Retaliation: Tomahawk missiles from the “USS Porter” on the way to the Shayrat Air Base on April 6, 2017
It wasn’t until I’d clicked into Dissident Voice the other day and found Sy’s new sarin report staring me in the eyes that I’d taken the time to read it. It’s old news by now, and all of you may know it only too well,thus I’m just beating a dead horse. But before featuring it, I’ll begin with a few easy links, and include a link to Peter Lee’s Oct. 23, 2015 essay: ‘Hersh Vindicated? Turkish Whistleblowers Corroborate Story on False Flag Sarin Attack in Syria’
“This is quite the bombshell delivered by two CHP deputies in the Turkish parliament and reported by Today’s Zaman, one of the top dailies in Turkey.
It supports Seymour Hersh’s reporting that the notorious sarin gas attack at Ghouta was a false flag orchestrated by Turkish intelligence in order to cross President Obama’s chemical weapons “red line” and draw the United States into the Syria war to topple Assad.”
‘Pseudo-left silent on Seymour Hersh’s exposé of US strike against Syria’, Josh Varlin, wsws.org July 5
“The pseudo-left has followed the lead of the mainstream press in studiously ignoring Hersh’s article. As of this writing, the article has received no mention whatsoever in Socialist Worker (the publication of the International Socialist Organization), International Viewpoint (the organ of the Pabloite United Secretariat), Jacobin (a magazine tied to the Democratic Socialists of America) or Socialist Alternative’s website.
These publications and the organizations to which they are tied claim association with socialism, Marxism and even Trotskyism. They all claim to oppose imperialism and the right-wing presidency of Donald Trump. Yet, after Hersh—the veteran investigative journalist who exposed the My Lai Massacre during the Vietnam War—provides detailed evidence that the Trump administration’s pretext for bombing a former colonial country was known to be false, they say nothing.” (Varlin’s list is long, but only too telling, as are some of the most egregious quotes from the cruise-missile ‘Left’.)
In Dave Lindorff’s June 29 ‘Sy Hersh, Exposer of My Lai and Abu Ghraib, Strikes Again, Exposing US Lies About Alleged Assad Sarin ‘Attack’ at Counterpunch, he speaks to one of Hersh’s largest fears having come potentially true:
“Hersh’s Die Welt article comes out just as Trump is now again making up, or is believing, a “fake news” story that Assad is “planning another Sarin gas attack” from the same Shayrat Air Base that the US bombed earlier, with Trump vowing to retaliate more seriously this time if Assad goes ahead with another gas attack. Again, the military and the intelligence community are both saying they see no evidence of planning for a gas attack, and in any case they believe that Assad’s poison gas weapons were all eliminated in the 2013 agreement, as monitored and certified later by UN inspectors.”
Jonathan Cook’s June 27 essay at CP ‘Hersh’s New Syria Revelations Buried From View’ includes this tidbit:
“Hersh’s new investigation was paid for by the London Review of Books, which declined to publish it. This is almost disturbing as the events in question.
What is emerging is a media blackout so strong that even the London Review of Books is running scared. Instead, Hersh’s story appeared yesterday in a German publication, Welt am Sonntag. Welt is an award-winning newspaper, no less serious than the New Yorker or the LRB. But significantly Hersh is being forced to publish ever further from the centres of power whose misinformation his investigations are challenging.”
Republished at DissidentVoice from Die Welt :‘Trump’s Red Line’ by Seymour Hersh / July 4th, 2017
Essentially Hersh says in a very long exposé that Herr Trump totally ignored intelligence reports, both his team’s and Russia’s, both military and NatSec, after he’d ‘seen’ photos of dying children in (perhaps) in the rebel-held town of Khan Sheikhounand, and attacked Syria.
“Trump issued the order despite having been warned by the U.S. intelligence community that it had found no evidence that the Syrians had used a chemical weapon.
The available intelligence made clear that the Syrians had targeted a jihadist meeting site on April 4 using a Russian-supplied guided bomb equipped with conventional explosives. Details of the attack, including information on its so-called high-value targets, had been provided by the Russians days in advance to American and allied military officials in Doha, whose mission is to coordinate all U.S., allied, Syrian and Russian Air Force operations in the region.
Some American military and intelligence officials were especially distressed by the president’s determination to ignore the evidence. “None of this makes any sense,” one officer told colleagues upon learning of the decision to bomb. “We KNOW that there was no chemical attack … the Russians are furious. Claiming we have the real intel and know the truth … I guess it didn’t matter whether we elected Clinton or Trump.“
Within hours of the April 4 bombing, the world’s media was saturated with photographs and videos from Khan Sheikhoun. Pictures of dead and dying victims, allegedly suffering from the symptoms of nerve gas poisoning, were uploaded to social media by local activists, including the White Helmets, a first responder group known for its close association with the Syrian opposition.”
‘Close association’ is a very polite way of phrasing it, this link will take you to Vanessa Beeley’s oeuvre on the ‘nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize’ UK/US/FSA-sponsored NGO the White Helmets at 21st century wire.
No, apparently the provenance of the photos wasn’t clear, but the president issued a statement indicating that this ‘heinous deed’ was the result of his predecessor having been too of much of a wimp to punish Assad for the last sarin nerve-gassing of his own people. Hersh recounts members of T’s team being ‘dismayed’ by his failure to be swayed by evidence that was contrary to ‘his beliefs’ during discussions over the two days after events at Khan Sheikhounand.
“I was provided with evidence of that disconnect, in the form of transcripts of real-time communications, immediately following the Syrian attack on April 4. In an important pre-strike process known as deconfliction, U.S. and Russian officers routinely supply one another with advance details of planned flight paths and target coordinates, to ensure that there is no risk of collision or accidental encounter (the Russians speak on behalf of the Syrian military). This information is supplied daily to the American AWACS surveillance planes that monitor the flights once airborne. Deconfliction’s success and importance can be measured by the fact that there has yet to be one collision, or even a near miss, among the high-powered supersonic American, Allied, Russian and Syrian fighter bombers.
Russian and Syrian Air Force officers gave details of the carefully planned flight path to and from Khan Shiekhoun on April 4 directly, in English, to the deconfliction monitors aboard the AWACS plane, which was on patrol near the Turkish border, 60 miles or more to the north.”
Russian intelligence had shared with the US military that a high level meeting was about to take place in a joint Al-nursa/Ahrar al-Sham command and control center in a two-story cinder block building in the town, in what sounds like a strip mall of shops.
“The rebels control the population by controlling the distribution of goods that people need to live – food, water, cooking oil, propane gas, fertilizers for growing their crops, and insecticides to protect the crops,” a senior adviser to the American intelligence community, who has served in senior positions in the Defense Department and Central Intelligence Agency, told me. The basement was used as storage for rockets, weapons and ammunition, as well as products that could be distributed for free to the community, among them medicines and chlorine-based decontaminants for cleansing the bodies of the dead before burial. The meeting place – a regional headquarters – was on the floor above. “It was an established meeting place,” the senior adviser said. “A long-time facility that would have had security, weapons, communications, files and a map center.” The Russians were intent on confirming their intelligence and deployed a drone for days above the site to monitor communications and develop what is known in the intelligence community as a POL – a pattern of life. The goal was to take note of those going in and out of the building, and to track weapons being moved back and forth, including rockets and ammunition.”
And yes, we read ‘jests’ about IS having the cleanest swimming pools evah! Hersh was apparently told that Russian intelligence took the matter straight to the CIA, in part because they could get any undercover agents the hell outta Dodge before they bombed the place. Having made it clear what a Big Deal these ‘high value targets’ were, all branches of the military had to have known what was up, including the fact that the Russians had given the Syrian military one of their (apparently carefully hoarded) precision guided bombs.
The same advisor spoke of the chairman of the joint chief’s (General Joe Dunford) explanation that the US and Russia can coordinate ops, but draw a big fat line between that and doing ‘combined operations’, but there is definitely shared intelligence, as in: hot tips, as with the high value targets in the cinder block building meeting in KS. He went on to explain what a goofy fairy tale it was to think that a ‘regular bomb’ could be handled like an epically dangerous sarin bomb, which would require…a long list of precautions.
“The target was struck at 6:55 a.m. on April 4, just before midnight in Washington. A Bomb Damage Assessment (BDA) by the U.S. military later determined that the heat and force of the 500-pound Syrian bomb triggered a series of secondary explosions that could have generated a huge toxic cloud that began to spread over the town, formed by the release of the fertilizers, disinfectants and other goods stored in the basement, its effect magnified by the dense morning air, which trapped the fumes close to the ground.” [snip]
“MSF also visited other hospitals that had received victims and found that patients there “smelled of bleach, suggesting that they had been exposed to chlorine.” In other words, evidence suggested that there was more than one chemical responsible for the symptoms observed, which would not have been the case if the Syrian Air Force – as opposition activists insisted – had dropped a sarin bomb, which has no percussive or ignition power to trigger secondary explosions. The range of symptoms is, however, consistent with the release of a mixture of chemicals, including chlorine and the organophosphates used in many fertilizers, which can cause neurotoxic effects similar to those of sarin.”
Dunno how (ahem) ‘unbiased’ Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is; for instance see “Doctors” Behind Syrian Chemical Weapons Claims are Aiding Terrorists’, Tony Cartalucci August 2013, landdestroyer.ca
He names their many corporate funders, but the whole piece is arrrggh-worthy.
It’s hard to characterize the next long paragraphs on Trump’s screeches, Nikki Haley’s, “those dead women and children!”, “Assad atrocity!”, on and on… but belief is stronger than proof. Zo, off to Whiskey-a-Go-Go his team went to decide how to ‘respond’ militarily. No intelligence, no proof, no…nuttin’, and notably Herr T’s own CIA director Mike Pompeo ‘the CIA director whose agency had consistently reported that it had no evidence of a Syrian chemical bomb’…wasn’t even in the room.
Zo…his team gave him four options, he picked the 39 Tomahawks, and apparently bombing Assad’s palace in Damascus was a bridge too far… But reading Rex Tillerson’s reported clueless questions and comments is…a blink-worthy exercise.
“After the meeting, with the Tomahawks on their way, Trump spoke to the nation from Mar-a-Lago, and accused Assad of using nerve gas to choke out “the lives of helpless men, women and children. It was a slow and brutal death for so many … No child of God should ever suffer such horror.” The next few days were his most successful as president. America rallied around its commander in chief, as it always does in times of war. Trump, who had campaigned as someone who advocated making peace with Assad, was bombing Syria 11 weeks after taking office, and was hailed for doing so by Republicans, Democrats and the media alike. One prominent TV anchorman, Brian Williams of MSNBC, used the word “beautiful” to describe the images of the Tomahawks being launched at sea. Speaking on CNN, Fareed Zakaria said: “I think Donald Trump became president of the United States.” (the rest, including the New Cold War™ by the papers of record dénouement, is here.)
Do you ever make sense, Nikki? Bono always makes sense, in that he’s just another mega-star tool of the Imperium.
the Terminator
Now on the other hand, some of you will remember that on May 17, 205, tarzie had posted ‘Sy Hersh is an Intel Asset and Therefore No Gary Webb’, just after ‘Seymour Hersh is badazzzzzzz’.
“To say that Hersh is an intelligence asset is not to reveal some dark secret. It is simply to concisely, and more bluntly, restate Chomsky’s caveat about Hersh’s stable of high-level sources inside Empire: “Their task is not to tell people the truth. Their task is to tell people what they want them to hear.” It follows that how Hersh sees himself or how others see him is entirely irrelevant to the question of precisely how he makes his living.
Hersh’s sources seek him out, or cooperate, for the very same reason members of the same community seek out Walter Pincus, known infamously as “The CIA’s man at the Washington Post:” To advance their own interests, or the interests of a faction within the security apparatus, or within the so-called Deep State, to which they belong. These people are in the business of misdirection, deception, manipulation, incitement and destabilization. At their most usefully dissident, they are reformists who simply want the U.S. to rule the world with less mess.” [snip]
“There could well be something I haven’t considered but the main point is this: there is absolutely nothing going on here to cheer anyone to the left of liberal Hersh’s basic faith in the system he tells tales on and obvious sympathy for the individuals that keep it running. As with the original story, we’re being manipulated, with information from a single government official we are to accept on faith. Falling for this crap and Hersh’s chest-beating does not make you a renegade. It makes you a rube.”
The link goes to transcript quotes from Hersh on TRNN. Oh, my.
What do you make of it all?
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
All journalist with inside sources are subject to their sources agendas. Sometimes those sources seek to tell the public the truth to further their current agendas. Certainly Hersh’s sources who thought that My Lai was a counterproductive way to win hearts and minds thought so.
Likewise, contra Trump, what Obama (with Putin’s help) did after the attack on Ghouta was give Assad an excuse to get rid of useless chemical weapons facilities and obsolete chemical weapons stockpiles that painted a big target on the Assad regime. That exposed the fact that the Assads had not be square with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It also gave Obama an opening to diplomatically maneuver all nations remaining with chemical weapons to give them up, something he was magically diverted from by a crisis in Ukraine. Funny that.
What I make of that is we have to trust Hersh’s long experience for finding straight shooters as sources. No, Hersh’s ability to find sources who are very clear where US actions are shooting US policy in the foot. That is why the blackout. US policy insists of shooting itself in the foot. What to make of that?
Pepe Escobar has the G-20 report to read closely. Consider it the Russian readout of the meeting between Putin and Trump.
What I find interesting is the sabotaging of all left-wing sources of information as unreliable because they have sources who might know what actually is going on at the moment.
No such anxiety about sources on the right.
When there’s an information war, those at war don’t want the public or any segment of the public to have clarity on what is going on. When Hersh is attacked for having sources, it tells me two things: (1) people have forgotten the skill of closely reading and (2) people want to disconnect you from independent reporters who have built their reputation through accuracy. We follow the bait at our peril.
now see, you just taught me something i hadn’t known: “what Obama (with Putin’s help) did after the attack on Ghouta was give Assad an excuse to get rid of useless chemical weapons facilities and obsolete chemical weapons stockpiles that painted a big target on the Assad regime. That exposed the fact that the Assads had not be square with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons. It also gave Obama an opening to diplomatically maneuver all nations remaining with chemical weapons to give them up, something he was magically diverted from by a crisis in Ukraine.”
i’d only thought it was putin who’d arranged it via the UN. but even that the assads hadn’t been truthful about their chemical weapons. i’m not s sure that sy is of the left, and indeed the list of alleged ‘left’ organizations who’d ignored his report ballasts that, i think. but as sy has often said, only to be called a crybaby, ‘it’s tough being an indy journalist (or close to that).
i’ve also forgotten how he outed abu ghraib, so i went and grabbed a link i haven’t had time to read. did someone leak him antonio taguba’s classified report?
“US policy insists of shooting itself in the foot. What to make of that?” the first thing that leaps to mind is ‘american empire exceptionalism’, but that the US is isolating itself further w/ its myriad foreign misadventures (and nato’s, of course), and *accidentally* creating an even more multipolar world (than you, Herr yellow hair) is interesting, and hopefully, a very good thing. for now.
here’s pépé’s piece, i went a-hunting, and look forward to reading it as soon as i can find the time. thanks for the heads-up. ‘Putin and Trump stage-manage a win-win meeting’; With a ceasefire in southwestern Syria in the works, meeting proves diplomacy beats demonization’
and woot! thunder and lightning and rain, beautiful rain! might have to shut down soon, but at 7, mr. wd and i have a date with 3 full hours of masterpiece programs (if the lightning dudn’t kill the signals from the towers on menefee mtn….)
My guess is that Hersh personally has the “solid American values” of his straight shooters; that likely would be Mid-Century “liberalism”. He is only seen to be left because his investigative reporting exposes things that some people don’t want exposed.
Putin initiated the idea of getting rid of Syria’s chemical weapons and after getting Assad’s agreement took it through Lavrov to Kerry, who took it to Obama. Kerry and Lavrov and their networks worked out the details and got moving on a plan that would satisfy all three countries as to the verification of removal and destruction. The UN provided the authorization to send the OPCW inspectors into a war zone to find, count, and verify the number of weapons and also to verify the Syrian government’s destruction of the manufacturing plants. The US responsibility in this phase was to authenticate that all of its suspected sites had been visited by the OPCW inspectors.
The weapons were transported to the Russian base at Tartus and ferried to a US vessel where they were disarmed then transported to a US base in the Mediterranean and flown to Germany, where they were dismantled and destroyed under the supervision of US and OPCW inspectors.
Which is why the subsequent gas attacks, including the one Trump responded to had low probability of being other than US-sponsored rebels trying to get the US to jump into the Syrian quagmire with both feet.
The US shoots itself in the foot by trying to maximize damage without thinking about the fact that “war is politics by other means”. If you argue that you are there to defend people from aggression, My Lai undercuts that story. If you argue that you are liberating the Iraqi people from Saddam Hussein, Abu Ghraib undermines that story but happens because the US Vice President has taken the gloves off. If you talk about crossing red line as an excuse for an attack, you better be sure who it was who crossed that line. In all those cases, even if you originally believed in benign helpful America, that there were no consequences for those behaviors was clarifying.
The turn in the Trump drama today is toward the fact that the Russian lawyer that Donald Trump, Jr. (dubbed Uday) was a defense lawyer for a case that Preet Bharara brought against Russian-emigre mobsters (the accusation) in the NY real estate business who were apparently laundering money from a tax scam conducted in Russia with Russian people as victims. Among the principles of that company were a number of those that were the targets of Obama’s recent “sanctions on Russia”. Apparently what Obama did was apply sanctions to Putin’s allies who had shady dealings and financial exposure in the US. Putin’s response was to end the ability of US couples to adopt Russian babies. So when Uday said that he was discussing Russian orphans with the lawyer, he was correct but not complete in his description. He was really discussing the fate of the 44 of Putin’s allies targeted with sanctions.
This is playing out in the blogosphere as a teach-in on Russian and US mob activity and the roles of the respective governments. And on Trump’s connections with the New York version of the mob. To use a now-quaint term for successful organized crime.
thanks for the nuts and bolts on the chemical weapons disposal, and yes, hersh had talked about it to some degree, as in: how could there be any left? iirc, putin/lavrov also helped to create the iranian nuke deal via john kerry, then getting fove other nations to sign off on it. now herr hair had said he would throw that out w/ the trash; did he?
ooof, i admit i’ve stayed away from the trump lawyer/preet bharara mess, and i admit even this much background may be too much to stick on my hard drive, as there seems to be so little room left there these days. but ‘no russian babbies for US adoption’ was the reaction? how very strange…
i started pepe’s piece, but as ever, find a few competing stories as to what putin and trump agreed to in southern syria. but what will happen…will happen, and the question of who breaks any ceasefires will be up to…each faction. but to me, it sounds as though escobar’s ‘sorta/kinda good for most or all parties’ means federalization; rand is very bullish, and eve have the new maps drawn! ;-)
The U.S. is in a full on campaign of lies and mis-information; win at all and any cost!
The U.S. knows it’s losing influence and the #1 position in the world.
Like an attacked and cornered animal; it will fight visciously in a no hold’s barred fight to the death to maintain its hegemon.
Lets just hope it won’t take the rest of the world with it, in a nuclear conflagration…
The insanity of the U.S. ruling elite/deep state, are the most frightening entities on the planet called earth.
I guess we’ll find out in the coming weeks/months/surely, not years; what the final outcome will be…
now correct me if i’m wrong, v, but i’m pretty sure that at the end of every news article at the NYT are the words: “any semblance of truth and fact in the above is entirely accidental”.
the rest of the world knows that the u.s. empire is failing in its constant quest for even more extreme domination, frau merkel for one example: “we need to look to ourselves”. how far that meme extends…i dunno; does she? but this iteration of U foreign policy by tweet is different, isn’t it? i haven’t ever looked at his account, but from what seems to be happening is that he tweets both too often and too reactionary/defiantly, then…swerves or loops back. but his fans seem to take his most provocative and bellicose threat as ‘strength’.
escobar’s overall theme viz putin and trump was close to: diplomacy trumps demonization. now in regard to north korea, that seems to be totally inoperative, and as we know, kim jong-un has been fairly begging for a diplomatic solution. but this shit is almost unbelievable:
“In a menacing move as leaders gathered at the G20 summit in Germany, the US Air Force flew two B1-B strategic bombers over the Korean Peninsula on Friday and unleashed inert bombs as part of a joint military exercise involving US and South Korean fighter aircraft.
US Air Force commander in the Pacific, General Terrence O’Shaughnessy, branded North Korea as a threat to the US and its allies. “If called upon we are trained, equipped and ready to unleash the full lethal capability of our allied air forces,” he warned.
The US bombers then flew with Japanese fighters over the East China Sea before returning to Guam. Just the day before, two US B1-B bombers provocatively flew over the South China Sea in a so-called freedom of navigation operation to challenge Chinese territorial claims in the disputed waters.
North Korea denounced the US-South Korean bombing drill as a “reckless military provocation” and warned that the US was pushing “the risk of a nuclear war on the [Korean] peninsula to a tipping point.” wsws.org
and then shinzo abe is attempting to moot article 9 (?) and build an aggressive military because: north korea.
Those B1-B bombers. An interesting and Trumpian move a prelude to G-20, like the Syrian attack with Xi Jinping’s state dinner desert at Mar al Lago. A wave a Xi and Putin, who were having their pre-meeting in Moscow, according to Pepe.
Shinzo Abe is being encouraged to have his own military by Trump who wants to get the US out of the unpaid business of being the Japanese nuclear umbrella. (As far as nuclear retaliation is concerned an attack on Japan is an attack on the US.) Why? Aside from the money, the US really doesn’t want a determined Kim Jung Un to test their resolve. And Kim’s noises are playing strongly to exactly that scenario. Whether Kim would actually go there is the question, isn’t it.
The rest of the world knows that the US has hollowed out its economic power by stretching its military too thin and too far and not getting its elites to pony up for the costs. And they see the folly of even more tax cuts. They can tell when someone is taking down a government piece by piece. And Trump is throwing over every bit of diplomatic power by not putting ambassadors in place who can at least communicate what the host government is saying to them. There is that much distrust of the permanent state within which the deep state is embedded. Tillerson is going to be hard pressed to keep the lights on in consulates and embassies in some countries without staff in the field to do it.
So we watch while the world tries to figure out what to do with an aging empire in its time of dementia.
great parallel, thd. trump is a narcissistic showman! and other reports indicate that xi and putin were meeting, and that the meeting stretched to at least two hours, mebbe three. i actually may post a whole thread on g-20, as so many alt journalists have weighed in. but it’s sadly have to be all copy paste, as life here isn’t quite sorted yet.
one piece of news is that the pentagon claimed, as did the imperial stenographers, that kim launched an icbm, ‘one like we’ve never seen before!!!’. well, the russian military says that’s because it was a medium range ballistic missile, so…. but yeah, kim can’t just stfu, can he? or is he ‘un’, i dunno.
thanks for explaining herr T and abe; it makes sense. but still, having al the imperial friends increasing their military expenditures and profiles…what could go wrong?
now i’d wondered about this aloud a bit on the open menu w/ reports that the US is quietly increasing its bases in syria, and the general trend toward federalization, esp. w/ those sexy anarchists the ypg in rojava. dunno if the prez listens to these folks or not, but:
oh, well that’s a real pip of an NGO most esp. on ;humanitarian missions’, qatar fueling terr’ism.. https://securitystudies.org/
and jacobin’s at it again, yet, still…
oh look it’s nobel’s prized peas winner Lu Xiabao, talkin’ bout love. awww. dance me to the end of wuv Wu, there’s a puppy in my heart that is wagging its tail. to death. puppy doesn’t even know we have prisons in this country. puppy prisons, too. now I made puppy sad.
Hopefully (scream screech yell) “Trumpeters meet w/Putinistas to share dirt on HRC!!!!!” (end scream screech yell) won’t derail humanity’s last chance for peace, Mad Dog Mattis. remember that Cerberus? one of the sane ones in the admin, someone who puts on his big boy britches. every day. and the dog Collar of Authority, too. look at them sparkly dog tags he wears to prove it. right where his wolfish heart is. hang dogs in office? or take the One Collar off & throw it in the fires of Kennel Doom? tough call. let’s see if he has any honesty left in him first, as Dogberry might say. if the mad dogs love their puppies too…
okay. i just the guardian’ crash course on lu. and ai wei wi, or close. so…translation, please?
and ay yi yi on mad dog mattis. i was just thinkin’ how convenient it is for the trumpeter to have said that he leaves alla the military stuff to his generals. save for the tomahawks (god, reminds me of the brave’s racist ‘chop’, and ‘operation geronimo’). love ‘the one collar’ (that fails to rule them all, but sho’ does try to).
i hope the mad dogs love their puppies, too.
i couldn’t remember for certain on the MOAB, but i’d clicked into CN on a different errand, and found: ‘Risk of Unleashing ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, Despite a constructive meeting between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin at the G-20, Official Washington’s hawks still hold a strong hand, in part, because Trump has ceded broad power to the military, says David Marks, july 8, david marks, consortium news side question: why does CN carry norman solomon?
“However, in Trump’s near-half-year in office, he has slid more into line with the war hawks both by continuing to beat his chest over his own application of military force and by shifting control over many attack decisions to military field commanders and the Pentagon high command.
In mid-April, after a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan, President Trump explained his thinking as he reveled in the first use of the massive “mother of all bombs” that was dropped on an Islamic State target in Afghanistan.
Trump said, “What I do is I authorize my military, we have the greatest military in the world, and they’ve done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and that’s what they’re doing. Frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately. If you look at what’s happened over the last eight weeks and compare that really to what has happened over the last eight years, you’ll see there is a tremendous difference.”
MAGA; N0T MENA.
lord luv a duck, bruce. i was about to ask if this might be some sort of magical incantation, then pinged some memory of #MAGA, yes, sparkle pony magic: make amerika great again, lol, once in a while i do…kinda/sorta zero in on something…eventually. ;-)
Two things are telling here: Sy Hersh is rarely wrong and the evidence supporting the accusations is totally bunk. I read Ted Postol’s initial debunking back in April, sorry I didn’t dig that out of Scribd.
It does seem that coverage that inquired rather than covered was only outside the MSM, like RT, Consortium News, ZeroHedge. Also TRNN and DN! .. consider the lesson for the rest of us is see who can be trusted to (at least) question the causes for war, war and moar war.
Like Postol, Hersh emphasizes the immediate production of shoddy, politically preferred intelligence as the hair-raising item here. As a reporter, Hersh only draws the parallel to Gulf of Tonkin, Iraq, etc. while Postol demands an inquiry into what’s wrong with the IC. The corporate dupopoly’s grand salute to the Big Lie and their scurrying to go on the MSM and join in praise of our beautiful
dicksmissiles is disgusting and disheartening.Bernie was too compliant (didn’t question the CW: Assad bad man always guilty!) although he was against the knee-jerk strike because zero diplomacy unilateralism doesn’t work. Tulsi Gabbard has been consistent and correct on these odd little gas ‘attacks’ and the war seeking behavior by both R and D administrations. She questions the ‘instant intelligence’ especially from terrorist held areas, calls for OPCW investigation and demands an end to these regime-change wars because they spawned the hell that spans MENA
Wilkerson was unequivocal on 7 April: it was for domestic political consumption. The way everyone thought Trump was so yummy all of a sudden… is just another sign of the US empire collapsing.
I put this Khan Shaykhun affair as the sudden, initial pivot by Trump towards the House of Saud and against Iran. I’m sure Russia quietly signed off on Trump’s retaliation: they get to be the careful and sane one versus US crazy cowboy action and that works for them at home and abroad. Again the US politics angle: I never believed there was a threat of escalation with Russia from Trump’s attacks on Syria. Twas a fakey slap fight (only Syrian losses) so they could make up now at the G20.
while doing evening chores, it was hard not to take a break and come back and say ‘someone’s wrong on the internet’, esp. since it was i. duh, of course putin would have told the syrians to move their airplanes out, as all that were left were thr ‘hanger maidens’ or whatever they’d called them (not flyable, anyway).
the other thing was that i’d brought this fukkery from the café to another site, and i suppose it was almost predictable how many were quite callous about it all.
“My personal favorite Evil of the Week flavor is Bill Gates, Western Imperium Deep State™ leader:
‘Gates urges to abandon generosity, impede migrants from reaching Europe’, July 5, 2017, RT
“During an interview Germany’s Welt am Sonntag, Gates, one of the richest people on the planet, warned of the grave consequences of exceeding generosity towards refugees coming to Europe, whose numbers would only rise unless something is done.” Why are there so many refugees, Barbaric Bill? Yes,let them all drown in the sea, save even funeral expenses. Something so Madeleine Albright-esque about his warning and prescription, isn’t there?
https://www.rt.com/news/395356-migrants-overwhelm-europe-gates/
your final paragraph is of high interest to me, lemoyne. i guess it’s down to which Trump day, in the end, but russia quietly signing off, etc., can you say more?
yes, Ts pivot to the sauds against iran, but as for gabbard, the new american hero, she was consistent on the gas attacks, and even on not selling more arms to the sauds cuz yemen. but big al at c 99 wrote: ‘Syria, Tulsi Gabbard, Progressives, and U.S. Imperialism’. i just grabbed the link, haven’t read it again, but i did check, and he’s right on all of it. plus she is a major friend of the hindu thug modi, and tours around the US. his charm offensive ad agency must be fucking awesome. (i’d posted some of her BS on a post here somewhere.)
i do remember reading coverage of postol’s report, not the report itself. i believe that alistair crooke at consortium news asked wtf DI as well, but thanks for comparing the differences. nice list of alt news sites, but do include black agenda report, as well. now this is a bit OT, but of keen interest to me, as i’ve watched a lot of it for a long time now, esp. on twitter, and been turned of in interviews w/ the new norton and the new blumenthal.
b at MOA has nailed it, imo, w/ “Syria – The Alternet Grayzone Of Smug Turncoats’, or Max Blumenthal and Ben Norton switching horses w/o acknowledgment or apology, from advocating for regime change in syria to trashing others who do. they’ve apparently even trashed sharimine narwani who writes from the field in lebanon. he notes a similar issue w/ rania khalek. b even hints at norton’s plagiarism of vanessa beeley’s investigations on ‘the white helmuts’ psyop. a few commenters provide links to khalek having explained her changed mind. ;-) gotta scoot; evening chores calling my name. thanks for all this, including the cockburn interview. i might say more about the numbers in diaspora later cuz of a discussion at another website. we’ll see; it’s not very important, though..
I am quite sure that Trump is beholden to Russians who have propped up his empire of branded crap, and I think that support runs to more than a billion dollars. My best hope is that this support is what gets rid of Trump: impeachment for being a foreign agent with his business supported by a long list of foreign powers while he is in office. I am fairly sure that the IC has had him pegged as a Russian stooge for some time now.
Trump wants to be like Putin… only more so.
Trump wants to be a real boy Billionaire Oligarch Yahoo.
The very last thing Trump will do is start a war with Russia.
The attack on the Syrian airbase was for domestic consumption.period.
It worked so well Trump will go back to the whiz-bang every time the Gulf States’ black ops give him the opportunity.
I just did a quick search to see who might have referenced Ted Postol and didn’t find BAR. I like BAR well enough considering they have the same rancid left perspective on Sanders that consistently stabbed him in the back as hec single-handedly knocked down the wall to the left of the Overton window. Almost all the back-biting of Sanders REEKS of envy.
I prefer Pied Piper to sheepdog as a metaphor for Sanders – He’s a failure as a sheepdog – he has refused ‘the [invisible corporate] hand that feeds’ and regularly snaps at it. As Pied Piper he has enthralled the youth and opened the space for a Tea Party of the left. People are demanding single-payer from Republicans (!) when the Rs dare to show up for town halls.
If formations like Justice Democrats, Brand New Congress, etc. can put forth viable winning progressive candidates, the leadership will be boxed in between office holders and the base and be forced to yield or go the way of the Whigs. Pretty big if there, but the alternative is the continued neo-liberal slide towards fascism &/or collapse into race war and barbarism so I prefer to see the obviously serious and real attempt to take over the Democrats which could either succeed or lead to a powerful walkout. Either way, this is the only path I have EVER seen that might provide a viable party of the left in the US. At the very least, Bernie’s presence and the battles for the state apparatii continue to expose the DLC-DNC Dinocrats for the namby-pamby corrupt sellouts that they are.
i hadn’t meant to imply that BAR had featured postol’s report, but that they collectively they’ve seen the truth of syria. but you must be referring to trump jr.’s giving up his emails? ach, thd, i now remember, had explained it, but i’d only seen it via site emails at i was putting together my g-20 diary. i’m in the middle of a major project here, or else i’d take the time to hunt it down now.
as for trump impeachment, thd had maybe (?) noted that it’s unlikely, as there is no opposition party w/ the power, but i may be mis-remembering what he’d said. impeachment, of course, doesn’t mean removal from office (see billy bubba clinton), but pence? even worse as some say? i dunno.
by and large i’ll leave ya alone on the bern, but for saying two things: he’s not anti-imperialist by any means, and democratic socialists are ‘reform capitalists’; i’m not.
on quick edit: naomi klein is also ‘reform capitalist’ (capitalism will never be ‘fettered’ again), and by my lights, it’s militarism and capitalism that are the roots of our oppression, and of millions upon millions more around the world.
i’m not nearly as down on putin as you seem to be, but a for war with russia, defense one says the military is gaming one as we speak. palace coup again? beats me.
Ann Garrison at BAR has repeatedly hit the so-called proof of a sarin ‘attack’ – but I haven’t read past the headlines on a search at BAR. I really am fine with BAR, but don’t get the left attacking Sanders as point man instead of using him as a foil and helping him break ground or break the ice. Don’t want to go around and around on Sanders or Klein with you, but I must note that No Is Not Enough is an important thing to say to the Dims and those newly activbated who are only against stuff. I have been saying for years that the left needs a positive vision: something clear and coherent [h/t John Trudell] that people can work towards and that can be used to separate candidates from corporations and the greedy wealthy.
I’m sure that I am not nearly as ‘down on Putin’ as you might think I am. He outclassed Obama on the Syrian chemical weapon stockpile. I too see the permanent state including the IC working to bring Trump down, but, at least in part, they are finally earning the trillions they have spent on national security. Trump is a sellout BS artist wannabe dicktater who Peter Principled himself into a world of hurt. I hate to get attached to these high-level things I can not really influence, but I do hope that Mueller’s hires are pointing towards a future where they make it clear that our system has been sold out. It’s a vague and perhaps fruitless hope that [the backlash against] Trump and the sycophantic Republicans will enable and cause systemic examination and reform.
Truly, I’m with Rose Ann DeMoro of NNU who said (when asked about #TheResistance) that she will focus on resisting corporate Democrats. I believe the battle over the D brand is real, has been joined and may take at least 3 or 4 years to play out.
You have been asking when will Bernie drop a single-payer plan in the hopper and the answer seems clear enough now: as the Republicans complete their own self-exposure as secretive, inept and cruel and the popular calls for single-payer get louder and clearer (especially from the D base) and co-sponsors come on board (last time he got none & has at least a handful now)…
Bernie will submit his single-payer bill after the Rs do what they will (and harm many) and before the August recess. Of course it won’t even move, much less pass, but single-payer is one element of a positive progressive frame for the Ds to run on in 2018.
i’m finally ladeling all of this pepita sauce into containers to freeze, a couple f-ups along the way. i have a few pails of flowers and greens mr. wd brought in before he left for work this a.m., and need to get them in vases. so…back as i can.
but for now, will you please say specifically what you mean by ‘single payer’? but no, i’d meant klein’s ‘this changes everything’. or ‘nothing’, as the wags would have it. ;-)
I am agnostic about single-payer, but do look for something that is like Canada’s system and for simplicity an expansion of an existing government entity paying all medical bills. So this discussion is not completely OT: I note that the ‘brutal regime’ in Syria still provides universal health care and that has gone more underreported than Sy Hersh.
The recent attempt in NV (vetoed by Gov. Brian Sandoval) recognized that 300,000 people (4x expected) signed up under the Medicaid expansion and so they extended that (another 1.5x?) to cover all the remaining uninsured … by opening it to everyone on a premium basis, I think.
Both the CA and NV legislation don’t directly answer the ‘day after’ question – I understand they both called for study into HowTo?. There is a real need for transition planning to bridge over the last-ditch defense of for-profit health insurance: “you will disrupt 1/6th of the economy!!!” The horror of uncertainty is sure to cause a massive meltdown of the Wall St. snowflakes. We can’t blame the poor widdle capitalists for striking [read:profit-taking] now can we?
The simple man still pays ‘for the pills that kill’.
The underlying, central need for the people is solidarity as coherence around a simple, clear vision of the future AND explicit, reasoned plans of how to move toward sustainable systems that care for, support and empower the environment and the people individually and in their groups. Yup, yup – this seems to be missing for single-payer, at least in part.
Yet now it seems that many people including most D voters are getting hangry for single-payer. The rapid passage of the single-payer through the NV leg. (Medicaid) and the CA Senate (Medicare) has been described as throwing a bone to the hangry hankerings of the base. In NV, Sandoval’s veto was inevitable – of course it did occur at the last possible minute in the Friday news hole. In CA, the House was always going to study it into oblivion to avoid putting Gov. Brown on the spot. Well played fer sure, but still playing games instead of building a world that works.
so it was under gadaffi in lybia, plus free college tuition, and more. cuba as well. single payer failed big in CO, but oh, my, the $$$ the for-pay health lobbyists spent!
well, i went and opened ajamu baraka’s piece at CP (it wasn’t up at BAR yet):
“Many on the left have called for a single-payer system similar to those that work well (if not perfectly) in Britain, the Netherlands, Finland and elsewhere in Europe. But even with an “improved Medicare for all” single-payer system, costs will continue to increase in the U.S. because they cannot be completely controlled when all of the linkages in the healthcare system are still firmly in the hands of private capital.
The only way to control the cost of healthcare and provide universal coverage is to eliminate for-profit, market-based healthcare. Take insurance companies completely out of the mix and bring medical device companies, the pharmaceuticals companies and hospitals chains under public control.”
https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/07/13/health-care-in-america-where-is-the-socialist-solution/
https://www.healthcare-now.org/legislation/hr-676/
maraget flowers agrees: ‘A fix for the Affordable Care Act’
“There is one way that we can fix the ACA, and I call it the Private Extraction. A private extraction means that we would remove the private health insurance industry from the system. No more tax credits for private plans. No more subsidies or re-insurance to private health insurers. No more government marketplaces and employees to sell their plans to the public. This would save hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars every year.”
https://popularresistance.org/yes-we-can-fix-the-aca-nobodys-talking-about-this/
“What I do is I authorize my military, we have the greatest military in the world, and they’ve done the job, as usual. We have given them total authorization, and that’s what they’re doing. Frankly, that’s why they’ve been so successful lately.” and there is a tremendous difference: our 1st billionaire spouting complete gibberish as he, not Matthis & co., bombs people. cuz, I mean I didn’t get out of the 7th grade to just let this “pass the presidential authority,” “my military,” to someone else b.s. slide. The MOAB stops here President dumbass. even cnn knows that.
Anyway, I get why people tho’t the obaminator was deep, after listening to 1.7 lectures by Milkbone fucking Glosswell, (aka when npr does a 30 minute segment of “practical philosophy.”) that barely-re-glanced-at-history dude w/the 5 “non-fiction” bestsellers who writes for the New Yorker. Rodin-esque except for being sculpted by Chanel & Ziprecruiter, not Glen Beck’s Goldmine or Alex Jones’ vitamins. w/ books like “the Tipster Point” & “Boink! Why things Bounce – and what *you* can do about it!” yes Slocum Gladchurch, now we all have the connection b/n golf courses, cemeteries and waste of primo real estate frying in our brain pans. thanks. so M. Honeywell is doing this mildly interesting talk for us, me, who don’t know precisely how screwed up the state of CA’s property taxes are. and it brings him to an analogy w/this rather more interesting paradox, that simple Jason had never heard of:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ship_of_Theseus#The_classic_paradox
The ship wherein Theseus and the youth of Athens returned from Crete had thirty oars, and was preserved by the Athenians down even to the time of Demetrius Phalereus, for they took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their places, in so much that this ship became a standing example among the philosophers, for the logical question of things that grow; one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.
— Plutarch, Theseus (this is a direct quote; I checked.)
Smoothwell places this question of identity over time/change w/Theseus in the boat, sailing somewhere, changing all these planks out mid-ocean. I am not joking. but it’s ok cuz they do it one plank at a time. what’s a dry dock? so the answer to this complete idiot’s pseudo-paradox is that Theseus & his crew get so obsessed w/ his dumb question they sink themselves & drown. don’t put any chowder-headed Platonists in charge of your boat you over-read ever illiterate dumbass. things that grow, indeed. since the greeks were like sailors & you know stuff, I tho’t his take was, um, like, odd, so, having had a set of World Book encyclopedias at home in 4th grade, I took 20 seconds to goog it & hit the wiki. and yes, I will provide chapter & verse for the doubters about our rev. dr. pangloss, M Gladcandy. I won’t link it but the wiki article on him has some nice comments in the “reception” section. there also used to be an on-line Gladwell book generator.
i couldn’t believe my truth-telling ears about how awful this lecture was so thank you sir, may i have another? he’s the kind of Earnest who asks, in a lecture on Vietnam, “how do you measure the morale of a people you are trying to bomb into submission?” w/o the slightest hiccup in the form feed tray of the Rand Institute talking points copier he is manning so cheerily in his mind. Esp. the question: why we were really losing when we (sic) tho’t we were winning. (answer? Rand is paid by the Pentagon. deep huh. who’d a figgered? eggheads don’t do that!) So naïve that I came to the conclusion that he is a psy-op. or that he doesn’t exist. or both. who else is so blindingly trusting of military self-reporting in the age of Vietnam? he explains the colossal delusions of McNamara & co by a David Brooks-esque resort to “confirmation bias”? see how philosophy helps us w/, like, stuff that’s like harder than other stuff? next up: how neuro-linguistics proves Goodgag’s thoughts plumb the depths. yes, deep thought kill brain cells.
the sum of the matter is that Seymour Hersch doesn’t write in the US partly cuz people in the US are fucking morons. Fartwell writes for the New Yorker; so did Seymour at one time. What comes to mind from this Deepwell image of a once-jew-banning & still urban minority-banning super elite country club: *Brentwood in L.A. is now surrounded by barbed wire*? not for a lack of security guards/dogs, cameras, fences, money, etc., etc. is it? so we need to adjust the CA tax code???? right? and that’s going to save us from Trump who is Hitler, who, despite being Hitler, needs to spend more time working & less on the golf course? “Being Adolf: the value of on the job training,” a new bestseller by the Charles Kuralt of thought, Talcum Smilefeel.
and all this from my m.d./phd doktor herrenperfesser friend, who got trapped in the same Cheergood spotlights. wow! CEO performance improves as golf course time goes down. isn’t social science neat? but does it apply to hospital administrators???? he’s now happy to change the tax code that won’t affect him till inheritance time rolls around if that gets those unseemly barbed wires down. oh, and let’s open Brentwood to the public (paying or not, Max Smartwell?) on Sundays, but not during the summer, and so we can be more like democratic, socialist-utopia, Canada. otherwise Lil’ Mal gonna climb him some fence, maybe, and take a stand! despite his ability to afford to walk in the front gate. for life. he’s today’s Trotsky.
fuck this country. when Odysseus’ bag of winds ran out, he should have had one of Amerika’s deep thinkers on board to set a-yappin’. he could have wrapped a sail around Gladfart’s head & then flown home.
speaking of wind bags…
sooooo glad that ya wind-bagged, j. but how can i possibly think which parts to answer at the end of a long day? srsly, and by the by…whooosh. yeah, but one question for now: would you like to be ruled by noam chomsky, et.al.? ;-)
oh, and was it you who brought the story (parable?) of the wooden ship that was given orders to the shipbuilder to make it faster, faster, w/ three decks of oarsmen? never tried, it listed and sank on its first voyage cuz: top heavy?
on edit: oh, and not to fence you in after such a sublime stram-of-consciousness epistle, but you never translated ‘oh look it’s nobel’s prized peas winner Lu Xiabao, talkin’ bout love. awww. dance me…’. that to much to ask?
“people of Jewusawem, Wome is yow fwiend.” Michael Palin as Pontius Pilate. cooing baby talk. it is so soothing not to know about Peltier, Jamal, and the millions of others I know nothing about. it’s a great comfort. Twue wuv & commitment is in Howwywood…and China. oh lord, we watched the movie “Okja” the other night. gmo super pigs will save us vegetarians, if we only have a heart. barf. I mean the movie was actually really good, except for that one giant gmo black hole at its center. anti-animal cruelty, yet pro-gmo. how hard was it for the creators to find a psychopathic CEO & his/her bootlick board as the model for their story? they hopped on the elevator to meet w/their own condescending boss? and is the origin, in the movie, of such psychosis capitalism itself, or the CEO’s certifiable dad? (it can be both.)
minus my comments about him personally, I sent my doctor friend my comments on Malware Shatgood. He said, “I read all 5 of his books and they were great!” and then he sent me another lecture…
when someone repeats a zen koan or some little proverb or story or whatever, the way they fuck it up is revelatory of the individual’s psyche. Gladheart gives a lecture about the abuse of ownership/wealth, golf courses & cemeteries, cuz we are all obsessed by gardens & graves, and his little lecture dinghy of observation capsizes on the question of ownership b/c he’s so damn superficial. and just plain dumb. as Bear Stearns is collapsing in 2008, from its business model of ripping off its clients in every way imaginable, again the problem is the CEO spending too much time on the golf course! their business was massive fraud. and they are not working hard enough. the work fetish, inter alia, blinds Derpwell from how dumb he is as he smugly sits there weaving the tapestry of cliché. I will not try to answer why this dipstick into the burnt motor oil of the engine of stupidity doesn’t know that big biz deals are wheeled around on those CEO golf carts. or maybe the guy has never heard of the Japanese? and actually knows nothing at all about golf, both the chirpy, casual bonhomie & laser-like precision, skill & focus these “friends” & “partners” have to show in order to screw each other over on the golf course? fucking idiot.
lol. i’d meant to come back and add that, given i hadn’t recognized most of your allusions, it made it even harder to respond. but gladheart is the gladheart farms dude in asheville, nc? and derpwell? ‘a full farm of 7 acres w/ 3 houses on it; tractors run on waste veggie oil’.
caveat auditor: you can’t unhear it. and his voice is really really annoying.
http://revisionisthistory.com/
i dinnae listen cuz i’m trying to put together a g-20 shuffle thng, but his wiki photo shows how eeek-worthy his voice must be. but yikes! he’s a commie, lol?
tempest in a tea saucer, ain’t it? letting the poors golf on occasion provided they can afford it is communism. you are not being paranoid if the entirety of public discourse actually is a strategy of tension.
and just who is or is not gonna let them unbarbed poors golf on “affordable non-summer sunday”? let me guess…the same someone w/lots & lots of guns?
if the happy Buddha is really a kitty cat newborn every moment, then meet the dialectics of enlightenment: “let me tell you this neat story I just read, about a swell, hard-working guy who was in trouble so he worked hard & stuck a big needle in this big giant’s one big circular eye, like a big white hot lunar pie like in that song, but sharp…” 45 dreary minutes later, “…what we learn from this story is what I call, The Power of Now, which is The Power of Yes. i’ll collect my fee now, thank you TED, for this marvelous opportunism.” yeah, nothing about not playing “fair” when some titanic asshole is making all the rules, aye mate? what Odysseus did is just not cricket. the RAND corporation does not approve of those unsound methods. (megalol. our US trained luau jihadi wanted to weaponize a drone for Allah. wherever he got that idea, again, not cricket. crazy not cricket.)
our hula-hipped luau jihadi in a bikini. scary.
sorry, censored by your overlord and host, double ish.
how did that get there???
accident, believe me. or am I just too embarrassed to admit my fetish? I have heard of octo-porn, but procto-porn? sick sick.
I feel ya j… I listened to A Good Walk Spoiled (S2 Ep1) … it’s like a dumbed-down comic book version of This American Life. First off the title is a rip-off of Frank DeFord’s golf book title, though it may be apocryphal … jeez it’s cheap and the show is really not about golf. Buncombe Happyhole went through that whole thing about golf-property tax-aristocracy and only used the word corporation once in passing. Of course it’s the corporations that provide the eternally living shell that allows the ‘temporal physical ontological continuation’ or whatever jargony fizz he added to the issue of wealth concentration that is so inherent in capitalism that it is recreating feudalism in China, US Eastern Europe, etc.
I keep thinking about Chevron’s refinery in Richmond CA on a huge piece of waterfront property paying some tiny, archaic, rigged and permanent assessment whereas any child inheriting their parent’s house gets reassessed in line with the inflated assets of the modern bubble economy. I’m sure there are other similar situations all over CA and all Malcum Gladhell can think is that we could maybe get the rich people to share their private parks (golf courses). Out of season, or maybe on the Sabbath.
I think what bugs me most about Revisioning Your Memory Hole (brought to you by Chanel!!!) is that I sorta liked much of it – it’s not definably bad or stupid at any particular point. After (more than once) spending time describing the fence and how it jams the public onto the verge of the road, he ends the show with ‘I will climb the fence… next time.’ Hahaha … i doubt it. Mr. Emptywell should just get some bolt cutters… make his own entrance to the glorious park they are maintaining just for him while he lives like Kato Kaelin at the back of his friend’s $million+ estate… when he’s in LA.
that was great. in the interest of masochistic fairness to my dr. friend, I listened to his ted talklet on David & Goliath. forget his lack of insight into the philistines or ancient warfare or the basic physics of bullets projected by hand, or his travelogue of how beautiful this valley was where they fought (supposedly, right Gallstone?) or whether goliath had marzipan syndrome or was it macadamia. Gildwell has not the insight into storytelling of a goddam itchy & scratchy episode. he has the philistines send out an oversized Forrest Gump to fight ancient Israel’s version of Bruce Lee. I am not joking.
his level of learned ignorance is not an accident nor is it forgivable. he gets paid to make the concern-troll readers of the Economist feel smart. “My friends from MIT all like him,” whined my dr. friend. Diagnosis: Overeducated Morons. who are the Philistines again?
oh, and i’d forgotten to say that i’m outta here for tonight. ain’t it awesome livin’ in the USA? somebody get me a cheeeezeburger!
Thank you, J, for the laughs.
Inspired, I looked up Glosswell over at the great wiki, and found these gems:
Nice to see that advertising has worked out for him:
Ralph.