Updating Citizenship,
I rode my bike down to the Capitol and back yesterday and stood there with many other people, from all walks of life, many from my clinic, also my Buddhist practice group, and at least one person I know from the UT dormitory in 1976.
Some of my friends protested the Vietnam War there. I got to chant "No Bombs, No War; US out of El Salvador!" in my day...
Yesterday we protested the injury to children caused by separating them from their families at our border, as they flee here to safety.
Nobody was shooting at us; not like Kent State at all, ever. There was no tension at all. That was already defused last week.
Still, it is important for us to stand together for our moral values. It's a good habit. We need to do things together. Sometimes we need to vote for somebody, but that whole process is pretty well controlled by the military-industrial-congressional-banking-media-complex. (mostly...)
We don't know what totalitarianism we may eventually get in the US, and it may be different regional forms of totalitarianism. One size may not fit all in North America. The current federal bureaucracy is vast, ineffective, but makes lots of "jobs" that keep lots of intelligent people focused upon "compliance". That is not an economy that actually provides for the needs of people and society without vast outside inputs. That is the zombie of the American postwar production economy.
Reset will have to be in places that CAN reset, with people who CAN reset. Once a place has something that works, others will go there and be assimilated.
These different centers of recovery will have different characteristics, I think.
Ride a bike. Grow vegetables. This takes a few years to become natural; really... Nobody will change for us.
"Become the change that you would see in the world!"
The big issue that we are not addressing is that the Empire (no name is accepted) continues to keep a war festering in El Savador, Honduras and Guatemala. "War-on-drug-dealers-who-don't-work-for-the-CIA" is one fitting name.
Manuel Noriega found out how that works. Don't be in a gang that rivals the CIA gangs! Venezuelan refugees from the economic warfare the Empire is executing there should start arriving soon. Ilargi, at The Automatic Earth looks in the shadowy corner... Boomeranging
You could see them coming from miles away. You created them. You literally built the space they occupy. What is happening is that the chaos we created in all these places is now boomeranging right back at us, on our own borders. And we’re not getting out of that chaos until we stop creating it in places where we don’t live. Until we allow people a future where they are born.
Important buried Korean War history from Wigs. The US employed all the tested-on-humans germ warfare secrets it got from Japan, who used germ warfare for genocide in Manchuria, then brutally murdered a prominent whistle-blower (as an example for others) to keep it hushed up..:
Canadian scholars Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman produced a thoroughly researched indictment of US germ warfare use in Korea, The United States and Biological Warfare. The book exposes how the CIA and US Air Force began a lengthy and complex secret deployment of germ bomb attacks over North Korea and China for many months in 1951-52. The lessons gained by Japan’s Unit 731 in mass murder warfare were applied by the US military in the Korean theater. President Truman, the CIA, the Army, Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff were all complicit in the secrecy of this operation.... The hidden history of the Korean War — the 4 million dead Koreans, the carpet bombing, firebombing, germ bombing, the entire built infrastructure of North Korea reduced to rubble, the prisoner torture, civilian massacres, suppression of war crime evidence, the lies and the silent forgetting — all this is now coming into the sunshine. Going forward toward Korean unification, nobody should agree to bury these truths again.https://truthout.org/articles/suppressing-us-war-crimes-the-cold-war-denial-machine-lives-on/"Officials" somewhere in the US government, who don't like the Korean Peace Process, leak that North Korea has not given everything up yet to NBC.The result of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore was a "freeze for freeze" deal. North Korea stopped its nuclear and missile testing while the U.S. stopped the large maneuvers it regularity held with South Korea's army. Both sides agreed to further talks. North Korea made some aspirational statements about denuclearization which have the same time frame as similar aspirational statements made by the U.S. in Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). There is no time frame to reach a certain state. There is no commitment towards declaring nuclear sites nor is there a commitment to stop the production of nuclear stuff.Trump declaration that there is "no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea" is correct in the sense that there is certainly no North Korean intent to launch a nuclear attack.Kim Jong Un will not only "try to hide" the North Korean nuclear facilities. He will surely keep them secret as long as he can. The security of his country depend on them.
The British Parliament is battening down the hatches to keep any specific criminal actions of government officials from being identified. That is a lot of hatches. No questions permitted. American torture in Yemen is not their concern, however, so some of that is revealed.
The CIA, MI6 and the myriad of "special forces" under this or that name continue to use these illegal practices.
The United Arab Emirates were just found to torture random Yemenis in its prisons in south Yemen. U.S. special forces and CIA interrogators are present:
Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaida militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme — including the “grill,” in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Several U.S. defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the topic, told AP that American forces do participate in interrogations of detainee.
Prisoners get isolated, threatened with dogs, waterboarded and more:
They raped detainees while other guards filmed the assaults. They electrocuted prisoners' genitals or hung rocks from their testicles. They sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.
"They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then the sodomizing starts," said one father of four.
The U.S. defense establishment claims that none of its soldiers are "present" when actual torture happens. It also put bridges on sale. The CIA declined to comment to AP.
"Walk or Die", Algeria Strands 13,000 migrants in the Sahara in 118 degree heat. Many "disappear in the sand."
This is part of the solution the EU is working out. Thanks Eleni.
More details of the complex political solution being worked out for immigration from military and economic war zones...
The crew of a Spanish rescue ship have said that Italian officials told them to let the Libyan coastguard respond to a distress call from a smuggling boat carrying migrants – only to hear shortly afterward that 100 migrants were missing and feared dead in the same area.
Israel Shamir: thanks Eleni...When I see a crying child on my screen, I know somebody is trying to take advantage of me. The same is true about every appeal to my basic human instincts, whether it is a naked female body or a dead baby. Instead of convincing me, such a cheap trick calls for immediate rejection... Picture pushers are dishonest and they do not care a fig about kids: Madeleine Albright famously thought it is worth while to kill half a million of Iraqi children. Hillary Clinton unleashed hell on Libyan and Syrian soil, killing and dispossessing hundreds of thousands of children. All the US Presidents have been hugging and kissing Israeli rulers, who habitually detain, torture and kill Palestinian kids... Diana Johnstone wrote recently that the immigration issue splits the German left. Indeed support for free immigration is suicide for the Left. But this issue does split the whole Western world. On one side, believers in the world without borders, in the free movement of people. It sounds great, until you understand that this is a way to destroy the native working class, abolish the welfare state, ruin social structures and at the same time undermine donor countries, in short, to destroy the world as we know it. On the other side, people who want to preserve the world they live in work to keep the walls up.What we need is some sincerity and honesty, as opposed to manipulation. If you think mass immigration will return us to new Dark Ages, say so. If you think it would be better to remove borders and to unleash a new Volkswanderung, just say so, but please do not show us baby pictures.The man captured in a video with a whip in the hands, the leader of the brutal gang of slavers is a former rebel against the ‘bloody dictator’ Muammar al-Gaddafi, a friend of democracy and European values, Abd al-Rahman al-Milad, a commander in the Coast Guard. The boats, in which he sends Africans to Europe, are bought with European money... The European NGO’s pick up rubber boats with migrants sent by Milad, take the migrants on board and deliver them to Europe, making a very decent profit. These “rescuers” directly cooperate with Milad and other slavers, they receive exact instructions from the “senders” where to pick up the boats, and they take a considerable share of the profit. They earn grants and donations of the compassionate Europeans, who do not understand that they are being manipulated by slavers.
What if you were warned, just in time, that you were about to be "regime-changed" by the Empire? Erdogan survived the coup attempt in Turkey, thanks to Putin. Lukashenko in Belarus just had a few days of intense and private talks with Putin, states that he doesn't like the looks of the color revolution the Empire did in Ukraine, and that Belarus "might have to join another country". Hopefully it would be a country that shares a common language and culture, and so on...
Thanks for the heads-up, Eleni.
The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland may sink the EU
, as Brexit creates a hole below waterline, which cannot be sealed off.
At face value, it seems straightforward -- the EU’s land frontier with Britain would need to be policed to uphold the rules of the single market. Yet, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar seems to take a different view. Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, he told reporters there are no preparations to install checks, and has consistently said Ireland won’t build a border.
“The U.K. has said they won’t do it,” Varadkar said in an interview with broadcaster TV3 this month. “And I’ve made it very clear to other European prime ministers and presidents that’s something Ireland will never do.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/could-ireland-really-refuse-to-build-a-border-after-brexit
Oil runs the global economy, and higher oil prices choke it into recession. It can't afford recession. The buffers are all used up...
The bottom line is that despite the agreement in Vienna, the price of oil, in the short-term, is bound to go up. Analyses by BNP Paribas, among others, are adamant that supply problems with Venezuela and Libya, plus the proverbial “uncertainty” about the sanctions on Iran, lead to “oil fundamentals still…favorable for oil prices to rise over the next six months despite the OPEC+ decision.”
Paul Craig Roberts looks at the upcoming Putin-Trump Summit. What kinds of ongoing deals can be made that will simultaneously benefit each side in their continuation. The US is "agreement-challenged", because it won't keep it's side of the bargain, once it gets some pay-off. the world knows this. The sides of the deal will need to stay parallel in real time for it to work.
Tom Luongo thinks Trump is giving away what he can't stop, anyway, going into the summit with Putin.
With Sweden issuing the last necessary permit for the construction of Nordstream 2 there is little way to stop the pipeline from being built. Most of the pipe has been produced along with the infrastructure. All that’s left is the actual putting the pieces together.
I think this is another pre-summit diplomatic offering by Trump ahead of his meeting with Putin. The other was cutting the Al-Qaeda-linked groups free in Dara’a while the Russians and Syrian Arab Army retake the territory up to the Golan Heights... So, at the end of the day the First Rule of Trump applies, react to what he does not what he says. Speech is a negotiating tactic for him. And right now, he has not moved further on sanctions to stop Nordstream 2. With his long-desired summit with Putin now on the table it makes zero sense to throw down the gauntlet over it now.
It is really not humanly possible to comprehend anything like the $21 trillion that the military has spent on an alternate universe that you can't be told about.
The picture below is $20 trillion, if each of those greenbacks is a $20 bill. Where is the CIA-Disneyworld? What are the attractions and rides?
We are just now hitting the arctic tipping point where the ice melts, the brown soil absorbs warm sunlight and massive waves of methane are released into our vast greenhouse. The buffer is exhausting as you read this. This is the last of the normal weather,
"Temperature rise has exceeded 1.2 degrees Celsius above 1880 temperatures...
Apart from sharp reduction in carbon emissions, there appears to be only one chance to save the biosphere as we know it, namely CO2 down-draw using every available method (cf. basalt rock dust farming[xxx], biochar, air streaming through basalt, extensive sea weed farms, “sodium trees”) which would require funds on the $trillions-scale currently allocated for the military and for wars."
Our Natural World is Disappearing before Our Eyes, George Monbiot
Hiding and Seeking
