Friends and Family,
Democratic Party Strategic Consultants are advising all Democratic Candidates to support "Medicare for All" but to change what that means.
In the new definition, it means eventually making a "public option" Medicare buy-in, which will "compete" (but not too hard) with private insurance company plans under an Obamacare or Trumpcare profiteering-umbrella. Don't try to pin them down on this. It's just painfully awkward. They are NOT supporting the Sanders initiative of All-Medicare.
The majority of American Doctors now support single payer. What changed? (The death of 1000 cuts. We waste so much of our time dealing with insurance companies refusing this or that essential medicine or procedure on computer-generated technicalities, whether cheap or expensive. If we can ever get through for "peer-to-peer" phone appeals the stuff always gets approved, but that takes days to go through, and long phone waits, while patients wait, and so on. All-Medicare = only-one-enemy)
Charles Hugh Smith explains that we need a social revolution, a social consciousness and connectedness awakening. We need real human contact and working together humanly for things that matter, like food, shelter and love. That cooperative endeavor has been taken away from us.
Look! It's gone.
We are divided and conquered, and less human, isolated...
One country that will not be divided-and-conquered is (majority Han) China.The Han-race are a nation. All others within the realm are second or third class wannabes.
This conversational English teacher from England was shocked at the normalcy of overt group-identity racism among the students she taught. Her prose is instructive. Perhaps more instructive, and certainly more novel is the Chinese TV commercial for a breath mint, which elegantly illustrates her point about the normalcy of racism in Han China. (It got removed after a fairly long play, when foreigners found out about it and complained.)
Eleni sends this from always-colorful Pepe Escobar:
"The Democrats," Bannon said in the interview, "the longer they talk about identity politics, I got 'em. I want them to talk about racism every day. If the left is focused on race and identity, and we go with economic nationalism, we can crush the Democrats."
So this is the money quote to understand the aftermath of Charlottesville. The Democrats fell on the trap. Hysteria reigns on what is essentially a fight of identity versus class politics. The key variable to watch from now on is how — and if — Trump, helped by outsider Bannon, may emerge as the winner, finally empowered to implement economic nationalism.
President Trump, now surrounded by Generals and neocon-Goldmanites, will announce "a new way forward" in Afghanistan. (I'm expecting the Blackwaterization of the war, instead of the only obvious "way forward", which is to leave the graveyard-of-empires. There is nothing good that America can do with guns and money, nothing at all.)
This is a French-penned article about "Russia's Role in the Coming Clash of Empires", with the oceanic empire of America against the land empire of China, being the topic of discussion. (There is a certain Byzantine garden path trod here, and a lot is shown, but it assumes a lot, too, without providing proof. It sort of assumes things will be as they are, with changes in flow patterns and fights over that. It does not look at situational fragility, or the fragility of the Saudi regime, and does not even calculate for Israel. How can you not calculate for Israel on the global chessboard?)
Want to fight climate change? Don't buy Tesla. (Well, Duh! these things are for the narcissistic wealthy, with a terrible ecological impact by the time they leave the factory, which would take a decade to pay off if you charged them from your own solar cells in Arizona. That's not really where that electricity comes from, and it's more carbon efficient to just drive a gasoline powered car. If you ride a bike, Tesla drivers are about like Audi and BMW drivers.)
The Yellowstone Super-volcano blows about every 600,000 years, and it is about due, as it has been for all of recorded history.
A solution has arisen to meet the threat, here at the dawning of the age of Anthropocene. We can tap the hot magma, many miles below the surface of the earth, and cool it by injecting water from far, far away, which will create steam, which will power turbines to electrify the American west for tens of thousands of years. WHEW! (what could go wrong?)
Threatened by Solutions
