Tuesday, April 30, 2019

Compare And Contrast

Heard In Passing,

Sergei Lavrov just said a lot of important things to global diplomats, I picked this one out. Thanks Eleni:
Obviously, lasting stabilisation in the Middle East and North Africa is unrealistic without overcoming the long-standing Arab-Israeli conflict, including the creation of an independent, viable and territorially integral Palestinian state in the safe and recognised borders of 1967 with possible exchanges and with the capital in East Jerusalem. The attempts to promote non-transparent plans that contradict UN resolutions and the Arab Peace Initiative cannot bring a lasting or fair solution and merely perpetuate old hotbeds of confrontation and create new ones.  

​Ilargi at The Automatic Earth, (broad discussion in the comments section, too)
Joe Biden is working for Donald Trump, right? I haven’t heard either of them say it outright, but it’s the only reason I can see that would explain why Biden is running for president.

Kunstler beats the dead horse, which is our daily lives...
How to account for Americans being the most anxious, fearful, and stressed-out people among the supposedly advanced nations? Do we not live in the world’s greatest democratic utopia where dreams come true?
​ ​What if the dreaming part is actually driving us insane? What if we have engineered a society in which fantasy has so grotesquely over-run reality that coping with daily life is nearly impossible. What if an existence mediated by pixel screens large and small presents a virtual world more compelling than the real world and turns out to be a kind of contagious avoidance behavior — until reality is so fugitive that we can barely discern its colors and outlines beyond the screens?
​ ​You end up in a virtual world of advertising and agit-prop where manipulation is the primary driver of human activity. That is, a world where the idea of personal liberty (including any act of free thought) becomes a philosophical sick joke, whether you believe in the possibility of free will or not. You get a land full of college kids trained to think that coercion of others is the highest-and-best use of their time on earth — and that it represents “inclusion.” You get a news industry that makes its own reality, churning out narratives (i.e. constructed psychodramas) to excite numbed minds.


​"Homeless" = "IV drug addicts" in cities that decriminalized possession. Guess who moved there. Ouch!​
Sex Pistols frontman Johnny Rotten was a key symbol of anti-establishment rebellion in the 1970s, but now he is freaking out because homeless people are making life very difficult for him and his wife in Venice Beach, and what he recently told Newsweek’s Paula Froelich is making headlines all over the nation…
​ ​He told her the homeless situation in his swanky LA neighborhood is so bad that thieves are tearing the bars from the windows of his multimillion-dollar home, lobbing bricks, setting up unsightly tent cities and littering the beach with syringes.
 ​“A couple of weeks ago I had a problem,” the former punk prince opined. “They came over the gate and put their tent inside, right in front of the front door. It’s like . . . the audacity. And if you complain, what are you? Oh, one of the establishment elite? No, I’m a bloke that’s worked hard for his money and I expect to be able to use my own front door.”
​ ​It is more than just a little bit ironic that a man that used drugs, sex and rock and roll to shoot to global fame now sounds like a tired old crank that just wants to get the hippies off of his front lawn.
​ ​And he also says that the beach in front of his home is almost unusable because of all the needles and human poop in the sand
 
​Missing a principled leader, 50 years without Charles de Gaul​le... Thanks Wigs.
With amazing effrontery last October, Macron told his people to stop complaining and be more like de Gaulle, after a meeting with a pensioner who complained he only had a small pension. This is the same Emmanuel Macron who accused his own people of being as "Gauls who are resistant to change" on a visit to Denmark.
 The truth is that the French people today have a lot to complain about. Macron's policies are in fact, the reverse of de Gaulle'sThe General 'did not care for those who own wealth.' Macron doesn't seem to care for anyone else.
Another big difference between de Gaulle and the politicians of today was his attitude to money. Has there ever been such an uncorrupt leader? As I noted in 2008, "Despite occupying the highest office in the country for a decade, he died in relative poverty. Instead of accepting the pension he was entitled to as a retired president and general, he only took the pension of a colonel. The contrast between de Gaulle and the money-obsessed career politicians of today could not be greater." 


Yellow Vest protesters who have suffered life-changing injuries at the hands of French police have launched their own association, promising fresh actions against police brutality.
Called “the mutilated for the edification of others,” the collective aims to accurately calculate the number of people who have been injured nationally by police during Yellow Vest protests. It also called for an end to the use of the non-lethal weapons deployed by French police — namely tear gas canisters and Flash Balls — and a large national demonstration is scheduled in Paris on May 26.
Among those attending was Jerome Rodrigues, a prominent Yellow Vest leader who was hit in the eye with a gas canister during a demonstration in January. “You have 19 people in front of you and you have only 26 eyes that look back,” he told the press conference. “Count, there is a small problem,” he added...
According to statistics gathered by the activist group Desarmons-les (“Disarm Them”), at least 154 people have been seriously injured by police use of non-lethal weapons during protests. Of that number, 22 people have lost the use of an eye due to Flash Balls. A further five have had their hands torn off by gas canisters.


​Thanks Eleni. Donald Trump AND Mike Pompeo help smash the empire against the rocks of political and economic reality.​
The European Union informed the United States government that it will resort to the World Trade Organization (WTO) if the US tightens its economic blockade against Cuba by enforcing chapter III of the Helms-Burton law...
In fact, the owners of all movable or immovable property which was nationalized in the past did receive compensation from the Cuban revolutionary government but those who chose to go into exile in the United States, as well as US transnational corporations, refused to accept the compensation...
 In 1996, the European Union and Canada negotiated the suspension of Chapter III of the Helms-Burton Act with the Clinton administration. Since then, successive US governments have confirmed the suspension every 6 months. But in January 2019, the Trump administration reduced the suspension period to 45 days and is now ready to repeal it definitively...
EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs, Federica Mogherini, states that the EU will be obliged to put the issue to the World Trade Organization.
 The EU’s letter to Washington, signed by Mrs. Mogherini and by the European Trade Commissioner, Cecilia Malmstrom, underlines that in order to compensate European companies for damages, the EU could retaliate with the confiscation of American interests in Europe
  At the same time, an EU legal challenge against the United States via the World Trade Organization could open the door to an avalanche of similar procedures from the numerous companies affected by the unilateral "sanctions" which Washington is currently imposing against other countries, such as Iran.


​What if Russia actually had the policies focused on making the US over-extend and waste it's resources? (Not strictly necessary, is it?)

​ ​A FEDERAL COURT IN TEXAS issued a ruling on Thursday afternoon preliminarily enjoining enforcement of Texas’ law banning contractors from boycotting Israel. The court ruled that the law plainly violates the free speech guarantee of the First Amendment. Following similar decisions by federal courts in Kansas and Arizona, the ruling becomes the third judicial finding – out of three who have evaluated the constitutionality of such laws – to conclude that they are unconstitutional attacks on the free speech rights of Americans.
​ ​The case was brought by Bahia Amawi, a longtime elementary school speech pathologist in Austin, Texas, whose contract renewal was denied due to her refusal to sign an oath certifying that she does not participate in any boycotts of Israel. In December,​..​
​ ​We thus now have a direct collision between, on the one hand, the attempts by elected political officials to please their pro-Israel constituencies by legally punishing anyone who boycotts Israel (while allowing boycotts of other countries or even states within their own country) and, on the other, court rulings decreeing that such attempts are attacks on free speech rights.
​ ​If the First Amendment was designed to do anything, it was to ensure that the latter attempt prevails over the former
. This latest ruling by a Texas federal court is a major vindication of this pro-free-speech principle.

 The populations are ​notably ​different, with lots of drug abuse and poverty in America.​​ US Vaccine companies have protected political speech.​
Japan Leads the Way in Child Health: No Compulsory Vaccines. Banned Measles Mumps Rubella (MMR) Vaccine
​  ​In the United States, many legislators and public health officials are busy trying to make vaccines de facto compulsory—either by removing parental/personal choice given by existing vaccine exemptions or by imposing undue quarantines and fines on those who do not comply with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC’s) vaccine edicts. Officials in California are seeking to override medical opinion about fitness for vaccination, while those in New York​ ​are mandating the measles-mumps-rubella (MMR) vaccine for 6-12-month-old infants for whom its safety and effectiveness “have not been established.”
 ​ ​The U.S. has the very highest infant mortality rate of all industrialized developed countries, with more American children dying at birth and in their first year than in any other comparable nation—and more than half of those who survive develop at least one chronic illness.
American children would be better served if these officials—before imposing questionable and draconian measures—studied child health outcomes in Japan. With a population of 127 million, Japan has the healthiest children and the very highest “healthy life expectancy” in the world—and the least vaccinated children of any developed country...
​  ​In 1994, Japan transitioned away from mandated vaccination in public health centers to voluntary vaccination in doctors’ offices, guided by “the concept that it is better that vaccinations are performed by children’s family doctors who are familiar with their health conditions.”...
​  ​Japan also banned the MMR vaccine in the same time frame, due to thousands of serious injuries​ ​over a four-year period—producing an injury rate of one in 900 children that was “over 2,000 times higher than the expected rate.” It initially offered separate measles and rubella vaccines following its abandonment of the MMR vaccine;


Fishing to Feed Salmon Farms Is Emptying the Seas, Claims Report
Millions of tonnes of sardines, anchovies, mackerel, herring, krill and other species are caught and ground into fishmeal and fish oil, known as FMFO. This is fed to salmon caged in hundreds of farms along the west coast.
Now an 80-page report by campaign groups, Changing Markets Foundation and Compassion in World Farming, warns that growing dependence on FMFO is threatening human food security, putting marine wildlife at risk and harming animal welfare.
The new report says that almost a fifth of the world’s total catch of wild fish is currently processed into FMFO, most of which is used to feed farmed fish.  


​Grinding Fish Sausage​

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Creating The Next Economy

​Co-creators,​
This Is the End of the Cycle​,​ Charles Hugh Smith
Both new households and new businesses are in secular decline. Goosing the stock market and GDP doesn't change this reality.
Everyone wants every cycle of expansion to last forever, but alas every cycle ends. The growth cycle that began in 2009 is finally coming to an end. The signs are everywhere, notwithstanding the torrid 3.2% GDP growth for the first quarter of 2019 (which as others have noted, is less than meets the eye.)
Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is the standard measure of expansion, but it is an imperfect metric. GDP can still notch gains while the majority of the economy is stagnating and assets are losing value.
Better guides to expansion than GDP are sales volumes, prices, profits, wage increases and sustained rises in new enterprises and households. All of these measures of expansion are stagnant, indicating that monetary and fiscal stimulus are no longer moving the needle.

Yellow Vest activists completely ignored French President Emmanuel Macron's 'olive branch' of compromises - taking to the streets of Paris and other French cities for the 25th straight weekend of protests, albeit in much smaller numbers than in previous weeks.  
 Yellow Vest spokesman Jérémy Clément told AFP that "the President has understood our claims, but he hasn't provided the answers to them."


Since the Treaty of Maastricht, all the members of the European Union (including the neutral countries) have placed their defences under the suzerainty of NATO, which is directed exclusively by the United States. This is why, when the Pentagon delegates the economic headquarters of the countries it wishes to destroy to the US Department of the Treasury (USDT), all members of the European Union and NATO are obliged to apply US sanctions.​..
Today, US sanctions concern at least twenty countries - Belarus, Myanmar, Burundi, North Korea, Cuba, the Russian Federation, Iraq, Lebanon, Libya, Nicaragua, the Syrian Arab Republic, the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the Central African Republic (CAR), the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Islamic Republic of Iran, Serbia, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and Zimbabwe. That gives us a very precise map of the conflicts led by the Pentagon, assisted by the US Department of the Treasury (USDT).

​"Diplomacy":
U.S. Ambassador to Russia Jon Huntsman has boarded one of two U.S. Navy aircraft carriers that arrived in the Mediterranean on Tuesday to caution Moscow against its activities in Syria and around the world...
The U.S. Navy said Huntsman observed the operations of 9,000 sailors and marines, 130 aircraft and 10 ships aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln. He said the Nimitz-class USS Abraham Lincoln and the John C. Stennis each “represent 100,000 tons of international diplomacy.”
“When you have 200,000 tons of diplomacy that is cruising in the Mediterranean,” Huntsman told CNN, “this is forward-operating diplomacy — nothing else need to be said.”

​Don't forget the proposed "Fort Trump" in Poland, either!
Netanyahu, who on Tuesday toured the Golan with his wife and sons, said a community or neighborhood on the Golan Heights should be named after US President Donald Trump in appreciation for his decision last month to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the strategic plateau.

Bernie Sanders seems to support returning to the Mideast policy of Eisenhower and Kennedy. 
 "The US gives billions of dollars in military aid to Israel. It should deal with the Middle East on a level-playing-field basis," Bernie Sanders told CNN.
Appearing on CNN, Bernie Sanders, the Democratic nominee for the US presidency in 2020, said he supports Israel’s right to exist and considers himself pro-Israel, but doesn’t support the policies of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was reelected earlier this month.

​The timing seems ideal for Netanyahu, with his power consolidated​, to destroy future potential threats to Israel's expansionist ("lebensraum") agenda. The economic sanctions against Lebanon have weakened the economy and the people, same as Syria. They will supposedly launch a massive assault, whenever they can find where Nasrallah is. Killing Nasrallah early is critical to their success, as they see it.
Israel Plans to Launch a Surprise War against Lebanon
Hezbollah Leader: "The Possibility of a War with Israel Is Very High this Summer and I May No Longer be with You"

President Putin left nothing to doubt when he proudly proclaimed that Russia and the Eurasian Economic Union regional integration organization that it leads are strategically merging with China and its Belt & Road Initiative, with this process having unprecedentedly far-reaching strategic consequences for the supercontinent and 21st-century geopolitics as a whole...
 There’s no doubt that this process will have unprecedentedly far-reaching strategic consequences for the supercontinent and 21st-century geopolitics as a whole, which is why his entire address deserves to be analyzed in full. What therefore follows is the transcript of his speech interspersed with brief interpretations...

https://orientalreview.org/2019/04/27/interpreting-president-putins-speech-at-the-2019-bri-forum/  

Same faces, similar jobs, new titles, more pay... Facebook is CIA.
Facebook announced Monday that Jennifer Newstead, a Trump appointee who served in the Department of Justice (DoJ) under President Bush, will join the social media company as General Counsel, supervising its global legal functions...
In a 2002 statement, Assistant Attorney General Viet Dinh described Newstead's role in drafting the Patriot Act: "Her enhanced leadership duties and her excellent service on a range of issues — including helping craft the new U.S.A. Patriot Act to protect the United States against terror — have earned her this important distinction. She is first among equals." 
Congress enacted the Patriot Act in the wake of September 11, 2001 attacks, the Act expanded the scope of the government’s surveillance powers to investigate terrorism, organized crime, and drug trafficking. It allowed government investigators to use roving wiretaps and the ability to collect telephone records from US carriers.  

Icelandic court orders Visa spin-off to pay Wikileaks $10 million for all those years of not paying what they were previously ordered to pay Wikileaks. They are appealing. (The US government doesn't want it paid, and Iceland can't really "trump" the empire.)

It's no secret that the CIA wants Assange killed as an example. This is intended be a long playing lesson to anybody who would leak information of the evil which the em[ire does. "Resistance is futile".

Creating Some Vegetables

Jim took this picture of the vegetable garden in Yoakum Saturday morning. It's heating up, so I put a timer on the drip system to come on for 40 minutes at 7:00 AM every day.

Friday, April 26, 2019

Not Yet Created

Collaborative Partners,

George Monbiot is getting flak for proposing the end to capitalism, without offering a completely worked-out replacement.
The economic system is incompatible with the survival of life on Earth. It is time to design a new one  
Let me defend Monbiot, by way of “agreeing with what he meant”, as Hillary Clinton recently did, while explaining Nancy Pelosi’s reluctance to push for Trump impeachment.
I do present a process for development of a new market economy, which needs to develop to meet the emerging economic circumstances, which have never exactly existed in the past.
They will change, too. This adaptation in groups is what we do that sets us apart in the ecosystem on the surface of the blue planet.  
First, a Monbiot quote, with which we can agree, basically about thermodynamic principles. To run any process requires a reduction in total energy/entropy in a system. Something must be “dissipated”.
“A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone – from which materials are taken without full payment – and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.”
What this thermodynamic analysis leaves in the long term is the work done from sunlight by photosynthesis, but we are not suddenly reduced to that, because we still have so much order and knowledge, and analysis capacity, which has come from burning coal, oil and gas.
That technical capacity is currently dedicated to burning more coal, oil and gas, as rapidly as possible, but that directive is already foundering.
The big question right now, the immediate problem, is how 7 billionish people stop running down hill faster and faster, and do something less doomed.
Individuals with wiggle room can make adaptive changes in the right direction, and they will need to expend available energy and technical resources to make those small changes. Any of those changes will be open to logical attack for being wasteful, but in that analysis, we can only curl up and die.
Our greatest potential as a species lies in optimizing our strong suit to the cultivation of photosynthetic living ecosystems on the face of the planet. It’s something we do.  
The progressive goal of this for humans is to have a good quality of life by being healthy and helpful and cooperative versions of the animals we were born as, not struggling to become more like machines, fighting distraction, fatigue and the urge to urinate. (We’re about at the end of that alley.)
This contrasts with the capitalist prime directive of winning by being the most effective at expending energy and resources every day, and thereby dominating and displacing the other contestants in the competition. That is short-termism.
I recently saw a genetic analysis, done over 150 years or so, that American families in a few towns with very good birth and death records, maximized their longer term growth by having fewer children later and investing in them. In the short term, breeding like rabbits won, of course, but I postulate that it failed badly in “selection events”, when things got difficult and needed sustained work and insightful innovation to adapt successfully.
Look up there! Selection Event on the horizon! …  
Next agreeable Monbiot paragraph:
“This drives us towards cataclysm on such a scale that most people have no means of imagining it. The threatened collapse of our life-support systems is bigger by far than war, famine, pestilence or economic crisis, though it is likely to incorporate all four. Societies can recover from these apocalyptic events, but not from the loss of soil, an abundant biosphere and a habitable climate.”
Now, a Monbiot paragraph with which I disagree, but mainly due to the boundary conditions, which he seems to assume. Rent extraction destroys real political economy in the long term, as per classical economics, but “wealth creation” happens within certain defined boundaries, and if those boundaries are defined as “photosynthesis” and “using stuff that already exists”, and “burning fossil fuel as a transitional investment in the new system”, then it looks pretty do-able. “Growth” needs rethinking.
“In the New York Times on Sunday, the Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz sought to distinguish between good capitalism, which he called “wealth creation”, and bad capitalism, which he called “wealth grabbing” (extracting rent). I understand his distinction. But from the environmental point of view, wealth creation is wealth grabbing. Economic growth, intrinsically linked to the increasing use of material resources, means seizing natural wealth from both living systems and future generations.”
Here is another paragraph about reframing goals/objectives/success, with which we can agree:
“Like coal, capitalism has brought many benefits. But, like coal, it now causes more harm than good. Just as we have found means of generating useful energy that are better and less damaging than coal, so we need to find means of generating human wellbeing that are better and less damaging than capitalism.”  
More agreeableness:
“There is no going back: the alternative to capitalism is neither feudalism nor state communism.”
I accept Monbiot’s closing summation, a call to cooperative problem solving:
“So what does a better system look like? I don’t have a complete answer, and I don’t believe any one person does. But I think I see a rough framework emerging. Part of it is provided by the ecological civilisation proposed by Jeremy Lent, one of the greatest thinkers of our age. Other elements come from Kate Raworth’s doughnut economics and the environmental thinking of Naomi Klein, Amitav Ghosh, Angaangaq Angakkorsuaq, Raj Patel and Bill McKibben. Part of the answer lies in the notion of “private sufficiency, public luxury”. Another part arises from the creation of a new conception of justice based on this simple principle: every generation, everywhere, shall have an equal right to the enjoyment of natural wealth.
I believe our task is to identify the best proposals from many different thinkers and shape them into a coherent alternative. Because no economic system is only an economic system but intrudes into every aspect of our lives, we need many minds from various disciplines – economic, environmental, political, cultural, social and logistical – working collaboratively to create a better way of organising ourselves that meets our needs without destroying our home.
Our choice comes down to this. Do we stop life to allow capitalism to continue, or stop capitalism to allow life to continue?”  

Sharing Homework

Thursday, April 25, 2019

Calling The Shots

​Analyzing Trajectories,​

Did Israel Kill both Kennedy Brothers?​ Thanks Eleni. 
This article focuses on the motive of Israel to save it's nuclear weapons program at Dimona, which JFK opposed most firmly, then the need to keep everything covered up by preventing a President RFK from investigating. 
The article is long, detailed and focused on Israel. Why does it come out in Russia Insider? More Russian interference? 
I personally think the deposed CIA Chief, Alan Dulles, the CIA, the Pentagon, the "military industrial complex" and the Federal Reserve Banking System all had ample interest in the elimination of JFK right away. 
This was the Globalist Deep State blood-inauguration.  Note: Sirhan Sirhan is a Palestinian Christian, not Muslim.
Let’s now conclude our overview of the evidence: beside the fact that John and Robert were brothers, their assassinations have at least two things in common: Lyndon Johnson and Israel.
First, their deaths are precisely framed by Johnson’s presidency, which was also the context for other political assassinations, such as Martin-Luther King’s. Johnson was in control of the State during the two investigations on John and Robert’s murders.
Secondly, in both cases, we find the fingerprints of Israel’s deep state. In the case of Robert, it is the choice of the manipulated patsy, which was obviously meant to disguise Robert’s assassination as an act of hatred against Israel. In the case of John, it it is the identity of the man asked to kill the patsy, a Jewish gangster linked to the Irgun.
Johnson and Israel, the two common elements in the Kennedy assassinations, are themselves closely linked, since Johnson can be considered as a high-level sayan, a man secretly devoted to Israel, or owned by Israel, to the point of committing high treason against the nation he had been elected to lead and protect.
The causal link between the two assassinations then becomes clear: even if Robert had been pro-Israel, which he was not, Israel and Johnson would still have had a compelling reason to eliminate him before he got to the White House, where he could—and would—reopen the investigation on his brother’s death.
What should have been obvious from the start now appears brightly clear: in order to solve the mystery of the assassination of John Kennedy, one has simply to look into the two other assassinations which are connected to it: the assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald, the man whose trial could have exposed the hoax and possibly put the plotters into the light, and the assassination of Robert Kennedy, the man who would have reopened the case if he had lived. And both these assassinations bear the signature of Israel.
At his death in 1968, Robert Kennedy left eleven orphans, not counting John’s two children, whom he had somewhat adopted. John’s son, John F. Kennedy Jr., aka John John, who had turned three the day of his father’s funeral, embodied the Kennedy myth in the heart of all Americans. The route seemed traced for him to become president one day. He died on July 16, 1999, with his pregnant wife and his sister-in-law, when his private plane suddenly and mysteriously nose-dived into the ocean a few seconds after he had announced his landing on the Kennedy property in Massachusetts.  

As the Metropolitan Police dragged Julian Assange from the Ecuadorian embassy in London into a van, the entire world could catch a glimpse of the naked essence of the Western regime; the regime in action – oppressive, gangrenous, murderous and vindictive.
But we should not forget: the regime is not doing it because it is confident and strong. It is actually terrified. It is in panic. It is losing. And it is murdering, wherever it feels ‘vulnerable’, which is, all over the world.
Why? Because the millions, on all continents, are waking up, ready to face Western terror, ready to fight it, if there is no other way.


A federal appeals court has struck down whistleblower Chelsea Manning’s bid to be released from jail, where she has been held indefinitely after refusing to testify to a grand jury probe into WikiLeaks...
Manning was arrested in March when she refused to provide grand jury testimony related to her disclosures of classified material in 2010 and her interactions with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. She is to be held for the duration of the grand jury, or until she agrees to answer prosecutors’ questions
. She has been in jail for 45 days... 
 Manning’s lawyers argue her rights were violated by the grand jury proceedings, and that federal prosecutors used a subpoena to “entrap” her. The lawyers added that Manning had already given authorities all the information she had during her previous court-martial investigation, and that her confinement is needlessly cruel, as the jail cannot provide proper medical care.​​
The former US Army intelligence analyst had already spent seven years behind bars. She was arrested in 2010 for handing classified documents to WikiLeaks that revealed evidence of US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In 2013, Manning was sentenced to 35 years in a military prison under the Espionage Act. Her sentence was commuted by President Obama before he left office, and she was released in May 2017.


“Collateral Murder” created a media sensation in 2010 and led to Chelsea Manning’s imprisonment and to a DOJ investigation of Julian Assange, reports Elizabeth Vos. But the war crimes the video exposed got no one else in trouble.
Consortium News today begins a series of articles, “The Revelations of WikiLeaks,” that will look back on the major works of the publication that have altered the world since its founding in 2006. This series is an effort to counter mainstream media coverage, which is ignoring WikiLeaks’ work, and instead is focusing on Julian Assange’s personality. It is the uncovering by WikiLeaks of governments’ crimes and corruption that set the U.S. after Assange and which ultimately led to his arrest on April 11. The “Collateral Murder” video was just the first of many major WikiLeaks revelations that made the journalist one of the world’s most wanted men, simply for the act of publishing...
WikiLeaks wrote of the film: “The video, shot from an Apache helicopter gun-sight, clearly shows the unprovoked slaying of a wounded Reuters employee and his rescuers. Two young children involved in the rescue were also seriously wounded.”
WikiLeaks noted that Reuters had unsuccessfully attempted to gain access to the video through the Freedom of Information Act in the years after the strike.


Terrorism and wars remain major concerns of world nations, but they’ve become more wary of threats to sovereignty – something “fragile” when exposed to outside meddling, such as that of the US, Minister Alexander Fomin told RT...
The most recent example of an external threat to sovereignty is Venezuela, which has faced extensive meddling from the US, ranging from backing the opposition to threats of a direct military invasion, he said.
 The US does not sit idly and is employing other tactics including a broad range of techniques developed for hybrid wars and color revolutions. The Americans have been training leaders and members of extremist groups. They have been ramping up pressure including bribery, bullying, and sectoral sanctions. Operation Blackout is underway, a man-made shutdown of energy facilities… deepening the economic crisis.


Kim Jong-un’s armored train has reached Vladivostok, a city in Russia’s Far East, which will host the first-ever meeting between Kim and President Vladimir Putin.
The summit, which is scheduled for Thursday, will be hosted by the Far Eastern Federal University at its new campus on Russky Island, which is across the bridge from Vladivostok...
The visit to Russia is Kim’s first since taking power in Pyongyang in 2011, as well as his first face-to-face meeting with President Vladimir Putin. Among other things, the top-level talks are expected to deal with the stalled process of de-escalation of tensions on the Korean Peninsula.  


​Tom Luongo gives background:  Both Putin and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping are angry at the breakdown of the talks in Hanoi back in February. It was clear that everyone expected that meeting to be a rubber stamp on a deal already agreed to by all parties involved.
In fact the two meetings between Kim and Trump were only possible because Trump convinced them of his sincerity to resolve the ‘denuclearization’ of North Korea which would clear a path to rapid reunification.
It’s why they went along with the U.S.’s increased sanctions on North Korea as administered through the U.N. in 2017.
That John Bolton and Mike Pompeo destroyed those talks and Trump was unwilling or unable (who cares at this point, frankly, useless piece of crap that he is) to stop them embarrassed and betrayed them.
They are now done with Trump.
Russian President Vladimir Putin has said North Korean leader Kim Jong-un needs international security guarantees if he is to end his nuclear programme.
Such guarantees would need to be offered within a multinational framework, he added, following talks near Vladivostok in Russia's far east.
Mr Kim praised the summit as a "very meaningful one-on-one exchange".
Mr Putin said North Korea's leader was "fairly open" and had "talked freely on all issues that were on the agenda".
The meeting followed the breakdown of talks between the US and North Korea in February, when Mr Kim met US President Donald Trump in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.

​Donald Trump is sure not John or Robert Kennedy, but he did run the race without permission...
Brennan was the key to the operation because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court refused to approve several requests by the FBI to initiate taps on Trump associates and Trump Tower as there was no probable cause to do so but the British and other European intelligence services were legally able to intercept communications linked to American sources. Brennan was able to use his connections with those foreign intelligence agencies, primarily the British GCHQ, to make it look like the concerns about Trump were coming from friendly and allied countries and therefore had to be responded to as part of routine intelligence sharing. As a result, Paul Manafort, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Gen. Michael Flynn were all wiretapped. And likely there were others. This all happened during the primaries and after Trump became the GOP nominee.
In other words, to make the wiretaps appear to be legitimate, GCHQ and others were quietly and off-the-record approached by Brennan and associates over their fears of what a Trump presidency might mean. The British responded by initiating wiretaps that were then used by Brennan to justify further investigation of Trump’s associates. It was all neatly done and constituted completely illegal spying on American citizens by the U.S. government.

Hillary Clinton has to stay on the offensive. There is way too much criminal evidence on her and Bill. She'll string this out as long as possible.
Just hours after Nancy Pelosi attempted to mend the gaping division between the realists and the extremists in her party, failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton decided to pile into the impeachment debate with her own take on the Mueller Report.
"Well, I think what Nancy means, and I agree with what she means, is that it shouldn't be a preordained conclusion, it shouldn't be what you do for partisan, political purposes almost outside the framework of the Constitution," she said during an appearance at the Time 100 Summit in New York.
"You don't put impeachment on the table as the only item on the table and say you're going to get there no matter what, which is what happened in '99. Instead, you say we are going to proceed with the seriousness that this demands." ...
She went on to detail the roadmap to Trump's impeachment...
"I’m really of the mind that the Mueller report is part of the beginning... because there’s still so much more that we should know and that we should act upon... And we’re a long way from knowing because we need to get the full report — the unredacted version."


​Nancy Pelosi sees different writing on her wall than Hillary Clinton sees on hers... Sanders, "Democratic" front-runner, remembers being robbed.
While Pelosi is desperately playing down impeachment threats (along with Bernie Sanders), many on the left refuse to let reality sink in and keep pushing for this distraction from their lack of policy positioning.
In a series of tweets this morning, President Trump once again exclaims his innocence and makes it clear what he is willing to do to protect it: " I DID NOTHING WRONG. If the partisan Dems ever tried to Impeach, I would first head to the U.S. Supreme Court." ...
 Returning once again to where the real crimes were committed: " All of the Crimes were committed by Crooked Hillary, the Dems, the DNC and Dirty Cops - and we caught them in the act! "

Touche'
Following Tuesday remarks by Clinton that Donald Trump would have been indicted if he weren't president, Giuliani hit back in a Wednesday tweet - writing: "I encourage Hillary to get very involved in the 2020 election. She blew the last one for the Dems," adding "She is working on a book called “How To Obstruct And Go Free.” And the sequel will be “How My Husband Escaped” a perjury conviction.From America’s number one crime family."  
"Christian" is such an inflammatory term. It's almost "hate-speech". Thanks Eleni and Tom.
Some people believe prominent Democrats deliberately avoided using the word “Christian” when condemning bombings of churches and hotels in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday as part of a policy to undermine Christian faith in the US.
The eight bomb attacks in Sri Lanka, which killed almost 300 people on Easter Sunday, sparked worldwide condemnation. But the way some US politicians expressed their condolences sparked a minor outcry among conservative Americans. Former President Barack Obama and the former secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, were blasted for using the term “Easter worshipers” instead of “Christians” when referring to the victims of the attacks.​..Particular ire was sparked by the fact that both US politicians didn’t hesitate to use the word “Muslim” when expressing condolences to the victims of last month’s massacre at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.


​It's almost like Christians and Muslims have to go to war against each other again. I'm tired... 
Judaism, Christianity and Islam are the three Abrahamic religions, recognizing the righteousness of Abraham, who was ready to cut out his son's heart because "God said to". Jesus had to be sacrificed to create Roman Christianity, which served the empire well. God didn't need it.
Members of German Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the liberal Free Democrats (FDP) and Greens all expressed their concern about what they saw as growing violence against Christians.
Germany's commissioner for religious freedom, Markus Grübel (CDU), told Die Welt newspaper that the Sri Lankan attacks were part of what appeared to be a global trend. -DW
"Christians are the target of radical Muslims worldwide," said Grübel - which he said was "incomprehensible" given "Christianity's close relation to Islam." Perhaps he's referring to the steady Islamisation of Europe? 

Moon of Alabama looks at the "Pompeo Doctrine" in action.:
The U.S. is waging a total economic war on Iran:
The United States announced on April 22 it will no longer grant sanctions exemptions to eight countries, including Turkey. 
"This decision is intended to bring Iran's oil exports to zero, denying the regime its principal source of revenue," the White House said in a statement.
"The Trump administration and our allies are determined to sustain and expand the maximum economic pressure campaign against Iran to end the regime's destabilizing activity threatening the United States, our partners and allies and security in the Middle East," it said.
Eight governments were initially given six-month reprieves from the unilateral U.S. sanctions on Iran. They were China, India, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Turkey, Italy and Greece.
Iran currently exports about 1 million barrels of oil per day. The current exemptions from unilateral U.S. sanctions end on April 30. Japan, South Korea and Taiwan are U.S. protectorates. They will do as told. Italy and Greece are less dependent and may show signs of resistance. India's reaction depends on the outcome of its current electionChina will probably not adhere to the U.S. command. Turkey needs Iranian oil and gas. It can not without it within a reasonable time frame. Iraq is most dependent on Iranian oil and gas which it needs to generate electricity. No electricity during the hot summer would likely lead to riots...
Some fear that the U.S. is preparing for war on Iran:
The Trump administration is laying siege to Iran. Taking pages from the Iraq War playbook, senior officials paint a picture of a rogue, outlaw, terrorist regime bent on acquiring nuclear weapons and whose “malign activities” are the cause of all the chaos in the Middle East. They know what they are doing. They have done it before. They are building a case for war.
The neoconservatives in the Trump administration may want to that. But it is not possible to wage war on Iran without causing a global depression.
As the commander of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Navy rightly points out, the Hormuz Strait, through which most Middle East energy exports flows, is under Iranian control:
"According to international law, the Strait of Hormuz is [an Iranian] waterway and we will close it [to other countries] in case we are banned from using it," the Iranian military commander said.
"In case of any threat, we will not hesitate to support and defend Iran's waters. We will defend our honor and will take reciprocal measures when it comes to protecting Iran's rights," he added.
Saudi Arabia and the UAE are supposed to make up for the shortfall of oil in international markets. The Saudis were prepared for this when, a year ago, the Trump administration reintroduced oil sanctions on Iran. When it then announced that several countires would receive waivers,  the Saudis suddenly produced more than the market needed and the oil price dropped. They vowed at that time to not repeat that error. The Saudis also have to consider the OPEC quotas to which they and Russia agreed. Will they brake their quota or let the price rise? Trump is betting on the first. My guess is that he will lose that bet.  
Gas prices in California are already at $4,70 per gallon. They will likely rise to $6,00 when the full sanctions against Iran set in while the Saudis sit back and appreciate their rising income.
Saudi Arabia’s energy minister said the world’s biggest oil exporter sees no need to take immediate action in the crude market, signaling a cautious response to the U.S. decision to tighten sanctions on Iran.
Any unforeseen event, in Libya or elsewhere, that further constrains the global oil output, will make the costs unbearable for the U.S. consumer. The U.S. economy does not do well under high oil prices.
What is Trump going to do when he finds out that the rising prices, caused by the Zionist demand to subdue Iran, endanger his reelection?

Out Of The Loop

Wednesday, April 24, 2019

Moral Decay

Accidentally Truthful,

Last week Mike Pompeo spoke at Texas A&M University, itself long known for being a favored recruiting ground of the CIA, considering too that one of the university's last presidents, Robert Gates, was CIA chief and later served as Bush and Obama's Secretary of Defense.
During the Q&A session, Pompeo boasted that in the CIA both the training and culture are geared toward the following:
"We lied, we cheated, we stole."

Interestingly, a Christian religious news broadcaster was the only media that seemed to pick up on Pompeo's words last week, and described it as follows: "that's not the resume of the Secretary of State... that's the resume of Satan."


The Triumph of Evil, Paul Craig Roberts
Today (April 17) I heard a NPR “news” report that described the democratically elected president of Venezuela as “the Venezuelan dictator Maduro.” By repeating over and over that a democratically elected president is a dictator, the presstitutes create that image of Maduro in the minds of vast numbers of peoples who know nothing about Venezuela and had never heard of Maduro until he is dropped on them as “dictator.” ...Secretary of state Mike Pompeo and vice president Pence have added their big mouths to the propaganda against the few independent governments in Latin America. Where is the shame when the highest American government officials stand up in front of the world and openly proclaim that it is official US government policy to overthrow democratically elected governments simply because those governments don’t let Americans plunder their countries?
How is it possible that Pompeo can announce that the “days are numbered” of the elected president of Nicaragua, who has been elected president 3 or 4 times, and the world not see the US as a rogue state that must be isolated and shunned? How can Pompeo describe Washington’s overthrow of an elected government as “setting the Nicaraguan people free?”

​James Petras on why Venezuela has not folded to the empire quite yet.
Despite the two decades of pressure by the world’s biggest imperial power ,which bears responsibility for the world’s highest rate of inflation, and despite the illegal seizure of billions of dollars of Venezuelan assets, the people remain loyal , in defense of their government. The reasons are clear and forthright.
The Venezuelan majority has a history of poverty, marginalization and repression, including the bloody massacre of thousands of protestors in 1989. Millions lived in shanty towns, excluded from higher education and health facilities. The US provided arms and advisers to buttress the politicians who now form the greater part of the US opposition to President Maduro. The US- oligarch alliance extracted billions of dollars from contracts from the oil industry.
Remembrance of this reactionary legacy is one powerful reason why the vast majority of Venezuelans oppose US intervention in support of the puppet opposition.


​Charles Hugh Smith:​
Consider America's favorite pastime, corrosive partisan politics. This distemper is often traced back to (surprise!) extreme partisans, but as the chart below shows, political partisanship has risen in near-perfect correlation with wealth-income inequality, which it itself the hallmark of deeply systemic corruption, as the system is rigged to benefit the few at the expense of the many. (Chart courtesy of Slope of Hope.)
There's a phrase that describes a socio-economic system becoming the means for personal aggrandizement at the expense of civil society itself: moral decay.​ ​How else can we describe a system whose inputs and processes are rigged so the output is the vast majority of all income gains flow to the top 0.1%? (See chart below.)
When a socio-economic system institutionalizes the extralegal privileges of wealth and power, that is moral decay. When government only responds in ways that first serve the interests of entrenched insiders, that is moral decay. When the financial system is rigged to sluice income and wealth to the top of the wealth-power pyramid while strip​-​mining the productive class below via inflation and taxes, that's moral decay. (See chart below of workers' share of the national income.)

For decades it was all but taboo to suggest that pro-Israel lobbies in the United States like AIPAC used their money and influence to keep lawmakers firmly in check on Israel-related issues - even if one had to be blind not to notice that that was exactly what they were up to.
When back in February Ilhan Omar pointed out the obvious - that U.S. Representatives like her were routinely expected to submit to the lobby's dictates on Israel, a foreign country - her colleagues clamored to distance themselves from her, just as one might have expected were the pro-Israel lobby to wield the very power Omar claimed. ...
Other insiders are more explicit still. Ben Rhodes, a former confidant of Barack Obama, says the lobby effectively tied Obama's hand's domestically on efforts to promote peace. "The Washington view of Israel-Palestine is still shaped by the donor class," he told Thrall, adding: "The donor class is profoundly to the right of where the activists are, and frankly, where the majority of the Jewish community is."
Joel Rubin, a former political director at lobby group J Street and a founding board member of the centrist Jewish Democratic Council of America, concurred: "The fight over Israel used to be about voters. It's more about donors now."  ...
It's important to point out, however, that advocates for Israel are not only Jews. While the pro-Israel lobby represents the views of a proportion of Jewish Americans, it is also significantly comprised of Christians, evangelicals in particular.
Millions of these Christians - including Vice-President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo - can be accused of dual loyalty too. They regard Israel's role in Biblical prophecy as far more important than the future of the U.S., or mankind for that matter. 

Politics makes strange damned bedfellows; really weird, these days...​
80% of white evangelicals voted for Trump in 2016, and his popularity amongst them remains high – in the 70s percent. Whilst other white voters may have become disheartened by Trump’s foreign policy (the Saudi embrace), white evangelicals have become his last, solid bastion. They are not insignificant either: they form some 25% of all Americans.
Professor of Religious Studies, Andrew Chesnut tells us that Christian Zionism has become the “majority theology” among white US Evangelicals. In a 2015 poll, 73% of evangelical Christians said events in Israel are prophesied in the Book of Revelation. For Christian Zionists, achieving a ‘Greater Israel’ is one of the key preconditions for ‘Rapture’. It is a belief, known as pre-millennial dispensationalism or Christian Zionism, Chesnut says...

Pompeo’s reference to Rapture is important: The Rapture, Tara Burton notes, “is a distinctively American theology that says Christians will be taken up, or “raptured,” into heaven, at the onset of the End Times … and a number of GOP politicians allow their belief in Rapture theology to influence their political worldview. Because the Rapture is ultimately desirable — it marks the return of Jesus Christ — anything that hastens it, is desirable too. For many evangelicals, apocalyptic “good versus evil” battles, particularly centred over the “Holy Land” of the Middle East, are signs that the longed-for end may be at hand”.​..
  Adelson’s role then – using his own money – has been to resurface neoconservative policies: Policies that had been discredited after the US invasion of Iraq, and to reconnect these policies to the Israeli Right (as they were, before the war on Iraq). This whole is underpinned through the extensive Evangelical base that forms Trump’s key constituency. Both Pompeo and Bolton are reportedly Adelson’s protégés, whom Adelson pushed into their key positions in the White House, as a part of his political architecture.

“The president has said that he does not want to see this country involved in endless wars… I agree with that,” Bernie Sanders told the Fox News audience at Monday’s town hall meeting in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Then turning and staring straight into the camera, Bernie added:
“Mr. President, tonight you have the opportunity to do something extraordinary: Sign that resolution. Saudi Arabia should not be determining the military or foreign policy of this country.”
Sanders was talking about a War Powers Act resolution that would have ended U.S. involvement in the five-year civil war in Yemen that has created one of the great humanitarian crises of our time, with thousands of dead children amidst an epidemic of cholera and a famine.​..
Trump may have just ceded the peace issue in 2020 to the Democrats. If Sanders emerges as the nominee, we will have an election with a Democrat running on the “no-more-wars” theme Trump touted in 2016. And Trump will be left defending the bombing of Yemeni rebels and civilians by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman of Saudi Arabia.

Official figures on the deaths in the Yemen War have been virtually unavailable, or at least years out of date. The database tracker from the Armed Conflict and Location Event Data Project, however, issued their own data on Yemen Thursday, showing more than 70,000 have been killed in Yemen just since January 2016.
This is a huge amount of deaths, and if there is some decrease in fighting in Hodeidah because of UN talks, it’s not like the war is slowing much. At least 10,000 people were killed just in the past five months.  

​Dmitry Orlov interview, Thanks Bill, good reading:
“I think that the American empire is very much over already, but it hasn’t been put to any sort of serious stress test yet, and so nobody realizes that this is the case”​ ...​
Here is the key point: the USSR was not a normal empire at all. Instead of functioning as a wealth pump that pumped wealth from the periphery to the imperial center, it functioned as a revolutionary incubator, exploiting the resources of the core (Russia) and exporting them to the periphery to build socialism, with the further goal of fomenting global communist revolution​...​  The inevitable result was that most of the other Soviet republics were able to suck resources out of Russia, making them far more prosperous than Russia itself.Thus, the image of the USSR as a typical empire is simply wrong. The right mental image of the USSR is that of a prostrate, emaciated sow (Russia) being suckled by 14 fat, greedy piglets (the other Soviet Socialist Republics).​..​
By the time the USSR collapsed, the Ukraine was its most highly developed and possibly its richest part, and some people expected that, having thrown off the Soviet yoke, its future would be too bright to look at without goggles. It had abundant natural resources (fertile land, coal) and an educated labor force. It manufactured numerous high-tech products such as jet aircraft, marine diesels, helicopter engines, rocket engines and much else that was the best in the world. Instead, what has occurred is several decades of thievery, stagnation and decay. By now the Ukraine has lost most of its industry and the Soviet-era infrastructure has decayed to the point where much of it is worn out and on the verge of collapse. Industry has shut down and the specialists it once employed have either retired or have gone off to work in Russia, in the EU or in the US. (Some Ukrainian rocket scientists have apparently gone off to work in North Korea, and this explains the DPRK’s recent stunning successes in rocketry as well as its unlikely, exotic choice of rocket fuel: unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine.)  ​...
Meanwhile, the two eastern regions​ (Donetsk, Lugansk)​, which are highly developed economically and have a lot of industry, have been integrating ever more closely into the Russian economy. Their universities and institutes are now fully accredited within the Russian system of higher education, their currency is the ruble, and although in terms of international recognition they remain part of the Ukraine, it is very important to note that the Ukraine does not treat them as such.​..​  
Also the dream of a depopulated Ukraine to be turned into a playground for Western agribusiness may be hindered somewhat by the fact that the Russians take a very dim view of Western GMOs and wouldn’t like to see GMO-contaminated pollen blowing across their border from the West. They would no doubt find some least-effort way to make the attempt at Western agribusiness in the Ukraine unprofitable. Orchestrating a smallish but highly publicized radiation leak from one of the ancient Ukrainian nuke plants would probably work. ​...
  The EU has a number of major problems. It isn’t fiscally or monetarily healthy. As a whole, or as its constituent nations, it is no longer capable of the exercise of its full sovereignty, having surrendered it to the US. But the US is no longer able to maintain control, because it is internally conflicted to the point of becoming incoherent in its pronouncements. ​...
Since none of this military/political superstructure is actually structural without the key ingredient of US hegemony, we shouldn’t expect it to perform particularly well. It will continue as a talking shop while various national governments attempt to reclaim their sovereignty. British referendum voters have certainly tried to prod their government in that direction, and in response their government has been experimenting with various methods of rolling over and playing dead, but a different government might actually try to execute the will of the people. ​..
The nations of Europe will gradually realize that its relationship with Russia is mostly beneficial while its relationship with the US is mostly harmful, and will make certain adjustments. ​...
​[After the demise of empire]  The US, as some set of institutions that serves the interests of some dwindling number of people, is likely to continue functioning for quite some time. The question is: who is going to be included and who isn’t? There is little doubt that retirees, as a category, have nothing to look forward to from the​​ US: their retirements, whether public or private, have already been spent. There is little doubt that young people, who have already been bled dry by poor job prospects and ridiculous student loans, have nothing to look forward to either.
But, as I’ve said before, the US isn’t so much a country as a country club. Membership has its privileges, and members don’t care at all what life is like for those who are in the country but aren’t members of the club.​..
But then the entire system of militarized police is designed to crush any sort of rebellion, and most people know that. Given the choice between certain death and just sitting on the sidewalk doing drugs, most people will choose the latter.  

​I'm gonna make this easy. There is very little actual production happening in Western Capitalism. It has been replaced by massive corporations investing in each other and buying back their own stock and paying each other well on their investments in each other, and rewarding their directors generously for the rising stock valuations... That's what this story says. Total Ponzi scheme.

In London, where environmental protesters have been lying down in front of traffic, and only the Bobbies wear yellow vests:
Sajid Javid calls for 'full force of law' against Extinction Rebellion protesters
Home secretary asks police to be firm against demonstrators ‘disrupting the lives of others’
“Let me be clear: I totally condemn any protesters who are stepping outside the boundaries of the law. They have no right to cause misery for the millions of people who are trying to lead their daily lives. Unlawful behaviour will not be tolerated.”  
​(No rubber bullets yet, but they are picking them up by all four limbs and carting them away. Sorta' civilized, despite the harsh rhetoric.​)

"Earth's sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions," researchers wrote in 2017.
They said decimation needed to be addressed immediately.
"Earth's sixth mass extinction is more severe than perceived when looking exclusively at species extinctions.
"Population extinctions, however, are a prelude to species extinctions, so Earth's sixth mass extinction episode has proceeded further than most assume.

The Permian Extinction, "The Great Dying" looks to have been caused by super-volcano eruptions.
 The eruptions propelled as much as 3 million cubic kilometers of ash high into the air over this extended period. To put that in perspective, the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens in Washington sent just 1 cubic kilometer of ash into the atmosphere, even though ash fell on car windshields as far away as Oklahoma.
In fact, Algeo said, the Siberian Traps eruptions spewed so much material in the air, particularly greenhouse gases, that it warmed the planet by an average of about 10 degrees centigrade.

​Teslas are the most wasteful electric vehicles, our own global-warming-supervolcanos. (I exaggerate for satirical emphasis.)
Electric vehicles in Germany account for more CO2 emissions than diesel ones, according to a study by German scientists.
When CO2 emissions linked to the production of batteries and the German energy mix - in which coal still plays an important role - are taken into consideration, electric vehicles emit 11% to 28% more than their diesel counterparts, according to the study, presented on Wednesday at the Ifo Institute in Munich.
Mining and processing the lithium, cobalt and manganese used for batteries consume a great deal of energy. A Tesla Model 3 battery, for example, represents between 11 and 15 tonnes of CO2. Given a lifetime of 10 years and an annual travel distance of 15,000 kilometres, this translates into 73 to 98 grams of CO2 per kilometre, scientists Christoph Buchal, Hans-Dieter Karl and Hans-Werner Sinn noted in their study.
...These new limits pressure German and other European car manufacturers into switching massively to electric vehicles whereas, the researchers feel, it would have been preferable to opt for methane ​(natural gas) ​engines, “whose emissions are one-third less than those of diesel motors.”