonomia. Lo invoca in Sicilia Davide Faraone, sottosegretario alla Salute e fedelissimo di Matteo Renzi. Faraone guarda con distacco al voto dei lombardi e dei veneti chiamati alle urne dai governatori della Lega: lui, palermitano che è cresciuto e ha conosciuto la politica in una regione che uno Statuto speciale ce l'ha dal 1946, va decisamente controtendenza.

"We hereby constitute the Catalan Republic as an independent,sovereign, legal,democratic, socially-conscious state" https://t.co/5Cyj2XC1gF

— Catalan News (@catalannews) October 27, 2017

Minutes after the Catalan vote, Spain's Senate approved direct rule by the central government over the wealthy eastern region, under Article 155 of the Spanish Constitution. In other words, it gave Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy the authority to take direct control of the regional administration in Barcelona.

No word here as to number of "opposition" ("walked out and refused") votes voluntarily withheld.

archived:
Catalonia open thread 29 Sep
"a week-long schedule for quorum and vote on the mystery package" 22 Oct

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Those who think we can just wait for the U.S. to return to its old role after Trump are deceiving themselves. Indeed, the transatlantic crisis didn't begin with Trump, and will not end with Trump. Why don`t the Atlanticists want to see this?

In other words: When did the Atlanticists lose touch with reality? The exact date can't be determined. But at the latest on June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump announced his candidacy. At this moment, a strange mechanism began to take effect: above all those in the German public who know a lot about the U.S. were spectacularly blindsided.

With the self-certainty of know-it-alls, it was said that Donald Trump could never become the presidential candidate of the Republicans, because after the primaries the party brass would erase such a deformation. Wrong.

Then, with sophisticated swing-state surveys, it was absolutely certain that Trump could never be elected President of the United States. Wrong again.

When the impossible then happened, the Atlantic community was immediately convinced that, thanks to the forces of the American system, this completely unsuitable man would soon become presidential. Wrong yet again. Even Trump's inauguration speech, as well as the continued tweeting, showed how unrealistic this was.

At the next stage of reality denial, the "adults" in the Trump administration were to shift things back onto their usual tracks. Also wrong. In fact, these supposed adults are in part men who believe that climate change is an invention and evolution theory is a mere proposition.

In fact, the Alanticists desire for a stable anchor of the Western world obscured the fundamental crisis.

Repubblica (Palermo edition)

Pino Scaduto meditava altri omicidi. Voleva colpire pure il maresciallo dei carabinieri. Puntava su un sicario fidato, suo figlio. Ma anche il figlio l'ha lasciato solo. Diceva a un amico, con cui si era confidato: "Io non lo faccio, il padre sei tu e lo fai tu... io non faccio niente... mi devo consumare io? Consumati tu, io ho trent'anni, non mi consumo"

Designer furniture retailer Lombok has become the first UK company to be prosecuted and fined under illegal logging rules designed to stop the import of timber linked to widespread deforestation around the world.

[...]

The company was prosecuted at Westminster Magistrates Court and fined £5,000 plus costs.

Michael Fallon resigned from his position as Defence Secretary because he had "fallen below the high standards that we require of the Armed Forces that I have the honour to represent".

But apparently, not below the standards of a backbencher in the House of Commons, which will now be Fallon's job.

Rapidly growing human populations risk having a "terrible impact" on the world, the Duke of Cambridge has warned.

The Duke said that as a result, wildlife was being put under "enormous pressure" and called for the issue to be addressed with renewed vigour.

His concerns echo those of his grandfather, the Duke of Edinburgh, who in 2011 advocated "voluntary family limitation" as a means of solving overpopulation, which he described as the biggest challenge in conservation.

In September, fund management trade body the Investment Association published the results of its Diversity Project study. The report, which was the first of its kind, looked at who is working in the industry and at what level of seniority, breaking down the results by gender, ethnicity, disability and sexual orientation. The survey comprised 3,755 people across 24 firms, with a combined £2.2tn under management.

Just 1% of all investment managers said they were black. Of the 650 respondents who were running money on behalf of millions of investors in the UK and beyond, no more than seven (accounting for rounding) were from an African or Caribbean background. Only 10% said they were of Asian heritage, while 81% said they were white.

The industry's ethnic distribution compares poorly with its surroundings. In Greater London, 40% of the population of working age are black or minority ethnic, according to the government's Race in the Workplace report published in February.

The Diversity Project focused on diversity among workers in the fund manager role in order to draw attention to the lack of black or minority ethnic workers in senior positions. While just 2% of the 3,755 total respondents were from either African or Caribbean backgrounds, the report said addressing the low share of BME employees among senior staff in the sector is the most urgent issue.

The IA's report highlights a glaring absence: There is no data on UK fund manager ethnicity available from the usual rating agencies, and individual firms are not obliged to disclose the ethnic distribution of their staff.

HSBC Banker Convicted of Wire Fraud, Looking at 20 Years

Mark Johnson, 51, of Great Britain, was convicted of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and eight counts of wire fraud.

Front running involves market makers dealing on advance information before delivering the information to the client. Prosecutors said Johnson and other traders case manipulated foreign exchange rates in a deal involving Cairn Energy, an HSBC client, to gain an extra [NEOLOGISM ALERT] $7.5 million for HSBC and their own proprietary accounts.

The conspirators were accused of buying Pounds Sterling for their own accounts ahead of [!] the $3.5 billion foreign exchange transaction to drive up the price of the Pound Sterling, benefiting their proprietary positions and HSBC at the expense of Cairn Energy.

Johnson also was accused of making misrepresentations to the client that concealed the self-serving [!] nature of his actions.

The process of neoliberalisation has entailed extensive and permanent state intervention, including: the liberalisation of goods and capital markets; the privatisation of resources and social services; the deregulation of business, and financial markets in particular; the reduction of workers' rights (first and foremost, the right to collective bargaining) and more in general the repression of labour activism; the lowering of taxes on wealth and capital, at the expense of the middle and working classes; the slashing of social programmes, and so on. These policies were systemically pursued throughout the West (and imposed on developing countries) with unprecedented determination, and with the support of all the major international institutions and political parties. In this sense, neoliberal ideology, at least in its official anti-state guise, should be considered little more than a convenient alibi for what has been and is essentially a political and state-driven project, aimed at placing the commanding heights of economic policy `in the hands of capital, and primarily financial interests', as Stephen Gill writes. Capital remains as dependent on the state today as it did in under `Keynesianism' - to police the working classes, bail out large firms that would otherwise go bankrupt, open up markets abroad, etc.

They tried to assimilate me. They failed.

Really important & enlightening @CassSunstein piece on Trump's Marxist ways of sowing division among us https://t.co/l3YEglvc3p

— Samantha Power (@SamanthaJPower) October 19, 2017

Mr. Powers writes "Russia Is Using Marxist Strategies, and So Is Trump" by

[m]imicking American voices, [Trump? Trump "surrogates"? Russian proletariat?] used Facebook to energize and inflame a diverse assortment of political groups: gay rights supporters, African-American activists, Texas secessionists and opponents of immigration.

The San Francisco-based company said it will donate the estimated $1.9 million (€1.6 million) RT and Sputnik paid for advertisements since 2011 "to support external research into the use of Twitter in civic engagement and elections, including use of malicious automation and misinformation."

A spokesperson for Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA), the ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters on Thursday that the upper echelon of Twitter never mentioned to him that they made a pitch deck [!] to persuade RT to advertise on Twitter during the election. ... Sputnik has in fact never advertised on the platform.
[...]
"In order to entice RT to agree to the exclusive elections offer, Twitter promised a package of perks and bonuses. The offer included such things as: closed beta testing of new tools and products; a customized emoji-hashtag that would help RT stand out with special election coverage; customized analytics and research solutions; and a dedicated team of Twitter experts to help with content curation and media strategy."

Indeed the strangest element of What Happened is the widespread belief, both within and without the Clinton campaign, that she would win. I can only take her word that this was widely believed, but it is difficult to fathom. The Clinton I discovered in these pages was a radical. From the moment she left her position as president of Wellesley's Republican club (a detail she mentioned, much to my shock, in the book's final pages), Clinton fought relentlessly against the entrenched, reactionary forces of her nation. As a young woman, she demonstrated against the imperial war in Vietnam. As an attorney, she was on the front lines against Jim Crow. In public service, she stood up not only to despots like Vladimir Putin, but to the most powerful corporations in the United States, proposing redistributive taxes and "truly universal" health care, even flirting with a guaranteed basic income funded by capital derivatives from nationalized resource services.

Writing about the decline of American labor solidarity, Clinton writes that "being part of a union is an important part of someone's personal identity. It helps shape the way you view the world and think about politics. When that's gone, it means a lot of people stop identifying primarily as workers--and voting accordingly--and start identifying and voting as white, male, rural, or all of the above." This account of class-consciousness puts Clinton to the left of even celebrated American essayist Ta-Nehisi Coates. How could anyone be naïve enough to believe that her victory was guaranteed? She was a radical taking on the establishment and the establishment is never more vicious than when it is protecting itself from a figure who has proven herself willing and able to defeat them. For the Clinton of What Happened to win the Presidency in a country like the United States would have been miraculous. Nothing in the history I can remember suggests that this was ever likely.

Paul Manafort Offers Up Trump Tower Apartment In Bid To Get Off House Arrest

Manafort is currently on house arrest under electronic monitoring and a $10 million unsecured bond. He's seeking less onerous conditions of release. To guarantee his future court appearances, his attorney said Manafort would be willing to pledge a $3 million Trump Tower apartment in New York City, another $3.5 million home in New York, a $1.5 million home in Palm Beach, Florida, and a "combination of life insurance policies held in trust and/or in his or his wife's name" and valued at approximately $4.5 million ― for a total of more than $12 million.

Here's my prediction: They're STUPID enough to let Manafort walk around free and HE DROPS OUT OF SIGHT WITHIN 24 HOURS AND ISN'T SEEN AGAIN FOR YEARS!  Just watch.
 

They tried to assimilate me. They failed.

The U.S. and its allies are engaged in an Asian and African offensive, a multi-pronged assault thinly camouflaged as humanitarian intervention that, in some regions, looks like a blitzkrieg....

Archaeologist Lutz: `We really weren't expecting this tremendous discovery'

Herbert Lutz: It's completely new to science, and it is a big surprise because nobody had expected such a tremendous, extremely rare discovery. To find a completely new species? Nobody expected that.
DW: Why were you looking at this precise location?
Lutz: We were excavating riverbed sediments of the proto-Rhine River near Eppelsheim. These sediments are approximately 10 million years old and are well known in science, ever since the first fossils were excavated here in the early 19th century.
DW: And how old are the teeth you've found?
Lutz: Around 9.7 million years old.
DW:What does a 9.7-million-year-old tooth look like?
Lutz: It's perfectly preserved. It actually looks like a new excellent tooth; however, it's no longer white. It's shining like amber. ... We were always waiting for such a find. But at the end of 2016, we decided to finish the excavation and just in the last second, if you will, these two teeth came to light.

August 12, Charlottesville, Virginia: 1 person killed by a white supremacist running down a group of protesters with his car. Not terrorism.

October 1, Las Vegas, Nevada: 58 people killed by a white gunman shooting with dozens of assault rifles. Not terrorism.

October 31, New York City, New York: 8 people killed by an Uzbek man claiming allegiance to ISIS by running them down with a rental truck. Terrorism!

The World Health Organization's cancer agency dismissed and edited findings from a draft of its review of the weedkiller glyphosate that were at odds with its final conclusion that the chemical probably causes cancer.

Documents seen by Reuters show how a draft of a key section of the International Agency for Research on Cancer's (IARC) assessment of glyphosate - a report that has prompted international disputes and multi-million-dollar lawsuits - underwent significant changes and deletions before the report was finalised and made public.

IARC, based in Lyon, France, wields huge influence as a semi-autonomous unit of the WHO, the United Nations health agency. It issued a report on its assessment of glyphosate - a key ingredient in Monsanto Corp's top-selling weedkiller RoundUp - in March 2015. It ranked glyphosate a Group 2a carcinogen, a substance that probably causes cancer in people.

That conclusion was based on its experts' view that there was "sufficient evidence" glyphosate causes cancer in animals and "limited evidence" it can do so in humans. The Group 2a classification has prompted mass litigation in the United States against Monsanto and could lead to a ban on glyphosate sales across the European Union from the start of next year.

Generic-Drugs Antitrust Case Expanded to Include 18 Companies

Attorneys general from 46 states and the District of Columbia expanded their antitrust case against the $75 billion generic drug industry to include 18 companies and at least 15 drugs.

a monstrous complaint, pp 231, pregnant so-to-speak with international reprecussions.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

The man was given a 15-month suspended sentence and a fine of 1,750 euros ($2,000) for using a bat spiked with nails to assault the woman in the street in 2015, leaving her covered in cuts and bruises.

The prosecutor had argued the sentence was too lenient and asked an appeals court for prison time of 3 years and 6 months. But the appeal judges on Oct. 11 rejected his request.

In related news (ordered by conspicuous "misconduct", x-referenced to offenses to normative behavior), EQUAL MEANS EQUAL et al. v. US Department of Education and Betsy DeVos is a federal complaint, challenging extraordinary evidentiary requirements imposed by respondents to secure relief under Title IX (prohibition of sex discrimination by public educational institutions)> Civil Rights Act > US Constitution > 8th Amendment.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

What Mongolian Nomads Teach Us About the Digital Future - Wired

They use their phones to order supplies, get market prices for their meat, or talk to their kids in school. (Nomad kids board in dormitories in towns during the school year.) And like everyone else on the planet, they have a bit of music and games loaded for fun. Where mobile coverage is lacking I've seen nomads use walkie talkies to connect with neighbors or even to coordinate a roundup of livestock. If they have coverage, they use their phones while on horseback.

Far more ubiquitous than mobile phones are solar LEDs. Every ger has its panels and batteries. The panel (usually one) is simple, tied to a pole, which can be rotated by hand every now and then to follow the sun. It will power a single LED light bulb, perhaps charge a phone and a shortwave radio. Less commonly it will power a TV with a satellite dish. Having a cheap, steady light all night makes a huge difference: It extends evenings, makes cooking more convenient, and reduces toxic smoke in the home. I did not see a ger without solar.

(...)

What may be most distinctive thing about traditional Mongolian nomad life is what's not in the ger. No refrigerator, no running water, no toilet, no air-conditioning, no wine cooler, no microwave, no radiant floor heating, no Amazon Alexa. Instead there is a leather bag made from a sheep's skin that is used to churn butter. The older the bag gets the more supple and better it gets. There is a goat stomach that serves as the container for cheese.

Facebook Stumbles in German Privacy Battle

Facebook should be held liable, an adviser to Europe's highest court [ECJ] recommended Tuesday, for not disclosing that its website stores personal data from visitors to user fan pages.
[...]
"By having recourse to Facebook for the publication of its information offering, a fan page administrator is subscribing to the principle that the personal data of visitors to his page will be processed for the purpose of compiling viewing statistics," the opinion states. "Even though a fan page administrator is not, of course, the designer of the `Facebook Insights' tool, he will, by having recourse to that tool, be participating in the determination of the purposes and means of the processing of the personal data of visitors to his page."

Unabhängiges Landeszentrum für Datenschutz Schleswig-Holstein (plaintiffs)
v.
Wirtschaftsakademie Schleswig - Holstein GmbH,
in the presence of [!]
Facebook Ireland Ltd, Vertreter des Bundesinteresses beim Bundesverwaltungsgericht (defendants)

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Plans by Germany's national rail provider to name a train after the diarist Anne Frank have come under fire, with the Anne Frank foundation saying it "caused new pain" to those who experienced deportations.

"A combination of Anne Frank and a train conjures up the image of persecution of Jews and deportations during World War II," the Amsterdam-based foundation said in a statement.

Frank and her family hid in a secret annexe in Amsterdam during the German occupation of the Netherlands during the second world war.

In what it says is an expansion of its existing federal work with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, IBM Watson Health has signed on with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to help explore new applications for blockchain in healthcare. ... CDC has already been running a series of pilots aimed to explore blockchain's real-world potential, and [IBM Chief Science Officer Shahram] Ebadollahi said the more participants who join in to help put it distributed ledger tools to work across the healthcare, the faster it could help tackle some of the industry's most challenging interoperability, security and other data management issues.

And when combined with AI, he said, blockchain holds big promise for managing patient data over time and across various care settings. ... In January, IBM and FDA signed a two-year agreement to explore potential blockchain applications for EHRs, clinical trials, internet-of-things, genomics and more.

archived: "We went through the same hysteria* with Watson/DeepBlue after it won the Jeopardy match in 2011." et seq
Always Read the Footnotes
"BlockChain Tech will stand athwart the tide of Reality" 2015
Introducing Chiralkine Contracts 2013

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

[Dr. Hannes] Vogel told The Times that he will leave nothing overlooked to put to rest much of the speculation on Paddock's health as investigators struggle to identify a motive for the shooting.

archived: "The search for mitigating circumstances --necessarily substituting for motive-- is a ritual in ah mostly-christian nations..."

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

Here we report the discovery of a large void (with a cross section similar to the Grand Gallery and a length of 30 m minimum) above the Grand Gallery, which constitutes the first major inner structure found in the Great Pyramid since the 19th century.

In Parliament, Lloyd George says "a thing no government can permit is organisation for rebellion."

"I thought it essential that the Government should take action, not provocative action, but firm action
[...]
"There are three things the Government ought to make clear in the interests of Ireland. First, incitement to rebllion cannot be permitted. ...Second, a thing no Government can permit is organization for rebellion.
[...]
The third point ... a demand for the sovereign independence of Ireland, and the Premier added: "Wed had better say at once that under no conditions will Great Britain permit anything of that Kind."

This, if publicized, likely comes as a surprise to homely US American matriots parroting Tho. Jefferson's aphorisms and the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution.

Diversity is the key to economic and political evolution.

A Circuit Court upholds the banning of The Masses from the mails, which evidently means that just producing the magazine is now illegal, through logic that seems ridiculously faulty. The court also says that the crime of obstructing enlistment in the military does not require that the magazine directly advise people not to enlist, but that it prints absolutely anything that could be interpreted by those inclined to so interpret it as impeding, hindering, restraining or putting an obstacle in the way of recruitment, including the "natural and reasonable effect of the publication".
[...]
The NYT is also opposed to the women's suffrage amendment.