Sunday, February 26, 2017

Going For Broke

Reliving the Past,

1177 BC, The Year Civilization Collapsed: Thanks Charles, for these first 3 stories
Why did Bronze Age Civilization suddenly collapse? Some answers here may sound somewhat familiar.
This is the entrance to the excavated ruins of the royal palace at Ugarit, which is located in present-day Syria. (Original image by Disdero. Uploaded by Jan van der Crabben, published on 26 April 2012 under the following license: Creative Commons: Attribution.)


Doomstead Diner reviews the new book by Nafeez Ahmed, Failing States, Collapsing Systems
This is the century of the "triple whammy of energy, climate and food crises". 
Reading the review makes me consider buying a hard copy of the book, but the review might be enough. Ahmed writes articles regularly, too.

Why Nothing Works Anymore:
"Technology’s role has begun to shift, from serving human users to pushing them out of the way so that the technologized world can service its own ends. And so, with increasing frequency, technology will exist not to serve human goals, but to facilitate its own expansion...
It’s a fact most easily noticed when using old-world gadgets. To flush a toilet or open a faucet by hand offers almost wanton pleasure given how rare it has become. A local eatery near me whose interior design invokes the 1930s features a bathroom with a white steel crank-roll paper towel dispenser. When spun on its ungeared mechanism, an analogous, glorious measure of towel appears directly and immediately, as if sent from heaven."

Just 8 Men Own The Same Wealth As Half The World (a ratio of about 1 : 450 million, like one man owning the US, Canada, and Mexico) Thanks Tom 
(This seems to be a strange arrangement, based on an extreme enforcement of concepts of "wealth" and "ownership". It makes me feel like a whole lot of owned people are going to die.)

Thanks for this article, Eleni:
"Today, Turkey, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia are once more joining the US and Israel in an alliance to prolong the six-year-old ongoing war against Syria, Libya, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, and the Arab Nations, in order to destroy their infrastructures, economies, armies, institutions, civilizational heritage, and cultural identity...
We can conclude that the tools used against Arabs since the 1950s remain the same. These tools are Arab States loyal to America and Israel, whether in secret or in public, and at every historical juncture, new schemes are contrived to destroy Arab civilization and drain Arab resource in order to weaken all Arabs, both resistors and collaborators." 

(yet another) Fresh Start for Afghan peace process, with Russia, China, Pakistan and India engaging together in a regional initiative. (This could get the US off the hook, too, if the military industrial complex can just take "bye-bye" for an answer for once.)

Kim Jong Nam, Kim Jong Un's big brother was murdered in Kuala Lumpur Airport by a young woman from Java and a young Vietnamese woman, each apparently paid about $90 to star in a reality show, where they pull the gag of each smearing a little oil on a man's face and walking away. Each of them had half of the binary VX Nerve Gas, which only becomes fatal when the two parts mix, as they did on Mr Kim, who never made it home for Valentine's Day. These two guys are said to have put the girls up to it. Authorities say the girls knew what they were doing all along. They have to say that. I think they probably did think $90 was pretty good to do a little Candid-Camera schtik...

Democratic National Committee votes to take as much donation money as corporations will give, undoing the "Obama ban".

New Democratic National Committee leader, Tom Perez vows to "be Trump's Worst Nightmare", which is bound to really scare President Donald awake all night (except that it sounds like the same old bullshit from another Clintonista corporate shill. The DNC learned nothing at all from stealing the nomination from Sanders to give it to Queen Hillary, who was always the worserer-evil against anybody out there, and lost, even with the best vote-rigging and media manipulation money could buy.)

The "Bernie Sanders wing of Democrats" feels screwed again, but where to go? 
"Progressives favored Keith Ellison, who was backed by Bernie Sanders, and see Perez as another establishment tool that conspired to boost Hillary Clinton over Sanders in the 2016 primary. As The Intercept noted, Perez was overly friendly to big banks as secretary of labor under Obama, granting privileges to banks that plead guilty to market manipulation."
(DNC has obviously not reached bottom yet. What's happening with all that child molestation investigation? Maybe that can get them there. It worked for Denny Hastert.)

David Stckman, Director of Management and Budget under Reagan, says that "After March 15, Everything Will Grind to a Halt" (I think he really means the federal budget will go into a long, uncontrolled skid for half a year when the 2 year $20 Trillion debt-ceiling agreement, reached by Obama and Boehner finally times out. It's the biggest debt any president ever faced. It's locked-in, and growing, growing, growing, with no legal way out. 
Heyyy, what about that $trillion-platinum-coin idea? Remember that one?)

$90 Actress

Friday, February 24, 2017

Hidden Influences

Slipped a Mickey,

"Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" is reviewed here, with the overall use of stimulants in military campaigns contrasted with the decadence of cocaine and heroin use in Weimar Germany (Cabaret). The uber-pure vegetarian, Adolf Hitler got started with some shots of "vitamins" and animal organ extracts, then opioids, stimulants, etc, from his personal Dr Feelgood. Hitler DID become a delusional drug addicted maniac. Oops... 
Why does history take some of those odd turns? 
What are we now doing, which we will later know as folly?

Moon of Alabama has another fog-of-war update on the war in Syria, following John McCain's visit to Kurdish fighters in Northern Syria, then his visit to Turkish president Erdogan. ISIS suddenly retreats to fortified positions on multiple fronts, without apparent attack on retreating forces from Turks and allies. Turkey can't get along with Kurds (but something is up after McCain) Turkey wants to invade Syria with Saudi Arabia to fight ISIS. Saudi Arabia is back in US favor, as US policy seems to revert to 2012. Will the US/Turkey/Saudi-Arabia carve up Syria. Did Turks and Kurds come to an agreement about carving off pieces of Syria? Syria appears to be the planned loser, but Turkish and Saudi troops suck really badly, and Russia doesn't want Syria carved up (though did support a new constitution with Kurdish federal area).
The only way for all these other losers to agree is for Syria to lose territory, preferably territory with some oil on it. Wassup?

Analyzing the Emerging World Order, The Future of Globalism:
"The true “rulers” of this bloc are a cabal of very wealthy and powerful oligarchs that work in the background (shadow banking, dark pool finance, shadow governments, think tanks, NGO’s) to subvert the various sovereignties to their advantage. These oligarchs are the principal owners of, not just the industries and corporations that front for them, but the governments that rule over the masses. Most importantly this cabal owns the means by which real wealth extraction is carried out: fiat currency, chiefly the “worlds reserve currency”- the United States dollar and it’s derivatives."

Marine Le Pen (Currently leading French presidential race, but can never actually get elected) explains a "Europe of Nations", Frexit, currency revisionism, and things like that. All pure fantasy...
“To assure the freedom of the French, there is no price too high too pay,” Le Pen said. “The foreign policy of France will be decided in Paris, and no alliance, no ally, can speak in her place.”

Frexit could crash the global financial system according to this alarmist piece from fake-news CNBC. (deep breath.... relax, imagine yourself on a warm sandy beach...)

Amnesty International says French police-state since November 2015 attack has eroded human rights there. (France seems to have had several false-flag attacks to lead to those police-state laws, under the most unpopular French "leader" to still have his head.)

French voters call on Barack Obama to run for president and "give them hope". (yeah, really, no joke...)

How will the Trump administration work to undo the Obama administration's clean power plan, which was finalized in 2015, and still bogged down in the courts? The more the Trump administration tries to do, the more it will also get bogged down in the courts. (Not mentioned here is the one CO2 reduction repeatedly proven effective, financial collapse.)

The 20th century saw a 23 fold increase in the use of natural resources for building. (Freeway flyovers are our pyramids, guys... It's built. It's above ground. Some of it is built to last, but only useful with central climate control, but the flyovers are our signature, and will always be good for something.)

20 million people are starving to death, and mostly because of other people.

Mulberry leaf extract treats type 2 diabetes. The very helpful drug, metformin is a chemical derivative of a component of this leaf, guanidine. Apparently this is very, very, very old news...

Reinventing the Wheel

Thursday, February 23, 2017

Exploring Alternatives

Ready to Negotiate,

Tennessee calls for a Constitutional Convention of the States. 
34 states must approve this plan. The proposed topic is a Balanced Budget Amendment for the Federal Government. 
This would effectively end the current global financial regime, which is based upon US Dollars created through Federal Debt. 
Constitutional Conventions are considered risky, because, once one is convened, any change to the Constitution can be enacted.

“Tennessee’s own Andrew Jackson was the last president who actually paid off the entire debt of the United States. It has been done by a Tennessean before, and that’s why we want Tennessee to be leaders of this effort once again,” Kelsey said.

It's getting to be reset time again: 
"In its first three decades, the Fund managed the world’s currency order... That was the role assigned at Bretton Woods in 1944, when the IMF and World Bank were set up. Forty-five nations attended the summit, but two men dominated it: John Maynard Keynes and America’s Harry Dexter White... Their goal was to avoid a repeat of the 1930s, when competitive devaluations and tariff wars led to the collapse of world trade. Keynes wanted the IMF to act as a central bank of central banks, denominating their accounts in a new global currency. It would let members devalue or borrow with relative ease. Both creditors and debtors would pay interest on their holdings, discouraging large trade surpluses as well as deficits... White’s plan was more creditor-friendly, reflecting the U.S. position as world lender. There would be no new currency: IMF members would tie their money to the dollar. They couldn’t devalue without consulting the Fund, and were only supposed to borrow short-term to close balance-of-payments gaps... The English economist was one of the 20th century’s sharpest thinkers, but it was the U.S. Treasury official who got his way... The system turned out to have a flaw: It depended on the supply of U.S. dollars backed by gold. That link came under pressure as America, financing social programs at home and war in Vietnam, slipped into persistent deficit. In 1971, President Richard Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard, ending phase one at the IMF."

The Republican health-insurance proposal is just ACA/Obamacare with a different slicing of the same pie. Nothing afundamental changes. It just shifts funds from poorer and younger people to wealthier and older people.

Military-Industrial-Complex-needs-MORE:
"The recently-disclosed story about the U.S using depleted uranium ordnance in Syria is suspect – not because there is reasonable doubt that the U.S used them – but because the story is being conflated in Western media with the notion that the weapons were used against ISIS. While the West sometimes attacks “both sides” to prolong the destruction and warfare, and/or to create intra-Syrian conflict, the notion that the weapons were used against ISIS infrastructure is (intentionally) misleading in the sense that it creates the false perception that the West is trying to destroy ISIS (despite on-the ground evidence to the contrary). Prior to Russia’s legal intervention in Syria, ISIS territory expanded beneath the illegal western bombardments.[2  The news story also ties in with the resignation of General Flynn, which appears to be the result of deep /dark state interventions that aim to upend President Trump and advance the causes of global war and poverty."

John McCain, Chair of Senate Armed Services Committee, made a "secret" trip to the Kurdish enclave of Raqqa, Syria, on the Turkish border, to meet with representatives of (especially armed-forces) Kurds, then flew to Turkey to do some secret haggling with President Erdogan, who hates Kurdish fighters. (Turkish armed forces are in severe disarray, and fighting very poorly, under Erdogan's purges-for-loyalty. They may take a decade to become reliable and effective.)

"Winning" in early winter in North Dakota, resulted in water protectors going home to avoid frostbite. Their camp is now besieged, almost empty, and just awaiting riot-police action to completely clear it. A lot of fires have been started by somebody. It is blamed on protesters, of course. They may be fires for warmth. The news of survival-fires-as-arson was twisted before, to justify aggression against them.

Here is some news of 1950s  experimental military aircraft. Interesting story.
It's clear that what was being reported in the news media as "Flying Saucers" was one of the smaller craft, specifically the 40' diameter model.

Revisiting History

Wednesday, February 22, 2017

Culture Bubble

Supported Invisibly,

The threat to science of cultural collapse, Joe Brewer
(You mean if the electricity cuts out, the internet servers lose everything, forever?)

China is installing missile batteries on those artificial islands, of course...

Col. (ret.) Ann Wright : "I support Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, going to Syria and meeting with President Bashar al-Assad because the congresswoman is a brave person willing to take criticism for challenging U.S. policies that she believes are wrong."

Washington's Blog has a densely packed current-history piece, from a real historian, about the deep-state contest now going on with American imperial policy, domestic policy, and the pedophilia blackmail used to control politicians by the deep-state. A bunch of pedophile-ring busts will break that control-system. Thanks Eleni.

Marine LePen, current front-runner (but "ultimately unelectable", right?) refuses to don head scarf mandated by Sunni Grand Mufti in Lebanon. 
"I will not cover myself", she says. She had met the Egyptian Grand Mufti who did not demand this of her. 
(Probably this ruins her chances of getting elected president of Lebanon...)
LePen committed the further gaffe of saying that president Assad is the only viable solution for Syria, NOT the official French position.

France leaving the Euro would be the largest sovereign default in history. (Yeah, it would end the Euro...)

Stampede out of French bonds as Le Pen extends lead in polls.

Finance as Warfare, The IMF lent to Greece, knowing it could never repay the debt. (That's not a bug, it's a feature. We want everything your country owns as community property, for very cheap. Sign here.)

There was an ECB legal analysis of the 2015 Greek "bailout", which financed all the creditors. It's classified. You don't need to know what's in it. Mr Draghi says it is "privileged". Don't ask to see it. Stop. Now...

Fumbling Towards Collapse, Jim Kunstler : 
"The falling energy-return-on-energy-investment in the oil industry is approaching the point where the immense activity of getting oil out of the ground won’t be worth the cost and trouble of doing it. And since most of the things we do and produce in this economy are based on cheap oil — with no reality-based prospect of replacing it with so-called “renewables” or as yet undiscovered energy rescue remedies — we can’t generate enough wealth to maintain anything close to our assumed standard of living. We can’t even generate enough wealth to pay the interest on the debt we’ve racked up in order to hide our growing energy predicament. And that, in a nutshell, is what will blow up the financial system. And when that department of the economy goes, the rest will follow."

Petro-American

Monday, February 20, 2017

Which Tomorrow

Living in the Past,

Everything in our world assumes plentiful energy, liquid fuel, oil. That assumption is grossly in error. Our owners know it, and we are being fed sweet lies on the way to the slaughterhouse. Which slaughterhouse? When do we get there? I have oversimplified. This polite Irish article gets there far more gently, but look at the chart. Thanks Charles.
clarke14

What's Wrong With Renewable Energy? 
It's only "renewable" if you have lots of oil to keep making it. It's like Hamburger-Helper. You need hamburger. Thanks again, Charles.

How the status-quo unravels, As the pie shrinks, everybody demands their piece should bigger, Charles Hugh Smith

Saker update on Trump administration:
"Whatever may be the case, the big story for the foreseeable future will be the infighting inside the US deep state. Why infighting? Because Trump is also part of the deep state, he did not just suddenly pop out of nowhere ex nihilo, he had, and still has, powerful backers. That’s the, comparatively speaking, the good news. The bad news is that the faction of the deep state which is backing Trump appears to be the weaker one. And Trump himself is not exactly a knight in shining armor, to put it mildly. Still, if we imagine that by some aggregate measure of power the anti-Trump forces inside the deep state are, oh, 70% and the Trump supporters are therefore 30%, the infighting between the 70% and the 30% will leave very little energy to either party to deal with Russia, China or Iran."

"A civil war for control of the country has erupted between the deep state and Donald Trump", Michael Snyder, who doesn't see Trump as the champion of a deep state underdog faction, but as an outsider. Intelligent and well informed people I know hold both of these views. I am of the opinion that nobody can be in the white house without a deep state sponsor.

Greece is no longer a sovereign state. That's a misperception. So who has the authority to default on Greek debt? No hands?

"Greece should pledge gold and real estate for new loans" German minister. (So what's left?)

I think Eeni sent this article about Pablo Escobar's son saying dad sold cocaine for the CIA until they didn't need him anymore, and it took it's toll on dad well before his end. 

No Longer Useful

Thursday, February 16, 2017

Swordfight at The Cliff

Errol Flynn Fans,

The Saker (Thanks for this and many of the deep-state-war articles today, Eleni) says that it is all over, that the sacking of General Michael Flynn as National Security Advisor was a death-blow to change by controlling interests in the deep state.  "Flynn was the cornerstone of Trump’s national security policy.  For one thing, Flynn dared the unthinkable: he dared to declare that the bloated US intelligence community had to be reformed.  Flynn also tried to subordinate the CIA and the Joint Chiefs to the President via the National Security Council."

In regards to Michael Flynn’s resignation, Kucinich defended Trump and told America to “Wake Up”... Kucinich did not see this as an anti-Trump game, but rather an anti-Russia game” “It’s not just this administration. I want to remind the views and all those who are on the panel that in the closing months of the Obama administration, they put together a deal with Russia to create peace in Syria. A few days later, a military strike in Syria killed a hundred Syrian soldiers and that ended the agreement. What happened is inside the intelligence and the Pentagon there was a deliberate effort to sabotage an agreement the White House made.” This is like “Deep State” said Kucinich.

"Democrats" representing deep-state interests have set the sequence of events in motion to lead to a Trump impeachment. Flynn was not the target. Flynn (bishop or rook?) is off the chessboard and the "king" is vulnerable. Trump's available moves appear highly constrained now.

Finian Cunningham has the best overall assessment of this major loss to the Trump chess game. Impeachment of Trump is the objective. Thanks Elani.
"The forced resignation of Michael Flynn, who was an influential advocate in the Trump White House for normalizing relations with Russia, can be seen as a much-desired blow against Trump over Russia – inflicted by the US Deep State operatives."

The question has been repeatedly raised of how General Flynn, broadly experienced, could have been caught saying the wrong things on the phone to Russians, while the Obama administration was still in office. The FBI says he didn't. He says "he never crossed any lines". The court of public opinion, as carried out in print, broadcast and online media has been overwhelmingly and successfully influenced. Flynn's one chance to speak, before resigning, is here.

Moon of Alabama has another fleshing out of this important mve in the smoke-screened-3D-chess-game within the deep-state. Flynn Defenestration (throwing out window) Will Hamper Trump's Foreign Policy:
After the election and Trump's unexpected win the Obama administration slapped sanctions on Russia and sent Russian embassy officials back to Moscow. This move was intended to blockade a Trump policy of better relations with Russia. Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador and, as a direct result, the Russian's did not respond tit for tat for the sanctions and expulsions. This was an absolutely positive move and in full accordance with announced Trump policies. Henry Kissinger made a similar move and visited the Russian embassy weeks before he became Nixon's NSC.

Who is Afraid of Peace in Afghanistan? Thanks Eleni. (Peace in Afghanistan would be bad for business, the military industrial business and the CIA-heroin-trade, which is also used to attack Russia, China and Iran with pleasure-powder. Good for everybody else, though.)

The US admits (under duress) to using uranium munitions in Syria, which lead to birth defects and cancer when they become uranium-oxide powder and get into food, water and lungs, as we know from Iraq.

Weird Trump/Netanyahu press conference seems to be a bit of a negotiation itself. Each applied pressure to the other, apparently unexpected pressure.

Jim Kunstler has his perspective: 
"Don’t be fooled by the idiotic exertions of the Red team and the Blue team. They’re just playing a game of “Capture the Flag” on the deck of the Titanic. The ship is the techno-industrial economy. It’s going down because it has taken on too much water (debt), and the bilge pump (the oil industry) is losing its mojo... What’s coming down is the fruit of the gross mismanagement of our society since it became clear in the 1970s that we couldn’t keep living the way we do indefinitely — that is, in a 24/7 blue-light-special demolition derby. It’s amazing what you can accomplish with accounting fraud, but in the end it is an affront to reality, and reality has a way of dealing with punks like us. Reality has a magic trick of its own: it can make the mirage of false prosperity evaporate."

While Elites Played Empire, America Fell Apart, Charles Hugh Smith points out a pervasive culture of hiding infrastructure problems and skimming the money, needed for infrastructure maintenance, for fun and profit.

Dmitry Orlov has a really interesting perspective on the distillation of petroleum products, and the need to use the 50% volatile waste product for something, the waste product that is so successfully used in the United States, the one we have come to know as "gasoline". It is really only good for smallish internal combustion engines, an invention that is important because it burns gasoline. Uses have grown up around this resource over the years.  "You are not in control"...

Chris Christie says universally supported asset-forfeiture (legal theft) transparency bill is "bad for law enforcement" and vetoes it. (Society would have to openly pay more for law enforcement, rather than funding it through criminal enterprise, which helps get rid of cash, another part of the plan.)

13 develish details about Brexit. (Damn, there are a lot of brambles in the forest between here and the castle!)

Police closely scrutinize veterans driving to Standing Rock, "Please sit in the patrol car, while we search your vehicle!" Busts for any pretext are happening, as would be expected. It's a blockade tactic. All assets are forfeited, of course.

Chelsea Manning thanks all those who kept her alive for years with their support. Not us. Other prisoners. Good perspective.

Welcome to the New Dark Ages, Where Only the Wealthy Can Retire (I never planned on it, myself. Maintain your health. Seriously. Maintain your health.)

Could be the end of a planned career for this criminal...
 An Arizona cosmetology student is currently being investigated for giving free haircuts to the homeless. Juan Carlos Montesdeoca has been giving away free haircuts to homeless individuals at Santa Rita park in Tucson and recently organized an event called Haircuts for the Homeless at a local library, during which he offered free haircuts and manicures to the homeless people of Tucson. Montesdeoca has been homeless in the past and wanted to do his part to help the community in any way he could. The cosmetology student says he was inspired to offer his services after he helped cut hair for a woman with cancer. “I started this as an act of kindness for a mom I met on Tucson Angels Facebook group,” he says. He also does it in memory of his mother, who lost her hair. “They can suspend – even before I even try to get a license, they can say no. That would be very very unfortunate.” 

Dubai Plans to Introduce Flying Drone Taxis as early as This Summer
(What could go wrong? Nice little video loop.)

George Jetson

Wednesday, February 15, 2017

Knowing You Better

Open Books,

Here are two articles about how persuasion algorithms are affecting our perception. We get a lot of information through Twitter, Facebook and email, and these media are manipulated most easily by Artificial Intelligence algorithms in that order. Retweeting, after selecting for information bias of a target recipient, is easy for a bot to do. Lots of political bots are programmed this way and can do a lot of work, but Twitter finds them if they do too much work. 
Facebook bots work better with a human avatar running 10 to 20 of them. They look human this way. This is a paid job. 
Cyborg bots may look like trolls. Look for first-few-comments from these augmented-troll-alliances. This shapes the trend of comments going forward. Other opinions get bullied out. All of us get emails from organizations, seeking contributions and petition-signatures. We are mostly able to have email conversations with real people, and may abandon sites where trolls and cyborg-trolls have taken over. That is a victory for them, too.

The first article gives the general framework well. It was written post-election last November. (The internal link to cognitive bias types on Wikipedia was a link worth visiting and reading.) Persuasive Machines: Weapons of Mass Disinformation

The second link is more recent, more exhaustively detailed, and written by a more alarmed person. It has more partisan bias, but is also transpartisan in the depiction of threats in this brave-new-world. It is the forest full of trees and wildlife, with the smell of fire. The Rise of the Weaponized AI Propaganda Machine:

How the Trump Regime was Manufactured by a War Within the Deep State, Nafeez Ahmed : It is fine to skim over the headings once you get the jist. There is some liberal pearl-clutching in the first half, but the second half and conclusion are seemingly written for a more serious and well informed audience. The parts that look like Clintonista panic give way to serious analysis of the deep state and it's creation and manipulation of 9/11 to reshape the world as we know it.

Eleni sends this serious interview with Alexander Dugin,  4th Political Theory and Post-Liberalism:
"Today’s liberalism is so rotten within that it’s easy enough to throw out now, because it itself has recognized progress, freedom, and development to be absolute fictions. Liberalism has recognized that it is a kind of particular totalitarian approach. Behind all these ideas of liberation, freedom, equality, individualism, etc., stands none other than the will to power. The last generation of philosophical thinkers of the liberal West feel within themselves despair, the exhaustion of all the possibilities of modernity, and they have finally showed that this is all a play - progress and development, perfection, and all these so-called moral aspects of modernity were all nothing other than simply a form of political spin doctoring, propaganda, advertising, and sale of some kind of defective product in order to realize the will to power of the greedy, cowardly, cynical, totally racist global elites."

American Veterans are physically returning to Standing Rock, to physically resist pipeline crews and police-goon-squads, arrayed to force their submission to corporate will.

Linking Arms

Sunday, February 12, 2017

Light And Heat

Increasingly Enlightened,

"Lost in the Political Wilderness", is the first in a series by Mike Kreiger, giving a human-development context to the Red-Blue war between the most hated candidates Republicans and Democrats had to offer, and the class-war going on in the western world. It's largely rich vs poor, but it is fragmented, tribal and has aspects of "religion", too. Mike found that there was too much 'splainin to do for this to go in one essay, so it's 5 essays, which he featured daily last week. 
Mike explains the human development paradigm called "Spiral Dynamics", which Ken Wilbur  is the main proponent of these days. 
Mike does a bang-up job, too. I tried really hard to read Ken Wilbur for a couple of months, about 15 years ago, this very paradigm. 
I was able to read something like 150 pages, skipped around searching, and set the book down for longer and longer. Ken just kept explaining the model in more and more intricate detail, and never gave any real-world application to pull it all together. 
I just couldn't hold that big and new and detailed of a mental set in purely abstract form. 
Mike fixes that completely here. Thanks for the tip-off, Judy.
What is Spiral Dynamics?
How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology created Trump, Part 1
How a Breakdown in Liberal Ideology Created Trump, Part 2
Why Increased Consciousness is the Only Path Forward

Outrageous Malevolence is Ilargi's update on the "Greeks situation". German and French banks took on covertly and illegally originated Greek debt, specially packaged by Goldman Sachs, to get Greece into the EU, by obfuscating the reality of (corrupt) Greek government finances. 
After the financial collapse in 2008, a lot of things started coming to light, and this bad-debt problem of those powerful banks needed to be transferred to somebody else. 
The people least able to carry that load were scapegoated with the odious-debt. 
Greeks are more crushed than ever, completely stuck in the worst phase of America's Great Depression. 
The Eurocrats need them to be bled drier, say they are doing better than the IMF claims, and can generate a 3.5% primary surplus from taxing people who make $8000/year, and expanding those taxes to people who make $4000/year soon. Of course folks already pay very high "value added" taxes, taxes on utilities, property taxes, etc. 
These people are innocent, and have always been innocent. Bankers and Politicians did the crime. It is really no secret.

Martin Armstrong says the EU is in Disintegration Mode (focus on Brexit):

Eurasian Solution for Afghanistan? (Damn! It's about time...) Thanks Eleni, for this excellent article. Russian diplomacy is at work again, as all of Afghanistan's neighbors are coming together with Afghan parties to confer about how an arrangement can be worked out to bring and end to the war, which has gone on for more than 30 years. (Afghanistan was "paradise" in the 1970s when a friend of mine trekked through there, and "Hell" when another friend of mine went there on a "brown bag" (cash pay) mission for the CIA decades later. The US is invited as a "partner", and might have a face-saving way out, if Trump, Mattus and friends are willing to take it. 
This is presented as a Pakistani plan. I'm sure there is some diplomatic reason for casting it in that light.

Russian Foreign Minister, Sergey Lavrov says NATO Actions at Russia's Borders have a Destabilizing Character. (Of course that's not a bug; it's a feature.)

Rand Paul warns neocons will scurry in with Abrams. Kristol says that's "anti-Semitic". (Whatever... Latest rumor is that Elliot Abrams is out of the running for Asst. Sec. of State for dissing candidate-Trump so badly.)  

Anti Donald Trump War Propaganda, Thierry Meyssan goes back to 9/11/01 and the videos of Donald Trump's same day structural assessments and conclusions about other explosives being absolutely necessary to have done what was just done. Trump had been in the WTC basement after the previous massive van-bombing, observed the damage witha  structural engineer he employed, who had been a project engineer in the design and construction of the WTC. The whole "with us or with the terrorists" rejection of contrary-truths had not been established yet that afternoon. Meyssan did one of the early and most influential 9/11 documentaries. He had been there that day filming something else, until...

Civil Asset Forfeiture is the big issue that Donald Trump went off half-cocked about when he was talking to that Texas Sheriff and offering to ruin the career of a Texas Senator who was trying to protect people from having all cash and valuables taken by police at all levels, without any proof that it was obtained unlawfully, or contributing to criminal enterprise. This is really huge in America. Trump should have known, and the media should present this issue, but does not. Anyone with cash is a criminal. You know that...

A new composite material has a very high reflectance of visible light, but permits infrared/heat to readily pass through. The obvious application is to keep a roof from heating in the sun, but to let any heat it does have from the house below, to be radiated out, anyway. 
BINGO! Massive cuts in electricity use for AC.


Honestly Reflecting