a week's worth of subrealism in a single epic comment...,

anonymny |  The reason why Trump appeals to many Americans is the lack of pomposity. He has the bomp and the pomp but without the pompousness. He comes across as a straight-talker. He’s rich and privileged, and he enjoys luxury. He’s honest about it. He talks and acts like an American in the street. And I think this part of Trump is real. It’s not put-on uh-shucks George H.W. Bush claiming to like pork rinds or Bush II as ‘beer buddy’. Trump is no saint, and I wouldn’t trust him. He may be a phony, but like Holly Golightly, he is a real phony. He plays this brand called ‘Trump’ and really believes in it. 

Also, the paradox of Trump is only a ‘crazy person’ can be sane and sound in today’s politics. Why? Cuz of the power of globo-PC and so many rules on what can be said and cannot be said. To be ‘sane’ and ‘sound’ is to just go by the script.

Now, in a sane world, following the script may be perfectly fine. But in an insane world, the script itself is nuts. So, to be ‘sane’ and ‘sound’ means to go along with the script without missing a beat.

Under communism in the USSR, the party members and bureaucrats all spoke and acted ‘sanely’. 

They didn’t throw fits and didn’t talk like blowhards. They seemed proper and dignified. But they were all speaking from a nutty script of Leninism-Stalinism. Solzhenitsyn, in contrast, seemed like a madman, but he was right. Now, I’m not saying Trump is Solzy. Trump is a blowhard and a narcissist and a fool. But he has balls, and it takes a big pair to do the Randall McMurphy thing in ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO’S NEST. US is a funny farm of PC and globalism. And the GLOB has appointed Hillary to be Nurse Ratched. In the movie, most of the patients act proper and sane. They are respectful of authority. They don’t realize that the place that is supposed to cure them is keeping them even more insane through dependence and weakness. This is why so many conservatives responded well to Trump in the GOP debates. It was like watching that scene in CUCKOO’S NEST. 

Propriety and Dignity are good under most circumstances, but there are times when someone has to howl like a wolf. With the likes of Jeb, Kasich, Fiorina, and etc reading from the same script of the Donor Class, someone had to howl and talk big to break through the PC fog. And Trump did that. Style mattered to break the ice.

In a sane world, propriety and dignity is about mutual respect and preservation of just order. But in a insane world, they are tools of corrupt power like in the former Soviet Union where the bureaucrats acted properly but dared not speak the truth that communism was a horror show and a vast prison.
In a crazy world, there has to some passion, some rage, some counter-craziness.

Look at Obama as the perfect specimen of slimeball dignity. He’s a smooth operator. He has this presidential style. He acts sane and sound. White folks were happy to have a Nice Negro with manners and intelligent style than boors like Sharpton and Jackson. But Obama is a total phony, a weasel, a skunk. He’s a globalist tool of Wall Street, open borders, more wars. And he is surely the most pompous president ever. His talk of his ‘profound humility’ or his speeches where everything is about ‘me’, even at the funeral of Daniel Inoue of Hawaii. And his pompous-ass book Dreams of My Father. Pure weasel-talk.

You can’t blame just Hillary for Libya and Syria and Ukraine. Obama totally went along with that stuff. Obama’s style may come across as clean and crisp, but he is just going along with the crazy globalist script. His policies messed up Middle East and set off massive ‘refugee’ problem. And then this jerk pressures EU to take in all these people. And the media just go along with this. And where the anti-war left? It is all but gone. It’s like the dignified and clean-seeming authorities in SANJURO are the real villains while ruffian-seeming hero is closer to the truth.

Now, it’s true that Trump’s style is fresh and boorish. Sometimes, he can be overbearing and even stupid. He made overstatements about Mexicans that was unnecessary. But is it worse than Obama fanning racial flames that burned down entire cities like Ferguson and Baltimore and encouraging a Lie Machine like BLM movement? Didn’t such rhetoric get innocent cops killed? And hasn’t there been increased policing and more tensions between cops and blacks precisely because urban Progs have been trying to revive cities by getting touch on black crime?

Also, if Trump’s side is so crazy, how come virtually all Trump supporters are well-behaved? How come all the violence is from the other side? They stormed a Trump rally in Chicago and aborted it. They physically assaulted Trump supporters. Where is the media on this? Media throw fits about ‘hate hoaxes’ from the Right but overlook ‘leftist’ violence as forgivable or even justified.

At any rate, we must not mistake style with real substance of the Trump Campaign. The idea that Trump is some nutjob who is going to blow the world up as president is pure nonsense. Trump’s style may be brash, but his positions are remarkably sane.

There is a massive immigration and illegal immigration problem in the US. Something must be done about it. Wall or no wall, we cannot let things go on as usual. Forcing Mexico to be responsible with the border is crazy? Only a crazy world would say that is crazy.

Trump also calls for economic policies that produce jobs for the middle class and working class. Why is that crazy? While the upper class are doing so well, middle class and working class are not. Is it so crazy to end the outsourcing of US jobs overseas? Where is insanity in this?

On the Muslim Issue, I think Trump went too far. But he still sounds more sane than Hillary. He is saying we need to stop foreign wars that set off these ‘refugees’ in the first place. Obama and Hillary, weasels that they are, pose as humanitarians with open arms to ‘refugees’, but they(along with media) overlook the fact that the ‘refugees’ are the product of conditions they created in the Middle East and North Africa by direct or indirect intervention. Why are Trump’s views crazy?

Now, it may well be Trump is less well-versed and informed about the details of other nations and crises around the world, but he sees the Big Picture more sanely than others. Stop messing other nations and creating crises that set off tons of refugees and migrants. The fact that Obama and Hillary could destroy so much of the world and then pose as ‘saviors’ goes to show how sick our media really are. It’d be like Hitler invading Poland and then offering aid to Polish rerfugees to show how wonderful he is. It’d be like Stalin displacing entire populations and then offering them food and cloting to show that he is a real humanitarian.

On the NATO and Russian issue, Trump is totally sane. NATO had a necessary purpose during the Cold War. But it has no use today. The idea of EU needing US protection is a joke. The idea of Russian invading the Baltic states, let alone Poland and Hungary and the rest, is complete fantasy, 1000x crazier than anything cooked up by Joe McCarthy. Russia didn’t even take Georgia when Suckassvillain attacked South Ossetia. It is about time Europeans took care of themselves. It is about time US got along with Russia.

The only purpose of NATO since the end of the Cold War has been to fight Wars for Israel. It is just an imperialist organization. It not only keeps EU as a vassal of the US, but it makes EU go along with every cockamamie plot cooked up by Jewish globalists.

So, how is Trump going to drive us ‘over the cliff’ by asking Europeans to build up their own militaries and by making peaceful overtures to Russia?

On every major issue, Trump is calling for sanity and common sense. He is no foreign policy expert, but he knows well enough that the Washington Pros have been in the neo-imperialist globalist game that is doing harm to US and the world.

Trump IS nutty about Iran, but he’s just playing to the Zionist crowd. In the US, you must find some way to appeal to Jewish Power(and now even holy homo power).

To sum up, Trump had to play ‘crazy’ to break through the fog of PC and globo-elite consensus that are suffocating this country. It was this brashness that allowed him to say and get away with what the cuckservatives like Jeb and others were afraid to do.

That said, Trump’s style is not his substance. His substance in terms of his policy proposals are common-sensical, realist, and even moral. A nation must defend its borders and have rule of law. We can’t just let illegals storm in and then reward them with amnesty, thereby encouraging more future invaders. I mean how did Reagan’s amnesty turn out? It only encouraged more for a second round.

Also, the Cold War is long over. There is NO REASON for the US to be enemies of Russia. That is just Jewish supremacist vanity at work. And we need to stop messing up Middle East and Muslim nations. If anything, Trump is really the pro-Muslim candidate. He may not be crazy about Muslims coming over here, but at least he doesn’t want to blow them over there.

He said some brash things about fighting ISIS, but it’s just red meat for the audience. Rambo talk. But the substance of his policy calls for minding our own business and making peace and making deals than invoking ‘human rights’ and other BS to mess up entire nations at the behest of Globalists
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Also, Trump is right to denounce Wall Street, though being a NY’er, I doubt he will or could do much about the banks. Banks, being ‘too big too fail’, can sink the economy if any politician tries to get tough with them. Also, both banks and media are owned by Jews. So, if any president decided to get tough with Wall Street, WS will set off market tremors and cause panic. And then the Jewish-controlled media will serve Wall Street by blaming the president for causing the crisis. So, WS essentially holds a gun to the head of the president.

Professors are expected to dress, talk, and act in a certain way.

Whatever the ideology, studies, specialty, department, or function, there is the Professional and Professorial style. It is supposed to be objective, intellectual, cerebral, restrained, and cautious. Of course, there are differences. Some professors have pony tails. Some dress loudly. Some talk shit in class. But there is an predominant Academic Culture. It is pervasive and becomes a way of thinking, acting, feeling, and being.

To an academe, Trump’s style is all wrong. Professors are not supposed to talk or even move like him. Serious students are not supposed to see him as model. And with PC dictating college values, no one is supposed to say the sort of things Trump has said. Serious academic types(professors and students) hate the party fraternities, and Trump acts like one-man Animal House. He rubs academes the wrong way like Rodney Dangerfield did in BACK TO SCHOOL. 

Academes are devoted to studying the world, and they become specialists in certain fields. But because they function in a social bubble, they don’t rub up against reality like Trump and the Dangerfield character do in the REAL WORLD. It’s the difference between a boxer who’s been in the ring and the locker room AND the scholar of sports who knows statistics and such but don’t know what it’s like to have a punch in the face and blood spurt out of the nose. 

In the academic world, proper form matters at all times. Professors must dress properly and talk properly. And there is rules of classroom conduct. This is all very good and necessary. But such a culture creates a false impression that the world should be like the school environment, where theory and reality are complementary.

Paradoxically however, it is the very culture of proper form that had led to the takeover of certain colleges by the lunatic fringe of PC-triggered madness. We see how this happens in David Mamet’s OLEANNA. In the film, a Liberal College professor is into being very professional and academic. He is part of that culture, and he lives it, inhales it, exhales it. He probably thinks and acts academic even at home, like Dustin Hoffman’s character in STRAW DOGS.

So, when a crazed feminist wench in OLEANNA makes a crazy accusation against the professor, he doesn’t know what to do. He’s so committed to maintaining the proper form that he hasn’t the guts to get angry and call her a vile, disgusting, stupid, ludicrous, lying, hag bitch. Why, such an emotional response would mean loss of form and dignity. It would seem barbaric in the eyes of academic culture, just like Barry Lyndon’s loss of temper in front of the aristocratic folks.

Professorial dignity is closely tied to proper form. So, even when up against great pressure, one’s respect depends on maintaining that form. Lose it, and you’re seen as a boor. So, rather than risking one’s loss of form and respect, many academics just have let the crazies run rampant on the campus. (This is why British society is so defenseless against PC lunacy. When one see nuttiness, one must show anger and take rough action. But such boorish behavior is beneath the dignity of the preening British elites. So, they just choose to make gentle assurances and accommodate the craziness by offering it a place in the power structure. That way, the British elites get to be ‘good whites’ and the radicals direct their ire at the ‘bad whites’ who aren’t so accommodating and offering of bribes. Social Justice Cult is just an extortion racket. The rich can keep their style of ‘dignity’ by buying off the radicals to attack something else. In the UK, the ‘bad whites’ are the ‘working class racists’ who voted for Brexit.)

Indeed, when the professor finally loses it in OLEANNA and strikes the no-good bitch, he knows he’s lost everything, just like Barry Lyndon. It’s damned if you do, damned if you don’t. If you must live by the culture of form, you can’t fight back against lunatics who insult and impugn you. You must take the smears and taunts. But if you do lose it and fight back, it will only confirm the taunts and smears that you’re an oppressive brute and barbarian. (It’s like radicals often provoked cops into violent reaction and then cried foul.)

The elite worlds of academia, military, and government all rely on the culture of form, propriety, and dignity. Necessarily so. But such emphasis on form has a constricting effect on the thoughts and emotions of people in it.

This is why academic types usually don’t make great artists. To be an artist, you have to be free, wild, imaginative, and passionate. To be an intellectual, one’s emotions have to be checked and controlled, and the mind has to be focused on critical assessment. If Bob Dylan, Marlon Brando, Sam Peckinpah, and Elia Kazan had taken an academic course in life, they never would have been artists. On the other hand, intellectuals, scholars, and critics must be more cerebral and objective than passionate and subjective.

Bacevich worked in military, government, and academia. He went from a culture of form to culture of form to culture of form. He is about control, order, system, form, and dryness. His culture is different from the culture that made Trump, the wheeler-dealer who had to be shifty, ‘artful’, bluffy, clever, crafty, bullying, and etc.

Trump is a player in the very game of money and power. Also, Trump had to be more savvy to rise up in his field. If one works in military, government, and academia, there are clearer rules as to what you must do to rise up the ranks. In business, so much depends on the ‘art of the deal’, charisma, handshakes, and instinct.

Trump’s world is about the play. You have to play to win.
Bacevich’s is about the program. You follow the program to rise up.
It’s the difference between Belfort and the Fed in Wolf of Wall Street.

Now, I’m not saying Trump is a douche like Belfort(though he could be, what with the Trump Chump University scandal) but merely making a point about the difference of personalities in different endeavors.

Anyway, people like Bacevich feel somewhat superior to the rest of us. They feel superior to us unschooled dummies because we don’t have Ph.D’s and other credentials. We don’t read books and don’t have access to special information in departments and archives. Also, people like Bacevich are wealthier than we are.

But people like Bacevich also feel superior to rich folks like Trump. They see people like Trump as having hustled and swindled their way to great wealth. Or even if super-rich folks didn’t cheat to rake in the dough, all they ever cared about is money, money, money. It’s like Bill Gates never got much respect as anyone other than a businessman. Even Steve Jobs said Gates got no culture, no taste. He only knows geekery and money and business.

People like Bacevich see themselves as Human Ideals. They are wealthy(or wealthy enough) and deserving of privilege. But they are not all about money. They are about knowledge and truth. They devoted their lives to studying the world and coming up with useful theories. They play the role of scholars and critics of power. And they have mastered a proper form of manners and behavior that epitomize dignity, seriousness, maturity, and integrity.

From their angle, there is nothing lower than someone like roguish Trump. Even if Trump agreed with them 100%, his talk-radio-like populist style would rub them the wrong way. It’d be like Rush Limbaugh coming on NPR. The only kind of conservative that such folks can maybe tolerate is Bill Buckley or some tweedy type with proper manners. Trump is too much like the Wild One in the Brando movie. Or maybe like the Lee Marvin character. It’s like how Jimmy Stewart reacts to the tough guys in THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE. It’s like how Gregory Peck the Eastern elitist reacts to the boors of Texas in THE BIG COUNTRY. Reagan was more bearable because he was more like John Wayne than Lee Marvin.

But, with all due respect, let us knock people like Bacevich down a few pegs.

For one thing, despite the culture of form, dignity, and propriety — and all those POMPOUS ceremonies with tassels, real and honorary degrees, highfalutin titles in Latin, graduation speeches, and etc — , much of the academia is corrupt, crazy, repressive, dishonest, radical, careerist, opportunistic, privileged, lazy, demented, partisan, nasty, vindictive, backstabbing, tribal, fiendish, scummy, and no good.

Bacevich says Trump is pompous. No, he’s boorish. Pompous would be something like all those graduation speeches where honorary guests make bloated statements about hope and etc. Pompous would be the 2008 election that presented Obama as The One, the messiah, the black jesus, ‘like god’(as one reporter said), the second coming of MLK and Camelot, and etc. Pompous would be all those ‘esteemed’ professors talking like they are philosopher kings. Pompous would be all those armchair revolutionaries with millions of dollars in their bank accounts but yammering about Marx and Social Justice. Consider Cornel West and Henry Louis Gates.

So many academics are actually cowards who don’t want to face the real world. So, they hide in the bubble, in the ivory tower. But they tell themselves that they are committed to studying the real world and critiquing what is wrong with it. But most professors have no idea of human nature since they have no contact with real people. They live with theories of reality. Many of them have no sense of reality beyond what they got from PC from cradle. Many are children of privilege pretending to be fighting privilege. But of course, they need privilege to study and oppose privilege. Just look at Harvard and Yale and Princeton. They are filled with kids of privilege and elitism, but they pose as ‘progressives’ and talk of equality and social justice.

Bacevich assumes that since Trump’s style is wild, his substance must be crazy. But in fact, the substance of Trump’s proposals are some of the most sane we’ve heard in many yrs. Indeed, they may sound crazy precisely because they sound TOO SANE. Fix our borders. No more crazy wars. Favor national interests of American people than globalist interests of elites. Stop with the new cold war business.

In contrast, so many academics have the form of integrity and dignity. They seem and sound so smart, balanced, thoughtful, critical, skeptical, and retrospective.

But, we must judge people by what they do, not what they say.

Weren’t the financial instruments that nearly brought down US finance in 2008 the creation of Ivy League-trained academics, economists, and investors?

Aren’t the people in the US intelligence, US military, and US state department mostly the graduates of top elite universities? Yet, the so-called Best and Brightest gave us stuff like Iraq War, War on Terror that actually aids terrorists, the disaster in Libya and Syria?

Bacevich speaks of Trump’s bad manners. Well, Colin Powell was one of the best-mannered men in government. Yet, he sat before the UN council and lied through his teeth that Hussein had nuclear weapons program using aluminum beer cans. John Yoo, the well-mannered professor from Berkeley argued that US could torture prisoners. The Best and Brightest planned for Iraq War that led to Abu Grahib, endless escalation, the looting of Iraq museum, civil war that no one anticipated(or maybe they did and wanted it), and etc.

And who were the advisers to the privatization in Russia in the 90s? It wasn’t Trump and such boors. No, it was the philosopher kings, the professors of the best schools. Larry Summers. Jeffrey Sachs. It was the Harvard Team. (To Sach’s credit, he must be feeling some remorse since he is opposed to Hillary’s nutty call for New Cold War against Russia.) And what happened to Russia as a result? Didn’t Larry Summers also push deregulation of Wall Street? And Yale-educated Clinton signed on it.

People say Obama is so smart and knowledgeable. But what has he accomplished in office? He didn’t know jack shit about Wall Street and just gave the banks everything they asked for. He got Obamacare only by lying to the public, and we don’t know how it will turn out. Almost surely badly. His foreign policy has been a total mess. Middle East and North Africa got worse than during Bush yrs when only Afghanistan and Iraq were burning. Now it also Libya, Yemen, Syria. And it may well spread to Turkey. And then, there is the massive ‘refugee’ crisis and terror attacks spreading all over.

Crime is up due to Ferguson effect. Whatever economic recovery has been largely due to printing money and borrowing, with debt now at over 20 trillion. Illegal immigration is totally out of control, worse than in Bush yrs. Obama’s SC appointees are PC commissars, not defenders of any Rule of Law based on Constitution. A ‘wise Latina’ and some Jewish lesbian who, in her stint at Harvard, filled the Law school with her tribesmen while bitching about ‘white privilege’.

Obama certainly perfected the academic style, and he became the darling of white/Jewish Libs who want to appear pro-black but had problems finding Negroes of real caliber. But as smart as Obama is, what has he done academically or professionally prior to becoming a politician? Zilch. He got by on style. He didn’t even become a professor at University of Chicago. He just hung around and made connections with the right kind of people who found him useful as ‘our Negro’. Jews went so far as to call him the ‘first Jewish president’. So, even though Obama did absolutely nothing as instructor and politician, he got to be president because he had the right kind of ‘style’ and knew the right kind of people.

So, before Bacevich gets all high and mighty about the academic world and its nice manners of civility and dignity, he should ask himself how so much of the academic style and prestige have been used for some of the most insane, irresponsible, reckless, stupid, vile, hideous, nasty, ugly, sick, and demented policies one can think of.

And look at foreign policy. You’d think academics would be honest and tough critics of power and politics. But we’ve seen so many academics whore themselves out to Republican and Democrat warmongers. There were plenty of academics advising the Bush administration in the reckless Iraq War. And there were plenty of highfalutin academics supporting and making excuses for Obama-Hillary’s war in Libya and subversion in Syria and Ukraine. Victoria Nuland is related to a Yale academic.

So much for honest critics of power. They act so professorial and dignified, but so many are partisan hacks or tribal opportunists(mostly of the Zionist kind). Jewish money and media pressure are so pervasive that Norman Finkelstein was robbed of a job at Depaul(and other universities) because the odious Alan Dershowitz made phone calls. And Steven Salaita couldn’t get a gig at U of I because of impassioned remarks during the Gaza massacre.

And do law schools really teach the law? Just how does law school produce idiots like Sonia Sotomayor the ‘wise Latina’? Just how does the academia justify something so bogus as ‘hate speech’ laws? I mean who decides what is hate and not hate? The powers that be, right? And how can any serious person say stuff like “I believe in free speech but not hate speech”? And how is it that the best law schools produce people who reinterpret and redefine marriage as between a man and man and between woman and woman? How is that the leading academic theories of justice advised NY to fine businesses for $250,000 if they confuse a ‘he’ with ‘she’? What are they teaching at Harvard Law School when they say a guy with a woman’s wig should use a woman’s washroom? What is this, farce?

And if academic life is about truth, dignity, and sanity, how is it that some of the craziest ideas in recent yrs came out of the academia? And if the academia has such high standards, how did it allow so many moronic or crazy lunatics to become tenured professors? How did colleges come up with stuff like ‘trigger warnings’ and ‘micro-aggressions’ and other hysteria? And how do universities react to stuff like false KKK sighting at Oberlin? They treat them as if they’re real. And when the Milo the homo poofter was interrupted and threatened at Depaul, where was the principle of freedom of speech? If anything, the Depaul administration sided with the thugs. How did Emma Sulkowicz get away with such rot. Even after she was exposed as a nut and fraud, NOW gave her the courage award. But this is a nation where Bruce Jenner won both the courage award and woman of the year award. And we live in a world where Obama got the Nobel prize for nothing. Well, how much peace did Obama spread around the world since then?

And look at the media. A massive lie machine. Now, so many journos are products of top journalism schools. So, how come so many are more committed to PC, the Narrative, and BS than to the truth? How come black thugs are called ‘teens’ and ‘youths’? Why did NBC’s Diane Sawyer say bombed out Gaza is Israel. How come Helen Thomas lost her job for saying European Zionists should return to Europe? How come NYT and rest of media cheer-lead the Iraq War? Why have they let Obama get away with so much spying, lack of transparency, and war-mongering? Why did they go easy on Wall Street that fleeced us blind in 2009 with bailouts? How did the whole media fall for the UVA rape hoax? If not for a handful of bloggers who exposed the fraud, the whole world would still be believing the story and the crazy bitch who wrote it probably would have won the Pulitzer.

And as I’ve said before, the academia has been either too cowardly or too complicit in the rise of PC craziness and hysteria in the campuses. The cowards didn’t speak out against the rise of PC lunacy and witch-hunt mentality. The complicit were the very professors — mostly in sociology, humanities, political science, and law — who filled the minds of millennial morons with paranoid lunacy about Evil White Males, Patriarchy, KKK, ‘homophobia’, and etc. If academic environment is so sane and rational, how come some of the most vile, aggressive, hateful, and bilious movements have emerged from the universities?

And what has come of college debates? Now, winners are usually shucking and jiving black wanna-be rappers. This is what US colleges allow, and the likes of Andrew Bacevich never lodged a complaint. Yet, he is bitching about Trump’s ill manners and craziness?

When Bacevich saw PC lunacy on his campus, did he ever speak out? Or did he just keep his head low and walk away because he didn’t want to lose his proper form as a dignified academic? If we want craziness, we don’t need Trump. We only need to look at colleges newspaper to see what the latest hysteria, craze, fad, or nutjobbery is.

But, the crazy stuff in colleges is cloaked with the conceit of intellectualism, rationalism, critical theory, or some such. So, it gets a pass while Trump is said to be crazy, extreme, and nutty because he said… let’s fix our borders(how mad!!!), end the stupid new cold war with Russia(how loony!!!), let’s stop messing up Muslim nations(how ludicrous!!!), let’s be careful about which Muslims we allow into America(how frightening!!!), let’s think about the American worker and not just the globalist urban class(how supercalifragilisticexpialidocious!!!).

What is truly crazy about America is that a NY real estate hustler and blowhard makes more common sense, moral sense, and good sense than all the experts of media, academia, military, and government combined. But in a world where the law of the land says 2 + 2 = 5, someone who insists it is 2 + 2 = 4 must be mad.

Trump is not the emperor who has no clothes. He is one who notices that the Empire has no clothes. Also, unlike the ridiculous expectations of Pompous Hope and Change of Obama that couldn’t be fulfilled(not least because they lacked specificity), what Trump is calling for can be achieved.

They are realistic about the real world. We can fix our borders if we really want to. We can lower immigration to give US workers time to breathe and catch up. We can end the stupid new cold war with Russia. It’s easy cuz Russia doesn’t want it. We can let EU carry a bigger burden with NATO. We need to stop seeing EU as a vassal state of US. We can stop the wars in the Muslim world and let Muslims and Arabs pick up their own pieces. It was US intervention and its collusion with allies that led to hell in Libya and Syria. Dealing with the big banks is a much tougher call.

Despite Trumps overstatements and boorish style, what he is calling for is doable, sensible, and right.
But then, we have too many people feeding on crisis caused by globalist interventions. They don’t want a fix to the problems. They thrive on problems. And that is why they see Trump as a threat.

The remarkable thing about Trump is his style is sometimes over-the-top and ‘crazy’, but he is, at the core, totally sane. He’s not like the man in NETWORK who really loses it and screams ‘I’m mad as hell’.

The way of Trump is to be ‘Sane as Hell’. In a world gone nuts as the new normal, he is wildly… sane.

deep state slice wants no part of granny goodness?

lewrockwell |  On the eve of the Democratic National Convention, WikiLeaks — the courageous international organization dedicated to governmental transparency — exposed hundreds of internal emails circulated among senior staff of the Democratic National Committee during the past 18 months.

At a time when Democratic Party officials were publicly professing neutrality during the party’s presidential primaries, the DNC’s internal emails showed a pattern of distinct bias toward the candidacy of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and a marked prejudice toward the candidacy of Sen. Bernie Sanders. Some of the emails were raw in their tone, and some could fairly be characterized as failing to respect Sanders’ Jewish heritage.

The revelation caused a public uproar during the weekend preceding the opening of the Democratic convention in Philadelphia last week, and it caused the DNC to ask its own chairwoman, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, to resign. When she declined to do so, President Barack Obama personally intervened and implored her to leave. She submitted to the president’s wishes, gave up her public role as chair of the convention and eventually resigned as chair of the DNC late last week.

In order to take everyone’s eyes off this intrusive and uncomfortable bouncing ball, the leadership of the DNC, in conjunction with officials of the Clinton campaign, blamed the release of the DNC emails on hackers employed by Russian intelligence agents. Many in the media picked up this juicy story and repeated it all last week.

Clinton promptly named Wasserman Schultz as a campaign consultant and complained that the Russians are trying to influence the presidential election. She did not complain about the unfairness manifested in the emails, complete with their religious prejudice; she only complained about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s helping Donald Trump.

deep state kept mum on who hacked the DNC

BI |  When asked about how the administration could be expected to respond to reports that Russia played a role in hacking into DNC computers, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper told the Aspen Security Forum on Thursday that "we are not quite ready yet to make a call on attribution."

He noted that he was "taken aback a bit" by the "hyperventilation" over Russia's alleged involvement in the hack.

Clapper was likely referring to the concern expressed in recent days among analysts and high-level officials that the hack was Russia's way of making the Democratic Party look bad in order to garner support for Donald Trump. The Republican presidential nominee has expressed views that largely align with Moscow's vision of the international order.

Earlier this week, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden claimed on Twitter that the US intelligence community — specifically, the NSA — has the technical ability to draw a straight line from the hack on the DNC back to Russia.

He then argued that it should use those capabilities if assertions about the Kremlin's attempts to meddle in the domestic politics of a foreign adversary are to be taken seriously.

Global Beta Test: Multi-Level Nottingham Antics You Could Not Make Up

theintercept |  After a watchdog blog repeatedly linked him and other local officials to  corruption and fraud, the Sheriff of Terrebone Parish in Louisiana on Tuesday sent six deputies to raid a police officer’s home to seize computers and other electronic devices.

Sheriff Jerry Larpenter’s deputies submitted affidavits alleging criminal defamation against the anonymous author of the ExposeDAT blog, and obtained search warrants to seize evidence in the officer’s house and from Facebook.

The officer, Wayne Anderson, works for the police department of Houma, the county seat of Terrebone Parish — and according to New Orleans’ WWL-TV, formerly worked as a Terrebone Sheriff’s deputy.

Anderson was placed on paid leave about an hour and a half after the raid on his house, Jerri Smitko, one of his attorneys, told The Intercept. She said that he has not yet been officially notified about why.

Smitko said Anderson denies that he is the author of ExposeDat.

But free speech advocates say the blogger — whoever he or she is — is protected by the First Amendment.

“The law is very clear that somebody in their private capacity, on private time, on their own equipment, has a First Amendment right to post about things of public concern,” Marjorie Esman, director of the ACLU of Louisiana, told The Intercept.

Larpenter told WWL: “If you’re gonna lie about me and make it under a fictitious name, I’m gonna come after you.”

Global Beta Test: Anyone Believe There Are No "Stay Behind" Units In The U.S.of A?

paulcraigroberts |  If you have been wondering what all the terror events in France and Germany are about, here is the answer: http://www.strategic-culture.org/news/2016/08/01/french-mps-visit-crimea-suggesting-early-end-sanctions.html

 

Washington has raised the cost of being a member of its Empire too high. Vassals such as France and Germany are beginning to exercise independent policies toward Russia. Observing the cracks in its Empire, Washington has decided to bind its vassals to Washington with terror. Most likely what we are witnessing in the French and German attacks is Operation Gladio.

Washington’s policy toward Russia, which has been imposed by Washington on all of Europe, benefits no one but the handful of American ideologues known as neoconservatives. 

Neoconservatives are crazed psychopaths willing to destroy Earth in behalf of American hegemony.

A delegation of members of the French National Assembly and Senate went to Crimea to participate in Russian Navy Day on July 28. Thierry Mariani, the head of the French delegation, addressed the parliament in Crimea and said that there are no reasons for France to continue to support Washington’s illegal sanctions on Russia. 

As the Strategic Culture Foundation reports, this “is part of a trend taking place in Europe.”

“On June 8, the French Senate voted overwhelmingly to urge the government to gradually reduce economic sanctions on Russia amid growing opposition to the punitive measures across Europe. The French National Assembly voted for lifting the sanctions in late April.”

See: https://www.rt.com/news/345898-french-senate-lifting-sanctions/ 

 

Politicians in Italy, Belgium, and Cyprus are taking the same tack. Politicians in Greece and Hungary have also questioned the sanctions.

So does Donald Trump, and that is why the servile American press is trying to drive him into unacceptability and out of the race.

Global Beta Test: Everyday People Will Gleefully Murder Their Neighbors If Asked By The State

libraryofsocialscience |  Well over 200 million people were killed in the twentieth century as a result of political violence generated by nations. Episodes of mass slaughter are given names like war, genocide, democide, social annihilation and murder by government. It seems as though the world has been living through an epidemic, or malignant disease.

Former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski states that the 20th century was dominated by the “politics of organized insanity.” Yet nowhere does one find a systematic concept of psychopathology to characterize the monumentally destructive, often bizarre events of political history. 

In the privacy of a movie theater—witnessing the carnage, absurdity and futility of battle—people often think to themselves, “War is insane.” But what happens when people leave the theater? Where are studies of the “war disorder”?

Freud in 1930 proposed a "pathology of cultural communities.” Chapter I of Norman O. Brown’s classic Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (1959) is entitled “The Disease Called Man” and Chapter II, “Neurosis and History.” Neurosis, Brown says, is not an occasional aberration and not just in other people. Rather, neurosis is an “essential consequence of civilization or culture” and therefore is “in us, and in us all the time.”

Roger Griffin, an authority on Fascism, summarizes his conclusions about Nazi destructiveness on his website: “Since so many millions were involved in Nazism and the Holocaust, this can’t be explained in terms of madness or pathology: Something more basic had to be involved.” Why the a priori assumption that just because millions of people are involved, a social movement cannot be characterized as a form of madness or pathology?

In this paper, I discuss the concept of collective psychopathology. I begin by focusing on the case-study of Adolf Hitler and Nazism, specifically the behavior of Hitler and Germany during the final years of the Second World War. I will show how Hitler acted to bring about the destruction of Germany. What occurred may be understood as a form of psychopathology enacted upon the stage of society. 

Hitler fought in the First World War, in which two million German men were killed and millions more maimed. In spite of the immense suffering that he and his comrades endured, Hitler refused to renounce the idea of warfare. Rather, he glorified the death of the German soldier in battle.

In Mein Kampf, Hitler wrote that in 1914 his young volunteer regiment had received its baptism of fire. With “Fatherland love in our heart and songs on our lips,” Hitler wrote, they had gone into battle “as to a dance.” The most precious blood, he said, “sacrificed itself joyfully.”

Upon assuming power as Chancellor in 1933, Hitler immediately began fantasizing about the Second World War—which would necessitate the death of millions more German men. In one of a series of conversations with Herman Rauschning in the mid-30s, he stated that he would be prepared for the “blood sacrifice of another German generation;” that he would not hesitate to take the deaths of 2 or 3 million German soldiers on his conscience “fully aware of the heaviness of sacrifice.”

In another conversation with Rauschning, Hitler said, “We all know what world war means. We must shake off sentimentality and be hard.” He declared that when he took Germany to war, he would not hesitate because of the “10 million men I shall be sending to their deaths.” In planning for war, Hitler was preparing for the slaughter of German soldiers.

I am going to cite during the course of this paper an article written by psychiatrist Stuart Twemlow and psychologist George Hough published in the journal Psychoanalysis and Psychotherapy. Looking at group dynamics from a clinical perspective, the authors develop the concept of a “psychotic fantasy of masochistic group death” and show how a leader can be both the “victim and perpetrator of a large group’s masochistic unconscious wishes and yearnings for death and martyrdom.”

gubmint instigated terra plots becoming more ambitious...,

publicintegrity |  The clandestine group’s goal was clear: Obtain the building blocks of a so-called radioactive “dirty bomb” – capable of poisoning a major city for a year or more – by openly purchasing the raw ingredients from authorized sellers inside the United States.

It should have been hard. The purchase of lethal radioactive materials – even modestly dangerous ones – requires a license from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a measure meant to keep them away from terrorists. Applicants must demonstrate they have a legitimate need and understand the NRC’s safety standards, and pass an on-site inspection of their equipment and storage.

But this secret group of fewer than 10 people – formed in April 2014 in North Dakota, Texas, and Michigan – discovered that getting a license and then ordering enough materials to make a “dirty bomb” was strikingly simple in one of their three tries. Sellers were preparing shipments that together were enough to poison a city center when the operation was shut down.

The team’s members could have been anyone – a terrorist outfit, emissaries of a rival government, domestic extremists. In fact, they were undercover bureaucrats with the investigative arm of Congress. And they’d pulled off the same stunt nine years before. Their fresh success has set off new alarms among some lawmakers and officials in Washington about risks that terrorists inside the United States could undertake a “dirty bomb” attack.

Here’s how they did it: 

Government agents 'directly involved' in most high-profile US terror plots

top people want us very concerned about terrorism, and not other, more serious issues...,

theantimedia |  One astounding aspect of the report is that the lucrative war-profiteering business involves nations the world would not usually regard as overly-interested in war. The countries contributing to the rising terror threat, as identified by the report, are Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, and Romania, among others.

This report adds to the already glaring problem of European countries making billions of dollars off the death and destruction of Middle Eastern civilian life. The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) found the United Kingdom was second only to the United States in arms sales, making up 10.4 percent of the total $401 billion worth of arms sold around the world for the 2014 period.

Although these figures refer directly to companies selling arms, the fact remains that European governments do nothing to deter this. In fact, former U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron insists the U.K. has “one of the strictest regimes anywhere in the world for sales of defence equipment but we do believe that countries have a right to self-defence.”

Shamefully, the United Kingdom’s billion dollar arms sales have been fueling the conflict in Yemen — thepoorest and most disadvantaged country in the Arab region — by arming the aggressive Saudi Arabian regime.Saudi Arabia’s ongoing intervention in Yemen merely benefits al-Qaeda.

Arms sales from Britain to human rights abusers are only increasing. The idea that European governments want to prevent terrorist attacks on the European mainland is ludicrous given the fact European governments continue to directly arm terrorist groups and brutal regimes that export jihadist philosophies.

theory of mind and exploitation of ignorance...,

theatlantic |  You’re holding a surprise party for a friend. The door opens, the lights flick on, everyone leaps out... and your friend stands there silent and unmoved. Now,you’re the one who’s surprised. You assumed she had no idea, and based on that, you made a (wrong) prediction about how she would react. You were counting on her ignorance. This ability to understand that someone else might be missing certain information about the world comes so naturally to us that describing it feels mundane and trite.

And yet, according to two psychologists, it’s a skill that only humans have. “We think monkeys can’t do that,” says Alia Martin from Victoria University of Wellington.

This claim is the latest volley in a long debate about how our fellow primates understand each other. Of particular interest is the question: Do they have a “theory of mind”—an understanding that others have their own mental states, their own beliefs and desires, their own ways of viewing the world?

Yes they do, say Martin and Laurie Santos from Yale University. But it’s different to ours in one crucial respect. The duo argue that other primates “have no concept of information that’s untrue or different [from] what they know.” That means, one, that they can’t conceive of states of the world that are decoupled from their current reality. And so, they can't imagine other individuals thinking about the world in a different way. They can think about the minds of others, but only when those minds have the same contents as theirs.

Put it this way: If a chimp sees other chimps staring at an apple on a ledge, it understands that they’re aware of the apple and might reach across to eat it—a basic theory of mind. But it can’t imagine what would happen if the apple was on the floor, or if the apple was a banana, or if its peers mistook the apple for something else.

“We might be the only species that can think about things that aren’t facts we have about the world, about other possible worlds, about states in the past or future, about counterfactuals,” says Santos. “We can simulate a whole fictional world. And if you’re a species that can get outside your own head, you can apply that to other people.” A chimp won't wonder if it'll be hungry tomorrow. It only cares if it's hungry now. An orangutan isn't going to write a novel, because this is the only reality that it knows.

lazy brains, subjective truth and propaganda...,

monbiot |  It’s not that the media failed to mention what the two platforms said about humanity’s existential crisis. But the coverage was, for the most part, relegated to footnotes, while the evanescent trivia of the conventions led the bulletins and filled the front pages. There are many levels of bias in the media, but the most important is the bias against relevance.

In Britain, the media largely failed to hold David Cameron to account for his extravagant green promises and shocking record. Theresa May has made some terrible appointments, but the new climate change minister, Nick Hurd, is an interesting choice, as he seems to understand the subject. The basic problem, however, is that the political costs of failure are so low.

To pretend that newspapers and television channels are neutral arbiters of such matters is to ignore their place at the corrupt heart of the establishment. At the US conventions, to give one small example, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and Politico were paid by the American Petroleum Institute to host discussions, which provided a platform for climate science deniers. The pen might be mightier than the sword, but the purse is mightier than the pen.

Why should we trust multinational corporations to tell us the truth about multinational corporations? And if they cannot properly inform us about the power in which they are embedded, how can they properly inform us about anything?

If humanity fails to prevent climate breakdown, the industry that bears the greatest responsibility is not transport, farming, gas, oil or even coal. All them can behave as they do, shunting us towards systemic collapse, only with a social licence to operate. The problem begins with the industry that, wittingly or otherwise, grants them this licence: the one for which I work.

mr. miracle vs. the nastiest proponent of ruthless democratic militarism

japantimes |  Against the wishes of her New York Democratic constituents, Hillary Clinton voted with Senate Republicans to invade Iraq. (It was a pivotal vote. Without Democratic support, George W. Bush’s request for this war of aggression would have failed.)

Humayun Khan, 27, was an army captain who got killed during that invasion.

Eight years later, the dead soldier’s parents appeared at the 2016 Democratic National Convention — not to protest, but in order to endorse one of the politicians responsible for his death: Hillary Clinton.

Even more strangely, Clinton’s opponent Donald Trump is the one who is in political trouble — not because Trump sent Khan to war, but because Trump committed a relatively minor slight, especially compared to the numerous outrageous utterances to his name. Trump didn’t denigrate the dead Humayun Khan. Nor did he directly insult his parents. Lamely trying to score a feminist point concerning radical Islam, Trump insinuated that Mr. Khan didn’t allow Mrs. Khan to address the crowd because as a Muslim, he doesn’t respect women.

Let us stipulate that no one should impugn the courage of the war dead. (Not that anyone did here.) Let us further concede that Trump is a remarkably tactless individual. Those things said, the Khan controversy is yet another spectacular example of the media distracting us with a relatively minor point in order to make a much bigger issue go away.

A week ago corporate media gatekeepers managed to transform the Democratic National Committee internal emails released by WikiLeaks from what it really was — scandalous proof that Bernie Sanders and his supporters were right when they said the Democratic leadership was biased and had rigged the primaries against them, and that the system is corrupt — into a trivial side issue over who might be responsible for hacking the DNC computers. Who cares if it was Russia? It’s the content that matters, not that it was ever seriously discussed.

Now here we go again.

Clinton’s vote for an illegal war of choice that was sold with lies, was a major contributing factor to the death of Capt. Khan, thousands of his comrades, and over a million Iraqis. Iraq should be a major issue in this campaign — against her.

love edo-era honor culture, but not the shogun's ruthless corporate policy oversight...,

japantimes |  The populist political tendencies among major powers is impeding the appropriate control of market activities, resulting in the creation of excess liquidity. That is making the world economy more speculative and uncertain, while turning the economic policies of the major powers more inward-looking.

Under these circumstances, globalism stands at a crossroads. Globalism is an international regime that was attained with the fall of the Berlin Wall as a turning point, beyond the waves of nationalism that dominated the world from the 19th to the 20th century and the East-West ideological divide in the second half of the last century.

It was widely hoped that the world would maintain peace through cooperation among the major powers while respecting democracy, the rule of law and human rights, promoting economic growth through market mechanism, free trade and liberalized corporate activities, and enhancing human welfare through protection of the environment, improvement in living conditions, propagation of medical care, elimination of poverty and spread of education. Globalism is the ideal of the world.

The survival of Japan, which relies on other countries for resources, food and markets, and depends on collective security for its defense, cannot be ensured without globalism. It’s now time for Japan to make efforts to fortify the foundation of globalism by explaining to the world its significance and presenting a concrete vision.

oops!!! used gold star condom drying up on the hot asphalt has a HUGE hole in it....,

breitbart |  Khizr Khan, the Muslim Gold Star father that Democrats and their allies media wide have been using to hammer GOP presidential nominee Donald J. Trump, has deleted his law firm’s website from the Internet.

This development is significant, as his website proved—as Breitbart News and others have reported—that he financially benefits from unfettered pay-to-play Muslim migration into America.

A snapshot of his now deleted website, as captured by the Wayback Machine which takes snapshots archiving various websites on the Internet, shows that as a lawyer he engages in procurement of EB5 immigration visas and other “Related Immigration Services.”

The website is completely removed from the Internet, and instead directs visitors to the URL at which it once was to a page parking the URL run by GoDaddy.

The EB5 program, which helps wealthy foreigners usually from the Middle East essentially buy their way into America, is fraught with corruption. U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has detailed such corruption over the past several months, and in February issued a blistering statement about it.

“Maybe it is only here on Capitol Hill—on this island surrounded by reality—that we can choose to plug our ears and refuse to listen to commonly accepted facts,” Grassley said in a statement earlier this year. “The Government Accountability Office, the media, industry experts, members of congress, and federal agency officials, have concurred that the program is a serious problem with serious vulnerabilities. Allow me to mention a few of the flaws.”

Grassley’s statement even noted that the program Khan celebrated on his website has posed national security risks.

Khan even brought out a pocket Constitution, claiming inaccurately that Trump’s plans were unconstitutional. That’s not true, as Congress has already granted such power to the president under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952—allowing the president to bar migration of any alien or class of aliens the president sees as a threat to the United States for any reason at any time. Such a class of aliens could be Muslims, or it could be people from a specific region of the world, or any other class—such as someone’s race, weight, height, age, national origin, religion, or anything else.

of course the hon.bro.preznit big-upped 2party1ideology team mate sen. john mccain...,

theamericanconservative |  None of this compelling evidence in the committee’s full report dislodged McCain from his contention that the whole POW issue was a concoction by deluded purveyors of a “conspiracy theory.” But an honest review of the full report, combined with the other documentary evidence, tells the story of a frustrated and angry president, and his national security adviser, furious at being thwarted at the peace table by a small, much less powerful country that refused to bow to Washington’s terms. That president seems to have swallowed hard and accepted a treaty that left probably hundreds of American prisoners in Hanoi’s hands, to be used as bargaining chips for reparations.

Maybe Nixon and Kissinger told themselves that they could get the prisoners home after some time had passed. But perhaps it proved too hard to undo a lie as big as this one. Washington said no prisoners were left behind, and Hanoi swore it had returned all of them. How could either side later admit it had lied? Time went by and as neither side budged, telling the truth became even more difficult and remote. The public would realize that Washington knew of the abandoned men all along. The truth, after men had been languishing in foul prison cells, could get people impeached or thrown in jail.

Which brings us to today, when the Republican candidate for president is the contemporary politician most responsible for keeping the truth about this matter hidden. Yet he says he’s the right man to be the commander in chief, and his credibility in making this claim is largely based on his image as a POW hero.

On page 468 of the 1,221-page report, McCain parsed his POW position oddly, “We found no compelling evidence to prove that Americans are alive in captivity today. There is some evidence—though no proof—to suggest only the possibility that a few Americans may have been kept behind after the end of America’s military involvement in Vietnam.”

“Evidence though no proof.” Clearly, no one could meet McCain’s standard of proof as long as he is leading a government crusade to keep the truth buried.

To this reporter, this sounds like a significant story and a long overdue opportunity for the press to finally dig into the archives to set the historical record straight—and even pose some direct questions to the candidate.

democraticunderground |  McCain screams "POW" as his major qualification for office and his mantra for silencing every embarrasing policy question. If the FACTS are different from what McCain says every day, why should he get a "free ride" from all Obama supporters as well as from the media?

See also http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph... .

gold star political condoms drying up on the asphalt in the midday sun...,

slate |  Sheehan sees the Khans’ story through the prism of her own sour experience in the public square. The villains aren’t all on one side of the aisle. “I think the Khans’ grief is being used by a party that is treacherous,” she said. “I have all the sympathy in the world for them. Not only sympathy, but empathy.”

She’s not just talking about the loss of her son but also her onetime alliance with the Democratic Party. After “Camp Casey,” Sheehan was a key figure in the Democrats’ efforts to reclaim power in Congress, which were predicated on riding, if not co-opting altogether, the moral energy of the anti-war movement. The strategy by the 2006 midterms was to rail against the now-unpopular war and regain a majority in the House. Sheehan met with members of Congress. She campaigned relentlessly. “Every Democrat I met with in 2005 said, ‘If you help us win the House, we’ll help you end the war,’ ” she recalled. Only one of those two things came true.

“Back when I was working with them after my son was killed, I was still a Democrat,” Sheehan said. “I still had some kind of illusion that they really cared about these issues the same way I did, but they really only cared about power.”

The party did reclaim Congress, though, and before long Nancy Pelosi presided over a new bill that continued to fund the war to the tune of $95 billion.

“I felt really betrayed,” Sheehan said. “But since then I’ve realized they didn’t betray me. It was my fault for thinking they would do anything else. If you pick up a rattlesnake, don’t be surprised if it bites you.”

“What Trump says is rhetorically belligerent,” she said. “But what Clinton and the Democrats actually did, it killed people. Why was the Khans’ son in Iraq? Why was my son in Iraq?” (Khizr Khan has made the same point, albeit a little more gently: “As a Muslim American I feel that these policies are not in the interest of the United States of America. ... We have created a chaos.”)

“That’s where the debate should be,” Sheehan went on. “If you support Hillary, I don’t really care, but you need to know what you’re supporting.”

Hon.Bro.Preznit need to worry more about Malia on the pole than Trump in the oval office....,

BostonGlobe |  President Barack Obama is challenging leading Republicans to repudiate Donald Trump.

Obama says Trump’s criticism of a fallen Muslim-American soldier’s family is the latest evidence that the GOP presidential nominee isn’t ready to lead the country.

The president said Trump is unfit to be president and “he keeps on proving it.”

“There has to come a point at which you say ‘enough,’” Obama said.

Obama also cited Trump’s misstatements on global crises.

LewRockwell | The U.S. and Russia are engaged in a ‘new Cold War’ and Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, in conjunction with much of the U.S. media, are actively misinterpreting Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s view on the escalating situation, according to one of America’s top experts on Russia.

“That reckless branding of Trump as a Russian agent, most of it is coming from the Clinton campaign,” said Stephen F. Cohen, professor emeritus of Russian studies at NYU and Princeton, on CNN’s Smerconish Saturday.

Cohen alleged that the Clinton campaign is intentionally misinterpreting Trump’s views on U.S. policy towards Russia in an attempt to brand him as a Russian “Manchurian Candidate.” Trump has argued that as president he would seek an easing of hostilities with Russia, as opposed to Clinton who would escalate tensions with an already aggressive Russian President Vladimir Putin. He has even gone as far as to suggest that he would consider allowing Crimea, which was forcibly and illegally seized by Russia in 2014, to remain under Putin’s control.

“I’m going to take a look at it,” Trump told CNN’s George Stephanopoulos during aninterview Sunday. “But you know, the people of Crimea, from what I’ve heard, would rather be with Russia than where they were. And you have to look at that, also … just so you understand, that was done under Obama’s administration.”

the 2party1ideology system WILL NOT reform anything...,

tanosborn |  America continues living the long perpetuated hoax that our citizenry has a government of the people, by the people, and for the people… and so, come November 8, at the 58^th quadrennial election, we’ll all be taking the ultimate Lesser-Evil or Repugnance Test as we are asked to make a choice between two throne seekers who are long, very long, on selfishness and false pride; and short, very short, on truth and judiciousness.  This 2016 edition, just formalized, brings us the extremely discomforting duo of an insanely lying braggadocio, Donald Trump, and a first-class deceitful elitist, Hillary Clinton. 

Unfortunately for 80+ percent of Americans, no matter how they vote, no matter who turns out to be the victor, their shrinking social (dignity) and economic lots have already been cast, predetermined, before going to the polls.  This Repugnance Test in November will solely determine how the economic spoils are to be distributed between the ruling 1 percent Knights – the millionaires and billionaires who draw Bernie’s ire; and the 19- percent Squires – crumb-gatherers who enforce the edicts of the Knights… in our Haves and Have-nots society.  To see it any other way, again, as Joe Biden would say, is just a bunch of self-deceiving malarkey.

The two ruling political parties that alternate governing America have not addressed the problems that beset the country, not with inspirational authenticity and most definitely not with any required judiciousness.  Problems arising from bigotry and an existing clear racial divide are disturbingly swept under the rug or, even worse, promised to be solved with the law and order magic wand.  Problems of safety and tranquility that have roots overseas, the Daesh boogeyman (Isis to most Americans), are treated as inimical to our democratically pure way of life, instead of the monster we have created and nurtured in our quest for economic, military and political world dominance.  Problems of an abusive economic disparity in our society, created by predatory capitalism deceivingly disguised as free enterprise, are hypocritically acknowledged but insultingly set aside, in-your-face disregarded… the power-elite in both ruling parties well aware that the 80 percent have-nots have no more power than that vassals had during feudal times.

if poor white America is unnecessariat, what in the world becomes of you?!?!?!?!

nypost |  There are decaying post-industrial Middletowns all over the map. In 1970, Vance notes, 25 percent of white children lived in neighborhoods with poverty rates above 10 percent. By 2000 the figure had risen to 40 percent, and Vance believes it is higher today. The life expectancy for Vance’s people is declining.

Trump’s promises to stand up to the Chinese are resonating, as is his message that “the system is rigged” against a proud group of Americans, Americans who built the postwar glory but now feel they’re being ignored or outright mocked. White trash is the one ethnic group it is still OK to make fun of.

“Humans appear to have some need to look down on someone; there’s just a basic tribalistic impulse in all of us,” Vance recently told The American Conservative. “And if you’re an elite white professional, working-class whites are an easy target: You don’t have to feel guilty for being a racist or a xenophobe. By looking down on the hillbilly, you can get that high of self-righteousness and superiority without violating any of the moral norms of your own tribe.”

Mapping the politics of Vance’s clannish, resentful neighbors is challenging, even exasperating. Hillbillies pride themselves on distinguishing the deserving poor from the lazy moochers, but Vance points out that it’s a fuzzy line. His grandmother would lash out at the government for doing too much, then for doing too little. She’d ask why society could afford aircraft carriers but not enough drug-rehab centers. She’d complain that the rich weren’t paying their fair share. But she and J.D. would be just as angry at people who paid for T-bone steaks with food stamps and hated the idea of the government using Section 8 housing vouchers so that poor people could move in next door — poor people “like us,” Vance says. She’d say people wouldn’t have so many problems if they were forced to work for their benefit checks.

the West's offensive against Russia is on multiple fronts and is very dangerous

unz |  But the most important reason for this nonsensical propaganda is that by constantly pretending to discuss a military issue the AngloZionist propagandist are thereby hiding the real nature of the very real conflict between Russia and the USA over Europe: a political struggle for the future of Europe: if Russia has no intention of invading anybody, she sure does have huge interest in trying to de-couple Europe from its current status of US colony/protectorate. The Russians fully realize that while the current European elites are maniacally russophobic, most Europeans (with the possible exception of the Baltic States and Poland) are not. In that sense the recent Eurovision vote where the popular vote was overturned by so-called “experts” is very symbolic.

The first Secretary General of NATO did very openly spell out its real purpose“to keep the Russians out, the Americans in, and the Germans down.” The Russians want it exactly the other way around: the Russians in (economically, not militarily, of course), the Americans out and the Germans up (again, economically). That is the real reason behind all the tensions in Europe: the USA desperately wants a Cold War v.2 while Russia is trying has hard as she to prevent this.

So, what would a war between Russia and the USA look like? To be honest, I don’t know. It all depends on so many different factors that it is pretty much impossible to predict. That does not mean that it cannot, or will not, happen. There are numerous very bad signs that the Empire is acting in an irresponsible way. One of the worst ones is that the NATO-Russia Council (NRC) has almost completely ceased to function.

The main reason for the creation of the NRC was to make sure that secure lines of communications were open, especially in a crisis or tension situation. Alas, as a way to signal their displeasure with Russia over the Ukraine, NATO has now almost completely closed down the NRC even though the NRC was precisely created for that purpose.

Furthermore, forward deploying, besides often being militarily useless, is also potentially dangerous as a local incident between the two sides can rapidly escalate into something very serious. Especially when important lines of communications have been done away with. The good news, relatively speaking, is that the US and Russia still have emergency communications between the Kremlin and the White House and that the Russian and US armed forces also have direct emergency communication capabilities. But at the end of the day, the problem is not a technological one, but a psychological one: the Americans are apparently simply unable or unwilling to negotiate about anything at all. Somehow, the Neocons have imposed their worldview on the US deep state, and that worldview is that any dynamic between Russia and the USA is a zero sum one, that there is nothing to negotiate and that forcing Russia to comply and submit to the Empire by means of isolation and containment is the only thinkable approach. This will, of course, not work. The question is whether the Neocons have the intellectual capability to understand that or, alternatively, whether the old Anglo US patriots can finally kick the “crazies in the basement” (as Bush senior used to refer to the Neocons) out of the White House.

But if Hillary makes it into the White House in November, then things will become really scary. Remember how I said that no US President would ever sacrifice a US city in defense of a European one? Well, that assumes a patriotic President, one who loves his country. I don’t believe that the Neocons give a damn about America or the American people, and these crazies might well think that sacrificing one (or many) US cities is well worth the price if that allows them to nuke Moscow.

Any theory of deterrences assumes a “rational actor”, not a psychopathic and hate-filled cabal of “crazies in a basement”.

During the last years of the Cold War I was much more afraid of the gerontocrats in the Kremlin than of the Anglo officers and officials in the White House or the Pentagon. Now I fear the (relatively) new generation of “ass-kissing little chickenshit” officers à la Petraeus, or maniacs like General Breedlove, which have replaced the “old style” Cold Warriors (like Admirals Elmo Zumwalt, William Crowe or Mike Mullen) who at least knew that a war with Russia must be avoided at all cost. It is outright frightening for me to realize that the Empire is now run by unprofessional, incompetent, unpatriotic and dishonorable men who are either driven by hateful ideologies or whose sole aim in life is to please their political bosses.

The example of Ehud Olmert, Amir Peretz and Dan Halutz going to war against Hezbollah in 2006 or Saakashvili’s attempt at ethnically cleansing South Ossetia in 2008 have shown the world that ideology-driven leaders can start absolutely unwinnable wars, especially if they believe in their own propaganda about their invincibility. Let’s is hope and pray that this kind of insanity does not take over the current US leaders. The best thing that could happen for the future of mankind would be if real patriots would come back to power in the United States. Then mankind could finally breathe a big sigh of relief.

behold the pale horse...,

lewrockwell |  The concept of the Deep State originated in Turkey, which is appropriate since it’s the heir to the totally corrupt Byzantine and Ottoman empires. And in the best Byzantine manner, the Deep State has insinuated itself throughout the fabric of what once was America. Its tendrils reach from Washington down to every part of civil society. Like a metastasized cancer, it can no longer be easily eradicated.

I used to joke that there was nothing wrong with Washington that 10 megatons on the capital couldn’t cure. But I don’t say that anymore. Partially because it’s too dangerous, but mainly because it’s now untrue. What’s now needed is 10 megatons on the capital and four more bursts in a quadrant 10 miles out.

In many ways, Washington models itself after another city with a Deep State, ancient Rome. Here’s how a Victorian freethinker, Winwood Reade, accurately described it:

Rome lived upon its principal till ruin stared it in the face. Industry is the only true source of wealth, and there was no industry in Rome. By day the Ostia road was crowded with carts and muleteers, carrying to the great city the silks and spices of the East, the marble of Asia Minor, the timber of the Atlas, the grain of Africa and Egypt; and the carts brought out nothing but loads of dung. That was their return cargo.

The Deep State controls the political and economic essence of the U.S. This is much more than observing that there’s no real difference between the left and right wings of the Demopublican Party. It’s well known by anyone with any sense (that is, by everybody except the average voter) that although the Republicans say they believe in economic freedom (but don’t), they definitely don’t believe in social freedom. And the Democrats say they believe in social freedom (but don’t), but they definitely don’t believe in economic freedom.

Who Is Part of the Deep State?

The American Deep State is a real, but informal, structure that has arisen to not just profit from, but control, the State.

The Deep State has a life of its own, like the government itself. It’s composed of top-echelon employees of a dozen Praetorian agencies, like the FBI, CIA, and NSA…top generals, admirals, and other military operatives…long-term congressmen and senators…and directors of important regulatory agencies.

But Deep State is much broader than just the government. It includes the heads of major corporations, all of whom are heavily involved in selling to the State and enabling it. That absolutely includes Silicon Valley, although those guys at least have a sense of humor, evidenced by their “Don’t Be Evil” motto. It also includes all the top people in the Fed, and the heads of all the major banks, brokers, and insurers. Add the presidents and many professors at top universities, which act as Deep State recruiting centers…all the top media figures, of course…and many regulars at things like Bohemian Grove and the Council on Foreign Relations. They epitomize the status quo, held together by power, money, and propaganda.

Altogether, I’ll guess these people number a thousand or so. You might analogize the structure of the Deep State with a huge pack of dogs. The people I’ve just described are the top dogs.

forced farm labor to distract from forced food hunger in venezuela

CNN |  A new decree by Venezuela's government could make its citizens work on farms to tackle the country's severe food shortages.

That "effectively amounts to forced labor," according to Amnesty International, which derided the decree as "unlawful."

In a vaguely-worded decree, Venezuelan officials indicated that public and private sector employees could be forced to work in the country's fields for at least 60-day periods, which may be extended "if circumstances merit."

"Trying to tackle Venezuela's severe food shortages by forcing people to work the fields is like trying to fix a broken leg with a band aid," Erika Guevara Rosas, Americas' Director at Amnesty International, said in a statement.

President Nicolas Maduro is using his executive powers to declare a state of economic emergency. By using a decree, he can legally circumvent Venezuela's opposition-led National Assembly -- the Congress -- which is staunchly against all of Maduro's actions.

According to the decree from July 22, workers would still be paid their normal salary by the government and they can't be fired from their actual job.