[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/
The Gulag of the Mind, Charles Hugh Smith
In a peculiarly human pathology, we now believe the exact opposite of reality: our abuser is our savior, we’re getting wealthier when in fact we’re getting poorer, the government will always save us, even though the government is the problem, not the solution, and we’re entitled to all sorts of good things even as the entire system clings to a veneer of normalcy that is increasingly difficult to maintain.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogaug19/gulag-mind8-19.html

“China just went nuclear in trade war, There’s no turning back now” (Except, it is trade-warrior Trump on the attack, and China just excluded US agricultural commodities, and put a 67% tariff on pork, which China is hungry for, since swine flu is devastating their herds. Importantly, China is paying $US to support the Yuan/Renmenbi at 7/$US, which costs them a lot. China is forced to support their currency internationally, since they want it to be seen as stable, as a viable alternative to the $US. Tremendous costs are being imposed upon the Chinese financial system, which is known to hold vast, cancerous bad debt in every corner. China needs to win-by-not-losing. The Western financial empire would prefer that China fail first, rather than divorcing UK/EU triggering the big crisis.)

China Just Went Nuclear In The Trade War, And There Is No Turning Back Now

The US exited the INF, Intermediate range Nuclear Force agreement with Russia, because China was not bound by it and has massively expanded intermediate range missile assault capabilities.
“Our strategic competitors are China and Russia, principally, in that order,” Esper recently said.
​ ​This can be seen in the formal decision by the US to exit the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia. While on the face of it, it looks as if the US is directly taking action against Russia (and don’t get me wrong, it totally is doing that as well), the fact remains that the US wants out of this treaty because it was concerned it was limiting its ability to combat China in the Asia-Pacific theater…
​ ​“I experienced the treaty’s [INF Treaty’s] shortcomings firsthand while serving as a deputy assistant secretary of defense under Secretaries Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates. Since China was not party to the agreement, it was not required to follow the treaty’s rules. As a result, it was unconstrained in pursuing not only theater nuclear capabilities but also land-based conventional precision strike systems. Today, China possesses up to 2,650 land-based missiles of types that would be banned if it was party to the INF. These weapons, most of which are non-nuclear, pose a threat to US and allied air bases in the Western Pacific as well as US and allied naval forces, principally US aircraft carriers.”
​ ​This is also the current strategy of the Trump administration according to Esper himself, who openly referred to China’s missile arsenal while stating that “80 percent plus of their inventory is intermediate range systems, so that shouldn’t surprise them that we would want to have a like capability.”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/465910-inf-china-pentagon-missiles-contain/

China masses troops on Hong Kong border, and issues warnings, but does not invade, which would threaten global financial recognition of Hong Kong’s “special status” and separate currency. It would be like the UK losing the City of London. Warnings, and gangsters in white shirts, and more tear gas from Hong Kong police are what is being deployed. Chinese people have a long history of massing in the streets and forcing change. The PRC regime needs to appear stable, prudent, wise and needs to prevail for the long term.
China warned protesters in Hong Kong they would soon be punished for “criminal acts,” refusing to rule out military force to restore order as near-daily demonstrations have plunged the city into chaos.
Demonstrators are causing “Hong Kong to slide into a dangerous abyss,” said Yang Guang, a spokesperson for the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office, which reports directly to China’s cabinet. “As for their punishment, it’s only a matter of time.”
The Chinese government will never allow any acts that challenge national unity, sovereignty or security, he said, sternly reminding residents that the People’s Liberation Army was a “strong and reliable force that defends every inch of its territory.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/08/06/china-warns-hong-kong-protesters-will-punished-refuses-rule/

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/trending-world-war.html
Alastair Crooke looks at the sudden transition of America’s ruling elite class into new-cold-war mentality and action i​n​ the last 18 months.
​ America’s élite is being fractured into balkanised enclaves that are not communicating with one another – nor wanting to communicate with each other. Rather, it is another conflict between deadly rivals.
​ ​One such orientation insists on a renewal of the Cold War to sustain and renew that supersized military-security complex, which accounts for more than half of America’s GDP. Another élite demands that US dollar global hegemony be preserved. Another orientation of the Deep State is disgusted at the contagion of sexual decadence and corruption that has wormed its way into American governance – and truly hopes that Trump will ‘drain the swamp’. And yet another, which sees DC’s now explicit amorality as risking the loss of America’s global standing and leadership – wants to see a return of traditional American mores – a ‘moral rearmament’, as it were…
​ ​But all these divided Deep State factions believe that belligerence can work…
​Like any cosseted élite, they have an exaggerated sense of their entitlement – and their impunity.

The Citadels of America’s Elites: Fractured and At Odds with Each Other

​Trump is Commander-in-Chief of the Trade War.
He’s sneak-attacking, pressing China to financial failure as hard as he can, without polite warning.
On Friday, when we learned courtesy of Bloomberg, that Trump imposed the latest, and very unexpected, round of Chinese tariffs less than 24 hours after Powell’s “insufficient” rate cut, he did so by overruling Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin in at least giving Beijing the courtesy of an advance notice, and instead China – like the rest of the world – learned what was coming by reading Trump’s twitter feed in real-time, resulting in a violent market selloff. Commenting on this development, we said on Friday that Trump’s refusal “suggested that the trade hawks are now fully in charge of the situation in the White House.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-04/trump-overruled-all-advisors-except-navarro-launching-new-china-tariffs

The $US, the global reserve currency, bastion of fly-by-wire financial stability, may have a flank exposed to attack, with the firing of 2 key players.
“The most important trading desk in the world”, staffed by over 400 financial warriors, is the Plunge-Protection-Team desk in New York. This desk has nursed the US stock markets back to the appearance-of-health since 2009. “Don’t fight the Fed” and “Buy the F….ing Dips” became the passwords to easy money for over a decade. 2 particular financial warriors ran this show: Simon Potter and Richard Dzina.
“levitating market wizard, Simon Potter, who promptly realized that to crush the bears one simply had to crush the VIX specs, and the rest would promptly follow.” …
As Bloomberg writes “the story involves Simon Potter, who ran the all-important markets desk, and Richard Dzina, head of the financial services group. Both were abruptly relieved of their roles in late May by Williams. Little explanation was given, but according to current and former New York Fed employees, as well as those close to the bank, the nature of the exits, by fault or design, seemed to be a warning: fall in line.”
​ ​It is not clear exactly what the two titans of US capital markets had to “fall in line” for, but two things are certain – i) Potter did not “resign”, he was fired by Williams, and ii) now that an economist with zero capital markets experience is in charge, and following his termination of Potter and Dzina, the world is one step closer to collapse as a clueless PhD hack is in charge of the most important market in the world.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-04/meanwhile-inside-plunge-protection-team-chaos

Trump attack on Chinese imports drops value of Yuan/Renmenbi and China counters with halt on state purchase of US farm products.
This is war, pressing the assault when the enemy is close to a critical weakness, as China is with massive internal debt instability.
China has vast gold reserves, and a lot of $US reserves. The $US reserves are already assigned to critical tasks of maintaining trade and stability of the currency.
Trump is forcing China to expend it’s ammunition in defense, at this time of his choosing, rather than on offense, later, at China’s choosing.
Trump adds insult to injury, accusing China of currency devaluation.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-04/currency-war-begins-chinese-yuan-crashes-past-7usd-record-low

Hong Kong has long been a critical global financial center. When the UK handed it back to China at the end of the colonial “lease” it was agreed that Hong Kong would retain almost all political and financial-center autonomy. That goose needed to keep laying golden eggs.
This year, Hong Kong has been racked with protests, by citizens who get no gold at all for their labors, mainly austerity and beds that rent for $1200/month. It is broadly rumored that this is being fed the color-revolution-diet by CIA and friends. I don’t know.
Hong Kong is increasingly paralyzed, just when China needs that battle group most, and to break the paralysis, China will have to militarily intervene, killing the goose.
Chinese military intervention will lead to invalidation of Hong Kong’s “special statue” and cut the legs out from under the Chinese financial system.
The situation in Hong Kong is rapidly deteriorating, with violence breaking out in seven locations Monday afternoon as the citywide strike crippled transportation.
What were supposed to be peaceful sit-ins in different districts turned into riots, “with Wong Tai Sin and Harcourt Road seeing the most intense confrontations as protesters kneel instead of flee, to shield themselves while tear gas rounds and sponge grenades rain on them,” according to SCMP.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-05/hong-kong-unravels-flights-canceled-police-stations-set-fire-and-triads-are-back
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-04/hong-kongs-lam-wont-resign-condemns-protesters-creating-very-dangerous-situation

​Professor Michael Hudson on the Petrobuck Empire and it’s global strategy.
​ ​Control of oil has long been a key aim of U.S. foreign policy. The Paris climate agreements and any other Green programs to reduce the pace of global warming are viewed as threatening the aim of dominating world energy markets by keeping economies dependent on oil under U.S. control. Also blocking U.S. willingness to help stem global warming is the oil industry’s economic and hence political power. Its product is not only energy but also global warming, along with plastic pollution.
​ ​This fatal combination of the national security state’s mentality and oil industry lobbying threatens to destroy the planet’s climate. The prospect of raising temperatures and sea levels along the coasts while inland regions suffer drought is viewed simply as collateral damage to the geopolitics of oil. The State Department is reported to have driven out individuals warning about global warming’s negative impact.1
​ ​The only attempts to restrict oil imports are the new Cold War trade sanctions to isolate Russia, Iran and Venezuela. The aim is to increase foreign dependence on U.S., British and French oil, giving American strategists the power to make other countries “freeze in the dark” if they follow a path diverging from U.S. diplomatic aims.
​ ​It was the drive to control the world’s oil trade – and to keep it dollarized – that led the United States to overthrow the Iranian government in 1953, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney to invade Iraq in 2013, and most recently for Donald Trump to isolate Iran while backing Saudi Arabia and its Wahabi foreign legion in Syria, Iraq and Yemen. Sixty years earlier, in 1953, the CIA and Britain joined to overthrow Iran’s elected President Mohammad Mosaddegh to prevent him from nationalizing the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. A similar strategy explains U.S. attempts at regime change in Venezuela and Russia.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/08/michael-hudson-global-warming-and-u-s-national-security-diplomacy.html

​ ​Political commentary is flooded with the word “terrorism” today. People are demanding that the El Paso shooter in particular and white supremacists in general be labeled terrorists by the narrative-making commentariat, and you know what? I totally get it. The push since 9/11 to tar Muslims as “terrorists” has been extremely obnoxious and fueled by hate and bigotry, so it makes sense for progressive-minded people to push for the egalitarian usage of that term. But before doing so, please reflect on what lessons we learned from the post-9/11 “Islamic terrorism” scare.
​ ​“Years of misguided alarmism over ‘Islamic terrorism’ resulted in the erosion of civil liberties, militarization of police, and a host of other bad outcomes. Applying the same alarmist logic to ‘white nationalist terrorism’ is likely to produce a host of similarly bad outcomes,” tweeted independent journalist Michael Tracey in response to the chatter.

Americans Should Be Very Skeptical Of Calls For New “Terrorism” Laws

[John Day]

@tabernick
Weak effort at obfuscation, paid-troll.
🙂

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/ny-fire-commissioners-for-911-truth.html
New York area fire commissioners have unanimously called for a new investigation into 9/11, claiming that “overwhelming evidence” of “pre-planted explosives…caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings.” The Franklin Square and Munson Fire District outside of Queens, New York made history by becoming the first legislative body in the country to support a new investigation into the events of 9/11, according to Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth.​..
​ “​Whereas, the overwhelming evidence presented in said petition demonstrates beyond any doubt that pre-planted explosives and/or incendiaries — not just airplanes and the ensuing fires — caused the destruction of the three World Trade Center buildings, killing the vast majority of the victims who perished that day​.”​
​ The impact of 9/11 on the community extends well beyond the victims and their grieving families. On September 12, 2001, the Franklin Square Fire Department was called in to assist with the massive rescue and recovery effort that was just getting underway. Countless members of the department, including Gioia and Commissioner Philip Malloy (then rank-and-file firefighters), spent weeks on the pile searching in vain for civilians and fellow responders who might still be alive. Today, Malloy is one of thousands suffering chronic health effects.​..
​ Conversing with guests after the meeting, Commissioner Dennis Lyons said: “We have a memorial — a piece of steel from the World Trade Center with 28 holes where the nuts and bolts used to go. Every year on the 11th, we put a rose in each hole for the 24 Nassau County firefighters and four Franklin Square residents who died on 9/11.” ​Thanks Colleen.​ What happened to the nuts and bolts?​
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-31/ny-fire-commissioners-call-new-911-investigation-citing-overwhelming-evidence-pre

​This is a very interesting article about British imperial continuity within the American empire, through careful cultivation of institutional influence through the CIA and State Department (Hi, John Bolton!). Roosevelt lost this one when he died.
The “special relationship” tried to keep Trump out, then get rid of him, as detailed in the second article.
“Turns out it was Britain that was the foreign country interfering in American affairs,” former MP George Galloway told RT, speaking about the new revelations published by the Guardian about early British involvement in the ‘Russiagate’ investigation.

The ‘Special Relationship’ Is Collapsing… and That’s a Good Thing

https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-01/uk-its-neck-russiagate-affair-secret-texts-reveal-british-role-trump-coup-effort

Propagandists are freaking-out over Gabbard’s destruction of Harris, Caitlin Johnstone
(A coworker saw “that Hawaiian woman” on the debate, accepted a TULSI 2020 bumper sticker from me and put it on her car yesterday.)

Propagandists Are Freaking Out Over Gabbard’s Destruction Of Harris

Another Obama?
“The only way to remove Trump is to crush Trump,” Moore said.
“And that’s the question that has to be asked. Who can crush Trump? Who’s the street fighter?
…There is one person that would crush Trump – and she hasn’t announced yet. And her last name rhymes with Obama. In fact, it is Obama – Michelle Obama.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-01/are-dems-prepping-michelle-obama-hail-mary-toss-against-trump

FBI: Conspiracy Theories Are Now A Domestic Terrorism Threat
​Put those dead firemen in their damned place!
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-01/fbi-conspiracy-theories-are-domestic-terrorism-threat

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/

​ ​“Sen. Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record,” Gabbard said. “There are too many examples to cite but she put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when she was asked if she ever smoked marijuana.” …
Harris later dismissed the attack after the debate during an interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper.
​ ​“I’m obviously a top-tier candidate, and so I did expect that I would be on the stage and take hits tonight, because there are a lot of people who trying to make the stage for the next debate,” Harris said.
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/harris-mocks-gabbard-attack-on-her-ag-record-says-shes-top-tier-candidate-being-attacked-by-someone-at-zero-or-1-percent

​Tulsi was the mot-googled candidate after the debate again (Thanks to her lawsuit against Google, for disappearing her website at the last debate, people were able to access it this time.)
​https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/tulsi-gabbard-googled-candidate-wednesday-night-debate-1228412

Dem Debate Post Mortem: Rivals Attack Biden, Harris; Gillibrand Says She’ll “Clorox The Oval Office”
​Some of the most searched and most tweeted moments are here.​ Grampa’ Joe Biden was the designated pinata again in this debate, as Harris and Booker beat the candy (and Kool Aid) out of his belly with broom-handles​. He scored an own-goal with his final self-endorsement, by misnaming his website. Freudian-slip, I think. He can’t enjoy this. He’s still the zombie candidate. (Not noted here is that Democratic candidates can’t break ranks about impeaching Trump, though there is no crime. That’s a dangerous limb to be out on, come next year. They fail to acknowledge the DNC criminality revealed in the leaked emails from the last election. RIP Seth Rich.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-08-01/dem-debate-post-mortem-rivals-attack-biden-harris-gillibrand-says-shell-clorox-oval

Tulsi Gabbard was pretty close to the bottom of the stack, in how much time she spoke last night, but here is the 9 minutes. No flailing.
https://www.tulsi2020.com/a/second-democratic-debate-highlights?utm_source=email&utm_medium=newsletter&utm_campaign=debate-night&utm_content=tulsi_highlights&sourceid=1014139&refcode2=em190731-t-highlights

Jeffrey Epstein wanted to seed the human race with his DNA, scientists claim​
Russian propaganda from Helen of Destroy, whose blog got blocked to the world last month. ​This​ actually gets much weirder than the headline…
https://www.rt.com/usa/465517-epstein-seed-dna-scientists-eugenics/

​Caitlin Johnstone discusses basics of crime-analysis:
Don’t just ask “Cui bono?” of potential false flag events. Ask it about every belief in your head. Rigorously holding that candle up to the ideas in your own mind will reveal a lot of junk floating around in there that benefit other people, both the powerful and the not-so-powerful…
From ground-level to the highest echelons of power, there are people who have been benefitting from the beliefs in our heads. Only by doing the necessary inner work and asking “Cui bono?” of all the ideas we believe about our world, our society, our community and ourselves can we sift apart the untrue from the true and construct a clear-eyed worldview which benefits no one but ourselves and our fellow man. Someone’s benefitting from the beliefs in our heads, and, very often, it ain’t us.

How The Question “Who Benefits From This?” Can Change Your Life

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/left-wing-trump.html
​Caitlin Johnstone:
​ Night one of the CNN Democratic debates has come and gone, and if you missed it you didn’t miss much. Basically the entire thing can be summed up as Jake Tapper asking the progressives on stage, “So explain why Americans would vote for your policies when we here at CNN have been telling them for years that they’re not allowed to support those policies?” Then for balance they ask one of the boring centrist candidates to explain why Bernie Sanders is crazy. Repeat for two and a half hours…
This debate also saw Montana Governor Steve Bullock extolling the merits of keeping a nuclear first strike policy on the table for the United States. This man sincerely argued that it is good and right for the United States to be prepared to use nuclear weapons even when not attacked with nuclear force, and for other nuclear-armed nations to see this and know this. This is clearly an omnicidal, psychopathic position which threatens every organism on our planet, but today everyone’s talking about Marianne Williamson and energy crystals.
These people are freaks. If someone came into our world from a parallel universe where humanity is healthy, the least of their concerns on that stage would be the lady talking about love and slavery reparations.
If people could really see what’s happening in their nation and their world with fresh eyes, they’d scream in horror. But that’s the exact status quo that all these sane, normal, serious politicians have dedicated their lives to upholding. One where people are deliberately kept poor by a plutocratic class which understands that money is power and power is relative. One where the most powerful military force in history circles the globe and wages endless wars upon disobedient populations. One where we rip apart the flesh of our planet and dump poison into our air and our water in facilitation of a new mass extinction event which will someday claim our own species if not reversed. One where we point weapons at each other that can wipe out cities, cover the earth’s surface in nuclear radiation, and fill the sky with black soot blocking out the sun for decades, and we play with escalations toward the deployment of such weapons like it’s a game.
The only reason any of this seems normal to anyone is because the propagandists have normalized it. The only reason the politicians who help support this system seem normal to anyone is because the propagandists have normalized them.

Conventional Politicians Are Infinitely Weirder Than Marianne Williamson

[John Day]

@V.Arnold. Thanks for looking at the Marianne Williamson candidacy announcement video I linked to last evening on yesterday’s blog post. I’m not so much advocating for her candidacy, and I know I don’t matter, but I observe that she is surfing the Zeitgeeist and historical trend-waves and she’s a righteous surfer. If you look at her, she knows the waters intimately and comfortably, and is on a third page, her own pagem not the Sanders/Warren page, nor the Bush/Clinton/Bush/Obama page that the other candidates seem to be wandering upon.
Marianne Williamson got the most Google searches in 49 states, not Wyoming. https://thehill.com/policy/technology/455465-marianne-williamson-most-searched-for-candidate-during-democratic-debate
Hollywood Reporter also notes that, but notes that Elizabeth Warren led in tweet activity. Holleywood Reporter used the goofiest screenshot of Williamson they could get, worth a thousand words as to their opinion. Register that, please. https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/marianne-williamson-googled-candidate-second-democratic-debate-1228204

Colbert likes Sanders and Warren, who were righteous, and had each other’s backs, Sanders as left-elder-statesman and Warren as inadequately-chained-junkyard-dog-attacking-thieves.
Stephen Colbert went after those long-shot candidates at the edges of the stage for inadvertently helping President Trump and Republicans make the case against the frontrunners who actually have a shot at winning the Democratic presidential nomination for 2020.
“It’s hard to sum up what happened tonight,” the Late Show host began. “But most of it was a bunch of guys with no chance to win the Democratic nomination yelling Republican talking points at the people who can. It was like watching the seven dwarves offering Snow White a poison apple.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/stephen-colbert-hits-longshot-democrats-for-spewing-republican-talking-points-at-cnn-debate?ref=scroll

The Guardian/US likes the sanders/Warren chained-together fight team, but fails to notice Willaimson.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/jul/31/bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-democratic-debate

If I may add my assessment (yeah, I just did…) the main thing I looked for was comfort zone. Sanders was comfortable, fully assured as elder-statesman-llefty. Elizabeth Warren was as itching to eat-the-livers-of-global-capitalist-lackeys as anybody I have ever seen. She got a big smile on her face when they started talking, then relished the carnage of eating their flesh alive. (graphc?) Buttegieg did better than I expected. Others did not. They were either stressed out and showing it, on better drugs than you should take every day, or living in the Reagan era. Williamson clearly enjoyed what she was doing, and never paused for a moment to clearly expound her vision, nor did she blather and run over. She was the most-not-like-the-others, a BETTER disruptor than Trump, in my humble(ish) opinion.
Could be FUN!

[John Day]

OK, the last 16 minutes or so is what’s happenin’. It’s different. It’s disruptive of the politicl model, maybe even more than Trump. There is stuff that rubs me wrong, but the message of moral change being the core, and jumping past the current paradigms, as has been done several times in American history, and measuring up to our moral calling, is compelling. She goes populist demagogue in the last 10 minutes, and her voice cracks, and she just uses that to her advantage. She calls the baby boomers to their moment in history. Right-on! She’s got guts.
I’d like to see her debate Kamala Harris, who is very tough, but shallower.

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/democrats-bust-loose.html
I don’t have much for you. I think Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders respect each other and will be respectful, not divisive. Buttigieg may try to come up with something new. He’s pretty much a Ken Doll. Beto is an expired Ken Doll. Marianne Williamson is described in the second story as a potential left-wing Trump. I like that. I looked at about 15 minutes of her candidacy announcement. Not bad at all, but I don’t have a lot of time for videos. Anyway, I’m rooting for Williamson, who has a lot of snap in front of crowds, and has had the ability to impress and mentor a lot of rich, smart people, to do the Trump-of-Love thing and shake up the proceedings tonight.

The line-up”
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2019/jul/30/democratic-debates-2019-live-news-tonight-bernie-sanders-elizabeth-warren-buttigieg-o-rourke-latest

Closer zoom on Williamson and Love candidacy.
https://www.theguardian.com/global/2019/jul/30/marianne-williamson-can-love-beat-trump-in-the-2020-presidential-elections

Caitlin Johnstone took a closer look at Williamson, since anybody who gets that much snide press must be worth hearing out.

Eight Thoughts On Marianne Williamson

Here is her announcement of candidacy for the presidency, all 43 minutes, of which the first 15 is ok by me,

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/cross-purposes.html
At the Center of U.S. Iran policies is an Israel-born Treasury official named Sigal Mandelker. The Atlantic writes that her ‘hand is on the lever’ of crippling economic sanctions meant to force Iran’s ‘capitulation or demise’… meanwhile the Treasury Department refuses to divulge whether Mandelker is still an Israeli citizen… (Iran has long been in Israeli crosshairs) By Alison Weir (Thanks Cat. Totally overt…)

Israel-born Treasury official is at the center of U.S. policies on Iran

History is weird. Oliver Cromwell was an “end days” religious zealot, and then…
Here is a summary of 4 centuries of history of Christian sects jockeying for position for seats to the end of the world.
Thanks Eleni.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article184973.html

Reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.) is seeking legislation that will expand government ability to declare it a crime to reveal the identities of undercover intelligence agents will inevitably lead to major abuse when some clever bureaucrat realizes that the new rule can also be used to hide people and cover up malfeasance.
A law to protect intelligence officers already exists. It was passed in 1982 and is referred to as the Intelligence Identities Protection Act (I.I.P.A.). It criminalizes the naming of any C.I.A. officer under cover who has served overseas in the past five years. The new legislation would make the ban on exposure perpetual and would also include Agency sources or agents whose work is classified as well as actual C.I.A. staff employees who exclusively or predominantly work in the United States rather than overseas…
Kiriakou also explains how the “…implementation of this law is a joke. The C.I.A. doesn’t care when an operative’s identity is revealed — unless they don’t like the politics of the person making the revelation. If they cared, half of the C.I.A. leadership would be in prison. What they do care about, though, is protecting those employees who commit crimes at the behest of the White House or the C.I.A. leadership.” He goes on to describe how some of those involved in the Agency torture program were placed under cover precisely for that reason, to protect them from prosecution for war crimes…
The new legislation is an intelligence agency dream, a get out of jail card that has no expiry date. And if one wants to know how dangerous it is, consider for a moment that if it turns out that serial pedophile Jeffrey Epstein was indeed a C.I.A. covert source, which is quite possible, he would be covered and would be able to walk away free on procedural grounds. Thanks Eleni

No Accountability in Washington. The CIA Wants to Hide All Its Employees

Ron Paul (Story by Helen of DesTroy) :
“I think we should never use the word ‘Russiagate’ again. I think we ought to use the ‘FBIgate’ because there was a conspiracy to try to frame Trump.”
https://www.rt.com/usa/464996-ron-paul-mueller-russiagate/

Tom Luongo:
The true third rail of U.S. politics is empire. Any candidate that is publicly against the empire is the enemy of not only the state, it’s quislings in the media, the corporations who profit from it and the party machines of both the GOP and the DNC.
That is Gabbard’s crime. And it’s the only crime that matters.
For that crime Google acted to blunt interest in her campaign in the critical hours after the first democratic debate. So, Gabbard, rightly, sued them.
The two main points of her lawsuit are: 1) suspending her Google Ad account for six hours while search traffic for her was spiking and 2) Gmail disproportionately junked her campaign emails.
This represents an intervention into her ability to speak to voters and, as such, is a violation of not only her First Amendment rights but also, more critically, campaign finance law.
https://tomluongo.me/2019/07/26/gabbard-google-censorship-election/

Inverting The Time Value Of Money Business Model , Eleni sent this piece, which I like for the elegance of the analysis it presents. By this analysis, the drop in interest rates, such as home mortgage rates, has not actually lowered effective interest rates, considered from production costs, proceeding to total payments, but raised them to the +10% range, moved their payoff way forward in time, eliminating bank risk, and setting the stage for the mess to blow up in the future, while getting something like a taxpayer bailout or buyout to save the system. The key was the tripling of assessed “value” while cutting rates on that assessment, then “taking profits” right away. “Subprime” systemic fraud. Thanks Eleni.

Inverting the Time Value of Money Business Model

Erdogan had a long overt and covert relationship with Israel, which was already souring some before that coup attempt, which Russia saved him from at the last moment. He’s generally open to negotiation, though, if he wants something, and he always does.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has slammed a recent wave of terror and bloodshed waged by Israel against the Palestinians, saying Ankara will oppose anyone who supports the Tel Aviv regime.
“Whoever is on the side of Israel, let everyone know that we are against them,” said Erdogan while addressing senior provincial officials from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) in Ankara on Saturday.
The remarks came amid a new wave of Israeli crackdown in the occupied Palestinian territories as regime forces continue with demolition of the Palestinian houses in occupied areas in the West Bank and in the Jerusalem al-Quds.

https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2019/07/27/602035/Turkey-Erdogan-Israel-violation-terror-Palestine

Siri ‘regularly’ records sex encounters, sends ‘countless’ private moments to Apple contractors Thanks again, Helen.

It is illegal, under federal law, to possess the confidential medical information Apple obtains this way.
That opens Apple to lawsuits if they don’t destroy it upon recognition.
https://www.rt.com/news/465181-apple-siri-human-contractors/

Limey expat. in France, long time journalist, John Ward, demoted to the blogosphere for his honesty, has a good take on nuevo UK Prime Minister BoJo. “The Slog” has wit, as usual, and also a lot of insight. (John is not so different in his conclusions from Ambrose Evans Pritchard, in a piece, paywalled, that somebody slipped me for free. Good company, that.)
Few people have a lower estimation than me when it comes to the ethics, innate corruption and auto-mendacity of Boris Johnson. But when you need a new weapon to terrorise the overwhelming forces of even more depraved enemies, the bastard will always make for a better and bigger blast. I discern signs in the behaviour of the Boris Cabinet (and the tone of Ms Symonds’ spin on its behalf) that the Prime Minister’s gamble is even more audacious – and far more cunning – than most commentators realise.
ANALYSIS: is Boris banking on a Trump card to beat Brussels?

[John Day]

The economy runs on economic-loss-producing-energy just fine, until the catastrophic realization of the losses destroys the pretext, upon which all trust in the economy is based.
Right?
When?
Ugh…

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/pedophile-economics.html
I’ve been reading for the last few years that Hollywood pedophiles have an economic barter system that trades in children.
Those folks fly places, New York, Florida, Pedo-Island, planet Earth.
The big secret in the Epstein case is where the money came from. Now we see one source.
Accused pedophile Jeffrey Epstein’s Gratitude America Ltd. foundation somehow kept getting stock allocations in more than 40 underwritten offerings by Morgan Stanley, according to Barron’s.
“Gratitude America” is a cute name for this kind of arrangement, isn’t it?
There are spots in the flow of money that are sure things. Who gets the sure things? Why?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-26/someone-morgan-stanley-kept-giving-epsteins-foundation-allocations-hottest-ipos

Lawyer to indicted power-elites, such as former friend, Jeffrey Epstein, Alan Dershowitz, has clearly and officially changed sides.
Here is an excerpt from his essay advocating elimination of the office of special counsel.
Dershowitz doesn’t want to lose this time. He “has skin in this game”.
​ ​The night before Mueller’s testimony, I was asked on a TV show whether it was a Hail Mary pass thrown by the Democrats. I predicted that it would be an intercepted pass. I was right. Even many Democratic stalwarts viewed the Mueller testimony as harmful to their cause. As a liberal Democrat, I share that view and it doesn’t please me. But as a patriotic American, I care far more about the implications of the Mueller testimony for all Americans and for the rule of law.
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14595/office-of-special-counsel

​Helen of DesTroy has this article about Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard suing Google.
Google can’t explain why it took her campaign website offline for a few hours when searches for her name were peaking during the first Democratic debate.
The searches took people to the many news stories about Gabbard being an “Aassad apologist” and “Russian puppet”, instead. Good enough.​
https://www.rt.com/usa/465093-tulsi-sues-google-ads-blocked/

From Vineyard of the Saker, sad… Israel is the anti-Aloha.
What Tulsi Gabbard’s caving in to the Israel Lobby really shows
A very wise friend of mine wrote this about why Gabbard had to cave in:
​ ​I told you she is a single issue politician. It’s about wars without end. Everything else is Realpolitik and nothing is more real than Zionists controlling the politics and legislation in Washington. She would have no hope of surviving the next round of laws. They are going to make anything “anti-Israel” equal “anti-Semitic” and that will be a crime like it is in France. She has high ideals on only a single issue. It’s a great issue. But you cannot count on a politician to be a noble warrior. Forget anyone doing the right thing all the time. She shines bright on one issue. If she was really wise or clever, she would have abstained. So, she is neither.

What Tulsi Gabbard’s caving in to the Israel Lobby really shows

John Helmer writes about another fading “justification” for war against Russia, Thanks Eleni
Ukraine shot down flight MH-17 and tried to blame it on Russia, as instructed by US/NATO. “Investigation” went where it HAD to go. Nowhere.

MH17 EVIDENCE TAMPERING REVEALED BY MALAYSIA – FBI ATTEMPT TO SEIZE BLACK BOXES; DUTCH COVER-UP OF FORGED TELEPHONE TAPES; UKRAINIAN AIR FORCE HID RADAR RECORDS; CRASH SITE WITNESS TESTIMONY MISREPORTED

Tom Luongo with Ukraine update. “Time is running out”, again.
It’s ok for the US to let Ukraine collapse, but not so much for the people who live there.
The last Russian gas flows can stop completely this winter. A sit-com comedian is now at the helm after recent elections, a Russian speaker.
Volodmyr Zelensky is in power along with Zelensky’s political party which won close to a clear majority in Verkovna Rada elections recently.
Zelensky’s Servent of the People party won 253 seats out of 450, giving him not only the presidency but no need to build a coalition government​.​
https://tomluongo.me/2019/07/25/time-runs-out-on-operation-ukraine/

This is the most salient read I have seen of this odd occurrence, and China was part of it, not just Russia, South Korea and Japan. Who knew?
RUSSIAN-CHINESE AIR PATROL MISSION NEAR SOUTH KOREA WAS SHOW OF FORCE TO US HAWKS
On July 23, a group of Russian and Chinese warplanes, including strategic bombers, conducted a joint patrol mission near South Korea’s territory under the annual cooperation plan, the Chinese Defense Ministry’s official spokesman Col. Wu Qian said on July 24.

Russian-Chinese Air Patrol Mission Near South Korea Was Show Of Force To US Hawks

​Something like WW-3 is underway, but it’s confusing. Michael Hudson clarifies. Hudson was the unintentional architect of the petrodollar system, which saved the western financial regime when the US ran out of gold and Nixon had to default on the gold standard. He knows how things work. You may want to scroll down to his summary.

U.S. Economic Warfare and Likely Foreign Defenses

[John Day]

Overextended,

i feel the stress more acutely, which comes in waves these days. I’m sensitive, and I don’t ignore or deny what I feel. I see signs that people all around are stressed, in how they drive, in how they walk on the streets, in how some of them bicycle. You are probably seeing people at work and family showing signs of stress.
How many are getting better? I don’t see much of that.
I believe that a big part of the problem is that the post-WW-2 global economy is terminally ill, due to massive untreated parasitism and a bad diet. The good food got eaten long ago. here is the GDP graph from Shadowstats, which uses the “old” measure of GDP, instead of the revision (which looks much better).
image.png
How does one person adapt to this, whether only feeling it, or feeling and seeing it, as we do?
The most common form of adaptation to stress in mammals is to work harder and faster at the same things as before, until exhaustion.
I think we are seeing that in the strident polarized politics, with so many positions being intellectually dishonest in one way or another, but “rallying the troops to the call”.
Social Justice Warriors vs Climate Denying Racists…
Everybody has to eat, and that’s where I see problems arising.
In America, people need to drive places, because that’s what has been built for 75 years, roadways. People need a safe place to live, electricity, clean water, working sewers and some gas for the stove and water heater.
Rents and taxes are high, so people camp under overpasses and pan-handle.
Bonded debt, voted for and spent for our lifetimes presents cities and states with high and growing fixed costs, which raise rents on everybody except the urban-hunter-gatherers, who also have a hard and stressful life. Rapes, beatings and robberies make it hard to sleep, say my patients.
Everything we were promised, and borrowed from, for so long, was predicated upon perpetual growth on what seemed like a really huge world in the 1960s.
We are approaching the limits, which shows as real economy stagnating (GDP graph above), air and water pollution, necessities of life more expensive, good coal being gone, fracking losing money, and polluting wildly…
There is the feeling of wanting to push it away, to erect some defenses, to rise above the suffering, because WE deserve better.
WE are not the culprits.
I and you still have to adapt ahead of the crunch. WE who have studied this a bit will be called upon to serve those who have not.
I get to try to serve people daily. Some people fall through all of the cracks, as medical and social welfare bureaucracies put up walls against them. This sounds harsh, and it is. Bureaucracies get squeezed tighter and tighter, but they cannot shrink with shrinking resources, because compliance demands need to be met. Services must be cut. Bureaucrats cannot really attempt much in the way of actual solutions, because experiments draw responsibility and risk. That’s how to lose your job. Nobody can risk that these days.
Some of us are old enough to remember work teams and personal responsibility and the satisfaction of success being a reward.
Failed attempts were less threatening, too.
Currently, i am spending many hours each day in meditation, compassion meditation, with, not “for” one of my patients, who is a massive fountain of anguish, for so many reasons. She is panicked, needs oxygen constantly due to years of smoking, has PTSD and probably bipolar disorder, lives alone and cannot keep care attendants, who don’t get much pay, and have their own problems and disabilities, personality disorders and criminality. EMS and the police usually want to help, but some are bullies, and she is a harsh and personally threatened judge. Meals on Wheels volunteers can’t handle her, so that stopped, but she can’t drive anywhere, has very little money, and no family…
You may have skipped down a little in self-defense, and that is my point.
Each of us, and our systems, churches and bureaucracies want to “solve problems”. We feel the resources shrinking and the wolf at the door, even if we don’t see it in our country yet. We don’t have to worry about Iraq, Venezuela, Iran, Greece, Turkey, Ukraine, etc. Right?
It isn’t going to happen here.
Except, it is so far along here, already, that denial is really hard to sustain any more.
It’s not America at work, or middle-class-America under threat. There is no “America” as we grew up knowing.
The middle class was defined by job security and open participation, even more than income level. there was a comfort to the roles.
That’s gone, even for the folks between 85% and 95% of income, who are living the externalities of what was “middle class”.
I’m there. I feel the stress before the snap. When will it snap?
If everybody reflexively pushes away from the zombie approaching, isn’t the path to a solution embracing the zombie?
Well, it is hard, thankless and feels endless.
Also, nobody else even wants to try to understand, so it is lonely and merely tolerated if you do all your other work and stay late, and so on.
I’m fortunate, and this starts to be whining (How I detest that!).
We are now used to having information and guidance from the internet. We can look things up, but we can’t look up the solution to going forward with less, in a system predicated on exponential growth forever, which has long ago failed.
The solution that I see is the same as in a dream, where something inescapable is about to kill you, like hitting the ground after a long fall.
I wake up, then. Can we wake up together?
Is “Universal Mind” a spiritual internet to provide us with the answers we need, without parasitic-selfish-interest pop-up ads?

Just Askin’
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/strain.html

[John Day]

Our Ruling Elites Have No Idea How Much We Want to See Them All in Prison Jumpsuits​ , Charles Hugh Smith (maybe they do know)
​ ​Let’s posit that America will confront a Great Crisis in the next decade. This is the presumption of The Fourth Turning, a 4-generational cycle of 80 years that correlates rather neatly with the Great Crises of the past: 1781 (Revolutionary War, constitutional crisis); 1861 (Civil War) and 1941 (World War II, global war).
​ ​What will be the next Great Crisis? Some anticipate another great-power war, others foresee another civil war, still others reckon a military coup is likely, and some view a collapse of the economy and U.S. dollar as inevitable.
​ ​While anything’s possible, I propose a novel crisis unlike any in the past, a Moral Crisis in which the people challenge the power of the nation’s corrupt Ruling Elites: not just elected officials, but the technocrats of the Deep State, the vested interests pillaging the nation, the New Overlords of Big Tech, the financier New Nobility, the Corporate Media and the self-serving state/corporate technocrat Nomenklatura who do the dirty work of the Ruling Elites.
​ ​Divide-and-Conquer has been the absurdly easy strategy of the Ruling Elites to fragment and disempower the citizenry. It’s child’s play for the Ruling Elites to ceaselessly promote a baker’s dozen of divisive issues via the corporate media.. The one issue that could unite the fragmented citizenry is moral revulsion: As the Epstein case promises to reveal, there is literally no limit on the excesses and exploitations of the privileged few in America, no limit on what our Ruling Elites can do with absolute impunity.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly19/moral-crisis7-19.html

​ P​erhaps, at long last, a serial rapist and pedophile may be brought to justice, more than a dozen years after he was first charged with crimes that have brutalized countless girls and women. But what won’t change is this: the cesspool of elites, many of them in New York, who allowed Jeffrey Epstein to flourish with impunity. For decades, important, influential, “serious” people attended Epstein’s dinner parties, rode his private jet, and furthered the fiction that he was some kind of genius hedge-fund billionaire. How do we explain why they looked the other way, or flattered Epstein, even as they must have noticed he was often in the company of a young harem? ​…
​ Though some observers have likened Epstein’s enigmatic rise as a glamorous social magnet to that of Jay Gatsby, a more appropriate archetype may be the fixer, sexual hedonist, and (ultimately disbarred) lawyer Roy Cohn. In the 1970s and early ’80s, Cohn was a favor broker for boldface chums as various as the top Democratic-machine politicians, the mobster Carmine “Lilo” Galante, Nancy Reagan, the proprietors of Studio 54, the Catholic Archdiocese of New York, Andy Warhol, the publishers Rupert Murdoch and Si Newhouse, Dershowitz, and the ambitious young real-estate developer Donald Trump.
​Names from “Black Book” are here, A to Z, with details. Man, that’s a long scroll!​
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2019/07/jeffrey-epstein-high-society-contacts.html

​Thanks for this, Eleni, from Eric Margolis:
​ ​I’ve had many strange experiences in my decades of covering intelligence affairs. These run from being invited to KGB HQ in Moscow, Chinese intelligence in Beijing, US intelligence in Virginia, Libyan intelligence in Tripoli, South African intelligence, and even Albanian intelligence in Tirana.
​ ​But none was odder than the day I was invited to lunch in New York City with the by now notorious figure Jeffrey Epstein.​..​
​ ​Soon after I walked into the entrance of Epstein’s mansion on E 71st Street, said to be the city’s largest private home, a butler asked me, ‘would you like an intimate massage, sir, by a pretty young girl?’ This offer seemed so out of place and weird to me that I swiftly declined.
​ ​More important than indelicacy, as an old observer of intelligence affairs, to me this offer reeked of ye old honey trap, a tactic to ensnare and blackmail people that was old when Babylon was young.​..
​ Also present was the self-promoting lawyer, Alan Dershowitz, who had saved the accused murderer Claus von Bulow, as well as a titan of the New York real estate industry (not Trump) and assorted bigwigs of the city’s elite Jewish society. All sang the praises of Israel.

The Honey Trap On E 71 ST

​Here is a video montage of all of the Democratic candidates who would answer some questions about their views for the press. Biden would not. The questions excerpted are about the human rights violations of Israel. To speak against Israel in American national politics means you are excluded. Everybody knows that. (What about “The Squad”? All seem to have gross failings, soon to be used to discredit whatever they espouse, as is beginning to happen with Ilhan Omar. This kind of deeply flawed opposition is good for Israeli-Zionist PR objectives.)​ Thanks Eleni.
“Israel is the one essential country on the planet.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51964.htm

Caitlin Johnstone: The Just World Fallacy: Why People Bash Assange And Defend Power
If you don’t cultivate a healthy respect for just how advanced modern propaganda has become, you won’t be able to understand what the propagandists are doing when observing the behaviors of the political/media class, and you’ll almost certainly wind up being fooled by the propaganda machine in various ways yourself…
For example, have you ever wondered why ordinary people you know in real life often harbor highly negative opinions about Julian Assange, seemingly to no benefit for themselves, even while he’s being viciously persecuted for his truthful publications by some of the most corrupt political forces on the planet? …
The reason is partly because of a glitch in human cognition known as the just world hypothesis or just world fallacy, which causes us to assume that if bad things are happening to someone, it’s because that person deserves it. Blaming the victim is more psychologically comfortable than seeing that we live in an unjust world where we could very easily become victim ourselves someday, and we select for that comfort over rational analysis.

The Just World Fallacy: Why People Bash Assange And Defend Power

Thanks Eleni, Ray McGovern reviews the download (almost certainly by Seth Rich) which was blamed on impossible Russian hacking.
July 22, 2019 “Information Clearing House” – Three years ago Monday WikiLeaks published a trove of highly embarrassing emails that had been leaked from inside the Democratic National Committee. As has been the case with every leak revealed by WikiLeaks, the emails were authentic. These particular ones, however, could not have come at a worse time for top Democratic Party officials.
The emails made it unmistakably clear that the DNC had tipped the scales sharply against Democratic insurgent Bernie Sanders, giving him a snowball’s chance in hell for the nomination. The posting of the DNC emails is also widely seen as having harmed the the electoral prospects of Hillary Clinton, who could not escape responsibility completely, while a handful of the very top DNC officials were forced to immediately resign.
Relatively few Americans read the actual emails, their attention diverted to the incessant media-fostered question: Why Did the Russians Hack the DNC to Hurt Hillary? For the millions of once enthusiastic Democrats who favored Sanders, however, the disclosure that the nomination process had been fixed came as a bitter pill, leaving a sour taste in their mouths and a passive-aggressive reluctance to promote the candidacy of one they considered a usurper. Having had a huge stake in Bernie’s candidacy, they had little trouble seeing through the diversion of attention from the content of the emails.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51960.htm

Pat Buchanan on America divided and manipulated by identity politics. (“Workers of the World, Unite!”, he does not quite say.)
But what is racism? …Republicans and conservatives believe “racist” is a term the left employs to stigmatize, smear and silence adversaries. As one wag put it, a racist is a conservative who is winning an argument with a liberal.
https://buchanan.org/blog/america-an-us-vs-them-country-137335 ​

​This is a critical and pivotal arena. Control of fossil fuel supplies to advanced nations is global power.
In recent weeks a dramatic escalation of tension around Turkish oil drilling rig presence in the disputed Exclusive Enterprise Zone surrounding EU member state Cyprus is taking place. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is claiming that Turkey has the right to drill not only in the waters off of Northern Cyprus, but also in waters far from there where Greek Cyprus has claimed rights. The actions, moving Turkish oil and gas drilling platforms into the waters, is creating a dramatic new clash in the energy-rich Eastern Mediterranean.

Erdogan, Cyprus and the Future of NATO

​ ​The Islamic Republic’s top military adviser further warned Iran and its regional allies will target all American bases in the region should the US launch war plans, while reiterating Iran’s ability to block the vital Strait of Hormuz to global oil transit. Everyone must be able to freely transit the Persian Gulf waterway or no one at all, Dehghan warned.
Yesterday, Iranian vice-president, Eshaq Jahangiri, said that Iran rejects UK-led attempts to establish a “joint European task force” to monitor and patrol the Persian Gulf in order to protect international shipping, countering that it would only bring “insecurity”.
“There is no need to form a coalition because these kinds of coalitions and the presence of foreigners in the region by itself creates insecurity,” he said. And added, “And other than increasing insecurity it will not achieve anything else.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-24/irans-military-vows-attack-all-regional-us-bases-if-war-starts

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/same-boat.html
Rugged Individualism cannot save us. Only Enlightened Collectivism can.​ ​ Caitlin Johnstone
Individualism cannot save humanity from the crises it faces. It’s not the right tool…
…Collectivism by itself is worthless. What we need is not just our healthy impulse to collaborate, but to collaborate in a wise and intuitive way that is not manipulated by the propaganda narratives of the powerful. We need an enlightened collectivism in which we all collaborate toward the good of the whole, not because we’ve been manipulated into it, nor even just because we’ve been convinced to by compelling arguments, but because we’ve become wise and compassionate enough to understand that that’s what’s best for everyone. This means fundamentally changing how our minds operate. It means a collective evolution into a wildly new relationship with thought…
The belief that humanity can and must undergo a profound psychological transformation if we’re to survive isn’t flaky “out there” spiritualism, nor is it in fact “spiritual” at all; it’s a political position just as mundane and valid as the belief that the working class can and must rise up against the plutocracy. There isn’t actually any mechanism in place preventing us from doing this; the only thing stopping it is our not wanting it badly enough yet.
Humans were never meant to operate as individuals. We’re not descended from solo creatures like tigers or polar bears, we’re descended from monkeys, group-oriented throughout our DNA. We need each other. It’s how our brains and nervous systems are wired. There’s no getting out of this. We’re going to wake up together or not at all. We’re going to evolve together or die together.

Rugged Individualism Cannot Save Us. Only Enlightened Collectivism Can.

This is the fantasy: we can rebuild our entire global industrial society every generation or two forever.​..​ Charles Hugh Smith
​ ​The revelation that strikes me is the insanity of pursuing eternal economic growth, not as an option but as the only possible path: there is literally no alternative to extracting ever greater quantities of the planet’s resources to enable ever greater consumption by the planet’s 7.7 billion humans.
​ ​Stripped to its essence, this mad drive is about profit and power. The necessity is sold as the only path to prosperity for humanity, but it’s really about securing wealth and power for the few.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly19/earthrise7-19.html

I can’t find much at all about Senator Rand Paul (and other Senators?) meeting with the Iranian Foreign Minister Thursday.
“I think diplomacy is a good idea, and I think that if sanctions are to work, you also have to talk about removing them,” Paul said. “So I think the discussion now, since we have maximum pressure on and maximum sanctions on Iran, now we have to say what would we be willing to remove them for.”
Zarif, speaking to reporters in New York Thursday, proposed that Iran could move up ratification of the Additional Protocol, ensuring lifelong extensive International Atomic Energy Agency inspections and verification to ensure Iran’s nuclear program is strictly for civilian purposes, in exchange for the United States moving up its lifting of sanctions.
“If Trump wants more for more, we can ratify the Additional Protocol and he can lift the sanctions he set,” Zarif told the journalists Thursday, The Guardian reported. “He has said that he will take any measure to Congress — fine. Lift the sanctions and you’ll have the Additional Protocol sooner than 2023.”
https://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2019/07/iran-zarif-meeting-rand-paul-possible-talks.html

Iranian oil tankers keep going to China and storing oil there. This hasn’t slowed down. China isn’t “buying” Iranian oil, because it is in bonded-storage-purgatory. Still, Iran seems to be fulfilling it’s oil-for-investment deals with China in this format. China is holding the oil locally, and seems to have developed a lot of storage capacity, somehow. This increases Chinese energy security, in case the US blocks oil. Clever Chinese and Persians, huh? https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-22/millions-barrels-iranian-crude-are-piling-chinese-ports

Tom Luongo has a lot of good insights into the shifting Persian Gulf balance of power as UAE pulls troops out of Yemen and negotiates with Iran, realizing that if a major war breaks out UAE will be clobbered. Saudi Arabian troops, bogged down in Yemen, are lonely and considering despair. Iran upped the ante of retaliation with shooting down the Global Hawk drone. Bolton blinked. The rest of the world against Israel/US/Saudi Arabia is looking stronger. Look at this point, too. The main reason why Trump and Netanyahu are so angry about the JCPOA is the mutual outsourcing of the nuclear ballistic missile program by Iran and North Korea. North Korea was working on the warhead while Iran worked on the ballistic missile. Trump tweeted about this nearly two years ago, confirming this link…. Trump can’t, at this point, back down directly with Iran. Yemen is deeply unpopular here and ending our support of it would be a boon to Trump politically. Trading that for some sanctions relief would be a good first step to solving the mess he’s in and build some trust. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/07/21/as-trump-backs-down-pips-squeak/

Tulsi Gabbard talked to Tucker Carlson a few nights ago, from Puerto Rico, where she was standing with protesters against the endemic governmental and corporate corruption which bleeds everything from them and “their” island. Corrupt local government taking the last skim to allow outside interests to take all of the major resources is the core of the colonial model. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kirbr1kqFKg

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case Thanks, Tom.
(The mob, FBI and CIA have had common purpose in arranging girls and boys for powerful men and women of the world , then insisting on their ongoing cooperation, since before WW-2. Hi Mr Hoover. Hi, Mr Lansky. Hi. Mr Cohen. Hi, Mr McCarthy.)
Epstein is only the latest incarnation of a much older, more extensive and sophisticated operation that offers a frightening window into how deeply tied the U.S. government is to the modern-day equivalents of organized crime.
by Whitney Webb

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Shocking Origins of the Jeffrey Epstein Case

The Harvard Crimson ​(2003) ​ran an article telling its readers what a good guy Jeff was.​..​
​ ​In addition to linking Epstein to a number of notables, including then Harvard president and future US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, the article notes Epstein was at the time a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission.
​ ​Described as “one of the most pleasant philanthropists” by professor Martin A. Nowak of Harvard’s mathematical biology and evolutionary dynamics program, Epstein was said to have a “bevy of eminent friends that includes princes, presidents and Nobel Prize winners.”
https://kurtnimmo.blog/2019/07/18/jeffrey-epstein-cfr-and-trilateral-commission-member/

[John Day]

4 minutes of Tulsi Gabbard on Tucke Carlson being clearly against war on Iran, while standing in Puerto Rico in support of protesters robbed by endemic corruption, one of the hallmarks of the colonial model.

[John Day]

Epstein is being used as a selective weapon by one power faction against another, but they negotiate these things. This looks like part-2 of Pizzagate, but not nuclear pedo-war, just underage girls, with plausible deniability about their under-age-ness, lesser charges. Plea bargaining is possible.
In the US I see neocons vs rationalists as the deep state factions. The neocons developed ties with the Bush-Clinton cabal, though the Clintons got added during Iran contra when George HW Bush needed a place to land the cocaine, and Bill had Arkansas.
So this is also between the unipolar globalists, who Zbigniew Brzezinski first inspired, then told they had missed the boat (it sailed emptyish) and the multipolar realists.
I think this is already in play in Israeli politics, with Netanyahu using it against Barak, but I sure see no good guys, just opportunism. That emergency 911 cellphone company Barak and Epstein are partners in uses the keyhole in cellphones, available for about 10 years in new models, for emergency services to access the phone. They notify you of stuff, like President Trump’s message. Yes, it has it’s own opening. No it is n ot limited, once open. These guys run the world of what the spooks can do with your phone any time, through that keyhole.
They say the big battle in Israeli politics now is between the silk-glove Rothschild faction and the Likud, Netanyahu’s clan.
We are all pawns staring from the sidelines.
Epstein is a bishop in play in the middle of the chessboard, already threatened. Does he have any moves left?
I’m sure all of the important people who move the pieces are negotiating, or I presume they are…

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/rolling-over.html
“SMILE, you’re on Candid Camera”!
Hi Ehud 🙂 We see you at Jeffrey’s house.
Israeli Gangster Bibi Netanyahu is really chowing down on rival Ehud Barak for this. (Pot, you’re black.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-17/camouflaged-israeli-ex-pm-pictured-entering-epsteins-mansion-same-day-hotties-show

I’ve had the weird feeling that Israeli electoral politics is wagging the dog of American electoral politics lately, but how could that possibly be?

Oh, my. There are a lot of names I recognize already listed here. More to come, and details.
As the Jeffrey Epstein case continues to unfold, a laundry list of celebrities, business magnates and socialites who have flown anywhere near the registered sex offender’s orbit are now tainted with pedo-polonium. Many of them, such as Bill Clinton, Ehud Barak, and Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner have sought to distance themselves from Epstein and his activities – however their attempts have fallen on deaf ears considering their extensive ties to the pedophile.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-17/its-going-be-staggering-epstein-associates-prepare-worst-massive-document-dump

Who knew Rand Paul could be such an effective negotiator.
One day after the Republican senator and son of Ron Paul was reported to be Trump’s liaison to negotiate with Iran in hopes of easing tensions, sending the price of oil tumbling, the Guardian report that Iran has offered a deal with the US in which it would “formally and permanently” accept enhanced inspections of its nuclear program, in return for the permanent lifting of US sanctions.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-18/iran-offers-nuclear-deal-if-us-lifts-sanctions-oil-tumbles

Neocons in high places can’t let peace happen. They will shrivel and die.
Update: In response to President Trump’s announcement earlier in the day that a U.S. Navy ship had “destroyed” an Iranian drone in the Strait of Hormuz on Thursday, Iran’s Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said he was not aware of any downing, according to Reuters:
“We have no information about losing a drone today,” Zarif told reporters at the United Nations before a meeting with Secretary-General Antonio Guterres.https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-18/us-navy-shoots-down-iranian-drone-trump

Turkey knows how to open a negotiation. they don’t want the expensive and does-nothing-well F-35 “Turkey”.
​ ​As expected, Turkey blasted the White House’s prior day announcement that it has killed Turkey’s involvement in the F-35 joint strike fighter program after Ankara received a first batch of S-400 Russian-made air defense components starting last week. Turkey’s foreign ministry called on the US to rectify its “mistake”.
​ ​“This unilateral step is incompatible with the spirit of alliance and does not rely on any legitimate justification,” the Turkish Foreign Ministry said in a strong-worded statement immediately following the White House press release. “We call on the United States to come back from this mistake that will cause irreparable wounds in our strategic relations,” it said.​ (heh, heh, heh…)​
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-18/pentagon-fears-turkey-retaliate-against-us-troops-syria-over-new-sanctions

​Eleni sends this about a lot of things, including analysis of once vaunted American military aircraft.
Turkey Trolls Trump

Turkey Trolls Trump

That’s escalating quickly!
“Russia is ready to sell its super-maneuverable Sukhoi Su-35 fighter jets to Turkey, the head of the Russian state conglomerate Rostec said Thursday,” according to Turkey’s English language Daily Sabah.
“If our Turkish colleagues express a desire, we are ready to work out the deliveries of the Su-35,” Rostec CEO Sergei Chemezov said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-18/russia-offers-turkey-its-advanced-su-35-fighters-day-after-f-35-program-expulsion

Three weeks after a meeting between the countries who singed the Iran nuclear deal, also known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which was ditched by US, French, British and German officials said the trade mechanism which was proposed last summer – designed to circumvent both SWIFT as well as US sanctions banning trade with Iran – called Instex, is now operational.
​ ​And while we await for the White House to threaten Europe with even greater tariffs unless it ends this special purpose vehicle – it already did once back in May when it warned that anyone associated with the SPV could be barred from the U.S. financial system if it goes into effect – a response from the US is now assured, because in the biggest attack on the dollar as a reserve currency to date, on Thursday, Russia signaled its willingness to join the controversial payments channel, and has called on Brussels to expand the new mechanism to cover oil exports, the FT reported.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-18/major-threat-dollars-reserve-status-russia-offers-join-european-swift-bypass

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/blabbing-secrets.html
Travis sends this Veterans Today article, regarding Turkish decision to “purchase” (installment plan) S-400 missile system from Russia.
Firstly, it is the best. Secondly, Turkish troops will control it, not a NATO crew, as would control Patriot missiles.
Thirdly, Russian intelligence saved Erdogan from the military coup the US/NATO backed against him in 2016.
This story has more specific details than I had seen before.

NEO – S-400 undermines the global military cabal

Iranian Foreign minister Zarif is at the UN in New York this week, and Rand Paul has never pushed for war with Iran.
​ ​Over a round of golf this past weekend, Sen. Rand Paul asked President Donald Trump’s blessing for a sensitive diplomatic mission.
Paul proposed sitting down with Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif to extend a fresh olive branch on the president’s behalf, according to four U.S. officials. The aim: to reduce tensions between the two countries. Trump signed off on the idea.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/07/17/rand-paul-iran-talks-donald-trump-1418075

CBS found some video of a party at Mar a Lago from 1992, with Donald Trump, Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislane Maxwell and a host of drunk hostesses, who were sure not teenagers. Make of it what you will, but Trump sure looked friendly with Epstein back then.
(I really want to know what is being secretly negotiated for the Clintons. Epstein is rumored to have been instrumental in setting up the Clinton Global Initiative, before he got busted.)
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7256805/Video-shows-Donald-Trump-partying-Jeffery-Epstein-dozens-young-models-Ghislaine-Maxwell.html

Here is a good article on the influence of vitamin D on cancer incidence and survival.
(Vitamin D is good. Deficiency is bad, weakening the immune system, bones and doubling risk of heart attack and stroke by making arterial linings more prone to inflammation and blood clots. Buy a bunch of 5000 unit pills and take one per day unless you are a surf lifeguard and get plenty of sun.)
http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v15n12.shtml

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/penultimatum.html
Epstein and the Explosive Crisis of the Deep State, Charles Hugh Smith
(So why now, with the Epstein case? Deep and pervasive moral corruption is a chink in the armor of the globalist-neocon camp, so useful in this elite power struggle. Returning to the government that Lincoln served is not on the table…)
The hidden conflicts within the Deep State are emerging, and the resulting crisis will be explosive. Remember, the housecleaning must be public or the legitimacy of the state will go over the cliff. If the Deep State wants to retain its power, it must root out the corrupt degenerates before they bring down the entire rotten structure.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/07/epstein-and-explosive-crisis-of-deep.html

​ ​FBI agents who cracked open a safe in Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan mansion discovered “piles of cash,” dozens of diamonds and an expired passport from the 1980s under a different name that listed his residence as Saudi Arabia, according to the Daily Beast – which notes that it is unclear whether this is the same safe that contained nude or semi-nude photographs believed to be of underage girls.
​ ​”The passport was issued in the name of a foreign country, it was issued in the 1980s, it is expired, it shows a picture of Jeffrey Epstein, and another name,” said Assistant US Attorney Alex Rossmiller.
​ ​It’s also a different safe than the one allegedly in an ‘off-limits’ room on his private island in the Caribbean.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-15/epstein-safe-had-piles-cash-diamonds-and-expired-passport-claiming-saudi-residency

The Clintons are real quiet recently. Bill tweeted a little memorial to Ross Perot, who swung the 1992 election his way, on 7/9/19. Hillary made a Trump=racist tweet a few days ago. Rumor is they are bugging out to their Irish flat, which I had a hard time verifying the existence of.
Clinton tees up his dream flat in Ireland
By Thomas Harding, Ireland Correspondent
12:01AM BST 11 Jul 2003
​ ​Bill Clinton yesterday united his two loves, Ireland and golf, by buying a two-bedroom apartment that overlooks a Ryder Cup venue.
​ ​The property comes with full membership for two to the prestigious Kildare Hotel and Country Club – better known as the K Club – 30 miles south-west of Dublin where an 18-hole round costs £190 and first year membership is £60,000.
​ ​The former American president, who has called Ireland his second home, struck a deal with an estate agent friend for an £850,000 flat while playing golf in Northern Ireland last weekend.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/ireland/1435784/Clinton-tees-up-his-dream-flat-in-Ireland.html

Jim Kunstler:
Don’t hold your breath waiting for a coherent pre-election debate about the mother-of-all-issues facing this republic, namely, that we can’t afford the living arrangements Americans think of as “normal” anymore. This quandary has stalked us since the millennium turned. It thunders through all the activities of daily life, and the tensions emanating from it are so agonizing and difficult to face that our politics have deflected off into the kind of hysteria spawned by bad dreams…
​ ​That’s the main issue of our time. We’re faced with the imminent and rather drastic re-organization of everyday life in America without oil. It should be reasonable to assume that the process will be disorderly, and the longer we ignore it, the more disorderly it will be. Granted, it is a tall order for politicians to talk about things this scary. The hard truth is that intelligent responses to this quandary would require heroic effort and painful change — and would probably be emotionally unacceptable to voters.

What Looms Behind

[John Day]

Hi, Ezixa1949
I’m in the choir, already,picture of garden & gardener in post
http://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html
I’ve not been idle, either. I’m now tending 3 gardens.

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/biotic-pump-world.html
I am delighted to present this novel (to me) scientific theory of the causal mechanism for airflows which contain water vapor on the surface of our fair planet. It has important implications for the course of our bucket-ride-to-heck. Charles sent the link to Ugo Bardi’s site, Cassandra’s Legacy, with the link to the 27 minute video of Dr Makarieva’s lecture, which uses the text and images in the first link. Go from page 1 to page 4 in sequence. Page 3 is physical mathematics, but also good footnotes. Page 4 is bye-bye.
The video is much easier to follow after reviewing the text.
Basically, forests draw water vapor to themselves from the ocean. It is an act of the complex life forms they are. It is an act of agency.
The mechanism is straightforward physics, and is somewhat mysterious why the power of it remained shrouded in mist these many eons.
Water vapor in air is a gas, mixed in with nitrogen, oxygen and CO2, but with different physical characteristics at temperature and pressure.
At the warm surface of the planet, air can hold lots of water vapor, a high gas pressure of water vapor.
A couple of miles up, where it is much cooler, the vapor condenses to liquid or ice, so the air holds zero water vapor. This creates a continuous pressure gradient for water vapor, much, much higher below than above and the vapor follows that gradient ever upward.
This is high over warm bodies of water and zero over the Sahara.
It is considerably higher, still over the warm Amazon rainforest, with so many little leaves and small life forms transpiring moisture into the air at ground level. That moisture moves up, up, up from the Amazon, over vast expanse, pulling in moist ground-level air from surrounding oceans, which deposits water as rainfall or condensate. Also, the high level condensation has to fall as droplets somewhere, so typically falls back on the rainforest. This was such a novel idea that it took a few years to get published in a scientific journal in 2007.
It’s kind of embarrassing to the established science, and it’s Russian, too…
https://www.bioticregulation.ru/pump/pump3.php
https://cassandralegacy.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-we-keep-destroying-things-that-make.html

Want to fight climate change, plant a trillion trees!
Charles also sent this, and these folks don’t know about the biotic pump model, but there is a convergence of remedies, so it’s time to plant. There are better and less better ways to plant trees, extending mature forest edges is best, but treeless areas along bodies of water also need trees to start drawing the moisture inland (Maybe avocado trees, maybe in Yoakum, Texas, for instance.)
https://www.livescience.com/65880-planting-trees-fights-climate-change.html

Climate Change and Capitalism, a Political Marxist’s View
(Doesn’t that title fail to entice you? It is piss-poor advertising, but actually an excellent article. It explains how the technology of mining coal and processing iron ore was known in many places in the world, such as China, but why capitalism and the industrial revolution were able to coalesce and co-evolve in England, not in China. The rest is our recent history. Again, capitalism is unstable, always lurching forward as fast as possible to avoid collapse as it consumes everything within reach as rapidly as possible to create “products” for us to purchase and send to landfills.)
https://newsocialist.org.uk/climate-capitalism-political-marxism/

[John Day]

What were Jeffrey Epstein’s investments on 9/10/2001, and how did they fare on 9/12/2001?

I would very much like to see the assessment of that.
Some people had some funny big bets against business entities that suffered losses on 9/11.
Did Jeffrey Epstein have such positions?

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/corrupt-power.html
Caitlin Johnstone:
Endless war is a 100 percent indispensable element in preserving existing power structures. The US-centralized empire cannot exist without it. The trouble for the empire, however, is that it can’t just come out and tell the public “Yeah we need to destroy everyone who opposes our resource control agendas and dominance in key geostrategic regions, so we’ll be forcibly eliminating this noncompliant government on Thursday.” The public would never go for it, because that’s a plainly sociopathic values system which we are taught since school age that our society evolved beyond many generations ago…
The primary role US-led warmongering plays in maintaining existing power structures, which I first started to notice during the 2016 Democratic primaries, is on even clearer display during the 2020 Democratic primaries. You see candidates like Bernie Sanders being frowned upon by hardline centrists for promoting domestic policies which would hurt the profit margins of the oligarchs, but overall he’s being treated as a legitimate candidate and receiving reluctant coverage on mainstream media networks. Then you look at the treatment of a candidate like Tulsi Gabbard, who is campaigning on a major overhaul of US foreign policy, and she’s treated as a raving lunatic and a traitor…
You can get away with promoting things like universal healthcare or student debt forgiveness with only moderate pushback from the establishment, but wanting to scale back the forever war will quickly see you branded a Russian asset or an antisemite and canceled. The empire won’t even tolerate you interfering with their narratives, let alone getting elected. Your voice will be targeted with an aggressive smear campaign until they make sure that hardly anyone is listening to what you have to say.

Opposing War Is The Best Approach To Revolution

​Maybe I’m being unfair to dedicated public servants, but it looks like rats chewing each other’s eyes out.
​ ​Acosta held a press conference in which he vehemently defended the deal to serve just 13 months in county jail – saying that Krischer would have let Epstein walk otherwise.
​ ​”Simply put, the Palm Beach State Attorney’s Office was willing to let Epstein walk free. No jail time. Nothing,” said Acosta. “Prosecutors in my former office found this to be completely unacceptable, and we became involved.”
​ ​Not true says Krischer – who said that Acosta abandoned a 53-page federal indictment “after secret negotiations between Mr. Epstein’s lawyers and Mr. Acosta,” according to The Hill.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-10/acosta-scrapped-53-page-epstein-indictment-2008-after-secret-negotiations-according

The Mockingbird posted this fact-filled research on Epstein in 2016:
​ Taking one step back to look beyond Florida and another step back to look into history and one views a different picture. It is of a billionaire and a spy’s daughter providing minors for sex to very important people in a house full of cameras. That same billionaire has an armored Mercedes, a friend with a command center, business relations with multiple CIA backed airlines, connections to the mob, many friends in the media and was associated with the false PR that lead to the Iraq war.
https://www.mockingbirdpaper.com/content/columbus-where-torture-taxi-and-lolita-express-meet

Cat sent this from Phil Giraldi:
But whose intelligence service? CIA and the Russian FSB services are obvious candidates, but they would have no particular motive to acquire an agent like Epstein. That leaves Israel, which would have been eager to have a stable of high-level agents of influence in Europe and the United States. Epstein’s contact with the Israeli intelligence service may have plausibly come through his associations with Ghislaine Maxwell, who allegedly served as his key procurer of young girls. Ghislaine is the daughter of Robert Maxwell, who died or possibly was assassinated in mysterious circumstances in 1991. Maxwell was an Anglo-Jewish businessman, very cosmopolitan in profile, like Epstein, a multi-millionaire who was very controversial with what were regarded as ongoing ties to Mossad. After his death, he was given a state funeral by Israel in which six serving and former heads of Israeli intelligence listened while ..Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir eulogized: “He has done more for Israel than can today be said”.
​ T​his time, if it was indeed an Israeli operation, it might prove difficult to cover up the story since the pedophile aspect of it has unleashed considerable public anger from all across the political spectrum. Senator Chuck Schumer, self-described as Israel’s “protector” in the Senate, is loudly calling for the resignation of Acosta. He just might change his tune if it turns out that Israel is a major part of the story.
https://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/did-pedophile-jeffrey-epstein-work-for-mossad/

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/bypassed.html
Investigative Journalist, Vicky Ward:​
​ ​Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.
​ ​“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta…
​ ​In 2007 and 2008, as the FBI prepared a 53-page indictment that would charge Epstein with sex crimes, Epstein’s powerful legal team played the influence card.
​ ​After the one meeting with then-U.S. Attorney Acosta, where presumably “intelligence” was mentioned, the indictment was shelved and, instead, Epstein signed a non-prosecution agreement with federal prosecutors, pleading guilty to one count of solicitation of prostitution and one count of procurement of minors for prostitution, which earned him a cushy 13 months in county jail, from where he was allowed to leave to work at his office and go for walks.
The deal granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators.” Most significantly, federal prosecutors agreed to keep the deal secret from Epstein’s victims, which meant they would not know to challenge it in court. As it turned out, this actually broke the law, because victims have a right to know of such developments, under the Crime Victims’ Rights Act.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/jeffrey-epsteins-sick-story-played-out-for-years-in-plain-sight?ref=scroll

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/epstein-revisited.html
With the Saturday arrest of billionaire financier Jeffrey Epstein on charges of sex-trafficking minors – days after a judge ordered that nearly 2,000 documents be made public following a 2017 court motion originally brought by filmmaker and author Mike Cernovich, the internet is once again abuzz with speculation over who exactly might be implicated by the new evidence.
​ ​Epstein pleaded guilty to one count of soliciting prostitution from a 14 year old girl in 2008 for which he served 13 months in jail in a sweetheart deal with the DOJ brokered by current Labor Secretary Alex Acosta. The sealed records appeal, meanwhile, stemmed from a separate 2015 defamation lawsuit in New York…
​ ​The case was settled in 2017 and the records were sealed – leading to an appeal by Cernovich, who was later joined by the Miami Herald and several other parties including lawyer Alan Dershowitz – who seeks to clear his name in connection with Epstein’s activities.
​ ​Epstein has spent the bulk of his adult life cultivating relationships with the worlds most powerful men. Flight logs show that from 2001 to 2003, Bill Clinton flew on Epsteins private plane, dubbed The Lolita Express by the press, 26 times. After Epsteins arrest in July 2006, federal tax records show Epstein donated $25,000 to the Clinton Foundation that year.
​ ​House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s Superdelegate daughter Christine quipped on Twitter “It is quite likely that some of our faves are implicated but we must follow the facts and let the chips fall where they may.”​…
​ Following a 2018 financial settlement between Florida attorney Bradley Edwards – who represented one of Epstein’s accusers, only to be later sued by Epstein, Edwards claimed that Donald Trump was the ‘only person’ who provided assistance when Edwards served subpoenas and notices to high-profile individuals connected to Epstein.
​ ​Edwards: The only thing that I can say about President Trump is that he is the only person who, in 2009 when I served a lot of subpoenas on a lot of people, or at least gave notice to some pretty connected people, that I want to talk to them, is the only person who picked up the phone and said, let’s just talk. I’ll give you as much time as you want. I’ll tell you what you need to know, and was very helpful, in the information that he gave, and gave no indication whatsoever that he was involved in anything untoward whatsoever, but had good information. That checked out and that helped us and we didn’t have to take a deposition of him in 2009.​..
​ Trump “once barred child molester Jeffrey Epstein from his famed Mar-a-lago club after the presidential candidate caught him hitting on a young girl.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-07-07/trump-was-only-one-help-prosecutor-2009-epstein-case

​Tom Luongo​
​ ​I was cautiously optimistic that Trump would turn the corner on his presidency now that Mueller, impeachment and the rest of it would lift from his shoulders. His foreign policy maneuvers didn’t fill me with much, if any, confirmation of this hope.
​ ​But domestically signs were there that he had stabilized the battlefield.
​ ​Epstein’s arrest tells me he’s now out for blood.
​ ​Because this goes directly to the heart of the matter. Trump left the Clintons’ social circle in disgust and I’m convinced he ran to stop her corrupt sell out of the U.S.
​ ​Never forget that, while corruption is rampant in D.C., it is not all-pervasive. It’s not a black and white thing…
​…​This is more than just Hillary and Bill.
​ ​This is likely far deeper a rabbit hole than anyone in D.C. wants to admit. Don’t think for a second that Epstein hasn’t been blackmailing very prominent people for years.
​ ​Because he has. And they are all now scared to death.
​ ​And Robert Mueller is up to his neck in this. Because it was Mueller who helped Epstein mostly get off the hook the last time and had the court documents sealed.​..
​ When Nancy Pelosi’s daughter is out there signaling for her mother on this immediately, you know this is bad.
​ ​Pelosi doesn’t roll over for nothing folks. Think what you want about her but she’s a pitbull. And she rolled over on border wall funding last week.
https://tomluongo.me/2019/07/08/epstein-arrest-peak-swamp/

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/hollow-empire.html
Denial is America’s national pastime, but real patriotism requires honesty​, Helen (of DesTroy) Buyniski​
As its economic fortunes began to decline in the latter half of the 20th century, the US government threw its considerable weight behind keeping up appearances, prioritizing maintaining the facade of a prosperous nation ahead of fixing the problems keeping prosperity at bay. Disciples of Milton Friedman’s neoliberal economics convinced the government that their only hope was to keep cutting taxes on the rich and hope they would eventually trickle a little down on everyone else. Admitting that this system had failed would betray weakness that would surely be leveraged into a full-fledged communist takeover. As a result, Americans have become shockingly adept at lying to themselves…
America’s once-mighty military-industrial complex, the best-funded sector of the economy, with more money flowing in than the next nine countries’ military budgets combined, is in such a sad state the government increasingly has to bully allies into buying its substandard product…
The Pentagon was recently reminded of just how dire the situation has become when China hinted that it could bring the US economy to a screeching halt by holding onto its rare earth minerals. While the US developed the rare-earth magnets currently used in nearly every item of high-tech military equipment and consumer electronics, the Pentagon is now 100 percent reliant on China for 20 minerals needed to make everything from fighter jets to cell phones to batteries and computer chips.
This is no accident – Chinese investors were able to use the mechanisms of Wall Street to take control of the US’ rare earth industry and ship it overseas – and it doesn’t help that US banks have bent over backward to help in this not-so-hostile takeover…
Even Silicon Valley, once the last hope for a nation that no longer builds anything, has been quietly offshored, shipped off to Israel over the past decade thanks in large part to hedge funder Paul Singer, who has worked hand in hand with PM Benjamin Netanyahu through his Start-Up Nation Central initiative, described as “a foreign ministry for Israel’s tech industry,” to make Big Tech an offer it can’t refuse. Rolling out the red carpet to multinationals like Amazon and Microsoft, populating their ranks with bright young alumni of the IDF’s Unit 8200 (often compared to the American NSA) and tempting them with a buffet of ripe-for-acquisition innovation-rich startups, Netanyahu has freely admitted he has a “very deliberate policy” to make Israel boycott-proof by making it the center of the Big Tech universe…
Intel’s announcement earlier this year that it would invest $11 billion in yet another Israeli factory was followed by hundreds of stateside layoffs; the company cut 12,000 US jobs in 2016, and last year plowed $5 billion into another Israeli factory. Intel is cleaning up, with hefty subsidies from both US and Israeli governments – but only one country is getting a return on its investment…
It’s no wonder Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google are quietly packing up and leaving, too. Nice work, if you can get it…
What does the US have left? The media, which should be sounding the alarm over the increasingly desperate looting of the nation, is instead a microcosm of the same catastrophe. Best exemplified by the grotesque pageantry of CNN – a network which purports to be a private company but is forced to pad its commercial breaks with ads for defense contractors like Boeing and Raytheon…
…If we really love America, it’s time to take an honest look at what needs to be fixed.
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/463411-patriotic-honesty-denial-economy/

The Military, Big Bankers and Big Oil Are Not In Climate Denial, They Are in Control and Plan to Keep It That Way​.
​ “Capitalism, militarism and imperialism are disastrously intertwined with the fossil fuel economy….A globalized economy predicated on growth at any social or environmental costs, carbon dependent international trade, the limitless extraction of natural resources, and a view of citizens as nothing more than consumers cannot be the basis…for tackling climate change….Little wonder then that the elites have nothing to offer beyond continued militarisation and trust in techno-fixes.”​ …
​ To maintain power they need to limit our thinking. The two most important narratives imposed on us are climate change as a “threat to national security” and as a “business opportunity” — the twin rationales for military and corporate power. They want to focus us on how to manage the crisis, profit from it, or adapt to it, instead of opposing it.​..
​ In truth, the military is caught in a crisis of its own making. As Desiree Hellegers puts it: “The US Military Poses a Significant Threat to the US Military.”[2]​…
​ ​So how is it that the bankrollers of climate chaos, investing $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels just since the Paris Accords, also claim to “manage and mitigate these climate-related risks?”​
​ ​According to the bankers, the problem with climate change is that it’s “posing significant risks to the prosperity and growth of the global economy.” What they will not say is that the global economy — which demands enormous fossil fuel production and consumption — is posing significant risks to the climate. The global shipping and aviation on which peak profit-making depends is, like the military, exempt from the Paris Accords.​..
​ What the bankers will not say is that billions of the dollars they trade in are “petrodollars” — as explained in this informative documentary video. A 40-year back-room deal with the Saudis secretly recycled oil money back to the US. This deal essentially shifted the US dollar from the “gold standard” to the “oil standard.”​ …
​ ​Buying oil in dollars is a form of imperial tribute other countries pay to the US — which is why the US insists all oil trading be in US currency. Iraq and Lybia once traded oil in other currencies. Venezuela, Syria, Iran, Russia and China still do. See?
​ Since oil props up the US Dollar, bankers have a direct interest in wars that prop up the fossil-fuel regime.​..
​ ​ ​“We cannot expect politicians to do what only mass movements can do…from below and to the left.” Truth. But how?

Doubling Down: The Military, Big Bankers and Big Oil Are Not In Climate Denial, They Are in Control and Plan to Keep It That Way.

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/dependence-day.html
UN Report says Human Rights Might Not Survive Climate Crisis, a statement that seems bland, since they do not exist in war zones in hot places that have oil and mineral resources, which are extracted for export, as people die.
The message here is that this is trending. It is not only driven by climate change, but also by resource depletion, and growth of the number of those at “the top”, who can still exert financial claim to resources, energy and products/services.
That’s us. Act accordingly. Invest in food and energy security. Invest in sustainable community. Be that change!
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/u-n-report-human-rights-might-not-survive-climate-crisis.html

Professor Michael Hudson interview on Guns and Butter, with transcript:
The purpose of a military conquest is to take control of foreign economies, to take control of their land and impose tribute. The genius of the World Bank was to recognize that it’s not necessary to occupy a country in order to impose tribute, or to take over its industry, agriculture and land. Instead of bullets, it uses financial maneuvering. As long as other countries play an artificial economic game that U.S. diplomacy can control, finance is able to achieve today what used to require bombing and loss of life by soldiers…
​ ​Dr. Hudson is a financial economist and historian. He is President of the Institute for the Study of Long-Term Economic Trend, a Wall Street Financial Analyst, and Distinguished Research Professor of Economics at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. His most recent books include “… and Forgive them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year”; Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Destroy the Global Economy, and J Is for Junk Economics: A Guide to Reality in an Age of Deception.​..​
​ ​We return today to a discussion of Dr. Hudson’s seminal 1972 book, Super Imperialism: The Economic Strategy of American Empire, a critique of how the United States exploited foreign economies through the IMF and World Bank, with a special emphasis on food imperialism.
https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/07/michael-hudson-discusses-the-imf-and-world-bank-partners-in-backwardness.html

Here is Liberty Garden, a gardening plan for climate zone 8a (and similar) which I developed and use, and posted on July 4 2016.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2016/07/liberty-garden-central-texas-climate.html

No fireworks from this US Provocation of Iran. Would you want to be assigned to this flight?:
Today (7/3/19) a manned U.S. reconnaissance plane entered Iranian airspace in a clear attempt to provoke Iran into shooting it down. Such an incident would have created an occasion for Trump to give the American people a special 4th of July fireworks.
On July 3 1988 the guided missile cruiser USS Vincennes shot down the civil Iranian Flight 655 with 290 people on board. The U.S. claimed that the plane’s transponder was signaling an Iranian military identification code, that it was seemingly attacking the Vincennes, that the ship warned the plane 12 times, and that the ship was in international waters when the incident happened.
The crew of the Vincennes received medals for killing the Iranian civilians.
This morning the U.S. spy plane willingly penetrated Iranian airspace. It squawked a fake code which showed ill intention. This happened on the 31st anniversary of Flight 655. The Iranian military would certainly still like to take revenge for that mass murder. It was a huge provocation likely intended to lure Iran into shooting it down.
Trump recently threatened to ‘obliterate’ some areas of Iran should it attack “anything American”
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/07/on-eve-of-4th-of-july-parade-us-attempts-to-lure-iran-into-shooting-down-another-us-plane.html#more

Trump might swap (rapture) Mike Pence out and run with Tucker Carlson.
(That would mean that Trump has enough political power to put somebody in who would have about the same policies if Trump died in office. It would imply a second term of consolidated political power and more freedom of action than he has had to date. It would mean that the old political guard had acquiesced to his position and the faction which supports him.)
Will President Trump switch up his ticket in 2020? The Wall Street Journal editorial page, bastion of the establishment right, certainly hopes so. A little over a week ago, it called for former ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley to replace the dutiful Mike Pence as vice president. But there’s well-placed chatter in Washington that suggests the president will take a different route. Trump does indeed feel he needs VP change, but it is not Nikki Haley he is considering. It is Fox News host Tucker Carlson…
Carlson, who just turned 50, was with the president on his trip to the Korean demilitarized zone over the weekend. His interview with 45 will air Monday night. This all while Trump’s national security adviser and fierce Carlson foe, John R. Bolton, was exiled, literally, to outer Mongolia. In some ways, Trump has already made the move, ex officio.
https://spectator.us/vice-president-tucker-carlson/

Monster, by Steppenwolf, today’s appropriate 50 year old song.
John Kay is 75 now, born in Germany, as his part was becoming Russia, in April 1944.
Mom ran with him, and ran, and ran…

[John Day]

I​srael’s Haartz newspaper makes this comment. (Koch and Soros want to control US foreign policy, which is on the cusp of change, due to “reality”.)
​WASHINGTON — One of the co-founders of a new U.S. think tank that includes the unlikely combination of liberal philanthropist George Soros and libertarian billionaire Charles Koch says the idea was to bring together people who will challenge U.S. foreign policy, regardless of their other political views.
https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium-george-soros-and-charles-koch-agree-on-this-u-s-foreign-policy-needs-to-change-1.7430566

​Eleni has articles from Andrew Korybko about Russian and US interests and “cooperation” in global politics.​
​ ​If the Kremlin concludes that Russia’s interests would best be advanced through engaging in a series of “mutual concessions/compromises” with the US as part of a “New Détente”, then it won’t hesitate to make that move; likewise, if the savvy Russian leader recognizes that he’s being “taken for a ride” by Trump and that his “counterpart” is offering him a lopsided deal that’s doomed to make his country America’s “junior partner” in Eurasia, then he won’t think twice about walking away with no “deal”.Ultimately, everything depends on whatever deal Trump puts on the table and whether he can convince President Putin that his newfound truce with the neoconservatives translates into being able to get the “deep state” to abide by the terms of any prospective agreement.
​ ​If Russia is swayed by the carrot-and-stick combination of the Trump Administration’s possibly sincere commitment to a “New Détente” in exchange for an alleviation of multisided and sometimes humiliating pressure against it, then the geopolitical implications would be profound since Moscow would be ascending into the perfect position for “balancing” Eurasian affairs. It wouldn’t just have China’s tacit support for this initiative but America’s too because each superpower would appreciate Moscow becoming a “balancing” force vis-à-vis the other and freeing them up to focus on their rival in other areas of concern, mostly in Africa. As such, Russia could count on being courted by both of them and finally fulfilling its grand strategic goal to “balance” Eurasia, though provided that this speculative deal goes through in the first place and is actually respected by the US afterwards.

What The US Really Wants From Russia

Beyond any shadow of doubt, the two Great Powers have made “Israel” their joint protectorate, and this surprising state of affairs has far-reaching implications for not just Syria, but the entire Mideast and especially Iran.
​ ​During the joint press conference in Helsinki, President Putin proclaimed his long-known desire to protect “Israeli” interests by telling the world that:
​ ​“I would also like to note that after the terrorists are routed in southwest Syria, in the so-called ‘southern zone’, the situation in the Golan Heights should be brought into full conformity with the 1974 agreement on the disengagement of Israeli and Syrian forces. This will make it possible to bring tranquillity to the Golan Heights and restore the ceasefire between the Syrian Arab Republic and the State of Israel. The President devoted special attention to this issue today.”
​ ​Trump took it even further by adding that:
​ ​“We’ve worked with Israel long and hard for many years, many decades. I think that never has any country been closer than we are. President Putin also is helping Israel, and we both spoke with Bibi Netanyahu. And they would like to do certain things with respect to Syria, having to do with the safety of Israel. So, in that respect we absolutely would like to work in order to help Israel, and Israel will be working with us, so both countries would work jointly.
​And I think that when you look at all the progress that has been made in certain sections with the eradication of ISIS – we’re about 98–99 percent there – and other things that have taken place that we have done and that, frankly, Russia has helped us within certain respects. But I think that working with Israel is a great thing, and creating safety for Israel is something that both President Putin and I would like to see very much.”
https://eurasiafuture.com/2018/07/17/its-official-israel-is-now-a-joint-russian-american-protectorate/?subscribe=error#blog_subscription-2

​”Israel”
​ The present piece aims to briefly explain why it’s politically important for some people to write “Israel” in quotation marks, and how this is actually very pro-Semitic as opposed to “anti-Semitic”. The vast majority of Palestine’s native inhabitants prior to the post-World War II tidal wave of “Weapons of Mass Migration” were Muslim Arabs, and they did not refer to their homeland as “Israel”, which is the name that the European migrants to that territory chose to call their self-declared and partially cleansed political entity. Although the majority of the world’s governments recognize “Israel”, there are still millions of people and a handful of states that don’t, such as the Syrian Arab Republic.

Writing “Israel” In Quotation Marks Is A Peaceful Form Of Pro-Semitic Protest

One of the cleanup workers who died of illness related to the Twin Towers cleanup had some shoe boxes of CDRs with pictures he took.
Lots. Here are a few.
This kind of photography was not allowed out. I’ve not seen this before. Thanks Cat.
I wonder what is in there…
All of the images were taken in the direct wake of the September 11 attacks, with the vast majority dating between mid-September and October, 2001.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7185067/Incredible-never-seen-images-Ground-Zero-clean-operation.html

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/07/billionaires-agree.html
I think both of these guys are smart and realistic, and sense that a change in tack is needed now, to better serve their​ oligarchic​ interests, as global winds change.
This is tactical. They are not different from last week. The unipolar​ “New American Century”​ moment passed away, and they realize that the globalist financial/military/intelligence empire is in the process of restructuring.
They are declaring “Swiss ​Bank ​Neutrality”.
​ ​A new Boston Globe article titled “In an astonishing turn, George Soros and Charles Koch team up to end US ‘forever war’ policy” reports that the two influential billionaires have chipped in a half a million dollars apiece to start a new DC think tank with the goal of doing the exact opposite of the sort of thing that billionaire-funded DC think tanks normally do…
​ ​“In concrete terms, this means the Quincy Institute will likely advocate a withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan and Syria; a return to the nuclear deal with Iran; less confrontational approaches to Russia and China; an end to regime-change campaigns against Venezuela and Cuba; and sharp reductions in the defense budget,” the article reads…
​ ​T​he term “think tank” almost always refers to a group of academics hired by plutocrats to come up with reasons why it is very good and smart to do something very evil and stupid, and then to market those reasons at key points of influence. They are key tools of narrative management for the billionaire class, and the interests of the billionaire class are rarely in alignment with those of ordinary people. This is especially true when said billionaires are operating in a bipartisan manner.

New Soros/Koch-Funded Think Tank Claims To Oppose US Forever War

https://www.carlbeijer.com/2019/07/the-oligarchs-wont-give-you-peace.html

​The real work must be between the “Koreas”. Trump’s step and handshake may be more effective outside the US.​
SEOUL, July 2 (Yonhap) — President Moon Jae-in said Tuesday that North Korea and the United States have effectively declared an end to their hostile relations with the symbolic weekend meeting between their leaders at the inter-Korean border.
​ ​Although they did not sign any document, their action was tantamount to a “de facto declaration of an end to hostile relations and the beginning of a full-fledged peace era,” Moon stressed, speaking at a Cabinet meeting.
​ ​He was referring to a meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un at the truce village of Panmunjom in the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) on Sunday.
​ ​Trump even stepped over into North Korea, together with Kim, becoming the first sitting American president to set foot in the communist nation. The U.S. and North Korea fought fiercely against each other during the 1950-53 Korean War, which ended in an armistice. The two Koreas remain technically at war, as a formal peace treaty has yet to be signed.
​ ​Moon had a brief three-way meeting with Kim and Trump at Panmunjom, although he stayed away from their talks, which lasted for nearly an hour.
https://m-en.yna.co.kr/view/AEN20190702003151315

​Tom Luongo
Trump presumably had a good meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin which likely set the stage for his meeting with Chairman Kim Jong-un. Remember Kim met with Putin earlier this year and designated him as his go-between with Trump after the talks in Hanoi fell apart. This event should not be downplayed. Trump showed great humility and generosity towards Kim at the moment of truth. We should be cheering this regardless of what we think of him personally. Diplomacy is not groveling. It is the acknowledgment of the other person’s basic humanity, a fundamental point lost in the political cesspit that is D.C. Because of his previous mistakes and belligerence, only Trump could have made the walk across the DMZ to meet Kim on his territory.
https://tomluongo.me/2019/07/01/only-trump-could-go-to-north-korea/

​Ray McGovern
​ ​Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping, who met individually with President Trump at the G20 in Osaka, have been singing from the same sheet of Korea music — particularly in the wake of Xi’s visit to North Korea on June 20-21. Putin’s remarks are the most illuminating.
​ ​In an interview with The Financial Times, Putin pointed to “the tragedies of Libya and Iraq” — meaning, of course, what happened to each of them as they lacked a nuclear deterrent. Applying that lesson to North Korea, Putin said,
​ ​“What we should be talking about is not how to make North Korea disarm, but how to ensure the unconditional security of North Korea and how to make any country, including North Korea, feel safe and protected by international law. …”

RAY McGOVERN: Hope for a Breakthrough in Korea

​Who gained and who lost from the Democratic Party debates?
Polls of likely Democratic voters leaned heavily to Kamala Harris (who gut stabbed “front-runner” Joe Biden to demonstrate her dominance).
The Google-search results of the 2 nights had Tulsi (Is she a Democrat?) Gabbard leading as the debate proceeded the first night, and beautiful-power-lizard Kamala wearing the necklace of shrunken heads after the second night.
Consequently, as of now, the likeliest winner of the Democratic nomination is Kamala Harris, who would then become a second Barack Obama, not merely in the sense that she is a light-skinned Black, but that she is an enormously gifted politician who is in the pockets of that Party’s billionaires. Pete Buttigieg had been trying to be that, but his style isn’t even nearly as effective as hers is…
​ What is particularly striking there is that in these results, one candiate, Harris, is also the likeliest to win the Party’s nomination, but the other, Tulsi Gabbard, scores dismally low in the (voting Democrats) polled figures:
Gabbard before debates 0.7%, after 1st debate 0.6%, after second debate 0.7%
What all this suggests is that, whereas possibly the strongest general-election candidate against Trump would be Tulsi Gabbard, Kamala Harris, who is one of the billionaires’ candidates, also might be. A voter in the Democratic Party primaries who is mainly concerned about beating Trump should be supporting either of those two candidates to become that Party’s nominee. As regards what criteria that person would be applying, no intelligent voter any longer trusts a candidate’s mere words, but instead votes on the basis of that person’s existing record of actual actions as a public official. And, of course, a part of that record is the politician’s current policy regarding acceptance of PAC money, and the politician’s record of largest donors, especially in the latest campaign.

Who Gained and Who Lost from the Democratic Party Debates?

[John Day]

Oh, Disclaimer:
My Grandmother said I’m descended from John Quincy Adams, and his dad, too.

[John Day]

Soros and the Koch family are front-bench globalist elites. A few years ago Zbigniew Brzezinski declared to opportunity-window for a unipolar world (that “New American Century” thing) to have closed.
They are both pretty realistic. They are not each other’s enemies, nor do they threaten each other’s interests. I think they are repositioning for what is now happening in the multipolar world, and working to advance their selfish interests through joint “philanthropic”projects.

[John Day]

The Forever War is so Normalized, that Opposing it is “Isolationism”.
Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard is not “isolationist”.​ Caitlin Johnstone
Calling an aversion to endless military violence “isolationism” is the same as calling an aversion to mugging people “agoraphobia”. Yet you’ll see this ridiculous label applied to both Gabbard and Trump, neither of whom are isolationists by any stretch of the imagination, or even proper non-interventionists.

The Forever War Is So Normalized That Opposing It Is “Isolationism”

​I think this will not just be applied to Donald Trump. Look where shadow banning is already. Even I get blocked from sending more often than not in the past 2 weeks. You may not see this, unless you go to the blog, of course…​
In essence, Twitter is telling us that they are going to start suppressing President Trump’s tweets. And if other conservative government officials get out of line, they will be censored too.
This is happening right out in the open, and Twitter is brazenly admitting that any tweets that they slap with this “notice” will “feature less prominently on Twitter”…
When a Tweet has this notice placed on it, it will feature less prominently on Twitter, and not appear in:
Safe search
Timeline when switched to Top Tweets
Live events pages
Recommended Tweet push notifications
Notifications tab
Explore

Blatant Election Rigging: Twitter Wants To Make Sure We NEVER Have Another President Like Trump

I’m trying to send this again, since it is important, but I use gmail, and Google is suppressing this news. Trying again…
​In an otherwise slow news-cycle, the mainstream media has somehow failed to report on an undercover exposé by Project Veritas in which a senior Google employee admits that the company is manipulating its algorithms ahead of the 2020 election in order to prevent the “next Trump situation.”
​ ​”We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,” said longtime Google employee and head of “Responsible Innovation,” Jen Gennai, in the undercover Veritas sting.
“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?” she added.
​ ​As noted by Infowars’ Jamie White, “CNN, WaPo, CNBC, HuffPost, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Newsweek, Politico, and even The Daily Beast haven’t written a single piece on the devastating evidence.”
​ ​Meanwhile, YouTube parent Google has scrubbed the video from its video sharing platform (also ignored by the MSM).
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-25/msm-silent-after-google-election-meddling-bombshell-video-scrubbed-youtube

[John Day]

My sends to 180 bcc newsie-friends are consistently blocked. I use gmail. The blog I started in the 2016 primaries for this obstruction still works, as far as I can see. Lemme’ know if you can see it, too.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/political-popularity.html
​Caitlin Johnstone paints Kamala Harris as having attributes of Barack Obama and Nancy Pelosi combined. She’s ​the neoliberal oligarch’s dream.
​ ​California Senator Kamala Harris won the Democratic presidential debate last night. It was not a close contest. She will win every debate she enters during this election cycle. If she becomes the nominee, she will win every debate with Trump…
​ ​The moment everyone’s talking about was when Harris created a space for herself to attack Biden on his citing his collaboration with segregationists as an example of his ability to reach across the aisle and “get things done”. Harris had not been called upon to speak, and once given the go-ahead by moderator Rachel Maddow after interjecting went way beyond the 30 seconds she’d been allotted in tearing Biden apart. She skillfully took control of the stage and engineered the entire space for the confrontation by sheer dominance of personality, and Biden had no answer for it.
​ ​That’s the moment everyone’s talking about. But Harris had already been owning the debate prior to that.
​ ​The goal of a political debate is to make yourself look appealing and electable to your audience. You can do that by having a very good platform, or you can do it with charisma and oratory skills. It turns out that Kamala Harris is really, really good at doing the latter. She made frequent and effective appeals to emotion, she built to applause lines far more skillfully than anyone else on the stage, she kept her voice unwavering and without stammer, she made herself look like a leader by admonishing the other candidates to stop talking over each other, and she hit all the right progressive notes you’re supposed to hit in such a debate.

Kamala Harris Is An Oligarch’s Wet Dream

​Harris was born to two high level elites from foreign countries, who were good enough to be recruited to the US. Her mother is an Indian breast cancer research scientist. Her father is a Jamaican born Economics Professor at Stanford University. Still, she is able to assume the cloak of racial underdog in America. Here is the Wikipedia read, which is fairly careful to avoid saying anything negative, but you may draw your own inferences about her political progression, and stances when she played various roles. She works hard to not be open to attack, and counterattacks for the jugular.​ (Wanna’ attack her?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamala_Harris

This was the the first political attack against Kamala:
Kamala Harris launched political career with $120K ‘patronage’ job from boyfriend Willie Brown
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/politics/kamala-harris-launched-political-career-with-120k-patronage-job-from-boyfriend-willie-brown

How Kamala won her first election against that attack on her relationship with Willie Brown’s power machine:
​ S​o, when an audience member inside the church asked how, if elected district attorney, she could operate independently from Brown’s political machine, Harris was ready with not just an answer, but a counterpunch. “Make them understand that if they’re going to try to hurt you, they’re going to get more hurt,” Stearns said he counseled her.
​ ​“That was her cue,” Stearns said. Harris dismissed the question for its negativity while highlighting the most salacious elements of her opponents’ records, displaying a mix of flint and charisma that would one day lead her supporters to believe she could become president of the United States.
​ ​As Stearns tells it, Harris rose from her seat at the front of the sanctuary and stepped behind Terence Hallinan, the incumbent who billed himself as “America’s most progressive district attorney.” She told the audience, “You know Terence Hallinan has attacked Bill Fazio for being caught in a massage parlor,” a reference to a 1998 raid. Fazio, a former prosecutor who had run two close races against Hallinan and was now taking a third shot at the office, maintained he was there to conduct interviews for a legal case he was working on. He was never charged with any crime.
​ ​Then, Harris walked behind Fazio, Stearns said, and recounted the times her opponent had criticized Hallinan “for people having sex in his office,” referring to an incident in which two of Hallinan’s prosecutors were found in flagrante delicto inside the building.
​ ​“And then she walked back to the middle and said, ‘I want to make a commitment to you that my campaign is not going to be about negative attacks,’” said Stearns, who is still a Democratic strategist in the city. “’I believe we need to talk about the issues and the policies and the way we’re going to move our criminal justice system forward.”
​ ​The response was immediate. “People just jumped on their feet and gave her a standing ovation,” Stearns said. “And I was at the back of the church, and the look on the face of Terence Hallinan and Bill Fazio was, ‘Oh, shit.’’
https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/24/kamala-harris-2020-history-224126

​Eleni sent this excellent, long interview with Vladimir Putin, by London’s Financial Times.​
​ “​What is happening in the West? What is the reason for the Trump phenomenon, as you said, in the United States? What is happening in Europe as well? The ruling elites have broken away from the people. The obvious problem is the gap between the interests of the elites and the overwhelming majority of the people.
​ ​Of course, we must always bear this in mind. One of the things we must do in Russia is never to forget that the purpose of the operation and existence of any government is to create a stable, normal, safe and predictable life for the people and to work towards a better future.
​ ​There is also the so-called liberal idea, which has outlived its purpose. Our Western partners have admitted that some elements of the liberal idea, such as multiculturalism, are no longer tenable.​”
​http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/60836

​The very next thing I looked at, after reading that interview for an hour was Moon of Alabama, which excerpts that same interview, picking out the same points I picked out (how gratifying!).
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/russias-president-putin-explains-the-end-of-the-liberal-order.html#more

[John Day]

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/as-advertised.html
The second night of Democratic debate went to Kamala Harris, with good wordmanship and instincts. Kamala got lots of Google searches, the new measure, but also subject to Google’s “social responsibility” department… (I’m told that Tulsi Gabbard’s search wave has been attributed to “Russian ‘bots” by some). What course does Kamala have planned? Hold that thought for awhile. Medicare for all is the only thing agreed upon so far. Who has a clear vision for the upcoming economic reset? Bernie Sanders has shaped political discourse and direction. Is he just too old? (Despite his rebel persona, he has always cut good deals for business.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-28/2020-race-over-post-mortem-second-dem-debate-kamala-crushes-bernie-biden

Moon of Alabama digs into the different presentations of Tulsi Gabbard’s first night “win”/”loss” as portrayed by Google searches, alternate media, and network media/pundits. She was supposed to be nowhere, not the front of that modest pack. That place was reserved for Elizabeth Warren.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/media-and-public-disagree-on-tulsi-gabbards-debate-performance.html

Here is fairly broadband proof that Warrior-Sister Gabbard won the first night debate, real polls and all.
http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=60413

Here more of what Gabbard opposes, and the others ignore.
Venezuela foils attempt on President Maduro’s life: government
An attempt to assassinate Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro has failed, the crisis-hit country’s government said. The leader has accused the United States of being behind an alleged coup plot.
https://www.dw.com/en/venezuela-foils-attempt-on-president-maduros-life-government/a-49368879

CIA funded Venezuelan opposition denies it all. It’s OK, they didn’t have to be much of a part of it. Mostly out-of-that-loop.
https://www.france24.com/en/20190627-venezuela-coup-nicolas-maduro-juan-guaido?ref=tw_i

Pat Buchanan says Trump should trade Bolton for Gabbard as National Security Advisor. I think Trump never had that choice, and that train left the station a long time ago. Buchanan’s point goes farther, to what America wants, which is not supposed to be on America’s menu in 2020.

Memo to Trump: Trade Bolton for Tulsi

Poland is way hotter than central Texas! Asphalt is folding. Naked fat Germans seen on scooters. End of life as we know it!
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-27/central-europe-alert-heat-wave-hell-terrorizes-france

[John Day]

Second day of Dem debates and my bcc news send to 190 friends is blocked by algorithms again. It included that graphic of searches for Tulsi during the debate, and this…
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/real-alternatives.html
This rare alternative view of another option of human life is worth putting first today.
Children don’t have to be stuck in a little screen all the time. They can be normal if they are born into a normal world.
Can we provide them a normal world?
If you ever wanted to see what the world might look like after the Tribulation, you could do worse than visit the Burren land on the Atlantic coast of Ireland…
…In the 1930s no one here had electricity or cars, no lights or radio, and people lived much the way they had in the 1830s, or for that matter the 1830s BC. Dersie Leonard, who grew up in the Burren then, later described how she and her childhood friends walked miles every day in all weather, barefoot and wearing clothes made from old flour sacks. Modern American kids, growing up in a cocoon of toys, clothes and Xboxes, would struggle to picture a more depressing existence.
Perhaps surprisingly, then, Leonard wrote joyfully about her early life, saying she and her friends had “lakes and rivers, good land and bad, bog and rocks, not to mention fairy rings and forts – in fact everything a person could wish for.” They spent their days exploring, playing games, singing and telling stories, immersed in the adventure of childhood, and she considered herself lucky to live as she had…
Relying only on local village schools, Ireland then had a literacy rate higher than the USA does now, and produced generations of celebrated novelists, poets and scholars. Even taking their poverty into account, and even without the advances of the last 50 years, their average health was still better than most Americans’ today. And they were much happier than modern people, both according to surveys at the time and the memories of people who lived through those days. They lived their lives and I didn’t, and I’m not going to tell them that they’re all wrong…
“We were real happy children, never bored,” said Jenny Buckley, who grew up in County Offaly in the 1930s. Most of the elders I interviewed said the same – their early years were filled with picking wildflowers and finding birds’ nests, climbing trees and looking under logs, swimming to islands or rowing boats, declaring themselves kings and queens of their domain, swearing eternal friendship, and engaging in the feral joy of a hunter-gatherer childhood.
Mind you, they had plenty of chores on their family homesteads — picking crops, caring for animals, all the other duties that kept their families fed. “Our farm kept us going; we bought nothing but tea, sugar, rice and sultanas,” she said. “Now our pocket money was that we had a hen each and collected her eggs and sold them.” I hear the same from many of my neighbours; by the time they hit the hormones of adolescence, they had already gained more business savvy and shouldered more responsibility than most 50-year-olds today.
https://restoringmayberry.blogspot.com/2019/06/a-different-kind-of-childhood.html

​ I keep reading about how capitalism, which turns resources into refuse as a race against time, is not compatible with a healthy and sustainable ecology on the face of Planet Earth.
Did these very powerful capitalists not get that memo? What is their intention?
LONDON (Reuters) – Investors managing more than $34 trillion in assets, nearly half the world’s invested capital, are demanding urgent action from governments on climate change, piling pressure on leaders of the world’s 20 biggest economies meeting this week.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-climatechange-investment-letter-exclu-idUSKCN1TQ31X

​ ​What I am seeing of late is that the Climate Crisis is destroying environmentalism. What I consider real environmentalism. The Climate discourse is quickly being taken over by monied interests whose desire is to save capitalism before they save the planet. They fly (in jets, often private) to conferences in which avocados (or whatever) are flown in from California (or wherever). And there is aristocracy, literally, in attendance. It feels almost required. The British or Dutch Royals, if we’re talking carbon footprints, are tracking in with size 12 Florsheims– while the indigenous activists who toil and are persecuted in places such as Honduras, or Colombia, are not invited. They are of an other way of life, the life of actual concern for nature. These conferences are a kind of ceremonial environmentalism.​..
​ The new Climate Crisis…or Climate Emergency, feels increasingly distant from radical environmentalists of an earlier time. And I think part of the problem in wrapping one’s head around this crisis is that one has to tie together so many different topics. Fertility, mental health, dropping literacy, infrastructure neglect, pollution, militarism, Big Agra and Big Pharma, as well as digital technology and the psychology of contemporary westerners. A psychology mediated in huge part by lives increasingly spent staring at screens. And rather than expend the effort to actually connect these threads I find most people gravitate toward a simplistic and generalized position on the environment. And that position feels increasingly shaped by a marketing of fear.​..
​ I mean honestly, Coca Cola is going to help save the planet? If you only read the Global Shapers section you will arrive at a pretty clear idea of how this all works. My point is that once you have The Climate Reality Project, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, Procter and Gamble, Reliance Industries, Oando, GMR Group, Hanwha Energy Corporation, Rosamund Zander and Yara International *investing* in saving the planet, you know something is wrong.​..
​ The U.S. military hides statistics on its petroleum usage and its disposal of chemical waste, and of course the severe consequences of all the current ongoing U.S. wars (see Cholera in Yemen just for starters). The socio-political landscape is seeing the rise of global fascism as well as a continuing migration of wealth to the very top tier of the class hierarchy.​..
​ …Environmental destruction has been going on a long time. And the industrial revolution intensified the harm and civilization never looked back. The greenhouse emissions theory may or may not be completely true or accurate. But it also doesn’t matter, really. Society itself is unravelling. People are sick, depressed, even increasingly suicidal — and the U.S. seems to want to wage even more war. The madness of this is stupefying — and it again underscores the need for a political vision that begins with a platform that says STOP WAR. All war, all of it. That men like John Bolton or Mike Pompeo are in positions of authority, that such men can manipulate their power to create military conflict speaks to the utter and absolute depravity and decadence of the Capitalist system (of course in a wider sense Bolton and Pompeo are just following the mandate of the ruling class, something they learned and perfected long ago). Capitalism cannot survive. I have no idea if the planet can survive, but I suspect it will, though with rather substantial damage and suffering. But the hierarchical profit driven capitalist system cannot. The new feudalism is here, already, but its not sustainable.

The Monkey’s Face. The Climate Crisis is Destroying “Real Environmentalism”

[John Day]

My bcc news snd to 190 recipients was just blocked today. Google algorithm on Democratic Debate Day, I suspect.
I started the blog in 2016 Primary season to bypass this problem.
Things sent out fine 2 days after each vote in 2016 and 2018.
I think the AI is blocking posts/emails more nimbly now.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/negotiations.html
I guess all of this is being discussed right now.
This week’s National Security Advisor summit in Jerusalem is an historic event because of the participation of the Russian, Israeli, and American representatives during this multi-day meeting from 24-26 June, but it’s also a juicy one too because of the many rumors that it’s given rise to, the most popular being the possibility of a so-called “grand deal” being clinched about the future of the Middle East.
US National Security Adviser John Bolton together with his Israeli and Russian counterparts Meir Ben-Shabbat and Nikolai Patrushev will meet behind closed doors in what is described as an “unprecedented summit” in Jerusalem.
According to the Israeli media: “The chaos in Syria, rising tensions in the Persian Gulf” are on the agenda.

Secret US-Russia-Israel National Security Summit in Jerusalem: What is the Hidden Agenda?

CJ Hopkins has something like a crackpot conspiracy theory:
​ ​See, according to this crackpot conspiracy theory that I would put forth if I were a geopolitical analyst instead of just a political satirist, there have been no “catastrophic policy blunders,” not for global capitalism.
​ ​The Restructuring of the Greater Middle East is proceeding exactly according to plan. The regional ruling classes are playing ball, and those who wouldn’t ​(cooperate) ​have been regime-changed, or are being regime-changed, or are scheduled for regime change.
​ ​Sure, for the actual people of the region, and for regular Americans, the last thirty years of wars, “strategic” bombings, sanctions, fomented coups, and other such shenanigans have been a pointless waste of lives and money … but global capitalism doesn’t care about people or the “sovereign nations” they believe they live in, except to the extent they are useful.​..​
​ ​Global capitalism has no nations. All it has are market territories, which are either open for business or not.
What you’re looking at is global capitalism cleaning up after winning the Cold War. And yes, I do mean global capitalism, not the United States of America (i.e., the “nation” most Americans think they live in, despite all evidence to the contrary)…
The point is, “America” is not at war with Iran. Global capitalism is at war with Iran. The supranational corporatist empire. Yes, it wears an American face, and waves a big American flag, but it is no more “American” than the corporations it comprises, or the governments those corporations own, or the military forces those governments control, or the transnational banks that keep the whole show running.

The Ongoing Restructuring of the Greater Middle East

Caitlin Johnstone: “For example, while ‘only’ 33 percent of the US public prefer a US preventive nuclear strike that would kill 15,000 North Koreans, 50 percent approve,” the report reads.

Survey: Americans Have Remarkably Ignorant Attitude Toward Nukes And North Korea

Ahead of the Democratic Party Presidential Debates, this is all they can say about the anti-war candidate:
Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) may have met with Donald Trump during the presidential transition and Trump’s transition team may have put together a vetting document on the Hawaii Democrat as part of considering her for the post of Secretary of Veterans Affairs. But a spokesperson for Gabbard now insists to The Daily Beast that she didn’t know she was considered for the position and was never asked about it.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/tulsi-gabbard-insists-she-was-never-vetted-for-a-trump-cabinet-post

​ ​The New York Times published a series of video interviews in which it queried Democratic presidential hopefuls on, among other questions, whether “Israel meets international standards of human rights,” in what it described as an attempt to gauge their willingness to voice criticism of the Jewish state.
​ ​Most, the newspaper said, were reluctant to do so…
​ ​The paper asked 21 candidates — excluding former vice president Joe Biden, who refused to participate — the question, “Do you think Israel meets international standards of human rights?”
https://www.timesofisrael.com/queried-on-israel-and-human-rights-democratic-hopefuls-offer-guarded-criticism/

Most Democratic Candidates Still Afraid to Criticize Israel’s Violations of Palestinian Rights

What does it cost to kill a nice old man with a security detail?
​ ​Sen. Bernie Sanders on Monday released a sweeping higher education plan that includes canceling all of the nearly $1.6 trillion of existing student loan debt that’s owed by roughly 45 million Americans.
​ ​Sanders announced his legislation alongside progressive lawmakers, including Reps. Pramila Jayapal (D-Wash.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), who are filing a companion bill to Sanders’ proposal in the House.​..
The overall higher education plan, including the debt cancellation, would cost $2.2 trillion. Sanders would pay for it by imposing a new tax on Wall Street transactions. His campaign said the tax would generate more than $2.4 trillion over the next decade.
https://www.politico.com/story/2019/06/24/bernie-sanders-2020-student-loan-debt-forgiveness-plan-1296863
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/06/bernie-student-loan-debt-forgiveness-aoc

​In an otherwise slow news-cycle, the mainstream media has somehow failed to report on an undercover exposé by Project Veritas in which a senior Google employee admits that the company is manipulating its algorithms ahead of the 2020 election in order to prevent the “next Trump situation.”
​ ​”We all got screwed over in 2016, again it wasn’t just us, it was, the people got screwed over, the news media got screwed over, like, everybody got screwed over so we’re rapidly been like, what happened there and how do we prevent it from happening again,” said longtime Google employee and head of “Responsible Innovation,” Jen Gennai, in the undercover Veritas sting.
“We’re also training our algorithms, like, if 2016 happened again, would we have, would the outcome be different?” she added.
​ ​As noted by Infowars’ Jamie White, “CNN, WaPo, CNBC, HuffPost, The New York Times, Vox, Vice, Newsweek, Politico, and even The Daily Beast haven’t written a single piece on the devastating evidence.”
​ ​Meanwhile, YouTube parent Google has scrubbed the video from its video sharing platform (also ignored by the MSM).
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-25/msm-silent-after-google-election-meddling-bombshell-video-scrubbed-youtube

[John Day]

“Conversions could often be brutal and deadly though…”

I used to convert Celsius to Fahrenheit pretty quickly, when I was going to high school in Japan.
I read the stuff about Saul of Tarsus getting knocked down by a blob of divine light, but I always felt odd about the account, and odd about a lot of other miracles, too.

[John Day]

So, the US cyberattack on Iran failed, and all those defensive systems lit up Thursday morning, before the attack, and it had to be canceled. I like that a whole lot.
https://www.rt.com/news/462533-iran-cyber-attack-unsuccessful/

The Iranian air defenses did not light up where they were expected to by the US/NATO, the tracking systems lit up in Syria, which was not a location the US was prepared to attack (Russian cover? Not mentioned.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-22/iran-activated-air-defenses-syria-after-learning-us-attack-report

Putin and Xi will talk to President Donald on Thursday and Friday, peer-to-peer. They are not going to put up with any more dictating to Venezuela and Iran, but they will be nice and polite and flattering. Is he agreement-capable? Does it matter, now?
https://www.rt.com/news/462513-putin-trump-talks-steamroll/

[John Day]

Is the horse stomping on that guy’s balls?
What is going on in that weird painting?

[Author]

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