Reminder: it cost 1.2 billion dollars to not put Hillary Clinton back into the White House.

That’s actually quite a lot of money.

Downloading the Chapo Trap House podcast has been a great way for me to spend international flights recently (I’m heartily sick of in-flight movies).

Chapo has become a minor phenomenon that emerged out of “Weird” Twitter. It has been condemned by all the right people within the Democratic party and the liberal media.

Here’s a great interview with documentary film maker Adam Curtis although it may be more of a monologue in places about the surreal disconnected world that has come into being over the last forty years. It explains the current wave of anti-politics politics pretty well.

(One minor quibble Ayn Rand was Russian not German)

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/episode-65-no-future-feat-adam-curtis-121216

The Irish government has banned this practice and it will be gone by 2020. It has already been replaced but other shitty methods. The only way to stop corps from hiding their money is to prosecute the banks that facilitate them. Only when the bankers face the prospect of actual jail time will things improve.

Originally shared by cedrick wilson

I’m gonna send my $5 to offshore accounts too.

http://www.theverge.com/2016/12/21/14048732/google-tax-bill-dutch-sandwich-loop-2015

If the Russians really did interfere with the US election (and the evidence for that is still very questionable) that’s not what determined the final vote.

To achieve that you’d need a ruling party that was completely out of touch with its electorate. It turns out that failing to jail the bankers or to do anything about building employment in areas hit by deindustrialization and capital flight really does have consequences*. As Bill Clinton put it:

It’s the economy, Stupid.

Or as Harry Truman put it many years earlier:

If it’s a choice between a genuine Republican, and a Republican in Democratic clothing, the people will choose the genuine article, every time

* Trump lost the popular vote but that was mainly because of California one of the few states to prosper comparatively in recent years.

But 57% think it had no impact on the election.

http://edition.cnn.com/2016/12/18/politics/poll-russian-hacking/index.html

The vultures are circling around the sub-profitable GitHub. With publicity like this you know things are going to get a little rocky.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-15/github-is-building-a-coder-s-paradise-it-s-not-coming-cheap

https://twitter.com/Chris_arnade/status/809583683833331712

One thing that has been a constant over many years of media coverage of the Syrian conflict is that the Western media have consistently backed Al-qaeda and ISIS. The Syrian regime is bad but not as bad as what these “freedom fighters” represent.

Via Jeff Zahari​

https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2016/12/aleppo/