NYMag | We now live in a world where the attorney general going out to dinner
with two top Justice Department officials is not only news, but a sign
that he’s rebelling against the president. As a senator, Jeff Sessions
was one of Donald Trump’s earliest supporters, and he served as one of
his campaign’s top foreign-policy advisers. But the seeds of the
attorney general’s rift with the president were planted during his
confirmation hearing, when he offered up some thoughts about Russia
collusion that turned out to be not entirely accurate. Here’s how the
Trump-Sessions relationship devolved to the point that two 71-year-old
lawmakers are barely speaking, lobbing insults on Twitter, and sending
passive-aggressive messages with their choice of dinner companion.
Sessions’s Russia Contacts Are Revealed
Exactly one year ago, President Trump was basking
in the unusually positive reviews from his first address to Congress.
The very next day, we learned that Sessions met with Russian
ambassador Sergey Kislyak at least twice while working with the Trump campaign — yet during his confirmation hearing he denied, under oath, having any such contacts.
“I’m
not aware of any of those activities,” Sessions said of Trump
officials’ Russia contacts, “I have been called a surrogate at a time or
two in that campaign and I did not have communications with the
Russians.”
NYTimes | Attorney General Jeff Sessions is reviewing a recommendation to fire the former F.B.I. deputy director, Andrew G. McCabe, just days before he is scheduled to retire on Sunday, people briefed on the matter said. Mr. McCabe was a frequent target of attack from President Trump, who taunted him both publicly and privately.
Mr. McCabe is ensnared in an internal review that includes an examination of his decision in 2016 to allow F.B.I. officials to speak with reporters about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation. The Justice Department’s inspector general concluded that Mr. McCabe was not forthcoming during the review, according to the people briefed on the matter. That yet-to-be-released report triggered an F.B.I. disciplinary process that recommended his termination — leaving Mr. Sessions to either accept or reverse that decision.
Lack of candor is a fireable offense, but like so much at the F.B.I., Mr. McCabe’s fate is also entangled in presidential politics and the special counsel investigation. He was involved from the beginning in the investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia. He is also a potential witness in the inquiry into whether Mr. Trump tried to obstruct justice.
Mr. Trump’s supporters have tried to cast Mr. McCabe as part of a “deep state” that operates in secret to undermine the administration. Mr. Trump has goaded Mr. Sessions into taking action against him.
libertyblitzkrieg |When the director of the CIA, an unelected public
servant, publicly demonizes a publisher such as WikiLeaks as a “fraud,”
“coward” and “enemy,” it puts all journalists on notice, or should.
Pompeo’s next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a
“non-state hostile intelligence service,” is a dagger aimed at
Americans’ constitutional right to receive honest information about
their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history by
bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings…
Words matter, and I assume that Pompeo meant his when he
said, “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in
an embassy in London. He’s not a U.S. citizen.” As a legal matter, this
statement is simply false. It underscores just how dangerous it is for
an unelected official whose agency’s work is rooted in lying and
misdirection to be the sole arbiter of the truth and the interpreter of
the Constitution.
What’s most unique about Mike Pompeo isn’t the fact he’s a terrible
human being, it’s the fact he’s so transparent and shameless about it.
This became crystal clear last April when I read the transcript of a
speech he gave at UAE-funded think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
timesofisrael | Moscow rejects accusation of responsibility for
attack on Sergei Skripal, likening it to previous attacks against
Russians on UK soil.
Moscow on Monday rejected British Prime Minister Theresa May’s statement
to parliament that it was “highly likely” Russia was responsible for
the poisoning of a former spy in Britain.
The statement was part of an “information and political campaign based
on provocation,” said Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria
Zakharova, in comments carried by news agencies.
“This is a circus show in the British parliament,” she added.
“Rather than think up new fairy tales, maybe someone in the kingdom
could explain how the previous ones ended up — about Litvinenko,
Berezovsky, Perepilichny and many others who have mysteriously died on
British soil,” Zakharova said.
timesofisrael | The White House on Monday condemned the chemical attack on a former
Russian spy in Britain as “an outrage,” breaking a week-long silence.
“The use of a highly lethal nerve agent against UK citizens on UK
soil is an outrage,” said press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders. “The
attack was reckless, indiscriminate and irresponsible.”
Sanders stopped short of pointing the finger of blame at Moscow, as
British Prime Minister Theresa May did earlier in parliament.
The United States and Britain have a long-standing intelligence-sharing agreement.
When asked whether Russia was to blame, Sanders demurred: “We stand by our ally and fully support them.”
For a week, the White House had refused to comment on the attempt to
kill Sergei Skripal, who sold secrets to Britain and later moved there
in a 2010 spy swap with Russia.
wsws | An extraordinary number of former intelligence and military
operatives from the CIA, Pentagon, National Security Council and State
Department are seeking nomination as Democratic candidates for Congress
in the 2018 midterm elections. The potential influx of
military-intelligence personnel into the legislature has no precedent in
US political history.
If the Democrats capture a majority in the House of Representatives
on November 6, as widely predicted, candidates drawn from the
military-intelligence apparatus will comprise as many as half of the new
Democratic members of Congress. They will hold the balance of power in
the lower chamber of Congress.
Both push and pull are at work here. Democratic Party leaders are
actively recruiting candidates with a military or intelligence
background for competitive seats where there is the best chance of
ousting an incumbent Republican or filling a vacancy, frequently
clearing the field for a favored “star” recruit.
A case in point is Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA operative with three
tours in Iraq, who worked as Iraq director for the National Security
Council in the Obama White House and as a top aide to John Negroponte,
the first director of national intelligence. After her deep involvement
in US war crimes in Iraq, Slotkin moved to the Pentagon, where, as a
principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international
security affairs, her areas of responsibility included drone warfare,
“homeland defense” and cyber warfare.
thesaker | Russia and the USA have been at war since at least 2014 (I have been warning about this year, after year, after year).
So far, this war has been about 80% informational, 15% economic and 5%
kinetic. But this could very well change, and very suddenly. Russia has
therefore embarked on an immense effort to prepare against both a
conventional and a nuclear attack by the AngloZionist Empire. Here are
some of the measures which have been taken in this context: (partial,
non-exhaustive list!)
In response to the conventional NATO threat from the West:
Putin has ordered the re-creation of the First Guards Tank Army. This Tank Army will include two Tank Divisions (the best ones in the Russian military – 2nd Guards Tamanskaya Motor Rifle Division and the 4th Guards Kantemirovskaya Tank Division),
and a total of 500+ T-14 Armata tanks. This Tank Army will be supported
by the 20th Guards Combined Arms Army (in progress). This will be what
was called a “Shock Army” during WWII and the Cold War.
The deployment of the Iskander-M operational-tactical missile system (completed)
The doubling of the size of the Russian Airborne Forces from 36’000 to 72’000 (in progress).
Creation of aNational Guard:
which will include troops of the Interior Ministry (about 170’000
soldiers), personnel from the Ministry of Emergency Situations, the OMON
riot police forces (about 40’000 soldiers), the SOBR rapid-reaction
forces (about 5000+ soldiers), the Special Designation Center of the
Operational Reaction Forces and Aviation of the Ministry of Internal
Affairs including the Special Forces units “Zubr”, “Rys’” and “Iastreb”
(about 700+ operators) for a total of about 250’000 soldiers which will
probably reach the 300’000 men figure in the near future.
The procurement and deployment of advanced multi-role and air
superiority fighters and interceptors (MiG-31BM, Su-30SM, Su-35S and,
soon, the MiG-35 and Su-57).
Deployment of S-400 and S-500 air defense systems along with very long range radars.
The adoption of about 70% of new, modern, systems across all the armed forces.
In response to the ABM “encirclement” of Russia by the USA:
The deployment of the RS-28 Sarmat ICBM with hypersonic maneuverable reentry vehicles
The deployment of conventionally armed very long-range cruise missiles
The deployment of a nuclear powered cruise missile with a basically unlimited range
The deployment of a nuclear powered unmanned submersible with
intercontinental range, very high speed, silent propulsion and capable
of moving a great depths
The deployment of the Mach 10 hypersonic missile Kinzhal with a 2’000 kilometer range
The deployment of a new strategic missile Avangard capable of Mach 20 velocities
This list is far from being exhaustive, there is much more missing
from it including new submarines, (air-independent propulsion,
conventional diesel-electric, nuclear attack and SSBNs), strike
aircraft, new armored vehicles of various types, new advanced (high
tech) individual soldier equipment, new artillery systems, etc. etc.
etc. But by far the most important element in the Russian readiness to
confront and, if needed, repel any western aggression is the morale,
discipline, training, and resolve of Russian soldiers (so powerfully
illustrated in several recent examples in Syria). Let’s just say that in
comparison US and EU servicemen (or their commanders, for that matter)
are not exactly an impressive lot and leave it at that.
Si vis pacem, para bellum
The reality is, of course, that nobody in Russia plans for a war,
needs a war or wants a war. In fact, Russia as a country needs many more
years of (even relative) peace. First, because time is obviously on
Russia’s side and that the military balance with the USA is very rapidly
shifting in Russia’s favor. But no less important is the fact that,
unlike the USA which strives for conflicts, wars, and chaos, Russia
badly needs peace to deal with her still very numerous internal problems
which have been neglected for all too long. The problem is that the
entire US political system and economy are completely dependent on a
permanent state of war. That, combined with an imperial hubris boosted
by an increasingly vocal russophobia is a potent and potentially
dangerous mix leaving Russia no other options than “bare her fangs” and
engage in some saber rattling of her own. So will Putin’s speech be
enough to wake up the Empire’s ruling elites from their delusional
slumber?
Probably not. In fact, in the short term, it might have the opposite effect.
Remember when the Russian’s deflected Obama’s planned attack on
Syria? The US reaction was to trigger the Maidan. Sadly, I expect
something very similar will happen soon, most likely in the form of a
full-scale Ukronazi attack against the Donbass this Spring or during the
World Cup this summer. Of course, regardless of the actual outcome of
such an attack (already discussed here),
this will not in any way affect the actual correlation of forces
between Russia and the Empire. But it will feel good (Neocons love
revenge in all its forms). We can also expect further provocations in
Syria (already discussed here).
Hence and for the foreseeable future, the Russians will have to
continue on their current, admittedly frustrating and even painful
course, and maintain a relatively passive and evasive posture which the
Empire and its sycophants will predictably interpret as a sign of
weakness. Let them. As long as in the real world the actual power (soft
or hard) of the Empire continues to decline, as long as the US MIC
continues to churn out fantastically expensive but militarily useless
weapon systems, as long as US politicians are busy blaming everything on
“Russian interference” while doing nothing to reform their own,
collapsing economy and infrastructure, as long as the USA continues to
use the printing press as a substitute for actual wealth and as long as
the internal socio-political tensions in the USA continue to heat up –
then Putin’s plan is working.
Forward | In an interview
with NBC’s Megyn Kelly in Moscow that aired on March 9, Russian
President Vladimir Putin was asked about the 13 Russian nationals
indicted by special counsel Robert Mueller for interfering in the 2016
U.S. presidential election with a covert social media campaign.
Through a translator, Putin responded:
“Maybe they’re not even Russians. Maybe they’re Ukrainians, Tatars,
Jews, just with Russian citizenship. Even that needs to be checked.
Maybe they have dual citizenship. Or maybe a green card. Maybe it was
the Americans who paid them for this work. How do you know? I don’t
know.”
The reaction from U.S. and Israeli media outlets was immediate and angry, with headlines focusing on one word: Jews.
Slate went with “Putin: Maybe it Was the Jews Who Meddled in U.S. Presidential Election”, New York Magazine with “Putin Says Jews Might Be to Blame for 2016 Election Hacking”, and the Jerusalem Post with “Putin: Jews might have been behind U.S. election interference”, as a representative sample.
The American Jewish Committee called Putin’s remarks “eerily reminiscent of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” a parallel also drawn
by the head of the Anti-Defamation League. Democratic lawmakers also
condemned the remarks, including Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut,
who tweeted,
“Repulsive Putin remark deserves to be denounced, soundly and promptly,
by world leaders. Why is Trump silent? Intolerance is intolerable.”
This reaction, while understandable, fundamentally misrepresents both
what Putin said and the cultural context in which he said it.
This is not to defend Putin for his smug and condescending tone
throughout the interview, his palpably dishonest statements regarding
whether the Russian government meddled in the 2016 election, or his
unhelpful injection of ethnicity into the debate. Nonetheless, it’s
important to be accurate about what Putin most likely meant and whether
it represents a deeper animus toward Jews. Anti-Semitism in Russia is a
real problem, but the panicked responses to Putin’s offhand comments
miss the mark.
WaPo | Jewish groups and U.S. lawmakers condemned Russian President Vladimir
Putin’s suggestion that the 2016 U.S. presidential election may have
been manipulated by Russian Jews.
Putin’s remarks came during a
long and occasionally surreal interview with NBC News on Saturday, in
which he speculated that nearly anyone other than the Russian
government could have been behind a program to disrupt the election. U.S. intelligence agencies believe Putin ordered the effort to undermine faith in the U.S. election and help elect Donald Trump as president.
“Maybe they’re not even Russians,” Putin told Megyn Kelly,
referring to who might have been behind the election interference.
“Maybe they’re Ukrainian, Tatars, Jews — just with Russian citizenship.”
He
also speculated that France, Germany or “Asia” might have interfered
in the election — or even Russians paid by the U.S. government.
But his
remark about Jews, which seemed to suggest that a Russian Jew was not
really a Russian, prompted particular outrage among those who remember
Russia’s centuries-long history of anti-Semitism and Jewish purges. Some
groups compared the statement to anti-Jewish myths that helped inspire
the Holocaust.
“Repulsive Putin remark deserves to be denounced, soundly and promptly, by world leaders,” Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) wrote on Twitter. “Why is Trump silent?” Rep. Don Beyer (D-Va.) also demanded a response by Trump, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported.
strategic-culture |But
the real game changer is the Russian ability to negate America’s
ability to project power through its navy. The already deployed
air-launched Kinzhal anti-ship missile has a range of 2000
kilometers and a hyper-sonic speed that makes it nearly impossible to
intercept. The development has made America’s thirteen aircraft carrier
groups obsolete. President Putin made clear that Russia now has an
overwhelming military advantage in cruise and ballistic missiles that
are capable of penetrating U.S. defenses.
The
new reality may or may not impel policymakers in Washington to approach
Moscow and seek a new round of negotiations for arms control, but the
real shock deriving from the Putin announcement is the failure of the
intelligence community to anticipate the developments and advise their
significance. Some of the new systems were hardly secret, with
development of the Sarmat, for example, known to western governments for a number of years.
There
will no doubt be a blame game in Washington over the inability to learn
of Russia’s arms programs, but the questions that probably will not be
asked relates to the intelligence agencies themselves and their
capabilities, or lack thereof. It is no secret that organizations like
the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have seen their basic missions
change since 2001. An organization that used to pride itself on its
ability to conduct classic espionage operations involving recruiting and
running spies suddenly heard from policymakers that those skills were
no longer in demand. Many officers who were made redundant or forced to
retire were precisely those individuals who had cut their teeth on
running operations directed against the old Soviet Union. They had the
language and cultural skills necessary to collect information on Russia.
With their departure, those capabilities also largely vanished.
You may not know it yet, but the world changed on March 1st, 2018, an
old era was ended, and a new era begun. In very great part, the
meaning of this new era is up to you.
On that historic day, Vladimir Putin revealed to the world that the US
military is now obsolete, and no longer capable of "projecting power",
committing war crimes, or intimidating and destroying smaller nations
around the world. That day has ended forever, one way or another. The
US military is still completely capable of the mission it needs and
deserves to do, which is to defend the territory and people of the
United States of America. You are safe. There is no threat. But the
days of your government threatening and destroying other countries is
over. I hope you understand this.
Putin's revelation of Russia's game-changing weapons, against which the
US military is literally defenseless, is not a threat or a bluff. Only
liars and fools speak of "Russian aggression", and the stupidity of
anyone who says or believes "Putin is bluffing" is beyond measure.
Russia's weapons are real, and the US military industrial complex (that
Dwight Eisenhower warned about 57 years ago) has absolutely no defense
against them. In spite of plundering and squandering literally trillions
of dollars from the US treasury and the American People in the name of
"defense", they are defenseless.
Russia's new weapons present no threat to the American People, unless
you allow the people who own and control your government to to start a
world war and force the Russians to use them. But if you do allow that
to happen, the American people will get exactly what the "good Germans"
got in 1945. And you will deserve it, just as much as they did. For the
exact same reasons.
Four of the six weapons Putin mentioned are, if Putin is to be
believed, already developed: the Sarmat heavy Intercontinental Ballistic
Missile (ICBM), a nuclear powered cruise missile, a nuclear powered
underwater drone, and an aircraft launched Kinzhai hypersonic missile.
They are breathtaking for their speed, range, maneuverability,
undetectability, and miniaturization of nuclear reactor technology. The
other two, the Avangard hypersonic projectile and laser weapons (which
Putin only cryptically mentioned), are believed to be still under
development.
Hypersonic means a minimum of at least 5 times the speed of sound
(Mach 1 or 741 mph, Mach 5 is 3705 mph). Putin claimed the Kinzhai
hypersonic missile travels at Mach 10 (7410 mph). The Avangard
hypersonic projectile may hit Mach 20 (14020 mph). Intercepting missiles
traveling at supersonic speeds (Mach 1 to Mach 5) has proven difficult
enough. Even in the limited, controlled tests that have been conducted,
present technology has not been 100 percent effective. Presumably, in
real world situations they would be even less effective. The
difficulties of intercepting weapons traveling at hypersonic speeds are
obvious and daunting.
Compounding those difficulties are the weapons’ range and
maneuverability. The Sarmat ICBM is believed to have range of at least
10,500 miles (Putin said it has “practically no range restrictions”) and
can attack targets via either the North or South Pole (US missile
defenses are oriented towards the North Pole). It is able to constantly
maneuver at a speed of what is believed to be Mach 5 or Mach 6, and to
carry 15 warheads with yields estimated at 150 to 300 kilotons (the
Nagasaki atomic bomb had a yield of 23 kilotons).
Powering cruise missiles and underwater drones (both of which can
carry nuclear warheads) with miniature nuclear reactors gives them
virtually unlimited range. Putin claimed the Kinzhai missile, “can also
manoeuvre at all phases of its flight trajectory, which also allows it
to overcome all existing and, I think, prospective anti-aircraft
and anti-missile defence systems.”
WashingtonExaminer | A panel of national and local experts, comprised mostly of
African-Americans, lambasted Chicago city officials in a meeting
Wednesday night for how they have worked closely with the Obama
Foundation to build the Obama Presidential Center on public land despite
criticism and serious concerns from representatives of the South Side
neighborhood.
"You have all this talk about collusion between Trump and Russia,
right? To me, that sounds like collusion between the city and the
university, and we see the same thing happening in relation to this,"
one of the panelists, Jawanza Malone, executive director of the
Kenwood-Oakland Community Organization, said.
University
of Chicago professors, leaders in the black community, and experts on
historic preservation and architecture repeatedly condemned former
President Barack Obama and his organization for engaging in closed-door
negotiations with the university and Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel, who
served as Obama's first term chief of staff, and said the Democratic
leader is ignoring the historic black community's needs.
Panelists indicated that their main gripe is the lack of
representation by those overseeing the project. The speakers also listed
other grievances they had with the current plan, though they agreed the
center itself was not the issue, but rather how it was being rolled
out.
Below is a list of 13 of those concerns.
1. Despite receiving invitations to attend and
participate in the discussion, no one from the Obama Foundation, city of
Chicago, Mayor Rahm Emanuel's office, the park district, or University
of Chicago chose to attend the meeting, university professor Tom
Mitchell announced.
2. The Obama Foundation has refused to sign a
Community Benefits Agreement, which Mitchell said would put in "writing
the many glowing promises that protect low-income residents from
eviction and higher rents." The idea of a CBA was "declared out of
bounds with a promise that the Obama administration would do even better
than such an agreement." No such deal has been struck in the four years
that organizations and residents have voiced concerns about
gentrification due to the project.
3. In the early planning stages for the center,
which was rolled out in 2014 as a plan for a library, the Obama
Foundation did hold community meetings, but Mitchell said they were
"more like marketing exercises, sometimes like pep rallies, featuring
glossy PowerPoints, but relatively few opportunities for open public
discussion.
Instead, we were given breakout groups, which fragment the public and
questionnaires that reduce the public to statistical interest groups."
Mitchell added that on the "rare occasions when an open discussion was
allowed, questions were too often or evaded."
4. What started as a presidential library that would
be overseen by the National Archives quickly turned into a privately
run operation that saw other private entities try to get a piece of the
deal. A PGA golf course scheme and five-acre parking garage were both
announced as additions to the center, only to be rescinded later due to
public outcry.
medium | What does it
mean to be American? To really “be” — see, feel, think, act American,
so much so that you are not self-aware of it, because it is unconscious,
reflexive, invisible, this way of “being”?
Well,
it means what it always has. Punching down, not lifting up. Punching
down is hardwired into America by now, thanks to a unique history of
settlers — who had never had any — punching the next wave down for
relative hierarchical position. An attitude of cruelty was born. And so
today cruelty is the point of its institutions, the purpose of its
norms, and the linchpin of its perverse idea of virtue, that by
punishing people, we can better them. It is all that Americans expect
from each other — and give to each other. That is the terrible burden of
a Promised Land that history’s despised warred among one another for
domination of.
The
problem is this. A society of people punching one another down must
collapse. What else could it do? It cannot rise, can it? If I am
punching you down, and I am punching the next person down below me, how
can anyone ever lift anyone up? But without lifting one another up, a
society cannot grow in quantity or quality of life. This, too, is what
happened to Soviet Russia.
America
has never reckoned with its history of cruelty. Instead, it developed a
defensive mythology of being welcoming — even while every new wave of
immigrants had to fight, sometimes quite literally little street by
street, against the last wave, for a piece of the Promise Land. Like all
myths, that one — was a lie that revealed the truth: America was a
Promised Land for the huddled masses to roam free — but only if they
could fend off the other tribes, by punching them down, endlessly,.
A
Promised Land is like a Garden of Eden. But who can live in the Garden
peacefully but angels? Human beings, flawed, indelicate things, are only
meant to be cast out— they are ever in conflict, in tension, hungry and
ravenous. And that is never truer than for their most despised — who
need to be healed most, or else will ravage their Gardens worst.
consortiumnews | Jane Mayer of The New Yorker and Cenk Uygur of The Young
Turks are the latest progressives to jump on the anti-Trump,
pro-Russiagate bandwagon. They have made it crystal clear that, in
Mayer’s words, they are not going to let Republicans, or anyone else,
“take down the whole intelligence community,” by God.
Odd? Nothing is too odd when it comes to spinning and dyeing the yarn
of Russiagate; especially now that some strands are unraveling from the
thin material of the “Steele dossier.”
Before the 2016 election, British ex-spy Christopher Steele was
contracted (through a couple of cutouts) by the Clinton campaign and
Democratic National Committee to dig up dirt on candidate Donald Trump.
They paid him $168,000. They should ask for their money back.
Mayer and Uygur have now joined with other Trump-despisers and new
“progressive” fans of the FBI and CIA – among them Amy Goodman and her
go-to, lost-in-the-trees journalist, Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel.net.
All of them (well, maybe not Cenk) are staying up nights with needle and
thread trying to sew a silk purse out of the sow’s-ear dossier of
Steele allegations and then dye it red for danger.
Monday brought a new low, with a truly extraordinary one-two punch by Mayer and Uygur.
strategic-culture |The
following report exposes one faux-‘progressive’ war-monger and
propagandist for U.S. invasions of countries that never invaded nor even
threatened the U.S.: Amy Goodman, and her “Democracy Now!”
‘alternative’ ’news’ media for Democratic Party billionaires’
international operations (such as for regime-change in Syria). These
propaganda-operations (just like the acknowlegedly mainstream ones, such
as TIME) promote using U.S. taxpayers’ money (the U.S. military, which is the most respected institution amongst Americans and thus receives “the benefit of the doubt” regarding any atrocities it may perpetrate — such as its having poisoned Iraq with depleted uranium,
for example) — using taxpayers’ money for so-called ‘humanitarian’
reasons that are actually just sales-angles for American billionaires’
bloody conquests of resistant foreign countries (in this case, Syria).
This propaganda is aimed at fooling liberals, or even “peaceniks,” into
supporting what are actually hidden financial benefits for these
behind-the-scenes billionaires.
Exposed here will be the depths that hypocrisy and psychopathy (both of which are pervasive at the very top of society, amongst the aristocrats and their retainers)
plunge down to, in American ‘news’. This type of operation can be done
only by taking advantage, especially, of well-intentioned Democrats, in
order for billionaires to become enabled to use taxpayers’ money, to
boost actually the private wealth not only of Democratic Party
billionaires, but even of Republican Party billionaires —
even of ‘the political opposition.’ The example that will be presented
in detail here, typifies a depraved scheme for the warfare-state (not
the welfare-state, which instead becomes proportionately
reduced as the warfare-state becomes increased), a scheme (support of
the military-industrial complex, or “MIC,” and its
permanent-war-for-permanent-peace economy) which largely controls
America, in order to build and maintain the public’s support for
obscenely high ‘defense’ spending and billionaires’ ‘defense’ profits,
which government-spending produces catastrophes for the victim-nations,
such as Iraq 2003, Libya 2011, and Syria 2012-, all of which invasions
are especially profitable for the owners of America’s ‘defense’
contractors such as General Dynamics and Lockheed Martin, which depend
upon war in order to funnel money from the domestic masses, to the
domestic classes, via taxes. And, of course, American
resource-extraction corporations, such as oil-and-gas giants, also
benefit handsomely from it, by grabbing foreign resources. Megabanks
benefit, too. After all: it’s the U.S. aristocracy that’s behind this,
the ultimate paymasters for these propaganda-operations (and some
details of this fact of aristocratic sponsorship will be documented
here).
vanityfair |When I first came out to L.A. [in 1968], my friend [photographer]
Joel Bernstein found an old book in a flea market that said: Ask
anyone in America where the craziest people live and they’ll tell you
California. Ask anyone in California where the craziest people live
and they’ll say Los Angeles. Ask anyone in Los Angeles where the
craziest people live and they’ll tell you Hollywood. Ask anyone in
Hollywood where the craziest people live and they’ll say Laurel
Canyon. And ask anyone in Laurel Canyon where the craziest people live
and they’ll say Lookout Mountain. So I bought a house on Lookout
Mountain. —Joni Mitchell
jaysanalysis | It seems more and more as if we are living in a bad B movie, replete
with cheesy set pieces and a Casio keyboard score – and the reason for
that is because we are. We have focused on Hollywood and propaganda
often at JaysAnalysis, but we have not looked at the music industry,
aside from brief mentions and a few shows. When it comes to the score
for that B movie we all live in, the best analysis I’ve read in a good
while is none other than recently deceased Dave McGowan’s excellent
work, Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream. I also have the honor of Amazon classing my book, Esoteric Hollywood,
with McGowan’s, in the “readers also purchased” section. I get emails
on daily basis requesting book recommendations (which is much harder to
choose than you’d expect), so I think for the spirit of my site, no
better book could be suggested for a reading list than Weird Scenes (aside from my own book, of course).
McGowan’s thesis is simple: The 1960s counter-culture movement was
not what it appeared to be. In a purple haze of pot smoke, free love,
booze and LSD tabs, the fog of the 60s is believed by most baby-boomers
to be a genuine (monstrous for faux conservatives) reaction
against the system. From student protests to politically active
musicians, the anti-war, anti-establishment ethos of the 60s was, so the
story goes, a natural, organic reaction to a hawkish, greedy corporate
demon, embodied in “the man,” opposed by all those revolutionaries who
love freedom, expressing themselves in the “arts.” After reading
McGowan’s analysis (a self-confessed fan of this era), it would appear
the mainstream view is only slightly correct – some artists were
political and genuinely anti-establishment, but the big names, and the
movements as a whole, were promoted and directed by design, for
large-scale social engineering.
McGowan begins his argumentation by pointing to Jim Morrison’s
father, Navy Admiral George Stephen Morrison, who played a central role
in the Gulf of Tonkin’s false flag event. Morrison, curiously, avoided
this association, stating his parents were dead, adding fuel to his
mythical narrative of having no musical training and supposedly becoming
a musical shaman following ghostly encounters and hallucinogenic trips.
While some of that may have been the case (such as the trips and
witchcraft initiation, for example, as shown in Oliver Stone’s The Doors),
the real story is likely much closer to McGowan’s analysis – Morrison
was promoted and made into an icon by the system because of these high
level connections. However, being well-connected was not the only
explanation – the establishment had a specific motive of derailing any
legitimate anti-war activism or artwork, as well as moving the culture
into a more degenerate state for social engineering.
RollingStone | For years, YouTube profited off all kinds of extremist content; its
three-strike policy was directed at copyright infringement. Its current
and newly aggressive posture towards content stems from the advertiser
revolt that erupted following Trump’s surprise victory. Within weeks of
the 2016 election, brands like Johnson & Johnson, and ad-tech
companies like AppNexus, began taking steps
to distance themselves from Breitbart and other purveyors of "fake
news" and extremist content. In early 2017, companies like Starbucks and
Walmart started pulling their ads from YouTube, worried that their marketing was sandwiched between clips featuring foaming-at-the-mouth racists and child abusers. In a watershed moment, the global buying agency Havas pulled its ads from Google/YouTube U.K., after the Times ofLondon
detailed how ads for well-known charities were supporting Neo-Nazi
articles and videos. When the influential research group Pivotal
downgraded Google stock from a buy to a hold, Google suddenly grew
concerned about the kind of content its proprietary algorithms had been
promoting for years – intentionally and by design.
This is not a
conspiracy theory worthy of a "strike," but the testimony of a former
YouTube engineer named Guillaume Chaslot, who was profiled by the Guardian
in early February. Chaslot, a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence,
explained how his team at YouTube was tasked with designing algorithms
that prioritized “watch time” alone. “Watch time was the priority,” he
told the paper. “Everything else was considered a distraction… There are
many ways YouTube can change its algorithms to suppress fake news and
improve the quality and diversity of videos people see… I tried to
change YouTube from the inside, but it didn’t work.”
When Chaslot
conducted an independent study of how his algorithms worked in the real
world, he found that during recent elections in France, Germany and the
U.K., YouTube "systematically amplifie[d] videos that are divisive,
sensational and conspiratorial." (His findings can be seen at Algotransparency.org.) At the height of the advertising revolt, in March of last year, YouTube announced that
it was "taking a hard look at our existing community guidelines to
determine what content is allowed on the platform – not just what
content can be monetized." CEO Susan Wojcicki announced the company
would hire thousands of human moderators to watch and judge all content
on the site.
YouTube's new policies were part of an industry-wide
course correction. Over the past year, under the banner of combatting
hate speech and fake news, Google and Facebook began to cut off search
traffic and monetized content-creator accounts, not only to dangerous
scam-artists like Jones, but to any site that garnered complaints or
didn't meet newly enforced enforced and vaguely defined criteria of
"credible" and "quality."
oftwominds |This opaque corporate censorship amounts to a private-sector Stasi, pursuing an Orwellian world of
profits reaped from the censorship and suppression of dissent
My longtime friend GFB recently suggested I revisit my position on RussiaGate, the investigation
into Russian interference in the 2016 US election.
I have been dismissive of the investigation because the idea that a pinprick of Facebook advertising
($100,000) could influence the sprawling ocean of public opinion struck me as preposterous.
But GFB suggested I look a bit deeper and consider the consequences of the Russian interference,
however modest it might have been; and I have taken his sage advice and reconsidered.
I've reached the conclusion that Facebook, Google and Twitter should be operated as public utilities,
not as for-profit corporations beholden solely to their shareholders and managers.
Here is my thinking:
1. As GFB so insightfully observed, Facebook says it sells advertising, as this is uncontroversial.
But what Facebook is actually selling is data on its users. This enables enterprises
to deliver adverts to
highly specific audiences (surfers between the ages of 18 and 34 with an interest in traveling
overseas, etc.), campaigns that are known only to the advertiser and Facebook, not to the targeted users.
But it also enabled the Russian crew to target audiences most likely to
be receptive to divisive, inflammatory content.
2. If we follow this dynamic to its conclusion, we realize that these for-profit corporations are
threats to democracy, or incompatible with democracy, if you prefer that wording, as they directly
enable the relatively affordable and easy sowing of intentionally divisive content.
A recent wired.com article,
Inside the Two Years that Shook Facebook--and the World,
describes Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's realization that the technology he'd assumed
was both incredibly profitable and helpful could be used as a force for exploitation and propaganda.
3. In response, the social media/online advertising quasi-monopolies--Facebook, Google and Twitter--
have all pursued censorship as their "solution" to "fake news."
But as we all know, censorship isn't quite as easy as the corporate technocrats reckoned; algorithms designed
to sort out "fake news" inevitably end up axing legitimate content, particularly legitimate dissent,
which often shares certain traits with what's conveniently labeled "fake news," that is, anything
that veers from supporting the conventional status quo.
As the failure of the quick-and-dirty algorithms has became painfully visible, the for-profit
quasi-monopolies have hired humans to sort the wheat of legitimate "news" (and what exactly defines
legitimate news?) from the chaff of "fake news," and discovered to their dismay that the people
they hired are biased against various dissenting views.
4. This opaque corporate censorship amounts to a private-sector Stasi, pursuing an Orwellian world of
profits reaped from the censorship and suppression of dissent, all in the name of "getting
rid of bad players."
5. Democracy depends on the free and open distribution of a wide spectrum of opinion, and an
electorate which is skeptical enough to decide for themselves what's inflammatory nonsense and
what contains kernels of truth that deserve further inquiry. The dominance of corporations seeking to maximize profits via
selling user data invites the sort of private censorship we are now witnessing--a trend that
is poisonous to a free press and democracy.
The Hill, on 9 November 2017, had the extraordinary courage to publish an
opinion-piece that condemned the mainstream news-media’s charges that
reports of widespread “neo-Nazi formations in Ukraine” are nothing but
“Russian propaganda.” An editor who would accept a submission like that at such media as the Washington Post, New York Times, New Yorker, The Atlantic,
or just about any other in America, would probably be fired or else
re-assigned, so as to prevent a repeat. It’s the way to achieve
mass-indoctrination, which the Ministry of Truth specializes in. Thus,
among the reader-comments to that bold article, the top-listed one under
“sort by best” (in other words, the most popular) was the anti-Russian “Have you counted how many neo-Nazis are in the Russian army as well?”
NYTimes | The Oscars are here: the first Oscars since powerful men started falling to #MeToo, a Trump-era Oscars, a #TimesUp Oscars, an Oscars in the shadow of “Black Panther.” Some big chairs will be empty. Some big secrets will stalk the red carpet, newly unleashed.
In an America where the ruling party seems willing to sacrifice many things — including decency and justice — to reassert white Christian masculinity as the tentpole of the universe, the best picture category offers a contrasting vision: a flaw-free indictment of that same colonial pathology (“Get Out”), a blazing affirmation of young womanhood (“Lady Bird”) and an aching gay romance (“Call Me by Your Name”), among others.
Jordan Peele has the chance to become the first black person ever to win best director; Greta Gerwig would be only the second woman. Yance Ford, whose film “Strong Island” is up for best documentary feature, would be the first trans director to win an Oscar. Vulture reported last week that some older Academy voters refused to even watch “Get Out,” calling it “not an Oscar film,” a dismissal more air horn than dog whistle. Identity politics loom large over the 90th Academy Awards, as well they should.
TV and film are in the thick of an unprecedented sociopolitical reckoning, the first ever of such scale and ferocity, a microcosm of our ever-more-literal national culture war. But to make that reckoning stick, we have to look ahead and ask ourselves what we want of this new Hollywood, and look back to avoid repeating the past.
Hollywood is both a perfect and bizarre vanguard in the war for cultural change. Perfect because its reach is so vast, its influence so potent; bizarre because television and movies are how a great many toxic ideas embedded themselves inside of us in the first place.
WaPo | Twitter is sick. And it’s sorry for infecting you. Oh, and — do you have an aspirin?
That was the gist of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey’s mea culpa this week. In a series of tweets
Thursday, Dorsey confessed that the company “didn’t fully predict or
understand the real-world negative consequences” of the instant, public
and global messaging it pioneered. “We aren’t proud of how people have
taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast
enough,” he said. “We’ve focused most of our efforts on removing content
against our terms, instead of building a systemic framework to help
encourage more healthy debate, conversations, and critical thinking.”
Dorsey
is asking the public to help Twitter get better. It is inviting outside
experts to submit proposals for ways to define and measure the “health”
of conversation on the platform, presumably as a first step toward
improving it. As a first attempt, Dorsey has suggested four metrics
based on the work of an MIT-affiliated nonprofit: shared attention (is
there overlap in what we’re talking about?); shared reality (are we
using the same facts?); variety (are we exposed to different opinions
grounded in shared reality?); and receptivity (are we open, civil and
listening to different opinions?).
It is good to see that Twitter is finally acknowledging its ill
health. It is even better to hear it’s open to intervention. The problem
is that the service may be too far gone to recover — and it is unclear
whether this initiative is a last gasp or a real attempt to change.
The
reasoning behind this proposal is probably not just a noble commitment
to public health. Platforms such as Twitter have clearly realized that
if they don’t begin to self-correct, the government is going to do it
for them through regulations that may not be as gentle as those they
would impose on themselves. And in the long run, the flaws in their
systems represent an existential threat worth getting ahead of. Being
seen as a destroyer of democracy and a net negative to public trust
isn’t exactly great branding. A short-term cure, if painful, might offer
the inoculation that platforms such as Twitter need for long-term
survival.
medium | Anti-Trumpism
has never been about opposing Trump. It’s about killing off what
remains of the true left in America by bullying them into falling in
line with the establishment and accusing them of supporting an evil Nazi
traitor if they don’t. It’s about manufacturing support for new cold
war escalations with Russia. It’s about manufacturing support for
internet censorship to quash anti-establishment ideas. It’s about
rescuing the career of every MSM pundit who’s been proven wrong about
everything since 2015. It’s about distracting from the DNC scandal which
proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that democracy does not exist in
America in any meaningful way. It’s about pacing rank-and-file Democrats
into alignment with Bush era neoconservatives. Opposing Trump has
nothing to do with it.
No,
when it comes to actual policies that actually matter, Trump and those
who McResist him are playing for the same exact team. Same expansion of
the US war machine, same expansion of unaccountable Orwellian
surveillance networks, same increasing government opacity and
persecution of whistleblowers, same increasingly militarized police
state, same soul-crushing Walmart economy, same subversion of anything
resembling democracy, same oligarchy, same agenda. Same play, different
masks.
The
two parties are both lying to you and the entire show is fake. US
politics is a WWE performance with the audience deeply invested in the
outcome of the match, each side of the stadium screaming for their
favorite wrestler when the only determining factor is what will make
Vince McMahon the most money. It’s all a fake spectacle, and it’s
designed to screw you over.
Ignore
the political theater and watch what actually happens, and you will see
a very, very different America than the one you are told to see by
proponents of mainstream narratives. Ignore their words and watch their
actions, and oppose everyone who’s on the side of the machine.
The Tor Project, a private non-profit that underpins the dark web and
enjoys cult status among privacy activists, is almost 100% funded by the
US government. In the process of writing my book Surveillance Valley, I
was able to obtain via FOIA roughly 2,500 pages of correspondence —
including strategy and contracts and budgets and status updates —
between the Tor Project and its main funder, a CIA spinoff now known as
the Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG). These files show incredible
cooperation between Tor and the regime change wing of the US
government. The files are released to the public here. —Yasha Levine
surveillancevalley | I obtained the documents in 2015. By then I had already spent a
couple of years doing extensive reporting on Tor's deeply conflicted
ties to the regime change wing of the U.S. government. By following the
money, I discovered that Tor was not grassroots. I was able to show that
despite its radical anti-government cred, Tor was almost 100% funded by
three U.S. national security agencies: the Navy, the State Department
and the BBG. Tor was military contractor with its own government
contractor number — a privatized extension of the very same government
that it claimed to be fighting.
This was a shocking revelation.
For years, the Tor Project — along with other government-funded
crypto tools like Signal — has been seen in almost religious terms by
the privacy community as the only way to protect people from government
spying online.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation held up Tor as the digital
equivalent of the First Amendment. The ACLU backed it. Fight for the
Future, the hip Silicon Valley activist group, declared Tor to be
“NSA-proof.” Edward Snowden held it up as an example of the kind of
grassroots privacy technology that could defeat government surveillance
online, and told his followers to use it. Prominent award-winning
journalists from Wired, Vice, The Intercept, The Guardian and Rolling
Stone — including Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald and Andy Greenberg
— all helped pump up Tor's mythical anti-state rebel status. Even Daniel
Ellsberg, the legendary whistleblower, was convinced that Tor was vital
to the future of democracy. Anyone who questioned this narrative and
pointed to Tor's lavish government support was attacked, ridiculed,
smeared and hounded into silence. I know because that's what Tor
supporters tried to do to me.
But the facts wouldn't go away.
The initial evidence that I had gathered in my reporting left little
room for doubt about Tor's true nature as foreign policy weapon of the
U.S. government. But the box of FOIA documents I received from the BBG
took that evidence to a whole new level.
Why would the U.S. government fund a tool that limited its own power?
The answer, as I discovered, was that Tor didn't threaten American
power. It enhanced it.
The FOIA documents showed collaboration between the federal
government, the Tor Project and key members of the privacy and Internet
Freedom movement on a level that was hard to believe:
The documents showed Tor employees taking orders from their handlers
in the federal government, including hatching plans to deploy their
anonymity tool in countries that the U.S. was working to destabilize:
China, Iran, Vietnam, Russia. They showed discussions about the need to
influence news coverage and to control bad press. They featured monthly
updates that described meetings and trainings with the CIA, NSA, FBI,
DOJ and State Department. They also revealed plans to funnel government
funds to run "independent" Tor nodes. Most shockingly, the FOIA
documents put under question Tor's pledge that it would never put in any
backdoors into their software. (See below.)
theintercept |Patrick Ryan, a congressional candidate from New York,
is leaning on his experience as a small business entrepreneur to
establish his readiness for office, but he has curiously failed to
mention the business he used to work in: domestic surveillance.
Seven years ago, Ryan, then working at
a firm called Berico Technologies, compiled a plan to create a
real-time surveillance operation of left-wing groups and labor unions,
hoping business lobbyists would pay top dollar to monitor and disrupt
the actions of activist groups across the country. At one point, the
proposal included the idea to spy on the families of high-profile
Democratic activists and plant fake documents with labor unions in a bid
to discredit them. The pitch, a joint venture with a
now-defunct company called HBGary Federal and the Peter Thiel-backed
company Palantir Technologies, however, crumbled in 2011 after it
was exposed in a series of news reports.
Years later, Ryan pivoted to a startup called Dataminr, a data
analytics company that provided social media monitoring solutions for
law enforcement clients. Dataminr, which received financial support from
the CIA’s venture capital arm, produced real-time updates about
activists for law enforcement. For example, according to documents
obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union of California and reported by The Intercept for the first time, Dataminr helped track social media posts relating to Black Lives Matter.
The candidate’s history of spying on
progressive groups has been conspicuously absent from the personal
history he has presented to voters. The biography section
of Ryan’s campaign website references only another technology
business he helped found, called Second Front Systems. That company
deploys “cutting-edge data analytics software to our troops on the front
lines,” according to the site. Ryan continues to own a 10 percent stake
in the firm, valued between $15,000 and $50,000, and has discussed his
work with the startup as part of his experience of building a business
and providing jobs.
But that business venture appears not
to have been as successful as Ryan’s domestic surveillance work — at
least not from a moneymaking perspective. His candidate ethics
disclosure, which covers money made in 2016 and 2017, does not list any
income from Second Front Systems — of which he is still a director — but it reveals that in 2016, Ryan collected $325,510 as a vice president of Dataminr.
In an hourlong presentation to local Democratic voters with Ulster Activists and Move Forward New York, Ryan stressed
his experience as a small business entrepreneur. At one moment during
the January 7 event, Ryan referenced his job at Dataminr, but did not
mention the company’s name or the type of work it engaged in. In a
question about whether taking a job in Congress would constitute a pay
cut, Ryan said yes and that he had taken work at another “another tech
company” in which he “leads the government team.” In terms of his
business career, Ryan talked at length about his efforts to employ
former veterans.
go-ogle | Deindustrialization, disinvestment in urban public infrastructure, the expanding criminal justice system, and the privatization of correctional facilities create the nexus in which the school-to-prison pipeline is the logical outgrowth. The relationship between urban public schools and the criminal justice system was fostered by a variety of forces that systematically excluded black populations from participation in economic and social development. The economization of incarceration has further influenced a political environment where crime control is the reigning logic of governance of the urban poor. Residential and school segregation spatially and socially marked the urban poor and the black population was targeted and object of social ill.
De-industrialization of inner cities in the 1940's marked a new era in racial and social disparity. Facilitated and accelerated by government subsidies, the movement of resources out of urban centers was a precondition of poor urban isolation. As manufacturing jobs shifted out into the suburbs, and later abroad, employment opportunity for inner city folks dwindled. Federal subsidies such as FHA and VA facilitated suburbanization beginning in the late 1940's, creating a mass exodus of middle-income and white households. There is an established pattern of discretionary action on behalf of banks and public institutions that excluded black folks from partaking in these opportunities to move out into the suburbs. Access to superior living conditions, better funded schools, and higher-paying work was significantly limited. White flight signaled the beginning of a systemic disinvestment in public urban institutions. With homeowners now mobilized in America's suburbs, local politicians were advocating for resources that privileged their propertied constituents. Meanwhile, in cities, high unemployment rates compounded with low performing urban schools further ossified the color line. City schools as public institutions are thus situated within a larger political economy of post-industrial urban change. In Ghetto Schooling, Jean Anyon writes:
In the years between 1945 and 1960, a number of developments coincided to lay the foundation for the isolation and alienation of the urban poor that characterize our cities-and our city schools-today. the migration to cities of southern blacks fleeing poverty, segregation, inadequate education, federally subsidized suburbanization of white families and manufacturing firms leaving these same cities, federal and state policies that did not adequately address the problems festering in urban neighborhoods, corporate disinterest, and local political patronage and corruption.
Within two decades, major American cities had drastically transformed from predominantly manufacturing to white collar industry. In the early 1940's, New York's manufacturing industry employed a little over 40 percent of the total working population. By the 1960's, the vast majority of those jobs had been displaced by employment opportunities in the corporate, real estate, banking, financial, legal, and insurance industries, as well as civil service jobs in the growing bureaucracy of New York. Under the auspices of Fiorello LaGuardia and Robert Moses, New York was transformed from an industrial working-class city to a corporate center with a booming middle-class. Investments shifted from the funding and supporting of urban infrastructure, including city schools, to financing middle-class housing and a growing service industry. Meanwhile, in 1950's New Jersey, the dispersal of manufacturing jobs from urban centers to the suburbs (and later abroad) accelerated the pace. The relocation of the manufacturing sector outside the reach of poor urban communities of color was aided by federal subsidies worth a little over 120 billion dollars. Resources for sustaining a viable community in poor areas, many of which were predominantly black or latino, were increasingly scarce. White flight and deindustrialization shifted good jobs away from them, creating a socially isolated superfluous population without the means to access white-collar jobs.
The effects of white flight and urban disinvestment would have generational reverberations, many youth of color were effectively shut out from jobs in the high-tech industry through the lack of educational preparedness available to them. Public schools in poor urban communities did little more than warehouse children in poor conditions. The institution funneled these youth into positions of subordination in the new economuy. Urban schools prepared youth for low-wage service sector jobs through a curriculum that emphasized discipline and conformity. They also pushed insubordinate youth into the juvenile justice system. City schools just did not have the adequate resources to provide a contemporary and quality education for its poor children.
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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