Saturday, April 30, 2016

Directing Traffic

Running Roughshod,
Will Clinton reach out to capture Sanders supporters? 
"Not much, they were bad children", is the upshot of this article. 

Now that most people have heard something about TTIP, global corporate rule plan, support has sunk to 18%, compared to 53% in 2014. (Obama has got to get this through before he times-out; absolutely critical to his benefits-package.)
http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/04/don-quijones-a-blow-to-transatlantic-corpocracy-support-for-ttip-begins-to-unravel.html

Rioting in Iraq means it's time to invade again, divide the country again, get a better handle on the oil this time, etc. Time for bold action from the lame-duck, right?
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-30/us-created-system-iraq-collapsing-protesters-storm-parliament-state-emergency-declar#comment-7496772
The US bombed 2 Syrian hospitals in Aleppo this week, blamed Russia, and got caught at it.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/us-air-force-bombed-aleppo-and-then-blamed-russia/5522397

French vote to lift US-imposed sanctions against Russia, which are hurting French farmers badly. (Lotsa' luck, guys. It only looks like a democracy.) Thanks Eleni.
http://www.defenddemocracy.press/french-deputies-ask-lifting-sanctions-russia/

Trump Foreign Policy Speech Analysis: New blood, fresh start, not neocons, make "great" deals with Russia and China, stop nation-building in Mideast. Good stuff.
Trust Trump to get it done against vast, global, murderous vested interests? How could that even happen? Dead man if he tries, right?
http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2016/04/28/the-trump-test/

"To reform a broken electoral system, the party needed to embrace an array of changes, he said. Elections should be publicly funded. Citizens should be automatically registered to vote when they turn 18. Primary contests should always be open to independent voters." Bernie Sanders on "revitalizing American Democracy".
http://www.theglobeandmail.com//news/world/the-us-could-feel-the-bern-for-decades-as-sanders-plans-to-reform-democracy/article29810864/
Jane Sanders, wife of Bernie, comments in an interview that it would be nice if the FBI would "move along" with the Clinton espionage investigation (and giggles nervously).
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-30/bernie-sanders-wife-it-would-be-nice-if-fbi-moved-along-hillarys-email-probe

"Anti-Semitism" wedge is being driven into Jeremy Corbin's Labor "shadow government" ahead of local elections, as Ken Livingstone, his longtime ally is called names in the press over politically forbidden comments to the media, which are not being called "incorrect". This may be a win, win, win for UK version of neocons.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/04/29/jeremy-corbyn-facing-coup-attempt-over-anti-semitism-row-as-mini/

"Why the Hard Sell for the Self-Driving-Car?" More control of everybody in America is the simple answer. It doesn't matter if you "own" it, or call the robo-cab You are owned in the process. Ideal "solution" for rulers. Coming soon. (Hey, they can deactivate the vehicle if you put a gun in it. I just thought of that. This technology can have EVERYTHING.)
http://ericpetersautos.com/2016/04/27/hard-sell-self-driving-car/
google car lead
Cooked, A Natural History of Transformation, is Professor Michael Pollan's new book, reviewed here. Even cooking your own local food has become a "revolutionary act" in corporate-world (how awkward), and is the first step to accepting the human birthright, evolved through eons of local agricultural survival, which Pollan details.
Not just a cookbook, a science book or anthropology. Pollan is hard to pigeon-hole.  :-)
http://www.greattransition.org/publication/a-recipe-for-change


 Walking on Eggshells

Thursday, April 28, 2016

Speak Of The Devil

Calling a Spade,

John Boehner, speaking in public recently:
"[Ted Cruz] is lucifer in the flesh...I have as many Democrat friends as I have Republican and I get along with almost everyone... but I have never worked with a more miserable son of a bitch than Ted Cruz... over my dead body would he represent [Republicans]"Boehner said he'd vote for Donald Trump in the general election if he were the Republican nominee, but he would not vote for Ted Cruz.
Boehner's shocking statement came because he was urged by the event's moderator, Professor David M. Kennedy, to be frank because the event was not being broadcasted. Perhaps Boehner did not realize people were still taking notes.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/just-released-listen-john-boehner-calling-ted-cruz-son-bitch

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/john-boehner-calls-ted-cruz-miserable-son-bitch-lucifer-flesh

 

The House Armed Services Committee voted to end the "sexist draft" by requiring young women to sign up for it, too.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-28/congress-fixes-sexist-draft-votes-require-women-register-selection

Bernie Sanders goes on record as supporting the extrajudicial drone killings, with 93 "non-targets" killed for every "targeted" person. He's ok with more troops in Syria, and "America's right to protect itself" from terrorist threats, and so on, too.http://theantimedia.org/did-bernie-sanders-just-go-full-establishment/
China trades enough cotton in one day to make more than a pair of jeans for every living human being (including plus sizes). Commodities is the latest and greatest Chinese bubble market.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-04-27/china-trades-enough-cotton-in-one-day-to-make-jeans-for-everyone

Pocket Change

Wednesday, April 27, 2016

Dirty Secrets

Detecting Foul Play,

(Washington, DC) – The Obama State Department last week admitted it withheld a key Benghazi email of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton from Judicial Watch since at least September 2014.  If the State Department disclosed the email when first supposedly found, Clinton’s email server and her hidden emails would have been disclosed nearly two years ago, before Clinton authorized the alleged deletion of tens of thousands of emails.

Colleen sends this article about why Nancy Reagan hated the Bush family. 
She believed that they had arranged for the Hinckley assassination attempt. Reagan really didn't want Bush as VP, but somehow, that's what he got...

Global Financial Reset has resumed as Saudi-supported "Petrodollar" is in terminal decline, taking the carrot out of the equation, and leaving just the big stick of US militarism. Notice all the thinly veiled threats lately? Germany and the Brits do. Thanks Paul.

Sweden is on alert since warning that ISIS team has arrived to target civilians in Stockholm.

Closed-Loop Agriculture (Wazzat?)

Cleaning Up Our Act

Tuesday, April 26, 2016

President Trump

Spray Paint on the Wall,

Hillary Clinton keeps a 4:3 lead in pledged delegates and almost all of the party apparatchik "Super-my-ass" delegates. 
Trump just wins everything, and Republican primary vote numbers are suddenly up while Democratic primary vote turnout drops like a rock.
Shit, I don't want a Clinton-Trump race, but only one of those is a proven evil. Yuck! (I'll Vote Jill Stein MD, Green Party, again, of course.)

Eleni sends this excellent John Pilger article, The World War on Democracy

Daesh/ISIS in Iraq has recently "executed" 250 young girls (not young women) for refusing to become sex slaves, and treated their families in various ways for being complicit in the crimes of their daughters.

Israeli Army closes Hebron Emergency center and hospital with huge concrete blocks and soldiers on the roof. (No medical care for Palestinians in the kill-zone, right?)

Syrians are starving, so they are forced to seek any refuge. Syrian farming is devastated by war, as is transport of harvests.

Under Nixon/Kissinger, with Jim Schlesinger as Secretary of Defense, the US was looking at invading Saudi Arabia around 1974. It didn't happen then...

President Obama says TTIP Global Corporate Rule "trade deal" should be signed by the end of the year so he can get his bonus.

Eleni, in Athens, sends this exquisitely nice 5 minute wordless video of Athens. (It's hard to get me to look at video, but this is lush with history.)

Likeness in Marble

Monday, April 25, 2016

Getting Out Of Hand

Existentially Threatened,

Pay attention to this chart to help avoid death from above today. Tom sends this story about the ongoing work on smart drones that pick their own targets. Right now, about 30 collateral-damage people get killed for every "targeted" human, using guys at computer consoles to pick the "bugsplats". Will smart Predator and Reaper drones do better? Does it matter as long as the power structure is maintained? (Yes, this is like in the movie "Terminator".)





















I've gotta' point out that the Chairman of this Gatestone Institute is Josh Bolton, neocon Sith-lord, but there is a point made here.
Turkey is pushing very hard for unrestricted travel of Turkish citizens to Europe. Why is it so important and time urgent?
Turkey may want to urgently offload about 6 million Turkish Kurds, who happen to fit that description, onto Germany.
Erdogan really, really wants to get the Kurds out of Turkey so they will quite wanting to control their ancestral lands, which they lost when the Ottoman Empire got divvied up after WW-1. This is a plan where northern Europe gets hit with a hot flood of war-refugees from north Africa, no matter what. Choose your poison. FAST!

President Obama announces the biggest-yet increase in US (uninvited) Special Forces troops inside Syria. These are mostly to coordinate with YPG Kurdish forces, hated by Turkey as PKK allies. More US airstrikes against somebody is the implication, here.

Syrian Army forces now have a small format radar to extend their heavy machine gun and artillery sighting past what is actually visible. Thanks, Russia. This is bound to help a lot.


Clinton Super PAC has been hiring trolls for internet and social media to attack Sanders supporters. $1 million was poorly enough hidden to be spotted. I've seen this attack-in-first-comment kind of response and noticed it. I presume there is software monitoring key words on new posts and trolls jump to the task immediately. I'd pay a troll more for every first post or first rebuttal, wouldn't you? Call out the Trolls. Ask what they get paid.

"Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Google’s parent company, has funded a semi-secret company, The Groundwork, to provide Hillary Clinton the engineering talent she needs to win the election, prompting Wikileaks founder Julian Assange to call Google “Hillary’s secret weapon.” Meanwhile, Hillary has hired a longtime Google executive as her chief technology officer. If Google were prioritizing pro-Hillary search results over those favoring Bernie Sanders, we’d never know."    http://www.resilience.org/stories/2016-04-25/the-new-mind-manipulators

Sander steps on the "third rail of American politics" and survives.
"Palestinians are always wrong – not in principle but insofar as their interests and the interests of the state of Israel, as determined by Israeli governments, conflict.
In the Sanders-Clinton debate last week in Brooklyn, Bernie Sanders steeped onto that third rail and survived. He showed that it could be done."​    http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/04/22/one-small-step-for-bernie-one-giant-leap-for-humankind/ 


"The official narrative around the bailout of Fannie and Freddie is that they were loaded up with toxic subprime debt piled high by the Wall Street banks that sold them dodgy mortgages. While that is factually true, the other potentially more important part of this story is the counterparty exposure the Wall Street banks had to Fannie and Freddie’s derivatives if the firms had been allowed to fail." How many trillions in counterparty risk are under this rug? The on-book backing has crept up to about a half trillion, already on US taxpayers. How long can this monetary regime remain credible? What's Plan-B?

In Colorado there is lots of financing to defeat Amendment 69 this November, which would provide single-payer health (AND Dental) coverage for Colorado, through higher taxes and no insurance premiums. Profits would drop, as would the cost to society. 

"Poor President Barack Obama flew to Saudi Arabia this past week but its ruler, King Salman, was too busy to greet him at Riyadh’s airport. This snub was seen across the Arab world as a huge insult and violation of traditional desert hospitality. Obama should have refused to deplane and flown home. Alas, he did not.  Obama went to kow-tow to the new Saudi monarch and his hot-headed son, Crown Prince Muhammed bin Nayef. They are furious that Obama has refused to attack Iran, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Syria’s Assad regime. They are also angry as hornets that the US may allow relatives of 9/11 victims to sue the Saudi royal family, which is widely suspected of being involved in the attack.          >>Interestingly, survivors of the 34 American sailors killed aboard the USS Liberty when it was attacked by Israeli warplanes in 1967, have been denied any legal recourse.<<   Thanks Eleni.  http://davidstockmanscontracorner.com/obamas-pathetic-pilgrimage-to-riyadh/ 

"Ownership of property" comes down to the ability to exclude all others from use of that property by threat of violence. It's simple. (The $US is the global reserve currency BECAUSE the US is the global cop/bully, right?)

2016: Is El Nino showing us the edge of the climate change cliff, the positive tipping point? (What about the next El Nino?)


King of the Desert

Sunday, April 24, 2016

Gardening For Peace

Bonhommes,

The Biology of Altruism. 
Yes, the human brain has an app. for that, or many human brains do. Some don't. What does the difference look like, now that we can look at things like the differences in brain function between cold-blooded murderers without remorse, and people who donate a kidney to an unknown person, because they can. (Which kind of person would do better in American politics?)

I'm going to take that as a jumping off point for speculation about our human future, about our prospects in the realm of social ecology, a term coined by Murray Bookchin.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_ecology
Over the past 10,000 years or so, we have embedded dominance of each other into our societies. It is ubiquitous, and it is the philosophical basis for "dominion over nature", supposedly "granted by God".
It is pretty clear that we need to have a paradigm shift and become truly human, truly awakened to our greatest potential, the potential to be really good stewards of natural systems, rather than bands of rapists and looters, our current paradigm.
I don't mean to be harsh, but we can all be on the way out and wishing it would come sooner, in 20 years. 
We can nurture and cultivate a food-producing ecosystem It's actually an innate talent we have. It takes some learning. It feels pretty satisfying, natural, healthy.
Each of us can find ways to do this.
I'm working on finding ways to help open this door of perception for people I work with by food-gardening in the break patio at the new clinic.
If we are all going down this time, I'd rather go down growing green beans than shooting people.

Mr Green Genes

Saturday, April 23, 2016

Grasping Harder

Bothering to Survive,

Will the Upheaval in Fossil Fuel Industry Take the Rest of the Economy Down With It? (Yeah, probably, huh? It needs to happen, and it is happening already. Awareness will strike a bit late, as usual.)

Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change:
We can modify our agricultural practices to sequester carbon in the soil. If this becomes the global paradigm, we can actually have enough of a mitigating effect on global CO2 to reduce it in the relatively near term, basically right away, if at least 50% of global food production happens this way. It's being done. It's not rocket science. Buffalo used to do it and they were not Einstein.

Capital, as defined in current economic terms, does not include the fundamental life-sustaining ecosystems, within which economy grows,. "Economy" consumes life as free and valueless until it is producing cash-flow. 
It's been a good run. Now that paradigm approaches the point where we all die. 
Suggestions?
"At every level, the life capital bases of society are invaded by private money-sequence demands adding costs and degrading them so that most are in cumulative decline. This is the macro pattern of life capital dispossession and common wealth destruction by the transnational money-sequence system until a public life capital turn steers us."

Russia announces policy to be completely food self-sufficient by 2020, and with high quality organic agriculture, which has become the norm in the past 15 years. Russian agriculture has recovered from Stalin (finally). Thanks Tom.










Russia is projected to be the world's largest wheat exporter this year.

Troika demands that Greeks prepare "contingency plans" for further austerity, to be enacted without recourse, if/when Greece fails to meet impossible commitments made last year, under duress. "It's not legal", say Greek officials. "Oh, we'll find a way for it to be legal", comes the reply.

On January 19, 2008, Obama said, "The Armenian Genocide is not an allegation, a personal opinion, or a point of view, but rather a widely documented fact supported by an overwhelming body of historical evidence. The facts are undeniable. An official policy that calls on diplomats to distort historical facts is an untenable policy." 
(Well he's never said that as President, and now makes it pretty clear that he never will.)

German thought police arrest Pirate Party leader for reciting anti-Erdogan poem at free-speech rally, and send everybody home. Thanks Tom.

There is online betting available on the question of whether the 147 FBI investigators on the case of the illegal Clinton email server will succeed in getting an indictment for Mrs Clinton in 2016 Current odds are down to around 17%. The "Justice" Department seems to be resisting it for some reason. Rumors that the FBI investigators may leak information are resurgent.

Octupus slips out of aquarium tank, crawls across floor and escapes down drain pipe to Pacific Ocean. (Just when you think you have everything bottled-up...) Thanks Charles

Slip-slidin' Away

Friday, April 22, 2016

History Rhyming

Questioned Rhetorically,

Eric Zuess asks, "Is Hillary Clinton the Democrat's Richard Nixon?" (heh, heh, heh...)

"Clinton’s image is at or near record lows among major demographic groups. Among men, she is at minus 40. Among women, she is at minus nine. Among whites, she is at minus 39. Among white women, she is at minus 25. Among white men, she is at minus 72. Her favorability among whites at this point in the election cycle is worse than President Obama’s ever has been, according to Bill McInturff, a Republican pollster who conducted the NBC-Wall Street Journal poll with Democratic pollster Peter Hart."

New York Democratic Primary Vote is not yet certified. It can't be, because Electoral Fraud Lawsuit is moving forward The disenfranchisement in Brooklyn was already obvious before the vote, though a judge refused to allow emergency voter registration. It became grossly apparent on Tuesday.

Chicago (Hillary's home town) Board of Elections documents gross electoral fraud flipping precincts from Sanders to Clinton.

Obama crosses some kind of Rubicon and politely tells UK not to leave the EU. How will this play with Limey voters? Obama is less popular than he was 8 years ago.

IMF's Lagarde now says there's no need for Greek debt reduction; just more austerity and extensions should do, and there will be no deal to unlock loan money for Greece today.

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel signed off on a deal with the devil (Turkey) that would give 80 million Turkish Muslims visa-free access to the EU. As part of the deal, Turkey will receive €3 billion in aid." [Time to pay up, or what's Plan-B?]

5 Mayors say refugee camp near Athens is huge public health problem (getting bigger daily)

Global Trade War is ON! Chinese Steel leads first over-the-top assault:









Bankrupt oil companies are still pumping flat out. Pumping is cheap and makes cash flow. They just are not drilling new wells. This can last awhile longer, then there will be a hard drop in output.

ALERT: Game (of LIFE) Changing Technology!
"The Haber-Bösch process currently consumes about two percent of the world's fossil fuel supply," Seefeldt says. "So, the new process, which uses nanomaterials to capture light energy, could be a game-changer." "Using light directly to create a catalyst is much more energy efficient, says Brown, NREL research scientist. "This new ammonia-producing process is the first example of how light energy can be directly coupled to dinitrogen reduction, meaning sunlight or artificial light can power the reaction."  Can we get another doubling of our human population out of this? NI-TRO-GEN, NI-TRO-GEN, NI-TRO-GEN !     http://phys.org/news/2016-04-light-driven-dinitrogen-reduction-scientists-global.html
















Second Verse (Same as the First?)

Thursday, April 21, 2016

Dogs And Politicians Without Collars

Free Humans,


The World is Full of Dogs Without Collars, 3/4 of the billion dogs in the world are free-dogs, village-dogs, poi-dogs, res-dogs, dingos...
This is a "superbreed" with Asian and European branches, that co-evolved with human agricultural communities, on the outskirts, not bred by humans, not domesticated wolves. We can learn about ourselves here. Thanks Colleen.
"They have remarkably varied connections to human beings. Some live completely on their own at dumps. Some are neighborhood dogs, recognized and perhaps given handouts by people who live in a certain area. Others may feed and breed on their own, but spend nights at the homes of people."
Additional Evidence of Mind-Boggling Fraud Emerges from New York Primary (Whu is my mind not boggled?)
Alba Guerrero was dumbfounded. She’d arrived at her polling place in Ozone Park, Queens only to be told that she had been registered as a Republican since 2004. That was news to her. She remembers registering to vote for the first time as a Democrat so she could vote for Barack Obama in the general election in 2008. When she recently moved from Manhattan to Ozone Park, in Queens, she re-registered at the DMV, she says, and even checked online on March 9th to be sure she was registered at her new address. But when she showed up to vote for Bernie Sanders at PS63 on Tuesday, she says she was told she couldn’t. New York is a closed primary, where only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic Primary—and voters had to be registered by last October. She was told—very politely, she wants to make clear—by poll workers to take it up with a judge. She was given a court order in nearby Forest Hills. Guerrero drove to the Queens County Board of Elections and pled her case, but Judge Ira Margulis initially turned her away.  “I said, ‘Excuse me, that’s not my signature,’” she said. “It’s not my handwriting. It showed completely different signatures.”

Greg Palast on how New York and US Elections are Being Stolen: (Brooklyn elections worker quote below)
“I just got off my 17 hour shift as an election official. In my election district, out of 166 Democratic voters, 39 were forced to file affidavit ballots. The last [election] I worked in, exactly ONE voter needed an affidavit ballot.”
Palast: Brooklyn is under the control of the Kings County Democratic Party, one of the last of the big city machines. Would they attack their opponents’ voter registrations? I don’t have to guess: in my wasted younger days, I was in the Brooklyn County elections office with the hacks where we were assigned by the Party to challenge voters’ signatures en masse. (I wouldn’t and nearly lost my state job.)

Greece could leave Eurozone on Brexit vote. Interesting analysis Something really has to overtly break, soon. (Maybe Europe wants this to just kettle all the refugees that get out of Turkey in Greece, with neither country being part of EU.)

How can politicians in US and Europe get TTIP passed with so much public sentiment completely against it? Time is short. Obama and Merkel meet to work on strategy.

"Despite all these differences, Saudi Arabia and America are not getting divorced," said Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution and a former CIA official. "We need each other." [Which is also why none of the much demanded revelations by the US public about Saudi involvement in the Sept 11 bombing will ever be revealed.]
















Maintaining Fictions

Wednesday, April 20, 2016

World Of Changes

Short Changed,

Trump cleans up New York delegates: Trump 89, Kasich 3, Cruz 0
Clinton gets more delegates than Sanders: Clinton 139, Sanders 106
The media is again trying to portray Clinton and Trump as the sure-thing-nominees. This was a closed Democratic primary, locking out a lot of younger, and all independent voters.

April 26 is another Super Tuesday with 4 states and 429 Democratic delegates.

Obama arrives in Saudi Arabia to reassure his close ally that nothing has changed (which is sarcastic, of course). [There is pressure being applied to the House of Saud through the "28 pages" of the 9/11 report. The crane that collapsed in Mecca last year, killing so many people, was a Bin Laden crane. Then all of the Bin Ladens died in a plane crash. The Bin Laden family is no more. There has been restructuring in Saudi Arabia, and now there are threats, counter threats, and certainly unseen intrigues. There is a lot to be looted in Arabia. The US and Israel have always had contingency plans for regime-change in Arabia. Probably pretty itchy to enact them by now.]
Inline image 1

Saudi Arabia came into existence in 1932, when Abdulaziz defeated other regional rulers to claim essentially all of Arabia under his absolute rule. Since then, either he or one of his sons (now quite old), has ruled, though the throne has changed hands through murder and depositions as well as succession. There is a whole lot of wealth and expensive military equipment under a shaky monarchy.

What if they built a financial hub and no bankers came? (I'd be really worried, wouldn't you? Bankers know stuff. Hmmm, the Bin Ladens had about half of the construction contracts, then that plane crash...)

1.3 million Chinese coal workers are becoming "redundant" and "will be relocated". Maybe the younger ones can get other work, maybe somewhere. There are already 1.8 million "redundant" steel workers. Concrete has to be next, doesn't it?

It's really not possible to fathom how deeply Syrian families are suffering from the US/NATO/Turkish/Saudi/Israeli-imposed war, which is destroying their lives and world. Turkey keeps accidentally shooting refugee families at the border.

"The EU has lost favor with it's citizens", Jean-Claude Juncker, EU President 
[More like the eurocrats never got enough of a strangle-hold on the citizens of the member countries to convert them fully into helpless subjects. Greece is excepted, of course. Time's-up.]

Charles Hugh Smith: How Systems Break, First They Slow Down: This is widely applicable, not just ecology and economics.

An Insider's Expose of the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster (500 Hiroshimas or so of radiation in the environment is still dwarfed by above ground nuclear testing before the test-ban treaty.) The US military evacuated to 80 kilometers rapidly. The Japanese government evacuated to 20 kilometers, because they had no facilities or contingency plan; apparently still don't.) Thanks Eleni.

"As Earth warms, our historical understanding will turn obsolete faster than we can replace it with new knowledge." (Very serious community, personal and family implications to consider and deal with, here.)

93% of Australia's Great Barrier Reef is affected by coral bleaching:

Permaculture Principles in Application, Geoff Lawton, This engaging 5 minute video introduction looks at a local system now about 20 years on. There's every reason to do what we can in our own living environments. Each is going to be different. We are the stewards. (Actual work over years and decades not shown... Geoff has more video links.)

Stewarding Life