(Geli Korzhev’s “The Triumphators” (1993) – what the victory of the ruling class looks like.)
The last Open Menu is here. A few contributions; I need to care of some RL obligations today, so I’ll be in and out, and have no idea when I’ll have time to read suggestions. (Slow reader here.)
Jeezum crow:
‘Israel to open permanent office at NATO HQ, five years after Turkey blocked move’; NATO’s treaty obligates the member states to militarily defend one another in time of attack, but that does not extend to the alliance’s some 40 partner countries’ jpost.com.
“The move represents a significant upgrade for Israel’s ties to the 28-nation alliance. Israel is currently a partner in NATO’s Mediterranean Dialogue, along with six other countries on the Mediterranean: Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Jordan, Mauritania and Morocco.
In addition to Israel, Jordan was also invited to open a permanent mission at NATO Headquarters, as were three members of the treaty organization’s Istanbul Cooperation Initiative: Qatar, Kuwait and Bahrain.”
Bibi: “I think this is important to Israel’s standing in the world. The countries of the world want to cooperate with us because of our determined struggle against terrorism, because of our technological knowledge, our intelligence deployment and other reasons.”
(Mondoweiss doesn’t have it yet, but The coming Rapture-End Times News’ does.)
Just below the headline:
‘NATO security chiefs warn of ISIS plan for nuclear attack on Europe’
Emptywheel had rec’d this; dunno stanton myself:
NEO.org: ‘New Armenia Protests, Same US-Backed Mobs
‘Venezuela Denounces US Denial of Visas to Diplomats’, telesur english
Jason’s contributions from the end of the ‘CIA LiveTweets OBL ‘We got him!’’ thread (h/t TarheelDem):
How Britain funds the ‘propaganda war’ against Isis in Syria; Government contractors effectively run a press office for opposition fighters but communications conceal UK’s role’, the Guardian
‘Inside Ricu, the shadowy propaganda unit inspired by the cold war, The Guardian unravels the secretive workings behind a campaign to stop UK Muslims from falling prey to Islamic State’, also the Guardian
Relatives of Western jihadist fighters go public, hoping to stop others’, pbs newshour
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
Thank you for this news summary. Very interesting indeed. Is Brussels the new Byzantium? Are the global imperial bureaucrats tired of going back to Foggy Bottom and Hell’s Bottom?
Global climate change: Eastern Mediterranean in drought worst in 900 years (based on tree ring studies). Rocking like 1216. Maybe some bigwigs are going to Brussels and leaving the “refugees” behind.
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2016/nasa-finds-drought-in-eastern-mediterranean-worst-of-past-900-years
No doubt you saw Yves’s article on Victoria Nuland’s meddling with Cyprus. The games go on.
whooosh, yes: brussels as the new byzantium. i went and looked at the map, not knowing much about the history of the eastern roman empire v. the western. eurasia must be stopped in militarily challenging the hegemon, but hoka-hey! it’s pretty easy to stem the pink tide just by way of NGOs, isn’t it?
(argentina, VZ, brazil, haiti, tra la la)
“well of course we won’t give you visas! you are a national security threat to the US!”
but i sure did love bibi’s remarks i quoted. imagine all the funny little legal justifications there’ll be for unified attacks on nations under nato’s umbrella, even though nato isn’t obligated’ to by treaty. holy hell. guess they’re lookin’ forward to a clinton presidency.
no, i hadn’t seen the helmer piece. i haven’t stopped by there as often since the comments are so often about cheer-leading the bern. but holy hell, that’s one surreal narrative of corruption, bribery, incestuous power relationships, and genuflecting to erdogan. what’s up with all that? ‘eu considers passport-free travel for turks’, etc. my favorite part was helmer’s contention that one plan vickie had floated was exiting turkish troops, bringing them back in nato uniforms. now come on; wouldn’t it be cheaper to let them all slip into phone booths an bathrooms, and come out in their shining new nato super-hero capes?
the nasa map and underlying ways they can develop IDs to ‘man-made causes to climate patterns’ lost me a bit, but i’ll try to read again later; thanks.
In other news, the Republicans who lost to Trump altogether spent $375 million doing so. That’s equivalent to the GDP of Tonga.
lol. cheap at twice the price. i read a thing at voltaire net about the possibility of former cent-com general mattis possibly challenging as an independent or something. looked it up, bill kristol says ‘he says nope’. but then, kristol gave us (tada!) the candidate who could see russia from her own backyard….
http://blackagendareport.com/why_bin_laden_died
worth reading.
well, he does believe ‘they got him’, but i admit to being a bit confused about the case he’s trying to make. i’d thought he was going to go from ‘showing al qaeda weakened’, etc., to the US claiming that the ‘moderates’ they were funding *are* al qaeda. not isis. nor did i know that al nusra is the syrian AQ affiliate, so that may be part of my misunderstanding. but no; dead men tell no tales, nor do the rafts of laptops and docs they say they took from his compound.
the world can’t know what, if anything, was in them. he was the muslim extremist jihadist Geronimo, and that is that. the coward who watched porn, knocked down the twin towers, and hid behind his wife during ‘the firefight’ that he started.
ha! from commenter beverly:
“Bin Laden probably died of kidney failure or complications from Marfan’s syndrome back in the early 2000s. Even Rumsfeld made the comment about “keeping Bin Laden on ice” for future needs. Sounds like he knew the guy was dead but they were keeping the premise of him being on the run going. Prime Minister Bhutto mentioned in an interview Bin Laden being dead and she was felled by a bullet a few months later. Whoever the Navy Seals shot was not Bin Laden; our govt had more than one body double for the guy. Coincidence or just fate that more than a few of the Seals involved in the operation were killed in plane crashes or met some similar fate. Dead Seals can tell no truths about what really happened.”
i do remember that bhutto was said to have mentioned that. was it clinton who’d urged bhutto to come home, then a week or so later she was assassinated?
on edit: b at moa had addressed the ‘free syrian army’ propaganda efforts, but really tasked the guardian for buting the sae coverage.
zo. the UK funding a de facto ‘free syrian army press office’ is by way of ‘maintain(ing) a foothold in the country until there can be greater British military involvement, offering “the capability to expand back into the strategic space as and when the opportunity arises”.
now did this ruffle any feathers among british citizens? or candidates for office? i didn’t read the comments…. probably too late to change any of today’s election results. a new muslim mayor of london looks likely, blow me down. corbyn’s expected to lose a hella lot of seats.
i think b/c they have a contingent of writers in Michigan, wsws gives particular attention to the many goings-on in the state. Today, in their lead article on Flint, they assert that in the GM bankruptcy settlement, the Obama admin eliminated any responsibility for GM to clean up the Flint River. no doubt it’s true. “I ate a lead paint chip when i was a kid, and i’m fine. You can be a lead-exposed President too!”
Poor naked wretches, whereso’er you are,
That bide the pelting of this pitiless storm,
How shall your houseless heads and unfed sides,
Your loop’d and window’d raggedness, defend you
From seasons such as these? O, I have ta’en
Too little care of this! Take physic, pomp;
Expose thyself to feel what wretches feel,
That thou mayst shake the superflux to them,
And show the heavens more just.-Lear.
As we see again in Alberta, capitalism lurches with reckless violence from economic, to military, to environmental crisis in an unending death spiral. what does middle class respectability politics have to say about Obama’s indifference during a forced appearance full of mendacity in Flint? nothing, except maybe black folks should put down the Popeye’s, pull up the pants, get a goddam better job, vote for Bern, i mean HRC, & move to…wait? where’s that place that has clean water again? getting harder & harder to find.
i was hoping the good folks of Flint would pull an impromptu “Charles 1, meet Cromwell.” not really, since i’m not in to executing people, summarily or otherwise. but even an attempt at a citizen’s arrest would have been nice. as aerosmith said, dream on.
the king lear quote is perfect for the current zeitgeist in so many directions; thank you. i’d imagine the trotskyites are big on the detroit schools sickouts as well. they are likely right about GM being permitted to avoid cleaning up the flint river, but the water offishuls shouldn’t have switched sources, either, iirc, not to mention holding back what they knew about lead levels for what, over a year? yeah, such a nice ‘caring’ photo op with little miss flint advertised at the guardian, but the water’s still shite, and another 20,000 households have had their water turned off in detroit. how many more are losing their food stamps this month? (talk about ‘get a job’.)
i really dunno what he said in flint, but i’d reckon that his ‘just showing up’ made most folks delirious with joyful appreciation.
but that’s just it, isn’t it? those of wealth and power don’t feel the pain they foist onto the wretched, so it’s up to us to show them. a number of the big brand names are organizing against fossil fuels in may, but knowing wo funds the orgs makes me a bit cynical about their goals.
but ah: remember you’d said of O: ‘I, robot’? i saved this for you. happy birthday. talk about ‘purrrfect’.
how do i make myself unsee that awful video? dancin w/the stormtroopers is probably appropriate but pity the poor robot.
i’d forgotten (how could i?) about the water shut offs. similar stuff going in Baltimore, too. i suppose the rationalization for this is that many houses have been abandoned? i was unable to find a story from several years ago, probably from wsws, that DTE (the Detroit electrical utility) is using UAV’s to surveil who is “squatting” on the electrical grid. pretty astonishing.
they will not voluntarily “expose themselves to feel what wretches feel”. prerogative & privilege never does. as rumsfeld said, more or less, “i stand on my feet 8-10 hours a day. what’s the bfd of people on their feet for 4 hours of stress positions?” people being tortured are such whiners. yes, indifference to poverty & relish for torture go hand in hand.
i’d just been transposing the last three lines of the lear.. i knew you’ love the stormtroopers (i.e. the new ‘white helmets’) ;-)
i dunno, folks talk about the food wars, but water has started already, hasn’t it? lot going on in the west about that, and ‘the mart lawyers’ will be studyin’ water law. but again: the law is what you can convince a court it is. if monsanto can ‘legally’ patent even wild sacred herbs in india…all bets are off, no?
dunno if you’ve seen this one, but…it’s also unforgettable, bless treble army’s pea-pickin’ hearts….
unfortunately, i’ve seen that viddy. i regret i’ll skip it.
people will be in for a shock when the state sides with Nestle & Coca Cola & the PGA (golf). from what i’ve read, the CO River & the Ogallala aquifer are going bye bye. so much for the cities in the desert & America’s breadbasket. apparently San Diego is investing billions in converting salt to fresh water (b/n bulldozing the tent cities of homeless people), but that ain’t really an option for Phoenix is it?
“when i get into office, you are not going to believe how much water we’ll have. mexico, and i love mexico, is stealing our water.” candidate you-know-who.
okay. but i’ve been working on a diary i just put up, and mine eyes and brain need a siesta. back later on w/ a thought or two on water.
the colorado is a sticky wicket, and yes, mccain’s campaign promise that he’d see that the co river compact was re-written lost him votes in the west. but it seems that it may be being (ahem) examined with sincere scrutiny. but yep, nestlé water grabs in oregon and CA are under fire by citizens, dunno how that will play out because: attorneys.
in western co, the yampa river for one, has been filed on by corporations for oil shale, and there was nothing left to legally file on. how will that play out? goddess only knows.
i can’t find an earlier report that visually demonstrated how much (by way of levels or transits), and this seems to understate the measurements, as i remember them, but yeah: it’s sinking. as is the ogalalla aquifir as you mention, but the remaining water is chock full of farming pesticides, herbicides, and farming nitrates. not good.
mr. wd spoke with a bureau of rec water man yesterday who said that legally, lake mead can call water rights when the lake isn’t able to make hydro power (as can lake foul, as i remember it), but recent rains filled mead to 45% or close.
question: that the alberta fire is so close to tar sands: did the oil extraction contribute to the fires? i haven’t read so, but one wonders.
update: not that i can find, but this from roger annis:
“There is a grim irony that the service center of the Alberta tar sands behemoth is burning to the ground due to… rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions. Other factors that may be contributing to the disaster are the geographic planning of Fort McMurray, a city which has grown rapidly along with tar sands production itself during the past two decades, and the many decades of destructive, clearcut forest industry practices which are common right across Canada (see article .
There is great political tragedy that the burning of Fort McMurray coincides with political offensives by the supporters in Canada of fossil fuel extraction and burning. The federal government in Ottawa is unleashing a ‘social license’ campaign in favour of expanded tar sands pipelines emanating from the province of Alberta. The Government of Alberta and its NDP premier, Rachel Notley, is embarked on a parallel effort, while the premier herself is a lead attacker against the pro-planet Leap Manifesto and the movement promoting the manifesto.”
and he quotes dahr jamahil:
“By late April, the Mauna Loa Observatory, which monitors atmospheric carbon dioxide, recorded an incredible daily reading: 409.3 parts per million. That is a range of atmospheric carbon dioxide content that this planet has not seen for the last 15 million years, and 2016 is poised to see these levels only continue to increase.”
here’s a fun chart:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/gr.html
found via the roger annis article at CP. invest in CO2 futures. they are up up up!
hoo, doggies; am i glad they explained wot the ‘ell they meant at the end:
” The estimated uncertainty in the Mauna Loa annual mean growth rate is 0.11 ppm/yr. This estimate is based on the standard deviation of the differences between monthly mean values measured independently by the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and by NOAA/ESRL. The annual growth rate measured at Mauna is not the same as the global growth rate, but it is quite similar. One standard deviation of the annual differences MLO minus global is 0.26 ppm/year.”
but…another year was close, eh? one of my gripes, and only ONE, mind you, was when i covered the ‘United Nations Rio+20 Summit on Sustainable Development’ in 2012, i paid the most attention to the indigenous side meetings. what i hadn’t known was that there were complaints that reps from 350.org were completely adverse to learning that even then, the best science said: 350 ppm is far too high. among other things, it was ‘their brand’, and fuck that. who was it who finally clued me in? ah, shoot; i’ll think of it in time. cory morningstar? prolly. no fan of that NGO, nore am i, come to that.
anyhoo, burned out, gonna go watch a bit of an old tape of: ‘call of wild’. sleep well if ya gottem, dear jason.