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U.S. Senators Visualized based on their votes
By Donald A. Smith Using data from VoteView and software that I wrote, I made visualizations of U.S. senators based on their 2023 rollcall votes. The visualizations use Principal Components Analysis (PCA) and tsne to project their voting data to 3d. Senators who voted the same on more bills/resolutions appear close together. Votes of Senators…
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Another good article by Jeffrey Sachs
In Jeffrey Sach’s NATO Expansion & Ukraine’s Destruction, he quotes NATO Secretary0-General Jens Stoltenberg saying, “So, he [Putin] went to war to prevent NATO, more NATO, close to his borders. He has got the exact opposite.” When Prof. John Mearsheimer, I, and others have said the same, we’ve been attacked as Putin apologists. The same…
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Bellevue City Council Climate Forum (2023-09-19)
Tuesday night I attended the Bellevue City Council Climate Forum at Eastshore Unitarian Universalist Church in Factoria. The candidates that appeared were, from the left, John Stokes (incumbent), Paul Clark (Stokes’ challenger) , Mo Malakoutian, Janice Zahn (incumbent), Betsi Hummer (Zahn’s challenger), and Dave Hamilton. Malakoutian’s challenger, Alex Tsimerman, did not appear. ( You can…
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Did the U.S. orchestrate the 2014 Maidan uprising? Or did it just back it and exploit it?
There are competing views about this. Modern Diplomacy’s US campaign behind the turmoil in Kiev says, “Incontrovertible proofs will be presented here not only that it was a coup, but that this coup was organized by the U.S. Government: “that the U.S. Government initiated the ‘new Cold War’.” I don’t know the nature of that…
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Summary of Jeffrey Sachs interview with Andrew Napolitano about the CIA, JFK, and Ukraine
CIA Manipulation of Public Opinion Here’s my summary: The security state (CIA and Pentagon) run the government more than the White House does, especially when the president is old and weak, as is Biden. Congress mostly follows what the White House wants (on foreign policy) [and funds the security state extravagantly]. The peoples’ voices barely…
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Some short AI-generated videos: Trump and Hillary kissing, etc
I made these short video clips with Pika Labs text-to-video tool. Some of the source images were made with Midjourney image generation.
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In response to David Ignatius on the strategic windfall from the war in Ukraine
From an opinion piece in the Washington Post by Washington Post associate editor David Ignatius: The West feels gloomy about Ukraine. Here’s why it shouldn’t: Meanwhile, for the United States and its NATO allies, these 18 months of war have been a strategic windfall, at relatively low cost (other than for the Ukrainians). The West’s…
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Chat GPT, write me a poem about militarism and the corruption of Congress
Chat GPT, write me a poem about the bipartisan incompetence, corruption and hubris of Congress, where the only things Democrats and Republicans can agree upon is huge military budgets and endless disastrous wars. (I edited Chat GPT’s output in about a dozen lines.) In the once hallowed halls where power resides, Bipartisan folly and corruption…
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Short note about government secrecy on Ukraine
This New Yorker essay Is the F.B.I. Truly Biased Against Trump? about the FBI’s investigations of Rudolph Giuliani and Hunter Biden has a couple of telling paragraphs: According to [FBI agent] Buma’s statement, shortly after Russia invaded Ukraine, on February 24, 2022, he was told to terminate relations with one of his most valuable sources…