"In 1996, Bill Browder went to Russia to try to make a fortune. He made his money, but he also found himself in a fight with Russian oligarchs over money and power. And he lost. It cost him not just his companies, but the life of friend."
"His crusade to punish the people responsible led to Congress freezing the assets of dozens of powerful Russians. In retaliation, Russia banned Americans from adopting Russian kids. Which is why Natalia Veselnitskya scheduled a meeting with Donald Jr. to talk about "adoptions." Browder knows her; he calls her his "arch-enemy." Really, Browder says, she wanted to talk about unfreezing those Russian assets."
"Today on the show, we call up Bill Browder and have him walk us through his years in Russia. Once, he and Putin were allies. But before Browder knew it, border guards were dragging him out of a VIP lounge, and eventually out of Russia. Now, even in exile, he doesn't eat in the same restaurant twice."
"The story of Browder and his late friend helps explain what the Russian government—Vladimir Putin—wants from the President of the United States. And how far he'll go to get it."
"An extraordinary new Pentagon study has concluded that the U.S.-backed international order established after World War 2 is “fraying” and may even be “collapsing”, leading the United States to lose its position of “primacy” in world affairs."
"The solution proposed to protect U.S. power in this new “post-primacy” environment is, however, more of the same: more surveillance, more propaganda (“strategic manipulation of perceptions”) and more military expansionism."
"The document concludes that the world has entered a fundamentally new phase of transformation in which U.S. power is in decline, international order is unravelling, and the authority of governments everywhere is crumbling."
"Donald J. Trump lashed out at a new target on Monday, blaming his bad poll numbers on the existence of the numerical system."
"In sometimes rambling remarks at an outdoor rally in Ohio, the Republican Presidential nominee called the numerical system “rigged” and unleashed a torrent of abuse on numbers themselves, calling them “disgusting” and “the lowest form of life.”
"He can't get Congress to send a health care bill for him to sign. His own family is causing public relations (and possibly legal) problems. He was something of an outsider at the recent G-20 meeting in Germany, emerging with no major deal and left behind as his international counterparts forged ahead with a climate change agreement the United States has now abandoned. Leaks – some of which are apparently coming from his own staff – reveal a White House foundering and struggling to get traction."
"President Donald Trump, made famous by being a dominant boss on reality TV, has lost control of the biggest enterprise he has taken on, the running of the federal government, analysts and experts say. And the one thing on which the Twitter-happy president has kept a firm grip – his mobile phone – has only gotten him in further trouble, with his tweets used against him in court decisions and by his political foes."
"Scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz wanted to gauge the reactions of mountain lions in a unique kind of way so they installed motion-sensitive cameras at locations where the predators stash their prey."
"When a lion entered the area, that movement triggered both a camera video recording as well as the release of an audio recording of a political talk show host. More than eighty percent of lions high-tailed it out of there. And there was no favoritism for either political party, whether Rachel Maddow, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck or Amy Goodman."
"Crack open Andrew Cuomo, and you won’t find Ted Kennedy. You probably won’t even find Mario Cuomo, someone who treated Albany like it was the Athenian agora. But you will find someone consumed with winning, who throttles anyone who looks like he or she might stand in the way of that winning. Is Cuomo really a warrior for social justice? Maybe, but probably not, but if you get a higher minimum wage and paid family leave and free college and same-sex marriage and gun control and a fracking ban and the first reversal of harsh Rockefeller-era drug laws in four decades, who cares?"
"The thing that falls out of this kind of confirmation bias is a lack of empathy. Narcissists are known for being totally unempathetic, but this has a unique character. Bill Nye’s new show and the March for Science perfectly illustrate one of the fundamental contradictions of liberal ideology: the truth is both politicized and neutral in the way that science is alleged to be neutral. The level of cognitive dissonance here is incredible. There is no such thing as political neutrality. And this ideological contradiction creates a major problem: the fetishization of rationality. The fetishization of rationality means you think reasonableness paves the road to political office and, on an individual level, that anyone who opposes you is an idiot who can’t understand reality. Thus, you have no purchase on someone else’s perspective because you’re narcissistically invested in your own view—the “correct” and only perspective. Dissenters are just the unworthy."