ICH |
The Russian president was meeting with foreign journalists at the
conclusion of the Saint Petersburg International Economic Forum on June
17th, when he left no one in any doubt that the world is headed down a
course which could lead to nuclear war.
Putin railed against the
journalists for their "tall tales" in blindly repeating lies and
misinformation provided to them by the United States on its
anti-ballistic missile systems being constructed in Eastern Europe. He
pointed out that since the Iran nuclear deal, the claim the system is
to protect against Iranian missiles has been exposed as a lie.
The
journalists were informed that within a few years, Russia predicted the
US would be able to extend the range of the system to 1000 km. At that
point, Russia's nuclear potential, and thus the nuclear balance between
the US and Russia, would be placed in jeopardy.
Putin
completely lost patience with the journalists, berating them for lazily
helping to accelerate a nuclear confrontation by repeating US
propaganda. He virtually pleaded with the western media, for the sake
of the world, to change their line:
We know year by year
what's going to happen, and they know that we know. It's only you that
they tell tall tales to, and you buy it, and spread it to the citizens
of your countries. You people in turn do not feel a sense of the
impending danger - this is what worries me. How do you not understand
that the world is being pulled in an irreversible direction? While they
pretend that nothing is going on. I don't know how to get through to
you anymore.
Does anyone in the reeking garbage heap that is
mainstream western media have a conscience? Do they even have enough
intellect to get what Putin is saying - that they are helping to push
the planet towards World War III?
marketwatch | Eleven police officers were shot by at least two snipers in Dallas
Thursday night during a protest over police brutality, leaving five
officers dead and wounding six, throwing the city into chaos and turning
parts of downtown into a massive crime scene by Friday morning.
Dallas
Police Chief David Brown said the snipers had opened fire on officers
from “elevated positions” during the protests. A civilian was also
wounded.
Three suspects were taken into custody, including a woman.
A fourth suspect exchanged gunfire with police in a tense, hourslong
standoff with police overnight, but that confrontation ended early
Friday morning, according to a city spokesperson. Sana Syed, a Dallas
public information officer, said she couldn’t confirm the status of the
fourth and final suspect, but said “the standoff is over.”
The
suspect had told police negotiators that “the end is coming,” and that
bombs had been placed around the garage and downtown with the aim of
killing more law-enforcement personnel, Chief Brown said, adding that he
had asked his staff for a plan to end the standoff.
Police are
working on the assumption that all four may have been involved in the
attack. It appeared the suspects had knowledge of the protest route,
allowing them to take up “triangulated” positions above the march and
target officers.
monbiot | When politicians do terrible things and suffer no consequences,
people lose trust in both politics and justice. They see them,
correctly, as instruments deployed by the strong against the weak.
Since the First World War, no prime minister of this country has done
something as terrible as Tony Blair’s invasion of Iraq. This unprovoked
war caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people and the
mutilation of hundreds of thousands more. It flung the whole region into
chaos, chaos which has been skillfully exploited by terror groups.
Today, three million people in Iraq are internally displaced, and 10 million need humanitarian assistance.
Yet Mr Blair, the co-author of these crimes, whose lethal combination
of appalling judgement and tremendous powers of persuasion made the
Iraq war possible, saunters the world, picking up prizes and massive
fees, regally granting interviews, cloaked in a force field of denial
and legal impunity. If this is what politics looks like, is it any
wonder that so many people have given up on it?
The crucial issue – the legality of the war – was, of course, beyond
Sir John Chilcot’s remit. A government whose members were complicit in
the matter under investigation (Gordon Brown financed and supported the
Iraq war) defined his terms of reference. This is a fundamental flaw in
the way inquiries are established in this country: it’s as if a
defendant in a criminal case were able to appoint his own judge, choose
the charge on which he is to be tried and have the hearing conducted in
his own home.
But if Brown imagined Sir John would give the authors of the war an
easy ride, he could not have been more wrong. The Chilcot report, much
fiercer than almost anyone anticipated, rips down almost every claim the
Labour government made about the invasion and its aftermath. Two weeks
before he launched his war of choice, Tony Blair told the Guardian:
“Let the day-to-day judgments come and go: be prepared to be judged by
history.” Well, that judgement has just been handed down, and it is
utterly damning.
Blair and his government and security services, Chilcot concludes,
presented the severity of the threat posed by Iraq’s supposed weapons
of mass destruction with “a certainty that was not justified”: in other
words they sexed up the evidence. Their “planning and preparations for
Iraq after Saddam Hussein were wholly inadequate.” They ignored warnings
– which proved to be horribly prescient – that “military action would
increase the threat from Al Qaida” and “invasion might lead to Iraq’s
weapons and capabilities being transferred into the hands of
terrorists.”
theintercept | this case does not exist in isolation. It exists in a political climate where secrecy is regarded as the highest end, where people have their lives destroyed for the most trivial – or, worse, the most well-intentioned – violations of secrecy laws, even in the absence of any evidence of harm or malignant intent. And these are injustices that Hillary Clinton and most of her stalwart Democratic followers have never once opposed – but rather enthusiastically cheered. In 2011, Army Private Chelsea Manning was charged with multiple felonies and faced decades in prison for leaking documents that she firmly believed the public had the right to see; unlike the documents Clinton recklessly mishandled,none of those was Top Secret. Nonetheless,thisis what then-Secretary Clinton said in justifying her prosecution:
I think that in an age where so much information is flying through cyberspace, we all have to be aware of the fact that some information which is sensitive, which does affect the security of individuals and relationships, deserves to be protected andwe will continue to take necessary steps to do so.
Comey’s announcement also takes place in a society that imprisons more of its citizens than any other in the world by far, for more trivial offenses than any western nation – overwhelmingly when they are poor or otherwise marginalized due to their race or ethnicity. The sort of leniency and mercy and prosecutorial restraint Comey extended today to Hillary Clinton is simply unavailable for most Americans.
What happened here is glaringly obvious. It is the tawdry by-product of a criminal justice mentality in which – as I documented in my 2011 bookWith Liberty and Justice for Some– those who wield the greatest political and economic power are virtually exempt from the rule of law even when they commit the most egregious crimes, while only those who are powerless and marginalized are harshly punished, often for the most trivial transgressions.
Had someone who was obscure and unimportant and powerless done what Hillary Clinton did – recklessly and secretly install a shoddy home server and worked with Top Secret information on it, then outright lied to the public about it when they were caught – they would have been criminally charged long ago, with little fuss or objection. But Hillary Clinton is the opposite of unimportant. She’s the multi-millionaire former First Lady, Senator from New York, and Secretary of State, supported by virtually the entire political, financial and media establishment to be the next President, arguably the only person standing between Donald Trump and the White House.
Like the Wall Street tycoons whose systemic fraud triggered the 2008 global financial crisis, and like the military and political officials who instituted a worldwide regime of torture, Hillary Clinton is too importantto be treated the same as everyone else under the law. “Felony charges appear to be reserved for people of the lowest ranks. Everyone else who does it either doesn’t get charged or gets charged with a misdemeanor,”
WaPo | When FBI Director James B. Comey stepped to the lectern to deliver his remarks
about Hillary Clinton on Tuesday, he violated time-honored Justice
Department practices for how such matters are to be handled, set a
dangerous precedent for future investigations and committed a gross
abuse of his own power.
Some have praised Comey’s
remarks as much-needed truth-telling from a fearless, independent
law-enforcement authority, an outcome Comey no doubt had in mind. But in
fact, his willingness to reprimand
publicly a figure against whom he believes there is no basis for
criminal charges should trouble anyone who believes in the rule of law
and fundamental principles of fairness.
Justice Department rules
set clear guidelines for when it is appropriate for the government to
comment about individuals involved in an ongoing investigation, which
this matter was until prosecutors closed it Wednesday. Prosecutors and
investigators can reassure the public that a matter is being taken
seriously, and in some rare cases can provide additional information to
protect public safety, such as when a suspect is loose and poses a
danger.
And when the department closes an investigation, it
typically does so quietly, at most noting that it has investigated the
matter fully and decided not to bring charges.
These practices
are important because of the role the Justice Department and FBI play in
our system of justice. They are not the final adjudicators of the
appropriateness of conduct for anyone they investigate. Instead, they
build cases that they present in court, where their assertions are
backed up by evidence that can be challenged by an opposing party and
ultimately adjudicated by a judge or jury.
In a case where the
government decides it will not submit its assertions to that sort of
rigorous scrutiny by bringing charges, it has the responsibility to not
besmirch someone’s reputation by lobbing accusations publicly instead.
Prosecutors and agents have followed this precedent for years.
In this case, Comey ignored those rules to editorialize about what he called carelessness by Clinton and her aides in handling classified information, a statement not grounded in any position in law.
tomdispatch | Consider Syria. The expansion of the free market in a country where
there was neither democratic accountability nor the rule of law meant
one thing above all: plutocrats linked to the nation’s ruling family
took anything that seemed potentially profitable. In the process, they
grew staggeringly wealthy, while the denizens of Syria’s impoverished
villages, country towns, and city slums, who had once looked to the
state for jobs and cheap food, suffered. It should have surprised no one
that those places became the strongholds of the Syrian uprising after
2011. In the capital, Damascus, as the reign of neoliberalism spread,
even the lesser members of the mukhabarat, or secret police, found themselves living on only $200 to $300 a month, while the state became a machine for thievery.
This sort of thievery and the auctioning off of the nation’s
patrimony spread across the region in these years. The new Egyptian
ruler, General Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, merciless toward any sign of
domestic dissent, was typical. In a country that once had been a
standard bearer for nationalist regimes the world over, he didn’t
hesitate this April to try to hand over
two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabia on whose funding and aid his
regime is dependent. (To the surprise of everyone, an Egyptian court
recently overruled Sisi's decision.)
That gesture, deeply unpopular among increasingly impoverished
Egyptians, was symbolic of a larger change in the balance of power in
the Middle East: once the most powerful states in the region -- Egypt,
Syria, and Iraq -- had been secular nationalists and a genuine
counterbalance to Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf monarchies. As those
secular autocracies weakened, however, the power and influence of the
Sunni fundamentalist monarchies only increased. If 2011 saw rebellion
and revolution spread across the Greater Middle East as the Arab Spring
briefly blossomed, it also saw counterrevolution spread, funded by those
oil-rich absolute Gulf monarchies, which were never going to tolerate
democratic secular regime change in Syria or Libya.
Add in one more process at work making such states ever more fragile:
the production and sale of natural resources -- oil, gas, and minerals
-- and the kleptomania that goes with it. Such countries often suffer
from what has become known as “the resources curse”: states increasingly
dependent for revenues on the sale of their natural resources -- enough
to theoretically provide the whole population with a reasonably decent
standard of living -- turn instead into grotesquely corrupt
dictatorships. In them, the yachts of local billionaires with crucial
connections to the regime of the moment bob in harbors surrounded by
slums running with raw sewage. In such nations, politics tends to focus
on elites battling and maneuvering to steal state revenues and transfer
them as rapidly as possible out of the country.
This has been the pattern of economic and political life in much of
sub-Saharan Africa from Angola to Nigeria. In the Middle East and North
Africa, however, a somewhat different system exists, one usually
misunderstood by the outside world. There is similarly great inequality
in Iraq or Saudi Arabia with similarly kleptocratic elites. They have,
however, ruled over patronage states in which a significant part of the
population is offered jobs in the public sector in return for political
passivity or support for the kleptocrats.
In Iraq with a population of 33 million people, for instance, no less than seven million
of them are on the government payroll, thanks to salaries or pensions
that cost the government $4 billion a month. This crude way of
distributing oil revenues to the people has often been denounced by
Western commentators and economists as corruption. They, in turn,
generally recommend cutting the number of these jobs, but this would
mean that all, rather than just part, of the state’s resource revenues
would be stolen by the elite. This, in fact, is increasingly the case in
such lands as oil prices bottom out and even the Saudi royals begin to cut back on state support for the populace.
Neoliberalism was once believed to be the path to secular democracy
and free-market economies. In practice, it has been anything but.
Instead, in conjunction with the resource curse, as well as repeated
military interventions by Washington and its allies, free-market
economics has profoundly destabilized the Greater Middle East.
Encouraged by Washington and Brussels, twenty-first-century
neoliberalism has made unequal societies ever more unequal and helped
transform already corrupt regimes into looting machines. This is also,
of course, a formula for the success of the Islamic State or any other
radical alternative to the status quo. Such movements are bound to find
support in impoverished or neglected regions like eastern Syria or
eastern Libya.
Note, however, that this process of destabilization is by no means
confined to the Greater Middle East and North Africa. We are indeed in
the age of destabilization, a phenomenon that is on the rise globally
and at present spreading into the Balkans and Eastern Europe (with the
European Union ever less able to influence events there). People no
longer speak of European integration, but of how to prevent the complete
break-up of the European Union in the wake of the British vote to leave.
The reasons why a narrow majority of Britons voted for Brexit have
parallels with the Middle East: the free-market economic policies
pursued by governments since Margaret Thatcher was prime minister have
widened the gap between rich and poor and between wealthy cities and
much of the rest of the country. Britain might be doing well, but
millions of Britons did not share in the prosperity. The referendum
about continued membership in the European Union, the option almost
universally advocated by the British establishment, became the catalyst
for protest against the status quo. The anger of the "Leave" voters has
much in common with that of Donald Trump supporters in the United
States.
The U.S. remains a superpower, but is no longer as powerful as it
once was. It, too, is feeling the strains of this global moment, in
which it and its local allies are powerful enough to imagine they can
get rid of regimes they do not like, but either they do not quite
succeed, as in Syria, or succeed but cannot replace what they have
destroyed, as in Libya. An Iraqi politician once said
that the problem in his country was that parties and movements were
“too weak to win, but too strong to lose.” This is increasingly the
pattern for the whole region and is spreading elsewhere. It carries with
it the possibility of an endless cycle of indecisive wars and an era of
instability that has already begun.
WaPo |FBI Director James B. Comey said Tuesday that while Hillary
Clinton and her staff were “extremely careless” in how they handled
emails while she was secretary of state, the bureau would not recommend criminal charges. Here is a transcript of Comey’s prepared remarks released by the FBI:
Good
morning. I’m here to give you an update on the FBI’s investigation of
Secretary Clinton’s use of a personal e-mail system during her time as
Secretary of State.
After a tremendous amount of work over the
last year, the FBI is completing its investigation and referring the
case to the Department of Justice for a prosecutive decision. What I
would like to do today is tell you three things: what we did; what we
found; and what we are recommending to the Department of Justice.
This
will be an unusual statement in at least a couple ways. First, I am
going to include more detail about our process than I ordinarily would,
because I think the American people deserve those details in a case of
intense public interest. Second, I have not coordinated or reviewed this
statement in any way with the Department of Justice or any other part
of the government. They do not know what I am about to say.
I
want to start by thanking the FBI employees who did remarkable work in
this case. Once you have a better sense of how much we have done, you
will understand why I am so grateful and proud of their efforts.
doomsteaddiner | A while back I wrote a 5 part series analyzing the relationship between Money, Energy, Waste and Thermodynamics I titled "The Money Valve".
The effort there was to show that the way the monetary system works is
to regulate the downhill flow of an energy stock as it is dissipated and
turned into waste of various kinds. The physical waste that stacks up
in landfills, the CO2 that collects in the atmosphere, the pollution
that works its way into the groundwater, rivers, lakes and finally into
the biggest toilet of them all, the world oceans, etc.
I looked at the major players in this game, Goobermints, Banks,
Industry, the Military and Consumers, but I missed a very important
connection. How the War Machine itself directly produces Waste! In
fucking COPIOUS QUANTITY AND FAST!
This came to me in another epiphany when I was considering how Mother
Russia has recently been upgrading and increasing it's Military power in
a number of areas, due to the constant and increasing threat from NATO
on its borders. NATO is moving missiles into states bordering Russia
which were formerly part of the old Soviet Union, and in response the
Ruskies have formed up entirely new divisions to drop on these borders
also. It's not just manpower they're ramping up here, they're upgrading
their jets and boats and coming up with their own hi-tech drone systems
as well.
Besides those investments in military personnel and hardware, they're doing NATO one better in the Death From Above
campaign against ISIS down in Syria, which is no cheap operation.
Where is all the money coming from for this bizness, which does not have
any direct form of revenue coming out of it? It's not like Mother
Russia is swimming in cash these days, like the other Oil exporting
nations their budget has been hit hard by the collapse in oil prices.
Nevertheless, over the last 15 years, Mother Russia has somehow found
the money to keep upgrading their military hardware, apparently actually
doing better with this task than NATO and the FSoA. Their new Jets
apparently actually WORK, unlike the F-35s.
So now we can answer the question: What is War Good For?
It's good for the ECONOMY, stupid! lol.
At least it is good for a Waste Based Economy, which is the only type of economy Homo Saps have run since Agriculture supplanted H-G living.
What War does is to DESTROY much if not all of what was built before, which then means it must all be REBUILT! That provides a lot of new jobs! In our current situation, at least in the 1st World, we have a SURPLUS
of housing. You might not believe that since there are so many
homeless people, but it's true. The problem for the homeless is not
that the housing doesn't exist for them, the problem is they can't AFFORD that housing.
The next thing that War does is to disproportionately remove a large
slice of the Poor population, from both the sides of the Winners and
Losers of the War. It is the poor mostly conscripted as grunts used as
Cannon Fodder in Wars, and the poor also suffer the most civilian
casualties. They can't get out of the way. The wealthy people in a
society generally can find somewhere to run and hide until the war is
over.
In Biblical terms, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, Famine, Pestilence, War and Death took a 25% cut of the Homo Sap population each time they showed up.
This past Saturday, June 25th, Harris talked about her work to a
group of journalists and bloggers who traveled to Washington D.C. from
different corners of the country to hear from leaders of the criminal
justice reform movement. Harris was the first speaker at FreedomWorks’ #JusticeForAll event, and as the leader of USJAN, she set the tone for what turned out to be a fascinating conference.
The veteran litigator opened her speech by outlining USJAN’s goals, explaining the organization believes “our [criminal] code just doesn’t make sense.” That’s why their “goal is to shrink criminal codes” and “get rid of these unfair, unnecessary duplicative and inconsistent laws.”
But it was something else she told the crowd a few minutes later that got attendees worked up.
“The fastest growing segment of the prison population in America,” Harris articulated, “is women … and nobody is talking about that.”
According to the Families Against Mandatory Minimums Foundation (FAMM), the female prison population in the United States has grown
by over 800 percent in the last 30 years, while the male population
grew by 416 percent during the same period. Despite this staggering
growth, violent criminals are not being sent to prison in droves.
Instead, nearly two-thirds of female prisoners are incarcerated for
nonviolent offenses.
About 56 percent of incarcerated women are in jail due to the drug
war or over property crimes, FAMM reports. These types of offenses
usually carry mandatory minimums, which are sentences that must be
imposed no matter what. This strips judges of the ability to consider
mitigating circumstances.
Due to mandatory minimums, FAMM contends, many women are given sentences that do not fit the crime — and the result is tragic.
Because 60 percent of women in prison are also mothers to children
under the age of 18, the drug war has negatively impacted countless
families; the number of American children whose mothers are in jail has
more than double since 1991.
When data is broken down into racial classifications, we also learn
there’s a serious racial element to incarceration in the United States.
According to FAMM, 380 out of every 100,000 black women in America
are in jail, while 147 out of every 100,000 Hispanic women and 93 out of
every 100,000 white women are incarcerated. While whites account for
79.8 percent of the U.S. population and 63.8 percent of women in America
are white, only 45.5 percent of the female prison population is white. “By contrast,” the FAMM report explains, “black women represent 32.6 percent of female prisoners, but only 12.8% of the general population,” making black children “nearly 7.5 times more likely than white children to have a parent in prison.”
rollingstone | One of the underpublicized revelations of the financial crisis, for
instance, was that millions of Americans found themselves unable to get
answers to a simple questions like, "Who holds the note to my house?"
People want more power over their own lives. They want to feel some
connection to society. Most particularly, they don't want to be dictated
to by distant bureaucrats who don't seem to care what they're going
through, and think they know what's best for everyone.
These are legitimate concerns. Unfortunately, they came out in this
past year in the campaign of Donald Trump, who'd exposed a tiny flaw in
the system.
People are still free to vote, and some peculiarities in the
structure of the commercial media, combined with mountains of public
anger, conspired to put one of the two parties in the hands of a
coverage-devouring billionaire running on a "Purge the Scum" platform.
But choosing a dangerous race-baiting lunatic as the vehicle for the
first successful revolt in ages against one of the two major parties
will have many profound negative consequences for voters. The most
serious will surely be this burgeoning movement to describe voting and
democracy as inherently dangerous.
Donald Trump is dangerous because as president, he'd likely have
little respect for law. But a gang of people whose metaphor for society
is "We are the white cells, voters are the disease" is comparably scary
in its own banal, less click-generating way.
These self-congratulating cognoscenti could have looked at
the events of the last year and wondered why people were so angry with
them, and what they could do to make government work better for the
population.
Instead, their first instinct is to dismiss voter concerns as
baseless, neurotic bigotry and to assume that the solution is to give
Washington bureaucrats even more leeway to blow off the public. In the
absurdist comedy that is American political life, this is the ultimate
anti-solution to the unrest of the last year, the mathematically perfect
wrong ending.
Trump is going to lose this election, then live on as the reason for
an emboldened, even less-responsive oligarchy. And you thought this
election season couldn't get any worse.
NYTimes | FOR
more than two centuries, we have been reading the Declaration of
Independence wrong. Or rather, we’ve been celebrating the Declaration as
people in the 19th and 20th centuries have told us we should, but not
the Declaration as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and John Adams
wrote it. To them, separation from Britain was as much, if not more,
about racial fear and exclusion as it was about inalienable rights.
The Declaration’s beautiful preamble distracts us from the heart of the document, the 27 accusations
against King George III over which its authors wrangled and debated,
trying to get the wording just right. The very last one — the ultimate
deal-breaker — was the most important for them, and it is for us: “He
has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to
bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages,
whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all
ages, sexes and conditions.” In the context of the 18th century,
“domestic insurrections” refers to rebellious slaves. “Merciless Indian
savages” doesn’t need much explanation.
In fact, Jefferson had originally included an extended attack
on the king for forcing slavery upon unwitting colonists. Had it stood,
it would have been the patriots’ most powerful critique of slavery. The
Continental Congress cut out all references to slavery as “piratical
warfare” and an “assemblage of horrors,” and left only the sentiment
that King George was “now exciting those very people to rise in arms
among us.” The Declaration could have been what we yearn for it to be, a
statement of universal rights, but it wasn’t. What became the official
version was one marked by division.
Upon
hearing the news that the Congress had just declared American
independence, a group of people gathered in the tiny village of
Huntington, N.Y., to observe the occasion by creating an effigy of King
George. But before torching the tyrant, the Long Islanders did something
odd, at least to us. According to a report in a New York City
newspaper, first they blackened his face, and then, alongside his wooden
crown, they stuck his head “full of feathers” like “savages,” wrapped
his body in the Union Jack, lined it with gunpowder and then set it
ablaze.
hotair | Finally, let’s stop focusing on the fact that this meeting was inappropriate because Clinton’s wife
is under investigation by Lynch’s Justice Department. I mean, that’s
bad, but it’s actually letting Lynch and Clinton off the hook a bit. By
focusing on the appearance of conflict because Hillary Clinton is being investigated, we are willfully overlooking the very real conflict in the fact that Clinton himself is under investigation, as the Grand Poo-bah at the Clinton Foundation. (Fox News)
The FBI investigation into Hillary Clinton’s use
of private email as secretary of state has expanded to look at whether
the possible “intersection” of Clinton Foundation work and State
Department business may have violated public corruption laws,
three intelligence sources not authorized to speak on the record told
Fox News.
This new investigative track is in addition to the focus on classified material found on Clinton’s personal server.
“The agents are investigating the possible intersection of Clinton
Foundation donations, the dispensation of State Department contracts and
whether regular processes were followed,” one source said.
Yes, the investigation into the intersection of Clinton Foundation
donations and the State Department slimes Hillary Clinton since it
happened during her tenure as Secretary of State, but what about Bill
Clinton? If the State Department and Hillary Clinton acted improperly or
illegally by commingling staff and by granting favors to Clinton
Foundation donors, isn’t the Clinton Foundation, and Bill Clinton
equally guilty of wrongdoing?
This may explain why the day after the surreptitious meeting in
Phoenix, Lynch’s Justice Department informed a judge they were going to drag their feet on the release of emails connecting the former president’s foundation and the State Department: (Daily Caller)
Department of Justice officials filed a motion in federal
court late Wednesday seeking a 27-month delay in producing
correspondence between former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s four
top aides and officials with the Clinton Foundation and Teneo Holdings, a
closely allied public relations firm that Bill Clinton helped launch.
If the court permits the delay, the public won’t be able to read the
communications until October 2018, about 22 months into her prospective
first term as President. The four senior Clinton aides involved were
Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Fuchs, Ambassador-At-Large
Melanne Verveer, Chief of Staff Cheryl Mills, and Deputy Chief of Staff
Huma Abedin.
I guess when all of this adds up, it’s clear why Lynch and her FBI
agents were so intent on keeping this inappropriate meeting private.
DOTE | Implicit bias is usually associated (in research) with racial bias. Thus the Aeon article cited at outset goes through this exercise.
Do you think racial stereotypes are false? Are you sure? I’m not
asking if you’re sure whether or not the stereotypes are false, but if
you’re sure whether or not you think that they are. That might seem like a strange question. We all know what we think, don’t we?
But of course the whole point is that we don't know what we think.
...Another consequence [of ISA theory] is that we might be sincerely mistaken about our own beliefs.
Return to my question about racial stereotypes. I guess you said you think they are false. But if the ISA theory is correct, you can’t be sure you think that.
Studies show that people
who sincerely say that racial stereotypes are false often continue to
behave as if they are true when not paying attention to what they are
doing.
Such behavior is usually said to manifest an implicit bias,
which conflicts with the person’s explicit beliefs. But the ISA theory
offers a simpler explanation. People think that the stereotypes are true
but also that it is not acceptable to admit this and therefore say they are false. Moreover, they say this to themselves too, in inner speech, and mistakenly interpret themselves as believing it. They are hypocrites but not conscious hypocrites. Maybe we all are.
Maybe we're all unconscious hypocrites. In fact, that is part of the
Flatland claim. The Flatland model also says that "implicit bias" is far
more general than simple racial bias. We can't be sure what we think
because those biases exist in the unconscious, which by definition is
inaccessible to us.
Now, consider an essay which just appeared in The Guardian called—and I'm not kidding—Why elections are bad for democracy. The author is named David VanReybrouck.
Brexit is a turning point in the history of western democracy. Never before has such a drastic decision been taken through so primitive a procedure — a one-round referendum based on a simple majority.
Never before has the fate of a country—of an entire continent, in fact—been changed by the single swing of such a blunt axe, wielded by disenchanted and poorly informed citizens.
I'm here to tell you that there is nothing more democratic than a simple up/down referendum where each vote counts equally. Nothing. That's as democratic as things get.
aeon | Scientists working
on animal cognition often dwell on their desire to talk to the animals.
Oddly enough, this particular desire must have passed me by, because I
have never felt it. I am not waiting to hear what my animals have to say
about themselves, taking the rather Wittgensteinian position that their
message might not be all that enlightening. Even with respect to my
fellow humans, I am dubious that language tells us what is going on in
their heads. I am surrounded by colleagues who study members of our
species by presenting them with questionnaires. They trust the answers
they receive and have ways, they assure me, of checking their veracity.
But who says that what people say about themselves reveals actual
emotions and motivations?
This
might be true for simple attitudes free from moralisations (‘What is
your favourite music?’), but it seems almost pointless to ask people
about their love life, eating habits, or treatment of others (‘Are you
pleasant to work with?’). It is far too easy to invent post-hoc reasons
for one’s behaviour, to be silent about one’s sexual habits, to downplay
excessive eating or drinking, or to present oneself as more admirable
than one really is.
No
one is going to admit to murderous thoughts, stinginess or being a
jerk. People lie all the time, so why would they stop in front of a
psychologist who writes down everything they say? In one study, female
college students reported more sex partners when they were hooked up to a
fake lie-detector machine, demonstrating that they had been lying when
interviewed without the lie-detector. I am in fact relieved to work with
subjects that don’t talk. I don’t need to worry about the truth of
their utterances. Instead of asking them how often they engage in sex, I
just count the occasions. I am perfectly happy being an animal watcher.
Now
that I think of it, my distrust of language goes even deeper, because I
am also unconvinced of its role in the thinking process. I am not sure
that I think in words, and I never seem to hear any inner voices. This
caused a bit of an embarrassment once at a meeting about the evolution
of conscience, when fellow scholars kept referring to an inner voice
that tells us what is right and wrong. I am sorry, I said, but I never
hear such voices.
Am
I a man without a conscience, or do I – as the American animal expert
Temple Grandin once said about herself – think in pictures? Moreover,
which language are we talking about? Speaking two languages at home and a
third one at work, my thinking must be awfully muddled. Yet I have
never noticed any effect, despite the widespread assumption that
language is at the root of human thought. In his 1972 presidential
address to the American Philosophical Association, tellingly entitled ‘Thoughtless Brutes’,
the American philosopher Norman Malcolm stated that ‘the relationship
between language and thought must be… so close that it is really
senseless to conjecture that people may not have thoughts, and also senseless to conjecture that animals may have thoughts’.
energyskeptic | The opening quote in this book is “We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us.” Obama 2013
Danner has defined the nature and scope of this struggle as a war on
terror. He says that our presence in Iraq and Afghanistan is a
Republican attempt to replace “being tough on communism as a defining
cause in their political identity” with a war on terrorism.
To make the case for a “war on terror” as our reason for being there,
Danner needs to state why we are NOT in the Middle east due to the 1980
Carter doctrine, which states “the overwhelming dependence of the
Western democracies on oil supplies from the Middle East…[any] attempt
by an outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be
regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of
America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary,
including military force.”
Since then we’ve invaded, occupied, or bombed Iran (1980, 1987–1988);
Libya (1981, 1986, 1989, 2011); Lebanon (1983); Kuwait (1991); Iraq
(1991–2011, 2014–present); Somalia (1992–1993, 2007-present); Saudi
Arabia (1991, 1996); Afghanistan (1998, 2001–present); Sudan (1998);
Yemen (2000; 2002-present); Pakistan (2004-present); and now Syria.
The reason Carter said this is because many Americans, Europeans, and
Chinese would die if the oil stopped flowing, but especially Americans
since no other nation on earth is as dependent on oil as we are (why we
have to be the world’s unpaid policeman is another topic). Just
consider a few of the things that what would happen if trucks stopped
running: by day 6 grocery stores would be out of food, restaurants,
pharmacies, and factories closed, ATMS out of cash, sewage treatment
sludge and slime storage tanks full, gas stations closed, 685,000 tons
of trash piling up every day, livestock suffering from lack of feed
deliveries. Within 2 weeks clean water would be gone since purification
chemicals couldn’t be delivered. Within 1 to 2 months coal power plants
would shut down due to lack of coal, and much natural gas is pumped
through pipelines electrically, so natural gas power plants would shut
down too. And there goes the financial system – our energy,
electricity, and other 16 vital infrastructures are inter-dependent,
which makes us incredibly vulnerable, since many of them can pull each
other down.
vanityfair |I sat on an uncomfortable chair, facing a camera. Generators hummed amid the delphiniums. Good Morning America
was first. I had been told that Diane Sawyer would be questioning me
from New York, but ABC has a McVeigh “expert,” one Charles Gibson, and
he would do the honors. Our interview would be something like four
minutes. Yes, I was to be interviewed In Depth. This means that only
every other question starts with “Now, tell us, briefly … ” Dutifully, I
told, briefly, how it was that McVeigh, whom I had never met, happened
to invite me to be one of the five chosen witnesses to his execution.
But I’ve left you
behind in the Ravello garden of Klingsor, where, live on television, I
mentioned the unmentionable word “why,” followed by the atomic trigger
word “Waco.” Charles Gibson, 3,500 miles away, began to hyperventilate.
“Now, wait a minute … ” he interrupted. But I talked through him.
Suddenly I heard him say, “We’re having trouble with the audio.” Then he
pulled the plug that linked ABC and me. The soundman beside me shook
his head. “Audio was working perfectly. He just cut you off.” So, in
addition to the governmental shredding of Amendments 4, 5, 6, 8, and 14,
Mr. Gibson switched off the journalists’ sacred First.
Why? Like
so many of his interchangeable TV colleagues, he is in place to tell
the viewers that former senator John Danforth had just concluded a
14-month investigation of the F.B.I. that cleared the bureau of any
wrongdoing at Waco. Danforth did admit that “it was like pulling teeth
to get all this paper from the F.B.I.”
TV-watchers have no
doubt noted so often that they are no longer aware of how often the
interchangeable TV hosts handle anyone who tries to explain why
something happened. “Are you suggesting that there was a conspiracy?” A
twinkle starts in a pair of bright contact lenses. No matter what the
answer, there is a wriggling of the body, followed by a tiny snort and a
significant glance into the camera to show that the guest has just been
delivered to the studio by flying saucer. This is one way for the
public never to understand what actual conspirators—whether in the
F.B.I. or on the Supreme Court or toiling for Big Tobacco—are up to. It
is also a sure way of keeping information from the public. The function,
alas, of Corporate Media.
journal-neo | The long-term Washington strategy since
at least 1992, well before September 11, 2001 and the Washington’s
declaration of its War on Terror, has been by hook or by crook, by color
revolution or outright invasion, to directly, with US
“boots-on-the-ground,” militarily control the vast oil reserves and
output of the major Arab OPEC oil countries. This is a long-standing
institutional consensus, regardless who is President.
Cheney: ‘Where the Prize Ultimately Lies’
To appreciate the long-term strategic
planning behind today’s chaotic wars in the Middle East there is no
better person to look at than Dick Cheney and his statements as CEO of
the then-world largest oilfield services company. In 1998, four years
after becoming head of Halliburton, Cheney gave a speech to a group of
Texas oilmen. Cheney told the annual meeting of the Panhandle Producers
and Royalty Owners Association in reference to finding oil abroad,
“You’ve got to go where the oil is. I don’t think about it [political
volatility] very much.”
During his first five years as CEO of
Halliburton, Cheney took the company from annual revenues of $5.7
billion to $14.9 billion by 1999. Halliburton foreign oilfield
operations went from 51% to almost 70% of revenues in that time. Dick Cheney clearly looked at the global oil picture back then more than most.
In September 1999 Cheney delivered a
speech to the annual meeting of an elite group of international oilmen
in London. One section is worth quoting at length:
“By some estimates there will be an
average of two per cent annual growth in global oil demand over the
years ahead along with conservatively a three per cent natural decline
in production from existing reserves. That means by 2010 we will need on
the order of an additional fifty million barrels a day. So where is the
oil going to come from?
Governments and the national oil
companies are obviously controlling about ninety per cent of the assets.
Oil remains fundamentally a government business. While many regions of
the world offer great oil opportunities, the Middle East with two thirds
of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize
ultimately lies, even though companies are anxious for greater access
there, progress continues to be slow.”
The PNAC Warplan
Now let’s follow that bouncing ball
sometimes called Dick Cheney a bit further. In September 2000 Cheney
signed his name before his selection as George W. Bush’s vice
presidential running-mate, to an unusual think-tank report that became
the de facto blueprint of US military and foreign policy to the present.
Another signer of that report was Don Rumsfeld, who would become
Defense Secretary under the Cheney-Bush presidency (the order reflects
the reality–w.e.)
The think-tank, Project for a New
American Century (PNAC), was financed by the US military-industrial
complex, supported by a gaggle of other Washington neo-conservative
think tanks such as RAND. The PNAC board also included neo-conservative
Paul Wolfowitz, later to be Rumsfeld’s Deputy Secretary of Defense;
‘Scooter Libby,’ later Vice President Cheney’s Chief of Staff. It
included Victoria Nuland’s husband, Robert Kagan. (Notably Victoria
Nuland herself went on in 2001 to become Cheney’s principal deputy
foreign policy adviser). It included Cheney-Bush ambassador to
US-occupied Afghanistan and Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, and hapless
presidential candidate Jeb Bush.
Cheney’s PNAC report explicitly called
on the future US President to remove Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and
militarily take control of the Middle East a full year before 911 gave
the Cheney-Bush Administration the excuse Cheney needed to invade Iraq.
The PNAC report stated that its
recommendations were based on the report in 1992 of then-Secretary of
Defense, Dick Cheney: “In broad terms, we saw the project as building
upon the defense strategy outlined by the Cheney Defense Department in
the waning days of the Bush Administration. The Defense Policy Guidance
(DPG) drafted in the early months of 1992 provided a blueprint for
maintaining U.S. pre-eminence, precluding the rise of a great power
rival, and shaping the international security order in line with
American principles and interests.”
At a time when Iran as a putative nuclear “threat” was not even on the map, PNAC advocated Ballistic Missile Defense: “DEVELOP AND DEPLOY GLOBAL MISSILE DEFENSES to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for US power projection around the world. (emphasis added)
In the report Cheney’s cronies further
noted that, “The military’s job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet
expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the “zones of
democratic peace; (sic)” to deter the rise of a new great-power
competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East;
and to preserve American preeminence…”
The Cheney PNAC document of 2000 went on: “The
United States has for decades sought to play a more permanent role in
Gulf regional security. While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides
the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force
presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.“
The quote is worth reading at least twice.
A year after the PNAC report was issued,
then-General Wesley Clark, no peacenik to be sure, in a March 2007
speech before the Commonwealth Club of California in San Francisco, told
of a Pentagon discussion he had had shortly after the strikes of
September 11, 2001 at the World Trade Center and Pentagon with someone
he knew in Defense Secretary Rumsfeld’s office.
sprottmoney | Where's all the news - where are all the headlines? A major
event has taken place yesterday and another event is about to unfold tomorrow.
Puerto Rico is going to
default
on its debt
and the US government is A-OK with it.
Once again, the American taxpayers have been on the short end of
the stick. This story is receiving little to no press and it is truly baffling
given the ramifications and meaning behind it. Perhaps this is exactly why it
is receiving so little attention.
The story of the Puerto Rican default is just another example of
the crumpling system of the elites. The establishment is desperately trying to
keep this broken fiat system together for as long as they possibly can, sucking
maximum profits from it before it implodes.
The U.S. Senate has done its part in this farce, as they passed the
bailout bill with overwhelming support yesterday, ensuring that Puerto Rico,
like Greece, can put off its consequences of overspending for the time being
and continue to stagnate. It's another stellar example of extend and
pretend by the elites.
Tomorrow, the government of Puerto Rico was supposed to be paying
back $2 billion in debt repayments - no small sum of money, but a drop in the
bucket when you look at the massive $70 billion that they owe in debt
payments.
Fortunately and unfortunately for them, they are being given
a "free" pass by the U.S. government this time. I say
unfortunately,
because the trade-off for them is their freedom and liberty. As part of the
bailout deal, the elites will install overseers that will monitor the Puerto Rican
government. Essentially, they are giving up their free will.
Despite this being a major story, don't expect to hear much about
it. The elites don't want to embolden other states or countries to default on
their debt as well. The illusion of debt and fiat money must be
maintained at all cost, or they risk completely losing the crumbling
empire they have built around them.
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