vile:
(more on the image above soon…)
i’ll let her speak ahead of the story:
“Ms. Power described April 18 as the “worst day of my professional life.”
“What can you say?” she said on ABC’s “Nightline” after the accident. “You come here to help.”
“Later, the State Department would provide compensation to Toussaint’s family — about $1,700 in cash; two cows; sacks of flour, rice, salt, sugar and onions; and cartons of soap and oil. The American government also had a well built near the front of the family’s house. The money provided for a new roof, according to Mr. Dague, Toussaint’s father.”
Oh, Toussaint Birwe, rest in peace, and may your family find some measure of comfort …eventually.
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
See? She has professional ethics!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA.
The collateral deaths when they intended to murder, however, were necessary collective sacrifice. O My Goodness.
Samantha’s kind of Power makes one stupid.
i couldn’t recall who’d said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are, ‘I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
~(small g) ronald rayguns, of course. but tweak it to “…from the USA and we’re here to help”, one is unintentional self-satire, the other…just so. but blood money often rules.
Kwistian Amurka hypocrites too. Western Civ is riven with it.
soccer mom sammie showed us what’s fantastically important in somalia; dec.27
and she retweeted this as important:
samaritan’s purse is franklin graham, who is the moar stridently evangelical son of billy graham. you’ll remember that ruining haiti forever was another clinton family project, and that the UN extended its mission there for another year or so, as the first occupation worked out so well.
two from dec. 31
Glenn Greenwald has noted the post-election move of the neoconservative national security folks to an alliance with the establishment rump Democrats. R2P has morphed into full-throated neoconservative imperialism. Are the Kristols and Podhoretzes coming home with the death of Reaganism and Clintonism? Has Scoopism returned in elite circles?
Also note Edward Jay Epstein’s hit job on Edward Snowden to ensure there is no surprise pardons of Snowden, Chelsea Manning, or other whistleblowers. And the full-throated broadcasting of it by the Clintonistas as Joy Reid asserts that Putin is ruling “communist” Russia.
Whomping up the old Red Scare like Dems did in the Truman era. Thanks Obama.
Whatever Rex Tillerson and Putin have in mind, it likely depends on a navigable Arctic Ocean, which would make Trudeau’s Canada a player as well.
The fact that DAESH/ISIS/ISIL attacks are terrorist attacks in Baghdad indicates that things are grinding to an end-game in Mosul and Raqqa. We saw claims of responsibility for the Paris, Brussels, and San Bernardino attacks occur as Palmyra and then Aleppo were under siege.
The major diplomatic conundrum is what to do with the Kurds, especially the YPG, given their role in the attack on DAESH/ISIS/ISIL. The traditional US solution would be to just let them hang out to dry in Turkey, Iraq, and Syria. Is not that what Poppy Bush did for the Shi’ites in Iraq after their rebellion at the end of the First Gulf War? For the long-term foreign policy and national security folks, that guarantees a follow-on crisis that “requires the indispensable nation”.
The major issue in this is breakout of DAESH/ISIS/ISIL to set up shop in another location. Already a breakout from Aleppo has them reinstalled in Palmyra. The other form of a breakout is dispersion as long-term terrorist cells; that is the eventuality that the West is most prepared for with its coming police state for everyone. UK, Europe, Australia, even New Zealand are all moving in this direction with NATO cheerleading. That trend will continue even if Trump’s US changes course (which is completely unpredictable at this point. Trump’s operating style is to preserve surprise by frustrating kremlinological analysis of his intentions and by throwing of stupid surprises as clickbait.)
And this within the context of the first major information war between Obama’s US and Putin’s Russia of the internet age — one that appears to use both cyberattacks, cyberespionage, and propaganda in a coordinated strategy and through national “independent” outlets as well as state-subsidized outlets to push narratives.
But like the effects of large powers using drone technology for surveillance, reconnaissance, and attack, this information war lowers the cost of making mischief; more state and non-state actors can play. And the high-cost activity is the process of attribution to make sure that you understand who it is that is attacking you and why.
As in all wars, the first casualty is truth, which means everyone is automatically on the road to folly.
Add in Trump, his European nationalist and white supremacist allies, including Putin and Farage, and you get an abrupt change in global geopolitical paradigms and internal political paradigms in the West as well. It is 1917, 1932, 1946, 1968, 1991, 2001 all over again. Xi-Jinping more than Trump or Putin will shape how it goes.
But what is clear is the unity of the governments and the corporate capitalist system in a way that we haven’t seen since the post-World War I Roaring Twenties.
part II:
i hadn’t thought about putin being white nationalist; is it so? as for the ypg, there seem to be conflicting beliefs about the group. on one hand is graeber and friends supporting them all the way, on another the fact that anarchist women w/ uzis are purported to be in the front lines, but they’re the only arrow left in the west’s quiver (read: they support a no-fly zone in syria). so i’m agnostic, but the kurds in iraq were sold out not once, but twice, during the ‘gulf wars’.
obama did mr. T another huge favor: the EO (or was it part of the defense budget?) funding on edit waging war against: all of the roving/evolving extremist muslim terrorist organizations globally. we’ve seen how simple it is for cia and other mercenaries to foment insurrections all over africa, and then the west, including the french, label the ‘participants’ as offshoots of al qaeda, isis, tra la la. so what will mr. T make of all that given his ‘kill zem all!’ (did he back away from ‘and their families’?).
but for me, for now…the ‘trump is a fascist, clinton and obama were not’ meme needs to have a stake put thru its heart.
liar-in-chief trudeau’s already made overtures w/ the new T admin to finish the xl pipeline; how long will it trudeau take to approve the northern gateway in the name of ‘using the profits to fund “clean energy”?
The sets of nationalists and white supremacists are intersecting not identical. Given the nationalities that Putin has to keep in enough of a consensus to govern, he likely cannot be both a white supremacist and a Rus nationalist. Or is he a Russian Federation nationalist concerned with not having the Russian Federation go the way of the Soviet Union. I’m betting he’s as multicultural as Trump and that Bannon is the major white supremacist among the three.
Trump’s personal style (if not his personality) is what is triggering charges of fascism. You are correct that the public-private fusion of interests has evolved US politics toward fascism year after year since the Reagan election. The attack on 9/11 accelerated the trend. Obama did nothing and Clinton promised nothing that would undo that trend. And Congress from Joe Lieberman and Dianne Feinstein to Richard Burr and Ron Johnson have not slowed the trend either.
What concerns the Trump critics is his propensity to snap the door shut. That because of a personal slight, he would use the powers that Obama put into place to detain or assassinate an American citizen who was nowhere near being spun as an imminent threat. His “boss from hell” persona and unpredictability is terrifying to people who have witnessed that from dangerous autocrats in other countries.
i’ll have to remain agnostic on putin’s positions; taibbi sure called him a lot of whopping names in his most recent piece. they might even be true, lol.
actually, obama arguably advanced rule by wall street domestically, and advanced the exporting of USA fascism all over the globe, imo. clinton was set to do do the same, and according to the emails, invoke simpson bowles once enthroned.
whooosh; the sort of trump fear you’re relating is hopefully way over the top, but i’ve heard him called a narcissistic loose cannon many times. but yes, O gave him the tools, as he gave him many other tools for crackdowns on journalists, whistleblowers, dissidents, goddam him. i still have yet to listen to him speak, dunno if i’ll ever be able to abide to.
now who funds the coming protests will be interesting, but don’t soros and pals take great pains to hide those fundings? what may be even harder to is to divine news from the msm; many say media will still be scribes to his administration: for access, yanno. what will purported ‘left’ sites cover?
guess it won’t be long until we see some of it unwind, but as w/ the intercept, what they don’t cover will be more important than what they do.
response part I (lol):
did you read epstein’s ‘the snowden fable’ then? being as it’s behind a paywall, i scouted around to see if someone had reprinted it; oddly, i clicked into an archived version on the wsj, there it was, so i pasted the whole thing into a word doc, plus the link of course. the link comically wouldn’t show it all the second time… but it’s long, and i haven’t had the time to read it. were the lies as damning as he’d said at the start of the piece? or does that depend on whether one is a supporter or detractor?
i hadn’t seen greenwald mention it on twitter, and i did have to google-bing to discover who joy reid is (she and some eichenwald fellah were having a twit war with greenwald… guess it takes watching the teevee to know about some of these celebrities)
what the queen’s loss did was effectively to bring out the inner red scare fascists among too many Ds, and esp. among the celebrity left. i’ll reblog an example or two a bit later; polemical as all giddy-up, but i was taken aback in my ignorance of almost all the author presented. as in: holy shit: seriously?
yes to your final paragraph, but the US has been arguably been ruled by finance capital/inverted totalitarianism for a long time, most notably since 2008, no? i gotta go for now, but pepé has a few interesting things to say about some of the new competing geopolitical forces and realignments; here’s on paragraph:
“The 2008 casino capitalism-provoked financial crisis, plus the American “resolve” to remake the so-called Greater Middle East through wars of choice, regime change and covert ops miserably failed. As we wait for the dawn of the Trump era – an almost intergalactic geopolitical question mark – what’s certain is that the War Party US deep state won’t admit defeat. And the key geopolitical riddle to be answered is how strident internal American tensions will deal with the hub of progressive Eurasia integration: Russia, China and Iran.”
back after a bit.
Does Trump have the Choots-Paw to work this? (from Pepe’s article)
“We might be reaching a possible geopolitical configuration where it’s not far-fetched to expect some sort of Grand Bargain involving the US and the three key hubs of Eurasia integration; a sort of Interregnum Détente before an extended Cold War 2.0, instigated by the US deep state, picks up again. It was only 25 years ago today. That was not the end of History; rather the preamble for a brand new historical drama. Get ready, because the thick of the action starts now.”
My long-suffering Facebook friends, a very politically divers bunch stretching from elementary school chums to current neighbors, saw a heavily contexted sharing of this Pepe analysis because of its radically different point of view than typical Americans.
So we are moving toward three (four?) relatively equal-powered oligarchic capitalist states that wrap the Northern Hemisphere and their tributary states. This structurally is much like the situation in the first two decades of the 20th Century. Where that balance of power went off the rails is in hardwiring the tendency to pre-emptive war and being so equal in power that they became involved in a mass four-year total war of attrition that broke one of the powers on each side of the conflict-one from devolution, the other from revolution. It appears not to be a stable balance of power.
nice tweak on chutzpah, but i dunno; it seems to depend on which ‘analysts’ one believes. mark sleboda is voting for a rational trump; ian williams skewers putin *and* trump. and this was over the s 400s the roosians placed on the border near kalingingrad, citing nato’s extreme provocation (whoever they are). why wouldn’t one do that as a defense or threat of power? and why do so many continue to claim that roosia occupied crimea and stole it for the federation? such a trash accusation: russian revanchism’. pffft.
mr. wd loved: “Get ready, because the thick of the action starts now.” more in the vein of pepe’s wild ride analyses, where ya just know he’d had a few shots of cuervo gold ‘n a pipe before he started writing. but really; i think he feels the gravitas of all these swirling geopolitical forces at play, yanno?
what form will the mashup of deep state actors and forces take? beats hell outta me. but…i’m not taking your meaning on your facebook friends having seen a ‘heavily contexted sharing of this Pepe analysis’. or is it that you just gave them cliffs notes?
Lambert Strether on resistance and Resistance&tm;:
” It’s going to be difficult to distinguish legitimate, organic resistance from branded, funded, Neera Tanden-esque “resistance.”
Not really.