pentagon studying and operationally targetting peaceful protest movements...,

guardian |  Among my questions, I asked:

"Does the US Department of Defense see protest movements and social activism in different parts of the world as a threat to US national security? If so, why? Does the US Department of Defense consider political movements aiming for large scale political and economic change as a national security matter? If so, why? Activism, protest, 'political movements' and of course NGOs are a vital element of a healthy civil society and democracy - why is it that the DoD is funding research to investigate such issues?"

Minerva's programme director Dr Erin Fitzgerald said "I appreciate your concerns and am glad that you reached out to give us the opportunity to clarify" before promising a more detailed response. Instead, I received the following bland statement from the DoD's press office:

"The Department of Defense takes seriously its role in the security of the United States, its citizens, and US allies and partners. While every security challenge does not cause conflict, and every conflict does not involve the US military, Minerva helps fund basic social science research that helps increase the Department of Defense's understanding of what causes instability and insecurity around the world. By better understanding these conflicts and their causes beforehand, the Department of Defense can better prepare for the dynamic future security environment."

In 2013, Minerva funded a University of Maryland project in collaboration with the US Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory to gauge the risk of civil unrest due to climate change. The three-year $1.9 million project is developing models to anticipate what could happen to societies under a range of potential climate change scenarios.

From the outset, the Minerva programme was slated to provide over $75 million over five years for social and behavioural science research. This year alone it has been allocated a total budget of $17.8 million by US Congress.

An internal Minerva staff email communication referenced in a 2012 Masters dissertation reveals that the programme is geared toward producing quick results that are directly applicable to field operations. The dissertation was part of a Minerva-funded project on "counter-radical Muslim discourse" at Arizona State University. 

The internal email from Prof Steve Corman, a principal investigator for the project, describes a meeting hosted by the DoD's Human Social Cultural and Behavioural Modeling (HSCB) programme in which senior Pentagon officials said their priority was "to develop capabilities that are deliverable quickly" in the form of "models and tools that can be integrated with operations."

surveillance is meant to crush citizen dissent, not catch terra-ists...,

washingtonsblog |  While many Americans understand why the NSA is conducting mass surveillance of U.S. citizens, some are still confused about what’s really going on.

In his new book, No Place to Hide, Glenn Greenwald writes:

The perception that invasive surveillance is confined only to a marginalised and deserving group of those “doing wrong” – the bad people – ensures that the majority acquiesces to the abuse of power or even cheers it on. But that view radically misunderstands what goals drive all institutions of authority. “Doing something wrong” in the eyes of such institutions encompasses far more than illegal acts, violent behaviour and terrorist plots. It typically extends to meaningful dissent and any genuine challenge. It is the nature of authority to equate dissent with wrongdoing, or at least with a threat.

The record is suffused with examples of groups and individuals being placed under government surveillance by virtue of their dissenting views and activism – Martin Luther King, the civil rights movement, anti-war activists, environmentalists. In the eyes of the government and J Edgar Hoover’s FBI, they were all “doing something wrong”: political activity that threatened the prevailing order.

The FBI’s domestic counterintelligence programme, Cointelpro, was first exposed by a group of anti-war activists who had become convinced that the anti-war movement had been infiltrated, placed under surveillance and targeted with all sorts of dirty tricks. Lacking documentary evidence to prove it and unsuccessful in convincing journalists to write about their suspicions, they broke into an FBI branch office in Pennsylvania in 1971 and carted off thousands of documents.

Files related to Cointelpro showed how the FBI had targeted political groups and individuals it deemed subversive and dangerous, including the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, black nationalist movements, socialist and communist organizations, anti-war protesters and various rightwing groups. The bureau had infiltrated them with agents who, among other things, attempted to manipulate members into agreeing to commit criminal acts so that the FBI could arrest and prosecute them.

Those revelations led to the creation of the Senate Church Committee, which concluded: “[Over the course of 15 years] the bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilate operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of first amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propagation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence.”

These incidents were not aberrations of the era. During the Bush years, for example, documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) revealed, as the group put it in 2006, “new details of Pentagon surveillance of Americans opposed to the Iraq war, including Quakers and student groups“. The Pentagon was “keeping tabs on non-violent protesters by collecting information and storing it in a military anti-terrorism database”. The evidence shows that assurances that surveillance is only targeted at those who “have done something wrong” should provide little comfort, since a state will reflexively view any challenge to its power as wrongdoing.

The opportunity those in power have to characterise political opponents as “national security threats” or even “terrorists” has repeatedly proven irresistible. In the past decade, the government, in an echo of Hoover’s FBI, has formally so designated environmental activists, broad swaths of anti-government rightwing groups, anti-war activists, and associations organised around Palestinian rights. Some individuals within those broad categories may deserve the designation, but undoubtedly most do not, guilty only of holding opposing political views. Yet such groups are routinely targeted for surveillance by the NSA and its partners.

One document from the Snowden files, dated 3 October 2012, chillingly underscores the point. It revealed that the agency has been monitoring the online activities of individuals it believes express “radical” ideas and who have a “radicalising” influence on others.

***

The NSA explicitly states that none of the targeted individuals is a member of a terrorist organisation or involved in any terror plots. Instead, their crime is the views they express, which are deemed “radical“, a term that warrants pervasive surveillance and destructive campaigns to “exploit vulnerabilities”.

Among the information collected about the individuals, at least one of whom is a “US person”, are details of their online sex activities and “online promiscuity” – the porn sites they visit and surreptitious sex chats with women who are not their wives. The agency discusses ways to exploit this information to destroy their reputations and credibility.

so long as the US populace accepts that it's white v black and not state v us, the state wins...,

theantimedia |  It is extremely important to note that in all of recorded history, an insurgency that matured through the phases and reached this stage has never been quelled through force. Ever. It may have been delayed, but the insurgency simply went underground until opposition forces relaxed. In some cases it took 800 years to achieve an insurgent victory. Once an insurgency reaches this stage, it wins. It is that simple. See: Irish Republic Army.

At this point, in a form of bizarre just deserts, the only option law enforcement has is the same option it offered to the American people, which prompted this cycle: comply or die.

Certain police departments may believe they are isolated from the violence because of their geographic location. They aren’t. Because of social media, events that historically would have only prompted violence within the immediate vicinity can prompt violence on the other side of the nation. We are so close to an open insurrection in this country that it boggles the mind. If police proceed with a law enforcement crackdown, events could spiral out of control and open insurrection could happen tomorrow.

Some in the media are calling for the arrests of the leaders of Black Lives Matter, Cop Block, and other organizations. This is possibly the worst move law enforcement could make. This gives the cause martyrs. To continue the Irish comparison, after the Easter Rising the British government arrested, interned, and even executed some of the rebellion’s leaders. The names of those men are still recited in songs today, 100 years later. It fanned the flames of rebellion and as Éamon de Valera is said to have  remarked while waiting for the British government to decide between executing or imprisoning him, “every one of us they shoot brings ten more to the cause.” Today, with social media, the effects of martyr-based propaganda are even stronger. As a more recent example, ask those associated with the Anonymous collective how much influence people like Jeremy Hammond, Aaron Swartz, and Dennis Collins hold. Two of them are deceased, one sits rotting in a federal prison, and yet they are still massive recruiting tools.

Is this guy really saying to give in to violence? Yes. That is exactly what I am saying. There was an opportunity for a negotiated peace after Ferguson. Law enforcement chose to refuse. Law enforcement chose to dismiss the threat. Law enforcement chose to listen to pundits within the media that were only interested in pandering to their viewers. Now, that time has past. My best advice: immediately decommission the MRAPs, end no-knock raids for non-violent offenders, make certain the suspect is home and that you have the correct house before executing a raid, issue body cameras to all officers, end intrusive electronic surveillance, decommission the drones, and adopt a “do not fire until fired upon” policy. The end result of this scenario will be law enforcement demilitarizing; the only thing left to determine is how many cops and innocents die along the way.

Those in political office do not care about police officers’ lives. The last time the United States came this close to an open insurrection we had a President that understood insurgency. In fact, he understood it so well that he is responsible for the SEAL Teams and Green Berets having the role they have today. He understood that once it reaches a certain point, violent revolution is inevitable. He said:

“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable.”

uh..., is there seriously ANY QUESTION concerning the identity of the race war team?!?!?!?!

slate |  This is the central thing to understand about what happened in Dallas: Black people who target whites are fundamentally allied with white people who target blacks. They’re on the same team: the race war team. It’s a lot like the global struggle over jihadism, in which Muslims who hate Christians collaborate, in effect, with Christians who hate Muslims. In the case of jihadism, the real struggle isn’t between two religions. It’s between people who want religious war and people who don’t. The same is true of race: Either you’re on the race war team, or you’re against it.

The attack in Dallas—allegedly committed by Micah Johnson, a black man—comes barely a year after a white man, Dylann Roof, allegedly shot nine black people to death in a church in Charleston, South Carolina. Roof told friends, and later police, that he wanted “to start a race war.” “He wanted it to be white with white, and black with black,” said a friend.

white america's biggest fear...,

WaPo |  They struggle to believe that the human indignity of being seen, apparently, as only a close-range shooting target by so many of those entrusted to protect and serve, can produce such heinousness. They refuse to understand what it means to be shot by police at 2.5 times the rate of whites, as are black males, according the The Washington Post’s database.

They don’t, or maybe can’t, comprehend what it is like to know that you make up 24 percent of all deaths at the end of law enforcement’s muzzle despite being just 12 percent of the population.

Instead, they’ve tried to find another reason Johnson could turn into a Charles. Maybe he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after his tour in Afghanistan? Maybe he was otherwise mentally disturbed? Maybe he was radicalized?

Especially for the families of the victims of Johnson’s outburst, he understandably will be seen forever as the madman he became. But as the best-selling white author of many sports books, Peter Golenbock, noted on Facebook on Friday: “For years we have seen the pictures of senseless murders of black men and children by white policemen. Afterwards, the cops are rarely indicted and never convicted.”

Golenbock continued, before knowing Johnson was the sole shooter: “After all these years a group of blacks, tired of this and obviously military trained, started shooting back in Dallas yesterday at white cops, and now everyone is scared to death. What is surprising is that this hasn’t occurred earlier.”

What is fortunate for America is that most black people, like those in the #BlackLivesMatter movement who marched that dreadful Thursday in downtown Dallas, just seek a fairer shake.

hillary escaped due process over drones and micah was denied due process by a drone....,

ronpaulinstitute |  This was a drone sent in to kill an American suspected of a crime.

Police claim that continuing the negotiations was pointless and attempting to capture him would have put officers at risk. He was supposedly shooting. While no sane person wants police officers to be killed, risk is something we are told they willingly accept when they sign up for police duty. There are plenty of low-risk jobs out there.

The media and opinion-leaders are presenting us with a false choice: if we question the use of drones to kill Americans -- even if we suspect they have done very bad things -- we somehow do not care about the lives of police officers. That is not the case. It is perfectly possible to not want police officers to be killed in the line of duty but to wholeheartedly reject the idea of authorities using drones to remotely kill Americans before they are found guilty.

African-American Dallas protester Mark Hughes was wrongly identified by Dallas Police as a suspect in the shootings. Police tweeted photos of Hughes marching with protesters openly carrying a rifle, as is permitted in Texas. Police claimed was involved in the shooting. He was a suspect just like Johnson was a suspect. During questioning they told Hughes that they had video of him shooting people, which was a lie. What if police had sent in a drone to take out Mark Hughes? What will happen in the future to a future Mark Hughes, falsely accused by police of being involved in a shooting? Will we come to accept murder without trial?

first the unnecessariat, then the precariat, now even illegal farm workers gotta go, gotta go, gotta go!!!

marketwatch |  I remember reading a piece about farmers using drones, and I must say I was impressed. 

For farmers, the transition from manned aircraft to drones is an easy choice to make. Not only are they much cheaper, but they also provide imaging tools, which can be used for detecting a variety of crop-related issues, ranging from problems with irrigation to measuring chlorophyll levels in plants.

So today I want to talk about the next step in agri-tech evolution: robots. Although most modern farmers don’t have to spend their days in the field anymore, sweating and toiling under the sun while harvesting crops or tending to cattle, they still spend a considerable amount of time servicing machines that harvest and spray for them. If this part of the production were automated, farmers would have more time (and money) to invest in expanding and perfecting their production capacities. 

They’d also boost yields in the process. 

If you think using robots in agriculture is too futuristic, think again: They are already assisting with a growing number of back-breaking activities in fields all over the world.

how is that community policing going in Iraq and Afghanistan again?!?!?!?!?!

WaPo |  I’m afraid that incidents such as those of the past several days will reinforce a view that violence is not only justified but appropriate. That such incidents will drive police and the communities they serve further apart, dampening any interest in reconciliation.

But I’m also optimistic. Even relationships that have been undermined by a long history of distrust and anger can be repaired. We have seen some remarkable progress in truly challenging situations, including police departments in Richmond, Calif., and Camden, N.J., just to name a few. 

We can learn from those successes, and from successes outside the United States. In Northern Ireland, for example, police and the Irish Republican Army were in a state approaching open warfare for years before establishing a tentative, then more lasting, relationship in the late 1990s. More recently, U.S. military personnel put community policing principles into practice with great effect in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

If positive relationships can be established or repaired in those environments, surely we can do the same in the context of domestic policing. Surely we must.

america lacks the resources to repeat mistakes of 68 - making draconian clampdown inevitable

theatlantic |  Commission staffers had produced a blistering and radical draft report on November 22, 1967. The 176-page report, “The America of Racism,” recounted the deep-seated racial divisions that shaped urban America, and it was damning about Johnson’s beloved Great Society programs, which the report said offered only token assistance while leaving the “white power structure” in place. What’s more, the draft treated rioting as an understandable political response to racial oppression. “A truly revolutionary spirit has begun to take hold,” they wrote, “an unwillingness to compromise or wait any longer, to risk death rather than have their people continue in a subordinate status.” Kerner then nixed the report, and his staff director fired all 120 social scientists who had worked on it.

Nevertheless, the final Kerner Report was still incredibly hard-hitting: “This is our basic conclusion: Our Nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal.” Though the commissioners had softened the language from the first draft, much of the data remained the same and the overall argument was still incredibly powerful. The report focused on institutional racism. This meant that racism was not just a product of bad individuals who believed that African Americans were inferior to white Americans, but that these racial hierarchies were literally embedded in the structure of society.

“Segregation and poverty,” the report said, “have created in the racial ghetto a destructive environment totally unknown to most white Americans. What white Americans have never fully understood—but what the Negro can never forget—is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” The riots in Newark and Detroit, the report continued, “were not caused by, nor were they the consequences of, any organized plan or ‘conspiracy.’” The rioters were educated and had been employed in recent years; most of them were furious about facing constant discrimination when seeking new employment, trying to find a place to live, or, worst of all, interacting with hostile law-enforcement officials.

The police received the most scrutiny in the report. In a haunting section, the report explained, “Negroes firmly believe that police brutality and harassment occur repeatedly in Negro neighborhoods.” The rioting had shown that police enforcement had become a problem not a solution in race relations. More aggressive policing and militarized officers had become city officials’ de facto response to urban decay. “In several cities, the principal response has been to train and equip the police with more sophisticated weapons.” The report stressed that law-enforcement officers were not “merely a spark factor” to the riots but that they had come to symbolize “white power, white racism, and white oppression.”

drug war deforestation

FP |  To hear the Guatemalan government tell it, the Maya Biosphere Reserve, a sprawling national park in the northern department of Petén, is the crown jewel of the Central American park system. Look on a map, and you’ll see the protected area spreads across the northern fifth of the country like a green carpet. Within those borders lie the famous Mayan ruins at Tikal and El Mirador, as well as huge swaths of the Maya Forest, the Americas’ largest tropical rainforest outside the Amazon, an invaluable storehouse of both carbon stocks and rare plants and wildlife, among them Guatemala’s last population of macaws.

But that rosy picture hides a grimmer reality. Journey to these protected areas of northern Guatemala, and you’ll find something resembling an ongoing ecological catastrophe. In Laguna del Tigre National Park, nestled in the heart of the reserve, the tall acacia and mahogany trees have been cut and burned, exiling the macaws to the tiny fringe of forest that remains. You can see this damage on a map included in an annual report published by the National Council of Protected Areas (CONAP), the Guatemalan national park service, in partnership with Western environmental NGOs, and paid for in part by the U.S. Department of the Interior. As the map shows, the Maya Biosphere Reserve is bisected by what appears to be creeping fungus — illegal cattle ranches, which have cleared about 8 percent of the reserve since 2000. These ranches stand as a parable for the drug war. According to Guatemalan park guards, U.N. researchers, and prosecutors alike, the unintended cause of the deforestation is a drug war victory: a successful interdiction campaign that redirected billions of dollars of drug cash across Guatemala, funding a trade that threatens to destroy Central America’s greatest forest.

According to a report by the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), until the early 2000s, Central America was a relative sideshow in the Western Hemisphere’s cocaine trade. The drug largely moved from Colombia across the Caribbean into either Mexico or the southern United States. But starting around 2002, aggressive U.S. law enforcement and interdiction campaigns closed the Caribbean route, seizing some 200 tons of cocaine. Other victories followed in allied states. Security forces in Mexico largely shut down direct drug flights into the country. In South America, the Colombian government broke the power of the country’s main cartels.

But the drug trade is a river of money stretching from the Andes to North America. Dam it in one place and — as long as there are still users in the United States — it will find another course.

DPD has a supply of bombs, drones, and used one to kill a civilian in a public place today...,

theverge |  Police in Dallas used a bomb disposal robot to kill a suspect after last night’s deadly shooting during a protest. In a press conference, Dallas police chief David Brown said that the robot was deployed after negotiations with the suspect failed. "We saw no other option but to use our bomb robot and place a device on its extension for it to detonate where the suspect was," said Brown. "Other options would have exposed our officers to great danger. The suspect is deceased as a result of detonating the bomb."

It’s not entirely clear what the "device" in question was, although it may have been one of the small explosives that are normally used to safely detonate larger bombs. A previous statement, from Dallas’ mayor, said only that the suspect had died after police used explosives to "blast him out."

Police have used remote-controlled bomb disposal robots for other purposes; San Jose police talked a man out of suicide last year after delivering a phone and pizza to him via one. But this is the first known case where a department has described using one as a weapon, defense technology expert Peter Singer posted on Twitter, although he notes it's been used this way informally by US troops and insurgents. Unlike with the "killer robots" that have ethicists most worried, any decisions in Dallas were made clearly by humans — it’s much more like an advanced tool used in an unexpected way than anything artificially intelligent or designed for murder. Still, beyond the unmanned drones used in bombing strikes, it’s one of the first known times that a robot has been intentionally used to kill a human outside the battlefield.

if this little unpleasantness stays rooted in race, it'll blow over - if it goes to class - all hell breaks loose...,

Criminality correlates a lot better to class than race.  It's just that in many areas, class correlates pretty well with race.  Looking at our nation's history, when the Black Panthers stuck to talking about race issues, the FBI didn't like them but dealt with them.  Even though the Black Panthers were arming themselves and talking of revolution.  However, as soon as the Black Panthers started talking about class and showing common cause with white people, the FBI exterminated them.  Food for thought. 

If this little unpleasantness stays rooted in race, it'll blow over.  If it gets anywhere near economic issues, all hell will break loose.  As soon as it looked like Occupy Wall Street was going to stick around, Obama coordinated public and private militias and took them out.  As ever, what Empires fears most is a peasant revolt.

rorschachian juggling of the absurdities of uhmurkan necropolitics internationale, worldwide...,

whitehouse |  "But regardless of the outcome of such investigations, what's clear is that these fatal shootings are not isolated incidents. They are symptomatic of the broader challenges within our criminal justice system, the racial disparities that appear across the system year after year, and the resulting lack of trust that exists between law enforcement and too many of the communities they serve.

"In the meantime, all Americans should recognize the anger, frustration, and grief that so many Americans are feeling -- feelings that are being expressed in peaceful protests and vigils.  Michelle and I share those feelings. Rather than fall into a predictable pattern of division and political posturing, let’s reflect on what we can do better.  Let’s come together as a nation, and keep faith with one another, in order to ensure a future where all of our children know that their lives matter."

peasant false flag distractions in Dallas vs great-ape war planning in Warsaw

Telegraph |  David Cameron 'shocked and horrified'

British Prime Minister David Cameron is "shocked and horrified" by the shootings, Downing Street has said.

The Prime Minister is expected to discuss the tragic incident with Barack Obama on the margins of the Nato summit which both are attending in the Polish capital, Warsaw.

The deaths - and injuries to six other officers - have been blamed on snipers who opened fire during a protest in the Texas city over this week's fatal police shootings of two black men in Louisiana and Minnesota.

Mr Cameron's official spokeswoman told a regular Westminster media briefing: "The Prime Minister is shocked and horrified by the terrible scenes we have seen overnight.

"He is due to be at the Warsaw summit and I think he will have the opportunity to talk to President Obama about it directly.

"I think he would echo what the President has said, which is that these attacks on police officers simply doing their job and trying to keep people safe are horrific and cannot be justified."

Valodya not handing his nizzuts over to Granny and Apokalips...,

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? 

withholding suspect information scrapes Granny Goodness' crimes off the front pages...,

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.

little is more corrosive of democracy than impunity...,

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.”

house oversight committee has neuticle comey live on the grill...,

until Granny Goodness the Hon.Bro.Preznit has been obsessed with punishing secrecy violations...,

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, this is 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 and we 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 important to 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,”

only a cleansing blue fyer can counter torrential vile secretions

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.

yesterday morning Granny Goodness took James Comey's badge, gun, and testicles....,

the age of disintegration

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.

Urban Dictionary Update - "with the quickness": speed of Granny Goodness email exoneration

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.

war, what is it good for?

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.

Above the Law WarPig Gov/Prez HillBilly Grew Female Prison Population 800%..,

theantimedia |  Holly Harris may wear cowboy boots to work, but the Kentucky mom and Executive Director for the US Justice Action Network (USJAN) is far from your average southerner.

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.”

Too Much Democracy - PEASANTS!!!

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.

fear of slave revolts drove american insurrection against Britain independence...,

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.

the server, the foundation, billybob - hugh hewitt OWNS clinton apologists...,

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.

you can't be sure what you think

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.