Linkage

• Japan Celebrates First Native Sumo Champion in 19 Years (Wall Street Journal) Good on Kisenosato for achieving Yokozona status. I do appreciate the sport, there is a lot of finesse and balance involved, though I am not an avid follower of the sport.
• America's Long-Overdue Opioid Revolution Is Finally Here (Smithsonian) New chemicals which would avoid the side effects of traditional opium derived substances. I'd like to see the doctors and pharma executives who have knowing profited by the addiction epidemic thrown in jail. This has to be a part of the fix.
• Paralyzed man regains use of arms and hands after experimental stem cell therapy at Keck Hospital of USC (University of Southern California) Promising, but we still have a way to go.
• Double Standards: Where Were the Liberal Protestors During Obama’s Wars? (Counterpunch) "They were asleep, weren’t they? Because liberals always sleep when their man is in office,  particularly if their man is a smooth-talking cosmopolitan snake-charmer like Obama who croons about personal freedom and democracy while unleashing the most unspeakable violence on civilians across the Middle East and Central Asia."
• In The Grandest Metaphor Of The Week, An Actual GOP Ghost Train Left 30th Street Station This Morning (PHILEBRITY) Congressional Republicans had a meeting in Philly. Their hotel was surrounded by garbage trucks to keep out protesters, and when the time came to leave, they were afraid to enter the station to use their chartered train. Priceless.
• Obama’s administration made the “Muslim ban” possible and the media won’t tell you (Terra Incognita) Money Quote: "Trump didn’t select seven “Muslim-majority” countries. US President Barack Obama’s administration selected these seven Muslim-majority countries." (Emphasis Original)
• The Real 007 Used Fake News to Get the U.S. into World War II (The Daily Beast) If all the assertions by Democratic Party apparatchiks regarding Putin's meddling in US elections are true, they still pale beside Winston Churchill's.
• Crowds are wise enough to know when other people will get it wrong (Ars Technica) An interesting development regarding the predictive powers of the Delphi principle. Basically, the more that a group thinks that other people will get the answer wrong, the more likely that they are right.
• Obama built a deportation machine that Trump can follow (McClatchy) The main stream media starts to notice.

The video really makes things clear: Many of Trump's policies are extensions of Obama's: Mass deportations, coddling the big bankers, implicit and explicit support for torture (Under Obama, they were not prosecuted, they were promoted to run the agencies), etc.

What's more the consequences of these policies led to a Completely Foreseeable backlash which put Trump in office.