John Day
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http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/strait-scoop.html
Tom Luongo summarizes:
It is clear that Iran is sending the U.S. a stern message. And that message is we can hurt you asymmetrically as much as you hurt us.
Over the weekend Iran’s leadership made it clear there was no mistake in their actions last week. They purposefully shot down one of our most advanced drones to send the U.S. a very clear warning.
‘Our capabilities far exceed your tolerance for withstanding them.’
The more we learn about this incident the more the initial story concocted by the U.S. looks specious. Drone in international airspace? Most likely not.
Trump said someone made a mistake? No, completely deliberate.
The drone that was shot down, an RQ-4A Global Hawk, was the cream of our surveillance drones. It was flying in tandem with an anti-submarine Poseidon P-8 spy plane, which, according to Elijah Magnier was carrying far more than its normal crew of 9.
Try 38…
There was no mistake involved. No IRGC officer panicked. Iran deliberately targeted the Global Hawk after it failed to respond to hails to leave Iranian airspace and turned off its GPS, lights and digital systems.
It was acting as a hostile and Iran treated it as such. After sparing the Poseidon P-8 and its crew and passengers Iran shot down the drone.
That said Iran made this decision only after getting confirmation that the U.S. ruled out going to war with them. So, they stood down from shooting the Poseidon, which was the initial target, according to Magnier’s sources within the IRGC.
“Iran was about to hit and destroy the US Navy P-8 Poseidon spy and anti-submarine Boeing that was flying in the area when we received confirmation that the US had decided not to go to war and not to bomb any control and command or missile batteries positions, cleared or non-cleared, along the Straits of Hormuz. Had Trump decided otherwise, we had orders to hit several US and US allies’ targets and the Middle East would have been the theatre of a very destructive war with huge losses on all sides”, said an Iranian IRGC General.
But even after that confirmation came down Iran still chose to shoot down the drone. This was a clear message that actions speak far louder than words.
The Iranian leadership decided it was time to test Donald Trump’s mettle. They didn’t have to shoot down the drone. But if they didn’t it would give the U.S. carte blanche to violate Iranian airspace without fear of reprisal solely because back-channel communications say, for now, the U.S. has stayed its hand.
https://tomluongo.me/2019/06/24/iran-message-sent-message-delivered/The Strait of Hormuz has no “international waters”. It’s Oman’s water or Iran’s water. It can’t be kept open against Iran’s will.
The Strait of Hormuz, located between Oman and Iran, connects the Persian Gulf with the Gulf of Oman and the Arabian Sea. The Strait of Hormuz is the world’s most important oil chokepoint because of the large volumes of oil that flow through the strait. In 2018, its daily oil flow averaged 21 million barrels per day (b/d), or the equivalent of about 21% of global petroleum liquids consumption.
Chokepoints are narrow channels along widely used global sea routes that are critical to global energy security. The inability of oil to transit a major chokepoint, even temporarily, can lead to substantial supply delays and higher shipping costs, resulting in higher world energy prices. Although most chokepoints can be circumvented by using other routes that add significantly to transit time, some chokepoints have no practical alternatives.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=39932
The stick is a failure. What’s your carrot?
President Trump delivered on his promise to impose new sanctions on the Supreme leader and other senior Iranian officials on Monday, with Treasury Secretary Mnuchin adding that more sanctions against Foreign Minister Javad Zarif would be handed down later this week.
Though we imagine the Iranians vastly prefer the sanctions to a missile strike on Iranian soil (a strike that Trump famously speculated could involve 150 casualties), and although the threat of all-out warfare in the Middle East has been averted (at least for now), Tehran is telegraphing a message of defiance, saying the path to a diplomatic solution is now permanently closed.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-25/new-us-sanctions-mean-path-diplomacy-forever-closed-iran-warnsOutrage Against ‘Rising Jewish Hegemony’ Was Widespread Among Top US Military Brass Before and After WW2
Ron Unz (12400 words, long and detailed, Thanks, Eleni)
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/changing-strategy.html
As US-Iran tensions increase, Tulsi Gabbard calls her 2020 candidacy a ‘threat to the foreign policy lies sold to the American people’
T his past week, two oil tankers in the Gulf of Oman were crippled with explosions that have set the region on edge and sparked concerns that the United States and Iran could soon engage in a bloody war with massive international ramifications.
With little information made public, the Trump administration has begun making the case for a potential conflict, blaming Iran and pointing to a grainy video as proof of its culpability.
Meanwhil..e, worlds away from the Middle East, congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard has been framing her presidential candidacy on avoiding this type of sabre rattling. While some of her better-known Democratic rivals have focused on healthcare or climate change as the number one concern, the army veteran has instead cited nuclear war and US regime-change policy as the number one threat to the the country she hopes to lead.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/tulsi-gabbard-2020-democrat-iran-us-regime-change-war-oil-a8959586.htmlEarly this morning Iranian air defense shot down a U.S. high attitude reconnaissance drone:
DUBAI (Reuters) – Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards have shot down a U.S. “spy” drone in the southern province of Hormozgan, which is on the Gulf, the Guards’ news website Sepah News said on Thursday.
State news agency IRNA carried the same report, identifying the drone as an RQ-4 Global Hawk.
“It was shot down when it entered Iran’s airspace near the Kouhmobarak district in the south,” the Guards’ website added...
Trump does not want to open a military conflict with Iran. But he is already waging a brutal economic war against Iran and the country is pushing back. Trump wants negotiations with Iran without first lifting his sanctions against it. Iran rejects that...
(Interestingly no MQ-4C is supposed to be in the Middle East. The deployment must have been secret. Update: This specific drone seems to have arrived in Qatar only five days ago.)…
It does no longer matter what Trump wants. Iran has achieved escalation dominance. It can cause a myriad of incidents that force Trump to react. He can either launch a hot war and thereby risk his reelection bid, or he can cut back on the sanctions that hurt the Iranian people. If he does not do either, more pinpricks will follow and will over time become more costly.
The loss of the Global Hawk drone is significant. These huge birds, with a wingspan larger than a Boeing 737, are considered strategic assets. They were build as replacements for the infamous U-2 spy planes. They carry highly classified sensors and cost more than $120 million a piece.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/06/iran-shoots-down-strategic-us-drone-is-ready-for-war-puts-maximum-pressure-on-trump-.html#moreAll over the world, leaders of important countries, and various “experts” of all stripe are calling ‘bullshit” on US evidence that “Iran obviously did it”.
Even Elliot Higgins of Bellingcat – who is famously pro-war against regimes which the U.S. has targeted, like Syria – writes in the New York Times:
Nothing presented as evidence proves that the object was placed there by the Iranians. The video shows only that the Iranians chose to remove it for an as yet unknown reason.
This is especially important in light of a statement by Yukata Katada, the president of the operator of the Kokuka Courageous, that the crew had reported that the ship was attacked by a “flying object.” Mr. Katada added, “I do not think there was a time bomb or an object attached to the side of the ship.”Officials Worldwide Are Skeptical of Claim that Iran Attacked Tankers In Gulf of Oman
Pompeo To Present Military “Options” To Trump As Iran Threatens Carriers With “Precision” Ballistic Missiles
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-18/iran-threatens-carriers-precision-ballistic-missiles-pompeo-present-trump-range@Dr. D,
The picture came through.
Yep, I noticed that Trump was doing “Guess what I’m thinking”, a presidential Rorschach test for the uneasy of all ilk.
Why?
Maybe the people who did 9/11 are pulling the strings that make him say that.
Maybe he has some variant of Tourette’s Syndrome and just has to blurt out weird stuff sometimes. Maybe he’s playing 8D chess with (RIP) Spock…
Sorry, gotta’ get back to managing “reality”…“A Man of Wealth and Taste”
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/perception-management.html
President Donald “thinks he knows who was behind the 9/11 attacks”, and “it wasn’t Iraq”.
OK, now what? Is that the end? He can’t really say who did it, can he?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-17/trump-i-think-i-know-who-was-behind-911-attacksCaitlin Johnstone:
What happens when you can control people’s experience of reality? Well, in a world of social creatures who build their society based on dominant consensuses about circumstances and events, you can to an extent control reality itself. You can create a reality where all resources are funneled toward you, your allies and your lackeys.The View From Abroad, America as Others See It, from Eleni, in Athens
http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=189928President Trump wasn’t thrilled by this morning’s selloff in the euro, and for the first time, is lashing out at ECB chief Mario Draghi, accusing him in a tweet of intentionally manipulating the value of the shared currency with his stimulus talk.
Earlier, Mario Draghi sent the euro tumbling and German yields to record lows when he said that rate cuts or more asset purchases could be part of the central bank’s toolkit for fending off a recession.
Update: Trump isn’t letting this go, and is now attacking Draghi because European stock markets rallied on Draghi’s stimulus remarks, which isn’t “fair” for the US.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-18/unprecedented-attack-trump-accuses-draghi-manipulating-euroThis just in!
President Trump “thinks he knows who did 9/11 attacks”
telling ABC News’s George Stephanopoulos “Iraq did not knock down the World Trade Center,” adding “It were other people. And I think I know who the other people were. And you might also.”
Rest of the story later, much later, laterer, why did he stop there?
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-17/trump-i-think-i-know-who-was-behind-911-attacks@Dr.D. “Department of Redundancy Department and The Natural Guard” , Firesign Theater
Russia and China are working hard to re-multipolarize the world, and it’s not easy, and it’s not all nice, by any means. I don’t really trust China any more than I trust our current owners, and Putin is Russia’s finest, along with Lavrov, but they ar both quite mortal, and this is the best Russia has been for over 100 years.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/subterranean.htmlI started the blog http://www.johndayblog.com around this time in 2016, when my bcc sends of the news (done for 10 years by then) were blocked by the internet. I did every possible thing to comply with rules and petitioned gmail repeatedly and occasionally got things to send for a day or two until I was shut down again. This blocking stopped 48 hours after the November 2016 election and did not start again until early October 2018. It stopped 48 hours after the November 2018 vote.
This week I have been getting steadily blocked from sending to the 190 of my closest friends (etc.) who usually get my dredge.
This is a really early start to the censorship cycle, but it is probably what is “necessary” this time. After all, I support Peace-Candidate, Tulsi Gabbard, who deserted the DNC for their vote rigging against Bernie Sanders in 2016.Eleni sends this insightful article. It’s all down to censorship for the DNC. No Plan-B.
Democrat strategy unlocked – Silence the Public, pretend Clinton isn’t in charge, and run half a dozen candidates representing some puerile pastiche of demography, until the very end.
While at first glance this may seem to be reflective of an incoherent strategy, we need to step back and see how there is indeed a certain logic at play here. Censorship will have a huge impact on this election, and all politics moving forward.
Not having a single candidate to focus on, that is, to draw fire on, isn’t the same thing as not having a single strategy. Single candidates and single strategies are not the same thing, not in the DNC, which is still clearly under a unified command structure under H.R Clinton. Yes indeed.
It’s clear to insiders and anyone nominally looking at the facts on paper that the DNC is still a Clinton monopoly...
Besides the actual strategy of relying on internet censorship, the nominal, plastered, plausible strategy is to run everyone at once, until the very end. There isn’t a single candidate because democrats in fact do not have a candidate to run. They have a censorship plan, and then simply run half a dozen people simultaneously and work their virtual supporters up into some ‘anyone but Trump’ frenzy, with each candidate taking the historic vow to officially throw their support and their supporters behind the candidate that wins the DNC primaries. The most trustworthy of corporations recently announced it is going to selflessly and patriotically secure our elections. It’s a small company run by vegans and powered by love. It goes by the name “Microsoft.” (You’re forgiven for never having heard of it.) …
“Microsoft aims to modernize and secure voting with ElectionGuard.”
Could anything be safer than software christened “ElectionGuard™”?! It has “guard” right there in the name. It’s as strong and trustworthy as the little-known Crotch Guard™.Microsoft and the Pentagon Are Quietly Hijacking U.S. Elections
The Intercept has unearthed some stunning quotes from Facebook’s lawyers as the controversial social media giant recently battled litigation in California courts related to the Cambridge Analytica data sharing scandal. The report notes that statements from Facebook’s counsel “reveal one of the most stunning examples of corporate doublespeak certainly in Facebook’s history” concerning privacy and individual users’ rights.
Contrary to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s last testimony before Congress which included the vague promise, “We believe that everyone around the world deserves good privacy controls,” the latest courtroom statements expose in shockingly unambiguous terms that Facebook actually sees privacy as legally “nonexistent”.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-14/court-transcript-exposes-facebooks-real-view-users-destroy-their-own-right-privacy An internal Facebook document reveals that the social media giant monitors its users’ offline behavior as part of how the company determines whether a person should be classified as a “Hate Agent,” …
Titled “Hate Agent Policy Review,” the document reveals that Facebook employs a series of “signals” which include a person’s behavior both on and off the platform. Once determined to be a “hate agent,” a person is banned from the platform.
If you praise the wrong individual, interview them, or appear at events alongside them, Facebook may categorize you as a “hate agent.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-14/facebooks-secret-hate-agent-formula-leaked-insiderAnother peek at the truth behind the curtain from Eleni, about global-vulture-capitalist-billionaire-Republican-donor, Paul Singer.
With nearly 6 million Americans unemployed and regular bouts of layoffs in the U.S. tech industry, major American tech companies like Google, Microsoft and Intel Corporation are nonetheless moving key operations, billions in investments, and thousands of jobs to Israel — a trend that has largely escaped media attention or concern from even “America first” politicians. The fact that this massive transfer of investment and jobs has been so overlooked is particularly striking given that it is largely the work of a single leading neoconservative Republican donor who has given millions of dollars to President Donald Trump…
Furthermore, many of these companies are hiring members of controversial Israeli companies — known to have spied on Americans, American companies, and U.S. federal agencies — as well as numerous members of Israeli military intelligence as top managers and executives.
This massive transfer of the American tech industry has largely been the work of one leading Republican donor — billionaire hedge fund manager Paul Singer, who also funds the neoconservative think tank American Enterprise Institute (AEI).How NeoCon Billionaire Paul Singer Is Driving the Outsourcing of US Tech Jobs to Israel
For a moment on Thursday, it appeared that the US Navy had produced the ‘smoking gun’ to which Secretary of State Mike Pompeo had alluded during his statement from earlier in the day: CENTCOM footage which the Navy said purported to show Iran’s IRGC ‘caught in the act’ of trying to remove an unexploded mine from the Kokuka Courageous, one of the two tankers damaged in Thursday’s attacks…
After the video’s release, Iran continued to deny any involvement in the attacks. And perhaps now we know why.
In comments that cast the entire narrative promulgated by the US in doubt, Yutaka Katada, the president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the Kokuka Courageous, said Friday that he doesn’t completely believe Washington’s version of events… “A mine doesn’t damage a ship above sea level,” said Yutaka Katada, president of Kokuka Sangyo, the owner and operator of the vessel. “We aren’t sure exactly what hit, but it was something flying towards the ship,” he said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-14/japanese-tanker-owner-denies-ship-hit-mine-says-crew-saw-flying-objects-attackSeven Reasons to be Highly Skeptical of the Gulf of Oman Incident, Caitlin Johnstone (really, 3-4 is enough)
In a move that surprised exactly zero people, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has wasted no time scrambling to blame Iran for damage done to two sea vessels in the Gulf of Oman on Thursday, citing exactly zero evidence.
“This assessment is based on intelligence, the weapons used, the level of expertise needed to execute the operation, recent similar Iranian attacks on shipping, and the fact that no proxy group operating in the area has the resources and proficiency to act with such a high-degree of sophistication,” Pompeo told the press in a statement. [Not mentioned is the US/NATO/Israeli elephant in that pond]
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/seven-reasons-to-be-highly-skeptical-of-the-gulf-of-oman-incident-48958389f53eIt looks like the mysterious attacks helped some of our elected representatives make up their minds on a difficult political decision.
A brief report from AntiWar.com’s Eric Garris suggests Thursday’s tanker attack incident in the Gulf of Oman which the United States promptly blamed on Iran has directly impacted bills placed before the Senate which would ban US arms sales to Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar.
Garris wrote of the vote which came hours after the Gulf tankers incident: “Both votes were considered highly likely to pass up until they were rushed to the floor today. The timing appears almost certainly to have been related to Thursday tanker bombings in the Gulf of Oman, and shifted a number of Senators’ votes in favor of continuing the arms sales.” He noted that “some senators switched sides to kill the bills” following news of the tanker attacks.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-14/senators-switched-key-votes-bill-gulf-arms-ban-hours-after-tanker-attacksWho possibly would and could torpedo a Japanese oil tanker while Japanese Prime Minister Abe and Iranian officials were meeting?
(Supposedly, Trump is using Abe to negotiate for the US. This looks like it would mess that up. Whose interests does that serve?)
2 Tankers Damaged After Torpedo Attack Near Strait Of Hormuz; Oil Soars
It appears earlier reports that the Front Altair had sunk were, in fact, incorrect. The ship’s captain has said that it is still afloat. VHF radio traffic confirmed that it is damaged but still afloat.
Hours have passed since the suspected attacks, and still nobody has claimed responsibility. Iran’s Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has noted how suspicious it is that a Japanese owned vessel would be attacked while Iranian leaders were meeting with the Japanese prime minister in Tehran.
And as one BBG analyst pointed out: “Fingers will certainly be pointed at Iran as the mastermind behind these events. But the potential benefits to the Persian Gulf nation are outweighed by the risks. And even if Tehran isn’t responsible, it will still suffer the consequences.”
Several American warships were nearby when the attack unfolded, per radio traffic, which also showed some signs of tensions with Iranian vessels: “American warship identifying itself as ‘Coalition Warship’ stating they have multiple vessels and aircraft in the vicinity. Iranian Navy calling vessels asking their intention in the area.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-13/2-tankers-damaged-after-suspected-torpedo-attack-near-strait-hormuz-oil-soars
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-13/false-flag-iran-has-little-gain-oman-tanker-attacksInterview with an Israeli military officer about US war with Iran. I think Eleni sent this one:
There are a few aspects. In purely military terms, it’s impossible to defeat Iran. It has a huge amount of territory. The Americans won’t have enough forces to deploy there. The logistics are crazy, it’s impossible for the Americans. So, there’s no opportunity to conduct a war against Iran and win it. And the Pentagon knows that better than anyone. And they warned and said it. To advance by a few miles in small, miserable Kuwait, the Americans deployed half a million servicemen there. They strained their entire army…
In the south of Iran, there are Arabs who are Shia. And there are Arabs who are Shia and live in Iraq. And in Saudi Arabia, the area where the oil is developed is controlled by the Shia. And the majority of Kuwait’s population is Shia. 80% of Bahrain’s population is Shia. Then, such a big fire will start in the Middle East. And the Sunni won’t be able to [stop] the Iranians and pro-Iranian forces. They don’t have enough forces. Saudi Arabia has a huge military budget. Its hands are tied, so it can’t do anything to tiny Yemen. They can’t do anything to the Houthi. Therefore, in this war of Persians against Arabs, the Persians will win. And this is another problem. It means a stronger Turkey. The Americans won’t remain whole after that war. The Middle East won’t remain whole. If anyone wins, it’ll be Russia…
This tale about 120,000 isn’t a tale. The American servicemen, just counted that in order to maintain the U.S. presence, 120,000 servicemen are required. These aren’t operational plans. When they ask the military what it’s necessary for that, they say that they need 120,000 servicemen in order to stay in the Middle East…
– They need one million servicemen to go to Iran. They don’t have them…
Trump came to the conclusion that it’s almost impossible to conduct regime change in Iran. Why almost? It’s because American specialists, who think like Americans and have no idea what the Middle East is, think that the economic environment in Iran will lead to the collapse of that regime.
They don’t understand what they’re talking about. The current government in Iran is stable. And nobody and nothing threats it. If Iranians will have half as much food, the government will stay. This is Iran. It isn’t Spain. That’s why everyone who thinks like Americans or Europeans, that if somebody doesn’t have enough of anything, the government will change. They treat Hamas and Iran like this.
They don’t understand what they’re talking about. Another option that Trump has is simple – to conduct negotiations. And all of those shouts, that hysteria, are meant to make Iranians take part in negotiations. But he wants to do it and save face, so he wants them to ask for it.
https://russia-insider.com/en/israeli-officer-explains-why-us-cant-win-war-against-iran-says-us-military-knows-russian-tv-newsEleni certainly sent this article, critical perspective for US/NATO imperial military operations in the post-Soviet era.
On March 24th, 1999, NATO launched its 78-day round the clock aerial assault on the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia without the approval of the United Nations Security Council. Over a thousand NATO warplanes delivered over 2,000 airstrikes in nearly 40,000 sorties, dropping over 20,000 bombs over the former Yugoslavia, killing thousands of civilian men, women, and children, as well as upwards of a thousand Yugoslav soldiers and police.[1] [2] [3] NATO employed weapons considered criminal by international law such as depleted uranium and cluster bombs.[4] [5] [6] [7] …
By the year 2000, Yugoslavia had been ripped apart with NATO bombs, IMF restructuring and ethnic conflict. Serbia was destroyed and the rest of the republics were transformed into neocolonies of the Western powers. The most popular narrative is that the West intervened in the region out of humanitarian concern – to stop genocide. However, this claim doesn’t hold up when actual facts are brought into play. In reality, the NATO intervention in Yugoslavia was not a humanitarian one; it was instead motivated by the colonial-imperialist, economic and ideological interests of the member states of NATO – namely the United States and Germany.
Although the bombing was dressed up as ‘humanitarian’, all it really served to do was dismantle all that remained of socialism in Europe and once again ‘Balkanize’ and colonize the Balkans. This truth becomes obvious upon a principled analysis of the economic interests and actions of the NATO bloc before formal intervention, an investigation into how the actual intervention was handled, and a look into the current state of the former Yugoslavia. The ‘humanitarian’ and ‘democratic’ bombs dropped on Yugoslavia resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars in economic damage which dramatically reduced the living standards of the Yugoslav people – the most damaging in the region since the Nazi occupation during WWII. The strategy of Balkanization and ‘humanitarian intervention’ has become the West’s (often through NATO) modus operandi; the same strategy of partitioning unified economically nationalist and independent states first exercised over Yugoslavia has also been practiced in Iraq, Libya, and now Syria. The results are always the same – a drop in living standards, a huge resentment towards the West and NATO from the populations of the targeted countries, and a profit for the imperialist powers.
https://www.sott.net/article/318529-The-spread-of-Balkanization-US-Empires-strategy-of-barbaric-dismemberment-of-sovereign-states-began-in-YugoslaviaMore correct perspective on the empire from Eleni:
Giving a speech at the ACLU last week after the Senate torture report was initially released, Hersh gave some insight into what was on the Pentagon’s secret tape.
Debating about it, ummm … Some of the worst things that happened you don’t know about, okay? Videos, um, there are women there. Some of you may have read that they were passing letters out, communications out to their men. This is at Abu Ghraib … The women were passing messages out saying ‘Please come and kill me, because of what’s happened’ and basically what happened is that those women who were arrested with young boys, children in cases that have been recorded. The boys were sodomized with the cameras rolling. And the worst above all of that is the soundtrack of the boys shrieking that your government has. They are in total terror. It’s going to come out.”Classified Evidence: US Soldiers Raped Boys In Front Of Their Mothers
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/poisoning-well.html
So anyway, Pompeo is asked by some ridiculous twat what he’s going to do in the event of a Corbyn-led Kristallnacht, and WaPo reports on his response as follows:
Pompeo said, “It could be that Mr. Corbyn manages to run the gauntlet and get elected. It’s possible. You should know, we won’t wait for him to do those things to begin to push back. We will do our level best,” he said to fervent applause from attendees.
“It’s too risky and too important and too hard once it’s already happened,” he said...
“President Trump and his officials’ attempts to decide who will be Britain’s next prime minister are an entirely unacceptable interference in the UK’s democracy,” The Guardian quotes a Labour spokesperson as saying in response to the revelation.
“STOP: The Secretary of State Mike Pompeo just promised ‘Jewish leaders’ in the United States that he would stop Jeremy Corbyn coming to power here,” tweeted former British MP George Galloway. “Is this normal now? Is this what we’ve been led to? Is this good for Jews? For Britain? Really?”
“They did it in Latin America, Africa and Asia. Now the US government wants to overthrow democracy in Britain,” tweeted The Guardian’s George Monbiot. “Still waiting for a UK government spokesperson to express their outrage. Hello???”
“Hmm. Hard to spin this any other way: the US secretary of state secretly promises US Jewish leaders to prevent Corbyn from becoming UK prime minister,” tweeted British journalist Jonathan Cook. “Hard too not to suspect that the US is *already* helping to ensure Corbyn doesn’t become PM. Because the obvious implication of Pompeo’s comment is that the US knows it can damage Corbyn without leaving fingerprints at the crime scene — presumably through black ops, image management etc. The elephant in the room: Why assume the US isn’t already using those techniques?”
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/uh-what-did-pompeo-mean-when-he-vowed-to-push-back-against-corbyn-8aa668c5416d
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/jun/09/mike-pompeo-leaked-recording-corbyn-labour-jewish-leaders Trump appears unwilling to go down in history as the president responsible for kicking off nuclear Armageddon. But what about the next president? The deep state in control of US politics would surely be able to place into office someone who would advance the final justification for a headlong confrontation with Moscow and Beijing.
If you think I am exaggerating, take Pompeo, a representative of the deep state, and his recent answer to the question of whether Trump was sent by God to save Israel from Iran. “As a Christian, I certainly believe that’s possible”, he responded.If only we could elect Joe Biden president, he would “Cure Cancer”!
https://www.rt.com/usa/461649-biden-cancer-cure-pragmatic/ Tulsi’s own military experience notwithstanding, she gives every indication of being honestly anti-war. In the speech announcing her candidacy she pledged “focus on the issue of war and peace” to “end the regime-change wars that have taken far too many lives and undermined our security by strengthening terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda.” She referred to the danger posed by blundering into a possible nuclear war and indicated her dismay over what appears to be a re-emergence of the Cold War.
In a recent interview with Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, Gabbard doubled down on her anti-war credentials, telling the host that war with Iran would be “devastating,” adding that “I know where this path leads us and I’m concerned because the American people don’t seem to be prepared for how devastating and costly such a war would be…
Gabbard, and also Carlson, did not hesitate to name names among those pushing for war, one of which begins with B-O-L-T-O-N. She then asked “How does a war with Iran serve the best interest of the American people of the United States? And the fact is it does not,” Gabbard said. “It better serves the interest of people like [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Bibi Netanyahu and Saudi Arabia who are trying to push us into this war with Iran.” …
Tulsi Gabbard had previously called for an end to the “illegal war to overthrow the Syrian government,” also observing that “the war to overthrow Assad is counter-productive because it actually helps ISIS and other Islamic extremists achieve their goal of overthrowing the Syrian government of Assad and taking control of all of Syria – which will simply increase human suffering in the region, exacerbate the refugee crisis, and pose a greater threat to the world.” …
Last May, she criticized Israel for shooting “unarmed protesters” in Gaza, a very bold step indeed given the power of the Israel Lobby...
Tulsi Gabbard could well be the only genuine antiwar candidate that might truly be electable in the past fifty years, and that is why the war party is out to get her.Tulsi Gabbard Pushes No War Agenda – and the Media Is out to Kill Her Chances
Two day after a massive, 1+ million protest took place in Hong Kong, with demonstrators demanding the end to a proposal allowing extraditions to China, a follow up protest took place with thousands of people blocking local streets, and Hong Kong police defended the use of tear gas and rubber bullets to control a “riot situation” after protesters tried to storm the chamber where lawmakers were expected to take up – and pass – the controversial bill…
As we noted last night, a repeat protest erupted early on Wednesday, and it only got worse as the day progressed as demonstrators – many of them clad in goggles, face masks and helmets -fled to different areas, running through plumes of smoke – threw bricks, bottles and umbrellas at riot police guarding the city’s Legislative Council; they dragged metal barriers and linked arms across roads surrounding government headquarters, in scenes reminiscent of the 79-day street protests that paralyzed parts of downtown Hong Kong in 2014…
So much tear gas was used that commuters waiting at nearby subway stations and people in shopping malls were coughing and tearing up, and many sought medical attention.
Many of the city’s lawmakers, from both the pro-democracy camp that opposes the contentious extradition legislation at the heart of the protests and the pro-Beijing majority that supports it, failed to arrive at the council for a scheduled debate on Wednesday morning, after protesters surrounded the complex and blocked traffic.
Some financial services were also disrupted. HSBC Holdings PLC closed two banking-service outlets in the Admiralty area until further notice, while other banks including Standard Chartered PLC, Bank of East Asia Ltd. and China Citic Bank Corp. temporarily suspended operations at branches near the protest area.
Even though the opposition bloc in the city’s legislature has been weakened after authorities ousted several democratically elected lawmakers through court orders and barred others from running, opposition to the proposed law came from many corners of society, including businesspeople, lawyers and activists, who say the changes would undermine Hong Kong’s relative autonomy and independent judicial system…
“The government needs to acknowledge that my voice matters,” said Candy Wong, a 27-year-old shop assistant who said she was angered after authorities pressed ahead with the bill even after more than a million people—including herself—took to the streets in protest. Ms. Wong took a day off to join the rally. “If I didn’t come today by next week I may no longer have the freedom to do so.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-12/hong-kong-police-fire-tear-gas-rubber-bullets-protesters-riot-situationDan sends this well researched and written “long read” on how the opioid epidemic came to nest in Appalachia.
In chemical terms, carfentanyl is as mortal a threat as nerve gas – more poisonous by median lethal dose (one nanogram) than the venom of the Mojave rattlesnake. It was once unregulated, but after containing its production, the Chinese government made a pointed statement:
America consumes 80 per cent of the world’s opioids. 2. China, a country in which these substances could be purchased online at wholesale prices, does not have an opioid problem. 3. If America has an opioid problem, it is not because of pharmaceutical imports but American-manufactured prescription drugs.
All true. At the heart of this domestic consumption is the region of Appalachia, set in mountainous seclusion between Kentucky, Virginia, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Appalachia, when it is thought of at all, occupies a kind of ‘herrre be dragyns’ place on the American mind map of most Americans, occupied by doodled stereotypes: coal, hillbillies, Deliverance playing on repeat. Opioid addicts were just added to the stereotypes, a single letter changed to neologize them as ‘pillbillies’…
Pastor M. told me about an early Pentecostal missionary, a barely tolerated presence in some mining camp full of hard men. They ignored him, and let him know he was ignored, until one day the whole camp arrived en masse to his tent, bending the brims of their hats in their hands, asking to join his ‘congregation’.
‘May I ask,’ said the missionary, ‘what made you change your minds?’
‘Well,’ said their leader, ‘we have been poisoning the water in your well, and as you are unaffected, we figure you must have something to teach us.’
Total Depravity: The Origins of the Drug Epidemic in Appalachia Laid BareLook at the bottom of the large patch of snow at the top of the picture. The leopard os lying catlike, face clearly just watching with a saddish look, Her head is directly to the left of the small patch of snow, just below the big patch of snow. Her bodi is to the left and angles up from her head. Her facial features are fairly well marked.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/green-old-deal.html
I’m going to start with the conclusion, which is that actual productive economic growth has already ended, and we are keeping the complex system coherent by using fake financial “growth”, which can seem to work, until it doesn’t. I think the dateline “2019” on the graph below should be 2-3 mm to the right. People keep changing the year on that same line. The real economy is rolling over.
The article on “degrowth” caught my interest, but it sounds like it was written by city people who are stressed out by paychecks that don’t keep up with shopping, and see a life with less shopping, less pay, city buses, and free education and medical care as being simpler, with more leisure time.
It does not seem that the author has had to solve existential problems, grow food, or make useful necessities, like clothing or furniture.
The life with more leisure time was easier to believe in the 1960s, when there was more of everything for everybody every year.
This is the simpler, easier life we are living now, which is why so much of the world wants to get in where there is plenty of food, cars, public services and clean water..
I’ll put in a piece Eleni sent from Jim Kunstler about where some of us might get to some day, without some of the others.
Gail Tverberg’s article, sent by Charles, along with the one about high tech can’t last (really limited existence on the planet of rare-earth elements, which are completely critical to the screen I’m looking at and everything that precedes it).
There’s more about the trade wars from other perspectives, but Gail’s perspective is paramount, directly related to global energy limits and the effects that expensive energy is having on the global economic web. She doesn’t mention the US policy of bombing all the oil countries that start selling oil for anything other than dollars. That moves their oil into the future, by destroying their ability to pump and burn it now.
The latest analysis, still showing the financing of the shale oil miracle to be a lot like the housing bubble is included. Shale oil is useful as a US weapon on the global stage, increasing the power of the Petrobuck-Empire to bomb and blockade oil-producing non-vassals, while keeping tribute-paying vassals in Europe and Japan from economic collapse.
Charles’ own essay about a rural revival follows that, and one I have sent before, about the rural creative class.
Creativity and manufacturing going rural is important, because what is happening in the cities is compliance economy, with creativity fading away, too risky. To afford a creative project, one has to be where rents are lower, code-compliance less daunting, and expectations of workers less tightly scripted and defined.
The article that packed the most punch for me was the one about the very limited supplies of rare-earth elements on our fair planet.
There is not enough to keep making laptops, smartphones, video screens, hard drives, microchips, electric car and wind turbine magnets and so on. Some of these very hard limits have already been brushed a few times, but the global trade war (best kind of war, I think) is likely to make them acute. The majority of these come from China, because that’s where most of them are. China has few enough cards to play in a trade war. China will probably stop exporting these, except in manufactured products.
I suspect there is already a lot of quiet coercion going on. Apple has to make iPhones in China, right?Imagine an almost infinite celestial fruit-cobbler…
In 1972, a team at MIT published The Limits to Growth, a report that predicted what would happen to human civilization as the economy and population continued to grow. What their computer simulation found was pretty straightforward: On a planet of finite resources, infinite exponential growth isn’t possible. Eventually, non-renewable resources, like oil, would run out.
Historically, we have considered growth a positive thing, synonymous with job security and prosperity. Since World War II, the gross domestic product (GDP) measure has been used as “the ultimate measure of a country’s overall welfare.” …
But growth has led to other problems, such as the warming of the planet due to carbon emissions, and the extreme weather and loss of biodiversity and agriculture that comes along with that. Consequently some activists, researchers, and policy makers are questioning the dogma of growth as good. This skepticism has led to the degrowth movement, which says the growth of the economy is inextricably tied to an increase in carbon emissions. It calls for a dramatic reduction in energy and material use, which would inevitably shrink GDP.
The Green New Deal, popularized by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, seeks to decrease carbon by growing the renewable energy industry. But the degrowth movement believes we need to take this further, by designing a social upheaval that disentangles the idea of progress and economic growth once and for all. This new accounting of economic success would instead focus on access to public services, a shorter work week, and an increase in leisure time. Their approach, they say, will not only combat climate change, but free us from a workaholic culture in which so many struggle to make ends meet…
This is how degrowthers envision the process: After a reduction in material and energy consumption, which will constrict the economy, there should also be a redistribution of existing wealth, and a transition from a materialistic society to one in which the values are based on simpler lifestyles and unpaid work and activities…
People can try to live a degrowth-esque lifestyle today by buying fewer things, but ultimately it’s challenging to commit to degrowth without those public services that are built into the model…
Since there are so few real-world examples of degrowth, Kallis has used a fictional utopia to explain the concept in a 2015 paper…
“It’s how we imagine the good life,” Kallis said. “A life that is simpler, not a life where we keep producing more and more running faster and faster, and having more and more products to choose from.”
https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bj9yjq/the-radical-plan-to-save-the-planet-by-working-lessEleni sent this from Kunstler: Going Where, Exactly?
Well, we’d better adjust our thinking to the fact that the horn-of-plenty is shockingly out of goodies, and that no amount of financial hocus-pocus is going to refill it. Valiant attempts to redistribute the already-existing wealth are liable to prove disappointing, especially when the paper and digital representations of that wealth in “money” turn out to be figments — promises to pay that will never be kept because they can’t be kept.
So, instead of fantasizing about free PhD programs for everybody, and free insulin for the multitudes, consider instead the vista of a reduced population working in the fields and pastures to bring enough food out of the long-abused land to live through the next winter. Consider a world in which, if we are lucky, the electricity runs for a few hours a day, but possibly not at all. Imagine a world in which men and women actually function in different divisions of labor and different social spaces because they must, to keep the human project going. Imagine a world in which the ideas in your head about that world actually have to comport with the way the way that world really works — and the severe penalty for failing to recognize that.
https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/going-where-exactly/ Nearly everyone wonders, “Why is Donald Trump crazy enough to impose tariffs on imports from other countries? How could this possibly make sense?”
As long as the world economy is growing rapidly, it makes sense for countries to cooperate with each other. With the use of cooperation, scarce resources can become part of supply lines that allow the production of complex goods, such as computers, requiring materials from around the world.
The downsides of cooperation include:
(a) The use of more oil to transport goods around the world;
(b) The more rapid exhaustion of resources of all kinds around the world; and
(c) Growing wage disparity as workers from high-wage countries compete more directly with workers from low-wages countries.
These issues can be tolerated as long as the world economy is growing fast enough. As the saying goes, “A rising tide lifts all boats.”
In this post, I will explain what is going wrong and how Donald Trump’s actions fit in with the situation we are facing. Strangely enough, there is a physics aspect to what is happening, even though it is likely that Donald Trump and the voters who elected him would probably not recognize this. In fact, the world economy seems to be on the cusp of a shrinking-back event, with or without the tariffs. Adding tariffs is an indirect way of allowing the US to obtain a better position in the new, shrunken economy, if this is really possible.
Why it (sort of) makes sense for the US to impose tariffs Yet another downturn could not come at a worse time for U.S. shale drillers, who have struggled to turn a profit. Time and again, shale executives have promised that profitability is right around the corner. Years of budget-busting drilling has succeeded in bringing a tidal wave of oil online, but a corresponding wave of profits has never materialized.
Heading into 2019, the industry promised to stake out a renewed focus on capital discipline and shareholder returns. But that vow is now in danger of becoming yet another in a long line of unmet goals.
“Another quarter, another gusher of red ink.”
https://oilprice.com/Energy/Energy-General/A-Gusher-Of-Red-Ink-For-US-Shale.htmlHigh Tech Can’t Last; There Are Limited Essential Elements:
This long post describes the rare metals and minerals phones, laptops, cars, microchips, and other essential high-tech products civilization depends on.
Metals and minerals aren’t just physically limited, they can be economically limited by a financial collapse, which dries up credit and the ability to borrow for new projects to mine and crush ores. Economic collapse drives companies and even nations out of business, disrupting supply chains.
Supply chains can also be disrupted by energy shortages and natural disasters. The more complex, the more minerals, metals, and other materials, machines, chemicals, a product depends on, the greater the odds of disruption.
Minerals and metals can also be politically limited. China controls over 90% of some critical elements.
And of course, they’re energetically limited. Once oil begins to decline, so too will mining and all other manufacturing steps, which all depend on fossil energy.
The next war over resources is likely to be done via cyber-attacks that take down an opponent’s electric grid, which would affect nearly all of the other essential infrastructure such as agriculture; defense; energy; healthcare, banking, finance; drinking water and water treatment systems; commercial facilities; dams; emergency services; nuclear reactors, information technology; communications; postal and shipping; transportation and systems; government facilities; and critical manufacturing (NIPP)http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/look-at-this.html
[MMT, Modern Monetary Theory is not a “thing” in itself. It is a lens through which one may see the workings of power in a country/society, and what choices the society makes, and what the limits to those choices actually are. This is a discussion we are entering, out of necessity, yet again…]
Finally, despite showing that currency-issuing governments don’t face a financial constraint, MMT doesn’t claim that a nation faces no spending constraints whatsoever; rather, it shows that the real constraints faced by governments are the real resources (plants, machines, workers, etc.) available to the nation either locally or through trade. It follows that the real limit to government spending is the capacity of the economy to absorb it without generating runaway inflation…
In fact, MMT is not a regime that you ‘apply’ or ‘switch to’ or ‘introduce’. Rather, it is a lens which allows us to see how our fiat monetary systems already work. How you decide to use that understanding depends on the value system or ideology you apply to it. It thus makes little sense to talk of ‘MMT-type prescription’ or an ‘MMT solution’. Indeed, governments already operate according to the framework offered by MMT, regardless of what they may claim in public (and the accounting smokescreens they may employ).
Citizens are constantly told that the government cannot afford to invest more in education, healthcare, infrastructure, welfare and other public services. Yet, there is never a lack of money when it comes tax cuts for the rich, bank bailouts, military activities and other programmes that benefit our political and economic elites. As of March 2006, approximately £4.5 billion had been spent by the UK in Iraq, enough to pay for the building of around 44 new hospitals and to fund the recruitment and retention of over 10,300 new teachers for ten years. Yet, there was never any debate about how the UK would ‘fund’ the war...
But if there is a need to attenuate spending growth in the economy, MMT demonstrates the superiority of an employment buffer stock approach–the Job Guarantee–over the current unemployment buffer stock approach to inflation control. Instead of creating unemployment to discipline wage demands, MMT proponents advocate that the government would, instead, offer a public sector job at a socially- inclusive minimum wage to anyone who seeks to work. Redistributing labour from the inflating sector to the fixed price sector would ensure price stability and avoid costly mass unemployment...
In the presence of an external deficit, the government will have to run a fiscal deficit to maintain spending sufficient to keep all resources fully employed. Since Britain has run an external deficit since the 1970s, and is not likely to generate large external surpluses in the foreseeable future, it follows that the only way private debt–and the power of financial institutions over society–can be brought under control without driving the economy into recession is for the government to run persistent and substantial fiscal deficits...
The support of mainstream economists and financial operators for certain theories and policies doesn’t stem from a sincere belief in their virtue, but from the fact that they promote the interests of the dominant forces in society. The idea that a socialist government could guarantee itself the support of the economic establishment simply by adhering to the ideological framework that its members claim to believe in, with the aim of deploying mainstream theories and policies for progressive ends, is naïve.
Moreover, Meadway neglects the fact that the power of the capitalist establishment derives as much from its command of the state and means of production as it does from its capacity to frame the narrative. The primacy of these fiscal rules is a key part of the way in which the economic establishment censures governments that might be intent on redistributing national income or improving welfare services and the like.
Ultimately, the ideology of scarcity of money is integral to the maintenance of our deeply unequal relations of power in society. If there’s anything the establishment fears more than the working classes seizing the means of production, it’s the working classes seizing the means of production of money (or more precisely, of currency)...
MMT gives us the power to imagine truly transformational politics, without getting caught up in meaningless debates about whether we can ‘afford’ it or not. This is also why it is being attacked so fiercely. Not because of its theoretical foundations, but because of the range of economic and political possibilities that it opens up. The bottom line, however, is that MMT is here to stay.
https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/06/for-mmt[These mules can’t pull the economic wagon, and they are giving up.]
The net worth of millennials (18- to 35-year-old) has collapsed 34% since 1996, according to a new, shocking report from Deloitte.
Millennials are financially worse off than any other generation before them. With student loans, auto and credit card debts, rising rents, and out of control, health-care costs have pushed their average net worth below $8,000.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-02/millennial-net-wealth-collapses-study-finds[The current monetarist capitalist framework pumps “money” into anything that can hold it, which amplifies the current system of wealth-distribution. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. This has become a very sick structure, and these sick structures ultimately collapse, because of reality. When the structure collapses, nobody is rich, because the economy does not function. This is monetarist analysis…
Hey, look! It ends up in the same place.]
Rickards: Going back to the 1929-1937 period, the old rule was to prick bubbles to relieve speculative pressures. But, this ended up causing recessions rather than preventing them. By the 1998 – 2001 period, the conventional wisdom was to let bubbles run their course and then clean up the mess afterwards. But the Fed has failed to distinguish between credit driven bubbles and mania driven bubbles. The former are dangerous because they are connected with the credit system, the latter less so because people loose money but the crisis is not systemic. The 2000 dot.com bubble was speculative, but not credit driven so it did not turn into a systemic crisis when it popped. Of course 2008 was credit driven and it did metastasize throughout the system right up to the top of the food chain with large banks and the housing GSEs failing. When you are kicking around the idea of should I or should I not pop the bubble, this is a key distinction and the threshold question for policy. You should pop or defuse credit driven bubbles, but perhaps let speculative bubbles (most recently Bitcoin) run their course. The problem is that Fed policymakers do not seem to grasp this fundamental distinction. This leads to credit bubbles being allowed to spin out of control into systemic crises...
Rickards: That is a profound question you raise about the impact of monetary policy on visible credit metrics. The answer very simply is that you can’t get out. It’s one thing when loose monetary policy results in private credit extremes. The Fed can reign that in. But, what happens when public credit from the Fed is the source of the problem? The Bernanke choice of stoking asset price inflation via zero rates and QE is not something that can be reversed without a great deal of pain. Once you make that trade-off between promoting inflation and future market instability, you have no way out. You’re much better off taking the pain and accepting a lower level of economic growth in the short-run rather than deferring the pain but creating far larger asset bubbles down the road. There is no way out of the Bernanke policy choice without bigger bubbles and much larger market crash that results. This is why I believe that we face a financial market crash as bad or worse than 1929 or 2008...
Rickards: When all of the solutions from Washington and all of the big ideas about economic growth fail, then we may need to fall back on a community based, semi-agrarian model that resembles austerity in today’s terms. Such a model is far more stable than the radical boom and bust model of Greenspan and Bernanke.
Rickards: We need to move beyond ideology and towards a more pragmatic discussion about how we measure and describe growth. Let’s do what works.
https://www.theinstitutionalriskanalyst.com/single-post/2019/06/05/Aftermath-Interview-with-James-Rickards[Chinese traditional farming is extremely sophisticated. It allowed China to have an empire for 5000 years. Those farmers have been pulled out to work in factories and pour concrete, a one-time extraction of human wealth. The US already spent it’s farmers long ago.
Global Food War: US farm output will be hugely down this year, and US farmers will need a lot of help, anyway.
Loss of exports to China to feed pigs may not hurt the American factory-agricultural sector much this year.]
According to the latest May 20 report of the National Agricultural Statistics Service (NASS) of the US Department of Agriculture, corn and soybean crops are well behind the planting growth levels normal this time of the planting season. They report that only 49% of all planned corn acreage in the US has been planted compared with 78% at this time a year ago. Of that only 19% has yet emerged from the ground compared to 47% in May 2018. In terms of soybeans, barely 19% of crops have yet been planted compared with 53% a year before. Rice acreage planted is down to 73% compared to 92% a year ago in the six US rice-growing states. Of course, should weather dramatically improve the final harvest numbers could improve. It is simply too early to predict.
The USA is by a wide margin the world largest soybean producer with 34 percent of the world’s soybean production and 42% of world exports prior to the China trade battles. The US is also the world largest corn or maize producer, almost double China, the number two. A serious harvest failure in these two crops could significantly affect world food prices, leaving aside the unfortunate fact that almost all US soybeans and corn are GMO crops. They are mainly used in animal feed.
https://journal-neo.org/2019/05/31/do-we-face-a-global-food-disaster/Kushner: Palestinians not yet capable of governing themselves
(AKA: “They won’t do what I say”)
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/06/kushner-palestinians-capable-governing-190603051426199.html[I am certain that Senator Elizabeth Warren understands Modern Monetary Theory (which does not mean that she groks everything.)].
Warren’s latest plan is in a class by itself, even for Warren. She calls it an Agenda for Economic Patriotism.
Warren’s proposal does nothing less than turn inside out the globalist assumptions pursued by the past several administrations, Democrat and Republican alike. Where they have pursued more globalization of commerce as an end in itself (and as a profit center for U.S.-based multinational corporations and banks), Warren’s goal is to bring production and good jobs home.
Even better, she knits it all together with a coherent plan, beginning with a new Department of Economic Development “with the sole responsibility to create and defend quality, sustainable American jobs.” …
Even better(er), Warren shows up Donald Trump on the question of trade. While Trump’s version of economic nationalism is all swagger, symbol, and shotgun retaliation. Warren’s would actually deliver tangible benefits for the voters who turned in desperation to Trump. By contrast, Trump’s version delivers nothing.
https://prospect.org/article/warrens-astonishing-plan-economic-patriotismhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/06/war-on-reality.html
Daisy Luther, The Organic Prepper:
When I was in Bosnia recently with Selco, I was in awe of the fact that they don’t have warning labels, guard rails, or any other protective things keeping stupid people alive. He got a good laugh from my shock over the fact that a scenic lookout had no railing to keep people from plunging to their deaths…
People have become so dependent on their navigation systems that reading a physical, honest-to-goodness-piece-of-paper map has become a lost art. Not only that, but some folks rely more on their GPS than their common sense, sort of like these tourists who drove right into the Pacific Ocean because the nav system told them to…
What if the situation was more dangerous than falling into a giant fountain? What if you were busy texting and there was an armed robbery and you walked right into the middle of it? What if your eyes were glued to the screen and there was some unexpected wild animal, like, I dunno, a bear?
Because…that actually happened.
Of course, a bunch of dependent dumb people are a whole lot easier to control than the critical thinkers who rely on themselves instead of Papa Government.
https://www.theorganicprepper.com/darwin-weeps-warning-labels-and-technology-render-the-survival-mindset-obsolete/Edward Snowden: With Technology, Institutions Have Made ‘Most Effective Means of Social Control in the History of Our Species’
NSA whistleblower says “new platforms and algorithms” can have direct effect on human behavior
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/05/31/edward-snowden-technology-institutions-have-made-most-effective-means-social-control
Pepe Escobar, via The Saker Blog:
The logic of this extreme “military diplomacy” is stark; if you don’t weaponize the American way, you will suffer. Key targets feature, among others, India and Turkey, two still theoretical poles of Eurasian integration.
In parallel, from US Think Tankland, comes the latest RAND Corporation report on – what else – how to wage Cold War 2.0 against Russia, complete with scores of strategic bombers and new intermediate-range nuclear missiles stationed in Europe to counter “Russian aggression”. Santa Monica’s RAND arguably qualifies as the top Deep State think tank.
So, it’s no wonder the road ahead is fraught with Desperation Row scenarios. The US economic war on China – at least for now – is not as hardcore as the US economic war on Russia, which is not as hardcore as the US economic siege or blockade of Iran. Yet all three wars carry the potential to degenerate in a flash. And we’re not even counting the strong possibility of an extra Trump administration economic war on the EU.
It’s no accident that the current economic wars target the three key nodes of Eurasian integration. The war against the EU may not happen because the main beneficiaries would be the Russia-China-Iran triumvirate.Helen Buyniski, via RT:
Frustrated by a legal ban on sharing intelligence with Israeli operatives conducting targeted assassinations against Hezbollah, the NSA crafted a loophole giving them total access even to US citizens’ data, leaked documents show.
The Israeli SIGINT National Unit (ISNU), the NSA’s counterpart in Tel Aviv, convinced the Americans to circumvent the legal prohibition on providing surveillance data for targeted assassinations during Israel’s 2006 war with Lebanon, according to the newest revelation from the archives obtained by whistleblower Edward Snowden…
The documents don’t include details of what “arrangement” was eventually worked out with the ODNI, but the Israeli military used American data to lay waste to Lebanon’s civilian population, much like the tech-enhanced US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, whose kill-counts swelled with civilian victims after they received access to NSA targeting data…
“Israel repeatedly, and in some cases egregiously, violated the laws of war,” Human Rights Watch reporter Nadim Houry told the Intercept, adding that the Israelis “engaged in indiscriminate aerial attacks” and cluster bombing against “civilian infrastructure that was not tied in any way to the armed conflict.” …
Apparently unsatisfied with the legal loophole the Americans had created for them, the Israelis sought and received full access to the NSA’s massive surveillance data troves after the war. A 2009 memorandum of understanding officially gave ISNU unrestricted access to the NSA’s raw intelligence data – including the phone and internet records of American citizens and citizens of third-party countries. Only American officials’ data was excluded, on an honor-system basis (with ISNU instructed to “destroy upon recognition” any records originating with a government official).
https://www.rt.com/news/460785-nsa-israel-intelligence-partner/With the joint Syrian and Russian air campaign over Idlib province heating up over the past three weeks, and with the final showdown between Damascus and the last major al-Qaeda stronghold in Syria’s northwest imminent, President Trump on Sunday issued a stern warning directed at Syria, Russia, and Iran.
Trump tweeted that the three allies are “bombing the hell out of Idlib Province in Syria” and are in the process of “indiscriminately” killing civilians which he further called “butchery”. He ended the statement in all caps, saying “STOP!”.
The Kremlin was quick to respond, saying Monday militants from Idlib had stepped up attacks on civilian areas in places like nearby northern Hama as well as into Latakia province.
Blaming Turkey for failing to uphold the Astana ceasefire agreement by allowing its proxies to attack Syrian government areas, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov said “militants were using Idlib as a base to launch attacks against civilian and military” which he called “unacceptable,” according to Reuters.
“Of course strikes by militants from Idlib are unacceptable and measures are being taken to neutralize these strike positions,” Peskov told reporters.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-03/russia-rebuffs-trumps-call-stop-ongoing-butchery-idlibSurreal footage shows a massive riot broke out inside al-Aqsa Mosque compound in Jerusalem on Sunday, with Israeli security forces storming Islam’s third holiest site, which sits atop Temple Mount.
It all started when Jews were controversially allowed entrance to the compound to celebrate Jerusalem Day which marks Israeli control over the Old City in the aftermath of the June 1967 Six-Day War. In response to reports that Jewish entrance was imminent, Palestinians began to riot, which included throwing stones, chairs, and objects at entering police.
Multiple reports noted the incident marked the first time in about three decades that Jews were allowed access to the compound during the final days of the month of Ramadan, which was likely the result of Israeli authorities feeling emboldened by the US formal recognition of Jerusalem as the Israeli capital last year.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-06-03/severe-clashes-jewish-settlers-enter-al-aqsa-mosque-compound-jerusalemMore from Helen of Des Troy on RT:
A top-secret NSA targeting system which dramatically increased the civilian death toll in Afghanistan and Iraq has made its way back home, according to leaked documents boasting of its use on the US-Mexico border.
The RT-RG targeting system, which sucks up and processes hundreds of millions of phone and internet records per day in order to “find, fix and finish” enemy combatants, has been deployed on the US’ southern border since 2010, according to documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden…
While the NSA praised the system for boosting the military’s kill-count in Afghanistan and Iraq, the documents show it gave soldiers a false sense of certainty, leading to an explosion in civilian casualties following its deployment. Most of those kills – 90 percent, in one five-month period of airstrikes – were not the intended targets. For such a flawed system to be placed in the hands of domestic authorities already prone to itchy trigger-fingers is unsettling.
https://www.rt.com/usa/460737-nsa-surveillance-casualties-deployed-mexico/
Helen points out that the Malaysian PM just cut his life expectancy to under-2-years:
Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad has floated the idea of creating a gold-backed common trading currency for all of East Asia, slamming regional currency exchange as “manipulative” and criticizing the US’s heavy-handed foreign policy.
“In the Far East, if you want to come together, we should start with a common trading currency, not to be used locally but for the purpose of settling of trade,” Mahathir said at the Nikkei Future of Asia conference in Japan, suggesting the currency be “based on gold because gold is much more stable” and warning that promoting any one country’s currency over others would result in conflict. Exchange rates would be based on the country’s economic performance and not subject to the volatility of forex markets…
Earlier this week, US President Donald Trump warned Malaysia that it could be placed on the US Treasury’s list of “currency manipulators” and required close scrutiny, though Malaysia’s central bank retorted that it maintains a floating exchange rate and strong external balance…
Mahathir is a long-time critic of the status quo in currency trading. He blames billionaire financier George Soros for triggering the 1997 Asian financial crisis by betting against the ringgit and baht and has accused the financier of attempting to “colonize” Malaysia through his network of NGOs, claiming his end goal is “regime change.”
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi proposed a pan-African gold dinar that would be used to sell the country’s oil on the world market in 2009, less than two years before his government fell to a NATO-backed regime change operation that has left the once-prosperous nation a conflict-ridden warzone. One of the ‘moderate’ rebels’ first actions upon brutally murdering Gaddafi was to create a central bank to replace the state-owned monetary authority that had previously managed Libya’s wealth. The US has historically not taken kindly to countries that attempted to trade oil in non-dollar currencies, as Iraq’s Saddam Hussein can attest – or could, if he hadn’t been regime-changed as well. Syria, too, dropped its peg to the dollar in 2007, not long before the West went from awarding Bashar al-Assad the French medal of honor to declaring him a bloodthirsty monster.
https://www.rt.com/business/460698-malaysia-proposes-gold-forex-currency/http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/what-we-pay-for.html
Trump has talked rightly about war being the last thing he wants and has broached the idea of a bilateral negotiation with Tehran on issues of concern. Establishing more communication nodes with the Iranians is the correct approach.
More weapons in the hands of the Saudis, however, sends Iran the opposite message—that the United States is only interested in talking if the topic is full surrender. And if Iran remains resistant to the idea, Washington will sell munitions to its adversaries until it‘s ready to sign off like the Japanese in 1945…
It’s not too late for President Trump to reverse a potentially calamitous decision. For the good of America’s security, one hopes he has second thoughts and recognizes that the U.S. and Saudi Arabia don’t always align.Trump’s Decision to Arm the Saudis Against Iran Will End in Disaster
Russia won’t send Iran S-400 anti-aircraft missiles right now. (I suspect there had to be some price for the US/Israel to pay for this, like promising Vladimir they won’t launch massive air attacks.)
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-30/putin-has-rejected-irans-s-400-missile-request-over-soaring-gulf-tensionsTrump called political financier/fixer, Sheldon Adelson a few days ago about Bolton running his own war policy…
In perhaps the best sign thus far that a potential US war with Iran has been averted (at least for the near term), given the possibility that both heightened saber-rattling and the potential for an “accidental” deadly encounter between IRGC forces and the recent build-up of American deployments could have led to a major conflict, White House National Security Adviser John Bolton himself appears to now be fast climbing down the escalation ladder.
According to Reuters on Thursday Bolton is singing a different tune compared to the war rhetoric of the past weeks since the crisis began: “The threat from Iran is not over but quick action from the United States has helped deter it.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-30/bolton-finally-backs-iran-escalation-not-over-us-deterred-threatMike Pompeo and Jared Kushner are participating in highly secretive Bilderberg meeting of global power elites this week. (shhh…)
https://sputniknews.com/world/201905281075423981-bilderberg-club-kushner-meeting/Nixon/Kissinger/Butz weaponized global staple food production against families, nations and farmers.
Archaeology, history and anthropology have been largely neglected in discussions on climate change and agricultural sustainability. However, our past contains a rich, diverse, and global dataset resulting from the successes and failures of numerous societies and their interactions with the environment.
This research provides an important source of information on food security and agricultural development over a much longer period than current studies allow and under a range of different challenges.
The memory of agriculture and food is carried by landscapes, seeds, animals, people, and technologies, as well as by oral traditions, languages, arts, rituals, culinary traditions, and unique forms of social organisation.
In many regions around the world landscapes and agricultural systems have developed often distinctive, ingenious practices that have stood the test of time in their robustness and resilience…
Of Earth’s estimated 400,000 plant species, 300,000 are edible, yet humans cultivate only around 150 species globally, and half of our plant-sourced protein and calories come from just three: maize, rice and wheat.http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/rabid-hierarchy.html
Long-planned big-war is behind schedule, so…
Bolton further said there was “no doubt” that Iran ordered the series of aggressive acts, also echoing prior Pentagon statements. “I think it is clear these (tanker attacks) were naval mines almost certainly from Iran,” Bolton said. “There is no doubt in anybody’s mind in Washington who is responsible for this [Mossad?] and I think it’s important that the leadership in Iran know that we know.” …
Not only does the US now have a carrier strike group and B-52 bombers on high alert in the Persian Gulf region, but the White House last week signed off on deployment of 1,500 additional troops in response to the heightened Iran threat.
The national security advisor further described the additional military build-up this month the “prudent and responsible” approach which signaled Iran that Washington was ready to give a “very strong” response to any continued action.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-29/bolton-says-no-doubt-iranian-naval-mines-used-uae-tankers-sabotageHey, Venezuela was supposed to be easy…
For the foreseeable future, the US cannot simply unseat Maduro and seize control of the Venezuelan government. In fact, as recent events in Washington DC have demonstrated, it has considerable difficulty even seizing the Venezuelan embassy, which was occupied by Code Pink activists for over a month until their forcible removal on May 16.
Like a child deprived of its favorite toy, sullen US hawks are now faced with the reality that there is no easy military shortcut to their geopolitical goals in Venezuela. However, advocates of regime change have never been on speaking terms with reality, as the recent increased likelihood of a US war with Iran has made clear…
For anti-imperialists in 2019, the lesson of Venezuela is that, against all odds, erecting obstacles to such intervention is now both demonstrably possible and arguably more effective than it was in the early days of the “war on terror.” But war takes many forms. As Empire Files journalist Abby Martin pointed out in January, current US sanctions against Venezuela “are not an alternative to war. They are war, in every way.”…
This crime against humanity, these means by which a country and a people are bled and starved into submission without a shot being fired, continues even now.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/05/venezuela-guaido-coup-united-states-interventionThis is the proper role for cryptocurrency, large international transactions. 1:1 gold-backing would be a very strong statement.
According to Russian news agency, TASS, Russia’s central bank, the Bank of Russia will consider issuing gold-backed cryptocurrencies—a rather strange move considering how cryptocurrencies are generally anathema to central banks.
…the head of the Bank of Russia, Elvira Nabiullina, has revealed that the cryptocurrencies are not meant for retail use but rather for conducting big mutual settlements for entities with global jurisdictions.
In other words, only the heavyweights will get to lay their hands on them. Further, she says that she still believes that it’s better for countries to develop international settlement systems such as the Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU) framework that use their own national currencies noting the said framework has demonstrated good dynamics.
https://safehaven.com/news/Breaking-News/Russian-Central-Bank-Eyes-Gold-Backed-Crypto.htmlThanks Guys,
I grew up on USMC and Navy bases during Vietnam.
Dad was there, as he had been at a forward fire station in Korea.
The draft ended precisely one month before I turned 18. I was blessed.
I am a family doctor in public health.
I grow vegetables.
We have to build something better, below the radar, for after the next firestorm.So many good songs already…
Effigy, Credence Clearwater Revival
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/financial-asphyxiation.html
Jim Hightower was Texas Commissioner of Agriculture, an elected office, from 1983 to 1991. He presents here, the past and current American history of choking farmers to death and suicide.
The current result of the average farm losing money for the past 5 years happens due to political and market arrangements, which give farmers no say in what they are paid for what they produce, but large financial firms, trading commodities, can rig prices every day. Seed and pesticide companies have ramped up their prices, and put farms out of business if they don’t cooperate. US farm policy since Nixon/Kissinger/Earl Butz has been to “get big or get out”, and to only support massive corporate players like Monsanto and Cargill. This puts all the farmers in the world at the “mercy” of these weaponized multinational corporations. Their interests are to dominate as part of the financial-capitalism-war-machine.
Thanks for the link, Ray. (God bless me, I’ve got the “black dirt” in Yoakum!)
In Democratic Promise, Larry Goodwyn’s definitive history of America’s 19th century Populist Movement, he describes the migration of hundreds of thousands of abjectly poor Southern farmers into Texas in the 1870s and ’80s. They were escaping the scurrilous “company-store” system of crop lending that predatory financiers had imposed on the rural South, trapping farmers in perpetual peonage. The people’s only way out of oppressive debt was literally to abandon their farms and flee the state. Family after family loaded their meager belongings onto horse-drawn wagons, nailed a “Gone to Texas” note to their cabin doors, and headed west, seeking land and some sort of positive future.
But the rich blackland prairie of East Texas was out of their financial reach, so their caravans pushed into the sparsely populated west-central region, ending up on the thin dirt of the Edwards Plateau.The devastation of farm country is biting us all on the butt
How to Thrive in the Next Economy, John Thackara’s preface to the upcoming Chinese Edition
A cultural disconnection between the man-made world and the biosphere lies behind the grave challenges we face today. We either don’t think about rivers, soils, and biodiversity at all – or we treat them as resources whose only purpose is to feed the economy. This ‘metabolic rift’ – between the living world, and the economic one – leaves us starved of meaning and purpose. We have to heal this damaging gap.
This book is about the design of connections between places, communities, and nature. Drawing on a lifetime of travel in search of real-world alternatives that work, I describe the practical ways in which living economies thrive in myriad local contexts. When connected together, I argue, these projects tell a new ‘leave things better’ story of value, and therefore of growth. Growth, in this new story, means soils, biodiversity and watersheds getting healthier, and communities more resilient.How To Thrive In the Next Economy: Preface to the Chinese edition
The chlorofluorocarbon-cheat emitters have been located!
After much speculation, the whereabouts and magnitude of these harmful emissions has been confirmed in scientific research. As earlier reporting in The New York Times had already suggested, they seem to be coming from the northeast coast of mainland China…
These violations are likely going unreported because even though CFC-11 is illegal, it is also one of the cheapest ways to produce new foam insulation in refrigerators and buildings.
After tracking down documents and international sources, journalists at The New York Times and independent investigators discovered that in some factories in China, illegal CFC use has been slipping through the cracks for years…
Gathering atmospheric observations from locations in South Korea and Japan, the researchers compared global monitoring data and atmospheric chemical movements to figure out whether these emissions came from eastern Asia – the area most suspected as the source of CFC-11…
China currently produces about one-third of the world’s polyurethane foam, and the emissions so far may only represent a fraction of what has already been manufactured. The rest of the CFC-11 may still be trapped inside a slowly-emitting foam bank, and the only way to know for sure is to find the ones responsible.
https://www.sciencealert.com/it-s-official-scientists-know-where-all-those-ozone-damaging-chemicals-are-really-coming-fromhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/transparent-lies.html
Helen of Des Troy has this breaking/broken story:
It’s almost as if Mossad agents have psychic powers. After exciting the bloodlust of the Trump regime’s hawk-in-chief John Bolton with an impossibly vague yet somehow “credible” tip that Iran (or its proxies) was plotting to attack US interests (or allies) somewhere in the Middle East, they have delivered the promised attack, right on time, with a “rocket strike” on Iraq that landed a mile outside the US embassy in Baghdad’s American-occupied Green Zone.
The plucky little rocket injured no one, and the launcher that fired it was immediately found in a canal in East Baghdad, which Israeli media breathlessly report is “home to Iran-backed Shiite militias.” “Non-emergency” US government personnel had already been safely bundled out of the Iraqi embassy by the State Department last Wednesday, supposedly due to an “imminent threat” from Iran, and even Exxon-Mobil interrupted its plunder of Iraq’s resources, pulling 30 engineers off a Basra oil field as a “temporary precautionary measure.” But despite its apparent futility, the lonely rocket fulfills the deliberately broad criteria set forth by “Rapture Mike” Pompeo earlier this month when he warned that any attacks on “US interests or citizens” by “Iran or its proxies” would be met with a “swift and decisive” response.
http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/94-mossad-psychic-friends-network-strikes-againLater the same yesterday:
HAJJAH, YEMEN — Saudi Arabia has claimed that its air defenses shot down two ballistic missiles over the city of Taif, just 65 kilometers east of Mecca, in the early hours of Monday morning. Saudi officials claim that another missile was intercepted over the Haddah in western Saudi Arabia.
Saudi newspaper Okaz reported that the missiles were intercepted as residents were breaking their day-long Ramadan fast. The paper claimed that the attempted attack was evidence that the Houthis had no regard for the safety and security of Muslim pilgrims visiting Mecca during the nights of Ramadan. The Houthis have unequivocally denied any involvement in the attacks.Houthis, Yemeni Army Deny Saudi Allegations of Attempted Missile Attack Near Mecca
Thanks for this link, Cat:
For nearly two decades, one of the most overlooked and little known arrests made in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks was that of the so-called “High Fivers,” or the “Dancing Israelis.” However, new information released by the FBI on May 7 has brought fresh scrutiny to the possibility that the “Dancing Israelis,” at least two of whom were known Mossad operatives, had prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center.
Shortly after 8:46 a.m. on the day of the attacks, just minutes after the first plane struck the World Trade Center, five men — later revealed to be Israeli nationals — had positioned themselves in the parking lot of the Doric Apartment Complex in Union City, New Jersey, where they were seen taking pictures and filming the attacks while also celebrating the destruction of the towers and “high fiving” each other. At least one eyewitness interviewed by the FBI had seen the Israelis’ van in the parking lot as early as 8:00 a.m. that day, more than 40 minutes prior to the attack.…
The men — Sivan Kurzberg, Paul Kurzberg, Oded Ellner, Yaron Shimuel and Omar Marmari — were subsequently apprehended by law enforcement and claimed to be Israeli tourists on a “working holiday” in the United States where they were employed by a moving company, Urban Moving Systems. Upon his arrest, Sivan Kurzberg told the arresting officer, “We are Israeli; we are not your problem. Your problems are our problems, The Palestinians are the problem.”
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/51631.htmThis is Helen’s story for RT. She says all these chips are manufactured in Israel. Go figure…
Researchers have found another security flaw in the Intel processor chips that power most of the world’s computers, one that can compromise users’ private data – and that can’t be fixed without a major performance drop.
The exploit, dubbed ZombieLoad, is embedded in Intel’s processor chips themselves, meaning even the best-designed software patches can only go part of the way toward plugging the hole without reducing the chips’ performance. The vulnerability may allow attackers to ‘resurrect’ critical data processed by the chip – from browser history and passwords to disk encryption keys and other system-level sensitive data.
Its reach isn’t even limited to the end-user’s computer, according to researchers Michael Schwarz, Moritz Lipp, and Daniel Gruss from Graz University of Technology and Jo Van Bulck from KU Leuven: it “can also be exploited in the cloud.”
https://www.rt.com/news/459358-zombieload-exploit-intel-processors/Finally, a well designed crossover study comparing a processed food diet, to an unprocessed food diet, then vice-versa with each group.
The team’s final results were striking. On the ultra-processed diet, the volunteers ate an average of 500 extra calories a day, gained body fat and about a pound of weight by the two-week mark; on the unprocessed diet, they lost body fat and dropped that same pound.
The results were published Thursday in Cell Metabolism.
While the findings may seem obvious on the surface, Hall said that it’s not clear why people overate on the ultra-processed diet. In recent years, many experts have gravitated to the simple, intuitive idea that since ultra-processed foods tend to be richer in fat, sugar, and salt, it’s these three nutrients that are largely to blame for the rise in weight, obesity, and metabolic disorders. But given the design of this study, that explanation seems to fall short.
“I was kind of suspecting that once you matched for these nutrients—for the fat, sugar, and salt—there wouldn’t be much difference, but I was wrong,” Hall said.
https://gizmodo.com/a-new-diet-study-confirms-your-worst-suspicions-about-u-1834818556http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/different-angles.html
There is a lot happening in the world all at once right now. The entire planet is rapidly reconfiguring itself. The world is begging for a new, post-capitalist, post-industrial order to be born, but the overabundance of natural resources that have made previous such revolutions possible (coal for the age of steam, oil for the current oil age) simply no longer exist. All that remains is optimizations, enhancements and reconfigurations of the existing order of things, cutting out that which is most harmful and most dysfunctional. To this end, Western European nations are attempting to reclaim the sovereignty they ceded to the United States and the European Union while Eurasia is coming together to form a massive economic and security conglomerate centered on China and Russia. Both are playing for time, because redirecting trade and financial flows away from the US is quite a process.
The world’s central banks are doing their best to get rid of their US dollar reserves and to buy gold, which, as of this April, they are allowed to consider a risk-free financial asset. Many people now expect gold to go up as a result, but that expectation is based on an illusion. Think of gold as a lighthouse and of fiat currencies as sinking ships: those aboard them may look around and decide that the lighthouse is going up, but that’s just an optical illusion. The purchasing power of fiat currencies is sure to fall (some more than others). The purchasing power of gold will seem to increase, but that will also be an illusion: it will appear to rise against the backdrop of crashing markets, in real estate and physical plant especially. But overall the purchasing power of gold will drop too, because the future purchasing power of any financial asset is determined by just one thing: energy, fossil fuel energy in particular, and energy from crude oil above all. Without energy, nothing within an economy moves, unless it is an agrarian economy based on fodder and animal muscle power.
https://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2019/05/america-you-are-fired.html With Trump shutting down Huawei and China’s entire telecom industry, it was only logical that China would at least try to retaliate, which it has done by formally breaching the US embargo on Iran oil exports. According to ship tracking data on Refinitiv Eikon (i.e. the old Reuters terminal), a tanker carrying Iranian fuel oil in violation of U.S. sanctions has unloaded the cargo into storage tanks near the Chinese city of Zhoushan.
A representative of the oil storage terminal confirmed that the tanker, Marshal Z, discharged nearly 130,000 tonnes of Iranian fuel oil; that marked the end of an odyssey for the cargo that began four months ago.
As Reuters reported on March 20, some Iranian fuel oil had managed to evade the United States’ sanctions on petroleum exports “by using ship-to-ship transfers involving four different ships, including the Marshal Z, and by using forged documents that masked the cargoes as originating from Iraq.”
Amusingly, a second representative from the terminal operator, Zhoushan Jinrun Petroleum Transfer Co, said the cargo could not be Iranian oil, “as the terminal had not received official shipments from Iran in at least the past four years. Both Jinrun representatives declined to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-16/mystery-tanker-violates-us-sanctions-unload-iranian-fuel-china-zarif-heads-beijing In the latest provocation against Tehran by the US, two Navy destroyers have entered the Persian Gulf as the American military continues to add to its assets in the region to head off any planned ‘aggression’, USNI reports.
The USS McFaul and USS Gonzalez traveled through the Strait of Hormuz Thursday afternoon without being challenged by IRGC forces in the are. They join the USS Abraham Lincoln, which is stationed in the Gulf of Oman, as well as a strike force that includes several B-52 bombers, as the US continues to build up its military presence in the region. Another Aircraft Carrier, the USS Kearsarge, is anchored off the coast of the UAE.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-17/two-more-us-warships-travel-persian-gulf-tensions-iran-escalateThe Saker gives this tidbit:
Diplomatic sources – from Russia and Iran – confirm, off the record, there have been secret talks among the three pillars of Eurasian integration – Russia, China and Iran – about Chinese and Russian guarantees in the event the Trump administration’s drive to strangle Tehran to death takes an ominous turn.
This is being discussed at the highest levels in Moscow and Beijing. The bottom line: Russia-China won’t allow Iran to be destroyed.So if you poll ALL likely voters, Bernie Sanders is still in the Democratic lead. Does this remind you of last time, with Joe playing Hillary?
CNN rigged a poll to censor out nearly everyone under 45 years of age. Based on this nonsensical false sampling they claim Biden is now in the lead.The actual, deep crimes, including the murder of leaker Seth Rich, and certainly deep state criminality, are already being investigated. The heat is on this crowd. The rats are scattering.
A dispute has erupted over whether former FBI Director James Comey or his CIA counterpart, John Brennan, promoted the unverified Steele dossier as the Obama-era intelligence community targeted the Trump campaign.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-15/fbi-cia-dispute-erupts-over-whether-comey-or-brennan-pushed-steele-dossierWhat 50 countries are backing Guaido? (13 is close to 50, though..)
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/05/16/what-50-countries-are-backing-guaido-who-knows-who-cares-if-the-media-say-it-enough-it-must-be-true/http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/something-completely-different.html
Finian Cunningham noticed the same thing yesterday as I did. Thanks Eleni.
After dramatic and patently scripted warnings of “Iranian aggression” by bellicose US officials, there then follows – conveniently enough – an alleged sabotage incident in the Persian Gulf region implicating Iran.
Meanwhile, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo poses with a straight face that his country doesn’t want war with Iran. His comments warp credulity given that American forces have suddenly escalated firepower in the Persian Gulf for the purpose of “responding” to alleged Iranian infractions.
Typically, Western news media are “reporting” (or rather, “echoing”) the purported sabotage incident as if it were fact, basing their source of information on Saudi and Emirati officials, sources which have a vested interest in creating a war pretext against Iran.And so on…
Saudi Arabia on Thursday blamed Iran for ordering an attack early this week on two Aramco pipeline booster stations, a strike that was intended as part of a broader sabotage campaign to disrupt world oil supplies, according to Saudi Energy Minister Khalid al-Falih.
The drone attacks came one day after a string of attacks on two Saudi oil tankers and two other vessels in the Strait of Hormuz, and caused the temporary closure of a vital east-west pipeline traversing the kingdom, since reopened.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-16/drone-attacks-aramco-pipeline-ordered-iran-says-saudi-arabiaIran: In Preparation of the Battle Space, former UK Diplomat Allistar Crooke. More thanks, Eleni.
(Same old subdivision map hasn’t worked-out yet.”Greater Jordan” mainly means “Greater Israel”.)
Map ME revision
https://www.sott.net/article/413065-Iran-In-preparation-of-the-battle-spaceMoon of Alabama:
The scare mongering about an attack on Iran continues. Bolton must be laughing his ass off how easy he can play the issue based on nothing. He simply counters any debunking of the alleged ‘thread from Iran’ by upping the ante. Yesterday a British general denied that any such threat exists in the area of his responsibility:
“No – there’s been no increased threat from Iranian-backed forces in Iraq and Syria,” Maj. Gen. Christopher Ghika, deputy commander of Operation Inherent Resolve (OIR), the coalition responsible for counter-terrorist operations against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, said in a video briefing, according to the Guardian.
Today Bolton countered that by again raising the noise level around the imaginary threat:
The U.S. Embassy in Iraq says the State Department has ordered all non-essential, non-emergency government staff to leave the country right away amid escalating tensions with Iran.
The alert, published on the embassy’s website on Wednesday, comes after Washington last week said it had detected new and urgent threats from Iran and its proxy forces in the region targeting Americans and American interests.
Bolton is for now achieving the results he wants. He systematically fills the public space with talk about the non-existing ‘threat from Iran’. If that threat is established in the public mind by its constant repetition, it will be used for the usual false flag incident to justify to launch a war on Iran.
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/05/the-lunacy-of-waging-a-war-on-iran-which-china-and-russia-would-win.html#moreSo that British General spoke out of turn against the position that the “Iranian threat” had increased, and the Spanish navy pulled it’s destroyer out of the USS Abraham Lincoln task force for “mission creep”, and Germany and Czech Republic are pulling trainers/advisers out of Iraq for “rising tensions”? Does that leave a coalition-of-the-trapped to help out? Who’s on-board?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/14/no-iran-threat-in-syria-or-iraq-says-top-british-officer-in-defiance-of-usIraqi government announces it won’t permit US forces to use Iraq launch attacks on neighboring Iran.
(Yeah, how do they think they can prevent it? Short memories?)
https://www.rt.com/news/459416-iraq-ambassador-us-iran-territory/Iraq announces agreement to purchase Russian S-400 antiaircraft missile defense systems (which is ridiculous because the US Air Force is there to defend Iraqi skies, right?)
http://tass.com/defense/1058382
Still Waitinghttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/accurate-history.html
Thanks to Cat for this book review by Paul Craig Roberts about WW-II, Hitler’s War, and also, Churchill’s War. (“He who controls the past…”)
Truth is seldom welcomed. David Irving, without any doubt the best historian of the European part of World War II, learned at his great expense that challenging myths does not go unpunished. Nevertheless, Irving persevered. If you want to escape from the lies about World War II that still direct our disastrous course, you only need to study two books by David Irving: Hitler’s War and the first volume of his Churchill biography, Churchill’s War: The Struggle for Power .
Irving is the historian who spent decades tracking down diaries, survivors, and demanding release of official documents. He is the historian who found the Rommel diary and Goebbles’ diaries, the historian who gained entry into the Soviet archives, and so on. He is familiar with more actual facts about the second world war than the rest of the historians combined. The famous British military historian, Sir John Keegan, wrote in the Times Literary Supplement: “Two books stand out from the vast literature of the Second World War: Chester Wilmot’s The Struggle for Europe, published in 1952, and David Irving’s Hitler’s War…
World War II was initiated by the British and French declaration of war on Germany, not by a surprise blitzkrieg from Germany. The utter rout and collapse of the British and French armies was the result of Britain declaring a war for which Britain was unprepared to fight and of the foolish French trapped by a treaty with the British, who quickly deserted their French ally, leaving France at Germany’s mercy.
Germany’s mercy was substantial. Hitler left a large part of France and the French colonies unoccupied and secure from war under a semi-independent government under Petain…
Winston Churchill kept Hitler’s peace offers as secret as he could and succeeded in his efforts to block any peace. Churchill wanted war, largely it appears, for his own glory. Franklin Delano Roosevelt slyly encouraged Churchill in his war but without making any commitment in Britain’s behalf. Roosevelt knew that the war would achieve his own aim of bankrupting Britain and destroying the British Empire, and that the US dollar would inherit the powerful position from the British pound of being the world’s reserve currency. Once Churchill had trapped Britain in a war she could not win on her own, FDR began doling out bits of aid in exchange for extremely high prices—for example, 60 outdated and largely useless US destroyers for British naval bases in the Atlantic. FDR delayed Lend-Lease until desperate Britain had turned over $22,000 million of British gold plus $42 million in gold Britain had in South Africa. Then began the forced sell-off of British overseas investments…
Hitler forbade the bombing of civilian areas of British cities. It was Churchill who initiated this war crime, later emulated by the Americans. Churchill kept the British bombing of German civilians secret from the British people and worked to prevent Red Cross monitoring of air raids so no one would learn he was bombing civilian residential areas, not war production. The purpose of Churchill’s bombing—first incendiary bombs to set everything afire and then high explosives to prevent firefighters from controlling the blazes—was to provoke a German attack on London, which Churchill reckoned would bind the British people to him and create sympathy in the US for Britain that would help Churchill pull America into the war. One British raid murdered 50,000 people in Hamburg, and a subsequent attack on Hamburg netted 40,000 civilian deaths…
The “death camps” were in fact work camps. Auschwitz, for example, today a Holocaust museum, was the site of Germany’s essential artificial rubber factory. Germany was desperate for a work force. A significant percentage of German war production labor had been released to the Army to fill the holes in German lines on the Russian front. War production sites, such as Auschwitz, had as a work force refugees displaced from their homes by war, Jews to be deported after war’s end, and anyone else who could be forced into work. Germany desperately needed whatever work force it could get.
Every camp had crematoriums. Their purpose was not to exterminate populations but to dispose of deaths from the scourge of typhus, natural deaths, and other diseases. Refugees were from all over, and they brought diseases and germs with them. The horrific photos of masses of skeleton-like dead bodies that are said to be evidence of organized extermination of Jews are in fact camp inmates who died from typhus and starvation in the last days of the war when Germany was disorganized and devoid of medicines and food for labor camps. The great noble Western victors themselves bombed the labor camps and contributed to the deaths of inmates…
In his Introduction to Hitler’s War Irving reports that despite the widespread sales of his book, the initial praise from accomplished historians and the fact that the book was required reading at military academies from Sandhurst to West Point, “I have had my home smashed into by thugs, my family terrorized, my name smeared, my printers [publishers] firebombed, and myself arrested and deported by tiny, democratic Austria—an illegal act, their courts decided, for which the ministerial culprits were punished; at the behest of disaffected academics and influential citizens [Zionists], in subsequent years, I was deported from Canada (in 1992), and refused entry to Australia, New Zealand, Italy, South Africa and other civilized countries around he world. Internationally affiliated groups circulated letters to librarians, pleading for this book to be taken off their shelves.”
So much for free thought and truth in the Western world. Nothing is so little regarded in the West as free thought, free expression, and truth. In the West explanations are controlled in order to advance the agendas of the ruling interest groups. As David Irving has learned, woe to anyone who gets in the way.Spain moves to avoid entrapment.
Spain has ordered its military frigate, the Méndez Núñez, which has 215 sailors on board, out of a US coalition naval group en route to the Persian Gulf, citing “it will not enter into any other type of mission” in the Persian Gulf region, according to the Spanish Minister of Defense.
Minister of Defense Margarita Robles ordered the “temporary measure of withdrawal of the frigate Méndez Núñez (F-104) from the combat group of the aircraft carrier Abraham Lincoln while it is in the Middle East,”sources from her office told the digital edition of El País.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-14/spanish-frigate-peels-us-carrier-group-over-iran-conflict-fearsNow that the US is poised for another intervention, this time in Venezuela, the press is right there again to cheer it along.
Analyzing 76 total press articles of the “elite” press from January 15 to April 15, 2019, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting (FAIR) could find not one voice that opposed Trump’s regime plans in Venezuela. Meanwhile, 54 percent openly supported these plans.Why Everyone in the US, Who Matters, Wants Julian Assange Dead:
Below is a full video version of Collateral Murder, the 2007 war footage that was leaked in 2010 to Wikileaks by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. This version was posted to the Wikileaks YouTube channel with subtitles. It will only take about 15 minutes of your life to view it. It’s brutal to watch, but I challenge you to do it anyway. It shows not just murder, but a special kind of murder — murder from the safety of the air, murder by men with heavy machine guns slowly circling their targets in helicopters like hunters with shotguns who walk the edges of a trout pond, shooting at will, waiting, walking, then shooting again, till all the fish are dead.
The film also shows war crimes that implicate the entire structure of the U.S. military, as everyone involved was acting under orders, seeking permission to fire, waiting, then getting it before once more blasting away. The publication of this video, plus all the Wikileaks publications that followed, comprise the whole reason everyone in the U.S. who matters, everyone with power, wants Julian Assange dead.
They also want him hated. Generating that hate is the process we’re watching today.
https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2019/05/why-everyone-who-counts-in-us-wants.htmlDemocratic congresswoman and presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard said that if elected president she would drop all charges against NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.
https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/gabbard-says-shed-drop-all-charges-against-assange-and-snowden-213f19407524http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/diplomatic-arts.html
More details from the Great-Negotiator’s leaked “Deal of the Century”: Thanks Eleni.
In addition to the Trump administration’s apparent game plan to force Palestinian compliance with the so-called “Deal of the Century,” the plan also calls for the creation of a demilitarized state of “New Palestine” that would be incredibly small, as the document calls for the Israeli annexation of the entirety of the Jordan Valley (around 30 percent of the West Bank) and the annexation of all illegal Israeli settlements in the West Bank, which now cover well over half of what international law maintains is Palestinian territory.
This “new” state would be showered in aid from several countries, including the Gulf monarchies, European nations and the United States, allegedly amounting to $30 billion over the next five years. Most of the funding, according to the plan, will come from oil-producing Gulf states like Saudi Arabia. It is unclear whether “New Palestine” would be considered a sovereign state and whether it would be allowed to apply for full membership in the United Nations.
While the plan would allow “New Palestine” access to Jerusalem as a shared, undivided capital with Israel, Palestinians would be responsible for paying the state of Israel for their security because it would be forbidden from having its own army. In other words, Palestinians would be forced to pay the Israel Defense Force (IDF), the military force that has occupied the West Bank for over 50 years, to “protect” them despite the fact the Palestinians are regularly extrajudicially murdered by IDF soldiers. However, the apparent “concession” offered by the Trump administration in this regard would be allowing the “New Palestine” to maintain a police force with “light weaponry.”Trump’s “Deal of the Century” Will Use Sanctions, Military Threats to Force Palestinian Acceptance
Turkey is in the crosshairs of Kushner Plan for Greater Israel: Thanks for this and the next one, Eleni.
https://russia-insider.com/en/turkey-crosshairs-kushner-plan-greater-israel/ri26959Washington has recently vowed to cut off both Iranian exports and any and all Syrian imports of crude by force. “Analysts have widely predicted that Iran will step up efforts to smuggle oil into Syria and neighboring Iraq as the U.S. makes it more difficult for Tehran to ship oil to its few remaining customers, including China, India and Turkey,” the CNBC report found.
It appears Iran’s latest Syria crude delivery was accomplished by “ghosting” – which involves tankers switching off their transponders.
https://www.sott.net/article/412890-Ghosting-Iran-delivers-1-million-barrels-of-oil-to-fuel-starved-Syria-in-defiance-of-sanctions The U.S. military and their allies from the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) opened fire on a Syrian government ferry that was attempting to transport oil in the Euphrates River Valley.
According to the pro-SDF Deir Ezzor Media Center page on Facebook, the U.S. Coalition forces fired shots at the Syrian government ferry as it was traveling down the Euphrates River.
The U.S. has been preventing Syria from transporting oil from neighboring countries like Iraq because of the Trump administration’s ongoing sanctions against the government in Damascus.
Syria is experiencing a nationwide fuel crisis as a result of these sanctions; it has forced the government to ration of fuel to civilians in order to maintain their current supply.
https://mobile.almasdarnews.com/article/us-forces-attack-syrian-govt-oil-transport-in-euphrates-region/Who potentially benefits from secretive attacks on 2 Saudi oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz?
Just askin’… Nobody I know.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-13/oil-jumps-after-2-saudi-tankers-attacked-sabotage-near-strait-hormuzAn American military team assessing blasts that damaged four commercial ships off the coast of the United Arab Emirates (UAE) Sunday has blamed Iran or Iranian-backed proxies using explosive charges, a source told Fox News on Monday evening.
Each ship had a 5-to-10-foot hole in it, near or just below the water line, a U.S. official told The Associated Press. A Norwegian-flagged vessel, two Saudi oil tankers and a bunkering tanker flagged in Sharjah, one of the UAE’s seven emirates, all suffered similar damage Sunday.
https://www.foxnews.com/world/iran-middle-east-ship-explosions-assessment
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-13/sabotage-attacks-saudi-tankers-stoke-fears-war-accidenthttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/historical-context.html
(“Watch out for false-flag attack by Israeli submarine on US ship to justify attack on Iran”, sez I.)
But in what appears to be an attempt to show Tehran who’s boss, and that it’s not bluffing, Washington committed to another threatening display of force. Reuters reports that the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had been dispatched to the Mediterranean last week amid worsening tensions with Iran, has passed through the Suez Canal, the first stop in what appears to be a journey into Iranian waters…
Last night, Trump issued a statement affirming that the relationship with Iran is “broken beyond repair” and placed new sanctions on Iran’s industrial metals sector.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-09/aircraft-carrier-abraham-lincoln-passes-through-suez-canal-route-iran-tensions-soarAnn Arbor (Informed Comment) – US secretary of state Mike Pompeo made a surprise four-hour visit to Baghdad on Tuesday in connection to the panic he is trying to trump up, along with US national security adviser and Sheldon Adelson plant John Bolton about Iran supposedly planning to attack US troops in the Middle East.
For his part, Iraqi prime minister Adel Abdul Mahdi said in remarks to the press that Iraq will undertake to ensure the safety of the some 5,000 US troops in Iraq, who are helping the Iraqi army mop up ISIL remnants.
At the same time, Abdul Mahdi insisted that Iraq would not participate in any economic boycott of any country, which is to say that he declined to cooperate with the Trump administration’s attempts to squeeze Iran.
Iraqi sources said after the visit was over that Bolton offered to give Iraq a temporary waiver with regard to its trade ties with Iran. He may as well, since he is unlikely to get much cooperation from Shiite-ruled Iraq in the blockade on Iran.
https://www.juancole.com/2019/05/baghdad-pressure-declines.html“Deal of the Century” gets leaked to Israeli newspaper. It is total capitulation by Palestinians, nothing else. Palestinians have nothing to gain through agreeing to this.
“New Palestine” would not be allowed to form an army but could maintain a police force. Instead, a defence agreement will be signed between Israel and the “New Palestine” in which Israel would defend the new state from any foreign attacks.
Upon signing the agreement, Hamas will hand over all its weapons to Egypt. The movement’s leaders would be compensated and paid salaries by Arab states while a government is established.
Elections are expected to be held within one year of the establishment of the “New Palestine” state.Helen has this historical comparison:
It’s worth looking at what triggered the Pearl Harbor attack, because it is happening again. When Japan refused to pull its forces out of China, the US imposed an oil embargo on Japan, cutting the nation off from 80 percent of its oil supply and leaving it no choice but to seek fuel elsewhere. The closest oil was in then-Dutch Indonesia, but US-controlled Philippines physically barred the way. The US had thus almost guaranteed Japan would have to attack the US, allowing Washington to enter the war with the American people’s approval in order to fight Germany, whom Roosevelt perceived as the “real” enemy.
The US has imposed the strictest sanctions on Iran yet, repealing the last waivers last week in the hope of forcing the country into a similarly suicidal act. Iran has threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz if it is blocked from using the waterway, which sees 20 percent of the world’s oil traffic. US officials have deemed such a move “unacceptable,” suggesting massive retaliation would follow, and a US carrier strike group is on its way to the region, supposedly acting on a “credible threat” that Iran plans to target US interests. Regardless of who fires the first shot – and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif has warned Trump a false flag attack is extremely likely – war with Iran would be the result, and Americans would be cheering it on. The question is not if, but when.
War with Iran wouldn’t benefit the US at all – a 2002 Pentagon wargame simulation has even indicated the US would lose. But Iran is the strongest enemy of Israel left standing, and Trump’s inner circle – like the neocons at PNAC (whose members included John Bolton) – has made it clear where his priorities lie. Just as laying waste to Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Yemen only created an endless supply of enemies for the US while crossing Israel’s regional rivals off the list, attempting to destroy Iran will have devastating repercussions for the US while ensuring no one is left to challenge Israel’s regional dominance. It is no coincidence that the intel suggesting Iran was plotting an attack on American targets in the Middle East – the tip that triggered the deployment of the carrier strike group Abraham Lincoln to the region last month – came from the Mossad, the Israeli intel agency whose motto is “by deception, thou shalt do war.” Israel has been lying about Iran’s ambitions for decades.
http://helenofdestroy.com/index.php/90-when-we-were-the-good-guys-us-keeps-invoking-wwii-to-validate-new-warshttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/contingency-plans.html
Moon of Alabama figures Guaido got snookered… Thanks Eleni.
There is no official explanation why the Trump administration believed that the comical coup attempt by Juan Guaidó and his master Leopolo López would work.
There are signs though that the government of President Nicolas Maduro set a trap. Several people in the top echelon of the Venezuelan government gave false promises that they would join the U.S. proxy side. They snookered Guaidó into launching his coup to let him fail…
Everyone in Washington believed that significant figures in the Venezuelan government would change sides. They did not do so. Vladimir Padrino rejected the coup within an hour after Guaidó announced it. It seems that the Guaidó side got played by the Venezuelan Defense Minister and several other officials and officers. They seem to have promised to support Guaidó only to bait him into taking steps that would embarrass him.
A McClatchy piece headlined “What went wrong?” seems to confirm this interpretation:
Shortly after Guaidó gave his predawn speech at the Carlota Air Force Base in Caracas, rumors spread that Armed Forces Chief of Staff Jose Ornelias and powerful commander Jesús Suárez Chourio were behind the military uprising. But just as quickly both men joined a growing list of officials swearing loyalty to Maduro.
… That military officials who owe their careers and livelihood to Maduro and the United Socialist Party of Venezuela didn’t abandon him shouldn’t have come as a surprise, said a former U.S. diplomat in Washington, who would only talk on background.
He said he’d known about Guaidós plans to call for an uprising for at least 10 days.
“If I knew it, then everyone knew it,” he said. “The [Maduro] regime saw it coming and was prepared. The regime probably even knew that people in the government were talking to the opposition and probably even approved of it.”
https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/05/venezuela-guaid%C3%B3-got-snookered-white-house-starts-beating-war-drums.html#moreRon Paul points out that Guaido might be worth more to the CIA and State Department as a martyr now, and they are good at arranging it, then blaming others.
“The big danger is a hard war breaking out. I’d still bet it won’t be too bad, with thousands of troops moving. But it could be a guerrilla war or something like that. If there is a false flag or some important official on either side gets killed, you can’t tell what might happen,” he said.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-05-01/ron-paul-warns-hapless-guaido-now-worth-more-dead-alive-washingtons-venezuelan-coupA peek at our Denisovan heritage.
It’s not human “races” or even species, which are important, but heritable TRAITS…
A human jawbone found in a cave on the Tibetan plateau has revealed new details about the appearance and lifestyle of a mysterious ancient species called Denisovans.
The 160,000-year-old fossil, comprising a powerful jaw and unusually large teeth, suggests these early relatives would have looked something like the most primitive of the Neanderthals. The discovery also shows that Denisovans lived at extremely high altitude and, through interbreeding, may have passed on gene adaptations for this lifestyle to modern-day Sherpas in the region.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2019/may/01/denisovan-jawbone-discovered-in-tibetan-cavehttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/05/tell-truth.html
Caitlin Johnstone wonders what news about Venezuela would look like if it were honest, instead of propaganda for global empire.
Juan Guaido: I would like to be regarded as the interim president of Venezuela because the current president of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, stands opposed to the interests of the political bodies with which I have aligned myself. Also, he stands opposed to my own personal ambitions of becoming powerful.
Washington, DC: We too would like for Juan Guaido to be regarded as the interim president of Venezuela, because the current President of Venezuela is too cozy in policy and practice with our geopolitical opponents. We would not mind this so much if Venezuela didn’t sit atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. If we can’t control what happens to those oil reserves, we won’t be as dominant on the world stage as we otherwise would be...
Mainstream media: The US government, and of course the powerful unelected individuals who run it from behind the scenes without any accountability or oversight from the public, is attempting to topple Venezuela’s only recognized government using starvation sanctions, CIA operations, and an open campaign to delegitimize the sitting president of that nation. They are doing this because controlling as much of the world’s oil supplies as possible helps them to control the world, and controlling the world is the thing that they want to do. These are the things we would be telling you if we weren’t owned by the same plutocratic class which owns the US government.If The Agenda To Oust Maduro Was Honest Instead Of Dishonest
The “deplorable” Hillary Clinton.
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said during a television interview on Wednesday that the United States was prepared to take military action to stem the ongoing turmoil in Venezuela.
“Military action is possible. If that’s what’s required, that’s what the United States will do,” Pompeo said in an interview with Fox Business Network, but added that the United States would prefer a (much cheaper) peaceful transition of power in Venezuela.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-venezuela-politics-pompeo/u-s-military-action-in-venezuela-is-possibility-if-required-pompeo-idUSKCN1S73Q1
A high level Pentagon official has admitted that US forces will be in Syria for “the long haul” and coupled his statement by declaring the territory contains “a lot of the oil resources and arable land.”
The unusually frank remarks were made this week by Michael Mulroy, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Middle East, while addressing a conference at the D.C. based Center for a New American Security (CNAS), months after President Trump appeared to have caved to his advisers, reversing course earlier this year from his stated goal of a full and rapid US troop exit from Syria.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-30/us-troops-syria-long-haul-atop-lot-oil-resources-top-pentagon-official
1) How can this happen if multinational corporations control the politicians of the powerful countries? 2) Who gets more of the money?
Introducing a global minimum effective corporate-tax rate on MNCs of between 20 and 25 per cent, as the ICRICT (of which I am a member) advocates, would greatly weaken these firms’ financial incentives to use so-called transfer pricing among their subsidiaries to shift recorded profits to low-tax countries. Moreover, a global minimum would end the race to the bottom in which countries lower their national tax rates to attract investment by MNCs.
These global tax revenues could then be allocated among governments according to factors such as the company’s sales, employment and number of digital users in each country—rather than on where multinationals decide to locate their operations and intellectual property.
https://www.socialeurope.eu/how-to-tax-a-multinationalhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/compare-and-contrast.html
Sergei Lavrov just said a lot of important things to global diplomats, I picked this one out. Thanks Eleni:
Obviously, lasting stabilisation in the Middle East and North Africa is unrealistic without overcoming the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict, including the creation of an independent, viable and territorially integral Palestinian state in the safe and recognised borders of 1967 with possible exchanges and with the capital in East Jerusalem. The attempts to promote non-transparent plans that contradict UN resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative cannot bring a lasting or fair solution and merely perpetuate old hotbeds of confrontation and create new ones.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article206321.html
Missing a principled leader, 50 years without Charles de Gaulle… Thanks Wigs.
With amazing effrontery last October, Macron told his people to stop complaining and be more like de Gaulle, after a meeting with a pensioner who complained he only had a small pension. This is the same Emmanuel Macron who accused his own people of being as “Gauls who are resistant to change” on a visit to Denmark.
The truth is that the French people today have a lot to complain about. Macron’s policies are in fact, the reverse of de Gaulle’s. The General ‘did not care for those who own wealth.’ Macron doesn’t seem to care for anyone else.
Another big difference between de Gaulle and the politicians of today was his attitude to money. Has there ever been such an uncorrupt leader? As I noted in 2008, “Despite occupying the highest office in the country for a decade, he died in relative poverty. Instead of accepting the pension he was entitled to as a retired president and general, he only took the pension of a colonel. The contrast between de Gaulle and the money-obsessed career politicians of today could not be greater.”
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/457819-charles-degaulle-france-president/Yellow Vest protesters who have suffered life-changing injuries at the hands of French police have launched their own association, promising fresh actions against police brutality.
Called “the mutilated for the edification of others,” the collective aims to accurately calculate the number of people who have been injured nationally by police during Yellow Vest protests. It also called for an end to the use of the non-lethal weapons deployed by French police — namely tear gas canisters and Flash Balls — and a large national demonstration is scheduled in Paris on May 26.
Among those attending was Jerome Rodrigues, a prominent Yellow Vest leader who was hit in the eye with a gas canister during a demonstration in January. “You have 19 people in front of you and you have only 26 eyes that look back,” he told the press conference. “Count, there is a small problem,” he added…
According to statistics gathered by the activist group Desarmons-les (“Disarm Them”), at least 154 people have been seriously injured by police use of non-lethal weapons during protests. Of that number, 22 people have lost the use of an eye due to Flash Balls. A further five have had their hands torn off by gas canisters.
https://www.rt.com/news/457786-injured-yellow-vests-association/Creepy Joe doesn’t hate billionaires. He’s the candidate of non-hate-for-billionaires.
Bernie/Tulsi 20:20 would have to die in a small plane crash, if they got the nod, because they hate all the fine people who have made America what it is today.
See how that works?Oh, My! I seem to be on a roll this morning.
Let me defend Monbiot, by way of “agreeing with what he meant”, as Hillary Clinton recently did, while explaining Nancy Pelosi’s reluctance to push for Trump impeachment.
I do present a process for development of a new market economy, which needs to develop to meet the emerging economic circumstances, which have never exactly existed in the past.
They will change, too. This adaptation in groups is what we do that sets us apart in the ecosystem on the surface of the blue planet.
First, a Monbiot quote, with which we can agree, basically about thermodynamic principles. To run any process requires a reduction in total energy/entropy in a system. Something must be “dissipated”.
“A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.”
What this thermodynamic analysis leaves in the long term is the work done from sunlight by photosynthesis, but we are not suddenly reduced to that, because we still have so much order and knowledge, and analysis capacity, which has come from burning coal, oil and gas.
That technical capacity is currently dedicated to burning more coal, oil and gas, as rapidly as possible, but that directive is already foundering.
The big question right now, the immediate problem, is how 7 billionish people stop running down hill faster and faster, and do something less doomed.
Individuals with wiggle room can make adaptive changes in the right direction, and they will need to expend available energy and technical resources to make those small changes. Any of those changes will be open to logical attack for being wasteful, but in that analysis, we can only curl up and die.
Our greatest potential as a species lies in optimizing our strong suit to the cultivation of photosynthetic living ecosystems on the face of the planet. It’s something we do.
The progressive goal of this for humans is to have a good quality of life by being healthy and helpful and cooperative versions of the animals we were born as, not struggling to become more like machines, fighting distraction, fatigue and the urge to urinate. (We’re about at the end of that alley.)
This contrasts with the capitalist prime directive of winning by being the most effective at expending energy and resources every day, and thereby dominating and displacing the other contestants in the competition. That is short-termism.
I recently saw a genetic analysis, done over 150 years or so, that American families in a few towns with very good birth and death records, maximized their longer term growth by having fewer children later and investing in them. In the short term, breeding like rabbits won, of course, but I postulate that it failed badly in “selection events”, when things got difficult and needed sustained work and insightful innovation to adapt successfully.
Look up there! Selection Event on the horizon! …
Next agreeable Monbiot paragraph:
“This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.”
Now, a Monbiot paragraph with which I disagree, but mainly due to the boundary conditions, which he seems to assume. Rent extraction destroys real political economy in the long term, as per classical economics, but “wealth creation” happens within certain defined boundaries, and if those boundaries are defined as “photosynthesis” and “using stuff that already exists”, and “burning fossil fuel as a transitional investment in the new system”, then it looks pretty do-able. “Growth” needs rethinking.
“In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.”
Here is another paragraph about reframing goals/objectives/success, with which we can agree:
“Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.”
More agreeableness:
“There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism.”
I accept Monbiot’s closing summation, a call to cooperative problem solving:
“So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.
I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.
Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?”And now for something really NOT completely different…
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/calling-shots.html
Did Israel Kill both Kennedy Brothers? Thanks Eleni.
This article focuses on the motive of Israel to save it’s nuclear weapons program at Dimona, which JFK opposed most firmly, then the need to keep everything covered up by preventing a President RFK from investigating.
The article is long, detailed and focused on Israel. Why does it come out in Russia Insider? More Russian interference?
I personally think the deposed CIA Chief, Alan Dulles, the CIA, the Pentagon, the “military industrial complex” and the Federal Reserve Banking System all had ample interest in the elimination of JFK right away.
This was the Globalist Deep State blood-inauguration. Note: Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian, not Muslim.
Let’s now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel.
First, their deaths are precisely framed by Johnson’s presidency, which was also the context for other political assassinations, such as Martin-Luther King’s. Johnson was in control of the State during the two investigations on John and Robert’s murders.
Secondly, in both cases, we find the fingerprints of Israel’s deep state. In the case of Robert, it is the choice of the manipulated patsy, which was obviously meant to disguise Robert’s assassination as an act of hatred against Israel. In the case of John, it it is the identity of the man asked to kill the patsy, a Jewish gangster linked to the Irgun.
Johnson and Israel, the two common elements in the Kennedy assassinations, are themselves closely linked, since Johnson can be considered as a high-level sayan, a man secretly devoted to Israel, or owned by Israel, to the point of committing high treason against the nation he had been elected to lead and protect.
The causal link between the two assassinations then becomes clear: even if Robert had been pro-Israel, which he was not, Israel and Johnson would still have had a compelling reason to eliminate him before he got to the White House, where he could—and would—reopen the investigation on his brother’s death.
What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel.
At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John’s two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. John’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., aka John John, who had turned three the day of his father’s funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his pregnant wife and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly and mysteriously nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.
https://russia-insider.com/en/did-israel-kill-both-kennedy-brothers/ri26455?ct=t(Russia_Insider_Daily_Headlines11_21_2014)&mc_cid=b1223a98e3&mc_eid=7a06d680cfMilo Minderbinder’s “Syndicate” corporation, in Catch-22, provides a good, and increasingly complex and conflicted model of global corporate governance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_Minderbinder
Milo Minderbinder is the mess officer at the United States Army Air Corps base who becomes obsessed with expanding mess operations and trading goods for the profits of the syndicate (in which he and everyone else “has a share”). Milo is a satire of the modern businessman, and beyond that is the living representation of capitalism, as he has no allegiance to any country, person or principle unless it pays him.[3]
Minderbinder, unlike most characters in Catch-22, who are only the subject of one chapter, is the subject of three chapters (Chapter 22: “Milo the Mayor”, Chapter 24: “Milo” and Chapter 35: “Milo the Militant”). He is one of the main characters in the novel. His most interesting attributes are his complete amorality without self-awareness, and his circular logicality in running his Syndicate.
Minderbinder’s enterprise becomes known as “M&M Enterprises”, with the two M’s standing for his initials and the “&” added to dispel any idea that the enterprise is a one-man operation. Minderbinder travels across the world, especially around the Mediterranean Sea, trying to buy and sell goods at a profit, primarily through black market channels. Everyone has a “share”, a fact which Minderbinder uses to defend his actions, stating that what is good for the company is good for all. For example, he secretly replaces the CO2 cartridges in the emergency life vests with printed notes to the effect that what is good for M&M is good for the country.
Eventually, Minderbinder begins contracting missions for the Germans, fighting on both sides in the battle at Orvieto, and bombing his own squadron at Pianosa. At one point Minderbinder orders his fleet of aircraft to attack the American base where he lives, killing many American officers and enlisted men. He finally gets court-martialed for treason. However, as M&M Enterprises proves to be incredibly profitable, he hires an expensive lawyer who is able to convince the court that it was capitalism which made America great, and is absolved only by disclosing his enormous profit to the investigating congressional committee.@Dr D:
If it’s not owned by a person it is owned by…?
Corporations…
I think Corporations are forms of oligarchy.
Whaddayuz think?@V.Arnold:
I’m in agreement with Graeber, Hudson and being grounded literally by planting and harvesting in real soil, and watching it. I’m looking out at the Austin garden now. We got 2 inches of rain yesterday, had fresh spinach last night, and I pulled a bunch of big carrots just now. this link is oldish news, provided just for pictures of my new and established Texas gardens, weekend before last.
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/the-pompeo-doctrine.htmlhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/moral-decay.html
Last week Mike Pompeo spoke at Texas A&M University, itself long known for being a favored recruiting ground of the CIA, considering too that one of the university’s last presidents, Robert Gates, was CIA chief and later served as Bush and Obama’s Secretary of Defense.
During the Q&A session, Pompeo boasted that in the CIA both the training and culture are geared toward the following:
“We lied, we cheated, we stole.”
Interestingly, a Christian religious news broadcaster was the only media that seemed to pick up on Pompeo’s words last week, and described it as follows: “that’s not the resume of the Secretary of State… that’s the resume of Satan.”
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-21/i-was-cia-director-we-lied-we-cheated-we-stoleThe Triumph of Evil, Paul Craig Roberts
Today (April 17) I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.” …Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Pence have added their big mouths to the propaganda against the few independent governments in Latin America. Where is the shame when the highest American government officials stand up in front of the world and openly proclaim that it is official US government policy to overthrow democratically elected governments simply because those governments don’t let Americans plunder their countries?
How is it possible that Pompeo can announce that the “days are numbered” of the elected president of Nicaragua, who has been elected president 3 or 4 times, and the world not see the US as a rogue state that must be isolated and shunned? How can Pompeo describe Washington’s overthrow of an elected government as “setting the Nicaraguan people free?”James Petras on why Venezuela has not folded to the empire quite yet.
Despite the two decades of pressure by the world’s biggest imperial power ,which bears responsibility for the world’s highest rate of inflation, and despite the illegal seizure of billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets, the people remain loyal , in defense of their government. The reasons are clear and forthright.
The Venezuelan majority has a history of poverty, marginalization and repression, including the bloody massacre of thousands of protestors in 1989. Millions lived in shanty towns, excluded from higher education and health facilities. The US provided arms and advisers to buttress the politicians who now form the greater part of the US opposition to President Maduro. The US- oligarch alliance extracted billions of dollars from contracts from the oil industry.
Remembrance of this reactionary legacy is one powerful reason why the vast majority of Venezuelans oppose US intervention in support of the puppet opposition.
http://www.unz.com/jpetras/why-venezuela-has-not-been-defeated/Charles Hugh Smith:
Consider America’s favorite pastime, corrosive partisan politics. This distemper is often traced back to (surprise!) extreme partisans, but as the chart below shows, political partisanship has risen in near-perfect correlation with wealth-income inequality, which it itself the hallmark of deeply systemic corruption, as the system is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many. (Chart courtesy of Slope of Hope.)
There’s a phrase that describes a socio-economic system becoming the means for personal aggrandizement at the expense of civil society itself: moral decay. How else can we describe a system whose inputs and processes are rigged so the output is the vast majority of all income gains flow to the top 0.1%? (See chart below.)
When a socio-economic system institutionalizes the extralegal privileges of wealth and power, that is moral decay. When government only responds in ways that first serve the interests of entrenched insiders, that is moral decay. When the financial system is rigged to sluice income and wealth to the top of the wealth-power pyramid while strip-mining the productive class below via inflation and taxes, that’s moral decay. (See chart below of workers’ share of the national income.)
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogapr19/moral-decay4-19.htmlhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/secret-fire.html
Who knew that there was a big fire at the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, also on Monday? What a coincidence!
It’s easy to see how that got completely missed by all the media and charitable corporations, with all of the important news about the Notre Dame fire, … isn’t it? Thanks Eleni.
Palestine news agency, Wafa, cited a guard as saying that,
“The fire broke out in the guard’s room outside the roof of the Marwani Prayer Room, and the fire brigade of Jerusalem Islamic Waqf handled the matter successfully.”
Al-Marwani prayer room is located underneath the south-eastern corner of the Al-Aqsa Mosque Compound (Haram Al Sharif).Criticizing Israel Will Land You In Prison:
Soon, this blog will be illegal.
No, I’m not selling drugs or peddling child pornography.
I write about America’s wars and the primary objective of those illegal and immoral wars—to make Israel the hegemon of the Middle East along with Saudi Arabia. All US foreign policy in that region centers on those two nations.
The following may soon be classified as hate speech and anti-semitism (as increasingly criticism of the Jewish state and its Zionist political ideology are considered crimes).
Jewish neocons found their way into the Reagan administration and later the Bush Junior White House and Pentagon. Huddled under the wing of Vice President Dick Cheney, they plotted to attack and destroy Israel’s enemies. Neocon ideologues strategized and published papers on these manufactured wars, most notably a paper presented to then Israeli president Bibi Netanyahu. It called for taking out Iraq and Syria. Israeli academics have written on this subject for decades. The nation’s early leaders engineered border provocations and false flag attacks (the Lavon Affair) to destabilize the region. Southern Lebanon is considered a valuable asset primarily for its water resources (e.g. “Operation Litani”) and the Golan Heights in Syria was occupied for its strategic value.Death of Free Speech: Criticizing Israel Will Land You in Prison
Why The Gulf States Are So Edgy, Alastair Crooke (I hope the link is working again when you click on it. Thanks Eleni)
The Gulf grandees have a right to be edgy, Alastair Crooke writes. They can see that Trump’s ‘war hawks’ are intent on cornering, pressurising and provoking Iran.. Algeria. Libya. Saudi Arabia.
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/04/15/why-gulf-states-are-so-edgy.htmlNOT Mike-the-Slob, please!
One day after North Korea’s Leader Kim reportedly oversaw the test of a “new tactical guided weapon”, North Korea on Thursday demanded that Secretary of State and former CIA chief, Mike Pompeo, should be replaced for any future negotiations with the U.S., the country’s media reported.
“Whenever Pompeo pokes his nose in, talks between the two countries go wrong without any results even from the point close to success,” Korean Central News Agency (KCNA) quoted Kwon Jong-gun as saying. Kwon is director general of the North Korean Foreign Ministry’s department for American affairs. He was addressing the first session of the 14th Supreme People’s Assembly of the country.
Two summits between U.S. President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un since June 2018 have failed to reach an agreement over the denuclearization of the Korean peninsula. In response, Kwon suggested a “more careful and mature” negotiator to take Pompeo’s place.
“I am afraid that, if Pompeo engages in the talks again, the table will be lousy once again and the talks will become entangled,” he said.
“Therefore, even in the case of a possible resumption of the dialogue with the U.S., I wish our dialogue counterpart would be not Pompeo but [anyone] who is more careful and mature in communicating with us,” he said.
Kwon said the North Korean leader and the U.S. president had good personal relations.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-18/nkoreas-kim-wants-pompeo-replaced-chief-us-negotiator-will-meet-putinhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/deep-france.html
Charles Hugh Smith looks at the sustained assault upon French identity.
These are not matters solely of politics and finance; they are manifestations of the elite war on the identity of France.
As rationalists, we’re supposed to take the dramatic and profoundly tragic fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris as random chance or bad luck. But I cannot be the only one who feels a symbolic tie between the near-destruction of a French religious and cultural icon and the embattled identity of France.
As it happens, I am reading Fernand Braudel’s massive two-volume history The Identity of France: Volume One: History and Environment and Volume Two: People and Production…
The Chinese famously view natural disasters and similar events as portents of political change, as disasters suggest the Emperor/ruling elite has lost the Mandate of Heaven. It is difficult not to see the disastrous fire in Notre Dame as just such a portent.
For the identity of France is under assault on a number of fronts. The left-leaning status quo has set up a false duality: one either worships multiculturalism and rejects a national identity as the sworn enemy of multiculturalism, or one is a rightist racist. Thus anyone who even refers to a national identity of France is quickly vilified and marginalized…
These are not matters solely of politics and finance; they are manifestations of the elite war on the identity of France, to transform it into a bland, globalized hierarchy in which capital and power benefit the few, a system enforced by state propaganda and public virtue-signaling...
The corporate media, a key defender of the self-serving elite, will reject any symbolism in the near-destruction of Notre Dame. But deep down, many sense what cannot be spoken openly: the elites in France have lost the Mandate of Heaven.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2019/04/notre-dame-and-identity-of-france.htmlThe cause of the Notre-Dame Cathedral fire is still being investigated and the Paris prosecutor has ruled out arson and says it was likely the result of an accident.
“We are favoring the theory of an accident,” prosecutor Remy Heitz told reporters Tuesday.
The fire to the iconic church, however, may have raised awareness to a rash of vandalism to French churches. A total of 875 of France’s 42,258 churches were vandalized in 2018, with a small fire set to the Saint-Sulpice church in Paris in March, according to French police.
In the same week that the fire broke out at the Saint-Sulpice church, another 11 churches were vandalized. According to the Ministry of the Interior, a total of 1,063 anti-Christian acts were recorded in 2018 alone.
Other acts of vandalism to the churches include human feces spread on the walls of the Notre-Dame-des-Enfacts in Nimes and a damaged organ at the Saint-Denis basilica. Another 129 churches had thefts on their property with still another 59 cemeteries vandalized.
Republication MP Valerie Boyer told the Sun, “Every day, at least two churches are profaned.”
The fire at the Saint-Sulpice church, although small, was started deliberately according to police and will cost several hundred million euros to repair, Courrier International reported.
There has been a call for more investigations in the anti-Christian acts in France by legislators as the acts of vandalism have been downplayed by church officials.
https://www.ibtimes.com/notre-dame-cathedral-fire-not-arson-875-french-churches-vandalized-2018-2785886“Hardly anyone writes and speaks about the increasing attacks on Christian symbols. There is an eloquent silence in both France and Germany about the scandal of the desecrations and the origin of the perpetrators…. Not a word, not even the slightest hint that could in anyway lead to the suspicion of migrants… It is not the perpetrators who are in danger of being ostracized, but those who dare to associate the desecration of Christian symbols with immigrant imports. They are accused of hatred, hate speech and racism.”
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/14044/europe-churches-vandalizedJesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.
Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.
Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-16/jesus-christ-julian-assange-when-dissidents-become-enemies-statehttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/the-pompeo-doctrine.html
When President Trump nominated the representative from Kansas, Mike Pompeo, as Director of the CIA, we interpreted this unexpected nomination in terms of the President’s difficulty to find allies in the Republican Party which he had just over-run. We had forgotten that from 2006 to 2010, Pompeo had been the CEO of the hydrocarbon equipment supplier Sentry International. He knew how the oil market worked, and knew personally the world’s main actors. At the same time, President Trump nominated Rex Tillerson as Secretary of State. Tillerson had been the CEO of one of the major hydrocarbon companies, Exxon-Mobil…
It is obviously impossible today to estimate the extent of Pompeo’s actions as head of the secret service. However, we may entertain the thought that his older objectives may not be too far removed from those he defends today…
The 2019 Congress (CERAweek, 9 to 13 March, in Houston, Texas) was the largest international meeting in History on this subject. The CEOs of the main companies of 78 countries were present. Top of the bill was the speech by Mike Pompeo. The whole profession had been notified of the importance of his intervention, and this was the only moment at which the huge room was chock-full.
After having saluted his ex-colleagues, Mike Pompeo expressed his pride for the incredible performances of his country’s oil industry, which, in six years, had become the world’s major oil producer, thanks to new techniques for the extraction of shale. He announced that he had created a special bureau in the State Department tasked with managing energy resources. From now on, the directors of specialised US companies would have to talk to him. His mission was to help them to win markets overseas. In exchange, they must agree to help their own country to apply his energy policy.
This consisted both of producing as much as possible in the United States, and also drying up a part of the world offer in order to balance the market. This is the only way that the country would be able to sell shale oil and gas, since their extraction is particularly expensive.
According to the Pompeo doctrine, it is not a question of reducing world production to the level of demand per quotas of production, such as the OPEP+ has instituted for the last two years, but by closing the door on certain large-scale exporters – Iran, Venezuela and Syria (whose gigantic reserves were discovered only recently, and are not yet being exploited)...
Besides this,the US Treasury Department is blocking all means of transport for Iranian and Venezuelan oil, and also deliveries to destinations in Syria…
The attitude of the White House towards Syria is different, insofar as this country is currently unable to exploit its reserves, and Russia is allowing time to pass. The aim is to prevent reconstruction and therefore make life impossible for its people. The CIA is implementing an intense strategy of sabotage against any form of energy supply. The majority of the population, for example, has no more gas for heating their homes, nor for cooking purposes. Worse, a Turkish petrol tanker which was transporting Iranian product to Syria was sabotaged off the port of Latakia. The ship exploded, causing the deaths of its entire crew and a vast oil slick which the Western Press did not even mention…
Mike Pompeo is attempting to impose a new distribution of territorial waters which would re-route Lebanese oil tankers under Israëli sovereignty…
For the moment, Donald Trump’s policies can only succeed by diminishing US demand. Until now, hydrocarbons were mainly used to fill automobile petrol tanks, which explains the development of projects for electric cars. Consuming petrol in order to supply electricity is much less expensive in the United States than using it directly in car motors. Above all, electricity can be supplied from various sources on US territory, inexpensively and at stable prices.
It is important to note that the development of electric vehicles has hardly any connection with the ideology according to which we must decrease the production of CO2 to bring down the temperature of the Earth...
The United States will not allow the export of hydrocarbons from Iran, Venezuela and Syria until 2023 or 2024, the date at which their shale production will begin to decrease rapidly, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA). Once again, the entire geopolitical structure will be overturned. Thanks Eleni.
https://www.voltairenet.org/article205987.htmlhttp://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/fake-reality.html
Naw, that’s impossible. Where would the Taliban get the kinds of weapons to shoot down a B-52? Who would trust them?
The Taliban is currently claiming that militants have shot down a US B-52 Stratofortress heavy bomber over Afghanistan, Middle East based news site Muraselon reports, citing official Taliban statements.
Taliban spokesman Qarri Muhammad Yousef Ahmad was cited by the Mideast news source as saying, “Mujaheddin of the Islamic Emirate targeted US B-52 bomber with heavy weapons today early morning in Lar area in Washir district of Helmand province, the bomber went down and all its crew were killed while smoke still rising from the crash site.”
Russian and Iranian state media were quick to circulate the claim, though it’s as yet to be confirmed by other sources. Neither US nor Afghan national sources have acknowledged a B-52 crash, which the Taliban further said killed all crew members on board.
The alleged incident occurred as the aircraft was departing Shawrab Airbase in southern Afghanistan during the early hours of Wednesday morning.
Well-known Taliban sources online also cited the alleged shoot down, such as Alemara Arabic, which brands itself the Arabic language version of the “Official account of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”:
The claim of a Taliban-downed US aircraft — which if true would constitute a rare and disastrous event for coalition forces — comes on the heels of a Taliban attack on a US convoy in north-eastern Afghanistan on Monday, which killed three US Marines and wounded an Afghan contractor.
Early reports out of neighboring Iran which highlighted the claimed incident featured publication of misleading photos of a downed B-52 bomber, given that the main image was of a prior B-52 accidental crash in Guam in 2016.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-10/taliban-claims-shoot-down-us-b-52-bomber-over-afghanistanNo news since yesterday on that. Nothing today…
https://sputniknews.com/asia/201904111074023557-taliban-missile-us-airbase-afghanistan/The US-Turkey showdown over Ankara’s deal with Russia for the S-400 anti-air defense system continues and could even escalate further considering Turkish foreign minister Mevlut Cavusoglu this week issued a return ultimatum after continued Washington pledges to halt sale of Lockheed’s F-35 stealth fighters.
Not only did FM Cavusoglu say on Wednesday that Turkey will not bow to mounting US pressure, but said if Washington blacklists Turkey on either sales of the US-made Patriot systems, or blocks F-35s already purchased, then Ankara may pursue even more S-400 systems and would further look for alternatives to the F-35 jets.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-04-10/turkey-threatens-buy-even-more-russian-s-400s-if-us-doesnt-cooperateNotice how the interview is kept from straying into any mention of who coordinated with the CIA and Israel for guns, money medical care and air support…
A former ISIS commander has claimed that the terror group cooperated directly with Turkish state intelligence agencies for years on areas of “common interest”.
The source said that senior Turkish government officials had numerous meetings with ISIS representatives to coordinate activities and that this also involved providing support and safe harbour to foreign fighters in the country. President Erdogan “was working hand in glove with ISIS” according to the US government counter-terrorism consultants who interviewed the ex-ISIS official…
Abu Mansour described having complete impunity to travel between Syria and Turkey, leading Speckhard to describe him as in effect an ISIS ‘Ambassador’. “I passed the borders and they let me pass”, he said. “[At the border], the Turks always sent me a car and I’m protected. A team of two to three people from our side were with me. I was in charge of our team most of the time.” …
Abu Mansour argued that his role was to coordinate a relationship between ISIS and Turkey where “both sides benefit.” Abu Mansour said that Turkey saw ISIS as a strategic tool to expand Turkey’s influence in northern Syria as the centre for a renewed empire:
“We are in the border area and Turkey wants to control its borders — to control Northern Syria. Actually they had ambitions not only for controlling the Kurds. They wanted all the north, from Kessab (the most northern point of Syria) to Mosul… This is the Islamists’ ideology of Erdogan. They wanted all of the north of Syria. That is what the Turkish side said [they wanted], to control the north of Syria, because they have their real ambitions. Actually, we talked about what Erdogan said in public [versus what he really desired.] This part of Syria is part of the Ottoman states. Before the agreement following the Second World War, Aleppo and Mosul were part of the Turkish Ottoman Empire. The agreement Sykes Picot [in which they lost these regions] was signed for one hundred years. In our meetings, we talked about reestablishing the Ottoman Empire. This was the vision of Turkey.”
https://medium.com/insurge-intelligence/erdogan-worked-hand-in-glove-with-isis-in-syria-claims-former-emir-e83c0e6b9c3dToday’s offering, Prisoners And Puppets is not essentially different from Debt Rattle, sigh…
Thanks Ilargi
http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/04/prisoners-and-puppets.html
