Monday, March 11, 2019

Poised...

Defining Property,

​The Golan is part of Syria, but Israel has based most of Israeli agriculture on that water for the past 50 years, and now there is found to be oil and gas..
Syria has notified Israel through United Nations diplomatic channels that it is prepared to go to war if Israel does not leave the Golan Heights. 
Syrian Deputy Foreign Minister Faisal Mikdad reportedly sent the message through the head of the United Nations Truce Supervision Organization (UNTSO), Christine Lund, this past week, according to a World Israel News report and later picked up other major Israeli sources, including The Jerusalem Post. “Syria will attack Israel if it does not leave the Golan Heights,” Mikdad told the UN representative.
Mikdad further warned Lund that Syria will respond with force should Israel continue its attacks on Syria, which have occurred more than a dozen times over the past year, but which seem to have recently paused following Russia's announced delivery of the advanced S-300 anti-air missile defense system to Damascus late last year.  
“We will not hesitate to confront Israel,” Syria's Mekdad said. “We are also not scared away by its [Israel’s] supporters who are helping to perpetuate the occupation of the Golan,” he added.
Damascus' firm warning appears a response to a controversial bill recently under renewed consideration by US Congress, co-sponsored by Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton, and Democratic Rep. Mike Gallagher, which aims to give formal US recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights region.
Meanwhile, multiple Israeli political leaders have responded to Syria's historic claim to the Israeli-occupied Golan and willingness to go to war over it. While speaking on a visit to the Golan Heights, Blue and White party politicians Gabi Ashkenazi, Yair Lapid, Benny Gantz and Moshe Ya'alon vowed, "It is ours and it will stay ours" — certainly a dominant sentiment that cuts across Israeli party lines.

​"Two to Tango" is a quorum...
Well informed sources say that “it all depends on the direction the Israeli elections will take. If Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu estimates his chances are high enough to win a second term, then he will not venture any time soon into a new confrontation with Syria and its allies. The date of the next battle will be postponed. But, if he believes he will lose the election, then the possibility of his initiating a battle becomes very high. A serious battle between Israel on one hand and Syria and Iran on the other would be sufficient enough to postpone the elections. Netanyahu doesn’t have many choices: either he wins the election and postpones the corruption court case against him, or he goes to jail”.
https://ejmagnier.com/2019/03/07/syria-preparing-its-missiles-for-the-next-battle-with-israel/

Israel hammers Gaza for 3rd night in ‘vigorous response’ ordered by Netanyahu

Electrical systems in Venezuela have been targeted by another cyberattack, President Nicholas Maduro has said. Caracas has accused the US of “sabotage”, while US officials blame local corruption and mismanagement for the blackout.
After a failure at the Guri hydroelectric power plant left much of the country without power on Thursday night, Venezuelan authorities managed to restore power to “many parts” of the country. However, the country’s grid took another hammering on Saturday, with many of the restored systems knocked out once again, the country’s embattled president said.
According to Maduro, the systems had been nearly 70 percent restored when “we received another attack, of a cybernetic nature, at midday… that disturbed the reconnection process and knocked out everything that had been achieved until noon.”

Paul Craig Roberts.
Don’t you think something is fishy when the presstitutes orchestrate a fake news “humanitarian crisis” in Venezuela, but totally ignore the real humanitarian crises in Yemen and Gaza?
Don’t you think something is really very rotten when the expert, Alfred Maurice de Zayas,  sent by the UN to Venezuela to evaluate the situation finds no interest by any Western media or any Western government in his report?
Don’t you think it is a bit much for Washington to steal $21 billion of Venezuela’s money, impose sanctions in an effort to destabilize the country and to drive the Venezuelan government to its knees, blame Venezuelan socialism (essentially nationalization of the oil company) for bringing “starvation to the people,” and offer a measly $21 million in “humanitarian aid.”​ ...​
In paragraph 37 of his report, de Zayas says:  “Modern-day economic sanctions and blockades are comparable with medieval sieges of towns with the intention of forcing them to surrender. Twenty-first century sanctions attempt to bring not just a town, but sovereign countries to their knees. A difference, perhaps, is that twenty-first century sanctions are accompanied by the manipulation of public opinion through ‘fake news’, aggressive public relations and a pseudo-human rights rhetoric so as to give the impression that a human rights ‘end’ justifies the criminal means. There is not only a horizontal juridical world order governed by the Charter of the United Nations and principles of sovereign equality, but also a vertical world order reflecting the hierarchy of a geopolitical system that links dominant States with the rest of the world according to military and economic power. It is the latter, geopolitical system that generates geopolitical crimes, hitherto in total impunity.”  ​...Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world and an abundance of other natural resources including gold, bauxite and coltan. But under the Maduro government they’re not accessible to US and transnational corporations.
The Media Is Lying About Construction At Sohae Launch Facility
In the aftermath of the Hanoi Summit, President Trump has been barraged with attempts to undermine his confidence in the good faith of Kim Jong Un and his intentions to deal fairly with the United States in the negotiation process concerning denuclearization and de-escalation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula. One of the primary causes of concern has been a series of reports from NBC News claiming that “commercial” satellite footage shows that the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) has been engaging in fresh construction at their Sohae Launch Facility in preparation for an alleged missile launch or test.​..​
The NBC report, written by Courtney Kube, Carol E. Lee and Andrea Mitchell, concerns satellite imagery released by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) purported to have been taken on March 2, 2019. The imagery suffers from two defects – the fact that the images show two different facilities being attributed as one by the media, and that the purported construction activity indicates dismantling of the Sohae site rather than fresh additions or repairs. Side by side comparisons of the photos show that they are in fact taken from two different locations. This discrepancy might be apparent to an analyst with knowledge of North Korea’s Sohae Launch Facility, but not to an average member of the public.Democratic presidential candidate Tulsi Gabbard, who has already taken a lot of heat from her party for being outspoken against senseless war and regime change, has released a strong statement in support of WikiLeaks.

“If the government can change the designation Wikileaks from being a news organization (Obama Admin’s designation of Wikileaks) to a hostile intelligence agency (Trump Admin’s designation), then any entity – online and offline – is in danger of being designated a ‘hostile intelligence service’ if they carry out investigative reporting that the US government or a particular administration considers to be hostile to itself,” Gabbard wrote in a series of tweets on Saturday. “This will have a chilling effect on investigative reporting of powerful government agencies or officials, including the president, intel agencies, etc. This is a serious breach of our constitutional freedoms and every American – Democrat, Republican or Independent – must stand up against it.”  

Tim Gibbons of Missouri Rural Crisis Center, a support group for family farmers set up during the 1980s farm crisis, says the cycle of economic shocks has blended with government policies to create a “monopolisation of the livestock industry, where a few multinational corporations control a vast majority of the livestock”. Gibbons explains: “They are vertically integrated, from animal genetics to grocery store. What they charge isn’t based upon what it costs to produce, and it’s not based on supply and demand, because they know what they need to make a profit. What they have done, through government support and taxpayer support, is to intentionally overproduce so that the price stays low, sometimes below the cost of production. That kicks their competition out of the market. Then they become the only player in town.
Over time, it has extracted wealth and power from communities. We can see how that has impacted rural main streets. You can see the boarded-up storefronts. You can see the lack of economic opportunity.” Gibbons says that corporations game the system by obtaining low-interest, federally guaranteed loans to build Cafos that then overproduce. But they know the government will buy up the surplus to stabilise prices. “The system has been set up for the benefit of the factory farm corporations and their shareholders at the expense of family farmers, the real people, our environment, our food system,” he adds.
“The thing that is really pervasive about it is that they control the rules of the game because they control the democratic process. It’s a blueprint. We’re paying for our own demise.

​What If Politics Can't Fix What's Broken? Charles Hugh Smith​
Government can't rescue a status quo which is failing due to negative return on investment (ROI), gross inefficiencies, the loss of trust in corrupt institutions , and all the other ills that are intrinsic to centralization of power and capital.
As a result, the greater the government's power, the greater the polarizationas the self-serving elites seek to protect their share of the pie as the pie shrinks. Each camp becomes increasingly extreme, and compromise is recognized as a process that erodes every camp's power and income.
The political solution is take-no-prisoners domination and the eradication of rivals' power to veto or contest the domination of the winner. This drive to polarization is the result of centralized elites attempting to ​at​tribute the system's increasing failure to their competing elites.
This is the politics of decline and collapse. This is the only possible output of centralized power grabs by self-serving elites, i.e. the status quo.

​Externalizing Blame​

2 comments:

  1. John- Is it possible to implement a non-Google comment system? (I realize that the blog is a Google Blog.) I would not recommend Disqus as they seem to mark posts as Spam when they are not.) I use typepad for my online journal, but blocked comments several years ago as I had so much spam. I don't if their are good alternatives. I want to avoid Google when I can, but I did establish an account several years ago.

    More than anything, I just wanted to let you know that I appreciate the articles. Matt in Spokane https://integraljournal.typepad.com/integraljournal/

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  2. Thanks Matt,
    I started the blog in the 2016 primaries when my bcc sends to about 200 recipients started getting blocked by gmail. That stopped 2 days after the November election, but it surfaced again a little before last November's vote, and stopped 2 days after, again.
    There is more going on with narrative control algorithms on the internet than meets the eye, even though it is getting more overt lately.
    I'm not a techie, just a guy trying to share what I see as important information.
    I expect to be stopped completely at some point.
    I grow vegetables, too. Not nearly enough, though.

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