What's The Matter With John Brennan?

theburningplatform |  Putin moved against the so-called “oligarch’s, a mainly Jewish gang of ex-Communists who were in the forefront of looting the country.  Those he did not chase off to London (where you can see their greasy mugs swilling in the best restaurants, hookers on each arm) he placed under firm control.  He reorganized the economy for Russia’s benefit, not ours.  Meddling?  The United States and various European countries sent in armies of international do-gooders and busy bodies to undermine the Russian government and, among other things, promote the homosexual agenda and corrupt Russian youth.  Loudmouth journalists, the Russian equivalents of Bill Maher, Rachel Maddow, Anderson Cooper, Trevor Noah and similar troublemakers (“pro-democracy” activists, all of them) were put on a leash.  Most surprisingly for me, and effectively for Putin, he restored the Russian Orthodox Church to its former importance and influence, a very Russian thing to do.  Is Putin a real Christian?  I don’t know.  Go ask him.  If it is merely a cynical ploy it has worked.  I might add that I admire the Russian Orthodox Church.  It is one of the few Christian churches that has rejected the filth and garbage of the modern world and remains focused on its real job, saving souls.  There are no faggot priests in it, I can tell you that.  Orthodox priests marry.

Putin shrewdly decided to focus on quality rather than quantity in his rebuilding of the Russian military.  If news reports are accurate (and I sure as hell hope they are not) the Russians have developed new generations of weapons against which we have no real defense.  China has done exactly the same thing.

There is no reason at all to believe that Russia has any intention of actually using those weapons against us in some new Pearl Harbor.  That being the case, Putin has made it crystal clear that he will not allow Russia to be pushed around.  Where is his redline?  Who knows?  I don’t want to find out.

The sight of a rejuvenated Russia, proud, controlling its own economy, conducting its won foreign policy in what it believes to be its own interests, throwing pedophiles and other perverts in jail, running foreign subversives out of the place, arresting or exiling Jewish gangsters, well, all of this is just too much for the globalists and the Neo-Con’s to take.

Then comes Trump!  Who woulda thunk it?  I seriously doubt if a single senior Russian ever imagined that Trump would emerge as a presidential candidate.  Did you?

This man, seen by the self-proclaimed elites of the U.S. and Europe as a turd in their punchbowl, is by any measure the most extraordinary person ever to occupy the White House.

Trump is not a Russian agent, he has not been blackmailed, he is not selling out the U.S., his interest in improving ties with Russia has nothing to do with his personal business empire, he did not have two Russian whores do pee-pee on Obama’s mattress.   Any person who claims to believe any of these things should be immediately marked down as either a fool, a Jew with an irrational ancestral hatred of Russia, a globalist, a Neo-Con, a leftist angry that Putin and Trump are both standing up for traditional culture (though neither are saints themselves), or somebody who either lost out on the Great Russia Piñata of the early 1990’s or fears that Russia will in some way hit them in the pocketbook, directly or indirectly.

There are several interest groups desperate to stop the building of a rational, normal, civilized relationship between the United States and Russia.  They include:

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An Opportunity to Rethink

unz |  Putin’s problem is the hybrid warfare carried out by the United States against Russia. Despite accusations you hear in your media (alleged Russian ads in the Facebook and Twitter influencing voters), American pressure on Russia is very real and very painful. American officials try to wreck every international deal Russia attempts to clinch. It is not only, or even mainly about weapons. If a country A wants to sell Russians, say, bananas, the US ambassador will come to A’s king, or his minister, and will expressly forbid him to sell bananas to godless Russians. Otherwise, do not expect the US aid, or do not count on US favours in your disputes with your neighbours, or the US won’t buy your production, or US banks will take another long and jaundiced view at your financial transactions. You witnessed the scene, when the crazed Nikki Haley, the US Ambassador to the UN, threatened sovereign nations with severe punishment for voting against the US desires, so you have an idea of American delicacy and caution while pushing their will through.

Russians are in a very uncomfortable seat. All their neighbours are subject to American pressure to annoy Russia, be it Georgia (once they even attacked Russia militarily being led by American and Israeli advisers) or the Ukraine (Americans arranged a coup d’état and installed extremely hostile to Russia government in Kiev). American military bases surround Russia and NATO troops drew closer and closer to its centres. American military budget of 600 billion dollars dwarfs the Russian one, while the armaments’ race can undermine Russian finances. If Russia were a woman, she would scream: stop it!

Perhaps our colleague Mr Andrei Martyanov is right and the US can’t destroy Russia militarily; perhaps Immanuel Wallerstein is correct and American power is in decline; but meanwhile the US is perfectly able to make life hard and difficult for any state. It made life unbearably hard for North Korea, extremely hard for Iran. Russia is not doing half as good as she could do without ceaseless American meddling.

President Putin would like Trump to relent. There is no reason for this incessant picking on Russia; it is not Communist anymore; it is much smaller and less populous than the former USSR; it wants to live in peace as a member of the family of nations, not as a great alternative. The anti-Russian offensive began in earnest in the days of previous US presidents, namely Obama and Clinton; so it would make sense for Trump to stop it.

Problem is, President Trump is also actively engaged in war against Russia. Just a few days ago he pressured the German Chancellor to give up on the North Stream-2, to stop buying Russian gas. His advisers demanded that Turkey desist from buying a Russian antimissile system. The US Air Force bombed Russian troops in Syria.

Still Putin made a good try. He proposed to hold a referendum in the Donbas area of Eastern Ukraine which is presently independent though lacking international recognition. The people of Donbas had their own referendum in 2014, and voted for independence; Kiev regime and its Western sponsors denied its validity as it was done under Russian army’s protection, they claimed. Now Putin proposed a re-run under international auspices.

The Untouchable Bill Browder

unz |  Enter Mr Andrey Nekrasov, a Russian dissident filmmaker. He made a few films considered to be highly critical of Russian government. He alleged the FSB blew up houses in Moscow in order to justify the Chechnya war. He condemned the Russian war against Georgia in 2008, and had been given a medal by Georgian authorities. He did not doubt the official Western version of Browder-Magnitsky affair, and decided to make a film about the noble American businessman and the brave Russian lawyer fighting for human rights. The European organisations and parliamentarians provided the budget for the film. They also expected the film to denounce Putin and glorify Magnitsky, the martyr.

However, while making the film, Mr Nekrasov had his Road to Damascus moment. He realised that the whole narrative was hinging on the unsubstantiated words of Mr Browder. After painstaking research, he came to some totally different conclusions, and in his version, Browder was a cheat who run afoul of law, while Magnitsky was his sidekick in those crimes.

Nekrasov discovered an interview Magnitsky gave in his jail. In this interview, the accountant said he was afraid Browder would kill him to prevent him from denouncing Browder, and would make him his scapegoat. It turned out Browder tried to bribe the journalist who made the interview to have these words expunged. Browder was the main beneficiary of the accountant’s death, realised Nekrasov, while his investigators were satisfied with Magnitsky’s collaboration with them.

Nekrasov could not find any evidence that Magnitsky tried to investigate the misdeeds of government officials. He was too busy covering his own tax evasion. And instead of fitting his preconceived notions, Nekrasov made the film about what he learned. (Here are some details of Nekrasov’s film)

While the screening in the EU Parliament was been stopped by the powerful Mr Browder, in Washington DC the men are made of sterner stuff. Despite Browder’s threats the film was screened, presented by the best contemporary American investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, who is 80 if a day, and still going strong. One has to recognise that the US is second to none for freedom of speech on the globe.

What makes Browder so powerful? He invests in politicians. This is probably a uniquely Jewish quality: Jews outspend everybody in contributions to political figures. The Arabs will spend more on horses and jets, the Russians prefer real estate, the Jews like politicians. The Russian NTV channel reported that Browder lavishly financed the US lawmakers. Here they present alleged evidence of money transfers: some hundred thousand dollars was given by Browder’s structures officially to the senators and congressmen in order to promote the Magnitsky Act.

Much bigger sums were transferred via good services of Brothers Ziff, mega-rich Jewish American businessmen, said the researchers in two articles published on the Veteran News Network and in The Huffington Post.

These two articles were taken off the sites very fast under pressure of Browder’s lawyers, but they are available in the cache. They disclose the chief beneficiary of Browder’s generosity. This is Senator Ben Cardin, a Democrat from Maryland. He was the engine behind Magnitsky Act legislation to such an extent that the Act has been often called the Cardin List. Cardin is a fervent supporter of Hillary Clinton, also a cold warrior of good standing. More to a point, Cardin is a prominent member of Israel Lobby.

Browder affair is a heady upper-class Jewish cocktail of money, spies, politicians and international crime. Almost all involved figures appear to be Jewish, not only Browder, Brothers Ziff and Ben Cardin. Even his enemy, the beneficiary of the scam that (according to Browder) took over his Russian assets is another Jewish businessman Dennis Katsiv (he had been partly exonerated by a New York court as is well described in this thoughtful piece).

Browder began his way to riches under the patronage of a very rich and very crooked Robert Maxwell, a Czech-born Jewish businessman who assumed a Scots name. Maxwell stole a few million dollars from his company pension fund before dying in mysterious circumstances on board of his yacht in the Atlantic. It was claimed by a member of Israeli Military Intelligence, Ari Ben Menashe, that Maxwell had been a Mossad agent for years, and he also said Maxwell tipped the Israelis about Israeli whistle-blower Mordecai Vanunu. Vanunu was kidnapped and spent many years in Israeli jails.

Why Would Victims of Globalization Be Loyal And Patriotic Servants Of Globalism?

nakedcapitalism |  The term “economic shock therapy” is based on an analogy with electroshock therapy for mental patients. One important analysis of it comes from Naomi Klein, who became famous explaining in 2000 the system of fashion production through subsidiaries that don’t adhere to the safety rules taken so seriously in Western countries (some of you may recall the scandal of Benetton and Rana Plaza, where more than a thousand workers at a Bangladesh factory producing Benetton (and other) clothes were crushed under a collapsing building).

Klein analyzes a future (already here to some degree) in which multinational corporations freely fish from one market or another in an effort to find the most suitable (i.e. cheapest) labor force. Sometimes relocating from one nation to another is not possible, but if you can bring the job market of other countries here in the form of a low-cost mass of people competing for employment, then why bother?

The Doctrine in Practice

Continuing flows of low-cost labor can be useful for cutting costs. West Germany successfully absorbed East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but the dirty secret of this achievement is the exploitation of workers from the former East, as Reuters reports.

The expansion of the EU to Poland (and the failed attempt to incorporate the Ukraine) has allowed many European businesses to shift local production to nations where the average cost of a blue or white collar worker is much lower (by 60-70% on average) than in Western European countries.

We see further evidence of damage to the European middle class daily, from France where the (at least verbally) pro-globalization Macron is cutting social welfare to attract foreign investment, to Germany where many ordinary workers are seriously exploited. And so on through the UK and Italy.

Political Reactions

The migrant phenomenon is a perfect counterpoint to a threadbare middle class, given its role as a success story within the narrative of globalization.

Economic migrants are eager to obtain wealth on the level of the Western middle class – and this is of course a legitimate desire. However, to climb the social ladder, they are willing to do anything: from accepting low albeit legal salaries to picking tomatoes illegally (as Alessandro Gassman, son of the famous actor, reminded us).

The middle class is a silent mass that for many years has painfully digested globalization, while believing in the promises of globalist politicians,” explains Luciano Ghelfi, a journalist of international affairs who has followed Lega from its beginnings. Ghelfi continues:

This mirage has fallen under the blows it has received from the most serious economic crisis since the Second World War. Foreign trade, easy credit (with the American real estate bubble of 2008 as a direct consequence), peace missions in Libya (carried out by pro-globalization French and English actors, with one motive being in my opinion the diversion of energy resources away from [the Italian] ENI) were supposed to have created a miracle; they have in reality created a climate of global instability.

Italy is of course not untouched by this phenomenon. It’s easy enough to give an explanation for the Five Stars getting votes from part of the southern electorate that is financially in trouble and might hope for some sort of subsidy, but the North? The choice of voting center right (with a majority leaning toward Lega) can be explained in only one way – the herd (the middle class) has tried to rise up.

I asked him, “So in your opinion, is globalization in stasis? Or is it radically changing?”

He replied:

I think unrestrained globalization has taken a hit. In Italy as well, as we have seen recently, businesses are relocating abroad. And the impoverished middle class finds itself forced to compete for state resources (subsidies) and jobs which can be threatened by an influx of economic migrants towards which enormous resources have been dedicated – just think of the 4.3 billion Euros that the last government allocated toward economic migrants.

This is an important element in the success of Lega: it is a force that has managed to understand clearly the exhaustion of the impoverished middle class, and that has proposed a way out, or has at least elaborated a vision opposing the rose-colored glasses of globalization.

In all of this, migrants are more victims than willing actors, and they become an object on which the fatigue, fear, and in the most extreme cases, hatred of the middle class can easily focus.

Not Even Valodya Is Allowed To Directly Criticize Those Who Rule...,

thejewishvoice |  Speaking to a group of US ambassadors, Putin referred to a group of “powerful” people who can “force-feed people their stories that would be hard to digest”,

“We see that there are forces in the United States that put their own group and narrow partisan interests above the national ones,” Mr. Putin said. “Our renowned satirists once wrote very well about such people: ‘Pathetic, paltry people.’ But this is not so in this particular case: These people are not pathetic and not paltry. On the contrary, they are quite powerful and strong if they can, excuse my crudeness, force-feed millions of their people various stories that are hard to digest in normal logic.”

Going off script and speaking personally, I’d like to say a few words,” the Russian president said. “We see that there are forces in the US which are prepared at the drop of a hat to sacrifice Russian-American relations for the sake of their internal political ambitions in America,” he said.

“They are prepared to sacrifice the interests of their own businesses” and “the interests of their allies in Europe and the Middle East,” as well as “their own national security,”

Putin said. Putin suggested that decades old issues can not be solved with one short Summit between the US and Russia ansd that is was important step for him to talk to Trump directly. “The path to positive changes has all the same begun,” Putin said, according to Reuters. “It’s important that a full-scale meeting has finally taken place allowing us to talk directly.”

Trump also tweeted similar sentiments.

The Fake News Media wants so badly to see a major confrontation with Russia, even a confrontation that could lead to war. They are pushing so recklessly hard and hate the fact that I’ll probably have a good relationship with Putin. We are doing MUCH better than any other country!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) July 19, 2018

Putin goes ‘off-script,’ slams US ‘forces’ undermining Russian-American relations pic.twitter.com/VInqUSlZhR

— Ruptly (@Ruptly) July 19, 2018

We Are Collectively Aware Of The Parasite But Too Cowardly To Kill It...,

Edge |  I'm thinking about collective awareness, which I think of as the models we use to collectively process information about the world, to understand the world and ourselves. It's worth distinguishing our collective awareness at three levels. The first level is our models of the environment, the second level is our models of how we affect the environment, and the third level is our models of how we think about our collective effect on ourselves.

Understanding the environment is something we've been doing better and better for many centuries now. Celestial mechanics allows us to understand the solar system. It means that if we spot an asteroid, we can calculate its trajectory and determine whether it's going to hit the Earth, and if it is, send a rocket to it and deflect it.

Another example of collective awareness at level one is weather prediction. It's an amazing success story. Since 1980, weather prediction has steadily improved, so that every ten years the accuracy of weather prediction gets better by a day, meaning that if this continues, ten years from now the accuracy for a two-day weather forecast will be the same as that of a one-day weather forecast now. This means that the accuracy of weather prediction has gotten dramatically better. We spend $5 billon a year to make weather predictions and we get $30 billion a year back in terms of economic benefit.

The best example of collective consciousness at level two is climate change. Climate change is in the news, it's controversial, etc., but most scientists believe that the models of climate change are telling us something that we need to pay serious attention to. The mere fact that we're even thinking about it is remarkable, because climate change is something whose real effects are going to be felt fifty to 100 years from now. We're making a strong prediction about what we're doing to the Earth and what's going to happen. It's not surprising that there's some controversy about exactly what the outcome is, but we intelligent people know it's really serious. We are going to be increasingly redirecting our efforts to deal with it through time.

The hardest problem is collective awareness at level three—understanding our own effects on ourselves. This is because we're complicated animals. The social sciences try to solve this problem, but they have not been successful in the dramatic way that the physical and natural sciences have. This doesn’t mean the job is impossible, however.

Browder Another Ahmed Chalabi Type Swindler/Hustler

Telegraph |  Bill Browder has described himself as "Putin's No 1 enemy". Now the Russian president had added weight to that claim by singling out the British investor at his controversial summit with Donald Trump on Monday. 

The UK-based financier appeared to be part of what the US president called an "incredible offer" by Vladimir Putin to assist American investigators in their prosecution of 12 Russian intelligence officers accused of hacking crimes during the 2016 presidential election season.

"He offered to have the people working on the case come and work with their investigators with respect to the 12 people," Mr Trump told reporters during a news conference in Helsinki following his joint summit with Mr Putin.

The special counsel investigating potential coordination between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin charged a dozen Russian military intelligence officers on Friday with hacking the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign and then releasing the stolen communications online as part of a sweeping conspiracy to meddle in the election.

While Mr Trump did not elaborate on the Russian leader's "incredible offer," Mr Putin himself suggested that special counsel Robert Mueller could ask Russian law enforcement agencies to interrogate the suspects. He said US officials could request to be present at such questioning in line with a 1999 agreement on mutual legal assistance in criminal cases.

However, there was a catch: Russia would expect the US to return the favour and cooperate with interrogations of people “who have something to do with illegal actions on the territory of Russia”. Mr Putin highlighted the case of Mr Browder.

"No journalist had asked about me," Mr Browder wrote in Time. "He just brought me up out of the blue ...To my mind, this can only mean that he is seriously rattled."

The American-born Jewish businessman, who has held British citizenship for the past two decades, was last year sentenced by a Russian court to nine years in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges.

More pertinently, he was also the driving force behind The Magnitsky Act, a 2012 US law targeting Russian officials over human rights abuses. It was named after Sergei Magnitsky, his lawyer whose investigations in 2008 uncovered a web of alleged tax fraud and corruption involving 23 companies and $230 million. He later died in Russian custody.

PROMESA Bishes: Obama Imposed Austerity on Puerto Rico...,

nakedcapitalism |  With that said, here’s a handy dashboard from the Puerto Rican goverment that shows the status of various systems on the island. In this post, I’m going to focus on the two systems that are in the worst shape: Power, at 5% coverage of the island, and water, where coverage differs by region: Metro, 57%; Norte, 29%; Oeste, 20%; Sur, 67%; and Este, 50%. But first, I’m going to look at one factor that differentiates the “natural” disaster of Maria in Puerto Rico from others on the mainland; then I’ll show how that factor affects the power system, and then cascades to affect the water supply. 

That one factor is, of course, finance. One difference between New Orleans (Katrina), Florida (Irma), and Texas (Harvey) on the one hand, and Puerto Rico (Maria), on the other, is that only Puerto Rico is under an austerity regime, imposed during the Obama administration. José A. Laguarta Ramírez described this regime (PROMESA) at Naked Capitalism in 2016:

The U.S. House of Representatives approved PROMESA on the evening of June 9, following a strong endorsement by President Barack Obama. The bill, which would also impose an unelected and unaccountable federal oversight board and allow court-supervised restructuring of part of the island’s $73 billion debt, now awaits consideration by the Senate…. Puerto Rico is not the only place, under the global regime of austerity capitalism to face predatory creditors and the imposition of unelected rulers —as illustrated by cases like Argentina, Greece, and post-industrial U.S. cities such as Flint, Mich.— but its century-old colonial status has made it particularly vulnerable and defenseless.

The House vote followed a concerted, carefully timed media push by the Democratic establishment, on the premise that “despite its flaws” PROMESA represents a bipartisan compromise that is, in Obama’s words, “far superior to the status quo.”

PROMESA’s oversight board, which will be staffed by San Juan and Washington insiders with the bondholders’ best interests at heart, is sure to continue to impose draconian austerity measures that have already slashed much-needed social services.

Of course! Austerity! Why did nobody think of this before? Mark Weisbrot in the New York Times:

This board, to which President Barack Obama appointed four Democrats and four Republicans, has now approved an austerity regimen that, if things go according to plan, envisions a second lost decade — in other words, no economic growth from 2005 through 2024. But the plan [reminscent of the austerity imposed on Greece] doesn’t take into account the impact of such austerity, which would add more years of decline. And there’s more: All the budget tightening over the second decade, including cuts to health care and education, would pay only about $7.9 billion of Puerto Rico’s $73 billion debt.
That means that creditors’ lawsuits, which have already been filed, could inflict additional damage and worsen the quarter-century of economic stagnation that is now in the cards. Hedge funds hold much of Puerto Rico’s debt, and since May their claims have been under consideration in a bankruptcy-like proceeding — also under the Promesa act — that does not look any more promising than the oversight board’s plan.

(One of Trump’s earlier tweets — September 25 — read: “Texas & Florida are doing great but Puerto Rico, which was already suffering from broken infrastructure & massive debt, is in deep trouble.” So it’s pleasing to see that the Democrats’ tender concern for the hedgies and vulture funds is shared across the political spectrum.)

Now let’s look at the effect of this thoroughly bipartisan austerity on the Puerto Rican power system.

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.

The Crush Control Chappelle Conspiracy Continues...,

esquire |  In 2014, before the sexual assault allegations against Bill Cosby went mainstream, a standup routine from Hannibal Burress went viral. "Bill Cosby has the fucking smuggest old black man public persona that I hate," Burress said during a set in Philadelphia. "'Pull your pants up, black people, I was on TV in the '80s. I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.' Yeah, but you raped women, Bill Cosby. So, brings you down a couple notches." Buress's bit made headlines, prompting a procession of women to come forward with new allegations, which ultimately led to the undoing of Cosby the comedian—and Cosby the man.

Now skip forward two years.

"The '70s were a wild era, and while all this was going on, Bill Cosby raped 54 people. Holy shit, that's a lot of rapes, man! This guy's putting up real numbers. He's like the Steph Curry of rape." That's Dave Chappelle in 2017, likening Cosby's "400 hours of rape" to a Top Gun pilot. His first specials in 13 years—Netflix paid $60 million for three, the first two of which premiered last month on the streaming service—were considered his big comeback. Instead, they feel more like a throwback. In Age of Spin, Chappelle mimics flamboyant Hollywood producers, fears trans women cutting off their genitalia, and is in creases over a hypothetical superhero who rapes women to activate his powers.

No longer wiry like he once was, Chappelle is not only physically less nimble—he has also seemingly lost his nuance as a storyteller. His delivery is preachy, his punchlines banal. For Vice, Australian comic Patrick Marlborough writes that Chappelle's stand-up in the early '00s "had a sublime mastery of taking a taboo, reiterating it, guiding it to a point, flipping the meaning, and shooting it in the back of the head." As he watched the Netflix specials, however, he was forced to wait for the twist that never came. In its place stood a man who performed ignorance rather than questioning it, who had become trapped in the bubble of his own privilege—a world where the last 10 years of identity politics haven't really made much of a difference. ("The jokes were mean, they were lazy," Marlborough writes. "They were something I never thought I'd see: Dave Chappelle punching down.") Unfortunately that puts him out of touch with the cultural conversation at large, which has itself progressed and in turn shifted the way comedians tackle loaded topics like race, class, gender, and sexuality. In short, Dave Chappelle may not have progressed, but many of us have.

Predatory Pharmaceutical Parasites (Pharmacy Benefit Managers)

prospect |  Rob Frankil of Sellersville, Pennsylvania, followed his father into the family business after college. “My entire life,” he said, “I’ve been involved with managing and owning independent pharmacies.” He now owns two stores, a traditional community pharmacy and another that caters to long-term care facilities.

Like any retail outlet, Frankil purchases inventory from a wholesale distributor and sells it to customers at a small markup. But unlike butchers or hardware store owners, pharmacists have no idea how much money they’ll make on a sale until the moment they sell it. That’s because the customer’s co-pay doesn’t cover the cost of the drug. Instead, a byzantine reimbursement process determines Frankil’s fee.

“I get a prescription, type in the data, click send, and I’m told I’m getting a dollar or two,” Frankil says. The system resembles the pull of a slot machine: Sometimes you win and sometimes you lose. “Pharmacies sell prescriptions at significant losses,” he adds. “So what do I do? Fill the prescription and lose money, or don’t fill it and lose customers? These decisions happen every single day.”

Frankil’s troubles cannot be traced back to insurers or drug companies, the usual suspects that most people deem responsible for raising costs in the health-care system. He blames a collection of powerful corporations known as pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs. If you have drug coverage as part of your health plan, you are likely to carry a card with the name of a PBM on it. These middlemen manage prescription drug benefits for health plans, contracting with drug manufacturers and pharmacies in a multi-sided market. Over the past 30 years, PBMs have evolved from paper-pushers to significant controllers of the drug pricing system, a black box understood by almost no one. Lack of transparency, unjustifiable fees, and massive market consolidations have made PBMs among the most profitable corporations you’ve never heard about.

Americans pay the highest health-care prices in the world, including the highest for drugs, medical devices, and other health-care services and products. Our fragmented system produces many opportunities for excessive charges. But one lesser-known reason for those high prices is the stranglehold that a few giant intermediaries have secured over distribution. The antitrust laws are supposed to provide protection against just this kind of concentrated economic power. But in one area after another in today’s economy, federal antitrust authorities and the courts have failed to intervene. In this case, PBMs are sucking money out of the health-care system—and our wallets—with hardly any public awareness of what they are doing.

SkyBoxification: How the Elites Shut Down Class Struggle

thearchdruidreport |  Much of the pushback against Trump’s impending presidency, in turn, is heavily larded with that same sneering contempt and condescension—the unending claims, for example, that the only reason people could possibly have chosen to vote for Trump was because they were racist misogynistic morons, and the like. (These days, terms such as “racist” and “misogynistic,” in the mouths of the affluent, are as often as not class-based insults rather than objective descriptions of attitudes.) The question I’d like to raise at this point, though, is why the affluent don’t seem to be able to bring themselves to come right out and denounce Trump as the candidate of the filthy rabble. Why must they borrow the rhetoric of identity politics and twist it (and themselves) into pretzel shapes instead?

There, dear reader, hangs a tale.

In the aftermath of the social convulsions of the 1960s, the wealthy elite occupying the core positions of power in the United States offered a tacit bargain to a variety of movements for social change. Those individuals and groups who were willing to give up the struggle to change the system, and settled instead for a slightly improved place within it, suddenly started to receive corporate and government funding, and carefully vetted leaders from within the movements in question were brought into elite circles as junior partners. Those individuals and groups who refused these blandishments were marginalized, generally with the help of their more compliant peers.

If you ever wondered, for example, why environmental groups such as the Sierra Club and Friends of the Earth changed so quickly from scruffy fire-breathing activists to slickly groomed and well-funded corporate enablers, well, now you know. Equally, that’s why mainstream feminist organizations by and large stopped worrying about the concerns of the majority of women and fixated instead on “breaking the glass ceiling”—that is to say, giving women who already belong to the privileged classes access to more privilege than they have already. The core demand placed on former radicals who wanted to cash in on the offer, though, was that they drop their demands for economic justice—and American society being what it is, that meant that they had to stop talking about class issues.  Fist tap Dale.

What is the Lesson Boys and Girls?

WaPo |  Venezuela’s economy is a catastrophe of Dickensian proportions. And for plenty of readers, that’s hardly a surprise. Every time I write about it, dozens pipe in with some variant on the same comment: “Socialism leading to total ruin — who would’ve thought?!” The temptation to read Venezuela’s collapse as ideological comeuppance seems to be irresistible. My country, people tell me again and again, is just the end of the line on the Road to Serfdom.

There’s just one problem with all this bashing of socialism: Bolivia.

Since 2006, Bolivia has been run by socialists every bit as militant as Venezuela’s. But as economist Omar Zambrano has argued, the country has experienced a spectacular run of economic growth and poverty reduction with no hint of the chaos that has plagued Venezuela. While inflation spirals toward the thousand-percent mark in Venezuela, in Bolivia it runs below 4 percent a year. Shortages of basic consumption goods — rampant in Caracas — are unheard of in La Paz. And extreme poverty — now growing fast in Venezuela — affects just 17 percent of Bolivians now, down from 38 percent before the socialists took over 10 years ago, even as inequality shrinks dramatically. The richest 10 percent in Bolivia used to earn 128 times more than the poorest 10 percent; today, they earn 38 times as much.

How can this be? It’s true that Bolivia has been on the receiving end of a staggering boom in natural resources for much of the past decade, as both the volume of its gas and mining exports and the price they fetch abroad jumped at the same time. Export revenue grew six-fold in the decade after Evo Morales, the charismatic hard-left president, took power, from $2.2 billion just before of his election to $12.9 billion at the peak of the boom.

So yes, that’s a bit like putting the game settings on “easy” when it comes to development. But it can hardly explain why Bolivia thrives while Venezuela spirals: Venezuela enjoyed an even bigger commodities boom, with exports climbing from $23 billion before the oil boom to $153 billion at its peak.

Turns out it’s not the boom itself that matters, it’s what you do with it.

Other Minds

If we think the rest of the universe is without awareness we have to invent a disembodied "God" to replace what is missing. And then we treat the planet as if it were a mindless object - resources to strip (as if that caused no harm or pain) .... and a place to dump our toxic chemicals and trash.

Imagine what our thought would be like, Dogen says, if we had no separate words for "mind" and "nature."

WaPo |  “The two of you look at each other. This one is small, about the size of a tennis ball. You reach forward a hand and stretch out one finger, and one octopus arm slowly uncoils and comes out to touch you. The suckers grab your skin, and the hold is disconcertingly tight. Having attached the suckers, it tugs your finger, pulling you gently in. . . . Behind the arm, large round eyes watch you the whole time.”

Encountering an octopus in the wild, as Peter Godfrey-Smith argues in his fascinating book, “Other Minds,” is as close as we will get to meeting an intelligent alien. The octopus and its near relatives — squid, cuttlefish and nautilus — belong to a vast and eclectic group of creatures that lack backbones, the invertebrates. Collectively known as cephalopods (head-footed), they are related to snails and clams, sharing with them the unfortunate characteristic of tasting wonderful. Don’t read this book, though, if you want to continue eating calamari with an untroubled conscience, for living cephalopods are smart, beautiful and possessed with extraordinary personalities.

Threaten the U.S. President-elect with the CIA - How Liberal

libertyblitzkrieg |  New Senate Minority leader, and Wall Street mega-defender, Chuck Schumer just went on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show and warned Donald Trump that U.S. intelligence agencies could retaliate against him for disagreeing with their claims (based on no public evidence thus far) that Russia hacked the DNC/John Podesta and released it to Wikileaks with the intent of helping Trump win the election.

Here’s what he said courtesy of The Washington Examiner:

The new leader of Democrats in the Senate says Donald Trump is being “really dumb” for picking a fight with intelligence officials, suggesting they have ways to strike back, after the president-elect speculated Tuesday that his “so-called” briefing about Russian cyberattacks had been delayed in order to build a case.

“Let me tell you: You take on the intelligence community — they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you,” said Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer Tuesday evening on MSNBC after host Rachel Maddow informed him that intelligence sources told NBC news that the briefing had not been delayed.

Now watch the clip for yourself. I’m certain the near permanent grin on his face will not be lost upon you either.

Will Trump's Truths Go More Than Skin Deep?

thedailybell |  This Bloomberg article is focused not on the top people in this conspiracy but on the “little people” who do the bidding of higher ups and have learned  how to survive in an internationalist environment and profit from it.

But in our view, these are probably NOT the people that Trump’s voters really voted against. Many of Trump’s voters, like Trump himself, understand that the problems go far beyond academics, bureaucrats and corrupt tycoons.

In fact, this Bloomberg article is a perfect example of a kind of elite propaganda. It is trying to convince us that we need to “listen” to the anger of Trump voters and then, we are instructed, the intelligentsia needs to react.

American intellectuals may violently disagree with the average Trump voter on most things. They may have access to facts that prove that voters wrong. But there’s no way they — we — can go on dismissing and ridiculing these people without dooming themselves to irrelevance and provoking further backlash.

This is in fact the fondest hope, no doubt, of those tasked with defending the REAL culprits from exposure and attack. Such individuals are the ones running the world’s largest corporations and leading the most powerful nation states.

And these individuals may be found in higher places still, plotting the propaganda that the rest of us imbibe. Also managing central bank strategies and even plotting our gradual progress toward a new world war.

The Bloomberg article ends by suggesting that a lot of the irritation of Trump voters is aimed at political correctness and that the US needs “an open conversation about what ails it, not … one that tiptoes around speech taboos about racism, misogyny and sexual discrimination.”

Once more – hooey. Our guess is that like Donald Trump himself, many of his voters – perhaps tens of millions are quite aware that the world’s problems extend far beyond political correctness and “intellectuals.”

Trump Calls Out the Vampire Squid and is Instantly Accused of Anti-Semitism...,

thenewcivilrightsmovement |  An Unleashed and Unhinged Trump Threaded His Denial Accusations of Sexual Assault With Even Darker, Uglier Rhetoric

Donald Trump delivered one of the most disturbing and fiery speeches of his entire campaign Thursday afternoon to cheering supporters in Florida that was, as many on Twitter noticed, threaded with anti-Semitism, fascism, and sexism.

The Atlantic's Senior Editor tweeted this disturbing section of Trump's speech:

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Adam Servianski ✔@AdamSerwer

Trump: "hillary clinton meets in secret with international banks to plan the destruction of global sovereignty"

12:15 PM - 13 Oct 2016

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20h

Adam Servianski ✔@AdamSerwer

Yep it was american sovereignty, which doesn't change the meaning of "international banks" https://twitter.com/TeamTrump/status/786616112700088320 …

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Adam Servianski ✔@AdamSerwer

Here is the full context of that Trump quote about "international banks" and the "global power structure"pic.twitter.com/p5qigLnxtS

1:34 PM - 13 Oct 2016

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Some responses:

20h

Adam Servianski ✔@AdamSerwer

Trump: "hillary clinton meets in secret with international banks to plan the destruction of global sovereignty"

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Doc Sportello @dogstar7tweets

@AdamSerwer 
Dog-whistle Translation: Jews pic.twitter.com/q23j3g9Coj

12:56 PM - 13 Oct 2016

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