Monday, July 31, 2017

Preoperative Testing

Surgical Candidates,

South Korea is preparing a "surgical strike" against North Korea, consisting of machete-surgery to hack off all the heads of North Korean military and civilian commanders, and whoever else is in the area, which will set the artillery off pounding millions of people in Seoul. That will stabilize things and save lives.

"We'll handle North Korea. We're going to be able to handle North Korea. It will be handled. We handle everything," Trump told reporters at the start of Monday's first Cabinet meeting with his new Chief of Staff, flanked by Secretary of State Rex Tillerson and Defense Secretary James Mattis. (Who is "we"? Tillerson was caught in a smile, just before the question, but not Mattis, who immediately looked down and rearranged himself in his chair, as President Trump answered woodenly.) 
China wants both balanced trade with the United States and lasting peace on the Korean peninsula, its official Xinhua news agency added in a commentary. "However, to realize these goals, Beijing needs a more cooperative partner in the White House, not one who piles blame on China for the United States' failures," it added.

Fallout map for nuclear strikes on continental US, just to consider, again... (Wind directions and speeds may vary, of course.)
nuclear-target-fallout-map

Since China is at some kind of impasse, influencing the nuclear-deterrent-behavior of North Korea, perhaps it is tie for deeper diplomatic engagement through Russian channels, maybe with those 455 diplomatic personnel, who will remain in Moscow, when 755 leave, in the long delayed answer to President Obama's parting slap at Russia. The House and Senate have cut off all presidential maneuver for normalization of relations, with recent ironclad sanctions votes.

The Military Industrial Complex, through spokesperson John McCain's Brain Tumor, advocates buying billions of dollars of high tech murder devices and gifting them to the tottering Ukrainian Mafi-Nazies to screw Russia some more.

Wait, you're saying that the sanctions that just passed make it 3:1, not 2:2? Marxist analysis? Teetering empire shoots self in foot? Petrodollar puking blood?
One must note that the sanctions do not affect the European economy, but directly target it, as the EU is the single greatest existential threat to US dollar hegemony after China and Russia.

That didn't last long. 
Trump removes (fatally disrespectful of his betters) foul mouthed Anthony Scaramucci as White House (mis)Communications Director.

"Nations Substitution": European peasants are too poor to have enough children to replace themselves. However, Europe seems "rich" to Africans, willing to do anything to live and slave there. And there are so-many-to-choose-from. What's a global multinational corporation supposed to do, eh? Thanks Eleni, in Athens.

Greece's Road to Bailout Exit (It's simple: Move to Africa. The rest is just contracts and window-dressing. Global capital will have your last drop of blood, slowly, legally, inexorably.)

The Toxic Fruit of Financialization: The Risk is for Those at the Bottom, Charles Hugh Smith (That's easy to see, but there are methods to it.)

Shell Oil profits triple as cost cuts take effect. (They quite exploring for oil. It's all been found. Game-almost-over; playing out the clock.)

Artificial Intelligence is already self-teaching. there's no regulation of it. Corporations are already "persons", all AI has to do is completely control a corporation or two, and VIOLA, democracy can permanently transcend carbon-based-life-forms! Carlos Perez, a researcher in AI, argues that Elon Musk is right about the need to think through regulating AI, while it remains possible. (What will AI value?)

Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the Pakistani IT scammers. (There's more than bank-fraud going on here. All hell broke loose after Hillary Clinton lost. These guys started liquidating assets and smashing hard drives, as families fled to Pakistan, but remained in highly-paid government employ to the end.)

New York property speculators have figured out how to evict everyone, (1000 ways to be cut to death that are mostly Catch-22 for "protected" renters.)

The Conservative Case for Medicare-for-All: "The evidence is appallingly clear: Among first-world countries, the U.S. is a public health disaster zone." 

Jimmy Carter calls for single-payer healthcare in the US, as elected Democrats look at their feet and mumble about Trump threatening Obamacare.

Too Fat to Stand and Their Flesh Rots While They're Alive: UK studies up on why US chickens have to be dipped in Chlorine before getting packed for markets, as Britons consider bilateral trade deals with corporate USA.

Tastes Like Chicken

Sunday, July 30, 2017

Mostly-Invisible Wars

Blindfolded,

Today's new war is in Venezuela, though the CIA has been carrying out war in Venezuela since at least 2000, including the 2002 coup against Hugo Chavez. This is class war. The people living in Venezuela, in a war zone, don't see American bombers in the sky, but they feel the privations of war, and they see the actions of their government against the war, which seem harsh and irrational. And why is there no food or toilet paper? It's time for the coup in Venezuela to be fully launched, "succeed" or fail, and for Venezuelans to suffer more. Eleni sent this and the next 3 stories. Whew!

David Stockman, parts 1 & 2 of this look at Trump disrupting the warfare sate, currently John McCain's War.
So that’s McCain’s War. Eleven million refugees, a destroyed country, 400,000 civilians dead and a decimated army of a nation that poses a zero threat to the American homeland. And all for the purpose of hazing the rulers of Tehran who never did have a program to get a nuke, according to Washington’s own 17-agency NIEs (national intelligence estimates); and gave it up anyway with ironclad mechanisms for international enforcement.

Robert Fisk looks at a few humans in Syria, living and dead, at the moment. Of 18 million citizens of the ancient civilization, 11 million have been killed or made refugees by Mr McCain's war. These are human beings. McCain's war is "our" war.

"A point worth making again is that you can’t judge Trump by traditional metrics. He’s a once in a century political force who will be judged more on what he destroys than on what he creates. He is the destroyer of worlds, because the world of Washington needs destroying."

Paul Craig Roberts frantically points out that the Doomsday Clock is two and a half minutes from midnight.

The Science and Security Board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has warned that the likelihood of a catastrophic nuclear war is closer than since 1953. (Why is that man smiling?) http://www.globalresearch.ca/the-doomsday-clock-two-and-a-half-minutes-to-midnight-ever-closer-to-nuclear-war/5600715

Kim Jong Un, hereditary ruler of bombed-out North Korea, proudly proclaims that North Korean ICBM can reacl all of the US, which is at least 80% true. The presumed value of this is the ability to send off one big counterpunch if the US starts bombing again. US bombing killed one of five North Koreans last time. Deep trauma.

The US flies two B-2 bombers from Guam over South Korea, towards North Korea. They dawdle in the sky for awhile. 
This is one bomber more than is needed to kill everybody in North Korea, and it is a threat to China, as well. 
This is PTSD freak-out for North Koreans.

Does Israel have 200 nuclear warheads, as Colin Powell said in a confidential email, or just 80, the official-public US estimate? An argument given here for the number "80" is "Why would they want more; what possible use?" 
Duh, Samson Option! Israeli policy is to destroy every nation it can reach, if Israel is at the point of destruction. 
Can you say "Israel has nuclear-capable subs from Germany"? 
This is vastly greater threat to the US and the world than shell-shocked North Korea.

Dying Asleep

Friday, July 28, 2017

Black Spots

Missing the Point,

The problem with excluding transgender people from military participation is that it is way too narrow an exclusion to help our current situation, 
ALL humans, Always, need to be excluded from working in the war machines. 
Only that will help.
"Available evidence suggests that transgender Americans serve at rates well above the national average. Though the data is sparse, studies estimate that trans men and women are anywhere from two- to five-times more likely to join the military as their non-transgender counterparts. For all its perceived conservatism and raging heteronormativity, the United States Armed Forces is almost certainly the largest employer of transgender people in this country. "

“(h)olocaust is the destruction of a large number of people and 9 million Iraqi deaths from Anglo-American violence or violently-imposed deprivation certainly constitutes an Iraqi Holocaust.”[1] Thanks Eleni.

Israeli control of US government is overt, out in the open, official. Paul Craig Roberts speaks the increasingly obvious truth. It is what it is. US Mideast policy is subject to Israeli prior-approval, for starters... Thanks Eleni
 "The House of Representatives unanimously passed HR 672 titled “Combating European Anti-Semitism Act of 2017.” Former CIA official Philip Giraldi reports that “the bill requires the State Department to monitor what European nations and their police forces are doing about anti-Semitism.” 

Today's Must-Read: 
Hidden History: The Secret Origins of the First World War
"Of the many myths that befog the modern political mind, none is so corrupting of the understanding or so incongruent with historical fact as the notion that the wealthy and the powerful do not conspire. They do."

Bolivian President  Avo Morales declares that Bolivia is free from control of IMF and World Bank. As a native Bolivian, this is his stand against colonialism, in it's global financial capitalism cloak. Thanks Colleen.

You may recall that Morales had his Presidential Plane rerouted through Europe, grounded and evaluated to some degree ("searched" is such a controversial term), when it was thought that he was transporting Edward Snowden from Russia to Bolivia in July 2013. (Bolivia will come under economic-hit-man attack, as Venezuela has been for over a decade, now in late stages.)

Venezuelan economic stress from years of financial attack, hit hard by oil price drops since global economy turned down at end of 2014, is at the point of political power struggle at the top this weekend. US Embassy orders families of "diplomats" out. Crunch time, again.

Other US "diplomats" and families will be leaving Moscow, as House and Senate (not Rand Paul or Bernie Sanders) vote for hard sanctions against Russia, without presidential room to negotiate. Moscow has been very patient. Now the US Embassy staff will fall to the same number as Russia has in the US, and Russia is taking away a little place int the country that the Americans use, too. 

Brandon Smith figures the globalist currency will look a lot like Bitcoin, or it may be Bitcoin, which is ideal for very large trade transactions for central banks. 
The extremely high expense of Bitcoin is under-appreciated. The more transactions, the more expense. No, it's not anonymous. Every transaction in the world is recorded everywhere in the world, permanently, as long as the internet is all working. You see the cost and fragility. Better if it is just a few very big and secure servers, like central banks...

House Judiciary Committee calls for special counsel to investigate Clinton, Comey and Lynch.

The Awan brothers, from Pakistan, were running all the computer systems for a core of Democratic elites, including Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Imran Awan recently smashed all the hard drives in his house, wired $283,000 to Pakistan and (almost) hopped a flight home from Dulles Airport. These guys have been under investigation since winter. He jumped too late. His brothers can't jump.

Algae are spreading across Greenland's ice sheets, accelerating the melt. No, it's not just soot making the ice dark.
White snow reflects up to 90% of solar radiation while dark patches of algae will only reflect about 35% or even as little as 1% in the blackest spots.

Unforeseen Life Form

Monday, July 24, 2017

The Real Machinery

Peeking Inside,

Murder, Spies and Weapons, 3 Deep State Stories from Moon of Alabama:
  • the weapons and ammunition are usual from east Europe (Bulgaria, Serbia, Croatia, Ukraine ...)
  • the contracts are with U.S. companies themselves hired by the CIA and/or Pentagon as well as with Saudi and Israeli companies
  • offloading during unusual "fueling stops" allowed to disguise the real addressee of the loads
Ten thousands of tons of weapons and ammunition to al-Qaeda and other Takfiris in Syria also came first from Libya by ship, then on at least 160 big cargo flights via Saudi Arabia and Qatar to Turkey and during the last years by various ships under U.S. contracts from mostly east-European countries

Benjamin Fulford explains his personal and media history, which is impressive, and how he has connections, which tell him things, and that 9/11 and Fukushima were both planned attacks, according to his sources. He lives and works in Japan, impressively multilingual, with friends in weird places. (transcript, too)

Propaganda war on electronic media is official and pervasive and efficiently run now. Yep, all of our governments are carrying out information warfare upon us. Thanks Eleni.
In January 2015, the British Army announced that its 77th Brigade would “focus on non‐lethal psychological operations using social networks like Facebook and Twitter to fight enemies by gaining control of the narrative in the information age”. The primary task of this unit is to shape public behaviour through the use of “dynamic narratives” to combat the political propaganda disseminated by terrorist organisations. The United Kingdom is not alone in allocating troops and funding for influencing online political discourse. Instead, this is part of a larger phenomenon whereby governments are turning to Internet platforms to exert influence over information flows and communication channels to shape public opinion.”

We are now in the Frightening Endgame:
The system we now have is based on Fake News, Fake Money with no morals, no principles and no moral or ethical values.

Nobody uses cash in Chinese cities for the past 3 years, just smartphones. Rarely do credit cards get used. What are the implications of this? What if service goes down? Is this a new currency for the next reset? (China is investigating a national blockchain based currency.)

China has enough data and enough computational ability to study future-crime and prevent it, the holy grail of law-enforcement. Yes, Minority Report. Thanks Jeff. (They have no choice but to process all the data they are getting now.)

If Trump signs the latest anti-Russian sanctions into law, which hurt European countries, particularly German companies, retaliation and damage control from the EU will be fairly swift, according to the leaks.

Getting the Bill

Saturday, July 22, 2017

Zombie Life In America

Struggling to Decide,

Dan sends this Counterpunch article on the origins and uses of the Zombie archetype. 
Zombies used to be human, but now they shuffle your way, slow and hungry. If you don't kill them quickly and ruthlessly and pervasively, you will become one. 
It's kinda' like starving refugees from a war zone, isn't it? 
If police and National Guard units had gone through Zombie Training before Hurricane Katrina, imagine how much more smoothly things could have been managed!
"The DOD’s strategy for dealing with a zombie uprising, outlined in “CONOP 8888,” is for all intents and purposes a training manual for the government in how to put down a citizen uprising or at least an uprising of individuals “infected” with dangerous ideas about freedom. Rest assured that the tactics and difficulties outlined in the “fictional training scenario” are all too real, beginning with martial law."

George Monbiot: To read Nancy MacLean’s new book, Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America, is to see what was previously invisible... The history professor’s work on the subject began by accident. In 2013 she stumbled across a deserted clapboard house on the campus of George Mason University in Virginia. It was stuffed with the unsorted archives of a man who had died that year whose name is probably unfamiliar to you: James McGill Buchanan. She says the first thing she picked up was a stack of confidential letters concerning millions of dollars transferred to the university by the billionaire Charles Koch... James Buchanan brought these influences together to create what he called public choice theory. He argued that a society could not be considered free unless every citizen has the right to veto its decisions. What he meant by this was that no one should be taxed against their will. But the rich were being exploited by people who use their votes to demand money... Any clash between “freedom” (allowing the rich to do as they wish) and democracy should be resolved in favour of freedom. In his book The Limits of Liberty, he noted that “despotism may be the only organisational alternative to the political structure that we observe.”... In 1980, he was able to put the programme into action. He was invited to Chile, where he helped the Pinochet dictatorship write a new constitution, which, partly through the clever devices Buchanan proposed, has proved impossible to reverse entirely. Amid the torture and killings, he advised the government to extend programmes of privatisation, austerity, monetary restraint, deregulation and the destruction of trade unions: a package that helped trigger economic collapse in 1982... None of this troubled the Swedish Academy, which through his devotee at Stockholm University Assar Lindbeck in 1986 awarded James Buchanan the Nobel memorial prize for economics... But his power really began to be felt when Koch, currently the seventh richest man in the US, decided that Buchanan held the key to the transformation he sought... He employed the economist to select the revolutionary “cadre” that would implement his programme (Murray Rothbard, at the Cato Institute that Koch founded, had urged the billionaire to study Lenin’s techniques and apply them to the libertarian cause)... Buchanan saw stealth as crucial. He told his collaborators that “conspiratorial secrecy is at all times essential”. Instead of revealing their ultimate destination, they would proceed by incremental steps. For example, in seeking to destroy the social security system, they would claim to be saving it, arguing that it would fail without a series of radical “reforms”. Gradually they would build a “counter-intelligentsia”, allied to a “vast network of political power” that would become the new establishment... Buchanan was right: there is an inherent conflict between what he called “economic freedom” and political liberty. Complete freedom for billionaires means poverty, insecurity, pollution and collapsing public services for everyone else. Because we will not vote for this, it can be delivered only through deception and authoritarian control... Buchanan’s programme is a prescription for totalitarian capitalism...

The US Military did not "lose" $6.5 trillion dollars, 40% of real US GDP, they just won't talk about the projects they have been spending this money on for the last four decades. (About the income these projects generated themselves, there is no need to comment at all. It never was on the books, except maybe at the banks, but they keep secrets.)  Thanks Eleni.

Charles Hugh Smith comments on the inevitable consequences of a system based upon lies, which the military and bankers know well enough... Collapse.
You know the one essential guideline to "leadership" in a doomed dysfunctional system: when it gets serious, you have to lie. In other words, the status quo's secular goddess is TINA--there is no alternative to lying, because the truth will bring the whole corrupt structure tumbling down.

Back in the 1980s, before the price of oil dropped so hard, I guess, the Soviet Union began work on a Doomsday Device. This durable system had one job, to fire every ICBM if a nuke went off in Russia. The targets were all set. They couldn't be quickly reset. It would assure the mutuality of  destruction. Who would ever be safe? It's a good thing that sort of plan died out with the old USSR, isn't it? 
Huh? They finished it and turned it on? Sez who? 
The President of Chechnya.... What a flake; a Muslim flake. Forget it. He's just talking trash, trying to scare you...

Super rich go bunker-building-crazy. Do they know something we don't? Giant Meteor? Yellowstone? Nuclear Armageddon? Melted icecaps? Union unrest?

What is a Glioblastoma? John McCain fans want to understand the brain cancer their hero is "battling", as he vows to "keep serving" from bed (with printed statements, I presume.)

In his first published statement since having some of the part of his brain with cancer removed, John McCain says Trump is "playing right into Vladimir Putin's hands", by cutting funding to all the alphabet-soup, organization-jumping, weapon-selling, entrepreneur-Jihadis the US has been plying with cash, training, and sophisticated weapons, to overthrow the Syrian government. (Yeah, I believe he said it, or it's the kind of thing he usually has said...)

How many wars has John McCain openly pushed for? (Vietnam is not on list. That was his dad's job.)

"Good", opines Caitlin Johnstone, about McCain's glioblastoma.

Yemen's cholera epidemic is the worst on record, with 360,000 cases in 3 months in the war devastated and sewer-bombed country. (You think it's hot where you live?)
McCain gets no credit for his role in this war, but I'd give him his share...

The most effective individual actions against climate change in this analysis are :
1) Don't reproduce
2) Don't drive
3) Don't fly
4) "Buy green energy" (Complex issue, actually.)
5) Eat vegetables
(This does not speak to climate effect mitigation. Grow vegetables is a mitigating step. All steps to local food, water, energy, social, housing, work, etc. security are mitigating factors for what is already "baked-in". If you think our species will survive, do you think you could raise children that would help, or just suffer?)

Citizen Zombie