With Intersectional "Allies" Like Ed Buck, Who Needs Nazi's for Enemies?

On our post a month ago about elite ritualistic sex and drug crime magick My Eyes Shut to Your Misdeeds Brother, friend of the blog Rohan dropped a dime on some sordid, degenerate intersectional skullduggery emanating from a prominent homosexual democratic party activist in west Hollywood. We pick up here where he left off...,

SacObserver |  The silence from L.A.’s Democratic community on the recent death of a 26-year-old Black gay male sex worker in the West Hollywood apartment of 63-year-old prominent Democratic political donor Ed Buck has been astounding.

Gemmel Moore’s July 27 death, was immediately classified as an accidental methamphetamine overdose by the coroner, but now the Sheriff’s Department is taking a closer look after his personal journal was published. Numerous young Black gay men have stepped forward making allegations against Buck recounting similar stories about a man who they say has a Tuskegee Experiment like fetish which includes shooting drugs into young Black men that he picks up off the street or via dating hookup websites.

In his journal, Gemmel Moore wrote, “I honestly don’t know what to do. I’ve become addicted to drugs and the worst one at that,” a December entry reads. “Ed Buck is the one to thank. He gave me my first injection of crystal meth it was very painful, but after all the troubles, I became addicted to the pain and fetish/fantasy.”

His last entry, dated Dec. 3, 2016, reads: “If it didn’t hurt so bad, I’d kill myself, but I’ll let Ed Buck do it for now.

Buck has given hundreds of thousands of dollars of Democratic causes and candidates over the years. His Facebook page boasts dozens of photos of him with everyone from presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to Governor Jerry Brown, Los Angeles County Democratic Party and California Democratic Party chairman Eric Bauman and even Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti.

In online ads soliciting young Black gay men, Buck has referred to them as being a “6-foot” n-word. On his Facebook page, he joked with friends using the n-word.

Typically in politics, we try to distance ourselves from white people who call Black people the n-word or use the n-word–not protect them with our silence.

Most of Los Angeles’ Democratic and LGBT community–which are often one in same–has had nothing to say publicly about Moore’s death. Politicians who have received thousands of dollars from Buck over the years have been curiously silent. I can count on one hand the number of people from the political party of allies, coalition building and we’re stronger together who have made a public call for a thorough investigation into Gemmel Moore’s death in light of the numerous allegations that have been made.

And while there was no shortage of politicians in Los Angeles falling over themselves to issue statements and be seen in the media condemning the events of Charlottesville and President Trump’s response to them–locally they have seemingly looked the other way and conveniently ignored that one of their top donors might be a serial predator who gets his kicks by drugging vulnerable young Black gay men.

Intersectionalism Suffocating On Its Own Fumes

theintercept |  Shortly after the 2016 election, Columbia University historian Mark Lilla published an op-ed in The New York Times lamenting that “American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.”

Lilla attacked “identity politics” as atomizing the American public and losing elections, contrasting it with a holistic variation of liberalism that powered the New Deal Coalition — Franklin Roosevelt’s Four Freedoms, which focused not so much on who individual Americans were, but what rights they all needed. The column went viral, sparking countless hot takes, and he quickly padded out the argument into enough words to call it a book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics.” Let the hot takes resume.

The reaction to Lilla’s original piece from left and liberal writers was harsh. In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Lilla’s Columbia University colleague Katherine Franke compared his ideology to that of former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s, arguing that “Duke is happy to own the white supremacy of his statements, while Lilla’s op-ed does the more nefarious background work of making white supremacy respectable.”

But while Lilla may be a white male professor in New York City, his concerns are hardly uncommon among those in left-liberal politics. For instance, former Democratic state representative LaDawn Jones — an African-American woman who chaired Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign in Georgia — lamented earlier this year that her party’s Atlanta convention seemed to offer caucuses and councils for every racial and affinity group except white people. In the state of Georgia, less than 25 percent of white voters choose Democrats at the ballot box, meaning that white Democrats are indeed a minority group. Would the logic of identity liberalism then dictate that the party design messaging aimed directly at them? Traditionally, identity liberalism justifies itself by organizing around groups that have been historically oppressed, but when traditional majority in-groups become out-groups in certain organizations and societies, is there a need for special categorization and organizing for their inclusion as well?

These are the sort of questions Lilla tries to wrestle with in the short book released this month. “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics” is a breezy 165 pages that he uses as a short overview of contemporary American political history and what he believes are the shortcomings of modern American liberalism.

The book is at its best when it is reviewing the strengths of modern conservative thought and liberal shortcomings — when Lilla reviews the towering political rhetoric of Ronald Reagan, who reset American politics, to his laments of over-reaching identity sectarianism on American campuses — but comes up much weaker when suggesting an alternative way forward.

TheNewYorker |   Now into the arena comes a distinctly more conservative brand of liberal and Trump opponent, Mark Lilla, a professor of the humanities at Columbia, who, on November 18th, published an Op-Ed in the Times declaring, “One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end.” His article, written while Clinton voters were still in a kind of disbelieving haze, outraged not a few readers of the paper with its blasts at “the fixation on diversity in our schools” and the “moral panic about racial, gender, and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force.” Lilla is hardly indifferent to injustices against women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community, and people of color, but he claims that too many liberals and leftists, indulging in a politics of “narcissism,” are “indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”

Lilla, who has expanded that article into his new, brief book, “The Once and Future Liberal: After Identity Politics,” insists that his is the pragmatic view: that in order to secure progress for overlooked and oppressed peoples—in order to advance a liberal economic, environmental, and social agenda—political power must be won, which means that elections must be won. At the moment, the Democratic Party—from elections for the White House to state legislatures—is failing. The Democrats, he says, were once the party of the working class; now the Democrats are largely a loose coalition of educated coastal élites and minorities. Why is it now possible to drive across the country for thousands of miles without hitting a blue state or county? How did the Democrats lose a decisive number of Obama voters to someone like Donald Trump? Lilla believes that identity politics is a central part of the answer.

When I read Lilla’s book and then talked with him for The New Yorker Radio Hour, I found much to disagree with, not least his cutting dismissals of “social-justice warriors” or movements like Black Lives Matter, which he sees as a “textbook example of how not to build solidarity.” Lilla was once an editor at The Public Interest and a neoconservative on domestic issues, though not on foreign policy; Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, and Daniel Patrick Moynihan were his elders and allies. He still writes with marked ambivalence and irritation about the contemporary left, particularly as he sees it on university campuses. Beverly Gage, Adam Gopnik, Michelle Goldberg, and others have already delivered serious critiques of Lilla’s argument about identity politics.

Manipulated Minorities

TheSaker |  Question: why does the US foreign policies always support various minorities? Is it out of kindness? Or a sense of fairness? Could it be out of a deep sense of guilt of having committed the only “pan-genocide” in human history (the genocide of all the ethnic groups of an entire continent)? Or maybe a deep sense of guilt over slavery? Are the beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” really inspiring US foreign policies?

Hardly.

I submit that the real truth is totally different. My thesis is very simple: the reason why the US always support foreign minorities to subvert states and use domestic minorities to suppress the majority US population is because minorities are very easy to manipulate and because minorities present no threat to the real rulers of the AngloZionist Empire. That’s all there is to it.

I think that minorities often, but not always, act and perceive things in a way very different from the way majority groups do. Here is what I have observed:

Let’s first look at minorities inside the USA:

1. They are typically far more aware of their minority identity/status than the majority. That is to say that if the majority is of skin color A and the minority of skin color B, the minority will be much more acutely aware of its skin color.
2. They are typically much more driven and active then the majority. This is probably due to their more acute perception of being a minority.
3. They are only concerned with single-issue politics, that single-issue being, of course, their minority status.
4. Since minorities are often unhappy with their minority-status, they are also often resentful of the majority.
5. Since minorities are mostly preoccupied by their minority-status linked issue, they rarely pay attention to the ‘bigger picture’ and that, in turn, means that the political agenda of the minorities typically does not threaten the powers that be.
6. Minorities often have a deep-seated inferiority complex towards the putatively more successful majority.
7. Minorities often seek to identify other minorities with which they can ally themselves against the majority.

To this list of characteristics, I would add one which is unique to foreign minorities, minorities outside the USA: since they have no/very little prospects of prevailing against the majority, these minorities are very willing to ally themselves with the AngloZionist Empire and that, in turn, often makes them depended on the AngloZionist Empire, often even for their physical survival.

Goy, Bye?

unz |  People close to power in the US know or feel the global hegemony. Its bearers are heavily Jewish liberal groups, who use their PC, their hostility to the Church, their approval of gender flux in order to undermine the mind and mentality of an ordinary American, of a redneck, of a working class Goy (as in the Goy, Bye headline). They ceaselessly tease and annoy this goy, in order to cause his premature acts of rebellion to be easily squashed. In order to spite the worker, they even put on the latest aircraft carrier only toilet bowls and no urinals ‚ to make it more comfortable for supposed transgenders and to enrage the rednecks.

 

The world globalists received a serious blow when their candidate Hillary Clinton lost the election, but they didn’t waste time and immediately mobilised for a fight. They aren’t going to give up hegemony. Practically all the media, judicial system, Congress, intelligence services are in their hands. Charlottesville provided an occasion to show rednecks in whose hands rests hegemony.

Hegemonists have their own storm troops – Antifa. This extremist movement was born in Germany. There they walk on the streets on the anniversary of Dresden bombings with Israeli flags and chant: “Death to Germany! Long live Bomber Harris” (the British commander of the Air Force, a big fan of the carpet bombing of Germany). They managed to terrorize the Germans: as soon as someone objects they call their opponent a Nazi and beat him up. And if they encounter resistance, the police comes to the rescue. That’s why in Germany resistance to the mass inflow of migrants was almost imperceptible. It is spoken about in the kitchen, but not on the streets.

And now Antifa came to America. They have the same mode of action as in Germany. Whoever is against them is a Nazi, or a “white racist”. They proved their mettle in Charlottesville, the city blessed with the Jewish mayor who chose the city police. Many Jewish activists came to participate, from as far as Boston. After the scuffle, the newspapers raised a hue and cry: Nazis attack Jews!

President Trump condemned both sides participating in the brawl‚ both white nationalists and Antifa. It is exactly what his opponents were waiting for. His attempt to stay above the brawl was doomed to defeat: liberal hegemonists immediately branded him a racist and neo-Nazi. Trump reminded them that not all defenders of the monument were white racists, but this argument didn’t work.

The public response to the dog-whistle “racist” was overwhelming. The Jews responded first. Rabbis said they do not want Trump to telephone them and greet them with the forthcoming Jewish High Holidays. 300 Jews, former Yale classmates of Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, imploring him to resign. (Aren’t there too many Jewish alumni in Yale? What about some diversity?)

A known Jewish writer Michael Chabon called upon Ivanka to kill her father, by magical means of going into full mourning for a still living President. Jews believe this should kill a living man as sure as a bullet. Chabon’s hysterical screed must be read to be believed. “Now you know [Trump is] an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a friend of the Jew-hating Klan,” he declared. And more and more Jews came in calling to impeach Trump the racist and anti-Semite.

However, non-Jews meekly followed while Jews played them like a fiddle. Industrialists resigned from the presidential council, generals issued a rebuke to their Commander-in-Chief, thousands of non-Jews participated in marches and demonstrations against “white racists”. In short, Jews played as a team, and they dictated the rules. Very, very few persons offered a learned defence of Trump. They would be ostracised, if they did, and Trump proved he is not going to stand for his friends. If his position on Flynn didn’t make it clear, his dismissal of Bannon supplied the sterling proof.

 

In the present political climate, you are not allowed to speak against the hegemonist view. If you do, you are a white racist, i.e. your opinion is not simply rejected, but it is declared as an unlawful and inadmissible view. This is what hegemony is: when an opposed view is delegitimised.

One can argue for racism (it is anyway better than greed, a mortal sin; it is a natural defence of a tribal territory), but it is a hard way, and quite futile. Before Trump the Racist, there was Trump the Russian Spy, and he was preceded by Trump the Pussy Grabber. New reasons for impeachment will be found, surely.

Pompeo Seeking License to Murder Assange...,

theintercept |  To legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who told The Intercept that he’s “quite critical” of WikiLeaks” behavior,” the “factual issue about just what WikiLeaks has done, what contacts it has and has had with adversaries of this country, and the like” should be separate from an official government designation:

The broader issue is whether our government should be designating any entity as a non-state hostile intelligence agency. I’m not sure of the intended consequences of such a designation but I’m pretty sure it could open WikiLeaks to threats and perhaps even violence. It has the sound of some official finding, which it is not, with some legal meaning to it, which it is not. So while I wouldn’t object to high ranking intelligence officials harshly criticizing WikiLeaks, I’d stay away from faux official designations.

Trevor Timm, Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, told The Intercept that “Ron Wyden is right that the WikiLeaks provision is unprecedented, vague, and potentially very dangerous”:

Regardless of whether you like or hate WikiLeaks, Congress singling out a publisher of information using a undefined and made up term like “non-state hostile intelligence service” to potentially stifle First Amendment rights and opening the door to more surveillance of sources should concern all journalists. It’s a shame more members of Congress do not see this obvious danger.

(Freedom of the Press Foundation receives funds from The Intercept’s parent company.)

In short, even if you think Julian Assange is a sleaze, or a liar, or a Putinist, and even if he were indeed all of those bad things, he’s also a publisher of authentic information he wasn’t supposed to have. A politically motivated publisher is still a publisher, and to deem one of them an enemy of the state would endanger any outlets working with or interested in materials and information they aren’t supposed to have–which in 2017 is almost all of them. From the Department of Justice to the White House to Congress, the anti-leaker sentiment is feverish, and the openly threatening language used against those who would publish true information unprecedented. WikiLeaks makes a tempting target for defenders of state secrecy because the website’s reputation is mostly in the mud once you get outside of Trumpland–but consider the consequences.

“Non-state hostile intelligence service” has no technical meaning–what would stop an outlet like the New York Times (or all of its peers and competitors) from being deemed the same based on its reporting of the same hacked emails?

What exactly is the legal status of a “non-state hostile intelligence service”? Would donating to WikiLeaks be considered providing material aid to an enemy?

What of the many reputable journalists who’ve worked with WikiLeaks in the past, from the New York Times to Der Spiegel? Are they now guilty of having collaborated with a “non-state hostile intelligence service”?

Were WikiLeaks to publish another truly groundbreaking and valuable release along the line of Manning’s, what then? Would journalists be free to glean stories from this enemy spy agency?

There aren’t any answers to these questions, making the language all risk with little upshot of reforming or changing Assange or WikiLeaks in any meaningful way. The much more likely outcome would be Assange treating the designation as a vindication, proof that he’s a victim of U.S. governmental persecution. It would not, however, do much to persuade him that Le Pen boosterism and bogus “spirit cooking” conspiracy theories aren’t in the public interest, but could do much to chill those around the world doing real work. Don’t give Assange, or Pompeo, the satisfaction.

Internet: Subverting Democracy? Nah.., Subverting Status Quo Hegemony? Maybe...,

TheNewYorker |  On the night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, took to her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were dismayed. Hayes himself remained up until midnight; then he, too, retired, convinced that his Democratic opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, would become the next President.

Hayes had indeed lost the popular vote, by more than two hundred and fifty thousand ballots. And he might have lost the Electoral College as well had it not been for the machinations of journalists working in the shady corners of what’s been called “the Victorian Internet.”

Chief among the plotters was an Ohioan named William Henry Smith. Smith ran the western arm of the Associated Press, and in this way controlled the bulk of the copy that ran in many small-town newspapers. The Western A.P. operated in tight affiliation—some would say collusion—with Western Union, which exercised a near-monopoly over the nation’s telegraph lines. Early in the campaign, Smith decided that he would employ any means necessary to assure a victory for Hayes, who, at the time, was serving a third term as Ohio’s governor. In the run-up to the Republican National Convention, Smith orchestrated the release of damaging information about the Governor’s rivals. Then he had the Western A.P. blare Hayes’s campaign statements and mute Tilden’s. At one point, an unflattering piece about Hayes appeared in the Chicago Times, a Democratic paper. (The piece claimed that Hayes, who had been a general in the Union Army, had accepted money from a soldier to give to the man’s family, but had failed to pass it on when the soldier died.) The A.P. flooded the wires with articles discrediting the story.

Once the votes had been counted, attention shifted to South Carolina, Florida, and Louisiana—states where the results were disputed. Both parties dispatched emissaries to the three states to try to influence the Electoral College outcome. Telegrams sent by Tilden’s representatives were passed on to Smith, courtesy of Western Union. Smith, in turn, shared the contents of these dispatches with the Hayes forces. This proto-hack of the Democrats’ private communications gave the Republicans an obvious edge. Meanwhile, the A.P. sought and distributed legal opinions supporting Hayes. (Outraged Tilden supporters took to calling it the “Hayesociated Press.”) As Democrats watched what they considered to be the theft of the election, they fell into a funk.

“They are full of passion and want to do something desperate but hardly know how to,” one observer noted. Two days before Hayes was inaugurated, on March 5, 1877, the New York Sun appeared with a black border on the front page. “These are days of humiliation, shame and mourning for every patriotic American,” the paper’s editor wrote.

History, Mark Twain is supposed to have said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Once again, the President of the United States is a Republican who lost the popular vote. Once again, he was abetted by shadowy agents who manipulated the news. And once again Democrats are in a finger-pointing funk.

Journalists, congressional committees, and a special counsel are probing the details of what happened last fall. But two new books contend that the large lines of the problem are already clear. As in the eighteen-seventies, we are in the midst of a technological revolution that has altered the flow of information. Now, as then, just a few companies have taken control, and this concentration of power—which Americans have acquiesced to without ever really intending to, simply by clicking away—is subverting our democracy.

Thirty years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown, however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy” (Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic. In his account, the new monopolies are even more powerful than the old ones, which tended to be limited to a single product or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would have been envious of the reach of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.

U.S. Patriot Act FUBARs Uruguay's Marijuana Legalization Effort

NYTimes |  Fighting drug trafficking was one of the main reasons the Uruguayan government gave for legalizing recreational marijuana. Officials spent years developing a complex regulatory framework that permits people to grow a limited supply of cannabis themselves or buy it at pharmacies for less than the black market rate. Lawmakers hoped that legal structure would undercut illicit marijuana cultivation and sales.

“There probably isn’t a trade in Uruguay today that is more controlled than cannabis sale,” Mr. Durán said.

As a candidate, President Trump said that American states should be free to chart their own courses on marijuana, and he promised to pare back regulation in the financial sector. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, however, has been a sharp critic of legalization and has compared marijuana to heroin.

Now, some members of the cannabis industry wonder whether the United States government will resolve the conflict between its banking laws and the expanding patchwork of measures to legalize recreational and medical marijuana use around the world. The guidance from the Obama administration, issued by the Justice and Treasury Departments in a pair of memos in 2014, addressed the matter domestically but not for international banking.

“Uruguay may be the tip of the iceberg,” said Mr. Robison, the Colorado lawyer who specializes in marijuana regulation.

Pharmacists in Uruguay were incredulous to learn that their bank accounts could be shut down, considering the years of study and planning that preceded the start of retail marijuana sales last month. The country’s marijuana law was passed in 2013.

“We can’t understand how the government didn’t have the foresight to anticipate this,” said Gabriel Bachini, a pharmacy owner in the coastal city of Colonia.

Since sales began, the number of registered buyers in Uruguay has more than doubled. As of Aug. 15, more than 12,500 people had enrolled in a system that verifies customers’ identities with fingerprint scanners and allows them to buy up to 40 grams per month (at a price of about $13 for 10 grams, enough for about 15 joints, advocates say). Under the law, only Uruguayan citizens and legal permanent residents are allowed to buy or grow marijuana.

“Demand has been very strong,” Mr. Bachini said. “People are thrilled that they no longer have to go to private homes or venture out into neighborhoods” to get marijuana.

In emailed statements, the Treasury and Justice Departments said that their earlier guidance was still being applied. But banking and legal experts say the Trump administration has yet to lay down clear markers on this area of policy.

Officials in Uruguay are hopeful that American lawmakers will pass legislation allowing banks to do business with marijuana sellers in states and countries where it is regulated. Representative Ed Perlmutter, Democrat of Colorado, introduced a bill in April that would do that, but marijuana advocates say they do not expect a prompt legislative change.

In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power

tomdispatch |  Alfred McCoy’s new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, won’t officially be published until September, but it's already getting extraordinary attention.  That would include Jeremy Scahill’s powerful podcast interview with McCoy at the Intercept, a set of striking prepublication notices (Kirkus Reviews: "Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike"), and an impressive range of blurbs (Andrew Bacevich: “This is history with profound relevance to events that are unfolding before our eyes”; Ann Jones: “eye-opening... America’s neglected citizens would do well to read this book”; Oliver Stone: “One of our best and most underappreciated historians takes a hard look at the truth of our empire, both its covert activities and the reasons for its impending decline”).  Of him, Scahill has said, “Al McCoy has guts... He helped put me on the path to investigative journalism.”  In today’s post, adapted by McCoy from the introduction to In the Shadows of the American Century, you’ll get a taste of just what Scahill means.  So read it and then pre-order a copy of the latest book from the man who battled the CIA and won.

 

When historian Alfred McCoy began his long journey to expose some of the darkest secrets of the U.S. national security establishment, America was embroiled in wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.  Almost 50 years later, the United States is, in one way or another, involved in so many more conflicts from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to Libya, Somalia, the Lake Chad region of Africa, and the Philippines.

To understand how the U.S. went from three interventions that actually ended to a proliferating collection of quasi-wars seemingly without end would require a detailed map to guide you through some of the thorniest wilds of American foreign policy.  Luckily, McCoy is still on the case with his buzz-generating blockbuster-to-be: In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.

He first stumbled upon some of the secrets of the national security state when, in the early 1970s, he started down Southeast Asia’s “heroin trail” and into a shadow world of black ops, mercenaries, and drug lords.  It’s a tale fit for a John le Carré novel or, better yet, a seedy bar where the air is hot and still, the customers are rough, and the drinks strong. If TomDispatch regular McCoy told you his story over a whiskey, you’d be obliged to buy the next round.  It’s that kind of tale.  Today, however, you’re in luck and he shares it with you for free. 

Asian Wars and Information Regimes

The Making of the U.S. Internal Security Apparatus

The History of the Southeast Asian Drug Trade

Carbon Based: Carbon Fiber Chassis Electric Vehicle on Goodyear 360's

PopularMechanics |  The tire of the future is a ball. An unbelievably sophisticated, nature-inspired, magnetic-levitation-infused ball. Goodyear just revealed its vision for a concept tire that's intended for the self-driving car of tomorrow. It's called Eagle-360, and it's totally round.

Why put a car on a quartet of glorified mouse trackballs? Goodyear says the 3D-printed tires will have a larger contact patch with the ground, allowing for more control. The design lets the tires hurl water away via centrifugal force. But the big reason is that spherical tires can be essentially omnidirectional.

PopularMechanics |  Stronger than steel and a fraction of the weight, carbon fiber is a brilliant invention. Has been for decades. Junior Johnson was building rule-bending Nascar racers out of the stuff back in the '80s. But even with all that time to come up with new sourcing and production methods, carbon fiber just won't stop being expensive. The cheapest new car with a carbon-fiber tub, the Alfa Romeo 4C, is sized for Stuart Little, yet costs as much as a Mercedes E-Class. And the real chariots of the carbon gods, the McLarens and Koenigseggs and Lamborghini Aventadors of the world, are strictly six-figure propositions. We still haven't managed to mass-produce the stuff at anything approaching the price of aluminum, let alone steel. Why hasn't anyone figured out how to make this stuff cost less?

That question is why I'm here in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, at Lamborghini's carbon-fiber facility, laboriously squeegeeing air bubbles out of a sheet of carbon weave. I want to ask the guys in (black) lab coats who make this material: Why aren't we rolling around in carbon-monocoque Hyundais?

Carbon Based: Nanotubes and Vantablack

wikipedia |  Carbon nanotubes (CNTs) are allotropes of carbon with a cylindrical nanostructure. These cylindrical carbon molecules have unusual properties, which are valuable for nanotechnology, electronics, optics and other fields of materials science and technology. Owing to the material's exceptional strength and stiffness, nanotubes have been constructed with length-to-diameter ratio of up to 132,000,000:1,^[1] significantly larger than for any other material.

In addition, owing to their extraordinary thermal conductivity, mechanical, and electrical properties, carbon nanotubes find applications as additives to various structural materials. For instance, nanotubes form a tiny portion of the material(s) in some (primarily carbon fiber) baseball bats, golf clubs, car parts or damascus steel.^[2][3]

Nanotubes are members of the fullerene structural family. Their name is derived from their long, hollow structure with the walls formed by one-atom-thick sheets of carbon, called graphene. These sheets are rolled at specific and discrete ("chiral") angles, and the combination of the rolling angle and radius decides the nanotube properties; for example, whether the individual nanotube shell is a metal or semiconductor. Nanotubes are categorized as single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs). Individual nanotubes naturally align themselves into "ropes" held together by van der Waals forces, more specifically, pi-stacking.

Applied quantum chemistry, specifically, orbital hybridization best describes chemical bonding in nanotubes. The chemical bonding of nanotubes involves entirely sp²-hybrid carbon atoms. These bonds, which are similar to those of graphite and stronger than those found in alkanes and diamond (which employ sp³-hybrid carbon atoms), provide nanotubes with their unique strength.

wikipedia |   Vantablack is a substance made of vertically aligned carbon nanotube arrays^[1] and is one of the blackest artificial substances^[2] known, absorbing up to 99.965% of radiation in the visible spectrum.^[3][4]

Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical tubes which are "grown" on a substrate using a modified chemical vapor deposition process (CVD). When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off, it becomes trapped and is continually deflected among the tubes, eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat.^[1]

Vantablack was an improvement over similar substances developed at the time. Vantablack absorbs 99.965% of visible light. It can be created at 400 °C (752 °F); NASA had previously developed a similar substance, but that can only be grown at 750 °C (1,380 °F). For this reason, Vantablack can be grown on materials that cannot withstand higher temperatures.^[1]

The outgassing and particle fallout levels of Vantablack are low. The high levels in similar substances in the past had prevented their commercial usefulness. Vantablack also has greater resistance to mechanical vibration, and has greater thermal stability.^[6]

Carbon-Based: Graphene

wikipedia |  Graphene (/ˈɡræf.iːn/)^[1][2] is an allotrope of carbon in the form of a two-dimensional, atomic-scale, hexagonal lattice in which one atom forms each vertex. It is the basic structural element of other allotropes, including graphite, charcoal, carbon nanotubes and fullerenes. It can be considered as an indefinitely large aromatic molecule, the ultimate case of the family of flat polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons.

Graphene has many unusual properties. It is about 200 times stronger than the strongest steel. It efficiently conducts heat and electricity and is nearly transparent.^[3] Graphene shows a large and nonlinear diamagnetism,^[4] greater than graphite and can be levitated by neodymium magnets.

Scientists have theorized about graphene for years. It has unintentionally been produced in small quantities for centuries, through the use of pencils and other similar graphite applications. It was originally observed in electron microscopes in 1962, but it was studied only while supported on metal surfaces.^[5] The material was later rediscovered, isolated, and characterized in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester.^[6][7] Research was informed by existing theoretical descriptions of its composition, structure, and properties.^[8] This work resulted in the two winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene."^[9]

The global market for graphene reached $9 million by 2012 with most sales in the semiconductor, electronics, battery energy, and composites industries.^[10]

 

NewYorker |  Perhaps the most expansive thinker about the material’s potential is Tomas Palacios, a Spanish scientist who runs the Center for Graphene Devices and 2D Systems, at M.I.T. Rather than using graphene to improve existing applications, as Tour’s lab mostly does, Palacios is trying to build devices for a future world.

At thirty-six, Palacios has an undergraduate’s reedy build and a gentle way of speaking that makes wildly ambitious notions seem plausible. As an electrical engineer, he aspires to “ubiquitous electronics,” increasing “by a factor of one hundred” the number of electronic devices in our lives. From the perspective of his lab, the world would be greatly enhanced if every object, from windows to coffee cups, paper currency, and shoes, were embedded with energy harvesters, sensors, and light-emitting diodes, which allowed them to cheaply collect and transmit information. “Basically, everything around us will be able to convert itself into a display on demand,” he told me, when I visited him recently. Palacios says that graphene could make all this possible; first, though, it must be integrated into those coffee cups and shoes.

As Mody pointed out, radical innovation often has to wait for the right environment. “It’s less about a disruptive technology and more about moments when the linkages among a set of technologies reach a point where it’s feasible for them to change lots of practices,” he said. “Steam engines had been around a long time before they became really disruptive. What needed to happen were changes in other parts of the economy, other technologies linking up with the steam engine to make it more efficient and desirable.”

For Palacios, the crucial technological complement is an advance in 3-D printing. In his lab, four students were developing an early prototype of a printer that would allow them to create graphene-based objects with electrical “intelligence” built into them. Along with Marco de Fazio, a scientist from STMicrolectronics, a firm that manufactures ink-jet print heads, they were clustered around a small, half-built device that looked a little like a Tinkertoy contraption on a mirrored base. “We just got the printer a couple of weeks ago,” Maddy Aby, a ponytailed master’s student, said. “It came with a kit. We need to add all the electronics.” She pointed to a nozzle lying on the table. “This just shoots plastic now, but Marco gave us these print heads that will print the graphene and other types of inks.”

American Sheeple Can ALWAYS Be Depended Upon To Play Themselves...,

Alt-Market |  The false left/right paradigm is an often misunderstood concept. Many people who are aware of it sometimes wrongly assume that it asserts the claim that there is "no left or right political spectrum;" that it is all a farce. This is incorrect. In regular society there is indeed a political spectrum among the general populace from socialism/communism/big government (left) to conservatism/free markets/individualism/small government (right). Each citizen sits somewhere on the scale between these two dynamics. The left/right spectrum is in fact real for the average person.

We do not find a " false" paradigm until we examine the beliefs and behaviors of the elitist and political classes. For many banking oligarchs and high level politicians, there is no loyalty to a particular political party or an identifiable "left" or "right" ideology. Many of these people are happy to exploit both sides of the spectrum, if they can, to achieve the goals of globalism; a separate ideology that doesn't really serve the interests of groups on the left or the right. That is to say, globalists pretend as if they care about one side or the other on occasion, but in truth they could not care less about the success of either. They only care about the success of their own exclusive elitist club.

This reality also tends to apply to national loyalty as well. Globalists do not carry any ideological love for any particular nation or culture. They are more than happy to sacrifice and sabotage a country if the action will gain them greater power or centralization in return. A globalist is only "Democrat" or "Republican," or American or Russian or Chinese or European, etc., insofar as the label gets them something that they want.

The reason globalists and the people that work for them adopt certain labels is because through this they can act as gatekeepers and better manipulate the masses. The hot button issue of the week provides us with a case in point...

The organizer of the "Unite The Right" group during the Charlottesville circus, which ended in one death and numerous injured, happened to be an ideological playmate of the extreme left only a year ago. Jason Kessler seemed to come out of nowhere as a leading figure in the white identity or "white nationalist" movement in 2017, but in 2016, he was an avid supporter of Barack Obama, and before that, an active champion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I suppose anyone can change their ideological worldview over time, but I'm certainly not stupid enough to believe that Jason Kessler went from hardcore leftist to white nationalist in less than a year. Though it cannot be proven conclusively that Kessler is a provocateur, he certainly idolized the position. Kessler is quoted in his own blog on December 12, 2015, (now shut down but archived) as stating:

"I can't think of any occupation I admire more than the professional provocateur, who has the courage and self-determination to court controversy despite all the slings and arrows of the world."

This is not the first time white nationalists have been exploited by agent provocateurs to make the "political right" in general look bad. And, it is certainly not the first time white nationalists have been discovered to be working directly for the federal government. Klu Klux Klan leader Bill Wilkinson openly admitted to being a FBI informant and cooperator in 1981. Hal Turner, a white supremacist radio personality notorious for calling for the deaths of judges and lawmakers, turned out to be a provocateur paid by the FBI to drum up extremism. He was exposed in 2009 after his arrest led to his admission that almost everything he did was "at the behest of the Federal Bureau of Investigations..."

Why would the government seek to instigate white nationalist groups into violence? Well, you have to examine the larger narrative here.

Anti-conservative propaganda has been overwhelmingly one-track over the past several years. If you are well educated on the activities of deceit machines like the Southern Poverty Law Center, you understand that the thrust of all of their operations has been to tie white nationalism directly to conservative organizations even if there is no connection. I call this "guilt by false association." Keep in mind that the SPLC cooperates closely with government agencies like the DHS and their "Working Group To Counter Violent Extremism" to create profiling techniques to identify "right wing extremists." Meaning, their skewed propaganda is often what the media and government agencies use as a reference when writing articles or implementing policy.

The SPLC is inseparable from the mainstream media and government agendas dealing with conservatives.

In order to justify the madness and violence of the left in recent months, it is more important than ever for the establishment to maintain the lie that conservatives are also all violent racists and "fascists" that need to be destroyed. Propaganda alone is rarely enough to make such notions stick in the public consciousness. Sometimes, provocateurs are needed to "stir the pot."

However, this is only half the equation of the American civil war being engineered before our eyes.

Looking Clearly at Not-Seeism

thebulletin |  Five years ago the US Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland Environment Threat Analysis Division released an assessment of US far-right extremism. Initially intended for law enforcement and intelligence agencies only, the report—“Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”—was almost immediately leaked. The report warned that small cells practicing “leaderless resistance” and “white supremacist lone wolves [posed] the most significant domestic terrorist threat.” Significantly, it highlighted the likelihood of expanded attempts by far-right extremists “to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities.” Overall, the report warned of trends similar to “the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a resurgence.” That far-right extremist rally reached a violent crescendo with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995.

Reflecting on the past five years, a leading far-right extremism expert I recently interviewed described the homeland security report as “prophetic.” Mark Pitcavage, the Anti-Defamation League’s director of investigative research, explained that most of the warnings in the 2009 report have become realities. Yet at the time of its release, the document was derided by many inside and outside of government as “ridiculous [and] deeply offensive,” an “inconceivable” assault on US veterans, and, in general, “a piece of crap.” Buckling under political pressure from conservatives, homeland security rapidly repressed the report. Promptly removed from department's website, the tabooed document also disappeared from the computer systems of state and local law enforcement divisions as well as federal intelligence agencies. The homeland security unit responsible for the report was virtually muzzled. The report essentially fell into obscurity.

The report’s demise was an unfortunate loss for all levels of law enforcement. Since its release, credible plots and attacks by violent extremists have surged. As the report forewarned, responsibility for the vast majority of these events lies with far-right individual extremists and extreme groups. Moreover, veteran and active-duty military personnel, when compared to the general population, were disproportionally involved in far-right extremist incidents. In just the first two months following the report, significant attacks occurred via the hands of major components of far-right extremism. For example, in May 2009, a “soldier” in the Christian terrorist anti-abortion network Army of God assassinated Kansas late-term abortion provider George Tiller. One day earlier, members of an anti-immigrant vigilante group—the Minutemen American Defense—invaded the home of an Arizona Latino and his 9-year-old daughter. Both were killed as part of a plan aimed at securing money to fund the group’s anti-immigrant terrorist operations. Less than two weeks later an octogenarian white supremacist shot and killed a security guard at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Reflecting the conspiracy theories adhered to by many white supremacists, hand-written notes found in his car read, “The Holocaust is a lie… Obama was created by Jews… Jews captured America’s money. Jews control the mass media.”

Persistent Infiltration Normative Since the Clinton Administration

military |  A 2008 FBI assessment titled "White Supremacist Recruitment of Military Personnel since 9/11" found just over 200 identifiable neo-Nazis with military training.

Military experience "ranging from failure at basic training to success in special operations forces" was evident throughout the white supremacist movement, the report said.

"FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the federal government, Jews, and people of color," the report added.

In 2009, a security analyst with the Department of Homeland Security, Daryl Johnson, alerted local police departments to a rising risk of terrorist attacks by the extremist right. The department "is concerned that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities," the report said.

Johnson's report, issued just after the election of Barack Obama, set off a conservative media firestorm that claimed it disparaged troops and law-abiding conservatives. The report was pulled and Johnson's office was shut down.

The same year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, another group that tracks extremist groups, compiled a list of 40 users of a white supremacist social networking website who identified themselves as active-duty military and asked Congressional committees to pressure the Pentagon to crack down.

"In the wake of several high-profile murders by extremists of the radical right, we urge your committees to investigate the threat posed by racial extremists who may be serving in the military to ensure that our armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic terrorists," group co-founder Morris Dees wrote to the legislators.

Haverstick said it's important to remember that "the overwhelming majority of servicemembers are honorable, law-abiding, disciplined patriots who represent the very best of America's population."

No anti-extremist group has disputed that assertion. Still, military veterans have been conspicuous in some of the most horrific right-wing extremist attacks, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168 people to the 2012 killings of six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.

Johnson, now a security consultant, said that the number of military white supremacists is relatively small. But he said veterans comprise a significant part of the militia movement that sprung up after the Obama election.  Fist tap Bro. Makheru.

The Awan Indictment is an Exercise in Prosecutorial Omission

NationalReview |  To summarize, the indictment is an exercise in omission. No mention of the Awan group’s theft of information from Congress. Not a hint about the astronomical sums the family was paid, much of it for no-show “work.” Not a word about Wasserman Schultz’s keeping Awan on the payroll for six months during which (a) he was known to be under investigation, (b) his wife was known to have fled to Pakistan, and (c) he was not credentialed to do the IT work for which he had been hired. Nothing about Wasserman Schultz’s energetic efforts to prevent investigators from examining Awan’s laptop. A likely currency-transportation offense against Alvi goes uncharged. And, as for the offenses that are charged, prosecutors plead them in a manner that avoids any reference to what should be their best evidence. 

There is something very strange going on here.

On Alleged Russian Hacking the MSM was and Still is Colluding with the DNC

WashingtonTimes |  The conventional wisdom that last year’s Democratic National Committee computer hack, which triggered WikiLeaks to release thousands of emails revealing Democratic Party favoritism of Hillary Clinton over Bernard Sanders, was conducted by Russian operatives is facing increasing scrutiny.

Theories once considered fringe and extreme have begun entering the mainstream, with a prominent group of former NSA and CIA officials claiming the hack that rocked the 2016 presidential election was not actually a hack at all but rather a leak by an insider with physical access to the DNC computer network.

Speculation around the claim by the group, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), is also being fueled by investigators re-examining statements by key players in the drama, including former President Barack Obama and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose carefully chosen words on the hack have drawn fresh attention.

A research memo compiled by VIPS last month directly conflicts with the U.S. intelligence community’s January claim that it was Russian operatives who orchestrated the cyberattack on the DNC network.

The memo, which the group sent to President Trump last month under the title “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?” — investigates metadata and data transfer speeds found in the records of the alleged Russian cyberintrusion into DNC computers.

Democrat IT Staffers Compromised Sensitive Data to Foreign Intelligence

NYPost |  Federal authorities are investigating whether sensitive data was stolen from congressional offices by several Pakistani-American tech staffers and sold to Pakistani or Russian intelligence, knowledgeable sources say.

What started out 16 months ago as a scandal involving the alleged theft of computer equipment from Congress has turned into a national security investigation involving FBI surveillance of the suspects.

Investigators now suspect that sensitive US government data — possibly including classified information — could have been compromised and may have been sold to hostile foreign governments that could use it to blackmail members of Congress or even put their lives at risk.

“This is a massive, massive scandal,” a senior US official familiar with the widening probe told The Post.

Alarm bells went off in April 2016 when computer security officials in the House reported “irregularities” in computer equipment purchasing. An internal investigation revealed the theft of hundreds of thousands of dollars in government property, and evidence pointed to five IT staffers and the Democratic Congress members’ offices that employed them.

The evidence was turned over to the House inspector general, who found so much “smoke” that she recommended a criminal probe, sources say. The case was turned over to Capitol Police in October.

When the suspected IT workers couldn’t produce the missing invoiced equipment, sources say, they were removed from working on the computer network in early February.

During the probe, investigators found valuable government data that is believed to have been taken from the network and placed on offsite servers, setting off more alarms. Some 80 offices were potentially compromised.

Most lawmakers fired the alleged “ringleader” — longtime IT staffer Imran Awan — in February. But Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the former Democratic National Committee chief, kept Awan on her payroll until his arrest last month on seemingly unrelated charges of defrauding the congressional credit union.