the sword of damocles
Okay, then. Given that a couple Café denizens had mentioned them, I swear I’d really tried to do some due diligence even though all of this seems a snooze-fest to me, as does most of the ‘Profiteering from Russian oligarchs’, etc. As in: ain’t it bidness as usual? Zo…I read Marcy Wheeler on Democracy Now’s ‘Trump White House in Crisis as Emails Confirm Campaign Embraced Russian Effort to Defeat Clinton’. Wait, no; I actually got soooo cross-eyed-blurry-eyed that I’d never finished (Manafort, Kushner, Kremlin-connected attorney, and a cha cha cha.)
But when I’d peeked in consortium news yesterday and had spied ‘Forgetting the ‘Dirty Dossier’ on Trump’, Robert Parry, consortium news, July 10, 2017, something rang a bell, of course.
“Yes, I realize that the editors of The New York Times long ago cast aside any journalistic professionalism to become charter members of the #Resistance against Donald Trump. But the latest frenzy over a meeting between Donald Trump Jr. and a Russian lawyer who was dangling the possibility of information about the Democrats receiving money from Russians represents one of the more remarkable moments of the entire Russia-gate hysteria.
Essentially, Trump’s oldest son is being accused of taking a meeting with a foreign national who claimed to have knowledge of potentially illegal activities by Trump’s Democratic rivals, although the promised information apparently turned out to be a dud.
Yet, on Monday, the Times led its newspaper with a story about this meeting – and commentators on MSNBC and elsewhere are labeling Trump Jr. a criminal if not a traitor for hearing out this lawyer.
Yet, no one seems to remember that Hillary Clinton supporters paid large sums of money, reportedly about $1 million, to have ex-British spy Christopher Steele use his Russian connections to dig up dirt on Trump inside Russia, resulting in a salacious dossier that Clinton backers eagerly hawked to the news media.
Also, the two events – Trump Jr.’s meeting with the Russian lawyer and the Clinton camp’s commissioning of Steele’s Russia dossier – both occurred in June 2016, so you might have thought it would be a journalistic imperative to incorporate a reference or two to the dossier.”
Now Parry (remember that Consortium News was on the Prop side of the Prop or Not list) gives more similar historical examples: HW Bush getting dirt on Bubba C. (’passport-gate’ & Prague), Rs talking to South Vietnamese to tank LBJ’s peace talks, similarly communicating with Iranian officials to queer Carter’s Iranian hostage negotiations (very evil), and more. Sure, he spells out the Steele Dossier in all its gory yellow glory later on…
“Since he was not able to go to Russia himself, Steele based his reports mostly on multiple hearsay from anonymous Russians who claim to have heard some information from their government contacts before passing it on to Steele’s associates who then gave it to Steele who compiled this mix of rumors and alleged inside dope into ‘raw’ intelligence reports.” ha ha, but ya can’t un-ring even a proven bullshit bell, can ya?
“Trump Jr. said Russian lawyer Natalie Veselnitskaya “stated that she had information that individuals connected to Russia were funding the Democratic National Committee and supporting Mrs. Clinton. Her statements were vague, ambiguous and made no sense. No details or supporting information was provided or even offered. It quickly became clear that she had no meaningful information.”
According to Trump Jr.’s account, Veselnitskaya then turned the conversation to President Vladimir Putin’s cancellation of an adoption program which had sent Russian children to American parents, a move he took in reaction to the so-called Magnitsky Act, a 2012 punitive law passed by the U.S. Congress in retaliation for the 2009 death of Sergei Magnitsky in a Russian jail.”
WikiTweet below:
‘With the help of the research team, we killed a Bloomberg story trying to link HRC’s opposition to the Magnitsky bill to a $500,000 speech that WJC gave in Moscow.’ (heh.)
Under Parry’s Only One Side Heard, relates some historical narrative on a documentary film “…entitled “The Magnitsky Act. Behind the Scenes,” was essentially blocked for distribution in the West, with the European Parliament pulling the plug on its planned premiere in Brussels shortly before it was scheduled for showing.
When the documentary got a single showing at the Newseum in Washington, a Washington Post editorial branded the documentary Russian “agit-prop.”
The Post sought to discredit the filmmaker, Andrei Nekrasov, without addressing his avalanche of documented examples of Browder’s misrepresenting both big and small facts in the case. Instead, the Post accused Nekrasov of using “facts highly selectively” and insinuated that he was merely a pawn in the Kremlin’s “campaign to discredit Mr. Browder and the Magnitsky Act.” Sorry, but I didn’t seem to take all that in, either.
But, wondering if Marcy Wheeler of holographic memory fame had thunk of the Steele Dossier, I went back to the transcript and found that she had, right at the end, and good on her.
“You referenced my comments before the email came out. And I raised this question about what the difference is between meeting with a lawyer—and at that point, we knew she was a lawyer with a bunch of oligarch clients, we did not know that she was introduced to Don Jr. as somebody with the Russian government—and as the—as a Hillary surrogate, so somebody, you know, degrees separate from Hillary, a Hillary surrogate paying Christopher Steele to pay Russian entities, including people in the Kremlin, for dirt on Trump. And I think that’s a fair question.
We now have a lot more evidence that, A, Don Jr. knew that this was—or was at least informed that this was tied to a Russian government effort, and we know that it was tied to this kind of quid pro quo, which was never the case for this Steele dossier, which is where the Peegate, the pee tape, is supposed to have come from. But, I mean, underlying it, our politics has become such that both sides spend a lot of money and a lot of effort to find dirt on their opponents. Where that, I think, crosses a new line—and Don Jr. pretends to be naïve: “Well, you know, this happens all the time”—where it crosses a line is when the dirt is being dealt in the context of things like policy changes on sanctions reliefs.”
If it did; I’m agnostic, as I haven’t really been read in on that, but do we know she was representing the Russian gov, even as a prosecutor?
But hoho, haha, heehee: ‘Trump-Russia dominates headlines, but there’s more evidence of collusion between Democrats & Ukraine’, Bryan MacDonald, RT ‘agitprop’, July 14
I’ll try to break it down in brief although his opening gambit on T, jr.’s idiocy, media coverage, especially on she-mailer Natalia Veselnitskaya is a great read, but I digress:
“There is another thing which makes this endless Trump-Russia delirium even more dubious. And that’s how the US establishment will leap on any connection, no matter how vague, concerning the President’s team and Russians, but ignores dealings between the Democratic Party and Ukraine. The elephant in the room which has been almost completely ignored, and was amazingly not even mentioned when Petro Poroshenko visited Washington last month.
The real world
Let’s be clear, Ukraine feared a Trump presidency. Because, on the campaign trail, the candidate had openly suggested recognizing Russia’s reabsorption of Crimea and spoke of the Donbass crisis as a problem for Europe, not America. As a result, Kiev bet the house on Hillary Clinton. And lost.
As Politico reported in January: “Ukrainian government officials tried to help Hillary Clinton and undermine Trump by publicly questioning his fitness for office. They also disseminated documents implicating a top Trump aide in corruption and suggested they were investigating the matter, only to back away after the election. And they helped Clinton’s allies research damaging information on Trump and his advisers.”
Now, this is pretty explosive stuff. A credible American news organization is reporting how a foreign government directly interfered in the US election. But the popular press didn’t pursue the story. Presumably, because its runs counter to the established narrative.
“A Ukrainian-American operative who was consulting for the Democratic National Committee met with top officials at the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington in an effort to expose ties between Trump, top campaign aide Paul Manafort, and Russia, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation,” the piece continued. “The Ukrainian efforts had an impact in the race, helping to force Manafort’s resignation and advancing the narrative that Trump’s campaign was deeply connected to Ukraine’s foe to the east, Russia.”
And here was the zinger: “Politico’s investigation found evidence of Ukrainian government involvement in the race that appears to strain diplomatic protocol dictating that governments refrain from engaging in one another’s elections.”
Later, Politico focused on the activities of Alexandra Chalupa, a Ukrainian-American activist, who admitted acting as a link between Ukraine’s Washington Embassy and the Democratic National Committee. And also how Sergei Leshchenko, elected in 2014 as an MP for Poroshenko’s party, had offered ledgers purportedly showing connections between Trump and Manafort before urging “Ukrainian and American law enforcement to aggressively investigate Manafort.” Incidentally, Manafort has always been especially appalled at attempts to link his work to Russia, saying “all my efforts were focused on helping Ukraine move into Europe and the West.” [long snip with more, plus other examples of the US ‘interfering’ in other nations elections (nowhere near the exhaustive lists we’ve seen).
“In Ukraine, the interruptions have had even more serious consequences. By the admission of Victoria Nuland, a member of the Obama administration, Washington spent over $5 billion on influence projects in the country. The first “regime change” operation came in 2004 and was known as the “Orange Revolution.” And in 2013, US politicians and officials, such as John McCain and Nuland herself, turned up in Kiev to encourage the Maidan movement, in which the US ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt was prominent.
That led to the violent overthrow of a democratically elected government, which divided the country and caused the separation of Crimea and a civil war in the Donetsk and Lugansk regions. And it also contributed to an economic collapse which has seen the average Ukrainian salary fall to around $200 a month and led to unprecedented levels of emigration.”
Now MacDonald doesn’t mention a lot of the history of say, Monsanto buying large swathes of ag land in Ukraine, Joe Biden’s son Hunter being appointed head legal counsel to Ukraine’s largest private gas producer, Burisma.
“The appointment comes just weeks after Vice President Biden visited Ukraine’s capital to show support for the country in its fight against Russia’s annexation of Crimea and troublemaking in Ukraine’s east. He also warned of the dangers of government corruption.
“Russia already regards the U.S. as meddling in Ukrainian affairs, so this news won’t change that perception,” said Steven Pifer, a former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine and a director of the Brookings Arms Control and Non-Proliferation Initiative. “Russia may, however, use it for propaganda purposes.
In late April, when the vice president made an official trip to Ukraine, Burisma appointed one of Hunter’s business partners, Devon Archer, to its board, according to the Moscow Times, an English-language Russian news service. Archer is a wealthy investor and Democratic campaign fundraiser with long ties to secretary of state John Kerry.”
Just bidness as usual, see? No quid pro quo. Evah. ‘No conflicts of interest’ says the White House. Shucks, ma; even Michael Sheerer at Time called horse hockey on that nonsense back in 2014. Back then, it was White, not Red.
Hooray on the above! Yanukovych’s failure to love it in 2014…meant he had to go, the poor schmuck. Hello, Vickie, Yats, and neo-Nazis!
@KyivPost ‘Poroshenko convinces EU no anti-corruption court needed’ | KyivPost http://buff.ly/2uYSfir
Kinda makes you wonder what all this is replacing that should be in the news, doesn’t it? (wsws.org suggests a few items.) Wsws.org also narrates the now ‘fevered pitch’ of Washington political warfare.)
davidly
Greyson Smythe
LeMoyne
juliania2
ohiobarbarian
stephenadavis1
wendyedavis
café babylon 
pointing out hypocrisy in either of these sinking plague rat parties is to waste time. “but everybody’s doing it” is the exculpating answer to everything. it’s that bromanwitch love that covers multitudes. to know all is to forgive all. until it’s bang bang time.
I miss the soviet union more and more every day.
and if ever the world is to be again flooded, like the Netherlands, to kill off its rats, then the eternal whale will still survive-you know who. maybe earth is meant to go back to the whales????
pasting this diary together was rather by a waste of my time, as well, j. but i didn’t bring the many other parallels/comparisons to make any noise that because both sides have done it so often makes it okay, forgivable, TINA, but just to demonstrate that it’s bidness as usual, although from what i just read via email…thd disagrees.
someone recently wrote that the main beef Ds have is that T is not only an oligarch’s oligarch, but a nepotistic/cronyist one to boot.
what bothers me a lot is that ‘the sides’ don’t seem to realize is that herr T was the next logical extension of oligarchic, inverted totalitarian US policies, domestic and foreign, from at least raygun onward, although more extreme, of course.
and i just read a 57 comment thread, 1/2 at least of which nailed revanchist putin to a cross and opened fire on him. and let’s not mince words: china and russia will be comin’ after us soon, cuz russia’s oil-based economy is over, and can only leverage itself by way of china.
reminded me of a crazed iraq war hawk writing a letter to the editor in answer to something i’d written, to the effect that she was glad that i wouldn’t might wearing a burka soon. those touting revolution damned well better hope that all this current and coming immiseration and ugliness causes a major revolution in spiritual consciousness, or my guess is they won’t like what follows any better. and sadly, that looks pretty unlikely far away right now, but all it takes is a spark…that can spread.
p.s. on edit: i wonder how many times i’ve wondered aloud that maybe we should just give the planet back to the cockroaches and dolphins, let them sort out some new evolutionary path. ;-)
i didn’t mean to imply this was diary was a waste. not at all. I was thinking of these lib fb know-nothings screeching about how the country is being handed over to the Corleones instead of the Gambinos and being invested in their party running the national casino/gun range. if only self-congratulation & ignorant hysteria effected anything in this world besides one’s floundering ego.
beside, per woody allen, I hear the Russians give good meeting. i’ll take a meeting if they’ll take a meeting. have their people call my people, ok?
yeah, trump’s bad. optics are bad. might ruin it for the rest of them. not an oligarch’s oligarch. sauron’s eye has gotten too big for his britches or something & the ring wraiths are getting extra screechy.
w/the icebergs, I mean, you know what I mean, collapsing and the specieses dying off and the other stuff, it’s hard to keep a sense of proportion about all the non-stop bells & whistles endlessly preceding the mouse that squeaks. Janet Yell-in says the economy is robust but she promises to keep an eye on it. so there’s always that bright star, that true north, to guide us.
ack, i hadn’t meant to imply that you’d thunk it was a waste of time, but that i did. had a few arguments w/ myself over it that (ahem) mr. wd was forced to overhear. he’s learned when i say ‘not gonna do it’ too many times, that i’m offering my own minority report, and that i will. hence: ‘sorry to bother you (and me) and tra la la. good on ya for ‘which crime families’; i like it.
hell yeah, take the meeting w/ the russians, and i’ll do lunch. but it’s all right ma, ‘Fukushima’s radioactive water to be released into ocean under new plan’, via RT, but tepco (at the japan times link) says it ain’t that bad, ma everybody must get stoned. i mean tritiumed… lord luv a duck, ya get treated to that bill gates’ ‘don’t be so generous yech on the right sidebar.
i’ll stick in paul street after i do some evening chores, speaking of icebergs breaking.
end the fed or federalize it! (ron paul).
did I hear you say fukushima? I knew I was leaving out a detail or two.
Don’t you find the first full-scale international information war of the post-American empire era fascinating? All of a sudden outlets like RT are balanced against Democracy Now. The entire Republican Congressional Caucus does a 180-degree turn on the danger of Russia (including John McCain in practice). The entire Democratic Caucus does a parallel 180-degree turn on what exactly? Enough of them already were Russophobes. What turns is that all of a sudden Democrats are the US deep state’s BFF. And the intelligence community can’t back Hillary Clinton enough. And the Twitter salvos and Facebook barrages continue to echo along with the “Bernie woulda won” and “BernieBros” crossfire. And then a blast of Rachel Maddow from one side or Sean Hannity from the other, rolling in Chris Hayes or David Gergen to do some softening up of the opposition. As the David Brooks and Tom Friedman battle fog shrouds the field. Just watch the aspens turn all together on each side in this war of facts.
And Mark Zuckerberg, who understands that war is a racket, is rolling it in and preparing to roll out the next dynasty.
What seems to be at play is a struggle between the privatized rump remains of the United States and the Soviet Union, relegitimized by religious alliances, and financed by personal oligopolies organized under a bewildering array of shell companies. Up until now both sides have lived to a degree on the legacy infrastructure of the Cold War period, but the oligarchs (plural in both cases) want to take out cash and move in dramatically new ways, but wanting guaranteed profits.
What triggered the information war as sure as you can say, “Franz Ferdinand” was the very high popular vote margin that still lost the electoral vote. And the popular vote that flipped those states was in total less than 90,000 votes out of 135 million. What drove the information war was the leaks of material about Hillary Clinton and no doubt some US intelligence community information, accurate or invented, that the US election was in play by some known Russian entities.
As far as Trump opposition research is concerned, a friend of Jeb Bush first contracted Steele’s research. After Trump’s primary victory, GPS Fusion (who also handles PR for the Magnitsky Act and handled Romney’s ) then shopped the Steele Dossier to a Clinton friend, to the DNC, and to investigators and journalists before it was leaked. Interesting little grift that Glenn R. Simpson and Peter Frisch have. Must be much better paid that their previous careers in journalism.
That much is bidness as usual.
What is not bidness as usual is the predictable lineup of journalistic outlets all with coordinated spin on the story, evenly matched in journalistic throwweight. Notice that no one has remarked much about the information war itself, but instead have reported from one side or the other. Nor the current nature of the Russian and US state institutions.
Corrupt, privatized, serving a small group of private masters doesn’t quite get to the sort of capitalism or even post-capitalism that is emerging in the US and Russia, both having experienced the effects of a shock therapy to the collapsing conventional order.
The word “frenemy” gets a lot of use these days. Trump’s US and Putin’s Russia are frenemies with similar agendas and similar bypasses of their state constitutional orders. Congress has become like the Duma. The US security apparatus is moving in the direction of arbitrary authority common to the point of tradition in Russia.
President Pence will not turn this clock back.
Meanwhile the number of efforts to remove Trump from office will continue to increase. Those who ensure that the White House has worked well enough to this point is what Pence will have to deal with should he actually come to power before 2020.
There is a new form of politics coming into play here. Best to figure out what is going on before being condemnatory, celebratory, or bored. Trump and the Republicans are in an alliance to create the long-awaited permanent Republican majority that can never be overturned. What is left of the Democratic Party seek to prevent that permanent closure from ever happening.
The rest of the world is having the thrill of watching the US suffer through the sort of legitimacy crises the US inflicted on other nations. Some see Putin’s hand (after a few too many “color revolutions”) in this. Others see rot within the the US system itself.
Don Jr. — just a little too unseemly in his jumping for Clinton oppo research from a foreign lobbyist. No doubt not the only emails of offers from foreign lobbyists in town during 2016. Flynn seems to have been an agent of Turkey himself.
i suppose i find it interesting, if not fascinating, amigo, but i’m not following your ‘outlets like RT are now balanced against democracy now’ at all. i hadn’t know that the R congressional caucus had 180-ed, but sure it’s been fun watching the Ds be bum-buddies with at least ‘part’ of the deep state, esp. the intel part that leak to the times that ‘all 18 agencies believe’…yada, yada, ‘according to anonymous sources’.
but yeppers, the question is WHY the IC can’t back her enough? many posit that rapprochement w/ russia was the biggest no-no; makes sense to me, although new military and economic alliances are breaking so fast that it’s hard to keep up. Loose Cannon Tweeter is likely harder for the deepest state to control, thus contend with, no? the rest of that paragraph i’ll have to think about, esp. as i don’t keep up w/ those writers and pundits. although i admit i spent ten full minutes trying to find a good example of putin derangement syndrome (jr.’s emails) by tada…rachel maddow.
pardon me, though, fuck all of those who cried ‘constitutional crisis!’ when the red queen won the popular vote, but lost the electoral college vote. great time to Not Have a Debate on that. but yep, seeing the berners on twitter and at forums do that schtick…well, three day old fish, to me. but you’ve always seemed to know how the russian state works, or believe so. i’m simply not sure i can talk anywhere near intelligently about that. some call it ‘a managed democracy’, but really don’t even know what that’s supposed to mean; no matter. kinda funny, but i’ve seen soooo many analyses of ‘who voted for trump where and why’ that all i could do was chuckle in the end.
well, ii didn’t know about gps fusion, but i did wiki the fine-smelling organization; did j’s gladwell spritz them all with chanel by chance? and again, your understanding of russia’s security state is beyond my ken, i guess, as in: it’s worse there? in 2017:
“The American criminal justice system holds more than 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 901 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 76 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, and prisons in the U.S. territories.” i suspect, though, that chris floyd would tend to agree w/ you. ;-)
pretty binary form of political aims you’ve named, but where are all those indies? and why didn’t more folks vote? no box for ‘they all suck’? but that’s of course why no run-off voting, and ‘keep it to a duopoly’, isn’t it? but i might stay a bit bored, or at least philosophical, even given this new iteration of what-the-fukkery red/blue hysteria. and i’ll just post…what i notice and can’t not paste together (sadly, not ‘write’ any longer.
yeah, donnie seems to be an idiotic son hoping to please his creepy apprentice papa to me. dayum; is he really the president? how embarrassing. but at least he’s helping create a far more multipolar world, i’ll give him that.
See, from invoking cockroaches and dolphins to musing about donnie’s role in his dad’s White House, where he is often upstaged by Sis and her hubby (who incidentally seems to have suddenly lost the counsel of Jamie Gorelick [that name should register]), your foray into this swamp has netted some inneresting critters.
The red/blue hysteria was orginally a trick. Label a state by the 50%+1 of its vote. All of the acreage outshines the people. And Team Blue was crazy enough to reinforce the meme. And then Wisconsin fell, Michigan fell, Pennsylvania fell, New Jersey fell, Ohio fell, and no amount of blue-dogging would revive that dead donkey. Unless the D’s can find them a Jeremy Corbyn, it’s not looking good for them; brand’s dead; organization in too many states has withered on the vine or been pocketed by the wrong people. Mechanics of elections have become harder; defending the vote harder; financial sellouts easier. And they keep waiting for conservative voters to have buyers remorse. Problem is, they can’t themselves shove the lemmings over the cliff on healthcare and they have no alternative; trapped by TINA.
The Rs are trapped by their own cleverness. If they do what the Cruzitarians of their caucus want, there will either be a collapse or a huge blowback. That blowback won’t benefit either of the current party organizations. Know anyone else who is ready? The libertarian Paulistas? Drowning the government in a bathtub is not a legislative agenda.
When that blowback comes, there are certain realities that could command votes if the entrhrallment of the past 40 years breaks (you might argue with the time period, fair enough):
– A multipolar world — How many players remains to be seen.
– The dead weight of the most expensive military in the world.
– The failure to maintain, extend, and modernize infrastructure for the past 50 years.
– The necessity to have the conversation about what as a member of society everyone needs and putting in place those goods and services to get that done and lower everyone’s costs of living. The societies that do this will be on top of the new order.
– The corruption of secrecy to democratic governance; no telling if that can be fixed.
– The chains of the legacy of the institutions of the American frontier — slavery and genocide (it was organized as a series of institutions- traders, Indian scouts, Indian war militaries of European and indigenous temporary allies, schools, cultural elements of denigration and discrimination, reservations, court system, prison system). That is not identity politics but the legacy of a historical reality.
– The limits on the natural resources of the US that are the result of 150 years of stripmining styles of extraction.
– The US tax code: might as well blow it away and pass 1950 tax rates with no deductions or exemptions. And strict enforcement.
– The mess of corporation law as enacted by 50 separate states.
– The mess that capitalism has made of agriculture and health care, which have effects on public health and public nutrition.
– Disconnection of productive and creative labor and basic necessities
– Reassertion of cultural activities over economic in motivating the values that drive the society.
– Stripping money completely out of the political process.
– Coming to terms with the politics of gender and the realities of sexuality — huge suppressed conversation going on and people forced to talk about it in language that predates Masters and Johnson’s studies and the subsequent research.
– Likely much more for that conversation
The duopoly is self-destructing; the common oligarchy remains for the moment but looking at Herr T’s statements and similar statements in form by Jamie Dimon even those wheels are rattling around.
Too bad the End Times Gang hasn’t picked up on their family of heroes. In other times what would they do with the fact that Jared Kushner owns 666 Fifth Avenue, where I had lobster and avocado salad at age 18 in the Top of the Sixes, when the building was close to new — over 53 years ago that. Quite the fare for tourists from South Carolina, eh?
dayum, tarheeldem; that’ a hella lot to fit on a bumper sticker! (and pleeeeze tell me that treatise didn’t just spring outta your head like athena did from zeus’s forehead)… (proving, apparently, that a god needs a goddess to give birth like a fish needs…a bicycle.) ;-)
great list,
OMG, i’d had to look up jamie cowlick heimlich; what a peach among…peach pits? somebody skip her next hoover maneuver! gorsuch, gorelick…..♪ let’s call the whole thing off! ♫
i dunno, do Ds want a corbyn? wouldn’t the end times crowd want cruz? that’s who my Xianist in-laws loved. great on the 666 fifth avenue, though. good times, high devil times! is kushner the anti-christ then? yum on the lobster and avo, and yes, quite the fare for tarheel touristas. (i love avos, and am soooo allergic to them, but i try one bit every five years or so in hopes…turns out i’m allergic to coconut oil, too. maybe it’s the devil in me?)
Rayne, who write on emptywheel, is an excellent technology analyst. She writes here about some obvious further facts from what’s been learned for Don Jr.’s email dump and follow-up.
https://www.emptywheel.net/2017/07/14/and-now-akmetshin-or-why-the-hell-didnt-obama-tapp-team-trump/
My question: What is the $10 billion a year plowed into the NSA doing if it can’t capture a “Russian agent” “subverting” the campaign of a US candidate for President?
This whole meeting is as remarkable as the XYZ Affair, isn’t it?
briefly, since i seem to have accepted this assignment, and there’s really 2 much 2 read with links in comments, yada, yada…and it’s almost time to toast. but yes, rayne was editing my.fdl when i first went there, and she used to write a lot on stuxnet or whatever it was called. we also had a tussle or two over ‘dems being elites, too’, not dissimilar to miz hamsher’s objecting to my critiques of big unions.
noteworthy on post rayne’s diary, and marcy’s cautionary one including the steele dossier were: ‘teddy’ (P?): ‘who’s side are you on, marcy?’, not a few are committed to the fact that russia is trying to take over the usa, and that bmaz is emphatic about col lang being a fucking idiot.
anyhoo, later i suppose, except to mention that we’re supposed to trust the AP (even if someone actually presented himself as rinat) and NY slimes? but yeah, i’m more bored than…not, by now.
p.s. on edit: and oh, my, paul ryan claims that putin pays orange julius; garsh, mickey, ya think ryan dreams of dual impeachments that will launch him into the oval office? also, i know some of them hate assange, thus likely his demos that show how easy it is to hide origins of documents, but i’ll take a gander at craig murray’s blog, too, as i’m getting soooo confused over guccifer, guccifer2, tr la la.
and it was rayne who’d explained to me that marcy has a holographic memory, perhaps not unlike your own, although that doesn’t make one’s reasoning infallible of course. gads, she and bmaz the grouch hate wikieaks, love snowden, the ‘good whistle-blower’.
yeah, craig murray kinda concurs as per his friend wm. binney, at least on the dlc emails, not the ‘russian agents in deecee’: in his july 3, 2017 ‘The Stink Without a Secret’, he treads a bit of his old ground, but he does get to wikileaks’ vault 7 by and by.
“The original, base accusation is that it was the Russians who hacked the DNC and Podesta emails and passed them to Wikileaks. (I can assure you that is untrue). The original “Russian hacking” allegation was that it was the Russians who nefariously obtained these damning emails and passed them to Wikileaks. The “evidence” for this was twofold. A report from private cyber security firm Crowdstrike claimed that metadata showed that the hackers had left behind clues, including the name of the founder of the Soviet security services. The second piece of evidence was that a blogger named Guccifer2 and a websitecalled DNC Leaks appeared to have access to some of the material around the same time that Wikileaks did, and that Guccifer2 could be Russian.
But there are a number of problems that prevent this being fact at all. Nobody has ever been able to refute the evidence of Bill Binney, former Technical Director of the NSA who designed its current surveillance systems. Bill has stated that the capability of the NSA is such, that if the DNC computers had been hacked, the NSA would be able to trace the actual packets of that information as those emails travelled over the internet, and give a precise time, to the second, for the hack. The NSA simply do not have the event – because there wasn’t one. I know Bill personally and am quite certain of his integrity.” [big snip]
“So those “17 agencies” are not really investigating but are prepared to endorse weird Crowdstrike claims, like the idea that Russia’s security services are so amateur as to leave fingerprints with the name of their founder. If the Russians fed the material to Wikileaks, why would they also set up a vainglorious persona like Guccifer2 who leaves obvious Russia pointing clues all over the place?
Of course we need to add from the Wikileaks “Vault 7” leak release, information that the CIA specifically deploys technology that leaves behind fake fingerprints of a Russian computer hacking operation.”
remember that he’d said he’d met with the leaker on a trip to deecee.
woot! rain, lightning, a clash of the titans v the olymmpians phooey, hail now, but wetness, sweet moisture from the sky!
as promised, kinda sorta (ouch, close lighting may shut down the wifi) ‘Russia Trumps Ecocide at the Petroleum Broadcasting System’, by Paul Street, today how can ya not love the teletubbies graphic?
“Nearly every weekday night she participates in the corporate state media’s elevation of the dubious, politically motivated charge that the ridiculous Insane Clown President Donald Trump is a Russian agent who stole the 2016 presidential election in collusion with the Kremlin.
Like her counterparts in other dominant media outlets, she and her producers privilege this endlessly broadcast story above other topics that might hold special interest to “public” media consumers. There’s no shortage of other and terrible things to cover, God knows. The list of horrors that deserve lead-story status from one night to the next is daunting. I could fill pages listing them, including things like these:
* Global capitalism has so savagely concentrated wealth upwards that five absurdly opulent people now have as much net worth between them as the bottom half of humanity,
* The top tenth of the U.S. upper One Percent owns as much wealth as the bottom U.S. 90 percent, along with a giant, outsized share of the nation’s plutocratically (s)elected officials in a nation that has become an open corporate-financial oligarchy.
* 15 million children (21% of all U.S. children, including 4 in 10 Black and Native American children) live at less than the federal government’s notoriously inadequate poverty level (more than 1 in 10 U.S. children ages 0-9 is living at less than half that level).
* Half the U.S. population is poor or near-poor and lacks any assets.
* Median Black U.S. net worth is less than seven cents on the median U.S. white wealth dollar.
* The U.S. has the highest incarceration rate in world history, achieved in ways so deeply racist that 1 in 3 adult U.S. adult Black males is saddled with the crippling lifelong mark of a felony record.
* The U.S. dedicates more than half of its discretionary federal spending to a giant military empire that transfers wealth upwards while killing millions the world over and accounting for more than 40 percent of global military spending.
* The U.S. interferes in the political process of countless nations across the world
* The U.S. is leading the planet over the environmental cliff through the championing of endless growth and attendant “anthropogenic” – really capitalogenic – climate destruction.
Stuff like that. I could go on. (More on the capitalist destruction of life on Earth below).”
Huh. There’s another article by Paul Street in Truthdig today: Why Russiagate Trumps Ecocide at CNN
AFAICT there’s no crossover in the articles. ‘Tis a busy Street!
crow!! and ‘THE anderson cooper’???? thanks, greyson, can’t wait to read and watch. nope, no cross-over from what a scan showed me. these three-day-weekends of chores are killers, and i need a west first, cuz i’m soooo tired. i’ll have a companion piece to that as son as i can manage it. shhhh: my bff billy kristol shut down PNAC in june. don’t tell bruce!
I hadn’t heard of *that*; I’d heard they’d rebranded themselves – but can’t find trace of that online atm…
Maybe they’re just reverting to their original form (Warning: Politico), John Birchers
Oh, here it is: Foreign Policy Initiative… (Though I thought there was another PNAC with a different “C” meaning that they were also involved with).
ha. i’ll read the birchers as i’m able, and yes, good memory, my friend. same characters, but a sparkling new *bipartisan* brand! (i’ll post it waaay below for space, but i’d remembered incorrectly that gergen was part of it, sorry.) still have yet to read the cnn street…dagnabbit.
first, it was interesting to hear how the CNN as #fake news had developed. i’m so out of the msm loop that i really hadn’t known, nor taken the time to ‘educate’ myself, as i reckon all major media news is fake, biased, or bullshit. interesting that street had noted it was zucker who’d brought in ‘the apprentice’, and had kept him there despite…all that rubbish, but again, if the ratings were good, why wouldn’t he? think of all the show that folks describe that are total psyops in favor of: torture, military heroes, endless war on ‘them bad and dangerous muslims’, soooo-smart and brave cia operative celebrations, well, i really dunno what’s on now, as i only ever watch pbs a couple nights a week. (jason’s pretty expert on all that…)
but while i do understand why he believes what he does about halting carbon ppm NOW, i think his timeline’s way off, esp. on how many ppm will mean: lights out for most of the light forms on the planet. i’d put up a warning piece on the last open menu named something like ‘not so fast on these local carbon cutting claims being enacted, and the author described some, but not all, of the cons involved.
but i did just see, lol, that elon musk is building a mega tesla battery that could change everything! i dunno, i guess i’m getting pretty cynical about the ‘hopeful’ stories, beliefs, high tech solutions; all of it should have happened decades ago, and the big green brands helped gate-keep it all, imo. and phooey on them. we’ve always been a consumer society, and people don’t wanna give up their toys. thd had some of those needed changes up yonder, kinda: know what minimums it would take to live…okay.
And H0W, teh DEM Clinton/0bama wing of the Poppy Bush Company crime family keep avoiding their multiple CRIME$ Swords ! : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sWwUBJj48P0
look, ma! no smoke, no mirrors, no apparent blood, just wiggles!
Pee Bigala is a craven waste of space. That people like him can make a living doing what he does must indicate the height of their hypocritical depth of decadence: http://www.thedailybeast.com/clinton-ally-paul-begala-trump-should-consider-bombing-russia
might we ‘debate’ blowing your house up, pee? christ, i just looked at his twit account, a list of names and faces i’d long forgotten, thankfully. they all loved him on anderson! and yes, a lot of his tweets were about the roosians have been proved to have hacked the dnc, not just the ‘russian agents’ stuff.
that documentary that wsws had mentioned and i’d failed to grasp the significance? that it was buried from sight is worse than orwellian. i’m queasy after reading this. ‘How Russia-gate Met the Magnitsky Myth’ robert parry, July 13, 2017; A documentary debunking the Magnitsky myth, which was an opening salvo in the New Cold War, was largely blocked from viewing in the West but has now become a factor in Russia-gate, reports Robert Parry.
“The Post concluded smugly: “The film won’t grab a wide audience, but it offers yet another example of the Kremlin’s increasingly sophisticated efforts to spread its illiberal values and mind-set abroad. In the European Parliament and on French and German television networks, showings were put off recently after questions were raised about the accuracy of the film, including by Magnitsky’s family.
“We don’t worry that Mr. Nekrasov’s film was screened here, in an open society. But it is important that such slick spin be fully exposed for its twisted story and sly deceptions.”
The Post’s gleeful editorial had the feel of something you might read in a totalitarian society where the public only hears about dissent when the Official Organs of the State denounce some almost unknown person for saying something that almost no one heard.”
New Paradigm
“The Post’s satisfaction that Nekrasov’s documentary would not draw a large audience represents what is becoming a new paradigm in U.S. mainstream journalism, the idea that it is the media’s duty to protect the American people from seeing divergent narratives on sensitive geopolitical issues.
Over the past year, we have seen a growing hysteria about “Russian propaganda” and “fake news” with The New York Times and other major news outlets eagerly awaiting algorithms that can be unleashed on the Internet to eradicate information that groups like Google’s First Draft Coalition deem “false.”
First Draft consists of the Times, the Post, other mainstream outlets, and establishment-approved online news sites, such as Bellingcat with links to the pro-NATO think tank, Atlantic Council. First Draft’s job will be to serve as a kind of Ministry of Truth and thus shield the public from information that is deemed propaganda or untrue.”
new NYT series: why iran must be destroyed (just the regime, not the people cuz homie the humanitarian don’t play that), first reason (aka part 1): handing Iraq back to the Iraqis.
you can imagine where the series goes from there. NYT cheering as trump wwe raw bodyslams the ayatollah assahola (and on CNN, no less) while converting the Shiites most holy site to a trump casino.
I can save First Draft a lot of time sweeping the stables of these not fake newz sties. of 95% of the articles in the NYT, etc., incl. the sports & cooking channels, take the 6 keywords of any of these articles, & write a sentence. insert “experts say” before that sentence. save lots of little electrons from unnecessary firing. indeed, as far as the tree edition is concerned, not reading the NYT is an act of solidarity w/the soil.
and by some law of thermonukular what have you, not wasting the electron spins, or neuronal firings, actually saves matter. by gum, I wonder if not reading NYT can contribute to Alzheimer’s treatment? or not spreading mad cow disease? I bet we can both reduce car prices & drive less by not reading the NYT.
here’s poser of a question for the big brains at these gatekeepers of thought: why did newton put down the principia & pick up Daniel? like what did that oppenheimer feller say after their magic box went “KABOOM, the end”? I don’t remember, and didn’t fully understand, but he didn’t invoke L Ron Hubbard, that’s for sure. or Nikolas Kristorc. or rush off to Oprah to talk about his feelings.
NYT had a piece yesterday: experts tell us the difference b/n incivility, rudeness, and offensiveness. next week, the NYT explains the difference b/n me rolling my eyes at them & me giving them the finger.
srsly on the new new york slimes’ series on an iranian coup? is wapo following their lead, as usual? not buying the dead tree would help the soil, but then the librul eco-warriors who recycle might think that’s good enough for the planet, yes?
would not reading the slimes also prevent X-treme cognitive dissonance that might lead to jeckyl and hyde disorder? explain, please: ‘why did newton put down the principia & pick up Daniel?’ but oppy had quotes the bhagavad gita: “now i am become death”, but then i expect you’re just riffin’.
is the slimes also planning a series on farting etiquette, public and private?
but jeebus, the firstdraftnews website is even uglier than ‘the intercept’. but oh, ho, i ‘found them on the twit machine to see some of those ginormous images. you will love the bejayzus outta this one, prince munchkin, guanandamnteed:
faust in his lab winds up a-courtin’ el diablo w/his thoughts about the end.
is parchment the draft to quench the eternal thirst? what if it ain’t??? oh lord, what is this potion for then? suicide???
the end of all book-larnin is to be eaten by book worms. newton figgered it all out, give or take, & then started obsessing over the End Times. you know, where does all this “speculating” and “curiosity” lead to? ok, we’ve got the destroyer of worlds part down just super. knowing about the gravitational vectors of the spheres teaches us to blow up our own. and what about the other, not destroyer, part? Einstein spent lots of time studying Mozart. (and being a socialist and supporting Zionism and lots of fascinating activities. eating ice cream and things.) knowing stuff is vastly overrated even if being an idiot also has a mostly inflated market value.
Versuch: the experiment is also a temptation, the probe is a test.
and doesn’t that tweet from first draft say it all? does the nike swoosh & “just do it” logo generate more sales or not?
thanks for explaining all that, munchkin. i’d even forgotten that uncle albert supported zionism, but i certainly did support the concept of ‘israel’ back in the day. but back in the day i was pretty anti-chavez, as well, both rooted in ‘not knowing’.
some of the quotes within were just luscious, like:“Repetition can bolster belief in statements, even those that squarely contradict our prior knowledge,” said Dr. Fazio in a press release from Vanderbilt. “Unfortunately, people tend to remember false information, and even if it is debunked, they sometimes forget that it was labeled as false or unreliable.”
seems as though twitter’s doin’ it, too; i’m not much of a caitlin johnstone fan, but…it seems she’s right on this.
Awww, come on wendyE …
Let us have our fun… It is so true!
Andy Serkis as Smeagol & Gollum &…
Reading Trump’s Tweets
https://youtu.be/64mWOoj68qo?t=3m45s
“The War for the Planet of the Apes is the war for Caesar’s soul.”
Amen to that.
Liberation will have been achieved when many of the oppressors accept their own inevitable and ultimate demise from overlordianism. In a strange way the Trump family offers a way out, with and without their bumbling commonness evidenced by their self-dealing..
We are all in this together, And Therefore, respect for the individual as a human being, however illusioned, must be paramount… as a foundation of a uniform, universal solidarity.
Seems a bridge too far, i know.
~~~~~<><~~~~~
A blast from my past…
I turned my head too often.
dayum, that was fun, lemoyne. it pinged this for me, of course…. howard dean?
and yes, and as an almost inevitable extension of nepotistic oligarchical rule, orange julius and family are re-arranging the deck chairs on the titanic, hopefully demonstrating just how illegitimate this government is, and capitalism as well. seems millennials globally are seeing capitalism as anti-regular human being.
thanks for the song; i’d never even heard of ambrosia. gotta go eat a bowl of them gluten-free sacramental ‘hosts’ (with banannana) now (a guilty pleasure).
“how can you expect these trump supporters to tell the difference b/n politics & television, howard dean?” that should have been a “debate” question. maybe jfk can help?
multiple choice question: since rating each of these people’s self-importance were to waste wit & time, who more harder believes that “the river is a brown god”? 1) howard dean 2) conan 3) bill ” don’t beam me up cuz i’m too fat for the tractor beam” shatner, 4) Senora Word Goulash? i’d put my money on the person who is least fascinated by the evil eye of camera time. in fact, I vote Sarah Palin for debate moderator for the next presidential, you know, “election cycle.” she could do no one an iota of harm in that position.
a) conan is seriously ‘not funny’, imo. b) at least shatner allowed himself to be the srsly nut job denny craine on the teevee c) palin dudn’t lurve the camera? okay, who’d be in the joint press conference, NOT-debate?
tulsi gabbard in this corner for the Ds; the bern for teh ‘people’s revolution’, and tony perkins for the Rs. but no, palin could do no harm, even if she brought her turkeys wid her..
no doubt, but gauged by performance measures, her malaprops & nonsensicals & does not sequiturs, she’s a bit less polished, less knee-worn, at obeisance to the one-eyed camera phallus than any of the rest. that might be taken as a positive sign, or at least neutral, rather than a knee-jerk source of derision. always being camera ready ain’t a virtue. and yeah captain kirk craves camera time and some of it is funny. and maybe he’s less worser than mrs. moosebilly, completely out of her element, in over her head, etc. conan? no comment due to not knowing/caring. the less said about dr. dean the better.
ah, i was just havin’ some fun with you is all; none of it really matters to me one way or the other..
it did finally occur to me, munchkin, that sarah p was bill kristol’s choice, remember? and that she could see russia from her window? but it got me to further musing that a Veep candidate know-nothing may have paved the way for herr cheeto, know what i mean? of course then there’s our new secty. of ed. know-nothing…not that arne was any sort of brain trust.
‘Neocons Enlist in Anti-Trump #Resistance’, July 15, 2017, consortium news, james carden
a few of the highlights; okay, too many of em…:
“In these summer dog days of the Trump presidency, good news is hard to come by, but in late June it was reported that the successor institution to William Kristol’s Project for a New American Century, the Foreign Policy Initiative (FPI), was shutting its doors for good. FPI was founded in 2009 to give the displaced neocons who had worked for President George W. Bush a platform from which to endlessly criticize the new Democratic administration and push for a continuation of Bush’s disastrous neocon foreign policy. (Some other neocons sheltered in place mostly inside the State Department and the Pentagon.)”
(but where will they put their funds now? they sure won’t disappear, nossir. there’s neo-con ‘work to be done’.) “And why would they? In Donald Trump’s Washington, the neocons are in high demand even though a number of high-profile neocons (such as Elliott Abrams and John Bolton) were rebuffed for senior positions inside the new administration. But neocons are finding plenty of high-profile jobs elsewhere.”
Carden names a few, NYT op-eds, daily beast, brookings, etc.
Joining the #Resistance
“Neocons are also in demand at what had long been one of the more responsible foreign policy think tanks in Washington. The German Marshall Fund just announced the launch of the Alliance for Securing Democracy, which, according to its mission statement, “will develop comprehensive strategies to defend against, deter, and raise the costs on Russian and other state actors’ efforts to undermine democracy and democratic institutions.”
““The Alliance,” read the statement, “will work to publicly document and expose Vladimir Putin’s ongoing efforts to subvert democracy in the United States and Europe.”
The Alliance will be run by none other than former FPI executive director Jamie Fly and a former foreign policy adviser to the Clinton campaign, Laura Rosenberger. The Alliance’s board of advisers is a veritable who’s who of neocon royalty including the ubiquitous Bill Kristol, along with David Kramer, Michael Morell and Kori Schake.”
“The neocon revival has been facilitated by #Resistance-friendly media like MSNBC, which frequently features David Frum and Willian Kristol, two early and outspoken members of the NeverTrump movement. But perhaps what the #Resisters at MSNBC are forgetting is that the neocon-dominated NeverTrump movement was driven by the fact that, for them, Trump was not militaristic enough, which is why they threw their support behind the likes of Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham in the Republican primaries and, in the cases of Robert Kagan and Max Boot, behind Hillary Clinton in the general election.
But perhaps all this isn’t so surprising, after all, the legions of embittered Clinton supporters never really objected all that strenuously (if at all) to their candidate’s record of support for endless war.
In the end, perhaps the neocons and the pro-Hillary #Resistance are not such strange bedfellows after all. Indeed, the #Resistance’s newfound enthusiasm for many prominent NeverTrumpers like Kristol and Frum helps explain the neocon revival now underway.”
http://securingdemocracy.gmfus.org/
oh mike morell, who voted you to tell us what is the most fundamental right?
can I vote for a less diabetic gov’t? answer: no.
let’s ask all our liberal drowned kittens & blind puppies which direction the national (hell, global) diabetes rate moved w/the introduction of ACA? the same or different direction from the cost of healthcare?
now can I get paid some big bucks to prove conclusively that “ACA causes diabetes”? let’s ask Aetna.
well, yes, j; as they say: post hoc ergo propter hoc. ‘take two cups of high fructose corn syrup…and call me in the morning.’
‘russia’s interference is an attack on Who We Are as a People™’ ` mikey morrell. Good! who we are could use some attacking, mikey. how helpful it was the the house just overwhelmingly approved (344-81) a $696 billion defense spending bill; herr yellow hair had *only* asked for…$604 billion. so keep it up, mikey and friends; you’ll prolly get alla them billions upon billions to ‘upgrade’ the nukes, too.
but i just saw this: ‘Breast implants can slow bullets, study proves’ well, sign me up, mikey! hell, sign us all up!
and here’s the tesla mega battery your pal elon built (and is selling). seems as though it’s based on lithium.
lithium? driving your car has never been such a healthy source for your bi-polar. it’s like that song by niravna, niranva, somebody. get 2 rare earth metals for the price of one.
yeah sarah palin. one in a line of the endumbening of the amerikan ewes. who me? no ewe. “you’re no jfk,” what’s his gas, Lloyd blankname, to that nice quail fellow. (but if jfk is not jfk, then maybe quail really is jfk??? let’s not confuse poor Lloyd Doggerel. A=A like Ayn Rand said.) speaking of incompetents hovering around the bushistas…is sarah more worser? or the pattern that breaks the mold? hard to say. which black light is blacker?
think pop culture is a psy op?
ack. thanks; i’d never seen any footage of any of the bonzos. bensen, dear, bensen, octagenarian, wasn’t he? but quayle’s “why doesn’t (some hungry schmuck or other) just cash in a CD?” yeah, plenty of stoopid around; i yield.
sorry for not embedding the ‘Wow, elon!; link to srsly, treehugger.com, but
a commenter had linked to, ‘lithium batteries, friend or foe’, treehugger nov. 2010 has some on point questions and a couple good reports and inquiry links, but:
“At the same time, due to a great concentration of Lithium found in Chile, Bolivia and Argentina (70% of the world’s deposits), the United States and other developed countries needing the material will be subject to geopolitical forces similar to those they have already encountered from the member countries of OPEC.” an internal link on bolivian lithium actually, seriously notes:
“Of course, there are some geopolitical fears: What if Bolivia and other lithium producers create a cartel like OPEC? What if they artificially inflate prices, blackmail the rest of the world, etc?
Well, even if they did, it would still be an improvement on OPEC. But chances are that if lithium becomes very expensive, new sources will be found via exploration (at least for a while) and recycling will become more efficient (how much lithium could we extract just from our landfills?).”
and of course there’s all that military munny for moar resource wars and economic wars; why not south america?
I pulled out my sno-globe crystal ball some time ago, shook it up, and out popped: ACA won’t be overturned. too much of a cash cow/abattoir. just restrict any insurance providers’ coverage of [insert drug] and watch the addicts drop like flies swatted by little gods. novalone or novalux or whatever is mentioned in this article.
http://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2017/07/18/pers-j18.html
Thousands of workers who have dedicated their lives to jobs that treat drug addiction experience second-hand trauma from the hardships that come with combating the epidemic, with little to no resources. Hospital workers are forced to turn away withdrawing addicts from the emergency room without care; social workers have the task of telling children they cannot be reunited with their parents, or worse, that one or both of their parents have died; rehabilitation clinicians are expected to “cure” addicts with nothing more than additional drugs and a 12-twelve step program.
The drug epidemic is a public health crisis of incredible magnitude, and yet nowhere in the political establishment is there serious discussion on the measures needed to combat it—or who is responsible.
The drug epidemic is a public health crisis of incredible magnitude, and yet nowhere in the political establishment is there serious discussion on the measures needed to combat it—or who is responsible.
———————
the ripple effect out into the community is a source of mass trauma. how gullible are traumatized people to suggestions that you know, rounding up immigrants will fix/improve things? to suggestions that our old arch-nemesis Vladimir Marx Kapitalkill & his commie cadre comrade cohorts have infiltrated the highest levels of our “democracy”????? (the true workers’ soviet is secretly among trump’s cabinet members. or something. how many NSA members are closet pinkos?) Dios mio, these “mind-forged manacles” make real manacles too, don’t they?
who is responsible, indeed? it’s funny how difficult it is to realize that the *intentions of the capitalist do not matter.* there need be no conspiracy among drug makers. they just act like a good capitalist: manufacture need, restrict access to the cure or balm. people suffering from lack of treatment increases the value of said treatment. (can I have a nobel prize please? I’ll take that fake one in economics, thank you.)
and what need for labor camps? addiction is concentrated. with the barbed fences marking who is outside the fence, not corralling those inside, not marking for death the prisoner inside, but the diabetic, zombie outside. those inside just hop on a helicopter to another pleasure palace surrounded by barbed wire. and guns for hire, a la g20. hoarders plotting how to herd migrants into starvation pens. make the rest, those outside, fight each other like gladiators in their arena for the scrap they throw in the palace land fill. and every real job, you know $$ is real, is some variation on security guard. patrolling boundaries b/n those few inside & outside.
how do we rob banks? by sharing?
“Mozart’s not going to cure him doc.” Midge, in “Vertigo.” yeah, but it’s not gonna hurt.
the mozart may not cure, but for me…it failed to even help after reading your link. what sort of world does capital expect? paradise for the few and *moral*? but yes, we need to get w/ the program somehow. putin is the root of all of the problem in the US.
who was the child then seen as an adult in one woody allen film. “i’m shallow, and happier for it”?
what sort of world does capital expect?
a mother nature that doesn’t respond to their delusions about money, I guess. you know, what’s protecting me from fukushima is my money.
as for what’s protecting the whales & such, that’s anybody’s guess.
they watch the same nature shows, know what’s going on in Borneo, know as much about global warming & species collapse & ocean death as any of us do. they know kids need water. and don’t give a shit.
the policy of mass immiseration brought about by the shitty health care system, incl. of course ACA, and manufactured drug epidemics is not an accident. it is policy. this is the goal, not a by-product of neglect.
now let’s all stick that in our bongs & smoke on it for a while.
i dunno that capital cares, as long as an everyday human’s life can be commodified to the Nth degree; same for the gifts of the planet. the pharma/opioid is manufactured to the degree that noxolone (?) is too expensive for the rabble to get to save their lives from the misery, depression, and deprivation they took it to alleviate.
but a tangential story of the realm’s cavalier, stingy, barbaric, ugliness was at naked capitalism the other day. gotta go finish my hummus; got slowed down by having to make more tahini for the amount of chickpeas i’d made, toast the seeds, tra la la.
‘Shocking Federal Report Details Continued Use of Solitary Confinement for Mentally-Ill Inmates’, nakedcapitalism, july 17
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2017/07/shocking-federal-report-details-continued-use-solitary-confinement-mentally-ill-inmates.html
Counterpunch, Mike Whitney: John Brennan’s Police State USA, October 20, 2017
Third, Zakharova’s comments suggest a motive for the Russia hacking campaign. Russia has become an insurmountable obstacle to Washington’s plans for global hegemony. It has blocked US progress in Ukraine and rolled backed US proxy-forces in Syria. Additionally, Russia has united the countries in Central Asia (EEU) and threatens to economically integrate Europe and Asia into the world’s biggest free trade zone spanning from Lisbon to Vladivostok. Here’s a quote from Putin that explains what’s going on:
Putin’s dream of Greater Europe is the death knell for the unipolar world order. It means the economic center of the world will shift to Central Asia where abundant resources and cheap labor of the east will be linked to the technological advances and the Capital the of the west eliminating the need to trade in dollars or recycle profits into US debt. The US economy will slip into irreversible decline, and the global hegemon will steadily lose its grip on power. That’s why it is imperative for the US prevail in Ukraine– a critical landbridge connecting the two continents– and to topple Assad in Syria in order to control vital resources and pipeline corridors. Washington must be in a position where it can continue to force its trading partners to denominate their resources in dollars and recycle the proceeds into US Treasuries if it is to maintain its global primacy. The main problem is that Russia is blocking Uncle Sam’s path to success which is roiling the political establishment in Washington.
The US wants to retaliate for the defeat of its proxy army in Syria but it’s not prepared for a military clash. Not yet, at least. And, keep in mind, Washington’s Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and CIA-trained. The defeat is not a loss for the US Military, but a blot on the record of CIA Director John Brennan, the architect and main proponent of the failed project to remove Assad. Brennan’s whole scheme has gone down in flames.
…
The US wants to retaliate for the defeat of its proxy army in Syria but it’s not prepared for a military clash. Not yet, at least. And, keep in mind, Washington’s Sunni proxies were not a division of the Pentagon; they were entirely a CIA confection: CIA recruited, CIA-armed, CIA-funded and CIA-trained. The defeat is not a loss for the US Military, but a blot on the record of CIA Director John Brennan, the architect and main proponent of the failed project to remove Assad. Brennan’s whole scheme has gone down in flames.
ugh, copy-paste failure:
Indeed. Brennan appears to be the central figure in this political fiasco, the source from which many of the spurious accusations originated. It was Brennan who first intimated that members of the Trump campaign colluded with Russian agents prior to the 2016 elections.
“I was aware of intelligence and information about contacts between Russian officials and U.S. persons that raised concerns in my mind about whether or not those individuals were cooperating with the Russians, either in a witting or unwitting fashion, and it served as the basis for the FBI investigation to determine whether such collusion [or] cooperation occurred,” Brennan stated in testimony before the House Intelligence Committee in May.
thank you, greyson, for the excerpts. i clicked in to see if i could figure out how to repair you copy/paste error, but mine eyes seem to have had it for the morning. but i did see he’d mentioned parry; the first is parry’s most recent, the second one on ukraine is carden. and really, i’ll read your excerpts soon as i can manage it. after er…answering comments, and so on. ;-)
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/18/blaming-russia-for-the-internet-sewer/
https://consortiumnews.com/2017/10/14/fueling-more-bloodshed-in-ukraine/