Author: HP McLovincraft

Seeker of rabbit holes. Pessimist. Libertine. Contrarian. Your huckleberry. Possibly true tales of sanity-blasting horror also known as abject reality. Prepare yourself. Veteran of a thousand psychic wars. I have seen the fnords. Deplatformed on Tumblr and Twitter.

Pelosi says there shouldn’t be any debates between Biden and Trump

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday she doesn’t think there should be any presidential debates ahead of the November election, arguing Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden shouldn’t “legitimize” a discussion with President Trump.

“I don’t think that there should be any debates,” Pelosi told reporters. “I do not think that the president of the United States has comported himself in a way that anybody has any association with truth, evidence, data and facts.”

“I wouldn’t legitimize a conversation with him nor a debate in terms of the presidency of the United States,” she added. 

“I think that he’ll probably act in a way that is beneath the dignity of the presidency,” she said, citing what she called his “disgraceful” actions during the 2016 debates with former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. 

“He does that every day,” she added. “But I think he will also belittle what the debates are supposed to be about.”

Instead, Pelosi proposed that the candidates take separate stages and answer questions about their policies in a “conversation with the American people” instead of “an exercise in skulduggery.” 

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‘Mostly Peaceful’ Rioting And Looting Is Helping Trump’s Campaign

‘Mostly peaceful protests’ are like the ‘moderate rebels’ in Syria – propaganda constructs that do not exist in the real world. The people who owned the burning cars and who’s businesses were destroyed will not be relieved by such phrasing.

Joe Biden’s attempt to swing Republican voters to his side has failed. At the same time he has rejected many of the issues progressives favored. This will hurt the election turn out the Democrats will need. Add to that the unrest which plays into Trump’s hands. The Democrats who fear that are right:

“There’s no doubt it’s playing into Trump’s hands,” said Paul Soglin, who served as mayor of Madison, on and off, for more than two decades. “There’s a significant number of undecided voters who are not ideological, and they can move very easily from Republican to the Democratic column and back again. They are, in effect, the people who decide elections. And they are very distraught about both the horrendous carnage created by police officers in murdering African Americans, and … for the safety of their communities.”

Trump, of course, is positioning himself as the antidote to urban unrest. “So let me be clear: The violence must stop, whether in Minneapolis, Portland or Kenosha,” Vice President Mike Pence declared in his Republican convention speech Wednesday night, with Trump looking on. “We will have law and order on the streets of this country for every American of every race and creed and color.”

Republicans had chided Joe Biden and other Democrats for not calling out the violence in the aftermath of the Blake shooting. Biden immediately addressed the shooting, but didn’t condemn the ensuing violence until Wednesday in a video posted on social media.

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US Military Robots on Fast Track to Leadership Role

With Covid-19 incapacitating startling numbers of U.S. service members and modern weapons proving increasingly lethal, the American military is relying ever more frequently on intelligent robots to conduct hazardous combat operations. Such devices, known in the military as “autonomous weapons systems,” include robotic sentries, battlefield-surveillance drones and autonomous submarines.

So far, in other words, robotic devices are merely replacing standard weaponry on conventional battlefields. Now, however, in a giant leap of faith, the Pentagon is seeking to take this process to an entirely new level — by replacing not just ordinary soldiers and their weapons, but potentially admirals and generals with robotic systems.

Admittedly, those systems are still in the development stage, but the Pentagon is now rushing their future deployment as a matter of national urgency. Every component of a modern general staff — including battle planning, intelligence-gathering, logistics, communications, and decision-making — is, according to the Pentagon’s latest plans, to be turned over to complex arrangements of sensors, computers, and software.

All these will then be integrated into a “system of systems,” now dubbed the Joint All-Domain Command-and-Control, or JADC2 (since acronyms remain the essence of military life). Eventually, that amalgam of systems may indeed assume most of the functions currently performed by American generals and their senior staff officers.

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