Ladies and Gentlemen, Boys and Girls, Dying Time's Here...,

globalguerillas |  The CIA is trying to topple Trump.

Why?  Self preservation. 

The real reason is that Trump was working with Peter Thiel to corporatize the intelligence gathering of the United States around companies, like Palantir, that can adopt and employ technology much faster and with more efficacy.  In other words, Trump is planning to turn the CIA and the NSA into peripheral collection systems.

That was unacceptable to the CIA, an agency with a strong sense of self-importance.

They acted again today when the head of the CIA refused to brief the House Intelligence Committee on the their claims because the chairman of the committee, Devin Nunes, was part of Trump's transition team.

Instead, the CIA leaked more information this afternoon to influence electors:

"new intelligence shows that Putin personally directed how hacked material.. was leaked"

However, due to tight legal restrictions on the use of the information the CIA gathers and who it gather it on (i.e. US citizens), I anticipated that any new leak would be from allied sources not covered by these restrictions.

That proved to be correct:

"The intelligence came from diplomatic sources and spies working for U.S. allies."

What's next?

We can expect to see more leaks this weekend, before the EC votes on Monday.  

What kind of info?  A shred of evidence (a taped conversation would be best), gathered by US allies and not the CIA, that shows that Trump knew about the hack or came to an agreement with Putin.  

At that point, the EC will definitely flip and Trump will be denied an electoral college win on Monday.

After that we head to the courts and start down the road to street level violence. 

John Podesta: Something is Deeply Broken at the FBI

WaPo |   The more we learn about the Russian plot to sabotage Hillary Clinton’s campaign and elect Donald Trump, and the failure of the FBI to adequately respond, the more shocking it gets. The former acting director of the CIA has called the Russian cyberattack “the political equivalent of 9/11.” Just as after the real 9/11, we need a robust, independent investigation into what went wrong inside the government and how to better protect our country in the future.

As the former chair of the Clinton campaign and a direct target of Russian hacking, I understand just how serious this is. So I was surprised to read in the New York Times that when the FBI discovered the Russian attack in September 2015, it failed to send even a single agent to warn senior Democratic National Committee officials. Instead, messages were left with the DNC IT “help desk.” As a former head of the FBI cyber division told the Times, this is a baffling decision: “We are not talking about an office that is in the middle of the woods of Montana.”

What takes this from baffling to downright infuriating is that at nearly the exact same time that no one at the FBI could be bothered to drive 10 minutes to raise the alarm at DNC headquarters, two agents accompanied by attorneys from the Justice Department were in Denver visiting a tech firm that had helped maintain Clinton’s email server.

Has the Internet Become a Failed State?

Guardian |  This blended universe is a strange place, simultaneously wonderful and terrifying. It provides its users – ordinary citizens – with services, delights and opportunities that were once the prerogative only of the rich and powerful. Wikipedia, the greatest store of knowledge the world has ever seen, is available at the click of a mouse. Google has become the memory prosthesis for humanity. Services such as Skype and FaceTime shrink intercontinental distances for families and lovers. And so on.

But at the same time, everything we do on the network is monitored and surveilled by both governments and the huge corporations that now dominate cyberspace. (If you want to see the commercial side of this in action, install Ghostery in your browser and see who’s snooping on you as you surf.) Internet users are assailed by spam, phishing, malware, fraud and identity theft. Corporate and government databases are routinely hacked and huge troves of personal data, credit card and bank account details are stolen and offered for sale in the shadows of the so-called “dark web”. Companies – and public institutions such as hospitals – are increasingly blackmailed by ransomware attacks, which make their essential IT systems unusable unless they pay a ransom. Cybercrime has already reached alarming levels and, because it largely goes unpunished, will continue to grow – which is why in some societies old-style physical crime is reducing as practitioners move to the much safer and more lucrative online variety.

“All human life is there” was once the advertising slogan for the now-defunct News of the World. It was never true of that particular organ, which specialised mostly in tales of randy vicars, celebrity love triangles, the foolishness of lottery winners and similar dross. But it is definitely true of the internet, which caters for every imaginable human interest, taste and obsession. One way of thinking about the net is as a mirror held up to human nature. Some of what appears in the mirror is inspiring and heart-warming. Much of what goes on online is enjoyable, harmless, frivolous, fun. But some of it is truly repellent: social media, in particular, facilitate firestorms of cruelty, racism, hatred and hypocrisy – as liberals who oppose the Trump campaign in the US have recently discovered. For a crash course in this darker side of human nature, read Jon Ronson’s book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed and weep.

S o we find ourselves living in this paradoxical world, which is both wonderful and frightening. Social historians will say that there’s nothing new here: the world was always like this. The only difference is that we now experience it 24/7 and on a global scale. But as we thrash around looking for a way to understand it, our public discourse is depressingly Manichean: tech boosters and evangelists at one extreme; angry technophobes at the other; and most of us somewhere in between. Small wonder that Manuel Castells, the great scholar of cyberspace, once described our condition as that of “informed bewilderment”.

Not Hacks. Inside Leaks. Until The Leak Was Plugged....,

DailyMail |   A Wikileaks envoy today claims he personally received Clinton campaign emails in Washington D.C. after they were leaked by 'disgusted' whisteblowers - and not hacked by Russia. Craig Murray, former British ambassador to Uzbekistan and a close associate of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange, told Dailymail.com that he flew to Washington, D.C. for a clandestine hand-off with one of the email sources in September.

'Neither of [the leaks] came from the Russians,' said Murray in an interview with Dailymail.com on Tuesday. 'The source had legal access to the information. The documents came from inside leaks, not hacks.'

His account contradicts directly the version of how thousands of Democratic emails were published before the election being advanced by U.S. intelligence.

Murray is a controversial figure who was removed from his post as a British ambassador amid allegations of misconduct. He was cleared of those but left the diplomatic service in acrimony.

His links to Wikileaks are well known and while his account is likely to be seen as both unprovable and possibly biased, it is also the first intervention by Wikileaks since reports surfaced last week that the CIA believed Russia hacked the Clinton emails to help hand the election to Donald Trump.

Murray's claims about the origins of the Clinton campaign emails comes as U.S. intelligence officials are increasingly confident that Russian hackers infiltrated both the Democratic National Committee and the email account of top Clinton aide John Podesta. 

More Pathetic By the Minute...,

counterpunch |  The Democratic Party is doing incalculable damage to itself by shapeshifting into the party of baseless conspiracy theories, groundless accusations, and sour grapes. Hillary Clinton was already the most distrusted presidential candidate in party history. Now she’s become the de facto flag-bearer for the nutso-clique of aspiring propagandists at the CIA, the New York Times and Bezo’s Military Digest. How is that going to improve the party’s prospects for the long term?

It won’t, because the vast majority of Americans do not want to align themselves with a party of buck-passing juveniles that have no vision for the future but want to devote all their energy to kooky witch-hunts that further prove they are unfit for high office.

The reason Hillary Clinton lost the election is because she is a polarizing, untrustworthy warmonger. Period. Putin had nothing to do with it.

And the same rule applies to the major media that has attached itself leech-like to this pathetic fairytale. Here’s a clip from the Times headline story connecting FSB-agent Trump with the evil Kremlin:

“American intelligence agencies have told the White House they have “high confidence” that the Russian government was behind the theft of emails and documents from the Democratic National Committee. …
The attack on the congressional committee’s system appears to have come from an entity known as “Fancy Bear,” which is connected to the G.R.U., the Russian military intelligence service, according to an official involved in the forensic investigation…
Clinton campaign officials have suggested that President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia could be trying to tilt the election to Mr. Trump, who has expressed admiration for the Russian leader.” (Computer Systems Used by Clinton Campaign Are Said to Be Hacked, Apparently by Russians, New York Times)

If there was a Pulitzer Prize for fearmongering innuendo or spurious accusations, the Times would win it hands-down. As it happens, readers have to delve much deeper into the article to find this shocking disclaimer:

“But the campaign officials acknowledge that they have no evidence. The Trump campaign has dismissed the accusations about Russia as a deliberate distraction…..”

“No evidence”???

They got nothing. NOTHING!

All they have is a few anonymous agents who refuse to identify themselves speculating on alleged hacking incidents that (they surmise) were the work of Vladimir P. Strangelove in his remote Soviet Cyber-war bunker. That’s not even enough material for a decent spy thriller.

When The Washington Post Ran the CIA's Propaganda Network

Counterpunch |  Here is a brief historical note on how at the height of the Cold War the CIA developed it’s very own stable of writers, editors and publishers (swelling to as many as 3000 individuals) that it paid to scribble Agency propaganda under a program called Operation Mockingbird. The disinformation network was supervised by the late Philip Graham, former publisher of Timberg’s very own paper, the Washington Post.

Craig Timberg’s story, which was about as substantial as anonymous slurs scrawled on a bathroom stall, lends rise to the suspicion that the Post may still be a player in the same old game it perfected in the 1950s and continued across the decades culminating in its 1996 hatchet-job on my old friend Gary Webb and his immaculate reporting on drug-running by the CIA-backed contras in the 1980s. The Post’s disgusting assault on Webb was spearheaded, in part, by the paper’s intelligence reporter Walter Pincus, himself an old CIA hand.

For Timberg, this was probably just another day at the office: fling some red slurs on the wall and see what sticks before moving on to his next big tech scoop (courtesy of hot tips from a couple of anonymous teenagers in Cupertino) on software glitches in the i-Phone 7. 

For the subjects of hit-and-run journalism such as this, however, it’s often a different matter entirely. In Webb’s case, the Post’s deplorable and baseless attacks killed his career as an investigative reporter and sparked a spiraling depression that ended with Gary taking his own life. Although the CIA’s own inspector general, Frederick Hitz, later confirmed Webb’s reporting, the Post never retracted its slanderous stories or apologized for ruining the life of one of the country’s finest and most courageous journalists.

Now it appears that the paper is circling round for yet another drive-by.

(This article is adapted from our book End Times: the Death of the Fourth Estate.) –JSC

He Who Controls the Spice Controls the Universe

NYTimes |  Struggling to keep Iraq from splintering, American diplomats pushed for a law in 2011 to share the country’s oil wealth among its fractious regions.

Then Exxon Mobil showed up.

Under its chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, the giant oil company sidestepped Baghdad and Washington, signing a deal directly with the Kurdish administration in the country’s north. The move undermined Iraq’s central government, strengthened Kurdish independence ambitions and contravened the stated goals of the United States.

Mr. Tillerson’s willingness to cut a deal regardless of the political consequences speaks volumes about Exxon Mobil’s influence. In the Iraq case, Mr. Tillerson and his company outmaneuvered the State Department, which he has now been nominated by President-elect Donald J. Trump to lead.

“They are very powerful in the region, and they couldn’t care less about what the State Department wants to do,” Jean-François Seznec, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, a research group in Washington, said of Exxon Mobil’s pursuits in the Middle East.

As America’s biggest oil company, with operations on six continents and a stock market value of more than $390 billion, Exxon Mobil is in some ways a state within a state. While Mr. Tillerson has never officially been a diplomat, he has arguably left an American footprint on more countries than any nominee before him — with an agenda overseas that does not always mesh with that of the United States government.

Why Are the Parasite 1%'s Terrified of the Producer 1%'s?

robertscribbler |  Rex will come to head an agency whose stated goals include the promotion of human rights and the advancement of U.S. policy aimed at mitigating and reducing the harms produced by human-caused climate change. But what Rex has done — for his entire 41 year career at Exxon — is promote the kind of oil extraction efforts in Russia that will saddle the Earth with yet one more gigantic carbon bomb and broker business deals with some of the worst human rights abusers in modern history.

Russian efforts to increase oil and gas production focus on Arctic regions of East and West Siberia. Exxon Mobile under Tillerson was slated to provide Russia with extraction assistance when plans were shut down by U.S. sanctions against Russia following its invasion of the Ukraine. Tillerson opposes sanctions and has, in the past, looked the other way when Russia has acted in an abusive fashion. Image source: EIA.)

For Rex and Exxon, in an admittedly risky courting of a Russian dictator well known for cynically turning against his ‘friends,’ a big deal with Russia promised to produce billions in profits by opening up Arctic oil exploration. Back in 2013, an arrangement was moving along in which Exxon would provide technical expertise for extracting a massive pile of hard to reach oil and gas reserves. Exxon didn’t seem concerned by the fact that Russia had betrayed a similar contract with British Petroleum, thrown one of the competitors to state-run Rosneft in jail, or forced a Total Oil CEO to flee Russia due to ‘sustained harassment.’

In 2014, the high-risk game that Exxon was playing with Russia went sour after Russia invaded the Ukraine. The U.S. under President Obama, decided to apply sanctions against Russia for its military occupation of Ukraine. And in subsequent years, Exxon lost at least 1 billion due to the combined sanctions and Russian military aggression. Russia, meanwhile, saw its Arctic oil extraction efforts slow due to lack of access to western technical expertise. Tillerson, at the time, used his position as Exxon CEO to put pressure on the U.S. to lift sanctions. Such efforts were arguably against the national interest — which focuses on containing and preventing aggression by foreign powers — and aimed at simply fattening Exxon’s and, by extension, Rex’s bottom line. In critiquing an Exxon CEO, we might lable these actions as amoral profit-seeking that runs counter to the national interest. But place Tillerson as Secretary of State and we end up with moral hazard writ large. For Tillerson, if he promotes similar goals while in office, would be wrongfully using a public appointment to pursue a personal monetary interest — in other words opening up the U.S. to corruption and enabling Tillerson to perpetrate graft.

To Resource Realists, What Do UN-NGO "Animal Farm" Noises About "Sustainability" Really Mean?

wikipedia |  On 25 September 2015, the 193 countries of the UN General Assembly adopted the 2030 Development Agenda titled Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. 

Following the adoption, UN agencies, under the umbrella of the United Nations Development Group, decided to support a campaign by several independent entities, among them corporate institutions and International Organizations. The Campaign, known as Project Everyone,^[16] introduced the term Global Goals and is intended to help communicate the agreed Sustainable Development Goals to a wider constituency. However the decision to support what is an independent campaign, without the approval of the member states, has met resistance^[17] from several sections of civil society and governments, who accuse^[18] the UNDG of ignoring the most important communication aspect of the agreement: Sustainability. There are also concerns that Global Goals is a term used to refer to several other processes that are not related to the United Nations.

The Official Agenda for Sustainable Development adopted on 25 September 2015 has 92 paragraphs, with the main paragraph (51) outlining the 17 Sustainable Development Goals and its associated 169 targets. This included the following goals:^[19]

REDUX 10/30/12 exploitation of arctic resources WILL happen...,

spiegel | September 16, 2012 was a historic date. According to the statistics of the National Snow and Ice Data Center in the US, Arctic sea ice shrank to cover an area of just 3.41 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) on that day. It was the lowest coverage measured since the beginning of satellite observations in 1979 -- some 760,000 square kilometers lower than the previous record minimum in 2007.

The extent of the shrinkage indicates that the Arctic is changing at a breathtaking pace; a new ocean is opening up.

At the same time, interest in both shorter shipping routes through the far north and Arctic mineral deposits is growing. Norway is one of the five countries bordering the Arctic that can benefit from their proximity to the region's presumed riches. The decades-long exploitation of oil and natural gas in waters further south has made the country extremely wealthy -- and hungry for more. At the same time, polar countries like Norway have to deal with increasing pressure from politicians and environmental groups, which complain about the risks of resource extraction and would like to see them remain untapped. In an interview with SPIEGEL ONLINE, Norway's new Foreign Minister Espen Barth Eide talks about the politics of resource extraction in the region.

REDUX from 4/11/08: Floating Arctic Nuclear Power Plants

Rosenergoatom is promoting floating nuclear power plants (NPP) for energy supply for Arctic oil-and gas drilling platforms. Instead of using gas to produce electricity for the platform one floating NPP can ensure needed power supply. A promotion brochure from Rosenergoatom details the plans to use the floating NPPs for offshore oil and gas installations in the remote Arctic oceans.

The general concept of the plan is based on the same technology as the floating nuclear power plant currently under construction at the Sevmash plant in Severodvinsk in the Arkhangelsk region.

The plant will be built as a barge where the core of the nuclear power plant is its KLT-40 reactor. This kind of reactors is similar to the ones onboard Russia’s civilian fleet of nuclear powered icebreakers operated by the Murmansk Shipping Company. Given the speed with which the Artic ice is melting, there won't be much foward-looking use for a fleet of nuclear ice breakers....,

REDUX from 4/11/08: Sevmorput

Murmansk gets the world’s first nuclear-powered oil drilling vessel

The Murmansk Shipping Company will turn the nuclear-powered container carrier “Sevmorput“ into a drilling vessel for the oil industry. The vessel will be ready for drilling operations in the Arctic within 18 months, the company announced this week.

With the transformation, the world will see the first ever nuclear-powered oil and gas service vessel. The place of work for the vessel is likely to be the Arctic, and first of all the Barents Sea.

Deep State Attempting to Overturn the Presidential Election?

antiwar |  So what is going on here?

When Trump supporters opined that the “Deep State” would never allow the populist real estate mogul to take office, I was skeptical. This seemed to me like a made-for-television movie script rather than a real possibility: after all, what could they actually do, aside from using force to prevent him from taking the oath of office?

However, as the campaign progressed, and the Clintonites became progressively more unhinged in their attacks on Trump, the Russian angle became more prominent: former acting CIA Director Mike Morell’s accusation that Trump is an “unconscious agent” of the Kremlin, and “not a patriot,” seemed over the top at the time, but in retrospect looks more like it was laying the groundwork for the current CIA-driven propaganda campaign.

But why would the CIA, in particular, have a special aversion to Trump? Marcy Wheeler, whose analytical abilities I respect despite our political disagreements, has this to say:

“First, if Trump comes into office on the current trajectory, the US will let Russia help Bashar al-Assad stay in power, thwarting a 4-year effort on the part of the Saudis to remove him from power. It will also restructure the hierarchy of horrible human rights abusing allies the US has, with the Saudis losing out to other human rights abusers, potentially up to and including that other petrostate, Russia. It will also install a ton of people with ties to the US oil industry in the cabinet, meaning the US will effectively subsidize oil production in this country, which will have the perhaps inadvertent result of ensuring the US remains oil-independent even though the market can’t justify fracking right now.

“The CIA is institutionally quite close with the Saudis right now, and has been in charge of their covert war against Assad.”

The Saudis, having given millions to the Clinton Foundation, along with their Gulf state allies, were counting on a Clinton victory. The CIA has a longstanding relationship with Riyadh, and together they have been working assiduously to not only overthrow Assad in Syria but to forge a “moderate” Sunni alliance that will effectively police the region while establishing the Saudis as the regional hegemon. This was the Clintonian strategy while Hillary was at the helm of Foggy Bottom: Libya, Syria, the alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, are all examples of this utterly disastrous “Sunni turn.” 

Trump represents a threat to this grand design, and therefore has to be stopped by whatever means necessary. His desire to “get along with Russia,” his opposition to regime change in Syria, his critique of the Libyan misadventure, his foreign policy stance in general – all this meant that he would come to power and “drain the swamp” of the CIA and the State Department. 

The irony here is that the accusation leveled at Trump – that his historic victory represents a successful attempt by a foreign power to take control of the White House – is a classic case of projection. What we are witnessing is a joint CIA-Saudi operation to overthrow the duly elected President of the United States.

Egghead AssClown Crying: Trump is Antagonizing the Intelligence Community!!!

WaPo |  Michael V. Hayden, a principal at the Chertoff Group and visiting professor at George Mason University’s Schar School of Policy and Government, was director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and the Central Intelligence Agency from 2006 to 2009.

 

A month ago I wrote here about the importance and challenge of the intelligence community establishing a relationship with President-elect Donald Trump. 

That has just gotten more important and more challenging.

In my November op-ed, I asked: “What role will facts and fact-bearers play in the Trump administration? . . . Which of the president-elect’s existing instincts and judgments are open to revision as more data is revealed?”

I had in mind the president-elect’s confidence in his own a priori beliefs and specifically his rejection of the intelligence community’s judgment that Russia had stolen American emails and weaponized their content to corrode faith in our electoral processes. 

This creates more than hurt feelings. The intelligence community makes great sacrifices, and CIA directors send people into harm’s way to learn things otherwise unavailable. And directors have seen stars carved on the agency’s memorial wall because of it. If what is gained is not used or wanted or is labeled as suspect or corrupt — by what moral authority does a director put his people at risk?

Then there is the ethic of the intelligence profession, captured by the gospel of John’s dictum in the agency’s headquarters lobby — that the truth will set you free.

Congress Busy Tryna Crack Down on Truth Telling Too!!!

PCR |  Ironic, isn’t it, that it is those who purport to be liberal and progressive who are responsible for the revival of McCarthyism in America. Moreover, the liberal progressives are institutionalizing McCarthyism in the US government. There is clearly a concerted effort being made to define truth as fake news and to define lies as truth. 

Ironic, isn’t it, that it is the war criminal Hillary, responsible for the destruction of Libya and the near destruction of Syria until the Russians intervened, that the liberal progressive forces are desperate to have as president. Not only did the liberal progressive forces attempt to elect a war criminal president of the US, they are doing their best to delegitimize the president-elect who opposes the orchestrated conflict with Russia. 

Ironic, isn’t it, that the liberal progressive bloc refuse to give peace a chance.

The faked news report from the imbeciles at PropOrNot, which was hyped by the fake news sheet, WaPo, claiming that I was a Russian agent was supposed to do my credibility harm. Instead, the 200 List told everyone where they could get good information, and my readership went up. Moreover, I almost got a Russian passport out of it. But before sending it along, Putin checked with Russian intelligence and was informed that I am not on their roster. 

The rumor is that if the House intelligence bill passes with Title V intact, those of us on the PropOrNot list could be called before congressional hearings in a replay of McCarthyism. If they waterboard me, I might breakdown and implicate Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Jim Baker, David Stockman, and all the rest. The evidence against us is pretty strong. Trump is suspect because he wants peace with Russia, and so did Reagan. From the standpoint of the Hillary forces and the presstitutes, anyone who wants peace with Russia is bound to be a Russian agent. 

The way the presstitutes have framed the issue, there are no legitimate reasons to be for peace.

CIA and WaPo Jointly Shed Their Last Vestiges of Credibility

craigmurray |  I have watched incredulous as the CIA’s blatant lie has grown and grown as a media story – blatant because the CIA has made no attempt whatsoever to substantiate it. There is no Russian involvement in the leaks of emails showing Clinton’s corruption. Yes this rubbish has been the lead today in the Washington Post in the US and the Guardian here, and was the lead item on the BBC main news. I suspect it is leading the American broadcasts also.

A little simple logic demolishes the CIA’s claims. The CIA claim they “know the individuals” involved. Yet under Obama the USA has been absolutely ruthless in its persecution of whistleblowers, and its pursuit of foreign hackers through extradition. We are supposed to believe that in the most vital instance imaginable, an attempt by a foreign power to destabilise a US election, even though the CIA knows who the individuals are, nobody is going to be arrested or extradited, or (if in Russia) made subject to yet more banking and other restrictions against Russian individuals? Plainly it stinks. The anonymous source claims of “We know who it was, it was the Russians” are beneath contempt.

As Julian Assange has made crystal clear, the leaks did not come from the Russians. As I have explained countless times, they are not hacks, they are insider leaks – there is a major difference between the two. And it should be said again and again, that if Hillary Clinton had not connived with the DNC to fix the primary schedule to disadvantage Bernie, if she had not received advance notice of live debate questions to use against Bernie, if she had not accepted massive donations to the Clinton foundation and family members in return for foreign policy influence, if she had not failed to distance herself from some very weird and troubling people, then none of this would have happened.

The continued ability of the mainstream media to claim the leaks lost Clinton the election because of “Russia”, while still never acknowledging the truths the leaks reveal, is Kafkaesque.

I had a call from a Guardian journalist this afternoon. The astonishing result was that for three hours, an article was accessible through the Guardian front page which actually included the truth among the CIA hype:

The Kremlin has rejected the hacking accusations, while the WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has previously said the DNC leaks were not linked to Russia. A second senior official cited by the Washington Post conceded that intelligence agencies did not have specific proof that the Kremlin was “directing” the hackers, who were said to be one step removed from the Russian government.
Craig Murray, the former UK ambassador to Uzbekistan, who is a close associate of Assange, called the CIA claims “bullshit”, adding: “They are absolutely making it up.”
“I know who leaked them,” Murray said. “I’ve met the person who leaked them, and they are certainly not Russian and it’s an insider. It’s a leak, not a hack; the two are different things.
“If what the CIA are saying is true, and the CIA’s statement refers to people who are known to be linked to the Russian state, they would have arrested someone if it was someone inside the United States.
“America has not been shy about arresting whistleblowers and it’s not been shy about extraditing hackers. They plainly have no knowledge whatsoever.”

But only three hours. While the article was not taken down, the home page links to it vanished and it was replaced by a ludicrous one repeating the mad CIA allegations against Russia and now claiming – incredibly – that the CIA believe the FBI is deliberately blocking the information on Russian collusion. Presumably this totally nutty theory, that Putin is somehow now controlling the FBI, is meant to answer my obvious objection that, if the CIA know who it is, why haven’t they arrested somebody. That bit of course would be the job of the FBI, who those desperate to annul the election now wish us to believe are the KGB.

GOD Cares Not About Your Suffering, Only Your Ability To Overcome It

NYTimes |  The point is that delivering deep and lasting reductions in inequality may be impossible absent catastrophic events beyond anything any of us would wish for. 

History — from Ancient Rome through the Gilded Age; from the Russian Revolution to the Great Compression of incomes across the West in the middle of the 20th century — suggests that reversing the trend toward greater concentrations of income, in the United States and across the world, might be, in fact, nearly impossible.

That’s the bleak argument of Walter Scheidel, a professor of history at Stanford, whose new book, “The Great Leveler” (Princeton University Press), is due out next month. He goes so far as to state that “only all-out thermonuclear war might fundamentally reset the existing distribution of resources.” If history is anything to go by, he writes, “peaceful policy reform may well prove unequal to the growing challenges ahead.”

Professor Scheidel does not offer a grand unified theory of inequality. But scouring through the historical record, he detects a pattern: From the Stone Age to the present, ever since humankind produced a surplus to hoard, economic development has almost always led to greater inequality. There is one big thing with the power to stop this dynamic, but it’s not pretty: violence.

The big equalizing moments in history may not have always have the same cause, he writes, “but they shared one common root: massive and violent disruptions of the established order.”

the insurrection of the seeds

opendemocracy |  Don Halcomb is a 63-year-old farmer who grows corn, soybeans, wheat and barley on his 7,000-acre family farm in Adairville, Kentucky. According to a report in the New York Times he’s expecting his profits to vanish this year because crop prices are falling and seeds and fertilizer are increasingly expensive, their costs driven up by Monsanto, Dupont and other agribusiness giants.

“We’re producing our crops at a loss now,” he told the Times, “You can’t cut your costs fast enough…It’s just like any other industry that consolidates. They tell the regulators they’re cost-cutting, and then they tell their customers they have to increase pricing after the deal’s done.”

The ‘deal’ cited by Halcomb concerns Monsanto’s recent announcement that it plans to merge with Bayer, one the world’s largest producers of agricultural chemicals and biotechnology products, spiking fears that the new conglomerate will raise the cost of inputs even further. Less competition equals more room for large corporations to dictate their prices and raise their profit margins, producing a virtual monopoly on seeds which will prevent farmers from diversifying and encourage the trend towards highly-vulnerable agricultural monocultures.

It’s a fearful image that’s been exercising my imagination in recent weeks, evoking some powerful theological memories in the process. Yes, I did say ‘theological’, though perhaps ‘spiritual’ is a better word, so what’s the connection between spirituality and seeds?

the semiosis of evolution

springer |  Most contemporary evolutionary biologists consider perception, cognition, and communication just like any other adaptation to the environmental selection pressures. A biosemiotic approach adds an unexpected turn to this Neo-Darwinian logic and focuses not so much on the evolution of semiosis as it does on the semiosis of evolution. What is meant here, is that evolutionary forces are themselves semiotically constrained and contextualized. The effect of environmental conditions is always mediated by the responses of organisms, who select their developmental pathways and actions based on heritable or memorized past experience and a variety of external and internal signals. In particular, recognition and categorization of objects, learning, and communication (both intraspecific and interspecific) can change the evolutionary fate of lineages. Semiotic selection, an effect of choice upon other species (Maran and Kleisner 2010), active habitat preference (Lindholm 2015), making use of and reinterpreting earlier semiotic structures – known as semiotic co-option (Kleisner 2015), and semiotic scaffolding (Hoffmeyer 2015; Kull 2015), are some further means by which semiosis makes evolution happen.

Semiotic processes are easily recognized in animals that communicate and learn, but it is difficult to find directly analogous processes in organisms without nerves and brains. Molecular biologists are used to talk about information transfer via cell-to-cell communication, DNA replication, RNA or protein synthesis, and signal transduction cascades within cells. However, these informational processes are difficult to compare with perception-related sign processes in animals because information requires interpretation by some agency, and it is not clear where the agency in cells is. In bacterial cells, all molecular processes appear deterministic, with every signal, such as the presence of a nutrient or toxin, launching a pre-defined cascade of responses targeted at confronting new conditions. These processes lack an element of learning during the bacterial life span, and thus cannot be compared directly with complex animal and human semiosis, where individual learning plays a decisive role.

The determinism of the molecular clockwork was summarized in the dogma that genes determine the phenotype and not the other way around. As a result, the Modern Synthesis (MS) theory presented evolution as a mechanical process that starts with blind random variation of the genome, and ends with automatic selection of the fittest phenotypes. Although this theory may explain quantitative changes in already existing features, it certainly cannot describe the emergence of new organs or signaling pathways. The main deficiency of such explanations is that the exact correspondence between genotypes and phenotypes is postulated a priori. In other words, MS was built like Euclidean geometry, where questioning the foundational axioms will make the whole system fall, like a house of cards.

The discipline of biosemiotics has generated a new platform for explaining biological evolution. It considers that evolution is semiosis, a process of continuous interpretation and re-interpretation of hereditary signs alongside other signs that originate in the environment or the body.

Permission? To Do GOD's Work?

nature |  Scientists in London have been granted permission to edit the genomes of human embryos for research, UK fertility regulators announced. The 1 February approval by the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority (HFEA) represents the world's first endorsement of such research by a national regulatory authority.

"It’s an important first. The HFEA has been a very thoughtful, deliberative body that has provided rational oversight of sensitive research areas, and this establishes a strong precedent for allowing this type of research to go forward," says George Daley, a stem-cell biologist at Boston Children's Hospital in Massachusetts.

The HFEA has approved an application by developmental biologist Kathy Niakan, at the Francis Crick Institute in London, to use the genome-editing technique CRISPR–Cas9 in healthy human embryos. Niakan’s team is interested in early development, and it plans to alter genes that are active in the first few days after fertilization. The researchers will stop the experiments after seven days, after which the embryos will be destroyed.