Considering the Source,
"How to Make a Profit From Defeating Climate Change" is a business proposition from billionaire Michael Bloomberg, former mayor of NYC.
Ilargi, at Automatic Earth, takes that as a starting point in the analysis of how the profit motive mindset has brought us here by burning and mining and trashing whatever it takes to make a profit, and the best-man keeps "winning".
We got here pretty fast. Fossil fuels were a one-time gift. The amount of free-energy left after we burn the energy to get black gold out of the ground is a small fraction of what it was 100 years ago. We got the easy stuff first.
Some easy oil remains in Iraq, Libya and Iran (funny, that).
It turns out that roads vastly facilitate our destruction and burning of nature ("development"), There's an article about that at the end.
We command vast fossil fuel energy to dominate this planet. When we have completed the task, we will all die of starvation.
We can individually change. Don't count on Trump to fix it any more than Obama or Bush or Clinton did. There's no "green energy".
The FBI continues investigation into criminal activities of the Clinton Foundation. "Just doing their job until it's done", is the word.
Implicated in Democratic Primary Election-Rigging and co-starring in Pizzagate, John Podesta is sore, and tired of all this bad publicity. He wants it to go away.
Washington Post op-ed today... "The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets," he begins...
Hillary Clinton explains to pissed-off-billionaire-donors that she lost their investments due to Vladimir Putin rigging the election against her, and FBI Chief Comey writing that damned letter to Congress. ("There, we're all friends again, right?")
Donald Trump isn't helping heal open wounds with Putin-defending tweets like this:
"Are we talking about the same cyberattack where it was revealed that head of the DNC illegally gave Hillary the questions to the debate?"
Why can't we all be friends and agree on things?
A group of retired senior intelligence officials, including the NSA whistleblower William Binney (former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA), have posted an open letter on consortiumnews.com that destroys the Obama administration's "Russian hacking" narrative. Within the letter, Binney argues that, thanks to the NSA's "extensive domestic data-collection network," any data removed remotely from Hillary Clinton or DNC servers would have passed over fiber networks and therefore would have been captured by the NSA who could have then analyzed packet data to determine the origination point and destination address of those packets. As Binney further notes, the only way the leaks could have avoided NSA detection is if they were never passed over fiber networks but rather downloaded to a thumb drive by someone with internal access to servers.
According to the historian William Blum, the CIA has “(1) attempted to overthrow more than 50 governments, most of which were democratically-elected, (2) attempted to suppress a populist or nationalist movement in 20 countries, (3) grossly interfered in democratic elections in at least 30 countries, (4) dropped bombs on the people of more than 30 countries, (5) attempted to assassinate more than 50 foreign leaders.” (So we should just take their word...)
President Obama, subsequently en-route to Hawaii, gave his last press conference of 2016, and blamed Putin.
"Obama stuck to the script, and said Russia "in fact" had "hacked into the DNC," but that the actual voting process was not compromised. The White House was just trying to "let people know" what was going on.'
Vladimir Putin has had enough of the relentless barrage of US accusations that he, personally, "hacked the US presidential election."
The Russian president's spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said on Friday that the US must either stop accusing Russia of meddling in its elections or prove it. Peskov said it was "indecent" of the United States to "groundlessly" accuse Russia of intervention in its elections.
“You need to either stop talking about it, or finally show some kind of proof. Otherwise it just looks very indecent.”
Finian Cunningham has this update on Aleppo, and the painful (for neocons) transition beginning in US Foreign Policy (First, you have to admit you have an alcohol problem, then...)
Instead of dealing with the reality that Syrian state forces have recaptured Aleppo from brutal, illegally armed groups, which the West and its regional clients have bankrolled and armed, the West distorts the dramatic victory as the «fall of Aleppo». One report on American channel CNN even referred to the victorious Syrian army and its allies as «persecutors».
Why aren’t the Western news media interviewing the tens of thousands of civilians who have now managed to flee from the defeated terrorist groups? Why don’t the Western media ask questions about the nature of their captivity? Such as, why could they not escape from militant-held eastern Aleppo until now? What do these civilians think of the Syrian army and its allies who have crushed the militants?
Saudi Arabia is willing to reduce the pumping rate on it's wells, which is quite magnanimous, unless they have to because they have been over-pumping to the point that total cumulative production is getting hurt; "unsustainable" rate of production...
In the latest encounter in international waters in the South China Sea region, the USNS Bowditch was sailing about 100 miles off the port at Subic Bay when the incident occurred, according to the official. Bowditch had stopped in the water to pick up two underwater drones. At that point a Chinese naval ship that had been shadowing the Bowditch put a small boat into the water. That small boat came up alongside and the Chinese crew took one of the drones. According to US officials, the unmanned vehicles was seized unlawfully by China. A Reuters official also adds that "the UUV was lawfully conducting a military survey in the waters of the South China Sea," the official said. "It's a sovereign immune vessel, clearly marked in English not to be removed from the water - that it was U.S. property." [Personally, I think it is not a vessel, which would hold people, but a device, which is different in the law of the sea. This is really double-grey-zone activity. "The toy was there in the playground, and had been there for days, and we picked it up just inside our yard."]
Touche' Turtle
