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Neoliberal war on reality bulleing, 2020

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[Feb 28, 2020] My contribution to musical healing today: "Ship Of Fools" by World Party dedicated in protest to the horrible Democrat establishment.

Feb 28, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

ChrisAtRU , , February 27, 2020 at 3:21 pm

... My contribution to musical healing today: "Ship Of Fools" by World Party dedicated in protest to the horrible Democrat establishment.

[Feb 28, 2020] Black Panther party founder's comment on Bernie rally: "Trump and Bloomberg are two cheeks on the same ass"

Feb 28, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Sam , , February 27, 2020 at 2:42 pm

I just went to his rally here in Winston-Salem. Incredible energy and it built as the rally went on; with students loving the local Black Panther party founder's comment "Trump and Bloomberg are two cheeks on the same ass" as well as minimum wage and marijuana. As a student at a relatively politically inactive college, it is great to be a part of other schools and students fighting to give themselves a future we can confide in and he and Nina Turner are great at providing incentive to vote. I hope he begins to tie Medicare for all to COVID for it is the only sensible way to combat it and would leave everyone in the dust on the issue.

[Feb 28, 2020] The 20th century model of [pandemic] containment was protecting lives. The 21st century model is protecting markets

Feb 28, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Geo , , February 27, 2020 at 2:36 pm

"The 20th century model of [pandemic] containment was protecting lives. The 21st century model is protecting markets."

https://twitter.com/jonst0kes/status/1233088857060626433?s=21

[Feb 28, 2020] "Abort operation! Russian agent Bernie Sanders has been compromised!"

Notable quotes:
"... I would suggest amending this to: Official D policy: "no candidate who intends to govern in the interest of the entirety of the citizenry should seek the nomination of this Party" ..."
Feb 28, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

clarky90 , , February 27, 2020 at 5:04 pm

"Abort operation! Russian agent Bernie Sanders has been compromised!"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=71&v=4xQTr14WMMs&feature=emb_logo

RT admits that Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are both Russian Agents!

USAian Patriot, Michael Bloomberg has uncovered the truth and heroically, "pulled aside the curtain". (sarc)

Mel , , February 27, 2020 at 5:13 pm

A candidate should not be trying to win the nomination.

LET'S give medals to EVERYbody!

Samuel Conner , , February 27, 2020 at 8:16 pm

I would suggest amending this to: Official D policy: "no candidate who intends to govern in the interest of the entirety of the citizenry should seek the nomination of this Party"

[Feb 27, 2020] Nixon about the last Dems debate

Feb 27, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

... attacks on Sanders may simply expose his opponents' own political desperation.

"Buchanan," Richard Nixon once instructed me after I went to work for him in 1966, "Whenever you hear of a coalition forming up to 'Stop X,' be sure to put your money on X."

[Feb 26, 2020] Why oh why would I waste my vote on these Democratic/Republican pseudo-fascists when I can vote for the only candidate promising me a free pony

Feb 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Gregory , Feb 26 2020 18:23 utc | 38

Why oh why would I waste my vote on these Democratic/Republican pseudo-fascists when I can vote for the only candidate promising me a free pony !!...I present the next President of the United States:

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

SharonM , Feb 26 2020 18:33 utc | 39

@38 Gregory

How's he going to pay for the ponies when most taxes will go to time traveling studies and zombie apocalypse defense? But brushing your teeth certainly will appeal to the middle class;)

[Feb 26, 2020] A serious US politician has to demonstrate a large capacity for betrayal.

Highly recommended!
Feb 26, 2020 | www.unz.com

Levtraro , says: Show Comment February 25, 2020 at 6:52 pm GMT

I suspect his open-borders advocacy and Russia-bashing too are lies; these are lines of defence against internal forces. It makes sense for him to take those positions while he seeks the nomination. If he gets it, he can betray those positions. A serious politician has to demonstrate a large capacity for betrayal. At the end of the day, he is a hardened politician like the rest.

[Feb 26, 2020] How many more years will we be blessed with fables about those dastardly Russians and their omnipotent control of US elections?

Feb 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

SteveR , Feb 26 2020 18:03 utc | 31

Darn Russians made people pay $1750 to $3200 to attend the debates last night and clap for Bloomberg. The Russians also aired a long Bloomberg informercial and an anti-Medicare for All commercial during the ad breaks - to divide us. Putin will stop at nothing.

[Feb 26, 2020] On possibility of Sander supporters reaction to the brokered convention

Feb 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

tongue.stan , 2 hours ago

In the brokered convention, The Body Double Pantsuit will get all of the bought and paid for super delegates, and Big Mike will pop out of the giant cake on stage for an Oprah-like orgy of identity politics madness. Little Mike is just buying his way into their cabinet.

If they manage to rig a win in November, half the country will wish they had the Wuhan Flu.

That's the view from the bleacher seats.

Anunnaki , 47 minutes ago

Sandroids gonna burn Milwaukee to the ground

[Feb 26, 2020] Why Trump will win

Feb 26, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Kooshy , Feb 26 2020 21:32 utc | 51

"This discussion is frankly irrelevant. Trump is assured of re-selection because he's appeased the only two constituencies that matter: the military industrial complex and the zionist lobby. "

No you forgot the other constituencies that will vote for him. Namely the dumb ass stupid rednecks , and the as stupid evangelist.

[Feb 26, 2020] On Steele dossier

Feb 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Freespeaker , 55 minutes ago

Steele dossier. Fruit of the Poisonous Tree .

Wow72 , 52 minutes ago

Fruit of the Poisonous Urinating Tree.. Its beyond...

[Feb 26, 2020] One problem of advanced age

Feb 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

fliebinite , 5 hours ago

These 70+ year old politicians have a hard time telling a lie on a dime. That's why the dems like the young ones like Buttigieg, Obama, McGreevey and their other gay candidates. They are natural actors.

Yannis , 5 hours ago

Dude this circus is amazing

LOL123 , 5 hours ago

If Bloomberg bought 21 seats to get Pelosi in.... He's not a very good investor. He buys damaged goods. 🔨Lol

venturen , 5 hours ago

He is buying people that DO WHAT HE SAYS. Smarter people want to think for themselves.

Democrats are just Wall Street prostitutes

[Feb 26, 2020] Why Sanders was booed for highlighting Bloomberg's "strong and enthusiastic base of support" among fellow billionaires?

Only Democrats can reach such a level of hypocrisy. They preach one thing to you and then turn around and do the opposite with no shame.
Feb 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

It's easy: Nothing says more about the "party of the people" like $1,750 to $3,200 tickets.

Asked about the crowd's behavior in an interview following the debate, Sanders said "to get a ticket to the debate, you had to be fairly wealthy."

The Bloomberg campaign denied that it stacked the audience with paid supporters amid rampant social media speculation that the billionaire " purchased " a portion of the crowd to create the appearance of a strong performance following his poor showing in Las Vegas last week.


Victory_Rossi , 2 minutes ago

Fairly wealthy? I refuse to believe that anyone would pay a couple of grand to go to a ******* debate.

Musum , 4 minutes ago

In America, $1750-$3200 per seat is democracy.

And oligarchs on Wall St. and industry is capitalism.

You don't have to go far to figure out why Sanders is popular. And voting doesn't matter.

XXX , 15 minutes ago

If it was serious, there wouldn't be a "studio audience", ala Jerry Springer, just reasoned arguments, courtesy and professionalism, all kept under tight control by an unbiased moderator. But it's not serious. It's just political carnival time, clowns only.

XXX , 1 minute ago

Yes. True. It's a shitshow for sure.

XXX, 16 minutes ago

Disgusting hypocrisy. Most of the U.S. citizenry Rep&Dem don't even have that kind of $ available for an emergency let alone some worthless, useless, meaningless debate for an election that will never be happen regardless of whether 100% of the information is presented that it did happen.

These psychopaths really are some sick mf'ers.

[Feb 26, 2020] Bloomberg, In Freudian Slip, Brags He Bought Democratic Majority In The House In 2018

"Wow!!! He's admitting he BOUGHT those seats! OMG!" -- Donald Trump Jr.
I don't view wealth as something that validates intelligence. -Steve Jobs
Notable quotes:
"... I bough-... I got them ..."
"... "Wow!!! He's admitting he BOUGHT those seats! OMG!" -- ..."
"... or rather buying ..."
Feb 26, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Washington Post commentary and the rare attention of the mainstream in a moment underscoring how the elites view their role in America's two-party system.

While he was touting his $100 million in donations to House Democrats, he essentially bragged that he "bought" 21 congressional Democrats their seats in 2018 midterms .

Bloomberg came within a hair's breadth of saying he *bought* the Democratic majority in the House and caught himself as it came out of his mouth pic.twitter.com/DG0keVMo2J

-- Brandon Wall (@Walldo) February 26, 2020

"Let's just go on the record, they talk about 40 Democrats," Bloomberg said, referring to former Vice President Joe Biden.

"Twenty-one of those were people that I spent $100 million to help elect," he continued.

"All of the new Democrats that came in and put Nancy Pelosi in charge and gave the Congress the ability to control this president, I bough-... I got them ."

Incredible. In the #DemDebate , billionaire Bloomberg boasted that he "bought" right-wing neoliberal Democrats like Nancy Pelosi

Then after saying "bought," he quickly corrected himself and said "I bought, uh got them" pic.twitter.com/2mcDgPPhIJ

-- Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) February 26, 2020

Needless to say the backlash was swift and merciless.

I BOUGHT THEM -- Bloomberg accidentally admitting his world view.

-- Markos Moulitsas (@markos) February 26, 2020

"Wow!!! He's admitting he BOUGHT those seats! OMG!" -- Donald Trump Jr. had also chimed in.

The billionaire founder of Bloomberg LP has faced deep criticism for leapfrogging other Democratic primary contenders in the national polls, despite being a latecomer.

He's faced labels of being an "oligarch" and essentially muscling, or rather buying , his way into debates based on his limitless campaign self-funding.


Comment__commentAvatar___xgVA3 talk-stream-comment-avatar talk-slot-comment-avatar" data-slot-name="commentAvatar"> Angry Panda , 1 hour ago

An oligarch buying politicians? I am shocked just shocked.

talk-slot-comment-reactions" data-slot-name="commentReactions"> row 2 play_arrow talk-slot-comment-actions" data-slot-name="commentActions"> Comment__commentAvatar___xgVA3 talk-stream-comment-avatar talk-slot-comment-avatar" data-slot-name="commentAvatar"> TheVigilant1 , 2 hours ago

Separation of Powers is for losers.

talk-slot-comment-reactions" data-slot-name="commentReactions"> play_arrow 1 play_arrow talk-slot-comment-actions" data-slot-name="commentActions"> Comment__commentAvatar___xgVA3 talk-stream-comment-avatar talk-slot-comment-avatar" data-slot-name="commentAvatar"> DEMIZEN , 2 hours ago

its getting hillarious outhere:

just look at this one:

Democratic megadonor Bernard Schwartz has started reaching out to party leaders to encourage them to coalesce around a candidate for president in order to stop the surge of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

and then we call iran a regime?

[Feb 26, 2020] Studying the mortality stats, at first glance, this looks like a sound chemical attempt to resolve the pension fund crisis

Paraphrasing Chomsky: When the press focuses on the health status of the population reach for your pocket, and see who's pulling out your wallet.
Feb 26, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Tim Jenkins ,

Oh well, studying the stats, at first glance, this looks like a sound chemical attempt to resolve the pension fund crisis

Excuse the skeptic, now withdrawing gracefully.

Gall ,

If I was being cynical I'd agree.

RobG ,

Many people are speculating that this coronavirus malarky is all about the coming global financial meltdown.

The way coronavirus is being mega fear hyped, along with unprecedented 'lock-downs' and enforced quarantine for huge numbers of people, does seem to suggest that the psychopaths who rule us know that when the global financial meltdown comes there'll be mega civil unrest, and what better way to control this unrest than a Frankenstein bug?

[Feb 25, 2020] The best thing about this debate is that Buttigieg won t survive to another one

Is it somehow an indicator of peak neoliberalism when a candidate literally begs for money from the debate stage?
Notable quotes:
"... Pee Wee Pete indeed. ..."
"... Is Bloomberg even worse than last week? Yes or Hell yes? ..."
Feb 25, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

shinola , February 25, 2020 at 8:13 pm

Buttgag's 1st comment brings up Russia! Russia! Rooskies would love to see chaos caused by Trump vs. Sanders.

Pee Wee Pete indeed.

flora , February 25, 2020 at 8:15 pm

1st question to Sanders: The economy is good. Why would your's be better.

Big River Bandido , February 25, 2020 at 8:15 pm

Bloomberg again just attempted to claim that he reduced stop and frisk by 95% which is a complete lie.

Samuel Conner, February 25, 2020 at 8:19 pm

After he realized it was a problem. I have read that the realization was imposed on him by a court order

flora, February 25, 2020 at 8:18 pm

Sanders: ideas
Warren: Sanders ideas, but I'd do it better.
hizzoner: Sanders is a Russian agent.
Butte: cliche, cliche, cliche
klobe: rhetoric, name drop, cliche, rhetroic, name drop a 3rd way SC pol.

chuckster , February 25, 2020 at 8:19 pm

Is Bloomberg even worse than last week? Yes or Hell yes?

[Feb 23, 2020] Did not Pompous Pompeo accidentally found a good method to ensure vassals compliance?

Notable quotes:
"... He is making the USA a laughing stock, very threatening for sure, but he is a laughing stock and he perfectly sets up the scenario to ridicule his mongrel stupid president. ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Piotr Berman , Feb 11 2020 23:08 utc | 26

On the big issue though I cant help seeing Pontious Pompeo as hurling himself about the globe tilting at windmills. He is making the USA a laughing stock, very threatening for sure, but he is a laughing stock and he perfectly sets up the scenario to ridicule his mongrel stupid president.

uncle tungsten | Feb 11 2020 22:52 utc | 30

Isn't it a good method? This way, the vassals can comply with a smile.

[Feb 23, 2020] The shortage of manpower in the US army can be compensated by giving people like Professor of identity studies Karlan M16 and sending then into trenches to fight Iranians

Dec 04, 2019 |

[Feb 23, 2020] The most important issue in 2020 elections is not longer "It's economy stupid", but "It's the Empire, stupid."

Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Feb 20 2020 18:21 utc | 18

Bill Clinton, 1992:
It's the economy, stupid.

Jackrabbit, 2020:

It's the Empire, stupid. (tm)

!!

[Feb 23, 2020] Intelligence agencies who invested hundred of millions in face recognition technology will not be happy

Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Since Foxconn is getting into mask development, we're surprised Apple hasn't released plans for an iMask, or scheming Elon Musk hasn't touted a Cybermask.

To sum up, we could all be wearing masks one day – if you think that's crazy just look at what's happening across Asia. Mask wearing is coming to America – it's only a matter of time.

[Feb 23, 2020] Looks like the USA intelligence (or, more correctly semi-intelligence) agencies work directly from KGB playbook or Bloomberg as Putin's Trojan Horse in 2020 elections

Highly recommended!
Surprising lack on intelligence in intelligence community. But after Brennan and "ruptured" Pompeo as CIA chiefs who would be surprised?" Or more correctly utter despise of ordinary Americans: 'nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people' ~ H L Mencken.
But seriously, if Putin does now have the power to decide US elections, he simply makes his preferred choice one day before the election. There is no reason to open cards right now. You could not make this up. What we have now is Government by Gossip and Innuendo with intelligence crooks on the frontline of spreading the disinformation.
Notable quotes:
"... The PUTIN's aim is to sow distrust among the US population. The USA, a peaceful civilized society with apparently no internal conflicts maintains a similar peaceful empire for the benefit of all humanity. ..."
"... The impersonate evil of the PUTIN has of course every intention to destroy the present state of tranquility and therefore aims to destruct the undisputed peaceful leader of this empire by sowing internal conflict. ..."
"... The concept of democracy was invented by the Kremlin, to sow discord ..."
"... The concept of democracy was invented by the Kremlin, to sow discord ..."
Feb 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

A careful reading of the news provides that Mike Bloomberg, who had two Russian grandfathers, is Putin's asset.

Consider:

Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump - New York Times , February 20 2020

Rather than impersonating Americans as they did in 2016, Russian operatives are working to get Americans to repeat disinformation , the officials said. That strategy gets around social media companies' rules that prohibit "inauthentic speech."

It is Bloomberg, working as a Russian operative, who pays the trolls that repeat disinformation.

Twitter suspends 70 pro-Bloomberg 'spam' accounts - The Hill , February 21, 2020

The temporary employees recruited by Bloomberg's camp are given the title "deputy field organizer" and make $2,500 a month to promote his White House bid among their followers . The employees can choose to use campaign-approved language in their posts.

Twitter said the practice violated its "Platform Manipulation and Spam Policy," which was established in 2019 to respond to Russia's expansive troll network that was tapped in 2016 to meddle in the U.S. elections.

Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign - Washington Post , February 21 2020

In that closed hearing for the House Intelligence Committee, lawmakers were also told that Sanders had been informed about Russia's interference. The prospect of two rival campaigns both receiving help from Moscow appears to reflect what intelligence officials have previously described as Russia's broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections.

Here are Bloomberg's behind the scene machinations which are sowing division and uncertainty about the validity of American elections. This is exactly what Russia wants.

Bloomberg quietly plotting brokered convention strategy - Politico , February 20, 2020

Mike Bloomberg is privately lobbying Democratic Party officials and donors allied with his moderate opponents to flip their allegiance to him -- and block Bernie Sanders -- in the event of a brokered national convention.
...
It's a presumptuous play for a candidate who hasn't yet won a delegate or even appeared on a ballot. And it could also bring havoc to the convention , raising the prospect of party insiders delivering the nomination to a billionaire over a progressive populist.

Lock him up!


Peter | Feb 22 2020 10:27 utc | 4

Mike Bloomberg Is Putin's Agent

This should have been obvious for some time.

The PUTIN's aim is to sow distrust among the US population. The USA, a peaceful civilized society with apparently no internal conflicts maintains a similar peaceful empire for the benefit of all humanity.

The impersonate evil of the PUTIN has of course every intention to destroy the present state of tranquility and therefore aims to destruct the undisputed peaceful leader of this empire by sowing internal conflict.

This is why from Sanders to Warren to Gabbard to Bloomberg to Trump everyone is on the PUTIN payroll or subconsciously exposed to some mind controlling rays he sends via satellite to the USA.

The PUTIN is the invention by the Russian Federation after their successful evil attempt to evade the good intentions of the EMPIRE to embrace Russia in its sphere of peaceful tranquility.

Bad PUTIN.

Christoph , Feb 22 2020 12:54 utc | 14

"The prospect of two rival campaigns both receiving help from Moscow appears to reflect what intelligence officials have previously described as Russia's broader interest in sowing division in the United States and uncertainty about the validity of American elections" WaPo, 2/21/20.

This level if clinical delusion is reminiscent of the Führer's last days in the bunker.

How about free passage to (swampy) Latin America?

Brendan , Feb 22 2020 13:10 utc | 15
I know, I know, it's a waste of time trying to ridicule the media when they're already doing that to themselves. Satire is definitely dead when the Washington Post reports about "two rival campaigns both receiving help from Moscow". WaPo's attempts to explain that the purpose of this bizarre behavior is "sowing division" makes it look even more incredible.
/div> The concept of democracy was invented by the Kremlin, to sow discord .

Posted by: bjd , Feb 22 2020 13:13 utc | 16

The concept of democracy was invented by the Kremlin, to sow discord .

Posted by: bjd | Feb 22 2020 13:13 utc | 16

Trailer Trash , Feb 22 2020 13:49 utc | 23
>How about free passage to (swampy) Latin America?
> Posted by: Christoph | Feb 22 2020 12:54 utc | 14

I'm thinking the Bermuda Triangle would fit right in with their magical thinking and mad delusions.

Jackrabbit , Feb 22 2020 13:58 utc | 24
Bloomberg + Trump = Checkmate?

Trump will say b writes "fake news" .

Damn you Putin!

!!

jared , Feb 22 2020 14:02 utc | 25
Perhaps the intelligence community would just tell us who we should vote for so as not to fall into Putins trap.

[Feb 23, 2020] Russian under each election booth: Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump

With the help of intelligence (or should we say semi-intelligence) agencies (with the second job as a shadow force that navigates American people to the proper choice ) the best money can buy democracy always ends as a comedy.
Feb 23, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

Lawmakers Are Warned That Russia Is Meddling to Re-elect Trump - New York Times , February 20 2020

Rather than impersonating Americans as they did in 2016, Russian operatives are working to get Americans to repeat disinformation , the officials said. That strategy gets around social media companies' rules that prohibit "inauthentic speech."

[Feb 23, 2020] They want what every first-term administration wants - a second term.

Feb 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Curtis , Jan 4 2020 21:43 utc | 78

John Clark : "Reciprocity." That's a clever name for it. Revenge is a very, very, very dangerous motivation.
Robert Ritter : Are you able to handle this operation or not? What I'm looking for here is a simple yes or no.
John Clark : What you're looking for is a political mess.
Robert Ritter : Yes or no?
John Clark : Is that what they want? Because that's what this is.
Robert Ritter : They want what every first-term administration wants - a second term.

from the movie Clear And Present Danger

[Feb 23, 2020] Michael Bloomberg is an Idiot

I used to think Bloomberg was smarter than what's been revealed recently. I'm truly shocked at the ease with which he's publicly stated such ignorant, elitist opinions.
Notable quotes:
"... It would be so much easier if Bloomberg was russian... but he's a capitalist.. Oh well... ..."
Feb 19, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Michael Bloomberg really did disparage farmers and metalworkers by saying that these are just "processes" that can be taught to anyone and then stating that information technology work requires a higher order of brainpower, implying that farmers and metalworkers are inferior to information technology professionals. I heard it myself.

It would be so much easier if Bloomberg was russian... but he's a capitalist.. Oh well...

[Feb 23, 2020] The Axis of Weasels

Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Anunnaki , 8 minutes ago link

The Axis of Weasels - The Deep State, the Presstitute Media and the Democratic Party

[Feb 23, 2020] An important difference

Feb 23, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Jacqueline Grace , 2 months ago

It's not "your tube" anymore.......it's "their tube".

[Feb 23, 2020] If you fire 70% of the admirals and generals you will increase the military capabilities of the US military by 40 percent

Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

3 hours ago (Edited)

If you fire 70% of the admirals and generals you will increase the military capabilities of the US military by 40%.

They are incompetent hacks who are better on their knees in front of the MIC and Congress then they are on any battlefield.

At least during WWII we had less of them and no one was hesitant to fire at least some of them for incompetence. I say sum of them because many of the war hero generals needed to be removed including Bradly, Eisenhower, Halsey, Nimitz, and even MacArthur.

But today, no one gets fired for anything.

Literally they have a special class of MBA's being generals and and strategic thinkers and it has turned out to be a disaster for the military and the US.

An example by way of analogy is look at Boeing. How much better would Boeing be if they fired all the MBA's and replaced them with engineers who loved air planes. Boeing would make a lot less profit but its planes would be the best in the world.

[Feb 23, 2020] Viva #MIGA

Feb 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

14 minutes ago

[Feb 22, 2020] It is about time that AMERICAN billionaires, AMERICAN banksters, AMERICAN generals, AMERICAN rotten CEOs from pharma, MIC, energy, and AMERICAN lobbyists with cash, reassert and regain control of the White House like in the good ole patriotic days. Down with borsch!

Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Erelis , Feb 22 2020 20:38 utc | 83

I am for Bloomberg. Why? Because the Russians have taken over the White House. Just ask Hillary.

I errorously believed that billionaires, banksters, generals, rotten CEOs from pharma, MIC, energy, lobbyists with cash, controlled the White House and Trump.

But somehow the Russians pushed all of them out.

It is about time that AMERICAN billionaires, AMERICAN banksters, AMERICAN generals, AMERICAN rotten CEOs from pharma, MIC, energy, and AMERICAN lobbyists with cash, reassert and regain gosh darn control of the White House like in the good ole patriotic days. Down with borsch!

[Feb 22, 2020] Hollywood Goes Full Blacklist and Fails to Grasp the Irony by Larry C Johnson

They don't call it 'programming' for nothing.
Feb 22, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

It is especially galling to see how the Hollywood Community has embraced the era of red-baiting Joseph McCarthy as the new standard for what is acceptable. There was a time that a few brave souls in Hollywood (I am thinking Lucille Ball, Kirk Douglas and Gregory Peck), spoke out against the blacklisting of actors, writers and directors for their past political ties to the Soviet Union.

If you are a film buff (and I consider myself one) you should be familiar with these great movies that remind the viewer of the horrors visited upon actors, writers and directors during the Hollywood Blacklist:

[Feb 22, 2020] I understand "social media" literally in the Orwellian sense, it is "social" media just like war is peace. The true meaning is "asocial media" which prevents real interaction, and is under complete control by big brother: you can become a non-person at any moment.

Feb 22, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Norwegian , Feb 22 2020 19:12 utc | 66

Posted by: Bemildred | Feb 22 2020 13:41 utc | 20
The "social" is "social media" is in contrast to "professional" or "business" or "commercial" media, i.e. the MSM and other commercial media.

I understand "social media" literally in the Orwellian sense, it is "social" media just like war is peace. The true meaning is "asocial media" which prevents real interaction, and under complete control by big brother, you can become a non-person at any moment.

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here." ..."
"... Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke." ..."
"... On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible. ..."
"... Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee. ..."
"... It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. ..."
"... Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves. ..."
"... What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets ..."
"... It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy. ..."
"... The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian ..."
Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com
Authored by Philip Giraldi via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

One of the more interesting aspects of the nauseating impeachment trial in the Senate was the repeated vilification of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin.

To hate Russia has become dogma on both sides of the political aisle, in part because no politician has really wanted to confront the lesson of the 2016 election, which was that most Americans think that the federal government is basically incompetent and staffed by career politicians like Nancy Pelosi and Mitch McConnell who should return back home and get real jobs .

Worse still, it is useless, and much like the one trick pony the only thing it can do is steal money from the taxpayers and waste it on various types of self-gratification that only politicians can appreciate. That means that the United States is engaged is fighting multiple wars against make-believe enemies while the country's infrastructure rots and a host of officially certified grievance groups control the public space.

It sure doesn't look like Kansas anymore.

The fact that opinion polls in Europe suggest that many Europeans would rather have Vladimir Putin than their own hopelessly corrupt leaders is suggestive. One can buy a whole range of favorable t-shirts featuring Vladimir Putin on Ebay , also suggesting that most Americans find the official Russophobia narrative both mysterious and faintly amusing. They may not really be into the expressed desire of the huddled masses in D.C. to go to war to bring true U.S. style democracy to the un-enlightened.

One also must wonder if the Democrats are reading the tea leaves correctly. If they think that a slogan like "Honest Joe Biden will keep us safe from Moscow" will be a winner in 2020 they might again be missing the bigger picture. Since the focus on Trump's decidedly erratic behavior will inevitably die down after the impeachment trial is completed, the Democrats will have to come up with something compelling if they really want to win the presidency and it sure won't be the largely fictionalized Russian threat.

Nevertheless, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment. His "closing arguments" speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as "magisterial," "powerful," and "impressive." The Washington Post 's resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it "a grand slam" while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it "dazzling." Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it "a great job" and added that Schiff is now "a rock star." Daily Beast enthused that the remarks "will go down in history " and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it "a closing statement for the ages." Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting "I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country."

Actually, a better adjective would have been "scary" and not merely due to its elaboration of the alleged high crimes and misdemeanors committed by President Trump, much of which was undeniably true even if not necessarily impeachable. It was scary because it was a warmongers speech, full of allusions to Russia, to Moscow's "interference" in 2016, and to the ridiculous proposition that if Trump were to be defeated in 2020 he might not concede and Russia could even intervene militarily in the United States in support of its puppet.

Schiff insisted that Trump must be removed now to "assure the integrity" of the 2020 election. He elaborated somewhat ambiguously that "The president's misconduct cannot be decided at the ballot box, for we cannot be assured that the vote will be fairly won." Schiff also unleashed one of the most time honored but completely lame excuses for going to war, claiming that military assistance to Ukraine that had been delayed by Trump was essential for U.S. national security. He said "As one witness put it during our impeachment inquiry, the United States aids Ukraine and her people so that we can fight Russia over there, and we don't have to fight Russia here."

Schiff, a lawyer who has never had to put his life on the line for anything and whose son sports a MOSSAD t-shirt, is one of those sunshine soldiers who finds it quite acceptable if someone else does the dying. Journalist Max Blumenthal observed that "Liberals used to mock Bush supporters when they used this jingoistic line during the war on Iraq. Now they deploy it to justify an imperialist proxy war against a nuclear power." Aaron Mate at The Nation added that "For all the talk about Russia undermining faith in U.S. elections, how about Russiagaters like Schiff fear-mongering w/ hysterics like this? Let's assume Ukraine did what Trump wanted: announce a probe of Burisma. Would that delegitimize a 2020 U.S. election? This is a joke."

Over at Antiwar Daniel Lazare explains how the Wednesday speech was "a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to [Democratic Party] dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they'll be driven from the fold."

The orthodoxy that Lazare was writing about includes the established Nancy Pelosi/Chuck Schumer narrative that Russia invaded "poor innocent Ukraine" in 2014, that it interfered in the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton, and that it is currently trying to smear Joe Biden. One might add to that the growing consensus that Russia can and will interfere again in 2020 to help Trump. Absent from the narrative is the part how the U.S. intervened in Ukraine first to remove its government and the fact that there is something very unsavory about Joe Biden's son taking a high-paying sinecure board position from a notably corrupt Ukrainian oligarch while his father was Vice President and allegedly directing U.S. assistance to a Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

On Wednesday, Schiff maintained that "Russia is not a threat to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again." Not surprisingly, if one substitutes the "United States" for "Russia" and "Kremlin" and changes "Ukraine" to Iran or Venezuela, the Schiff comment actually becomes much more credible.

The compulsion on the part of the Democrats to bring down Trump to avoid having to deal with their own failings has brought about a shift in their established foreign policy, placing the neocons and their friends back in charge. For Schiff, who has enthusiastically supported every failed American military effort since 9/11, today's Russia is the Soviet Union reborn, and don't you forget it pardner! Newsweek is meanwhile reporting that the U.S. military is reading the tea leaves and is gearing up to fight the Russians. Per Schiff, Trump must be stopped as he is part of a grand Russian conspiracy to overthrow everything the United States stands for. If the Kremlin is not stopped now, it's first major step, per Schiff, will be to "remake the map of Europe by dint of military force."

Donald Trump's erratic rule has certainly dismayed many of his former supporters, but the Democratic Party is offering nothing but another helping of George W. Bush/Barack Obama establishment war against the world. We Americans have had enough of that for the past nineteen years. Trump may indeed deserve to be removed based on his actions, but the argument that it is essential to do so because of Russia lurking is complete nonsense. Pretty scary that the apparent chief promoter of that point of view is someone who actually has power in the government, one Adam Schiff, head of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee.


Chain Man , 10 hours ago link

If the USA doesn't have a bogey man to be afraid of, the USA might worry more and to insist on fixing the problems within the Nation.

So many of our politicians are guilty of allowing un constitutional on going act like the removal of Due Process of law for some people and the on going bailout of Global Markets with the US Dollar. The Patriot act and FISA Courts should have been gone.

J Frank Parnell , 11 hours ago link

I never saw the problem with Russians. They practice the same religion as I do and are mostly the same color...

Sid Finch , 10 hours ago link

Agreed. He seems as about as close as a leader can get to genuinely liking his country and people. It seems the ones here only give a **** about carbon, Central and South Americans, and cutting off my kids genitalia.

Archeofuturist , 11 hours ago link

Well let see.... Who has a historical beef with Russia and controls both parties. I wonder?

globalintelhub , 11 hours ago link

It is scary, but what else can Schiff say? They have no credible arguments against Trump, or for their own party. They are a bunch of lying scumbags that will kill, cheat, steal, mislead, carpet-bag and anything else unethical to achieve their sleazy goals. When Trump wins in a landslide in 2020, they will claim it's because the Russians 'fixed' the election, and the Democratic party will break into pieces arguing about how they failed and what they did wrong. See www.splittingpennies.com

Alice-the-dog , 11 hours ago link

Since the US Sociopaths In Charge have totally Effed up the nation, and a significant portion of the world, they have to have SOMEBODY to blame. They certainly won't take the blame they deserve themselves.

John Hansen , 10 hours ago link

Don't leave out Israel, they aren't the American peoples friend either.

motiveunclear , 13 hours ago link

There used to be this thing we don't hear used much anymore called "diplomacy" and another useful thing in international politics called "tact".

https://skulltripper.com/2020/01/18/statesmanship/

44magnum , 12 hours ago link

What the ZOG wants the ZOG gets

toady , 13 hours ago link

McCarthyism II. Will the US be able put down a second "red scare"? Tune in next week. Same bat time, same bat channel.

sillycat , 13 hours ago link

lots of words and no answer to the title question. Giraldi does not see the deep ideological problems: Russia is not trying to diversify into a PoC country, they do not worship gays and may be the only white people nation with sustaining birth rate. The US will go to war there is no way to let this continue.

hispanicLoser , 13 hours ago link

The level of Russia hate coming out of the dems is so much greater than that coming out of repubs that one can safely ignore this retarded article.

Jeffersonian Liberal , 12 hours ago link

True. But their hatred is pretended hatred. It is a form of projection.

Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

Its our own fault.

The smart ppl are doing a lousy job of informing the dumb ones about accepted policy like "America Always Needs An Enemy". Smart ones understand that, and see the bigger game because of it.

We fight the dumb ones who believe Russian boogeyman crap, instead of helping them understand they are being misled on who the enemy really is. The dumb ones then fight back and further entrench that brainwashing.

vasilievich , 13 hours ago link

I'm trying to imagine the Russian Army marching down Pennsylvania Avenue. But first, across the Atlantic Ocean.

ombon , 13 hours ago link

It is appropriate to recall the words of Joseph Goebbels: "Give me the media, and I will make a herd of pigs from any nation," and pigs are easy to drive to the slaughterhouse. Only Russia can really resist such a situation in the world. Therefore, she is the enemy.

Dan The Man , 13 hours ago link

Coming Soon... Why the Gullibles Will Believe Anything

south40_dreams , 14 hours ago link

....and the many thieves are gulping at the money spigot.....time to shut that sucker OFF

whatisthat , 14 hours ago link

I would observe there is evidence the corrupt establishment has done more damage to the US than any other country could ever imagine...

Chain Man , 15 hours ago link

The Centrist Democrats and Republicans want to paint the old school God and Country Conservatives Equality and Justice for the USA (Nationalist) into being Russian. How dare we expect enforcement of the Laws on the books against them. They want to be deemed Royalty with all the Elitist Rights.

The old rally call about Russia was always Communist Russia but, they don't do that anymore? Why ? They love their Communist China wage slaves. The Centrist love Communist labor in the name of profits . Human rights be damned it's all about the Global Elitist to them now.

[Feb 21, 2020] How Can America Play Kingmaker in Venezuela When It Can't Be Trusted to Conduct a Caucus in Iowa -- Strategic Culture

Feb 21, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

The headline tells it all ;-)

Future historians, when conducting the messy autopsy on Clown Nation, will point to the first week of February 2020 as the moment when the greatest experiment in popular democracy entered into an inescapable death spiral. This implosion will probably puzzle many people because, as the Commander-in-Chief Donald J. Trump reminded throughout his SOTU address, times are good – indeed, as they so often are before an epic crash.

Don't know how you got all these lucrative primary election contracts for a sub-standard app that a drunk college student computer science major could have designed better. But there should be an investigation into that.

-- Eugene Gu, MD (@eugenegu) February 4, 2020

Just below the surface of the scorching U.S. economy, however, lies a bubbling volcanic lake of political passions – personified by Nancy Pelosi's unhinged behavior at the SOTU that was so outrageous it needs no further comment – will eventually blow its lid, freeze-drying the nation in its treacherous tracks like a modern day Pompeii.

In the week that foretold of impending disaster, the establishment suffered two major setbacks, first by failing to drive out the swamp killer, Donald Trump, and second by failing to name, in transparent and time-honored fashion, the winner of the Iowa state caucus. These tandem events are connected since there is no way the 'deep state' would have accepted two major defeats at the same time. Thus it was forced to derail an enemy potentially more dangerous to the Democratic Party than Donald Trump, and that is the 'democratic socialist' Bernie Sanders.

Here is where America's democratic mask slipped, revealing the true nature of the beast. As the results from the Iowa caucus were being tallied live, Mayor Pete Buttigieg enjoyed an early lead. Eventually, however, the democratic socialist Bernie Sanders started to close the gap before surging ahead of the pack. It was at this precise moment that the results fizzled out, purportedly due to a bad app. Not until the next day were the results made public as Buttigieg was declared the narrow victor, although the small-town mayor had been boasting that he had won the contest before any results were posted. Now to many observers, it looked as though the Democratic Party, sensing the winds of political change in the air, took their ball and stormed home in the middle of the game. Sound familiar?

At this point, a person could either choose to buy the story that a new app for reporting the results simply went kaput, or they could register as a 'conspiracy theorist' by arguing that the dirty Democrats rigged the game when it became apparent that Sanders was heading for victory. There are many reasons for supporting the latter theory, namely because the Democrats had conspired against Sanders before, as WikiLeaks revealed in 2016 with the release of some 20,000 Democratic National Committee emails.

The apps "failure": Des Moines Precinct 80:

Bernie's group had 101 people
Pete's group had 66 people

Bernie & Pete end up tied at 4 delegates following a coin toss.

This is democracy??? 🤔 #IACaucus pic.twitter.com/ZeekGiL6yM

-- andthenwhat? (@NWcarol28) February 5, 2020

And then there is the company behind the app, happily named Shadow Inc, which has a very shadowy lineage indeed. First off, Buttigieg, who certainly profited politically from Shadow's inconceivable incompetence, or expertise, depending on how you look at it, had paid the company tens of thousands of dollars ahead of the Iowa caucus. Second, many of the top executives at Shadow worked in the past for Hillary Clinton's campaign, no small footnote considering that particular campaign's notorious commitment to 'fair play.' Third, efforts by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security to "vet" the Shadow app were rejected out of hand by the Iowa Democratic Party. Now with all of the talk over the past several years about 'Russian meddling' in the U.S. elections, wouldn't allowing the DHS a peek at the new technology seem like the smart thing to do? Maybe Iowans, like so many other Democrats , never really believed the Russian "nothing burger" after all.

[Feb 21, 2020] The catch 22 in 2020 elections: if any of the current Dem dwarfs is nominated he/she will lose to Trump. If Sanders is nominated DNC will make sure that he lose to Trump.

Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Richard Steven Hack , Feb 20 2020 23:13 utc | 66

My prediction - which is based on nothing, to be sure:

Neither Sanders nor Gabbard have any chance of getting the nomination, whatever the DNC establishment and Democratic elites have to do to prevent it, as they did in 2016.

If either are nominated - or any other of the current crop of losers - the Democrats will lose against Trump, despite Trump making all kinds of incredibly stupid statements during the campaign. Because, let's face it, Trump will do stupid stuff all during the election race - and his supporters will no doubt ignore them or praise him for them.

In other words, US "democracy" is a joke and a sham, and I don't expect to pay much attention to the election as the end result will be the same for the rest of us.

[Feb 21, 2020] One thought about Bloomberg

The dog and pony show conducted by corporate news has adult political aspirants panting like sixth graders for teachers attention. Demeaning to all involved.
Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bjd , Feb 20 2020 17:14 utc | 4

Bloomberg knows the price of everyone, but the value of nothing.

[Feb 21, 2020] The best argument

Feb 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Feb 20 2020 23:16 utc | 67

Bubbles @50:
The best argument against Democracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average voter.

Winston Churchill


The best argument against plutocracy is a 5 minute conversation with the average oligarch.

- Jackrabbit

!!

[Feb 20, 2020] Fratricide in Las Vegas - Six dwarfs mud fight should be fun all the way to November

Looks like it will Oligarch vs Oligarch Wrestling World Championship match again ;-)
Notable quotes:
"... These six dwarves will probably persist in their quest for the brass ring all the way to the convention ..."
Feb 20, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Some particulars:

  1. Bloomberg is revealed as having said in public that all the disposable income of the poor should be taxed away so that they will not have funds with which to do mischief like buying fast food or sugary drinks.
  2. Bloomberg described Sanders as a Communist who cannot be elected. In this he was correct.
  3. Bloomberg was described by Warren as a cold-hearted and insulting man who openly scorns women, gays and minorities.
  4. Mayor Pete mocked Klobuchar for her inability to remember the name of the president of Mexico. She asked if he was calling her "stupid."

These six dwarves will probably persist in their quest for the brass ring all the way to the convention. In the mayhem there, the "winner" will probably have to choose one of the "losers" to be his VP running mate.

This should be fun all the way to November. pl

[Feb 20, 2020] Argument in favor of tem limits for politicians

Feb 20, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Connecticut Farmer -> Osse • a day ago • edited

"Trump's crudity, arrogance, bigotry, narcissism and sense of entitlement?"

To one degree or another that pretty much characterizes ALL politicians--and, I might add, a great argument in favor of term limits.

[Feb 20, 2020] Time and Coronavirus epidemics

Feb 20, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Reply

Amy Fargochar February 19, 2020 at 6:39 pm

A year from now, maybe sooner, this will be out of the news and something equally as existentially juicy will replace it in the Breaking News

[Feb 20, 2020] Zombie Senator McCarthy is now employed by NYT: NYT Secret Sources Claim Russia Backing Trump Re-Election

They had learned nothing and forgotten nothing ~Taleyrand
Feb 20, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Clearly the only way Trump can win, right?

It's Putin again, right?

Moments after the Times report was published, CNN immediately picked it up for their dozens of viewers.

And of course, the hot-takes:

This story doesn't say how Russia is supposedly doing this https://t.co/6IiamPtSPI

-- Chuck Ross (@ChuckRossDC) February 20, 2020

This story claims that it had five (5!) people criminally leaking alleged content from a classified briefing. And why not, since no one gets prosecuted for these crimes. Still, we have a serious problem with our supposedly professional "intelligence" and "oversight" communities. https://t.co/zuAdwXpU2L

-- Mollie (@MZHemingway) February 20, 2020

Until heads roll and hoaxers are sent to prison, the seditious Russian collusion hoaxers will never stop. They will lie and leak and fabricate evidence, whatever it takes, to prevent the American people from taking charge of their own government. https://t.co/wijJ07QKOO

-- Sean Davis (@seanmdav) February 20, 2020

[Feb 19, 2020] The job the Warren can do really well

Feb 19, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Diana Croissant , 16 February 2020 at 03:30 PM

Does anyone else suspect that Elizabeth Warren is making money on the side doing the voice for Pinocchio in the GEICO ads?

[Feb 19, 2020] No One Gets Out Of Here Alive, Part 2

Feb 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

02/18/2020 Authored by Jim Quinn via The Burning Platform blog,

In Part One of this article I exposed the numerous false narratives being peddled to the masses, as this Fourth Turning is entering the intense phase headed towards an unknown climax.

I've been expecting the next shoe to fall in this Fourth Turning for years, but the financial elite have pulled the debt levers to keep the Ponzi scheme alive far longer than a reasonable person would expect.

We are only six weeks into 2020 and it seems like a year's worth of major events have already occurred.

The year started with the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in Iraq.

For the next week the world was awash in rhetoric about World War III and possible revolution in Iran. Accusations of Trump using the Wag the Dog method to deflect the negative press from the impeachment hearings were rampant among the half of the country that despises Trump. Soleimani was lauded as a hero by the left and a terrorist by the right. Now, the entire episode seems like ancient history, as more interesting squirrels have arisen for the propaganda media to chase.

The entire month of January was occupied by the ongoing coup/impeachment against Donald Trump. Schiff, Nadler and Pelosi doing their best impression of the three stooges, conducted a laughable prosecution in the House, revealing this was nothing more than a desperate attempt to avoid losing to Trump in a November landslide.

The predictable trial in the Senate resulted in an acquittal and Trump's popularity soaring to all-time highs , as independents realized the Democrats misused the power of impeachment for purely political purposes.

Trump's SOTU address infuriated Pelosi to such an extent it provoked her into acting like a petulant child, tearing up the speech. Future campaign ads wrote themselves.

The DNC again has looked corrupt and incompetent with the disastrous Iowa caucus. The party is again trying to cheat Sanders out of the nomination by pushing the CIA hand selected empty suit – Buttigieg, a white gay Obama clone, mayor of a Podunk town in Indiana, who talks incessantly without saying anything. The Democrats, who want to run your healthcare and have government take control over our lives, lost credibility in the eyes of millions by their inability to even count a few thousand votes in Iowa.

The left-wing pundits on MSNBC and CNN are exasperated with the populist admiration by millennials of Bernie Sanders , an unapologetic socialist. Alzheimer Joe Biden's candidacy is imploding and Pocahontas Warren is sending desperate smoke signals for her tribe to come to the rescue. The Democratic party is a train wreck in progress.

The left-wing fake news outlets were shrill in the lead up to the 2nd Amendment rights rally in Richmond to protest Governor "Blackface" Northam's blatant attempt to pass laws which would result in the attempted confiscation of legally owned firearms of citizens of Virginia. Talk of civil war swirled across social media. Northam called out the National Guard. Antifa terrorists threatened to storm the protest.

The displeasure among the left-wing pundits on MSNBC and CNN that thousands of legally armed citizens gathered peacefully to support their Constitutional rights without one incidence of violence was palpable. The left wingers were praying for another Charlottesville, where they could peddle more fake news about Nazis and white supremacists being Trump's main supporters. Not only did the Richmond protestors act civilly, they actually cleaned up after themselves. Total fail for the liberal elite.

After years of fear mongering by the establishment about Brexit, the UK left the EU on January 31 with absolutely no negative consequences. A blizzard of lies falls from the sky, manufactured by those in power, in order to maintain their power, control and immense wealth. The economic catastrophe Brexit was supposed to create was used by the government apparatchiks to flog and terrify the citizens of the UK. This is par for the course.

The Deep State functions under a cloud of lies, misinformation and false narratives, capitalizing upon the gullibility, willful ignorance and folly of the masses. As this decade has gotten underway, it seems the lies are flowing in greater volume, and the fear mongering by governments, central bankers and the corporate media has reached unprecedented levels.

As if these myriad of events over the course of a few weeks weren't enough to keep the world on edge, a potential Black Swan of immense proportions has arisen in China, threatening to initiate a worldwide pandemic . After ten years of expecting something to be the catalyst for the next leg down in this Fourth Turning, I've remained skeptical of every new doom and gloom event that comes along, as all previous threats have been neutralized through monetary or political means. But a pertinent quote near the end of Strauss and Howe's prophecy, certainly seems to apply at this moment in history.

"History offers no guarantees. Obviously, things could go horribly wrong – the possibilities ranging from a nuclear exchange to incurable plagues, from terrorist anarchy to high-tech dictatorship. We should not assume that Providence will always exempt our nation from the irreversible tragedies that have overtaken so many others: not just temporary hardship, but debasement and total ruin. Losing in the next Fourth Turning could mean something incomparably worse. It could mean a lasting defeat from which our national innocence – perhaps even our nation – might never recover." – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

I would say we are already experiencing terrorist anarchy in the Middle East and a virtual high-tech dictatorship through the partnership between the Deep State and the titans of Silicon Valley to surveil everything we say, email, tweet or think . Snowden and Assange have revealed the truth about our military industrial surveillance state, but the masses are too distracted by their iGadgets, Twitter likes, and Facebook fans to notice they live in a technological prison, with the Deep State prison guards ready to stomp on their faces with a boot, forever.

... ... ...

" History's howling storms can bring out the worst and best in people. The next Fourth Turning can literally destroy us as a nation and people, leaving us cursed in histories of those who endure and remember. Alternatively, it can ennoble our lives, elevate us as a community, and inspire acts of consummate heroism–deeds that will grow into mythlike legends recited by our heirs far into the future." – Strauss & Howe – The Fourth Turning

* * *
The corrupt establishment will do anything to suppress sites like the Burning Platform from revealing the truth. The corporate media does this by demonetizing sites like mine by blackballing the site from advertising revenue. If you get value from this site, please keep it running with a donation.

[Feb 16, 2020] Understanding why they lie and why they get away with it by The Saker

Feb 16, 2020 | www.unz.com

Have facts and truth become redundant?

I doubt that there are many reading these lines who don't already know for a fact that Kennedy was not killed by one "lone gunman". Likewise, we all know the truth about the "Gulf of Tonkin" incident. Then there are those who realize that something about the Pearl Harbor attack stinks to high heaven. Some even remember the USS Liberty. Most specialists know about GLADIO. And I could go on and on. The fact is that most of the worst lies of the 20th century have been debunked beyond reasonable doubt, really.

Chris Hedges really nailed it when he spoke of an " Empire of Illusions ". He names the following types of illusions: the illusion of Literacy , the illusion of Love , the illusion of Wisdom , the illusion of Happiness and the illusion of America . The book is most interesting, and I highly recommend it. But I think that there is one crucial aspect of the Empire being an "Empire of Illusions" and that is the illusion of Reality . What do I mean by that?

I mean the following: most people are aware that there is a "reality" of some kind out there. Of course, many people are aware of how difficult it can be to ascertain what the "real reality" really is, thus they prefer to cautiously state that getting to the truth is a very difficult endeavor. These are the folks who know enough to know that they really don't know much. But then there are also those who misinterpret this caution as to mean that there really is no such thing as reality at all and all there is, is the sum of our subjective perception thereof (of reality that is). Pretty soon we have slipped from:

to

to

Of course, most people won't directly declare that reality does not exist – they just act as if it didn't.

It all began centuries ago by a quite formidable indifference to Truth on the part of the leaders of the Papacy. These folks were all about power, so if religion could give it to them, then religion was good, but when religion placed limits on what the Latins could or could not do (say like during the famous " Valladolid debate "), then suddenly religion became a hindrance which had to be "reformed". And, indeed, once the original Christianity was "reformed" (be it by the Reform or the Counter-Reformation) all hell broke lose for most of mankind and the Age of Imperialism was fully ushered in and the ancient motto " exitus acta probat " became the de facto measure of morality.

Then came the first blow of the scientific revolution of the late Renaissance which left the Papacy with very little credibility left.

ORDER IT NOW

The next blow came during WWII when the Papacy saw its very last hurrah come and go, pretty quickly, in fact (it lasted just as long as Hitler's "1000 year Reich" did: 12 years). By the end of the war, western Christianity was left in shambles and, even worse was the fact that none of the victors of WWII (Reformed Anglos, Atheist Soviets, Jews – secular and not, etc.) had any warm feelings left for the Christianity (truth be told, neither did Hitler or Mussolini). At this point the Papacy decided to commit suicide and organized the Vatican II Council, which must be the most massive surrender of values previously held for sacred in history. This ill-advised attempt to show "Roman Catholicism with a human face" resulted in a total failure. Those who hated the Papacy were unimpressed did not like it any more. As for the confused rank and file "Roman Catholics" (whom I refer to as "Latins"), they were were left with the following conundrum: if the Pope is infallible (which he is as per the First Vatican Council of 1868), how can he so clearly contradict the teachings of his own Church (not to mention the teachings of his putatively infallible predecessors!)? Some declared that the Pope was a heretic, others simply declared that the "Holy See" was unoccupied (" sedevacantism "), but most simply gave up in total disgust (sex scandals did not help!) and simply stopped asking "what is the truth"?

When a Church which had declared itself " T he C hurch" (all in CAPS, and at the exclusion of all others) for 910 years (almost a millennium!) suddenly acts as if all religions were equally "true" (this is logically impossible, but never mind that) and when a once powerful "Holy Father" (and Vicar of Christ , no less!) becomes just another public figure somewhere between Kim Kardashian and Greta Thunberg, you know that something very big has taken place.

Something very bad too.

The truth is not only unwelcome, it does not even exist, right?!

Both world wars were the manifestation of an immense civilizational collapse. WWI saw the collapse of the traditional European monarchies and empires. WWII, and its absolutely unprecedented explosion of hatred (political, class, racial, linguistic, religious, etc.) saw Europe, once the center of our planet, being subjected to a monstrous (but also highly predictable) bloodbath which resulted in two non-European powers splitting the world into two spheres of influence (at least that was the plan). More interestingly, while nominally "Christian" rulers and countries could not openly advocate for mass terror, the "enlightened" secular folks had no such problems at all. Just read Trotsky's brilliant, if clearly satanic, " Dictatorship versus Democracy " or Hitler's 5th chapter in Mein Kampf (here in German if you can!).

Both Dostoevskii and Solzhenitsyn predicted what would inevitably happen to a world in which Nihilism prevails. Dostoevskii very simply summarized it all when he wrote (in the Karamazov Brothers) " if there is no God, then everything is allowed ". The Nihilists have simply logically concluded that if there is no God, and everything is allowed, then nothing really exists, most certainly not any "real" (objective) reality. Even the very notions of "good" and "evil" are absolutely meaningless absent an absolute reference system.

Bertrand Russel (and, apparently, also Voltaire) once brilliantly wrote that " God created Man in His image and Man returned Him the favor ". Amazing words, really! If we are not the creation of God, but God is our creation, that makes us very much God-like, does it not? And, as "gods" – don't we deserve to define for ourselves what is "good" and what is "bad"? Of course we do! Once life/existence has no meaning, how could concepts such as "good" or "evil"? And that is exactly what we have done, especially our post-modern 21 century Nihilists!

Back to where we started – assessing the "so what?" defense

I have already mentioned many times the mind-blowing hypocrisy of the Dems, who all hate on Trump for his alleged "so what?" defense (which, by the way, is a mis-characterization – his defense was much more solid and logical), but have absolutely no problems with people like the Obamas or, even better, the Clintons next to whom Trump almost sounds like a paragon of honesty, integrity and an acute sense of decency. I mean, really, the Clintons made even violent mobsters (Italian or Jewish) look pure and innocent. And when they lie, this is absolutely no big deal. But when Trump lies, then he elicits the kind of blind, impotent, rage which in the Gospel is described by the words " weeping and gnashing of teeth ". Maybe that is what they refer to when they speak of a "Trump derangement syndrome" amongst US liberals?

The truth is simple: we all know that Trump lied. About the Iranian counter-strike and about many other things. We also know that Obama lied. And Baby-Bush too. And the Clinton and his no-sex cigars And we remember " read my lips, no new taxes " just as well as we remember " We did not, I repeat, did not trade weapons or anything else [to Iran] for hostages, nor will we ". So yes, we remember.

We just don't care anymore.

We have been completely desensitized not only to truth, but even to reality.

So what, right?

And the consequences are dire indeed!

Conclusion: life in a reality-free world

The fact that we, who live inside the Empire, live in a reality-free world has a huge impact upon the actions of our rulers. After all, if nobody really believes in, or cares about, reality, then why should our rulers bother with making reality any better, especially for us? It is much, much, simpler to simply present a "feelgood" message about how great "America" is (as in " We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! ") and never mind that this most powerful military in the Galaxy could not even protect its own soldiers even though they knew exactly when and where the Iranian counter-strike would come.

Of course, with time, the entire edifice of lies built by US and EU politicians will come crashing down, either as a consequence of a military defeat impossible to hide, or from a major economic shock. This will be totally unexpected for those who choose to live in a reality-free world.


JasonT , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 2:26 am GMT

A very good summary of what I have been feeling and then understanding for the last four decades. My entire system of family and friends live inside the Empire and only see tbe illusion. In fact, I too am so bombarded by the illusions that it is difficult to keep my mind outside the matrix. When I try to break the illusion for others, I receive disbelief, derision, anger or (at best or worst) attempts to argue based on the illusions they see, disregarding even the most basic of physical and human principles in their arguments.
Biff , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 3:27 am GMT

Is there really anybody out there who will deny that the US government lies pretty much about everything and anything?.

Yea! My liberal friends back in the U.S. of A. The intolerant left that hung on every word that came out of Obama's mouth, but conversely holds everything Trump says with contempt.
Very partisan!
That's where they get ya .

Avianthro , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 3:44 am GMT
The Edelman Trust Barometer:

https://www.edelman.com/trustbarometer

Friedrich Nietzsche "On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense":

http://nietzsche.holtof.com/Nietzsche_various/on_truth_and_lies.htm

Weston Waroda , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 3:49 am GMT

The fact that we, who live inside the Empire, live in a reality-free world has a huge impact upon the actions of our rulers. After all, if nobody really believes in, or cares about, reality, then why should our rulers bother with making reality any better, especially for us?

Those who live inside the Empire are bedazzled by the sophistry of the elites, like the senior official of the George W Bush administration, likely Karl Rove, quoted in Ron Suskind's article:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

They are the masters, we are just unworthy pupils and and lackeys. Take our money, please, take streams of it. Rule as you will.

ThreeCranes , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 4:06 am GMT
We live in a permanent state of undeclared war. Congress has abdicated.

During wartime the media must fall in line, pitch in and do their part to win. Bending and suppressing the truth is their mission.

The media elites see themselves as an uber-class of omniscient Navigators. Truth is an irrelevant irritant.

Cowboy , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 4:18 am GMT
Interesting but a lot loose ends dangling. I'll pull this string:
I'd like to see Saker discuss the heresy of caesaropapism especially in relation to the Russian Orthodox church and its relation to the Russian State.
SeekerofthePresence , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 5:31 am GMT
If a dunce believes his actions have no consequence,
Then try nuclear weapons and hear the flatulence.
Peter Akuleyev , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 8:59 am GMT
the Clintons next to whom Trump almost sounds like a paragon of honesty, integrity and an acute sense of decency.

Oh come on. Trump is far and away the most corrupt President we have ever had. Second place probably goes to John F. Kennedy. Both Trump and Kennedy are/were intimate with mobsters and organized crime. Trump really has no sense of shame or honor whatsoever, he doesn't need them.

It is interesting that when rich people behave in insanely corrupt and self-dealing fashion most people don't mind, even admire it. When lower middle class people like the Clintons try to climb the social ladder using similar methods people hate their guts. It goes to show how deeply our sense of relative social status determines our reactions to people. For example, a lot of people admire JFK and find Trump disgusting. Typically those are members (or wannabe members) of the upper middle class who see the Trump family as nouveau riche frauds who have no business pretending to be aristocracy. (Ironically of course Joseph Kennedy built his family's wealth through even more criminal methods than Fred Trump, but the Kennedys knew how to adopt upper class mannerism. Plus JFK married a woman of good breeding and Trump keeps marrying sluts, for lack of a better word. )

der einzige , says: Website Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 10:09 am GMT
How can someone (Tulsi "Champion of Freedom" Gabard) who, based on a lie, served two rounds in Iraq as impersonating the truth? How Sucker?
onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 11:57 am GMT
"The truth is that lies have become the norm of the western political discourse."

Its important to understand the true fundamental nature of all governments. Not understanding their true nature leads to complaints/observations such as: "The truth is that lies have become the norm of the western political discourse."

Its a misconception to believe that this phenomena ["lies have become the norm of the western political discourse."], is something "only" of recent creation. No, no, no, its always been this way – to believe otherwise is to engage in total, ongoing, self-delusion, and to seriously damage an individuals mental health.

This "just" in:

"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree

The question is : once an individual reaches this depressing, reality-based conclusion, what can/should be done about it ?

Regards, onebornfree

Vince , says: Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 6:26 pm GMT
It's the power of money – the bankster clique has created this alternative reality & it is sustained(so far) by the power of money.
John Chuckman , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:38 pm GMT
"Understanding Why They Lie and Why They Get Away with It"

I find the article somewhat jumbled, but its author has managed a few powerful truths on an important subject.

This phrase does hit the mark, "life in a reality-free world"

It is indeed a realty-free world when it comes to America's activities abroad.

But perhaps there should be little surprise at the fact.

Empire is inherently oppressive and anti-democratic.

We have a tiny percentage of the world's population (America has roughly five percent of world's population, but America's establishment, the people who truly count, represent a tiny fraction of one percent) telling everyone else what to do.

And America uses a great deal of violence to enforce its will – bombing, insurgencies, assassinations, wars, and coups. It cannot be otherwise.

In some cases, as with allies, it uses only the pressure of its globally-dominant financial institutions and markets, but that is still coercion, and it is very unwelcome.

Even granting American elections are somewhat democratic, the fact means nothing to those being forced to do what they do not wish to do.

Power is power no matter how granted, as by election, and abuse of that power is abuse no different than abuse by any other kind of government.

From the world's point of view, America is a form of authoritarian government, and all authoritarian governments lie about what they are doing.

No one likes being openly credited with oppression and killing and theft. That is true even for governments as notorious in our memories as Stalin's or Hitler's or the former junta in Argentina, but it is equally true for America in its affairs abroad or for Israel in its affairs with its neighbors.

All that dirty work requires a lot of lying to cover over. America still likes to think of itself as descending from that small group of men pledging their sacred honors, and of course that is an absurd contradiction with today's reality.

Despite those who work to inform themselves often recognizing the lies, they are a small minority of any society, and I think the lying, on the whole, does work. Much as with the tiresome and threadbare claims of commercial advertising, a sizable part of the population accepts them, or at least does not question them, having no motive for close examination.

And there is no need for guilt on the part of officials doing the lying. If you don't feel guilty about killing and stealing, why would you feel guilty about some mere lies?

As crimes of empire, lies are just pocket change.

I've said many times that you can have an empire or you can have a decent country, but you cannot have both. America long ago chose empire.

You can take that principle a step further: you can have an empire or you can have a democratic state, but you cannot have both.

To say otherwise is as absurd as Israel's claim to being a democracy while it occupies and abuses millions who enjoy no rights.

onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT
" Why They Lie and Why They Get Away with It"

Believing anything any government says is true is a recipe for disaster.Even a "comedian" knew that much:

"My first rule- I don't believe anything the government tells me- nothing!- ZERO!" George Carlin

https://www.youtube.com/embed/GUg_Zx_oORs?feature=oembed

Regards, onebornfree

The Alarmist , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 9:26 pm GMT

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.

Above is dubiously attributed to Goebbels, who himself riffed off Hitler's Mein Kampf passage on the subject, but Goebbels clearly picked up on the theme in Aus Churchills Lügenfabrik with this:

The essential English leadership secret does not depend on particular intelligence. Rather, it depends on a remarkably stupid thick-headedness. The English follow the principle that when one lies, one should lie big, and stick to it. They keep up their lies, even at the risk of looking ridiculous.

Which we witnessed in spades recently in a number of things, like the Novichok poisoning cases. America has clearly picked up the mantle on this.

Patagonia Man , says: Show Comment February 14, 2020 at 11:29 pm GMT
Here I am reminded of a former US intelligence agency head honcho, William Casey's words:

"By the time we finish with the American people, they won't know what to believe."

There's 4 points here:

1. Generally speaking, the reason why propaganda (aka brainwashing) is so, so effective in the Western (so-called) 'liberal democracies' is because Westerners are not expecting it – unless of course they have developed their ability for critical thinking, by asking themselves such questions as:

i) why is this information being presented?;
ii) why is this information being presented in this manner?; &/or
iii) why is this information being presented at this point in time?

2. There's no better understanding as to why the Elites (who I prefer to call the Cabal) lie than Paul Craig Roberts' short, concise article: Cover Stories are Used to Control Explanations See:

"Years ago James Jesus Angleton left me with the impression that when an intelligence agency pulls off an assassination, bombing, or any event with which the agency does not wish to be associated, the agency uses the media to control the explanation by quickly putting into "

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/?s=Cover+stories+are+used+to

3. The reason why the Cabal must control explanations is to maintain Plausible Deniability. Maintaining Plausible Deniability is crucially important to keep the general public believing in, and functioning, in the politico-economic system (which is essentially exploitative).

4. Specifically, re: CNN, it is owned by Northrupp Grumann (why would an armaments manufacturer need to own/operate a TV/online news network?, I hear you ask) and hence is a propaganda organ of the US Military Industrial Complex (MIC). In order to defend yourself against propaganda – next time you find yourself viewing a CNN "exclusive", know for sure the 'report' is purely propaganda.

RichardTaylor , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 5:52 am GMT

Is there really anybody out there who will deny that the US government lies pretty much about everything and anything?

Is there a reason to preface the word government with US in that sentence?

Monotonous Languor , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 7:09 am GMT
For once, 'The Saker' (what a ridiculous appellation) finally nails it

You can believe that either God created Man, or else that Man created God.
You can believe that either organized Christianity truly represents God on earth, or else that belief in God must rise above Christian denominations.
Either illusion is all there is, or else there is an independent reality.
Either the objective Truth of the Logos is grounded in reality, or else there is no truth at all.

And the final most universal dichotomy: If you are of the one kind, then you absolutely cannot co-exist with the other.

kikl , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 7:32 am GMT
"Understanding Why They Lie and Why They Get Away with It."

Why they lie is easy, so I don't want to adress that. Why do they get away with it?

1. The mass media repeat the lies ad nauseam. Thus, most people eventually believe the lies.

2. Most people want to believe the lies. Why? Well, realizing that you've been duped is painfull and Americans want to believe that their country is noble and good.

3. They must fear virtually no consequences when their lies are exposed.

But things are gradually changing.

I think the story of 9/11 is a case in point. In spite of clear evidence for the controlled demolition of world trade towers, 1, 2 and 7, the media still repeats the same old lies and defames anyone who may not go along with lying by calling them truthers and "conspiracy theorists". Indeed the term "truther" has become a smear. But due to the internet, 9/11 truth has become very popular.

https://www.ae911truth.org/

Monotonous Languor , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 7:33 am GMT
@Vince "Money", "Greed", "the 1%", "MORE greed", "MORE money", on and on and on and on and

If you ever pull your mind from out of that hackneyed little box, be sure to come back and let us know.

Avianthro , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 8:29 am GMT
We'll never get anywhere in answering questions of this nature unless we begin with a scientific approach and here's just one of a number of relevant article from the field of evolutionary psychology:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18954212

"Effortful control, explicit processing, and the regulation of human evolved predispositions."

Evolutionary psych is a relatively young field but one that deserves a lot more attention.

As Francis Bacon realized hundreds of years ago, we humans live in a world of idols that we make for ourselves and that then come to control us. Science (the scientific method and spirit of patient and disciplined truth seeking) is the only tool we have for wiping out the idols so that we can be free from their control.

http://www.sirbacon.org/links/4idols.htm

JackOH , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 10:52 am GMT
The Saker, thanks.

I'm only an occasional reader of yours, and, at best, a modest fan of Chris Hedges, but his admirable Empire of Illusions is a fine example of authorial overreach that is persuasive anyway.

9/11 Inside job , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 11:52 am GMT
@kikl 9/11 truth may have become very popular on the internet ,but the mainstream media is still repeating the lies about Muslim hijackers and fires bringing down the Twin Towers , try convincing a family member , a friend or neighbor that 9/11 was an "inside job". I have tried but it's an impossible task as politicians and the media continue to repeat the big lie . Even today , for a politician to tell the truth about 9/11 would be to touch "the third rail" and they would be pilloried by the CIA's "Mockingbird" media .
dimples , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 12:43 pm GMT
The Saker:
"The worst is not that western politicians lie, the worst is that almost nobody cares."

Not true. The masses believe the lies otherwise they would not be effective. Plausible deniability, trust in media personalities, suppression of evidence, all are factors in producing a 'normal' paradigm that keeps the masses on the consensus path

When I was a young conspiracy theorist I continually had difficulty with my brain wanting to go back into its comfortable non-conspiracist rut. Surely I kept thinking, the US government would never do anything like, for example, shoot JFK in the head and cover it up. Eventually I had to force it into accepting the evidence. It protested for about a week, then magically jumped tracks and I no longer had to think twice about it.

Since the masses never get to this point, their normal paradigm always channels them back into believing the lies. Democrats actually believe Obama didn't lie, or if he did there must have been some sound reason for it. Trump followers believe the same thing about Trump. Both sides see and don't see lies according to their political persuasion.

The only difference in the modern world is the presence of the internet, which allows a minority to obtain and check facts at least one hundred times more efficiently than in prior eras. The negative side of the internet sadly is that it is a pool of knowledge about one inch deep. The lies of the other side of politics are more visible, but the lies of your own side are invisible or more excusable.

Niebelheim , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
As Nietzsche put it, "The strength of a person's spirit would then be measured by how much 'truth' he could tolerate, or more precisely, to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened, muted, falsified."

So it is for the collective spirit of a broken people, a people whose history has been systematically purged and falsified, whose gods have died, who don't know or care to know their neighbors, for whom little matters but bread and circus subsistence.

onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 1:12 pm GMT
"Why They Lie and Why They Get Away with It"

Why? Its very simple once one understands the true, core nature of all governments:

"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed"or "improved",simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree

"People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist? ". H. L. Mencken

Regards, onebornfree

OscarWildeLoveChild , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 1:22 pm GMT
The King's word is the law, and at the very top, they do whatever they want. They manage the narrative and the coalition that supports them has a perpetual obligation to maintain that narrative, forever. It does not matter who is in control.
Really No Shit , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 2:14 pm GMT
Not only the Executive and the Legislative branches are corrupt but most notably the non-Protestant, Jewish and Catholic filled Supreme Court is almost as corrupt, if not more.

When Barney "the fat Jew" Frank used to be in the House of Representatives, at least we knew that beside giving felatio, his interest lied in helping the cause of his own people but with androgynous Lindsay Graham you can never tell for which side he is working. And until America can be sure of its White-Christian-Protestant sons and daughters, ain't nothing gonna change for the better!

sally , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 3:41 pm GMT
@Biff I deny your claim. The USA Government has never lied, not once.

Denying liars is the beginning of everyone else's freedom.

The government has never, ever lied, in can neither tell the truth nor lie. Government is a structure, its an an expression of an abstraction that dictates the form and constraints of an underlying functioning organization.. In my opinion it is important for the minds of mankind to teach themselves to separate human things and human acts from things humanized such as inanimate objects, animations and the like. Unless we separate non human from human we can never ever identify in the minds of mankind, the facts needed to assign the false hood to a person, and to make that person pay the price for his or her lie.

The USA, a government designed to empower a few to rule the masses of humanity within its reach, cannot lie, cannot tell the Truth. Colin Powell's Weapons of Mass Destruction Speech, altered millions of lives. Immunity for lying exist because neither the USA Constitution nor underlying government it dictates, make lying actionable either criminally or civilly. A person harmed by a law should be able to recover against the person that uttered the lie. (<=not one politician has offer a law against lying. No court, I am aware of, has recognizes harms caused by lying to be recoverable by those harmed by the lie. Yet any citizen that lies under oath is a criminal? So do we just need to add to the oath of office that it is a duty and obligation of the person that holds the office not to lie?

Citizens cannot bring a liar to a USA court for his or her lies, I have for years wondered if lying is a Tort. <=if courts recognized lying as a tort eligible for recovery Trump would be always in transit between Tort Courts till broke. .. It is not alright to lie. Lying is not a social event or custom.

Accepting as normal, lying <=is one of the giant reasons we citizens have no means to deny those who use their positions in government to engage corruption and to commit atrocities against mankind . Think how different our world would be if no one was allowed to get away with a lie.

The media is the biggest liar of them all, and if citizens were smart, citizens would all boycott any media and sponsor who engage in any lie.

Crush Limbraw , says: Website Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 3:42 pm GMT
This amazingly well thought out analysis will be added to DaLimbraw Library for future reference because it perfectly complements and characterizes my own personal experience of overcoming presuppositions and binary thinking which kept me from seeing the real world – and which I still see darkly – as the Apostle Paul wrote.
Only by relentless reading over the last 15-20 years from various sources did the dawn begin to arrive for me – and which I am sharing on my website and the linked library for others – that before one can 'see', you have to remove the filters which prevent you from seeing.
These 'filters' have been purposely established from our past indoctrination and as Paul also wrote, 'we are not dealing with flesh and blood but wicked spirits in high places' – Ephesians 6:12.
No single person or collection of humans can coordinate what has been going on for eons! It's Old Scratch at his wicked best!
About 10 days ago I posted this – https://crushlimbraw.blogspot.com/2020/02/ingrained-presuppositions-and-binary.html?m=0 – but beware, it's for patient readers only!
Desert Fox , says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 3:55 pm GMT
The zionists lie to us because they have complete control over us, they own the ZUS government via their ownership of the money creation aka the FED and IRS and from this comes complete control, as Nathan Rothschild infamously said, I care not what puppet is placed on the throne of England to rule the British empire, for the man who controls the money supply controls the British empire and I am that man.

It is the same here in the ZUS the zionists aka Rothschilds and company control the money supply and control the people, and can lie and cheat and send young naive Americans to fight and die in the mideast for the zionist greater Israel project, that is the damn truth!

America is a zionist plantation and we are the slaves!

[Feb 16, 2020] Are you suggesting that The Greatest Fighting Force in the Galaxy in All of History, the military of the world's Exceptional Nation, is riddled with grifters?

Feb 16, 2020 | www.unz.com

The Scalpel says: Website Show Comment February 13, 2020 at 7:04 am GMT 300 Words I posted this on an earlier thread, but it is relevant here.

I have been a working full time in Emergency Medicine for over 20 years. I was a "Flight Surgeon" in the Army. Soldiers are notorious for playing up any combat related injury in order to qualify for disability and the financial benefits that flow from being categorized as being disabled. As far as we know, the most serious claimed injuries were "concussions." As a practicing specialist in Emergency Medicine, I can explain that the diagnosis of "concussion" means, by definition, that no abnormality is seen on CT scanning of the brain. The diagnosis is made based on the injured person's purely subjective complaints, i.e. whatever the allegedly injured person says. If the allegedly injured person says the right things, then a physician may call the symptoms that of a concussion.

So, ultimately, a soldier would be diagnosed with a concussion because the soldier (who has financial benefits to gain) says so, and a physician does not dispute it.

I have seen hundreds if not thousands of diagnoses of "concussion". That diagnosis does not have to be supported by any specific findings or even a proper understanding of the diagnosis. It simply has to be entered in the record by a licensed physician. Once that diagnosis is on the medical record, it is up to subsequent providers to refute that diagnosis if they desire to do so.

This is something subsequent providers are very unlikely to want to dedicate the time and effort required to accomplish. There is usually no financial or professional incentive to do so – often the opposite. There is no specific test to definitively say one way or the other if a person had a "concussion". Like PTSD it is a "functional" diagnosis based mainly on subjective symptoms and not objective test results. This is not to say such things do not exist. They do exist. It is only to say that they can be faked or misinterpreted and that will happen if there is a financial incentive to do so. Buck Ransom says: Show Comment February 16, 2020 at 3:36 pm GMT @The Scalpel Are you suggesting that The Greatest Fighting Force in the Galaxy in All of History, the military of the world's Exceptional Nation, is riddled with grifters?

[Feb 16, 2020] DNC jump from one "great hope" to another each six months or so: previously it was Biden, not it's Bloomberg

How ironic! "Billionaire" Bloomberg and his identical twin: "Tons of Money Tom Steyer" are now the favorites of the so called "Party of the People" to win the White House in 2016! Moveover, Bloomberg supported Iraq was and covered-up 9/11
Feb 16, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

From the day he entered the race, Joe Biden was the great hope of the Democratic establishment to spare them from the horrifying prospect of a 2020 race between The Donald and Bernie Sanders.

Today, that same establishment wants Joe out of the race.

[Feb 15, 2020] How does one say Adam Schiff without laughing? by title="View user profile." href="https://caucus99percent.com/users/alligator-ed">Alligator Ed

Highly recommended!
Feb 15, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

At the end of this essay, you may find a song which reasonably applies to Donald Trump directed to Democrats.

How does one say Adam Schiff without laughing? It's hard to continue typing while contemplating the Burbank Buffoon. Yet AS is making obscene flatus-like noises about impeachment 2.0. He and Nervous Nancy will conspire with chief strategist Gerald Nadler about extending the charges of 1.0 to 2.0.

Second verse
Same as the first

Obstructing leaking by firing leakers. That's one of the pending charges. Leutnant Oberst Vindman will be help up as the innocent victim of political retaliation. As I understand the military code of conduct, it says that the underling, Herr Oberst Vindman, went outside the chain of command and released classified information. In the military this is called insubordination, perhaps gross insubordination in view of the classified nature of the information.

Another charge to be filed on behalf of former Ambassador Yovanovich, is that her God-given Female rights were brutally violated as retaliation of advising Ukrainian officials to disregard Commander Cheeto.

There is no telling what additional non-crimes may be thrown at the feet at El Trumpo. All too horrible to contemplate--like someone throwing feces-contaminated dope needles onto Nervous Nancy's front lawn in Pacific Heights.

If this Shampeachment 2.0 (S2) occurs before November's election, Democrats will become as rare as dodo birds. If such proponents of S2 persist after the general election, they better have secure transportation to an extradition-free country.

If it gets bad enough, considering the Clinton Mafia's body count, would it be unreasonable to expect some untimely heart attacks and suicides with red scarves? On Clintonites? Soros et al.?

When the first shot and you don't kill the king, flee. But the DNC is going to attempt shot number 2. Trump WILL NEVER ALLOW A SECOND IMPEACHMENT TO OCCUR, no matter how patently worthless? Will the most powerful narcissist in the world allow the DNC / coup perpetrators to escaping Trumpian retribution?

Those doubting the Wrath of Q be prepared to be disabused of the impression that Q is pure fantasy. Fantasy--like GPS targeting a single small sniper drone to shoot someone from 3000 feet.

Sorry folks. I live in a swamp. I've stepped in shit with my eyes open. Many of you have too. Some of the excrement was of my own making.

Think about the singularly most effective and complex plot the world has ever seen, called 9/11. Think of the thousands of lives purposefully snuffed in then name of power and money. Call yourselves serfs--that's a euphemism. You--including me-- are nothing but ants. Goddam little ants that only Janes respect. There are no ascetic Janes in the penthouses of the elites.

But I digressed to the mysterious existence of morality in politics as a whole. Today's topic is more confined to the Democratic nomination.

Statement of Bias: Go Tulsi. Bravo Andy. The rest of you to the elsewhere--yeah, BS too.

The Dems are determined to grasp Defeat from the jaws of Defeat. Quite a trick. Like trying to borrow money from the Judge during a Bankruptcy trial.

I talked today with a freshman college student majoring in political science about her thought about the Shampeachment. She hadn't been paying attention. Not that I blame her. Her college freshman friend watched C-Span; wasn't impressed. We political aficionados know all about this political debauchery. If AS and NN attempt S2, expect many defections from the supporting vote.

Democrat respect has dwindled in the Independent sector. This is not to say the Repugnants are thereby more popular. They aren't. Trump is. Trump need that NH clown to challenge him in the Repugnant primary to prove exactly how powerful he is. Anybody notice who were in the audience, sitting nearby during Trump's post acquittal speech. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham. The lamb and the lion laying together. They are both on the Trump Train. Even Richard Burr voted Trump in the impeachment. Mittens feared both his cojones would be excised if he voted against Trump on both counts. What a chickenheart.

But where are the Dems? Why, they are Here. Yes. Yes. And they are There. Yes. Yes. And they are Near. Yes. Yes. But....they are Far. Whither thou goest?

I refrain from pointed comments about AOC in further comments. The Squad is the iceberg floating away from the glacier which spawned it. Unsuitable to warm weather produced by political combat, the Squad faction will woke themselves up to dubious futures.

Establishment versus Bernie:

Not a contest. Spineless Bernie pretzelizes during first heated combat (which the Dem Debate Debacles were not). Won't take a second punch--the first during night 3 of the '16 DNC convention. Fist-shy now. Open Borders? WTF? Are you so nuts? If one offered a person the choice personal safety in their own homes and streets and free medical care for all--including the criminal aliens that A New Path Forward proposes--what do you think 85% of the public would choose?

Pandering.

The Left is also pushing strenuous avoidance of discussing issues in a platitude-depleted fashion. Yeah, Bernie's giving the same speech, with suitable modification, over 40 years. Consistency is a good thing, yeh? How about persistently beating your head with a hammer (while you still can)? Sounds like something Sun Tzu might not recommend.

Now, speaking of Las Vegas and the Nevada Primary. The culinary workers union will not endorse Bernie due to well-deserved or ill-deserved claims that M4A will abolish hard won union health benefits. And don't worry, the Shadow will be there, although Buttjiggle has now disavowed any further connection, along with David Plouffe.

Keeping the Bern off the campaign trail is going to infuriate the Woke Generation / Antifa. When--not if--the DNC cheats Bernie out of the nomination, if such proves necessary* will literally result in blood on the streets along with broken windows and flaming tires. Associate with that lot, eh? Given the choice of going into a biker bar, where brawls are always on the menu, or a discreet wine bar, which would one rather choose? Sorry, those are your only choices.

Nancy Pelosi, impressed by Arnold Schwarzenegger's former physical prowess, tears up her copy of the state of the union address. How decorous. How courteous. How polite. Seen around the world. Nigel Farage must be laughing his butt off, thinking about the shallow anti-Brexit campaigns against his were compared to our Coup. Nigel won. Trump . is. winning. Getting tired of winning yet?

I could go on for pages more of Dem stupidity, but why bother? Stupidity surrounds us.

Betting odds: DNC 1,999,999 to Bernie 1.

Place your bets.

For all the good it will do and I am sincere about this, I will vote Tulsi in the Dem primary.

Here is the song Dems need to heed. This is Donald Trump telling' y'all I'M NOT YOUR MAN

[Feb 15, 2020] Regarding Bloomberg+Clinton

Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

IronForge , Feb 15 2020 19:08 utc | 11

Regarding Bloomberg+Clinton: Everyone on ZH and Drudge's Tweet discussing the Pairing are joking that if they Win 2020, Bloomberg will Die somewhen btwn the Post-Election Victory Lap and a Month after the Inauguration.

Jackrabbit , Feb 15 2020 19:44 utc | 34

Hillary as VP? Why not Netanyahu? He's a dual citizen and I hear he may be looking for a job soon. He brings international experience to the ticket that Bloomberg lacks.

Bloom 'n Yahoo. It's a killer combo.

JR , Feb 15 2020 19:58 utc | 38
US democracy could definitely take a lesson from Putin with respect to dealing with oligarchs buying media and political influence.

[Feb 15, 2020] Tell me who is your VP and I will tell you who are you

Feb 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Bloomberg Considers Hillary For Running Mate Zero Hedge

... Steve Bannon predicted that something like this would happen.

REGAN: Let me turn to 2020. Let me turn to the Democrats. Bloomberg's now in on the mix. By the way, just to remind the viewers, this is the guy that broke the news here. Watch.

BANNON: They will throw Biden away. They'll throw Biden away to get to Trump and hope Elizabeth Warren or I even think Hillary Clinton or Bloomberg or some centrist comes in here. All these other people that could have been the centrist candidate for whatever reason haven't materialize. And that leaves a huge opportunity for two people, I believe, Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton.

[Feb 15, 2020] A strong argument against "bioweapon origin of Coronavirus"

Feb 15, 2020 | www.unz.com

Old and grumpy , says: Show Comment February 15, 2020 at 2:35 pm GMT

Is the American deep state that good in being a perfectly timed evil? Wasn't the deep state designed to assist multinational corporations in stealing foreign resources? Yet the corporate supply chain is being interrupted in what will be devastating for the bottom line. The stock market is about all Trump has. The scenario outlined above just quite doesn't add up, despite its plausibility. Unless it is not about China, but purging Trump .maybe?

[Feb 15, 2020] An interesting "in name only" analogy: China is Communist in name only, just like America is a Republic in name only

Feb 15, 2020 | www.unz.com

Ko , says: Show Comment February 15, 2020 at 2:27 pm GMT

There's a lot to read here, and I read all of it. If the virus is engineered to affect only Chinese people, I feel better and feel no need to worry about it. Though, sorry for the Chinese people, sad indeed.

"Except China is Communist in name only, just like America is a Republic in name only."

[Feb 15, 2020] Can Sanders run as an independent?

Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

D. , Feb 15 2020 19:42 utc | 32

@farm ecologist #29

Surely he could. But the good sheepdog he is he wont!

[Feb 15, 2020] One face of the US voters desprations with establishment candidates

Highly recommended!
Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Antoinetta III , Feb 15 2020 21:47 utc | 55

In the past several elections, in the space for "President," I wrote in - Vladimir Putin.

Antoinetta III

[Feb 15, 2020] But they do put on a good show, don't they?

Feb 15, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jackrabbit , Feb 15 2020 19:18 utc | 18

Interesting analysis b.

Here's another view: Zionist Bloomberg and Zionist Biden and Zionist Buttigieg and Zionist Klubachar and Zionist Warren and Zionist Sanders competing to race against Zionist Trump. I think I know who the winners and losers are already.

But they do put on a good show, don't they?

!!

[Feb 14, 2020] Empire of illutions chronicles: MSM headlines vs reality

Notable quotes:
"... Lead paragraph: "Former Vice President Joe Biden outpolled six challengers in yesterday's New Hampshire Democrat presidential primary election. All seven candidates are tied for count of delegates won in the state." ..."
Feb 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Publicus_Reanimated, 2 hours ago

Headline: "Biden Defeats 6 Rivals in NH Primary"

Lead paragraph: "Former Vice President Joe Biden outpolled six challengers in yesterday's New Hampshire Democrat presidential primary election. All seven candidates are tied for count of delegates won in the state."

[Feb 14, 2020] Damage: The Democrats on Russia

Full spectrum Dominance doctrine leaves no space for Russia. It needs to become a vassal or disappear in timi, dependents of the West statelests.
Feb 05, 2020 | responsiblestatecraft.org

Extracted from Presidential Election Politics are Damaging U.S. Foreign Policy Written by
Robert E. Hunter

It's not just the White House that is doing serious damage to U.S. interests abroad during this year's election campaign. Of even greater consequence (absent a new Middle East war) is the U.S. relationship with Russia. It's currently unthinkable that Washington will try to move beyond the status quo, even if Russian President Vladimir Putin were prepared to do so. Even before Trump was inaugurated, many Democrats began calling for his impeachment . Leading Democrats laid Hillary Clinton ' s defeat at the feet of Russian interference in the U.S. election -- a claim that stretched credulity past the breaking point. Further, as Democrats looked for grounds to impeach Trump (or at least terminally to reduce his reelection chances), the " Russia factor" was the best cudgel available. Charges included the notion that " Putin has something on Trump," which presumes he would sell out the nation ' s security for a mess of pottage.

All this domestic politicking ignores a geopolitical fact: while the Soviet Union lost the Cold War and, for some time thereafter, Russia could be dismissed, it was always certain that it would again become a significant power, at least in Europe. Thus, even before the Berlin Wall fell, President George H. W. Bush proposed creating a " Europe whole and free" and at peace. Bill Clinton built on what Bush began. Both understood that a renascent Russia could embrace revanchism, and for several years their efforts seemed to have a chance of succeeding.

Then the effort went off the rails. Putin took power in Russia, which made cooperation with the West difficult if not impossible. He worked to consolidate his domestic position, in part by alleging that the West was " disrespecting" Russia and trying to encircle it. For its part, the U.S. played into the Putin narrative by abandoning the Bush-Clinton vision of taking legitimate Russian interests into account in fashioning European security arrangements. The breaking point came in 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and sent " little green men" to fight in some other parts of Ukraine. The West necessarily responded, with economic sanctions and NATO's buildup of " trip wire" forces in Central Europe.

But despite the ensuing standoff, the critical requirement remains: the United States has to acknowledge Russia's inevitable rise as a major power while also impressing on Putin the need to trim his ambitions, if he is to avoid a new era of Russian isolation. There is also serious business that the two countries need to pursue, including strategic arms control, the Middle East (especially Iran), and climate change. Despite deep disagreements, including over Ukraine and parts of Central Europe, the U.S. needs to engage in serious discussions with Russia, which means the renewal of diplomacy which has been in the deep freeze for years.

All of this has been put in pawn by the role that the "Russia factor" has been permitted to play in American presidential politics, especially by Democrats. Longer-term U.S. interests are suffering, along with those of the European allies and Middle East partners. The task has been made even more difficult by those U.S. politicians, think tanks , and journalists who prefer to resurrect the term "cold war" rather than clearly examining the nation's strategic needs because of the blinkers imposed by domestic politics. Open discussion about alternatives in dealing with Russia is thus stifled, at serious cost to the United States and others.

In all three of these areas, the U.S. is paying a high price in terms of its national interests to the games political leaders, both Republicans and Democrats, are playing. Great efforts will be needed to dig out of this mess, beginning with U.S. willingness to do so. Leaders elsewhere must also be prepared to join in -- far from a sure thing! Unfortunately, there is currently little hope that, at least in the three critical areas discussed above, pursuit of U.S. interests abroad will prevail over today's parochial domestic politics.

[Feb 14, 2020] Bullshit Earnings: Charlie Munger Slams using Adjusted EBITDA To Report Earnings

Feb 13, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

xxx 43 minutes ago

Charlie looks pretty good for a 96 year old billionaire, compare him to 89 year old George Soros who looks like a goblin from hell.

[Feb 14, 2020] This is Jimmy Dore of Tucker Carlson show FoxTV.

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

uncle tungsten , Feb 13 2020 4:10 utc | 114

This is Jimmy Dore of Tucker Carlson show FoxTV.

You would not ever have seen this on Fox at the last election. Best high voltage spit by Jimmy Dore I have seen.
Tucker shows a great smirk especially when Jimmy dumps on Guaido.

five minutes of mirth

[Feb 14, 2020] Dave Chappelle on Jussie Smollett HA HA

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Jayne , Feb 13 2020 16:43 utc | 183

OMG -- this made me laugh... Had to share coz Priceless!!! Sometimes you just gotta say WTF is wrong with politics and this world... LOL

Dave Chappelle on Jussie Smollett HA HA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wZXoErL2124

[Feb 14, 2020] Definitely worth five minutes to watch Jimmy Dore on FOX plainly stating the US is a one-party system.

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Trailer Trash , Feb 13 2020 18:30 utc | 200

> five minutes of mirth
>Posted by: uncle tungsten | Feb 13 2020 4:10 utc | 114

Definitely worth five minutes to watch Jimmy Dore on FOX plainly stating the US is a one-party system. ON FOX NEWS TV! Never thought to see the day when I had anything good to say about FOX.

[Feb 14, 2020] The trouble with Artificial Intelligence

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Hoarsewhisperer , Feb 12 2020 6:36 utc | 43

Posted by: juliania | Feb 12 2020 5:15 utc | 39
(Artificial Intelligence)

The trouble with Artificial Intelligence is that it's not intelligent.
And it's not intelligent because it's got no experience, no imagination and no self-control.

[Feb 14, 2020] NSC Chief O'Brien on Vindmans

With people like Pompeo at the helm what are the benefits of expelling Vindmans ?
Feb 14, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

" We're not a banana republic where a group of Lt. Colonels get together and decide what the policy is or should be ," he added.

[Feb 14, 2020] U.S. rehash Old Spy Stories To Bash Putative Chinese Espionage

Feb 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

BraveNewWorld , Feb 11 2020 19:01 utc | 2

They have nothing on the efficiency of the Israelis. You don't even have to break in there. They will deliver the information directly to your phone.

"In vast breach, Likud campaign leaks ID, phones, addresses of all Israeli adults"
https://www.timesofisrael.com/in-vast-breach-likud-campaign-leaks-id-phones-addresses-of-all-israeli-adults/


Brendan , Feb 11 2020 19:59 utc | 10

The Washington Post must have some reason to dig up this old story but it has nothing to do with the Chinese. Crypto AG and Huawei have so little in common that nobody will think of any connection between them.

Crypto AG was a maker of encryption/decryption devices from tiny Switzerland and it spied for the US and its allies, mainly between the 1950s and the 1980s.

Huawei is known mainly as a producer of consumer products in China in the 21st century.

My guess is that something about Crypto AG is about to be revealed, and this is a way of slowly feeding the story in a way that it does not make headlines. When the story comes out, people will think 'Oh, we know most of that already, it's old news'. Classic news management.

Crypto AG was involved in all sorts of criminal acts. The most notable was when one of its devices was used by UN chief Dag Hammarskjold before he died in a plane crash in 1961.

rico rose , Feb 11 2020 19:59 utc | 11
it seems cia and bnd started their work with crypto ag just in that moment, when became known, that the enigma coding machine was already hacked while wwII. this was a big surprise for the germans, because they still had this thing in use at their embassies worldwide. you have to be a worm in this world.
GMJ , Feb 11 2020 20:04 utc | 12
During the research for a book, I discovered that the UK gave Australia a coding machine (basically a revised Lorenz from WW2). This was in the early 1950s or just before and with the cipher they were assured to read all Australian secret messages. We, South Africa, to this day, never use computer storage for reports, etc. but paper that can be protected more easily. Quite amusing the above. Note also that Chinese internet devices control 80-90% of the internet in Africa. Okay, why is this important? Simply because sub-Saharan Africa is where the terrorists fled and flee to from the Middle East and other places. See Code Name Wednesday 7 how we picked them up via their new mosques. Regards, GMJ

[Feb 10, 2020] The Clinton Machine Will Do Anything To Stop Bernie. Except run a decent canidate

Feb 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

surf@jm , 2 hours ago link

Maybe Hillary can have Steele make up a Russian dossier on Bernie, and have her employees at CNN run with it......Lmao!.......

Bernie pee'ed on the hammer and sickle in Moscow...........Heritic!.......

onewayticket2 , 3 hours ago link

Bernie endorsed Clinton....hard for him to complain now.

[Feb 10, 2020] For some reason not everybody cheers the perspective of a gay couple in the White House.

Feb 10, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Sami Hussain 34 minutes ago

Buttigieg is an empty vessel. He poses no threat to entrenched wealth in this country or to the neocon foreign policy establishment. He won't do anything to curb the excesses of American militarism. The only powerful group he offends is the religious right - a group deeply offended by his homosexuality. They won't want a gay couple in the White House.

[Feb 10, 2020] Note on Clintons

Feb 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Reaper , 4 hours ago link

Clinton is cancer.

south40_dreams , 3 hours ago link

Even cancers don't live forever...

[Feb 09, 2020] Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything.

Feb 09, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Biden performed surprisingly well all year in polls, but he headed into Iowa like a passenger jet trying to land with one burning engine, hitting trees, cows, cars, sides of mountains, everything. The poking incidents were bad, but then one of his chief surrogates, John Kerry, was overheard by NBC talking about the possibility of jumping in to keep Bernie from "taking down" the party.

"Maybe I'm fucking deluding myself here," Kerry reportedly said -- mainstream Democrats may not have changed their policies or strategies much since Trump, but they sure are swearing more -- then noted he would have to raise a "couple of million" from people like venture capitalist Doug Hickey.

[Feb 08, 2020] Please stand up and clap for Colonel Vindman

Feb 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

snoopydawg on Fri, 02/07/2020 - 7:48pm

...

..

Joe Biden asks the Democratic audience to stand up and clap for Colonel Vindman, a member of the national security state

A perfect encapsulation of the last few years

-- Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) February 8, 2020

..

Joe Biden asks the Democratic audience to stand up and clap for Colonel Vindman, a member of the national security state

A perfect encapsulation of the last few years

-- Saagar Enjeti (@esaagar) February 8, 2020

BTW Vindman quit his job so why was it bad for Trump to remove him early? Games

lol, Joe demands a standing ovation for Lt. Col. Vindman, a security state apparatchik who was offended that Trump didn't read from the talking points he prepared. Beyond parody

-- Michael Tracey (@mtracey) February 8, 2020

..

This moment of Amy and Joe basically telling HRC to f*** off is truly beautiful. #DemDebate

-- Krystal Ball (@krystalball) February 8, 2020

[Feb 08, 2020] Deception induced cerebral delirium of Americans public

Feb 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Scipio Africanuz , 3 hours ago link

Thanks Major..

America the country will lose absolutely nothing, folks don't hate Americans, they're simply baffled at what's going on in the US..

And we've been energetic in informing them that Americans are suffering from deception induced cerebral delirium, which ought be brought into remission soon..

As a matter of fact, the "full package" treatment, once the illness is treated, will permit Americans to sally forth and befriend the world again, and folks are expectantly looking forward to the day when they can say again, my good American friend..

The United States, properly managed, has enough resources to engender prosperity in the Western Hemisphere, in harmonious cooperation devoid of coercion..

Imagine Major, a thriving Western Hemisphere, where folks visit each other, doing cultural exchanges, trading amicably..

Anyhow, the reason it's not happening, has to do with the mentality of folks in America's government, whose incredulous gem we came across thus..

"While the First Amendment protects the free speech rights of Americans -- and Twitter should not be censoring the political speech of Americans -- the Ayatollah enjoys zero protection from the United States Bill of Rights," the senators argued..

Here's the link to the threat:

https://sputniknews.com/world/202002081078259694-us-senators-urge-twitter-to-ban-irans-ayatollah-foreign-minister-threaten-platform-with-sanctions/

It beggars belief that these folks are lawmakers in the US government, who don't even understand the US Constitution, or the reason for the country's founding to be a "Shining City" on a hill for guidance to the world..

We warned during the impeachment saga, that shredding the due process of the Sacred Constitution, would eventually breach its core and thus, here we are, as another shoe drops..

Now, the GOP folks who took a scissors to the constitution have now advanced their attack to its very core.. The right to speech..

We'll, we warned you, did we not, just like we warned in 2001, when Constitutional redlines were being crossed..

Anyhow, they're not worth the designation "lawmakers" seeing as they neither understand law, nor its foundation, upon which the constitution is built..

They do understand aggression however, the antithesis of law and like we averred, if God did not spare Adam whom he personally begot, he certainly ain't gonna spare those he didn't.. the transgression of His law..

And that, threats or assassination notwithstanding, is the inescapable fact.. Even unto the 6th and 7th generation or more if necessary.. to satisfy the dues of Justice, Divine, Unimpeachable, Inescapable Justice..

Anyhow, seeing as we don't utilize social media of those types under consideration, we'd simply say to the platforms and their users, bed made is bed slept upon..

laba laba fi ará rẹ wé ẹiyẹ ó fo títì aṣọ rẹ fà yà...

PeeWeedUp , 4 hours ago link

Beyond stupid: America's coming (losing) battle with reality.

[Feb 08, 2020] The United States of America's Doll House by Edward Curtin

Notable quotes:
"... Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population. He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal. ..."
"... The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, "He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair." But he can't live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense. He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn't so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. ..."
"... Great article. But, as the author states, he's preaching to the converts while the overwhelming majority want to remain cocooned within their comfortable ignorance. But even if the veil of ignorance allows a little light through (as with crackpots), it is quickly shut out because it endangers the security of one's worldview built-up over the span of one's life. Why step outside and into the storm of uncertainties if conformity resolves everything without fuss and worry? ..."
"... Considering the above necessary requirements to leave the doll's house, it is not hard to see why so few seek the light. In the old days religion used to be the source and fulfilment of man's questions and needs; now he is a lone traveller on the road to nowhere. ..."
"... CIA's not scared of communism, they're scared of US public contact with the outside world. When Churchill said an iron curtain will come down, he meant it would come down around you. ..."
"... A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors, are not victims but accomplices. – George Orwell ..."
Feb 08, 2020 | www.unz.com

This is an updated and revised version of the full cover-story that appeared in the important publication, garrison: The Journal of History and Deep Politics , Issue 003. Issue 004 is due out this week and I urge readers to purchase it. You will read articles there that you will find no place else, brilliant, eye-opening analyses of issues that the MSM will never touch.

"It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest. The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It's a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis." – Harold Pinter's Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech , 2005

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia, the American people hole up in an illusionary dwelling constructed to reduce them to children afraid of the truth. Or is it the dark? This is not new; it has been so for a very long time, but it has become a more sophisticated haunted doll's house, an electronic one with many bells and whistles and images that move faster than the eye can see. We now inhabit a digital technological nightmare controlled by government and corporate forces intent on dominating every aspect of people's lives. This is true despite the valiant efforts of dissidents to use the technology for human liberation. The old wooden doll houses, where you needed small fingers to rearrange the furniture, now only need thumbs that can click you into your cell's fantasy world. So many dwell there in the fabricated reality otherwise known as propaganda. The result is mass hallucination.

In a 1969 interview, Jim Garrison, the District Attorney of New Orleans and the only person to ever bring to trial a case involving the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, said that as a result of the CIA's murderous coup d'état on behalf of the military-industrial-financial-media-intelligence complex that rules the country to this day, the American people have been subjected to a fabricated reality that has rendered them a nation of passive Eichmanns, who sit in their living rooms, popping pills and watching television as their country's military machine mows down people by the millions and the announcers tell them all the things they should be afraid of, such as bacteria on cutting boards and Russian spies infiltrating their hair salons. Garrison said:

The creation of such inanities as acceptable reality and unacceptable reality is necessary for the self-preservation of the super-state against its greatest danger: understanding on the part of the people as to what is really happening. All factors which contribute to its burgeoning power are exaggerated. All factors which might reveal its corrosive effect on the nation are concealed. The result is to place the populace in the position of persons living in a house whose windows no longer reveal the outside but on which murals have been painted. Some of the murals are frightening and have the effect of reminding the occupants of the outside menaces against which the paternal war machine is protecting them. Other murals are pleasant to remind them how nice things are inside the house.

But to live like this is to live in a doll's house. If life has one lesson to teach us, it is that to live in illusion is ultimately disastrous.

In the doll's house into which America gradually has been converted, a great many of our basic assumptions are totally illusory. [1] Interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney of Parish of Orleans, Louisiana, May 27, 1969, kennedysandking.com

Fifty years have disappeared behind us since the eloquent and courageous Garrison (read On the Trail of the Assassins ) metaphorically voiced the truth, despite the CIA's persistent efforts to paint him as an unhinged lunatic through its media mouthpieces. These days they would probably just lock him up or send him fleeing across borders, as with Assange, Manning, and Snowden.

It is stunning to take a cue from his comment regarding the JFK assassination, when he suggested that one reverse the lone assassin scenario and place it in the U.S.S.R. No American could possibly believe a tale that a former Russian soldier, trained in English and having served at a top Soviet secret military base, who had defected to the U.S. and then returned home with the help of the K.G.B., could kill the Russian Premier with a defective and shoddy rifle and then be shot to death in police headquarters in Moscow by a K.G.B. connected hit man so there would be no trial and the K.G.B. would go scot free. That would be a howler! So too, of course, are the Warren Commission's fictions about Oswald.

Snowden, Assange, and Manning

If we then update this mental exercise and imagine that Snowden, Assange, and Manning were all Russian, and that they released information about Russian war crimes, political corruption, and a system of total electronic surveillance of the Russian population, and were then jailed or sent fleeing into exile as a result, who in the U.S., liberal, libertarian or conservative, would possibly believe the Russian government's accusations that these three were criminals.

Nevertheless, Barack Obama, the transparency president, made sure to treat them as such, all the while parading as a "liberal" concerned for freedom of speech and the First Amendment. He made sure that Snowden and Manning were charged under the Espionage Act of 1917, and that Assange was corralled via false Swedish sex charges so he had to seek asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London (a form of jail). He brought Espionage Act prosecutions against eight people, more than all former presidents combined. He hypocritically pardoned Manning on his way out the door as if this would polish his deluded liberal legacy after making her suffer terribly through seven years of imprisonment. He set the stage for Trump to re-jail Manning to try to get this most courageous woman to testify against Assange, which she will not do, and for the collaborationist British government to jail Assange in preparation for his extradition to the United States and a show trial. As for Snowden, he has been relegated to invisibility, good for news headlines once and for a movie, but now gone and forgotten.

Obama and Trump, arch political "enemies," have made sure that those who reveal the sordid acts of the American murderous state are cruelly punished and silenced. This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn't matter. They don't care, just as they don't care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d'état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these "non-white" people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long. Who does care about the truth? Has anyone even noticed how the corporate media has disappeared the "news" of all those desperate people clamoring to enter the U.S.A. from Mexico? One day they were there and in the headlines; the next day, gone. It's called news.

The Sleepwalkers

But even though a majority of Americans have never believed the government's explanation for JFK's murder, they nevertheless have insouciantly gone to sleep for half a century in the doll's house of illusions as the killing and the lies of their own government have increased over the years and any semblance of a democratic and peaceful America has gone extinct. The fates of courageous whistle-blowers Assange, Manning, and Snowden don't concern them. The fates of Hondurans don't concern them. The fates of Syrians don't concern them. The fates of Iraqis, Afghans, Yemenis, Palestinians don't concern them. The fates of America's victims all around the world don't concern them. Indifference reigns.

Obviously, if you are reading this, you are not one of the sleepwalkers and are awake to the parade of endless lies and illusions and do care. But you are in a minority.

That is not the case for most Americans. When approximately 129 million people cast their votes for Donald Trump and HilIary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election, you know idiocy reigns and nothing has been learned. Ditto for the votes for Obama, Bush, Clinton, et al. You can keep counting back. It is an ugly fact and sad to say. Such a repetition compulsion is a sign of a deep sickness, and it will no doubt be repeated in the 2020 election. The systemic illusion must be preserved at all costs and the warfare state supported in its killing. It is the American way.

It is true that average Americans have not built the doll's house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices. But that does not render them innocent for accepting decades of fabricated reality for so-called peace of mind by believing that a totally corrupt system works. The will to believe is very powerful, as is the propaganda. The lesson that Garrison spoke of has been lost on far too many people, even on those who occasionally leave the doll house for a walk, but who only go slightly down the path for fear of seeing too much reality and connecting too many dots. There is plain ignorance, then there is culpable ignorance, to which I shall return.

Denying Existential Freedom

One of the first things an authoritarian governing elite must do is to convince people that they are not free. This has been going on for at least forty years, ever since the Church Committee's revelations about the CIA in the mid-seventies, including its mind-control program, MKULTRA. Everyone was appalled at the epiphany, so a different tactic was added. Say those programs have been ended when in fact they were continued under other even deeper secret programs, and just have "experts" – social, psychological, and biological "scientists" – repeat ad infinitum that there is no longer any mind control since we now know there is no mind; it is an illusion, and it all comes down to the brain. Biology is destiny, except in culturally diversionary ways in which freedom to choose is extolled – e.g. the latest fashions, gender identity, the best hair style, etc. Create and lavishly fund programs for the study of the brain, while supporting and promoting a vast expansion of pharmaceutical drugs to control people. Do this in the name of helping people with their emotional and behavioral problems that are rooted in their biology and are beyond their control. And create criteria to convince people that they are sick and that their distress has nothing to do with the coup d'état that has rendered them "citizens" of a police state.

We have been interminably told that our lives revolve around our brains (our bodies) and that the answers to our problems lie with more brain research, drugs, genetic testing, etc. It is not coincidental that the U. S. government declared the 1990s the decade of brain research, followed up with 2000-2010 as the decade of the behavior project, and our present decade being devoted to mapping the brain and artificial intelligence, organized by the Office of Science and Technology Project and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). How convenient! George H. W. Bush, Clinton, George W. Bush, Obama, Trump -- what a difference! But this is science and the welfare of the world. Science for idiots.

Drip by drip, here and there, in the pattern of the best propaganda, as the French sociologist Jacques Ellul says – "for propaganda is not the touch of the magic wand. It is based on slow, constant impregnation. It creates conviction and compliance through imperceptible influences that are effective only by continuous repetition" [2] Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes , Jacques Ellul, Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 17-18 – articles, books, media reports have reiterated that people are "determined" by biological, genetic, social, and psychological forces over which they have no control. To assert that people are free in the Sartrean sense ( en soir , condemned to freedom, or free will) has come to be seen as the belief of a delusional fool living in the past , a bad philosopher, an anti-scientist, a poorly informed religionist, one nostalgic for existential cafes, Gauloises, and black berets. One who doesn't grasp the truth since he doesn't read the New York Times or watch CBS television. One who believes in nutty conspiracy theories.

The conventional propaganda – I almost said wisdom – created through decades-long media and academic repetition, is that we are not free.

Let me repeat: we are not free. We are not free.

Investigator reporter John Rappoport has consistently exposed the propaganda involved in the creation and expansion of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) with its pseudo-scientific falsehoods and collusion between psychiatrists and the pharmaceutical industry. As he correctly notes, the CIA's MKULTRA mind-control program has morphed into modern psychiatry, both with the same objectives of disabling and controlling people by convincing them that they are not free and are in need of a chemical brain bath. [3] "CIA mind control morphed into psychiatry?" Jon Rappoport, com , July 11, 2017

Can anyone with an awareness of this history doubt there is a hidden hand behind this development? Once you have convinced people that they are not free in the most profound sense, the rest is child's play. Convinced that they are puppets, they become puppets to be willingly jerked around.

"He played with me just as I used to play with dolls," says Nora in Ibsen's A Doll's House.

Now who would want to get people to believe they were not free? The answer is obvious given a minute of thought. It is not just Nora's husband Torvald.

Perfect examples of the persistence of the long-term, repetitive, impregnating propaganda appear in news headlines constantly. Here is an egregious example concerning the little understood case of the assassination of Senator Robert Kennedy. On Friday, August 30, 2019, Sirhan, who has been in prison for fifty-two years for the murder of RFK that he did not commit, was stabbed by another prisoner. A quick click through the MSM headlines reporting this showed the same words repeated by all the corporate media as they fulfilled their function as CIA stenographers. One example, from CBS News, will suffice: "Robert Kennedy assassin hospitalized after prison stabbing." [4] "Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan hospitalized after prison stabbing," Caroline Linton, CBS , August 31, 2019 RFK assassin, RFK assassin, RFK assassin all the media said the same thing, which they have been doing for fifty-two years. Their persistency endures despite all the facts that refute their disinformation and show that Senator Kennedy, who was on his way to becoming president, was murdered, like his brother John, by forces of the national security state.

Sartre and Bad Faith

Lying and dissembling are ubiquitous. Being deceived by the media liars is mirrored in people's personal lives. People lie and want to be deceived. They choose to play dumb, to avoid a confrontation with truth. They want to be nice (Latin, nescire , not to know, to be ignorant) and to be liked. They want to tuck themselves into a safe social and cultural framework where they imagine they will be safe. They like the doll's house. They choose to live in what Jean Paul Sartre called bad faith ( mauvaise foi ): In Existential Psychoanalysis he put it thus:

In bad faith it is from myself that I am hiding the truth. But with this 'lie' to myself, the one to whom the lie is told and the one who lies are one and the same person, which means that I must know in my capacity as deceiver the truth which is hidden from me in my capacity as the one deceived.

Such bad faith allows people to fabricate a second act of bad faith: that they are not responsible for their ignorance of the truths behind the government's and corporate media's lies and propaganda, even as the shades of the prison house ominously close around us and the world edges toward global death that could arrive in an instant with nuclear war or limp along for years of increasing suffering.

Those of us who write about the U.S. led demented wars and provocations around the world and the complementary death of democracy at home are constantly flabbergasted and discouraged by the willed ignorance of so many Americans. For while the mainstream media does the bidding of the power elite, there is ample alternative news and analyses available on the internet from fine journalists and writers committed to truth, not propaganda. There is actually far too much truth available, which poses another problem. But it doesn't take a genius to learn how to research important issues and to learn how to distinguish between bogus and genuine information. It takes a bit of effort, and, more importantly, the desire to compare multiple, opposing viewpoints and untangle the webs the Web weaves. We are awash in information (and disinformation) and both good and bad reporting, but it is still available to the caring inquirer.

The problem is the will to know. But why? Why the refusal to investigate and question; why the indifference? Stupidity? Okay, there is that. Ignorance? That too. Willful ignorance, ditto. Laziness, indeed. Careerism and ideology? For certain. Upton Sinclair put it mildly when he said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it." Difficult? No, it's almost impossible.

But then there are many very intelligent people who have nothing to lose and yet adamantly refuse to entertain alternative possibilities to the reigning orthodoxies that have them in their grip. As do many others, I know many such people who will yes me to death and then never fully research issues. They will remain in limbo or else wink to themselves that what may be true couldn't be true. They close down. This is a great dilemma and frustration faced by those who seek to convince people to take an active part in understanding what is really going on in the world today, especially as the United States wages war across the globe, threatens Russia, China, and Iran, among many others, and expands and modernizes its nuclear weapons capabilities.

As for Assange, Manning, and Snowden, their plight matters not a whit. In fact, they have been rendered invisible inside the doll's house, except as the murals on the windows flash back their images as threats to the occupants, Russian monsters out to eat them up. As the great poet Constantine Cavafy wrote long ago in his poem "Waiting for the Barbarians" and they never come: "Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution." Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff, who knows the Russian barbarians have and will come again, life must be terrifying as he tries so manfully to bar the gates. The Russians have been the American solution in this fairy tale for so long that it's hard for many Americans to believe another story.

The Two-Headed Monster

On the one hand, there is the massive propaganda apparatus operated by American intelligence agencies in conjunction with their media partners.

On the other, there is the human predilection for untruth and illusions, the sad need to be comforted and to submit to greater "authority," gratefully to accept the myths proffered by one's masters. This tendency applies not just to the common people, but even more so to the intellectual classes, who act as though they are immune. Erich Fromm, writing about Germans and Hitler, but by extension people everywhere, termed this the need to "escape from freedom," since freedom conjures up fears of vertiginous aloneness and the need to decide, which in turn evokes the fear of death. [5] Escape from Freedom , Erich Fromm, Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1941 There are also many kinds of little deaths that precede the final one: social, career, money, familiar, etc., that are used to keep people in the doll's house.

Fifty years ago, the CIA coined the term "conspiracy theory" as a weapon to be used to dismiss the truths expressed by critics of its murder of President Kennedy, and those of Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK. All the media echoed the CIA line. While they still use the term to dismiss and denounce, their control of the mainstream media is so complete today that every evil government action is immediately seconded, whether it be the lies about the attacks of September 11, 2001, the wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Yemen, Iran, etc., the coups disguised as color revolutions in Ukraine, Venezuela, Bolivia, Hong Kong, the downing of the Malaysian jetliner there, drone murders, the Iranian "threat," the looting of the American people by the elites, alleged sarin gas attacks in Syria, the anti-Russia bashing and the Russia-gate farce, the "criminals" Assange, Manning, Snowden – everything. The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, Fox News, the Washington Post, CNN, NPR, etc. – all are stenographers for the deep state.

So much of the ongoing propaganda travels under the banner of "the war on terror," which is, of course, an outgrowth of the attacks of September 11, 2001, appropriately named and constantly reinforced as 9/11 in a wonderful example of linguistic mind-control: a constant emergency reminder to engender anxiety, depression, panic, and confusion, four of the symptoms that lead the DSM "experts" and their followers to diagnose and drug individuals. The term 9/11 was first used in the New York Times on September 12, 2001 by Bill Keller, the future Times' editor and Iraq war cheerleader. Just a fortuitous coincidence, of course.

Jacques Ellul on Propaganda

Jacques Ellul has argued convincingly that modern propaganda in a technological mass society is more complicated than the state and media lying and deceiving the population. He argues that propaganda meets certain needs of modern people and therefore the process of deceit is reciprocal.

The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, "He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair." But he can't live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense. He wants to participate and have opinions that suggest he grasps the flow of events. He doesn't so much want information, but value judgments and preconceived positions that provide him with a framework for living. Ellul wrote the following in 1965 in his classic book Propaganda :

The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a 'key' that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions .The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework .the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be; the more fragmented the canvas, the simpler the pattern; the more difficult the question, the more all-embracing the solution; the more menacing the reduction of his own worth, the greater the need for boosting his ego. All this propaganda – and only propaganda – can give him. [6] Ellul, op cit., p. 140

Another way of saying this is that people want to be provided with myths to direct them to the "truth." But such so-called truth has been preconceived within the overarching myth provided by propaganda, and while it satisfies people's emotional need for coherence, it also allows them to think of themselves as free individuals arriving at their own conclusions, which is a basic function of good propaganda. In today's mass technological society, it is essential that people be convinced that they are free-thinking individuals acting in good faith. Then they can feel good about themselves as they lie and act in bad faith.

Culpable Ignorance

It is widely accepted that political leaders and the mass media lie and dissemble regularly, which, of course, they do. That is their job in an oligarchy. Today we are subjected to almost total, unrelenting media and government propaganda. Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition. Trump is a liar. No, Obama is a liar. And Hillary Clinton. No, Fox News. Ridiculous! – it's CNN or NBC. And so on and so forth in this theater of the absurd that plays out within a megaplex of mainstream media propaganda, where there are many shows but one producer, whose overall aim is to engineer the consent of all who enter, while setting the different audiences against each other. It is a very successful charade that evokes name-calling from all quarters.

In other words, for many people their opponents lie, as do other people, but not them. This is as true in personal as well as public life. Here the personal and the political converge, despite protestations to the contrary. Dedication to truth is very rare.

But there is another issue with propaganda that complicates the picture further. People of varying political persuasions can agree that propaganda is widespread. Many people on the left, and some on the right, would agree with Lisa Pease's statement in her book on the RFK assassination, A Lie Too Big to Fail: The Real History of the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy, that "the way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time." [7] A Lie Too Big To Fail , Lisa Pease, Feral House, 2018, pp.500-501 That is also what Garrison thought when he spoke of the doll's house.

If that is so, then today's propaganda is anchored in the events of the 1960s, specifically the infamous government assassinations of JFK, Malcolm X, MLK, and RFK, the truth of which the CIA has worked so hard to conceal. In the fifty or so years since, a vast amount of new information has made it explicitly clear that these murders were carried out by elements within the U.S. government, and were done so to silence the voices of four charismatic leaders who were opposed to the American war machine and the continuation of the Cold War. To turn away from this truth and to ignore its implications can only be described as an act of bad faith and culpable ignorance, or worse. But that is exactly what many prominent leftists have done. Then to compound the problem, they have done the same with the attacks of September 11, 2001.

One cannot help thinking of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called these people in the 1950s: "the compatible left." He felt that effective CIA propaganda, beside the need for fascist-minded types such as Allen Dulles and James Jesus Angleton, depended on "courting" leftists and liberal into its orbit. For so many of the compatible left, those making a lot of money posing as opponents of the ruling elites but often taking the money of the super-rich, the JFK assassination and the truth of September 11, 2001 are inconsequential, never to be broached, as if they never happened, except as the authorities say they did. By ignoring these most in-your-face events with their eyes wide shut, a coterie of influential leftists has done the work of Orwell's crime-stop and has effectively succeeded in situating current events in an ahistorical and therefore misleading context that abets U.S. propaganda. They truncate the full story to present a narrative that distorts the truth.

Without drawing a bold line connecting the dots from November 22, 1963 up to the present, a critique of the murderous forces ruling the United States is impossible.

Among the most notable of such failures are Noam Chomsky, Alexander Cockburn, Howard Zinn, and Chris Hedges, men idolized by many liberals and leftists. And there are many others who have been deeply influenced by Chomsky, Cockburn, and Zinn and follow in their footsteps. Their motivations remain a mystery, but there is no doubt their refusals have contributed to the increased power of those who control the doll's house. To know better and do as they have is surely culpable ignorance.

From Bad to Worse

Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks, increased or decreased in the past half century? Who is winning the battle, the people or the ruling elites? The answer is obvious. It matters not at all whether the president has been Trump or Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan or George W. Bush, Barack Obama or George H. W. Bush, Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter. The power of the national security state has grown under them all and everyone is left to moan and groan and wonder why. All the while the doll's house has become more and more sophisticated and powerful with the growth of electronic media and cell phone usage.

The new Cold War now being waged against Russia and China is a bi-partisan affair, as is the confidence game played by the secret government intended to create a fractured consciousness in the population. This fragmentation of consciousness prevents people from grasping the present from within because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data. Trump and his followers on one side of the coin; liberal Democrats on the other. The latter, whose bibles are the New York Times, NPR, The Washington Post, Democracy Now , The Guardian , etc. – can only see propaganda when they can attribute it to Trump or the Russians. The former see everything as a liberal conspiracy to take down Trump. The liberals have embraced a new McCarthyism and allied themselves with the deep-state forces that they were once allegedly appalled by, including Republicans. Their embrace of the formerly despised war-monger John Bolton in the impeachment trial of Trump is a laughable case in point, if it weren't so depraved and slimy. It surely isn't the bloodthirsty policies of the Trump administration or his bloviating personality, for these liberals allied themselves with Obama's anti-Russian rhetoric, his support for the U.S. orchestrated neo-fascist Ukrainian coup, his destruction of Libya, his wars of aggression across the Middle East, his war on terror, his trillion dollar nuclear weapons modernization, his enjoyment of drone killing, his support for the coup in Honduras, his embrace of the CIA and his CIA Director John Brennan, his prosecution of whistle-blowers, etc. The same media that served the CIA so admirably over the decades became the liberals' paragons of truth. It's enough to make your head spin, which is the point. Spin left, spin right, spin all around, because we have possessed your mind in this spectacular image game where seeming antinomies are the constancy of the same through difference, all the presidents coined by the same manufacturer who knows that coin flipping serves to entertain the audience eager for hope and change.

This is how the political system works to prevent change. It is why little has changed for the better over half a century and the American empire has expanded. While it may be true that there are signs that this American hegemony is coming to an end (I am not convinced), I would not underestimate the power of the U.S. propaganda apparatus to keep people docile and deluded in the doll's house, despite the valiant efforts of independent truth-tellers.

How, for example, is it possible for so many people to see such a stark difference between the despicable Trump and the pleasant Obama? They are both puppets dancing to their masters' tunes – the same masters. They both front for the empire.

In his excellent book, Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State , Jeremy Kuzmarov assiduously documents Obama's crimes, including his CIA background. [8] Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State , Jeremy Kuzmarov, Clarity Press, 2019 As Glen Ford, of Black Agenda Report, says in the first sentence of his forward, "Barack Obama may go down in presidential history as the most effective-and deceptive-imperialist of them all." Read the book if you want all the details. They form an overwhelming indictment of the con artist and war criminal that is irrefutable. But will those who worship at the altar of Barack Obama read it? Of course not. Just as those deluded ones who voted for the reality television flim-flam man Trump will ignore all the accumulating evidence that they've been had and are living under a president who is Obama's disguised doppelganger, carrying out the orders of his national security state bosses. This, too, is well documented, and no doubt another writer will arise in the years to come to put it between a book's covers.

Yet even Jeremy Kuzmarov fails to see the link between the JFK assassination and Obama's shilling for the warfare state. His few references to Kennedy are all negative, suggesting he either is unaware of what Kennedy was doing in the last year of his life and why he was murdered by the CIA, or something else. He seems to follow Noam Chomsky, a Kennedy hater, in this regard. I point out this slight flaw in an excellent book because it is symptomatic of certain people on the left who refuse to complete the circle. If, as Kuzmarov, argues, Obama was CIA from the start and that explains his extraordinarily close relationship with the CIA's John Brennan, an architect, among many things, of the CIA's extraordinary rendition program, and that Obama told CIA Director Panetta that the CIA would "get everything it wanted," and the CIA killed JFK, well, something's amiss, an enormous gap in the analysis of our current condition.

The doll's house is a mind game of extraordinary proportions, orchestrated by the perverted power elites that run the show and ably abetted by their partners in the corporate mass media, even some in the alternative press who mean well but are confused, or are disinformation agents in the business of sowing confusion together with their mainstream Operation Mockingbird partners. It is a spectacle of open secrecy, in which the CIA has effectively suckered everyone into a game of to-and-fro in which only they win.

Our only hope for change is to try and educate as many people as possible about the linkages between events that started with the CIA coup d'état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.

Yes, we must educate but also agitate for the release of this courageous trio. Their freedom is ours; their imprisonment is ours, whether we know it or not. The walls are closing in.

Lisa Pease is so right: "The way the CIA took over America in the 1960s is the story of our time, and too few recognize this. We can't fix a problem we can't even acknowledge exists."

If we don't follow her advice, we will be toyed with like dolls for a long time to come. There will be no one else to blame.

Notes

[1] Interview with Jim Garrison, District Attorney of Parish of Orleans, Louisiana, May 27, 1969, kennedysandking.com

[2] Propaganda: The Formation of Men's Attitudes , Jacques Ellul, Vintage Books, 1973, pp. 17-18

[3] " CIA mind control morphed into psychiatry? " Jon Rappoport, com , July 11, 2017

[4] " Robert Kennedy assassin Sirhan Sirhan hospitalized after prison stabbing ," Caroline Linton, CBS , August 31, 2019

[5] Escape from Freedom , Erich Fromm, Rinehart & Company, Inc., 1941

[6] Ellul, op cit., p. 140

[7] A Lie Too Big To Fail , Lisa Pease, Feral House, 2018, pp.500-501

[8] Obama's Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State , Jeremy Kuzmarov, Clarity Press, 2019


Biff , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 6:18 am GMT

A good dose of reality will drive a man to drink. Where's my beer?

A good summary:

events that started with the CIA coup d'état in Dallas on November 22, 1963, continued through the killings of Malcolm X, MLK, RFK and on through so much else up to September 11, 2001, and have brought us to the deeply depressing situation we now find ourselves in where truthtellers like Julian Assange, Chelsey Manning, and Edward Snowden are criminalized, while the real perpetrators of terrible evils roam free.

Parfois1 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 8:25 am GMT
Great article. But, as the author states, he's preaching to the converts while the overwhelming majority want to remain cocooned within their comfortable ignorance. But even if the veil of ignorance allows a little light through (as with crackpots), it is quickly shut out because it endangers the security of one's worldview built-up over the span of one's life. Why step outside and into the storm of uncertainties if conformity resolves everything without fuss and worry?

Intellect or knowledge, logic or reason, spiritual guidance or revelation, are not enough to excite the common man to step outside the doll's house and confront the reality of his existence and his place in the world. One needs all that plus, having learned life's lessons, have the courage to step fearlessly into the unknown and ready to accept the challenges ahead. He also needs a vision or a beacon – a symbolic "Mamayev Kurgan" ideal – to embolden and steel him to overcome the hurdles on his road of discovery and instill the fire of curiosity to go further. And he heeds to ask the ultimate question (What's the meaning of life?) and fulfill his answer to that question. That's a tall order for the common man in the post-modern world where the self is all there is.

Considering the above necessary requirements to leave the doll's house, it is not hard to see why so few seek the light. In the old days religion used to be the source and fulfilment of man's questions and needs; now he is a lone traveller on the road to nowhere.

On the other hand, for the less endowed among us to make the grade, a course in Moral Philosophy and Marxism, could be a short-cut but not much easier for the turgid prose and cerebral wear.

gotmituns , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 10:08 am GMT
As a young veteran (grunt) of the war in Vietnam I learned to question everything when Nixon bombed N. Vietnam to the peace table (Christmas bombing). I said to myself [if he could get the N. Vietnamese to come running back to the peace negotiations with just ten days of serious bombing, then they could have done it at any time during that war but didn't]. After that, I question everything. Sure enough, everything coming from our government is a lie, even the words and, and the.
onebornfree , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:09 pm GMT
Reality check. This "just" in:

On The True Nature of All Governments[ Past, Present, or Future]:

"Because they are all ultimately funded via both direct and indirect theft [taxes], and counterfeiting [central bank monopolies], all governments are essentially, at their very cores, 100% corrupt criminal scams which cannot be "reformed" or "improved", simply because of their innate criminal nature." onebornfree

"People do not expect to find chastity in a whorehouse. Why, then, do they expect to find honesty and humanity in government, a congeries of institutions whose modus operandi consists of lying, cheating, stealing, and if need be, murdering those who resist?" H. L. Mencken

"To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be placed under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality."
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, translated by John Beverly Robinson (London: Freedom Press, 1923), pp. 293-294." 
~ Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

Regards, onebornfree

SolontoCroesus , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:10 pm GMT

...An earlier article on CIA by Curtin: The CIA Then and Now: Old Wine in New Bottles opened with this sentence:

The Nazis had a name for their propaganda and mind-control operations: weltanschauungskrieg – "world view warfare."

Why make "Nazi" the first thought planted in the reader's mind, as if to suggest that USAians -- and CIA -- developed their bad habits from the Nazis?

To be sure, Curtin spent the next sentences and paragraphs explaining that Nazis learned their psychological warfare techniques from Bernays, and that USA/CIA has perfected and expanded those techniques to the point that they're all-pervasive.

Moi , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 12:50 pm GMT
@Biff The simple fact is that Americans are not a reality-based people. They are greedy, egotistical and violent and love to bs themselves to feel better about themselves. They celebrate the abnormal (LGBTQI) and can hold two opposing notions at the same–e.g. they tear down statues of the Confederate leaders even as they raise slavers Washington and Jefferson to sainthood.
Willem , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:16 pm GMT
'It is true that average Americans have not built the doll's house; that is the handiwork of the vast interconnected and far-reaching propaganda arms of the U.S. government and their media accomplices.'

True, but what is also true is that there is nothing new or American to this doll house. It's Plato's cave that has been designed by rulers who need myths (of their greatness) in order to 'justifiably' rule over the population. That is as old as the world.

That we live in this reality may have nothing to do with bad faith. It could just as well be that people see no other option than to be believe in the narrative that is spun before their eyes. Please note that propaganda is not made for people who know from experience (bombs e.g.) how empires work, but for people who live comfortable as long as they believe in the myth. The prospect of nihilism is what people keep thinking that what is not true is true. And it could only be bad faith if they could acknowledge that there is an alternative reality (which they can't, because they consider that nihilism). So here is a job for you, dear reader, convince your neighbour who believes in the myth that the myth is just that (a myth) AND provide him or her an alternative reality that is not leading to chaos and nihilism.

I am happy that Curtin calls the phonies by name: Hedges, Chomsky These people have some interesting views, but very little and if you would believe all their words you would surely end up in a blind alley where you must vote for a Democrat (Chomsky), or get tear gassed by the police (Hedges)

Nice essay

Put something in it for the jigs , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:50 pm GMT
What's more, Martin/Malcolm et al. is best viewed as a program. CIA also killed two of Malcolm's African interlocutors and the friend who wrote a screenplay about his life (there's a good book about it by Karl Evannzz.) Rainbow sparkle pony Jesse Jackson got his start in life by trying and failing to start the gunfight that was going to get Martin King killed in the 902nd MIG's bazooka crossfire. Dick Ober also killed Fred Hampton, students at Jackson State, and a long list of others. John Burge prototyped Abu Ghraib with his torture chamber in Chicago.

The thing that scares CIA most is international solidarity. The outside world understands the CIA regime perfectly well. And they're assembling the institutional framework for dismantling CIA and prosecuting the command structure it imposed on our country. CIA's murder panic over the Bandung Conference dwarfed the Red Scare in scale and intensity. That's because CIA's not scared of communism, they're scared of US public contact with the outside world. When Churchill said an iron curtain will come down, he meant it would come down around you.

Is there a way to get more foreign commenters here? Association in a plaintext forum is necessarily limited, but Unz would be greatly benefited by the geographic reach of e.g. moonofalabama.org (I see denk found this place already.)

Twodees Partain , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 1:58 pm GMT
The Garrison interview is an important piece as an introduction to the subject the author tackles here. Any of Garrison's observations can be quoted as revelatory for those who have never considered the basic theme of this article, but here's one in particular:

"Q. 8. Has the change in the administration in Washington

[Johnson to Nixon] affected your relations with the federal agencies whose cooperation until now has been denied you?

A. There has been no change of any kind in the power base in Washington. There have been seeming changes but the warfare machine and its extensive intelligence tentacles, domestic as well as foreign, remain untouched. Congress is free to debate concerning daylight savings time,and the president is free to re-paint the rooms of the White House any color he chooses,but there is not likely to be any diminution in the power of the warrior chieftains and their allies in the government.

The President of the United States is a transient official in the regard of the warfare conglomerate. His assignment is to act as master of ceremonies in the awarding of posthumous medals, to serve when needed as a salesman for the military hardware manufacturers,and to speak as often as possible about the nation's desire for peace.

He is not free to trespass on the preserve of the war interests nor even to acknowledge that such an organism exists. He is not free because of the collective power to remove the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff nor the heads of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He must re-appoint them because of their amazing efficiency. That is his assignment in the game. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff used to be required to be replaced every two years. No such change has been made since November 22nd, 1963.

Nor has there ever been any mention in the mass media of the curious
end of what once was not merely custom but a requirement of law. Apparently, like so much else that has happened since 1963, it is not newsworthy. "

This interviews took place in 1969. Not much has changed since then.

Anonymous [286] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:00 pm GMT
@ThereisaGod Yes, brilliant in almost all respects except the conclusion, since it's organized Jewry that's taken over the United States. Focusing on the CIA's activities is confusing cause with effect in the way blaming these endless wars on the "MIC" deflects attention from the masters behind the screen.

The quotes from Jacque Ellul are right on target all these years later, and more so. But, what the article's author forgot to add was Ellul's conclusion that it's the most educated among us who are far and away the most influenced by propaganda because of their need to feel well informed within their social circles. Voltaire pointed out that in an age of disbelief, as ours is for the educated classes, damnation now takes the form of social irrelevance. Can you imagine going to a reception in DC and not knowing what the actors were reading on CNN or Fox News last night?

As the late Underground Grammarian, Richard Mitchell, put it, college mis educated Americans fancy themselves educated and yet generally don't know who authored their thoughts. Ellul called education "pre-propaganda," and so our brainwashed kids now regard lying crap like climate change as science, accept the fiendish chemical and surgical transgendering of their emotionally troubled classmates as virtuous, and believe that male sodomy, which is factually the externalization of coprophilia and often coprophagia, is not only something rather gay, but an expression of love. If today's college kids vote, we could get Mayor Pete as president solely because he's "gay."

Voting does little more than legitimize the grave evils committed in our name. Democracy in America is now close to mobocracy and ensures pretty much the opposite of its supposed virtues read from the same script on CNN and Fox News every night. The president, in any case, as with every president before him since JFK, has revealed who his true masters always were by coming very close to criminalizing any hint of criticism of Israel, which in turn is not so much a country as it is a de facto exclave of organized Jewry in America.

John Chuckman , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:12 pm GMT
A very nice piece of work. I love the Harold Pinter quote. And Jim Garrison, despite some errors, was simply a remarkable man. I read his very articulate books and saw him in interviews. He never had quite the complete picture, as you might expect with all the clever, well-paid people of CIA and FBI working against him. And America's mainline press was dedicated to diminishing and defaming him, how else could it be?

But he got an awfully lot right, and his efforts should have made more of a difference to more Americans, but he was literally portrayed as a person with mental problems and as a crook. Just the intensity of the efforts to do so should tell you something.

I was long a fairly serious student of the Kennedy Assassination, and I understand many of the details that were routinely glossed over or misrepresented.

The fact is Kennedy was the only President in modern American history to oppose the unelected establishment. He did so on several important matters.

And he did so at a time when the CIA, under the pleasant and avuncular Eisenhower who wanted to avoid open military hostilities, had given the Agency free rein pretty much to do as it pleased in many places of the world.

It was arrogant with its success and privilege and deeply resented Kennedy's approach to exerting Presidential authority. Kennedy's threats and firings after the Bay of Pigs fiasco plus his later efforts to establish good backchannel communication with Russia and, to a lesser extent, Cuba, made him a doomed man. His relations with Israel and its determination to acquire nuclear weapons went against the grain of the establishment. His important relationship with Mary Pinchot Meyer was also a dark cloud over him, and Mary was murdered a year after Kennedy, her murder never solved.

An important bottom line consideration concerning the Warren Commission was Bertrand Russell's profound question, never answered, "If, as we are told, Oswald was the lone assassin, where is the issue of national security?"

Over the years, I've done a good deal of serious writing on the assassination. Readers will find some intriguing material in the following:

[MORE]
https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/07/13/john-chuckman-comment-the-first-genuine-information-in-the-kennedy-assassination-records-release-to-give-us-some-genuine-information-about-what-happened/

https://chuckmanwords.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/1544/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/john-chuckman-comment-on-re-opening-the-kennedy-assassination-investigation-why-it-would-be-a-waste-of-time-the-nature-of-truth-where-empire-or-great-power-is-involved-some-truth-about-the-fbi/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/12/14/john-chuckman-comment-further-thoughts-on-the-kennedy-assassination-someone-suggests-the-involvement-of-israel-a-real-possibility-but-cia-still-is-involved/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/05/25/john-chuckman-comment-an-article-on-parts-of-the-last-century-of-american-history-raises-thoughts-of-the-deadly-mix-of-ingredients-for-war-brewing-now-in-americas-establishment-note-on-kennedy-as/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/29/john-chuckman-comment-the-guardian-offers-an-impoverished-list-of-kennedy-assassination-books-i-offer-a-few-of-the-best-although-a-couple-of-them-are-now-hard-to-get/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/10/john-chuckman-comment-a-new-book-on-cia-murders-of-western-leaders-plus-another-important-book-lead-to-my-revaluation-of-the-kennedy-assassination/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/23/john-chuckman-comment-some-really-interesting-historical-stuff-on-the-assassination-of-john-kennedy/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/28/john-chuckman-comment-heres-an-additional-batch-although-still-not-all-of-the-reasons-that-kennedys-assassination-had-to-be-a-conspiracy/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/12/11/john-chuckman-comment-a-remarkable-dull-little-photograph-of-george-h-w-bush/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/04/23/john-chuckman-comment-time-magazine-and-its-old-relationship-with-cia-most-glaring-example-decades-ago-was-times-ownership-and-treatment-of-the-zapruder-film-of-kennedys-assassination/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/11/26/john-chuckman-comment-the-absolute-nonsense-of-suggesting-that-54-years-after-kennedys-assassination-similar-circumstances-now-work-against-trump-why-kennedy-actually-died-why-trump-wont/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2019/09/11/john-chuckman-comment-the-kennedy-assassination-and-israels-nuclear-weapons-program-lyndon-johnson-almost-custom-tailored-to-israels-desires-of-the-time-the-book-final-judgment-jack-rub/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/08/16/john-chuckman-comment-conspiracies-are-real-enough-especially-in-america-when-stakes-are-high-but-the-label-conspiracy-theory-is-just-a-dirty-little-game-to-help-cover-them-up/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2018/01/22/john-chuckman-comment-writer-calls-lyndon-johnson-a-political-hero-in-fact-he-was-the-most-demonic-man-ever-in-the-oval-office-despite-lots-of-competition/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/11/04/14114/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/10/27/john-chuckman-comment-release-of-secret-jfk-files-why-was-this-junk-ever-secret-is-the-question-to-ask-i-offer-just-some-of-the-reasons-the-killing-had-to-be-a-conspiracy-here/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2017/04/20/john-chuckman-comment-israels-1967-attack-on-intelligence-ship-u-s-s-liberty-during-its-six-day-war-of-conquest-the-only-mystery-has-always-been-lyndon-johnsons-bizarre-reaction-what-he-crea/

https://chuckmanwordsincomments.wordpress.com/2015/12/31/john-chuckman-comment-just-a-few-of-the-many-flaws-in-the-warren-commissions-report-a-sham-investigation-that-investigated-nothing/

ChuckOrloski , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:16 pm GMT
@ThereisaGod Hey ThereisaGod!

I note you credited Edward Curtin's epistle as two-x's "brilliant." Okay, okay.

Fyi, early this morning & while quite into the article, I was, as recommended, prepped to activate my debit card & buy the book, "The Journal of History & Deep Politics," which might yet happen.

Nonetheless, I arrived at the strange part where Ed Curtin opined, "Then again, for people like U.S. Representative Adam Schiff , who knows the Russian barbarians have & will come again, life must be a terrifying as he tries to so manfully bar the gates."

Haha, (Gasp) The bug-eyed Jewish & Neo-Bolshie barbarian, Adam Schiff, made ZUS political history by lying about the zealot-Likud Chosen One, President Trumpstein.

Then, voila, Ed Curtin nobly turned to Jacques Ellul to bring sense into American dumb goyim heads, and who wrote veritically downward and wordy, yawn:
"The majority prefers expressing stupidities to not expressing any opinion: this gives them the feeling of participation. For they need simple thoughts, elementary explanations, a 'key' that will permit them to take a position, and even ready-made opinions .The man who keeps himself informed needs a framework .the more complicated the problems are, the more simple the explanations must be;"

Well, either Mr. or Ms. ThereisaGod, thank you!
Fyi, & as the unHoly Land & the Netanyahu/Kushner Greater Israel "deal" is about to explode into WW3, I still might buy the book, but I shall never leave behind the plain-spoken & affordable sermon, issued by a Nazarene & nearby the Sea of Galilee, , "The Beatitudes."

Mulegino1 , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:24 pm GMT
@SolontoCroesus

But why suggest that it was the drop of Nazi ink that sullied the milk of CIA purity? Why not treat CIA as its own being, sui generis, and attempt to expose the roots of the evil that CIA represents?

I suggest that that exploration would expose not the evil Nazis but roots entangled in the Hebrew mythos and in zionism; and that, ironically, rather than exemplifying that evil, Nazis recognized and attempted to extract that malign influence.

Brilliant!

The "Nazis" were pikers when it came to propaganda, not because they were manipulative but because they tended to eschew the "big lie" as its operative principle, which is exactly the opposite of the official narrative. Hitler did not propose the "big lie" as a means of mass control, he condemned it! Goebbels observed that good propaganda must be based upon the truth.

The archetypal infotainment prole is subjected relentlessly to History Channel level propaganda with Hitler shrieking wildly (without context or subtitles), the iconic striped pajama pathos and roaring Stuka terror. We Dumbmericans will buy anything about history provided it has the right packaging.

anonymous [508] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:37 pm GMT

This is how the system works, and for most Americans, it is not happening. It doesn't matter. They don't care, just as they don't care that Obama backed the 2009 coup d'état in Honduras that has resulted in so many deaths at the hands of U.S trained killers, and then Trump ranted about all these "non-white" people fleeing to the U.S. to escape a hell created by the U.S., as it has been doing throughout Latin America for so long.

1,000 Israeli Soldiers To Arrive in Honduras to Train Troops, Police on Border Protection
https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/1000-Israeli-Soldiers-To-Arrive-in-Honduras-to-Train-Troops-Police-on-Border-Protection-20190506-0014.html

Honduras will receive 1,000 Israeli soldiers to train the country's army for border protection, fight against drug trafficking , investigation, and counterterrorism. [notice how eliminating a comma = truth-telling]

The main mission of the troops is to train for border protection to stop migrants fleeing Honduras to the U.S., especially children.

This would be the second time that Honduras is allowing foreign military personnel in the territory and the first time in Israel's history to send troops abroad.

Nonny Mouse , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:52 pm GMT
@Wizard of Oz You make a good point. The family centres on the children and finding them a place in the world, which means a place in the doll's house, which means our own place is to believe what the elite tells us.
Saggy , says: Website Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:55 pm GMT
@SolontoCroesus I stopped reading at the 'passive Eichmann's' and was typing up my comment when I saw yours what the hell is this guy, who's supposed to be exposing the propaganda world we live in, doing repeating a trope from the biggest hoax of all? So, I googled E Curtin and holocaust and discovered he is silent as a mouse on the subject, and is a writer for globalresearch.ca , so I did a site search for global research and discovered that the site promotes the holohoax . son of a bitch ! . for example
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-bush-familys-links-to-nazi-germany-a-famous-american-family-made-its-fortune-from-the-nazis/5512243

The Bush bank helped the Thyssens make the Nazi steel that killed Allied solders. As bad as financing the Nazi war machine may seem, aiding and abetting the Holocaust was worse.

Moi , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:55 pm GMT
@Nonny Mouse Perhaps not, but I don't know of any other "civilized" country that serially bombs/invades other countries that have not even threatened it or have the capacity to do so
ChuckOrloski , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 2:58 pm GMT
@Mulegino1 Am impressed at how Mulegino1 said to SolontoCroesus: "We Dumbmericans will buy anything about history provided it has the right packaging."

Soon perhaps around Purim time, & after his zio-impeachment acquittal, the unchained President Trumpstein will take revenge on the ethnically cleansed Palestinians for their leadership's having snubbed ( ) The Steal/Deal of the Century.

Doubtless, Muley, International Supremacist Jewry has the "right packaging," Thank you!

Desert Fox , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:29 pm GMT
A people that elect corrupt politicians, imposters, thieves and traitors, are not victims but accomplices. – George Orwell
Sam J. , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:40 pm GMT
" The modern person feels lost, powerless, and empty. Ellul says, "He realizes that he depends on decisions over which he has no control, and that realization drives him to despair." But he can't live in despair; desires that life be meaningful; and wants to feel he lives in a world that makes sense "

You answer your own questions I believe.

" Depending on their political leanings, people direct their anger toward politicians of parties they oppose and media they believe slant their coverage to favor the opposition "

It relieves tension even if ineffectual. They do this because the only other answer is war against the State. True if it was a mass movement the deep State would be soon overthrown but when someone does this they pay all the cost and no one else does. To do so is to be dead and no one will likely know. It will end when enough people feel like they would rather be dead than go on like this.

"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If if We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation . We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn

I agree with Solzhenitsyn except for the part that they deserved it. NO they didn't for reasons I stated above. No one NOT in the camps knew for sure what happened to all these people. They could speculate but they didn't KNOW. So risking everything for something you suspect is not normal.

There's also the fact that most normal people wouldn't dream of doing some of the vast evil things the psychopaths that run things do. They couldn't imagine themselves doing anything remotely like this so unless they have solid proof, and even then, they just have a hard time believing people can be so evil in a such a straight forward systematic way.

Sparkon , says: Show Comment February 8, 2020 at 3:48 pm GMT

While truth-tellers Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning sit inside jail cells and Edward Snowden lives in exile in Russia,

I think this is an excellent essay, as far as it goes, but Assange's declaration that 9/11 is a false conspiracy rules him out as a truth-teller.

"I'm constantly annoyed that people are distracted by false conspiracies such as 9/11, when all around we provide evidence of real conspiracies, for war or mass financial fraud."

-- Julian Assange

And Snowden?

I was right outside the NSA [on 9/11], so I remember the tension on that day. I remember hearing on the radio, 'the plane's hitting,' and I remember thinking my grandfather, who worked for the FBI at the time, was in the Pentagon when the plane hit it

-- Edward Snowden

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/1229368-i-was-right-outside-the-nsa-on-9-11-so-i

Will coincidences never cease?

[Feb 08, 2020] Hey would someone remind Biden

Feb 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

janis b on Fri, 02/07/2020 - 7:36pm

I say, reminding him

@Dr. John Carpenter

won't make any difference. Not only will he probably forget again anyway, but because his capacity for self-reflection is forever set at 0.

[Feb 08, 2020] Things I Learned from the Dem Debate (02-07-20)

Feb 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

I predict that someday in the not-so-distant future, the entire world will be shocked to learn that Andrew Yang is actually the mutated clone splice of Elon Musk and Bob Barker.

Amy Klobuchar says she's a 'fresh face', yet everything about Klobuchar is as stale as a twenty-year-old Twinkie. If 59 is the new 38, then in Amy's world we're all still living in 1999.

Early on in the debate, ABC briefly showed a split screen with Pete Buttigieg in both frames, which leads to the inevitable question: technical glitch or wishful thinking?

Tom Steyer is like the high school basketball coach in that old TV show ' The White Shadow '. Tom gave a rousing pep talk to all the players about the need to beat Donald Trump, although I kept waiting for him to yell over at Pete, "Watch those elbows, Salami!"

Desperate to revive her flagging campaign, Elizabeth Warren now argues that the way Democrats win elections is by calling out corruption. Liz then proved her brave commitment to this bold new strategy by spending the entire evening not uttering a single word about the Iowa Caucuses.

When Joe Biden yells, clouds tremble.

Joe did have a nice moment when he gave Bernie Sanders a hug in response to a question about Hillary Clinton's claim that nobody likes Bernie. A very classy gesture. Even so, in the interests of party unity I think we should ALL be extremely grateful that Bernie does not have a lot of hair.

[Feb 08, 2020] Debate low points

Feb 08, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

snoopydawg on Fri, 02/07/2020 - 7:20pm #Hogwarts is spreading.

BREAKING exclusive footage of @PeteButtigieg entering tonight's #Democraticdebate #NewHampshirePrimary #ratmode pic.twitter.com/QORPdrmuy0

-- Anya Parampil (@anyaparampil) February 8, 2020

Get him Bernie

BREAKING: @BernieSanders ABSOLUTELY DISMANTLES @PeteButtigieg . pic.twitter.com/RHb68JHxtv

-- Isiah Blair (@forevertawl) February 7, 2020

Ugh

"Is anybody else on the stage concerned about having a democratic socialist at the head of the democratic ticket?" - 10 minutes in and we've had one question asked three different ways. #DemDebate

-- Secular Talk (@KyleKulinski) February 8, 2020

Heh

#DemDebate
BIDEN: Bernie's a Dem Socialist, Trump will fry him.

MODERATOR: Why shouldn't Dems worry about that Bernie?

BERNIE: Cuz Trump lies dipshit. Fuuuuck this gets old.

-- Nate's Liver - Commentary (@SilERabbit) February 8, 2020

Let's talk policy

Why should we believe you and not Trump?

"Because Donald Trump lies all the time." - @BernieSanders #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/3OfHOwKrOz

-- KatBrezler (@KatBrezler) February 8, 2020

Good lord! More politics talk

"Is anyone else on the stage concerned about having a democratic socialist at the top Democratic ticket?"

*silence*

*
S
I
L
E
N
C
E
*

Bernie: I'm not

Senator Klobuchar: *raises hands* #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/DSSqj7BR6w

-- People for Bernie (@People4Bernie) February 8, 2020

Now to take a break from hitting at Bernie

ICYMI: Biden himself admits to being a loser. #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/xVwyJMWAfz

-- America First (@AmericaFirstPAC) February 8, 2020

Don't think about that elephant not on stage

Why isn't @TulsiGabbard on the debate stage tonight? #DemDebate pic.twitter.com/vf8ZAq7146

-- YALiberty (@YALiberty) February 8, 2020

[Feb 08, 2020] Biden has suffered in Iowa the fate of the party establishment favorite who believed his own propaganda

This is a fiasco.
Feb 08, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

... He and his supporters have insisted that he is the "most electable" candidate, but for some reason he is the candidate that very few actual voters want to elect.

...The embarrassment was lessened by the chaos and incompetence of the Iowa Democratic Party's handling of the caucus results, but not by much.

[Feb 08, 2020] It's comical in a horrifying way how the people voted to be "representatives" in this "representative democracy" actually have no idea what the people they are supposedly representing actually think.

Feb 08, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

chuckster , February 7, 2020 at 7:14 pm

[T]oday her model tells her the Democrats are a near lock for the presidency in 2020, and are likely to gain House seats and have a decent shot at retaking the Senate.

Can someone please tell me where I can bet against her. The PMCs will be enthralled.

a different chris , February 7, 2020 at 7:39 pm

I wouldn't be that quick. But in any case, you're missing the biggest tree in her forest (reversing the old axiom):

The parties don't win elections for the reasons the cognoscenti, which includes at least pretty much everyone important in the Democratic Party – and a lot of the Republican Party too if you recall all the gnashing of teeth about Trump in 2016 – believe.

I know Trump didn't win because of "racism, period" for example. The Dems somehow do (hey, your candidate was white, morons) and weirdly enough, sifting thru Trump's recent verbal diarrhea (ewww), I think the Republicans think so too.

It's comical in a horrifying way how the people voted to be "representatives" in this "representative democracy" actually have no idea what the people they are supposedly representing actually think. That has pretty much brought us to this "voting against" stage, b/c nobody says anything anybody really wants to vote for.

[Feb 08, 2020] Progress in scientific understanding in the USA on one small example

Feb 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

LiteBeeer , 31 minutes ago link

There is again the brainwash propaganda ball earth.

We know from infrared imagery (seeing very far through the haze) that Goodle Earth ball fantasy does not match reality.

E A R T H - I S - F L A T

WAKE UP. RESEARCH.

[Feb 08, 2020] I've never seen anyone want another four years of trump as badly as Hillary does

Feb 08, 2020 | twitter.com

I've never seen anyone want another four years of trump as badly as Hillary does https://t.co/I9v8oG91m5

-- pokey pup (@Whatapityonyou) February 7, 2020

[Feb 08, 2020] Instead of praise, someone should tell Congressman Adam Schiff, who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, to shut up as he is becoming an international embarrassment

Feb 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

His "closing arguments" speeches last week were respectively two-and-a-half hours and ninety minutes long and were inevitably praised by the mainstream media as "magisterial," "powerful," and "impressive."

The Washington Post 's resident Zionist extremist Jennifer Rubin labeled it "a grand slam" while legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin called it "dazzling." Gail Collins of the New York Times dubbed it "a great job" and added that Schiff is now "a rock star." Daily Beast enthused that the remarks "will go down in history " and progressive activist Ryan Knight called it "a closing statement for the ages."

Hollywood was also on board with actress Debra Messing tweeting "I am in tears. Thank you Chairman Schiff for fighting for our country."

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon. ..."
"... This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception." ..."
"... During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted. ..."
"... When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. ..."
"... Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war." ..."
"... The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. ..."
"... Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. ..."
Mar 20, 2018 | www.counterpunch.org

The war on Iraq won't be remembered for how it was waged so much as for how it was sold. It was a propaganda war, a war of perception management, where loaded phrases, such as "weapons of mass destruction" and "rogue state" were hurled like precision weapons at the target audience: us.

To understand the Iraq war you don't need to consult generals, but the spin doctors and PR flacks who stage-managed the countdown to war from the murky corridors of Washington where politics, corporate spin and psy-ops spooks cohabit.

Consider the picaresque journey of Tony Blair's plagiarized dossier on Iraq, from a grad student's website to a cut-and-paste job in the prime minister's bombastic speech to the House of Commons. Blair, stubborn and verbose, paid a price for his grandiose puffery. Bush, who looted whole passages from Blair's speech for his own clumsy presentations, has skated freely through the tempest. Why?

Unlike Blair, the Bush team never wanted to present a legal case for war. They had no interest in making any of their allegations about Iraq hold up to a standard of proof. The real effort was aimed at amping up the mood for war by using the psychology of fear.

Facts were never important to the Bush team. They were disposable nuggets that could be discarded at will and replaced by whatever new rationale that played favorably with their polls and focus groups. The war was about weapons of mass destruction one week, al-Qaeda the next. When neither allegation could be substantiated on the ground, the fall back position became the mass graves (many from the Iran/Iraq war where the U.S.A. backed Iraq) proving that Saddam was an evil thug who deserved to be toppled. The motto of the Bush PR machine was: Move on. Don't explain. Say anything to conceal the perfidy behind the real motives for war. Never look back. Accuse the questioners of harboring unpatriotic sensibilities. Eventually, even the cagey Wolfowitz admitted that the official case for war was made mainly to make the invasion palatable, not to justify it.

The Bush claque of neocon hawks viewed the Iraq war as a product and, just like a new pair of Nikes, it required a roll-out campaign to soften up the consumers. The same techniques (and often the same PR gurus) that have been used to hawk cigarettes, SUVs and nuclear waste dumps were deployed to retail the Iraq war. To peddle the invasion, Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell and company recruited public relations gurus into top-level jobs at the Pentagon and the State Department. These spinmeisters soon had more say over how the rationale for war on Iraq should be presented than intelligence agencies and career diplomats. If the intelligence didn't fit the script, it was shaded, retooled or junked.

Take Charlotte Beers whom Powell picked as undersecretary of state in the post-9/11 world. Beers wasn't a diplomat. She wasn't even a politician. She was a grand diva of spin, known on the business and gossip pages as "the queen of Madison Avenue." On the strength of two advertising campaigns, one for Uncle Ben's Rice and another for Head and Shoulder's dandruff shampoo, Beers rocketed to the top of the heap in the PR world, heading two giant PR houses: Ogilvy and Mathers as well as J. Walter Thompson.

At the State Department Beers, who had met Powell in 1995 when they both served on the board of Gulf Airstream, worked at, in Powell's words, "the branding of U.S. foreign policy." She extracted more than $500 million from Congress for her Brand America campaign, which largely focused on beaming U.S. propaganda into the Muslim world, much of it directed at teens.

"Public diplomacy is a vital new arm in what will combat terrorism over time," said Beers. "All of a sudden we are in this position of redefining who America is, not only for ourselves, but for the outside world." Note the rapt attention Beers pays to the manipulation of perception, as opposed, say, to alterations of U.S. policy.

Old-fashioned diplomacy involves direct communication between representatives of nations, a conversational give and take, often fraught with deception (see April Glaspie), but an exchange nonetheless. Public diplomacy, as defined by Beers, is something else entirely. It's a one-way street, a unilateral broadcast of American propaganda directly to the public, domestic and international, a kind of informational carpet-bombing.

The themes of her campaigns were as simplistic and flimsy as a Bush press conference. The American incursions into Afghanistan and Iraq were all about bringing the balm of "freedom" to oppressed peoples. Hence, the title of the U.S. war: Operation Iraqi Freedom, where cruise missiles were depicted as instruments of liberation. Bush himself distilled the Beers equation to its bizarre essence: "This war is about peace."

Beers quietly resigned her post a few weeks before the first volley of tomahawk missiles battered Baghdad. From her point of view, the war itself was already won, the fireworks of shock and awe were all after play.

Over at the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld drafted Victoria "Torie" Clarke as his director of public affairs. Clarke knew the ropes inside the Beltway. Before becoming Rumsfeld's mouthpiece, she had commanded one of the world's great parlors for powerbrokers: Hill and Knowlton's D.C. office.

Almost immediately upon taking up her new gig, Clarke convened regular meetings with a select group of Washington's top private PR specialists and lobbyists to develop a marketing plan for the Pentagon's forthcoming terror wars. The group was filled with heavy-hitters and was strikingly bipartisan in composition. She called it the Rumsfeld Group and it included PR executive Sheila Tate, columnist Rich Lowry, and Republican political consultant Rich Galen.

The brain trust also boasted top Democratic fixer Tommy Boggs, brother of NPR's Cokie Roberts and son of the late Congressman Hale Boggs of Louisiana. At the very time Boggs was conferring with top Pentagon brass on how to frame the war on terror, he was also working feverishly for the royal family of Saudi Arabia. In 2002 alone, the Saudis paid his Qorvis PR firm $20.2 million to protect its interests in Washington. In the wake of hostile press coverage following the exposure of Saudi links to the 9/11 hijackers, the royal family needed all the well-placed help it could buy. They seem to have gotten their money's worth. Boggs' felicitous influence-peddling may help to explain why the references to Saudi funding of al-Qaeda were dropped from the recent congressional report on the investigation into intelligence failures and 9/11.

According to the trade publication PR Week, the Rumsfeld Group sent "messaging advice" to the Pentagon. The group told Clarke and Rumsfeld that in order to get the American public to buy into the war on terrorism, they needed to suggest a link to nation states, not just nebulous groups such as al-Qaeda. In other words, there needed to be a fixed target for the military campaigns, some distant place to drop cruise missiles and cluster bombs. They suggested the notion (already embedded in Rumsfeld's mind) of playing up the notion of so-called rogue states as the real masters of terrorism. Thus was born the Axis of Evil, which, of course, wasn't an "axis" at all, since two of the states, Iran and Iraq, hated each other, and neither had anything at all to do with the third, North Korea.

Tens of millions in federal money were poured into private public relations and media firms working to craft and broadcast the Bush dictat that Saddam had to be taken out before the Iraqi dictator blew up the world by dropping chemical and nuclear bombs from long-range drones. Many of these PR executives and image consultants were old friends of the high priests in the Bush inner sanctum. Indeed, they were veterans, like Cheney and Powell, of the previous war against Iraq, another engagement that was more spin than combat .

At the top of the list was John Rendon, head of the D.C. firm, the Rendon Group. Rendon is one of Washington's heaviest hitters, a Beltway fixer who never let political affiliation stand in the way of an assignment. Rendon served as a media consultant for Michael Dukakis and Jimmy Carter, as well as Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Whenever the Pentagon wanted to go to war, he offered his services at a price. During Desert Storm, Rendon pulled in $100,000 a month from the Kuwaiti royal family. He followed this up with a $23 million contract from the CIA to produce anti-Saddam propaganda in the region.

As part of this CIA project, Rendon created and named the Iraqi National Congress and tapped his friend Ahmed Chalabi, the shady financier, to head the organization.

Shortly after 9/11, the Pentagon handed the Rendon Group another big assignment: public relations for the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan. Rendon was also deeply involved in the planning and public relations for the pre-emptive war on Iraq, though both Rendon and the Pentagon refuse to disclose the details of the group's work there.

But it's not hard to detect the manipulative hand of Rendon behind many of the Iraq war's signature events, including the toppling of the Saddam statue (by U.S. troops and Chalabi associates) and videotape of jubilant Iraqis waving American flags as the Third Infantry rolled by them. Rendon had pulled off the same stunt in the first Gulf War, handing out American flags to Kuwaitis and herding the media to the orchestrated demonstration. "Where do you think they got those American flags?" clucked Rendon in 1991. "That was my assignment."

The Rendon Group may also have had played a role in pushing the phony intelligence that has now come back to haunt the Bush administration. In December of 2002, Robert Dreyfuss reported that the inner circle of the Bush White House preferred the intelligence coming from Chalabi and his associates to that being proffered by analysts at the CIA.

So Rendon and his circle represented a new kind of off-the-shelf PSYOPs , the privatization of official propaganda. "I am not a national security strategist or a military tactician," said Rendon. "I am a politician, and a person who uses communication to meet public policy or corporate policy objectives. In fact, I am an information warrior and a perception manager."

What exactly, is perception management? The Pentagon defines it this way: "actions to convey and/or deny selected information and indicators to foreign audiences to influence their emotions, motives and objective reasoning." In other words, lying about the intentions of the U.S. government. In a rare display of public frankness, the Pentagon actually let slip its plan (developed by Rendon) to establish a high-level den inside the Department Defense for perception management. They called it the Office of Strategic Influence and among its many missions was to plant false stories in the press.

Nothing stirs the corporate media into outbursts of pious outrage like an official government memo bragging about how the media are manipulated for political objectives. So the New York Times and Washington Post threw indignant fits about the Office of Strategic Influence; the Pentagon shut down the operation, and the press gloated with satisfaction on its victory. Yet, Rumsfeld told the Pentagon press corps that while he was killing the office, the same devious work would continue. "You can have the corpse," said Rumsfeld. "You can have the name. But I'm going to keep doing every single thing that needs to be done. And I have."

At a diplomatic level, despite the hired guns and the planted stories, this image war was lost. It failed to convince even America's most fervent allies and dependent client states that Iraq posed much of a threat. It failed to win the blessing of the U.N. and even NATO, a wholly owned subsidiary of Washington. At the end of the day, the vaunted coalition of the willing consisted of Britain, Spain, Italy, Australia, and a cohort of former Soviet bloc nations. Even so, the citizens of the nations that cast their lot with the U.S.A. overwhelmingly opposed the war.

Domestically, it was a different story. A population traumatized by terror threats and shattered economy became easy prey for the saturation bombing of the Bush message that Iraq was a terrorist state linked to al-Qaeda that was only minutes away from launching attacks on America with weapons of mass destruction.

Americans were the victims of an elaborate con job, pelted with a daily barrage of threat inflation, distortions, deceptions and lies, not about tactics or strategy or war plans, but about justifications for war. The lies were aimed not at confusing Saddam's regime, but the American people. By the start of the war, 66 per cent of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11 and 79 per cent thought he was close to having a nuclear weapon.

Of course, the closest Saddam came to possessing a nuke was a rusting gas centrifuge buried for 13 years in the garden of Mahdi Obeidi, a retired Iraqi scientist. Iraq didn't have any functional chemical or biological weapons. In fact, it didn't even possess any SCUD missiles, despite erroneous reports fed by Pentagon PR flacks alleging that it had fired SCUDs into Kuwait.

This charade wouldn't have worked without a gullible or a complicit press corps. Victoria Clarke, who developed the Pentagon plan for embedded reports, put it succinctly a few weeks before the war began: "Media coverage of any future operation will to a large extent shape public perception."

During the Vietnam War, TV images of maimed GIs and napalmed villages suburbanized opposition to the war and helped hasten the U.S. withdrawal. The Bush gang meant to turn the Vietnam phenomenon on its head by using TV as a force to propel the U.S.A. into a war that no one really wanted.

What the Pentagon sought was a new kind of living room war, where instead of photos of mangled soldiers and dead Iraqi kids, they could control the images Americans viewed and to a large extent the content of the stories. By embedding reporters inside selected divisions, Clarke believed the Pentagon could count on the reporters to build relationships with the troops and to feel dependent on them for their own safety. It worked, naturally. One reporter for a national network trembled on camera that the U.S. Army functioned as "our protectors." The late David Bloom of NBC confessed on the air that he was willing to do "anything and everything they can ask of us."

When the Pentagon needed a heroic story, the press obliged. Jessica Lynch became the war's first instant celebrity. Here was a neo-gothic tale of a steely young woman wounded in a fierce battle, captured and tortured by ruthless enemies, and dramatically saved from certain death by a team of selfless rescuers, knights in camo and night-vision goggles. Of course, nearly every detail of her heroic adventure proved to be as fictive and maudlin as any made-for-TV-movie. But the ordeal of Private Lynch, which dominated the news for more than a week, served its purpose: to distract attention from a stalled campaign that was beginning to look at lot riskier than the American public had been hoodwinked into believing.

The Lynch story was fed to the eager press by a Pentagon operation called Combat Camera, the Army network of photographers, videographers and editors that sends 800 photos and 25 video clips a day to the media. The editors at Combat Camera carefully culled the footage to present the Pentagon's montage of the war, eliding such unsettling images as collateral damage, cluster bombs, dead children and U.S. soldiers, napalm strikes and disgruntled troops.

"A lot of our imagery will have a big impact on world opinion," predicted Lt. Jane Larogue, director of Combat Camera in Iraq. She was right. But as the hot war turned into an even hotter occupation, the Pentagon, despite airy rhetoric from occupation supremo Paul Bremer about installing democratic institutions such as a free press, moved to tighten its monopoly on the flow images out of Iraq. First, it tried to shut down Al Jazeera, the Arab news channel. Then the Pentagon intimated that it would like to see all foreign TV news crews banished from Baghdad.

Few newspapers fanned the hysteria about the threat posed by Saddam's weapons of mass destruction as sedulously as did the Washington Post. In the months leading up to the war, the Post's pro-war op-eds outnumbered the anti-war columns by a 3-to-1 margin.

Back in 1988, the Post felt much differently about Saddam and his weapons of mass destruction. When reports trickled out about the gassing of Iranian troops, the Washington Post's editorial page shrugged off the massacres, calling the mass poisonings "a quirk of war."

The Bush team displayed a similar amnesia. When Iraq used chemical weapons in grisly attacks on Iran, the U.S. government not only didn't object, it encouraged Saddam. Anything to punish Iran was the message coming from the White House. Donald Rumsfeld himself was sent as President Ronald Reagan's personal envoy to Baghdad. Rumsfeld conveyed the bold message than an Iraq defeat would be viewed as a "strategic setback for the United States." This sleazy alliance was sealed with a handshake caught on videotape. When CNN reporter Jamie McIntyre replayed the footage for Rumsfeld in the spring of 2003, the secretary of defense snapped, "Where'd you get that? Iraqi television?"

The current crop of Iraq hawks also saw Saddam much differently then. Take the writer Laura Mylroie, sometime colleague of the New York Times' Judy Miller, who persists in peddling the ludicrous conspiracy that Iraq was behind the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center.

How times have changed! In 1987, Mylroie felt downright cuddly toward Saddam. She wrote an article for the New Republic titled "Back Iraq: Time for a U.S. Tilt in the Mideast," arguing that the U.S. should publicly embrace Saddam's secular regime as a bulwark against the Islamic fundamentalists in Iran. The co-author of this mesmerizing weave of wonkery was none other than Daniel Pipes, perhaps the nation's most bellicose Islamophobe. "The American weapons that Iraq could make good use of include remotely scatterable and anti-personnel mines and counterartillery radar," wrote Mylroie and Pipes. "The United States might also consider upgrading intelligence it is supplying Baghdad."

In the rollout for the war, Mylroie seemed to be everywhere hawking the invasion of Iraq. She would often appear on two or three different networks in the same day. How did the reporter manage this feat? She had help in the form of Eleana Benador, the media placement guru who runs Benador Associates. Born in Peru, Benador parlayed her skills as a linguist into a lucrative career as media relations whiz for the Washington foreign policy elite. She also oversees the Middle East Forum, a fanatically pro-Zionist white paper mill. Her clients include some of the nation's most fervid hawks, including Michael Ledeen, Charles Krauthammer, Al Haig, Max Boot, Daniel Pipes, Richard Perle, and Judy Miller. During the Iraq war, Benador's assignment was to embed this squadron of pro-war zealots into the national media, on talk shows, and op-ed pages.

Benador not only got them the gigs, she also crafted the theme and made sure they all stayed on message. "There are some things, you just have to state them in a different way, in a slightly different way," said Benador. "If not, people get scared." Scared of intentions of their own government.

It could have been different. All of the holes in the Bush administration's gossamer case for war were right there for the mainstream press to expose. Instead, the U.S. press, just like the oil companies, sought to commercialize the Iraq war and profit from the invasions. They didn't want to deal with uncomfortable facts or present voices of dissent.

Nothing sums up this unctuous approach more brazenly than MSNBC's firing of liberal talk show host Phil Donahue on the eve of the war. The network replaced the Donahue Show with a running segment called Countdown: Iraq, featuring the usual nightly coterie of retired generals, security flacks, and other cheerleaders for invasion. The network's executives blamed the cancellation on sagging ratings. In fact, during its run Donahue's show attracted more viewers than any other program on the network. The real reason for the pre-emptive strike on Donahue was spelled out in an internal memo from anxious executives at NBC. Donahue, the memo said, offered "a difficult face for NBC in a time of war. He seems to delight in presenting guests who are anti-war, anti-Bush and skeptical of the administration's motives."

The memo warned that Donahue's show risked tarring MSNBC as an unpatriotic network, "a home for liberal anti-war agenda at the same time that our competitors are waving the flag at every opportunity." So, with scarcely a second thought, the honchos at MSNBC gave Donahue the boot and hoisted the battle flag.

It's war that sells.

There's a helluva caveat, of course. Once you buy it, the merchants of war accept no returns.

This essay is adapted from Grand Theft Pentagon.

[Feb 07, 2020] We'll it looks like Bernie lost by .09%. It took a lot of finagling with the results to make sure he didn't win

Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

wick7 , 4 minutes ago link

We'll it looks like Bernie lost by .09%. It took a lot of finagling with the results to make sure he didn't win.

PigMan , 26 minutes ago link

A computer glitch unfortunately wiped all the data with bleach bit, the surveillance cameras had all malfunctioned, and the person tallying the votes hung himself behind the voter curtain.

Crazy huh?

RufusMacDuff , 35 minutes ago link

It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch...!

[Feb 07, 2020] Well, the runners up in most beauty pageants usually react to their loses better than Nancy did last night.

Nancy behavior was quite the stunt. Watch Nancy Pelosi rip up Trump's State of the Union speech
Speaker Pelosi at CAP Ideas Conference C-SPAN.org
Feb 07, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
Well, the runners up in most beauty pageants usually react to their loses better than Nancy did last night.

Recent politics in the House have taken a toll on her. Having to deal with the out-of-control Democratic "kids" in the House and having to give control to The Republicans in the Senate has taken its toll.

Her reputation for being so masterfully in control and in charge has, with her actions last night, totally disappeared into history.

Posted by: Diana Croissant | 05 February 2020 at 03:49 PM

[Feb 07, 2020] Jummy Dore asks the question

"Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men ?"
Feb 07, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ltU8w6GGpCc#action=share

Jummy Dore asks the question why are campaigns funding the shadow app?

and then goes down the rabbit hole laughing all the way

Posted by: Terence Gore | 06 February 2020 at 11:46 AM

[Feb 07, 2020] One reason to wish Trump is defeated

Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Renodino , Feb 6 2020 19:44 utc | 62

I would like to see Trump defeated if for no other reason than to have a new administration look under the hood of the all the economic government data that has been produced over the last four years. I bet, just like Trump's tax returns he doesn't want us to see, his miraculous creation of prosperity will be far less than advertised.

[Feb 07, 2020] The favored candidate of the DNC is clearly Trump

Trump is Hillary2020 ;-)
Feb 07, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Feb 6 2020 20:57 utc | 74

Yes pft, the favored candidate of the DNC is clearly Trump.

Posted by: Blue Dotterel | Feb 6 2020 19:25 utc | 58


Only if the ungrateful commoners who identify as Democrats or moderates can't be brought to heel and give their full throated support for the DNC's favoured Cookie Cutter candidate who might as well be one of those dolls with a string and a recording you hear when you pull the string.

Then yes, they would prefer 'fore moar years!!' of the Ugliest American ever to be installed as President of the United States.

One of things I respect about Tulsi Gabbard is she ain't no Doll with a string attached. When she made the comment about cleaning out the rot in the Democratic Party, she left no doubt her intent and goals. And to take on hillary, the Red Queen to boot, why that was simply delicious.

Alas, the View, the DNC, it's web of evil rich and the media will never forgive her for Soldiering for her Country.

[Feb 07, 2020] Allow me a moment to thank -- and this may be a bit of a surprise -- Adam Schiff. Were it not for his crack investigation skills, @realDonaldTrump might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired

Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Allow me a moment to thank -- and this may be a bit of a surprise -- Adam Schiff. Were it not for his crack investigation skills, @realDonaldTrump might have had a tougher time unearthing who all needed to be fired. Thanks, Adam! 🤣 #FullOfSchiff

-- Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) February 8, 2020

[Feb 07, 2020] On globalism

Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

surf@jm , 5 hours ago link

Globalism was outlawed forever at the Tower of Babel.....

That law has never been revoked....

[Feb 07, 2020] Absurdistan: Government-Funded Feminists Suggest Banning Heterosexual Relationships

Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

" Heterosexual couple relationships are really violent . In addition, the vast majority are relationships based on religion. It may be time to have a conversation about their ban and abolition ."

[Feb 07, 2020] What do you think of american democracy? I think it would be a good idea.

Feb 07, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

pretzelattack , February 7, 2020 at 7:02 am

what do you think of american democracy? i think it would be a good idea.

[Feb 07, 2020] Just one subjective opinion ;-)

Feb 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Rusty Trombone , 43 minutes ago link

Trump is in many ways a narcissistic scumbag...but given the alternative of any of these degenerate limp wristed faggots and gun grabbing communists who want to pay reparations for slavery to people who were never slaves, transgender 7 year olds and have their mental illness rammed down our throats, open borders, and whatever assorted lunacy is in vogue with their purple haired minions ?

Yeah, go **** yourself.

Trump, it's not even close.

Gaius Petronius , 13 minutes ago link

Instant classic. Love it.

[Feb 04, 2020] Democrats concluded some time ago that the only viable strategy for removing Trump requires demonization of Russia as our enemy

Feb 04, 2020 | www.thenation.com

Michael Robertson says: February 3, 2020 at 3:39 pm

Democrats concluded some time ago that the only viable strategy for removing Trump requires demonization of Russia as our enemy. And Ukraine as our ally. No one questions how this came to be, or demands any real reporting about Ukraine. It's a black hole, and we are expected to simply accept the framing of the Dems. Those who question it are accused of being brainwashed by RT, or of secretly loving Mr. Trump. And they are simply befuddled by accusations of neo-McCarthyism.

Clark Shanahan says: February 3, 2020 at 8:03 pm

As the professor warns us, we have gone through some very backwards times:
"Speaker Nancy Pelosi is connecting the dots -- "all roads lead to Putin," she says -- and making the argument that Trump's pressure campaign on Ukraine was not an isolated incident but part of a troubling bond with the Russian president reaching back to special counsel Robert Mueller's findings on the 2016 election.

"This has been going on for 2 1/2 years," Pelosi said Friday.

"This isn't about Ukraine," she explained a day earlier. "'It's about Russia. Who benefited by our withholding of that military assistance? Russia.""
(AP Dec 6, Lisa Mascaro/Mary Clare Jalonick)
Schiff has claimed that the Evil Vlad wakes up every morning, plotting to destroy our virginal democracy because the US makes Russia look shabby.. He happens to receive a lot of funding from the arms industry.
Nadler equated Russian meddling to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor..

If these three actually believe their own spin, heaven help us.
It truly is obscene.
The Battle of Stalingrad ended February 2, 1943.
Listening to our Russophobes, it seems the wrong people won that war. It is so ugly.

Clark Shanahan says: February 3, 2020 at 8:21 pm

on topic:

https://thegrayzone.com/2020/02/03/huffpost-uk-editor-censorship-dsma-russia-jess-brammar/

[Feb 03, 2020] 'Trump Might Trade Alaska To The Russians!' Cries Schiff During Closing Impeachment Remarks

Notable quotes:
"... Adam Schiff: If Trump isn't removed he "could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country, delegating to him the decision whether they go to war." pic.twitter.com/VBzkonqpmH ..."
Feb 03, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Impeachment manager Adam Schiff (D-CA) argued on Monday during closing remarks that if President Trump isn't removed from office, he " could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country , delegating to him the decision whether they go to war."

Adam Schiff: If Trump isn't removed he "could offer Alaska to the Russians in exchange for support in the next election or decide to move to Mar-a-Lago permanently and leave Jared Kushner to run the country, delegating to him the decision whether they go to war." pic.twitter.com/VBzkonqpmH

-- Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) February 3, 2020

[Feb 03, 2020] Brexit: Warmed Over Chlorinated Chicken; Boris Johnson as everyone's last choice as a babysitte

Feb 03, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

paul , February 3, 2020 at 10:29 am

He [Boris Johnson] is clearly delusional, or he doesn't have a mirror by the door. Anyone who thinks his unique synthesis of geriatric skateboarder and everyone's last choice as a babysitter is a good look, needs someone to have a word with them.

Hardly matters in these heady moments. He figures the enforcer/eminence gris role will protect him. Which it will (given his extraordinarily indolent 'boss') for now.

Monty , February 3, 2020 at 12:39 pm

"everyone's last choice as a babysitter" Ooof! roblox_death_sound.wav

[Feb 03, 2020] Coronovirus protection

Feb 03, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

See also

Rob Dunford , February 2, 2020 at 6:47 pm

"...I predict an upsurge in Moscow Mule consumption which has both alcohol and copper (the cups) to prevent transmission."
That's more like it!

[Feb 03, 2020] Fake interference, real Israel firms with deep ties to Israeli intelligence

Feb 03, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Likklemore , Feb 2 2020 17:16 utc | 8

Russia, China and Iran are already being blamed for using tech to undermine the 2020 election. Yet, the very technologies they are allegedly using were created by a web of companies with deep ties to Israeli intelligence.

Manufacturing Fear with a click "Bring down nations to their knees"

[Feb 01, 2020] DNC affirms one dollar -- one vote principle

Notable quotes:
"... "Thankfully seeing Bloomberg speak can only hurt his standing," ..."
Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) announced Friday afternoon that the criteria for making the debate stage will no longer include a requirement about individual donors -- allowing Bloomberg, whose campaign is largely self-funded, to join the candidates if his polling numbers reach the new threshold.

Comedian and writer Jack Allison took a wry look at the changes and what they mean about the party. "Remember when they wouldn't even think of changing them for like Cory Booker," Allison tweeted . "This is what we mean when we talk about the DNC cheating, obviously and out in the open."

"Thankfully seeing Bloomberg speak can only hurt his standing," Allison added, "but still."

But it was outspoken filmmaker Michael Moore that really went off on the DNC's decision. Speaking Friday night at a Sanders rally in Clive, Iowa, Moore went on an expletive-filled rant against the party.

https://youtu.be/sMnS9eP4uPY

Coram Justice , 17 minutes ago link

Gosh Bernie, haven't you read about yourself in Profiles of Corruption . If you can be corrupt why can't the DNC be corrupt? It's only fair. How do you expect the people running the DNC to become millionaires like you? Shouldn't they be able to pocket a little of Mike Bloomberg's $325,000? Don't be a poor loser. Maintain dignity.

[Feb 01, 2020] How many yachts do billionaires need? How many cars do they need? Give us a break. You can't have it all. -- Bernie Sanders

Feb 01, 2020 | www.rt.com

Although Bernie Sanders talks a big game about social equality, redistributing the wealth and all that, he is in fact the epitome of the so-called " limousine liberal ." In 2016, perhaps as a consolation prize for his campaign loss, he forked out over $575,000 on a lake-front home in Vermont. He also owns a row house in Washington DC, and another in his home state. His personal wealth is estimated in the millions. Thus far, his extravagant lifestyle has not hurt his socialist message, but Trump will certainly not waste the opportunity to mock it.

How many yachts do billionaires need? How many cars do they need? Give us a break. You can't have it all.

-- Bernie Sanders (@BernieSanders) April 21, 2017

[Feb 01, 2020] Pages that Google AI classifies as "Dangerous or derogatory content"

That tells us something about Google
Notable quotes:
"... Yes, that's right Pope speeches are dangerous ;-) ..."
Feb 01, 2020 | adsense.googleblog.com
www.softpanorama.org/Populism/Christian_populism/index.shtml Yes Dangerous or derogatory content Yes, that's right Pope speeches are dangerous ;-)
www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Financial_skeptic/Casino_capitalism/index.shtml Yes Dangerous or derogatory content
www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Neoliberalism/index.shtml Yes Dangerous or derogatory content
www.softpanorama.org/Skeptics/Political_skeptic/Two_party_system_as_poliarchy/index.shtml Yes Dangerous or derogatory content

[Feb 01, 2020] Another curious episode in the life and times of a dual citizen Sheepdog

Feb 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Jan 31 2020 20:45 utc | 36

2016

"Boris Johnson has renounced his US citizenship, ending years of ambiguous loyalties and probably ridding himself of a hefty tax bill.

A list released by the US Treasury department showed the UK foreign secretary was one of 5,411 individuals to renounce his American citizenship in 2016.

Johnson was born in New York when his parents worked there, but has not lived there since he was five years old. His decision does not appear to be an attempt to distance himself from the politics of Donald Trump, but may instead be a move to ensure he is out of reach of America's Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

In 2014 he publicly said that the US was trying to hit him for tax on the sale of his home in Islington, north London, something he said he regarded as "absolutely outrageous", although he later reportedly paid the demand. The US tax authorities have been mounting a campaign to crack down on the earnings of dual nationals."

https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/08/boris-johnson-renounces-us-citizenship-record-2016-uk-foreign-secretary

Another curious episode in the life and times of a dual citizen Sheepdog.

[Feb 01, 2020] Bloomberg was a Republican, Biden was both, Warren used to be a Republican, and Trump was a lifelong Democrat! Both parties can't be relied on to accomplish anything meaningful or substantive except to betray our own national interests

Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Thinking123 , 1 hour ago link

How easy is it to switch parties to run for Presidential Campaign? Bloomberg was a Republican, Biden was both, Warren used to be a Republican, and Trump was a lifelong Democrat!

Do you guys still believe in the two part duopoly? What happened to integrity and values? None! Both parties are the same ****!

[Feb 01, 2020] Brexit means that Oceania is born!

Feb 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

FSD , Jan 31 2020 19:59 utc | 28

Britain has finally made the Orwellian Pivot. Brazil is Bolsonaro-fied, Mexico and Canada are USMCA-ed, Venezuela will be MAGA-cized. The Monroe Doctrine is growing carnivorous incisors. Oceania is born!

https://imgur.com/gallery/uicp6HO

Qparticle , Feb 1 2020 17:27 utc | 114

No wonder banker boy Macron has been nice to Vlad lately, time to go east...

Posted by: Paco | Feb 1 2020 7:36 utc | 84
-- --

Hee hee hee! ;)

[Feb 01, 2020] GB path forward: "Singapore on the Thames" or "European Puerto Rico"

Feb 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

David Goodrich , Jan 31 2020 19:33 utc | 17

Boris wants Britain to be "Singapore on the Thames". A one party,authoritarian state.
Instead,one generation from now, England will be America's European Puerto Rico.

[Feb 01, 2020] Hello Ministry of Truth: Seth Rich story is deleted from from the history of Russiagate

Feb 01, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Solomonpal , 2 hours ago link

The freedom of redaction act.

[Feb 01, 2020] Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won

Feb 01, 2020 | www.unz.com

I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but I'm a little worried about Donald Trump. I'm worried he may be on the verge of a sudden, major heart attack, or a stroke, or a fatal golfing accident.

Food poisoning is another possibility. Or he could overdose on prescription medication. A tanning bed mishap is not out of the question.

He could accidentally hang himself during autoerotic asphyxiation, or get shot by a lone-wolf white supremacist terrorist trying to start the RaHoWa. The Russians could spray him with that Novichok perfume.

There are any number of ways he could snuff it.

I don't mean to sound alarmist, but the Resistance is running out of non-lethal options for removing Donald Trump from office. Here they are, in no particular order


TG , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 6:40 pm GMT

Cute, but seriously: Trump has been pretty much hammered into toeing the party line. The oligarchy still doesn't like him, and it has taken a lot of effort to reign in him, but rhetoric aside he's currently governing a lot like Hilary Clinton would have. The borders are still open to illegal immigrants and the rich have their cheap labor, we're still wasting trillions on pointless winless foreign wars, our manufacturing base is pretty much hollowed out, we're still shoveling trillions of dollars in direct and indirect subsidies to Wall Street, big medicine is still busy with organized looting ('surprise medical billing', anyone?), you get the idea.

Trump fought the swamp, and the swamp won. The 2020 election looks to be yet another heads they win/tails we lose circus. Trump is in no danger, IMHO.

Unless Bernie gets the nomination. Now there's a politician that needs to worry about his health

Ozymandias , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 6:48 pm GMT
You're overlooking the obvious contingency plan for the Dems: Biden will recruit Terry Crews or Tiny Lister for his VP candidate. Of course the Veep will have to dress transgender and change their name to Cornpop, but that's a small price to pay. The future of the country is at stake.
WorkingClass , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 7:44 pm GMT
It has become clear to Bernie's supporters that they and the Deplorables have the same enemies. The more the media demonize Bernie in the same way they demonize Trump the stronger Bernie will become. Bernie doesn't need to be in Iowa. CNN and the NYT are working for him. Fake news is also stupid news.
Curmudgeon , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 9:00 pm GMT

the total stranglehold the Russians now have on American democracy

I'm grateful Mr. Hopkins sorted that out for us.

Anon [111] Disclaimer , says: Show Comment January 28, 2020 at 8:03 pm GMT
@Nancy O'Brien Simpson

CJ Hopkins has to be one of the best political commentators alive today. His writing is both hilarious and profound. No easy fete.

Yes, absolutely exquisite use of the language to ridicule the ridiculous "resistance."

Clearly, Andy Kaufmann (aka Latka Gravis) did not die: he slinked away to politics and took on the mantle of Schifty the Popeyed Crackpot California Congressman.

Omegabooks , says: Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 5:52 am GMT
Love this Hopkins dude!

Dead President Walking .or walking contradiction? Dead or not

eah , says: Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 8:39 am GMT
Hopkins entertainingly finds the black humor in all of this -- but none of it is funny, even darkly so -- the reason it isn't funny is that millions of decent, hard-working Americans are chained to this amoral freak show via the coercive tax system.
OverCommenter , says: Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 3:13 pm GMT
Well nothing of value would be lost Trump hasn't drained the swamp, locked her up, or built the wall. In fact the only people that have been arrested are Paul Manafort and Roger Stone. I was going to add a string of "lols" tied together, but this place is classier than that.

Honestly it might be a good thing, because then Pence would be president. Think about it, then the Evangelicals who the GoP relies on their vote, but have also been strung along for decades getting none of the social issues addressed while, and then also being blamed for everything from war in the Middle East to every social problem. I think it would be good for them to see the righteous avatar Pence ascend to the throne, and then completely shun and ignore them. Maybe that will finally wake them up.

[Feb 01, 2020] Bolton's mustache is trying to impeach his face: Trump tweets 'game over' after Bolton, Schiff videos resurface

Feb 01, 2020 | www.youtube.com

Matthew Rand , 22 hours ago

Bolton's mustache is trying to impeach his face.

G Blizzard , 1 day ago

Well, if his credibility is done, Michael Bolton can always go back to singing.


Curt Stolpe
, 1 day ago

"We can't beat him so we have to impeach him" no truer words were ever spoken. Too bad they couldn't come up with a reason. I think November will be a Democrat Slaughter.

IJJ , 1 day ago

Bolton & Schiff - Bozo 1 and Bozo 2 😂


MoralHi
, 1 day ago

That old man Bolton would sell his Gandma to sell his book !

[Jan 31, 2020] Bernie's old and he knows it. He might consider a sniper's bullet more humane than American old-age care even for the relatively wealthy.

Jan 31, 2020 | www.unz.com

alex in San Jose AKA Digital Detroit , says: Show Comment January 31, 2020 at 6:51 am GMT

@Longfisher Vote for Bernie. Bernie's got guts and he says what he means and does what he says. I think also:

Bernie's old and he knows it. He might consider a sniper's bullet more humane than American old-age care even for the relatively wealthy.

That will make whoever he elects as vice president important. I like to think that will be Bloomberg. Jewish, yeah, but actually not a crook, and sane. He's about all that's left who can pass that very low bar. It may be Warren which I hope does not happen, because I consider her a sell-out and much worse than Bloomberg. Same goes for pretty much every else, with the possible exception of AOC, but she needs more experience.

[Jan 31, 2020] Hovering in Cyberspace by Edward Curtin

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences. The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both In such a society, people come to believe that in health care, as in all fields of endeavor, technology can be used to change the human condition according to almost any design. ..."
"... The frustration is that there is so much information, the vast majority of which can be plain incorrect, depending on subject. For example, the information over global warming. There is clear evidence that the climate is changing – melting glaciers etc – and we can see the north pole marching into Russia at a pace not seen in recoded history, but what is very difficult to determine is the cause or the consequence: so much misinformation that the truth is buried and cannot be found by us mere mortals. ..."
"... I have been living in southern California for the last two years, yet I'm still trying to adjust to what I observe daily in terms of "screen addiction." It is a daily occurrence here to stop at red light, wait all of 30 to 40 seconds for the light to change, only to have one or more cars in line fail to move when light turns green. Why? Because they are completely glued to their cell phones either reading messages, texting, or god knows what? Inevitably one has to honk one's car-horn to get them moving. I've never observed this anywhere else I've lived, but then again the screen addiction thing is growing daily in real-time so who knows if this is just standard operating procedure around the world in all urban areas at this time? ..."
"... I was going to link to the CIA released document which is a translation of USSR studies into the effects of non-ionizing radiation. It has an eye-watering summary of the effect of milimeter waves on biological structure, a fundamental aspect of 5G. It has been pulled and I cannot find it on their website. Very interesting. Luckily the FUllerton INformer has it on his 5G Dangers website. ..."
"... I though it was China (Huawei), the nation that has its citizens even more hooked on mobile phones than the US: even opium was a less popular escape from a top down society. ..."
"... Not only do the Chinese, Americans and many others suffer from cyber addiction but also from gross materialism. Same symptoms, same cause: lack of spirituality. "Money" is just another deficient religion. ..."
www.youtube.com
Jan 26, 2020 | off-guardian.org

We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people's "window on the world." An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass hallucination.

This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological "advances" are accepted as human destiny. We now inhabit a technological nightmare (that seems like a paradise to so many) in which technology and technique – the standardized means for realizing a predetermined end most efficiently – dominate the world.

In such a world, not only does the end justify the means, but to consider such a moral issue is beside the point. We are speeding ahead to nowhere in the most "efficient" way possible. No questioning allowed! Unless you wish to ask your phone.

These days there is much political talk and commentary about fascism, tyranny, a police state, etc., while the totalitarianism of technocracy and technology continues apace. It is not just the ecological (in the human/natural sense) impact of digital technology where one change generates many others in an endless spiral, but the fact that technical efficiency dominates all aspects of life and, as Jacques Ellul wrote long ago, "transforms everything it touches into a machine," including humans.

For every problem caused by technology, there is always a technological "solution" that creates further technological problems ad infinitum. The goal is always to find the most efficient (power) technique to apply as rapidly as possible to all human problems.

Writing nearly fifty years ago in Medical Nemesis , Ivan Illich, explained how in medical care the human touch was being replaced by this technical mindset. He said,

In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences. The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both In such a society, people come to believe that in health care, as in all fields of endeavor, technology can be used to change the human condition according to almost any design.

We are of course living with the ongoing results of such medical technical efficiency. The U.S.A. is a country where the majority of people are drugged in one way or another, legally or illegally, since the human problems of living are considered to have only technological solutions, whether those remedies are effective or anodyne.

The "accidents" and risks built into the technological fixes are never considered since the ideological grip of the religion of technology is all-encompassing and infallible. We are caught in its web.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s – whether he was applauding or bemoaning the fact – was right when he claimed that the medium is the message.

Cell phones, being the current omnipresent form of the electronification of life, are today's message, a sign that one is always in touch with the void. To be without this small machine is to be rendered an idiot in the ancient Greek sense of the word – a private person.

Translation: one who is out of it, detached, at least temporarily, from the screens that separate us from reality, from the incessant noise and pinging messages that destroy reflection and create reflex reactions.

But to be out of it is the only way to understand it. And to understand it is terrifying, for it means one knows that the religion of technology has replaced nature as the source of what for eons has been considered sacred. It means one grasps how reality is now defined by technology.

It means realizing that people are merging with the machines they are attached to by invisible manacles as they replace the human body with abstractions and interact with machines.

It means recognizing that the internet, despite its positive aspects and usage by dissenters intent on human liberation, is controlled by private corporations and government forces intent on using it as a weapon to control people.

It means seeing the truth that most people have never considered the price to be paid for the speed and efficiency of a high-tech world.

But the price is very, very high.

One price, perhaps the most important, is the fragmentation of consciousness, which prevents people from grasping the present from within – which, as Frederic Jameson has noted, is so crucial and yet one of the mind's most problematic tasks – because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.

As a result, a vicious circle has been created that prevents people from the crucial epistemological task of grasping the double-bind that is the ultimate propaganda.

Data is Dada by another name, and we are in Dada land, pissing, not into Marcel Duchamp's ridiculous work of Dada "art," a urinal , but into the wind. And data piled on data equals a heap of data without knowledge or understanding.

There is no time or space for grasping context or to connect the dots. It is a pointillist painting in the form of inert facts that few can understand or even realize that they don't.

I am typing these words on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter, a beautiful piece of technology whose sound and movement creates a rhythmic sanctuary where my hands, head, and heart work in unison.

It allows me to think slowly, to make mistakes that will necessitate retyping, to do second and third rereadings and revisions, to roll the paper out of the machine and sit quietly as I review it. My eyes rest on the paper, not a blue-lit screen.

Technology as such is not the problem, for my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world. It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.

I am alone and unplugged, disconnected, off-line and out of line, a sine qua non for thinking, and thinking about deep matters. The typewriter is mine, and mine alone, unlike the connected digital devices that have destroyed aloneness, for to be alone is to contemplate one's fate and that of all humanity. It is to confront essential things and not feel the loneliness induced and exacerbated by the illusion of always being in touch.

But while this typing machine allows me to write in peace, I am in no way suggesting that I have escaped the technological condition that we all find ourselves in. There are little ways to step outside the closing circle, but even then, one is still in it. I will eventually have to take my paper and type it into a computer document if I wish to publish it in the form you will be reading it.

There is no other way. The technocrats have decreed it so. We are all, as George Orwell once wrote in a different context and meaning, "inside the whale," the whale, in this case, being a high-tech digital world controlled by technocrats, and we have only small ways to shield ourselves from it.

Sitting in a quiet room, working on a typewriter, taking a walk in the woods without a cell phone, or not owning a cell phone, are but small individual acts that have no effect on the structural realty of what Neil Postman calls technopoly in his masterful book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology .

And even in the woods one may look up to admire a tree only to find that it is a cell phone tower.

Humans have always created and used technology, but for a very long time that technology was subject to cultural and religious rules that circumscribed limits to its use. Today there are no limits, no rules to constrain it. The prohibition to prohibit is our motto.

In our acceptance of technical efficiency, we have handed over our freedom and lost control of the means to ends we can't fathom but unconsciously fear. Where are we heading? many probably wonder, as they check the latest news ping, no doubt about something to fear, as a thousand pieces of "news" flash through their devices without pause, like wisps of fleeting dreams one vaguely remembers but cannot pin down or understand. Incoherence is the result. Speed is king.

Of course, this kaleidoscopic flood of data confuses people who desire some coherence and explanation. This is provided by what Jacques Ellul calls "the explanatory myth." He writes,

This brings us to the other pole of our bizarre intellectual situation today: the explanatory myth. In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer's mind and enables everything to be explained.

This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity.

It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena this myth [is] their one stable point of thought and consciousness enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience.

What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles [they] have a good conscience because they have an answer for everything; and whatever happens and whatever they do, they can rely on the explanation that myth provides. This process places them within the most complete unreality possible.

They live in a permanent dream, but a realistic dream, constructed from the countless facts and theories that they believe in with all the power of 'mass persons' who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.

Today that myth is the religion of technology.

So if you have any questions you want answered, you can ask your phone.

Ask your phone why we are living with endless wars on the edge of using our most astounding technological invention: nuclear weapons.

Ask your computer why "nice" Americans will sit behind computer screens and send missiles to kill people half-way around the world whom they are told they are at war with.

Ask your smart device why so many have become little Eichmanns, carrying out their dutiful little tasks at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and all the other war manufacturers, or not caring what stocks they own.

Ask your phone what really happened to the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Iran. See if your phone will say anything about cyber warfare, electronic jamming, or why the plane's transponder was turned off preventing a signal to be sent indicating it was a civilian aircraft.

Ask who is behind the push to deploy 5G wireless technology.

Ask that smartphone who is providing the non-answers.

Ask and it won't be given to you; seek and you will not find. The true answers to your questions will remain hidden. This is the technological society, set up and controlled by the rulers. It is a scam.

Google it!

God may respond.


aspnaz ,

The frustration is that there is so much information, the vast majority of which can be plain incorrect, depending on subject. For example, the information over global warming. There is clear evidence that the climate is changing – melting glaciers etc – and we can see the north pole marching into Russia at a pace not seen in recoded history, but what is very difficult to determine is the cause or the consequence: so much misinformation that the truth is buried and cannot be found by us mere mortals.

In the past we had an editor picking the version of the "truth" that would be exposed to us: was that "truth" also just fabrication or was it closer to the truth that what we are exposed to today? Was it more healthy to be secure in the knowledge that the BBC always told the truth, even if that truth was a lie? At least we didn't have the stress of trying to find the real truth, it was printed there on our daily.

Rhisiart Gwilym ,

Thank god for the Long Descent. This will all be a fading nightmare (though some will dream it as a lost golden age !) in a century or so; when the Limits To Growth have finally insisted that we stop expanding the Technosphere (aka 'Koyaanisqatsi') – and then go into reverse. Roll effin' on!

Richard Le Sarc ,

We cannot possibly, on the current trajectory, make another century. A few decades at most, months or years if thermo-nuclear or biological warfare is unleashed.

Gary Weglarz ,

I have been living in southern California for the last two years, yet I'm still trying to adjust to what I observe daily in terms of "screen addiction." It is a daily occurrence here to stop at red light, wait all of 30 to 40 seconds for the light to change, only to have one or more cars in line fail to move when light turns green. Why? Because they are completely glued to their cell phones either reading messages, texting, or god knows what? Inevitably one has to honk one's car-horn to get them moving. I've never observed this anywhere else I've lived, but then again the screen addiction thing is growing daily in real-time so who knows if this is just standard operating procedure around the world in all urban areas at this time?

The most frightening example of the screen addiction here is that in stop and go, bumper to bumper freeway traffic, moving from 60 miles and hour one moment to a dead stop the next, I've glanced over many times to see drivers next to me literally looking down at their cell phones instead of at the road in front of them, while driving 60 miles and hour, and when knowing that at any second they may have to slam their brakes on to avoid a collision. Two years ago I was living in rural France and I NEVER witnessed behavior like this anywhere, even when driving in Paris. Maybe things have changed there – I just don't know.

What does it say about us here in the U.S. (at least southern California) that we can't drive our car, or sit for 30 seconds at a traffic light, without pressing a screen into our face? How frightened and alienated and uncomfortable must so many of us be that we are unable to be alone with ourselves and with our own thoughts for even a few moments? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that, though I dare say it is a rather important question. Thank you Mr. Curtain.

George Mc ,

This article made me realise how visionary the SF writer Philip K Dick was – with his spaced out psychotic "heroes", sinister shady corporations and breakdown in the whole criteria for determining what's real.

Recommended reads:

"A Scanner Darkly" where a schizophrenic main character seems to represent a schizophrenic world in which the ones fighting against drugs and the ones supplying then are two arms of the same organisation.

"Lies Inc." – A total mindfuck of a book in which psychotropic weapons have spiralled so far out of control that the whole narrative seems to break down.

Robbobbobin ,

This article made me realise how visionary the SF writer Philip K Dick was

The Machine Stops , E.M. Forster ( A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India, ), Short Story, published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review ( November 1909 ).

There are other free versions of the same text as well as several free audiobook versions available online.

Norn ,

This app shows in real time which app on your Android phone is talking/connecting to the outside world. App name: 'Network Connections' or 'Network Connections for Android'. Not sure if there are other flavours.

You can get it from Google Play, and if you don't like Google, the APK (Android Package) can be found quite easily online. Full version is paid but to check it out it is free. Sometimes it says you need to pay, but then the message disappears and you can keep using it (from my experience).

Interesting to see apps, that were forced to stop, coming back to life all by themselves and talking to whatever server they are supposed to talk to. However, you cannot tell, using this app, what data is being sent to the server. It would be good fun to find out.

You can click on a connection to see the IP owner and location information which take a few seconds to show. But it is an eye-opener to see the geolocations of various servers around the world that the mobile phone connects to simultaneously. It shows clearly, there are no boundaries (and no limits perhaps) on how high-tech companies operate. For example, an app (which I don't need and could not be disabled) can activate more than one connection and each connection is made to a server in a different country.

Mucho ,

Answers to the author's questions are contained herein:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pjtyj3SdlfA?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Tallis Marsh ,

Wow! I don't praise many articles nowadays but what an excellent article; one of the very few I've read in media (MSM and alternative) over the last couple of years. Thanks Mr Curtin – bravo!

Incidentally, on a more mundane level – I haven't had a mobile for quite some time now and have never had a smart-phone; corded landlines are so much better for phone calls (and freedom from stress when you are away from home/office!). Also, if you want to email, watch films, or play games PCs are infinitely better than mobile phones! Never got the thing about all-in-one devices, myself.

Mucho ,

The filth in power will use electronic warfare (5G, wifi, blue/white light LED ie cars, homes and streetlights, health harming devices like CCTV camersa which all emit microwaves at 2.4GHz same as your microwave oven, note: anyone noticed the massive uptick in radiation you are now exposed to in supermarkets with the ultra powerful new LED lights and wifi routers lining the ceilings? etc), false flag terrorism, mass poisoning of the food and water, synthetic man-made viuses, geo-engineered climate change and other methods straight out of the "how to genocide" handbook to conduct WW, reduce the population and destrot the world as we know it. Oh wait a minute, they're already doing all of those things. Do the maths people, it's pretty simple to figure it out. This is a silent war being waged against YOU and YOUR FAMILY. Who would have thought streetlights would be turned into a weapon of war? Well, they have been and with 5G, it won't just be the light they emit that is harmful. They know what all these things do, that's why they are installing them. WAKE UP!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/oY5SReQ2Kqc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Norn ,

When the space outside of jail is much smaller than the space inside the jail, those outside become prisoners by default as their freedom is curtailed by the lack of space and dearth of options.

This is the exact situation with our present Digital Prison that has been built by exploiting science and technology for nefarious and psychopathic and tyrannical aims.

Gezzah Potts ,

Another thought provoking peice Edward, thanks. And yeah, I read this while staring at my Huawei smartphone, which also contains my Email and things like Google Earth.

And, yes, I was wincing.

As someone who boycotts the mainstream presstitutes, and who hasn't bought a newspaper for over 15 years, how then do I find out what is happening in the world?

How do I find out when a protest is happening, or if a major war breaks out?

I regularly comment here (when it actually posts – major gremlins last 4-5 days) and at a few other independent sites.

It's about connecting with others who also see what is happening – the havoc and rank injustice created by the Neoliberal economic system and the Empire – epitomised by thugs like Pompeo and Esper.

Connecting with other like minded people is important.

The word to use here is balance. I check the news at a few sites, make comments, but also limit the time I spend on my phone. Balance.

I read a fair bit as well as listen to quite a lot of music, watch thought provoking films, and also connect with nature in a spiritual sense. That's an important one.

Mucho ,

Just research the radiation you are exposing your body to by using a smart phone, carrying it in your pocket is plain crazy! They have tricked you into harming your self with it. That's how they do it, it's all trickery ..illusion ..lies.

Listen to this guy, Kevin Mottus, he is ultra qualified to impart info about this. This presentation is not just about 5G it is about wireless.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Me1YfVZgHlA?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Gezzah Potts ,

Thanks Mucho for the clip, just heading off to work, will watch it tonight. Hmmm, 40 years ago, we didn't even have Dvds or Cds.

And now we can watch movies on our phone and Skype people on the other side of the world.

And everyone staring at their phones

Mucho ,

I just cannot believe what is unfolding before our eyes with this technology. Meet your new streetlights:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/26/new-led-streetlights-may-double-cancer-risk-new-research-warns/

kevin morris ,

All of the answers to all of the problems that face us are already within us. All we need to do is to switch off from the stuff that they want us to consume.

Norn ,

"switch off"? And miss on Providential Guidance? Here is the White House Spiritual Advisor sharing their flash of enlightenment:
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1220740601781608448

This is the providential guidance the masters of the universe receive in Washington .. Thank me for the giggle, and don't miss the comments below the (1minute 34seconds) video

kevin morris ,

not found your on/off switch yet, then?

Norn ,

Oooops ..

Gall ,

I think technology reaches an apex then it's downhill from there. The only advantage the internet has over the Gutenberg Press is that it's faster and easier to use. Both snail mail and email deliver mostly junk. Hey but it's faster and easier to get rid of and you don't have to recycle it which reminds me of the paragon of political correctness when he isn't planning mass genocide Bill Gates changing the name of what us Mac users still call trash and called it the "recycle bin". Yet his OS is still a dumpster fire with an architecture that was designed by a chimpanzee. Too funny 😂

Anyway seriously somewhat. Google is now a joke with its stupid "AI" that only hits on mainstream news and approved sites lest the holi poli find out what's really going on. Same with YouTube which has gotten as bad as watching cable TV. Like that ol Springsteen tune 55 channels and still nothing's on. Only there's a lot more of nothing thanks to the holy censors. Unless you're into soft core porn and cat vids.

Ain't technology great?

Now there's 5G that aside from being an overhyped hoax is dangerous. Hey but if you want to get irradiated in your own home or walking down the street than go fer it dude! Hope ya'll got a supply of Potassium Iodide because it'll come in handy when that goes on line but your last words will be sent faster with more ghz. What more can you ask for?

Funny you should mention the bomb Ed because with 5G coming on line we may not have to wait for that mushroom cloud.

It's probably not that bad at least that's what the experts who haven't bothered testing it say 😎👍

milosevic ,

Hope ya'll got a supply of Potassium Iodide because it'll come in handy when that goes on line

why, does 5G technology somehow produce radioactive iodine? how is that supposed to work?

Gall ,

It's possible that high concentrations of EMR can convert natural iodine in the thyroid gland to iodine 131. Just a theory but better safe than sorry. Also Vitamin K and Niacin have been shown to be somewhat effective as well.

milosevic ,

It's possible

no, it isn't.

otherwise, anybody who uses a microwave oven would have died of cancer, long ago.

take your anti-scientific disinfo someplace where it will be appreciated, like Alex Jones' psyop websites.

Gall ,

Why don't you stick your head in a microwave and turn it on? Report back when you've finished that experiment.

milosevic ,

are you a disinfo troll, or just an common moron? inquiring minds want to know.

Gall ,

No I'm just someone making a comment. If you're looking for a "disinfo troll" I suggest you look in the mirror. Now GTFO of my face moron.

milosevic ,

common moron it is, then. at least until further evidence becomes available.

Gall ,

Are you referring to yourself again? Personally I'd say that you're not just common but exceptionally moronic.

Mucho ,

I was going to link to the CIA released document which is a translation of USSR studies into the effects of non-ionizing radiation. It has an eye-watering summary of the effect of milimeter waves on biological structure, a fundamental aspect of 5G. It has been pulled and I cannot find it on their website. Very interesting. Luckily the FUllerton INformer has it on his 5G Dangers website.

https://thefullertoninformer.com/5g-dangers/

Go to page 57 of this document:

https://thefullertoninformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/cia-millimeter-waves-1.pdf

Gall ,

Thanx Mucho. There is also another factor to consider as well and that there is a very fine line spectrally that is almost nonexistent between Ionizing and Non-ionizing Radiation.

Also as I was trying to point out. There is nothing wrong with taking supplements that may counteract the effects of either.

Just like there is nothing wrong with taking vitamin C to counteract a cold.

Anyone who would should suggest that there is is not only a "disinfo troll" or agent but also a homicidal maniac.

milosevic ,

ionizing radiation produces ionization, which is not at all the same thing as nuclear transmutation.

evidently, you don't know what you're talking about.

Capricornia Man ,

Wasn't it Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul who said that an obsession with information technology is one of the hallmarks of a corporate state?

I think it was the editor of a US record magazine who wrote that one of the sicknesses of our society is that perfectly good, tried and trusted technology is junked the minute something else is invented.

Thoughts worth considering, at least.

BigB ,

And Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan made the similar observation: "First, we take control of our tools, then they take control of us".

Technology – or technique as Ellul preferred – gains an almost real time velocity, compressing time and space, making ends and means virtually synchronic but why? Does a 10 millisecond arbitrage trade vastly improve the quality of life compared to a 100 millisecond arbitrage trade or are we in the service of the machine?

Gary Wilson ,

We upset the biology but cling to the technology.

Fair dinkum ,

More bogged than 'hovering' methinks.

Norn ,

"nice" Americans: .. Here is a sample of nice Americans who want to control our breath: Pompeo , Fri 24 Jan 2020: "You Think Americans Really Give A F**k About Ukraine?"

Michael Richard Pompeo (57 y.o.) is the United States secretary of state. He is a former United States Army officer and was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 2017 until April 2018

Nuland , earlier than Feb 2014: "Fuck the EU."

Victoria Jane Nuland (59 y.o) is the former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State. She held the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest diplomatic rank in the United States Foreign Service. She is the former CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and is also a Member of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

Jack_Garbo ,

" my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world. It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type."

Edward, you've slipped into pseudo-Ludditism (and grammar errors). Your noisy, ribbon chewing, paper consuming (think of the trees!), typing machine is surely "durable" unless you suffer to endure it (Lying to another lover?). It may not contain "conflict coltan" and other imperial minerals but I'll bet it was produced by low wage serfs somewhere less than ritzy.

Anyone in your room can spy on your work, while my computer can be adjusted to a "narrow pixel view", blocking any spies, and if I want noise I can simulate the clack of keys hitting the carriage (I don't, can't stand the noise). I can also isolate all screen distractions in "private" mode, can choose my "paper color", usually a burnt cream mimicking early 19th C manuscripts (Ha, joke coming, my word processor is called Manuskript). Enough

I'll read the rest after coffee, proofing this electronic creation, and posting. It's all real, not totalitarian electronic post-modern fascism. Oh, my smartphone? It sits obediently silent, taking messages, reminding me of appointments, like a dutiful secretary, as I've programmed it. Ain't technology great?
PS. I write for a living and the invention of the computer saved my sanity, since I'm a "backwards" writer – end first, middle, then start. Years of real "cut & paste" drove me mad.

So, all praise the god Laptop and his children, Word Processors. Anon.

Gall ,

Personally I don't see anything "therapeutic" about staring at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I write for a living too at times and still I end up going old school and actually writing notes or doing a handwritten outline before I hit the big empty.

Writing is a personal thing. Actually I admire Ed's method. Anyone who takes the time to type out their piece on a manual typewriter is a craftsman. Makes me want to haul out my old Smith Corona and give 'er a spin.

Jack_Garbo ,

That's the difference between an amateur (lover) and a pro (expert). I don't caress the keyboard or kiss the screen, but my words sell or I don't eat. Typewritten words pay the same as electronic words. Nothing's therapeutic about about a blank screen; my job is to fill it.

I envy amateurs, who enjoy inserting the sheets, adjusting the light, polishing the keys and neatly stacking that final draft, even if it's never published. I used to do that when I worked as an engineer, when writing was a hobby.

Antonym ,

Who is behind 5G?

I though it was China (Huawei), the nation that has its citizens even more hooked on mobile phones than the US: even opium was a less popular escape from a top down society.

Not only do the Chinese, Americans and many others suffer from cyber addiction but also from gross materialism. Same symptoms, same cause: lack of spirituality. "Money" is just another deficient religion.

[Jan 31, 2020] Two "nice" Americans

Jan 31, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Norn ,

"nice" Americans: .. Here is a sample of nice Americans who want to control our breath: Pompeo , Fri 24 Jan 2020: "You Think Americans Really Give A F**k About Ukraine?"

Michael Richard Pompeo (57 y.o.) is the United States secretary of state. He is a former United States Army officer and was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 2017 until April 2018

Nuland , earlier than Feb 2014: "Fuck the EU."

Victoria Jane Nuland (59 y.o) is the former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State. She held the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest diplomatic rank in the United States Foreign Service. She is the former CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and is also a Member of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

[Jan 31, 2020] Hovering in Cyberspace

www.youtube.com
Jan 31, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Search Jan 26, 2020 49 Hovering in Cyberspace Kit Knightly Edward Curtin

Photo by Ales Nesetril on Unsplash

We live in a fabricated reality where the visible world became nearly meaningless once the screen world became people's "window on the world." An electronic nothingness replaced reality as people gleefully embraced digital wraparound apparitions. These days people still move about in the physical world but live in the electronic one. The result is mass hallucination.

This is the fundamental seismic shift of our era. There is a lot of bitching and joking about it, but when all is said and done, it is accepted as inevitable. Digital devices are embraced as phantom lovers. Technological "advances" are accepted as human destiny. We now inhabit a technological nightmare (that seems like a paradise to so many) in which technology and technique – the standardized means for realizing a predetermined end most efficiently – dominate the world.

In such a world, not only does the end justify the means, but to consider such a moral issue is beside the point. We are speeding ahead to nowhere in the most "efficient" way possible. No questioning allowed! Unless you wish to ask your phone.

These days there is much political talk and commentary about fascism, tyranny, a police state, etc., while the totalitarianism of technocracy and technology continues apace. It is not just the ecological (in the human/natural sense) impact of digital technology where one change generates many others in an endless spiral, but the fact that technical efficiency dominates all aspects of life and, as Jacques Ellul wrote long ago, "transforms everything it touches into a machine," including humans.

For every problem caused by technology, there is always a technological "solution" that creates further technological problems ad infinitum. The goal is always to find the most efficient (power) technique to apply as rapidly as possible to all human problems.

Writing nearly fifty years ago in Medical Nemesis , Ivan Illich, explained how in medical care the human touch was being replaced by this technical mindset. He said,

In all countries, doctors work increasingly with two groups of addicts: those for whom they prescribe drugs, and those who suffer from their consequences. The richer the community, the larger the percentage of patients who belong to both In such a society, people come to believe that in health care, as in all fields of endeavor, technology can be used to change the human condition according to almost any design.

We are of course living with the ongoing results of such medical technical efficiency. The U.S.A. is a country where the majority of people are drugged in one way or another, legally or illegally, since the human problems of living are considered to have only technological solutions, whether those remedies are effective or anodyne.

The "accidents" and risks built into the technological fixes are never considered since the ideological grip of the religion of technology is all-encompassing and infallible. We are caught in its web.

Marshall McLuhan, the media guru of the 1960s – whether he was applauding or bemoaning the fact – was right when he claimed that the medium is the message.

Cell phones, being the current omnipresent form of the electronification of life, are today's message, a sign that one is always in touch with the void. To be without this small machine is to be rendered an idiot in the ancient Greek sense of the word – a private person.

Translation: one who is out of it, detached, at least temporarily, from the screens that separate us from reality, from the incessant noise and pinging messages that destroy reflection and create reflex reactions.

But to be out of it is the only way to understand it. And to understand it is terrifying, for it means one knows that the religion of technology has replaced nature as the source of what for eons has been considered sacred. It means one grasps how reality is now defined by technology.

It means realizing that people are merging with the machines they are attached to by invisible manacles as they replace the human body with abstractions and interact with machines.

It means recognizing that the internet, despite its positive aspects and usage by dissenters intent on human liberation, is controlled by private corporations and government forces intent on using it as a weapon to control people.

It means seeing the truth that most people have never considered the price to be paid for the speed and efficiency of a high-tech world.

But the price is very, very high.

One price, perhaps the most important, is the fragmentation of consciousness, which prevents people from grasping the present from within – which, as Frederic Jameson has noted, is so crucial and yet one of the mind's most problematic tasks – because so many suffer from digital dementia as their attention hops from input to output in a never-ending flow of mediated, disembodied data.

As a result, a vicious circle has been created that prevents people from the crucial epistemological task of grasping the double-bind that is the ultimate propaganda.

Data is Dada by another name, and we are in Dada land, pissing, not into Marcel Duchamp's ridiculous work of Dada "art," a urinal , but into the wind. And data piled on data equals a heap of data without knowledge or understanding.

There is no time or space for grasping context or to connect the dots. It is a pointillist painting in the form of inert facts that few can understand or even realize that they don't.

I am typing these words on a Hermes 3000 manual typewriter, a beautiful piece of technology whose sound and movement creates a rhythmic sanctuary where my hands, head, and heart work in unison.

It allows me to think slowly, to make mistakes that will necessitate retyping, to do second and third rereadings and revisions, to roll the paper out of the machine and sit quietly as I review it. My eyes rest on the paper, not a blue-lit screen.

Technology as such is not the problem, for my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world. It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type.

I am alone and unplugged, disconnected, off-line and out of line, a sine qua non for thinking, and thinking about deep matters. The typewriter is mine, and mine alone, unlike the connected digital devices that have destroyed aloneness, for to be alone is to contemplate one's fate and that of all humanity. It is to confront essential things and not feel the loneliness induced and exacerbated by the illusion of always being in touch.

But while this typing machine allows me to write in peace, I am in no way suggesting that I have escaped the technological condition that we all find ourselves in. There are little ways to step outside the closing circle, but even then, one is still in it. I will eventually have to take my paper and type it into a computer document if I wish to publish it in the form you will be reading it.

There is no other way. The technocrats have decreed it so. We are all, as George Orwell once wrote in a different context and meaning, "inside the whale," the whale, in this case, being a high-tech digital world controlled by technocrats, and we have only small ways to shield ourselves from it.

Sitting in a quiet room, working on a typewriter, taking a walk in the woods without a cell phone, or not owning a cell phone, are but small individual acts that have no effect on the structural realty of what Neil Postman calls technopoly in his masterful book, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology .

And even in the woods one may look up to admire a tree only to find that it is a cell phone tower.

Humans have always created and used technology, but for a very long time that technology was subject to cultural and religious rules that circumscribed limits to its use. Today there are no limits, no rules to constrain it. The prohibition to prohibit is our motto.

In our acceptance of technical efficiency, we have handed over our freedom and lost control of the means to ends we can't fathom but unconsciously fear. Where are we heading? many probably wonder, as they check the latest news ping, no doubt about something to fear, as a thousand pieces of "news" flash through their devices without pause, like wisps of fleeting dreams one vaguely remembers but cannot pin down or understand. Incoherence is the result. Speed is king.

Of course, this kaleidoscopic flood of data confuses people who desire some coherence and explanation. This is provided by what Jacques Ellul calls "the explanatory myth." He writes,

This brings us to the other pole of our bizarre intellectual situation today: the explanatory myth. In addition to its political and its mystical and spiritual function, the explanatory myth is the veritable spinal column of our whole intellectual system Given that appearances produce confusion and coherence is needed, a new appearance unifies them all in the viewer's mind and enables everything to be explained.

This appearance has a spiritual root and is accepted only by completely blind credulity.

It becomes the intellectual key for opening all secrets, interpreting every fact, and recognizing oneself in the whirl of phenomena this myth [is] their one stable point of thought and consciousness enables everyone to avoid the trouble of thinking for themselves, the worry of doubt, the questioning, the uncertainty of understanding, and the torture of a bad conscience.

What prodigious savings of time and means, which can be put usefully to work manufacturing some more missiles [they] have a good conscience because they have an answer for everything; and whatever happens and whatever they do, they can rely on the explanation that myth provides. This process places them within the most complete unreality possible.

They live in a permanent dream, but a realistic dream, constructed from the countless facts and theories that they believe in with all the power of 'mass persons' who cannot detach themselves from the mass without dying.

Today that myth is the religion of technology.

So if you have any questions you want answered, you can ask your phone.

Ask your phone why we are living with endless wars on the edge of using our most astounding technological invention: nuclear weapons.

Ask your computer why "nice" Americans will sit behind computer screens and send missiles to kill people half-way around the world whom they are told they are at war with.

Ask your smart device why so many have become little Eichmanns, carrying out their dutiful little tasks at Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and all the other war manufacturers, or not caring what stocks they own.

Ask your phone what really happened to the Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Iran. See if your phone will say anything about cyber warfare, electronic jamming, or why the plane's transponder was turned off preventing a signal to be sent indicating it was a civilian aircraft.

Ask who is behind the push to deploy 5G wireless technology.

Ask that smartphone who is providing the non-answers.

Ask and it won't be given to you; seek and you will not find. The true answers to your questions will remain hidden. This is the technological society, set up and controlled by the rulers. It is a scam.

Google it!

God may respond.

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aspnaz ,

The frustration is that there is so much information, the vast majority of which can be plain incorrect, depending on subject. For example, the information over global warming. There is clear evidence that the climate is changing – melting glaciers etc – and we can see the north pole marching into Russia at a pace not seen in recoded history, but what is very difficult to determine is the cause or the consequence: so much misinformation that the truth is buried and cannot be found by us mere mortals.
In the past we had an editor picking the version of the "truth" that would be exposed to us: was that "truth" also just fabrication or was it closer to the truth that what we are exposed to today? Was it more healthy to be secure in the knowledge that the BBC always told the truth, even if that truth was a lie? At least we didn't have the stress of trying to find the real truth, it was printed there on our daily.

Binra ,

Our pattern of consciousness development persists until there is a new decision in place of the old.
Normalised insanity can be managed at a cost. While we are willing to pay the cost we 'live in a fabricated reality' of lies and deceits.

A work that inspires me states; 'There is no life outside Heaven' – and another way of saying this is that Thoughts never actually leave the mind of their thinker and so we who are Thoughts – are still living in our Creator no matter how our minds are set in giving life instead to images, idols and ideas as identities conformed to 'thinking' in a frame of opposition in fear of loss.

There are 'upstream' perspectives to our virtual reality experience of a displaced and dissociated 'physical' consciousness – which like a Russian doll continues to further displacement and dissociation as the belief in Separation as survival.

The pattern of modelling Reality as image and concept and now as 'systems' of learned, acquired and manipulated meanings, from behavioural response patterns of conditioning is an ancient archetype of psychic separation or 'splitting off' from Source, from Other and from World.

This is the 'death' spiral that works through our defences, to constrict, paralyse and checkmate us in what we took to be an autonomous free will. As if a Thought could cast itself from the mind of its Living Inheritance and suffer the belief it not only has such power – but is now trapped in subjection to a loveless experience in which every move to escape or overcome is weaponised against it.

The idea of Space in a object-modelled reality is 'nothing' and 'distance' or separation.
All Space is a Field of Knowing for there is nothing between us but the objection modelling of a psyche in denial. Yet in some moment, everyone has had experience of transcendence – upstream to a thinking-script that resumes 'service' after the temporary disappearance of the conditions of a driven struggle of a split sense of isolation to somehow regain or restore Life in the forms of a world of treachery and deceit.

There IS another way of looking at what we have made of ourselves, our world and a Creator in our own image.But not while everything is seeking to hide, mask over and dump this onto others, world and Life itself.

The nature of our entanglement in hate has ancient roots that tare at our attempts to reach the fruits of fulfilment. A mind at war with itself. Many minds set in war as the very basis of their survival in a world that plasters over the cracks of a managed chaos that only grows the more it is 'controlled'.

Embrace the seeming chaos with the desire to see with new eyes – or persist in diving down rabbit holes of the lure of the power of deceit.
Wherever you go – there you are. Not just the fragments that remain – but All of You is right here while a tiny part is aggrandised in victim or victory to fill the space of awareness that remains.

And yet if All of You is here – then there is a potential or indeed opportunity for Communication or indeed Communion of an intimate recognition. All that blocks such a simple fact reaching awareness is invested belief in narrative identity. Opening the narrative and its supporting beliefs to the space of awareness is the opposite of trying to invest light in darkness – as if to change it.

The more you give it the more it feeds and the more it needs.
The darkness eating our world is not in any of the false trails set in the world to sustain it as a suction upon a captured light. It is in our heart's desecration.

Order set over a chaos assigned to a personally responsible and irrevocable guilt – is the usurping of an Order arising from wholeness that guilt can no longer see or believe in EXCEPT as the victim made sacred to power over Life. Because once you have hate in your heart you are convicted by your own judgement to protect and persist it as the 'only world there is'.

The Script unfolds logically and inexorably from its predicates. And insane world is reliable feedback to insane premises. One of which is the attempt to kill or eradicate an evil – that thus becomes us – as we righteously become the thing we hate beneath the bubble of a 'righteousness' that completely blinds us until our 'world' cracks open to a helpless recognition of our own undoing.

If there is a way to See and know truly, instead of shifting perceptions that repackage ancient hate in complex instruments of incentivisation, it is a matter of the heart's desire and not technological ingenuity purposed to self-specialness. For desire vibrates the 'space' – and what we accept and hold in our heart is given power in our name – regardless it be true or worthy of you to share in.
We 'object' amidst a Universe that is 99.9% Space – and yet filled with energetic order of a kind we are only just beginning to – somewhat reluctantly – recognise. The only 'nothing' is the false given acceptance as true. Acting as if something fearful is true MAKES it true in the mind of that experience.

Do we really have choice?
If so – are we even now using it to deny or rule out the only real choice available for an ancient mis-identification struggling to make itself real?

Rhisiart Gwilym ,

Thank god for the Long Descent. This will all be a fading nightmare (though some will dream it as a lost golden age !) in a century or so; when the Limits To Growth have finally insisted that we stop expanding the Technosphere (aka 'Koyaanisqatsi') – and then go into reverse. Roll effin' on!

Richard Le Sarc ,

We cannot possibly, on the current trajectory, make another century. A few decades at most, months or years if thermo-nuclear or biological warfare is unleashed.

Gary Weglarz ,

I have been living in southern California for the last two years, yet I'm still trying to adjust to what I observe daily in terms of "screen addiction." It is a daily occurrence here to stop at red light, wait all of 30 to 40 seconds for the light to change, only to have one or more cars in line fail to move when light turns green. Why? Because they are completely glued to their cell phones either reading messages, texting, or god knows what? Inevitably one has to honk one's car-horn to get them moving. I've never observed this anywhere else I've lived, but then again the screen addiction thing is growing daily in real-time so who knows if this is just standard operating procedure around the world in all urban areas at this time?

The most frightening example of the screen addiction here is that in stop and go, bumper to bumper freeway traffic, moving from 60 miles and hour one moment to a dead stop the next, I've glanced over many times to see drivers next to me literally looking down at their cell phones instead of at the road in front of them, while driving 60 miles and hour, and when knowing that at any second they may have to slam their brakes on to avoid a collision. Two years ago I was living in rural France and I NEVER witnessed behavior like this anywhere, even when driving in Paris. Maybe things have changed there – I just don't know.

What does it say about us here in the U.S. (at least southern California) that we can't drive our car, or sit for 30 seconds at a traffic light, without pressing a screen into our face? How frightened and alienated and uncomfortable must so many of us be that we are unable to be alone with ourselves and with our own thoughts for even a few moments? I'm not sure I want to know the answer to that, though I dare say it is a rather important question. Thank you Mr. Curtain.

George Mc ,

This article made me realise how visionary the SF writer Philip K Dick was – with his spaced out psychotic "heroes", sinister shady corporations and breakdown in the whole criteria for determining what's real.

Recommended reads:

"A Scanner Darkly" where a schizophrenic main character seems to represent a schizophrenic world in which the ones fighting against drugs and the ones supplying then are two arms of the same organisation.

"Lies Inc." – A total mindfuck of a book in which psychotropic weapons have spiralled so far out of control that the whole narrative seems to break down.

Robbobbobin ,

This article made me realise how visionary the SF writer Philip K Dick was

The Machine Stops , E.M. Forster ( A Room with a View, Howards End, A Passage to India, ), Short Story, published in The Oxford and Cambridge Review ( November 1909 ).

There are other free versions of the same text as well as several free audiobook versions available online.

Norn ,

This app shows in real time which app on your Android phone is talking/connecting to the outside world. App name: 'Network Connections' or 'Network Connections for Android'. Not sure if there are other flavours.
You can get it from Google Play, and if you don't like Google, the APK (Android Package) can be found quite easily online. Full version is paid but to check it out it is free. Sometimes it says you need to pay, but then the message disappears and you can keep using it (from my experience).
Interesting to see apps, that were forced to stop, coming back to life all by themselves and talking to whatever server they are supposed to talk to. However, you cannot tell, using this app, what data is being sent to the server. It would be good fun to find out.
You can click on a connection to see the IP owner and location information which take a few seconds to show. But it is an eye-opener to see the geolocations of various servers around the world that the mobile phone connects to simultaneously. It shows clearly, there are no boundaries (and no limits perhaps) on how high-tech companies operate. For example, an app (which I don't need and could not be disabled) can activate more than one connection and each connection is made to a server in a different country.

Mucho ,

Answers to the author's questions are contained herein:

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Pjtyj3SdlfA?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Tallis Marsh ,

Wow! I don't praise many articles nowadays but what an excellent article; one of the very few I've read in media (MSM and alternative) over the last couple of years. Thanks Mr Curtin – bravo!

Incidentally, on a more mundane level – I haven't had a mobile for quite some time now and have never had a smart-phone; corded landlines are so much better for phone calls (and freedom from stress when you are away from home/office!). Also, if you want to email, watch films, or play games PCs are infinitely better than mobile phones! Never got the thing about all-in-one devices, myself.

Mucho ,

The filth in power will use electronic warfare (5G, wifi, blue/white light LED ie cars, homes and streetlights, health harming devices like CCTV camersa which all emit microwaves at 2.4GHz same as your microwave oven, note: anyone noticed the massive uptick in radiation you are now exposed to in supermarkets with the ultra powerful new LED lights and wifi routers lining the ceilings? etc), false flag terrorism, mass poisoning of the food and water, synthetic man-made viuses, geo-engineered climate change and other methods straight out of the "how to genocide" handbook to conduct WW, reduce the population and destrot the world as we know it. Oh wait a minute, they're already doing all of those things. Do the maths people, it's pretty simple to figure it out. This is a silent war being waged against YOU and YOUR FAMILY. Who would have thought streetlights would be turned into a weapon of war? Well, they have been and with 5G, it won't just be the light they emit that is harmful. They know what all these things do, that's why they are installing them. WAKE UP!

https://www.youtube.com/embed/oY5SReQ2Kqc?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Norn ,

When the space outside of jail is much smaller than the space inside the jail, those outside become prisoners by default as their freedom is curtailed by the lack of space and dearth of options.

This is the exact situation with our present Digital Prison that has been built by exploiting science and technology for nefarious and psychopathic and tyrannical aims.

Gezzah Potts ,

Another thought provoking peice Edward, thanks.
And yeah, I read this while staring at my Huawei smartphone, which also contains my Email and things like Google Earth.
And, yes, I was wincing.
As someone who boycotts the mainstream presstitutes, and who hasn't bought a newspaper for over 15 years, how then do I find out what is happening in the world?
How do I find out when a protest is happening, or if a major war breaks out?
I regularly comment here (when it actually posts – major gremlins last 4-5 days) and at a few other independent sites.
It's about connecting with others who also see what is happening – the havoc and rank injustice created by the Neoliberal economic system and the Empire – epitomised by thugs like Pompeo and Esper.
Connecting with other like minded people is important.
The word to use here is balance. I check the news at a few sites, make comments, but also limit the time I spend on my phone. Balance.
I read a fair bit as well as listen to quite a lot of music, watch thought provoking films, and also connect with nature in a spiritual sense. That's an important one.

Mucho ,

Just research the radiation you are exposing your body to by using a smart phone, carrying it in your pocket is plain crazy! They have tricked you into harming your self with it. That's how they do it, it's all trickery ..illusion ..lies.
Listen to this guy, Kevin Mottus, he is ultra qulaified to impart info about this. This presentation is not just about 5G it is about wireless.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/Me1YfVZgHlA?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

Gezzah Potts ,

Thanks Mucho for the clip, just heading off to work, will watch it tonight. Hmmm, 40 years ago, we didn't even have Dvds or Cds.
And now we can watch movies on our phone and Skype people on the other side of the world.
And everyone staring at their phones

Mucho ,

I just cannot believe what is unfolding before our eyes with this technology.
Meet your new streetlights:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/2018/04/26/new-led-streetlights-may-double-cancer-risk-new-research-warns/

kevin morris ,

All of the answers to all of the problems that face us are already within us. All we need to do is to switch off from the stuff that they want us to consume.

Norn ,

"switch off"? And miss on Providential Guidance? Here is the White House Spiritual Advisor sharing their flash of enlightenment:
https://twitter.com/RightWingWatch/status/1220740601781608448
This is the providential guidance the masters of the universe receive in Washington .. Thank me for the giggle, and don't miss the comments below the (1minute 34seconds) video

kevin morris ,

not found your on/off switch yet, then?

Norn ,

Oooops ..

Gall ,

I think technology reaches an apex then it's downhill from there. The only advantage the internet has over the Gutenberg Press is that it's faster and easier to use. Both snail mail and email deliver mostly junk. Hey but it's faster and easier to get rid of and you don't have to recycle it which reminds me of the paragon of political correctness when he isn't planning mass genocide Bill Gates changing the name of what us Mac users still call trash and called it the "recycle bin". Yet his OS is still a dumpster fire with an architecture that was designed by a chimpanzee. Too funny 😂

Anyway seriously somewhat. Google is now a joke with its stupid "AI" that only hits on mainstream news and approved sites lest the holi poli find out what's really going on. Same with YouTube which has gotten as bad as watching cable TV. Like that ol Springsteen tune 55 channels and still nothing's on. Only there's a lot more of nothing thanks to the holy censors. Unless you're into soft core porn and cat vids.

Ain't technology great?

Now there's 5G that aside from being an overhyped hoax is dangerous. Hey but if you want to get irradiated in your own home or walking down the street than go fer it dude! Hope ya'll got a supply of Potassium Iodide because it'll come in handy when that goes on line but your last words will be sent faster with more ghz. What more can you ask for?

Funny you should mention the bomb Ed because with 5G coming on line we may not have to wait for that mushroom cloud.

It's probably not that bad at least that's what the experts who haven't bothered testing it say 😎👍

milosevic ,

Hope ya'll got a supply of Potassium Iodide because it'll come in handy when that goes on line

why, does 5G technology somehow produce radioactive iodine? how is that supposed to work?

Gall ,

It's possible that high concentrations of EMR can convert natural iodine in the thyroid gland to iodine 131. Just a theory but better safe than sorry. Also Vitamin K and Niacin have been shown to be somewhat effective as well.

milosevic ,

It's possible

no, it isn't.

otherwise, anybody who uses a microwave oven would have died of cancer, long ago.

take your anti-scientific disinfo someplace where it will be appreciated, like Alex Jones' psyop websites.

Gall ,

Why don't you stick your head in a microwave and turn it on? Report back when you've finished that experiment.

milosevic ,

are you a disinfo troll, or just an common moron? inquiring minds want to know.

Gall ,

No I'm just someone making a comment. If you're looking for a "disinfo troll" I suggest you look in the mirror. Now GTFO of my face moron.

milosevic ,

common moron it is, then. at least until further evidence becomes available.

Gall ,

Are you referring to yourself again? Personally I'd say that you're not just common but exceptionally moronic.

Mucho ,

I was going to link to the CIA released document which is a translation of USSR studies into the effects of non-ionizing radiation. It has an eye-watering summary of the effect of milimeter waves on biological structure, a fundamental aspect of 5G. It has been pulled and I cannot find it on their website. Very interesting. Luckily the FUllerton INformer has it on his 5G Dangers website.

https://thefullertoninformer.com/5g-dangers/

Go to page 57 of this document:
https://thefullertoninformer.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/cia-millimeter-waves-1.pdf

Gall ,

Thanx Mucho. There is also another factor to consider as well and that there is a very fine line spectrally that is almost nonexistent between Ionizing and Non-ionizing Radiation.

Also as I was trying to point out. There is nothing wrong with taking supplements that may counteract the effects of either.

Just like there is nothing wrong with taking vitamin C to counteract a cold.

Anyone who would should suggest that there is is not only a "disinfo troll" or agent but also a homicidal maniac.

milosevic ,

ionizing radiation produces ionization, which is not at all the same thing as nuclear transmutation.

evidently, you don't know what you're talking about.

Capricornia Man ,

Wasn't it Canadian philosopher John Ralston Saul who said that an obsession with information technology is one of the hallmarks of a corporate state?

I think it was the editor of a US record magazine who wrote that one of the sicknesses of our society is that perfectly good, tried and trusted technology is junked the minute something else is invented.

Thoughts worth considering, at least.

BigB ,

And Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan made the similar observation: "First, we take control of our tools, then they take control of us".

Technology – or technique as Ellul preferred – gains an almost real time velocity, compressing time and space, making ends and means virtually synchronic but why? Does a 10 millisecond arbitrage trade vastly improve the quality of life compared to a 100 millisecond arbitrage trade or are we in the service of the machine?

Gary Wilson ,

We upset the biology but cling to the technology.

Fair dinkum ,

More bogged than 'hovering' methinks.

Norn ,

"nice" Americans: .. Here is a sample of nice Americans who want to control our breath:
Pompeo , Fri 24 Jan 2020: "You Think Americans Really Give A F**k About Ukraine?"

Michael Richard Pompeo (57 y.o.) is the United States secretary of state. He is a former United States Army officer and was Director of the Central Intelligence Agency from January 2017 until April 2018

Nuland , earlier than Feb 2014: "Fuck the EU."

Victoria Jane Nuland (59 y.o) is the former Assistant Secretary of State for European and Eurasian Affairs at the United States Department of State. She held the rank of Career Ambassador, the highest diplomatic rank in the United States Foreign Service. She is the former CEO of the Center for a New American Security (CNAS), and is also a Member of the Board of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED)

Jack_Garbo ,

" my typewriter is a very useful and endurable machine, a useful technology that has enhanced life. It does not break or need to be replaced every few years, as computers do. It does not contain coltan, tantalum, or other minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, and other places by poor people working under oppressive conditions created by international consumer greed that is devouring the world. It does not allow anyone to spy on me as I type."

Edward, you've slipped into pseudo-Ludditism (and grammar errors). Your noisy, ribbon chewing, paper consuming (think of the trees!), typing machine is surely "durable" unless you suffer to endure it (Lying to another lover?). It may not contain "conflict coltan" and other imperial minerals but I'll bet it was produced by low wage serfs somewhere less than ritzy.
Anyone in your room can spy on your work, while my computer can be adjusted to a "narrow pixel view", blocking any spies, and if I want noise I can simulate the clack of keys hitting the carriage (I don't, can't stand the noise). I can also isolate all screen distractions in "private" mode, can choose my "paper color", usually a burnt cream mimicking early 19th C manuscripts (Ha, joke coming, my word processor is called Manuskript). Enough
I'll read the rest after coffee, proofing this electronic creation, and posting. It's all real, not totalitarian electronic post-modern fascism. Oh, my smartphone? It sits obediently silent, taking messages, reminding me of appointments, like a dutiful secretary, as I've programmed it. Ain't technology great?
PS. I write for a living and the invention of the computer saved my sanity, since I'm a "backwards" writer – end first, middle, then start. Years of real "cut & paste" drove me mad.
So, all praise the god Laptop and his children, Word Processors. Anon.

Gall ,

Personally I don't see anything "therapeutic" about staring at a blank screen and a blinking cursor. I write for a living too at times and still I end up going old school and actually writing notes or doing a handwritten outline before I hit the big empty.

Writing is a personal thing. Actually I admire Ed's method. Anyone who takes the time to type out their piece on a manual typewriter is a craftsman. Makes me want to haul out my old Smith Corona and give 'er a spin.

Jack_Garbo ,

That's the difference between an amateur (lover) and a pro (expert). I don't caress the keyboard or kiss the screen, but my words sell or I don't eat. Typewritten words pay the same as electronic words. Nothing's therapeutic about about a blank screen; my job is to fill it.
I envy amateurs, who enjoy inserting the sheets, adjusting the light, polishing the keys and neatly stacking that final draft, even if it's never published. I used to do that when I worked as an engineer, when writing was a hobby.

Antonym ,

Who is behind 5G?

I though it was China (Huawei), the nation that has its citizens even more hooked on mobile phones than the US: even opium was a less popular escape from a top down society.

Not only do the Chinese, Americans and many others suffer from cyber addiction but also from gross materialism. Same symptoms, same cause: lack of spirituality. "Money" is just another deficient religion.

Richard Le Sarc ,

Dear me, Ant-did you forget your own tribe, hooked on materialism for 3500 years.

nottheonly1 ,

All cared for by loving machines – or so it says.

[Jan 30, 2020] Those Who Have Visions

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

KD , Jan 30 2020 11:35 utc | 1

The former German chancellor Helmut Schmidt once famously said :

People who have visions should go see a doctor.

Yesterday U.S. President Donald Trump published a Vision for Peace, Prosperity, and a Brighter Future for Israel and the Palestinian People . The paper refers to 'vision' 28 times.

It is similar to this Lebanese 'Vision for Peace' for a brighter future for the people in North America which foresees some split of territory between natives and colonial settlers. Haha.. I had a good laugh seeing the diagram.
Thank you 'b' for keeping us in good spirits!

Ciso Tagori , Jan 30 2020 11:43 utc | 2

They never learn,vision for them is equal to dictate.

[Jan 30, 2020] So it is a matter of change the flag in the US bases and all will be OK?

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

DFC , Jan 30 2020 18:02 utc | 63

A bit off-topic but seems that may be US will be Iraq, but who remains is NATO:

https://middle-east-online.com/en/iraq-considers-nato-role-instead-us-led-coalition

So it is a matter of change the flag in the US bases and all will be OK?

[Jan 30, 2020] Brits in 1812 and Kushner plan

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

the pair , Jan 30 2020 16:04 utc | 33

i always thought it a shame that the war of 1812 ended in a (more or less) draw. the brits had ideas for cutting up the US that would have been similar to that fake map (which was kinda amusing until i saw the "derpa derp russia" bit) and kept the settler trash from moving west and genociding everything that wasn't nailed down.

oh well...at least it's comforting to think ahead a few decades when most of the southwest will be "little mexico".

Walter , Jan 30 2020 16:12 utc | 35

BM | Jan 30 2020 15:50 utc | 29 (map)

I see Alaska and Hawaii have presumably gone back to the original owners, but it's not shown.

I assume Alaska went to Russia (which is what a pal who fishes there expects!) (there is a plan, I am told, to run a rail tunnel under Bering Strait, Canada, America, and further South all the way as part of the OBOR project.). But that can happen if the natives wish association with Ru and Chin...

(I'm not terribly serious about this, but Times do change and stuff does happen)

I assume the Monarchy is re-established in Hawaii.

In all seriousness, the DoD plans for Alaska if nukewar with USSR went against the US, was to use Gladio teams to control the natives, who were regarded as unloyal and sympathetic to the "commies"... no url, but I read this in FOIA stuff years ago.

Jackrabbit | Jan 30 2020 17:14 utc | 55

I assume that American Indians have already agreed to the North American Peace Plan (NAPP)so they can now go ahead and take 30% of the land that the NAPP grants them - just as with the Trump-Jared Plan to settle the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.

Will homes of White Americans that disagree be bulldozed like the Israelis do to Palestinians?

[Jan 30, 2020] After Trump "vision" another map needed

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mark2 , Jan 30 2020 15:08 utc | 23

Good map 'b'
I would love to see a political map of the US White House showing percentage of Israeli influence on American policy! Duel nationals, lobby groups etcetera plus maybe one showing which states are biased toward Israel as opposed to Palestine.

It's known as 'declaring an interest' those people should be barred from decision making re Israel.

Kabobyak , Jan 30 2020 15:22 utc | 25

Mark2 @ 23

Israeli population in the world: 0.11 %
Israeli influence in US foreign policy: 99.89 %

[Jan 30, 2020] Tennessee State Rep. Files Bill To Officially Designate CNN As 'Fake News' by Steve Watson

Jan 30, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Steve Watson via Summit News,

In a move that is sure to please President Trump, a State Representative in Tennessee has introduced legislation that would officially designate CNN, as well as The Washington Post, as fake news.

c8089923 , 8 minutes ago link

I'm moving to Tennessee

[Jan 30, 2020] A classic Jewish joke

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Vig , Jan 30 2020 16:04 utc | 34

R.I.P. Uri Avnery:
... reminded of the classic Jewish joke about the Jewish mother in Russia taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve the Czar in the war against Turkey. "Don't overexert yourself'" she implores him, "Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again "

"But mother," the son interrupts, "What if the Turk kills me?"

"You?" exclaims the mother, "But why? What have you done to him?"

[Jan 30, 2020] Putin is nothing if not a pragmatist. A nationalist as well. See where Russia was when he began his first term as President and where it is now which is even more impressive when resistance from the US and 'friends' is taken into account.

Jan 30, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Jan 30 2020 15:32 utc | 27

Posted by: paul | Jan 30 2020 13:49 utc | 12

Putin is nothing if not a pragmatist. A nationalist as well. See where Russia was when he began his first term as President and where it is now which is even more impressive when resistance from the US and 'friends' is taken into account.

Being pragmatic doesn't always satisfy everyone. He doesn't have the same political system as the US and Western Democracies either, so there's that. I think a large part of his appeal to those who see him objectively is his attempts to be a broker rather than a hot head reactionary and that would apply to the nasties in Israel. Capt Obvious says Israel isn't a standalone problem.


Hoarsewhisperer , Jan 30 2020 15:57 utc | 30

Putin and Netanyahu's relationship is too close for comfort.
Posted by: SharonM | Jan 30 2020 13:01 utc | 6

Name one national leader to whom Putin displays a lack of respect?
He's not a big-mouthed AmeriKKKan or a sleazy Pom. It's Russian (and Chinese) policy to keep the door to the path of diplomacy open at all times.

I'm surprised that everyone is pretending not to notice that Trump hasn't finished helping the "Israelis" to outsmart themselves. He's made several of their criminally psychotic dreams come true and they've lapped them up without any apparent reservations about the legal and moral ramifications.
He'll keep 'giving' them increasingly ridiculous concessions because he's probably as curious as everyone else to discover if there's a practical limit to the quality and quantity of asinine bullshit the "Israelis" will believe.

moe , Jan 30 2020 18:33 utc | 71
Extremely informative article about Putin - concentrating on his leadership style and his character: https://russialist.org/sharon-tennison-shake-up-in-the-kremlin-putin-selects-a-new-leader.
AntiSpin , Jan 30 2020 20:01 utc | 88
@ moe | Jan 30 2020 18:33 utc | 71

Thank you for the informative article by Sharon Tennison, about Putin.

Those who find it interesting and/or informative will also be interested in this much earlier, much more detailed article that she wrote six years ago, about her initial and considerable interactions with him when he was a civil-servant bureaucrat in St Petersbug in the 90s.
http://www.russiaotherpointsofview.com/2014/04/russia-report-putin-.html

I wholeheartedly recommend this linked article (along with the one from Moe, above), and am sure that anyone reading it will find it informative and a very helpful tool with regard to understanding Putin's actions in today's world.

Ian2 , Jan 30 2020 21:21 utc | 104
@88 & 102:

I believe this Russia Report: Putin [2014] is what AntiSpin was referring to.

AntiSpin , Jan 31 2020 1:02 utc | 136
@ Ian2 | Jan 30 2020 21:06 utc | 102
"FYI. Dead link. Goes to Center for Citizen Initiatives."

Rats!

Thanks for the heads up -- the article is here now:
https://russiaotherpointsofview.typepad.com/russia_other_points_of_vi/2014/04/russia-report-putin-.html

Sharon Tennison's rather in-depth account of the Vladimir Putin that she knew and dealt with when he was a civil-servant bureaucrat in St Petersburg in the 90s will shed a lot of light on the actions of today's Putin.

Well worth reading!

[Jan 29, 2020] Funny that Iraqis are not happy with our gift-bearing. human pyramid-building saviors. How so utterly ungrateful.

Jan 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

DEDA CVETKO , 1 hour ago link

Funny that the locals are not happy with our gift-bearing. human pyramid-building saviors. How so utterly ungrateful. We brought them democracy, human rights and genocide, and they now want us out. Shame!

We should immediately send them Madeleine Albright to explain to them that the deaths of 600,000 Iraqi babies was actually a good thing and "God's work". That'll do!

MsCreant , 46 minutes ago link

Wow. What a way to win friends and influence people. Help them. What a concept. Invade and erase their standard of living. Then take their oil.

[Jan 29, 2020] Not So Subtle Cover-Up: From Zero To 50 Iran Attack Injuries In Under 3 Weeks

Jan 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Ironically, perhaps first time in history the American public was fed naked war propaganda for the sake of not going to war .

[Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

Highly recommended!
Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Charlotte Russe ,

Trump doesn't have a thing to fear he's been a huge asset to the security state, whose Russiagate theatrics provided mainstream media news with just enough bullshit to distract the public, so that Trump could never be aggressively attacked from the Left. For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia. Meanwhile, this enabled Trump to successfully pass a slew of reactionary legislation and fasttrack numerous lifetime appointments to the federal court without barely a whimper from the phony Dems. In fact, the Democrats unanimously voted for Trump's military budget. The same idiot they called unhinged was given the power to start WWIII.

No matter how much liberals complain–the wealthy are happy with the status quo and the right-wing Evangelicals are as pleased as punch. However, there's quite a large number of disaffected Trump voters looking at Tulsi, but could eventually come Bernie's way. Especially, if Tulsi endorses Bernie. This discontented bunch includes the working-poor, the indebted young, and all the folks who are not doing economically well under Trump's fabulous stock market. It especially includes the military families who were promised an end to the miserable foreign interventions. Bernie, has some appeal to these folks. His platform certainly resonates with all those who can barely pay their health insurance
premiums, and whose salary is NOT nearly considered a living wage. But Bernie could win hands-down and steal Trump's base, if he only had the courage to UNAPOLOGETICALLY speak out against US imperialism and connect all the dots explaining how the security state plundered the treasury for decades f–king over the working-class.

[Jan 29, 2020] How The U.S. Regime And Its Allies Enforce Their Smears And Their Other Lies by Eric Zuesse

Notable quotes:
"... the West's equivalent to the former Soviet Union's systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not. ..."
"... (The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be "good," even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.) ..."
"... The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, "Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it." How true that was, and unfortunately still is! And Assange himself is the best example of it. ..."
"... Let's examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it's perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government ( Kaplan/The Washington Post ), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it's an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from? ..."
"... This is the American gospel, and it is called "capitalism." Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest -- über -imperialism -- and the American public didn't even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That's today's American gospel. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today's Amerika. ..."
Jan 29, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Authored by Eric Zuesse via The Strategic Culture Foundation,

Without enforced suppression of truth, there would be no way that the U.S. and its allied regimes could continue hiding the lies that were behind their invasions of Iraq in 2003 , and of Syria since 2012 , and their coup against Ukraine in 2014 , and also of their takeovers and attempted takeovers of other countries that had refused to be bullied by the U.S. regime into complying with its obsessive anti-Russian demands -- America's subterranean continuation of the Cold War, even after Russia had quit the Cold War in 1991 .

All of the lies are still being propounded by the U.S. regime and remain fully enforced by suppression of the truth about these matters.

That's being done in all news-media except a few of the non -mainstream ones.

So: this is about an actual Western samizdat - the West's equivalent to the former Soviet Union's systematic, and equally pervasive, truth-suppression, to fool the public into thinking that the Government represents them, no matter how much it does not.

(The chief trick in this regard is to fool them into thinking that since there is more than one political party, one of them will be "good," even though the fact may actually be that each of the parties represents simply a different faction of a psychopathically evil aristocracy. After all: each party lied and supported invading Iraq in 2003, Libya in 2011, and Syria constantly; and no party acknowledges that the 2014 regime-change in Ukraine was a U.S. coup instead of a domestic Ukrainian democratic revolution. On such important matters, they all lie, and in basically the same ways. These lies are bipartisan, even though most of the other political lies are heavily partisan.)

Right now, Julian Assange is rotting to death inside Britain's equivalent to the U.S. regime's Guantanamo Bay prison, which is Belmarsh Prison, in London. As the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia's article on Belmarsh Prison retrospectively admits, "Between 2001 and 2002, Belmarsh Prison was used to detain a number of people indefinitely without charge or trial under the provisions of the Part 4 of the Anti-terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001, leading it to be called the 'British version of Guantanamo Bay'." However, only because of the case of Julian Assange is it now publicly known that this characterization of that prison is -- at least for him -- equally true today . And Assange is, indeed, being held there "indefinitely without charge or trial," even after his having previously been held in various other forms of confinement, ever since at least 12 April 2012, when -- being then 'temporarily' under house-arrest in Norfolk England, while awaiting trial on a manufactured rape-charge against him which was reluctantly abandoned by the Government only when the alleged victim refused to testify against him -- Assange broadcast an interview for RT, Russian Television, an interview of the head of Lebanon's Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.

The U.S.-and-allied regimes' billionaires-owned-and-controlled 'news'-media condemned Assange for this interview, because it enabled whomever still had an open mind, amongst the Western public, to hear from one of those billionares' destruction-targets (Nasrallah), and for Assange's doing this on the TV-news network of the main country that America's billionaires are especially trying to conquer, which is (and since 26 July 1945 has consistently been ) Russia.

The great then-independent investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald headlined about that interview, at Salon on 18 April 2012, "Attacks on RT and Assange reveal much about the critics: Those who pretend to engage in adversarial journalism will invariably hate those who actually do it." How true that was, and unfortunately still is! And Assange himself is the best example of it. Greenwald wrote:

Let's examine the unstated premises at work here. There is apparently a rule that says it's perfectly OK for a journalist to work for a media outlet owned and controlled by a weapons manufacturer (GE/NBC/MSNBC), or by the U.S. and British governments (BBC/Stars & Stripes/Voice of America), or by Rupert Murdoch and Saudi Prince Al-Waleed Bin Talal (Wall St. Journal/Fox News), or by a banking corporation with long-standing ties to right-wing governments (Politico), or by for-profit corporations whose profits depend upon staying in the good graces of the U.S. government ( Kaplan/The Washington Post ), or by loyalists to one of the two major political parties (National Review/TPM/countless others), but it's an intrinsic violation of journalistic integrity to work for a media outlet owned by the Russian government. Where did that rule come from?

But from 'temporary' house-arrest there, Assange was allowed asylum by Ecuador's progressive President Rafael Correa on 20 June 2012 , to stay in London's Ecuadoran Embassy, so as not to be seized by the UK regime to be sent to prison and probable death-without-trial in the U.S. To Correa's shock, it turned out that Correa's successor, Vice President Lenin Moreno, was actually a U.S. agent, who promptly forced Assange out of the Embassy, into Belmarsh prison, to die there or else become extradited to die in a U.S. prison, also without trial.

And, for what, then, is Assange being imprisoned, and perhaps murdered? He divulged government secrets that should never even have been secrets! He raised the blanket of lies, which covers over these actually dictatorial clandestine international operations. He exposed these evil imperialistic operations, which are hidden behind (and under) that blanket of imperialists' lies. For this, he is being martyred -- a martyr for democracy, where there is no actual democracy (but only those lies).

Here is an example:

On December 29th, I headlined "Further Proof: U.S., UK, & France Committed War-Crime on 14 April 2018" and reported highlights of the latest Wikileaks document-dumps regarding a U.S.-UK-French operation to cover-up (via their control over the OPCW) their having committed an international war-crime when they had fired 105 missiles against Syria on 14 April 2018, which was done allegedly to punish Syria for having perpetrated a gas-attack in Douma seven days before -- except that there hadn't been any such gas-attack, but the OPCW simply lied and said that there might have been one, and that the Syrian Government might have done it! That's playing the public for suckers.

Back on 3 November 2019, Fox News bannered "Fox News Poll: Bipartisan majorities want some U.S. troops to stay in Syria" and reported that when citing ISIS as America's enemy that must be defeated, 69% of U.S. respondents wanted U.S. troops to stay in Syria. But when did ISIS ever constitute a threat to U.S. national security? And under what international law is any U.S. soldier, who is inside Syria, anything other than an invader there? The answer, to both of these questions, is obviously "never" and "none." But if you are an investor in Lockheed Martin, don't you want Americans to be suckers about both ? And, so, they are . People such as Julian Assange don't want the public anywhere to be lied-to. Anyone who is in the propaganda-business -- serving companies such as Lockheed Martin -- wants the public to be suckers.

This is the way the free market actually works. It works by lying, and in such a country the Government serves the people who have the money, and not the people who don't. The people who don't have the money are supposed to be lied-to. And, so, they are. But this is not democracy.

Democracy, in fact, is impossible if the public are predominantly deceived.

If the public are predominantly deceived, then the people who do the deceiving will be the dictators there. And if a country has dictators, then it's no democracy. In a totally free market, only the people with the most money will have any freedom at all; everyone else will be merely their suckers, who are fooled by the professionals at doing that -- lying.

The super-rich enforce their smears, and their other lies, by hiring people to do this.

When Barack Obama said that "The United States is and remains the one indispensable nation" - so that each other nation is "dispensable" - he was merely exemplifying the view that only the most powerful is indispensable, and that therefore everyone else is dispensable. Of course, this is the way that he, and Donald Trump, both have governed in the U.S. And Americans overwhelmingly endorse this viewpoint . They're fooled by both parties, because both parties serve only their respective billionaires -- and billionaires are above the law; they are the law, in America and its allied regimes. That's the way it is.

This is the American gospel, and it is called "capitalism." Oddly, after Russia switched to capitalism in 1991, the American gospel switched instead to pure global conquest -- über -imperialism -- and the American public didn't even blink. So: nowadays, capitalism has come to mean über-imperialism. That's today's American gospel. Adolf Hitler would be smiling, upon today's Amerika.

And as far as whistleblowers -- such as Julian Assange, and Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning, and other champions of honesty and of democracy -- are concerned: Americans agree with the billionaires, who detest and destroy such whistleblowers. Champions of democracy are shunned here, where PR reigns and real journalism is almost non-existent.

[Jan 29, 2020] Mossad as reincarnation of Satan

Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Richard Le Sarc ,

Come on Ant-everybody knows that it was the MOSSAD, allied to US sayanim and rogue elements of the US elite who did 9/11. The Saudis were just the patsies, Oswalds one and all.

Antonym ,

Did you know that even Hamas and Iran are run by the Mossad? And Xi Jinping too! Me too, you too. No more need for an Off Guardian site, all riddles solved.

paul ,

No, they don't run Hamas any more. They did create it and gave it money and guns. To undermine Yasser Arafat and his organisation. Standard dirty colonial gam of divide and rule.

[Jan 29, 2020] The Onion gets it: Trump has been impeached Netanyahu was indicted

Let's remember: Trump has been impeached & Netanyahu was indicted
Jan 29, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

White House Rolls Out Middle East Peace Plan https://t.co/Cke1QOPW6d #WhatDoYouThink ? pic.twitter.com/eXWDjAmvhn

-- The Onion (@TheOnion) January 28, 2020

[Jan 29, 2020] Gllomy prediction

Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

paul ,

When Trump beats Creepy Joe, or Crazy Anti Semitic Bernie, or Pocahontas, or Whoever this November, and threatens us with another 4 years of merciless, deranged Twittering, you have to expect an outbreak of Trump Derangement Syndrome that will make the Black Death look like a 3 day cold.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

[Jan 29, 2020] Bridge in Brooklin, now for sale

Jan 29, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Information_Agent , Jan 28 2020 18:26 utc | 13

Posted by: dh | Jan 28 2020 18:03 utc | 14

If you believe ISIS is going to start attacking Israel then I've got a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.

GeorgeV , Jan 28 2020 19:24 utc | 16

Looking at this map I am reminded of what Albert Einstein said about insanity, which he described as "doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result each time." The US of A never seems to ever learn anything from its' mistakes. The US is truly the United States of Amnesia.

[Jan 29, 2020] Amusing if the Democrats get their way and face President Pence and Vice President Ted Cruz in the fall

Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

George Marchand ,

Amusing if the Democrats get their way and face President Pence and Vice President Ted Cruz in the fall😱

[Jan 29, 2020] At least that way, the Donald could get to build his hotels in North Korea, or wherever

Jan 29, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Rhys Jaggar ,

... ... ...

'Make Love, not War!' was the strapline for Woodstock 1969. 'Get a boner, vote Democrat' could be the 2020 strapline??

At least that way, the Donald could get to build his hotels in North Korea, or wherever .

[Jan 28, 2020] Consistency is a sign of real mastery of the craft

Jan 28, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Antonym ,

Robert Mueller III buried any FBI case against HRC; he also buried any 9/11 FBI case against any Saudis!

[Jan 28, 2020] Note about pompous Pompeo

Jan 28, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

bumbershoot10 hours ago

The Secretary of State has all of the vanity and arrogance of a diva, but none of the talent.

Hmm, that seems to remind me of someone else in this administration...

[Jan 28, 2020] What I'd like to see out of this "Impeachment" baloney is this. Trump is impeached and thrown out of office and runs for reelection anyway and wins.

Jan 28, 2020 | www.unz.com

gotmituns , says: Show Comment January 28, 2020 at 9:17 am GMT

What I'd like to see out of this "Impeachment" baloney is this. Trump is impeached and thrown out of office and runs for reelection anyway and wins. Of course, if that happened, I think he'd be eligible to run for reelection of course. There'd be mass suicides as well, which would suit me just fine.

[Jan 28, 2020] Americans are the best entertained people in the world, and the least informed

Jan 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Jan 27 2020 23:14 utc | 78

Posted by: karlof1 | Jan 27 2020 22:44 utc | 74

Perhaps Americans are the new Citizens of Rome?

Heard something apt yesterday, "Americans are the best entertained people in the world, and the least informed".

[Jan 28, 2020] Our losses in Afghanistan are negligible

Notable quotes:
"... It would be highly ironic if these American military aircraft were shot down with the (in)famous US Stinger missiles that America gave to Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union in the 1980s. ..."
"... Uncle Sam has declared War on the World, thinking it is just a bunching bag. Now he is finding out that sometimes punching bags can punch back... ..."
Jan 28, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

c1ue , Jan 27 2020 16:17 utc | 4

If the $1.6 trillion cost of the US military being in Afghanistan is correct, then the loss of 4 helicopters and even the E11 won't significantly increase US overall spend there. $1.6 trillion over 18 years is a tad under $250 million per day

Walter , Jan 27 2020 17:24 utc | 16

...I recall a quotation from that good man, Winston C, who wrote long ago about Afghanistan...{populated by} "poverty-stricken illiterate tribesmen possessed of the finest Martini-Henry Rifles..."

That was over 100 years ago...

Now, it seem, "possessed of the finest surface to air missiles."

Well now, who'd a think...

ak74 , Jan 27 2020 17:37 utc | 20
It would be highly ironic if these American military aircraft were shot down with the (in)famous US Stinger missiles that America gave to Afghan jihadists against the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Reap what you sow.

Trailer Trash , Jan 27 2020 17:42 utc | 23
Uncle Sam has declared War on the World, thinking it is just a bunching bag. Now he is finding out that sometimes punching bags can punch back...

[Jan 27, 2020] Surely you knew that WaPo is crap before you turned WaPo on?

Jan 27, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

MrAToZ , 14 minutes ago link

I watched the Washington Posts stream of the impeachment today. The spin began immediately at the dinner break. There was barely a word about anything the President's team presented. All they talked about was Bolton. These weasels are completely without shame or ethics. It's news for spongeheads with no ability to think.

flappyjaws , 4 minutes ago link

Surely you knew that before you turned it on??

[Jan 27, 2020] The assessment of the key players in Global Chessboard party

Notable quotes:
"... They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne). ..."
Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment January 27, 2020 at 3:45 pm GMT

@PeterMX

I think President Putin is a great leader and the greatest in the world today.

Putin is just a man with normal quite ordinary intelligence, like Xi. They look so great only because the Empire and its sidekicks have morons at the helm (I don't mean disposable figureheads, "presidents", "chancellors", and "PMs", but real powers behind the throne).

[Jan 27, 2020] Televangelists Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) - YouTube

Jan 27, 2020 | www.youtube.com

joseph dragojevich , 1 month ago

MAKE CHURCHES OPEN THEIR BOOKS! AND IF THE CHURCHES DONT REINVEST THE MONEY INTO CHARITY THEN REVOKE THEIR TAX EXEMPTION!

Isabelle Vasquez , 1 week ago

Televangelists are genuinely some of the worst people on the face of the planet. I don't even have words to express my disgust.

Bob ap Bob , 2 months ago

Protestant televangelists have forgotten their own heritage and the selling of indulgences for salvation which Luther attacked to start off the Reformation.

Humphrey Reader , 3 weeks ago

TV preachers = total travesty of the Christian faith.

John Hardwick , 2 months ago

Internal Revenue Service are unfair to the poor and allow these filthy rich prosperity pimps to live a lavish lifestyle tax free.

Sara Romero , 3 weeks ago

3:00 Dude is bragging about buying 2 private jets with 'cash' to an audience who can't even afford to turn their heaters on in the winter time in Minnesota. Ironically, he used their money to pay for it. They will still continue to send more.

[Jan 27, 2020] Trump's Faith Advisor Paula White: To say no to president Trump would be saying no to God

From comments: "The Christian Taliban." George Carlin: "GOD NEEDS MORR MONNEEYYY"
Nov 05, 2019 | www.youtube.com

'When I walk on White House grounds, God walks on White House grounds.' -- Meet Paula White, spiritual adviser to President Trump and the latest addition to the White House staff.
" Subscribe to NowThis: http://go.nowth.is/News_Subscribe

Hansel Ontaneda , 2 months ago

"To say no to president Trump would be saying no to God" this s**t is just mind blowing

[Jan 27, 2020] Should we start an anti Putin hashtag campaign? #bankerslivesmattermore

Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

Old and grumpy , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT

Should we start an anti Putin hashtag campaign? #bankerslivesmattermore That'll show him, since there is not much more we can sanction except for maybe Russian baby mama tourism and Russian hockey players. Doubt Capital fans (aka swamp dwellers) would tolerate the latter.

[Jan 27, 2020] Consistency is the first sign of mastery: Trump Is Third President to Lie About Afghan War Success

Jan 27, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

T he administrations of George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump all routinely lied to the American people about the success of the 18-year war in Afghanistan. They exaggerated progress and inflated statistics to create an illusion that that the war was winnable. But after the deaths of 157,000 people at a cost of $2 trillion, corruption is rampant and the carnage continues.

[Jan 27, 2020] One way to predict 2020 elections results

Jan 27, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Jan 27 2020 1:15 utc | 66

Old saying; " You get the kind of Gov. you deserve" And the U$A deserves every bit of DJT, and his merry band of grifters...

[Jan 27, 2020] George H W Bush as wasp-infected cockroach

Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

SolontoCroesus says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 2:54 pm GMT 100 Words

...The Emerald Jewel wasp –> cockroach process is highly instructive;

https://youtu.be/ovo_T0KqdYg

At close of Cold War, George H W Bush exhibited every symptom of a wasp-infected cockroach (as has every US president since FDR). It may be that some categories of Americans have a greater Cockroach Coefficient than others...

[Jan 27, 2020] Why is it that the media never refer to Soros, Bezos or the Rockefellers as 'oligarchs'? Why only Russians?

Jan 27, 2020 | www.unz.com

NPleeze , says: Show Comment January 26, 2020 at 11:37 am GMT

@Digital Samizdat

why is it that the media never refer to Soros, Bezos or the Rockefellers as 'oligarchs'? Why only Russians?

Because the West is the home of love, milk, honey, puppies, apple pie. There's simply no room for oligarchs in utopia – and if you disagree, you're an anti-Semite, a Nazi even.

[Jan 25, 2020] While opinions about his capabilities as a President vary widely, Trump is undeniably gifted in giving his oppoinent a catchy nicknames

"Adam shifty Schiff" is a good one ;-)
On Saturday, before his defense team took the Senate floor, Trump used Twitter to deliver a broadside against Democrats "& the entire Radical Left."
Notable quotes:
"... Our case against lyin', cheatin', liddle' Adam "Shifty" Schiff, Cryin' Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrat Party, starts today at 10:00 A.M. on @FoxNews ..."
Jan 25, 2020 | www.nydailynews.com
On Saturday, before his defense team took the Senate floor, Trump used Twitter to deliver a broadside against Democrats "& the entire Radical Left."

Our case against lyin', cheatin', liddle' Adam "Shifty" Schiff, Cryin' Chuck Schumer, Nervous Nancy Pelosi, their leader, dumb as a rock AOC, & the entire Radical Left, Do Nothing Democrat Party, starts today at 10:00 A.M. on @FoxNews , @OANN or Fake News @CNN or Fake News MSDNC!

-- Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 25, 2020

[Jan 25, 2020] Davos, what a place !

zerohedge.com

[Jan 24, 2020] Impeachment Super Bowl Trump 2, Dems 0

One need not be Pontius Pilate to understand the false changes against Trump
When this Brennan CIA faction stooge Schiff insists that the US anti-tank missiles and sniper rifles with help Ukraine and its people to fight nuclear armed Russia (if and when Russian decided to put the end to the rule of US supported Western Ukrainian far right nationalists in Kiev ) it is over the top even for completely brainwashed part of the US audience. This is not even funny. They can help to kill some Donetsk insurgents, but that's about it. If Russia decided to compesate insurgent with supplies of similar weapons the war simply became more deadly for both sides. Which might be the USA plan.
The neoliberal MSM were crucial in the creation of this farce. "These swine care nothing about truth--their only object is to create a "narrative" (which used to be known as a "line of ********") to brainwash what few followers can still stomach it and cover their moral bankruptcy and crimes."
Jan 24, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

The case against Trump isn't nonexistent, but after two days of prime time airing, it is ultimately unpersuasive.

[Jan 24, 2020] It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.

Jan 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Danny , Jan 24 2020 15:11 utc | 25

It's amazing all the money in the State Department and other intelligence agencies should be attracting the best minds. Yet a bunch of us sitting here watching this from our boring office jobs realize how genuinely stupid US foreign policy has been.

A separate Sunni state in West Iraq would be doomed. We need to leave these people alone, we've made enough foolish mistakes and this will get a lot of people killed. That's along with US troops being put in harms way for ridiculous reasons like stealing Syrian oil and now occupying Iraq against their parliaments wishes.

Back in the day you told someone you were American and they wanted to shake your hand and ask you about this place or that. Now they want to spit in our faces

[Jan 24, 2020] Propaganda number game

Jan 24, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Michael Droy , Jan 24 2020 17:22 utc | 44

The numbers game.

A million in HK (sometimes 2 million) is a place where there was room for 150k (the police estimate). The number was "an organiser estimate" for one day, and then became fact.

1 million Ujghurs in prison - but satellite evidence of less that 10k of prison space.

Gen Hodges reckoned 14,000 Russian troops in Ukraine, but no evidence of more than 5 in any one spot.

Everyone believed in the Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea, but no photos of more than 8 in any one place (though the BBC shows pictures of dozens which can be google image search to be in Sevastopol).

400-800k demonstrators at the Maidan - again 120k is tops in that space - and the source was Boris Nemstvov, the man who constantly promised proof of Russian troops in Ukraine but was killed conveniently before he could (having extended his deadline repeatedly).

Bosnia.

And the other way around - nothing happening in France.

[Jan 24, 2020] Putin Calls for a New System Guided by the UN Charter But Is It Possible by Matthew Ehret

Jan 24, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Anyone looking with sober eyes upon today's world and the feeble economic and geopolitical underpinnings holding the system together must accept the fact that a new system WILL be created.

This is not an opinion, but a fact. We are moving towards eight billion lives on this globe and the means of productive powers to sustain that growing population (at least in the west) has been permitted to decay terribly over the recent half century while monetary values have grown like a hyperinflationary cancer to unimaginable proportions.

Derivatives speculation alone under the deregulated "too big to fail" banking system has resulted in over $1.5 quadrillion in nominal values which have ZERO connection to the real world (GDP globally barely accounts for $80 trillion). Over the past 5 months $415 billion of QE bailouts have been released into the bankrupt banks to prevent a collapse. So, economically it's foundation of sand.

Militarily, the west has followed the earlier Roman empire of yesteryear by overextending itself beyond capacity creating situations of global turmoil, death and unbounded resentment at the dominant Anglo American powers controlling NATO and the Military-industrial complex.

The recent near-war with Iran at the start of 2020 put the world on a fast track towards a nuclear war with Iran's allies Russia and China.

Culturally, the disconnection from the traditional values that gave western civilization it's moral fitness to survive and grow has resulted in a post-truth age now spanning over three generations (from the baby boomers to today's young adults) who have become the most confused class of people in modern history losing all discrimination of "needs" vs "wants", "right" vs "wrong", "beauty" vs "ugliness" or even "male" and "female".

Without ranting on anymore, it suffices to say that this thing is not sustainable.

So the question is not "will we get a new system?" but rather "whom will this new system serve?"

Will this new system serve an oligarchical agenda at the expense of the nations and people of the earth or will it serve the interests of the nations and people of the earth at the expense of the oligarchy?

Putin Revives a Forgotten Vision

President Putin's January 15 State of the Union was a breath of fresh air for this reason, as the world leader who has closely allied his nation's destiny to China's Belt and Road Initiative, laid out a call for a new system to be created by the five largest nuclear powers as common allies under a multi-polar paradigm.

After speaking about Russia's vision for internal improvements, Putin shifted towards the international arena saying:

I am convinced that it is high time for a serious and direct discussion about the basic principles of a stable world order and the most acute problems that humanity is facing. It is necessary to show political will, wisdom and courage. The time demands an awareness of our shared responsibility and real actions."

Calling for Russia, the USA, UK, China and France to organize a new architecture that goes far beyond merely military affairs, Putin stated:

The founding countries of the United Nations should set an example. It is the five nuclear powers that bear a special responsibility for the conservation and sustainable development of humankind. These five nations should first of all start with measures to remove the prerequisites for a global war and develop updated approaches to ensuring stability on the planet that would fully take into account the political, economic and military aspects of modern international relations."

Putin's emphasis that "the United Nations should set an example" is not naïve fantasy, nor "crypto globalist rhetoric" as some of his critics have stated.

Putin knows that the UN has been misused by anti-nation state ideologues for a very long time. He also knows his history better than his critics and is aware that the original mandate of the United Nations was premised upon the defense of the sovereign nation state. Article 2.1 of the charter clearly says:

The Organization is based on the principle of the sovereign equality of all its Members."

For readers who are perhaps rightfully cynical that such organizations as the UN could ever play a truly positive role in world affairs, it is important to recall that the UN was never intended to have any unilateral authority over nation-states, or military power unto itself when was created in 1945.

Its purpose was intended to provide a platform for dialogue where sovereign nation-states could harmonize their policies and overcome misunderstanding with the aim of protecting the general welfare of the people of the earth.

Articles 1.3-4 state clearly that the UN's is designed "to achieve international co-operation in solving international problems of an economic, social, cultural, or humanitarian character, and in promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and for fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language, or religion and to be a centre for harmonizing the actions of nations in the attainment of these common ends."

If the United Nations principles as enunciated in its pre-amble and core articles were to ever be followed (just like America's own admirable constitution): then wars of aggression and regime change would not be possible.

Article 2.4 directly addresses this saying:

All Members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state".

These principles stand in stark contrast to the earlier 1919 Round Table/RIIA-orchestrated attempt at a post-national world order under the failed League of Nations which was rightfully put out of its misery by nationalists of the 1920s.

FDR's 1944 vision, as Putin is well aware, was based not on "world government", but rather upon the concept of a community of sovereign nations collaborating on vast development and infrastructure projects which were intended to be the effect of an "internationalization" of the New Deal that transformed America in the years following the Great Depression.

The closest approximation to this spirit in practice in our modern age is found in China's Belt and Road Initiative .

Thousands of Asian, African and South American engineers and statesmen were invited to visit the USA during the 1930s and early 1940s to study the Tennessee Valley Authority and other great New Deal water, agriculture and energy projects in order to bring those ideas back to their countries as a driver to break out of the shackles of colonialism both politically, culturally and economically.

In opposition to FDR, Churchill the unrepentant racist was okay with offering political independence, but never the cultural or economic means to achieve it.

Although the world devolved into an Anglo-American alliance with FDR's death in 1945, the other Bretton Woods Institutions which were meant to provide international productive credit to those large scale infrastructure projects to end colonialism were taken over by FDR's enemies who purged the IMF and World Bank of all loyalists to FDR's international New Deal vision throughout the years of the red scare.

Whether these corrupt financing institutions can be brought back to their original intention or whether they must simply be replaced with new lending mechanisms such as the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank, BRICS New Development Bank or Silk Road Investment Fund remains to be seen.

What is vital to keep in mind is that Putin (just like FDR before him) knows that neither Britain nor Britain's Deep State loyalists in America can trusted.

Yet, in spite of their mistrust, they both knew that a durable world order could only be accomplished if these forces were reined in under a higher law imposed by the authority of truly sovereign nations, and this is why FDR's post-war plans involved a USA-Russia-China-UK partnership to provide the impetus to global development initiatives and achieve the goals of the Atlantic Charter.

This partnership was sabotaged over FDR's dead body as the Cold War and Truman Doctrine broke that alliance. The goal of ending colonialism had to wait another 80 years.

At the 2007 Munich Security Conference, Putin had already laid his insight into history clearly on the table when he said:

This universal, indivisible character of security is expressed as the basic principle that "security for one is security for all."

As Franklin D. Roosevelt said during the first few days that the Second World War was breaking out:

When peace has been broken anywhere, the peace of all countries everywhere is in danger I consider that the unipolar model is not only unacceptable but also impossible in today's world. And this is not only because if there was individual leadership in today's – and precisely in today's – world, then the military, political and economic resources would not suffice. What is even more important is that the model itself is flawed because at its basis there is and can be no moral foundations for modern civilisation."

Putin is not naïve to call for the United Nations charter to serve as the guiding light of a new military, political, economic architecture.

Nor is he naïve to think that such untrustworthy nations as the USA, UK and France should serve in partnership with Russia and China since Putin knows that it will be Russia and China shaping the terms of the new system and not the collapsing basket-cases of the west whose excess bluff and bluster betrays a losing hand, which is why certain forces have been so desperate to overthrow the poker table over the past few years.

The fact that Putin, Xi and their growing allies have not permitted this chaos agenda to unfold has not only driven "end of history" imperialists into rage fits but also gives FDR's vision for a community of sovereign nation-states a second chance at life.

Originally published by Strategic Culture . Facebook Twitter Reddit Pinterest WhatsApp vKontakte Email Filed under: latest , Russia Tagged with: Belt and Road Initiative , china , FDR , Matthew Ehret , russia , UN , UN Charter , United Nations , Vladimir Putin can you spare $1.00 a month to support independent media

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Gall ,

The big mistake was giving France, UK and the US or FUKU or FUKUS, USSR NKA Russia and China any veto over the other independent Nations on the planet. Especially since the first two were responsible for hobbling together the Frankenstein monster known as the United States of America that was created by rapacious theft and genocide of the indigenous population followed by almost total ecocide and now has been loosed upon the world it seems to accomplish the same thing under the cover of bringing it "freedom and democracy".

Paul ,

It's a pity the experience of the League of Nations isn't examined any longer because it is instructive. OK Congress declined to approve it so the Pilot Wilson was missing but more serious was the problem of totally partisan and self serving decisions that made its provisions a mockery. Italy was 'allowed' to keep on occupying Ethiopia and sanctions eg on oil were simply declined, partly because the US supplied the oil and wasn't going to stop selling it, especially to Mussolini who was rapidly becoming a client state of America in enormous debt.

BigB ,

Someone said it was "banal" of me to oppose 'The Western Intellectual Tradition' (TWIT). Well, here is its vision *in extremis*. If you do not recognise it: this is 'Platonic Humanism' in all its glory.

It reads well. It is sensible and intelligible in its clearly written propositions. It has meaning and clearly denotes real world events – right? And yet it is ultimately unintelligible and non-sensical in an early Wittgensteinian sense of its underlying logic. If you did not immediately recognise the subtextual vision of Lyndon LaRouche: you might want to read it again?

The underlying logic is one of economic infinity: completely decoupled from the neo-Malthusian sustainable 'green iron cage' that prohibits the *productive* economy growing forever as per the deluded LaRouchian proscription. Which is utterly banal: if not actually exceedingly dangerous.

This fact of life is the essential proof that not only mankind but the universe is unbounded in its potential for constant self-perfectibility and thus ANTI-ENTROPIC in its essence.

https://orientalreview.org/2019/07/31/the-genocidal-roots-of-the-green-new-deal-the-limits-to-growth-and-the-unchaining-of-prometheus/

To illustrate my point: this is from an earlier text. I never actually know where I stand: because "anti-entropy" is laced through much of the commentary here. Which is why this text may appeal on a superficial reading? It ticks a lot of boxes: including perpetual capitalist growth; expansion of the SCO/BRI/BRICS/EAEU/CPEC colonisation of the Eurasian 'supercontinent'; and development of an anti-hegemonic sovereigntist bloc. All of which seem as a fashionable vogue for the internet progressive about town. But in multipolar alliance with Donald Trump! Infinite anti-entropic capitalistic growth – guided by the UN Charter – with Putin, Xi AND Trump at the helm in an "alliance for a new just economic order"? Sounds like hell to me.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/06/trumps-relationship-to-russia-and-china-a-revival-of-the-henry-wallace-doctrine-for-the-post-war-world/

My point is that perhaps we should learn to read more deeply? Perhaps at the underlying paradigmatic logic of the text? Power is transmitted in mysterious ways. Everyone is paranoid about "mind-control" and "hidden agendas". Well, Matthew's is a prime exemplar of hidden context perhaps not to be uncritically assimilated? Unless, perhaps you share the vision of unlimited self-perfectibility; infinite nuclear fusion powered bourgeois ecumenical consumerism decoupled from ecological neo-Malthusian 'limits-to-growth'; and ANTI-ENTROPY? In which case you may be a banal Platonist TWIT too? 🙂

LaRouche was a cultic delusionist who took cherrypicked ideas to assemble an intelligible and sensible montage of beliefs that did not hang together. Which makes his writing absurd nonsense and a philosophical non-entity. Any putative logical link to the real world is severed by its premises. This piece is reduced to a mere a Trojan Horse for gibberish. It is a meaning-less 'language game'.

As unfortunate as it may seem: entropy exists as a fundamental property of the ecosphere. Resources deplete and growth is thermodynamically limited. We need a new system: one which actually addresses the extinction level ecological crisis we are in the midst of. Something we need to understand and embrace: not illogically deny. This text subverts that strategic denial to its own ends. Let the reader be aware of the paradigmatic subtext.

paul ,

Russia and China have always been status quo powers, more concerned with their own internal development than implementing insane Neocon/ James Bond Villain-style fantasies of world domination. This was true even during the period of communist rule. Their growth and influence in the world can only be viewed as a positive development.

China built the infrastructure in the Third World that was neglected during centuries of colonialism.

China builds things.
America (and its cringing satellites like Britain and France) bomb things.
Most people in Africa and elsewhere prefer building things to bombing things.

Dungroanin ,

A good piece – The UN is not fit for purpose.
The SCO already operates under a 'charter' – which goes past religion and cultural hagemony by any one nation or peoples. Since it already represents more than half the worlds population and the majority of its land mass – it is only a matter of time that the defunct UN is upgraded to these standards and absorbed into it OR crashes and burns.

Today there were hundreds of thousands of Iraqis – maybe over million, in showing the US and its allies that they really are serious about their national sovereignty and demand that the foreign forces fuck off!

The US response? To revive the old divide and rule option. Break up Iraq into religion and sectarian areas – using the 'never learning Charlie Brown' proxy Kurds by offering them tet another football to kick!

While the world accelerates towards a new order which puts economic security and mutual defence at its core, the US and its gunfighter professional gamblers resort to poker terminology – 'we are ALL IN' in keeping the Iranians and Syrians (and Turkey?) out of the SCO to stop a nonstop link from the Med to the Pacific and Artic to the Southern Seas.

All in! Lol. They going to lose their shirts and be overturning the table and demanding a shootout to keep from paying up their bet.
It's a bluff and sitting with pocket rockets a simple CALL by the new, new world order.

Philip Roddis ,

Excellent. Worthy of wide dissemination for its first nine paragraphs alone.

BigB ,

Phillip, my friend this is not a personal attack, but – have you heard of Lyndon LaRouche? I suggest you might want to read up on his agenda then re-read the text in its wider context? The subtleties are not explicit: but if you are aware of LaRouche – or read some of the authors other texts – they are obvious in the subtext.

The basic premise – unstated herein – is for Trump, Putin, and Xi to form a wider multipolar alliance against the British economic empire (the British Deep State infiltrators) for untrammeled infinite global economic growth – with maximum penetration of nuclear power (eventually nuclear fission) into every economy of the world. To the ends of a global bourgeois consumer culture serviced by the BRI intitiative. Unrestricted by neo-Malthusian ecologists like me, who say this is impossible.

We may not always see eye to eye: but I'm pretty sure you do not envisage a hypothetically- infinite ecumenical consumerism as humanities apex culture? Not least as I assume that you would agree that this is actual ecological fantasy – the world is finite, as are resources – which means this text needs to be shredded not further disseminated?

https://www.strategic-culture.org/contributors/matthew-ehret/

Norn ,

UN Charter .. "sustainable development of humankind"

One of the top priorities must be: Swift actions to STOP poisoning our food.

Seamus Padraig ,

A very sanguine view of FDR. To be sure, it's impossible to say with 100% certainty what he would have done had he survived the war, but it boggles the mind to think that he was going to be forever cool with the idea of sharing the world with Russia and China, when he abjectly refused to share it with Germany and Japan in his own lifetime.

And please don't believe that old canard about the Japanese wanting to take over America; it was actually Roosevelt who precipitated the whole war with Japan, with his oil embargo and what not. He even had advance knowledge of Pearl Harbor from multiple sources, but deliberately withheld that intelligence from his own navy. FDR clearly wanted the attack on Pearl Harbor to be as devastating as possible, so as to drag his recalcitrant countrymen to war, and it worked. In fact, eighty years later, we're still at war. That's the real legacy of FDR, not the long-gone New Deal, of which only Social Security survives (for now). All the other 'alphabet soup' programs he initiated are gone.

I will always wonder wistfully how our history would have turned out had Huey Long become president instead.

seriouslyman ,

Everything Putin says is perfect. There is nothing bad that can be said about Russia on offguardian. Anyone with any mild criticism of russia is a pro imperialist bastard and cannot be engaged with. Offguardian has rightly attacked almost every significant political figure on earth from corbyn to trump. Putin is the only person who can save us. There is no flaw in his character or politics and anyone who suggests otherwise is a conspiracy theorist. Good on Offguardian for never publishing any negative stories about this brilliant intelligent fair play hero who will save us all from hell.

paul ,

No, Little Greta is going to save us.
Vlad isn't going to do that, but he has done quite a good job so far of stopping the Exceptional And Indispensable People from blowing up the planet.
This gives Greta the chance to save us all from the global warming and the polar bears.

Andy ,

Sarcasm can be an effective tool for making a point. This is an example of it not being.

Francis Lee ,

I am trying hard to assess your contribution but couldn't find anything either interesting or relevant to say about it, other than it is little more than sarcastic rant. How does it, or is it even meant to, increase our understanding of international relations? Who exactly makes those claims about Putin?

What I would say about Putin is that he is simply talking like a foreign policy realist. More power to his elbow I say; we could do with some more realism. His political position is very similar to American foreign policy realists such John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt who to their credit put the Zionist noses (AIPAC, JINSA, ADL, AEI) out of joint with the publication of – "The Israel Lobby". Putin's views could have come straight out of the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) which brought an end to the Wars of the Reformation could have come straight from the Treaty, which were based on the following precepts which of course support a multipolar not a unipolar system. Liberal imperialism, humanitarian intervention, call it what you will is a deadly threat to the future of mankind. In contrast multipolarism as an alternative. See below.

1. States existed within recognised borders.
2. Each states sovereignty was recognised by the others
3. Principles of non-interference were agreed.
4. Religious differences between states were tolerated.
5. States might be monarchies, republics, democracies, as was their wont
6. Permanent state interests or raison d'etat was the organizing principle of interntional relations.
7. War was not entirely eliminated, yet it was mitigated by diplomacy and balance-of-power politics.
9. The object of the balance of power was to prevent one state from becoming so powerful that it could conquer others and destroy world order.

Sounds like straight common sense to me.

BigB ,

seriouslyman has a point. The progressive world is extremely slow to recognise the capitalist colonisation of 70% of the Eurasian globe as an existential threat to humanity. As I have been pointing out: capitalism does not transform to a benign humanist alternative as it travels West to East. Russia and China's economic expansionist extractivisim is inimical to all life on Earth. Especially as China has taken a coal-fired 'Great Leap Backwards' to maintain growth in the face of the secular synchronised global economic slowdown.

When the very real extinction level threat of industrialised financialised capitalism is reduced to a personification and represented as the personality of one man – VVP – this is nothing more than a masking discourse that conceals the globalised extinctionism of fossil fuel capitalism. Perhaps the time to reflect on the superior personality of VVP will come when we are all gasping for our last breath – breathing in petrol?

Capitalism thrives on such personal Fetishism. Power is the invisibilising of capitalism's truly destructive force. No one even wants to open the discourse into what underlies Russia's welfare capitalism. Which is infinite market mechanism extraction and quasi-eternal expansionism of fossil fueled growth. Which will kill us all just as soon as America's big guns and bombs.

George Mc ,

You know BigB I can't help but get the feeling that behind all that polysyllabic pontificating, everything you say comes down to a kind of masked reactionary claptrap. You call yourself "neo-Malthusian". Well that's comparatively candid. Malthus being the most obvious case of a capitalist apologist of the most brutal sort. And how interesting that you are having a go at Putin here – as if to suggest that even some kind of socialist transformation isn't going to save us. So what then? Some kind of reaching back to some healthy sparsely populated savannah filled with Conan the barbarian types?

And this:

"Perhaps the time to reflect on the superior personality of VVP will come when we are all gasping for our last breath – breathing in petrol?"

Seems to me you are secretly longing for that moment of last breath when you can finally gleefully shout, "Nyah nyah nyah nyah nyah – Told you so!" before croaking.

Frank ,

Sorry, but this doesn't sound much like satire.

It sounds like an 8-year-old taught you everything you know about geopolitics, and unfortunately it all went a bit over your head.

George Mc ,

Two points:

First, I fail to see the point of pillorying Putin when the entire Western media is already doing so.

Second, to pillory Putin on the pretence of "a plague on all their houses" takes us nicely into that pleasant non-committal "higher sphere" where all-is-one-and-one-is-all. The old con trick of "being reasonable" in order to sit on an all-facing fence and basically have no opinion at all.

Estaugh ,

So far, Vlad has being doing a very good job, (saving us all from Hell), and it seems, most of the world is increasingly backing him up. That's tough on 'pro-imperialist bastards' but that's cricket.

[Jan 23, 2020] Once Trump is impeached peace and freedom return to the land of the free and the home of the brave

Ron Paul" "It's always been said that impeachment is a political process. Well that's an understatement when you look at what's going on now."
This time this is a Kabuki theater in which both size are frantically afraid to touch real issues and to discuss real crimes. This is completely artificial reality trial.
Jan 01, 2020 | strategic-culture.org

"We used to stand up to Putin and Russia – I know the party of Ronald Reagan used to," declared Adam Schiff, the Democratic point man on impeachment, his voice quivering with emotion. The fight to defend the Ukraine is "about more than Ukraine. It's about us. It's about our national security. Their fight is our fight. Their defense is our defense . And when the President sacrifices our interests, our national security for his election, he is sacrificing our country for his personal gain."

...This was the Democratic line in a nutshell. In order to safeguard the ancient republic at home, the U.S. must pay foreign satraps to defend its imperial interests abroad. Since no patriotic American could possibly disagree, any and all problems must stem from meddling by the evil dictator Vladimir Putin and his traitorous puppet in the Oval Office.

Americans must therefore fulfill the ancient law by impeaching him just as the "founding fathers" would have wanted. Only then will peace and freedom return to the land of the free and the home of the brave.

[Jan 23, 2020] Side effects Trump impeachment

See also https://youtu.be/uQJoar17jyo
Jan 23, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com
There are key indicators that the Trump Impeachment saga is not going as Democrats hoped:

Opthamologists across the United States have been flooded with patients who had attempted to claw out their eyes after being forced to watch just one hour of the proceedings.

Radical Muslim prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, who were strapped into their chairs with their eyes taped open and forced to watch the Impeachment hearings, are demanding to be water boarded instead.

The UN Commission on Human Rights has weighed in and decreed that compelling prisoners to watch the hearing is a most dastardly, evil form of torture.

Pharmaceutical manufacturer Sanofi-Aventis has filed suit against the Democrat National Committee for copyright infringement alleging that the hearings are interfering with the sale of Ambien.

[Jan 23, 2020] Note to Pelosi gang: if can't shoot strait do not shoot at all

Pelosi gang is too afraid to point to actual crimes (like Douma false flag, Yemen war, etc), so they invented this Kabuki theater, as if they can fool already suspicious population.
Jan 23, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

You can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. So said Abraham Lincoln – maybe. But whoever it was forgot to mention an important corollary: fun as it may be to pull the wool over people's eyes, you'll writhe in agony for an equal period once the truth emerges and the fraud is exposed.

...the agony of those responsible for the Russiagate fiasco can only intensify while, for the rest of us, the fun has just begun. So lean back and enjoy the show. It going to be a doozy.

[Jan 23, 2020] Guinness record in Presidential twits: Trump broke his previous Twitter record

Jan 23, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

On Wednesday, Jan 22 Donald Trump wrote his name in the Guinness records books setting Presidential record in Twits. According @FactbaseFeed, an account which tracks Trump's Twitter habits, Trump sent 142 tweets and retweets on Wednesday -- eclipsing his previous single-day presidential record of 123.

pretzelattack , Jan 23 2020 16:06 utc | 8

According to the US diplomat, President Trump has made it very "clear that any attack on Americans or American interests will be met with a decisive response, which the president demonstrated on January 2".

And American interests are defined very flexibly, sometimes in conflicting tweets.

[Jan 23, 2020] Ghislaine Hacked Jeffrey Epstein's Alleged Madam Claims Email Server 'Breached'

Jan 23, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Give Me Some Truth , 1 hour ago link

It has now been over a year since the DOJ "re-opened" its "investigation" into Epstein. Any prosecutor who has just passed his bar exam would need only a few weeks to compile a mountain of evidence against Ghislaine Maxwell. Enough to charge her with scores of crimes.

ItheOne , 1 hour ago link

How many Israelis are dancing now?

NERVEAGENTVX , 1 hour ago link

Because the Federal Bureau of (non) Investigation and the Department of (non) Justice conducting a (non) investigation probably won't turn up much in my (non) opinion.

Give Me Some Truth , 1 hour ago link

Lots of brain-storming and perhaps negotiations must have gone on behind the scenes to figure out how to handle Ms. Maxwell.

I somehow doubt that she will agree to a life sentence (which she deserves).

lwilland1012 , 1 hour ago link

A lot of people getting hacked lately. When this all comes to a head (If it does) we know what their defense is going to be. Too bad. It's not gonna work.

[Jan 22, 2020] Who is a real "Russian asset" is an on-trivial question ;-)

Jan 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

pparalegal , 1 hour ago link

Stay out of Arkansas.

Best President Ever , 2 hours ago link

Nobody likes Hillary even liberals like myself won't vote for her and that is why Trump won. She is the Russian asset.

RG_Canuck , 1 hour ago link

Please don't insult the Russians like that.

[Jan 22, 2020] 'Remember Where You Are' Chief Justice Roberts Admonishes Both Sides After Impeachment Arguments Get Personal

Sometime Kabuki theater can be very entertaining ;-)
Jan 22, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

John Law Lives , 2 hours ago link

Listening to Schiff drone on and on is cruel and unusual punishment (imo). Maybe that is a Democrat tactic.

J Jason Djfmam , 2 hours ago link

It's like he's Rachel Madcow in a blue suit.

[Jan 21, 2020] Russian Hackers May Have Interfered With Vote on Church Potluck, Local Man Suspects

Dec 23, 2019 | www.anti-empire.com

Putin “needs to keep his commie hands” off of the sovereign Independent Baptist church’s affairs

According to sources, local man Clarence Williams has urged his church’s lead pastor as well as local law enforcement to move forward with an investigation into Russian hacking, claiming that there was ample evidence to support the theory that malicious foreign agents infiltrated and influenced the outcome of a vote on the date for next month’s potluck at Second Baptist Church.

... ... ...

The Babylon Bee 23 Dec 19 Society 625 0

[Jan 21, 2020] Its a mystery to me why Donald's mouth never got the shit beat out him during his NY days

Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

Alfred , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 4:55 pm GMT

@renfro Its a mystery to me why Donald's mouth never got the shit beat out him during his NY days

Because these officers are essentially cowards. They are afraid of losing their pensions, bits of tin and limousines.

I am sure Trump was much more polite to the "made men" of NYC

[Jan 21, 2020] Iran War Would Be Only One Letter Different From Iraq War

Jan 21, 2020 | www.anti-empire.com

The Raytheon Institute, a bipartisan think tank that specializes in starting Middle Eastern wars, has released a report that estimates the imminent Iran War will be approximately one letter different from the ongoing Iraq War.

"We based our analysis primarily on the words themselves," explained Richard Cheney, the institute's Bonelli Fellow. "If you look closely, you'll see that both countries' names start 'IRA,' but 'IRAN' ends with an 'N' while 'IRAQ' ends with a 'Q.'"

The report spelled out further similarities , including America's total lack of justification for initiating hostilities, a draft dodging Republican president who was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, spinelessness on the left during the buildup despite virtue signaling of being antiwar, simmering sectarian tensions in the country to be invaded, the prospective enemy's large standing military that won't be able to face down America's initial assault but could become deadly in a drawn out guerilla campaign, a complete lack of support from the rest of the world, large amounts of oil at stake, media reports that have inflamed overwrought concerns about weapons of mass destruction, and relief from service members in Kuwait that they finally have something to do

[Jan 21, 2020] Flashback from Orwell's Animal Farm

Jan 21, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

ML , January 21, 2020 at 10:31

Pompeo reminds me of the pigs in Animal Farm. He is a grotesque figure, steely-eyed, cold-blooded, fanatical, and hateful. "We lied, cheated, and stole" Pompous Maximus will get his comeuppance one of these days. I hope he plans more overseas trips for himself. He is a vile person, a psychopath proud of his psychopathy. He alone would make anyone considering conversion to Christianity, his brand of it, run screaming into the night. Repulsive man.

[Jan 21, 2020] Warren as Lizzie-Faire Capitalist.

Jan 21, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

none , January 21, 2020 at 12:46 am

Warren will never endorse Bernie. She is not a progressive and the Republican in her is back in operation. But, there is a new Jeep named after her:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EOuTYRlXsAg151I.jpg

Henry Moon Pie , January 21, 2020 at 1:41 am

But we already had the Tin Lizzie.

ambrit , January 21, 2020 at 6:30 am

I can't resist. What we have here is an old fashioned "Lizzie-Faire Capitalist."

John Zelnicker , January 21, 2020 at 10:28 am

@ambrit
January 21, 2020 at 6:30 am
-- -- -

"Strike three! A sizzling fast ball over the middle of the plate, while the batter just looked dumbfounded"

[Jan 21, 2020] Maybe we should put sanctions on Pompeo

Jan 21, 2020 | www.unz.com

Old and grumpy , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 3:48 pm GMT

Maybe we should put sanctions on Pompeo. He could use the diet. Maybe raiding his pantry would feed Iraqi for a couple months. He is truly perfect spokesman American empire. Sadistic, bloated, and corrupt.
Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 21, 2020 at 4:20 pm GMT
@Old and grumpy Trump also needs to have food sanctions placed on him. His body is being oppressed and is crying out for (diet) regime change.

[Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates

Highly recommended!
Are WaPo and NYT both encouraging their readerships to split the 'Anybody But Bernie' vote six ways from Super Tuesday? Fantastic!
Jan 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

Cassiodorus on Mon, 01/20/2020 - 11:44am Alexandra Petri tells us:

In a break from tradition, I am endorsing all 12 Democratic candidates.

Of course, this is a parody of the NYT's endorsement of Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren , trying to encourage the "who cares about policy we want an identity-politics win" vote. Petri's funniest moment is:

One of two things is wrong with America: Either the entire system is broken or is on the verge of breaking, and we need someone to bring about radical, structural change, or -- we don't need that at all! Which is it? Who can say? Certainly not me, and that is why I am telling you now which candidate to vote for.

[Jan 21, 2020] Definition of cynicism

Jan 21, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Sasha , Jan 20 2020 21:07 utc | 28

Definition of cynicism: that the Colombian State, world-renowned for killing social leaders, financing narco and paramilitarism, is the organizer of a summit against terrorism where Mike Pompeo, intellectual author of the murder of Soleimani, is the star.

https://twitter.com/williamserafino/status/1219277223913496578

[Jan 21, 2020] Bernie Sanders Walks Straight Into the Russiagate Trap

Jan 21, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Daniel Lazare January 20, 2020 © Photo: Wikimedia The New York Times caused a mini-commotion last week with a front-page story suggesting that Russian intelligence had hacked a Ukrainian energy firm known as Burisma Holdings in order to get dirt on Joe Biden and help Donald Trump win re-election.

But the article was flimsy even by Russiagate standards, and so certain questions inevitably arise. What was it really about? Who's behind it? Who's the real target?

Here's a quick answer. It was about boosting Joe Biden, and its real target was his chief rival, Bernie Sanders. And poor, inept Bernie walked straight into the trap.

The article was flimsy because rather than saying straight out that Russian intelligence hacked Burisma, the company notorious for hiring Biden's son, Hunter, for $50,000 a month job, reporters Nicole Perlroth and Matthew Rosenberg had to rely on unnamed "security experts" to say it for them. While suggesting that the hackers were looking for dirt, they didn't quite say that as well. Instead, they admitted that "it is not yet clear what the hackers found, or precisely what they were searching for."

So we have no idea what they were up to, if anything at all. But the Times then quoted "experts" to the effect that "the timing and scale of the attacks suggest that the Russians could be searching for potentially embarrassing material on the Bidens – the same kind of information that Mr. Trump wanted from Ukraine when he pressed for an investigation of the Bidens and Burisma, setting off a chain of events that led to his impeachment." Since Trump and the Russians are seeking the same information, they must be in cahoots, which is what Democrats have been saying from the moment Trump took office. Given the lack of evidence, this was meaningless as well.

But then came the kicker: two full paragraphs in which a Biden campaign spokesman was permitted to expound on the notion that the Russians hacked Burisma because Biden is the candidate that they and Trump fear the most.

"Donald Trump tried to coerce Ukraine into lying about Joe Biden and a major bipartisan, international anti-corruption victory because he recognized that he can't beat the vice president," the spokesman, Andrew Bates, said. "Now we know that Vladimir Putin also sees Joe Biden as a threat. Any American president who had not repeatedly encouraged foreign interventions of this kind would immediately condemn this attack on the sovereignty of our elections."

If Biden is the number-one threat, then Sanders is not, presumably because the Times sees him as soft on Moscow. If so, it means that he could be in for the same neo-McCarthyism that antiwar candidate Tulsi Gabbard encountered last October when Hillary Clinton blasted her as "the favorite of the Russians." Gabbard had the good sense to blast her right back.

"Thank you @Hillary Clinton. You, the queen of warmongers, embodiment of corruption, and personification of the rot that has sickened the Democratic Party for so long, have finally come out from behind the curtain. From the day I announced my candidacy, there has been a concerted campaign to destroy my reputation. We wondered who was behind it and why. Now we know – it was always you, through your proxies and powerful allies in the corporate media and war machine ."

If only Sanders did the same. But instead he put out a statement filled with the usual anti-Russian clichés:

"The 2020 election is likely to be the most consequential election in modern American history, and I am alarmed by new reports that Russia recently hacked into the Ukrainian gas company at the center of the impeachment trial, as well as Russia's plans to once again meddle in our elections and in our democracy. After our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that Russia interfered in the 2016 election, including with thousands of paid ads on Facebook, the New York Times now reports that Russia likely represents the biggest threat of election meddle in 2020, including through disinformation campaigns, promoting hatred, hacking into voting systems, and by exploiting the political divisions sewn [sic] by Donald Trump ."

And so on for another 250 words. Not only did the statement put him in bed with the intelligence agencies, but it makes him party to the big lie that the Kremlin was responsible for putting Trump over the top in 2016.

Let's get one thing straight. Yes, Russian intelligence may have hacked the Democratic National Committee. But cybersecurity was so lax that others may have been rummaging about as well. (CrowdStrike, the company called in to investigate the hack, says it found not one but two cyber-intruders.) Notwithstanding the Mueller report, all the available evidence indicates that Russia did not then pass along thousands of DNC emails that Wikileaks published in July 2016. (Julian Assange's statement six months later that "our source is not the Russian government and it is not a state party" remains uncontroverted.) Similarly, there's no evidence that the Kremlin had anything to do with the $45,000 worth of Facebook ads purchased by a St. Petersburg company known as the Internet Research Agency – Robert Mueller's 2018 indictment of the IRA was completely silent on the subject of a Kremlin connection – and no evidence that the ads, which were politically all over the map, had a remotely significant impact on the 2016 election.

All the rest is a classic CIA disinformation campaign aimed at drumming up anti-Russian hysteria and delegitimizing anyone who fails to go along. And now Bernie Sanders is trying to cover his derrière by hopping on board.

It won't work. Sanders will find himself having to take one loyalty oath after another as the anti-Russia campaign flares anew. But it will never be enough, and he'll only wind up looking tired and weak. Voters will opt for the supposedly more formidable Biden, who will end up as a bug splat on the windshield of Donald Trump's speeding election campaign. With impeachment no longer an issue, he'll be free to behave as dictatorially as he wishes as he settles into his second term.

After inveighing against billionaire's wars, he'll find himself ensnared by the same billionaire war machine. The trouble with Sanders is that he thinks he can win by playing by the rules. But he can't because the rules are stacked against him. He'd know that if his outlook was more radical. His problem is not that he's too much of a socialist. Rather, it's that he's not enough.

[Jan 20, 2020] I don't want to be cruel. But in the Trump Era, we must be prepared to face a certain amount of callousness in politics. Just imagine all the terrible shots Mr. Trump could take at Mrs. Warren:

"Mrs. Warren is singularly and excruciatingly unpleasant."
Jan 20, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Elizabeth Warren is a Professional Scold and an Academic Elitist

... ... ...

Again, I don't want to be cruel. But in the Trump Era, we must be prepared to face a certain amount of callousness in politics. Just imagine all the terrible shots Mr. Trump could take at Mrs. Warren:

"Liz, I like you a lot. I think you're a nice person. But you need to calm down. I don't know if you take any medication -- your blood pressure must be very high. I'm worried about you. I really am. Relax. Put on a nice sweater, have a cup of tea, grade some papers."

"I went to Wharton, okay? A much better school than Harvard, by the way. Harvard used to be a very good school. Now it's failing, because of people like you. And I did very well at Wharton. Very well. I don't need any more lectures. Save it for your students, professor."

"Professor Pocahontas, I call her. Iron Eyes Cody had more Indian blood than Liz! Remember him? 'Keep America Beautiful.' That was his thing. I like that. He would vote for Trump. But maybe he'd vote for his fellow Native American. I don't know."

"I'm doing very well with the Latino community, even the Latina community. Not so much with the Lateen-ex community. But that's okay. Liz can have them. All seven of them. What do you do with a Lateen-ex ? Blow your nose with it?"

[Jan 20, 2020] Important clarification about MadCow disease

Jan 15, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

DC_rez , January 16, 2020 at 16:08

Are you insinuating Rachel Maddow is a journalist?

[Jan 20, 2020] Devastating documentary sheds new light on Ukrainegate: Biden as the poster boy for nepotism and corruption.

A new documentary by Olivier Berruyer, editor of the website les-crises.fr . See https://videos.les-crises.fr/embed/player.php
Jan 15, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Eugenie Basile , January 15, 2020 at 02:01

I guess this makes Biden the most solid candidate MSM and DNC can deliver.

[Jan 19, 2020] It is unclear what percentage of Congress are alcoholics, but judging from their statements looks like more then half

The situation in neoliberal MSM probably is close to a real epidemics ;-)
Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Last of the Middle Class , 2 hours ago link

Finally, a group Pelosi can lead and be proud of .

[Jan 19, 2020] Facebook blocks documentary about Biden dealing in Ukraine from ukrainegate.info which sheds a new light on Ukrainegate

Jan 19, 2020 | consortiumnews.com

Fran Macadam , January 14, 2020 at 07:28

You've been zucked.

[Jan 19, 2020] Syrian Jihadists Filmed Jet-Setting To Next Proxy War On Commercial Plane

Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

J S Bach , 7 minutes ago link

10,000 virgins anxiously await the downing of this jet of jihadists.

Vernon_Dent , 9 minutes ago link

Join ISIS and see the world. The few, the proud.

dogismycopilot , 37 minutes ago link

For our frequent fliers who are members of our "Chopping Heads and Eating Livers of Infidels" Afriqiyah Airways is a code share flight with Turkish Airlines. Also, remember your points can be used in Paradise to rent hotel rooms for you and your 72 virgins.

Turkish Airlines. The airline of choice for Jihadis.

(satire)

[Jan 19, 2020] What separates the winners from the losers in America?

Don't take this too seriously ;-)
Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Nature_Boy_Wooooo , 23 minutes ago link

What separates the winners from the losers in America?

Government contracts....... you're either getting them or you're a ******* loser who pays for them.

[Jan 19, 2020] The Murder Of Qassem Soleimani Will Deter No One

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Ron , Jan 18 2020 21:41 utc | 31

Kali 15

Ten reasons why the US is the Beast of Revelation

Kali , Jan 18 2020 22:00 utc | 35

@31 Ron

There are 2 beasts, the first is either America or NATO, or basically "The Empire" or The Neocon Oligarchy--all work well but America is a bit too broad since there are many good people in America. The second beast whose number is 666, is Trump. Search: Trump 666 and be amazed.

And of course The Pièce de résistance

[Jan 19, 2020] Internal Boeing Emails Claim 777X Shares MAX Problem

Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Tillyoudrop , 49 seconds ago link

Greed is good, greed is right, greed works.

Neochrome , 2 minutes ago link

sacrificing the safety of the planes to drive sales higher

Good thing we sentence people to life in jail for shoplifting couple of t-shirts, safety restored.

VodkaInKrakow , 12 minutes ago link

Financialization killed Boeing. All those MBA's who dreamed up outsourced supply-chains for the Dreamliner. Thought they were going to make a lot of money through savings.

Silly rabbit MBA's... if you don't spend money? You don't make money.

MBA graduates are f*cking useless retards trained in only one system: FAILURE.

What sank McDonald Douglas - bought out by Boeing? Is the same bullsh*t that is ruining Boeing. Boeing kept a lot of board member & management failures around from McDonald Douglas. Poisoned the Boeing culture.

Bounder , 14 minutes ago link

How many of you remember all the McDonald Douglas passenger jet success stories? There wasnt any - the whole mgmt of MD was to to strip out every possible cost and maximize very profit at the expense of the end customer and the government - and these are the guys who bought Boeing - and then made the first step of moving the headquarters to chicago. Guess which party gave lots and lots of government boondoggles to MD?

VodkaInKrakow , 10 minutes ago link

Damn. Wish I would have read your comment.

I had a Polish executive tell me how proud they were as they were about to hire an American executive who graduated with an MBA.

That is, until I asked him... "Have you checked what happened to the previous companies that he worked at?"

So the Polish executive did just that. This led to a ban on hiring any American MBA. Turns out, the American MBA worked at companies, all of which FAILED.

Though, somehow, despite a track record of working at failed companies? The American was still quite well off.

VodkaInKrakow , 1 minute ago link

Boeing is a symbol of American reliability that reflected hugely upon American manufacturing.

Well, WAS a symbol of American reliability. Which casts doubt upon American manufacturing.

Confidence in American manufacturing quality is in GRAVE DOUBT. Which leads to people seeking their products elsewhere.

The US business leadership consists of crapification.

fedslayer , 20 minutes ago link

Ok but what's the alternative?

If the parts meet specifications, get the lowest price.

If you don't, you will have executives drop-shipping parts. That's what i would do.

If you don't go with the lowest-price, executives like me will rob you blind.

east of eden , 16 minutes ago link

The ******* alternative you stupid ******* americunt is already in the air. They are labelled Airbus A220 and A230, otherwise known as Bombardier CS200 and CS300 and they are sold out 15 years in advance.

VodkaInKrakow , 4 minutes ago link

That was part of the problem. The parts from Boeing's foreign suppliers MET SPECIFICATIONS.

That is, until they went to assemble the Dreamliner. Where parts did not fit together.

You see, Boeing found out LONG, LONG AGO... that it was necessary to have manufacturing close to design. That way, when parts that "met specifications" did not fit? The engineers and machinists were there to correct deficiencies. Thus leading to reliable planes that were fit together very well. Only THEN could Boeing could assemble parts in other locations and mate them together.

This never happened with the Dreamliner. Quadrupled costs. The Dreamliner only exists thanks to taxpayer subsidies through the ExIm Bank. The Dreamliner WILL NEVER BE PROFITABLE. Accounting gimmicks make it appear as if Boeing makes money on the Dreamliner.

Bay Area Guy , 28 minutes ago link

Amazing that in less than a generation, we go from "if it's not Boeing, I'm not going" to wondering what the next Boeing screw-up will be and how many will be killed as a result.

The existing 777 is a fantastic plane and, other than pilot error (Asiana at SFO), a missile attack (Malaysia 17) and some unknown (but apparently not mechanical) issue (Malaysia 370), the 777 has been the safest plane around.

Ignorance is bliss , 1 hour ago link

American executives are incentivized to manipulate their company's stock. So they squeeze the workforce and cut everything to the bone. That's why Boeing, GM, and other household names are crashing.

According to economist William Lazonick, Boeing spent $43.1 billion on stock buybacks from 2013 to 2019, raising the company's stock price to a record high just 10 days before the second crash of its 737 MAX. Boeing CEO Muilenburg collects most of his pay through stock or compensation based on financial metrics. Yet the company reportedly avoided spending the estimated $7 billion it would have needed to engineer a safer plane. Less than 10 years after a public sector bailout, GM has spent $10.6 billion on stock buybacks, while engaging in layoffs and plant closures. That amounts to $221,308 for each of the 47,897 active UAW members currently on strike at GM. Walmart spent $9.2 billion on stock buybacks from August 2018 to July 2019, which, by my calculations, could have been used to give a raise of roughly $5/ hour to each of its 1 million hourly workers instead.

Illegal , 56 minutes ago link

Boeing should have been spending all its supposed profits on R&D. The other problem is the military side of the business is grossly corrupt. Remember the blowup over Air Force 1?

flyonmywall , 24 minutes ago link

Yep. Stock buybacks.

This is what happens when the Federal Reserve lets the financial cat out the bag, and pump up the stock market to the tune of 35-60 billion every 3 days, because some hedge funds "could" fail and topple the financial system.

If multiple entities are now too important and could topple the financial system if they failed, the Fed has massively screwed up.

aldol11 , 1 hour ago link

In 1991 a Boeing purchaser told me that he would give us a contract if we transferred 51% of the shares to a minority.

This is God's truth

He added that when he could not find minority businesses that would make components according to specifications, he would buy stuff from minority owned businesses and not use it but store it in warehouses around the country indefinitely. this in order to meet a quota of 20% purchases from minority owned businesses mandated by the Feds for all government suppliers.

I can just imagine how bad the discrimination is now.

Svastic , 1 hour ago link

Good grief. Look at Boeing's board of directors anyway.

https://www.boeing.com/company/general-info/corporate-governance.page

These are politically connected animals who feed from the trough of government pork barrel a.k.a taxpayer money. Exactly what has Nikki Haley achieved in her life, except for being a pathological liar?

These animals were responsible for our reckless fiscal deficits and looming debt bombs which will soon come crashing down. Kinda good metaphor for Boeing.

BidnessMan , 46 minutes ago link

All former CFOs and politicians ( civilian and military - only political types in the military get stars ). No evidence of any engineering expertise. Sad for a once-proud global leader.

moseybear , 1 hour ago link

In the "investor economy", there is no morality. EVERYTHING is "commoditized". Even you .. your DNA. A pricetag hovers over your head like a dialog bubble. Bean counters can incorporate your morbidity and mortality into mathematical equations showing investors why cutting costs and saving 0.01% is worthy of investment. While 911 was the paradigm shift for Rights ... the Lehman "crisis" was its own "911" -- the death of the labor economy ... and rise of the "investor economy". Nobody works, trading time for dollars. They "invest" Why work? Investors can kill without being held personally responsible. They only risk their fiat capital. You die.

[Jan 19, 2020] Trump as the dark soul of America

Jan 19, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Circe , Jan 18 2020 16:47 utc | 143

You wanna know who Trump really is? Trump is the dark soul of America. He's everything ugly that Amerikkka is: greedy, immoral, corrupt, an uncouth bully...more than that, he's a lawless tyrant, a pretentious hypocrite that sends the dumb masses kids to kill, die and occupy sovereign property while he, the privileged spends hundreds of millions revelling in superficial distraction, playing golf, comfortably numb, filthy rich and repulsed at the sight of tent cities, vets sleeping under bridges and by the migrant help that clean the toilets, pluck chickens all day and are bent over for hours picking crops at slave wages so he, his trophy wife and the well-off he favors, can eat.

Trump is America's depraved soul that Republicans and Zionists want to nurture and protect, because he's the Chosen one delivering everything they dreamed of; that Democrats are powerless to remove because Trump's the price you pay when your own hands are stained with the blood of those you killed with those you sent to war, stained with the betrayal of your principles and your own on behalf of AIPAC and corporate bribery to gain power.

Everything Trump is, Amerikkka is, and that's why he's in power. He's in the White House because he IS Amerikkka and who Amerikkka desires and deserves. Trump is the irresistable, uncensored charlatan; the rasputin Amerikkkans lusted after to free their lawless, depraved nature and latent immorality from the mask of shame, fake decorum and respectability. He's reassured Amerikkkans that selling your soul to the devil to do God's work is okay, as long as the end always justifes the means, and they love it!

[Jan 19, 2020] America can be a force for good in the Middle East.

Jan 19, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

LostForWords a day ago

America can be a force for good in the Middle East. The day is coming when Iran and Israel will, with US help, partner Israel to lift the ME out of its ignorance and poverty, and Saudi Arabia will, in the absence of the Shia revolution, be able to ditch its Wahhabist extremism.

[Jan 19, 2020] With "help" like this from CNN, one struggles to imagine what sabotage might look like.

Is Warren Warren the Jussie Smollet of politics. I wonder if she claims Bernie attacked her while wearing a red hat and screaming, "A woman can't win! This is MAGA country!"
Jan 18, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Connecticut Farmer a day ago

SCENARIO I

Joe is conservative, libertarian or possibly both.
Joe opposes Bernie Sanders on ideological grounds.
Ergo, Joe and Bernie have a different worldview.

SCENARIO II

Joe is conservative, libertarian or possibly both.
Joe opposes Liz Warren on ideological grounds.
Ergo, Joe is an unprincipled sexist.

esquimaux 11 hours ago
Being one of Liz' constituents and familiar with her career and her base (consisting of people like me,) I think she faces so little consequence for her "embellishments" at least in part because "we" (her base) inhabit an environment in which, with ease, we adjust facts and perceptions to conform to whatever our self-serving narrative of the moment may be.

We know that Liz will say anything she imagines will be to her advantage and it's okay with "us" that she does. In a way, she's our ideal candidate and media darling because she reflects and affirms our plastic values.

[Jan 19, 2020] Trump and his Iran adventure

Jan 19, 2020 | jessescrossroadscafe.blogspot.com

"For fools rush in where angels fear to tread
Distrustful sense with modest caution speaks,
It still looks home, and short excursions makes;

But rattling nonsense in full volleys breaks,
And, never shocked, and never turned aside.
Bursts out, resistless, with a thundering tide."

Alexander Pope, Essay on Criticism

[Jan 19, 2020] Sometimes House accidentally tells the truth

Yes, with Soleimani assassination and subsequent crisis Trump crossed the red line. But the House is afraid to tell he whole truth... Obama was probably even bigger threat to the US national security, especially with Hillary as the Secretary of State and hi Libyan and Syrian adventures.
Jan 19, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

The 111-page summons urges the Senate to "eliminate the threat that the President poses to America's national security" as it lays out the case against President Trump.

emmanuelthoreau , 1 hour ago link

Hilarious. What other president would've tolerated this?

**** Cheney would've had the homes of these people "visited" by faceless-looking men long ago, evidence gathered, and a second visit made a few weeks later to protect himself and Bush. Just to pluck one recent administration out of thin air.

Trump doesn't seem all that worried. Maybe that's for a reason most of us can't possibly comprehend.

This country is fucked and you know it.

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 17 2020 19:24 utc | 6

Yes! The inability to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite its being published because that policy goal--to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world--is actually 100% against genuine American Values as expressed by the Four Freedoms (1.Freedom of speech; 2.Freedom of worship; 3.Freedom from want; 4.Freedom from fear) and the articulated goals/vision of the UN Charter--World Peace arrived at via collective security and diplomacy, not war--which are still taught in schools along with Wilson's 14 Points. Then of course, there's the war against British Tyranny known as the Spirit of '76 and the Revolutionary War for Independence and the documents that bookend that era. In 1948, Kennan stated, in an internal discussion that was never censored, the USA consumed 60% of global resources with only 5% of the population and needed to somehow come up with a policy to both continue and justify that great disparity to both the domestic and international audience. Yet, those truths were never provided in an overt manner to the American public or the international audience. The upshot being the US federal government since it dropped the bombs on Japan has been lying or misleading its people such that it's now habitual. And Trump's diatribe against the generals reflects the reality that he too was taken in by those lies.

[Jan 18, 2020] Boris Yeltsin, (western installed) Russian President from 1991 to 1999, during which the former Soviet Union was totally plundered

Jan 18, 2020 | off-guardian.org

RobG ,

Boris Yeltsin, (western installed) Russian President from 1991 to 1999, during which the former Soviet Union was totally plundered

https://www.youtube.com/embed/v9YnDirqwT4?version=3&rel=1&fs=1&autohide=2&showsearch=0&showinfo=1&iv_load_policy=1&wmode=transparent

richard le sarc ,

'He might be a son-of-a-bitch, but he's OUR son-of-a-bitch'. Surely a 'Yeltsin' must replace or join 'Quisling' in the popular lexicon as a title for a traitor, in future.

[Jan 18, 2020] Trump is following Putin and started grooming his own successor

Jan 18, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Fair dinkum ,

I hear tell that Emperor Trump is also grooming his potential successor/s

It's a neck and neck race between Kim Kardashian, who Trump is giving personal 'hands on' assistance, and Montgomery Burns, who is one of Trump's role models.

[Jan 18, 2020] Trump and militry brass

Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Baron , Jan 18 2020 14:09 utc | 136

"
"I wouldn't go to war with you people," Trump told the assembled brass.
Addressing the room, the commander in chief barked, "You're a bunch of dopes and babies."
"

Source: Washington Post.

[Jan 18, 2020] Complete fools and the isde of noble and honest politician

Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Russ , Jan 18 2020 7:45 utc | 113

Posted by: Daniel | Jan 17 2020 19:57 utc | 13

"At this stage in the game anyone who still thinks Trump is an honest man with noble intentions is a complete fool"

That only needs to be changed to: At this stage in the game anyone who still thinks any system politician is honest and has noble intentions is a complete fool.

But then religious fundamentalists, such as the cultists of electoralism, cannot be reached by evidence or rational argument.

[Jan 18, 2020] Trump and Iranian people

Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

SharonM , Jan 18 2020 3:24 utc | 98

This is Trump's idiotic tweet earlier today:
"The noble people of Iran -- who love America -- deserve a government that's more interested in helping them achieve their dreams than killing them for demanding respect. Instead of leading Iran toward ruin, its leaders should abandon terror and Make Iran Great Again!"

And here's Sharmine Narwani's response:
"I'm in Iran right now. These "noble" people find you disgusting, just like most Americans. Iranians laugh at you and mock you and really, really want their government to bring you to your knees."

;)

[Jan 18, 2020] One feature of the Washington swamp

Jan 18, 2020 | www.strategic-culture.org

Washington is certainly недоговороспособны – it's impossible to make an agreement with it and, if you should think you have done so, it will break it.

A dangerous, uncontrollable madman, staggering around blowing everything up

[Jan 18, 2020] The joke is on us: Without the USSR the USA oligarchy resorted to cannibalism and devour the American people

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.theguardian.com

In another sense, however, the passing of the cold war could not have been more disorienting. In 1987, Georgi Arbatov, a senior adviser to the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev , had warned: "We are going to do a terrible thing to you – we are going to deprive you of an enemy."

...Winning the cold war brought Americans face-to-face with a predicament comparable to that confronting the lucky person who wins the lottery: hidden within a windfall is the potential for monumental disaster.

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

Highly recommended!
Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

Peripatetic Commenter , says: Show Comment January 17, 2020 at 9:43 pm GMT

I don't think it will be long before we see Congress in the US calling for invasion of Russia on the grounds of a lack of diversity, lack of respect for LGBTP and so forth.

[Jan 18, 2020] If Bernie is nominated, he better buy a flak jacket..

Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Jan 18 2020 3:11 utc | 96

An earlier poster said Bernie could defeat DJT. Not to worry, I'll be the most shocked person in the U$A if Sanders gets to nod to run for POTUS.

If that happens, he better buy a flak jacket..

[Jan 17, 2020] In the full sprit of bipartisanship

Notable quotes:
"... Why then were all eight House members chosen as managers to prosecute the case against Trump, who ceremoniously escorted the articles across the Capitol, all Democrats? Why did the articles of impeachment receive not a single Republican vote on the House floor? ..."
Jan 17, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Why then were all eight House members chosen as managers to prosecute the case against Trump, who ceremoniously escorted the articles across the Capitol, all Democrats? Why did the articles of impeachment receive not a single Republican vote on the House floor?

[Jan 17, 2020] I knew that if you kept it up, Putler would get around to targeting you.

Jan 17, 2020 | www.unz.com

iffen , says: January 15, 2020 at 5:55 pm GMT

Ban PMs, Ministers, governors, some mayors and judges, from having second citizenships of foreign residencies; moreover, Presidential candidates should have been resident in Russia for 25 years (previously 10 years) and never had a foreign citizenship.

I knew that if you kept it up, Putler would get around to targeting you.

[Jan 16, 2020] TRANSCRIPT Putin's Address to the Federal Assembly

Jan 16, 2020 | off-guardian.org

This is about fight with fifth column... The time for those changes is long overdue.

I truly believe that it is time to introduce certain changes to our country's main law, changes that will directly guarantee the priority of the Russian Constitution in our legal framework.

What does it mean? It means literally the following: requirements of international law and treaties as well as decisions of international bodies can be valid on the Russian territory only to the point that they do not restrict the rights and freedoms of our people and citizens and do not contradict our Constitution.

Second, I suggest formalising at the constitutional level the obligatory requirements for those who hold positions of critical significance for national security and sovereignty. More precisely, the heads of the constituent entities, members of the Federation Council, State Duma deputies, the prime minister and his/her deputies, federal ministers, heads of federal agencies and judges should have no foreign citizenship or residence permit or any other document that allows them to live permanently in a foreign state.

The goal and mission of state service is to serve the people, and those who enter this path must know that by doing this they inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances.

Requirements must be even stricter for presidential candidates. I suggest formalising a requirement under which presidential candidates must have had permanent residence in Russia for at least 25 years and no foreign citizenship or residence permit and not only during the election campaign but at any time before it too.

I know that people are discussing the constitutional provision under which one person cannot hold the post of the President of the Russian Federation for two successive terms. I do not regard this as a matter of principle, but I nevertheless support and share this view.

I have already said before that our goal is to ensure high living standards and equal opportunities for all throughout the country. It is towards this goal that our national projects and development plans are aimed.


Stephen Morrell ,

Putin clearly is the most informed and visionary bourgeois politician in the world today, by a country mile. He not only is attempting to address the very real real social, demographic and economic needs of Russia, in his usual comprehensive manner, but also and cannily is co-opting many of the expectations that the USSR used to fulfil, attempting to neutralise any socialist political sentiments in the Russian population. Putin is the Bismarck of Russia.

richard le sarc ,

Russia's economic situation, within the global capitalist system, with its large reserves, much in gold, no exposure to the toilet paper of US Treasuries, and substantial local self-sufficiency in agriculture (thank-you sanctions)means that when the Western debt Ponzi Himalaya implodes, the Russians will be pretty much immune to the consequences.

richard le sarc ,

I agree entirely, but Putin has no alternative. Any chink in his armour and the USA will destroy Russia and break it up into fragments as they did in Yugoslavia, the USSR and wish to do in China. I rather think that Putin knows full well how dire is the global ecological situation, but he needs to balance less enlightened forces at home, and the 'Atlanticist' Quislings.

BigB ,

I don't disagree either: but that is not my point. The Atlanticists are waiting in the wings for another four years. Last time I checked: they still command 80% of Russian private property. And were expropriating $25bn pa annum in capital flight which has slowed slightly in the last few years. I read the Saker too. There is a deadlock and uneasy power sharing arrangement internally. But you may have missed the time when the Saker admitted "Putin is a neoliberal"?

It may be difficult to disentangle our vision from the neoliberal-statist-market ontology we are being repressed by but that is what we must do. We cannot expect neoliberal capitalist social inclusivity to save us from ecological catastrophe. Nor can we expect to grow economically into humanism: when exponential growth is what is destroying any lasting chance of a purely sustainable human-emancipatory freedom. Putin may not have a choice: but we do. The neoliberal-statist-market ontology is globally self-determined to produce total failure as its inevitable and only possible outcome. This is known a 'parametric determinism' when we automatically follow a maladaptive 'rational' self-optimising behaviour pattern long after it failed as it did in 2007. There is no recovery possible, and technology only speeds total failure whilst masking the ecological destruction it is accelerating.

States have to think and act in a pre-determined way that is true. But we do not have to think like that. Not if there is to be any alternative or succession of humanity ex-post the neoliberal-statist-market ontology which is morally, ecologically, humanistically and most importantly *actually* bankrupt at this point.

Do we exit a 350 year process of exponentially disproportionate wealth distribution, deliberate maldevelopment and global dehumanisation with all the wealth in the hands of those who benefited from the expropriation? Or do we attempt a redistribution and develop a new, hitherto unknown (and unknowable under capitalist alienation), value set where everyone globally has equal access to resources and a right to life as a birthright?

The decision is not beyond you or I: but it will take the development of the assessment of capitalism on other than its own neoliberal-statist-market ontological terms. No state or state leader can develop humanity on the path of less-is-more it needs to take but the people can. That's all.

richard le sarc ,

Putin is either a believing neo-liberal, in which case he is part of the problem you identify, or he is using it through necessity. I could not agree more with your diagnosis of the omnicidal nature of capitalism, and the inability of so many to visualise the end of capitalism-they more easily can conceive of the end of humanity. In fact I rather think that that is the way in which the ruling parasites intend to save their own bacon, by allowing the ecological Holocaust to cull the 90% of 'useless eaters' that the ruling elites fear and despise, and who they see only as a threat. Their labour is no longer required in an age of automation, robotisation and computerisation, and even their consumption is today superfluous. The ecological Holocaust has passed numerous tipping-points and points of no return, while the IPCC downplays the extremity of our situation, the Right still denies it is even happening, and the public is slowly waking up, too late of course. We've just experienced a fire Holocaust, yet the Pentecostal thug PM, 'Smoko' Morrison, who is surely seeing it all as God's Will and the sign of the coming End Times that his cult so longs for, utterly refuses to reduce CO2 emissions beyond a ludicrous 28% by 2030 from 2005 (base-line creep)levels, 'target', that we will not come close to. And now it is raining, a little, so the Great Austrayan Mediocracy can go back to their slumber. But they'll 'Wake in Fright', again, soon.

Hugh O'Neill ,

"It is very important that they adopt the true values ​​of a large family – that family is love, happiness, the joy of motherhood and fatherhood, that family is a strong bond of several generations, united by respect for the elderly and care for children, giving everyone a sense of confidence, security, and reliability. If the younger generations accept this situation as natural, as a moral and an integral part and reliable background support for their adult life, then we will be able to meet the historical challenge of guaranteeing Russia's development as a large and successful country."

I know very little of Russia alas, but the over-riding impression I take from this speech is President Putin's depth and breadth grasp of detail and concern for every aspect of Russian society – and his frustration that decisions made at federal level do not transform into concrete action at regional levels. The curse of bureaucracy and local fiefdoms jealous of their power and autonomy.

I was fully expecting him to come up a resonating phrase like: "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask instead what you can for your country." For Russia to have (seemingly) escaped the rapacious talons of the vulture capitalists unleashed by the Yeltsin puppet ought to be a lesson for us all.

Finally, in international politics, he remains impeccably diplomatic, restrained and wise. Would that there were more world leaders of such calibre.

Hugh O'Neill ,

Leadership and Learning are indispensable to each other. Looking at the calibre of Presidents since JFK, it seems that all the best candidates were either killed off or scared off. All the Unspeakable can do is kill in answer to any and all problems.

richard le sarc ,

Imagine the money freed if US military expenditure was not 90% graft and inefficiency.

richard le sarc ,

His manifest virtues are precisely why the vermin of the Western ruling elites hate him so psychotically.

[Jan 16, 2020] Americans are in a vicious circle/Infinite Loop

Jan 16, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Trond January 15, 2020 at 7:40 am

Americans are in a vicious circle/Infinite Loop

I think they are using an old version of BASIC from the cold war era, called BASIC Russia Hate.

10 Print "Russia bad!"
20 Goto 10
Run
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!
Russia bad!

BREAK IN 10
READY.

10 Print "Russia good!"
20 Goto 10
Run
SYNTAX ERROR!!!!!!!

[Jan 16, 2020] Would Russians spend money and respources on undermining semi-seline Biden: Are they that stupid? Biden is a better gift than Trump ;-)

Jan 16, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Courtesy of Bloomberg :

"U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are assessing whether Russia is trying to undermine Joe Biden in its ongoing disinformation efforts with the former vice president still the front-runner in the race to challenge President Donald Trump, according to two officials familiar with the matter

Part of the inquiry is to determine whether Russia is trying to weaken Biden by promoting controversy over his past involvement in U.S. policy toward Ukraine while his son worked for an energy company there."

... ... ...

Yes, somehow those dastardly Russians have outsmarted the brightest and best-paid political strategists in Washington, D.C. by brandishing what amounts to some really persuasive memes over social media, and for just rubles on the dollar. The techies at Wired went so far as to call this epic assault on the fragile American cranium, "meme warfare to divide America." By way of evidence, it cited a very creative meme that screamed, "F*CK THE ELECTIONS," which was intended, as the ironclad argument goes, to cause a number of impressionable Americans to throw up their hands in a fit of collective exasperation and say, 'Ok, that's it. I'm staying at home on Election Day.'

Yes, it's really that easy! Imagine all the money the Russians and their radical new political technologies could have saved guys like casino tycoon, Sheldon Adelson, who showered the Trump campaign with $100 million dollars.

[Jan 16, 2020] https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/trump-canada-yukon-1.3235254

Jan 16, 2020 | www.cbc.ca

Posted by: Tom | Jan 16 2020 4:55 utc | 207

[Jan 16, 2020] RUSSIAN RESHUFFLE by Patrick Armstrong - Sic Semper Tyrannis

Jan 16, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

RUSSIAN RESHUFFLE by Patrick Armstrong

(Written on the evening of. So subject to reconsideration/revision/outright denial as we learn more.)

I didn't expect any of it. Neither did anyone else, whatever the so-called experts outgassing on the US Garbage Media may be pretending. I don't know what it all means. Neither does anyone else. (Well Putin & Co do, but they keep their cards close to their chests. As we've just seen.)

What do we know? Putin gave his annual address to the Federal Council ( Rus ) ( Eng ) and started off with how important it was that the birthrate should be raised. Fair enough: he wants more Russians on the planet, the government's programs have ensured that there will be quite a few more but there are still more to come. Many programs planned; some of which will work: after all, not everything works out as we hoped does it? He mentioned how dangerous the world is – especially the MENA – and said at least Russia is pretty secure (as indeed it is except against lunatics addicted to the Book of Revelation .)

Then the constitutional stuff. He believes the Constitution needs a few tweaks. Important officials should really be Russians and not people with a get-out-of-jail-card/alternate-loyalty-card in their vests. Reasonable enough: they should "inseparably connect their lives with Russia and the Russian people without any assumptions and allowances." (Good idea actually. Can we in the West steal the idea? We vote for X but who does he vote for?) Russian law should take precedence over decrees contaminated by the " Rules-Based International Order" (" we make the rules , you follow our orders "). The PM should be named by the Duma. (A pretty big change, actually: let's have more details on the division of labour please. In some countries the head of state is The Boss – USA, Russia (now), France – in others the head of government is The Boss – Germany, Canada, Denmark. There is a serious carve up of powers question here that has to be worked out in detail.) Constitutional changes should be approved in a referendum. The President either should or should not be bound by the no-three-terms-in-a-row-rule (I personally can't figure out what "этим" refers to in "Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим. Не считаю, что этот вопрос принципиальный, но согласен с этим." But, no doubt we will soon learn.)

So, a somewhat less presidential republic. Details to be decided. Many details. But I'm confident that it's been worked out and we will learn. Putin & Co have shown us over 20 years that they don't make things up on the fly.

Then we learned that the entire government had resigned – but individuals to stay in place until replaced. Then we learned – a fast few hours indeed! – that Dmitri Medvedev was replaced by somebody that no one (other than Russian tax specialists) had ever heard of: Mikhail Vladimirovich Mishustin. ( Russian Wiki entry – none in English so far.) Those cheering Medvedev's dismissal (something predicted and hoped for by a sector of Russianologists) had to then swallow this: not tossed out into ignominy and shame, as they wanted, but something else. Putin says that there is a clear distinction between government and presidential concerns; defence and security are clearly in the latter. But Medvedev has always been closely following defence and security issues and it is suitable and appropriate that he continue to do so. So a new position, deputy heard of the security council, will be created for him. So what are we to make of this? Medvedev has been given the boot and a sinecure? Or he's been given a crucial job in the new carve-up of responsibilities?

After all, Russia's problems keep getting bigger but nobody is getting any younger. Especially the problems from outside. For some years Washington, an implacable enemy of Moscow, has been getting less and less predictable. Lavrov and Kerry spend hours locked up negotiating a deal in Syria ; within a week the US military attacks a Syrian Army unit; "by mistake" . Who's in charge? Now with the murder of Soleimani, possibly on a Washington-approved peace mission, Washington has moved to another level of lawlessness and is exploring the next depth as it defies Baghdad's order to get out. A pirate power. The outside problems for Moscow aren't getting smaller, are they? Washington is certainly недоговороспособны – it's impossible to make an agreement with it and, if you should think you have done so, it will break it. A dangerous, uncontrollable madman, staggering around blowing everything up – is any foreign leader now to be assumed to be on Washington's murder list? Surviving its decay is a big job indeed. The problems are getting bigger in the Final Days of the Imperium Americanum.

So, maybe Moscow needs more people on the job.

So are we looking at a new division of labour in Moscow as part of managing the Transition? (To say nothing of the – what's the word? – Thucydides trap ? ). Mishustin looks after the nuts and bolt of Russia's economy and internal management. Medvedev looks after defence and security – something not likely to get smaller while Putin looks after the big picture?

But this is only the first step in The Transition and we will learn more soon.

[Jan 15, 2020] Impeachment motto: in our guts, we know Trump is nuts

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Dumbo , says: Show Comment January 3, 2020 at 6:46 pm GMT

Donald Trump rode to victory in 2016 on a promise to end the useless wars in the Middle East, but he has now demonstrated very clearly that he is a liar

He also promised a wall. Maybe he meant the Israeli wall?

[Jan 15, 2020] Democracy in action: voters choice in 2016 was limited to the choice between brain cancer and leprosy

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Trailer Trash , Jan 8 2020 16:32 utc | 105

Trump is such a douchebag. He claims there were no lives lost due to their "early warning system" -- no mention that the "early warning system" was a phone call!

Now he's once again justifying assassination, etc.

pretzelattack , Jan 8 2020 16:39 utc | 110

there was no "better choice" between trump and clinton. i still think clinton represented a greater danger than trump of getting into a war with russia, but they are both warmongers first class. for our next election, we may have a choice between ebola and flesh eating bacteria, or brain cancer and leprosy. if the game is rigged there's no winning it playing by the game's "rules".

[Jan 15, 2020] In each episode when Kushner and/or Ivanka stands behind Trump with American flag on the background, Trump chances of reelection drop one percent

Also In each episode when Adam Schiff makes announcement about Trump with the USA flag at the background Trump re-election chances increase one percent.
theamericanconservative.com

Trump Signs Order Interpreting Judaism as a Nationality and Race:

[Jan 15, 2020] Why the heck should I care about Putin!?

Jan 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

TheySayIAmOkay , 18 minutes ago link

...Why the heck should I care about Putin!?

flappyjaws , 10 minutes ago link

You have it right. The rhetoric "this is a free country" is only true to an extent now with the constant chipping away at our freedoms on a daily basis.

[Jan 15, 2020] GNU Guccifer vs. CIA Lucifer. To jail or not to jail, this is the question. And who will jail whom? Make your bets for 2020

In March 2016, the DOJ found that "the FBI had been employing outside contractors who had access to raw Section 702 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) data, and retained that access after their work for the FBI was completed," as Jeff Carlson reported in The Epoch Times.
Dec 29, 2019 | zerohedge.com

Willie the Pimp

You can take the libtards, dumbocraps, antifa, RINOs, Never Trumpers, lawyers and bureaucrats and send them pronto to Mars

paint it red call it hell

I having real butter on my popcorn.....

Giant Meteor

Hmmm, interesting. Like Chinese interesting .. A curse .. I like understatements!

[Jan 15, 2020] Bolton's spirit

Jan 15, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

KekistanisUnite , 1 hour ago link

Bolton's spirit still rules on in the Trump administration alongside Fat Mike.

[Jan 14, 2020] Europe is the USA Airstrip 1. Imagine my surprise to learn the EU had a reputation worth protecting.

Notable quotes:
"... Deal finishes October 2020 if I remember correctly. All sanctions will be lifted so long as Iran is in compliance at that time. This is a move to prevent this. ..."
Jan 14, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Nemo , Jan 14 2020 19:35 utc | 1

Be fair. It doesn't matter if the EU is agreement capable or not. They have no sovereignty to begin with. It is known.

powerandpeople , Jan 14 2020 19:37 utc | 2

Deal finishes October 2020 if I remember correctly. All sanctions will be lifted so long as Iran is in compliance at that time. This is a move to prevent this.
BraveNewWorld , Jan 14 2020 19:41 utc | 3
I always learn some thing here. For example imagine my surprise to learn the EU had a reputation worth protecting. All you need to know about the EU is bitches will do what bitches are told. This is just one more step on the road to war with China, is that really what the citizens of the EU want? Are the people of the EU ready to die for the Trump and the Republican party?

[Jan 12, 2020] Is it possible to imagine that Trump will write the same to the brave people of France?

Jan 12, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

John Doe , Jan 12 2020 9:07 utc | 390

Donald J. Trump: "To the brave, long-suffering people of Iran: I've stood with you since the beginning of my Presidency, and my Administration will continue to stand with you. We are following your protests closely, and are inspired by your courage."

Is it possible to imagine that such a trump will write to the brave people of France:

https://twitter.com/BasedPoland/status/1216118380857569280

???

[Jan 12, 2020] One of "Ruptured" Secretary of State "exaggerations"

Jan 12, 2020 | www.nakedcapitalism.com

Dwight , January 10, 2020 at 6:32 am

Secretary of State Pompeo claimed that Soleimani was responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in Syria. Basically blaming Iran for all deaths in the Syrian war.

[Jan 11, 2020] What About "Whataboutism." by Vladimir Golstein

Highly recommended!
Notable quotes:
"... One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them.' ..."
"... 'If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country.' ..."
Jan 11, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Wikipedia – the most popular source of information for most people – boldly announces:

"Whataboutism, also known as whataboutery, is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy that attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging them with hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving their argument. It is particularly associated with Soviet and Russian propaganda Prominent usage: Soviet Union propaganda."

Perusal of recent mainstream articles adds one more dimension to the story. Not only everything negative is habitually associated with Soviets and Russians, unless of course, it is Iranians or North Koreans, when the equation has frequently been reversed.

If something negative occurs: Cherchez La Russie.

Mass media bias against President Trump has been observed on numerous occasions, but what is particularly fascinating about this negativity is a persistent desire to paint Trump with the Russian brush.

So it is hardly surprising that Trump has been turned into a practitioner of Russian "Whataboutism," allowing Washington Post to declare triumphantly: "Whataboutism: The Cold War tactic, thawed by Putin, is brandished by Donald Trump."

The article elaborates:

What about the stock market? What about those 33,000 deleted emails? What about Benghazi? .. What about what about what about. We've gotten very good at what-abouting. The president has led the way. His campaign may or may not have conspired with Moscow, but President Trump has routinely employed a durable old Soviet propaganda tactic."

The WaPo article by Dan Zak goes even further and explains the reasons behind Trump's embrace of Russian Whataboutism. It is moral relativism, you see. It is a ploy of tyrannical regimes, which intend to divert attention from their crimes:

That's exactly the kind of argument that Russian propagandists have used for years to justify some of Putin's most brutal policies," wrote Michael McFaul , former ambassador to Russia during the Obama administration. .. "Moral relativism -- 'whataboutism' -- has always been a favorite weapon of illiberal regimes," Russian chessmaster and activist Garry Kasparov told the Columbia Journalism Review in March. "For a U.S. president to employ it against his own country is tragic.

Viewed from the historical perspective, all this is blatantly false.

It is the democratic systems that need propaganda, spinning, and other soft-power weapons. It is the democracies that rely on one party blaming another party for its own transgressions. It is the liberal economic structures that need to promote one brand of toothpaste by denigrating another brand.

"Whataboutism" is an integral fabric of Western society, as both its business and political models depend on comparing, contrasting, diverting attention and so on.

Soviets, who had difficulty obtaining even one kind of toilet paper, did not need the commercials that claim that the other brand leaks more. Soviet leadership that relied primarily on the power of the gun didn't need to spend time and effort and hone its skills in the art of maligning another party.

In other words, Soviets, and consequently Russians, are plain amateurs when it comes to "whataboutism." When their government felt the need to resort to it, they would do it rather sloppily and amateurishly, so that the people would just laugh it off, as the endless political jokes testify.

Soviets were forced to resort to it during the time of Cold War, however, when there was a real competition for the hearts and minds of several European countries such as France and Italy, where post-war sympathies for Communists were running strong.

Needless to say, the Soviets were beaten soundly. The arguments that American freedoms were worse than Soviets because of American racism did not really work for Europeans, who preferred their Louis Armstrong to Leonid Utesov and their Jackson Pollock to Alexander Gerasimov. In the battle between Georgy Alexandrov's Marion Dixon of Circus (1936) and Ernst Lubitsch's Ninotchka (1939), Ninotchka won.

That's why I find it extremely ironic and peculiar that these methods of "whataboutism," these lines of reasoning that have pervaded the Western news coverage to the core, have been magically turned into a signature method of Soviet Propaganda.

Equally ironic is the fact that any attempt to question Western hypocrisy, spinning, and relentless brainwashing is deflected by a silly counter-attack: this criticism is nothing but "whataboutism," the favorite activity of Russians and other moral relativists and denizens of illiberal regimes.

Additional irony, of course, lies in the fact that Russians are the most self-critical people that I know. That's the one thing they truly excel at – criticizing themselves, their state, their people, their customs and their political system. It is another irony that the information the West habitually exploits in its own shameless "whataboutism" was provided to it free of charge by Russian dissidents from Herzen all the way to Solzhenitsyn and Masha Gessen.

There is rarely an article in the mass media which, while addressing some ills of modern society, doesn't refer to the evils of Gulag, Stalin, lack of democracy and other "ills" of Soviet life. How many articles in the mass media do we read where references to the extermination of the native population, of workers burning in their factories, of thugs dispersing protests or demonstrations, of brutal exploitation, mass incarceration, deportation of the Japanese, witch hunts, or cruel cynical wars – occur without simultaneous references to Stalin's Russia?

You complain about the lack of political choices during elections? What, you want Commies to run you life? You complain about economic inequality? What, you want drab socialism instead? In other words, instead of a traditionally defined "whataboutism," Western propaganda utilizes a slightly more subtle version revealing something bad about itself, but then rapidly switching to demonizing and criticizing its rivals.

The classic example of this approach was described by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky in their 1988 study Manufacturing Consent .

In the chapter entitled "Worthy and Unworthy Victims," the authors draw the comparison between the coverage of Polish priest, murdered by in Poland in 1984 and the media coverage of Catholic Priests assassinated in Latin America. Jerzy Popieluszko had 78 articles devoted to him, with ten articles on the front page. In the meantime, seventy-two religious victims in Latin America during the period of 1964-78 were subject of only eight articles devoted to all of them combined, with only one article making the front page (Chomsky & Herman, Manufacturing Consent , Pantheon Books, 2002, p. 40).

Presumably, Soviets become a subject of jokes when, instead of addressing the question of Stalin's victims, they embark on discussing the lynching of black Americans. What is worth pondering is why the United States hasn't become the subject of similar jokes when they write hundreds of articles on one death within the Soviet zone of influence while practically ignoring persistent right-wing violence in their own sphere.

"Whataboutism" is not just a rhetorical device invented to deflect criticism; the accusation in "whataboutism" leveled at anyone who defends himself from arbitrary or illogical charges is the accusation that reveals a particular set of power relations.

These accusations of "whataboutism" imply a certain inequality, when the accuser bullies the accused into admitting his guilt.

The accuser puts the accused on the defensive, clearly implying his moral superiority. This moral superiority, of course, is rather fictional, especially if we keep in mind that the Hebrew word "satan" means an accuser. Accusing and blaming others has a satanic ring to that, something that anyone engaged in accusations should remember.

You belched yesterday during dinner. You violated the laws of good table manners.

– But everybody belches!

It is irrelevant, please answer the charge and don't try to avoid it by resorting to 'whataboutism." Did you belch or not?

"Putin's a killer," Bill O'Reilly said to Trump in a February interview. "There are a lot of killers," Trump whatabouted . "We've got a lot of killers. What do you think -- our country's so innocent?"

Here, the media dismisses as "whataboutism" Trump's perfectly logical and correct answer – the one that Trump highlighted himself last week when he ordered the killing of the Iranian general Soleimaini.

Trump's answer, however, was interpreted as somehow outrageous. How dare he compare? As if only a Russian stooge engaged in "whataboutism" can suggest that Western murders and violence are not different from Russian ones.

Dan Zak, who invents a verb "to whatabout" in reference to Trump's exchange with O'Reilly, reveals another highly significant dimension of the term. Due to the abuse of the concept during the Cold War era, and due to the relentless propaganda of the likes of Edward Lucas or the former Ambassador to Russia, Michael McFaul, the charge of "whataboutism" began to be leveled at anyone who says anything critical about the United States.

You talk about US racism – you are carrying water for Soviet "whataboutists;" you talk about militarism, police brutality, wars and regime changes, or complain about the destruction of nature – you are a Russian stooge.

And God forbid you criticize failed policies of the Democrats, the Clintons in particular. You are worse than a stooge. You are a Soviet troll spitting "whataboutism," while interfering in the US electoral process.

Trump might have more faults than any of the recent American political leader. Yet, it is the charge of Russian connection and its merging with the charge of "Whataboutism" that began to highlight some sort of sick synergy: if Trump uses this trope of Russian propaganda, he has to be working with Putin. That's the tenor of all recent applications of the term in the mass media.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the Trump administration's murky ties to Vladimir Putin and his associates, whataboutism is viewed by many as a Russian import,"

opines Claire Fallon in her essay on the subject, while the title says it all: "Whataboutism, A Russian Propaganda Technique, Popular With Trump, His Supporters."

The list of publications with very similar titles can obviously go on and on.

And herein lies the most pernicious legacy of the term.

It subconsciously invokes the spirit of Joe McCarthy. And as such it is still very effective in stifling discourse, in dismissing criticism, while character-assassinating dissenting voices.

Never mind that the press, as in the good old days of Father Popieluszko, is still filled to the brim with endless stories of Russian discrimination of the gay community, of Chinese abuse of the Uighurs, or the absence of new and old freedoms in the countries that Pentagon classifies as adversary.

To complain about the lack of balance and the biased focus would be engaging in "Soviet Style of Whataboutism," wouldn't it be?

Vladimir Golstein, former associate professor at Yale University, is currently Chair of the Department of Slavic Studies at Brown University.


Charlotte Russe ,

US propaganda has been quite effective. After all, isn't it merely the merchandising and selling of ideas. So why wouldn't a hyper-capitalist country be extremely effective at using words and images to control behavior. That's how multibillion dollar corporations stimulate consumerism. They convince the public to buy goods and services they don't really need. So why not use those same marketing skills to impart ideological beliefs.

Essentially, isn't that how the notion of "exceptionalism" became rooted in the American psyche, establishing a rationale to pursue a slew of military misadventures. And think of the ingenious propagandist who invented the idea of "spreading democracy" via bombs, drones, and bullets. For decades this secured public consent for innumerable military escapades.

However, the arrival of Trump changed everything. He unwittingly forced the US propaganda machine to stumble and fumble with contradictory messages disassembling the control mainstream media news once happily secured over the entire population.

In desperation to avoid building political consciousness the US state-run media neglected to attack Trump exclusively over reactionary policies, but misguidedly warmongered against Russia for more than three years. Liberal media accused right-wing Trump of being a Russian asset a tactic used more than half a century ago by McCarthyite Russophobes to discredit the Left. Perhaps, the silliness of this propaganda could only produce "lackluster" results consequently never gaining substantial traction among the working-class.

The security state ultimately loses its ability to control the population with sloppy propaganda–they just tune it out. Americans are becoming similar to their Russian counterparts who just assume that all mainstream media news is contrived and not to be believed.

George Mc ,

I thought the reference to the Wiki article was a piss take until I went direct to the source. I see no logical connection between Russia or indeed any country and the rhetorical device of "whataboutism". But it seems the mighty omniscient Wiki says otherwise. Yes – and there's Trump getting a prominent place in the Wiki entry. Is every entry in Wiki geared to the current demands of propaganda? What next I wonder? How about:

Willem ,

I first read about whataboutism at Chomsky's website. I thought Chomsky made a very good definition at the time, so I looked up what he actually said and thought of quoting him here. Well his definition is typical for Chomsky where he says some truthful things, which he immediately buries under a pack of lies

Chomsky on whataboutism:

'CHOMSKY: One of the most elementary moral truisms is that you are responsible for the anticipated consequences of your own actions. It is fine to talk about the crimes of Genghis Khan, but there isn't much that you can do about them.'

That is correct. But unfortunately for the professor, he is not devoid of a little whataboutism himself, where he continues to say that

'If Soviet intellectuals chose to devote their energies to crimes of the U.S., which they could do nothing about, that is their business. We honor those who recognized that the first duty is to concentrate on your own country.'

Then Chomsky buries this whataboutism with another lie saying that:

'And it is interesting that no one ever asks for an explanation, because in the case of official enemies, truisms are indeed truisms.'

Which isn't a truism at all, but apparantly all official enemies of the US are, by definition enemies of Chomsky.Then Chomsky continues by saying that

'It is when truisms are applied to ourselves that they become contentious, or even outrageous. But they remain truisms.'

Not necessarily so, but it's close enough to pass for truth when discussing whataboutism. After which Chomsky adds another lie, i.e., that

'In fact, the truisms hold far more for us than they did for Soviet dissidents, for the simple reason that we are in free societies, do not face repression, and can have a substantial influence on government policy.'

I mean, that is just so much bullshit that I do not even know where to start. For instance Solzjenitsyn, SU greatest dissident, wrote his books in the SU, the Russians didn't like it, and they let Solzjenitsyn go to Switzerland where he become famous and a millionaire, a Nobel price winner, everything that money could buy. He returned to Russia in 1990 and was lauded by amongst others Putin himself and died peacefully in 2008.

'Free society', bollocks: most of us have the freedom to watch the show that others play on their behalf and toil, 'no repression': tell that to Assange, 'substantial influence on government policy': quite difficult when most of the government's decisions are faceless.

This type of lying by Chomsky just goes on and on and I am amazed that I hadn't seen through it the first time I read Chomsky.

Worst is his hypocrisy where professor Chomsky, the worlds best known 'dissident', whose books are sold at airports, who received grants from the MIC to work on linguistics, and who became a millionaire by airing his convoluted views that are not what they are supposed to be (ie dissident), dares to write in the same interview that

'Elementary honesty is often uncomfortable, in personal life as well, and there are people who make great efforts to evade it. For intellectuals, throughout history, it has often come close to being their vocation. Intellectuals are commonly integrated into dominant institutions. Their privilege and prestige derives from adapting to the interests of power concentrations, often taking a critical look but in very limited ways.'

I mean that is just Chomsky writing about himself, but pretending a whataboutism about all those other bad intellectuals.

Interview: https://chomsky.info/2003____/

Jack_Garbo ,

Chomsky's an example of the establishment "pet intellectual" who quietly rages against his master. Youthful dissidence, he found after a few police beatings, is a fool's game, noisy, bloody and futile. Better to growl from a safe distance, repeat the obvious with clear logic and wallow in unearned respect.

lundiel ,

According to a 2019 Gallop poll 40% of American women under 30 would like to leave the US.

Given the economic burden forced upon south/central american countries by the land of the free, it's understandable that America has net migration.

If you up sticks and move to another country it becomes survival at any cost. However, a lot don't make it and return home .if they can afford to.

lundiel ,

When you move to a racist, nationalist country, you have to spend every opportunity thanking them for taking you and congratulating them for allowing you to work yourself to death so you can pay the mortgage on your shed home.

Estaugh ,

Calm doctor, calm, you will wake up Napoleon in the next ward https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4

Gall ,

Many of them are economic refugees who come here after B-52s have turned their country into a parking lot or the elite of other countries who were caught selling out their nations and enriching themselves or those that actually believed the PR that the USG actually gives a flying phuk about "freedom and democracy" propagated by the child molesting perverts in Pedo Wood.

There are also a number who have specifically come here to get even and who can blame them?

Dungroanin ,

What about the 'Russian influence' report not published by Bozo The PM?

& while I'm here

What about the Durham investigation into Russiagate which also seems to have disappeared from imminent publication over a month ago?

Hmm – wasn't it Kruschevs staffers who admired the US propaganda / Perception Management advertising/PR industry by saying in Russia nobody believed the Russian propaganda because Russians knew that's what it was; but all westerners swallowed it and rushed out to buy ever 'better' washing powders, poisonous foods and products without realising they were being lied to.

Steve Hayes ,

What about US violations of international law?
What about US wars of aggression?
What about US regime change operations?
What about US lying propaganda?
What about US murderous sanctions?
What about US funding, arming and training of jihadist terrorists?
What about US funding, arming and training of fascist terrorists?
What about US threats and intimidation of the International Criminal Court?
What about US exceptionalism, which mirrors nothing so much as the Nazi ideas of ubermensch and untermensch?

richard le sarc ,

In Trump and Pompeo you see the evolution of a new type-the Ubumensch.

Gall ,

Just like to add: What about the genocide of the Indigenous population? What about all those broken treaties? What about all the lies?

[Jan 10, 2020] Joe Biden under cross examination in senate trail would be Conedy Central show transmitted live

The folks who hatched that particular impeachment plan and pitched it to Nancy Pelosi must have been the same idiots in the DNC who dreamt up the Russiagate scandal and also pursued Paul Manafort to get him off DJT's election campaign team. Dmitri Alperovich / Crowdstrike, Alexandra Chalupa: we're looking at you.
The real Trump move would be to hit the twitter right before the house impeachment vote and announce that he has instructed the House Republicans to vote for impeachment.
Notable quotes:
"... At least this mess made it patently clear the Dem obsession with Russia has been all about preserving their Ukraine pickpocketing operation. ..."
Nov 27, 2019 | www.forbes.com

Forbes.com billwhalen 26 September 2019 Link

I ordered a truckload of pop corn to snack on during the trial in the Senate. Just imagine Joe Biden under cross examination as he flips 'n flops! "Was that me in the Video, I can't recall."

Maracatu | Nov 26 2019 21:56 utc | 18

I can see a Trump marketing consultant designing a campaign centered on the impeachment hearings called "The Swamp Strikes Back". It might be most effective as a comic strip.

Fly | Nov 27 2019 0:30 utc | 33

At least this mess made it patently clear the Dem obsession with Russia has been all about preserving their Ukraine pickpocketing operation.
Just Saying | Nov 27 2019 7:22 utc | 58

All the bull-Schiff comes from Hillary's lingerie. The democrats need to secure a huge laundromat

[Jan 10, 2020] Samson was a fool and his own worst enemy. Something of the same can be said of the United States in recent decades.

Jan 10, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Most people are familiar with at least the outlines of the biblical Samson story: a mighty warrior who slays the enemies of the Israelites in great numbers using the jawbone of an ass among other weapons.

Sadly, after the captivating Delilah seduces Samson into revealing the secret of his extraordinary strength -- his unshorn hair -- he ends up blind, in chains, and held captive in the temple of the Philistines.

Samson asks the Lord to restore his strength. The King James Bible explains what happens next: "And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life." It was a huge bloodletting, and among the victims was the hero himself.

It's a dramatic story, made for the movies. The 1949 Technicolor version, directed by Cecil B. DeMille and starring Victor Mature and Hedy Lamarr, remains a camp classic of the sandal-and-togas genre. But whether in the original text or on celluloid, the denouement does not qualify as a happy one. Samson was a fool and his own worst enemy. Something of the same can be said of the United States in recent decades.

[Jan 10, 2020] Trump decided to play the role of Benjamin Netanyahu Santa Claus again

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

DFC , Jan 8 2020 19:20 utc | 198

Probably in the medium term the situation for the US in ME will be worse, but in the short term (in an electoral year) the people I talked, with some knowledge of the recent history of the ME, and me, we think:

a) Trump dares to do what at least 3 former administration did not dare to do: kill the first "terrorist" on the list (as ex-admiral William J. Fallon has said, Suleimani was the Nº 1 in his list for 12 years), so for the American people is the more resolute and brave POTUS of at least 10 administration (somebody says from Lincoln times). Obama was a coward.

b) The fact that Suleimani was a national hero for a nation of 82 million people and also for 150 million of shia around the world, mourned by millions in the streets, make a bigger Trump "victory" over the Iranian "regime", and it is a powerful advice to the others leaders and commanders in the world that try to fight or oppose to USA.

c) People say that after killing Al-Bagdadi, Suleimani, Muhandis, the next in the list is Nasralah (pure wishful thinking but right now, why not thinking that?)

d) The USA did no use their AA system to shut-down the incoming missiles to not give a clue to the Iranians of their real effectiveness in combat situation and because the Russians have many SIGINT platforms following the events to capture the signals, methods, tactics and technology of the US anti-ballistic missiles systems. So now the Iranians are blind of the real effectiveness of their missiles in a real combat situation and the Russians do not have a clue also. For sure USA can take down at least some modified SCUD C missiles, simply it was not worth to do.

e) The fact that Trump did not retaliate is not a symptom of weakness, simply no American was hurt after killing Suleimani (an act of war), only some holes in the sand.

f) In the speech of today Trump is defiant with the killing of Suleimani and with more economic sanctions to Iran, that will be more crippling than now. He does not want to escalate (more). There will be a deal in the future, but much less good for the Iranians than the Obama's JCPOA (it was an electoral promise).

g) The retaliation of the PMU, they say, "will be similar than that of Iran", translating it : "lob some katyusha rockets in the backyard of few US bases giving advice to the Americans do not go out". No risks at all, the se-escalation is complete.

h) Trump is defiant about not leaving Iraq, I think at the end they will go but after they have a very good deal. Of course it is all about the Iraqi oil, in exchange for the American blood and money wasted in Iraq. Iraq has the biggest oil reserves in the world and USA want a good chunk of them, they never ever leave "giving" all of them to the Chinese or Iranians or anybody else. Trump does not want US soldiers in Iraq, but he wants the oil above anything else (it is condition "sine qua non" to maintain the Empire)

i) Trump has now the full enthusiastic support of the AIPAC and all the others powerful Israeli lobby he will have more money than required for the election. He has demonstrated he is the best possible POTUS for Israel

j) In the short term USA will leave Syria and in the medium term Iraq, OK, but they never ever leave "all the region", they need to be there to maintain the "American Way of Live" (US $ as reserve currency)

If nothing dramatically change, I expect a crushing victory of Trump in the coming US election, he has all the cards now in his hand, and he will not waste them.


Petri Krohn , Jan 8 2020 19:22 utc | 199

The 5 lightweight hangars at the Ain al-Asad airbase that were destroyed in the Iranian bullseye hit housed US drones. Possibly the very one used to assassinate General Qassem Soleimani.

See this tweet by Babak Taghvaee from yesterday with photos:

#BREAKING: It is now confirmed that the #IRGC backed Kataib Hezbollah (45th Brigade of #PMU) launched 40 unguided rockets at Ain Al Asad Air Base where the #USArmy's MQ-1Cs are based. At-least one of them participated in the operation for elimination of #Soleimani in #Baghdad!

arby , Jan 8 2020 19:22 utc | 200
The US contractor that was killed worked for Valiant Integrated Services.

https://www.sacbee.com/news/local/article239053173.html

valiant

[Jan 10, 2020] Proof that truth can be funnier than fiction

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ben , Jan 8 2020 21:15 utc | 278

Bubbles @ 103 opined:

"Trump has accomplished 3 things in 3 years."

1. "Being Santa Claus to Netanyahu, the far right and the very rich (Generous donors)"
2. "Doing the impossible, making Hillary look like the better of 2 terrible choices"
3. " Proving 42% of the American public aren't too swift."

Proof that truth can be funnier than fiction..LOL

[Jan 10, 2020] Looks like the US does not like unfriendly countries firing missiles at them

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ItIsMeItIs , Jan 8 2020 20:48 utc | 258

The US does not like unfriendly countries firing missiles at them. They're funny like that.

[Jan 10, 2020] Who it the most contemptible single group of people in the USA today?

Dec 23, 2019 | www.wnd.com

KDC4 hours ago ,

"Nancy Pelosi, pressing the Senate to comply with her demands"...Hey, Nancy, this isn't how it works. You, yourself, are in "contempt of Senate" by not proceeding with the article of impeachment for a vote.

Is there such a thing as "contempt of Senate?" Probably not. Just like there's no such thing as "contempt of Congress." Hey the Dems used it, so I used it as an example. Ha, ha, ha...stooges!

TrumpyBear KDC3 hours ago ,

Contempt of Congress is a real thing - I think those asshats are the most contemptible single group of people in the USA today!

[Jan 10, 2020] "This Plane Was Designed By Clowns, Who Are Supervised By Monkeys"

Jan 10, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Shocking Boeing Emails Reveal Contempt For Management, FAA

"Would you put your family on a Max simulator trained aircraft? I wouldn't," one employee said to a colleague in another exchange from 2018, before the first crash. "No," the colleague responded.

[Jan 10, 2020] Corporate Dems are afrid that that those weird Russian ads will magically swayed our entire nation into re-electing Donald Trump for President.

I bet Robert Mueller still has GRU phone number. The Dems could mention a quid pro quo and offer to lift some of our sanctions.
Nov 28, 2019 | caucus99percent.com

Pluto's Republic on Thu, 11/28/2019 - 3:32am

The Democratic Party ought to give ...Russia a jingle

@Situational Lefty

Maybe the Russians would be willing to drop a handful of anti-left, baitclick ads on Facebook -- you know? Those weird ads that magically swayed our entire nation into electing Donald Trump for President. I bet Robert Mueller still has their phone number. The Dems could mention a quid pro quo and offer to lift some of our sanctions.

entrepreneur on Thu, 11/28/2019 - 1:03pm
You're right. They are obviously much smarter with their advertising dollars

@Pluto's Republic

Politicians spend millions and don't get the results that RUSSIA! got with 100K.

[Jan 08, 2020] 75% Of Registered Voters Can't Identify Iran On A Map

"War Is God's Way of Teaching Us Geography" the quote that has been attributed to both Ambrose Bierce and Mark Twain
Jan 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

As thousands of American service members prepare for the worst in the Middle East following an American drone strike that killed Iran's second-most powerful man, just 23% of registered voters can identify the Islamic republic on an unlabeled map of the globe, according to a Morning Consult/Politico survey.

When shown an unlabeled map of just the Middle East, the number rose to a still-abysmal 28% . Eight percent of those thought Iran was Iraq on the second map - just like Joe Biden .

Of those surveyed, men were around twice as likely as women to identify Iran on both maps...

[Jan 08, 2020] How to turn gold into lead

Jan 08, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Edward A. Vazquez 14 hours ago • edited

One day after 9/11, Russian president Vladimir Putin said that "we are all Americans, now." And, on the Sunday following 9/11--at an international soccer match in Tehran, Iran--our flag was raised as 60,000 Iranian spectators sang our national anthem.

Leave it to George W. Bush to turn GOLD into LEAD.

[Jan 08, 2020] Americans Feel So Much Safer After Assassination of Some Guy They Never Heard of Before

Jan 08, 2020 | www.anti-empire.com

Mr. Dueck of Seminole is breathing a sigh of relief this morning after it was revealed that some guy he'd never heard of before was now dead.

"Finally I can sleep at night!" said Dueck, quickly Googling 'General Qasem Solemaini' so he can look smart at the coffee shop this afternoon. "I'm glad we finally have a President who looks after our interests instead of just being concerned about his own reelection!"

After skimming the Wikipedia article about Solemaini, Dueck now believes that the assassination was definitely justified.

"I don't know how we survived and thrived as a country all these years with that guy I just heard of his morning around," said Dueck. "Good thing that guy from out over there somewhere is gone!"

Dueck spent the rest of the afternoon arguing with people on the Internet and informing them about some group he recently learned about, but cannot pronounce, called Quds Force.

"You don't have to be scared of them anymore," said Dueck to his buddies who informed him they weren't actually afraid to begin with. "Having watched more than three YouTube videos on the topic, I can tell you that the world is a lot safer now that what's his name is dead!"

After a full day's worth of reading Internet comments, Dueck is now the nation's self-proclaimed foremost expert on foreign policy and is looking forward to his work as a pundit on Fox News in the very near future.

Source: The Daily Bonnet

[Jan 08, 2020] While 60^of Americans neven heard aboutSoleimani befor 43$ of the country approcved Trump-Pomeo assasination of this senior Iran commander

The unique, really exceptional feature of the USA is that it does not try to hide idiocy of its leaders and lack of education and interest in knowing the truth of the majority of population
Jan 08, 2020 | www.rt.com

RT :

A new poll has found that Americans doubt Donald Trump has a clear Iran policy, but nonetheless they support the decision to kill Qassem Soleimani – who, remarkably, had been an unknown entity for the majority of respondents.

Forty-three percent of Americans said they approved of the US drone strike that killed the Iranian commander last week in Baghdad, while 38% disapproved and 19% said they were unsure, according to the results of a HuffPost/YouGov survey.

And while almost half the country backs Soleimani's assassination, 60% of Americans conceded that they had never heard of the Quds Force commander before last week. An additional 14% said they weren't sure if they had known about him before the strike.

[Jan 08, 2020] Big, bad Putin attacked by slimy rat Browder.

Jan 08, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Is there a chorus of politicians singing in there about how lazy they are, and how they never bothered to verify Browder' story? The story is indeed remarkable, but not in the way that first appears.

Stephen Fry / @stephenfry

You may or may not know the remarkable story of @Billbrowder and the #MagnitskyAct - find out the startling truth by listening to
#MagnitskytheMusical by the wondrous @JohnnyFlynnHQ & @roberthudson - @BBCRadio3 7.30 Sun 12th Jan

Magnitsky the Musical

Book and lyrics by Robert Hudson
Music and lyrics by Johnny Flynn

12 January 2020
О 1 hour, 34 minutes

Johnny Flynn and Robert Hudson bring us a musical based on the
incredible story of an American venture capitalist, a Russian tax
advisor, a crazy heist, the Trump Tower meeting and the very rule of
law.

Blending music and satire, the story explores the truths and fictions
surrounding the origins and aftershocks of the Magnitsky Act; global
legislation which allows governments to sanction those who they see
as offenders of human rights.

It tells the story of a tax adviser's struggle to uncover a huge tax
fraud, his imprisonment by the very authorities he is investigating,
and the American financier's crusade for justice.

Johnny Flynn, Paul Chahidi and members of the cast perform songs in
a epic story that explores democracy, corruption, and how we
undervalue the law at our peril.

Bill Paul Chahidi Sergei Johnny Flynn Jamie Fenella Woolgar Natalia Ellie Kendrick Kuznetsov Gus Brown Guard Clive Hayward Silchenko Ian Conningham Jared Will Kirk Fisherman Neil McCaul Judge Jessica Turner

Additional singing by Sinead Maclnnes, Laura Christy, Scarlett
Courtney and Lucy Reynolds.

The cellist is Joe Zeitlin. Sound is by Peter Ringrose. Directed by Sasha Yevtushenko.

[Jan 08, 2020] Iraqi Militia Leader Threatens To Target American Citizens If They Re-Elect Trump

Jan 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

"If the American people re-elect Trump to the US presidency, this would mean they support his crimes. "

[Jan 08, 2020] Three major Trump accomplishments

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Bubbles , Jan 8 2020 16:29 utc | 103

arby @90

Trump has accomplished 3 things in 3 years.

1. Being Santa Claus to Netanyahu, the far right and the very rich (Generous donors)
2. Doing the impossible, making Hillary look like the better of 2 terrible choices
3. Proving 42% of the American public aren't too swift.


[Jan 08, 2020] Like all too many Americans, Trump has a hard time grasping the fact that Iran can strike back and strike hard

Jan 08, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

F. Margaret Oregon 2h ago

My favorite line in this article: "I suspect ... like all too many Americans, Trump has a hard time grasping the fact that other countries are real." So very dismal, but that gave me a good laugh.

[Jan 08, 2020] Is Pence an idiot or just a religious nut?

Jan 08, 2020 | abcnews.go.com

"Soleimani did 9/11!" - Pence helpfully yet insanely chimed in.

"You're not a wimp like Obama, who refused to assassinate this terrorist," he was probably told. "You're decisive, a real leader. This one blow will change the entire calculus of the Middle East," they likely told him. "If you take out Soleimani, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region."

[Jan 08, 2020] What about moving UN to Moscow

Jan 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Volkodav , 1 hour ago link

Trump Administration is barring Iran Foreign Affairs Minister Javad Zarif

https://twitter.com/John_Hudson/status/1214292153654009856

Brazen Heist II , 1 hour ago link

LOL

The indispensible nation of imbeciles is at it again.

Please tell me that is a joke.

Noob678 , 1 hour ago link

Germany to withdraw part of its military forces from Iraq

ChinFu , 1 hour ago link

That letter is no mistake. It shows that there are 2 opposing sides in the US Military, the dark hats and the white hats. One side wants to end wars, the other side do not. Just like what Q has been saying all along.

Noob678 , 2 hours ago link

Iranian MPs declare all of US military 'terrorist entity' after General Soleimani killing

logical-different , 2 hours ago link

Good old USA. Invade illegally by lying, killing, build an airbase and tell everyone that they'll leave if Iraq will pay for the airbase and if not they'll sanction Iraq into oblivion.

Is it any wonder why most of the world is disgusted with their behaviour.

[Jan 08, 2020] CNN Attacks Babylon Bee Is The Web Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site

Jan 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

And, The Babylon Bee immediately jumped into action to satirically 'document' the reaction:

CNN has slammed the world's best satire site, The Babylon Bee, after CNN executives realized that "fake news" articles on the website were getting at least as much social media traction as their own.

"There ain't room in this internet for the both of us," growled one CNN anchor on the air Monday evening. "There simply aren't enough people out there for us to fool with our fake news stories and The Babylon Bee to fool with their satire. There isn't enough clickbait and outrage traffic to go around. "

"They're obviously amateurs over there at The Bee," said Brian Stelter.

"A lot of times, their reporting comes true. If you're gonna do fake news, do it right -- 100% fake, guaranteed, 24/7. They really should learn from the pros over here at CNN."

"Stay out of our territory," he growled.

[Jan 08, 2020] Russia Proposes To Secure Iraqi Airspace With S-400 Air Defense

Jan 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

sijoittaja , 32 minutes ago link

Does Trump get a kickback from the deal? He should get a bonus after his latest achiements in how to make Russia great again.

[Jan 08, 2020] Isreal did became a normal country

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Jan 7 2020 20:05 utc | 30

an interesting survey that found "More than four out of every five Israelis consider their leaders to be corrupt

[Jan 08, 2020] History repeats first of tragedy and then as a farce

Eminent threat from Soleimani is a close equivalent to Bush "WDM in Iraq" hoax. And Compo looks like a better fed version of Gondoliza with her "mushroom cloud" evil war propaganda.
As There was implicit agreement that Iran officials can travel safely in Iraq, which was breached, the natural result might expulsion of the US forces from Iraq. Which also means the collapse of US forces in Syrian bases and the Trump's idea of stealing oil.
Like Bush II Trump exceeded his authority and ordered illegal assassination. He needs to be impeached. Pompeo and Ester need to be fired and tried.
Jan 08, 2020 | www.cnn.com
n 2008, Trump told CNN's Wolf Blitzer he thought George W. Bush should have been impeached for lying about the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We are still feeling the blowback from that fatally flawed Iraq war. One can only shudder at the gale force of another one.

[Jan 08, 2020] Pompeo as a religious nut

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lurk , Jan 6 2020 22:28 utc | 103

Sasha and Joerg:

You misspelled "evilgelical"

[Jan 08, 2020] Trump real priorities: fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homelessTrump real priorities: MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

Jan 08, 2020 | twitter.com

Donald J. Trump ‏ 9:11 PM - 4 Jan 2020

The United States just spent Two Trillion Dollars on Military Equipment. We are the biggest and by far the BEST in the World! If Iran attacks an American Base, or any American, we will be sending some of that brand new beautiful equipment their way...and without hesitation!

shoe ‏ 9:18 PM - 4 Jan 2020

fuck healthcare, fuck our veterans, fuck our crumbling infrastructure, fuck the homless MOMMY MILITARY INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX NEEDS MORE MONEY HELL YEAH

[Jan 08, 2020] Trump established Guinness record in US Present lawless, petty, childish, infantile, imbecile behaviour

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

bjd , Jan 7 2020 1:28 utc | 153

Zarif is blocked from addressing the UN Security Council .
The level of lawless, petty, childish, infantile, imbecile behaviour is breathtaking.

[Jan 08, 2020] Shame on you for using such language with regard to the current President of the United States of America!

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

RJPJR , Jan 7 2020 1:31 utc | 154

Cemi | Jan 6 2020 22:15 utc | 97: "The point is: Trump is loose cannon. We can analyse back and forth but no-one knows what the narcissistic jackass decides next."

Shame on you for using such language with regard to the current President of the United States of America!

It is an outrageous insult to jackasses!

[Jan 08, 2020] One small question

Jan 08, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ab initio , Jan 6 2020 22:18 utc | 98

Inevitably the US will leave Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan.

The question is if Tehran will become rubble in the process? If Saudi oil installations are destroyed? And even Tel Aviv?

[Jan 08, 2020] An emperor with no clothes

It takes a real winner to make Bush 43 look like a beacon of self-control.
Jan 08, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

Trump the Intimidator Fails Again.

Because he's just a bully with delusions of grandeur.

Steve, LHR|2h ago

Times Pick
It's finally abundantly clear that the great deal maker is nothing more than an emperor with no clothes. The real shame is the inability of a large part of America to see this for what it is: a failure of leadership from voter on up. Unfortunately, America has lost its moral ability to lead, and more's the pity as the ascendancy of others, like China, will not be as progressive as America was in the past. You'd think that the great deal maker would understand that leaders are not bullies. Sad.

[Jan 08, 2020] One way to retaliate

Jan 08, 2020 | www.nytimes.com

PMD Arlington, Virginia 6h ago

Maybe the Iranians will counter by invoking their intent to hit 52 Trump properties?

[Jan 08, 2020] If Trump wants to destroy Iran he should just become their president.

Jan 08, 2020 | twitter.com


hrygirl ‏ 5:22 AM - 6 Jan 2020

Jeff Tiedrich ‏ 6:24 AM - 5 Jan 2020

no money for healthcare or education or infrastructure but we have 2 trillion dollars for bombs so that a pathetic old draft-dodging coward who deep down inside knows he's a weak piece of shit can try to pretend he's the man his tyrant father told him he never will be

Stonekettle ‏ 8:30 AM - 27 Dec 2019

Is the best part where the market implodes and we lose our homes, jobs, savings while the rich fucks who got huge tax breaks blame us for the disaster as they bail out in golden parachutes and we get to pay to save the country yet again while being lectured about responsibility?

[Jan 08, 2020] Looking for a framework [in Trump forign policy] is like searching for symmetrical patterns in a bowl of spaghetti.

Jan 08, 2020 | www.msn.com

The danger posed by that ignorance is matched daily by the crises created by Trump's own erraticism. His performance as commander in chief has been shaped by a collection of scattered grievances, emotional impulses and random tweets. As the Financial Times's Philip Stephens has said of Trump's foreign policy, "Looking for a framework is like searching for symmetrical patterns in a bowl of spaghetti."

[Jan 08, 2020] CNN Attacks Babylon Bee Is The Web Only Big Enough For One Fake News Site

Jan 08, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

And, The Babylon Bee immediately jumped into action to satirically 'document' the reaction:

CNN has slammed the world's best satire site, The Babylon Bee, after CNN executives realized that "fake news" articles on the website were getting at least as much social media traction as their own.

"There ain't room in this internet for the both of us," growled one CNN anchor on the air Monday evening. "There simply aren't enough people out there for us to fool with our fake news stories and The Babylon Bee to fool with their satire. There isn't enough clickbait and outrage traffic to go around. "

"They're obviously amateurs over there at The Bee," said Brian Stelter.

"A lot of times, their reporting comes true. If you're gonna do fake news, do it right -- 100% fake, guaranteed, 24/7. They really should learn from the pros over here at CNN."

"Stay out of our territory," he growled.

[Jan 07, 2020] Russia Proposes To Secure Iraqi Airspace With S-400 Air Defense

Jan 07, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

sijoittaja , 32 minutes ago link

Does Trump get a kickback from the deal? He should get a bonus after his latest achiements in how to make Russia great again.

[Jan 07, 2020] Israel will fight against Iran to the last American soldier

Jan 07, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

Keyser Söze Alexander Mahone 2 days ago • edited Israel will fight against Iran to the last American soldier 😂😂😂
15 million Jews in the whole world against 90 million Iranians in Iran, I think they will need to fill their ranks with poor, hungry, uneducated teenagers from Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia (74% of US army recruits) 😂😂😂

[Jan 07, 2020] Lucky Trump relocated to Florida just in time: Mar-a-Lago is a national historic landmark

Jan 07, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

edg on Mon, 01/06/2020 - 8:35pm

@DonMidwest

Is Mar-a-Lago a US cultural site? Wait, just looked it up -- it's a national historic landmark. Since Iran obeys international law, it can't be on their list of 35 Best Places to Attack. Trump Tower on the other hand....

[Jan 07, 2020] New Year message to Trump supporters: DUMP TRUMP

Jan 07, 2020 | off-guardian.org

Gall ,

I've given up on Trump. He's just another Zionist sell out. DUMP TRUMP.

[Jan 06, 2020] How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda by Nathan J. Robinson

Highly recommended!
Jan 05, 2020 | www.currentaffairs.org
The Trump administration has assassinated Iran's top military leader, Qassim Suleimani, and with the possibility of a serious escalation in violent conflict, it's a good time to think about how propaganda works and train ourselves to avoid accidentally swallowing it.

The Iraq War, the bloodiest and costliest U.S. foreign policy calamity of the 21 st century, happened in part because the population of the United States was insufficiently cynical about its government and got caught up in a wave of nationalistic fervor. The same thing happened with World War I and the Vietnam War. Since a U.S./Iran war would be a disaster, it is vital that everyone make sure they do not accidentally end up repeating the kinds of talking points that make war more likely.

Let us bear in mind, then, some of the basic lessons about war propaganda.

Things are not true because a government official says them.

I do not mean to treat you as stupid by making such a basic point, but plenty of journalists and opposition party politicians do not understand this point's implications, so it needs to be said over and over. What happens in the leadup to war is that government officials make claims about the enemy, and then those claims appear in newspapers ("U.S. officials say Saddam poses an imminent threat") and then in the public consciousness, the "U.S. officials say" part disappears, so that the claim is taken for reality without ever really being scrutinized. This happens because newspapers are incredibly irresponsible and believe that so long as you attach "Experts say" or "President says" to a claim, you are off the hook when people end up believing it, because all you did was relay the fact that a person said a thing, you didn't say it was true. This is the approach the New York Times took to Bush administration allegations in the leadup to the Iraq War, and it meant that false claims could become headline news just because a high-ranking U.S. official said them. [UPDATE: here's an example from Vox, today, of a questionable government claim being magically transformed into a certain fact.]

In the context of Iran, let us consider some things Mike Pence tweeted about Qassim Suleimani:

"[Suleimani] assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats and military personnel. The world is a safer place today because Soleimani is gone."

It is possible, given these tweets, to publish the headline: "Suleimani plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats, says Pence." That headline is technically true. But you should not publish that headline unless Pence provides some supporting evidence, because what will happen in the discourse is that people will link to your news story to prove that Suleimani was plotting imminent attacks.

To see how unsubstantiated claims get spread, let's think about the Afghanistan hijackers bit. David Harsanyi of the National Review defends Pence's claim about Suleimani helping the hijackers. Harsanyi cites the 9/11 Commission report, saying that the 9/11 commission report concluded Iran aided the hijackers. The report does indeed say that Iran allowed free travel to some of the men who went on to carry out the 9/11 attacks. (The sentence cut off at the bottom of Harsanyi's screenshot, however, rather crucially says : "We have no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.") Harsanyi admits that the report says absolutely nothing about Suleimani. But he argues that Pence was "mostly right," pointing out that Pence did not say Iran knew these men would be the hijackers, merely that it allowed them passage.

Let's think about what is going on here. Pence is trying to convince us that Suleimani deserved to die, that it was necessary for the U.S. to kill him, which will also mean that if Iran retaliates violently, that violence will be because Iran is an aggressive power rather than because the U.S. just committed an unprovoked atrocity against one of its leaders, dropping a bomb on a popular Iranian leader. So Pence wants to link Suleimani in your mind with 9/11, in order to get you blood boiling the same way you might have felt in 2001 as you watched the Twin Towers fall.

There is no evidence that either Iran or Suleimani tried to help these men do 9/11. Harsanyi says that Pence does not technically allege this. But he doesn't have to! What impression are people going to get from helped the hijackers? Pence hopes you'll conflate Suleimani and Iran as one entity, then assume that if Iran ever aided these men in any way, it basically did 9/11 even if it didn't have any clue that was what they were going to do.

This brings us to #2:

Do not be bullied into accepting simple-minded sloganeering

Let's say that, long before Ted Kaczynski began sending bombs through the mail, you once rented him an apartment. This was pure coincidence. Back then he was just a Berkeley professor, you did not know he would turn out to be the Unabomber. It is, however, possible, for me to say, and claim I am not technically lying, that you "housed and materially aided the Unabomber." (A friend of mine once sold his house to the guy who turned out to be the Green River Killer, so this kind of situation does happen.)

Of course, it is incredibly dishonest of me to characterize what you did that way. You rented an apartment to a stranger, yet I'm implying that you intentionally helped the Unabomber knowing he was the Unabomber. In sane times, people would see me as the duplicitous one. But the leadup to war is often not a sane time, and these distinctions can get lost. In the Pence claim about Afghanistan, for it to have any relevance to Suleimani, it would be critical to know (assuming the 9/11 commission report is accurate) whether Iran actually could have known what the men it allowed to pass would ultimately do, and whether Suleimani was involved. But that would involve thinking, and War Fever thrives on emotion rather than thought.

There are all kinds of ways in which you can bully people into accepting idiocy. Consider, for example, the statement "Nathan Robinson thinks it's good to help terrorists who murder civilians." There is a way in which this is actually sort of true: I think lawyers who aid those accused of terrible crimes do important work. If we are simple-minded and manipulative, we can call that "thinking it's good to help terrorists," and during periods of War Fever, that's exactly what it will be called. There is a kind of cheap sophistry that becomes ubiquitous:

I remember all this bullshit from my high school years. Opposing the invasion of Iraq meant loving Saddam Hussein and hating America. Thinking 9/11 was the predictable consequence of U.S. actions meant believing 9/11 was justified. Of course, rational discussion can expose these as completely unfair mischaracterizations, but every time war fever whips up, rational discussion becomes almost impossible. In World War I, if you opposed the draft you were undermining your country in a time of war. During Vietnam, if you believed the North Vietnamese had the more just case, you were a Communist traitor who endorsed every atrocity committed in the name of Ho Chi Minh, and if you thought John McCain shouldn't have been bombing civilians in the first place then clearly you believed he should have been tortured and you hated America.

"If you oppose assassinating Suleimani you must love terrorists" will be repeated on Fox News (and probably even on MSNBC). Nationalism advocate Yoram Hazony says there is something wrong with those who do not "feel shame when our country is shamed" -- presumably those who do not feel wounded pride when America is emasculated by our enemies are weak and pitiful. We should refuse to put up with these kind of cheap slurs, or even to let those who deploy them place the burden of proof on us to refute them. (In 2004, Democrats worried that they did appear unpatriotic, and so they ran a decorated war veteran, John Kerry, for president. That didn't work.)

Scrutinize the arguments

Here's Mike Pence again:

"[Suleimani] provided advanced deadly explosively formed projectiles, advanced weaponry, training, and guidance to Iraqi insurgents used to conduct attacks on U.S. and coalition forces; directly responsible for the death of 603 U.S. service members, along with thousands of wounded."

I am going to say something that is going to sound controversial if you buy into the kind of simple-minded logic we just discussed: Saying that someone was "responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members" does not, in and of itself, tell us anything about whether what they did was right or wrong. In order to believe it did, we would have to believe that the United States is automatically right, and that countries opposing the United States are automatically wrong. That is indeed the logic that many nationalists in this country follow; remember that when the U.S. shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, causing hundreds of deaths, George H.W. Bush said that he would never apologize for America, no matter what the facts were. What if America did something wrong? That was irrelevant, or rather impossible, because to Bush, a thing was right because America did it, even if that thing was the mass murder of Iranian civilians.

One of the major justifications for murdering Suleimani is that he "caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers." He was thus an aggressor, and could/should have been killed. That is where people like Pence want you to end your inquiry. But let us remember where those soldiers were. Were they in Miami? No. They were in Iraq. Why were they in Iraq? Because we illegally invaded and seized a country. Now, we can debate whether (1) there is actually sufficient evidence of Suleimani's direct involvement and (2) whether these acts of violence can be justified, but to say that Suleimani has "American blood on his hands" is to say nothing at all without an examination of whether the United States was in the right.

We have to think clearly in examining the arguments that are being made. Here 's the Atlantic 's George Packer on the execution:

"There was a case for killing Major General Qassem Soleimani. For two decades, as the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, he executed Iran's long game of strategic depth in the Middle East -- arming and guiding proxy militias in Lebanon and Iraq that became stronger than either state, giving Bashar al-Assad essential support to win the Syrian civil war at the cost of half a million lives, waging a proxy war in Yemen against the hated Saudis, and repeatedly testing America and its allies with military actions around the region for which Iran never seemed to pay a military price."

The article goes on to discuss whether this case is outweighed by the pragmatic case against killing him. But wait. Let's dwell on this. Does this constitute a case for killing him? He assisted Bashar al-Assad. Okay, but presumably then killing Assad would have been justified too? Is the rule here that our government is allowed unilaterally to execute the officials of other governments who are responsible for many deaths? Are we the only ones who can do this? Can any government claim the right?

He assisted Yemen in its fight against "the hated Saudis." But is Saudi Arabia being hated for good reason? It is not enough to say that someone committed violence without analyzing the underlying justice of the parties' relative claims.

Moreover, assumptions are made that if you can prove somebody committed a heinous act, what Trump did is justified. But that doesn't follow: Unless we throw all law out the window, and extrajudicial punishment is suddenly acceptable, showing that Suleimani was a war criminal doesn't prove that you can unilaterally kill him with a drone. Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. So is George W. Bush. But they should be captured and tried in a court, not bombed from the sky. The argument that Suleimani was planning imminent attacks is relevant to whether you can stop him with violence (and requires persuasive proof), but mere allegations of murderous past acts do not show that extrajudicial killings are legitimate.

It's very easy to come up with superficially persuasive arguments that can justify just about anything. The job of an intelligent populace is to see whether those arguments can actually withstand scrutiny.

Keep the focus on what matters

"The main question about the strike isn't moral or even legal -- it's strategic." -- The Atlantic

"The real question to ask about the American drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise" -- The New York Times

"I think that the question that we ought to focus on is why now? Why not a month ago and why not a month from now?" -- Elizabeth Warren

They're going to try to define the debate for you. Leaving aside the moral questions, is this good strategy? And then you find yourself arguing on those terms: No, it was bad strategy, it will put "our personnel" in harms way, without noticing that you are implicitly accepting the sociopathic logic that says "America's interests" are the only ones in the world that matters. This is how debates about Vietnam went: They were rarely about whether our actions were good for Vietnamese people, but about whether they were good or bad for us , whether we were squandering U.S. resources and troops in a "fruitless" "mistake." The people of this country still do not understand the kind of carnage we inflicted on Vietnam because our debates tend to be about whether things we do are "strategically prudent" rather than whether they are just. The Atlantic calls the strike a "blunder," shifting the discussion to be about the wisdom of the killing rather than whether it is a choice our country is even permitted to make. "Blunder" essentially assumes that we are allowed to do these things and the only question is whether it's good for us.

There will be plenty of attempts to distract you with irrelevant issues. We will spent more time talking about whether Trump followed the right process for war, whether he handled the rollout correctly, and less about whether the underlying action itself is correct. People like Ben Shapiro will say things like :

"Barack Obama routinely droned terrorists abroad -- including American citizens -- who presented far less of a threat to Americans and American interests than Soleimani. So spare me the hysterics about 'assassination."

In order for this to have any bearing on anything, you have to be someone who defends what Obama did. If you are, on the other hand, someone who belives that Obama, too, assassinated people without due process (which he did), then Shapiro has proved exactly nothing about whether Trump's actions were legitimate. (Note, too, the presumption that threatening "America's interests" can get you killed, a standard we would not want any other country using but are happy to use ourselves.)

Emphasis matters

Consider three statements:

These are statements made by Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, respectively. Note that each of them is consistent with believing Trump's decision was the wrong one, but their emphasis is different. Buttigieg says Suleimani was a "threat" but that there are "questions," Warren says Suleimani was a "murderer" but that this was "reckless," and Sanders says this was a "dangerous escalation." It could be that none of these three would have done the same thing themselves, but the emphasis is vastly different. Buttigieg and Warren lead with condemnation of the dead man, in ways that imply that there was nothing that unjust about what happened. Sanders does not dwell on Suleimani but instead talks about the dangers of new wars.

We have to be clear and emphatic in our messaging, because so much effort is made to make what should be clear issues appear murky. If, for example, you gave a speech in 2002 opposing the Iraq War, but the first half was simply a discussion of what a bad and threatening person Saddam Hussein was, people might actually get the opposite of the impression you want them to get. Buttigieg and Warren, while they appear to question the president, have the effect of making his action seem reasonable. After all, they admit that he got rid of a threatening murderer! Sanders admits nothing of the kind: The only thing he says is that Trump has made the world worse. He puts the emphasis where it matters.

I do not fully like Sanders' statement, because it still talks a bit more about what war means for our people , but it does mention destabilization and the total number of lives that can be lost. It is a far more morally clear and powerful antiwar statement. Buttigieg's is exactly what you'd expect of a Consultant President and it should give us absolutely no confidence that he would be a powerful voice against a war, should one happen. Warren confirms that she is not an effective advocate for peace. In a time when there will be pressure for a violent conflict, we need to make sure that our statements are not watery and do not make needless concessions to the hawks' propaganda.

Imagine how everything would sound if the other side said it.

If you're going to understand the world clearly, you have to kill your nationalistic emotions. An excellent way to do this is to try to imagine if all the facts were reversed. If Iraq had invaded the United States, and U.S. militias violently resisted, would it constitute "aggression" for those militias to kill Iraqi soldiers? If Britain funded those U.S. militias, and Iraq killed the head of the British military with a drone strike, would this constitute "stopping a terrorist"? Of course, in that situation, the Iraqi government would certainly spin it that way, because governments call everyone who opposes them terrorists. But rationality requires us not just to examine whether violence has been committed (e.g., whether Suleimani ordered attacks) but what the full historical context of that violence is, and who truly deserves the "terrorist" label.

Is there anything Suleimani did that hasn't also been done by the CIA? Remember that we actually engineered the overthrow of the Iranian government, within living people's lifetimes . Would an Iranian have been justified in assassinating the head of the CIA? I doubt there are many Americans who think they would. I think most Americans would consider this terrorism. But this is because terrorism is a word that, by definition, cannot apply to things we do, and only applies to the things others do. When you start to actually reverse the situations in your mind, and see how things look from the other side, you start to fully grasp just how crude and irrational so much propaganda is.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hPOy-LutJQg?feature=oembed

Watch out for euphemisms

Our access to much of the world is through language alone. We only see our tiny sliver of the world with our own eyes, much of the rest of it has to be described in words or shown to us through images. That means it's very easy to manipulate our perceptions. If you control the flow of information, you can completely alter someone's understanding of the things that they can't see firsthand.

Euphemistic language is always used to cover atrocities. Even the Nazis did not say they were "mass murdering innocent civilians." They said they were defending themselves from subversive elements, guaranteeing sufficient living space for their people, purifying their culture, etc. When the United States commits murder, it does not say it is committing murder. It says it is engaging in a stabilization program and restoring democratic rule. We saw during the recent Bolivian coup how easy it is to portray the seizure of power as "democracy" and democracy as tyranny. Euphemistic language has been one of the key tools of murderous regimes. In fact, many of them probably believe their own language; their specialized vocabulary allows them to inhabit a world of their own invention where they are good people punishing evil.

Assassination sounds bad. It sounds like something illegitimate, something that would call into question the goodness of the United States, even if the person being assassinated can be argued to have "deserved it." Thus Rothman and Bloomberg will not even admit that what the U.S. did here was an assassination, even though we literally targeted a high official from a sovereign country and dropped a bomb on him. Instead, this is " neutralization ." (Read this fascinatingly feeble attempt by the Associated Press to explain why it isn't calling an obvious assassination an assassination, just as the media declined to call torture torture when Bush did it.)

Those of us who want to resist marches to war need to insist on calling things exactly what they are and refuse to allow the country to slide into the use of language that conceals the reality of our actions.

Remember what people were saying five minutes ago

Five minutes ago, hardly anybody was talking about Suleimani. Now they all speak as if he was Public Enemy #1. Remember how much you hated that guy? Remember how much damage he did? No, I do not remember, because people like Ben Shapiro only just discovered their hatred for Suleimani once they had to justify his murder.

During the buildup to a war there is a constant effort to make you forget what things were like a few minutes ago. Before World War I, Americans lived relatively harmoniously with Germans in their midst. The same thing with Japanese people before World War II. Then, immediately, they began to hate and fear people who had recently been their neighbors.

Let us say Iran responds to this extrajudicial murder with a colossal act of violent reprisal, after the killing unifies the country around a demand for vengeance. They kill a high-ranking American official, or wage an attack that kills our civilians. Perhaps it will attack some of the soldiers that are now being moved into the Middle East. The Trump administration will then want you to forget that it promised this assassination was to " stop a war ." It will then want you to focus solely on Iran's most recent act, to see that as the initial aggression. If the attack is particularly bad, with family members of victims crying on TV and begging for vengeance, you will be told to look into the face of Iranian evil, and those of us who are anti-war will be branded as not caring about the victims. Nobody wants you to remember the history of U.S./Iran relations, the civilians we killed of theirs or the time we destabilized their whole country and got rid of its democracy. They want you to have a two-second memory, to become a blind and unthinking patriot whose sole thought is the avenging of American blood. Resisting propaganda requires having a memory, looking back on how things were before and not accepting war as the "new normal."

Listen to the Chomsky on your shoulder.

"It is perfectly insane to suggest the U.S. was the aggressor here." -- Ben Shapiro

They are going to try to convince you that you are insane for asking questions, or for not accepting what the government tells you. They will put you in topsy-turvy land, where thinking that assassinating foreign officials is "aggression" is not just wrong, but sheer madness. You will have to try your best to remember what things are, because it is not easy, when everyone says the emperor has clothes, or that Line A is longer than Line B, or that shocking people to death is fine, to have confidence in your independent judgment.

This is why I keep a little imaginary Noam Chomsky sitting on my shoulder at all times. Chomsky helps keep me sane, by cutting through lies and euphemisms and showing things as they really are. I recommend reading his books, especially during times of war. He never swallowed Johnson's nonsense about Vietnam or Bush's nonsense about Iraq. And of course they called him insane, anti-American, terrorist-loving, anti-Semitic, blah blah blah.

What I really mean here though is: Listen to the dissidents. They will not appear on television. They will be smeared and treated as lunatics. But you need them if you are going to be able to resist the absolute barrage of misinformation, or to hear yourself think over the pounding war drums. Times of War Fever can be wearying, because there is just so much aggression against dissent that your resistance wears down. This is why a community is so necessary. You may watch people who previously seemed reasonable develop a pathological bloodlust (mild-mannered moderate types like Thomas Friedman and Brian Williams going suck on our missiles ). Find the people who see clearly and stick close to them.

Someday peace will prevail. If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to our magnificent print edition or making a donation . Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported. Nathan J. Robinson

[Jan 06, 2020] How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda by Nathan J. Robinson

Jan 05, 2020 | www.currentaffairs.org
The Trump administration has assassinated Iran's top military leader, Qassim Suleimani, and with the possibility of a serious escalation in violent conflict, it's a good time to think about how propaganda works and train ourselves to avoid accidentally swallowing it.

The Iraq War, the bloodiest and costliest U.S. foreign policy calamity of the 21 st century, happened in part because the population of the United States was insufficiently cynical about its government and got caught up in a wave of nationalistic fervor. The same thing happened with World War I and the Vietnam War. Since a U.S./Iran war would be a disaster, it is vital that everyone make sure they do not accidentally end up repeating the kinds of talking points that make war more likely.

Let us bear in mind, then, some of the basic lessons about war propaganda.

Things are not true because a government official says them.

I do not mean to treat you as stupid by making such a basic point, but plenty of journalists and opposition party politicians do not understand this point's implications, so it needs to be said over and over. What happens in the leadup to war is that government officials make claims about the enemy, and then those claims appear in newspapers ("U.S. officials say Saddam poses an imminent threat") and then in the public consciousness, the "U.S. officials say" part disappears, so that the claim is taken for reality without ever really being scrutinized. This happens because newspapers are incredibly irresponsible and believe that so long as you attach "Experts say" or "President says" to a claim, you are off the hook when people end up believing it, because all you did was relay the fact that a person said a thing, you didn't say it was true. This is the approach the New York Times took to Bush administration allegations in the leadup to the Iraq War, and it meant that false claims could become headline news just because a high-ranking U.S. official said them. [UPDATE: here's an example from Vox, today, of a questionable government claim being magically transformed into a certain fact.]

In the context of Iran, let us consider some things Mike Pence tweeted about Qassim Suleimani:

"[Suleimani] assisted in the clandestine travel to Afghanistan of 10 of the 12 terrorists who carried out the September 11 terrorist attacks in the United States Soleimani was plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats and military personnel. The world is a safer place today because Soleimani is gone."

It is possible, given these tweets, to publish the headline: "Suleimani plotting imminent attacks on American diplomats, says Pence." That headline is technically true. But you should not publish that headline unless Pence provides some supporting evidence, because what will happen in the discourse is that people will link to your news story to prove that Suleimani was plotting imminent attacks.

To see how unsubstantiated claims get spread, let's think about the Afghanistan hijackers bit. David Harsanyi of the National Review defends Pence's claim about Suleimani helping the hijackers. Harsanyi cites the 9/11 Commission report, saying that the 9/11 commission report concluded Iran aided the hijackers. The report does indeed say that Iran allowed free travel to some of the men who went on to carry out the 9/11 attacks. (The sentence cut off at the bottom of Harsanyi's screenshot, however, rather crucially says : "We have no evidence that Iran or Hezbollah was aware of the planning for what later became the 9/11 attack.") Harsanyi admits that the report says absolutely nothing about Suleimani. But he argues that Pence was "mostly right," pointing out that Pence did not say Iran knew these men would be the hijackers, merely that it allowed them passage.

Let's think about what is going on here. Pence is trying to convince us that Suleimani deserved to die, that it was necessary for the U.S. to kill him, which will also mean that if Iran retaliates violently, that violence will be because Iran is an aggressive power rather than because the U.S. just committed an unprovoked atrocity against one of its leaders, dropping a bomb on a popular Iranian leader. So Pence wants to link Suleimani in your mind with 9/11, in order to get you blood boiling the same way you might have felt in 2001 as you watched the Twin Towers fall.

There is no evidence that either Iran or Suleimani tried to help these men do 9/11. Harsanyi says that Pence does not technically allege this. But he doesn't have to! What impression are people going to get from helped the hijackers? Pence hopes you'll conflate Suleimani and Iran as one entity, then assume that if Iran ever aided these men in any way, it basically did 9/11 even if it didn't have any clue that was what they were going to do.

This brings us to #2:

Do not be bullied into accepting simple-minded sloganeering

Let's say that, long before Ted Kaczynski began sending bombs through the mail, you once rented him an apartment. This was pure coincidence. Back then he was just a Berkeley professor, you did not know he would turn out to be the Unabomber. It is, however, possible, for me to say, and claim I am not technically lying, that you "housed and materially aided the Unabomber." (A friend of mine once sold his house to the guy who turned out to be the Green River Killer, so this kind of situation does happen.)

Of course, it is incredibly dishonest of me to characterize what you did that way. You rented an apartment to a stranger, yet I'm implying that you intentionally helped the Unabomber knowing he was the Unabomber. In sane times, people would see me as the duplicitous one. But the leadup to war is often not a sane time, and these distinctions can get lost. In the Pence claim about Afghanistan, for it to have any relevance to Suleimani, it would be critical to know (assuming the 9/11 commission report is accurate) whether Iran actually could have known what the men it allowed to pass would ultimately do, and whether Suleimani was involved. But that would involve thinking, and War Fever thrives on emotion rather than thought.

There are all kinds of ways in which you can bully people into accepting idiocy. Consider, for example, the statement "Nathan Robinson thinks it's good to help terrorists who murder civilians." There is a way in which this is actually sort of true: I think lawyers who aid those accused of terrible crimes do important work. If we are simple-minded and manipulative, we can call that "thinking it's good to help terrorists," and during periods of War Fever, that's exactly what it will be called. There is a kind of cheap sophistry that becomes ubiquitous:

I remember all this bullshit from my high school years. Opposing the invasion of Iraq meant loving Saddam Hussein and hating America. Thinking 9/11 was the predictable consequence of U.S. actions meant believing 9/11 was justified. Of course, rational discussion can expose these as completely unfair mischaracterizations, but every time war fever whips up, rational discussion becomes almost impossible. In World War I, if you opposed the draft you were undermining your country in a time of war. During Vietnam, if you believed the North Vietnamese had the more just case, you were a Communist traitor who endorsed every atrocity committed in the name of Ho Chi Minh, and if you thought John McCain shouldn't have been bombing civilians in the first place then clearly you believed he should have been tortured and you hated America.

"If you oppose assassinating Suleimani you must love terrorists" will be repeated on Fox News (and probably even on MSNBC). Nationalism advocate Yoram Hazony says there is something wrong with those who do not "feel shame when our country is shamed" -- presumably those who do not feel wounded pride when America is emasculated by our enemies are weak and pitiful. We should refuse to put up with these kind of cheap slurs, or even to let those who deploy them place the burden of proof on us to refute them. (In 2004, Democrats worried that they did appear unpatriotic, and so they ran a decorated war veteran, John Kerry, for president. That didn't work.)

Scrutinize the arguments

Here's Mike Pence again:

"[Suleimani] provided advanced deadly explosively formed projectiles, advanced weaponry, training, and guidance to Iraqi insurgents used to conduct attacks on U.S. and coalition forces; directly responsible for the death of 603 U.S. service members, along with thousands of wounded."

I am going to say something that is going to sound controversial if you buy into the kind of simple-minded logic we just discussed: Saying that someone was "responsible for the deaths of U.S. service members" does not, in and of itself, tell us anything about whether what they did was right or wrong. In order to believe it did, we would have to believe that the United States is automatically right, and that countries opposing the United States are automatically wrong. That is indeed the logic that many nationalists in this country follow; remember that when the U.S. shot down an Iranian civilian airliner, causing hundreds of deaths, George H.W. Bush said that he would never apologize for America, no matter what the facts were. What if America did something wrong? That was irrelevant, or rather impossible, because to Bush, a thing was right because America did it, even if that thing was the mass murder of Iranian civilians.

One of the major justifications for murdering Suleimani is that he "caused the deaths of U.S. soldiers." He was thus an aggressor, and could/should have been killed. That is where people like Pence want you to end your inquiry. But let us remember where those soldiers were. Were they in Miami? No. They were in Iraq. Why were they in Iraq? Because we illegally invaded and seized a country. Now, we can debate whether (1) there is actually sufficient evidence of Suleimani's direct involvement and (2) whether these acts of violence can be justified, but to say that Suleimani has "American blood on his hands" is to say nothing at all without an examination of whether the United States was in the right.

We have to think clearly in examining the arguments that are being made. Here 's the Atlantic 's George Packer on the execution:

"There was a case for killing Major General Qassem Soleimani. For two decades, as the commander of the Revolutionary Guards' Quds Force, he executed Iran's long game of strategic depth in the Middle East -- arming and guiding proxy militias in Lebanon and Iraq that became stronger than either state, giving Bashar al-Assad essential support to win the Syrian civil war at the cost of half a million lives, waging a proxy war in Yemen against the hated Saudis, and repeatedly testing America and its allies with military actions around the region for which Iran never seemed to pay a military price."

The article goes on to discuss whether this case is outweighed by the pragmatic case against killing him. But wait. Let's dwell on this. Does this constitute a case for killing him? He assisted Bashar al-Assad. Okay, but presumably then killing Assad would have been justified too? Is the rule here that our government is allowed unilaterally to execute the officials of other governments who are responsible for many deaths? Are we the only ones who can do this? Can any government claim the right?

He assisted Yemen in its fight against "the hated Saudis." But is Saudi Arabia being hated for good reason? It is not enough to say that someone committed violence without analyzing the underlying justice of the parties' relative claims.

Moreover, assumptions are made that if you can prove somebody committed a heinous act, what Trump did is justified. But that doesn't follow: Unless we throw all law out the window, and extrajudicial punishment is suddenly acceptable, showing that Suleimani was a war criminal doesn't prove that you can unilaterally kill him with a drone. Henry Kissinger is a war criminal. So is George W. Bush. But they should be captured and tried in a court, not bombed from the sky. The argument that Suleimani was planning imminent attacks is relevant to whether you can stop him with violence (and requires persuasive proof), but mere allegations of murderous past acts do not show that extrajudicial killings are legitimate.

It's very easy to come up with superficially persuasive arguments that can justify just about anything. The job of an intelligent populace is to see whether those arguments can actually withstand scrutiny.

Keep the focus on what matters

"The main question about the strike isn't moral or even legal -- it's strategic." -- The Atlantic

"The real question to ask about the American drone attack that killed Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani was not whether it was justified, but whether it was wise" -- The New York Times

"I think that the question that we ought to focus on is why now? Why not a month ago and why not a month from now?" -- Elizabeth Warren

They're going to try to define the debate for you. Leaving aside the moral questions, is this good strategy? And then you find yourself arguing on those terms: No, it was bad strategy, it will put "our personnel" in harms way, without noticing that you are implicitly accepting the sociopathic logic that says "America's interests" are the only ones in the world that matters. This is how debates about Vietnam went: They were rarely about whether our actions were good for Vietnamese people, but about whether they were good or bad for us , whether we were squandering U.S. resources and troops in a "fruitless" "mistake." The people of this country still do not understand the kind of carnage we inflicted on Vietnam because our debates tend to be about whether things we do are "strategically prudent" rather than whether they are just. The Atlantic calls the strike a "blunder," shifting the discussion to be about the wisdom of the killing rather than whether it is a choice our country is even permitted to make. "Blunder" essentially assumes that we are allowed to do these things and the only question is whether it's good for us.

There will be plenty of attempts to distract you with irrelevant issues. We will spent more time talking about whether Trump followed the right process for war, whether he handled the rollout correctly, and less about whether the underlying action itself is correct. People like Ben Shapiro will say things like :

"Barack Obama routinely droned terrorists abroad -- including American citizens -- who presented far less of a threat to Americans and American interests than Soleimani. So spare me the hysterics about 'assassination."

In order for this to have any bearing on anything, you have to be someone who defends what Obama did. If you are, on the other hand, someone who belives that Obama, too, assassinated people without due process (which he did), then Shapiro has proved exactly nothing about whether Trump's actions were legitimate. (Note, too, the presumption that threatening "America's interests" can get you killed, a standard we would not want any other country using but are happy to use ourselves.)

Emphasis matters

Consider three statements:

These are statements made by Pete Buttigieg, Elizabeth Warren, and Bernie Sanders, respectively. Note that each of them is consistent with believing Trump's decision was the wrong one, but their emphasis is different. Buttigieg says Suleimani was a "threat" but that there are "questions," Warren says Suleimani was a "murderer" but that this was "reckless," and Sanders says this was a "dangerous escalation." It could be that none of these three would have done the same thing themselves, but the emphasis is vastly different. Buttigieg and Warren lead with condemnation of the dead man, in ways that imply that there was nothing that unjust about what happened. Sanders does not dwell on Suleimani but instead talks about the dangers of new wars.

We have to be clear and emphatic in our messaging, because so much effort is made to make what should be clear issues appear murky. If, for example, you gave a speech in 2002 opposing the Iraq War, but the first half was simply a discussion of what a bad and threatening person Saddam Hussein was, people might actually get the opposite of the impression you want them to get. Buttigieg and Warren, while they appear to question the president, have the effect of making his action seem reasonable. After all, they admit that he got rid of a threatening murderer! Sanders admits nothing of the kind: The only thing he says is that Trump has made the world worse. He puts the emphasis where it matters.

I do not fully like Sanders' statement, because it still talks a bit more about what war means for our people , but it does mention destabilization and the total number of lives that can be lost. It is a far more morally clear and powerful antiwar statement. Buttigieg's is exactly what you'd expect of a Consultant President and it should give us absolutely no confidence that he would be a powerful voice against a war, should one happen. Warren confirms that she is not an effective advocate for peace. In a time when there will be pressure for a violent conflict, we need to make sure that our statements are not watery and do not make needless concessions to the hawks' propaganda.

Imagine how everything would sound if the other side said it.

If you're going to understand the world clearly, you have to kill your nationalistic emotions. An excellent way to do this is to try to imagine if all the facts were reversed. If Iraq had invaded the United States, and U.S. militias violently resisted, would it constitute "aggression" for those militias to kill Iraqi soldiers? If Britain funded those U.S. militias, and Iraq killed the head of the British military with a drone strike, would this constitute "stopping a terrorist"? Of course, in that situation, the Iraqi government would certainly spin it that way, because governments call everyone who opposes them terrorists. But rationality requires us not just to examine whether violence has been committed (e.g., whether Suleimani ordered attacks) but what the full historical context of that violence is, and who truly deserves the "terrorist" label.

Is there anything Suleimani did that hasn't also been done by the CIA? Remember that we actually engineered the overthrow of the Iranian government, within living people's lifetimes . Would an Iranian have been justified in assassinating the head of the CIA? I doubt there are many Americans who think they would. I think most Americans would consider this terrorism. But this is because terrorism is a word that, by definition, cannot apply to things we do, and only applies to the things others do. When you start to actually reverse the situations in your mind, and see how things look from the other side, you start to fully grasp just how crude and irrational so much propaganda is.

https://www.youtube.com/embed/hPOy-LutJQg?feature=oembed

Watch out for euphemisms

Our access to much of the world is through language alone. We only see our tiny sliver of the world with our own eyes, much of the rest of it has to be described in words or shown to us through images. That means it's very easy to manipulate our perceptions. If you control the flow of information, you can completely alter someone's understanding of the things that they can't see firsthand.

Euphemistic language is always used to cover atrocities. Even the Nazis did not say they were "mass murdering innocent civilians." They said they were defending themselves from subversive elements, guaranteeing sufficient living space for their people, purifying their culture, etc. When the United States commits murder, it does not say it is committing murder. It says it is engaging in a stabilization program and restoring democratic rule. We saw during the recent Bolivian coup how easy it is to portray the seizure of power as "democracy" and democracy as tyranny. Euphemistic language has been one of the key tools of murderous regimes. In fact, many of them probably believe their own language; their specialized vocabulary allows them to inhabit a world of their own invention where they are good people punishing evil.

Assassination sounds bad. It sounds like something illegitimate, something that would call into question the goodness of the United States, even if the person being assassinated can be argued to have "deserved it." Thus Rothman and Bloomberg will not even admit that what the U.S. did here was an assassination, even though we literally targeted a high official from a sovereign country and dropped a bomb on him. Instead, this is " neutralization ." (Read this fascinatingly feeble attempt by the Associated Press to explain why it isn't calling an obvious assassination an assassination, just as the media declined to call torture torture when Bush did it.)

Those of us who want to resist marches to war need to insist on calling things exactly what they are and refuse to allow the country to slide into the use of language that conceals the reality of our actions.

Remember what people were saying five minutes ago

Five minutes ago, hardly anybody was talking about Suleimani. Now they all speak as if he was Public Enemy #1. Remember how much you hated that guy? Remember how much damage he did? No, I do not remember, because people like Ben Shapiro only just discovered their hatred for Suleimani once they had to justify his murder.

During the buildup to a war there is a constant effort to make you forget what things were like a few minutes ago. Before World War I, Americans lived relatively harmoniously with Germans in their midst. The same thing with Japanese people before World War II. Then, immediately, they began to hate and fear people who had recently been their neighbors.

Let us say Iran responds to this extrajudicial murder with a colossal act of violent reprisal, after the killing unifies the country around a demand for vengeance. They kill a high-ranking American official, or wage an attack that kills our civilians. Perhaps it will attack some of the soldiers that are now being moved into the Middle East. The Trump administration will then want you to forget that it promised this assassination was to " stop a war ." It will then want you to focus solely on Iran's most recent act, to see that as the initial aggression. If the attack is particularly bad, with family members of victims crying on TV and begging for vengeance, you will be told to look into the face of Iranian evil, and those of us who are anti-war will be branded as not caring about the victims. Nobody wants you to remember the history of U.S./Iran relations, the civilians we killed of theirs or the time we destabilized their whole country and got rid of its democracy. They want you to have a two-second memory, to become a blind and unthinking patriot whose sole thought is the avenging of American blood. Resisting propaganda requires having a memory, looking back on how things were before and not accepting war as the "new normal."

Listen to the Chomsky on your shoulder.

"It is perfectly insane to suggest the U.S. was the aggressor here." -- Ben Shapiro

They are going to try to convince you that you are insane for asking questions, or for not accepting what the government tells you. They will put you in topsy-turvy land, where thinking that assassinating foreign officials is "aggression" is not just wrong, but sheer madness. You will have to try your best to remember what things are, because it is not easy, when everyone says the emperor has clothes, or that Line A is longer than Line B, or that shocking people to death is fine, to have confidence in your independent judgment.

This is why I keep a little imaginary Noam Chomsky sitting on my shoulder at all times. Chomsky helps keep me sane, by cutting through lies and euphemisms and showing things as they really are. I recommend reading his books, especially during times of war. He never swallowed Johnson's nonsense about Vietnam or Bush's nonsense about Iraq. And of course they called him insane, anti-American, terrorist-loving, anti-Semitic, blah blah blah.

What I really mean here though is: Listen to the dissidents. They will not appear on television. They will be smeared and treated as lunatics. But you need them if you are going to be able to resist the absolute barrage of misinformation, or to hear yourself think over the pounding war drums. Times of War Fever can be wearying, because there is just so much aggression against dissent that your resistance wears down. This is why a community is so necessary. You may watch people who previously seemed reasonable develop a pathological bloodlust (mild-mannered moderate types like Thomas Friedman and Brian Williams going suck on our missiles ). Find the people who see clearly and stick close to them.

Someday peace will prevail. If you enjoyed this article, please consider subscribing to our magnificent print edition or making a donation . Current Affairs is 100% reader-supported.

Nathan J. Robinson

More from Nathan J. Robinson

[Jan 06, 2020] Pompeo as a religious nut

Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Lurk , Jan 6 2020 22:28 utc | 103

Sasha and Joerg:

You misspelled "evilgelical"

[Jan 06, 2020] Trump is unintentionally working on MAGA in Iraq.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

A P , Jan 6 2020 21:28 utc | 58

Best comment I've seen anywhere?

Trump is unintentionally working on MAGA in Iraq...

Make America Go Away

[Jan 06, 2020] Klein Nancy Pelosi Celebrated Killing of Gaddafi, Slams Trump for Eliminating Soleimani Breitbart

Jan 06, 2020 | www.breitbart.com

Consistency is not the Speaker strong triat

Pelosi hailed the killing just after news broke of Gaddafi's October 2011 death.

She released the following statement on her Congressional website:

Today's news marks the next phase of Libya's march toward democracy. After decades of tyrannical rule in Libya, the world is hopeful that the next generation of Libyan leaders will bring their country out of this dark chapter. The strong action taken by the United States, led by President Obama, and NATO, the United Nations and the Arab League proves the power of the world community working together.

[Jan 06, 2020] Russia's Real Reasons for Partnering with Iran by Nadya Glebova

July 13, 2019 | nationalinterest.org

Moscow has a vested interest in the state of affairs in the Persian Gulf; it has tried its best to contain the impact that the U.S.-Iranian crisis could have on its own national security.

The third area of focus is connected with overlapping humanitarian and economic concerns that impact both Russia and Iran. These concerns have been footholds in the history of mutual relationships since the time of Russian and Persian empires. Nowadays both of the countries are trying to compensate for their failures by pursuing policies that promote their own and unique civilizations. In this situation the humanitarian sphere is one of the strategic ones allowing to pursue long-term aims. Of note, Russian-Iranian educational and cultural projects have doubled since the Trump administration announced its strategy for Iran. While the United States has been focused on "bringing Iran to its knees," Russia has been focused on the future. Economic ties between these two countries have been strengthening over the past few years, with bilateral trade reaching $2 billion in 2018.

Hopefully, Russia and Iran will maintain a positive relationship despite their differences and past difficulties. For example, in 2016 Russian forces were pushed off of a military base in Iran that it had used to conduct military operations in Syria. The strategic shift happened after the Iranians squabbled over whether foreign forces should be allowed to use an Iranian military base. Also, the two countries have had some disputes over the fate of Syria. Despite these issues, Russia maintains a positive relationship with Iran, which it further confirmed during a June 25 meeting between national security advisers John Bolton, Meir Ben-Shabbat and Nikolai Patrushev. During the meeting, Patrushev, the Secretary of the Russian Security Council, declared that Russia would continue to accommodate Iran's interests in the Middle East because it remains "the ally and partner" of choice in Syria. Both countries are focused on preventing further destabilization in the region, he said.

Nadya Glebova is a fellow at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, a MENA researcher.

[Jan 06, 2020] Putin's Hour Is At Hand - PaulCraigRoberts.org

Notable quotes:
"... Putin's Hour Is At Hand was published in the Russian press Monday morning, January 6, 2020. ..."
Jan 06, 2020 | www.paulcraigroberts.org

Putin's Hour Is At Hand January 4, 2020 | Categories: Articles & Columns | Tags: | Print This Article Print This Article

Putin's Hour Is At Hand was published in the Russian press Monday morning, January 6, 2020.

Putin's Hour Is At Hand

Paul Craig Roberts

Vladimir Putin is the most impressive leader on the world stage. He survived and arose from a Russia corrupted by Washington and Israel during the Yeltsin years and reestablished Russia as a world power. He dealt successfully with American/Israeli aggression against South Ossetia and against Ukraine, incorporating at Crimea's request the Russian province back into Mother Russia. He has tolerated endless insults and provocations from Washington and its empire without responding in kind. He is conciliatory and a peacemaker from a position of strength.

He knows that the American empire based as it is on arrogance and lies is failing economically, socially, politically, and militarily. He understands that war serves no Russian interest.

Washington's murder of Qasem Soleimani, a great Iranian leader, indeed, one of the rare leaders in world history, has dimmed Trump's leadership and placed the limelight on Putin. The stage is set for Putin and Russia to assume the leadership of the world.

Washington's murder of Soleimani is a criminal act that could start World War 3 just as the Serbian murder of the Austrian Archduke set World War 1 in motion. Only Putin and Russia with China's help can stop this war that Washington has set in motion.

Putin understood that the Washington/Israeli intended destabilization of Syria was aimed at Russia. Without warning Russia intervened, defeated the Washington financed and armed proxy forces, and restored stability to Syria.

Defeated, Washington and Israel have decided to bypass Syria and take the attack on Russia directly to Iran. The destabilization of Iran serves both Washington and Israel. For Israel Iran's demise stops support for Hezbollah, the Lebanese militia that has twice defeated Israel's army and prevented Israel's occupation of southern Lebanon. For Washington Iran's demise allows CIA-supported jihadists to bring instability into the Russian Federation.

Unless Putin submits to American and Israeli will, he has no choice but to block any Washington/Israeli attack on Iran.

The easiest and cleanest way for Putin to do this is to announce that Iran is under Russia's protection. This protection should be formalized in a mutual defense treaty between Russia, China, and Iran, with perhaps India and Turkey as members. This is hard for Putin to do, because incompetent historians have convinced Putin that alliances are the cause of war. But an alliance such as this would prevent war. Not even the insane criminal Netanyahu and the crazed American neoconservatives would, even when completely drunk or deluded, declare war on Iran, Russia, China, and if included in the alliance India and Turkey. It would mean the death of America, Israel and any European country sufficiently stupid to participate.

If Putin is unable to free himself from the influence of incompetent historians, who in effect are serving Washington, not Russian, interests, he has other options. He can calm down Iran by giving Iran the best Russian air defense systems with Russian crews to train the Iranians and whose presence serve as a warning to Washington and Israel that an attack on Russian forces is an attack on Russia.

This done, Putin can then, not offer, but insist on mediating. This is Putin's role as there is no other with the power, influence and objectivity to mediate.

Putin's job is not so much to rescue Iran as to get Trump out of a losing war that would destroy Trump. Putin could set his own price. For example, Putin's price can be the revival of the INF/START treaty, the anti-ballistic missile treaty, the removal of NATO from Russian borders. In effect, Putin is positioned to demand whatever he wants.

Iranian missiles can sink any American vessels anywhere near Iran. Chinese missiles can sink any American fleets anywhere near China. Russian missiles can sink American fleets anywhere in the world. The ability of Washington to project power in the Middle East now that everyone, Shia and Sunni and Washington's former proxies such as ISIS, hates Americans with a passion is zero. The State Department has had to order Americans out of the Middle East. How does Washingon count as a force in the Middle East when no American is safe there?

Of course Washington is stupid in its arrogance, and Putin, China, and Iran must take this into consideration. A stupid government is capable of bringing ruin not only on itself but on others.

So there are risks for Putin. But there are also risks for Putin failing to take charge. If Washington and Israel attack Iran, which Israel will try to provoke by some false flag event as sinking an American warship and blaming Iran, Russia will be at war anyway. Better for the initiative to be in Putin's hands. And better for the world and life on Earth for Russia to be in charge.

[Jan 06, 2020] Ricky Gervais Slams Woke Virtue-Signaling, Drops Epstein Didn't Kill Himself Joke At Golden Globes

Jan 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

British comedian Ricky Gervais is dropping red pills at the Golden Globes, joking about "Epstein didn't kill himself" while telling 'woke' virtue signaling celebrities to stop talking about politics.

... If ISIS started a streaming service, you'd call your agent,"


Shifter_X , 15 minutes ago link

It was a good speech but if it hadn't been rehearsed that way they would have pulled the plug and called it "technical difficulties."

chippers , 18 minutes ago link

"You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg. " as usual David Brett nails it , the british office was one of funniest tv shows ever

tschanakya , 38 minutes ago link

People like these are rare. To be able to say the truth and joke about it.

[Jan 06, 2020] Trump just managed to tweet support for US citizens, who fight in Syria and Iraq as members of IS and AQ, thus supporting enemies of the US and thus formally committing an act of treason as per the US Constitution

Trump clearly is way too stupid to be the President. Such a logical fallacy is inexcusable ;-)
Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org
TJ , Jan 5 2020 20:46 utc | 108
Trump just managed to tweet support for US members of IS and AQ, thus supporting enemies of the US and committing Treason as per the US Constitution-

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump

These Media Posts will serve as notification to the United States Congress that should Iran strike any U.S. person or target, the United States will quickly & fully strike back, & perhaps in a disproportionate manner. Such legal notice is not required, but is given nevertheless!

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

Highly recommended!
Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Fec , Jan 5 2020 15:23 utc | 3

"We have learned today from #Iraq Prime Minister AdilAbdl Mahdi how @realDonaldTrump uses diplomacy:
#US asked #Iraq to mediate with #Iran. Iraq PM asks #QassemSoleimani to come and talk to him and give him the answer of his mediation, Trump &co assassinate an envoy at the airport."

https://twitter.com/ejmalrai/status/1213833855754485762

[Jan 06, 2020] It is somehow ironic that the U.S. has spent lots of lives and money to "spread democracy" in Iraq only to be kicked out through an Iraqi parliament vote

Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

lizard , Jan 5 2020 15:21 utc | 1

.

That is one reason why I recommend to Iraq to invite Russia to train its army.

the other day my enemy
looked me in the eye
I cried DEFENSIVE ACTION!
then shot him till he died

I heard there was a warrant
out for my arrest
I decided to de-escalate
and bought a bullet-proof vest

when the SWAT team came
to take me from my home
I declared my hope for peace
and launched a lethal drone

the incendiary device
took the SWAT team out
peace had been achieved
of that I have no doubt

so if you have an enemy
who exhibits mal-intent
take quick, defensive action
with wrath that's heaven sent

[Jan 06, 2020] Great heavens - Donald Trump has turned into Hillary!

Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

TG , Jan 5 2020 15:40 utc | 11

Great heavens - Donald Trump has turned into a [neo]liberal Democrat!!

I mean, if I had wanted Hilary Clinton to be president, I would have voted for her!

Jerry , Jan 5 2020 15:48 utc | 13

Trump-Kushner is no different than Hillary, Schumer, Nadler, Schiff, Epstein, Maxwell, Weinstein, Wasserman-Schultz, Bibi. Trump is no friend to American citizens just like all of Congress.

There will be no draining of any swamps. Trump-Kushner just another Bibi lackey.

[Jan 06, 2020] One humble suggestion about resolving the crisis with Iran

Jan 06, 2020 | angrybearblog.com

SW , January 5, 2020 9:12 am

If they want revenge, in the interest of avoiding future bloodshed, I suggest that we give them Mike Pence.

[Jan 06, 2020] Who is in the pockets of Israel First nationalists?

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Just passing through , says: Show Comment January 5, 2020 at 9:38 pm GMT

@gotmituns I think we all know the Orange One who is in the pockets of Jews and Israel First nationalists* will not actually pull out troops. I have also heard someone on this comments board says the agreement between the US and Iraq stipulates that the US has 1 year to withdraw if requested to do so by Iraq, so he will no doubt cite that reason for staying there as long as possible – which leaves ample time for more Jewish tricks and swindles à la USS Liberty or Lavon Affair.

The real question is whether or not his room-temperature IQ support base will pick up on the fact that their man in the White House is only increasing troop presence despite being told to piss off by the Iraqis, thus laying waste to the myth that Iraqis are begging the US to stay there. Will this be the broken promise that will finally deprogram the hordes of MAGAtards and awaken them from their slumber?

* – https://lobelog.com/trump-has-a-259-million-reason-to-bomb-iran/

[Jan 06, 2020] But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com

Commentator Mike , says: Show Comment January 5, 2020 at 9:08 pm GMT

@Bookish1

Not only Mossad but probably many others would like to see a suicide bomber blow himself up somewhere in the US killing alot of people. That makes it difficult to figure out who did it and maybe impossible to figure it out. It would be a mess.

But they could always find an un-scorched Iranian passport in mint condition among the debris of the explosion.

[Jan 06, 2020] Jon Leibowitz didn't call it "Mess-o-potamia" for no reason.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

beijing expat , 58 minutes ago link

If only America had more allies like KSA and Israel.

5fingerdiscount , 1 hour ago link

Miss Lindsey the *** bumboy is in makeup as we speak ready to pump the war on MSM "news" shows.

McCain can't make it today.

[Jan 06, 2020] The most optimistic post on this thread.

Jan 06, 2020 | www.unz.com


AnonFromTN , says: Show Comment Next New Comment January 5, 2020 at 10:28 pm GMT

@Cloak And Dagger

Henry Kissinger Predicts 'In 10 Years, There Will Be No More Israel'

That's the most optimistic post on this thread.

[Jan 06, 2020] Trump Says US Will Not Leave Iraq Unless Billions For Air Base Are Repaid, Threatens Baghdad With Very Big Sanctions

Jan 06, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Amusingly, if Trump is indeed serious that Iraq will have to reimburse the US for its countless military bases, camps and other installations, the US will be able to repay its $23 trillion in debt (and have money leftover), when all is said and done: here is a partial list of the US camps in iraq:

[Jan 04, 2020] Surreal comment award

Jan 04, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Lucifer Dreams , 1 hour ago link

Just a wild *** guess but what if Maj. Gen. Soleimani was close to kicking the bucket anyways and wanted to poke America one last time and did so by causing an issue at the American embassy in Iraq.

If the General was such an asset why be in Iraq? Normally you would send your aide to the area. If it was really important to meet someone then they would come to Iran.

I don't think Iran is necessarily that careless. I can believe ego can play a big part in making bad decisions but if he was such an asset for so long why risk it unless you were a dead man walking already.

The other Iranian leaders could of said to the already dying general if that is the way you want to go out then by all means do so. It doesn't cost Iran anything if he does.

Just a different look at it. It may also be the reason why Iran won't do anything for awhile if at all. He might of been a good general in Iran's eyes but still replaceable. Later.

Lucifer's Chosen People , 1 hour ago link

INTERESTING ANGLE AND POSSIBLE. ONE THING IS TRUE MUZZIES AREN'T AFRAID TO DIE LIKE THIS.

IT MAKES HIM A MARTYR ...THAT WAS A MISTAKE IN MY MIND .

jm , 22 minutes ago link

Surreal comment award.

[Jan 04, 2020] Pelosi was a little be too early with imperachment of Trump. Now is the time ;-)

Jan 04, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

Schroedingers Cat , 58 minutes ago link

The great irony is Trump has finally committed an actual impeachable offense.

nuerocaster , 1 hour ago link

If the Iranians were really smart they wouldn't respond.

DemandSider , 1 hour ago link

If our entire dollar racket fueled country were slightly more honestly governed, the Dept. of Offense would bill Israel for at least 1/2 of its budget.

Rusty Pipes , 1 hour ago link

We will invade Iran only to diversify them. They need more minorities and genders and then they will be peaceful, non polluting Earth citizens.

[Jan 04, 2020] The USA only choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo

Jan 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Peeps like Sen Graham saying "the Iraqi's need to choose between us or Iran."

(That choice is a Sunni sandwich with Kurdish Bread and Shia Mayo)

[Jan 04, 2020] A peaceful solution is obvious.

Jan 04, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

ADKC , Jan 4 2020 20:33 utc | 67

A peaceful solution is obvious.

The actions of the US was a war crime. Those that are responsible should be arrested and handed over to the International Criminal Court (ICC) for prosecution. This would obviously include Trump, Pompeo and Esper (as well as a number of others).

The US should then negotiate reparations with Iran.

If the US/West will not do so, if the people of the US/West democracies do not insist, if we do nothing then we are all guilty of this War Crime. I don't really think we can have this any other way.

[Jan 04, 2020] One way to inject some sanity into some members of Congress

Jan 04, 2020 | www.anti-empire.com

Report: Internet Users Who Call for Attacking Other Countries Will Now Be Enlisted in the Military Automatically

"After all, we want people who are passionate about occupying foreign lands, not grunts who are just there for the paycheck"

The Babylon Bee 11 hours ago <S> 554 *10

A new policy issued by the United States Department of Defense, in conjunction with online platforms like Twitter and Facebook, will automatically enlist you to fight in a foreign war if you post your support for attacking another country.

People who bravely post about how the U.S. needs to invade some country in the Middle East or Asia or outer space will get a pop-up notice indicating they've been enlisted in the military. A recruiter will then show up at their house and whisk them away to fight in the foreign war they wanted to happen so badly.

"Frankly, recruitment numbers are down, and we needed some way to find people who are really enthusiastic about fighting wars," said a DOD official. "Then it hit us like a drone strike: there are plenty of people who argue vehemently for foreign intervention. It doesn't matter what war we're trying to create: Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China -- these people are always reliable supporters of any invasion abroad. So why not get them there on the frontlines?"

"After all, we want people who are passionate about occupying foreign lands, not grunts who are just there for the paycheck," he added.

Strangely, as soon as the policy was implemented, 99% of saber-rattling suddenly ceased.

Source: The Babylon Bee

Text may contain traces of satire.

[Jan 04, 2020] The classic Jewish joke about the mother words to the departing to the front lines. Don't overexert yourself' she implores him, Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again Son: What if the Turk kills me? You? exclaims the mother, But why? What have you done to him?

Jan 04, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Ishmael Zechariah , 03 January 2020 at 09:10 PM

SST;

Some comments reminded me of two sayings at opposite ends of phase space.

The first I learnt from an article of Uri Avnery almost a decade ago. It is the classic Jewish joke about the Jewish mother in Russia taking leave of her son, who has been called up to serve the Czar in the war against Turkey. "Don't overexert yourself'" she implores him, "Kill a Turk and rest. Kill another Turk and rest again "

"But mother," the son interrupts, "What if the Turk kills me?"

"You?" exclaims the mother, "But why? What have you done to him?"

[Jan 04, 2020] Oh, I thought last night's peace-loving strike was supposed to prevent additional warfare

Jan 04, 2020 | www.zerohedge.com

https://t.co/Z2S3WQaz7L

-- Michael Tracey (@mtracey) January 3, 2020

Crush the cube , 3 minutes ago link

This will end great, a fucked up circus called congress who hasn't had the balls to do their job and legally declare war for nearly three decades, and a president who can't even defend himself from a gang of thugs staging a direct coup against him in his own government. What could possibly go wrong?

me or you , 3 minutes ago link

Weird from a guy who dodged military service.

NubianSundance , 9 minutes ago link

Yep, Trumpt got into office by weaving a web of lies to a naive public, but the us remains the pre eminent military power and can do what it likes.

[Jan 04, 2020] On Thucydides quote "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must

Jan 04, 2020 | turcopolier.typepad.com

Andrei Martyanov (aka SmoothieX12) -> Ishmael Zechariah... ,03 January 2020 at 11:20 PM

The second are the immortal words of Thucydides: "the strong do what they will, the weak suffer what they must."

Yeah, I heard Thucydides had some issues with resolution of uncertainties for targeting, especially for stand-off precision guided weapons. Plus there were some issues with long range air-defense systems in Greece in times of Plato and Socrates. You know, GLONASS wasn't fully operational, plus EW was a little bit scratchy.

So, surely, it all fully applies today, especially in choke points. Plus those Athenians they were not exactly good with RPGs and anti-Armour operations. Other than that, Thucydides nailed it.

Something To Think About -> Ishmael Zechariah... , 04 January 2020 at 01:11 AM
Ah, yes, the Melian Dialogue.

Interesting to note that it was the party professing those words - Athens - who started the Peloponnesian War, driven in large part by that haughty attitude. It was Athens that also ended that war, of course. They did so when they surrendered to the Spartans.

[Jan 03, 2020] Russian pranksters strike again Fake Greta Thunberg convinces eager US politician that she has dirt on Trump -- RT USA News

Jan 03, 2020 | www.rt.com

US Congresswoman Maxine Waters has allegedly fallen for a prank call in which she thought activist Greta Thunberg was offering her a tape of Donald Trump confessing to pressuring Ukraine into investigating his political rivals. YouTube pranksters Vladimir Kuznetsov and Alexey Stolyarov, who go by the names Vovan and Lexus, are claiming they tricked Waters (Dem-Calif.) into thinking she was speaking to teen climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

Vovan and Lexus made names for themselves by previously pranking Congressman Adam Schiff (Dem-Calif.) into thinking there were nude photos of US President Donald Trump that Schiff could get his hands on. They also claim to have pranked Waters two years ago, in a phone call where one posed as Ukraine's prime minister.

Though Waters herself has not responded to the new video, the woman at the other end of the phone identifies herself as the congresswoman and sounds an awful lot like her.

In the call, the pranksters pretend to be Thunberg and her father, with help from a female colleague, and claim to have proof that Trump pressured the Ukrainian government into investigating his political rivals, something Democrats have claimed, for months now, is true.

[Jan 03, 2020] Trump assassination of General Suleimani was worse than a crime. It was a mistake

Jan 03, 2020 | nationalinterest.org

Talleyrand remarked that Napoleon's assassination of the Duke of Enghien was worse than a crime. It was a mistake. Donald Trump's decision to target Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, for destruction brings to mind the French diplomat's lapidary verdict. Iran is likely to unleash its fearsome Shia proxy militias, wherever and whenever it can. Nor is support from Europe, which is on the frontlines of Iranian blowback, likely to be forthcoming. Quite the contrary.

[Jan 03, 2020] Wag the dog, Trump way: People really thought this guy had a coherent ideology and wasn't just another Bush/Clinton/Obama neocon

Ironically, the Hollywood film 'Wag the Dog,' which tells the story of a US president caught in a similar situation as Clinton's, and the lengths he goes to distract public attention from his plight, was released just months before Clinton ordered the attack on Yugoslvia.
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

JSC2397 20 hours ago

"Irrational and destructive"?

Maybe: but in the short term at least, it will provide Trump and his creatures with exactly the jingoistic deflection they need to draw attention away from his and his Administration's criminality and incompetence.

Even at this early date we're seeing an orgy of bellicose gloating from all the usual suspects: and it will probably not be too long into tomorrow's news cycle before the full fury of the RW Machine is turned on their REAL targets: not Iran, but any Americans who might question Glorious Leader's "tough" actions....

[Jan 03, 2020] I guess Trump decided had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

I guess somebody had to make the 1914-vintage Hapsburgs look relatively competent,

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] If you previously have doubts that Trump is senile warmonger, not you have a definite proof

Bombing a civilian airport in another country in order to assassinate Iranian and Iraq leaders is a very bad diplomacy ;-)
It might well be that today this idiot blow up his chances fro reelection because revenge is dish that should be served cold and Iran can postpone it for 11 months or so.
What is interesting is that neoliberal MSM are glad and still talking about Zelensky and impeachment. What a country ! It looks like the decade of the twenties can be the decade of another World War. "In every war the first casualty is truth."
Jan 03, 2020 | www.theamericanconservative.com

Trump think that the war with Iran will be another cake walk, like in Afghanistan and Iraq. This is a proof that he is a senile idiot.

[Jan 03, 2020] Is not it strange that Wikipeaida founder was former pornography seller and Bellingcat founder -- a female underwear salesman

Jan 03, 2020 | www.unz.com

Brabantian says: Show Comment

January 2, 2020 at 6:56 am GMT 200 Words Intelligence agencies recruit pornographers to lead their disinformation operations, apparently because porn purveyors are so lacking in ethics they will tell public lies about anything

The alleged 'founder' of Wikipedia is the arch-Zionist Jimmy 'Jimbo' Wales, who attends intimate birthday parties of Presidents of Israel

Wales was 'selected' for this role after being in the pornography-selling business

[Jan 03, 2020] A new brilliant diplomatic strategy of Trump administration: Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis

"USA clusterfuck express hurtles headlong down the track for a rendezvous with disaster: War with a united Iraq and Iran, with the latter backed by the Russians and Chinese. https://www.checkpointasia.net/iraqi-pm-told-trump-gang-they-didnt-have-permission-to-bomb-iraqi-paramilitaries-they-did-it-anyway/ "
Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

et Al January 2, 2020 at 10:32 am

Sic Semper tyrannis: Our Embassy in Baghdad – TTG
https://turcopolier.typepad.com/sic_semper_tyrannis/

For weeks, it was Iranian consulates and facilities that bore the brunt of Iraqi popular unrest. Iran reacted with restraint. With our lethal attacks on the Kata'ib Hezbollah, we changed that. Pompeo, Esper and Trump are keeping up the trash talking. Threatening Iran by killing Iraqis whose ass was that brilliant diplomatic strategy pulled from?
####

Plenty more at the link.

Have dick, will step on!

[Jan 03, 2020] Did Winston Churchill really say: "Poland is a greedy hyena of Europe."?

See also https://www.quora.com/Did-Winston-Churchill-really-say-Poland-is-a-greedy-hyena-of-Europe-In-what-context
Jan 03, 2020 | thenewkremlinstooge.wordpress.com

Moscow Exile December 30, 2019 at 11:30 am

US Ambassador to Poland gets her 2 cents in as regards the comments of Vladimir Putin and others in the Empire of Evil concerning the Molotov – Ribbentrop Non-Aggression Pact and Polish pre-WWII connivings with Nazi Germany.

Russian politicians had earlier strongly condemned the position of Warsaw, which does not consider itself responsible for any of the events leading up to the outbreak of WWII in Europe. Thus, the speaker of the state Duma, Vyacheslav Volodin, urged Polish "colleagues" to apologize for the anti-Semitic remarks of Jozef Lipsky, former Polish Ambassador to Nazi Germany, who supported some ideas of Adolf Hitler and even suggested putting up a monument to him in honour of his plans to deport European Jews to Madagascar. Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova also criticized the attempt of Poland to rewrite history in favour of its political interests.

On Sunday, the Prime Minister of Poland, Mateusz Morawiecki, criticized the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and actually laid the blame on the USSR for starting WWII along with Nazi Germany.

Head of the scientific Department of the Russian Military Historical Society, Yuri Nikiforov, noted that the Warsaw version of events leading to WWII was a "totally ideologized interpretation of history by orderr" and had nothing to do with the historical truth, and was promoting its version of history in order to weaken Russian influence on the world stage.

Drogi Prezydencie Putin, to Hitler i Stalin zmówili się, aby rozpocząć II wojnę światową. To jest fakt. Polska była ofiarą tego okropnego konfliktu.

-- Georgette Mosbacher (@USAmbPoland) December 30, 2019

Dear President Putin, it was Hitler and Stalin who agreed to start World War II. This is a fact. Poland was a victim of this terrible conflict.

Dear American business executive, entrepreneur and untrained diplomat now acting as US Ambassador to Poland, try studying some history.

By the way, before your plum appointment as ambassador to Poland, wasn't it you who suggested that Poland was responsible for the re-emergence of anti-Semitism across the continent of Europe because of a law which criminalizes blaming Poland for the actions of Nazi Germany on its soil during the Holocaust?

And wasn't it headbanger of a Polish President Andrzej Duda who stated that if you were to be appointed as the new U.S. ambassador to Poland, then you would be accepted, despite having made "unnecessary and mistaken" comments about his country?

Can't you see that the truth as regards WWII matters is only that which is approved by the Poles?

source

yalensis December 31, 2019 at 4:19 am
The Poles are putting Germany in an awkward position.
The official position of the modern German government (based on Nurnberg, etc.) is that Germany, and Germany alone, is responsible for the outbreak of WWII. Not the Soviet Union. Just Germany, ma'am, just Germany.

So, in the face of this Polish revisionism, as Russian analysts are pointing out, Germany will either have to (a) bitch-slap Poland, or (b) renounce their entire official state policy and historical ideology since their defeat in WWII and start singing Horst Wessel Lied again.

What, oh what, will Germany do?

[Jan 02, 2020] The Art of Doublespeak Bellingcat and Mind Control by Edward Curtin

Notable quotes:
"... Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine. ..."
"... The Intercept , along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using "open source" tools -- with Bellingcat's past, controversial investigations for use as case studies Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as "independent" and "investigative journalism." ..."
Dec 17, 2019 | countercurrents.org

In the 1920s, the influential American intellectual Walter Lippman argued that the average person was incapable of seeing or understanding the world clearly and needed to be guided by experts behind the social curtain. In a number of books he laid out the theoretical foundations for the practical work of Edward Bernays , who developed "public relations" (aka propaganda) to carry out this task for the ruling elites. Bernays had honed his skills while working as a propagandist for the United States during World War I, and after the war he set himself up as a public relations counselor in New York City.

There is a fascinating exchange at the beginning of Adam Curtis's documentary, The Century of Self , where Bernays, then nearly 100 years old but still very sharp, reveals his manipulative mindset and that of so many of those who have followed in his wake. He says the reason he couldn't call his new business "propaganda" was because the Germans had given propaganda a "bad name," and so he came up with the euphemism "public relations." He then adds that "if you could use it [i.e. propaganda] for war, you certainly could use it for peace." Of course, he never used PR for peace but just to manipulate public opinion (he helped engineer the CIA coup against the democratically elected Arbenz government in Guatemala in 1954 with fake news broadcasts). He says "the Germans gave propaganda a bad name," not Bernays and the United States with their vast campaign of lies, mainly aimed at the American people to get their support for going to a war they opposed (think weapons of mass destruction). He sounds proud of his war propaganda work that resounded to his credit since it led to support for the "war to end all wars" and subsequently to a hit movie about WWI , Yankee Doodle Dandy , made in 1942 to promote another war, since the first one somehow didn't achieve its lofty goal.

As Bernays has said in his book Propaganda ,

The American motion picture is the greatest unconscious carrier of propaganda in the world today.

He was a propagandist to the end. I suspect most viewers of the film are taken in by these softly spoken words of an old man sipping a glass of wine at a dinner table with a woman who is asking him questions. I have shown this film to hundreds of students and none has noticed his legerdemain. It is an example of the sort of hocus-pocus I will be getting to shortly, the sly insertion into seemingly liberal or matter-of-fact commentary of statements that imply a different story. The placement of convincing or confusing disingenuous ingredients into a truth sandwich – for Bernays knew that the bread of truth is essential to conceal untruth.

In the following years, Bernays, Lippman, and their ilk were joined by social "scientists," psychologists, and sundry others intent on making a sham out of the idea of democracy by developing strategies and techniques for the engineering of social consensus consonant with the wishes of the ruling classes. Their techniques of propaganda developed exponentially with the development of technology, the creation of the CIA, its infiltration of all the major media, and that agency's courting of what the CIA official Cord Meyer called in the 1950s "the compatible left," having already had the right in its pocket. Today most people are, as is said, "wired," and they get their information from the electronic media that is mostly controlled by giant corporations in cahoots with government propagandists. Ask yourself: Has the power of the oligarchic, permanent warfare state with its propaganda and spy networks increased or decreased over your lifetime. The answer is obvious: the average people that Lippman and Bernays trashed are losing and the ruling elites are winning.

This is not just because powerful propagandists are good at controlling so-called "average" people's thinking, but, perhaps more importantly, because they are also adept – probably more so – at confusing or directing the thinking of those who consider themselves above average, those who still might read a book or two or have the concentration to read multiple articles that offer different perspectives on a topic. This is what some call the professional and intellectual classes, perhaps 15-20 % of the population, most of whom are not the ruling elites but their employees and sometimes their mouthpieces. It is this segment of the population that considers itself "informed," but the information they imbibe is often sprinkled with bits of misdirection, both intentional and not, that beclouds their understanding of important public matters but leaves them with the false impression that they are in the know.

Recently I have noticed a group of interconnected examples of how this group of the population that exerts influence incommensurate with their numbers has contributed to the blurring of lines between fact and fiction. Within this group there are opinion makers who are often journalists, writers, and cultural producers of some sort or other, and then the larger number of the intellectual or schooled class who follow their opinions. This second group then passes on their received opinions to those who look up to them.

There is a notorious propaganda outfit called Bellingcat , started by an unemployed Englishman named Eliot Higgins, that has been funded by The Atlantic Council, a think-tank with deep ties to the U.S. government, NATO, war manufacturers, and their allies, and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), another infamous U.S. front organization heavily involved in so-called color revolution regime change operations all around the world, that has just won the International Emmy Award for best documentary. The film with the Orwellian title, Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World, received its Emmy at a recent ceremony in New York City.

Bellingcat is an alleged group of amateur on-line researchers who have spent years shilling for the U.S. instigated war against the Syrian government, blaming the Douma chemical attack and others on the Assad government, and for the anti-Russian propaganda connected to, among other things, the Skripal poisoning case in England, and the downing of flight MH17 plane in Ukraine.

It has been lauded by the corporate mainstream media in the west. Its support for the equally fraudulent White Helmets (also funded by the US and the UK) in Syria has also been praised by the western corporate media while being dissected as propaganda by many excellent independent journalists such as Eva Bartlett, Vanessa Beeley, Catte Black, among others. It's had its work skewered by the likes of Seymour Hersh and MIT professor Theodore Postol, and its US government connections pointed out by many others, including Ben Norton and Max Blumenthal at The Gray Zone. And now we have the mainstream media's wall of silence on the leaks from the Organization for the Prohibition on Chemical Weapons (OPCW) concerning the Douma chemical attack and the doctoring of their report that led to the illegal U.S. bombing of Syria in the spring of 2018. Bellingcat was at the forefront of providing justification for such bombing, and now the journalists Peter Hitchens, Tareq Harrad (who recently resigned from Newsweek after accusing the publication of suppressing his revelations about the OPCW scandal) and others are fighting an uphill battle to get the truth out.

Yet Bellingcat: Truth in a Post-Truth World won the Emmy , fulfilling Bernays' point about films being the greatest unconscious carriers of propaganda in the world today.

Who presented the Emmy Award to the film makers, but none other than the rebel journalist Chris Hedges . Why he did so, I don't know. But that he did so clearly sends a message to those who follow his work and trust him that it's okay to give a major cultural award to a propaganda outfit. But then, perhaps he doesn't consider Bellingcat to be that.

Nor, one presumes, does The Intercept , the billionaire Pierre Omidyar owned publication associated with Glen Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill, and also read by many progressive-minded people. The Intercept that earlier this year disbanded the small team that was tasked with reviewing and releasing more of the massive trove of documents they received from Edward Snowden six years ago, a minute number of which have ever been released or probably ever will be. As Whitney Webb pointed out , last year The Intercept hosted a workshop for Bellingcat. She wrote:

The Intercept , along with its parent company First Look Media, recently hosted a workshop for pro-war, Google-funded organization Bellingcat in New York. The workshop, which cost $2,500 per person to attend and lasted five days, aimed to instruct participants in how to perform investigations using "open source" tools -- with Bellingcat's past, controversial investigations for use as case studies Thus, while The Intercept has long publicly promoted itself as an anti-interventionist and progressive media outlet, it is becoming clearer that – largely thanks to its ties to Omidyar – it is increasingly an organization that has more in common with Bellingcat, a group that launders NATO and U.S. propaganda and disguises it as "independent" and "investigative journalism."

Then we have Jefferson Morley , the editor of The Deep State, former Washington Post journalist, and JFK assassination researcher, who has written a praiseworthy review of the Bellingcat film and who supports Bellingcat. "In my experience, Bellingcat is credible," he writes in an Alternet article, "Bellingcat documentary has the pace and plot of a thriller."

Morley has also just written an article for Counterpunch "Why the Douma Chemical Attack Wasn't a 'Managed Massacre'" – in which he disputes the claim that the April 7, 2018 attack in the Damascus suburb was a false flag operation carried out by Assad's opponents. "I do not see any evidence proving that Douma was a false flag incident," he writes in this article that is written in a style that leaves one guessing as to what exactly he is saying. It sounds convincing unless one concentrates, and then his double messages emerge. Yet it is the kind of article that certain "sophisticated" left-wing readers might read and feel is insightful. But then Morley, who has written considerably about the CIA, edits a website that advertises itself as "the thinking person's portal to the world of secret government," and recently had an exchange with former CIA Director John Brennan where "Brennan put a friendly finger on my chest," said in February 2017, less than a month after Trump was sworn in as president, that:

With a docile Republican majority in Congress and a demoralized Democratic Party in opposition, the leaders of the Deep State are the most -- perhaps the only -- credible check in Washington on what Senator Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) calls Trump's " wrecking ball presidency ."

Is it any wonder that some people might be a bit confused?

"I know what you're thinking about," said Tweedledum; "but it isn't so, nohow."

"Contrariwise," continued Tweedledee, "if it was so, it might be; and if it were so, it would be; but as it isn't, it ain't. That's logic."

As a final case in point, there is a recent book by Stephen Kinzer , Poisoner in Chief: Sidney Gottlieb And The CIA Search For Mind Control, t he story of the chemist known as Dr. Death who ran the CIA's MK-ULTRA mind control project, using LSD, torture, electric shock therapy, hypnosis, etc.; developed sadistic methods of torture still used in black sites around the world; and invented various ingenious techniques for assassination, many of which were aimed at Fidel Castro. Gottlieb was responsible for brutal prison and hospital experiments and untold death and suffering inflicted on all sorts of innocent people. His work was depraved in the deepest sense; he worked with Nazis who experimented on Jews despite being Jewish himself.

Kinzer writes in depth about this man who considered himself a patriot and a spiritual person – a humane torturer and killer. It is an eye-opening book for anyone who does not know about Gottlieb, who gave the CIA the essential tools they use in their "organized crime" activities around the world – in the words of Douglass Valentine, the author of The CIA as Organized Crime and The Phoenix Program . Kinzer's book is good history on Gottlieb; however, he doesn't venture into the present activities of the CIA and Gottlieb's patriotic followers, who no doubt exist and go about their business in secret.

After recounting in detail the sordid history of Gottlieb's secret work that is nauseating to read about, Kinzer leaves the reader with these strange words:

Gottlieb was not a sadist, but he might well have been . Above all he was an instrument of history. Understanding him is a deeply disturbing way of understanding ourselves.

What possibly could this mean? Not a sadist? An instrument of history? Understanding ourselves? These few sentences, dropped out of nowhere, pull the rug out from under what is generally an illuminating history and what seems like a moral indictment. This language is pure mystification.

Kinzer also concludes that because Gottlieb said so, the CIA failed in their efforts to develop methods of mind control and ended MK-ULTRA's experiments long ago. Why would he believe the word of a man who personified the agency he worked for: a secret liar? He writes,

When Sydney Gottlieb brough MK-ULTRA to its end in the early 1960s, he told his CIA superiors that he had found no reliable way to wipe away memory, make people abandon their consciences, or commit crimes and then forget them.

As for those who might think otherwise, Kinzer suggests they have vivid imaginations and are caught up in conspiracy thinking: "This [convincing others that the CIA had developed methods of mind control when they hadn't] is Sydney Gottlieb's most unexpected legacy," he asserts. He says this although Richard Helms, the CIA Director, destroyed all MK-Ultra records. He says that Allen Dulles, Gottlieb, and Helms themselves were caught up in a complete fantasy about mind control because they had seen too many movies and read too many books; mind control was impossible, a failure, a myth, he maintains. It is the stuff of popular culture, entertainment. In an interview with Chris Hedges, interestingly posted by Jefferson Morley at his website, The Deep State , Hedges agrees with Kinzer. Gottlieb, Dulles, et al. were all deluded. Mind control was impossible. You couldn't create a Manchurian Candidate; by implication, someone like Sirhan Sirhan could not have been programmed to be a fake Manchurian Candidate and to have no memory of what he did, as he claims. He could not have been mind-controlled by the CIA to perform his part as the seeming assassin of Senator Robert Kennedy while the real killer shot RFK from behind. People who think like this should get real.

Furthermore, as is so common in books such as Kinzer's, he repeats the canard that JFK and RFK knew about and pressured the CIA to assassinate Fidel Castro. This is demonstrably false, as shown by the Church Committee and the Assassinations Record Review Board, among many others. That Kinzer takes the word of notorious liars like Richard Helms and the top-level CIA operative Samuel Halpern is simple incredible, something that is hard to consider a mistake. Slipped into a truth sandwich, it is devoured and passed on. But it is false. Bullshit meant to deceive.

But this is how these games are played. If you look carefully, you will see them widely. Inform, enlighten, while throwing in doubletalk and untruths. The small number of people who read such books and articles will come away knowing some history that has no current relevance and being misinformed on other history that does. They will then be in the know, ready to pass their "wisdom" on to those who care to listen. They will not think they are average.

But they will be mind controlled, and the killer cat will roam freely without a bell, ready to devour the unsuspecting mice.

Edward Curtin is a writer whose work has appeared widely. He teaches sociology at Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts. His website is http://edwardcurtin.com/

[Jan 02, 2020] In his 2007 Munich speech wherein Putin made one very prescient observation: "It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within."

Jan 02, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

karlof1 , Dec 31 2019 22:14 utc | 51

Patrick Armstrong recaps the past 20 years since Putin wrote "Russia at the turn of the millennium" , where Putin stressed the aspects of geoeconomics as most important while barely mentioning Russia's military.

What Armstrong fails to connect is the need for the first to be accomplished so that the second has a chance of complete success: Russia's political-economy needed resuscitating and strong-arming in the case of the kleptocrats for Russia's condition to be as bright as it is on the dawn of a new decade 1/5 of the way into the 21st Century.

Armstrong also tarries at length with Putin's 2007 Munich speech wherein Putin made one very prescient observation: "It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within."

Armstrong uses Putin's observation made after the Outlaw US Empire's failed attempt to prolong its Unipolar Moment in Iraq after it attacked itself to cause that conlict to show the self-inflicted damage has yet to stop:

"Do we not see this today? The USA is tearing itself apart over imagined Russian collusion, imagined Russian electoral interference and real Ukrainian corruption. And, meanwhile, the forever wars go on and on."

In 2016, I thought there was an excellent chance the D-Party would splinter in a manner similar to 1860 that was generated by both bottom->up and top->down forces. And in light of the court decision allowing the DNC to name whomever it wants as its POTUS and VEEP candidates regardless of both primary and convention balloting, IMO that possibility is even greater as like 2016 the DNC will not--cannot--anoint Sanders as its POTUS candidate. But all that's the subject for another comment.

The dynamics of geopolitics has allowed the China/Russia team and its allies to usher the EU into Eurasian integration over the next decade while exposing the Outlaw US Empire as nothing but a Ponzi Scheme that will collapse upon itself at some point in time.

karlof1 , Dec 31 2019 23:28 utc | 54

Xi Jinping's New Years speech is motivational as one would expect. His closing exhortations:

"2020 will be a year of milestone significance. We will finish building a moderately prosperous society in all respects and realize the first centenary goal. 2020 will also be a year of decisive victory for the elimination of poverty....

"Human history, like a river, runs forever, witnessing both peaceful moments and great disturbances. We are not afraid of storms and dangers and barriers. China is determined to walk along the road of peaceful development and will resolutely safeguard world peace and promote common development. We are willing to join hands with people of all countries in the world to build together the Belt and Road Initiative, and push forward the building of a community with a shared future for mankind, and make unremitting efforts for the creation of a beautiful future for mankind ." [My Emphasis]

Clearly, China has grasped the leadership role abandoned by the Outlaw US Empire for promoting humanity, Trump and Pompeo's daily actions giving China's position a continual boost.

Putin's New Year speech is short but emphasizes his key points. Do note that for Russians the New Year celebration is akin to the West's Christmas (or perhaps was is the better verb):

"Friends, we always prepare for the New Year in advance and, despite being busy, we believe that the warmth of human relations and companionship are the most important thing. We strive to do something important and useful for other people and to help those who require our support, to make them happy by giving them presents and our attention.

"Such sincere impulses, pure thoughts and selfless generosity are the true magic of the New Year holiday. It brings out the best in people and transforms the world filling it with joy and smiles.

"Uplifting New Year's feelings and wonderful impressions have been living in us since childhood and come back every New Year, when we hug our loved ones, our parents, prepare surprises for our children and grandchildren, decorate the New Year tree with them and unpack once again paper cut-outs, baubles and glass garlands. These, sometimes ancient, but beloved family trinkets give their warmth to the younger generations."

His preamble is nationalist; his message paternalistic and humanist.

IMO, the Scrooges of the Outlaw US Empire's Current Oligarchy haven't a chance versus the likes of Putin, Xi and their likeminded allies.

I'll leave my fellow barflies with this 32 year-old music video that IMO well expresses the heart sets of Putin, Xi, and those of us who want to share the world they're trying to build instead of what the Outlaw US Empire's trying to pull down and destroy.

Happy New Year!

[Jan 01, 2020] Protocols of the Elders of White Christendom by changing the dominant identity). The key idea, is that well-off, white, Christian men are being oppressed by virtue of challenges to their natural position of dominance, and rejection of their natural expectation of deference .

Jan 01, 2020 | crookedtimber.org

The central claim is also addressed to white Christian women, particularly married women, who are assumed to identify their interests with those of their families.

Gorgonzola Petrovna 12.31.19 at 3:35 pm ( 18 )

Ha-ha. Protocols of the Elders of White Christendom.

[Jan 01, 2020] In one poll 18% of the USA respondents are clearly suicidal

Jan 01, 2020 | twitter.com

Reply 1 Retweet 2 Retweeted 2 Like 5 Liked 5 Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. Undo Undo stefania maurizi Retweeted

David Santoro ‏ 4:29 PM - 28 Dec 2019

Should (and can) we re-confirm the Reagan-Gorbatchev statement that "A # nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought?" Plus say why

[Jan 01, 2020] "Freedom gas" named Worst Words of the Year

Jan 01, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Mao , Dec 30 2019 9:03 utc | 48

"Freedom gas" named Worst Words of the Year

Plain English Foundation has voted freedom gas as the worst word or phrase of 2019.

The term comes from the United States Department of Energy, which rebranded natural gas as "freedom gas" and boasted about bringing molecules of US freedom to the world.

"When a simple product like natural gas starts being named through partisan politics, we are entering dangerous terrain," said the Foundation's Executive Director, Dr Neil James. "Why can't natural gas just remain natural gas?"

Each year, Plain English Foundation gathers dozens of examples of the worst words to highlight the importance of clear and ethical public language.

The full list of 2019's worst words and phrases follows.

https://www.plainenglishfoundation.com/documents/10179/636280/2019_Worst_Words_media_release

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[Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates Published on Jan 21, 2020 | caucus99percent.com

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world Published on Jan 18, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

[Jan 18, 2020] The joke is on us: Without the USSR the USA oligarchy resorted to cannibalism and devour the American people Published on Jan 18, 2020 | www.theguardian.com

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government Published on Jan 18, 2020 | www.unz.com

[Jan 11, 2020] What About "Whataboutism." by Vladimir Golstein Published on Jan 11, 2020 | off-guardian.org

[Jan 06, 2020] How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda by Nathan J. Robinson Published on Jan 05, 2020 | www.currentaffairs.org

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low Published on Jan 06, 2020 | www.moonofalabama.org

Oldies But Goodies

[Feb 26, 2020] A serious US politician has to demonstrate a large capacity for betrayal.

[Feb 23, 2020] Looks like the USA intelligence (or, more correctly semi-intelligence) agencies work directly from KGB playbook or Bloomberg as Putin's Trojan Horse in 2020 elections

[Feb 21, 2020] Why Both Republicans And Democrats Want Russia To Become The Enemy Of Choice by Philip Giraldi

[Feb 15, 2020] How does one say Adam Schiff without laughing? by title="View user profile." href="https://caucus99percent.com/users/alligator-ed">Alligator Ed

[Feb 15, 2020] One face of the US voters desprations with establishment candidates

[Feb 07, 2020] How They Sold the Iraq War by Jeffrey St. Clair

[Jan 31, 2020] Hovering in Cyberspace by Edward Curtin

[Jan 29, 2020] For the last three years, all the "resistance oxygen" was sucked up by the warmongering against Russia

[Jan 21, 2020] WaPo columnist endorses all twelve candidates

[Jan 18, 2020] The inability of the USA elite to tell the truth about the genuine aim of policy despite is connected with the fact that the real goal is to attain Full Spectrum Dominance over the planet and its people such that neoliberal bankers can rule the world

[Jan 18, 2020] The joke is on us: Without the USSR the USA oligarchy resorted to cannibalism and devour the American people

[Jan 18, 2020] Putin plants to prohibit dual citizens to serve in government

[Jan 11, 2020] What About "Whataboutism." by Vladimir Golstein

[Jan 06, 2020] How To Avoid Swallowing War Propaganda by Nathan J. Robinson

[Jan 06, 2020] Diplomacy Trump-style. Al Capone probably would be allow himself to fall that low

Sites



Etc

Society

Groupthink : Two Party System as Polyarchy : Corruption of Regulators : Bureaucracies : Understanding Micromanagers and Control Freaks : Toxic Managers :   Harvard Mafia : Diplomatic Communication : Surviving a Bad Performance Review : Insufficient Retirement Funds as Immanent Problem of Neoliberal Regime : PseudoScience : Who Rules America : Neoliberalism  : The Iron Law of Oligarchy : Libertarian Philosophy

Quotes

War and Peace : Skeptical Finance : John Kenneth Galbraith :Talleyrand : Oscar Wilde : Otto Von Bismarck : Keynes : George Carlin : Skeptics : Propaganda  : SE quotes : Language Design and Programming Quotes : Random IT-related quotesSomerset Maugham : Marcus Aurelius : Kurt Vonnegut : Eric Hoffer : Winston Churchill : Napoleon Bonaparte : Ambrose BierceBernard Shaw : Mark Twain Quotes

Bulletin:

Vol 25, No.12 (December, 2013) Rational Fools vs. Efficient Crooks The efficient markets hypothesis : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2013 : Unemployment Bulletin, 2010 :  Vol 23, No.10 (October, 2011) An observation about corporate security departments : Slightly Skeptical Euromaydan Chronicles, June 2014 : Greenspan legacy bulletin, 2008 : Vol 25, No.10 (October, 2013) Cryptolocker Trojan (Win32/Crilock.A) : Vol 25, No.08 (August, 2013) Cloud providers as intelligence collection hubs : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : Inequality Bulletin, 2009 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Copyleft Problems Bulletin, 2004 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Energy Bulletin, 2010 : Malware Protection Bulletin, 2010 : Vol 26, No.1 (January, 2013) Object-Oriented Cult : Political Skeptic Bulletin, 2011 : Vol 23, No.11 (November, 2011) Softpanorama classification of sysadmin horror stories : Vol 25, No.05 (May, 2013) Corporate bullshit as a communication method  : Vol 25, No.06 (June, 2013) A Note on the Relationship of Brooks Law and Conway Law

History:

Fifty glorious years (1950-2000): the triumph of the US computer engineering : Donald Knuth : TAoCP and its Influence of Computer Science : Richard Stallman : Linus Torvalds  : Larry Wall  : John K. Ousterhout : CTSS : Multix OS Unix History : Unix shell history : VI editor : History of pipes concept : Solaris : MS DOSProgramming Languages History : PL/1 : Simula 67 : C : History of GCC developmentScripting Languages : Perl history   : OS History : Mail : DNS : SSH : CPU Instruction Sets : SPARC systems 1987-2006 : Norton Commander : Norton Utilities : Norton Ghost : Frontpage history : Malware Defense History : GNU Screen : OSS early history

Classic books:

The Peter Principle : Parkinson Law : 1984 : The Mythical Man-MonthHow to Solve It by George Polya : The Art of Computer Programming : The Elements of Programming Style : The Unix Hater’s Handbook : The Jargon file : The True Believer : Programming Pearls : The Good Soldier Svejk : The Power Elite

Most popular humor pages:

Manifest of the Softpanorama IT Slacker Society : Ten Commandments of the IT Slackers Society : Computer Humor Collection : BSD Logo Story : The Cuckoo's Egg : IT Slang : C++ Humor : ARE YOU A BBS ADDICT? : The Perl Purity Test : Object oriented programmers of all nations : Financial Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2008 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2010 : The Most Comprehensive Collection of Editor-related Humor : Programming Language Humor : Goldman Sachs related humor : Greenspan humor : C Humor : Scripting Humor : Real Programmers Humor : Web Humor : GPL-related Humor : OFM Humor : Politically Incorrect Humor : IDS Humor : "Linux Sucks" Humor : Russian Musical Humor : Best Russian Programmer Humor : Microsoft plans to buy Catholic Church : Richard Stallman Related Humor : Admin Humor : Perl-related Humor : Linus Torvalds Related humor : PseudoScience Related Humor : Networking Humor : Shell Humor : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2011 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2012 : Financial Humor Bulletin, 2013 : Java Humor : Software Engineering Humor : Sun Solaris Related Humor : Education Humor : IBM Humor : Assembler-related Humor : VIM Humor : Computer Viruses Humor : Bright tomorrow is rescheduled to a day after tomorrow : Classic Computer Humor

The Last but not Least Technology is dominated by two types of people: those who understand what they do not manage and those who manage what they do not understand ~Archibald Putt. Ph.D


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Last modified: March, 01, 2020