{"id":3261,"date":"2016-10-12T09:01:55","date_gmt":"2016-10-12T07:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=3261"},"modified":"2016-10-12T09:06:28","modified_gmt":"2016-10-12T07:06:28","slug":"russia-and-the-usa-converging-in-the-s-bend","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/3261\/","title":{"rendered":"Russia and the USA: Converging in the S-Bend"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the comments of my most recent post<\/a> on Trump, regular commenter and fellow blogger<\/a> Alex K. spots<\/a> an interesting similarity between Russia and the USA:<\/p>\n

In the late 1990s, people who posted about the Clintons deserving pink (prison issue) undies and the MSM being leftwing through and through sounded like boring whiners unloading their loserdom into cyberspace. Losers or not, apparently some of them were right, but it only became obvious to me during this campaign how incredibly corrupt HRC always was and how the US media is capable of lying. They are catching up with Putin\u2019s state media the way they play fast and loose with facts and work up fits of hysteria.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I noted this partly because I came across another unsavoury similarity between the two nations, also in a\u00a0blog comment<\/a>, over at David Thompson’s:<\/p>\n

It doesn’t matter what you do. You are the object, not the subject. Consistency on the side of the rule-makers is not only not required, it would get in their way.
\nI knew we were doomed back about 1980 when I heard an account of a small meat-packer who got in trouble with OSHA (US Federal Occupational Health And Safety). Their inspector noticed the removable cleaning hatch on the packaging line, and told them the presence of the hole in the machine was a violation. Shop owner replies that the Cal-OSHA (California state equivalent) inspector had insisted on the hatch. Too bad, violation, pay up and weld it closed. “But what about Cal-OSHA? They’ll fine me and make me re-install it.” “Not our problem.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is a paragraph near the end of John Mole’s I was a Potato Oligarch<\/em><\/a> where the Moscow police department orders him to install bars in the window of his restaurant’s kitchen as a security measure, only for the fire department to fine him for those very same bars. \u00a0Of course in Russia this was a deliberate scam to keep the income via bribes or fines flowing and in the USA it is simply bureaucratic incompetence paired with callousness, but the result is the same for the end user.<\/p>\n

It’s hard to see how either country is moving in the right direction.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the comments of my most recent post on Trump, regular commenter and fellow blogger Alex K. spots an interesting similarity between Russia and the USA: In the late 1990s, people who posted about the Clintons deserving pink (prison issue) … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21,60,20,3,44],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3261"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3263,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3261\/revisions\/3263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}