Workings

Violently Ejected,

MSM Adamantly Avoids The Word “Coup” In Bolivia Reporting​, ​by Caitlin Johnstone  ​ ​

​ ​There has been a military coup in Bolivia backed by violent right-wing  rioters and the US government, but you'd hardly know this from any of the mainstream media headlines...
 ​ ​The indigenous leader of a socialist South American government which has successfully lifted masses of people out of crushing poverty, which happens to control the world's largest reserves of lithium (which may one day replace oil as a crucial energy resource due to its use in powering smartphones, laptops, hybrid and electric cars), which has an extensive and well-documented history of being targeted for regime change by the US government, simply stepped down due to some sort of scandal involving a "disputed election". Nothing to do with the fact that right-wing mobs had been terrorizing this leader's family, or the fact that the nation's military literally commanded him to step down and are now currently searching for him to arrest him, leading to ousted government officials being rounded up and held captive by soldiers wearing masks.  

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/11/11/msm-adamantly-avoids-the-word-coup-in-bolivia-reporting/  

​ ​Two days before Bolivian president Evo Morales was pushed out by the country’s military, Mark Weisbot of the Center for Economic and Policy Research penned a warning about what was happening, and what might unfold, in a Nation article titled, The Trump Administration Is Undercutting Democracy in Bolivia.
He noted:
​ ​Multilateral organizations like the Organization of American States (OAS) have a certain perceived impartiality because they are, in theory, controlled by a diverse group of nations. But sometimes a great power can wield a disproportionate influence. It could theoretically be a coincidence that both the Trump administration and the OAS have tried—without offering any evidence—to discredit Bolivia’s national election in the past couple of weeks. But it’s more likely that this dangerous, ugly, and destabilizing operation is being pushed by Washington.
​ ​This “destabilizing operation” came to a head yesterday when Morales resigned under pressure from the military amidst a wave of protests and violence. The situation is Bolivia is complicated, but one thing you can be sure of is anything you hear or read in U.S. mass media will be a heaping pile of lies and propaganda...
​ ​Morales was barred by the constitution from running for another term, but he attempted to override this with a referendum which he lost 51% to 49%. The Bolivian Supreme Court later ruled that term limits were unconstitutional, so he decided to run again. He then won this new election in the first round by the 10% spread required, but the Organization of American States (OAS) immediately called into question the validity of the result. This sparked weeks of protests and culminated in yesterday’s military coup. According to Mark Weisbot, the OAS has provided zero evidence of election fraud, and also notes that approximately 60% of the OAS budget comes from the U.S. government.

https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2019/11/11/bolivia-adds-to-the-ranks-of-global-political-chaos/  

Bolivian Coup Comes Less Than a Week After Morales Stopped Multinational Firm's Lithium Deal
"Bolivia's lithium belongs to the Bolivian people. Not to multinational corporate cabals."

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/11/bolivian-coup-comes-less-week-after-morales-stopped-multinational-firms-lithium-deal  

​The Many Ways Sanders and Warren are Different, and Why It Matters:

​https://downwithtyranny.blogspot.com/2019/11/the-many-ways-sanders-and-warren-are.html

​Moon of Alabama:

Hong Kong - "Marginal Violence" Fails To Win More Protest Support
​ ​After nearly six months of violent "protest" the U.S. supported anti-Chinese rioters in Hong Kong are switching into overdrive.
Today there were more than 16 hours of continuous violent rioting by small groups of black clad "protesters"...
​ ​Violence against the  government was supposed to create a violent response which would then increase the support for the protests. That theory seems not to work in Hong Kong. Legit demonstrations are now reduced to a few hundreds of people. The hundred thousands who attended the first demonstrations no longer come. They have recognized that the core protesters' "mild force" is just senseless violence and that these rioters are completely unreasonable.
Today they intentionally burned a man who was verbally opposing them:
​ ​By Monday evening, Leung Chi-cheung, a 57-year-old father of two daughters, was fighting for his life in hospital with severe burns to his body as well as head trauma.
​ ​The video footage then showed Leung returning to confront the protesters, whereupon a dispute ensued.
“During the dispute, he was doused with flammable liquid and set alight,” a police source said.
Another source described the attack as ruthless.
“The victim stood up bravely after the sabotage, but the rioters tried to burn him alive,” the source said. “Such an attack is inhumane.”

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/11/hong-kong-marginal-violence-fails-to-win-more-protest-support.html 

​ ​Over the weekend multiple Bradley infantry fighting vehicles (IFV) were filmed leading convoys in around the northern cities of Tal Tamir and Kobani, escorting other armored vehicles along with infantry crew members. Syrian Kurdish and local media are mistakenly describing the armored Bradley M2 infantry fighting vehicles rumbling across the highways as "tanks"...
​ ​One Pentagon official was pressed during a briefing last Thursday over how a country's sovereign resources could be legally stripped away on its own soil, to which a US commander responded: "U.S. troops have the... authorization to shoot if a representative of the Syrian government comes to the.. oil fields and says, 'I am here to take property of these oil fields.'"

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-infantry-fighting-vehicles-appear-northern-syria 

​Iran announces new oil field find with 53 billion barrels, increasing "proven reserves" by over 30%​.

https://apnews.com/a6adb7b30adb444998541b1b5aca4332  

Shrink the military, shrink injustice​, ​The US Green New Deal must be anti-imperialist

http://unevenearth.org/2019/10/shrink-the-military-shrink-injustice/ 

​As UK snap elections lean towards a hung Parliament, UKIP's Nigel Farage announces he will not contest the Tories in 317 local elections. He wants Brexit, actually wants it. What's his strategy?

​ Farage listed two main points that he could work with that speaks directly to Labour voters who voted Leave:
Johnson has promised no extension to the Transition Period beyond 2020, keeping No Deal on the table.
Johnson would negotiate based on a Canada+ Trade Deal.
 Both of these things were part of Farage’s “Big Ask” in the first place. By conceding he got most of what he wanted, something to campaign against Johnson on, since Johnson wasn’t about to give Farage anything official publicly.
 The Tories cannot form an alliance with an outsider like Farage. That would be damning to them, conceding they are the past.

https://tomluongo.me/2019/11/11/farage-saves-brexit-johnson-big-ask/  

 No Recession Ever Again? The Yellowstone Analogy​, Charles Hugh Smith​
​ ​Just ​as forestry management's policy of suppressing forest fires insured uncontrollable conflagrations, so central banks' attempts to eliminate recessions insure a financial conflagration that will burn down the entire global financial system.
​ ​The first task of those at the levers of neoliberal global capitalism is to deny that global capitalism is in crisis.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blognov19/recession-conflagration11-19.html  

​ ​Amber Dykshorn stood at her kitchen window and watched the storm come in.
​ ​It was a very dark Saturday night in the middle of the summer in the middle of a year that is on track to be the wettest in more than a century. The wind blew over the farm, the rain came down and she heard the ominous pings on her roof – pea-sized hail, striking the still-fragile stalks of the only corn her husband, Chris Dykshorn, was able to plant before he took his own life in June.
​ ​Chris had lost all hope.
​ ​The couple was absolutely drowning in debt, and they desperately needed a good year just to keep the farm going.
​ ​But then the rain just kept on coming, and now Amber has to deal with three young kids and $300,000 in farm debt all by herself…
​ ​Did their crop insurance cover hail damage? She had no idea. That was something Chris would have taken care of, if he were here. Instead she was alone, with nearly $300,000 in farm debt, three kids ages 5 to 13 and a host of grief-fueled questions. Why hadn’t she been able to save him? What would happen to them now?  

http://themostimportantnews.com/archives/for-millions-of-americans-in-the-middle-of-the-country-it-feels-like-an-economic-depression-right-now  

​Beaten​

Relating Ideas

Understanding Relationships,

The conclusion is obvious. The details are important to understand our human context.

​ ​In terms of population numbers, few species can compare to the success of humans. Though much attention on population size focuses on the past 200 years, humans were incredibly successful even before the industrial revolution, populating all of the world's environments with more than a billion people. Kramer uses her research on Maya agriculturalists of Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula and the Savanna Pumé hunter-gatherers of Venezuela to illustrate how cooperative childrearing increases the number of children that mothers can successfully raise and—in environments where beneficial—even speed up maturation and childbearing. Kramer argues that intergenerational cooperation, meaning that adults help support children, but children also share food and many other resources with their parents and other siblings, is at the center of humans' demographic success. "Together our diet and life history, coupled with an ability to cooperate, made us really good at getting food on the table, reproducing, and surviving," Kramer writes.
​ ​During her time with the Maya, Kramer constructed a demographic model that considered how much household members consume, as the family grows and matures across a mother's reproductive career, balanced against how much a mother, father, and their children contribute. She found that Maya children contributed a substantial amount of work to the family's survival, with those aged 7-14 spending on average 2 to 5 hours working each day, and children aged 15-18 spending as much as their parents, about 6.5 hours a day. Labor type varied, with younger children doing much of the childcare, older children and fathers fill in much of the day-today cost of growing and processing food and running the household. "If mothers and juveniles did not cooperate, mothers could support far fewer children over their reproductive careers," Kramer writes. "It is the strength of intergenerational cooperation that allows parents to raise more children than they would otherwise be able to on their efforts alone."  
https://phys.org/news/2019-11-human-population-ability-cooperate.html 

I’m Watching My Students Become Soldiers in Our Endless Wars
At West Point, Graduation Day felt more like a tragedy than a triumph. 
 My greatest fear, I said, was that their budding young lives might closely track my own journey of disillusionment, emotional trauma, divorce, and moral injury. The thought that they would soon serve in the same pointless, horrifying wars, I told them, made me “want to puke in a trash bin.” The clock struck 1600 (4 pm), class time was up, yet not a single one of those stunned cadets—unsure undoubtedly of what to make of a superior officer’s streaming tears—moved for the door. I assured them that it was okay to leave, hugged each of them as they finally exited, and soon found myself disconcertingly alone. So I erased my chalkboards and also left.  
https://www.thenation.com/article/afghanistan-army-west-point/ 

​"It can't happen here"...​

​ ​Where did all the time go? Thirty years ago this week the Berlin Wall fell. Then Soviet chairman Mikhail Gorbachev freed the Baltic states and allowed divided Germany to reunite. It was a geopolitical earthquake of historic proportions – and a major miracle of our times.
​ ​The once mighty Soviet Union had become exhausted by its long military/economic/political struggle to keep up with the much wealthier United States and its rich allies. Moscow had 40,000 tanks, but its economic infrastructure, crippled by Marxist ideology, was an empty shell.
​ ​A senior KGB general in Moscow told me that, a decade earlier, the renowned Soviet physicist Andrei Sakharov had warned the Politburo that failure by Soviet industry to account for deprecation to modernize and replace outdated equipment would provoke a major crisis by 1990. This is exactly what happened.
​ ​By 1990, Soviet industry was broken down, outdated or rusted away. The Kremlin could no longer maintain the Soviet welfare state with its free medicine and education, long holidays, vacation spas, early pensions and unaffordable military spending. Arms alone may have accounted for over 40% of Moscow’s budget.

https://ericmargolis.com/2019/11/miracle-in-berlin/  

​America's Gorbachev?

​International Man: Last year, President Trump took the unusual step of bypassing his advisors to announce his intention to withdraw all US troops from Syria quickly. The decision rattled Washington and the mainstream media. It caused former Defense Secretary Mattis to resign. Almost a year later, the US has withdrawn only a token number of soldiers. It still has thousands of troops occupying the part of the country where oil fields are located. What is going on here?
David Stockman: Well, that’s the Deep State at work.
Donald Trump is all by his lonesome. He’s home alone in the Oval Office. Now, half of it, he can blame himself. If he hires someone, a known idiot like John Bolton, what does he expect is going to happen except that everything he wanted to do is going to be undermined...

​ ​When you have a regime change policy—and this was the one real positive thing Trump brought to the table. He said regime change has failed; we’re not going to do it under my policy.
​ ​Why do you think the North Koreans are quasi-starving? And I know the Communist elite and Kim’s family and so forth live a pretty fat life, but nevertheless they’re in dire straits economically.
​ ​Why do they invest all this money in developing nuclear capability and missile capability? Because they don’t want to be regime changed. Kim is a young man, he’s in his mid-30s, and he doesn’t want to be another Muammar Gaddafi or Saddam Hussein.​..

...I think the stock market is in its last days of bubble excess. I think the economy is slouching toward recession within a matter of a few quarters or months. If that happens, Trump is toast. Elizabeth Warren becomes president, and then that’ll be a whole new ball game that is hard to figure.​..

...Foreign policy has been totally taken over by the Democratic paranoia about Russia and Putin and meddling in our elections.
​ ​Now it’s extended to the whole impeachment inquiry and Ukraine-gate. That’s what the whole debate is going to be about. The debate is going to be about a sideshow.​..

​ ...​It’s not even mentioned because, as I say, the Warfare State machinery essentially squelches any kind of debate, suffocates any kind of thought that at all deviates from the status quo.
​ ​The big issue in the world today is war and peace, and we’re facing a campaign in 2020 where it won’t even be mentioned. 
https://internationalman.com/articles/david-stockman-on-how-the-deep-state-really-works/  

A United Nations expert in torture diagnosis has in the past week issued a stark warning that Australian whistleblower Julian Assange is in danger of dying from extreme prison conditions in Britain.
It is testimony to the rank hypocrisy of British and American governments who lecture others around the world about democracy, human rights and international law...
The appalling assessment corroborates what Assange’s father told Strategic Culture Foundation in an interview published on September 24. John Shipton warned then that he feared his son was being killed extrajudicially by the British and American authorities.
Despite Assange’s award-winning journalism and truth-telling, the Western mainstream media have shown utter disregard for his plight. Indeed, such media have tended to bolster the vilification and character assassination piled on Assange by the American and British governments. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/11/08/un-envoys-grim-warning-over-assanges-life/

S​peech becomes less and less and less "free". 

Mostly, speech disappears if it is not the-right-stuff, within the shrinking  "Overton Window".

"This judgment has major implications for online freedom of expression around the world.... The ruling also means that a court in one EU member state will be able to order the removal of social media posts in other countries, even if they are not considered unlawful there.  

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/15139/european-court-free-speech 

​Last Words​

Looking at avocado seedlings with Tyler this morning

Narratives

Narrators,

Caitlin Johnstone, Life Minus Narrative 

(I can't access her site or comments, due to clever artificial intelligence filtering, but I'm on her email list. You might be able to access this link, though.)

​ ​Humanity's movement into full psychological health, if we ever get there, will look very much the same: as a collective we'll stop buying into the narratives we're being fed, and we'll start seeing things as they are without the narrative overlay. And from there we can use the power of our numbers to force a change into a wholesome relationship with each other and our environment.
​ ​You can catch a glimpse of what this will look like for yourself right now. Ignore all the narratives about why things need to be as they are, and you simply see things as they are: resources disappearing from the hands of the many into the hands of the few, weapons of war being spread around the globe, journalists locked in cages for telling the truth, increasing surveillance, increasing police militarization, increasing imprisonment, increasing censorship. That's world minus narrative. That's what's real.

https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/11/08/life-minus-narrative/ 

​Eleni sends this Kunstler piece from Russia!​ 

He says those dedicated public servants at the CIA and FBI are afraid for their very well being under the evil, sexist, racist Trumpian regime.

The CIA and the FBI are in a fight for their lives now. The evidence shows pretty clearly that these rogue agencies conducted all the election “meddling” of 2016 and that the RussiaGate hysteria was an engineered smokescreen to hide their tracks and cover their asses when the certainty of a Hillary election triumph nauseatingly resolved unfavorably in the cold, gray dawn of 11/8/16. Despite the chatter about an “insurance policy,” they were quite unprepared for the exposure that loomed.​..

​ ​It’s not an overstatement to say that many of the figures behind this gigantic web of lies and deceit ought to answer charges up to and including treason. The question is whether Messers Barr & Durham have the cojones to cater the banquet of consequences that this huge cast of characters should be made to feast from. Another question is whether these desperate characters and the agencies they represent will go all the way now and attempt to enlist the military brass in an outright overthrow of the executive. There are already intimations of this. It would be answered by the kind of civil violence that has broken out in other parts of world where other Deep States have worn out their welcome — and their legitimacy.

https://russia-insider.com/en/media-criticism/cia-fbi-fight-their-lives-russiahoax-implodes/ri27825  

​Forget this. Don't notice, please. Move along, now...

"CBS Sided With A Pedophile": Network Fires Staffer Who Had Access To Robach-Epstein Rant

CBS has fired a female staffer believed to have had access to a candid tape of ABC host Amy Robach complaining that in 2016, the network shelved her scoop on Jeffrey Epstein's sex crimes  

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/cbs-sided-pedophile-network-fires-staffer-who-had-access-robach-epstein-rant 

​Elizabeth Vos reviews lessons from 2016, in a world where nothing has actually changed.

​ The Democratic Party’s bias against Sen. Bernie Sanders during the 2016 presidential nomination, followed by the DNC defense counsel doubling down on its right to rig the race during the fraud lawsuit brought against the DNC, as well as the irregularities in the races between former DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Tim Canova, indicate a fatal breakdown of the U.S. democratic process spearheaded by the Democratic Party establishment. Influences transcending the DNC add to concerns regarding the integrity of the democratic process that have nothing to do with Russia, but which will also likely impact outcomes in 2020.
 The content of the DNC and Podesta emails published by WikiLeaks demonstrated that the DNC acted in favor of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the 2016 Democratic primary. The emails also revealed corporate media reporters acting as surrogates of the DNC and its pro-Clinton agenda, going so far as to promote Donald Trump during the GOP primary process as a preferred “pied-piper candidate.” One cannot assume that similar evidence will be presented to the public in 2020, making it more important than ever to take stock of the unique lessons handed down to us by the 2016 race.

https://consortiumnews.com/2019/11/04/its-the-dnc-stupid-democratic-party-not-russia-has-delegitimized-the-democratic-process/ 

Another Billionaire White Knight, saddling up to joust for the honor of the DNC?

 Former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, after saying in March that he wouldn't run for president, is backtracking and preparing a potential run for a 2020 bid, a spokesman for the billionaire tells CNN.
Bloomberg is expected to file the necessary paperwork to get on the Democratic primary ballot in Alabama this week, the spokesman said, the clearest sign to date that the former mayor is seriously considering following through with something he has been weighing for weeks.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/07/politics/michael-bloomberg-alabama-2020-primary/index.html 

​Don Quixote​

Life Support Systems

Exotherms,

Economy must be fueled by energy sources. Natural gas runs manufacturing, electrical generation and some synthetic chemistry. It is critical. Europe goes nowhere without natural gas. Liquified gas from the US costs way too much.

​ ​Simply put, Europe’s addiction to Russian gas remains a fact of life and with the continent’s own gas production on the decline, Europe needs to import much bigger volumes of gas and lots of it is going to come from Russia.
​ ​The amazing part has been the dogged resistance by Germany to the US pressure tactic to abandon Nord Stream 2. The US even threatened to sanction German companies; US Congress passed resolutions calling for an end to construction of the pipeline. Germany’s manufacturing economy is dependent on imports for 98% of its oil and 92% of its gas supply, and cheap gas is the lifeblood of its export-based economy.

https://indianpunchline.com/europes-gas-alliance-with-russia-is-a-match-made-in-heaven/ 

​Eurasian integration threatens American power dominance. 

We don't really need to fight and destroy everything, do we?

  Russia’s comparative advantage derives from its geographical expanse by developing an East-West corridor connecting Northeast Asia with Europe, and a North-South Corridor that links India, Iran and Russia. Moscow sees itself as a stabilising factor in Eurasia by bringing together the entire continent with economic connectivity to ensure that it becomes multipolar and no one state or region can dominate....
 Halford Mackinder[1] said we don’t think of Asia and Europe as a single continent because sailors couldn’t voyage around it. Today the Northeast Passage, NEP, along Russia’s northern coast, links the Pacific and Atlantic coasts while a network of pipelines and air, rail, road and fiber routes are knitting Mackinder’s World Island into ‘Eurasia’ despite Kissinger’s warning, “Domination by a single power of either of Eurasia’s two principal spheres–Europe or Asia–remains a good definition of strategic danger for America. For such a grouping would have the capacity to outstrip America economically and, in the end, militarily.”

http://thesaker.is/russia-china-and-the-european-peninsula/ 

​The Argument for a Neo-Nixonian Foreign Policy, to limit China's rise to global dominance, is presented here. 

This article presumes that the nature of "national interests" will not be redefined in a more cooperative way. 

I believe it must be, for life on Earth to persist recognizably.​

​ ​Japan is a critical element of the “Iron Quadrilateral.” Under no circumstances can it be hung out to dry. Nor can it be merely assumed that the Japanese can then take care of themselves if the U.S. pulls out of its long-term relations. This is an area where Trump, or his successor, needs to consider our alliance structure in East Asia with greater care.
​ ​Japan, along with India and Russia, will form part of a critical potential counterbalance to China over the next few decades. The U.S. should consummate the “Asian Pivot,” started under Obama but under-resourced. It should also shift the lion’s share of our defense investment in Europe towards East Asia. In a nutshell, if Trump wants savings from reducing our overseas posture, it should come from NATO and Europe, not East Asia.
​ ​President Trump, or his successor, should not view the U.S.-Indian relationship primarily through the lens of trade. While India will certainly seek to retain its options and geopolitical independence, the U.S. should do nothing to undermine what should be a budding friendship. Even at the risk of allowing India greater latitude on trade than most other nations, America should continue to try to develop economic relations while also seeking to facilitate India’s military cooperation with other Asian-based powers. This would include not just Japan, but Australia as well. In essence, the U.S. should cultivate the so-called “Quad.”
​ ​Without a dramatic change from the status quo of foreign policymaking in Washington, America’s strategic position will further decay and facilitate the rise of a Sino-centric world order inimical to U.S. interests and values. But by referring back to one of our greatest strategists, America can create a long-term policy that effectively confronts what is likely to be the greatest geopolitical challenge this country has ever faced.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/its-time-for-a-neo-nixonian-foreign-policy/ 

​This article looks at the vulnerability to "Omniviolence" in the modern world, as technology is able to leapfrog the monopoly-on-violence, which characterizes the State, as we know it. The State decides who will be imprisoned and executed, or roughed up by the police force. The State defends peasants from gangs and foreign powers​.

The internet opens people up to blackmail, asset theft and coercion. 

This essay looks at the possibility of wiping out all the people in a city like New York, using a few shipping containers full of tiny drones with thimble-sized shaped explosive charges to target things that look like heads.

How would the State protect from this attack (or use it)?

What is presumed here is the continued spread of mass produced industrial technology for cheap, and the concentration of humans in vast mega-cities. 

I personally think we need to spread out to where we can grow vegetables and ride bikes places, to decentralize.

http://nautil.us/blog/omniviolence-is-coming-and-the-world-isnt-ready 

How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything

Hostile takeovers by vulture capitalists use leveraged loans to buy companies like Sears, sell off long-accumulated assets, borrow massively, buy back stock to raise the price of the stock the vultures hold, so they can sell it, let the company die, and find another to bleed to death. 

This is killing the host. The parasites are running the business. This can be prevented with different financial laws.

 https://www.thenation.com/article/private-equity-deadspin/

Auto Industry Recession is Tanking Global Economy

This may not be a "problem".  7 year payments on a $65,000 pick up truck are "normal" around here. 

https://www.zerohedge.com/economics/recession-auto-industry-tanking-global-economy 

Democratic politicians have a blind-spot for cars and excessive driving.

​ ​Sanders’ plan aims to speed up this process by offering a “cash for clunkers”-style grant program that would purchase electric vehicles for low- and medium-income drivers. Over 10 years, the plan would cost $2.1 trillion, enough for roughly 54 million EVs at today’s average price of $36,600 each. It is the largest single expenditure in Sanders’ $16.3 billion climate plan.
​ ​Matthew Lewis, a climate and urban policy consultant in Berkeley, said Sanders’ plan is an inefficient way to spend such a large outlay. “Even as a symbolic victory, it’s not much of a victory,” Lewis said. “It’s like, ‘Congratulations, you just threw away enough money to build a great public transit system in every city in the country.’”...
​ ​“Depending on how much you drive, a car that’s 10 to 12 years old might actually be better for the environment than replacing it with an electric vehicle,” Lewis said.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-democrats-baffling-blind-spot-on-carbon-emissions_n_5da4db19e4b0cad669a9b705 

​America's food-chain map. 

Truck everything thousands of miles in multiple steps, irrespective of distance, invisibly to the grocery shopper. "Sustainable"?

​https://www.fastcompany.com/90422553/the-first-map-of-americas-food-supply-chain-is-mind-boggling

US Embassy pressures Thailand not to outlaw Round-Up. Thailand seeks to limit medical risks.

https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-embassy-pressures-thailand-monsanto-poison-ban/5693861 

Traditional Chinese Agriculture, 9000 years of empirical wisdom is not destroyed yet. 

Deeply informative, though dryly written. 

http://factsanddetails.com/china/cat9/sub63/item1892.html  

Cat sends this good analysis of identity-politics-warfare from Taki. (Look at Taki's picture for perspective.)

"Transmenstrual cyclists" are genetic males, who identify as dominant-female-bicycle-racers. The size and musculature are winning advantages in bicycle racing. 

This effectively crushes feminism, and gags feminist voices who object. Extremely clever, sort of...

Transgendered people are grossly misused in politics. The vast majority of my transgender patients have sought to lead normal lives without publicity.

​  Conservatives sometimes speak of trannyism as a cult, but they get it backwards. They write as if it’s the trannies who are in the cult. 

No, the trannies are a tool to put us in a cult, a process that starts by changing our names. As cult guru Tim Conway (not the Dorf guy) writes in his manual for successful culting, name changes “help effect a psychological ‘death’ to the old ego-persona.”
​ ​A good cult leader always begins by assigning initiates a new name.
​ ​So, now we’re all named “cis.” We’re no longer “normal,” we’re “cis.” We’ve been renamed. Why? Because to the left it’s all about seeing how much we’re willing to take. If they can make us accept a new name, they can pretty much make us do anything.

https://www.takimag.com/article/tyranny-triumphant-part-i-transmenstrual-cyclists/  

​Redefining Victory​

Live And Let Live

Internet Hunter Gatherers,

My bcc news sends did not get through the last 2 times, so I have given the internet a couple of days to forget me, without trying again to send them every day. 

Here are the links to the blog posts:

Tulsi Gabbard stands with 9/11 families is really informative to watch. They repeatedly call her "their champion".

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/tulsi-stands-with-911-families.html 

Offensive News has gotten enough hits that I presume some folks have looked at it when it did not come to their inbox. The theme of sudden turmoil and change carries on today, but this one focuses on the precarious situation we live in, on ICU life support systems, that can't last forever.

http://www.johndayblog.com/2019/10/offensive-news.html 

Caitlin Johnstone says "Things are only going to get weirder", and I completely agree. 

Hunter S. Thompson said, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro." 

I often hear people in my line of work saying “Man, we’re going to look back on all this crazy shit and think about how absolutely weird it was!”
No we won’t. Because it’s only going to get weirder.
It’s only going to get weirder, because that’s what it looks like when old patterns start to fall away.

https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/things-are-only-going-to-get-weirder-888764673704 

Pepe Escobar says: South America, Again Leads the Fight Against Neoliberalism

The presidential election in Argentina pitted the people against neoliberalism and the people won. What happens next will have a tremendous impact all over Latin America and serve as a blueprint for assorted Global South struggles.  

https://www.globalresearch.ca/south-america-again-leads-fight-against-neoliberalism/5693526 

Paul Craig Roberts, who served in the Reagan administration, makes the well reasoned argument that the risk of accidental nuclear war between the US and Russia is higher than it was through most of the cold war. He gives numerous examples where it almost-happened, except for some individual deciding to go against orders and not push the button. Pre-emptive US attack on Russia is now a plausible scenario, so mistaken counter-attack is more likely.

 Former CIA official Ray McGovern reminds us that on October 27, 1962, during the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, a single Soviet Navy submarine captain, Vasili Alexandrovich Arkhipov, prevented the outbreak of nuclear war. Arkhipov was one of two captains on Soviet submarine B-59. After hours of B-59 being battered by depth charges from US warships, the other captain, Valentin Grigorievich Savitsky readied a 10-kiloton nuclear weapon capable of wiping out the entire USS Randolph carrier task force, to be readied for launch. It didn’t happen only because Arkhipov was present and countermanded the order and brought the Soviet submarine to the surface. Ray McGovern tells the story here: https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/most-dangerous-moment-human-history and you can read it in Daniel Ellsberg’s book, The Doomsday Machine. The really scary part of the story is that US intelligence was so incompetent that Washington had no idea that Soviet nuclear weapons were in the combat area on a submarine undergoing debt-charging by the US Navy. The brass thought they could teach the Soviets a lesson by sinking a submarine and came close to getting the United States destroyed.

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/10/30/telling-the-truth-has-become-an-anti-american-act/ 

Brother Randy gave me the heads-up on Tulsi Gabbard calling for a RoundUp ban, and I found it on a nicer site than Newsweek...

  Presidential candidate, Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, has renewed her criticism of the agro-chemical industry’s use of toxic pesticides, calling for Monsanto’s Roundup to be banned.
“I’ve said it before, I’ll keep saying it: ban roundup!” Gabbard said in a tweet on Friday. “It’s long past time we stopped relying on corrupt corporations with a profit incentive to fund science telling us their chemicals are ‘safe.’ Victims shouldn’t have to go to trial to get the truth.”
In February she tweeted: “We need to ban all products containing glyphosate, including Roundup. It’s poisoning our people, butterflies and other insects, the land and the water.”

http://mauiindependent.org/tulsi-gabbard-becomes-first-presidential-candidate-to-call-for-ban-on-monsantos-roundup/ 

Tom sends this Fox News story: 

Tulsi Gabbard wants findings of probe into possible Saudi 9/11 involvement declassified

https://www.foxnews.com/media/tulsi-gabbard-saudi-arabia-report-september-11-government 

The Saker presents very good analysis of how and why "The Axis of Kindness" is losing narrative control in the lands of sand and oil. Instant fallback to the nuclear-option shows actual weakness.

  It is now time to try to make sense of all this and try answer the question of why one group of relatively strong actors had so much bad luck as to become weaker and weaker, while the weaker became stronger and stronger.
The first thing we need to agree upon is that irrespective of the public posturing, everybody is, and has been, talking to everybody else.  This “conversation” could be official and public, or behind closed doors, or even by means of intermediaries and, last but not least, a state version of “body language”: by means of actions which send a message to the other party or parties.  Still, while this is certainly true, it is the quality of the communications between the various parties which made all the difference.  When, say, Netanyahu or Trump publicly proclaim they they don’t give a damn about anything at all (including international law) and that they reserve the right to threaten or even attack anybody, at any time, for any reason whatsoever, this is a very clear message to, say, the Iranians.  But what is that message, really?  It says a couple of things:
Resistance is futile because we are so much stronger than you and therefore
We don’t give a damn about you or your national interests and therefore
We are not interested in negotiating with you (or anybody else for that matter).  Your only solution is to submit to us
This is really crucial.  The USA and Israel have proclaimed their total superiority over the entire planet and, specifically, over every single actor in the Middle-East.  Furthermore, their entire worldview and ideology is predicated on this very strong sense of military superiority.   Ask any Israeli or US American what their countries will do if some coalition of local powers is successful in attacking them: they will reply something along the lines of “we will simply nuke all the friggin’ ragheads and sand-niggers – f**k them!”.  This line is always delivered with a tone of absolute finality, a total certitude and the mental equivalent of “’nuff said!”.

http://thesaker.is/revisiting-the-win-win-win-win-outcome-in-syria/ 

How Controlling Syria's Oil Serves Washington's Strategic Objectives

I'm going to insert my thoughts here. The US can deny Syria something which is it's property, and which it desperately needs, and can retake militarily, only so long. 

It is a bargaining chip. 

Trump needs to look like he gets some little wins on the way out. He declares "We are keeping their oil", and it gets some good reviews in the US/Israel. He will need more good press when he makes his great-deal and sends the last 1000 troops in Syria to Saudi Arabia. 

The US also has a strategic outpost near Israel and Jordan. Perhaps Trump needs some cover to vacate that. 

Syria and Russia do want to help Trump save face on the way out, so they will. 

Israeli interests hate this, because they incrementally lose their big-dumb "ally" in the neighborhood. 

What is good press for Trump "We took their oil", is bad PR for the empire,

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/how-controlling-syrias-oil-serves-washingtons-strategic-objectives 

US Loses More Than Just The Battle Over Nordstream 2, Tom Luongo

Never once did I think this day wouldn’t come where the U.S. would eventually (fail to) shut the pipeline down. The reason is simple. Europe, and specifically Germany, need the gas and there is no compelling reason for Germany to cave in the end if it wants to survive the 21st century a first world economy.
Russian piped gas is simply too cheap for any LNG to compete with.
In a sense, this pipeline is Germany’s declaration of independence from seventy-plus years of U.S. policy setting. Never forget that Germany is occupied territory with more than 50,000 U.S. troops stationed there.
So it is supremely rich of President Trump call Nordstream 2 something that could make Germany a “hostage of Russia” when it’s been a hostage of the U.S. sinced 1945.

https://tomluongo.me/2019/10/30/trump-loses-more-than-just-the-battle-over-nordstream-2/ 

Don't buy a Tesla or a Prius, just drive less, bike more and be more human, less an economic entity.

 “Brands are allowing people to pat themselves on the back without them personally having to sacrifice anything,” Will Fowler, creative director for Headspace, told the Guardian in 2017, describing the bull market in corporate virtue-signaling. And this is the essence of green consumerism – reassuring people used to a high-consumption standard of living that they need not change their lifestyle in order to reduce their carbon footprint.
 In reality, consuming less is always better than consuming a “green” product. But there’s no way for companies to monetize non-consumption, and no way to grow a nation’s economy through not spending money. For all the ink wasted in touting “compassionate capitalism,” unrestrained economic growth is not compatible with reducing humanity’s environmental impact. No country can buy its way to zero emissions (though that won’t stop governments from trying with constructs like carbon offsets and cap-and-trade that reek of magical thinking).

https://www.rt.com/news/472337-green-economy-fraud-marketing/ 

Peace , Or The Fight Against CO2, by Thierry Meyssan, is an odd article, which is really good on historical perspective, but somehow loses something completely in translation (perhaps). The fight to control fossil-fuel access is the strategic military objective, not the existence of the fossil fuels. 

To my mind, the one rational path is to take the destructive and fuel-gluttonous military machine out of this, step back from futile war, and negotiate rational use of dwindling fuel supplies, while we all come up with more holistic and human adaptations. 

Lets live and let live, ok? Thanks Eleni.

https://www.voltairenet.org/article208187.html  

Following the Seasons

Offensive News

Somewhat Fragile,

We, all of us who can read this, have a vast vulnerability, which is that we depend upon the internet and electric grid for our life support, to such a degree that we would soon die in droves if they went away.

That is fairly dramatic, but also inevitable. It is something like 0.7% per decade, they say here:

The probability of occurrence on the next decade of an extreme event of a magnitude comparable or larger than the well-known Carrington event of 1859 is explored, and estimated to be between 0.46% and 1.88% (with a 95% confidence)  

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-019-38918-8 

What was the probability of a couple of 20-somethings from Romania hijacking most of the street cameras in Washington DC before the Trump inauguration and holding them for Bitcoin ransom? Impossible to calculate?

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/romanian-couple-hacked-nearly-every-street-camera-dc-ahead-trumps-inauguration  

What is the probability of North Korea, China, Russia or Israel, perhaps setting off  nuclear warhead 30 miles above Kansas?

It would do about the same thing. (2-3 more would help cover the coastal areas better.)

https://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/china-emp-threat-u-s/  

A point I would like to make is that the Department of "Defense" should stop sending the imperial armies and secret assassins around the world to do the bidding of supra-national power elites.

Instead the Department should defend the continuity of the lives of all of the people who live in America, by developing back up supports for food supplies, transportation, fuel and electricity. 

That would put America back to work, because we would have to build a 1950s back-up-America. Vegetable gardens and bicycles still work, though the speedometers on them won't.

My suggestion re-employs Americans to re-create a resilient local economy. This will be necessary, I believe, in the next economic reset, and it would be a positive plan to rebuild America off the war-economy it has had since Pearl Harbor.

Russian Defense minister Publishes Evidence of US Oil Smuggling From Syria, with photographs. This is theft from Syrian citizens to fund US wars of empire. It's what's always for dinner.

https://thesaker.is/russian-defense-ministry-publishes-evidence-of-us-oil-smuggling-from-syria/ 

Here is how it gets packaged for us:

U.S. military envisions broad defense of Syrian oilfields

This means American soldiers defend oil-smuggling mercenary armies from the Syrian owners of the oil, as it gets trucked to turkey for refining and transport to market, which happens to be Israel.

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-mideast-crisis-syria-usa-oil-idUSKBN1X72BH 

This whole thing may or may not be as-advertised. The body has been dumped at sea already. More dead kids:

“He died like a dog.” President Trump could not have scripted a better one-liner as he got ready for his Obama bin Laden close-up in front of the whole world.
Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, fake caliph, ISIS/Daesh leader, the most wanted man on the planet, was “brought to justice” under Trump’s watch. The dead dog caliph is now positioned as the ultimate foreign policy winning trophy ahead of 2020 reelection.
The climatic scenes of the inevitable-as-death-and-taxes movie or Netflix series to come are already written. (Trump: I “watched it like a movie.”) Cowardly uber-terrorist cornered in a dead-end tunnel, eight helicopter gunships hovering above, dogs barking in the darkness, three terrified children taken as hostages, coward detonates a suicide vest, tunnel collapses over himself and the children.

http://thesaker.is/caliph-closure-he-died-like-a-dog/ 

Eleni provides this first-hand whistle-blower account of the US-Ukraine-Burisma-gas-company-scam. It's huge.

A talk with Oleg Tsarev reveals the alleged identity of the "Trump/Ukraine Whistleblower"   

Oleg, you followed Biden story from its very inception. Biden is not the only Dem politician involved in the Ukrainian corruption schemes, is he?
Indeed, John Kerry, the Secretary of State in Obama’s administration, was his partner-in-crime. But Joe Biden was number one. During the Obama presidency, Biden was the US proconsul for Ukraine, and he was involved in many corruption schemes. He authorised transfer of three billion dollars of the US taxpayers’ money to the post-coup government of the Ukraine; the money was stolen, and Biden took a big share of the spoils.
It is a story of ripping the US taxpayer and the Ukrainian customer off for the benefit of a few corruptioners, American and Ukrainian. And it is a story of Kiev regime and its dependence on the US and IMF. The Ukraine has a few midsize deposits of natural gas, sufficient for domestic household consumption. The cost of its production was quite low; and the Ukrainians got used to pay pennies for their gas. Actually, it was so cheap to produce that the Ukraine could provide all its households with free gas for heating and cooking, just like Libya did. Despite low consumer price, the gas companies (like Burisma) had very high profits and very little expenditure.
After the 2014 coup, IMF demanded to raise the price of gas for the domestic consumer to European levels, and the new president Petro Poroshenko obliged them. The prices went sky-high. The Ukrainians were forced to pay many times more for their cooking and heating; and huge profits went to coffers of the gas companies. Instead of raising taxes or lowering prices, President Poroshenko demanded the gas companies to pay him or subsidise his projects...

 At that time Biden the father entered the fray. He called Poroshenko and gave him six hours to close the case against his son. Otherwise, one billion dollars of the US taxpayers’ funds won’t pass to the Ukrainian corruptioners. Zlochevsky, the Burisma owner, paid Biden well for this conversation: he received between three and ten million dollars, according to different sources...

 Sam Kislin was involved in this investigation. He is a good friend and associate of Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and an ex-mayor of New York. Kislin is well known in Kiev, and I have many friends who are Sam’s friends [said Tsarev]. I learned of his progress, because some of my friends were detained in the United States, or interrogated in Ukraine. They briefed me about this. It appears that Burisma is just the tip of the scandal, the tip of the iceberg. If Trump will carry on, and use what was already initiated and investigated, the whole headquarters of the Democratic party will come down. They will not be able to hold elections. I have no right to name names, but believe me, leading functionaries of the Democratic party are involved...
And President Zelensky? Is he free from Clintonite Democrats’ influence?
If he were, there would not be the scandal of Trump phone call. How the Democrats learned of this call and its alleged content? The official version says there was a CIA man, a whistle-blower, who reported to the Democrats. What the version does not clarify, where this whistle-blower was located during the call. I tell you, he was located in Kiev, and he was present at the conversation, at the Ukrainian President Zelensky’s side. This man was (perhaps) a CIA asset, but he also was a close associate of George Soros, and a Ukrainian high-ranking official. His name is Mr Alexander Daniluk.  He is also the man the investigation of Sam Kislin and of the DoJ had led to, the Finance Minister of Ukraine at the time, the man who was responsible for the embezzlement of three billion US taxpayer’s best dollars. The DoJ issued an order for his arrest. Naturally he is devoted to Biden personally, and to the Dems in general. I would not trust his version of the phone call at all...  (and so, so much more...)

https://www.unz.com/ishamir/the-plundering-of-ukraine/ 

NYC Secretly Shipping Homeless People To Over 350 Cities Including Honolulu, Houston 

Under Mayor Bill de Blasio's "Special One-Time Assistance Program," (SOTA) local homeless families are given a full year's worth of rent - which has cost NYC taxpayers $89 million on rent alone since August 2017 - before exporting some 5,074 homeless families (12,482 individuals) to cities as far as the South Pacific.

https://www.zerohedge.com/health/nyc-secretly-shipping-homeless-people-over-350-cities-including-honolulu-houston 

Flying Somewhere

Tulsi Stands With 9/11 Families

Truthers,

Tulsi Gabbard stands with 9/11 families as she remembers 9/11 and her decision to join the US Army, in response to what was done that day.

https://www.facebook.com/TulsiGabbard/videos/433077854012149/

She is introduced as "Our Champion" by Tim Frolich, who was injured when the south tower collapsed.  

I have never seen Tulsi Gabbard as tense as when she makes her opening remarks to the families and press.

This is subtle, and she speaks more freely when she talks about her own decision to join the Army. She unhesitatingly goes after the Saudi connection to 9/11.

She sounds certain calling for release of records.
She calls for "truth" at least 3 times.

She closes her initial statement by, "calling on our government to bring everyone responsible for this attack to justice".

This is a dangerous line for her to tread, and she seems to know it.. 

 While technically within the Overton Window of acceptable political discourse, Major Gabbard appears to be pushing that envelope by what she is demanding, as she stands with those families.

Later in the conference, when she gets back to the podium, she says "we couldn't believe our eyes, when we saw those images over and over", on 9/11. 

She also quotes another attendee in agreement, "This is the Pearl Harbor of our generation". 

That may allude to the "New Pearl Harbor", in the Project For A New American Century.

It is ambiguous.

The close of the news conference is good.

Tulsi gives hugs.

She appears reserved in her statements in the close, as if she is restraining herself from saying something she knows.

She does say she will do everything in her power to get all of those who were responsible brought to justice.

Watch and listen to her with the daughter, who was 4 years old when she lost her father.

Tulsi really listens and hugs the young woman, and her mother. 

She appears to feel a load of responsibility to them.

She is the only presidential candidate standing with these families. 

She says they should all be there.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard throws down the gauntlet, in a way that implies she knows the gravity of her actions.

Thanks to Professor Anthony Hall for this video. I watched it all and took these notes. 

Other speakers also make important statements.

(I wonder if Tulsi would accept a nomination to Secretary Of Defense, even from "Cheeto". They won't let her be nominated for President, will they?)

Wondering Out Loud

Iconoclastic Messengers

Damned If We Do,

Charles Hugh Smith:

​ ​The unraveling of everything that actually matters is quickening. While every "news" outlet cheerleads the stock market ("The Dow soared today as investor optimism rose... blah blah blah"), our "leadership" and our media don't even attempt to measure what's unraveling, much less address the underlying causes.
​ ​The hope is that if we ignore what's unraveling, it will magically go away. But that's not how reality works...
​ ​Note that the only group that benefited from the past 20 years of speculative bubbles is the top 1%. The whole idea that inflating bubbles creates a "wealth effect" that "trickles down" is preposterous, as evidenced by the decline of the middle 60% of households while the speculators and owners of bubble-assets skimmed the vast majority of income gains...
 The only way forward with any chance of success is to start by acknowledging the decay of our economy due to rampant financialization, legalized looting, the pathologies of "winner take most" speculation and the realities of a two-tiered system in which entrenched elites are "more equal" than the rest of us, economically, socially and politically. We have to accept the limits of technology to reverse the unraveling and assess the damage that's already been done to our shared capital.
​ ​Acting as if the system is working just fine and the problem is perception/optics is accelerating the unraveling.

https://www.oftwominds.com/blogoct19/unraveling-quickens10-19.html 

​Finian Cunningham:

​ ​No wonder Democratic Party bosses and mainstream media are trying to bury presidential contender Tulsi Gabbard. She is the only candidate, perhaps the only politician in the US, who is telling the American public exactly what they need to know about what their government and military are really up to: fighting illegal regime-change wars, and to boot, sponsoring terrorists for that purpose...
​ ​“Donald Trump has blood of the Kurds on his hands, but so do many of the politicians in our country from both parties who have supported this ongoing regime-change war in Syria that started in 2011… along with many in the mainstream media who have been championing and cheer-leading this regime-change war.”
​ ​The 38-year-old military veteran went on to denounce how the US has sponsored Al Qaeda terrorists for its objective of overthrowing the government in Damascus.
​ ​It was a remarkably damning assessment of US policy in Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. And it was by no means the first time that Gabbard has leveled with the American people on the brutality and criminality of Washington’s so-called “interventions”.
​ ​The other 11 Democratic candidates on the stage during the TV debate looked agog after Gabbard’s devastating and calmly delivered statement. All the others have proffered the false narrative that US forces are in Syria to “fight terrorism”.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/18/tulsi-nails-national-tv-us-regime-change-wars/ 

​Helen of DesTroy, via RT (Then her email comment about the real reason Tulsi is not running for re-election to a fourth congressional term):

​ ​Democratic presidential hopeful Tulsi Gabbard has abandoned her race for re-election in Hawaii to focus on securing her party’s presidential nomination, kicking the ‘Russian asset’ conspiracy theorizing into high gear.
​ ​Gabbard announced on Friday that she would not seek re-election to Congress, declaring she would focus instead on the presidential race. Promising to “end our interventionist foreign policy of being the world’s police, toppling dictators and governments we don’t like, and redirect our precious resources towards serving the needs of the people here at home,” she “humbly” asked her Hawaii constituents to support her candidacy, sending social media into a frenzy of speculation.

Helen: ​"From what I've heard, her Hillary troubles have led the DCCC to throw a big pile of cash behind her rival in Hawaii, Kai Kahele - supposedly a progressive, but if you've ever seen him speak the dude is the biggest stick-up-the-ass corporate centrist this side of Mazie Hirono... Anyway, Tulsi, lacking a massive warchest & having been effectively abandoned by her party, can only afford to do one race, according to people working for her campaign. I don't know what she's going to do when she loses the nomination."

https://www.rt.com/usa/471865-tulsi-gabbard-president-stein-conspiracy/  

​ ​The truth is that in addition to Turkey, the US, the UK, France, Saudi Arabia and Qatar have armed, financed and trained about 250 thousand jihadis from all around the world since 2010 for the purposes of attacking Syria, precipitating a disaster in the region, with repercussions felt in Europe, and committing crimes against humanity.
​ ​The Syrian Arab Army, with the assistance of its Russian, Iranian and Hezbollah allies, has managed to overcome the depredations of al-Qaeda and ISIS, confining them to the Idlib region, creating in the process some problems for the countries that armed and supported these monsters.

https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2019/10/25/the-united-states-turkey-and-the-sdf-the-internal-war-between-syrias-enemies/ 

 ​ ​A ​(real)​ ​whistleblower with the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW), responsible for conducting an independent investigation into the alleged chemical attack in the Syrian town of Douma on April 7, 2018, has presented WikiLeaks with a body of evidence suggesting the chemical weapons watchdog agency manipulated and suppressed evidence...
“We became convinced by the testimony that key information about chemical analyses, toxicology consultations, ballistics studies, and witness testimonies was suppressed, ostensibly to favor a preordained conclusion.”
​ ​The testimony further revealed “disquieting efforts to exclude some inspectors from the investigation whilst thwarting their attempts to raise legitimate concerns, highlight irregular practices or even to express their differing observations and assessments.”

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/wikileaks-releases-new-documents-questioning-syria-chemical-attack-narrative 

Attorneys ​for ​John Bolton, President Trump's former National Security Adviser, are in discussions with House committees about the possibility of giving a deposition in their impeachment investigations, according to CNN.
Bolton, who some speculated was the original "first-hand" source of the whistleblower complaint which launched the impeachment inquiries, was fired after President Trump says he "disagreed strongly with many of his suggestions." ...
 According to sources, while Trump had been growing displeased with Bolton's belligerent recommendations and overall demeanor (recall "Bolton 'Deep in His Heart' Believes Trump Is a 'Moron,' Former Aide Claims"), the tipping point happened when Bolton expressed his displeasure with Trump's impromptu invitation of the Taliban to Camp David on the week of the Sept 11 anniversary, a peace overture which as we reported over the weekend, collapsed in the last moment.

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/john-boltons-attorneys-have-consulted-impeachment-inquiry-about-possible-deposition 

 Is a humane softening of US sanctions on Iran currently in the works? A new US Treasury announcement suggests this is the case, as it is "taking steps to ease sales of food and medicine to Iran amid stringent sanctions imposed on the country by the Trump administration," according to the AP. 

​ ​Critics of Trump's far reaching sanctions after the May 2018 US pullout of the Iran nuclear deal (JCPOA), which especially hit the energy, banking, aviation, and auto sectors, have long argued the economic punitive measures have only served to make life miserable for the common populace, depriving people of outside food and medicine shipments, as well as safety-related technology, similar to the humanitarian crisis that unfolded in sanctioned Iraq under Saddam in the 1990's.

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/us-treasury-eases-regulations-food-medicine-sales-iran-humanitarian-mechanism  

​I hear nothing good about "freedom of speech" these days. Howzabout you? 

(If we don't have to hear things that trigger us, we'll be fine. Got that, you grammar-racist Nazi?!​)

Helen again: 

 Some Americans are having second thoughts about the First Amendment, a new survey has found. Over half are calling for it to be rewritten, and some 61 percent believe there should be limits on freedom of speech.
 The First Amendment, which guarantees Americans freedom of speech, should be overhauled to reflect current cultural norms, according to 51 percent of the respondents to a survey published on Wednesday by the Campaign for Free Speech. The campaign is hoping to call attention to the dire state of Americans' preeminent civil right with the poll, which breaks down opposition along gender, race, class, and educational lines.

https://www.rt.com/usa/471762-free-speech-survey-americans-hate/ 

Moon of Alabama on Dirty Uncle Joe:

​Biden's Intervention In Ukraine And Ukraine's 2016 Election Meddling Are Matters of Fact
Several mainstream media have made claims that Joe Biden's intervention in the Ukraine and the Ukrainian interference in the U.S. election are "conspiracy theories" and "debunked". The public record proves them wrong. By ignoring or even contradicting the facts the media create an opening for Trump to rightfully accuse them of providing "fake news".

https://www.moonofalabama.org/2019/10/bidens-intervention-in-ukraine-and-ukraines-2016-election-meddling-are-matters-of-fact.html#more 

​All across the industrialized world retirees are poised to swamp workers in competition for the goods and services which will exist​. Not enough servants to go around and provide what retirees are entitled to. Central banks can't fix it.

​Plenty of easy to read graphs, country by country. Take care of yourself, cheaply...​ Thanks Charles.

 Over the coming decade, the current growth based system and paradigms will fall by the wayside.  The global trickle-down mantra is already failing, and will entirely come apart.  The impact will be bad for wealthy nations but even worse for poor nations.  The real question is what will replace the current faulty system...and will it be any better?

https://econimica.blogspot.com/2019/10/the-demographic-depression-will.html  

​Guy  McPherson, at Nature Bats Last summarizes how the sudden end of industrial civilization, and disappearance of it's lovely smokestack particles, could immediately accelerate global heating, by failing to reflect sunlight back out into space. Sulfur dioxide and clouds reflect solar energy away..​ (Chemtrails that cover the sky in similar haze will also presumably go away with the Pentagon budget cuts) Thanks Guy.

https://guymcpherson.com/2019/10/the-mcpherson-paradox-very-briefly/  

​Damned If We Don't​