Wednesday, January 8, 2020

Murder Most Foul

Betrayed,

​ ​The bombshell facts were delivered by caretaker Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi, during an extraordinary, historic parliamentary session in Baghdad on Sunday.
​ ​Maj. Gen. Qasem Soleimani had flown into Baghdad on a normal carrier flight, carrying a diplomatic passport. He had been sent by Tehran to deliver, in person, a reply to a message from Riyadh on de-escalation across the Middle East. Those negotiations had been requested by the Trump administration.
​ ​So Baghdad was officially mediating between Tehran and Riyadh, at the behest of Trump. And Soleimani was a messenger. Adil Abdul-Mahdi was supposed to meet Soleimani at 8:30 am, Baghdad time, last Friday. But a few hours before the appointed time, Soleimani died as the object of a targeted assassination at Baghdad airport.
​ ​Let that sink in – for the annals of 21st century diplomacy. Once again: it does not matter whether the assassination order was issued by President Trump, the US Deep State or the usual suspects – or  when. After all, the Pentagon had Soleimani on its sights for a long time, but always refused to go for the final hit, fearing devastating consequences.
​ ​Now, the fact is that the United States government – on foreign soil, as a guest nation – has assassinated a diplomatic envoy who was on an official mission that had been requested by the United States government itself.​..
​ ​Killing Soleimani does prove that Trump, the Deep State and the usual suspects all agree on the essentials: there can be no entente cordiale between Saudi Arabia and Iran. Divide and rule remains the norm.

​Former UK Ambassador Craig Murray:
​ ​In one of the series of blatant lies the USA has told to justify the assassination of Soleimani, Mike Pompeo said that Soleimani was killed because he was planning “Imminent attacks” on US citizens. It is a careful choice of word. Pompeo is specifically referring to the Bethlehem Doctrine of Pre-Emptive Self Defence.
​ ​Developed by Daniel Bethlehem when Legal Adviser to first Netanyahu’s government and then Blair’s, the Bethlehem Doctrine is that states have a right of “pre-emptive self-defence” against “imminent” attack.

“Why don’t we simply take their oil?”  Donald Trump
​Michael Hudson, the original author of the idea of the Petrodollar, in his book, Super Imperialism, which Nixon and Kissinger used after Nixon had to default on the gold standard, explains the current military and financial status of the Petrobuck Empire. US military must support American dollar trading of Mideast oil, and must effectively prevent countries like Iraq, Libya and Iran from selling oil outside the $US regime. Failure to assure the need for dollars to buy oil will demote the $US to just another global currency. The US/empire will quite getting stuff for freely-conjured dollars, and won't be able to afford the imperial army.​ The imperial army consists of democratic air force and navy, with mercenary jihadis like ISIS and al-Qaeda on the ground getting killed. Lessons of Vietnam... 
This is reality. Iran is not threatening New York with terrorist attacks. Iran is not who does that..
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/01/06/america-escalates-its-democratic-oil-war-in-the-near-east/  

Dan White's military analysis of the (in)ability of the US to defeat Iran, from 2015, remains pertinent and instructive. The US has no will to lose tens of thousands of American soldiers in a meat grinder. The grinder would keep on grinding,too.
https://contraryperspective.com/2015/04/06/with-iran-america-its-time-to-grow-up/ 

What if we invade Iran with a robot Terminator army. That would save lives, right? Helen of DesTroy has the story:
Make no mistake: Military robots are not there to preserve human life, they are there to allow even more endless wars

​Your move, Don...
​ ​Last night Iran fired 22 Qiam missiles towards two U.S. bases in Iraq. Between 1:45 and 2:15 local time (~22:00 UTC) seventeen missiles hit the Ain al Asad airbase west of Ramadi. Five missiles were aimed at Erbil airport in the northern Kurdish region of Iraq. There were no casualties.
​ ​The Swiss embassy in Tehran, which represents the U.S., was warned at least one hour before the attack happened. Around 0:00 UTC the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration issued a Notice to Airmen (NOTAM) which prohibited civil U.S. flights over Iraq, Iran, the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman.
​ ​This attack was the "open" and "proportional" response for the U.S. assassination of Major General Qassem Soleimani which Iran's Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei had promised. It will certainly not be the only response but represents the opening shot of a long and much more silent campaign to kick the U.S. out of the Middle East.​..​
The Ain al Asad airbase which was hit is where the drones that killed Soleimani and the Iraqi leader Abu Mahdi al-Muhandis were launched from. Erbil airport is the logistic center for the U.S. forces in Syria.​..​ 
​ ​Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump - 2:45 UTC · Jan 8, 2020
All is well! Missiles launched from Iran at two military bases located in Iraq. Assessment of casualties & damages taking place now. So far, so good! We have the most powerful and well equipped military anywhere in the world, by far! I will be making a statement tomorrow morning.  

​What is up with this Boeing 737  that plummeted to the ground right after take-off from Tehran last night, killing all aboard? Does it mean anything that it was owned by a Ukrainian company?​ 
American media is saying "Maybe Iran accidentally shot it down". I don't think so.
​ ​Nothing was wrong with the Ukraine International Airlines jet that came down in Iran with 176 on board, the company has said. It was one of the best planes in UIA’s fleet and had undergone maintenance just days before the crash.
​ ​Delivered to UIA in 2016, the Boeing 737-800 was “in excellent condition” before its last flight from Tehran to Kiev, Evgeny Dykhne, the company’s president, told reporters in Kiev, also describing the aircraft as “one of the best.”

​Lest we forget:​
Iran Air Flight 655 was a scheduled passenger flight from Tehran to Dubai via Bandar Abbas, that was shot down on 3 July 1988 by an SM-2MR surface-to-air missile fired from USS Vincennes, a guided missile cruiser of the United States Navy  
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Monday, January 6, 2020

Responses

Respondents​,

​I would like to propose to the Iranian government that they "paint" all tankers​,​ carrying oil paid for in $US through the Strait of Hormuz, with missile targeting radar, and announce that they won't actually start sinking them yet.
China can start paying for oil in Yuan/Renmenbi, or even Euros. 
Lloyd's of Lond​o​n can say that insurance will be higher for oil bought in $US.​ ​
​That will hasten the fall of the Petrobuck-Empire.​

​ ​Former UK Ambassador, Craig Murray discusses the change in Mideast power politics, which has just been brought about.
​ ​US influence was balanced by strong Iranian aligned militia forces who were an alternative source of strength to the government of Baghdad, and of course by the fact that the centre of Sunni tribal strength, the city of Falluja, had itself been obliterated by the United States, three times, in an act of genocide of Iraqi Sunni population.
​ ​Through all this the Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi had until now tiptoed with great care. Pro-Iranian yet a long term American client, his government maintained a form of impartiality based on an open hand to accept massive bribes from anybody. That is now over. He is pro-Iranian now.
​ ​Such precarious balance as there ever was in Iraq was upset this last two months when the US and Israelis transported more of their ISIL Sunni jihadists into Iraq, to escape the pincer of the Turkish, Russian and Syrian government forces. The Iranians were naturally not going to stand for this and Iranian militias were successfully destroying the ISIL remnants, which is why General Qassem Suleimani was in Iraq, why a US mercenary assisting ISIL was killed in an Iranian militia rocket attack, and why Syrian military representatives were being welcomed at Baghdad airport.
​ ​It is five years since I was last in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but it is extraordinarily heavily fortified with military barriers and checks every hundred yards, and there is no way the crowd could have been allowed to attack the US Embassy without active Iraqi government collusion. That profound political movement will have been set in stone by the US assassination of Suleimani. Tehran will now have a grip on Iraq that could prove to be unshakable.
​ ​Nevertheless, Tel Aviv and Riyadh will also be celebrating today at the idea that their dream of the USA destroying their regional rival Iran, as Iraq and Libya were destroyed, is coming closer. The USA could do this. The impact of technology on modern warfare should not be underestimated.​..
​ So what happens now? Consolidating power in Iraq and finishing the destruction of ISIL in Iraq will be the wise advance that Iranian statesman can practically gain from these events. But that is, of course, not enough to redeem national honour. Something quick and spectacular is required for that. It is hard not to believe there must be a very real chance of action being taken against shipping in the Straits of Hormuz, which Iran can do with little prior preparation. Missile attacks on Saudi Arabia or Israel are also well within Iran’s capability, but it seems more probable that Iran will wish to strike a US target rather than a proxy. An Ambassador may be assassinated. Further missile strikes against US outposts in Iraq are also possible. All of these scenarios could very quickly lead to disastrous escalation.
https://www.craigmurray.org.uk/archives/2020/01/the-usa-doubles-down-on-its-saudi-allegiance/  

Iraqi Parliament votes to expel US troops, as expected.
The US State Department has expressed its "disappointment" at the Iraqi parliament's vote to expel US forces. However, as Axios' Jonathan Swan notes in a tweet, that he just spoke with a senior Iraqi government official, who explained that people should be very cautious about drawing certain conclusions from Iraq's parliamentary vote to expel the U.S.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/iranian-mps-chant-death-america-iraq-votes-have-us-troops-removed-country  
We'll pay for your base, if you pay for what you did to our country.​..​
Trump Says "US Will Not Leave" Iraq Unless Billions For Air Base Are Repaid, Threatens Baghdad With "Very Big" Sanctions   https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/trump-says-us-will-not-leave-iraq-unless-billions-air-base-are-repaid  
Gail Tverberg reads the hydrocarbon-fuel tea leaves. ​   ​The real situation is different. We already seem to be on the road toward a new crisis; this crisis is likely to be much worse than the Great Recession of 2008-2009. This time, a major problem is likely to be energy prices that are too low for producers. Last time, a major problem was oil prices that were too high for consumers. The problem is different, but it is in some ways symmetric.​                                                       ​​ ​ Last time, the United States seemed to be the epicenter; this time, my analysis indicates China is likely to be the epicenter. Last time, the world economy was coming off a high growth period; this time, the world economy is already somewhat depressed, even before hitting headwinds. These differences, plus the strange physics-based way that the world economy is organized, explain why the outcome seems likely to be worse this time than in 2008-2009.​ ​https://ourfiniteworld.com/2019/12/08/recession-ahead-an-overview-of-our-predicament/ 

​Michael Hudson lays out the economic reasons why Americans are feeling so very stressed by finance, despite a booming stock "market".
​ Payments on the economy’s rising debt should rightly be viewed as a subtrahend from national income. But the GDP accounting format treats this rising debt as a necessary cost of production. In this line of theorizing, creditors provide a productive service whose value is reflected in the rate of interest and the magnitude of fees and penalties. Ultra-low interest rates, resulting from financial lobbying pressures, have held down the cost of carrying this debt, but these low official rates mask the reality that many debtors fall behind and have to pay penalty fees and high penalty interest rates.
 These payments are added to today’s GDP measure, even as they leave less family income available to be spent on products. The result is a statistical confusion concerning how much GDP growth is actual income and product growth, and how much is rent extracted from disposable personal and corporate income. That is the basic conceptual issue addressed in this paper.
https://michael-hudson.com/2019/10/asset-price-inflation-and-rent-seeking/ 

Charles Hugh Smith, to whom we are also beholden for drawing attention to the above financial news, asks
 "Is this the top?"
It's not an idle question. Look at both posts for the broadest picture.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan20/the-top1-20.html 
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjan20/two-charts1-20.html

Australian bushfires have mostly been started by people,about 85% of them, especially kids on school holidays. Almost 200 people have been arrested. Lots get away, of course.
https://summit.news/2020/01/06/nearly-200-people-arrested-across-australia-for-deliberately-starting-bushfires/  

Inescapable Consequences
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Saturday, January 4, 2020

To Stop A War

Mourners,

Moon of Alabama says this murder of Qassim Suleimani (and a dozen Iraqi military personnel) was the assassination of an Iranian official, openly seeking to attend an Iraqi state funeral, after taking a commercial flight from Lebanon. 
It is particularly another act of war against Iraq, after the 5 attacks last weekend. (The attack Friday 12/27/19 which killed an American mercenary is broadly thought to have been an Israeli false-flag provocation.)
Earlier today a U.S. drone or helicopter killed Major General Qassim Soleimani, the famous commander of the Iranian Quds ('Jerusalem') force, while he left the airport of Baghdad where he had just arrived. He had planned to attend the funeral of the 31 Iraqi soldiers the U.S. had killed on December 29 at the Syrian-Iraqi border near Al-Qaim.
 The Quds force is the external arm of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps. Soleiman was responsible for all relations between Iran and political and militant movements outside of Iran. Hajji Qassim advised the Lebanese Hisbullah during the 2006 war against Israel. His support for Iraqi groups enabled them to kick the U.S. invaders out of Iraq. He was the man responsible for, and successful in, defeating the Islamic State in iraq and Syria. In 2015 Soleimani traveled to Moscow and convinced Russia to intervene in Syria. His support for the Houthi in Yemen enabled them to withstand the Saudi attackers.

​The US is on a killing spree in Iraq, using drone forces based in Iraq, and has killed more Iraqi command level officers late Friday US time. This is more war against Iraq from inside Iraq. US Army reinforcements are already arriving...
​https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/round-two-us-drone-airstrikes-kill-six-pro-iran-militia-commanders

Trump gets CIA briefings every morning, and frequent updates. Garbage in, garbage out? What "reality" is this?
President Trump on Friday said that America does not seek "regime change" in Iran, and that the United States "took action last night to stop a war" by killing Iran's #2 commander, Qasem Soleimani, on Thursday.
​ ​Speaking from Mar-a-Lago one day after the strike, the president said that Soleimani "made the death of innocent people his sick passion."
​ ​"We caught him in the act and terminated him," said Trump, adding that The US is "ready and prepared to take whatever action is necessary."
"We took action last night to stop a war."

​Always the voice of reason: ​
​Lindsay ​Graham Tells Trump To ​"​Crush Iranian Economy' By Targeting Oil Refineries After Assassination​'​

​Tom Luongo has a good synthesis of the situation: (Again, think Obi Wan Kenobi.)
​ ​Like it or not Trump executed the man most responsible for the systemic destruction of ISIS and neutering of Al-Qaeda in Syria and Iraq. He’s also a man, over the years, who has fought the U.S. to a standstill across the Middle East.
​ ​Those were his pertinent crimes.
​ ​This is the most dangerous escalation of Trump’s administration. Nothing he’s done to this point compares with killing Solemaini and taking immediate credit for it.
​ ​Nothing he’s done is more tone deaf or disproportionate to whatever crimes were the proximate cause. And nothing he could have done would be more galvanizing of resistance to U.S. occupation of Iraq and Syria.

"​In case of emergency, break glass and pull"​
​ ​The U.S. military in September ordered the largest stress test of its wartime sealift fleet in the command’s history, with 33 out of 61 government-owned ships being activated simultaneously. The results were bad, according to a new report.
​ ​In an unclassified U.S. Transportation Command report posted to its website, the so-called turbo activation revealed that less than half of the sealift fleet would be fully prepared to get underway for a major sealift operation in a crisis.

​Craig Murray on the rise of the Zombie State:
​ ​The ruling Establishment has learnt a profound lesson from the debacle over Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction. The lesson they have learnt is not that it is wrong to attack and destroy an entire country on the basis of lies. They have not learnt that lesson despite the fact the western powers are now busily attacking the Iraqi Shia majority government they themselves installed, for the crime of being a Shia majority government.
​ ​No, the lesson they have learnt is never to admit they lied, never to admit they were wrong. They see the ghost-like waxen visage of Tony Blair wandering around, stinking rich but less popular than an Epstein birthday party, and realise that being widely recognised as a lying mass murderer is not a good career choice. They have learnt that the mistake is for the Establishment ever to admit the lies.

​Thanks Eleni, for the updated Israeli 2-state-solution-but-we-take-it-all peace plan.
​ The Israeli right is preparing to present a plan to overthrow the Jordanian king after annexing the Jordan Valley in the West Bank to realise the dream of Jordan being converted to Palestine. They aim to establish a confederation between the PA and “Palestinian Jordan” because the Israeli right is interested in annexing the West Bank without the millions of Palestinians within it. Forcing them to head to Jordan.
 Israel’s Haaretz newspaper revealed in late December the Israeli right-wing’s approaches and plans, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This is based on the claims that Israel has major plans for Jordan, but these plans do not include the same king.
https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20200101-israels-countdown-to-achieve-the-alternative-homeland-in-jordan-begins/

Going whole-hog at Davos. Watch out for Iranian counter-attack, everybody!
  US.Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin will lead a group of US officials who will attend the World Economic Forum later this month in Davos, Switzerland, the White House said Wednesday.
 Mnunchin will be joined by officials including Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, Labor Secretary Eugene Scalia, Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao, US Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer and White House senior advisers Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner.
 Also attending will be Keith Krach, a State Department under secretary for growth, energy and the environment, and Christopher Liddell, a White House deputy chief of staff...
 A White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said on Wednesday that Trump is still expected to attend at this time.      https://www.presstv.com/Detail/2020/01/02/615142/Treasury-Mnunchin-to-head-US-delegation-to-Davos-conclave
​French President and House of Rothschild representative, Emmanuel Macron will not be deterred from looting the, surprisingly healthy by globalist standards, French pension plans, no matter how many workers strike, or for how long, "because that's where they keep the money".​
https://sputniknews.com/europe/202001011077916944-frances-macron-vows-to-finalise-pension-reform-despite-vocal-protests/ 

Ellen Brown points out that we may have been barking up the wrong, or not-the-best, tree. Thanks Travis.
I hope Davos gets the memo.
 Perry observes that before farmland was cultivated, it had soil carbon levels of from 3% to 7%. Today, those levels are roughly 1% carbon. If every acre of farmland globally were returned to a soil carbon level of just 3%, 1 trillion tons of carbon dioxide would be removed from the atmosphere and stored in the soil – equal to the amount of carbon that has been drawn into the atmosphere since the dawn of the Industrial Revolution 200 years ago. The size of the potential solution matches the size of the problem.
​ ​So how can we increase the carbon content of soil? Through “regenerative” farming practices, says Perry, including planting cover crops, no-till farming, rotating crops, reducing chemicals and fertilizers, and managed grazing (combining trees, forage plants and livestock together as an integrated system, a technique called “silvopasture”).

​Grows On Trees​
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Friday, January 3, 2020

Tortured Existence

Innocent,

Professor Anthony Hall has an article about Israeli torture of Palestinian prisoners of all ages, most often detained indefinitely without charges or trial or any particular rights. Israel is the illegal military occupying power of the world which these rightful citizens inhabit. No Israeli guard/interrogator has ever been charged with wrongdoing.
​ ​One example is Mahmoud Zakarner, 19, from Kabatya village. Mahmoud had his testicles smashed in front of his uncle in an effort to force his uncle to provide the names of those who participated in the killing of a collaborator in February 1988. Mahmoud is now paralyzed and unable to speak as a result...
 ​ ​The misrepresentation of 9/11 was used to infuse into US military policy the Israeli embrace of the strategy of so-called “pre-emptive war.” This policy of hitting targets immediately on the suspicion that combatants may be preparing attacks has oozed into many aspects of public policy. One of the casualties of the shift has been the legal presumption of innocence until guilt is proven. The sharp increase in rates of arbitrary detention followed by frequent rounds of torture of Palestinians provides a classic example of post-9/11 practice in Israel.​..
​ ​How much is torture used these days to draw from victims desired explanations to give the appearance of evidence for concocted narratives? The Global War on Terror originates in a concocted narrative supported with supposed evidence obtained through illegal torture. The ongoing Global War on Terror continues to require a steady stream of concocted narratives to give a steady stream of deceptions some resemblance to truth. Since torture victims can be terrorized into saying almost anything in order to make the pain stop, torture victims can easily be pressured to produce the false narratives needed to keep culprits in power.​..
​ Why is it that whenever and wherever torture is taking place, whether it be in Latin America, Abu Ghraib or the Balkans, Israeli individuals tend to have some involvement as protagonists. In the post-9/11 world the governments and companies of Israel have marketed themselves as leading practitioners of anti-terrorism, counter-terrorism. This claim is often justified by pointing to the Israeli experience of repressing the Palestinians​..​.
​ ​When the people of France discovered in the 1950s that torture was being inflicted by French soldiers on Algerian foes, the uproar was such that France itself was plunged into a chaotic state approaching the severity of civil war. So far the travesty of proliferating torture in our times, including in Israel and the USA, has yet to arouse the level of popular opposition it deserves. Of this crime against humanity Yara Hawari has written, “torture requires the total dehumanization of the person, and once that occurs the boundaries of degradation are limitless.”

​ ​A United Nations official says the U.S. is torturing Chelsea Manning with detention, in a letter to the U.S. government released Tuesday.
​ ​Nils Melzer, the U.N. special rapporteur on torture, accused the U.S. of torture by holding Manning in “civil contempt” of court for refusing to testify in front of a grand jury, in a letter sent in November.
​ ​Melzer says in the letter that the former Army intelligence analyst is being subjected to “an open-ended, progressively severe measure of coercion fulfilling all the constitutive elements of torture or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Iran's Top Military Commander, Qasem Suleimani, Assassinated In US Airstrike
It looks like US drones killed General Suleimani and a fair number of other people at Baghdad airport early Friday 1/3/20.​ I expect Iran to be very careful and patient in responding.​

​Here is the situation in Iraq, as the US assassinated General Suleimani on Iraqi soil, with the usual collateral damage:
​ ​When on December 29 several missiles hit a U.S. base in Iraq and killed one U.S. contractor the Trump administration did exactly that. It bombed five sides at the Iraqi Syrian border hundreds of kilometers away from the original attack. Some 32 people died of which only nine were members of the of the Kata'ib Hezbollah group of the PMF. The others killed were Iraqi border policy men and regular Iraqi soldiers.
​ ​We immediately predicted that the incident was likely to end the presence of U.S. military in Iraq.
After the official mourning family members and comrades of the deceased soldiers stormed the perimeter of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad. They left yesterday after the prime minister guaranteed them that the Iraqi parliament would soon vote on a law that would evict all U.S. forces.
​ ​The U.S. has reinforced its embassy guards. It has airlifted an airborne infantry battalion to Kuwait and put another 4,000 troops on standby.
​ ​The Trump administration did not apologize for its attack on the Iraqi troops. Instead it appealed to Iraqi sovereignty, which it had broken when it attacked the PMF, when it demanded better protection for its embassy. Even today, with no demonstrators anywhere nearby, the U.S. was flying helicopters patrols over Baghdad. The Iraqis see that as a further insult.​..
​ The U.S. sees Iraq and Syria as the grounds on which it can fight Iran. Neither country wants to be in such a position.

​Iran puts all forces on high alert. They know what is coming.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/iran-deploys-f-14-fighter-jets-puts-ballistic-missile-bases-high-alert  

​We know that God is patient, though...
​Iran's supreme leader, the Ayatollah Khamenei, warned in a statement that the "criminals" responsible for the death of a top Iranian general will face "severe revenge", and that his work fighting on behalf of the Iranian people "won't be stopped by his martyrdom," according to a statement published on Twitter.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/ayatollah-vows-severe-retaliation-against-criminals-responsible-killing-iranian  
​The fact is that recycling plastics has always been a scam and will always be a scam. It just allows the manufacturers and industrial users of disposable plastic products to keep increasing output into the world. We just need to stop using plastic packaging, plastic bags and disposable eating utensils. Do you remember before they existed? It will be a change in lifestyle. Eating in traffic will be over.
​https://www.treehugger.com/plastic/how-our-thinking-changed-2019-recycling-and-plastics.html

Choosing Responsibly
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Wednesday, January 1, 2020

Truth Will Out

Facing Reality,

Jim Kunstler lets it all hang out in his 2020 predictions, best I've seen. Here's some lead-in.
​ W​hat drove the American thinking class insane? I maintain that it comes from the massive anxiety generated by the long emergency we’ve entered — the free-floating fear that we’ve run out the clock on our current way of life, that the systems we depend on for our high standard of living have entered the failure zone; specifically, the fears over our energy supply, dwindling natural resources, broken resource supply lines, runaway debt, population overshoot, the collapsing middle-class, the closing of horizons and prospects for young people, the stolen autonomy of people crushed by out-of-scale organizations (government, WalMart, ConAgra), the corrosion of relations between men and women (and of family life especially), the frequent mass murders in schools, churches, and public places, the destruction of ecosystems and species, the uncertainty about climate change, and the pervasive, entropic ugliness of the suburban human habitat that drives so much social dysfunction. You get it? There’s a lot to worry about, much of it quite existential. The more strenuously we fail to confront and engage with these problems, the crazier we get.  

​George Monbiot on Christmas giving as currently practiced.
 Researching her film The Story of Stuff, Annie Leonard discovered that of the materials flowing through the consumer economy, only 1% remain in use six months after sale(1). Even the goods we might have expected to hold onto are soon condemned to destruction through either planned obsolescence (breaking quickly) or perceived obsolesence (becoming unfashionable)...
 People in eastern Congo are massacred to facilitate smart phone upgrades of ever diminishing marginal utility(3). Forests are felled to make “personalised heart-shaped wooden cheese board sets”. Rivers are poisoned to manufacture talking fish. This is pathological consumption: a world-consuming epidemic of collective madness, rendered so normal by advertising and the media that we scarcely notice what has happened to us.
https://www.monbiot.com/2012/12/10/the-gift-of-death/?fbclid=IwAR2H2WrQGqTADv0p6BTmffngWCcP9LZlvcLhjtYRgx2ILzmWGQU7hm8atGo#.XfkGjDMOtJk.facebook 

China is investing in Africa for the long term. Wazzat mean? 
China is building Chinese economic areas, with Chinese workers, factories and products, Chinese autonomous cities, with good roads, railroads, ports and utilities. African governments are taking out loans from China to do this, and having to turn over state-owned assets, like electric utilities, when they can't make payments. 
This is colonialism-with-Chinese characteristics, isn't it. 
China could use another continent some day. 
Europeans tried some of this, so some African countries still speak French and English, and Europeans did try to populate South Africa and Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, which are more temperate.
Michael Snyder presents this as "much worse", but I can't really see that. 
It's mainly different, but it might become genocidal by the end of the century.
http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/the-takeover-china-is-building-enormous-self-sustaining-chinese-cities-all-over-the-african-continent  

Google is different, suddenly quite different. A whole lot of core employees and top directors have suddenly left.
​ ​Workers told CNBC that 2018 was a pivotal point in the company’s shift away from upfront communication. That was when news of Project Dragonfly, a secret Google plan to develop a censored search engine for possible rollout in China, first broke in The Intercept. Internally, the existence of the project had been kept on a need-to-know basis.
​ ​The company later canceled Project Dragonfly after employees expressed concern over the secrecy of the project. Some workers left the company altogether.

​Russian Foreign Minister, Sergei Lavrov, talks about meeting with Donald Trump as the impeachment festivities kicked off 12/20/19. Thanks Eleni.
"I like the way Trump discusses international agenda and issues in bilateral relations. He avoids any ambiguity and tries to say what he thinks directly," Lavrov said in an interview aired by Russia's Channel One.
​ ​This "productive approach" that not many top politicians use allows parties "to better understand the opportunities, difficulties and prospects of relations."
​ ​The FM met with Trump on December 10 when the House Democrats announced the articles on which they were going to vote to impeach him for what they call pressure on Ukraine to launch an investigation into former Vice President Joe Biden and his son's activities.
​ ​As Democrats had failed to impeach Trump previously for "collusion with Russia" because the probe found none, his meeting on that day fueled up the Resistance. But Lavrov insisted that it was just a "coincidence," with the date of his meeting with Trump agreed a month before his arrival to Washington.
​ ​Lavrov described his talks at the White House as "substantial," saying that at least "a dozen of substantial issues" were discussed including bilateral ties, strategic stability, arms control and various regional conflicts, such as those in the Middle East, Ukraine and the Korean Peninsula. "There was an extremely direct conversation on all those topics, with no attempts to cut corners or avoid contentious issues."  

 ​ ​Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has hailed the completion of an against all odds landmark deal with Russia's Gazprom as ensuring "energy security and prosperity for Ukrainians."
​ ​It will keep natural gas flowing to Western Europe via Ukraine for the next five years, which is estimated to net Ukraine $7 billion (€6.25 billion) in gas transit fees by 2024.
​ ​After a series of compromise breakthroughs over the past weeks, including Gazprom paying out $2.9 billion legal settlement to Naftogaz and Kiev in turn agreeing to wave a separate legal claim, the two sides finally inked the historic deal on Monday.
https://www.zerohedge.com/energy/no-more-transit-risk-european-gas-prices-fall-ukraine-russia-ink-landmark-deal  

"One Nation Conservatism" is a populist package the Tories are putting into place to give more support to places where most Britons live, that are not London, a completely novel initiative. It seems that this is a serious preparation for holding the country together through Brexit.
https://sputniknews.com/europe/201912281077888333-britain-government-spending-boris-johnson/ 

"I'm slowly dying", says Julian Assange on Christmas Eve, sounding groggy and sedated in Belmarsh Prison. (There is a lot of interest in having Assange die of something that resembles "natural causes" among certain imperial elites.)
 https://www.rt.com/uk/477138-assange-prison-awful-sedated-uk/

Addicted to Anticipation, what goes on in the brain chemistry of a gambling addict 
​ ​“First you get that euphoric feeling, that rush and excitement,” Townsend-Lyon says, “Once you become addicted, then you get to the point where you don’t care about anything. You’re in a zone and you don’t realize what’s going on around you.”
The high is in expecting an outcome, desiring it, imagining it, not in its fulfillment.

W​all Street Gambler​
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Monday, December 30, 2019

Eventually Advancing

​Advanced Life Forms,​

Eric Zuesse sees Obama in ​legal​ crosshairs for coordinating illegal investigation to thwart candidate Trump. "Treason"
​ ​Americans who vote for reform will be only increasing the likelihood of hell-on-Earth. Reform is no longer an available option, given America’s realities. A far bigger leap than that will be required in order for this country to avoid falling into an utter abyss, which could be led by either Party, because both Parties have brought the nation to its present precipice, the dark and lightless chasm that it now faces, and which must now be leapt, in order to avoid a free-fall into oblivion.
​ ​The problem in America isn’t either Obama or Trump; it’s neither merely the Democratic Party, nor merely the Republican Party; it is instead both; it is the Deep State.

​Massive international criminal conspiracy, including Democratic politicians and deep state, is rightly worried about being subject to legal consequences, including prison. The Saul Alinsky, "accuse them of whatever you did to confuse people" strategy of impeaching Trump is a hoped-for get-out-of-jail-free card.​
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/28/because-youd-be-in-jail-the-real-reason-democrats-are-pushing-trump-impeachment/  

​Bernie Sanders could win the Democratic nomination. It is being said. There is some opinion that the Democratic Party that Trump is battling, typified by Clinton, Biden, Obama et.al. would already have been beaten before the election, if Sanders got the nod. 
(It depends on what you mean by "beaten", though. They would need to be assured immunity from prosecution, hundreds of 'em.)​
https://www.politico.com/news/2019/12/26/can-bernie-sanders-win-2020-election-president-089636 

 I wish this were more complicated, like economists make it sound on TV and radio.
Understanding The U.S. Economy: Lots Of Rotten Jobs

​Yanis Varoufakis imagines a world without capitalism, and gives a narrow definition of capitalism, and suggests tools for deconstruction of corporate capitalism. Good thoughts and historical analysis.
​In this system, calls for a gentler capitalism are mere fads – especially in the post-2008 reality, which confirmed the total control over society by mega-firms and mega-banks. Unless we are willing to ban tradable shares, first introduced in 1599, we will make no appreciable difference to the distribution of wealth and power today. To imagine what transcending capitalism might mean in practice requires rethinking the ownership of corporations.  

​Tom Luongo postulates that (Rothschild backed) Emmanuel Macron and UK PM Boris Johnson made a deal in October to pull off a no-deal Brexit, in a way that would betray German interests, increase French prerogative within EU governance (and probably be good for Rothschild banking on both sides of the "chunnel", sez I).

​Moon of Alabama has an important story:
​ On Friday a volley of some 30 107mm Katyusha rockets hit the K1 base which houses Iraqi and U.S. troops near Kirkuk, Iraq. One U.S. mercenary/contractor died, two Iraqi and four U.S. soldiers were wounded. Instead of finding the real culprits - ISIS remnants, disgruntled locals, Kurds who want to regain control over Kirkuk - the U.S. decided that Kata'ib Hizbullah was the group guilty of the attack.
 Kata'ib Hizbullah is a mostly Shia group with some relations to Iran. It is part of the Popular Mobilization Units (PMU) which were founded and trained by Iran to stop and defeat the Islamic State (ISIS) when it occupied nearly a third of Iraq and Syria. KH is like all PMU units now under command and control of the Iraqi Ministry of Defense.
 To take revenge for the death of one of its mercenaries the U.S. air force attacked five camps where Kata'ib Hizbullah and other Iraqi forces were stationed...
The strikes were designed to kill those who still fight ISIS in its most virulent hide outs.​..
​ In the aftermath of the American strikes, Iraqi Prime Minister Adil Abdul-Mahdi said, “We have already confirmed our rejection of any unilateral action by coalition forces or any other forces inside Iraq. We consider it a violation of Iraq’s sovereignty and a dangerous escalation that threatens the security of Iraq and the region,”
The U.S. and Israel have already killed hundreds of Iraqi forces that are aligned with Iran. But these were the most egregious strikes. 
There is no doubt. The U.S. forces will have to (again) leave Iraq​.​  (I have doubts. JD)

What the World’s Most Controversial Herbicide Is Doing to Rural Argentina
After enormous lobbying efforts, Monsanto’s GMO soybeans, treated with Roundup, became the country’s largest export, as cancer rates and other health issues skyrocketed.

​Scientists assess where one might best live in North America as this century grinds on, considering climate change, aquifer depletion, storms, infrastructure breakdowns, local agriculture and other practical matters.
​http://energyskeptic.com/2019/scientists-on-where-to-be-in-in-the-future/  


Restoring natural forests is the best way to sequester atmospheric carbon (not growing pulp timber and chopping it down in 10-20 years, but actually letting big, complex forests keep growing and making wood, and moss and pine needles for centuries)
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-01026-8 

Chimpanzee with AK-47 wins. Short and intense video with no apparent fatalities. Thanks Bosco.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GhxqIITtTtU  

Naked Ape
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Saturday, December 28, 2019

Don't Believe Your Thoughts

​Navigators,

​ ​Another thing you have the power to do, which I highly recommend, is to get rid of beliefs which do not serve you and replace them with nothing at all. When you notice a belief you have about the world, or about yourself, or about someone else, or whatever, you can ask yourself how that belief is beneficial to you. If you conclude that the belief harms your ability to enjoy life or to succeed at your goals, or even if it’s just not particularly useful, you can simply consciously relinquish it by ceasing to energetically hold it in yourself as true and real. You don’t actually need to replace it with another belief if you don’t want to; you can just let it exist as one big question mark.
​ ​In fact it’s possible to live life with very few beliefs, because very few of them will be useful to you at any given time. You can comb through your entire belief system and consciously relinquish almost all of it one item at a time, leaving nothing in its place but question marks. You can choose to experience life as a mystery.

​4 million Muslims killed since 1990, but the American Empire has been at it a LOT longer than that.
("White Man's Burden", signed copy for you, T.R.)
​ ​After the U.S. defeated the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay and annexed the Philippines under the 1898 Treaty of Paris, the Moro population were not even consulted. The U.S. then sought to “pacify” them using brute force.
​ ​“I want no prisoners,” ordered General Jacob Smith on Samar Island during the war in 1902. “I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better you will please me.”
​ ​Fast forward over 100 years later and it is difficult to see how U.S. military doctrine has changed for the better. A video came to light in 2010 of then-General James Mattis saying that it was “a hell of a lot of fun to shoot” people in Afghanistan. 

​Rat Line Reversal will solve problems for Turkey by getting rid of heavily armed "refugees" from Syria, at bargain price, while exerting "regional influence" in oil-rich Libya. Libya's the cheapest place to send that riffraff.
​ President Erdogan in a speech on Thursday presented plans to send Turkish national troops bolster Tripoli as well.
 Possibly thousands from among the so-called Turkish Free Syrian Army (formerly the FSA), with most of its fighters currently attacking Syrian Kurds in the ongoing 'Operation Peace Spring', will now be sent into Libya.
 There are reports suggesting Turkey is ready to pay $2,000 a month for each Syrian 'rebel' willing to go to Libya...
 And akin to the current proxy war which has seen both the US, Kurds, and Sunni Islamists backed by Turkey wrangle over Syria's oil rich eastern region, Libya is heating up to be the latest 'oil and gas prize' — but with immensely more at stake.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/foreign-fighter-rat-line-reverse-turkey-sends-syrian-rebels-libya 

 Wikileaks has released their fourth set of leaks from the OPCW’s Douma investigation, revealing new details about the alleged deletion of important information regarding the fact-finding mission.
​ ​“One of the documents is an e-mail exchange dated 27 and 28 February between members of the fact finding mission (FFM) deployed to Douma and the senior officials of the OPCW. It includes an e-mail from ​("Voldemort") Sebastien Braha, Chief of Cabinet at the OPCW, where he instructs that an engineering report from Ian Henderson should be removed from the secure registry of the organisation:[Documents Registry Archive]​:​
‘Please get this document out of DRA [Documents Registry Archive]… And please remove all traces, if any, of its delivery/storage/whatever in DRA.'”  

 Up until the OPCW leaks, WikiLeaks drops always made mainstream news headlines. Everyone remembers how the 2016 news cycle was largely dominated by leaked Democratic Party emails emerging from the outlet. Even the relatively minor ICE agents publication by WikiLeaks last year, containing information that was already public, garnered headlines from top US outlets like The Washington Post , Newsweek, and USA Today. Now, on this exponentially more important story, zero coverage.
​ ​The mass media’s stone-dead silence on the OPCW scandal is becoming its own scandal, of equal or perhaps even greater significance than the OPCW scandal itself. It opens up a whole litany of questions which have tremendous importance for every citizen of the western world; questions like, how are people supposed to participate in democracy if all the outlets they normally turn to to make informed voting decisions adamantly refuse to tell them about the existence of massive news stories like the OPCW scandal? How are people meant to address such conspiracies of silence when there is no mechanism in place to hold the entire mass media to account for its complicity in it? And by what mechanism are all these outlets unifying in that conspiracy of silence?
​ ​We can at least gain some insight into that last question with the internal Newsweek emails which were published by journalist Tareq Haddad two weeks ago.

​4 years ago Wikileaks found some emails from nice Mr Soros. (Hey, Joe, Hunter, Check This Out!)
​ Rarely does the world get a true look inside the corrupt world of Western oligarchs and the brazen manipulations they use to enhance their fortunes at the expense of the public good. The following comes from correspondence of the Hungarian-born billionaire, now naturalized American speculator, George Soros. The hacker group CyberBerkut has published online letters allegedly written by Soros that reveal him not only as puppet master of the US-backed Ukraine regime. They also reveal his machinations with the US Government and the officials of the European Union in a scheme where, if he succeeds, he could win billions in the plunder of Ukraine assets. All, of course, would be at the expense of Ukrainian citizens and of EU taxpayers.
https://journal-neo.org/2015/06/12/an-american-oligarch-s-dirty-tale-of-corruption/  

2 years ago, George moved almost all of his chips into his charity, remember?
​ ​Uber-liberal billionaire George Soros infused “the bulk of his wealth” -- $18 billion -- into his activist charity arm Tuesday, making the philanthropic organization second only to Bill and Melinda Gates' Foundation in U.S. assets and further extending and strengthening Soros' tentacles worldwide.
​ ​It's unclear what Soros' group will use the billions of dollars toward. He recently posted on his Twitter page articles about the Open Society Foundations' work in countries including Albania and Macedonia.

​Is Social Media The New Tobacco? Charles Hugh Smith 
(Is killing bicyclists while texting the new second-hand-smoke?)
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogdec19/new-tobacco12-19.html  

Pipe Dreamer
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Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Troubled World

Seekers of Peace,

This is something we don't really see in our world, but I look at most years, or rather I read the transcript of Vladimir Putin's year-end press conference and watch a little bit, to see how he looks. He looks good, at ease, in command of the facts, conversant with all that he is asked. The conference is 4 hours and 20 minutes. It's a really long transcript, yet it was worth the read to me. Where is another political leader like this? He comports himself as a public servant. His knowledge and humility are hard for me to describe. I come up short. He is an important human for this historical epoch, I believe.
http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/62366 

Proof That America's "Deep State" Exists and Controls the Government, Eric Zuesse  (lots here, poor organization)
​ ​As everyone knows who has been closely following the most-reliable evidence regarding the question of how DNC emails had been copied and supplied to Wikileaks, there has been much credible, soundly-sourced, speculation that the DNC employee Seth Rich had physically copied the data from a computer there onto a thumb drive (or “USB stick”), which then was picked up in the U.S. by a Wikileaks agent, who physically delivered it to Julian Assange at London’s Ecuadorean Embassy. The great independent investigative journalist (virtually barred since 2007 from being published in the U.S. anymore), Seymour Hersh, personally investigated the records of the murder of Seth Rich, both at the Washington DC police and at the FBI, and this is from the transcript I had made of his statement in a Web-posted phone-call​.

Gladio, The Story of a Conspiracy  Thanks Dan.
​ ​When in the early 1970s an Italian right-wing journalist told me about a secret army training in Italy’s mountains, I scoffed at first thinking he was repeating a rumor picked up from some scoop-obsessed reporter. But my tune began changing when he gave it a name—“Stay Behind Army”—and explained it was a secret army to fight the Soviet armies which someday soon would invade West Europe. He gave me the name of a member of that secret army who would talk with me... 
​ ​Years later, in the late 1980s or early 90s, it happened by chance that I met in a Rome hotel bar an American who knew details about that secret army. I was sitting on a stool at the bar of the luxurious Grand Hotel waiting for an appointment with a well-known writer when the man sat down on the stool next to me. I recognized William Colby from pictures of him in the press announcing the presence in Rome for a conference of the former Director of the CIA. I nodded, said hello, and we chatted bar talk until the chat turned into a short interview, which I subsequently published in the European press. I told him I knew who he was, and as we spoke I asked him point-blank about the mysterious Stay-Behind Army.
​ ​To my surprise Colby almost boasted that the covert action branch of the CIA to which he was attached in the 1950s built throughout Western Europe what in intelligence trade parlance were known as ‘Stay-Behind Nets’, in Italy known as Gladio, the headquarters of which was in Rome. In that post-war period Colby was a young intelligence officer assigned to the CIA station in the US Rome Embassy. Officially the network was clandestine, he related, ready to be called into action as sabotage forces when the time came, confirming the few words of those two young Romans of years earlier. Colby said that in 1951 the chief of the CIA in West Europe sent him to the field to help build the Stay-Behind network. ‘Our aim was the creation of an Italian nationalism capable of halting the slide to the left,’ he said, as if speaking of ancient Greek history.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2019/12/20/gladio-the-story-of-a-conspiracy/ 

​The Real Revolution In Military Affairs, Pepe Escobar gives the high points of the American military's complete vulnerability to Russian and Chinese hypersonic weapons, both at sea, and every American military base in the world. Mutual Assured Destruction has never been more robust.​ The most expensive military in the world can only kill, not protect.
https://consortiumnews.com/2019/12/21/pepe-escobar-you-say-you-want-a-russian-revolution/  

​It's not the new normal. It's the new slavery.
Sanders Report Shows How Millennial Generation Is 'Being Punished With Crushing Student Debt and Low-Paying Jobs'
"In the richest country in the history of the world, we have an obligation to turn this around and make sure our kids live healthier and better lives than we do."

Child slaves reduce retail prices...
 There’s a chance that the iPhone you’re about to get for Christmas contains cobalt mined by a six-year-old. There’s also a chance that that six-year-old has been killed or maimed in the processes of mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the lion’s share of the world’s cobalt comes from.
​ ​Or, maybe, for those whose Christmas lists are more upscale, you’ll be driving around in a new Tesla next week, with a battery containing cobalt from that same mine.
​ ​Our luxuries are necessarily someone else’s sacrifice – and sometimes that sacrifice is the ultimate one.

"Byzantine"  It's hard to see exactly which objectives Turkey hopes to achieve in this very complex regional dance to dominate oil and gas wells and pipelines.
Turkey may now intervene directly in Libya's civil war after a military cooperation deal was ratified between President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Libyan Prime Minister Fayez Al Sarraj.​..
​Sputnik Comment:
​ Turkish snipers and storm groups are fighting in the ranks of Libya's Government of National Accord (GNA) in the capital of Tripoli. The LNA units gain control over new positions in Tripoli daily.
"We saw Turkish soldiers fighting on the ground in the direction of Khallet al-Furjan in Tripoli among the GNA armed militias. We saw them with our own eyes... snipers and Turkish storming groups. The progress is slow but continuous."

​Human anguish as a weapon.​
​ ​At a moment Erdogan has his hands dirty in Syria and is preparing to get more militarily involved in Libya, Turkey's president has yet again threatened Europe with a refugee horde so large no country will be able to handle it. He's now specifically threatened Greece as being among the first to bear the brunt of the first waves of refugees unleashed by Turkey.
​ ​His threats are now centering on the major uptick in airstrikes by Russia and Syria on Idlib province, said to number in the "hundreds" since a new operation began on Dec.16. Since then, tens of thousands of civilians living under al-Qaeda's Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) have reportedly fled.
​ ​"Turkey cannot handle a fresh wave of migrants from Syria​"​, President Tayyip Erdogan said on Sunday, warning that ​"​European countries will feel the impact of such an influx if violence in Syria’s northwest is not stopped," Reuters reports.
https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/turkey-cant-handle-impending-refugee-explosion-greece-will-be-first-feel-impact  

​Acting Israeli PM, Netanyahu says the International Criminal Court has no standing to investigate Israeli war crimes in Palestine, because only countries can appeal to the ICC, and Israel doesn't recognize Palestine as a country.
The UN General Assembly does, but the General Assembly is just racist and anti-semitic and hates Israel's freedom and democracy.​
https://www.rt.com/news/476518-icc-palestine-war-crimes/ 

Don't forget how anti-semitic Jeremy Corbyn is. He supports Palestinian​s​. 
​ ​When is a war crime not a war crime? When, according to British officials, that war crime has been given a makeover as a “charitable act”.
​ ​The British state is being asked to account for its financial and moral support for a UK organisation accused of complicity in the ethnic cleansing of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their homeland. So far, it appears determined to evade answering those questions.
​ ​The target of the campaign is the Jewish National Fund UK (JNF UK), which describes itself as “Britain’s oldest Israel charity”. Noting its role in “building Israel for over a century”, the organisation boasts: “Every penny raised by JNF UK is sent to a project in Israel.”
​ ​In fact, donations to JNF UK were used to buy some of the 250 million trees planted across Israel since 1948, the year when 750,000 Palestinians were forced out at gunpoint from their homes by the new Israeli army. Those expulsions were an event Palestinians call their Nakba, or “catastrophe”.
​ ​Afterwards, the Israeli army laid waste to many hundreds of Palestinian villages, turning them into rubble. Forests planted over the villages were then promoted as efforts to “make the desert bloom”.

Gosh, what's this mean?  Obama was like the billionaires' and bankers' best friend ever. 
 While Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) spent most of her campaign railing against the donor class while refusing to accept large checks from Democratic bundlers, former President Obama has been privately talking up the 2020 candidate who formerly identified as a Native American.
 According to The Hill, Obama has advised reluctant donors to back the Massachusetts Democrat despite her plans to separate them from as much of their wealth as she can. If she becomes the nominee, according to Obama, donors will have no choice but to throw their support behind her.  
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/biden-who-obama-privately-telling-top-donors-rally-around-warren 

More on Tulsi Gabbard's principled stance voting "present" at impeachment hearing, and then...
She also introduced a resolution calling on the House to censure Trump on five issues she implied were far more substantial. Those include carrying out wars without congressional approval, illegally “occupying and pillaging” Syria, “recklessly enabling” Turkey to invade Northern Syria and ethnically cleanse Kurds (a U.S. ally), continuing to support Saudi Arabia’s “genocidal war” in Yemen and scrapping nuclear agreements with Iran and Russia, thereby strongly increasing the risk of nuclear proliferation.  (but this is the stuff they ALL agree on​!​)
https://www.mintpressnews.com/war-pillaging-and-peace-why-tulsi-gabbard-did-not-vote-to-impeach-trump/263657/  

Only RT seemed to have a piece on Julian Assange testifying in Spanish trial of company that spied on him 24:7 in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, for the American deep-state. No "fair trial" in America is remotely possible. 
https://www.rt.com/news/476529-assange-testify-spanish-spying/  

Trump Impeachment Slapstick Is A Diversion From Reality, Finian Cunningham 
(Thou shalt not upset the consumers minds with harsh reality during Christmas shopping season.)
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/12/20/trump-impeachment-slapstick-diversion-from-reality/  

Steve Mnuchin says $1.5 trillion in $100 bills are lying low, somewhere on earth and that's just the officially printed ones. (Paging CIA to white courtesy telephone) 
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/steven-mnuchin-explains-why-15-trillion-100-bills-have-disappeared 

Mohamed El-Erian is worried about the "new normal" without economic growth, and thinks Europe is first in line at the chopping block. The whole interview is realistic, but targets very rich audience. Upshot is "dump risk now!"
What’s going on in the advanced world is structural. It’s about productivity and growth potential. If you run complex liberal democracies at low growth for a long time, things start to break. So as good as the «New Normal» was for the last ten years, I don’t think it will expand the next ten years. We’re going to see a tip, and in Europe we’re getting much closer to it: If Europe hits stall speed in 2020, which is a growth rate of below 1%, the chances of a recession are increasing. Yet, with better policies, Europe can also bounce back quite quickly. So Europe is really heading for this tipping point or T-junction. The same is true for China and the US. But Europe is most advanced in that process.  

​Pat Buchanan makes the point (from his value-perspective, but a valid point) that France is breaking politically and economically, and the US is steadily headed in that direction. It's basically El-Erian's concern, but from a political vantage. He offers no solution.​ (Do keep watching Rothschild-man Macron for clues of what not to do.The problem has not been worked yet, but it involves massive sharing of losses by the top echelons of the wealth pyramid: Demotions, Real investment of shared national-outcomes by trapped humans of all classes.)
https://buchanan.org/blog/today-france-tomorrow-the-usa-137917  

​Don't try to interpret this study at home! 
It won't actually have a real, verified meaning until we have a medicine to sell you for a few thousand dollars per month, for the rest of your life.​ (I eat chilies 4 times a day, myself.)
​ ​For many years, chili has been hailed for its therapeutic properties, and now researchers have found that eating chili peppers regularly can cut the risk of death from heart disease and stroke.
​ ​Carried out in Italy, where chili is a common ingredient, the study compared the risk of death among 23,000 people, some of whom ate chili and some of whom didn't.
​ ​Participants' health status and eating habits were monitored over eight years, and researchers found that the risk of dying from a heart attack was 40% lower among those eating chili peppers at least four times per week.
Death from stroke was more than halved, according to results published Monday in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.  

​Ima Pepper​
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Thursday, December 19, 2019

Whatchacallit

Balancing Checkbooks,

Dmitry Orlov, famous for being a Russian who went through the collapse of the USSR, sees the world through that lens. Hell, he thinks he sees it coming in the western financial system. What a laugh! He sounds like a "Putin puppet".
​ ​Looking at the numbers for October and November, the Fed monetized over half (50.7%) of new US government debt. A straight-line projection is that if it took the Fed to go from 0% to 50% in four months, then it will go from 50% to 100% in another four—by April Fool’s 2020. But who’s to say that the increase will be linear rather than exponential? Whichever it is, the trend is unmistakable: the market in US government debt—once the deepest and most liquid market in the world—is dead. The only thing propping up the value of USTs is the Fed’s printing press. And the only thing propping up the value of the output of the Fed’s printing press is… what is it, exactly? Exactly!
​ ​Let’s add one more salient detail. Over the course of 2020, $4.665 trillion of USTs will mature and will need to be rolled over into new USTs. This is an all-time record, and this is on top of new debt that will have to be issued in order for the US government to be able to stay open. Over the past year the US budget deficit has amounted to $1.022 trillion, which is a 15.8% increase over the previous year. If this trend continues, the new deficit will be around $1.183 trillion. In order to keep the wheels of finance from grinding to a halt, over 2020 the Fed will have to monetize, or print, close to $6 trillion.
​ ​It appears likely that at some point over the coming months Fed chairman Jerome Powell will have to announce “not not QE,” and then “not not not QE,” and then “Milk-milk-lemonade, ’round the corner fudge is made!” and run for the unigender restroom sobbing inconsolably.  

​A real "whistleblower":
NSA whistleblower, former NSA technical chief, Bill Binney, says CIA created the ‘evidence’ for the Mueller Report’s allegation that Russia had hacked DNC.
BILL BINNEY: I basically have always been saying that all of this Russian hack never happened, but we have some more evidence coming out recently. 
​ ​We haven’t published it yet, but what we have seen is that there are at least five items that we’ve found that were produced by Guccifer 2.0 back on June 15th, where they had the Russian fingerprints in them, suggesting the Russians made the hack. Well, we found the same five items published by Wikileaks in the Podesta emails. Those items do not have the Russian fingerprints, which directly implies that Guccifer 2.0 was inserting these into the files to make it look like the Russians did this hack. 
​ ​Taking that into account with all the other evidence we have; like the download speeds from Guccifer 2.0 were too fast, and they couldn’t be managed by the web. And that the files he was putting together and saying that he actually hacked, the two files he said he had were really one file, and he was playing with the data; moving it to two different files to claim two hacks. Taking that into account with the fabrication of the Russian fingerprints, it leads us back to inferring that in fact the marble framework out of the Vault 7 compromise of CIA hacking routines was a possible user in this case. ​ ​In other words, it looked like the CIA did this, and that it was a matter of the CIA making it look like the Russians were doing the hack. 
​ ​So, when you look at that and also look at the DNC emails that were published by Wikileaks that have this phat file format in them, all 35,813 of these emails have rounded off times to the nearest even second. That’s a phat file format property; that argues that those files were, in fact, downloaded to a thumb drive or CD-rom and physically transported before Wikileaks posted them. Which again argues that it wasn’t a hack. 
​ ​So, all of the evidence we’re finding is clearly evidence that the Russians were not in fact hacking; it was probably our own people. 
​ ​It’s very hard for us to get this kind of information out. The mainstream media won’t cover it; none of them will. It’s very hard. We get some bloggers to do that and some radio shows.  

​US Army Reserve Major, and Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard​ voted "I showed up". (I sent her a $50 vote this morning.)
​ ​Throughout my life, whether through serving in the military or in Congress, I’ve always worked to do what is in the best interests of our country. Not what’s best for me politically or what’s best for my political party. I have always put our country first. One may not always agree with my decision, but everyone should know that I will always do what I believe to be right for the country that I love.
​ ​After doing my due diligence in reviewing the 658-page impeachment report, I came to the conclusion that I could not in good conscience vote either yes or no.
​ ​I am standing in the center and have decided to vote Present. I could not in good conscience vote against impeachment because I believe President Trump is guilty of wrongdoing.
​ ​I also could not in good conscience vote for impeachment because removal of a sitting President must not be the culmination of a partisan process, fueled by tribal animosities that have so gravely divided our country. When I cast my vote in support of the impeachment inquiry nearly three months ago, I said that in order to maintain the integrity of this solemn undertaking, it must not be a partisan endeavor. Tragically, that’s what it has been.

​Schrodinger's Impeachment is half alive and half dead as long as it does not get looked at by the Senate, so it will be maintained in this condition by House Democrats​ for public relations purposes.
This prevents it being declared "dead" by the Senate, or worse yet, the "autopsy" of the legal discovery process.
This sort of contains the damage to the Democratic Party, but only sort of. It doesn't help their cause, and it doesn't hurt Trump's cause. Trump can keep tweeting and writing letters about facts. 
Giuliani is supposed to spill his dirt on Ukrainian corruption after the Senate vote. What's the new timeline on that? 
https://summit.news/2019/12/19/why-pelosi-plans-to-delay-sending-impeachment-articles-to-the-senate/ 

​Doing the Limbo​
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Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Merry Go Round

Quidly Pro Quo,

Former Israeli spy, Ari Ben-Menashe, had another interview, with Whitney Webb, about Jeffrey Epstein's early days of value to Israeli intelligence. He was working with Robert Maxwell, a major Mossad asset, when Bill Clinton's star began to ascend towards the White House. Epstein was ideal, under those conditions, to become a friend of Bill, and procure underage girls for him, to help keep him from turning out bad like Jimmy Carter, and pressuring Israel for a two state solution; things like that. 
(Again, the dead guys head is not Epstein's head http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/08/whose-murdered-corpse.html )
https://www.mintpressnews.com/ari-ben-menashe-israel-relationship-jeffrey-epstein/263465/ 

There is a loss of trust in banking. Banks don't trust banks in the overnight lending, "repo" market. 
Why not? What do they know. They say the same thing happened in summer 2008. 
Here's The Slog, John Ward.
​ ​T​​o see banks in the repo financial sector through to 2020 – that’s exactly two weeks away – the NYFed will whack $130bn of button-created money into that niche to stop collapses…and in the first ten days of January, another $180bn. By the end of the first month of the year, something like 3 trillion dollars will have been thrown at the problem since September...
  After the 2008 Crash1, despite all their attempts (largely successful) to avoid being reined in by regulation, the banks themselves lost all trust in each other. In this playground, there is zero honour between thieves – just children playing at Lord of the Flies. For weeks before 2008 went critical, nobody trusted Lehman. Equally, Wall Street firms stood and watched as other banks circled round Lehman like sharks in a feeding frenzy – sinking their teeth into the bloated whale by withdrawing cash. Barcap wound up buying the bank for a song.
​ ​So repo became a channel for offsetting risk while providing short-term liquidity or credit.  Banks still demanded collateral for their loans to other banks, and so the repo market became a way of avoiding that by spreading risk and using cheap government bonds (T-Bills) as collateral.
​ ​However, since late 2017, lending via the repo has been a quadropoly involving the megabanks. Any reduced willingness by the Big  Four to lend there reduces in turn the liquidity of other banks….who have, of course, spent the last decade overleveraging themselves again.
https://hat4uk.wordpress.com/2019/12/17/analysis-one-lesson-for-both-the-new-york-fed-and-boris-johnson-you-cant-buy-trust/?unapproved=858891&moderation-hash=f5cdac68e6556d24803664af03c37513#comment-858891 

Interest rates have to be suppressed, despite risks, despite withering pension funds, because the current financial system is so heavily over-indebted, that rises in rates will collapse it, as interest service becomes impossible.
​ ​Herbert Stein, a prominent economist and adviser to presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked, “If something cannot go on forever, it will stop.”...
 ​Current global debt levels are simply not sustainable. Debt actually is sustainable if the debt is used for projects with positive returns and if the economy supporting the debt is growing faster than the debt itself.
​ But ​neither of those conditions applies today.
​ ​ Debt is being incurred just to keep pace with existing requirements in the form of benefits, interest and discretionary spending.​ (Not just government, but corporate, and household, etc.)

​Proposed Social Security Disability restructuring will kick a lot of people off the back of the bus, older people, sort of pre-retirees, as the system now operates. They spend what they get into the basic economy of food, rent and bills. 
This clearly benefits no player within the economy. therefore, I see it as some kind of contrived bargaining chip.
​ ​Currently, beneficiaries are placed in three separate categories based on the severity of their disability: “Medical Improvement Not Expected,” “Medical Improvement Expected,” and “Medical Improvement Possible.” People with more severe medical conditions face less frequent disability reviews.
​ ​The Trump administration’s proposed rule would another category called “Medical Improvement Likely,” which would subject beneficiaries to disability reviews every two years.
​ ​According to the Inquirer, “an estimated 4.4 million beneficiaries would be included in that designation, many of them children and so-called Step 5 recipients, an internal Social Security classification.”
​ ​Step 5 recipients, the Inquirer noted, “are typically 50 to 65 years of age, in poor health, without much education or many job skills [and] often suffer from maladies such as debilitating back pain, depression, a herniated disc, or schizophrenia.”

​Across the pond, Boris Johnson shows which side he thinks his bread will be buttered upon in the coming year, by not going to Davos, and not letting members of his government going to Davos, so as to demonstrate that the Tories have become a party of the workers, not the elites. Hopefully there will be many such signals to follow in the upcoming 54 weeks or so.
​https://www.zerohedge.com/political/uk-pm-johnson-boycott-davos-trip

This is such a signal. BoJo puts the heat on the EU, whose banking sector is reportedly treading barefoot upon glass shards these days, by declaring intent to make it illegal to extend Brexit transition beyond 12/31/2020. He looks like he can pull this off. It doesn't look like a bluff now. He's got some face cards in his hand.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/pound-tumbles-report-pm-johnson-plans-outlaw-further-brexit-delays  

Television Populist President Donald Trump wrote a letter to wily swamp amphibian , Nancy Pelosi about how she's betraying the constitution and stuff. 
It's all true, and all circus at the same time. 
Big day for circus today. Watch your assets!
http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/trump-said-what-here-are-the-top-10-zingers-in-president-trumps-historic-letter-to-nancy-pelosi 

Hand on Wallet
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