AIPAC and CPAC America's N-1 SARS-CoV2 Super Spreader Nodes

forward | The tens of thousands of devotees who attended last week’s American Israel Public Affairs Committee policy conference and the Conservative Political Action Conference at the end of February have all gone back home, bringing with them new ideas about U.S.-Israel relations and strategies for Republican victories in the 2020 election, respectively. Some have also brought back the coronavirus.

At least five attendees of AIPAC and one from CPAC — two of Washington’s marquee annual political events — have tested positive for the virus, diagnoses that have rippled out to create quarantines and school closings from Cleveland to California. Neither AIPAC nor CPAC would address reports on social media that the infected CPAC attendee also attended AIPAC, which started the next day.

With New Rochelle, N.Y., being declared a “contamination zone” on Tuesday, scores of schools and universities going online only, many businesses asking employees to work remotely and thousands of gatherings large and small getting postponed indefinitely, there have been some complaints about the approach taken by the two advocacy organizations.

CPAC in particular has come under fire for a lack of adequate communication with individuals who came into contact with the affected attendee. Raheem Kassam, a conservative author and commentator, and Brandon Darby, a reporter for the right-wing outlet Breitbart, are among several people who were at CPAC and claim that VIP attendees have gotten access to more information faster than have the rest of the 20,000 people in attendance. The American Conservative Union, which organizes the conference, did not respond to inquiries on Tuesday.

Politico reported that the CPAC attendee with the virus ate at a Shabbat dinner Feb. 28, and held a gold-level ticket that provided access to Republican lawmakers including Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas, and Reps. Matt Gaetz of Florida, Paul Gosar of Arizona and Doug Collins of Georgia. All four are self-quarantining. The Washington Beacon, a conservative Website, reported Tuesday that the infected person was at a VIP congressional reception on the opening night of the conference, Feb. 26.

RIP: The Late Great Otis Rush

Counterpunch |  Otis Rush was born in 1934 in Philadelphia, Mississippi, one of the most racially mixed towns in the Delta. In Rush’s youth the population of Philadelphia was almost equally divided between whites, blacks and Choctaw Indians. As a consequence, Philadelphia was also one of the most racist towns in Mississippi, a hotbed of Klan activity and, of course, site of the 1964 murders of civil rights workers Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. In 1980, Reagan picked the Neshoba County Fair in Philadelphia as the locale  to give his first post-convention speech, an attack on the federal government that launched his own race-baiting “Southern Strategy.” J.L. Chestnut, one of two black people in the huge audience, recalled Ronald Reagan shouting  that “‘the South will rise again and this time remain master of everybody and everything within its dominion.’ The square came to life, the Klu (sic) Kluxers were shouting, jeering and in obvious ecstasy. God bless America.”

Like many black youths in the Delta, Otis sat near the radio every day at 12:15, tuning in to KFFA, broadcast out of Helena, Arkansas, for the King Biscuit Time show, hosted by Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Lockwood, Jr. For half an hour Williamson and Lockwood played live in the studio, often featuring other rising stars of the blues, such as B.B. King, James Cotton and Pinetop Perkins (who was an original member of the studio band, called the King Biscuit Entertainers.) Otis decided he wanted to be a blues player. He began playing the blues harp at the age of six and later his father rigged him a makeshift one-string guitar out of a broom handle and baling wire.

Rush’s father was a sharecropper, toiling in the parched red clay soils of eastern Mississippi. But mechanization was slowly drawing this brutal way of life to a close. In 1948, Rush’s father moved the family (there were 8 Rush children) to Chicago. At the age of 14, Otis began working 12-hour days in the stockyards. At night he played the blues with two other young stockyard workers, Mike Netton, a drummer, and “Poor Bob” Woodfork, a guitar player recently migrated up from Arkansas. The band began to get some paying gigs in some of the new clubs springing up on Roosevelt Avenue.  One night when Rush was 18, Willie Dixon walked into the Alibi club on the West Side of town. Dixon, one of the true geniuses of American music, had just left Chess Records in a bitter dispute over royalties. The great bassist and arranger had taken a job with the new Cobra Records, a small Chicago label run by a TV repairman. Dixon was enthralled by Rush’s uniquely expressive, almost tortured guitar-style and signed him on the spot.

In the studio, Dixon, the real architect of the Chicago Blues sound, assembled a small talented R&B combo to back Rush, featuring Shakey Horton on harmonica, Harold Ashby on tenor, veteran drummer Odie Payne,  Little Brother Montgomery hammering the piano and Dixon himself on stand-up bass. The first song Rush recorded was Dixon’s “I Can’t Quit You, Baby.” Dixon said he wrote the song about an obsessive relationship Rush was having with a woman at the time. Dixon wanted to provoke an emotional response from the singer and he got one. “I Can’t Quit You, Baby” opens with a chilling falsetto scream, then Rush launches into a staccato guitar attack unlike anything heard before it. Led Zeppelin (and dozens of other bands) would cover Rush’s version of the song but never capture the excrutiating fervency of the original. The recording was released in the summer of 1956 as Cobra’s first single. The song hit number 6 on the Billboard R&B charts.

Over the next two years Rush and Dixon would release eight more records, each of them dazzlingly original. The sound was aggressive and confident, like the hard-charging jump blues “Violent Love,” where Rush’s slashing guitar chords seem to be engaged in a romantic combat with the horns. Rush’s own composition, “Checking on My Baby,” is an eerie, minor key blues that sweats sexual paranoia. This is not the blues of despondency and despair, but of defiance and, at times, rage. It’s music with an edge, sharpened by the metallic sounds of urban streets, of steel mills, jail cells and rail yards.

The International Criminal Court MUST NOT BE Recognized...,

newyorker |  The I.C.C., from its inception, has been impossibly compromised by the simple, definitive fact that many of the world’s most lawless countries, along with some of its most powerful—including the U.S., Russia, and China, the majority of permanent members of the U.N. Security Council—reject its jurisdiction. After sixteen years with no major triumphs and several major failures to its name, it would be easier to make the case for it if there were reason to believe that it could yet become the court of last resort for all comers that it is supposed to be, rather than what it is: a politically captive institution that reinforces the separate and unequal structures of the world. Maybe the best that one can hope for the court, in its current form, is that it can yet inspire some people who seek the rule of law to find a way to achieve it. Bolton rejected the very idea that it could inspire any good, simultaneously exaggerating the power of the I.C.C. as an ominous global colossus and belittling it as a puny contemptible farce. The only historically proven deterrent to “the hard men of history,” he declared, is “what Franklin Roosevelt once called ‘the righteous might’ of the United States.”

So what, really, was the point of Bolton’s speech? Where was the news in this “major announcement on U.S. policy?” He noted that Israel, too, faces the prospect of an I.C.C. investigation and announced that, in solidarity, the State Department was closing down the Palestine Liberation Organization office in Washington. But then he said that the closure wasn’t necessarily about the court but rather a general punishment of “the Palestinians,” because “they refuse to take steps to start direct and meaningful negotiations with Israel.” Beyond that, nothing that Bolton threatened—by way of shutting out, sanctioning, and declaring war on the I.C.C., and treating its personnel or anyone in the world who assisted it as criminals—went much beyond a rhetorical amplification of what he acknowledged has been established in U.S. law since the American Service-Members’ Protection Act. This wasn’t foreign policy. It was swagger.

Bolton has, thus far, enjoyed an absence from the Woodwardian accounts of Trump White House backbiting, subterfuge, and dysfunction. So it is tempting to think that he was deployed to deflect attention from the White House chaos, while his boss spent the day issuing uncharacteristically Presidential tweets about the hurricane bearing down on the Carolinas. Bolton, however, left out one point from his old Journal piece in this week’s speech, and the omission seems telling: “The ICC prosecutor,” Bolton wrote, “is an internationalized version of America’s ‘independent counsel,’ a role originally established in the wake of Watergate and later allowed to lapse (but now revived under Justice Department regulations in the form of a ‘special counsel’). Similarly, the ICC’s prosecutors are dangerously free of accountability and effective supervision.”

So the threat comes from within, after all. The problem is the existence of the prosecutor, who endangers sovereignty, which in Trump-speak means being above the law. The President and the nation cannot be held to account or supervised, so the prosecutor has to be. The President and the nation cannot be criminals, so the prosecutor must be. The prosecutor cannot be recognized. The prosecutor must be disempowered.

Concerning Specific Forms of Masturbation...,

theguardian |  The game’s top umpires are considering forming a union because they believe Carlos Ramos was “hung out to dry” by the authorities during and after the US Open women’s final despite upholding the rules in sanctioning Serena Williams.

Many officials were also left angry with the fact that the International Tennis Federation took nearly 48 hours to defend Ramos, on Monday afternoon, by which time the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and United States Tennis Association (USTA) had supported Williams’s claims of sexism after she was given a game penalty for her behaviour during her defeat by Naomi Osaka.

Umpires are not allowed to speak out publicly under the terms of their contracts, and are employed by grand slams and men’s and women’s tours, which means many are reluctant to say anything for fear of losing their jobs. However, one senior figure told the Guardian that privately there was widespread concern about how the USTA and WTA had rushed to support Williams – which had led to vitriol and abuse on social media for Ramos.

“There is a lot of unhappiness in the umpiring community because no one is standing up for officials,” the senior figure told the Guardian. “Umpires keep asking: ‘What if it was me in that chair on Saturday?’ There is a widespread feeling that Carlos was hung out to dry for nearly 48 hours and that no one is standing up for officials.”

In the absence of any official support for Ramos until Monday, it was left to two former senior umpires, Mike Morrissey and Richard Ings, to defend the Portuguese official. “I have had lots of messages saying this is a joke,” said one source. “There is a lot of anger out there.”

Listen Little Man....,

telegraph |  As the sport continued to tear itself apart over the Serena Williams sexism row, the International Tennis Federation stepped in on Monday night to defend beleaguered umpire Carlos Ramos.

In the absence of any representative body to speak for tennis officials, it fell to the ITF to say what should be evident to all: despite Williams’s repeated insistence that Ramos owes her an apology, he was just doing his job when he penalised her a point and a game during Saturday’s tumultuous women’s US Open final.

“Carlos Ramos is one of the most experienced and respected umpires in tennis,” said the ITF, which is Ramos’s employer. “[His] decisions were in accordance with the relevant rules and were re-affirmed by the US Open’s decision to fine Serena Williams for the three offences.

“It is understandable this high-profile and regrettable incident should provoke debate. At the same time, it is important to remember Mr Ramos undertook his duties as an official according to the relevant rule book and acted at all times with professionalism and integrity.”

The statement might not have been necessary were it not for the further accusations of sexism that were levelled at Ramos on Sunday by two of tennis’ major stakeholders. First Katrina Adams, the head of the United States Tennis Association, told ESPN: “We watch the guys do this all the time, they’re badgering the umpire on the changeovers. Nothing happens. There’s no equality. There has to be some consistency across the board. These are conversations that will be imposed in the next weeks.”

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 We Cain't See The Magnitsky Act: Behind the Scenes?

consortiumnews |  Why is the U.S. mainstream media so frightened of a documentary that debunks the beloved story of how “lawyer” Sergei Magnitsky uncovered massive Russian government corruption and died as a result? If the documentary is as flawed as its critics claim, why won’t they let it be shown to the American public, then lay out its supposed errors, and use it as a case study of how such fakery works?

Instead we – in the land of the free, home of the brave – are protected from seeing this documentary produced by filmmaker Andrei Nekrasov who was known as a fierce critic of Russian President Vladimir Putin but who in this instance found the West’s widely accepted Magnitsky storyline to be a fraud.

Instead, last week, Senate Judiciary Committee members sat in rapt attention as hedge-fund operator William Browder wowed them with a reprise of his Magnitsky tale and suggested that people who have challenged the narrative and those who dared air the documentary one time at Washington’s Newseum last year should be prosecuted for violating the Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA).

It appears that Official Washington’s anti-Russia hysteria has reached such proportions that old-time notions about hearing both sides of a story or testing out truth in the marketplace of ideas must be cast aside. The new political/media paradigm is to shield the American people from information that contradicts the prevailing narratives, all the better to get them to line up behind Those Who Know Best.

Nekrasov’s powerful deconstruction of the Magnitsky myth – and the film’s subsequent blacklisting throughout the “free world” – recall other instances in which the West’s propaganda lines don’t stand up to scrutiny, so censorship and ad hominem attacks become the weapons of choice to defend “perception management” narratives in geopolitical hot spots such as Iraq (2002-03), Libya (2011), Syria (2011 to the present), and Ukraine (2013 to the present).

But the Magnitsky myth has a special place as the seminal fabrication of the dangerous New Cold War between the nuclear-armed West and nuclear-armed Russia.

In the United States, Russia-bashing in The New York Times and other “liberal media” also has merged with the visceral hatred of President Trump, causing all normal journalistic standards to be jettisoned.

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.

Bill Browder: The Tax-Evading Fugitive From Justice Behind The New Cold War

strategic-culture |  One has to ask why there is a crisis in US-Russia relations since Washington and Moscow have much more in common than not, to include confronting international terrorism, stabilizing Syria and other parts of the world that are in turmoil, and preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons. In spite of all that, the US and Russia are currently locked in a tit-for-tat unfriendly relationship somewhat reminiscent of the Cold War. 

Apart from search for a scapegoat to explain the Hillary Clinton defeat, how did it happen? Israel Shamir, a keen observer of the American-Russian relationship, and celebrated American journalist Robert Parry both think that one man deserves much of the credit for the new Cold War and that man is William Browder, a hedge fund operator who made his fortune in the corrupt 1990s world of Russian commodities trading. 

Browder is also symptomatic of why the United States government is so poorly informed about international developments as he is the source of much of the Congressional “expert testimony” contributing to the current impasse. He has somehow emerged as a trusted source in spite of the fact that he has self-interest in cultivating a certain outcome. Also ignored is his renunciation of American citizenship in 1998, reportedly to avoid taxes. He is now a British citizen. 

Browder is notoriously the man behind the 2012 Magnitsky Act, which exploited Congressional willingness to demonize Russia and has done so much to poison relations between Washington and Moscow. The Act sanctioned individual Russian officials, which Moscow has rightly seen as unwarranted interference in the operation of its judicial system. 

Browder, a media favorite who self-promotes as “Putin’s enemy #1,” portrays himself as a selfless human rights advocate, but is he? He has used his fortune to threaten lawsuits for anyone who challenges his version of events, effectively silencing many critics. He claims that his accountant Sergei Magnitsky was a crusading "lawyer" who discovered a $230 million tax-fraud scheme that involved the Browder business interest Hermitage Capital but was, in fact, engineered by corrupt Russian police officers who arrested Magnitsky and enabled his death in a Russian jail. 

Many have been skeptical of the Browder narrative, suspecting that the fraud was in fact concocted by Browder and his accountant Magnitsky. A Russian court recently supported that alternative narrative, ruling in late December that Browder had deliberately bankrupted his company and engaged in tax evasion. He was sentenced to nine years prison in absentia. 

Browder is again in the news recently in connection with testimony related to Russiagate. On December 16th Senator Diane Feinstein of the Senate Judiciary Committee released the transcript of the testimony provided by Glenn Simpson, founder of Fusion GPS. According to James Carden, Browder was mentioned 50 times, but the repeated citations apparently did not merit inclusion in media coverage of the story by the New York Times, Washington Post and Politico.

The Vast Fortune Behind Trump's Immigration Regime

splinternews |  Tanton’s individual persistence was at bottom made possible by the greater persistence of wealth across generations in the United States, coming to fruition in the hundreds of millions of dollars that Cordelia Scaife May left to the Colcom Foundation when she died. What endures is not any individual or personality but capital and institutions. Tanton’s best political skill was not his analysis or his rhetoric but his ability to flatter wealthy racists. He was not a great theoretician or leader or organizer, but an adroit servant of capital’s class interests, for this is how the capitalist class exerts power—not by engaging in democratic politics, but by creating a bulwark against it.

Ironically, Tanton recognized this dynamic himself, however accidentally, in his striving for an essentially American identity. “I think there is such a thing as an American culture, however difficult it may be to define,” he once mused. “For instance, the United States is the most philanthropic society on the face of the earth, and most of the work that FAIR and our opponents do is supported by philanthropy. Few, if any, other cultures have developed the idea of public philanthropy as strongly as we have here.”

What he failed to recognize is that the very idea of public philanthropy as it is practiced in the United States of America is wholly the creation of the American plutocracy—wealthy industrialists and corporate scions seeking ways to consolidate and protect their money over time. While the practice of establishing private family trusts and foundations and of spending copious amounts of money on ostensibly philanthropic (though in fact political) causes is now commonplace among the capitalist class, it was not always so. The first of these, the Rockefeller Foundation, was formed in 1913; a century later, according to political scientist Robert Reich, there were over 100,000 private foundations in the United States, controlling over $800 billion. “The tax code turned many extraordinarily wealthy families, intent upon preserving their fortunes, into major forces in America’s civic sector,” Jane Mayer writes in Dark Money. “In order to shelter themselves from taxes, they were required to invent a public philanthropic role.”

Scaife, were the beneficiaries of two charitable trusts of $50 million each, structured such that, after 20 years of donating all net income from the trusts to nonprofit charities, the siblings would receive their $50 million principals. Their mother did the same in 1961, setting up a pair of $25 million trusts, and again in 1963, setting up another $100 million in trusts for her grandchildren. Mellon Scaife, who once called a reporter for the Columbia Journalism Review a “fucking Communist cunt,” would go on to make some $1 billion in political and philanthropic contributions over a 50-year period, anticipating the Koch brothers’ current reign and shaping the right-wing of American politics for half a century. In a secret memoir, obtained by Mayer, Mellon Scaife gloated, “Isn’t it grand how tax law gets written?”

There is deep and horrible irony in Mellon family money, which powered American imperialism in Central and South America and which grew as a result of that imperial expansion, now being spent to denigrate and punish the children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the men and women whose countries the Mellons helped to colonize, who now come to the United States seeking respite from their nations’ ruin. For people like Tanton and Scaife May or organizations like FAIR and CIS, the point is not to purge the United States of immigrants wholly but to ensure the continued immiseration and suffering of the poor and the dispossessed—the most destitute of whom, it is no accident, are mostly people of color.

The activity of the Tanton network and the support it has received from one of America’s oldest imperial families shows above all how one faction of the ruling class, at least, imagines it can create a permanent underclass from which to extract value: first, by dehumanizing migrants in the minds of the citizens; then, by allowing them to sell their labor to employers across the country; and finally, in the prisons and detention centers where they are housed until deportation, and the cycle begins anew. In turn, this contributes to the continued creation of a massive population of surplus labor, which puts downward pressure on wages for all workers.

Rank, Dank, and Stank Swamp Gasses Billowing Out The DOJ...,

conservativetreehouse |   However, the ongoing Dossier story gets far more intriguing as it is now discovered that Bruce G Ohr’s wife, Nellie H. Ohr, actually worked for Fusion GPS and likely helped guide/script the Russian Dossier. (Link)

Contacted by Fox News, investigators for the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence (HPSCI) confirmed that Nellie H. Ohr, wife of the demoted official, Bruce G. Ohr, worked for the opposition research firm last year. The precise nature of Mrs. Ohr’s duties – including whether she worked on the dossier – remains unclear but a review of her published works available online reveals Mrs. Ohr has written extensively on Russia-related subjects. HPSCI staff confirmed to Fox News that she was paid by Fusion GPS through the summer and fall of 2016.

But wait, it doesn’t stop there… Mrs. Nellie Ohr was not only a Fusion GPS contracted employee, but she was also part of the CIA’s Open Source Works, in Washington DC (link)

Both Mr. and Mrs Ohr worked on a collaborative group project surrounding International Organized Crime. (pdf here) Page #30 Screen Shot Below

But wait, it gets even better.

 

Gabriel Kron: Negative Resistance

cheniere |  At the time of his death, Gabriel Kron was arguably the greatest electrical scientist ever produced by the United States.

It appears that the availability of this Heaviside energy component surrounding any portion of the circuit may be the long sought secret to Gabriel Kron's “open path” that enabled him to produce a true negative resistor in the 1930s, as the chief scientist for General Electric on the U.S. Navy contract for the Network Analyzer at Stanford University.  Kron was never permitted to release how he made his negative resistor, but did state that, when placed in the Network Analyzer, the generator could be disconnected because the negative resistor would power the circuit.  Since a negative resistor converges surrounding energy and diverges it into the circuit, it appears that Kron's negative resistor gathered energy from the Heaviside component of energy flow as an “open path” flow of energy — connecting together the local vicinities of any two separated circuit components — that had been discarded by previous electrodynamicists following Lorentz.  Hence Kron referred to it as the “open path.”  Particularly see Gabriel Kron, “The frustrating search for a geometrical model of electrodynamic networks,” circa 1962.  We quote:

“...the missing concept of "open-paths" (the dual of "closed-paths") was discovered, in which currents could be made to flow in branches that lie between any set of two nodes.  (Previously — following Maxwell — engineers tied all of their open-paths to a single datum point, the 'ground').  That discovery of open-paths established a second rectangular transformation matrix... which created 'lamellar' currents...” 
“A network with the simultaneous presence of both closed and open paths was the answer to the author's years-long search.”

A true negative resistor appears to have been developed by the renowned Gabriel Kron, who was never permitted to reveal its construction or specifically reveal its development.  For an oblique statement of his negative resistor success, see Gabriel Kron, “Numerical solution of ordinary and partial differential equations by means of equivalent circuits,” Journal of Applied Physics, Vol. 16, Mar. 1945a, p. 173.  Quoting:

“When only positive and negative real numbers exist, it is customary to replace a positive resistance by an inductance and a negative resistance by a capacitor (since none or only a few negative resistances exist on practical network analyzers).” 

Apparently Kron was required to insert the words “none or” in that statement.  See also Gabriel Kron, “Electric circuit models of the Schrödinger equation,” Phys. Rev. 67(1-2), Jan. 1 and 15, 1945, p. 39.  We quote:

“Although negative resistances are available for use with a network analyzer,…”. 

Here the introductory clause states in rather certain terms that negative resistors were available for use on the network analyzer, and Kron slipped this one through the censors.  It may be of interest that Kron was a mentor of Sweet, who was his protégé.  Sweet worked for the same company, but not on the Network Analyzer project.  However, he almost certainly  knew the secret of Kron's “open path” discovery and his negative resistor.

---

Pooh-poohing the Kron negative resistor is just sheer naïveté.  Kron was one of the greatest electrical scientists of all time, and applied full general relativity to rotating machines, electrical circuits and generators, etc. 

Simply go check his papers in the literature.  Even today, there are few electrodynamicists really able to fully comprehend his advanced work.  And his direct quotations from his own published technical papers in the literature leave no doubt he had made a negative resistor.  Further, other scientists have commented on Kron's discovery of the “open path” connecting any two points in a circuit, and usable to provide energy transfer at will.

The mechanism by which he did this is what Kron was never allowed to reveal.

Dangerous Propagandist Deconstruction (REDUX Originally Posted 3/27/13)

shameproject | Author of The Bell Curve; Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute

Charles Murray is one of the most influential right-wing ideological architects of the post-Reagan era. His career began in a secret Pentagon counterinsurgency operation in rural Thailand during the Vietnam War, a program whose stated purpose included applying counter-insurgency strategies learned in rural Thailand on America's own restive inner cities and minority populations. By the late 1970s, Charles Murray was drawing up plans for the US Justice Department that called for massively increasing incarceration rates. In the 1980s, backed by an unprecedented marketing campaign, Murray suddenly emerged as the nation's most powerful advocate for abolishing welfare programs for single mothers. Since then, Murray revived discredited racist eugenics theories "proving" that blacks and Latinos are genetically inferior to whites, and today argues that the lower classes are inferior to the upper classes due to breeding differences.

U.S. Police Forces Mimic Israeli/South African Minority-Colonizer Survivalism

unz |  The various levels of government that make up the United States seem to be preparing for some kind of insurrection, which may indeed be the case somewhere down the road if the frustrations of the public are not somehow dealt with. But there is another factor that has, in my opinion, become a key element in the militarization of the police in the United States. That would be the role of the security organs of the state of Israel in training American cops, a lucrative business that has developed since 9/11 and which inter alia gives the “students” a whole different perspective on the connection of the police with those who are being policed, making the relationship much more one of an occupier and the occupied.

 

The engagement of American police forces with Israeli security services began modestly enough in the wake of 9/11. The panic response in the United States to a major terrorist act led to a search for resources to confront what was perceived as a new type of threat that normal law-and-order training did not address.

Israel, which, in its current occupation of much of Palestine and the Golan Heights as well as former stints in Gaza, southern Lebanon and Sinai, admittedly has considerable experience in dealing with the resistance to its expansion manifested as what it describes as terrorism. Jewish organizations in the United States dedicated to providing cover for Israeli’s bad behavior, saw an opportunity to get their hooks into a sizable and respected community within the U.S. that was ripe for conversion to the Israeli point of view, so they began funding “exchanges.”

Since 2002 there have been hundreds of all-expenses-paid trips including officers from every major American city as well as state and local police departments. Some have been sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA). The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) has also been directly funding trips since 2008, explaining that “As a people living under constant threat of attack, the Israelis are leading experts in security enforcement and response strategies.” The intent? To “learn” and “draw from the latest developments” so the American cops can “bring these methods back home to implement in their communities.”

AIPAC has several pages in its website dedicated to security cooperation between the two countries. It asks “Did you know? In May 2010, 50 retired Generals and Admirals wrote to President Obama, highlighting the value of U.S. Israeli cooperation.” It goes on to cite an Alabama sheriff who enthuses that “There is no other country [Israel] that shares the same values and overarching goal to allow others to live in peace.” Regarding airport security, it also quotes a U.S. “security expert” who states “We should move even closer to an Israeli model where there’s more engagement with passengers…We’ve just stated to do that at TSA…” Indeed. That’s called profiling and pre-boarding interrogations.

California Joins New York and New Jersey in Outlawing Criticism of Israel

yournewswire |  California Governor Jerry Brown has signed a new law that prevents companies from engaging in actions that could be deemed critical of Israel. 

The new law prevents companies that boycott or discriminate against any country, including Israel, from doing business with California.

Richardedmondson.net reports:

Brown signed Assembly Bill 2844 on Saturday afternoon. The State Senate approved the bill by a vote of 34 to 1 on August 24, and the State Assembly passed it by 69 to 1 on August 30.

An earlier version of the legislation banned the state from making contracts worth over $100,000 with companies boycotting Israel.

In order to satisfy critics, who said it violated the constitutional right to boycott, the bill was modified to include reference to other countries as well.

The approved version does not prohibit companies working with the state from boycotting Israel. Rather, companies have to certify that they do not violate California civil rights laws in boycotting a foreign country – including Israel, the only country mentioned by name – according to The Jewish Journal.

“We commend Governor Brown for signing this bill,” said Janna Weinstein Smith, American Jewish Committee’s Los Angeles Regional Director, in a statement.

Just 3% of American Adults Own Half of Guns in the US

guardian |  Exclusive: New survey, part of most definitive portrait of gun ownership in decades, shows just 3% of American adults own half of guns in the US.

Americans own an estimated 265m guns, more than one gun for every American adult, according to the most definitive portrait of US gun ownership in two decades. But the new survey estimates that 133m of these guns are concentrated in the hands of just 3% of American adults – a group of super-owners who have amassed an average of 17 guns each.

The unpublished Harvard/Northeastern survey result summary, obtained exclusively by the Guardian and the Trace, estimates that America’s gun stock has increased by 70m guns since 1994. At the same time, the percentage of Americans who own guns decreased slightly from 25% to 22%.

The new survey, conducted in 2015 by public health researchers from Harvard and Northeastern universities, also found that the proportion of female gun owners is increasing as fewer men own guns. These women were more likely to own a gun for self-defense than men, and more likely to own a handgun only. 

Women’s focus on self-defense is part of a broader trend. Even as the US has grown dramatically safer and gun violence rates have plummeted, handguns have become a greater proportion of the country’s civilian gun stock, suggesting that self-defense is an increasingly important factor in gun ownership.

“The desire to own a gun for protection – there’s a disconnect between that and the decreasing rates of lethal violence in this country. It isn’t a response to actuarial reality,” said Matthew Miller, a Northeastern University and Harvard School of Public Health professor and one of the authors of the study. 

The data suggests that American gun ownership is driven by an “increasing fearfulness”, said Dr Deborah Azrael, a Harvard School of Public Health firearms researcher and the lead author of the study. 

causally connected to the campus catawampus?

electronicintifada |  During his time as UC president from 2008 to 2013, Yudof ignored a litany of assaults, vandalism and threats against members of Students for Justice in Palestine on UC campuses, but spoke out loudly against alleged “incidents of intolerance” when supporters of Israel were affected.

Yudof admitted he “sought guidance” from the American Jewish Committee, a leading Israel lobby group, following the 2010 divestment initiative at UC Berkeley and the UC Irvine protest by Muslim students during a university-sponsored propaganda event featuring Israeli ambassador Michael Oren.

The students — known as the Irvine 11 — were prosecuted at the instigation of the university administration and eventually convicted in September 2011 of “criminal conspiracy” for their decision to make statements of protest during Oren’s speech. The University of California also suspended the Muslim Student Union at UC Irvine.

Rights groups warned Yudof that the University of California under his administration had “exacerbated” a climate of fear for Arab and Muslim students.

Doubled down
Before he left office, Yudof doubled down on his support for Israel and suppression of speech related to Palestine on UC campuses.

He helped draft a 2012 California State Assembly resolution that conflated criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.

In 2013, Yudof participated in a conference organized by Israeli military and political elites — which renowned physicist Stephen Hawking boycotted.

In his talk, Yudof railed against the growing divestment campaigns on college campuses and asserted that the “delegitimization of Israel is an ongoing problem.”

Three years earlier, Yudof had changed the university’s policy to make it much harder to divest. Had his policy been in place a generation ago, it would have prevented the university divesting from apartheid South Africa, as it did in 1986.

Fear
Yudof’s fears about the spread of BDS on campus are shared by the presidents of Israeli universities. They are demanding that the American Anthropological Association not move forward with a referendum to endorse its recent vote to boycott Israeli academic institutions.

Many in Israel already fear that a “silent boycott” is taking hold that is far more threatening to the status quo than even the visible boycott initiatives.