monitoring Trump and relevant contemporary events

I know people have questioned the effect of the Russian trolls' work in social media platforms but I haven't heard anyone say that Russian meddling was the sole cause of the Clinton defeat.

Heh, you wanna talk about "evidence?" You quote one guy who says he didn't see anyone celebrating and, for you, that PROVES it never happened.

I see several of my posts have been deleted by the cheese-eatin admins here, eh? Most notably a post linking two different videos where bin ladin claimed responsibility, and one exposing the utter absurdity of your claim that the terrorists never even existed.

Nanoscale Chemistry Yields Better Explosives

...

Simpson explains, "In general, the smaller the size of the materials being combined, the better the properties of energetic materials. Since these `nanostructures' are formed with particles on the nanometer scale, the performance can be improved over materials with particles the size of grains of sand or of powdered sugar.

...

"Greater energy densities versus greater power—that's been the traditional trade-off," says Simpson. "With our new process, however, we're mixing at molecular scales, using grains the size of tens to hundreds of molecules. That can give us the best of both worlds-higher energy densities and high power as well."

https://str.llnl.gov/str/RSimpson.html

Finn, do you have any evidence to back up your charge?

Why do they attempt to deny what can easily be proven by simple searches on the internet?

In August 2015, the leading Washington budget watchdog predicted that the federal deficit would total about $600 billion the next year.

Now, just about two and a half years later, the projected gap for 2019 has grown to $1.2 trillion, in large part because of a boisterous round of tax cuts and spending increases. And if history is any guide, when the books close, the final number will be higher.

That amounts to a shortfall that will rival the deficits of a decade ago, when the economy was struggling to recover from the financial crisis and ensuing recession.

But while fiscal stimulus to restore economic growth has merit, staggering deficits in the ninth year of a recovery, with unemployment down to 4.1 percent, make no sense.

In addition to piling more debt onto the current $20 trillion of outstanding obligations, today’s mounting gap between revenues and expenses is already contributing to higher interest rates and the shakiness in the stock market.
Continue reading the main story

Leading the charge into rising amounts of red ink have been the Trump administration and Republicans in Congress.

Yes, blame for what is likely to be $15 trillion of added debt over the next 10 years should be placed squarely on the self-proclaimed party of fiscal responsibility.

“The level of national debt is dangerous and unacceptable,” the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell, said in 2016. Referring to President Obama’s stimulus program, he added, “We borrowed $1 trillion and nobody could find that it did much of anything.”

That was then and this is now.

On top of insisting that the nation needed tax cuts that could total $2.1 trillion over the next decade, the Republicans clamored for large increases in military spending. As the price for their cooperation, the Democrats won an equal increase in domestic spending.

Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised, but that’s just not responsible governing. While I’m all for meeting pressing needs, as part of doing so, both the White House and the Congress have an obligation to find other savings or sources of revenues. Just like every household and business must.

I recognize that those of us who have warned of the ominous consequences of deficit and debt have yet to be proven right by a market crisis or the like. And the current gyrations in both stocks and bonds may not turn out to constitute that proof.

However, never in the 35 years since Ronald Reagan managed to eradicate fear of deficits from the national psyche have we flirted so aggressively with potential fiscal disaster.

For one thing, on present course and speed, deficits of more than $1 trillion will persist indefinitely. Indeed, if current policies are maintained, the gap would exceed $2 trillion by 2027, according to calculations by the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget.

That would mean that the amount of debt relative to the size of our economy (the ratio of debt to gross domestic product) could reach a record 109 percent by 2027, exceeding even post-World War II levels.

For another, for the first time since at least the 1960s, we have thrown a deficit log onto a fire that was already burning briskly. That Vietnam War era decision — that we could have both guns and butter — contributed meaningfully to the raging inflation that erupted a few years later.

Although inflation has been quiescent so far in this recovery, potential pressure from rising wages has begun to appear, particularly in last week’s unemployment report.

While we all want to see pay go up, particularly for working-class Americans, excessive wage increases can become excessive price increases, which would in turn force the Federal Reserve to increase interest rates faster than it would otherwise.

The bond market, which can serve as a kind of early warning signal of overheating, has been signaling concerns for several weeks. The yield on 10 year Treasury notes, which had been loitering around 2.35 percent, has jumped to 2.8 percent.

That may not sound like much, but in the world of bonds, rates generally don’t move that far that fast. Importantly, higher interest rates are the enemy of stock prices. As yields rise, investors begin to shift money from equities to debt, depressing valuations of the former. That may well be a part of what is now occurring.

Having lived for nearly 15 years with high deficits and low inflation, Americans may have become inured to the risks of bad budget policy.

As unattractive as the policy options are (essentially, raising taxes or finding spending that we are willing to cut), we would all be well advised to take on the challenge before it is too late.

And I think there's room for a Star Trek season where the crew of the USS Enterprise are all senior citizens.

In January 2017, senior Trump aide Rob Porter approached White House Counsel Don McGahn to inform him that his security clearance background check might return derogatory information, CBS News has learned.


The White House staff secretary was not specific about what the information was — Porter said only that his ex-wives were likely going to say unflattering things about him to investigators.

“Boom!” Bannon explodes, and pumps his fist. When Trump shortly follows this with a plug for “beautiful, clean coal” (ad-libbing, with typical weirdness, the “beautiful”), Bannon says “I love it,” and starts to laugh. “He’s trolling! He’s trolling from the podium.”

In Internet slang, a troll (/troʊl, trɒl/) is a person who sows discord on the Internet by starting quarrels or upsetting people, by posting inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community (such as a newsgroup, forum, chat room, or blog) with the intent of provoking readers into an emotional response[2] or of otherwise disrupting normal, on-topic discussion,[3] often for the troll's amusement.

Deficits are a stalking horse Republicans use as a political cudgel when they are out of power. Again. Full stop. You simply cannot argue with the fact that deficits have risen dramatically under Reagan and Bush and now under Trump. Republicans do not care about deficits. They care about keeping taxes as low as possible.

Donald Trump's White House is many things, but it's not apologetic.