John Day
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http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/extra-rich-people.html
Peter Turchin has set up analysis, based on Complexity Theory, that predicts periods of political discord. When the ratio of rich people to working people rises, it eventually leads to fighting among the elites and aspiring elites, which somehow involves regular people killing each other in droves. The severity of the die-off is one of the ways of grading mild, moderate or severe. The 2020s are poised to be one of those periods for the US. These are the transcript and slides of an hour lecture, given in Utrechet, Netherlands, earlier this month. The transcript link doesn’t work for me today, but the slides tell the story.
Rich people are very expensive to keep, and are inclined to lie, cheat and steal when playing with others on a good day…A History of the Near Future: What history tells us about our Age of Discord
http://peterturchin.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/MPF2019.pdfCharles Hugh Smith:
All the status quo “fixes” only hasten the collapse of the status quo.
That economic, social and political conflict is accelerating is self-evident.
What’s open to debate are the core drivers of conflict / disorder /unraveling.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blognov19/confict-accelerating11-19.html“Algorithmic Feudalism”
Google has the power to shape your mind by limiting what you have access to, while at the same time wielding the power to destroy your livelihood with a tweak of an algorithm. Although a lot of the most nefarious stuff is still being conducted at the margins so the masses don’t realize what’s happening, stealth censorship will continue to be rolled out until the internet most people use becomes for all practical purposes an information gulag where nothing but shameless propaganda is pumped onto screens by hidden algorithms tweaked (for your own good) by billionaires.
A perfect example of this can be seen in how YouTube hides ones of the most popular videos ever made regarding the attacks of September 11, 2001. The short clip made by James Corbett, is titled 9/11: A Conspiracy Theory, and has over 3.2 million views. Nevertheless, here’s what YouTube spits out if you search by the exact title of the video.
https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/11/18/algorithmic-feudalism/
Keep scrolling and you still won’t find it. This isn’t YouTube helping users find the information they want, it’s YouTube hiding content from its users. Moreover, the only reason I’m aware of the censoring of this particular item is because I’m familiar with the video from years ago. You can be certain this sort of thing is more common than you realize and will only get worse.Do The World’s Energy Policies Make Sense?, Gail Tverberg
(The reset will be into a world of less fossil fuel, less, manufacturing, less “wealth”)
In order for coal production to grow as much as the higher emission scenarios assume, there needs to be a major turnaround in the situation. World coal prices would need to rise substantially. In fact, coal in very difficult locations for extraction, such as under the North Sea, need to become profitable to extract. This situation seems very unlikely.
It seems to me that climate modelers should be considering more realistic scenarios regarding CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. One scenario which should be considered is the possible near term collapse of several governmental organizations, such as the European Union, World Trade Organization, and the governments of several oil exporting countries.
Do the World’s Energy Policies Make Sense?@moonraker,
Ilargi’s not right-wing, and you seek comfort and solace where none is to be found.
The world will never again be as you fondly recall it, no matter who you blame.
Get to work, Amigo!
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/worth-working-for.htmlGathering in Groups as Society Falls Apart (harder than it may sound)
“Everyone wants community. Unfortunately, it involves other people.” I used that line in lectures on frugal living when talking of the loneliness of consumerism and the benefits of sharing resources. We idealize the good old days of people helping people out. But can we live them, given who we have become?
Individualism is one of the many privileges of ‘the privileged’ in Western society. We have options and choices about where we live, with whom, of what genders, ages or races, whether we are child-free or have a brood, what we eat, what we believe, jobs we’ll accept, and on and on and on. As people look at civilizational breakdown in detail, though, they realize that to survive, other people might not be optional – joining a group, a farm, a small town might be necessary.
Survival is not a solo sport. If it happens, it will happen in community – intentional, multi-generational family, accidental – where we can share the work, grow food, trade, defend ourselves, socialize, learn, teach, repair. Civilization, it turns out, has a lot of services built in that will need to be maintained as long as possible or created anew… or done without.The technical starting point of any major war is, in fact, incidental. Most any excuse will suffice. What’s necessary is two opponents, each of whom accuses the other of attempting to foment aggression. At that point, all that’s needed to light the spark is a young soldier or agitator with an itchy trigger finger, or a politician with a show of bravado, or a military leader who chooses to break from his orders to stand down.
In many cases, if the war does not start spontaneously, a false-flag incident suffices. One country creates an event which it purports is an act of aggression by its opponent. (The recent events in the Strait of Hormuz have a distinct false-flag odour about them.)
Again, the actual catalyst matters little. Once the rattling of sabres begins, as it has, presently, in the Middle East, all that’s required to create a major war is a slipup or a nudge.Pipelines to Europe are a major physical asset under contention in global power games.
Europe is quickly becoming one of the most important export destinations for gas exporters. Production is decreasing quickly due to political and technical developments. The next few decades are promising for exporters. Nord Stream 2 is arguably one of the most contentious projects currently under development. Denmark recently granted the last necessary permit to start construction activities in its EEZ and analysts now agree that the project’s completion is only a matter of time. In reality, the pipeline’s future was decided long before construction even started due to external factors such as Poland’s decision to diversify away from Russian gas and Western Europe’s determination to turn away from nuclear and fossil fuel production.
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/The-Inevitable-Finale-Of-The-Nord-Stream-2-Saga.html#Ousted Bolivian President Evo Morales has accused the US-headquartered Organization of American States of making a political decision in backing the right-wing opposition, saying the coup continues to wreak havoc after his exile.
Speaking from Mexico a day after he fled Bolivia, Morales said: “The OAS is in the service of the North American empire.”
Morales said he “could not understand” how his military commanders could show such “disloyalty.”
“That confirms that my great crime is to be indigenous. It’s a class problem,” he said.
The exiled president said that after freeing itself from the International Monetary Fund, the Bolivian economy was doing better.
We had big plans in the field of exports.
Yet, the coup plotters “do not accept the nationalization of natural resources,” Morales said.
Morales also claimed that a mechanical failure on a helicopter he was traveling on in early November was “not accidental” and said he wants the incident to be investigated. The helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing just after takeoff due to a “mechanical fault in the tail rotor.”
https://www.rt.com/news/473353-evo-morales-imf-exports-oas/According to Max Keiser, there could be “a catastrophic trapdoor opening underneath the US economy.”
When China announces as a surprise its 20,000 tons of gold and a gold-backed cryptocurrency that “will kill the US dollar deader than a doornail,” it will be a “Pearl Harbor-type event and it’s coming in the next six to nine months,” he predicts.
https://www.rt.com/business/473222-china-gold-crypto-us-dollar/Lots of history rhyming, I’m afraid. Can we survive it?
The story about FDR’s war with central bankers is presented in a clearer light than I have seen it, a more favorable light to FDR (who “died funny”), and unfavorable to Truman, who FDR never trusted, and (puppet) Woodrow Wilson.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/sociopaths-at-war.html
Bolivia’s President Evo Morales was overthrown in a military coup on November 10. He is now in Mexico. Before he left office, Morales had been involved in a long project to bring economic and social democracy to his long-exploited country. It is important to recall that Bolivia has suffered a series of coups, often conducted by the military and the oligarchy on behalf of transnational mining companies. Initially, these were tin firms, but tin is no longer the main target in Bolivia. The main target is its massive deposits of lithium, crucial for the electric car.
Over the past 13 years, Morales has tried to build a different relationship between his country and its resources. He has not wanted the resources to benefit the transnational mining firms, but rather to benefit his own population. Part of that promise was met as Bolivia’s poverty rate has declined, and as Bolivia’s population was able to improve its social indicators. Nationalization of resources combined with the use of its income to fund social development has played a role. The attitude of the Morales government toward the transnational firms produced a harsh response from them, many of them taking Bolivia to court.
Over the course of the past few years, Bolivia has struggled to raise investment to develop the lithium reserves in a way that brings the wealth back into the country for its people. Morales’ Vice President Álvaro García Linera had said that lithium is the “fuel that will feed the world.” Bolivia was unable to make deals with Western transnational firms; it decided to partner with Chinese firms. This made the Morales government vulnerable. It had walked into the new Cold War between the West and China. The coup against Morales cannot be understood without a glance at this clash…
China’s Tianqi Lithium Group, which operates in Argentina, was going to make a deal with YLB. Both Chinese investment and the Bolivian lithium company were experimenting with new ways to both mine the lithium and to share the profits of the lithium. The idea that there might be a new social compact for the lithium was unacceptable to the main transnational mining companies.
Tesla (United States) and Pure Energy Minerals (Canada) both showed great interest in having a direct stake in Bolivian lithium. But they could not make a deal that would take into consideration the parameters set by the Morales government.
Morales himself was a direct impediment to the takeover of the lithium fields by the non-Chinese transnational firms. He had to go.
After the coup, Tesla’s stock rose astronomically.http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/workings.html
MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting, by Caitlin Johnstone
There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing rioters and the US government, but you’d hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines…
The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world’s largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a “disputed election”. Nothing to do with the fact that right-wing mobs had been terrorizing this leader’s family, or the fact that the nation’s military literally commanded him to step down and are now currently searching for him to arrest him, leading to ousted government officials being rounded up and held captive by soldiers wearing masks. Two days before Bolivian president Evo Morales was pushed out by the country’s military, Mark Weisbot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research penned a warning about what was happening, and what might unfold, in a Nation article titled, The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia.
He noted:
Multilateral organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) have a certain perceived impartiality because they are, in theory, controlled by a diverse group of nations. But sometimes a great power can wield a disproportionate influence. It could theoretically be a coincidence that both the Trump administration and the OAS have tried—without offering any evidence—to discredit Bolivia’s national election in the past couple of weeks. But it’s more likely that this dangerous, ugly, and destabilizing operation is being pushed by Washington.
This “destabilizing operation” came to a head yesterday when Morales resigned under pressure from the military amidst a wave of protests and violence. The situation is Bolivia is complicated, but one thing you can be sure of is anything you hear or read in U.S. mass media will be a heaping pile of lies and propaganda…
Morales was barred by the constitution from running for another term, but he attempted to override this with a referendum which he lost 51% to 49%. The Bolivian Supreme Court later ruled that term limits were unconstitutional, so he decided to run again. He then won this new election in the first round by the 10% spread required, but the Organization of American States (OAS) immediately called into question the validity of the result. This sparked weeks of protests and culminated in yesterday’s military coup. According to Mark Weisbot, the OAS has provided zero evidence of election fraud, and also notes that approximately 60% of the OAS budget comes from the U.S. government.Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm’s Lithium Deal
“Bolivia’s lithium belongs to the Bolivian people. Not to multinational corporate cabals.”
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/bolivian-coup-comes-less-week-after-morales-stopped-multinational-firms-lithium-dealThe Many Ways Sanders and Warren are Different, and Why It Matters:
https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-many-ways-sanders-and-warren-are.htmlDavid Stockman interview excerpts:
Donald Trump is all by his lonesome. He’s home alone in the Oval Office. Now, half of it, he can blame himself. If he hires someone, a known idiot like John Bolton, what does he expect is going to happen except that everything he wanted to do is going to be undermined…
When you have a regime change policy—and this was the one real positive thing Trump brought to the table. He said regime change has failed; we’re not going to do it under my policy.
Why do you think the North Koreans are quasi-starving? And I know the Communist elite and Kim’s family and so forth live a pretty fat life, but nevertheless they’re in dire straits economically.
Why do they invest all this money in developing nuclear capability and missile capability? Because they don’t want to be regime changed. Kim is a young man, he’s in his mid-30s, and he doesn’t want to be another Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein...
…I think the stock market is in its last days of bubble excess. I think the economy is slouching toward recession within a matter of a few quarters or months. If that happens, Trump is toast. Elizabeth Warren becomes president, and then that’ll be a whole new ball game that is hard to figure...
…Foreign policy has been totally taken over by the Democratic paranoia about Russia and Putin and meddling in our elections.
Now it’s extended to the whole impeachment inquiry and Ukraine-gate. That’s what the whole debate is going to be about. The debate is going to be about a sideshow...
…It’s not even mentioned because, as I say, the Warfare State machinery essentially squelches any kind of debate, suffocates any kind of thought that at all deviates from the status quo.
The big issue in the world today is war and peace, and we’re facing a campaign in 2020 where it won’t even be mentioned.And I am at fault for posting tht article about human cooperation here, which I found very useful. Since cooperation between generations has helped us be healthy families, and have more and healthier children, is not everything being done in society today, to atomize us and make each of us a separate automaton, answerable to a computer, a form of birth control and destruction of humanity.
Is our current society not a form of genocide?
Who will replace us?http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/relating-ideas.html
The conclusion is obvious. The details are important to understand our human context.
In terms of population numbers, few species can compare to the success of humans. Though much attention on population size focuses on the past 200 years, humans were incredibly successful even before the industrial revolution, populating all of the world’s environments with more than a billion people. Kramer uses her research on Maya agriculturalists of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula and the Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers of Venezuela to illustrate how cooperative childrearing increases the number of children that mothers can successfully raise and—in environments where beneficial—even speed up maturation and childbearing. Kramer argues that intergenerational cooperation, meaning that adults help support children, but children also share food and many other resources with their parents and other siblings, is at the center of humans’ demographic success. “Together our diet and life history, coupled with an ability to cooperate, made us really good at getting food on the table, reproducing, and surviving,” Kramer writes.
During her time with the Maya, Kramer constructed a demographic model that considered how much household members consume, as the family grows and matures across a mother’s reproductive career, balanced against how much a mother, father, and their children contribute. She found that Maya children contributed a substantial amount of work to the family’s survival, with those aged 7-14 spending on average 2 to 5 hours working each day, and children aged 15-18 spending as much as their parents, about 6.5 hours a day. Labor type varied, with younger children doing much of the childcare, older children and fathers fill in much of the day-today cost of growing and processing food and running the household. “If mothers and juveniles did not cooperate, mothers could support far fewer children over their reproductive careers,” Kramer writes. “It is the strength of intergenerational cooperation that allows parents to raise more children than they would otherwise be able to on their efforts alone.”
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-human-population-ability-cooperate.htmlI’m Watching My Students Become Soldiers in Our Endless Wars
At West Point, Graduation Day felt more like a tragedy than a triumph.
My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets—unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears—moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.
https://www.thenation.com/article/afghanistan-army-west-point/”It can’t happen here”…
Where did all the time go? Thirty years ago this week the Berlin Wall fell. Then Soviet chairman Mikhail Gorbachev freed the Baltic states and allowed divided Germany to reunite. It was a geopolitical earthquake of historic proportions – and a major miracle of our times.
The once mighty Soviet Union had become exhausted by its long military/economic/political struggle to keep up with the much wealthier United States and its rich allies. Moscow had 40,000 tanks, but its economic infrastructure, crippled by Marxist ideology, was an empty shell.
A senior KGB general in Moscow told me that, a decade earlier, the renowned Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov had warned the Politburo that failure by Soviet industry to account for deprecation to modernize and replace outdated equipment would provoke a major crisis by 1990. This is exactly what happened.
By 1990, Soviet industry was broken down, outdated or rusted away. The Kremlin could no longer maintain the Soviet welfare state with its free medicine and education, long holidays, vacation spas, early pensions and unaffordable military spending. Arms alone may have accounted for over 40% of Moscow’s budget.Hi Ilargi,
I think this is the third time you have used that picture, and the lady who might be the same one, who has never been out of (Georgia?) and has a withered hand got at least 2 showings.
Just sayin…
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/narratives.html
Caitlin Johnstone, Life Minus Narrative
(I can’t access her site or comments, due to clever artificial intelligence filtering, but I’m on her email list. You might be able to access this link, though.)
Humanity’s movement into full psychological health, if we ever get there, will look very much the same: as a collective we’ll stop buying into the narratives we’re being fed, and we’ll start seeing things as they are without the narrative overlay. And from there we can use the power of our numbers to force a change into a wholesome relationship with each other and our environment.
You can catch a glimpse of what this will look like for yourself right now. Ignore all the narratives about why things need to be as they are, and you simply see things as they are: resources disappearing from the hands of the many into the hands of the few, weapons of war being spread around the globe, journalists locked in cages for telling the truth, increasing surveillance, increasing police militarization, increasing imprisonment, increasing censorship. That’s world minus narrative. That’s what’s real.Eleni sends this Kunstler piece from Russia!
He says those dedicated public servants at the CIA and FBI are afraid for their very well being under the evil, sexist, racist Trumpian regime.
The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed...
It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.
https://russia-insider.com/en/media-criticism/cia-fbi-fight-their-lives-russiahoax-implodes/ri27825Elizabeth Vos reviews lessons from 2016, in a world where nothing has actually changed.
The Democratic Party’s bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC, as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.
The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred “pied-piper candidate.” One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.It’s the DNC, Stupid: Democratic Party, Not Russia, Has Delegitimized the Democratic Process
Another Billionaire White Knight, saddling up to joust for the honor of the DNC?
Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after saying in March that he wouldn’t run for president, is backtracking and preparing a potential run for a 2020 bid, a spokesman for the billionaire tells CNN.
Bloomberg is expected to file the necessary paperwork to get on the Democratic primary ballot in Alabama this week, the spokesman said, the clearest sign to date that the former mayor is seriously considering following through with something he has been weighing for weeks.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/07/politics/michael-bloomberg-alabama-2020-primary/index.htmlH Ilargi,
I didn’t mean to dis you, but what you said is what I say and we’ve been saying it for years, as has Stoeleigh, Gail-the-Actuary Tverberg, Ugo Bardi and so on.
I just took it as a starting place for discussion today. It’s like my discussion most days.
e are at a cusp for our species. We can become stewards of life on earth, or keep burning things up into a brick-wall crises of thermal-death, as energy disapears and toxic waste chokes us all.
We will have to take sociopaths out of power. I’m ready to bell that cat.
Who’s up to help me?hands?
It’ll need to be a bunch of us, and some of us will get killed…
waiting…
Today’s compilation is “Life Support Systems” same theme, some different aspects…
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/11/life-support-systems.html
How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything
Hostile takeovers by vulture capitalists use leveraged loans to buy companies like Sears, sell off long-accumulated assets, borrow massively, buy back stock to raise the price of the stock the vultures hold, so they can sell it, let the company die, and find another to bleed to death.
This is killing the host. The parasites are running the business. This can be prevented with different financial laws.
https://www.thenation.com/article/private-equity-deadspin/Auto Industry Recession is Tanking Global Economy
This may not be a “problem”. 7 year payments on a $65,000 pick up truck are “normal” around here.
https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/recession-auto-industry-tanking-global-economyDemocratic politicians have a blind-spot for cars and excessive driving.
Sanders’ plan aims to speed up this process by offering a “cash for clunkers”-style grant program that would purchase electric vehicles for low- and medium-income drivers. Over 10 years, the plan would cost $2.1 trillion, enough for roughly 54 million EVs at today’s average price of $36,600 each. It is the largest single expenditure in Sanders’ $16.3 billion climate plan.
Matthew Lewis, a climate and urban policy consultant in Berkeley, said Sanders’ plan is an inefficient way to spend such a large outlay. “Even as a symbolic victory, it’s not much of a victory,” Lewis said. “It’s like, ‘Congratulations, you just threw away enough money to build a great public transit system in every city in the country.’”…
“Depending on how much you drive, a car that’s 10 to 12 years old might actually be better for the environment than replacing it with an electric vehicle,” Lewis said.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-democrats-baffling-blind-spot-on-carbon-emissions_n_5da4db19e4b0cad669a9b705America’s food-chain map.
Truck everything thousands of miles in multiple steps, irrespective of distance, invisibly to the grocery shopper. “Sustainable”?
https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-bogglingGuys, Jeffrey Epstein’s “death” has been reported, but those pictures of the body on the stretcher being wheeled by do not match Epstein’s.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/whose-murdered-corpse.html
Narrative control is getting us to argue about whether he suicided or was Arkancided.
Epstein IS a global player. Notice that Ghislane Maxwell is not in custody anywhere, either.Ilargi,
You asked about the DNC email download vs hack 2 days ago, and nobody got back to you.
The forensics determined that the data left the system much faster than it could through an internet connection, so a direct download to a memory stick, Analysis here:
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51106.htmMost people think Craig Murray carried the data stick from Seth Rich to Julian Assange. Murray and Assange keep mum. Murray does say this:
It seems to me that agent-of-change Trump is playing the news and election cycle in openly putting US troops on Syrian oil. It plays well in Tel Aviv, also. Tel Aviv was really turned off when Donald moved the US Army “war-trigger” forces out of harm’s way, abandoning the favorite Israeli scheme of independent-disruptive-Kurdistan.
Donald needs to be seen holding Syrian oil hostage, then making some killer deal for it, while removing those troops to Saudi Arabia, to help watch Arabian oil.
Trump stating overtly what he is doing is both good for Trump and bad for empire. That’s ok. Empire is not really good for any of us, though we are hostage to imperial transfer payments.
We need to find a better way.
Sister Caitlin in Oz, whose site I have been blocked from commenting on for 2 weeks, and blocked from visiting for almost a week (the “invisible hand”) has a good piece on things getting weirder because the patterns we know are changing, and that’s always weird, and it’s that time again.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/things-are-only-going-to-get-weirder-888764673704I’ve also been blocked from sending my posts out to my 180 bcc friends, but you can see it at http://www.johndayblog.com (I think)
I had something like a little epiphany, bigger than a brain-fart, anyway…
Donald Trump can quietly let it be known, like to Nncy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, not a public statement, that he will nominate Tulsi Gabbard for Secretary of Defense, if she fails to receive the Democratic nomination.
That would really put pressure on the DNC to not actively prevent that event.
Cheeto would struggle to keep quiet about it all winter and spring, though…
🙂
Ilargi,
I am greatly appreciative of your tutelage since at least very early 2008, maybe a little earlier, but I can’t be certain. AS I have said, I discovered the r=early Zero Hedge from TAE. It was much more modest then. Nobody wonders “who Tyler Durden is” anymore.
You have been defunded as a death blow to your voice. The warfare has become so overt, yet not acknowledged as such in the MSM.
I don’t know where we are heading, or how fast, and you, and I and all of us have hands in co-creating where we go.
I am fortunate to have a job caring for poor people, a historical anomaly, which won’t last too long, I think.
I have been looking to prepare a lifeboat for a long time. Here is a post about Saturday before last, with nice pictures of planting the avocado orchard in the early light, after making preparations over the previous half year. http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/guacamole-fans-saturday-morning-at-600.html
I consider you a brother-in-arms. I don’t say that for effect. I will respond to any communication from you.The Saker (and others) have a more complete version of what the Russian Defense Minister actually said, which is that the US military has been running that oil out of Syria for a long time, with US protection of the tanker trucks. Photographic evidence is included, too.
Russian Defense Ministry publishes evidence of US oil smuggling from Syria
Posts might be “disallowed” now, still trying. Thanks for doing this for so long, Ilargi.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/iconoclastic-messengers.html
Charles Hugh Smith:
The unraveling of everything that actually matters is quickening. While every “news” outlet cheerleads the stock market (“The Dow soared today as investor optimism rose… blah blah blah”), our “leadership” and our media don’t even attempt to measure what’s unraveling, much less address the underlying causes.
The hope is that if we ignore what’s unraveling, it will magically go away. But that’s not how reality works…
Note that the only group that benefited from the past 20 years of speculative bubbles is the top 1%. The whole idea that inflating bubbles creates a “wealth effect” that “trickles down” is preposterous, as evidenced by the decline of the middle 60% of households while the speculators and owners of bubble-assets skimmed the vast majority of income gains…
The only way forward with any chance of success is to start by acknowledging the decay of our economy due to rampant financialization, legalized looting, the pathologies of “winner take most” speculation and the realities of a two-tiered system in which entrenched elites are “more equal” than the rest of us, economically, socially and politically. We have to accept the limits of technology to reverse the unraveling and assess the damage that’s already been done to our shared capital.
Acting as if the system is working just fine and the problem is perception/optics is accelerating the unraveling.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/unraveling-quickens10-19.htmlFinian Cunningham:
No wonder Democratic Party bosses and mainstream media are trying to bury presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard. She is the only candidate, perhaps the only politician in the US, who is telling the American public exactly what they need to know about what their government and military are really up to: fighting illegal regime-change wars, and to boot, sponsoring terrorists for that purpose…
“Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011… along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and cheer-leading this regime-change war.”
The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing the government in Damascus.
It was a remarkably damning assessment of US policy in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. And it was by no means the first time that Gabbard has leveled with the American people on the brutality and criminality of Washington’s so-called “interventions”.
The other 11 Democratic candidates on the stage during the TV debate looked agog after Gabbard’s devastating and calmly delivered statement. All the others have proffered the false narrative that US forces are in Syria to “fight terrorism”.Helen of DesTroy, via RT (Then her email comment about the real reason Tulsi is not running for re-election to a fourth congressional term):
Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has abandoned her race for re-election in Hawaii to focus on securing her party’s presidential nomination, kicking the ‘Russian asset’ conspiracy theorizing into high gear.
Gabbard announced on Friday that she would not seek re-election to Congress, declaring she would focus instead on the presidential race. Promising to “end our interventionist foreign policy of being the world’s police, toppling dictators and governments we don’t like, and redirect our precious resources towards serving the needs of the people here at home,” she “humbly” asked her Hawaii constituents to support her candidacy, sending social media into a frenzy of speculation.
Helen: ”From what I’ve heard, her Hillary troubles have led the DCCC to throw a big pile of cash behind her rival in Hawaii, Kai Kahele – supposedly a progressive, but if you’ve ever seen him speak the dude is the biggest stick-up-the-ass corporate centrist this side of Mazie Hirono… Anyway, Tulsi, lacking a massive warchest & having been effectively abandoned by her party, can only afford to do one race, according to people working for her campaign. I don’t know what she’s going to do when she loses the nomination.”
https://www.rt.com/usa/471865-tulsi-gabbard-president-stein-conspiracy/http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/war-zone-living.html
Eva Bartlett from Canada has been traveling in Donetsk, and has a story here of the people who hosted her and explained their lives, being shelled in their homes for 5 years by western-backed Ukrainian neo-nazis. Children lost, schools shelled, ordinary people captured and sent to torture camps, humans rushing out to get the wounded into their cars, to get to a hospital. They want their lives back. They are not invading, just holding their homes and dying in them.
Thanks Eleni.Under Fire from Ukraine and Misperceived by the West, The People of the DPR Share Their Stories
Pepe Escobar has a truly informative article about the fires of strife burning in South and Central America, where neoliberalism has accellerated the rate of bleeding of native peoples, in order to further advance the wealth of colonial elite classes and foreign multinational corporations. This is presented country by country, comparing and contrasting, and providing historical context for these long-term wealth extraction processes. Bolivian election last…
Bolivia is now the most dynamic economy in Latin America, as stressed by top Argentine analyst Atilio Boron.
The campaign to discredit Morales, which is bound to become even more vicious, is part of imperial 5G war, of which, Boron writes, “the chronic poverty that the absolute majority of the population suffered for centuries”, a state that always “maintained the population under total lack of institutional protection” and the “pillaging of natural wealth and the common good”.http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/hive-mind.html
A hive of lesser evils , a little tidbit from Helen of DesTRoy’s Democratic Party Zombification story
(Look for the cat-and-cake-copy-of-cat picture)
Even if Clinton does not run, her influence permeates the party. “I’ve talked to most of them,” she revealed on ABC’s The View earlier this month, slyly hinting that previous contests’ frontrunners a year before the election had failed to secure the nomination. Instead of Sanders and Gabbard, the Democratic National Committee is propping up Biden and grooming as his second Elizabeth Warren, the neoliberal wolf in sheep’s clothing trying to steal Sanders’ thunder by insisting she’s all he represents plus a pair of X chromosomes. Decked out in borrowed rhetoric and forged identity politics credentials, she earnestly presents herself as a leftist, hoping no one remembers she was registered as a Republican until her 40s.
Lest anyone be fooled by Warren’s “radical” act, former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently gushed “I know she’s pragmatic, just wait.” Such an endorsement should be a death knell for her progressive support, especially after the revelation that she has been in constant contact with Clinton. Warren emphasizes in communications with donors that she doesn’t actually intend to upend the status quo, and has flip-flopped repeatedly on accepting big-dollar donors and PACs, only rejecting them once she’d stockpiled a healthy war chest from those very donors.
http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/129-zombie-nation-the-democratic-party-is-dead-and-everyone-knows-it-but-themOops, sorry to include the opening story, already posted here, about Democratic Party existential question.
chagrinedhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/understanding-reality.html
Will the Democratic Party Exist After the 2020 Election? (Real question, CIA owned and operated.)
As a result of the corrupt foundation of the Russiagate allegations, Attorney General Bob Barr and Special Investigator John Durham appear hot on the trail with law enforcement in Italy as they have apparently scared the bejesus out of what little common sense remains among the Democratic hierarchy as if Barr/Durham might be headed for Obama’s Oval Office.
Barr’s earlier comment before the Senate that “spying did occur’ and that ‘it’s a big deal’ when an incumbent administration (ie the Obama Administration) authorizes a counter-Intelligence operation on an opposing candidate (ie Donald Trump) has the Dems in panic-stricken overdrive – and that is what is driving the current Impeachment Inquiry.Pepe Escobar has Syria update, and historical context. Important context.
What is happening in Syria, following yet another Russia-brokered deal, is a massive geopolitical game-changer. I’ve tried to summarize it in a single paragraph this way:
“It’s a quadruple win. The U.S. performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO ally Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of the entire northeast.”
Syria may be the biggest defeat for the CIA since Vietnam.
Yet that hardly begins to tell the whole story... (see history lesson)
The reconstruction of Syria may cost as much as $200 billion. Damascus has already made it very clear that the U.S. and the EU are not welcome. China will be in the forefront, along with Russia and Iran; this will be a project strictly following the Eurasia integration playbook — with the Chinese aiming to revive Syria’s strategic positioning in the Ancient Silk Road.
As for Erdogan, distrusted by virtually everyone, and a tad less neo-Ottoman than in the recent past, he now seems to have finally understood that Bashar al-Assad “won’t go,” and he must live with it.”Agreement to pause Turkey’s campaign in Syria destroys US credibility”, top Democrats say, despite demanding it. Helen of DesTroy
https://www.rt.com/usa/471179-pelosi-schumer-complain-trump-turkey/Turkey threatens to kill all the Kurds who are not out of the area of north Syria that borders Turkey (How deep?) by tomorrow, Tuesday 10/11/19. That’s when talks with Russia and Syria about how wide the temporary strip will be resume.
Believable? How much?
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/we-have-hours-left-turkish-ceasefire-edge-collapse-erdogan-gives-kurds-hours-flee-territoryHelen of DesTroy also has this story on RT
A Navy “doomsday” aircraft designed to be used as a command center in a nuclear war was knocked out of commission – by a bird, which caused over $2 million in damages when it was sucked into an engine during a test flight.
The E-6B Mercury plane was grounded after an unidentified species of bird was sucked into one of its four engines during a test flight at Naval Air Station Patuxent River in Maryland earlier this month. The plane was conducting a touch-and-go landing when the “Class A” accident occurred, causing over $2 million in damages and requiring the replacement of the entire engine. The bird was the only casualty.
https://www.rt.com/usa/471182-bird-strike-grounds-doomsday-plane/Paris zoo unveils ideal modern citizen, lacking a brain, but having 720 sexes.
https://www.treehugger.com/natural-sciences/paris-zoo-exhibits-worlds-weirdest-living-thing.htmlI know it seems off-topic in this crazy world, but avocado trees convert sunlight, rain, CO2 and soil nutrients into GUACAMOLE. Mexican varieties are the most “cold tolerant”.
Yoakum Avocado Orchard Planting, Dawn October 18, 2019
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/guacamole-fans-saturday-morning-at-600.html
Saturday morning at 6:00 AM, having made coffee and had my first mug, I went out to start the final prep for getting the 12 Mexican avocado trees that I have been raising in pots this summer, into their permanent environment.
Yetti the dog came out around dawn to check on my progress, and went back to wag at Holly and Tommy that something was afoot outside that they should go check out.
They started planting avocados in the holes I had prepped, while I got another mug of coffee and Yetti stood guard.
Then we all engaged the planting together, and I watered the babies in for an hour.
Jenny composed these documentary images to share with you.http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/planetary-life-is-russian-asset.html
Planetary Life Is A Russian asset
We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too Late
In the face of climate breakdown and ecological overshoot, alluring promises of “green growth” are no more than magical thinking. We need to restructure the fundamentals of our global cultural/economic system to cultivate an “ecological civilization”: one that prioritizes the health of living systems over short-term wealth production...
In practice, transitioning to an ecological civilization would mean restructuring some of the fundamental institutions driving our current civilization to destruction. In place of an economy based on perpetual growth in GDP, it would institute one that emphasized quality of life, using alternative measures such as a Genuine Progress Indicator to gauge success. Economic systems would be based on respect for individual dignity and fairly rewarding each person’s contribution to the greater good, while ensuring that nutritional, housing, healthcare, and educational needs were fully met for everyone. Transnational corporations would be fundamentally reorganized and made accountable to the communities they purportedly serve, to optimize human and environmental wellbeing rather than shareholder profits. Locally owned cooperatives would become the default organizational structure. Food systems would be designed to emphasize local production using state-of-the-art agroecology practices in place of fossil fuel-based fertilizer and pesticides, while manufacturing would prioritize circular flows where efficient re-use of waste products is built into the process from the outset.
In an ecological civilization, the local community would be the basic building block of society. Face-to-face interaction would regain ascendance as a crucial part of human flourishing, and each community’s relationship with others would be based on principles of mutual respect, learning, and reciprocity. Technological innovation would still be encouraged, but would be prized for its effectiveness in enhancing the vitality of living systems rather than minting billionaires. The driving principle of enterprise would be that we are all interconnected in the web of life—and long-term human prosperity is therefore founded on a healthy Earth.
We Need an Ecological Civilization Before It’s Too Latehttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/third-grade-politicians.html
Professor Anthony Hall has a lot of insight gained from his attendance at the New Horizon Conference in Lebanon. The Yemeni victories within Saudi Arabia have been particularly hushed up in the west, as has the weakness and instability of the ruling Saudi royal clan.
In recent years the Saudi assault on Yemen has been widely recognized as the basis of the largest humanitarian crisis in the world. The invasion has directly affected about 80% of Yemen’s 24 million people where starvation in running rife. As a high-level UNICEF official put it, “Yemen has become today a living hell for children…. with 400,000 children suffering acute malnutrition.”
Those engaged in the Yemeni resistance to Saudi Arabia’s assault on their country began in the summer of 2019 to demonstrate increasingly sophisticated forms of self-defense especially through the deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles including drones. In mid-September this strategy of targeting Saudi installations in the cause of undermining the strength of the imperial predator extended to hitting oil-producing and oil-refining installations of the Saudi corporate giant, Aramco.
As the New Horizon delegates learned in Beirut, the Yemeni resistance forces followed up this action in late September by capturing about 2,000 Saudi officers and their mercenary soldiers who hail from many locations including Sudan, Pakistan, and Iraq. The Yemeni resistance also captured hundreds of Saudi military vehicles including some light armored vehicles made in Ontario by a Canadian-based unit of General Dynamics.
The turnaround in the military balance of power in the Arabian Peninsula in September of 2019 has many global implications. There is no doubt this turnaround is a game-changer with many far-reaching implications. The Yemeni resistance demonstrates that the world’s biggest importer of armaments emanating mostly from the United States cannot repel a concerted attack on the Saudi Arabian Armed Forces within Saudi territory. The attack comes from highly-skilled fighting units hailing mostly from one of the poorest and most aggressively assaulted countries in the world.
In 1945 Saudi Arabia was effectively taken over by the United States and its oil and gas sector. The USA claimed the lion’s share of Arabia’s fossil fuel wealth as one of the main fruits of victory for intervening to help shift the balance of power towards the allies in the Second World War. The family of Ibn Saud was entrusted to play the role of custodian of the massive Saudi oil fields largely on behalf of the emerging US superpower with its imperial headquarters in the Pentagon.
https://ahtribune.com/world/3564-iran-biggest-exporter-of-terrorism.htmlCongresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was again, most-Googled during the Democratic debates Tuesday.
Why does that always happen? White suit?
Here is 6 minutes of Tulsi.
https://971talk.radio.com/blogs/marc-cox-morning-show/tulsi-gabbard-democratic-debate-highlightsPepe Escobar, who was also at that New Horizon conference in Beirut with Professor James (lead article) has a complimentary update on Syria, discord in US politics, and the Iraqi rumor that the snipers were US/Israeli actors.
In the annals of bombastic Trump tweets, this one is simply astonishing: here we have a President of the United States, on the record, unmasking the whole $8-trillion intervention in the Middle East as an endless war based on a “false premise.” No wonder the Pentagon is not amused...
What’s happening is a quadruple win. The US performs a face saving withdrawal, which Trump can sell as avoiding a conflict with NATO alley Turkey. Turkey has the guarantee – by the Russians – that the Syrian Army will be in control of the Turkish-Syrian border. Russia prevents a war escalation and keeps the Russia-Iran-Turkey peace process alive. And Syria will eventually regain control of its oilfields and the entire northeast.
https://www.asiatimes.com/2019/10/article/kurds-face-stark-options-after-us-pullback/http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/weakest-link.html
Moon of Alabama:
The U.S. had more than 1,000 troops in northeast Syria. There were also several hundred French and British special forces and some 2,000 U.S. contractors. They, and a huge amount of equipment, are now moving out. They have nothing to fear from the Syrian forces. Syria is happy to see them leave. (Reports that the U.S.yesterday bombed Syrian troops are false.)
The strategic plan behind last week’s development must have come from Moscow. Russia has tried for some time to get Turkey into its camp. Russia, Iran and Syria allowed Turkey a limited invasion of Syria to scare the U.S. out. Russia largely supported the Turkish move but it will also set its limits.
Trump has been looking for a chance to move the U.S. troops out of Syria since December 2018. The borg made that politically unfeasible. The Turkish (Russian) move gave him the excuse he needed.
It is possible that the whole arrangement was made for exactly that purpose.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/syria-regains-its-northeastern-parts.html#moreGlobal Research:
The Syrian President Bashar al-Assad agreed to guarantee the safety of the Kurds as long as these become part of the National Security Forces. No other conditions were put forward by the Kurds, who have lost momentum with the sudden US withdrawal. Damascus promised there will be no revenge or resentment measures towards the Kurds who have, for years, acted as human shields to protect the US occupation forces which remained in Syria notwithstanding the defeat of ISIS.
The Russian-Kurdish deal consists of the deployment of the Syrian army on all borders with Turkey and the return of all sources of energy (gas and oil) to the Syrian government-controlled forces. These sources of energy are vital to the Syrian government, which has been suffering under heavy US-EU sanctions. Any delivery of oil was blocked, except the crude oil from Iran, whose supertanker managed to breach the siege.
The initial agreement between the Kurds and Damascus (via Russia) consists in the ending of the self-administration of NES, the integration of the Syrian Kurds under the command of the Syrian Army, and the pursuit and destruction of all ISIS forces.One Rocket Provoked the US Withdrawal: Details of the Kurdish-Russian-Syrian Deal
There is a lot of bloviating by Trump and Erdogan, but I don’t get the feeling they are actually mad at each other.
They’ll have to stay-together-for-the-children, anyway…
Erdogan Holding 50 US Tactical Nukes ‘Hostage’ As Trump Authorizes Sanctions
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/erdogan-holding-50-us-tactical-nukes-hostage-trump-authorizes-sanctionsIt’s not looking like the House is going to formally vote on whether to begin impeachment proceedings against President-Orange-Republican.
Schiff: Public Has No Right To Observe Impeachment Inquiry…Then Kicks GOP Lawmaker Out
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/schiff-says-public-has-no-right-observe-impeachment-inquiry-then-kicks-gop-lawmaker-out A formal vote would allow Republicans to subpoena their own documents and witnesses, something the minority party was allowed in both the Nixon and Clinton impeachment inquiry resolutions – which is why the Trump administration won’t cooperate until a vote is held.
Pelosi has called pressure to do so a “Republican talking point.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/pelosi-punts-official-impeachment-vote-robbing-gop-subpoena-powerElizabeth Warren comported herself deftly and “won” the debate last night, I think.
Bernie Sanders is setting the popular agenda, and AOC will endorse him.
Tulsi Gabbard is not noticed in the American media. She was there. Nobody really agreed with her. Sanders, sorta’.
“The slaughter of the Kurds being done by Turkey is yet another negative consequence of the regime-change war that we’ve been waging in Syria. Donald Trump has the blood of the Kurds on his hand — but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011, along with many in the mainstream media, who have been championing and cheerleading this regime-change war,” she said.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/democratic-debate-tulsi-gabbard-syria-pete-buttigieg-trump-turkey-a9157711.html
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-election/democratic-debate-summary-highlights-biden-warren-sanders-trump-impeachment-a9157716.htmlThe CIA has had a heart-attack gun since the 1960s…
Bernie Sanders released a proposal today that would gradually shift 20 percent of corporate equity into funds owned and controlled by the workers in each company. The plan, which would apply to all publicly-traded companies and large closely-held companies, would move 2 percent of corporate stock into worker funds each year for a decade. Once the shares are transferred into the funds, workers would begin receiving dividends and have the ability to exercise the voting rights of the shares, including the right to vote on corporate board elections and on shareholder resolutions.
Sanders’s plan is by far the most radical worker ownership proposal put forward by a presidential candidate in recent memory.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/10/bernie-wants-you-to-own-more-of-the-means-of-productionThe only thing keeping Bernie alive is having been robbed by the DNC…
Billionaires could be slapped with an effective tax rate of 97.5% if Bernie Sanders wins the 2020 presidential elections, reported Bloomberg, who spoke with two economists advising both the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren Presidential Campaigns.
Sanders’ effective tax rate of 97.5%, includes an income tax, but also a wealth tax that is aimed at breaking up family fortunes over time.
“With the wealth tax, you get directly at the stock instead of hitting the flow of income, making it a much more powerful de-concentration tool than income taxes,” University of California, Berkeley professor Emmanuel Saez wrote in an email.
Saez said Sanders’ wealth tax would slash the number of billionaires in the country by at least half by 2030.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/sanders-goes-jugular-could-slap-billionaires-975-effective-tax-rateMoon of Alabama
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/syria-regains-its-northeastern-parts.html#more
The strategic plan behind last week’s development must have come from Moscow. Russia has tried for some time to get Turkey into its camp. Russia, Iran and Syria allowed Turkey a limited invasion of Syria to scare the U.S. out. Russia largely supported the Turkish move but it will also set its limits.Trump has been looking for a chance to move the U.S. troops out of Syria since December 2018. The borg made that politically unfeasible. The Turkish (Russian) move gave him the excuse he needed.
Maybe they use cryptocurrency transactions to communicate. I think that would be workable. I’m no expert.
There is a lot of public bloviation by Trump, Erdogn and EU “leaders” about what is going on with the reset of forces in Northern Syria.
I suspect, as Ilargi does, that it is staged for domestic audiences, and actual details a been pre-arranged with agreed limits.
I suspect Russian diplomacy is in action.Hi Alexander,
Point of correction.
Pol Pot was not a school teacher. He was always of the elite ruling class. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pol_Pot
You are conflating him with “Comrade Duch”, who was a schoolteacher, and became the head of Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kang_Kek_Iew
The only reason I know this is that I took my wife and kids to that prison when we traveled through Southeast Asia. The lesson is that ordinary people become monsters in such circumstances. Spot the trend and avoid the circumstances. Comrade Duch never tried to hide what he did, admitted and repented, helped investigators and converted to Christianity, by the way.Alexander,
We are kindred spirits. So were our grandfathers. My grandfather was an observer-gunner in a Spad in WW-1, attended the Sorbonne after that, traveled the world as a radio man on a tramp steamer, went to Harvard Grad School in Journalism, raised a family during the depression and built them a house with his hands, then went to WW-2 in OSS counter-intelligence, Major Robert H. Williams. I knew him as my grandfather who raised cattle. He was a good and loving hman, who wanted the world to be free of it’s sociopathic masters. I listened.
I also appreciate Murray Bookchin, and have read his work in my search for the best form of human government. His :ibertarian Municipalism apealed to Ocalon, too, who is the long-confined Kurdish leader, and seemingly a good and thoughtful human.
I am not sure what is going on. Fog of war. You are also not sure what is going on.
Different powerful interests want a gas pipeline from the Pars gas field (Iran/Qatar) to feed Europe’s energy thirst. It has to go through Syria. Assad (a decent human, unlike his brother and sociopathic father) said “No”. That’s what made the US/Israel/Western-interests start this war in Syria and fund it with money and mercenaries.
That’s failed. Iran may eventually get to do it’s pipeline. Turkey is in a critical position for a lot of pipeline and trade flows, where Greece used to be, and mostly made up of ethnic Greeks, not Turkic peoples.
There are different reports of levels of support from Basher al Assad for Kurds than what you have posted. I don’t personally know. He’s an Ophthalmologist. He didn’t plan to rule Syria. It’s an accident of history.
The Kurds have been used by Israel and the US/Empire, and are now discarded, but they are still who they are, whoever that is, always a people without a country.
I was hopeful a few years ago for Rojava, and I dearly want this communitarian form of governance to flourish. The Empire does not, of course.I watched Beau’s 5th Column video about Trump crowing that the Saudis are paying for that infusion of 1800 US soldiers, added to those already stationed there.
I would look at this more carefully. The $US is the petro-dollar because Nixon & Kissinger made that deal with King Faisal.
Saudi Arabia just lost over half of it’s mercenary army, and their Saudi officers to the Yemeni army last month, and never said a word about it.
The House of Saud needs that Aramco IPO to go through, and so does Wall Street.
This makes it possible.
Also, the US military is in the act of occupying Saudi Arabia to protect-the-oil, not to protect the house of Saud, at least not more than is necessary to control the oil.
(Or so I interpret this)Tom at INN World Report sent this clip of President Trump talking to a large crowd in Iowa this past week. He cued it up to the part where Trump talks about the worst thing he has to do, which is to sign all the letters to the families of dead servicemen and women. He reads the letters.He greets the planes and the families sometimes.He describes his first time greeting families of dead soldiers on the tarmac. I wish you would watch these three minutes. He wants them to come home alive, now. He seems to genuinely mean it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vT3O5WFYUxo&feature=youtu.be&t=4825Trump can’t be a sociopath, having made that unscripted speech to those people. He also can’t be a complete narcissist, though he sure has some narcissistic traits.He’s human.He’s “The Gray Champion” of this country, for this particular systemic-reset-round as history deploys.
I had a dream early Sunday (yesterday) morning, that I was (sort of) Donald Trump, and I started speaking truth, correcting history, apologizing for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and explaining why, and explaining FDR’s trick to get Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, to get the US into the war, and assure that so many Americans died that day and then more and more, and about JFK and 9/11, and how this is our real world.
It was a good dream. It felt good.
Just a dream, right?http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/coupa-cola.html
Matt Taibbi
I’ve lived through a few coups. They’re insane, random, and terrifying, like watching sports, except your political future depends on the score.
The kickoff begins when a key official decides to buck the executive. From that moment, government becomes a high-speed head-counting exercise. Who’s got the power plant, the airport, the police in the capital? How many department chiefs are answering their phones? Who’s writing tonight’s newscast?
When the KGB in 1991 tried to reassume control of the crumbling Soviet Union by placing Mikhail Gorbachev under arrest and attempting to seize Moscow, logistics ruled. Boris Yeltsin’s crew drove to the Russian White House in ordinary cars, beating KGB coup plotters who were trying to reach the seat of Russian government in armored vehicles. A key moment came when one of Yeltsin’s men, Alexander Rutskoi – who two years later would himself lead a coup against Yeltsin – prevailed upon a Major in a tank unit to defy KGB orders and turn on the “criminals.”
We have long been spared this madness in America. Our head-counting ceremony was Election Day. We did it once every four years.
That’s all over, in the Trump era.
On Thursday, news broke that two businessmen said to have “peddled supposedly explosive information about corruption involving Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden” were arrested at Dulles airport on “campaign finance violations.” The two figures are alleged to be bagmen bearing “dirt” on Democrats, solicited by Trump and his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani.
Lev Parnas and Igor Fruman will be asked to give depositions to impeachment investigators. They’re reportedly going to refuse. Their lawyer John Dowd also says they will “refuse to appear before House Committees investigating President Donald Trump.” Fruman and Parnas meanwhile claim they had real derogatory information about Biden and other politicians, but “the U.S. government had shown little interest in receiving it through official channels.”
For Americans not familiar with the language of the Third World, that’s two contrasting denials of political legitimacy.
The men who are the proxies for Donald Trump and Rudy Giuliani in this story are asserting that “official channels” have been corrupted. The forces backing impeachment, meanwhile, are telling us those same defendants are obstructing a lawful impeachment inquiry.
This latest incident, set against the impeachment mania and the reportedly “expanding” Russiagate investigation of U.S. Attorney John Durham, accelerates our timeline to chaos. We are speeding toward a situation when someone in one of these camps refuses to obey a major decree, arrest order, or court decision, at which point Americans will get to experience the joys of their political futures being decided by phone calls to generals and police chiefs.
My discomfort in the last few years, first with Russiagate and now with Ukrainegate and impeachment, stems from the belief that the people pushing hardest for Trump’s early removal are more dangerous than Trump. Many Americans don’t see this because they’re not used to waking up in a country where you’re not sure who the president will be by nightfall. They don’t understand that this predicament is worse than having a bad president.
The Trump presidency is the first to reveal a full-blown schism between the intelligence community and the White House. Senior figures in the CIA, NSA, FBI and other agencies made an open break from their would-be boss before Trump’s inauguration, commencing a public war of leaks that has not stopped...
It was also a bold new foray into domestic politics by intelligence agencies that in recent decades began asserting all sorts of frightening new authority. They were kidnapping foreigners, assassinating by drone, conducting paramilitary operations without congressional notice, building an international archipelago of secret prisons, and engaging in mass warrantless surveillance of Americans. We found out in a court case just last week how extensive the illegal domestic surveillance has been, with the FBI engaging in tens of thousands of warrantless searches involving American emails and phone numbers under the guise of combating foreign subversion.
The agencies’ new trick is inserting themselves into domestic politics using leaks and media pressure. The “intel chiefs” meeting was just the first in a series of similar stories, many following the pattern in which a document was created, passed from department from department, and leaked...
I don’t believe most Americans have thought through what a successful campaign to oust Donald Trump would look like. Most casual news consumers can only think of it in terms of Mike Pence becoming president. The real problem would be the precedent of a de facto intelligence community veto over elections, using the lunatic spookworld brand of politics that has dominated the last three years of anti-Trump agitation.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/were-in-a-permanent-coupTrump is cutting staff loyal to Bolton and neocons at the National Security Council.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/national-security-council-gutted-establishment-loyalists-undermine-trumpBut I thought the US was pulling soldiers out of the Mideast!
The Pentagon has increased the number of US forces in the Central Command (CENTCOM) area of operations by about 14,000 since May this year, as it continues to lock horns with Tehran. Not all of those went to Saudi Arabia, however, as CENTCOM’s area of operations covers the entire Middle East, including Afghanistan and Syria.
https://www.rt.com/news/470730-pentagon-troops-saudi-iran/Ukrainian MP Andriy Derkach revealed on Wednesday that former Vice President Joe Biden received $900,000 from Burisma Group for lobbying activities, citing materials related to an investigation.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/joe-biden-personally-paid-900000-burisma-according-ukrainian-mp-bombshell-admissionUkrainian Government Will ‘Happily” Investigate Pro-Hillary Election Interference, President Says
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ukrainian-government-will-happily-investigate-2016-us-election-interference-zelenskyReal whistle-blowers get treated like this:
Julian Assange to remain locked up in UK prison following brief court appearance ahead of US extradition hearing
https://www.rt.com/news/470708-assange-remanded-custody-extradition/But the border area Erdogan marked is quite populated with some 850,000 people living there. Most of them are Kurds.
Turkey wants to replace those Kurds with the Syrian mob that it armed and supported against the Syrian government troops. These people and their families currently live in Turkey. To move them into north Syria would be one of the largest ethnic cleansing operation the world has seen in recent times.
A saying goes “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” But there are no mountains in Syria’s north east. While the YPG might want to fight off a Turkish invasion they have little chance to succeed. The land is flat and the YPG forces only have light arms.
There is only one solution for them. They will have to call up the Syrian government and ask it to come back into the north east. That would remove the Turkish concerns and would likely prevent further Turkish moves.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/syria-trump-gives-green-light-for-another-turkish-invasion.html#more
The illegal weapons rat-line into Syria, to arm the ISIS caliphate and assorted “good terrorists” is laid out again in detail. It is US and UK covert operations, as usual.
Arms Watch published emails exposing how British shell companies were used as cover for a US government program to arm militants in Syria, called in internal memos ‘Task Force Smoking Gun’.
Years after the height of the CIA billion dollar program ‘Timber Sycamore’, and after the US Department of Defense ‘Train and Equip’ program, more and more details of the nuts and bolts of covert aid to jihadists in the Levant are falling into place.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wikileaks-covert-arms-investigation-reveals-uk-shell-companies-served-us-weapons-ratIs the second CIA “whistleblower” John Bolton?
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-is-a-lot-of-speculation-that-john-bolton-is-the-second-whistleblowerIsraeli politics has been jammed recently. This article has good detail on those political processes. Johnathan Cook
The reality is that there is strong unity in Israel – over shared, deeply ugly attitudes towards Palestinians, whether citizens or those under occupation. Paradoxically, the only obstacle to realising that unity is Netanyahu’s efforts to cling to power.Why Israel is Struggling to find a way out of Its Political Deadlock
A few days old, but useful information. Israel has been attacking Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, frustrated by the formation of a “Shia Crescent” of political solidarity from Iran to Syria.
During the last five days there have been protest all over the south of Iraq where the majority of the people are Shia. The protest escalated within a few days into shootings with over a hundred killed. In several cities party and government offices were burned and various groups hustle to take a position in the “leaderless” movement.
There are legitimate reasons for protests. The majority of the people in Iraq is younger than 20 years. The people have little chance of finding a job. The state is weak and many of its actors are corrupt. Services the state is supposed to provide don’t get delivered. Electricity and water supply is often sparse.
But those are not the reasons why the protests immediately escalated into violence:
Liz Sly @LizSly – 22:19 UTC · Oct 4, 2019
Many Iraqi protesters are complaining of unknown snipers targeting them from rooftops, and it’s possible they are aiming at both the demonstrators & the security forces.
Quote: Reporting Iraq @TFPOI · Oct 4
Protestors are confirming the use of snipers from buildings, targeting protesters approaching Tahrir Square.
A young man was killed by the use of snipers. Evidence in the form of a photo can be seen.
#iraq #baghdad #save_the_iraqi_people
During the 2014 U.S. coup in Ukraine the same method was used to inflame the country.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/the-us-led-coup-attempt-in-iraq-may-further-weaken-that-country.htmlTurkey Joins Russia’s Ruble-Based Alternative To SWIFT
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/turkey-joins-russias-ruble-based-alternative-swift Brexit talks have come to an abrupt halt in Brussels days after the British government demanded intensive negotiations on Boris Johnson’s proposals.
Sources on both sides confirmed that no meetings between the negotiating teams were scheduled. There are 22 days to go before the UK is due to leave the EU.
Discussions between EU and UK officials had been held almost daily since the prime minister and the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, met for lunch in Luxembourg in mid-September.
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/09/brexit-talks-in-brussels-between-eu-and-the-uk-come-to-a-haltMPs will be called to Parliament for a special Saturday sitting in a decisive day for the future of Brexit.
Parliament will meet on 19 October after a crunch EU summit – seen as the last chance for the UK and EU to agree a deal ahead of 31 October deadline.
If a deal is agreed, Boris Johnson will ask MPs to approve it – but if not, a range of options could be presented.
The BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg says these could include leaving without a deal, and halting Brexit altogether.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-49984367Tom Luongo thinks Trump has been motivated by the impeachment political circuis to go all-out.
Michael Snyder says the rumor is that the “second whistleblower” is John Bolton
http://theeconomiccollapseblog.com/archives/there-is-a-lot-of-speculation-that-john-bolton-is-the-second-whistleblower
And Israeli political deadlock explained rather well:
The reality is that there is strong unity in Israel – over shared, deeply ugly attitudes towards Palestinians, whether citizens or those under occupation. Paradoxically, the only obstacle to realising that unity is Netanyahu’s efforts to cling to power.Why Israel is Struggling to find a way out of Its Political Deadlock
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/innocent-until-charged.html
Democracy is the coat of paint applied for PR purposes to the Imperial State. Charles Hugh Smith
If we step back from the histrionics of impeachment and indeed, the past four years of political circus, we have to wonder if America’s democracy is little more than an elaborate simulation, a counterfeit democracy that matches our counterfeit capitalism (Matt Stoller’s term).
If we review the mechanics of our “democracy,” we find that swapping which party controls Congress doesn’t really change the policies of The Imperial State, the central state that oversees America’s global commercial and geopolitical empire…
Bush I was the ideal Imperial State president because he understood the need for the velvet glove of diplomacy, the most important element of which is an orchestrated demonstration of Imperial restraint. This also includes healthy dollops of PR about the sanctity of our alliances, which are heavily promoted as the acme of win-win cooperation, etc. He also understood the essential role of America’s commercial Empire: the US dollar, US banking and US corporate interests around the world.
Imperial State handlers cannot tolerate loose-cannon presidents, those who keep their own council and who act outside the “recommended guidelines,” for example, trying to make peace with rivals and enemies that the Imperial State cultivates as “enemies” for its own purposes.
John F. Kennedy appeared to be the ideal Imperial State president: wealthy Eastern Establishment, Harvard, combat military service, informal diplomatic experience via his father’s connections, an enthusiastic supporter of the Imperial State’s Cold War and a youthful politician with superb communication skills who the mass media fell for hook, line and sinker.
Once Kennedy soured on the CIA, things got dicey. The ideal president quickly became less ideal as his independence grew.
The Imperial State and mass media always feared and hated Richard Nixon, a poker player who kept his cards hidden and who surrounded himself with loyalists and outsiders, a rogue politician who could upstage the Imperial State’s agenda by private diplomacy (opening relations with China) or expanding wars of choice (the invasion of Cambodia).
Nixon’s cabinet was well-stocked with Establishment pros, but they were largely figureheads when it came to the bold private diplomatic moves Nixon favored. In other words, Nixon was the Imperial State’s nightmare president.
Just to show that the Imperial State plays no favorites in party affiliations, the State and its media organs also hated Jimmy Carter, another independent who wandered outside the “recommended guidelines” and had to be destroyed via endless mockery and the undermining of his initiatives…
Bush II was no Bush I, but he followed orders and never strayed from the “recommended guidelines.” The same can be said of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, telegenic communicators in the Kennedy mold.
Needless to say, the Imperial State and its media organs loathe Trump, the loosest cannon imaginable. Hillary Clinton had proven herself a reliable water carrier for the Imperial State, and so her election was elaborately planned and staged: potentially loose cannon Bernie Sanders was shivved in the primaries by the Democratic Party, and the champagne was chilled for Hillary’s victory.
Democracy is the coat of paint applied for PR purposes to the Imperial State. “Democracy” is only tolerated if it follows the approved script. The Republic is good PR, but the Empire makes the rules and the scripts that elected officials follow, and woe to anyone who wins an election they were supposed to lose or who strays too far from the “recommended guidelines.” (Imperial enemies must remain enemies until the Empire decides otherwise.)
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/democracy-empire10-19.htmlFormer CIA Chief Brennan Unblinkingly Rewrites Entire Basis Of US Judicial System In One Short Sentence:
In an interview on MSNBC, Brennan, unblinkingly states that “people are innocent, you know, until alleged to be involved in some kind of criminal activity.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/former-cia-chief-brennan-unblinkingly-rewrites-entire-basis-us-judicial-system-one-shorthttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/what-future-history.html
Historical transitions are completely insecure. No assurances exist. No comfort zone. Root hog or die.
How much daily insecurity are we used to?
One of our main goals in life is to be more secure, to save resources for times of need, to be well liked socially, to have good clothes, a good roof over our heads, and a warm hearth, surrounded by loving family.
Nonetheless, economic resets must periodically be worked out by all the economic participants, in all of the critical classes: Production and Transport, Management/Organization, Politics, Resource-Allocation and Enforcement. (That’s just my own quick division of economic segments. I’d lump religion with politics, for instance.)
All of us could be more conversant with production, especially kitchen-gardening, the intimate scale.
Below is a picture of me before work, October 1, at one end of the long break-patio at People’s Community Clinic, It shows about half of the vegetable garden I grow there for my coworkers. My purpose growing vegetables at work, is to create familiarity with that core human activity, to provide a chance to get some vegetables in season, and to understand how a garden progresses through the seasons and years.
Vegetable gardening provides the kind of security that comes from knowing the context intimately. It’s well aware of all of the limitations and weaknesses that inherently exist. It is not like the blind faith that “we” can transition to “completely renewable energy” by 2050, for instance.
One of the classes of people which is still being supported by global financial capitalism is the managerial class, that I include second in the list, those who provide structure and order to the fundamental processes of our economy, roughly the top 10% of wealth, minus the 1-2% at the tip.
I’m in that demographic, as you likely are. We can’t feel too easy; at least I do not. I’m in the business of understanding humans, their problems, diagnosing what is wrong, and finding inroads to improve and heal what is failing.
I believe that American and global economies broke away from the paradigm of sustainable economy in the early 1980s, started lying about the future, which was well-received, and started a Ponzi scheme for all forms of retirement plans, keeping up payments from current receipts, while gutting the productive assets, and protecting them from the future claims of society, under private ownership.
The problems inherent in that are myriad. “Ownership” exists within the context of a pervasive social-contract. The “owners” assume this will always exist for them, despite their covert embezzlement of all the cookies from the jar.
They pay the enforcers and managers and transport people, don’t they?
They are the masters of resource-allocation, are they not?
They have lots of product saved up for bad times, and protected in bunkers, right?
The problem is that the economy still needs productive workers, even though automation is so vast and pervasive. Workers and managers who are directly engaged in production have a working bond, that does not extend to bankers.
Which side do the police and army take?
Historically, they side with the bankers until they change sides and the revolution succeeds.
They are never the banker’s kids, after all…
At this point, we are forced to accept that there is actually an important societal role for Politicians. (Consider a writhing mass of earthworms in a manure bucket, which we don’t really want to reach in and grab with both hands.)
All of our lives, the main paid-job of politicians has been to deliver the workers, managers and enforcers to the resource-allocators.
That’s ending. It’s entering transition.
The successful politicians in the next decade will convince the resource-allocators to allocate a lot less to themselves, in trade for some security, which will be gained from creating a new societal contract.
The new social contract will be viable under conditions of more expensive and scarce energy and natural resources, and the fouling of our nest, which we finally have to address2020 is for all the marbles. The global capitalist ruling classes either crush this ongoing populist insurgency or … God knows where we go from here. Try to see it through their eyes for a moment. Picture four more years of Trump … second-term Trump … Trump unleashed. Do you really believe they’re going to let that happen, that they are going to permit this populist insurgency to continue for another four years?
They are not. What they are going to do is use all their power to destroy the monster … not Trump the man, but Trump the symbol. They are going to drown us in impeachment minutiae, drip, drip, drip, for the next twelve months. The liberal corporate media are going to go full-Goebbels. They are going to whip up so much mass hysteria that people won’t be able to think. They are going to pit us one against the other, and force us onto one or the other side of a simulated conflict (Democracy versus the Putin-Nazis) to keep us from perceiving the actual conflict (Global Capitalism versus Populism). They are going to bring us to the brink of civil war in order to prevent civil war. And, if that doesn’t work, and Trump gets reelected (or if it looks like he’s going to get reelected), they’ll probably have to just go ahead and kill him.
One way or another, this is it. This is the part where the global capitalist ruling classes teach us all a lesson. The lesson they intend to teach us is the same old lesson that masters have been teaching slaves since the dawn of slavery. The lesson is, “abandon hope.” The lesson is, “resistance is futile.” The lesson is, “shut up, eat your tofu, get back to work at your three gig jobs, service your school loans and your credit card debt, vote for who and what we tell you, and be grateful we don’t fucking kill you.
http://www.unz.com/chopkins/trumpenstein-must-be-destroyed/Former Israeli Intel Official Claims Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Worked for Israel
A recent interview given by a former high-ranking official in Israeli military intelligence has claimed that Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual blackmail enterprise was an Israel intelligence operation run for the purpose of entrapping powerful individuals and politicians in the United States and abroad. by Whitney Webb (Thanks for the link, Cat)Former Israeli Intel Official Claims Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell Worked for Israel
