In Your Face,
The United States of Weinstein, Complicity, Greed and Corruption is the Status Quo
FBI documents reveal for the very first time that the Obama administration was well aware of illegal bribery, extortion and money laundering schemes being conducted by the Russians to get a foothold in the atomic energy business in the U.S. before approving a deal that handed them 20% of America's uranium reserves...and resulted in a windfall of donations to the Clinton Foundation... In the run-up to the approval of the deal by the State Department, nine shareholders of Uranium One just happened to make $145mm in donations to the Clinton Foundation. Moreover, the New Yorker confirmed that Bill Clinton received $500,000 in speaking fees from a Russian investment bank, with ties to the Kremlin, around the same time.
Monsters Among Us, When can we blacklist the monsters who cause horrific wars across our world at a selfish whim, instead of the few, brave whistle-blowers, who may already be dead or imprisoned? Gordon Duff, USMC Vietnam Vet. Thanks Eleni.
The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home... Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan... “Everyone knows Ms Caruana Galizia was a harsh critic of mine,” said Muscat at a hastily convened press conference, “both politically and personally, but nobody can justify this barbaric act in any way”. (He's asked the FBI to help cover-up, er... investigate the murder.)
Caruana Galizia's son, who was at the house as his mother drove away and was blown to pieces, says.
"My mother was assassinated because she stood between the rule of law and those who sought to violate it, like many strong journalists. But she was also targeted because she was the only person doing so. This is what happens when the institutions of the state are incapacitated: the last person left standing is often a journalist. Which makes her the first person left dead."... "A few hours later, while that clown of a Prime Minister was making statements to parliament about a journalist he spent over a decade demonising and harassing, one of the police sergeants who is supposed to be investigating her murder, Ramon Mifsud, posted on Facebook, “Everyone gets what they deserve, cow dung! Feeling happy :)” ... "Yes, this is where we are: a mafia state where you can now change your gender on your ID card (thank God for that!) but where you will be blown to pieces for exercising your basic freedoms. How did we get here?"
One week ago, Jesus Campos, the Las Vegas security guard who got shot just before everybody else got shot, was in a room, about to come out and give 4 interviews. He disappeared and has not been heard of since. Was he going to say something that would crash the official narrative, which is being patched together? Was Jesus murdered?
The True Danger of the North Korea Crisis, It could Cost America it's Allies (yeah, if they die...) Pulling the trigger that assures millions of Korean and Japanese deaths will make sure nobody trusts America again.
US-backed Arab and Kurdish fighters – supported by US airstrikes – has declared victory over ISIS in Raqqa, reclaiming the terror group’s de facto capital for the first time since ISIS first rose to prominence in 2014... Fighters managed to push the last remaining bastions of ISIS fighters out of a hospital and a stadium in the city. The stadium and hospital had become the last major positions held by Islamic State after the departure of some of the group’s fighters on Sunday, leaving only foreign jihadists to mount a last stand. (Paying both sides to fight in somebody else's house while it is being looted,)
"The Kurds have no friends, but the mountains." A free (not "separatist") Kurdish journalist is killed in Syria, his book advocating freedom-in-place, not movement of national boundaries to include oilfields, is unfinished. Making the individual community the basis of political action, while leaving national structures in place, is the goal of the Rojava movement. (Taking control of the oilfields in Kirkuk, Iraq, leaving ISIS to slaughter and rape unarmed civilians in Mosul, was the work of Masoud Barzani's gang, as below.)
The Kurdish independent zone in Iraq won't include the oilfields of Kirkuk. That's been swiftly dealt with by the Iraqi army. (Israel is quietly chuckling at their handiwork.)
Iran: "We will stick to the nuclear deal, if Europe does." US further marginalizes itself (un)diplomatically.
"Make Austria Great Again" and stuff. 31 year old Foreign Minister, Sebastian Kurz, is a charming right-populist-nationalist, soon to become Prime Minister, with a lighter right-populist agenda, than what did not quite fly in the last election. He wants to team up with Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic, and keep Immigrant human-waves out. (Again, stop the damned wars in their countries!)
Pepe Escobar looks at "The Spanish Civil War" as the fencers are still circling each other with rapiers drawn and serious looks. No duel necessary. Who is served by this?
First, there is no "Nobel Prize for Economics". Alfred Nobel never made that. (The Nobel Prize legacy should merely be tarnished, by giving it to Henry Kissinger and Barack Obama, not identity-thefted, by giving it to economists.)
Anyway, this guy Andrew Lo, rubbishes the "rational actor" model of economics. We are not rational, and we are full of tricks and deception, so let's use that to get people to do what we want... "Animal Spirits" with new intellectual instruction manual...
Comparing the amount of energy used for a bitcoin transaction to running his home in the Netherlands, Brosens says: "This number needs some context. 200 kWh is enough to run over 200 washing cycles. In fact, it's enough to run my entire home over four weeks, which consumes about 45 kWh per week costing €39 of electricity (at current Dutch consumer prices)."
Russia's Crypto-Ruble has already gone through a lot of development work and may be ready for prime-time:
"First-mover advantage is important here. If Russia continues to develop blockchain technology and embrace it in a relatively tax-free way, it won’t matter that it is ‘regulating’ the beautiful decentralized market of cryptos. What will matter is that Russia treats its crypto-investors better than everyone else. In the fight for global capital flows, you don’t have to be perfect, you just have to be slightly better than everyone else. Arbitrage will take care of the rest. And tax-free ruble/crypto exchange is the killer app that the crypto-market has been looking for to take it to the next level. Russia got there first."
Strange New World
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