(Please feel free to add what you’d like: links, peeves, music, any old thing. The last Open Menu is here, and you can always find one on the right sidebar under ‘Categories’.
From telesur.net: ‘US: Anti-TPP Activists Occupy Monsanto, Trade Center’
“Washington, D.C. joined Manila and ten other cities in protests against the Pacific trade agreement that is expected to affect all aspects of ordinary life.
Crowds shut down traffic in Washington, D.C. on Monday and occupied various offices that are implicated in the Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement, which will be voted on soon.
The #FallRising National Mobilization featured over 60 groups—from environmentalists to migrants to food justice activists—and representatives from the Philippines, where actions are ongoing against the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting, where 12 Pacific-rim countries are finalizing the TTP. [snip]
About a thousand protesters brought drums, banners and even an alpaca as they marched from the Chamber of Commerce to the offices of Morgan Stanley, Monsanto and the Reagan International Trade Center, each of which they occupied for several minutes. Bystanders often honked their horns and joined in, said McDonald Wilkins, who encouraged corporate businesspeople to “leave that job, become a whistleblower and join us.”
On Tuesday (from Popular Resistance):
“November 17, as part of the Flush the TPP days of action and in solidarity with people protesting the Asian Pacific Economic Coordination (APEC) meetings in Manila, Philippines, trade justice advocates took over the streets of Embassy Row and committed acts of civil disobedience including a lockdown at the Embassy of Japan. Trade ministers and leaders from all of the countries involved in the TransPacific Partnership (TPP) are attending the APEC meetings to coordinate their strategy to ratify the TPP treaty in their countries and to bring in more Asian Pacific countries as TPP members.” (more is here)
But in potentially good news from thehill.com: ‘Obama’s trade deal is in trouble’
The short version: even many Republicans who’d jammed fast-track are pissed because: business. Too short a time for med patent protections and not allowing IS lawsuits against tobacco, for instance. Hatch says: reopening negotiations might be needed. Lame duck? Ooof. Plus: Clinton was for it before she was against it.
‘Keep It in the Ground’ Victory: BLM Utah Halts Oil and Gas Lease Sale’, canyoncountryuprisingtide.org
“November 17th, 2015, SALT LAKE CITY— Elders and climate activists are celebrating today as the Bureau of Land Management made a last-minute decision to halt an oil and gas lease sale owing to a “high level of public interest.”
Dozens of citizens were planning to protest the auction on Tuesday morning in Salt Lake City. Instead, they will now celebrate the Bureau’s decision to postpone the auction of 73,000 acres of publicly owned oil and gas in Utah — which harbor an estimated 1.6 – 6.6 million tons of potential greenhouse gas pollution. The planned protest had been led by elders calling on the BLM to act to prevent catastrophic climate change and to ensure a livable future for generations to come. [snip]
“A number of national and local groups are coming together to demand that fossil fuels stay in the ground, including ‘Elders Rising’ – a group of seniors concerned for their children and grandchildren in an age when catastrophic climate change is destroying the possibility of a livable future. Elders Rising is joined by national groups Rainforest Action Network, the Center for Biological Development, the Women’s Congress for Future Generations, Canyon Country Rising Tide, and WildEarth Guardians in calling for inter-generational justice and an end to fossil fuel development.”
It’s at least a temporary reprieve, thus not requiring any brave and committed soul to do a Tim DeChristopher and get sent to prison, isn’t it? Speaking of whom…Tim is advising this in answer to:
“This morning the French foreign minister, Laurent Fabius, suggested that demonstrations outside the COP 21 climate negotiations in Paris should be scaled back from marches of hundreds of thousands to a safe “kettled” rally of 5,000. The French Prime Minister has already announced that many of the “side events,” where the public gets to have a voice, are being cancelled. Many journalists are already being excluded from the negotiations out of capacity concerns. Obviously this repression of the public is coming in the wake of the Paris attacks that killed 129 people. But that is not the only dynamic at play.
If the voice of the movement is reigned in while the voice of fossil fuel lobbyists are given free reign, the movement should storm the talks. And those of us who can’t be in Paris (say because we’re on federal probation and can’t leave the country), should storm the UN building in New York.”
I’m not as convinced as Tim is that ‘people power’s beginning to win’, but there have indeed been a few wins, as he narrates.
And in a major victory for all those people who have been salivating for two decades while imagining wrapping their mouths around salmon spliced with eel growth hormone DNA: ‘The FDA finally approved ‘Frankenfish’ — the first genetically modified animal you can eat’
“The US Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved AquAdvantage Salmon as the first genetically modified food from animals, the agency said in a statement.
The agency also issued guidance for manufacturers who choose to voluntarily label their products as containing ingredients from GMO sources.
The FDA regulates genetically engineered animals under new provisions of the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, because the modified DNA introduced into the animal qualifies it as a drug. [snip]
“”The FDA has thoroughly analyzed and evaluated the data and information submitted by AquaBounty Technologies regarding AquAdvantage Salmon and determined that they have met the regulatory requirements for approval, including that food from the fish is safe to eat,” Bernadette Dunham, director of the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine, said in a statement.
The GM salmon cannot be raised in the US. It can only be raised in contained hatchery tanks on land in two facilities in Canada and Panama. The FDA completed an environmental assessment to show that the salmon would not significantly impact the “human environment” in the US.
To ensure the fish don’t escape, they must be contained using multiple physical barriers, including plumbing that filters out eggs and fish. Even if the fish did escape, they are sterile, so they could not breed in the wild, according to the FDA.”
But see, Frankenfish could not be either materially different from plain old Atlantic salmon, or contain any biologically relevant differences.
You can make comments at the FDA’s website at the link inside the article; I’m $ure they will take them under con$ideration…
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Odds and Ends…
For all these many years that I have written over 2,000 columns for the Chicano Veterans Organization, I am suspending this Friday’s effort on the Crazy that is generally espoused in our nation’s public square since I have become both dismayed and disgusted with the splendiferous voices that appear in our public square and in particular all that has been said about “refugees.”
And over these many years, over 700,000 refugees have been resettled in our United States, and not one person has ever been indicted, arrested, or prosecuted for “domestic terrorism.”
Consequently, demeaning these refugees for upending our Constitution, continues apace and all because these voices cannot exercise a tad of self-restraint or in accepting of the Unassailable Fact that the overwhelming majority of any demonstrable behavior for “domestic terrorism” has come from the European American majority of our population, and yet the loud and vocal opposition to any influx of refugees, denies today’s reality, and arguing in favor of inciting “fear” into our body politics underscores that this intent and actualization, is diminishing our Humanity and to include our well-organized Morality.
Jaango
Good for you, veterans need to step up and call out the cowardice of the politicians and pundits inflaming the panic over refugees. Terror that doesn’t terrorize fails; these hyperventilating demagogues are functioning as DAESH amplifiers.
i feel your angst, jaango, but i’d tweak your last notion to ‘well-organized Amorality, or Immorality’, myself, considering what at least every website online is all about… yes, the Statue of Liberty is mocked, especially given that the insane numbers of refugee have been caused by the Western states.
but i wonder if your comment reflects a headline i’d seen over the past couple days asking (and please don’t hold me to the exact theme): “if hispanics are now a plurality in this nation, why are are so many of the MoC (or was it govs?)…republican? a good question, but i reckon there are deeper answers at play, akin to so many upper-middle class blacks voting R because: ‘death taxes’ as the first generation of black millionaires happened.
not that Ds are so very preferable over Rs, of course. but one thing i’ll credit O with is trying to push back against the House having passed a bill to essentially make syrian refugees impossible to enter the US.
how can we make the case that we needn’t work at creating ‘an other’ to make war upon? or:
Boston tonight
puddle-icious wonderful, marym; thank you. may it spread, and sanity and brother/sisterhood prevail.
the “rebels” in “Life of Brian” started referring to each other as “siblings” after, uh, Loretta. siblinghood. works for me.
and thanks for the photos and good news.
hallo, jason. i guess i don’t know ‘the life of brian’, but ‘siblinghood’ does have a nice ring to it.
a bit of good news is better than no good news, isn’t it? and oh, my…you were so right in knowing that all would be ‘paris’ and ‘isis’ for the next six weeks.
i just checked with some of the twit hashtags akin to those marym found, and the naysayers are out in ugly force. by today, it’s not young black males who have been ‘weaponized’ by the culture, but all muslims.
peace to you and yours.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-stockman/blowback-the-washington-w_b_8582296.html
David Stockman, Huiffington Post: Blowback: the Washington War Party’s Folly Comes Home to Roost
It came out November 17, but I didn’t see it until today. Stockman awoke with major enlightenment and barely disguised hatred for Cheney and Wolfowitz. Stunning.
The end paragraphs:
hmmm; i remember having read that stockman had gotten religion awhile ago, but that’s amazing, even though given that his column is three feet long…i’ll have to settle for the graphs you’ve highlighted. but ‘peace given a chance’? such a hippie! ;-)
TD, you are too easily impressed by this ‘let the Free-Market pacify the world’ Libertarian/Republican enlightenment rant. Stockman gets a few things right about the neocons and Kissinger but most of the rest is ignorant gibberish.
He can’t even understand recent history in Syria where he thinks that the Axis of Resistance, who were losing towns, cities, military bases, and control until the Russian intervention, are capable of defeating the Army of Conquest no less the Islamic State.
I do agree with him about letting them settle this Modern ‘quarrel’ but he doesn’t mention the Russian part of them.
Where he broke new ground for a member of the establishment was; (1) letting out the fact that Ike’s original speech on the military-industrial complex included an take-down of Congress’s role but his advisers prevailed on him to take that section out (he was retiring; they needed the MIC for employment). (2) He confessed that overthrow of Mossadegh was unnecessary and part of the source of today’s blowback by encouraging the agents of the oil companies. (3) His “April Glasspie was right” section about Kuwait being only a bank account and the issue being over Kuwait slant drilling into Iraq’s oil fields is something new; I’ve never heard April Glasspie vindicated. (4) He laid out the entire regime change plan and tied it back to Cheney and Wolfowitz. (5) He outline the many sources of arms to Syria’s destabilization and their American and American ally connections.
It is all too easy to overestimate what it will take to end the DAESH regime in Syria and Iraq. And to underestimate the damage that US actions in support of that aim will in fact delay the elimination of DAESH. The nations with the most to gain from the destruction of DAESH are Iraq, Syria, Russia, Iran, China, and France. The US is in the difficult position of having to ally with Iran, Syria, Russia, and Hezbollah in fact in order to operate against DAESH. At a minimum that means ensuring that the US and Russia operate so as to avoid taking down one of the other’s aircraft. The main US role is diplomatically restraining Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and the Gulf States long enough to deal with DAESH on behalf of Abadi’s Iraq while Syria re-establishes control of the western portion of what DAESH holds and various Kurdish militias re-establish control over the eastern portion. You are right that Stockman does not see all of what is required to do that, but getting rid of the “booyah” attitude in the theater cannot but help.
The Kurdish militias have been successful in interdicting the roads between DAESH-controlled towns and cities. The US and now Russian air mission are taking out the Toyota trucks and heavy equipment that US aid so conveniently supplied and fell into DAESH hands.
The major hurdle is preventing DAESH from slipping the noose and reforming in another fragmented state, the primary result of the US program of regime change. On this last item, Stockman is the first Republican to come out and say that it was not only a failure but it was folly from the beginning. And more importantly, he says that the way the national security state has operated has denied in every case since World War II (including World War II) the peace that was promised by engaging in those wars. The Global War on Terror just allowed the program of endless military weapons procurement and endless war to justify it to come out in the open in the frame of “there is no alternative” because of the chaos.
I’m not impressed by pols who whine about the current state of affairs after they helped bring them about and that includes Ike. They failed to do anything while they had any influence or power and Stockman doesn’t even seem to understand that his beloved Free-Market Good Capitalism requires the endless war to function and grow.
Many people, besides you, use the same bravado militaristic rhetoric about the imminent demise of the Islamic State as if brave words will turn the tide but the IS persists and their reach is global. The same rhetoric is used by the supporters of Assad, now begging the US to join them, to describe the fate of the other ‘terrorist’ rebels who so long as they have Abu-TOW will not end their quest to put a noose around the bloody dictator and his minions.
The poor Syrian Kurds and their Arab friends got a taste of what to expect, if they plan on continuing as US proxy forces against the IS, when their first armored column headed for al-Raqqa was ambushed and routed even though they had air support. They owe the US for all their victories so far in their own territories but I doubt they will be willing to take heavy loses inflicted by the IS in its territory, to repay that gift.
i take your point, wayoutwest, but from where i sit, it’s better they do kinda recant…than not. i’m especially thinking of robert macnamara’s having admitted that he’d gotten it all wrong about viet nam, although i’ve forgotten the particulars when i’d read it, i’d hoped that my father had taken note of it wherever he was in the afterlife.
we had quarreled so bitterly over that war that our relationship never did mend. (he’d wanted macnamara for prez, srsly.)
Better for whom, if they recant? The dead and damaged lives can’t be recanted and these pricks like Mac knew what they were doing and why. There was a close LBJ advisor who explained in clear terms that the war was unwinnable but Mac and others were more afraid of the Republicans than the Russians and LBJ agreed, looking tough and getting elected, keeping their positions of power, was paramount.
Allowing this self promotion, for their legacy, to pass as better than not just gives the next war monger, driven by political expediency, a tool to rejoin the human race, at least superficially, before they die.
If Mac or other like political creatures turned themselves into the Hague to be tried for war crimes or just hung themselves because of real guilt for their evil deeds I might recant my opinion about them. They never even consider such abasement instead they do some hand ringing and teary eyed promotion on the Sunday talk shows and book promotions.
well argued, wayoutwest. i did look it up, and macnamara was vilified for his remarks in his book, so ‘legacy shopping’ may not apply. i won’t claim that he grew a conscience, either. i guess my ‘better than not’ was that he did set the record a bit straighter, and was apparently a heavy critic of dubya’s war in iraq, and might have acted as a cautionary tale. but i’ve found that wasn’t even true: it was later discovered that he’d lied to lbj about the ship having been attacked in the gulf of tonkin. (‘withheld calls’; i didn’t quite grasp it)
i don’t know that he ever gave up his belief in the domino theory, but for many russophobes, the ‘new cold warriors‘ may amount to the same thing.
the ICC has only tried black leaders, hasn’t it? thus is thought to be a tool of the Imperium, even though i seem to recall the US never ratified its alleged signing, and bush threw it all over just before ‘marching to baghdad’. wonder what the ICC would have done had he submitted himself to them for investigations of war crimes?
on the right sidebar is a link to ash carter’s joint briefing with Moshe Ya’alon, the Israeli minister of defense; quite full of horseshit.
Better for current discussions of policy to roll back their failed policies by having the architects of those policies or formerly sympathetic observers (like Stockman) witness to those failures from inside knowledge.
I take your point that the millions of Vietnamese who suffered McNamara’s blindness (not to mention the Japanese in the fire bombing that McNamara was doing after-action counts of effectiveness) and the hundreds of thousands into milliions of Iraqis, Syrians, Libyans, and Afghanis who have been “collateral damage” in the Global War on Terror would have gained more from whistling a stop at the beginning that writing a mea culpa years after the damage is done. And there were no dearth of people back in the day who were calling on them to do that. They irretrieveably did moral damage to themselves. That is not the issue I am highlighting with Stockman (who bears the damage of the double-counting for defense spending plus a mathematical error that ran up the Reagan deficits).
Why Stockman is important is for changing the public narrative about the US military and national security policy. Stockman is saying point-blank that it was foolish and craven all along and only after the historical information was declassified in several points were we aware of how foolish and craven the policy was. We need some tools of disenthrallment of the “greatest military in the world” myth. Stockman’s history is one. Referring to the “most expensive military in the world” might be another. The key political point, as Stockman points out, is that the military has become a positive feedback mechanism for its own interests of war (and funding) without end. The public does not yet understand that that is not sustainable. Indeed the wheels are rapidly coming off the cart even as there are huge projects in the pipeline — projects that are completely unmatched with the real threats that the US could possibly face even from the blowback it has created.
First, Mac never suffered from blindness, his decisions were weighed and intentional and the probable results visualized.
Stockman is certainly a lesser creature with lesser powers but his work helped lead to massive economic shifts and displacement in the Homeland which were probably inevitable just as permanent war was due to his blindly leading the march towards end stage Capitalism.
You make the false assumption that those who create the public narrative have any incentive to change it because of Stockman’s or anyone else’s insights or that the public have any agency to make them change.
The public does understand that the MIC still provides, while others fail to deliver, high paying jobs throughout the country and even Bernie Sanders will fight to maintain his constituents share of that limited prosperity.
Instead of wild-carding GM’s into the world gene-pool; the government could be responsibly RNAi Interferon-targeting genetic DISEASE (such as my, my brother, brother-in-law, nephews’ and niece’s DIABETES) for Their CURES, instead!
http://oxbridgebiotech.com/review/the-nobel-for-rnai-from-petunias-to-potential-cure
But, NOooooo!! IN$ANITY REIGN$ !!!
oh, my; i’d reckoned RNA was ‘recombinant dna’, that’s how much i don’t know. but let me take you at your word (and your good relatives’) that ‘cures’ are possible, and should be pursued mightily, but…profits rule in this world. sigh. but how white of them to allow companies to state ‘no gmo ingredients in this product’, eh wot?
more antibiotic-resistant bugs afoot again, as well, and iirc, hospitals are the great purveyors.
from intercontinental cry’s newsletter: ‘Our Roots, Our Responsibility’
“Indigenous custodians from Benin, Uganda, Kenya and Ethiopia have released a powerful new statement outlining the importance of sacred natural sites and governance systems.
Emerging out of a biocultural diversity revival movement that’s starting to build serious momentum across continental Africa, the statement forms the heart of a new report that builds the case for the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights to do its part.
The new report, authored by The Gaia Foundation, African Biodiversity Network and human rights lawyer Roger Chennels, draws attention to the way that sacred natural sites and their community custodians have been systematically undermined and violated since the colonial era. Despite the official decolonization of Africa, this persecution continues today, say the authors, who have extensively documented the renewed scramble for Africa’s land, mineral, metal and fossil fuel wealth and its impact on Indigenous territories.
Both the custodians and the report’s authors are now urging the African Commission to invoke the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights (African Charter). and protect sacred sites, governance systems and custodians in a ‘decisive policy and legislative response’ to these threats.”
more is here; it’s hard not to tear up at their conviction and understanding of ‘the sacred’. would that ‘we’ could honor it in order to all survive and thrive.
The House ‘SAFE’ vote, veto-proof. swear to gawd it stands for ‘American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act.
the guardian lists the 47 dem yea votes, links to their statements. jared polis, CO 2nd. first openly gay person to be elected to congress as a freshman. he tweeted this about a dozen times, and seems to like the TPP.
how could you vote ‘yea’ for a bill citing refugees as ‘foreign enemies’? oh: just Better Screening™.
http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/around-nuclear-weapons.html
The latest estimate of Israel’s nuclear stockpile: 115 plutonium weapons.
From the hawkish Institute for Science and International Security with the oh so unfortunate acronym ISIS.
it sorta squares with the Wiki, including sources and history, although it mentions the possibility of 400. question: would this ‘hawkish’ ISIS outfit have a geopolitical stake in what went into the report? silly question, i suppose, but the timing’s interesting, too, isn’t it?
it seems that although the 17 nations met in vienna and hatched a political transition plan for syria, obama is now in agreement with turkey and saudi arabia that assad must go.
pepe escobar didn’t mention hollande’s ‘we will wage pitiless war against IS’, but writes: ‘russia ain’t takin’ no prisoners’:
“Putin’s vow to go after anyone or any entity that facilitates/collaborates with Daesh should logically imply a trip back to ‘Shock and Awe 2003’: the bombing, invasion and occupation of Iraq that created the conditions for the establishment of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, “directed” by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi up to 2006.
The next significant step was Camp Bucca, near Umm Qasr in southern Iraq; a mini-Guantanamo where at least nine members of the future metastasis of al-Qaeda – Islamic State (IS) – was spawned.”
so yes, there will be more blowback, more recruits to the cause. He also links to wikicables in which clinton says that saudi arabia was then the largest funder of terrorist groups, and that their purported state crackdown against it left some pretty big loopholes.
julian assange recently featured an apparently previously published wikicable about the CIA’s ‘red cell’ group titled ‘What will the world do if it realises that the US is an exporter of terrorism?’ who could fault us for being fooled for a tick or two that the cia knows that ‘exporting terrorism’ is what the US does best?
i dunno how much the account balances for the military really matters in the US, given the national debt clock is now at 18 and a half trillion dollars, but cameron just announced that he’ll hit the whatever percent of gdp nato requires (now for fighting isis) to the tune of $30 billion for f-35s and an nice aircraft carrier, so he’ll slash the social safety net that amount, including police.
and part 3 of nick turse’s interview on democracy now: ‘How Secret U.S. Drone Outposts Create Ill Will in Countries Across Africa’. Africom is the best-kept secret in the CIA destabilization/war/resource grab racket, i think.
nick does pretty well until the end:
“NICK TURSE: Well, I think that if the U.S. wants a presence on the continent in some way, I think it has to be upfront, transparent about what it’s doing, and I think the military really needs to be de-emphasized. If you look back over the last decade, this hasn’t been successful in any way. You know, we talked about the Chinese influence on the continent with economics. The Chinese have brought projects, brought money, but, you know, they haven’t done much for labor rights there, they haven’t done much for the environment. These are things that we could do—sustainable development, that type of thing. If the U.S wants to be on the ground there, I think that would be a much better usage of funds.”
I wonder if the Republican Party are agents of Saudi Arabia and Turkey. The Syrian Refugee obstruction bill probably has the folks inside the bubble really spooked. Plus the US long ago forgot Washington’s wisdom about entangling alliances.
From a practical perspective, one should fight only one enemy at a time. Choose: ISIS or Assad. You can’t have both.
What do you do with the majority Sunni of Syria, or just the ones now potentially targets for retaliation should Assad resume full control of the territory? That surely is the scare scenario that Erdogan and Saltan were pitching.
And yes, that’s only one of 700 possible place to teach Americans their next geography lesson.
The more broken nations, the easier it is to put together a caliphate. And the trans-national corporations will not like that result.
The march of folly continues.
whoosh to ‘entangling alliances’. again, RL is jamming me up. but for now, and given that i’ve been watching ‘the borgias’ with all that’s attendant there, including machiavelli and many of his ilk :):
fairleft at MoA had linked to Ali Gharib’s (?) ‘Islamophobia Surges on the Right’
no dubya, for instance, striking against ‘all Muslims are not terrorists’, and ‘the clarion project, sheldon edelson, and AIPAC. i’d hate to go back to check links at MoA, but someone had posited that turkey wants a slice of syria, so…and my geography was bad enough not to know if it were russia’s sole warm water port.
ack, i’d tried to remember more earlier when i’d seen your comment by email, but: more lacunae than engrams any more. fiddlesticks.
added on edit: wayoutwest’s: “…even bernie sanders”…. ha ha ha.
Someone at MOA made the observation that the Moonies including b have been wrong about every one of their predictions about Syria, He was banned and the prediction mill keeps churning out nonsense including Turkey’s desire for a buffer zone being a land grab.
‘Moonies’, ha. so it was just a commenter’s speculation with no credible evidence linked? i just checked some maps, and tartus is far south of the border with turkey.
still, turkey remains a cypher to me in all of this, and increasingly so as i read at the DoD’s website.
but bernie is calling for a nato-ish body that would include russia. and he still seems to want the saudis to ‘get their hands dirty’ and help fight isis (as if their hands aren’t already dirty enough).
Pepe Escobar’s latest
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176072/tomgram%3A_pepe_escobar%2C_the_new_great_game_between_china_and_the_u.s./
Jeremy Rifkin???????!!! Glad the Chinese leader didn’t latch onto John Michael Greer, although Greer’s pessimism might be on target.
oy; it looks primo, but soooo long. i’m working on a cop 21 post, and the reading is going slowly… and it’s suposed to be bread day.
i’ll try to read it pepe this afternoon, and thank you. gotta look up ‘thucydides trap’.
okay, doggonnit, i did. ;-)
It’s amazing to watch Pepe don his various hats for his different audiences. WD’s link shows him wearing Alex Jones’ tinfoil helm and ranting nonsense about things he should know the facts about. His latest electrified wild-haired offering to the nutters is that it was the Israelis who blew up the Russian airliner over Sinai not the weak ineffective Islamic State, Jew baiting is popular with this crowd.
TD’s link shows him with his wild hair slicked back wearing a new Hong Kong silk suit and top hat promoting the new Chinese Capitalist penetration of world markets which is mostly about grinding up Africa/Asia/South America and shipping it back to China for processing and profit along with sucking up as much oil/gas as needed to cook the mess and joining the US in the final baking of the biosphere. All those Silk Roads, Rails and Ports will dump cheap plastic into the world’s trash heaps but the loads they carry back to China and their construction will help build the expanding Millionaire/ Billionaire Class whose growth is the metric for progress. This expansion will also fund the new Chinese military reorganization that will be needed to protect those expanded infrastructures and Chinese foreign interests.
which ‘facts’ should he know about in the link i’d provided, wayoutwest? and are they facts, or what you believe? i get lost on some of this. but when i looked at the link i’d provided, this may have been part of what left me frazzed about turkey’s part in all this:
“The key reason the Obama administration had not thought about this before is Turkey. Washington needs NATO member Ankara for the use of the Incirlik air base. And then there’s the sensitive subject of who profits from Daesh’s oil smuggling.
Turkish Socialist party member Gursel Tekin has established that Daesh’s smuggled oil is exported to Turkey by BMZ, a shipping company controlled by none other than Bilal Erdogan, son of “Sultan” Erdogan. At a minimum, this violates UN Security Council resolution 2170. Under the light of Putin’s message of going after anyone or any entity engaged in facilitating Daesh’s operations, Erdogan’s clan better come up with some really good excuses.”
and please if you’re going to say that he’s jew-baiting about who blew up the airliner, provide a link, not just say again: “anyone can find it”. he may have said it, how the hell do i know? your fave, paul craig roberts, early on said that ‘paris’ may have been a false flag.
on edit: before i get back to the grind: i did enjoy your alt-take on the link THD had provided; i cant speak to the truth of it yet. but it may echo my ‘Pfffft’ about nick turse’s lame-ass ending of the DN interview. ‘funds better spent’ by the Imperial war machine??? i was shocked to discover that he has joined ‘the Intercept’; would that be a reason?
And glenn greenwald has joined Telesur, just for good measure.
It seems I have committed an Escobar against Pepe by repeating an unverified rumor about his statement about the Russian airliner which I withdraw and the Jew baiting was a reference to others who were using this speculation for their purposes. PCR just as PE has written some things I agreed with but I don’t have ‘faves’ and PCR has also joined the Legion’s of the Tinfoil Hats.
Pepe is parroting the same BS as others we have discussed about the Afghan/Russian war and US involvement. When he uses bogus rhetoric such as ‘ al-CIAda and the IS developed from the Afghan MJ you have to wonder what is going on under all that hair. The last time the CIA tried to turn an AQ operative in Afghanistan there were seven or eight dead CIA agents to show for that effort.
There are plenty of true narratives to use to expose US hegemonic/ evil plans and actions so why use this false narrative?
Another odd thing about Pepe is that he didn’t seem to exist before 1980, I couldn’t find any bio about him before then except he was born in Brazil.
i sincerely applaud your giving up the pepe/it was israelis meme, wayoutwest. but iirc, he spent some amount of time in afghanistan doing interviews and talking to folks. perhaps iraq, as well, but i’ve forgotten.
that being said, it’s hard to believe that he may have known a bit more than you/we do about cia agents in afghanistan, and how far they mixed into the creation of al qaeda, especially in what time periods/iterations.
but you may have your own tinfoil hat on noting that wot? he only appeared in 1980 and was born in brazil? some say he was fired from a brazilian paper for ‘plagiarism’, but then, that’s an easy way to get rid of a journalist or professor, as with ward churchill. (i can’t say i was a big fan, much as i wasn’t of russell means, but that’s irrelevant).
sure, pepe is a polemecist, and his posts may depend a bit on which brand of tequila he’d imbibed, but i like his free-wheeling posts quite a bit. as to strict veracity, who do you trust? and heck yeah, i was teasin’ you about PCR, as you had said he must be a liar (or something): cuz he’s so ugleee. i’d countered with ‘look at old sourpuss chris hedges!’ ;-)
zo. are you believing turkey or roosia on the shoot-down of the jet fighter?
on edit: a clearer litmus test might be: do you believe that russia ‘annexed’ crimea illegally?
Pepe wasn’t reporting on Afghanistan until the late ’90s long after the war and I doubt the Taliban shared much with him after arresting him in ’00. He did make a good call on OBL just before 9/11. I don’t think he found any spooks there, they came after 9/11.
I’m not a believer of initial reports and it probably doesn’t matter now but Russia has violated Turkish airspace numerous times during armed raids and I’m surprised that Erdogan is the one who made them pay for that arrogance. The Syrian rebels took advantage of the incident, shot the pilots and used a TOW to blow up one of the rescue choppers adding the first revenge killings of Russians for their bombing.
The probable overreactions from the Kremlin may mean very dangerous days are ahead.
And Argentina elects a “center right” president to replace Kristina Kirchner.
yeah, her hand-picked Daniel Scioli. even the WaPo(?) said their were massive ‘irregularities’ to the vote, but he’s apparently conceded. also, somewhere i’d read that macri has asked the Us of A for help, and i wish i could remember where (or anything for longer than twelve minutes, for that matter).
but as per telesur: ‘Argentina’s Mauricio Macri Vows to Boost Trade, Shun Venezuela’ (and iran):
“President-elect Mauricio Macri has pledged to open the economy to free trade while requesting Venezuela be suspended from Mercosur.
Argentina’s president-elect, Mauricio Macri, vowed to make drastic changes Monday to open up the economy to investors and rearrange foreign ties after his electoral victory over government-backed Peronist candidate Daniel Scioli on Sunday.
“You made the impossible possible,” Macri of the Let’s Change coalition said to supporters Sunday night. Indeed, Macri’s victory marks the first time the corporate elite-aligned, right-wing has come to power in Argentina through democratic means.”
spying on VZ’s oil company, yada yada, US claiming ‘no’ to destabilization, yeada yada. they will route anything that smells like socialism, of course. or liberation theology.
oh, and maduro shook hands w/ putin over oil prices.
Interesting evolution of “Hands up – don’t shoot”
whooosh; thank you, marym. hadn’t he tweeted yesterday that there were something like 55,000 signatures on a petition to mcginty to prosecute or get outta the way? or close to that?
i’d binged tamir’s name yesterday, and had found some ‘black’ journalist stating his big fat opinion that only samaria could implore cleveland citizens to NOT RIOT!!!™ if the GJ failed to indict. pfffffft.
one.year. one.year.
keegan had joined the ‘photography is not a crime’ folks. i saw on (perhaps) counter current news that youtube had taken down loads of their videos, maybe citizen ones, of crimes by cops, saying that they were ‘too violent’ or some such. no appeals to youtube changed their minds, apparently. more: pffffft.
Erdogan or one of his military staff are not playing the Vienna game to oust ISIL by strengthening Assad (even temporarily). Turkey shoots down Russian jet, one pilot dead. Bet that was an interesting tete-a-tete between Putin and Obama on the red telephone. Obama seemed to have had the effect of greenlighting that through his “Assad must go” statements in Italy.
Meanwhile the GOP are more and more desperate to provoke confrontation with Obama. That smells of weakness but I’m at a loss to say why, given the popular sentiment. When you’ve got Chuck Schumer and Steve Israel standing with you….
i’m at a loss about all of it. but read the transcription of the NATO nac meeting, and make sense of it (nato’s borders?) ,”our allies concur? (no follow-ups) including the question “Do you have any more clarity as to how the plane was actually shot down because that’s disputed, whether it be surface to surface or surface to air or ground to air missile? wot?
if i’d read correctly, putin was quite enigmatic over it all, read: de-escalating.
and once again, stoltenberg: “What we have seen is that most of the attacks by Russia so far has been targeted towards targets in parts of Syria where ISIL is not present. So we welcome all efforts to fight ISIL. Our common enemy is ISIL, and therefore I would also welcome all efforts to strengthen the fight against ISIL.”
are there (nato) fiefdoms countering obama/hollande? but oof, i dunno ‘steve israel’, sorry. and again, how does aipac figure in? as you’d hinted?
signed,
clueless in mancos, co
p.s. on edit: “on our NATO borders”. well, yes…we get your drift, jens.