Kudos to President Biden, NATO, and Heads Of State on the March 24th statement...
...(full statement by NATO Heads of State and Government)...Yes, China and other nations must choose between changing the international system by force or abetting others and participating in that international system...perhaps NATO, UN et al. can regularize the process for routinely and quickly disconnecting nations from the international system ("dis[russia]nification") choosing change by force?
"... For God's sake, this man cannot remain in power..."--President Biden--
Our international community and its heads of state must implement the processes and procedure necessary and sufficient to enable more explicit condemnation (e.g. "...Tragically, President Putin's actions have reduced his future to a cage and coffin...") of a rogue colleague, who has invaded another nation without provocation or justification; pathologically lied, implicitly threatened nuclear annihilation, bombed civilians, starved villages, destroyed hospitals, obliterated culturally significant objects, silenced opposition, and etc.
Hey Senator McConnell your partial mea culpa is ineffectual and disingenuous. You and your party have spent the past four plus years fomenting a fanciful insurrection instead of saying "enough"! Your party's platform and deviant behavior has exclaimed strongman, insurrection, deceit, duplicity and dictatorship. Forget the mea culpa. Immediately dissolve and replace your party!
Recently, elite woman Australian cyclist Carlee Taylor demonstrates that women race just like the men (minus ubiquitous doping1)—unfortunately, the camera did not stick around to record her unbelievably determined race reentry.
Reminds me of multiple Grand Tours winner Bernard Hinault's racing determination:
Kudos to the Sunweb organization and its 2018 women, men, and development squads for their determined efforts to "up their game" and leave professional cycling better than they found it.
Road and MTB cyclist Jolanda Neff shares some laboratory performance data and Road and MTB cyclist Kasia Niewiadoma tells what happens to a novice elite rider during competition who ignores her sweating:
—
UCI Women's WorldTour peloton should begin publishing racers' real-time performance and imaging data.
UPDATED 03/16/2016 Ronde van Drenthe 2016 (UCI Road Race Results) A four rider (Anna van der Breggen, Worrack, Elvin, and Blaak) breakaway demonstrates near perfect competitive-cooperation. Anna van der Breggen's riding form and technique was majestic. (full race, hd rtvoost)
Felt Development, FSA, and HED team up to design an asymmetric track cycling frame (TA-FRD), which has been optimized for the Rio 2016 women's team pursuit track cycling team.
Marianne Vos and Emma Johannes are beginning to mentor the younger women riders and racers, which will significantly benefit formative women's cycling.
Kudos to USADA! Usage of TUES are temporary "short duration" exception to a strict goal of no doping in competitive cycling, not a permanent or routine competitive tool.
UPDATED 12/05/2017 NYT, Russia Banned from Winter Olympic by I.O.C.
Can UCI President, Brian Cookson end chemical and mechanical doping in the professional men's peloton without ending men's professional cycling? Cookson's dilemma is that professional men's cycling may decline or end with and without chemical and mechanical doping, which may explain Cookson's approach of pursuing doping, but not too aggressively!
Can the impressive professional women's peloton avoid Cookson's dilemma as its sponsorships and fan base continue a dramatic ascent?
A leading professional cyclist, especially one wearing the magical rainbow jersey who provides a pattern or series of jeremiad instead of randomly drawn blood and urine samples through the "whereabouts system" should expect a lot of skepticism.
Inside an Anti-doping Laboratory
LiveScience, The 'Doping Arms Race': How Athletes Evade Testing As the costs decrease and automated screening efficiency using large micro-arrays increases the imaginations of cheating athletes, coaches, and boutique chemists will begin to lag. When coupled with certain, credible, and effective career ending suspensions from competition the short-term appeal to use unauthorized (i.e. noncompetitive) performance enhancing methods will begin to lag, too.
UPDATED 08/02/2016 VeloNews, Lizzie, we need answers [...and fast] How does a domestic federation clear an elite cyclist that misses four three "out of competition" drug tests?
"The UCI is absolutely committed to protecting the rights of clean athletes at the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and beyond." --UCI, July 28, 2016--
..not to mention preserving the sport of elite cycling...cyclists bans, exemptions, and performances across time will be more meaningful than press announcements.
It's astonishing that a sports MD would say a drug, which increases blood flows and hence oxygen is not performance enhancing. Such statements buttress the argument against team or private doctors for professional and elite cyclists—every rider uses a trained and certified doctor from the peloton pool.
Heightened awareness of peloton doping, biological passports, team or individuals’ doctor's notes, or national lab countermand tests are not substitutes for independent routine, rigorous drug testing and permanent peloton disqualification of all doped racer.
Training regimens for serious amateur and professional cyclists requires input and oversight from competent sports doctors to minimize the possibility of cyclists' injury. However, this does not mean every amateur and pro team or individual riders require their own personal sports doctor.
UPDATED 11/13/2015 VeloNews, Cookson: We couldn’t run pro cycling without dopers Fine, let the men's pro-cycling peloton completely implode, if necessary to clear the ubiquitous doping and dopers! UCI can focus its resources on building a clean women's peloton.
We'll see if the women's pro-cycling peloton can exist and thrive without the doping, dopers and their indispensable (some might say indefensible) doctors?
The Independent Commission (IC) is created by decision of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) President following allegations of doping aired between 3rd and 8th December 2014 by the German television channel ARD.
Our First Amendment should not become a fraud amendment by assigning "free speech" or "religious" labels to mythinformation, misinformation, or disinformation.
"...The reasons for the anti-vaccine movements mistrusting vaccines are diverse, but in the United States and Europe the belief that the risks of vaccines outweigh their benefits is especially prevalent. That vaccines are an artificial intervention into natural processes and that it is less dangerous to let nature run its course.
If you understand the mechanisms of the immune system and how immunity is created, this idea quickly loses all power because vaccines and diseases both do the same thing: They create Memory Cells by triggering an immune reaction. But while pathogens do this by attacking the body and causing a huge amount of stress, which carries the very real risks of various long-term consequences including death, vaccines arrive at the same goal, without all the risks of diseases..." --Immune, by Philipp Dettmer--
The area between the black and blue curves is a partial measure of the permanent carnage (i.e. death) inflicted on the unvaccinated.
Democracy is a process that enable leaders to provide balanced responses to citizens' discontent and interests.
Interestingly, a multi-party political system, while preferable is not a prerequisite for an extant democracy. For example the current Republican Party while professing to be "for the people"1 excludes many of our citizens from political participation, usually under the rubric of "States Rights" using a variety of gimmicks, ruses and artifices. If you can exclude citizens then any responsiveness to their discontent and interests becomes irrelevant. Assuming the Democrats' leaders continue providing a balanced response to the discontent and interests of all citizens you've created a de facto single party democracy.
The Republican Party and its followers' use of dogma to obviate their responsiveness to our citizenry's discontent and interests strengthens the case for a de facto single party democracy. According to their dogma "God, Markets, and Prayers" are the responsive constructs to our citizenry.
The Democratic Party must stop pretending that the Republican Party is part of our multi-party system of democracy and call it what it is - a dogma spewing deceptive dictatorship requiring immediate removal and replacement.
1. The Republican Party is highly likely to be "for the people" - just not for the people participating in their own governance.
It is likely that some leaders of the Republican Party are using populism for undemocratic ends, but it would be significant error to generalize those ends to all Americans identifying with the Republican Party. [Those interested in sorting the (un)democratic ends may find this short article (pdf): Populism, Authoritarianism and Constitutionalism helpful?]
How long before these leaders begin spewing the shibboleth "democracy with Republican Party characteristics".
2. Sifting through all the economic hype on China is more difficult than sorting through Russian (dis/mis)information...yes China is developing runways and planes hoping to takeoff, but that takeoff is far from certain...especially into Tiananmen Square-like global headwinds.
Asserting a "right to develop" in the context of a contest between autocracy vs democracy is highly unlikely to significantly change those headwinds.
There is a difference between corporate complexity and corruption. Yes, software is extraordinarily complex—software defeat devices✈ are corrupt. Boeing has been doing extraordinarily "complex" products, including software for decades, using talented engineers and risk analysis—not rent-seeking behavior or shameless calls by its chief executive officer.
Last week our Supreme Court decided Citizens
United v. Federal Election Commission, a monstrous 5-4 opinion
unconvincingly1 characterizing our corporations as associations of
citizens entitled to First Amendment political speech rights, limited only by
disclaimer and disclosure requirements.
The majority seems to have conflated the regulatory process
applicable to our corporations with the political process applicable to our
citizens.
Evidently, an interest to protect is sufficient for the
majority to guarantee our corporations First Amendment rights in our political
process.
That said one can only hope for such a simplified,
expansive, and unlimited approach for all First Amendment case law—call it the
return to ancient First Amendment principles approach to First Amendment case
law.
Not so says petitioner Western Tradition Partnership—Citizens United forbids the forbidding of corporate contributions to candidates.
Justice Ginsburg has stayed the state court's decision, rhetorically asking her colleagues whether granting certiorari would provide them with an opportunity to revisit Citizens United.
"...Thus, the Citizens United ruling, the lack of adequate law, as well as the lax disclaimer policies for digital platforms altogether created multi-level loopholes for campaigns run by anonymous groups, which potentially includes foreign countries’ disinformation campaigns..."--The Stealth Media--
Maybe the billionaires' threat to our congressional representatives that there will be "no cash until action on healthcare" means that without gutting healthcare for our poor (Medicaid) there is no cash for the billionaires' tax break!
Unsurprisingly, our "new" alt-white-house tells congress to gut healthcare now and replace it later so they can get on with legislation giving the billionaires a tax break. Where is the promise of affordable healthcare for all our citizens without gaps?
What a beautiful bare knuckle brawl between our prostitutes and their whoremasters. A standoff over whether to deliver the f^cking before the cash or the cash before the f^cking?
Maybe our Supreme Court will take the case and abandon its "free speech" cover story for the whoremasters' cash?
How ironic one billionaire's neo-anarchic agenda blown up by another billionaire's neo-anarchic agenda—hey it's free entertainment, watch and enjoy!
Even Koch couldn't imply his support for Hillary Clinton with a straight face. It's like Russia's Putin implying if the United States et al. doesn't ease up on economic sanctions he'll support China's Xi efforts to replace the dollar with the renminbi, so thugs can more freely finance their thuggery!
UPDATED 04/12/2016 AP News, Hundreds Protest Money in Politics at US Capitol
Maybe a hedge fund or super pac will use their free speech to bail out the arrested protesters as soon the judge declares how many words each protester will be required to post as bail?
Mayer's "Dark Money" illuminates a backstory of a bizarre billionaires' bazaar behind America's escalating and increasingly nefarious electioneering. Mayer's best-selling book opens with a variant of the quotation oft-attributed to deceased Associate Justice Louis D. Brandeis:
“We can have a democratic society or we can have the concentration of great
wealth in the hands of a few. We cannot have both.”4
And ends with a near billion dollar projection ($889M), which concentrated wealth is expected to pledge for Presidential Election 2016 electioneering. This, in addition to the $1,000M each major party (Republicans and Democrats) is expected to spend.
Mr. Chief Justice, that's a lot of concentrated and costly speech!
Conflating faux federalism with financial interests is likely to produce undesirable mischief. When attorneys generals are doing the conflation excessive "ingratiation" (commonly called corruption) and incredulity are likely to follow.
Transparent measures and constraints on monies flows to our representatives should not require NSA intercepts or FBI recordings of representatives' quid pro quo exchanges—a premise artfully articulated by the four dissenters
One might phrase Jane Mayer's question a little different—should our President place his confidence in the abilities of the American people or personal casino concierges?
UPDATED
08/26/2010 New Yorker, Covert Operations. Jane Mayer provides a
mini-tutorial on the mischief our billionaires create (literally) behind
networks of coordinated corporate facades and fronts—it can be very difficult
to determine who's funding the "chants of our cults" and for what
purpose. Penetration of the facades and fronts usually depreciates and
tarnishes much of the good our billionaires accomplish—there's a transparent
message here somewhere.
UPDATED 04/04/2010 UPI, U.S. Supreme Court: Wallowin' again in that ol' soft money. The Supreme Court's recent decision in Citizens created a disparity between the now unlimited spending permitted by unions and corporations and the still limited "soft money" spending by political parties. Litigants are expected to ask our Supreme Court to eliminate the current "soft money" limitation in time for the next election—bet you can't wait. Of course Congress could act to neutralize the corrosive perception, if not reality, that our politicians are bought and paid for before, during, and after their "public service"2 to our nation.
Our chief justice does the Supreme Court and our nation a disservice by engaging in polemics with respect to the courts recent decisions. It may be news to a youthful and energetic chief justice but that's what a Supreme Court justice does—sit, study, listen, and decide, hopefully with dispassionate interest and without political polemics2. It’s unlikely Supreme Court justices can successfully and simultaneously engage the role of polemic politician and credible Supreme Court justice without doing harm to themselves and the Court.
-----notes-----
1. Many have viewed the decision as an unreasoned political
polemic, which further dulls our Supreme Court's patina of credibility.
2. The definition of "public service" appears to
be raising money for the next election and not voting inconsistent with
interests necessary to raise that money. Wonder what the relationship is, if
any, between this definition of "public service" and the recent
harmful shocks to our financial, economic, and social systems equilibrium?
Assuming unconstrained "soft money" enables each political party to
offset the "public service" of the other will such offsetting
increase or decrease the frequency and magnitude of the harmful shocks to our
financial, economic, and social systems equilibrium?
