Saturday, July 7, 2018

Talk Is Cheaper

Critters of Earth,

Eagle and Bear Meeting, Pepe Escobar looks at deals to be made in the .Syria Neocons are seething and chomping at the bits, but...
What will be negotiated in the Trump-Putin summit, as Asia Times has learned, is something completely different. This negotiation, incidentally, will happen after the NATO summit in Brussels and before the next Astana format meeting in Sochi on July 30, as confirmed by Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Vershinin.
​.. 
Once again, the holy of the holies concerns al-Qaeda. Actually, Jabhat al-Nusra, as in al-Qaeda in Syria, is now rebranded as Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, and their allied collection of 54 takfiri militias, trained and weaponized in a base in Jordan, for years, by the CIA and British Special Forces.
​.. 
Al Tanf is absolutely key to the whole plot, because that’s where US advisers have been for all practical purposes rebranding takfiris into something called Maghawhir al Thawra (Commandos of the Revolution).
​.. ​ 
Across the chessboard, what’s really significant, as Magnier notes, is how “the presence of Takfiri Wahhabi jihadists on the Israeli-Syrian borders represents – in Tel Aviv’s view – a security factor to the Israeli Army. And Israel would rather not see the Syrian state recovering and eliminating all terrorists and jihadists.”
​... “The US, Israel and their allies cannot win this southern fight. They can only prolong the insecurity for a while before the SAA decides to launch a military campaign against the 54-plus-militias-Nusra occupying the south of Syria.” So there’s got to be a deal. And this is what Putin and Trump may be able to negotiate in Helsinki.
http://www.atimes.com/article/eagle-meets-bear-and-the-syria-tug-of-war/

Syrian government forces on Friday took control over the major crossing point on the border with Jordan, raising a Syrian flag there, a Sputnik correspondent reported from the site.
​..
The Russian center for Syrian reconciliation stated earlier that over the week, 27 settlements had voluntarily joined the ceasefire regime in the southern part of the country.
https://sputniknews.com/middleeast/201807061066108861-syria-control-border-jordan/

A senior Kremlin official tells Bloomberg that Vladimir Putin is preparing to offer significant concessions to President Trump at their July 16 summit in Helsinki, Finland in the hopes of beginning to repair strained relations between Russia and the United States. 
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-05/putin-prepared-shoo-syrian-iran-proxies-away-israeli-border-major-concession-trump

"The United States of Terror", includes a map of countries bombed since the end of WW-2. (The rest of the world has been paying for this for the last 46 years or so through the Petrodollar that Nixon/Kissinger worked out with King Faud of Saudi Arabia. The rest of the world, led by Russia and China, are putting together the mechanisms to bypass the $US in global trade. that will probably happen in this crisis we are edging in to now. "Trade war" means getting in the first punch in the global reset. Trump is seemingly in a position to negotiate this military empire away while declaring "victory". Can he?)
https://antoniusaquinas.com/2018/07/05/the-united-states-of-terror/

"No Nukes-No THAAD" Koreans don't want all these weapons on their peninsula...
The United States had a hard time placing its Terminal High-Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems on South Korean soil. The only apparent reason Washington had was the notorious North Korean nuclear threat. Now that North Korean leader Kim Jong Un has indicated his willingness to get rid of his country's nuclear weapons program, South Koreans have renewed their pressure on the unwanted US military presence.

​I predict that Putin can help Trump with the whole grand negotiating scheme, including a breakthrough for the once-and-future Korea. This grand dealmaking has to include lots of parts of our planet at once, to really work for everybody. The neocons and globalists do not want it to work for everybody, because that does not work for them...
​ In the statement released hours after Pompeo departed Tokyo after meeting with Kim Yong Chol, a senior aide to North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, a North Korean Foreign Ministry spokesman accused the US is trying to unilaterally pressure Pyongyang into abandoning its nuclear weapons by insisting on unilateral complete, verifiable and irreversible denuclearisation (CVID), and said trust between countries is in a "dangerous stage", while adding that North Korea still trusts President Donald Trump.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-07-07/north-korea-slams-extremely-troubling-us-attitude-says-resolve-denuclearization-may

We are All Hostages of Corporate Profits, Charles Hugh Smith (I don't feel safe at all in this arrangement. All I know is on that chopping block.)
We're in the endgame of financialization and globalization, and it won't be pretty for all the hostages of corporate profits. Giving Amazon et al. more tax breaks won't fix what's broken, and neither will lavishing subsidies or taxpayer giveaways on global corporations that maintain the useful illusion of being based in America.
Economies dependent on bubbles for their survival self-destruct.
http://charleshughsmith.blogspot.com/2018/07/we-are-all-hostages-of-corporate-profits.html

"Survival of the Psychopaths, They are Plotting to Leave Us Behind", is a catchy article I was trying to find without a paywall last night, and Bill sent it to me without my even telling him. This article is simple enough, a renowned "futurist" sits down with some really rich guys who ask him questions pertaining to their perceived futures. It's a straightforward look at their projections and plans. We are not serving them in their bunkers, and they give a lot of thought to how to maintain control over the armed men who do serve them in their bunkers. It will be nice if they will stay in their bunkers for awhile, but maybe this is just a false lead we are getting thrown at us...
https://www.sott.net/article/390327-Survival-of-the-psychopaths-they-are-plotting-to-leave-us-behind

Asgardia-Open Recruitment for a Breakaway Civilization Begins (OK, this really reminds me of the big spaceship that they filled with hairdressers and such in Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy, to colonize some far distant world with those subject to the flattery of being told they were "the best and the brightest", but were really incompetent dead weight being lifted from an overburdened world.) I have heard for years that the $21 trillion the Pentagram can't find went into a parallel-universe kind of economic thing that ain't for us, but has all of the wealth we are expecting in retirement, and stuff like that. Who knows who owns all that stuff held everywhere by multinational corporations? Who knows what the "owners" plan to do with "their property"? 
https://truedisclosure.org/news/asgardia-an-open-recruitment-for-a-breakaway-civilization-begins-a-second-brain-drain-and-the.html

"Testosterone Causes Men To Desire Luxury Goods" , Straight from the mouth of science to your ears. You would never suspect that men given testosterone skin cream would light up to status symbols they could display in public, and men given plain skin cream would not be so inclined.
You can walk down the street snickering about this for the rest of the week! ("Nothing comes between me and my Calvins")
https://scienceblog.com/501943/testosterone-causes-men-to-desire-luxury-goods/

Ancient Urging
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Perspective

Seeing Clearly,

Charles Mann is a scientific writer, much awarded, and rightly so, who has released a book, The Wizard and The Prophet, this year, about 2 approaches to human starvation. The Green Revolution was a revolution in choosing parts of the plant genome to work 4 times as effectively to feed us. On the other hand, we realize that we have limits to embrace on this finite planet, and we have a moment in time to do that work, before we all die suddenly of success. Mann talks for 55 minutes, and there are 35 minutes of selected questions he answers after that. 
Mann presents as high a flow rate of information, and as well organized, as I can get from reading, which is rare and deeply satisfying. This is really good and insightful information, no matter how much you may already know. I watched it all. Thanks for the tip, Jeanine.
http://longnow.org/seminars/02018/jan/22/wizard-and-prophet/

Charles Hugh Smith looks at our current situation in the US and Western economic system. What now? (All i can find as an entry to the path forward is replacing TV with vegetable gardening, and bike commuting. these change my perceptions and the kinds of thoughts which enter my mind. Meditation arises more readily on a bike than in a car, too.)
In other words, the social crises, the constitutional crises, the financial crises--all of these are to some degree mere manifestations of the failure of centralized systems that arose to benefit from conditions that no longer exist. Our centralized institutions and systems are failing, and shuffling the management and tweaking the parameters cannot stave off collapse.What nobody gorging at the trough of the status quo dares admit is the system is failing most of its participants, and this is the source of populism and other manifestations of social disorder.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly18/gathering-storm7-18.html

Paul Craig Roberts let USMC General Smedley Butler speak on July 4, the words as true as ever...
“WAR is a racket. It always has been. “It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives. “A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small ‘inside’ group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes. “A few profit — and the many pay. But there is a way to stop it. You can’t end it by disarmament conferences. You can’t eliminate it by peace parleys at Geneva. Well-meaning but impractical groups can’t wipe it out by resolutions. It can be smashed effectively only by taking the profit out of war. “The only way to smash this racket is to conscript capital and industry and labor before the nation’s manhood can be conscripted. One month before the Government can conscript the young men of the nation — it must conscript capital and industry and labor. Let the officers and the directors and the high-powered executives of our armament factories and our munitions makers and our shipbuilders and our airplane builders and the manufacturers of all the other things that provide profit in war time as well as the bankers and the speculators, be conscripted — to get $30 a month, the same wage as the lads in the trenches get.” https://ratical.org/ratville/CAH/warisaracket.pdf

​Developing Alternatives​
Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, July 3, 2018

Next Logical Step

Tripping,

Chris Hedges talks about The Coming Collapse:
As a foreign correspondent I covered collapsed societies, including the former Yugoslavia. It is impossible for any doomed population to grasp how fragile the decayed financial, social and political system is on the eve of implosion. All the harbingers of collapse are visible: crumbling infrastructure; chronic underemployment and unemployment; the indiscriminate use of lethal force by police; political paralysis and stagnation; an economy built on the scaffolding of debt; nihilistic mass shootings in schools, universities, workplaces, malls, concert venues and movie theaters; opioid overdoses that kill some 64,000 people a year; an epidemic of suicides; unsustainable military expansion; gambling as a desperate tool of economic development and government revenue; the capture of power by a tiny, corrupt clique; censorship; the physical diminishing of public institutions ranging from schools and libraries to courts and medical facilities; the incessant bombardment by electronic hallucinations to divert us from the depressing sight that has become America and keep us trapped in illusions. We suffer the usual pathologies of impending death. I would be happy to be wrong. But I have seen this before. I know the warning signs. All I can say is get ready.

The only comprehensive and scientific study which has ever been done of whether the US is a democracy or instead a dictatorship, was published in 2014. It studied the period during 1981 through 2002, and it found that, “In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes.”
https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/07/01/dictatorship-over-america-how-it-functions.html

​What will Trump and Putin and Lavrov and Bolton talk about July 16?
Trump also suggested that scrapping sanctions on Russia depended on its actions, including in Syria. Asked about potentially lifting sanctions on Russia, Trump told reporters, "We'll see what Russia does. We're going to be talking to Russia about a lot of things. We're going to be talking to them about Syria."
https://sputniknews.com/us/201806301065906664-trump-putin-usa-russia-interview/

Lavrov says Edward Snowden is a free-agent, not a bargaining chip. Lavrov very carefully chooses and keeps his words. 
He says the Western order is pretty late in it's process of corruption; well past it's sell-by date.
“I do not know why people would start asking this particular question in relation to the summit. Edward Snowden is the master of his own destiny,” Lavrov reiterated. 
https://www.rt.com/news/431306-lavrov-post-west-world-order/
https://www.rt.com/news/431302-snowden-extradition-russia-lavrov/

The risks of peace breaking out when Putin and Trump talk are mind-boggling. Nobody really gets how catastrophic this could be! Just shoot me now...
In the context of the impending US-Russia presidential talks, not a single Western media outlet mentioned that, as detailed in the 2018 World Report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), “In 2017 the USA spent more on its military [$610 billion] than the next seven highest-spending countries combined... at $66.3 billion, Russia’s military spending in 2017 was 20 per cent lower than in 2016.”
​ ...
US Senator Ben Sasse grouched that “Putin is not our friend and he is not the president’s buddy. He is a thug using Soviet-style aggression to wage a shadow war against America, and our leaders should act like it.”

​These guys have to talk about Israel, don't they?
Israeli planes have been bombing Syria and, less publicly, the Houthi regions of Yemen, using “roundabout” routes to evade air defenses. This, in itself, is not controversial. However, what is controversial is reports that Israel has been operating out of bases inside both Saudi Arabia and Jordan.
Sources not only confirm these reports but military analysis of Israel’s missions, as they announce them publicly, prove use of particularly Saudi bases is mandatory.
Questions then arise regarding the degree of inter-cooperation between these nations and the Gulf States, against Syria, against Yemen, against certainly Iran and to a lesser known extent, in support of ISIS operations across the region.
Of course, none of this would be possible without logistical support, mission planning and AWAC services supplied by the United States.
Thus, we are confronted with a leading question; how will Russian policy in the region address this threat to their own interests?
https://journal-neo.org/2018/07/01/will-israel-be-on-the-table-at-the-trump-putin-summit/

Angela Merkel says the refugee situation is sorted out, agreed in principle. Hungary, Poland and Czech Republic say they didn't get that memo.
“There are no any new agreements regarding the reception of asylum seekers from EU countries, we confirm (that), like the Czech Republic and Hungary,” Polish Foreign Ministry spokesman Artur Lompart said. 
https://www.rt.com/news/431382-hungary-poland-czech-migrants/

CIA trained, equipped and paid good-terrorists are working hard to bring regime change to Iran. 
It seems more likely to just make Iranians more tired and pissed-off.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/07/on-the-path-to-failure-us-goes-for-regime-change-in-iran.html

Rudy Giulliani says the end is near for Iran's rulers, as he cheerleads at a conference in France for said good-terrorists.
VILLEPINTE, France (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump will suffocate Iran’s “dictatorial ayatollahs”, his close ally Rudy Giuliani said on Saturday, suggesting his move to re-impose sanctions was aimed squarely at regime change. 
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-iran-nuclear-opposition-giuliani/trump-ally-giuliani-says-end-is-near-for-irans-rulers-idUSKBN1JQ0PA

Indefinite Detention of Central American families fleeing the war-on-them is the new Federal policy. 
They can sleep in the same tent behind the concertina wire in the desert forever.
The executive order Trump signed June 20, which he claimed would end family separation, was in fact an instruction for the executive branch to start finding as much space as possible for family detention. It also told the Department of Justice to ask US District Judge Dolly Gee to reverse her own 2015 Flores settlement ruling that prevented the government from keeping children in immigration detention longer than necessary even when they were being held with their parents. 
https://www.vox.com/2018/6/30/17520820/families-together-detention-separate-camp-military

Oh, Man the amount of this stuff is vast! The tiny little parts in it are inseparable and have bits of toxic poison lightly and evenly salted through them. There is no way out, once the machines are set in motion to make billions of iPhones, and laptops, and TVs, and so on. 
Until the beginning of this year, China was a willing recipient of the world’s electronic waste, which it recycled in vast factories. According to the UN, 70% of all electronic waste was ending up in China.
​ ​
But in January, having calculated that the environmental impact far outweighed the short-term profit, China closed its gates to virtually all foreign rubbish. It has prompted something of a global crisis, not just for e-waste but plastic waste as well.

​Keynesian Economics is an artifact of Cheap Energy (and it isn't working like it used to in 1970), Charles Hugh Smith
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjuly18/keynes-energy7-18.html

The hypothesis of how successful toolmaking, and the conveyance of that benefit through teaching other humans, led to a unique form of conceptual ability in humans.
Kolodny points out what might seem like a contradiction in this notion: Many species of ape use tools in sequence-dependent ways and also have highly developed levels of communication. But the order in which those apes produce their utterances doesn’t make much difference to their meaning, Kolodny explains. “The question becomes not ‘How did language arise only in humans?’but ‘Why did it not arise in other apes as well?’ And the answer is, the qualitative difference between us and other apes is they don’t have the communication system coupled to those temporal sequencing structural capabilities.”

​Chipping Flint​
Posted by at No comments:

Sunday, July 1, 2018

Look In The Corner

Updating Citizenship,

I rode my bike down to the Capitol and back yesterday and stood there with many other people, from all walks of life, many from my clinic, also my Buddhist practice group, and at least one person I know from the UT dormitory in 1976. 
Some of my friends protested the Vietnam War there. I got to chant "No Bombs, No War; US out of El Salvador!" in my day... 
Yesterday we protested the injury to children caused by separating them from their families at our border, as they flee here to safety.
Nobody was shooting at us; not like Kent State at all, ever. There was no tension at all. That was already defused last week. 
Still, it is important for us to stand together for our moral values. It's a good habit. We need to do things together. Sometimes we need to vote for somebody, but that whole process is pretty well controlled by the military-industrial-congressional-banking-media-complex. (mostly...)
We don't know what totalitarianism we may eventually get in the US, and it may be different regional forms of totalitarianism. One size may not fit all in North America. The current federal bureaucracy is vast, ineffective, but makes lots of "jobs" that keep lots of intelligent people focused upon "compliance". That is not an economy that actually provides for the needs of people and society without vast outside inputs. That is the zombie of the American postwar production economy.
Reset will have to be in places that CAN reset, with people who CAN reset. Once a place has something that works, others will go there and be assimilated.
These different centers of recovery will have different characteristics, I think.
Ride a bike. Grow vegetables. This takes a few years to become natural; really... Nobody will change for us.
"Become the change that you would see in the world!"

The big issue that we are not addressing is that the Empire (no name is accepted) continues to keep a war festering in El Savador, Honduras and Guatemala. "War-on-drug-dealers-who-don't-work-for-the-CIA" is one fitting name. 
Manuel Noriega found out how that works. Don't be in a gang that rivals the CIA gangs! Venezuelan refugees from the economic warfare the Empire is executing there should start arriving soon. Ilargi, at The Automatic Earth looks in the shadowy corner...  Boomeranging
You could see them coming from miles away. You created them. You literally built the space they occupy. What is happening is that the chaos we created in all these places is now boomeranging right back at us, on our own borders. And we’re not getting out of that chaos until we stop creating it in places where we don’t live. Until we allow people a future where they are born. 
https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2018/06/boomeranging/

Important buried Korean War history from Wigs. The US employed all the tested-on-humans germ warfare secrets it got from Japan, who used germ warfare for genocide in Manchuria, then brutally murdered a prominent whistle-blower (as an example for others) to keep it hushed up..:​
Canadian scholars Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman produced a thoroughly researched indictment of US germ warfare use in Korea, The United States and Biological Warfare. The book exposes how the CIA and US Air Force began a lengthy and complex secret deployment of germ bomb attacks over North Korea and China for many months in 1951-52. The lessons gained by Japan’s Unit 731 in mass murder warfare were applied by the US military in the Korean theater. President Truman, the CIA, the Army, Air Force and Joint Chiefs of Staff were all complicit in the secrecy of this operation....  The hidden history of the Korean War — the 4 million dead Koreans, the carpet bombing, firebombing, germ bombing, the entire built infrastructure of North Korea reduced to rubble, the prisoner torture, civilian massacres, suppression of war crime evidence, the lies and the silent forgetting — all this is now coming into the sunshine. Going forward toward Korean unification, nobody should agree to bury these truths again.
https://truthout.org/articles/suppressing-us-war-crimes-the-cold-war-denial-machine-lives-on/

"Officials" somewhere in the US government, who don't like the Korean Peace Process, leak that North Korea has not given everything up yet to NBC.
The result of the Trump-Kim summit in Singapore was a "freeze for freeze" deal. North Korea stopped its nuclear and missile testing while the U.S. stopped the large maneuvers it regularity held with South Korea's army. Both sides agreed to further talks. North Korea made some aspirational statements about denuclearization which have the same time frame as similar aspirational statements made by the U.S. in Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). There is no time frame to reach a certain state. There is no commitment towards declaring nuclear sites nor is there a commitment to stop the production of nuclear stuff.
Trump declaration that there is "no longer a nuclear threat from North Korea" is correct in the sense that there is certainly no North Korean intent to launch a nuclear attack.
Kim Jong Un will not only "try to hide" the North Korean nuclear facilities. He will surely keep them secret as long as he can. The security of his country depend on them.
​The British Parliament is battening down the hatches to keep any specific criminal actions of government officials from being identified. That is a lot of hatches. No questions permitted. American torture in Yemen is not their concern, however, so some of that is revealed.
The CIA, MI6 and the myriad of "special forces" under this or that name continue to use these illegal practices.
The United Arab Emirates were just found to torture random Yemenis in its prisons in south Yemen. U.S. special forces and CIA interrogators are present:
Hundreds of men swept up in the hunt for al-Qaida militants have disappeared into a secret network of prisons in southern Yemen where abuse is routine and torture extreme — including the “grill,” in which the victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun in a circle of fire, an Associated Press investigation has found.
Several U.S. defense officials, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the topic, told AP that American forces do participate in interrogations of detainee.
Prisoners get isolated, threatened with dogs, waterboarded and more:
They raped detainees while other guards filmed the assaults. They electrocuted prisoners' genitals or hung rocks from their testicles. They sexually violated others with wooden and steel poles.
"They strip you naked, then tie your hands to a steel pole from the right and the left so you are spread open in front of them. Then the sodomizing starts," said one father of four.
The U.S. defense establishment claims that none of its soldiers are "present" when actual torture happens. It also put bridges on sale. The CIA declined to comment to AP.
​http://www.moonofalabama.org/2018/06/british-parliament-confirms-conspiracy-theory-torture-and-renditions-continue.html
​"Walk or Die", Algeria Strands 13,000 migrants in the Sahara in 118 degree heat. Many "disappear in the sand." 
This is part of the solution the EU is working out. Thanks Eleni.
​https://apnews.com/9ca5592217aa4acd836b9ee091ebfc20

More details of the complex political solution being worked out for immigration from military and economic war zones...
The crew of a Spanish rescue ship have said that Italian officials told them to let the Libyan coastguard respond to a distress call from a smuggling boat carrying migrants – only to hear shortly afterward that 100 migrants were missing and feared dead in the same area.

Israel Shamir: thanks Eleni...
When I see a crying child on my screen, I know somebody is trying to take advantage of me. The same is true about every appeal to my basic human instincts, whether it is a naked female body or a dead baby. Instead of convincing me, such a cheap trick calls for immediate rejection...  Picture pushers are dishonest and they do not care a fig about kids: Madeleine Albright famously thought it is worth while to kill half a million of Iraqi children. Hillary Clinton unleashed hell on Libyan and Syrian soil, killing and dispossessing hundreds of thousands of children. All the US Presidents have been hugging and kissing Israeli rulers, who habitually detain, torture and kill Palestinian kids... 
Diana Johnstone wrote recently that the immigration issue splits the German left. Indeed support for free immigration is suicide for the Left. But this issue does split the whole Western world. On one side, believers in the world without borders, in the free movement of people. It sounds great, until you understand that this is a way to destroy the native working class, abolish the welfare state, ruin social structures and at the same time undermine donor countries, in short, to destroy the world as we know it. On the other side, people who want to preserve the world they live in work to keep the walls up.
What we need is some sincerity and honesty, as opposed to manipulation. If you think mass immigration will return us to new Dark Ages, say so. If you think it would be better to remove borders and to unleash a new Volkswanderung, just say so, but please do not show us baby pictures.
The man captured in a video with a whip in the hands, the leader of the brutal gang of slavers is a former rebel against the ‘bloody dictator’ Muammar al-Gaddafi, a friend of democracy and European values, Abd al-Rahman al-Milad, a commander in the Coast Guard. The boats, in which he sends Africans to Europe, are bought with European money... The European NGO’s pick up rubber boats with migrants sent by Milad, take the migrants on board and deliver them to Europe, making a very decent profit. These “rescuers” directly cooperate with Milad and other slavers, they receive exact instructions from the “senders” where to pick up the boats, and they take a considerable share of the profit. They earn grants and donations of the compassionate Europeans, who do not understand that they are being manipulated by slavers.

​What if you were warned, just in time, that you were about to be "regime-changed" by the Empire? Erdogan survived the coup attempt in Turkey, thanks to Putin. Lukashenko in Belarus just had a few days of intense and private talks with Putin, states that he doesn't like the looks of the color revolution the Empire did in Ukraine, and that Belarus "might have to join another country". Hopefully it would be a country that shares a common language and culture, and so on...
Thanks for the heads-up, Eleni.
​https://russia-insider.com/en/politics/belarus-could-yet-end-part-russia/ri23943

The border between Ireland and Northern Ireland may sink the EU
​, as Brexit creates a hole below waterline, which cannot be sealed off.​

At face value, it seems straightforward -- the EU’s land frontier with Britain would need to be policed to uphold the rules of the single market. Yet, Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar seems to take a different view. Speaking in Brussels on Thursday, he told reporters there are no preparations to install checks, and has consistently said Ireland won’t build a border.
“The U.K. has said they won’t do it,” Varadkar said in an interview with broadcaster TV3 this month. “And I’ve made it very clear to other European prime ministers and presidents that’s something Ireland will never do.”
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-06-28/could-ireland-really-refuse-to-build-a-border-after-brexit

​Oil runs the global economy, and higher oil prices choke it into recession. It can't afford recession. The buffers are all used up...
​The bottom line is that despite the agreement in Vienna, the price of oil, in the short-term, is bound to go up. Analyses by BNP Paribas, among others, are adamant that supply problems with Venezuela and Libya, plus the proverbial “uncertainty” about the sanctions on Iran, lead to “oil fundamentals still…favorable for oil prices to rise over the next six months despite the OPEC+ decision.”
http://www.atimes.com/article/how-the-iran-sanctions-drama-intersects-with-opec-plus/

Paul Craig Roberts looks at the upcoming Putin-Trump Summit. What kinds of ongoing deals can be made  that will simultaneously benefit each side in their continuation. The US is "agreement-challenged", because it won't keep it's side of the bargain, once it gets some pay-off. the world knows this. The sides of the deal will need to stay parallel in real time for it to work.
https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2018/06/28/two-views-putin-trump-summit-paul-craig-roberts/

​Tom Luongo thinks Trump is giving away what he can't stop, anyway, going into the summit with Putin.
​
With Sweden issuing the last necessary permit for the construction of Nordstream 2 there is little way to stop the pipeline from being built.  Most of the pipe has been produced along with the infrastructure.  All that’s left is the actual putting the pieces together.
​ ​
I think this is another pre-summit diplomatic offering by Trump ahead of his meeting with Putin.  The other was cutting the Al-Qaeda-linked groups free in Dara’a while the Russians and Syrian Arab Army retake the territory up to the Golan Heights... So, at the end of the day the First Rule of Trump applies, react to what he does not what he says.  Speech is a negotiating tactic for him.  And right now, he has not moved further on sanctions to stop Nordstream 2. With his long-desired summit with Putin now on the table it makes zero sense to throw down the gauntlet over it now.

​It is really not humanly possible to comprehend anything like the $21 trillion that the military has spent on an alternate universe that you can't be told about.
The picture below is $20 trillion, if each of those greenbacks is a $20 bill. Where is the CIA-Disneyworld? What are the attractions and rides?
​https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-21-trillion-in-u-s-tax-money-disappeared-full-scope-audit-of-the-pentagon/5638534

We are just now hitting the arctic tipping point where the ice melts, the brown soil absorbs warm sunlight and massive waves of methane are released into our vast greenhouse. The buffer is exhausting as you read this. This is the last of the normal weather,
"Temperature rise has exceeded 1.2 degrees Celsius above 1880 temperatures...
Apart from sharp reduction in carbon emissions, there appears to be only one chance to save the biosphere as we know it, namely CO2 down-draw using every available method (cf. basalt rock dust farming[xxx], biochar, air streaming through basalt, extensive sea weed farms, “sodium trees”) which would require funds on the $trillions-scale currently allocated for the military and for wars."

Our Natural World is Disappearing before Our Eyes, George Monbiot

Hiding and Seeking
Posted by at No comments:

Thursday, June 28, 2018

Pat Tillman Lives

Living Archetypes,

Spenser Rapone, "The Commie Cadet", who graduated West Point with a history degree, including studies in economics, after being an Army Ranger in Afghanistan, is somehow alive, somehow able to tell us what he saw in these travels. He accepted an Army commission and was fairly quickly discharged other than honorably. Chris Hedges ha this story after interviewing our hero.
“When you get to RASP [the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program], you’re told you not only have to understand Ranger culture and history, you have to adopt what’s called an airborne Ranger in the sky,” he said. “They make you go online and look at Rangers who were killed in action. You have to learn about this person and print out a copy of their obituary. It’s really unsettling, the whole process. This was a class leader acting on behalf of the cadre, he said something to the effect of ‘I’ll give you a hint, don’t pick Pat Tillman.’ ”   Rapone began to read about Pat Tillman, the professional football player who joined the Rangers and was killed in 2004 in Afghanistan by friendly fire, a fact that senior military officials, including Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, who at the time was the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, covered up and replaced with a fictitious Hollywood version of death in combat with the enemy. Rapone watched the 2010 documentary “The Tillman Story” and would later read the 2006 Truthdig essay “After Pat’s Birthday,” written by Pat’s brother Kevin, who was in the Rangers with Pat. Pat Tillman, who had been in contact with Noam Chomsky, had become a critic of the war. In addition to lying to the Tillman family about Pat’s death, the Army did not return, and probably destroyed, Pat’s papers and diary.
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-soldiers-tale/

Ralph Nader still lives, too.
"Would be nice if Laura Bush and Michelle Obama had expressed similar heartfelt concern for the tens of thousands of children killed or seriously maimed by the wars of their husbands in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere," he tweeted.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/49707.htm
Eleni sends this, and I can see that this is actually what occurs in institutional invluntary psychiatric commitments in the US. I can testify that these procedures are routinely used. The courts watch for lots of little points, like hourly notes, constant visual monitoring, and so on, but the courts may not watch the illegal kids...   Court documents made public in Virginia and Texas give a glimpse of the systematic brutality being meted out to immigrant children in both public and private jails. Children are strapped down, hooded and beaten, or drugged by force, as part of the everyday procedure in what can only be called the American Gulag.
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/06/22/immi-j22.html

Mish Shedlock lays out the 5 points that make the EU immigration crisis politically insoluble in the current context.
https://www.themaven.net/mishtalk/economics/eu-s-5-point-migration-problem-in-a-nutshell-z6u2D7Er-U2ATtxn_VceZw/

Putin and Lavrov have something that Bolton wants, but what?
http://www.businessinsider.com/john-bolton-putin-meeting-russia-policy-shift-2018-6

Trump-Putin summit will be July 16 in Helsinki, Finland. Deals will be made.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-28/trump-putin-summit-will-take-place-helsinki

It looks like Americans will vote on issues, if given a chance...
Establishment Democrat Joe Crowley's nearly two-decade career in Congress came to an end Tuesday night in a shocking primary loss to 28-year-old Democratic Socialist and former Bernie Sanders organizer Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez - a harsh critic of Israel and immigration enforcement. 
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-06-26/hes-out-establishment-democrats-rocked-joe-crowley-primary-loss-socialist

Here is a review of a historical assessment, or two, of the history of fossil energy to expand human population, and the tchnological adaptations that it subsidized and enegized, and what is next as oil, gas and coal peter out...
If, following Rhodes’ thinking, we give science the whole credit for making a population explosion possible, we should also credit science with blowing through millions of years of accumulated energy resources in just a few hundred years. We should give science credit for the fact that billions of people live in areas already being severely impacted by climate change caused by fossil fuel emissions (even though those people typically have used minimal quantities of fossil fuel themselves.) And we should ask, why can’t science come up with a cost- and time-effective way of replacing all those fossil fuels, so that all 7 billion of us plus our more numerous descendants can keep on living the high-energy lifestyle to which (some of) us are accustomed?

​A Medical Case for a Whole-Food, Plant-Based Diet, Ankush Bansal MD
​https://opmed.doximity.com/a-medical-case-for-a-whole-food-plant-based-diet-c91580875463

Eating Solar Energy

Posted by at No comments:

Tuesday, June 26, 2018

Negotiating Settlements

​Assessing Risks,​

North Korea's MAD threat against South Korea is massive artillery dug into mountains that can rain death on Seoul, killing millions​. 
The ICBM to place an EMP nuke 50 miles above Kansas and knock out half the US electric grid is far less certain. 
Having both hands empty of plausible threat must feel terribly wrong. It is what is being "asked" by the US and South Korea."​
North Korea has deployed an estimated 1,000 artillery pieces along the border, posing a significant threat to Seoul and the metropolitan area.
In a speech marking the 68th anniversary of the outbreak of the 1950-53 Korean War, Prime Minister Lee Nak-yon said that "moving (North Korea's) long-range artillery to the rear is under discussion," as he explained what types of good-will steps between the sides have been taken in recent months.
Lee's comments appear to be Seoul's first official confirmation of media reports that South Korea demanded that the North reposition its forward-deployed artillery pieces during inter-Korean military talks this month. Seoul's Defense Ministry, which has denied those reports, said it had no immediate comment on Lee's speech.​"​
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/06/25/us-to-present-north-korea-with-post-summit-asks-report.html

A history of nuclear weapons on the Korean Peninsula, is interesting but uses officially released and partial military documentation. It has been
​told​ to me, for instance, that US Nuclear subs still visit the underground cave-base in Yokosuka​
that the Japanese navy made in WW-2. Official US military stance is that there are no nuclear armed vessels in the Western Pacific. That is more politically comfortable in Japan, where people are sensitive about nuclear weapons.
“Tree-Trimming Incident” in August 1976, US forces in Korea were placed on alert in response to a fatal skirmish between US and North Korean border guards over American attempts to trim a tree in the demilitarized zone. As part of the alert, the United States deployed nuclear and other forces in operations that signaled preparations for an attack on North Korea. Nuclear-capable B-52 bombers flew north from Guam in the direction of Pyongyang. It is not clear whether North Korean radars could see the bombers, but since North Korean soldiers did not interfere with tree trimming again, some people may have concluded that the US nuclear threat worked.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/a-history-of-us-nuclear-weapons-in-south-korea/5623878

The Okinawa nuclear missile attack order mistake, during DEFCON-2 status in Cuban Missile Crisis:
By Bordne's account, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Air Force crews on Okinawa were ordered to launch 32 missiles, each carrying a large nuclear warhead...
According to Bordne's account—which, recall, is based on hearing just one side of a phone call—the situation of one launch crew was particularly stark: All its targets were in Russia. Its launch officer, a lieutenant, did not acknowledge the authority of the senior field officer—i.e. Capt. Bassett—to override the now-repeated order of the major. The second launch officer at that site reported to Bassett that the lieutenant had ordered his crew to proceed with the launch of its missiles! Bassett immediately ordered the other launch officer, as Bordne remembers it, “to send two airmen over with weapons and shoot the [lieutenant] if he tries to launch without [either] verbal authorization from the ‘senior officer in the field’ or the upgrade to DEFCON 1 by Missile Operations Center.” About 30 yards of underground tunnel separated the two Launch Control Centers.
https://thebulletin.org/okinawa-missiles-october8826

Captain William Bassett received the orders to launch his four nukes. They even went through three layers of security codes, getting confirmation each time that they were correct.
https://paleofuture.gizmodo.com/another-day-another-story-about-how-america-almost-sta-1738998649

​What's to be gained from the US/Russia July summit?​  (There are lots of possibilities and good trades to be made. What will the deep state allow?)
​"​Both Russia and the United States are set to invest billions in modernizing their nuclear arsenals, which, although positive from a safety and reliability standpoint, create the impression of a new “arms race,” as the presidents acknowledged in a March phone call. An especially worrying new dimension to the nuclear risk is the possibility that cyber attacks by states or non-state actors could lead either party to raise its nuclear alert level, thus triggering a matching response from the other side, and possibly touching off a dangerous escalatory cycle.
.. A simple but vital step toward such de-escalation could be for the two presidents to reiterate the joint view of Presidents Reagan and Gorbachev from their 1986 Reykjavik summit, that “a nuclear war cannot be won, and so should never be fought.” In fact, thirty-two years ago the U.S. and Soviet leaders discussed the possibility of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether, a goal which then Presidents Obama and Medvedev confirmed and supported in 2009."

​Tom Luongo has a more in-depth view, and reminds that the US only negotiates when it is in a weak position, as in Syria. He believes this summit is mostly about getting the US forces out of their Al Tanf base in southern Syria, which will otherwise be overrun, by Syrian Army forces, backed up by 1000 elite Russian infantry now waiting near Palmyra.​ Assorted "moderate rebels" in Southern Syria have been supplied with advanced weapons, like TOW missiles, across the Jordanian border, but just now told that they are "on their own" and won't get US air support. They will have to negotiate their way out or fight...
"Trump needs to walk away with a win from any meeting with Putin and in Syria there is one.  He can Declare victory over ISIS in Dara’a and the Southwestern Syrian desert.
Negotiating a withdrawal of troops from Al-Tanf is the first part of a deal towards a new multi-party reality which lessens Iran’s future threat to Israel, which is what this is all about now anyway.
I don’t think there’s much more on the table than this officially at the moment, unfortunately.  Trump is still fully committed to trade and tariff wars to force substantive change to the way the world trades goods.  So, he’ll offer up concessions on Nordstream 2 and sanctions on Rusal, the State owned Russian aluminum company, to get Putin to give up his support of Iran and its ‘nuclear ambitions.’
This Kissinger-esque approach of offering nothing for something will not work since Putin holds all the cards on these issues.  The more likely scenario is a Singapore-like agreement to begin draw downs of U.S. troops in Central Asia, including Afghanistan and Iraq, in exchange for a security guarantee from Putin on Iran’s presence in Syria.

​How the US created Europe's Refugee Crisis (on Obama's watch, but he was just a spokesmodel...) "Arab Spring", Afghanistan, and so on. 
​https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2018/06/24/how-us-under-obama-created-europe-refugee-crisis.html

1% of the (surviving) humans in the world are refugees. (Thanks for the "freedom", America!) There's also a downside. "Peaceful" places are "less peaceful".
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/06/refugees-now-make-up-1-of-the-worlds-population

Immigrant parents are no longer being referred for criminal prosecution (They have to take the kids away from anybody jailed on criminal charges.)
https://www.politico.com/story/2018/06/25/customs-border-protection-immigrant-parents-criminal-prosecution-670358

“We cannot allow all of these people to invade our Country. When somebody comes in, we must immediately, with no Judges or Court Cases, bring them back from where they came.”  (Of course it is stickier than that.95% of current immigrants are fleeing undeclared-war in central America, and have legitimate asylum claims, involving American dirty-war in their home countries. The empire does not want that explored in the courts, or anywhere else.)
https://jonathanturley.org/2018/06/25/trump-calls-for-deportations-without-hearings-or-judges/

When are America’s global corporations and Wall Street going to sit down with President Trump and explain to him that his trade war is not with China but with them.  The biggest chunk of America’s trade deficit with China is the offshored production of America’s global corporations. When the corporations bring the products that they produce in China to the US consumer market, the products are classified as imports from China...  “Making America great again” means dealing with these corporations, not with China...  The job loss from offshoring also has had a huge and dire impact on Federal Reserve policy.  With the decline in income growth, the US economy stalled. The Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan substituted an expansion in consumer credit for the missing growth in consumer income in order to maintain aggregate consumer demand. Instead of wage increases, Greenspan relied on an increase in consumer debt to fuel the economy... The credit expansion and consequent rise in real estate prices, together with the deregulation of the banking system, especially the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act, produced the real estate bubble and the fraud and mortgage-backed derivatives that gave us the 2007-08 financial crash. The Federal Reserve responded to the crash not by bailing out consumer debt but by bailing out the debt of its only constituency—the big banks...  The Federal Reserve has learned that it can keep afloat the Ponzi scheme that is the US economy by printing money with which to support financial asset prices.  The alleged rise in interest rates by the Federal Reserve are not real interest rates rises.  Even the under-reported inflation rate is higher than the interest rate increases, with the result that the real interest rate falls.  If the stock market tries to sell off, before much damage can be done the Federal Reserve steps in and purchases S&P futures, thus driving up stock prices... As I have explained previously, the Ponzi scheme falls apart when it becomes impossible to continue to support the dollar as burdened as the dollar is by debt levels and abundance of dollars that could be dumped on the exchange markets.  This is why Washington is determined to retain its hegemony.  It is Washington’s hegemony over Japan, Europe, and the UK that protects the American Ponzi scheme.  The moment one of these central banks ceases to support the dollar, the others would follow, and the Ponzi scheme would unravel.
https://www.globalresearch.ca/how-long-can-the-federal-reserve-stave-off-the-inevitable/5645482

Dear High School Graduates, Charles Hugh Smith:
Here's the summary: the status quo is pressuring you to accept its "solutions": borrow mega-bucks to attend college, then buy a decaying bungalow or hastily constructed stucco box for $800,000 in a "desirable" city, pay sky-high income and property taxes on your earnings, and when the stress of all these crushing financial burdens ruins your health, well, we've got meds to "help" you--lots of meds at insane price points paid for by insurance-- if you have "real" insurance without high deductibles, of course.
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogjun18/dear-grads6-18.html

An essay on 25 years of being homeless, by an Australian man with mental illness, raised in an orphanage, beaten and shunned on the streets, who moved to a forest for 10 years, and almost died. This is fairly brief and extremely good. (I suspect Gregory Smith was in the orphanage due to a parent having bipolar, which is passed down as an autosomal dominant trait, which he got. It is quite treatable for the majority of people. He seems clear and lucid.)
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/jun/25/after-25-years-of-being-homeless-i-learned-theres-one-simple-thing-you-can-do-to-help-gregory-p-smith

AT&T collaborates with NSA spying through web of secretive buildings in the US. 
https://techcrunch.com/2018/06/25/nsa-att-intercept-surveillance/

The latest study shows that the US oil and gas supply chain emits about 13 million metric tons of methane, the main component of natural gas, every year. That's much higher than the US Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) estimate of about 8 million metric tons.

​Our future is "crumbling before our eyes", Chris Hedges looks at how the steel reinforcement in concrete inevitably rusts and destroys the concrete. You've seen it, especially curbs, especially where salt is used on the roads, because the chloride ions work particularly quickly to cause rust where you can't see it.
The time lapse video of the building of a wind turbine is especially informative, in the middle of this essay. 96,000 pounds of welded steel rebar and 53 mixing trucks full of concrete are only the beginning.​
https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/99486/our-future-literally-crumbling-our-eyes

Here is the concrete engineering science regarding "corrosion of embedded metals".
http://www.cement.org/learn/concrete-technology/durability/corrosion-of-embedded-materials

How to Start and Maintain a Microrevolutionary Project: This is a German Commune, started in 1986, by  17 completely committed and apparently successful adults and 3 children, who bought a large property outright and began living it it with all money held communally. This is full commitment of already-saved and substantial resources, by people competent enough to have accumulated those resources. They are now 60 adults and 20 children/teens.
"To become a member, one needs to give all the property and savings to the commune. However, it is possible to negotiate a sum of money in case of exit from the commune to start a new life."
http://geo.coop/story/how-start-and-maintain-micro-revolutionary-project

Considering the Cost

Posted by at 3 comments:

Sunday, June 24, 2018

No Dichotomy

Noticing Changes,

The world transformed and nobody in the West noticed. India and Pakistan have joined the Shanghai Cooperation Organization. The 17 year-old body since its founding on June 15, 2001 has quietly established itself as the main alliance and grouping of nations across Eurasia. Now it has expanded from six nations to eight, and the two new members are the giant nuclear-armed regional powers of South Asia, India, with a population of 1.324 billion and Pakistan, with 193.2 million people (both in 2016).In other words, the combined population of the SCO powers or already well over 1.5 billion has virtually doubled at a single stroke. The long-term global consequences of this development are enormous. It is likely to prove the single most important factor insuring peace and removing the threat of nuclear war over South Asia and from 20 percent of the human race. It now raises the total population of the world in the eight SCO nations to 40 percent, including one of the two most powerful thermonuclear armed nations (Russia) and three other nuclear powers (China, India and Pakistan).
https://www.globalresearch.ca/the-world-transformed-and-no-one-in-america-noticed/5645114

This piece by Andrew Korybko is better than it's title, which is meant to catch the attention. Narendra Modi of India does not have to choose Trump or Putin, not even today, and this may get even easier by the end of the year. Still, there has been a strong campaign to win India over, beginning in the Clinton years, but now India is taken for granted. There is a permanent resentment in India to being taken for granted by a foreign empire. India has had a fairly long and friendly cooperative relationship with Russia, which is again blossoming. there is a lot oc complexity here. Indians exist in complexity, as do Russian diplomats. No artificial false dichotomy can be imposed upon India. Changes in global power relations are well underway. Actual global peace and cooperation, instead of knives-in-everybody's-backs, would be a welcome help for all of us.
https://orientalreview.org/2018/06/23/the-indian-crossroads-will-modi-choose-putin-or-trump/

Did Jesus speak Greek? Thanks Eleni. 
This is not a trivial question at all. Gallile was part of a thriving Mediterranean economy, with many primarily Greek-speaking Jews and also Hebrew-speaking Jews, who carried different name designations, and lived in the same towns, doing business, socially engaging. There is biblical evidence of Jesus employing Greek words and phrases in some of his speech. Apostles were fishermen, who would have had to do business in Greek, and some bore Greek names. Greek was a widespread spoken and written language in that day and that area, very useful. This language, if the primary or secondary language of Jesus, would have tied him into the vast Greek intellectual/philosophical and economic discourse. What teachings of his remain, may be seen in a different light, if they come from 2 traditions, not just one.
https://academic.logos.com/did-jesus-speak-greek/

Not mentioned in the article above is the ancient rumor that the "real dad" of Jesus was a Macedonian archer in the Roman army, named Pantera, or Panthera, who would have spoken Greek. Wikipedia actually has a lot on this. I had not looked into it for a decade or so. Ancient allegations that the teachings of Jesus were Greek are included in this detailed entry. 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiberius_Julius_Abdes_Pantera  

Michael Hudson, the premier economist of our current historical epoch, is also a historian of Mideast economy, and presents a strong argument that the "Gospel" or "Good News" was specifically the debt jubilee returning, nothing more or less. this was a battle being fought throughout the ancient world at that time, partuclarly in Greece. People were dying over this. The same battle was being fought between the Pjharisees, who privately owned a lot of debt, and the indebted classes, who had not had a jubilee for 200 years. There was no jubilee. Jesus was crucified, ad horrible execution, reserved by Rome for threats to the political order (not weird rabbis, claiming to be the son of God.)
http://michael-hudson.com/2017/12/he-died-for-our-debt-not-our-sins/

"Shooting the Messenger", the chilling effect of criminalizing journalism, seems appropriate here, somehow...
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2018/jun/24/shooting-the-messenger-the-chilling-effect-of-criminalising-journalism

Pedophrasty, Bigoteering, and Other Modern Scams (What is that first word? It's not "pederasty". It is important.) Nicholas Taleb, Black Swan Author:
https://medium.com/incerto/pedophrasty-bigoteering-and-other-modern-scams-c84bd70a29e8

More science on how and why and how much coffee is good for people (and rats).
https://www.forbes.com/sites/alicegwalton/2018/06/22/researchers-figure-out-why-coffee-is-good-for-the-heart/#7383ddf956b7

Green tea and Disease Prevention, Jason Fung MD (I'm living proof that it does not have to be one or the other. Coffee first in the morning, then green tea all day at work is sustainable...)
https://medium.com/@drjasonfung/green-tea-and-disease-prevention-df65ca28addc

Cooperative Worker (Pictured in kitchen garden summer solstice 2018)


Posted by at 1 comment:
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)