Yeah the Hillary people and the establishment would love Bernie to drop out.

Why?

"1. Young people – the future of our country – continue to vote for our campaign in overwhelming numbers. It's remarkable, and honestly quite humbling.

2. When we compete in open primaries that encourage the participation of independents, new voters, and young people, we do very well.

3. What remains in front of us is a very narrow path to the nomination. In the weeks to come we will be competing in a series of states that are very favorable to us – including California. Just like after March 15 – when we won 8 of the next 9 contests – we are building tremendous momentum going into the convention.

That is the reality of where we are right now, and why we are going to fight for every delegate and every vote. It is why I am going to continue to speak to voters in every state about the very important issues facing our country. Our country cannot afford to stop fighting for a $15 minimum wage, to overturn Citizens United, or to get universal health care for every man, woman, and child in America."

Congratulations T-Birds!

http://www.seattlethunderbirds.com/page/2016-us-division-champions-wallpaper

A well played series, right to the very end. 

Now it's on to the WHL Finals.

An example of how the esta(bliss)ment media tries to cover it's origins.

http://fair.org/home/voxs-puff-piece-on-goldman-sachs-doesnt-reveal-goldman-sponsors-vox/

“A widely recognized brand name built on excellence” would probably not be how the thousands it defrauded with faulty mortgages would describe Goldman Sachs.

I always figured producing meat consumed a considerable amount of energy.

I didn't realize it was this much -

Well least Sather's former team doesn't have a chance any more at a Stanley Cup.

Rangers eliminated by the Penguins.

RIP Lonnie Mack - a guitar hero's guitar hero.

Lonnie McIntosh (July 18, 1941 – April 21, 2016)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lonnie_Mack

Since TheNation.com seems intent of denying it.

... and since one cannot read any of their articles without paying for it ...

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/why_cant_the_nation_the_left_deal_with_election_theft_20160418

Hmm ....

We plead guilty to writing a piece at Reader Supported News pointing out that the exit polls show Bernie doing far better than the official vote count. Josh dismisses the reliability of exit polls, along with our mention of those in Germany. Suffice it to say that exit polling is the most reliable way we have of monitoring the vote count. In Germany they are usually within 1% of the official tally.

Here they are corrupted after the original compilations. They’re generally post-rigged to conform to the final official vote count, which is often pre-rigged. What matters is the original raw data, which we feel after much study is the gold standard for knowing how the public actually voted.

Of course that data can be messed with along the way. But at this point it’s the best we’ve got. And the original data can be hard to get. When statistician Ron Baiman requested original data from big-time pollster Warren Mitofsky (since deceased) Mitofsky told to him to “go fuck yourself.”

Of course it's possible there's electoral fraud. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties in the US have been around for over 150 years. They are established organizations with very strong political machinery, both of which have been severely co-opted and corrupted by the larger corporate establishments. 

So of course it's no surprise that there's a chance there's been electoral fraud in the primaries (not just New York, but Arizona, Colorado), when outsiders who were never really part of them, nor such people ever really kow-tow or submit to their will, suddenly turn around and challenge their supremacy over voters.

Happy Earth Day - 2016.

Let's hope Americans don't fuck it up further this year by voting in an establishment candidate like Hillary Clinton, or someone endorsed by the KKK.

RIP Prince

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_%28musician%29#Illness_and_death

Gone way too fucking soon.

Yeah that takes some serious balls to say.

“If we are ever going to bring peace to that region which has seen so much hatred and so much war, we are going to have to treat the Palestinian people with respect and dignity.”

Bernie Sanders - at the Democratic Presidential Debate in Brooklyn, NY, April 14th, 2016.

https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/19/the-sandersclinton-split-on-israel/ 

He's got my vote. None of the other candidates running presently will get it.

I'm shitting in my pants.

Slash AND Angus Young on stage

It truly rocks! Axl sounds great!

AND .... in standard tuning!

Quote of the day - 04-17-2016.

Paul Rosenberg

"... it’s not just Sanders as an individual candidate they don’t like. Rather, it’s a reflection of deep ideological biases, which the Sanders campaign challenges head on. He is attacking the establishment for decades of mismanagement—on the rigged economy and the corruption of democracy most of all, but also on climate change, reckless foreign wars, and more recently (having actually listened to and learned from Black Lives Matter activists) on racial justice. The establishment media are part of the establishment, and they are attacking Sanders in return—not because he’s wrong, but because he’s right. They just need to find the right terrain on which to attack him—and this is what this latest round has been all about, finding some way to convince the electorate to see Sanders in the same superficially negative terms that they themselves do."

Context: http://www.salon.com/2016/04/17/our_media_is_just_this_dumb_easily_suckered_press_screws_bernie_sanders_again/

Well at least one Seattle sports team is doing well.

It's the Seattle Thunderbirds.

http://edmontonjournal.com/sports/hockey/whl-playoffs-seattle-thunderbirds-edge-everett-silvertips-to-advance 

WHL playoffs: Seattle Thunderbirds edge Everett Silvertips to advance

The Canadian Press
More from The Canadian Press

Published on: April 16, 2016 | Last Updated: April 17, 2016 9:41 AM MDT

KENT, Wash. — Ryan Gropp scored the eventual winner in the second period as the Seattle Thunderbirds advanced to the Western Conference final with a 3-2 victory over the Everett Silvertips in Game 5 Saturday night.
The Thunderbirds won the Western Hockey League second-round series 4-1.

Steve Miller's rant about the 'Rock 'n Roll Hall of Fame' was spot-on, not 'bizarre' as the current media narrative.

His only mistake was giving those elitists at Rolling Stone a forum to sell copy off his thoughts.

It's the middle of the week

And I already wish it was Saturday.

You'd think this would draw more attention.

https://www.rt.com/usa/339347-sanders-colorado-delegate-mistake/

Originally, it was projected that Sanders – who won the Democratic caucus against Hillary Clinton by a tally of 60 percent to 40 percent – would earn 38 delegates compared to Clinton’s 28. After tallying Clinton’s support from 10 Colorado superdelegates, the former secretary of state tied Sanders 38-38 in delegates. If she won the support of the last two state superdelegates, Clinton could have actually won Colorado despite losing the primary vote by 20 points.

The juicy bit -

However, the Denver Post uncovered what Colorado Democratic Party Chairman Rick Palacio called “a reporting error on caucus night” that led the party to underreport Sanders’ support in 10 precincts from Denver County by almost four percent. This led to projections showing Clinton would tie Sanders in delegates from that district instead of giving Sanders a two-delegate edge.

Giganto strawberry

From Costco. I placed next to a Hershey Kiss for comparison.

DAMN!

Sigh - what happened to Canadian teams in the NHL?

 

 http://www.tsn.ca/nhl/standings#/league

Only two teams at .500 or over?

Bottom six teams in the standings are all Canadian (well that last one I don't care for).

Quote of the day - 04-08-2016.

Robert Parry -

So, is Hillary Clinton “qualified” to be President of the United States? While her glittering résumé may say one thing, her record – a litany of misjudgments, miscalculations and catastrophes – may say something else.

Context here  - https://consortiumnews.com/2016/04/08/is-hillary-clinton-qualified/

The distance past -

Clinton’s most notable undertaking as First Lady was her disastrous health insurance plan that was concocted with her characteristic secrecy and then was unveiled to decidedly mixed reviews. Much of the scheme was mind-numbing in its complexity and – because of the secrecy – it lacked sufficient input from Congress where it found few enthusiastic supporters.

Not only did the plan collapse under its own weight, but it helped take many Democratic members of Congress with it, as the Republicans reversed a long era of Democratic control of the House of Representatives in 1994. Because of Hillary Clinton’s health-care disaster, a chastened Democratic Party largely took the idea of providing near-universal health-insurance coverage to Americans off the table for the next 15 years.

In Clinton’s next career as a senator from New York, her most notable action was to enthusiastically support President George W. Bush’s Iraq War. Clinton did not just vote to authorize the war in 2002, she remained a war supporter until 2006 when it became politically untenable to do so, that is, if she had any hope of winning the Democratic presidential nomination against anti-war Sen. Barack Obama.

The recent past -

Again and again, Hillary Clinton seemed incapable of learning from her costly errors – or perhaps she just understands that the politically safest course is to do what Washington’s neocon-dominated foreign policy establishment wants done. That way you get hailed as a serious thinker in the editorial pages of The Washington Post and at the think-tank conferences.

Virtually all the major columnists and big-name pundits praised Clinton’s hawkish tendencies as Secretary of State, from her escalating tensions with Iran to tipping the balance of the Obama administration’s debate in favor of a “regime change” mission in Libya to urging direct U.S. military intervention in Syria in pursuit of another “regime change” there.

Final vacation sunset - This time - Loomis Lake State Park.

Too bad some assholes had to get into the shot - oh well.

Pictures of Manzanita Beach, Oregon.

Good about these - no idiots having their exhaust all over us. There was enough strange grey crud on the ground anyways.

Another sunset in Long Beach, WA

It's about as much happiness as I can get these days.

How much time do you have to read the Panama Papers?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers

I am somewhat suspicious that it's been sitting with a group for ~ a year before being published. I have to wonder if certain information, groups or people's names have been redacted in that time -

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panama_Papers#Leak

Leak

More than a year before the first publication of the Panama leaks in April 2016, the German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung received 2.6 terabytes of documents related to Mossack Fonseca from an anonymous source.^[4]
The total size of the leaked documents dwarfs that of the Wikileaks Cablegate 2010^[4] (1.7 GB),^[23] Offshore Leaks 2013 (260 GB), Lux Leaks 2014 (4 GB), and Swiss Leaks 2015 (3.3 GB). The data primarily comprises e-mails, PDF files, photos, and excerpts of an internal Mossack Fonseca database. It covers a period spanning from the 1970s to the spring of 2016.^[4] The Panama Papers leak provide data on some 214,000 companies. There is a folder for each shell firm that contains e-mails, contracts, transcripts, and scanned documents.^[4] The leak comprises 4,804,618 emails, 3,047,306 database format files, 2,154,264 PDFs, 1,117,026 images, 320,166 text files, and 2,242 files in other formats.^[4]
The data had to be systematically indexed. This was done with a proprietary software called Nuix, which is also used by international investigators. The documents were fed to high-performance computers for optical character recognition processing, making the data machine-readable and searchable. Compiled lists of important persons were then cross matched against the processed documents.^[4] The next step in the analysis is to connect persons, roles, flow of money and legality of structures.^[4]

Posting will be light the next few days.

No, not an April Fool's Joke.

Just going to go on vacation for a few days.