It's Koch/Pompeo Spearheading Anti-Deep State Mercenary Security Worldwide

See, I thought global private "security" would be part of Rex Tillerson's portfolio, but evidently Exxon is compromised on multiple fronts and multiple levels: 

Why Are The Parasite 1% Terrified of the Producer 1% ?

Eight Families to Rule Them All

Rex Knows His Company Is In Liquidation

theintercept |   Prince told a top fundraiser that Maguire was working on part of his Afghanistan plan, characterizing it as the first part of a multi-pronged program. The fundraiser added that Prince never directly asked him for money. But sources close to the project say Maguire did seek private funding for Amyntor’s efforts until a CIA contract materialized. “They’ve been going around asking for a bridge loan to float their operations until the CIA says yes,” said a person who has been briefed on the fundraising efforts.

Beginning last spring and into the summer, Maguire and a group of Amyntor representatives began asking Trump donors to support their intelligence efforts in Afghanistan, the initial piece of what they hoped would be a broader program. Some Trump fundraisers were asked to provide introductions to companies and wealthy clients who would then hire Amyntor for economic intelligence contracts. Maguire explained that some of the profit from those business deals would fund their foreign intelligence collection. Others were asked to give money outright.

“[Maguire] said there were people inside the CIA who joined in the previous eight years [under Obama] and inside the government, and they were failing to give the president the intelligence he needed,” said a person who was pitched by Maguire and other Amyntor personnel. To support his claim, Maguire told at least two people that National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, in coordination with a top official at the National Security Agency, authorized surveillance of Steven Bannon and Trump family members, including Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump. Adding to these unsubstantiated claims, Maguire told the potential donors he also had evidence McMaster used a burner phone to send information gathered through the surveillance to a facility in Cyprus owned by George Soros.

Amyntor employees took potential donors to a suite in the Trump Hotel in Washington, which they claimed was set up to conduct “secure communications.” Some White House staff and Trump campaign supporters came to refer to the suite as “the tinfoil room,” according to one person who visited the suite. This account was confirmed by another source to whom the room was described. “John [Maguire] was certain that the deep state was going to kick the president out of office within a year,” said a person who discussed it with Maguire. “These guys said they were protecting the president.”

Maguire and others at Amyntor have boasted that they have already sent intelligence reports to Pompeo.

Cruelty Is The American Way

Counterpunch |  With the Senate and House all but assured to pass the $4.5 trillion in tax cuts for businesses, investors, and the wealthiest 1% households by the end of this week, phases two and three of the Trump-Republican fiscal strategy have begun quickly to take shape.

Phase two is to maneuver the inept Democrats in Congress into passing a temporary budget deficit-debt extension in order to allow the tax cuts to be implemented quickly. That’s already a ‘done deal’.

Phase three is the drumbeat growing to attack social security, medicare, food stamps, medicaid, and other ‘safety net’ laws, in order to pay for the deficit created by cutting taxes on the rich. A whole new set of lies are resurrected and being peddled by the media and pro-business pundits and politicians.

Counterpunch |  Pay no attention to the ongoing palace intrigue. Mueller’s investigation will at most act as a speed bump of sorts. Don’t mistake symptoms for the disease. Should the President or one of his minions be dismissed they will almost certainly be replaced by another donor class proxy. There’s no shortage of political mercenaries (in either party) willing to ply us with carefully crafted distortion.

Despite internecine squabbles the majority of lawmakers in congress can all agree on more military spending, more surveillance, more money for corporate executives… and less for everyone else. And so a parade of talking heads trot out the usual pleasant fiction about trickle-down economics. And it is fiction. Corporate leaders have openly conceded they have no intention of creating jobs or raising wages with money attained through tax cuts. They’re simply going to take it and pass it on to their shareholders.

This is what happens when business interests call the shots. Society ends up in a place where three oligarchs own as much as the bottom half of society and allegations of Russian “interference” somehow overshadow the reality of a billion dollar presidential race which is funded heavily by concentrated sources of private power.

Counterpunch |  By associating success (e.g. physical, emotional, financial, etc.) with evolutionary value, this ideology ignores historical structures of power and inequality and distorts the public’s understanding of their true conditions.

When people come to believe individuals’ conditions are determined solely by their genetics, or by how hard they fight to survive, impoverished people are seen as lacking the abilities or motivation to reach a privileged place in society, while privileged people are seen as having the abilities which brought them their success.

The origin and history of this phrase, which understandably misleads people, explains why there is this deep-seeded psychological inclination to equate “fittest” to the best.

The phrase is often and incorrectly attributed to the father of evolutionary theory, Charles Darwin, and though Darwin did use this language later in his life, the phrase was actually coined by Herbert Spencer — an English philosopher, sociologist, and social Darwinism’s most enthusiastic proponent.

Spencer believed that Darwin’s biologic theory of evolution could be applied to society, arguing that social transformation was a progressive process leading to more perfect human beings and social formations. He claimed that if people should struggle or die because of their conditions, it was because they were not biologically fit enough to achieve a better position in life.

“The whole effort of nature is to get rid of such, to clear the world of them, and make room for better … If they are sufficiently complete to live, they do live, and it is well they should live. If they are not sufficiently complete to live, they die, and it is best they should die” [10]. He used this system of thought to theorize about the evolutionary benefits of warfare and to justify a laissez faire approach to the economy as well.

Prominent American philosophers, theologians, scientists, and politicians espoused and popularized Spencer’s ideas. Andrew Carnegie, who at the time was the richest man in America, and Edward Youmans, the founder of the magazine Popular Science, were among his American admirers. “Successful business entrepreneurs apparently accepted almost by instinct the Darwinian terminology which seemed to portray the conditions of their existence.” [6]

Countless instances of social Darwinist messaging can still be observed in our media. Publications like The Economist (where Spencer was once an editor), The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal, provide examples of this.

Lotta Restless Unemployed Killers Out'Chere Yo!

theintercept  |  The White House press secretary did not directly dispute the revelation that Blackwater founder Erik Prince and former Iran-Contra figure Oliver North pitched a plan to develop a private spy network to members of the Trump administration.

The plan, detailed in a story broken by The Intercept on Monday, is to develop a private intelligence network to counter perceived “deep state” enemies within the ranks of government. Prince denied the report, and North did not respond to The Intercept’s request for comment.

“I’m not aware of any plans for something of that definition or anything similar to that at this time,” said White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders, in response to a question from CBS News’s Major Garrett about the story.

Garrett followed up to ask if President Donald Trump “would be opposed” to an outside spy network operating on his behalf. Sanders said she was unaware.

Garrett asked to Sanders to confirm whether any administration official had been briefed on such a network.

“I’m not going to answer some random hypothetical. Did some random person off the street come in and say something? I don’t know,” Sanders said.

And finally, Garrett asked if it was an idea Trump would consider.

“Again, I haven’t asked him, but its not something that’s currently in the works,” Sanders replied.

A White House official later told New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman that the proposal was indeed pitched to the Trump administration, but that there is no sign the president himself was briefed.

Russiagate Conspiracy Theorists Don't Scrutinize Power, They Protect It!

medium |  Lately I’ve been getting a lot more accusations of being a Kremlin agent and questions about my motives and agendas in response to my writings and far fewer actual arguments against the content of my writing, as well as demands that I stop arguing with this Russiagate thing and move on to writing about other matters. I’ll tell you what: I’ll stop writing about the Russiagate lies when they stop happening, how’s that sound? If you foam-brained pussyhat-wearing cultists are going to keep using lies to inadvertently manufacture support for America’s new cold war escalations, the least I can do is try to throw a monkey wrench in it.

If Russiagate was legit, the people responsible for selling it to us wouldn’t have to come up with new lies about it constantly. There are many very real dangers of the Trump administration that we can focus on without fanning the flames of world-threatening tensions between two nuclear superpowers based on lies, and the longer we spend fighting over this crap the more of those dangers manifest unnoticed.

Russiagaters are the very worst kind of conspiracy theorist, and as long as they’re imperiling my world with their complicity in the manipulations of the US power establishment I’m going to keep fighting them. Get used to it.

From ‘Russia-Gate’ to ‘Israel-Gate’

unz |  Reading the mainstream media headlines relating to the flipping of former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn to provide evidence relating to the allegations about Russian interference in America’s last presidential election requires the suspension of one’s cognitive processes. Ignoring completely what had actually occurred, the “Russian story” with its subset of “getting Trump” was on display all through the weekend, both in the print and on the live media.

 

Flynn’s guilty plea is laconic, merely admitting that he had lied to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about what was said during two telephone conversations with then Russian Ambassador to the United States Sergey Kislyak, but there is considerable back story that emerged after the plea became public.

The two phone calls in question include absolutely nothing about possible collusion with Russia to change the outcome of the U.S. election, which allegedly was the raison d’etre behind the creation of Robert Mueller’s Special Counsel office in the first place. Both took place more than a month after the election and both were initiated by the Americans involved. I am increasingly convinced that Mueller ain’t got nuthin’ but this process will grind out interminably and the press will be hot on the trail until there is nowhere else to go.

Based on the information revealed regarding the two conversations, and, unlike the highly nuance-sensitive editors working for the mainstream media, this is the headline that I would have written for a featured article based on what I consider to be important: “Israel Colluded with Incoming Trump Team to Subvert U.S. Foreign Policy,” with a possible subheading “FBI Entraps National Security Adviser.”

Russiagate The Excuse For Stifling U.S. Dissent

consortiumnews |  So, where are independent-minded Western journalists to turn if their stories critical of the U.S. government and corporations are suppressed?

The imperative is to get these stories out – and Russian media has provided an opening for some. This has presented a new problem for the plutocracy. The suppression of critical news in their corporate-owned media is no longer working if it’s seeping out in Russian media (and through some dissident Western news sites on the Internet).

The solution has been to brand the content of the Russian television network, RT, as “propaganda” since it presents facts and viewpoints that most Americans have been kept from hearing. But just because these views – many coming from Americans and other Westerners – are not what you commonly hear on the U.S. mainstream media doesn’t make them “propaganda” that must be stigmatized and silenced.

As a Russian-government-financed English-language news channel, RT also gives a Russian perspective on the news, the way CNN and The New York Times give an American perspective and the BBC a British one. American mainstream journalists, from my experience, arrogantly deny suppressing news and believe they present a universal perspective, rather than a narrow American view of the world.

The viewpoints of Iranians, Palestinians, Russians, North Koreans and others are never fully reported in the Western media although the supposed mission of journalism is to help citizens understand a frighteningly complex world from multiple points of view. It’s impossible to do so without those voices included. Routinely or systematically shutting them out also dehumanizes people in those countries, making it easier to gain popular support to go to war against them.

Russia is scapegoated by charging that RT or Sputnik are sowing divisions in the U.S. by focusing on issues like homelessness, racism, or out-of-control militarized police forces, as if these divisive issues didn’t already exist. The U.S. mainstream media also seems to forget that the U.S. government has engaged in at least 70 years of interference in other countries’ elections, foreign invasions, coups, planting stories in foreign media and cyber-warfare.

Now, these American transgressions are projected onto Moscow. There’s also a measure of self-reverence in this for “successful” people with a stake in an establishment that underpins the elite, demonstrating how wonderfully democratic they are compared to those ogres in Russia.

The overriding point about the “Russian propaganda” complaint is that when America’s democratic institutions, including the press and the electoral process, are crumbling under the weight of corruption that the American elites have created or maintained, someone else needs to be blamed. Russia is both an old and a new scapegoat.

The Jan. 6 intelligence assessment on alleged Russian election meddling is a good example of how this works. A third of its content is an attack on RT for “undermining American democracy” by reporting on Occupy Wall Street, the protest over the Dakota pipeline and, of all things, holding a “third party candidate debates.”

According to the Jan. 6 assessment, RT’s offenses include reporting that “the US two-party system does not represent the views of at least one-third of the population and is a ‘sham.’” RT also “highlights criticism of alleged US shortcomings in democracy and civil liberties.” In other words, reporting on newsworthy events and allowing third-party candidates to express their opinions undermine democracy.

The report also says all this amounts to “a Kremlin-directed campaign to undermine faith in the US Government and fuel political protest,” but it should be noted those protests by dissatisfied Americans are against privileges of the wealthy and the well-connected, a status quo that the intelligence agencies routinely protect.

There are also deeper reasons why Russia is being targeted. The Russia-gate story fits neatly into a geopolitical strategy that long predates the 2016 election. Since Wall Street and the U.S. government lost the dominant position in Russia that existed under the pliable President Boris Yeltsin, the strategy has been to put pressure on getting rid of Putin to restore a U.S. friendly leader in Moscow. There is substance to Russia’s concerns about American designs for “regime change” in the Kremlin.

Moscow sees an aggressive America expanding NATO and putting 30,000 NATO troops on its borders; trying to overthrow a secular ally in Syria with terrorists who threaten Russia itself; backing a coup in Ukraine as a possible prelude to moves against Russia; and using American NGOs to foment unrest inside Russia before they were forced to register as foreign agents. Russia wants Americans to see this perspective.

Tell Truth, Risk Consequences...,

theatlantic  |  Little distinguishes democracy in America more sharply from Europe than the primacy—and permissiveness—of our commitment to free speech. Yet ongoing controversies at American universities suggest that free speech is becoming a partisan issue. While conservative students defend the importance of inviting controversial speakers to campus and giving offense, many self-identified liberals are engaged in increasingly disruptive, even violent, efforts to shut them down. Free speech for some, they argue, serves only to silence and exclude others. Denying hateful or historically “privileged” voices a platform is thus necessary to make equality effective, so that the marginalized and vulnerable can finally speak up—and be heard.

The reason that appeals to the First Amendment cannot decide these campus controversies is because there is a more fundamental conflict between two, very different concepts of free speech at stake. The conflict between what the ancient Greeks called isegoria, on the one hand, and parrhesia, on the other, is as old as democracy itself. Today, both terms are often translated as “freedom of speech,” but their meanings were and are importantly distinct. In ancient Athens, isegoria described the equal right of citizens to participate in public debate in the democratic assembly; parrhesia, the license to say what one pleased, how and when one pleased, and to whom.

When it comes to private universities, businesses, or social media, the would-be censors are our fellow-citizens, not the state. Private entities like Facebook or Twitter, not to mention Yale or Middlebury, have broad rights to regulate and exclude the speech of their members. Likewise, online mobs are made up of outraged individuals exercising their own right to speak freely. To invoke the First Amendment in such cases is not a knock-down argument, it’s a non sequitur.

John Stuart Mill argued that the chief threat to free speech in democracies was not the state, but the “social tyranny” of one’s fellow citizens. And yet today, the civil libertarians who style themselves as Mill’s inheritors have for the most part failed to refute, or even address, the arguments about free speech and equality that their opponents are making.

The two ancient concepts of free speech came to shape our modern liberal democratic notions in fascinating and forgotten ways. But more importantly, understanding that there is not one, but two concepts of freedom of speech, and that these are often in tension if not outright conflict, helps explain the frustrating shape of contemporary debates, both in the U.S. and in Europe—and why it so often feels as though we are talking past each other when it comes to the things that matter most.

A Hot Mess of Pound Me Too Stew...,

Counterpunch |  Now, there is something else being obscured in all this hashtag outrage. And that is the criminality and coercion of all labor under capitalism. Remember, too, that there is silence thus far from the most vulnerable women working in the West; au pairs, maids, factory workers and the like. Many of whom are immigrants or from immigrant families. Also, the most acute violence directed at the working class can be found in the near servitude of citrus pickers and migrant workers in states like Florida, California and Texas. There is very little media attention given to this.

And one could also examine the actual rape conditions of American prisons and county correctional facilities (see below). The clear rape by proxy of young people intentionally put into cells with sexual predators. This is the disciplining of the underclass via sexual violence.

The 1% (or ruling class) are there to distract the populace from the growing economic chasm between themselves and the rest of us. And this is done by providing cheap satisfactions. The system grants the illusion of reform but simply repackages the same. White male power will now adjust to present itself as caring and sensitive to causing offense. Or will there be genuine structural and substantive change? The odds are against change if it challenges the ruling class. I also have noticed a new sort of white male subject position that insists on being thee most feminist man in any discussion, and publicly self lacerates as evidence of his personal evolution. The confessional element in public discourse today looms over all of this.

And today, in an age of electronic media and mass marketing of everything, including lingerie for five year olds (see Victoria’s Secret) this eruption of anger and outrage at the behavior of privileged white men, feels oddly linked to that shadow guilt and resentment of the white ruling class. The white patriarchy needs to abuse the help. And if the slave is now too much of a threat, then women will suffice. And, this is Capitalism after all, where everything is for sale. And much of the language of this anger at white patriachy takes on the quality of self help books and the therapy culture that favors empowerment over organizing. It also manufactures a kind of theatre of grief, in which the word “feelings” is used quite a bit. This is anger predicated upon an identity consensus. And the massive hashtag response speaks to a shared world view. There is a progressive aspect to it all, and that is clear. I think, anyway. The boorish and abusive and humiliating — a key word — behavior of men like Harvey Weinstein, and their default belief that they can do what they want, with women, with anyone under them, is being exposed. 

Pound MeToo In The HBCU's

NYTimes | The fliers appeared suddenly on a crisp morning in early November. They were scattered among golden leaves on the grounds of Spelman and Morehouse, the side-by-side women’s and men’s colleges that are two of the country’s most celebrated historically black schools.

“Morehouse Protects Rapists,” some of them read. “Spelman Protects Rapists.”

Some of the documents accused prominent athletes and fraternity members by name. Though workers quickly made the fliers disappear, students were already passing photos from cellphone to cellphone. Before long, the names were on Twitter.

And the next morning, students at Morehouse woke up to another unnerving sight: graffiti marring the chapel, a spiritual gathering place dedicated to a revered alumnus, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Scrawled in red spray paint, the message read: “Practice What You Preach Morehouse + End Rape Culture.”

In a letter to the campus on Oct. 29, the provost, Michael Quick, announced he was convening a series of forums and task forces. “There is no place on our campuses, or in our society, for abuse of power,” it said.

And in Atlanta, the issue is gripping two campuses, and exposed a deep fissure between schools closely linked by history and geography.

Neither Spelman nor Morehouse would disclose how many complaints it has received, and in interviews, Spelman students and professors said they did not believe sexual assault was any more common there than elsewhere.

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But most said they believed the colleges had not been taking the issue seriously enough. Now their pent-up frustration has burst into the open during a national moment of reckoning.

“I don’t believe our students would be doing what they’re doing if things like this hadn’t been happening nationally,” said Beverly Guy-Sheftall, a women’s studies professor who was one of more than 70 Spelman professors who signed an open letter supporting students who said they had been assaulted.

In a three-minute speech on Nov. 9, the day the graffiti was found on the King chapel, Harold Martin Jr., the interim president of Morehouse, said there was “clearly a belief that there is a population that does not feel heard.”

Pound Me Too Among The Kansas City Roos...,

progressivekc |  UMKC administration once again failed to take concrete action against sexual assault at the last town hall. They talked about meetings, and committees and procedures – but when have those accomplished anything? Their mouths made the same motions they did during last semester’s sexual assaults, while their actions are still absent.

In face of such incompetence, PYO has taken a stand! We pasted fliers with the names and faces of two known rapists on campus, in order to warn the student body, while letting rapists know that they are not welcome here. During the flyering, we were pleased to discover that other rebellious youth had decorated the Bloch School of Business.

This is only the beginning – more actions will come. The end goal of this campaign is to build a revolutionary counter-culture on campus that will empower the student body to annihilate rape culture ourselves!

Such a goal is a high order, and will require dedicated, protracted struggle. If you wish to keep in touch with our future efforts, like our Facebook, and/or keep watching this website.

Power And Control Over Your Mind, Attention, Resources...,

Counterpunch  |  When a system enters into the final stage of its deterioration – whether that is an institutional system, a state, an empire, or the human body – all the important information flows that support coherent communication breakdown. In this final stage, if this situation is not corrected the system will collapse and die.

It has become obvious to nearly everyone that we have reached this stage on the planet and in our democratic institutions. We see how the absolute dysfunction of the global information architecture — represented in the intersection of mainstream media outlets, social technology platforms and giant digital aggregators — is generating widespread apathy, despair, insanity and madness at a scale that is terrifying.

And we are right to be terrified, because this situation is paralyzing us from taking the action required to solve global and local challenges. While liberals fight conservatives and conservatives fight liberals we lose precious time.

While progressives fight government, the corporations and the super-rich we drown in despair. While philanthropists, fueled by their own certainty and wealth, fight for justice or equality or for some poor hamlet in Africa we become apathetic and distracted from the real source of the problem. And while the president fights everyone and everyone fights the president, the collective goes mad.

In the background, however, the game of hoarding resources and not redistributing them accelerates; absorbing the sum total of our collective actions and commitments into a singular unacceptable future. There is only one way to avoid this fate; uncover the source of the disease and cure it by mobilizing solutions.

We are about to break down for you the source of this disease of information that is accelerating us to ecological and institutional collapse because once you see it, you will be free to act and build something else.

Is Dis-Inter-Mediation Necessarily A Bad Thing?

theatlantic  |  Agony is the natural state of the news industry. Newspaper sales per capita peaked before color television was a thing, and magazines have been in decline since the Clinton administration. When it comes to the finances of the Fourth Estate, bad news is, generally speaking, the news.

But 2017 has been a uniquely miserable year in the media business, in which venerable publications and fledging sites, divided by audience age and editorial style, have been united in misery. At Vanity Fair, the editorial budget faces a 30 percent cut. At The New York Times, advertising revenue is down $20 million annually after nine months. Oath, the offspring of Yahoo and AOL’s union, is shedding more than 500 positions as it strains to fit inside of its Verizon conglomerate. Meanwhile, almost every digital publisher seems to be struggling, selling, or soliciting, whether it’s the media company IAC exploring offers to offload The Daily Beast, Fusion Media Group offering a minority stake in The Onion and former Gawker Media sites, or Mashable selling for a fifth of its former valuation. So many media companies in 2017 have reoriented their budgets around the production of videos that the so-called “pivot to video” has became an industry joke. Today, the pivot seems less like a business strategy and more like end-of-life estate planning.

Even the crown princes of digital upstarts, Vice and BuzzFeed, are projected to miss their revenue targets by 20 percent each, which amounts to a combined shortfall of hundreds of millions of dollars. Finally, this week, Time Inc., the storied publisher of magazines and websites, including People, Sports Illustrated, and Time, announced it had reached an agreement to be sold to the Meredith Corporation, whose focus on lifestyle is inspiring rumors that it may yet offload or even shut down Time, Fortune, and Money.

What on Earth is going on? There are at least three major trends contributing to this dismal media moment. They all point to the same solution, and it’s something everyone in journalism should know by now: News publishers have to get better at making money outside of advertising.

Nobody Wants Roy Moore - But He's A Bigger Middle-Finger Than Trump

NationalReview | Earlier today The Federalist published a piece by a philosophy professor and self-proclaimed “superhero against the dark forces of political correctness” that purports to present the case for Roy Moore. Unlike many of Moore’s defenders, he’s trying to persuade Alabamians to vote for Moore even if the claims against him are “mostly true.” 

It’s an embarrassing effort. Ordinarily, I wouldn’t waste my time responding to something so silly, but the author, Tully Borland, claims to be rebutting one of my pieces about Moore, and he’s making actual arguments I’m hearing from real life friends. So, today I’m making an exception. 

Borland’s piece rests — as most defenses of Moore do — on minimizing Moore’s sins, maximizing his importance, and making incredibly stupid analogies. Indeed, the efforts to minimize Moore’s actions almost reach “Joseph married a teenager” levels of insanity. 

Shame Is For Losers

WaPo |  Pity poor Alabama voters. On Dec. 12, they must choose between a radical pro-abortion Democrat and an alleged sex predator who has been accused of pursuing and molesting teenage girls. 

There is no good choice in that equation, and Alabamians should not have to make it. In an earlier era, Roy Moore either would have done the honorable thing out of his own sense of shame or would have been forced to step down by state party leaders. Instead, he is staying in the race — with the full complicity of Alabama Republican leaders who have defended Moore and attacked his victims.

In refusing to step down, Moore is executing a playbook written two decades ago by the 42nd President, Bill Clinton. During the Monica Lewinsky scandal, Clinton figured out that if you have no shame and ignore calls to resign, you can survive any scandal. All you have to do is lie repeatedly (“there is nothing going on between us”) and show no remorse when you are caught doing so. When more women come forward with more allegations, deny them, too, and create just enough doubt that your supporters will feel justified sticking with you. Blame your opponents for conducting a political witch hunt to run you out of office. If the evidence becomes overwhelming, then admit “a critical lapse in judgment” but declare it is time “to move on” because “we have important work to do.”

For Clinton, it worked like a charm. He forced his supporters to choose between power and principle — knowing full well that power would win out. The feminist movement — the very people who should have been championing Clinton’s victims — instead sided with him. Gloria Steinem beclowned herself in a notorious 1998 New York Times op-ed where she attacked Clinton’s accusers, made excuses for his deceit and made light of his crimes. All 45 Senate Democrats voted to acquit Clinton in his impeachment trial.

Today, with the cavalcade of revelations of sexual transgressions by politicians and celebrities, some Democrats are expressing belated regret that their party rallied around Clinton. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.), who occupies Senate seat that Hillary Clinton once held, now says that Bill Clinton should have resigned. Isn’t that convenient? Now that the Clinton political machine is finally defunct, liberals come forward to condemn him? How courageous.

Subrealist Theology of a Red Door

So..., having meditated for quite a long time on degeneracy this year, I was more primed and ready to explode on the #MeToo trope than little Rocket Man's spanking new MIRV.  Not that I sincerely give a rat's nasty little flea-ridden patootty about the foolishness and phuckery of peasants - or even middle and upper class strivers peasants with a couple of nickels to rub together for that matter - I don't.

Above the gossipy fray, I don't care about the underlying gender/power disparities, or, virtue-signalling intersectional alliance with the oppressed either.  It's simply not part of my psychic constitution to care about the high-minded retelling of what amount to high-school style antics. The nekkid goings-on of chronologically grown-folk whose psychological development can best be described as de-evolutionary arrested, is of little interest to me.

Simple critter that I am, at the reptile-brain level of engagement, it all comes down to my very weakly resisted inclination to wallow in schadenfreude. I am a glutton for the vicarious enjoyment of watching other despicable apes get ripped to shreds on the plains of the popular-cultural serengeti by various and sundry wildly enflamed letgo beasts. I've been needing to go to confession six times a day for the past couple of months because of the obsessive and compulsive nature of my abiding and overarching enjoyment of this spectacle.

On the meta-level, i.e., philosophically above the sticky fray, what I care most deeply about is individual sovereignty and the associated requisite science and methodology of asymmetrical violation of the established order. If you haven't figured this out about me yet, if you haven't identified my "chief-feature" as it were, let me spell it out for you. I have a profound, all-consuming, and irrational problem with authoriteh.

This has not only been my career-limiting professional modus operandi, pared of all guise and dissimulation, it is truly my religion. It has been this way for me since about the age of eleven, when a phenomenal sunday school teacher encouraged me to question any and everything. This encouragement was permanently crystallized and violentized in my psyche at twelve when I first rebelled against peer authoriteh and beat the literal shit out of an arrogant neighborhood bully. (I would link to this buffoon, but I see he's still alive and never made it out of Wichita)

Anyway, as best I can gather, this current, energetic eruption of rule-breaking in polite society all started when the late Si Newhouse decided to go laughing to his grave by profoundly deviating  from the established behavioral norms of the Trans-American Protectorate (now archived) - by publishing Ronan Farrow's expose on the disgusting degenerate rape-pig Harvey Weinstein. Publication of that story in The New Yorker amounted to detonation of a nuclear grenade of asymmetric, unintended consequences. 

Said grenade has cracked an American cultural dam. Not only did it unleash the pent-up gender-flood from the oppressed and long-offended feminine-striver masses in entertainment/media/politics - it also unexpectedly unleashed the genuinely oppressed rage of the deplorables still rightfully and righteously angered over the cultural and moral pass given to serial rapist William Jefferson Clinton. 

Now, which camp will keep the very hot fires of this cultural moment burning - remains to be seen.  Whether the fires rise up to the Impyrian heights of the multi-billionaire TAP elites who are earnestly warring among themselves remains to be seen. That it's forced its way onto teevees all across America and is the hot potato that will determine the outcome of the Alabama senatorial special election - does not yet give us a clear indication of whether this moment will engulf, scorch, and shred all the really big killer-apeswho fundamentally have no game and need to get righteously burned. Meanwhile, I'll continue wallowing in schadenfreude and enjoying every single instance of yet another despicable ape getting shredded and scorched out'chere on these fields of dystopian sorrow....,

Wonder Why Weaponized #MeToo Hasn't Snatched A Real Baller Yet...,

pagesix |  A source familiar with the purchase said: “While everyone in New York wants a doorman, Eric specifically said he didn’t want one. He doesn’t want anyone to see him and his guests coming in and out. He insisted on his own elevator.” 

Schmidt has also spent millions getting the 6,250-square-foot duplex — which has four bedrooms and a large entertainment area with a wet bar opening onto a 3,300-square-foot terrace — soundproofed, claiming he “doesn’t sleep well,” but also affording him complete privacy.

Other sources say that earlier this summer, the tech mogul was embarking on a tour of the French Riviera and asked his aides to find alluring female companions to “decorate his yacht.”

Schmidt, who’s worth $8.2 billion, bought the 195-foot Oasis for about $72.3 million in 2009. The source said, “He had one of his aides approach beautiful and intelligent women that Schmidt never met before, saying, ‘Eric would like to invite you to his yacht,’ which was cruising around the Riviera.”

He was spotted in St. Tropez earlier this month, and later sailed to the Cap d’Antibes, and we’re told that some of the women approached by his aides had agreed to join Schmidt onboard.

Wendy Schmidt, who lives in Nantucket, said in an interview last year that they started living separate lives because she felt like “a piece of luggage” following him around the world. 

A rep for Schmidt didn’t respond last night. 

In case y'all forgot exactly who this is...,

Unintended Consequences or Tightly Scripted Political Theatre?

newyorker |  We have witnessed a theatre of accountability insidiously refine itself, quite quickly, in the past few months. Louis C.K.’s statement, for example, following the exposé in the Times of his sexual harassment of female comics, was not as passionate as, but was more coherent than, Harvey Weinstein’s ramblings about Jay-Z and the gun lobby. The opportunistic finesse of Kevin Spacey’s coming-out certainly tripped some social alarms, but he nonetheless garnered some sympathy. Power brokers like the Pixar animation baron John Lasseter have even scooped long-labored-over articles by preëmpting them altogether. (Lasseter is taking a six-month leave of absence.) No display was savvier than NBC’s orchestration on Wednesday.

The “Today” show’s artful transposition of grief where there would naturally be scrutiny continued into the 10 A.M. slot, in which the veteran host Kathie Lee Gifford spoke of how much she, too, loved Lauer and how sad she was. It continued on this morning’s program, with Guthrie and Kotb again at the helm. Not since Bill Cosby—or Bill O’Reilly, depending on one’s television diet—has the scourge of sexual assault so acutely infiltrated the righteous perimeter of the American home. (President Trump, also affiliated with NBC and accused of assaulting women, never quite depended on a family-man image.) The influence of a behind-the-scenes figure like Weinstein can feel diffuse, removed from our everyday cultural consumption; Lauer was, and is, synonymous with the family feel of “Today.” Part of this comes from the network’s bloated investment in Lauer—he reportedly earns between twenty million and twenty-five million dollars a year. (In 2014, a source told Page Six that the company chartered helicopter rides for Lauer from his Hamptons compound to its Rockefeller Center studios at his request.) When, in 1996, Lauer wrested the anchor chair from Bryant Gumbel, gossip magazines swooned over his geometric jaw and feathery hair; twenty years later, he was transforming comfortably into a smug but wise paternal figure. His tenure at the “Today” show was the longest in its history. Now instances of Lauer’s public pettiness toward women seem like the exertions of a holistically awful campaign. In 2012, he admonished the actress Anne Hathaway for photographs that the paparazzi had taken of her exiting a car. “Seen a lot of you lately,” he said. And, famously, Lauer was an architect of “Operation Bambi,” a plan that succeeded in getting his former co-anchor Ann Curry fired from the show that same year. (“ ‘Chemistry,’ in television history, generally means the man does not want to work with the woman,” Curry said, according to Brian Stelter’s insider anatomy, “Top of the Morning: Inside the Cutthroat World of Morning TV.”) On her final show, Curry wept and Lauer pretended to soothe her. His interview of Hillary Clinton last year was intrusive and aggressive when compared with his handling of Trump. How a man thinks of women dictates how he works with them.

You Already Know What Truth Looks and Sounds Like...,

gabbard.house.gov |  Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (HI-02) held a press conference and spoke on the House floor today urging Congress to overhaul the broken system of sexual harassment and assault in Congress and across the country. The congresswoman called for an end to taxpayer-funded settlements which total more than $17 million in 268 Congressional settlements over the past two decades, according to recent reports. 

 

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard was joined by Reps. Ron DeSantis (FL-06), Marsha Blackburn (TN-07), Jim Cooper (TN-05), and Kathleen Rice (NY-04) to introduce the Congressional Accountability and Hush Fund Elimination Act. This bipartisan, comprehensive legislation would ensure that perpetrators are held personally and financially accountable for their actions by ending taxpayer-funded harassment settlements and require any individual who has settled such a claim using taxpayer funds to fully reimburse the Treasury.

Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard said:
“For too long survivors of sexual harassment and assault have been isolated, shamed, and bullied into silence, while their abusers walk away scot-free with the privilege of anonymity and without personal or financial accountability.

“This has been happening right here in Congress, in the media, and in many other sectors of our society. No one, whether it be a Capitol Hill staffer, a Hollywood actor, a school teacher, or a soldier or anyone in any profession, at any time should have to choose between their job and personal safety.

“Congress needs to act now to end the practice of taxpayer-funded sexual harassment settlements, expose perpetrators of sexual harassment and assault, and provide a fair and transparent path to justice for survivors. This behavior is absolutely unacceptable. It has no place in Congress or in our society. It must end."

Nancy Pelosi The Embodiment of Democratic Hypocrisy and Double-Standards

NationalReview |  The rules of society should be fair to everybody, not based on tribal identity. 

It’s amazing how complicated simple principles can become when they’re inconvenient to your team. On Sunday, House minority leader Nancy Pelosi created a mess for herself by insisting on NBC’s Meet the Press that Representative John Conyers deserves “due process” in the face of a series of accusations of improper conduct. Politically, Pelosi’s performance was a gift to her many critics. 

For liberals who think she’s passed her sell-by date as a Democratic leader, her hapless effort will now be Exhibit A in the brief against her, despite her subsequent efforts to clean up the mess. For populists on the left and right who think the political establishment is rigged to protect members of the club, Pelosi’s effort to protect Conyers — and Senator Al Franken, who has also been accused of several sexual transgressions — while at the same time insisting that we know all we need to know about President Trump and Alabama Senate candidate Roy Moore is simply a naked partisan double standard.

“We are strengthened by due process,” Pelosi insists when the topic is Conyers. But Moore is “a child molester.” This raises the most dismaying gift that Pelosi lobbed to the mob. 

 

By circling the wagons around Conyers and Franken (and Bill Clinton to some extent), Pelosi is all but guaranteeing the election of Moore. It is difficult to exaggerate the anger among many Republicans who believe that liberals use the rules selectively, shamelessly invoking standards of conduct to delegitimize and destroy their enemies while exempting their own. 

 

“Zero tolerance” for thee, “it’s complicated” for me. It was this belief — hardly unfounded — that let millions of Republicans dismiss allegations of sexual abuse against Trump and now Moore. 

 

Every day, conservatives angry at my opposition to Moore tell me “we” can’t “unilaterally disarm.” If they won’t play by the rules, why should we?

Sen. Mazie Hirono Self-Clowns In Partisan #MeToo Hypocrisy

freebeacon  |  Sen. Mazie Hirono (D., Hawaii) said Wednesday that she isn’t sure what to do about her Democratic colleagues facing sexual harassment allegations.

Hirono did not say Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn) or Rep. John Conyers (D., Mich.) should step down, adding that the world is not "so black and white" as to make it clear what to do. Franken was photographed with his hands over a sleeping woman’s breasts and Conyers is facing numerous harassment allegations, but Hirono called for regular procedures to continue.

"I think that we are [cleaning up politics] in the sense that we have procedures, you know?" Hirono said to MSNBC's Chuck Todd. "We are figuring out how we can best deal with the kinds of complaints that have come forward, the allegations."

She was quick to say that the problem is not confined to the Democratic Party and extends to other parties and industries. Todd countered by saying, "you have to start somewhere," and he asked Hirono if she was comfortable working with Conyers and Franken.

"I have served with them before we knew that they engaged in this kind of behavior—which, by the way, anybody who engages in this kind of behavior should be held accountable—but notice that good people do bad things," Hirono replied. "Gee, I wish that life were so black and white that you can't think of a single good person who has done bad things."

Hirono emphasized that the problem is cultural and argued that people should not focus too much on individual offenses.