TheSaker | Question: why does the US foreign policies always support various
minorities? Is it out of kindness? Or a sense of fairness? Could it be
out of a deep sense of guilt of having committed the only “pan-genocide”
in human history (the genocide of all the ethnic groups of an entire
continent)? Or maybe a deep sense of guilt over slavery? Are the
beautiful words of the Declaration of Independence “we hold these truths
to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” really inspiring US
foreign policies?
Hardly.
I submit that the real truth is totally different. My thesis is very simple: the
reason why the US always support foreign minorities to subvert states
and use domestic minorities to suppress the majority US population is
because minorities are very easy to manipulate and because minorities present no threat to the real rulers of the AngloZionist Empire. That’s all there is to it.
I think that minorities often, but not always, act and perceive
things in a way very different from the way majority groups do. Here is
what I have observed:
Let’s first look at minorities inside the USA:
They are typically far more aware of their minority identity/status
than the majority. That is to say that if the majority is of skin color
A and the minority of skin color B, the minority will be much more
acutely aware of its skin color.
They are typically much more driven and active then the majority. This is probably due to their more acute perception of being a minority.
They are only concerned with single-issue politics, that single-issue being, of course, their minority status.
Since minorities are often unhappy with their minority-status, they are also often resentful of the majority.
Since minorities are mostly preoccupied by their minority-status
linked issue, they rarely pay attention to the ‘bigger picture’ and
that, in turn, means that the political agenda of the minorities typically does not threaten the powers that be.
Minorities often have a deep-seated inferiority complex towards the putatively more successful majority.
Minorities often seek to identify other minorities with which they can ally themselves against the majority.
To this list of characteristics, I would add one which is unique to
foreign minorities, minorities outside the USA: since they have no/very
little prospects of prevailing against the majority, these minorities
are very willing to ally themselves with the AngloZionist Empire and that, in turn, often makes them depended on the AngloZionist Empire, often even for their physical survival.
unz |People
close to power in the US know or feel the global hegemony. Its bearers
are heavily Jewish liberal groups, who use their PC, their hostility to
the Church, their approval of gender flux in order to undermine the mind
and mentality of an ordinary American, of a redneck, of a working class
Goy (as in the Goy, Bye headline). They ceaselessly tease and
annoy this goy, in order to cause his premature acts of rebellion to be
easily squashed. In order to spite the worker, they even put on the
latest aircraft carrier only toilet bowls and no urinals ‚ to make it
more comfortable for supposed transgenders and to enrage the rednecks.
The
world globalists received a serious blow when their candidate Hillary
Clinton lost the election, but they didn’t waste time and immediately
mobilised for a fight. They aren’t going to give up hegemony.
Practically all the media, judicial system, Congress, intelligence
services are in their hands. Charlottesville provided an occasion to
show rednecks in whose hands rests hegemony.
Hegemonists
have their own storm troops – Antifa. This extremist movement was born
in Germany. There they walk on the streets on the anniversary of Dresden
bombings with Israeli flags and chant: “Death to Germany! Long live
Bomber Harris” (the British commander of the Air Force, a big fan of
the carpet bombing of Germany). They managed to terrorize the Germans:
as soon as someone objects they call their opponent a Nazi and beat him
up. And if they encounter resistance, the police comes to the rescue.
That’s why in Germany resistance to the mass inflow of migrants was
almost imperceptible. It is spoken about in the kitchen, but not on the
streets.
And
now Antifa came to America. They have the same mode of action as in
Germany. Whoever is against them is a Nazi, or a “white racist”. They
proved their mettle in Charlottesville, the city blessed with the Jewish
mayor who chose the city police. Many Jewish activists came to
participate, from as far as Boston. After the scuffle, the newspapers
raised a hue and cry: Nazis attack Jews!
President
Trump condemned both sides participating in the brawl‚ both white
nationalists and Antifa. It is exactly what his opponents were waiting
for. His attempt to stay above the brawl was doomed to defeat: liberal
hegemonists immediately branded him a racist and neo-Nazi. Trump
reminded them that not all defenders of the monument were white racists,
but this argument didn’t work.
The
public response to the dog-whistle “racist” was overwhelming. The Jews
responded first. Rabbis said they do not want Trump to telephone them
and greet them with the forthcoming Jewish High Holidays. 300 Jews,
former Yale classmates of Mnuchin, the treasury secretary, imploring him
to resign. (Aren’t there too many Jewish alumni in Yale? What about
some diversity?)
A known Jewish writer Michael Chabon called upon Ivanka
to kill her father, by magical means of going into full mourning for a
still living President. Jews believe this should kill a living man as
sure as a bullet. Chabon’s hysterical screed must be read to be
believed. “Now you know [Trump is] an anti-Semite — a Nazi sympathizer, a
friend of the Jew-hating Klan,” he declared. And more and more Jews
came in calling to impeach Trump the racist and anti-Semite.
However,
non-Jews meekly followed while Jews played them like a fiddle.
Industrialists resigned from the presidential council, generals issued a
rebuke to their Commander-in-Chief, thousands of non-Jews participated
in marches and demonstrations against “white racists”. In short, Jews
played as a team, and they dictated the rules. Very, very few persons
offered a learned defence of Trump. They would be ostracised, if they
did, and Trump proved he is not going to stand for his friends. If his
position on Flynn didn’t make it clear, his dismissal of Bannon supplied
the sterling proof.
In
the present political climate, you are not allowed to speak against the
hegemonist view. If you do, you are a white racist, i.e. your opinion
is not simply rejected, but it is declared as an unlawful and
inadmissible view. This is what hegemony is: when an opposed view is
delegitimised.
One
can argue for racism (it is anyway better than greed, a mortal sin; it
is a natural defence of a tribal territory), but it is a hard way, and
quite futile. Before Trump the Racist, there was Trump the Russian Spy,
and he was preceded by Trump the Pussy Grabber. New reasons for
impeachment will be found, surely.
theintercept | To legendary First Amendment lawyer Floyd Abrams, who told The
Intercept that he’s “quite critical” of WikiLeaks” behavior,” the
“factual issue about just what WikiLeaks has done, what contacts it has
and has had with adversaries of this country, and the like” should be
separate from an official government designation:
The broader issue is whether our government should be
designating any entity as a non-state hostile intelligence agency. I’m
not sure of the intended consequences of such a designation but I’m
pretty sure it could open WikiLeaks to threats and perhaps even
violence. It has the sound of some official finding, which it is not,
with some legal meaning to it, which it is not. So while I wouldn’t
object to high ranking intelligence officials harshly criticizing
WikiLeaks, I’d stay away from faux official designations.
Trevor Timm, Executive Director of the Freedom of the Press
Foundation, told The Intercept that “Ron Wyden is right that the
WikiLeaks provision is unprecedented, vague, and potentially very
dangerous”:
Regardless of whether you like or hate WikiLeaks,
Congress singling out a publisher of information using a undefined and
made up term like “non-state hostile intelligence service” to
potentially stifle First Amendment rights and opening the door to more
surveillance of sources should concern all journalists. It’s a shame
more members of Congress do not see this obvious danger.
(Freedom of the Press Foundation receives funds from The Intercept’s parent company.)
In short, even if you think Julian Assange is a sleaze, or a liar, or a Putinist, and even if he were
indeed all of those bad things, he’s also a publisher of authentic
information he wasn’t supposed to have. A politically motivated
publisher is still a publisher, and to deem one of them an enemy of the
state would endanger any outlets working with or interested in materials
and information they aren’t supposed to have–which in 2017 is almost
all of them. From the Department of Justice to the White House to Congress,
the anti-leaker sentiment is feverish, and the openly threatening
language used against those who would publish true information
unprecedented. WikiLeaks makes a tempting target for defenders of state
secrecy because the website’s reputation is mostly in the mud once you
get outside of Trumpland–but consider the consequences.
“Non-state hostile intelligence service” has no technical
meaning–what would stop an outlet like the New York Times (or all of its
peers and competitors) from being deemed the same based on its
reporting of the same hacked emails?
What exactly is the legal status of a “non-state hostile intelligence
service”? Would donating to WikiLeaks be considered providing material
aid to an enemy?
What of the many reputable journalists who’ve worked with WikiLeaks
in the past, from the New York Times to Der Spiegel? Are they now guilty
of having collaborated with a “non-state hostile intelligence service”?
Were WikiLeaks to publish another truly groundbreaking and valuable
release along the line of Manning’s, what then? Would journalists be
free to glean stories from this enemy spy agency?
There aren’t any answers to these questions, making the language all
risk with little upshot of reforming or changing Assange or WikiLeaks in
any meaningful way. The much more likely outcome would be Assange
treating the designation as a vindication, proof that he’s a victim of
U.S. governmental persecution. It would not, however, do much to
persuade him that Le Pen boosterism and bogus “spirit cooking” conspiracy theories
aren’t in the public interest, but could do much to chill those around
the world doing real work. Don’t give Assange, or Pompeo, the
satisfaction.
TheNewYorker | On the
night of November 7, 1876, Rutherford B. Hayes’s wife, Lucy, took to
her bed with a headache. The returns from the Presidential election were
trickling in, and the Hayeses, who had been spending the evening in
their parlor, in Columbus, Ohio, were dismayed. Hayes himself remained
up until midnight; then he, too, retired, convinced that his Democratic
opponent, Samuel J. Tilden, would become the next President.
Hayes
had indeed lost the popular vote, by more than two hundred and fifty
thousand ballots. And he might have lost the Electoral College as well
had it not been for the machinations of journalists working in the shady
corners of what’s been called “the Victorian Internet.”
Chief
among the plotters was an Ohioan named William Henry Smith. Smith ran
the western arm of the Associated Press, and in this way controlled the
bulk of the copy that ran in many small-town newspapers. The Western
A.P. operated in tight affiliation—some would say collusion—with Western
Union, which exercised a near-monopoly over the nation’s telegraph
lines. Early in the campaign, Smith decided that he would employ any
means necessary to assure a victory for Hayes, who, at the time, was
serving a third term as Ohio’s governor. In the run-up to the Republican
National Convention, Smith orchestrated the release of damaging
information about the Governor’s rivals. Then he had the Western A.P.
blare Hayes’s campaign statements and mute Tilden’s. At one point, an
unflattering piece about Hayes appeared in the Chicago Times,
a Democratic paper. (The piece claimed that Hayes, who had been a
general in the Union Army, had accepted money from a soldier to give to
the man’s family, but had failed to pass it on when the soldier died.)
The A.P. flooded the wires with articles discrediting the story.
Once
the votes had been counted, attention shifted to South Carolina,
Florida, and Louisiana—states where the results were disputed. Both
parties dispatched emissaries to the three states to try to influence
the Electoral College outcome. Telegrams sent by Tilden’s
representatives were passed on to Smith, courtesy of Western Union.
Smith, in turn, shared the contents of these dispatches with the Hayes
forces. This proto-hack of the Democrats’ private communications gave
the Republicans an obvious edge. Meanwhile, the A.P. sought and
distributed legal opinions supporting Hayes. (Outraged Tilden supporters
took to calling it the “Hayesociated Press.”) As Democrats watched what
they considered to be the theft of the election, they fell into a funk.
“They
are full of passion and want to do something desperate but hardly know
how to,” one observer noted. Two days before Hayes was inaugurated, on
March 5, 1877, the New York Sun appeared
with a black border on the front page. “These are days of humiliation,
shame and mourning for every patriotic American,” the paper’s editor
wrote.
History, Mark Twain is supposed to have
said, doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme. Once again, the
President of the United States is a Republican who lost the popular
vote. Once again, he was abetted by shadowy agents who manipulated the
news. And once again Democrats are in a finger-pointing funk.
Journalists,
congressional committees, and a special counsel are probing the details
of what happened last fall. But two new books contend that the large
lines of the problem are already clear. As in the eighteen-seventies, we
are in the midst of a technological revolution that has altered the
flow of information. Now, as then, just a few companies have taken
control, and this concentration of power—which Americans have acquiesced
to without ever really intending to, simply by clicking away—is
subverting our democracy.
Thirty
years ago, almost no one used the Internet for anything. Today, just
about everybody uses it for everything. Even as the Web has grown,
however, it has narrowed. Google now controls nearly ninety per cent of
search advertising, Facebook almost eighty per cent of mobile social
traffic, and Amazon about seventy-five per cent of e-book sales. Such
dominance, Jonathan Taplin argues, in “Move Fast and Break Things: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy”
(Little, Brown), is essentially monopolistic. In his account, the new
monopolies are even more powerful than the old ones, which tended to be
limited to a single product or service. Carnegie, Taplin suggests, would
have been envious of the reach of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos.
NYTimes | Fighting drug trafficking was one of the main reasons the Uruguayan government gave for legalizing recreational marijuana. Officials spent years developing a complex regulatory framework that permits people to grow a limited supply of cannabis themselves or buy it at pharmacies for less than the black market rate. Lawmakers hoped that legal structure would undercut illicit marijuana cultivation and sales.
“There probably isn’t a trade in Uruguay today that is more controlled than cannabis sale,” Mr. Durán said.
As a candidate, President Trump said that American states should be free to chart their own courses on marijuana, and he promised to pare back regulation in the financial sector. Attorney General Jeff Sessions, however, has been a sharp critic of legalization and has compared marijuana to heroin.
Now, some members of the cannabis industry wonder whether the United States government will resolve the conflict between its banking laws and the expanding patchwork of measures to legalize recreational and medical marijuana use around the world. The guidance from the Obama administration, issued by the Justice and Treasury Departments in a pair of memos in 2014, addressed the matter domestically but not for international banking.
“Uruguay may be the tip of the iceberg,” said Mr. Robison, the Colorado lawyer who specializes in marijuana regulation.
Pharmacists in Uruguay were incredulous to learn that their bank accounts could be shut down, considering the years of study and planning that preceded the start of retail marijuana sales last month. The country’s marijuana law was passed in 2013.
“We can’t understand how the government didn’t have the foresight to anticipate this,” said Gabriel Bachini, a pharmacy owner in the coastal city of Colonia.
Since sales began, the number of registered buyers in Uruguay has more than doubled. As of Aug. 15, more than 12,500 people had enrolled in a system that verifies customers’ identities with fingerprint scanners and allows them to buy up to 40 grams per month (at a price of about $13 for 10 grams, enough for about 15 joints, advocates say). Under the law, only Uruguayan citizens and legal permanent residents are allowed to buy or grow marijuana.
“Demand has been very strong,” Mr. Bachini said. “People are thrilled that they no longer have to go to private homes or venture out into neighborhoods” to get marijuana.
In emailed statements, the Treasury and Justice Departments said that their earlier guidance was still being applied. But banking and legal experts say the Trump administration has yet to lay down clear markers on this area of policy.
Officials in Uruguay are hopeful that American lawmakers will pass legislation allowing banks to do business with marijuana sellers in states and countries where it is regulated. Representative Ed Perlmutter, Democrat of Colorado, introduced a bill in April that would do that, but marijuana advocates say they do not expect a prompt legislative change.
tomdispatch |Alfred McCoy’s new Dispatch Book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power,
won’t officially be published until September, but it's already getting
extraordinary attention. That would include Jeremy Scahill’s powerful podcast interview with McCoy at the Intercept, a set of striking prepublication notices (Kirkus Reviews: "Sobering reading for geopolitics mavens and Risk aficionados alike"), and an impressive range of blurbs (Andrew Bacevich: “This
is history with profound relevance to events that are unfolding before
our eyes”; Ann Jones: “eye-opening... America’s neglected citizens would
do well to read this book”; Oliver Stone: “One of our best and most
underappreciated historians takes a hard look at the truth of our
empire, both its covert activities and the reasons for its impending
decline”). Of him, Scahill has said, “Al McCoy has guts... He helped
put me on the path to investigative journalism.” In today’s post, adapted by McCoy from the introduction to In the Shadows of the American Century, you’ll get a taste of just what Scahill means. So read it and then pre-order a copy of the latest book from the man who battled the CIA and won.
When historian Alfred McCoy began his long journey to expose some of
the darkest secrets of the U.S. national security establishment, America
was embroiled in wars in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Almost 50 years
later, the United States is, in one way or another, involved in so many
more conflicts from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen to Libya, Somalia, the Lake Chad region of Africa, and the Philippines.
To understand how the U.S. went from three interventions that
actually ended to a proliferating collection of quasi-wars seemingly
without end would require a detailed map to guide you through some of
the thorniest wilds of American foreign policy. Luckily, McCoy is still
on the case with his buzz-generating blockbuster-to-be: In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.
He first stumbled upon some of the secrets of the national security
state when, in the early 1970s, he started down Southeast Asia’s “heroin
trail” and into a shadow world of black ops, mercenaries, and drug
lords. It’s a tale fit for a John le Carré novel or, better yet, a
seedy bar where the air is hot and still, the customers are rough, and
the drinks strong. If TomDispatch regular
McCoy told you his story over a whiskey, you’d be obliged to buy the
next round. It’s that kind of tale. Today, however, you’re in luck and
he shares it with you for free.
PopularMechanics | The tire of the future is a ball. An unbelievably sophisticated, nature-inspired, magnetic-levitation-infused ball. Goodyear just revealed
its vision for a concept tire that's intended for the self-driving car
of tomorrow. It's called Eagle-360, and it's totally round.
Why
put a car on a quartet of glorified mouse trackballs? Goodyear says the
3D-printed tires will have a larger contact patch with the ground,
allowing for more control. The design lets the tires hurl water away via
centrifugal force. But the big reason is that spherical tires can be
essentially omnidirectional.
PopularMechanics | Stronger than steel and a
fraction of the weight, carbon fiber is a brilliant invention. Has been
for decades. Junior Johnson was building rule-bending Nascar racers out
of the stuff back in the '80s. But even with all that time to come up
with new sourcing and production methods, carbon fiber just won't stop
being expensive. The cheapest new car with a carbon-fiber tub, the Alfa
Romeo 4C, is sized for Stuart Little, yet costs as much as a Mercedes
E-Class. And the real chariots of the carbon gods, the McLarens and
Koenigseggs and Lamborghini Aventadors of the world, are strictly
six-figure propositions. We still haven't managed to mass-produce the
stuff at anything approaching the price of aluminum, let alone steel.
Why hasn't anyone figured out how to make this stuff cost less?
That
question is why I'm here in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, at
Lamborghini's carbon-fiber facility, laboriously squeegeeing air bubbles
out of a sheet of carbon weave. I want to ask the guys in (black) lab
coats who make this material: Why aren't we rolling around in
carbon-monocoque Hyundais?
In addition, owing to their extraordinary thermal conductivity, mechanical, and electrical
properties, carbon nanotubes find applications as additives to various
structural materials. For instance, nanotubes form a tiny portion of the
material(s) in some (primarily carbon fiber) baseball bats, golf clubs, car parts or damascus steel.[2][3]
Nanotubes are members of the fullerene
structural family. Their name is derived from their long, hollow
structure with the walls formed by one-atom-thick sheets of carbon,
called graphene. These sheets are rolled at specific and discrete ("chiral")
angles, and the combination of the rolling angle and radius decides the
nanotube properties; for example, whether the individual nanotube shell
is a metal or semiconductor. Nanotubes are categorized as single-walled nanotubes (SWNTs) and multi-walled nanotubes (MWNTs). Individual nanotubes naturally align themselves into "ropes" held together by van der Waals forces, more specifically, pi-stacking.
Applied quantum chemistry, specifically, orbital hybridization best describes chemical bonding in nanotubes. The chemical bonding of nanotubes involves entirely sp2-hybrid carbon atoms. These bonds, which are similar to those of graphite and stronger than those found in alkanes and diamond (which employ sp3-hybrid carbon atoms), provide nanotubes with their unique strength.
Vantablack is composed of a forest of vertical tubes which are
"grown" on a substrate using a modified chemical vapor deposition
process (CVD). When light strikes Vantablack, instead of bouncing off,
it becomes trapped and is continually deflected among the tubes,
eventually becoming absorbed and dissipating into heat.[1]
Vantablack was an improvement over similar substances developed at
the time. Vantablack absorbs 99.965% of visible light. It can be created
at 400 °C (752 °F); NASA
had previously developed a similar substance, but that can only be
grown at 750 °C (1,380 °F). For this reason, Vantablack can be grown on
materials that cannot withstand higher temperatures.[1]
The outgassing and particle fallout
levels of Vantablack are low. The high levels in similar substances in
the past had prevented their commercial usefulness. Vantablack also has
greater resistance to mechanical vibration, and has greater thermal stability.[6]
Graphene has many unusual properties. It is about 200 times stronger
than the strongest steel. It efficiently conducts heat and electricity
and is nearly transparent.[3] Graphene shows a large and nonlinear diamagnetism,[4] greater than graphite and can be levitated by neodymium magnets.
Scientists have theorized about graphene for years. It has
unintentionally been produced in small quantities for centuries, through
the use of pencils and other similar graphite applications. It was
originally observed in electron microscopes in 1962, but it was studied only while supported on metal surfaces.[5] The material was later rediscovered, isolated, and characterized in 2004 by Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov at the University of Manchester.[6][7] Research was informed by existing theoretical descriptions of its composition, structure, and properties.[8] This work resulted in the two winning the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010 "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene."[9]
The global market for graphene reached $9 million by 2012 with most
sales in the semiconductor, electronics, battery energy, and composites industries.[10]
NewYorker | Perhaps the most expansive thinker about the
material’s potential is Tomas Palacios, a Spanish scientist who runs the
Center for Graphene Devices and 2D Systems, at M.I.T. Rather than using
graphene to improve existing applications, as Tour’s lab mostly does,
Palacios is trying to build devices for a future world.
At thirty-six, Palacios
has an undergraduate’s reedy build and a gentle way of speaking that
makes wildly ambitious notions seem plausible. As an electrical
engineer, he aspires to “ubiquitous electronics,” increasing “by a
factor of one hundred” the number of electronic devices in our lives.
From the perspective of his lab, the world would be greatly enhanced if
every object, from windows to coffee cups, paper currency, and shoes,
were embedded with energy harvesters, sensors, and light-emitting
diodes, which allowed them to cheaply collect and transmit information.
“Basically, everything around us will be able to convert itself into a
display on demand,” he told me, when I visited him recently. Palacios
says that graphene could make all this possible; first, though, it must
be integrated into those coffee cups and shoes.
As
Mody pointed out, radical innovation often has to wait for the right
environment. “It’s less about a disruptive technology and more about
moments when the linkages among a set of technologies reach a point
where it’s feasible for them to change lots of practices,” he said.
“Steam engines had been around a long time before they became really
disruptive. What needed to happen were changes in other parts of the
economy, other technologies linking up with the steam engine to make it
more efficient and desirable.”
For Palacios,
the crucial technological complement is an advance in 3-D printing. In
his lab, four students were developing an early prototype of a printer
that would allow them to create graphene-based objects with electrical
“intelligence” built into them. Along with Marco de Fazio, a scientist
from STMicrolectronics, a firm that manufactures ink-jet print heads,
they were clustered around a small, half-built device that looked a
little like a Tinkertoy contraption on a mirrored base. “We just got the
printer a couple of weeks ago,” Maddy Aby, a ponytailed master’s
student, said. “It came with a kit. We need to add all the electronics.”
She pointed to a nozzle lying on the table. “This just shoots plastic
now, but Marco gave us these print heads that will print the graphene
and other types of inks.”
Alt-Market | The false left/right paradigm is an often misunderstood concept.
Many people who are aware of it sometimes wrongly assume that it
asserts the claim that there is "no left or right political
spectrum;" that it is all a farce. This is incorrect. In regular
society there is indeed a political spectrum among the general
populace from socialism/communism/big government (left) to
conservatism/free markets/individualism/small government (right). Each
citizen sits somewhere on the scale between these two dynamics. The
left/right spectrum is in fact real for the average person.
We do not find a " false" paradigm until we examine the beliefs and
behaviors of the elitist and political classes. For many banking
oligarchs and high level politicians, there is no loyalty to a
particular political party or an identifiable "left" or "right"
ideology. Many of these people are happy to exploit both sides of the
spectrum, if they can, to achieve the goals of globalism; a separate
ideology that doesn't really serve the interests of groups on the
left or the right. That is to say, globalists pretend as if they care
about one side or the other on occasion, but in truth they could not
care less about the success of either. They only care about the
success of their own exclusive elitist club.
This reality also tends to apply to national loyalty as well.
Globalists do not carry any ideological love for any particular nation
or culture. They are more than happy to sacrifice and sabotage a
country if the action will gain them greater power or centralization
in return. A globalist is only "Democrat" or "Republican," or American
or Russian or Chinese or European, etc., insofar as the label gets
them something that they want.
The reason globalists and the people that work for them adopt
certain labels is because through this they can act as gatekeepers and
better manipulate the masses. The hot button issue of the week
provides us with a case in point...
The organizer of the "Unite The Right" group during the
Charlottesville circus, which ended in one death and numerous injured,
happened to be an ideological playmate of the extreme left only a
year ago. Jason Kessler seemed to come out of nowhere as a leading figure in the white identity or "white nationalist" movement in 2017, but in 2016, he was an avid supporter of Barack Obama, and before that, an active champion of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
I suppose anyone can change their ideological worldview over time,
but I'm certainly not stupid enough to believe that Jason Kessler
went from hardcore leftist to white nationalist in less than a year.
Though it cannot be proven conclusively that Kessler is a
provocateur, he certainly idolized the position. Kessler is quoted in his own blog on December 12, 2015, (now shut down but archived) as stating:
"I can't think of any occupation I admire more than the
professional provocateur, who has the courage and self-determination
to court controversy despite all the slings and arrows of the world."
This is not the first time white nationalists have been exploited
by agent provocateurs to make the "political right" in general look
bad. And, it is certainly not the first time white nationalists have
been discovered to be working directly for the federal government.
Klu Klux Klan leader Bill Wilkinson openly admitted to being a FBI informant and
cooperator in 1981. Hal Turner, a white supremacist radio
personality notorious for calling for the deaths of judges and
lawmakers, turned out to be a provocateur paid by the FBI to drum up extremism.
He was exposed in 2009 after his arrest led to his admission that
almost everything he did was "at the behest of the Federal Bureau of
Investigations..."
Why would the government seek to instigate white nationalist groups
into violence? Well, you have to examine the larger narrative here.
Anti-conservative propaganda has been overwhelmingly one-track over
the past several years. If you are well educated on the activities
of deceit machines like the Southern Poverty Law Center, you
understand that the thrust of all of their operations has been to tie
white nationalism directly to conservative organizations even if
there is no connection. I call this "guilt by false association."
Keep in mind that the SPLC cooperates closely with government
agencies like the DHS and their "Working Group To Counter Violent
Extremism" to create profiling techniques to identify "right wing
extremists." Meaning, their skewed propaganda is often what the media and government agencies use as a reference when writing articles or implementing policy.
The SPLC is inseparable from the mainstream media and government agendas dealing with conservatives.
In order to justify the madness and violence of the left in recent
months, it is more important than ever for the establishment to
maintain the lie that conservatives are also all violent racists and
"fascists" that need to be destroyed. Propaganda alone is rarely
enough to make such notions stick in the public consciousness.
Sometimes, provocateurs are needed to "stir the pot."
However, this is only half the equation of the American civil war being engineered before our eyes.
thebulletin | Five years ago the US Department of Homeland Security’s Homeland
Environment Threat Analysis Division released an assessment of US
far-right extremism. Initially intended for law enforcement and
intelligence agencies only, the report—“Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment”—was
almost immediately leaked. The report warned that small cells
practicing “leaderless resistance” and “white supremacist lone wolves
[posed] the most significant domestic terrorist threat.” Significantly,
it highlighted the likelihood of expanded attempts by far-right
extremists “to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to
boost their violent capabilities.” Overall, the report warned of trends
similar to “the 1990s when rightwing extremism experienced a
resurgence.” That far-right extremist rally reached a violent crescendo
with the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma
City on April 19, 1995.
Reflecting on the past five years, a
leading far-right extremism expert I recently interviewed described the
homeland security report as “prophetic.” Mark Pitcavage,
the Anti-Defamation League’s director of investigative research,
explained that most of the warnings in the 2009 report have become
realities. Yet at the time of its release, the document was derided by
many inside and outside of government as “ridiculous [and] deeply offensive,” an “inconceivable” assault on US veterans, and, in general, “a piece of crap.” Buckling under political pressure from conservatives, homeland security rapidly repressed the report.
Promptly removed from department's website, the tabooed document also
disappeared from the computer systems of state and local law enforcement
divisions as well as federal intelligence agencies. The homeland
security unit responsible for the report was virtually muzzled. The
report essentially fell into obscurity.
The report’s demise
was an unfortunate loss for all levels of law enforcement. Since its
release, credible plots and attacks by violent extremists have surged.
As the report forewarned, responsibility for the vast majority of these
events lies with far-right individual extremists and extreme groups.
Moreover, veteran and active-duty military personnel, when compared to
the general population, were disproportionally involved in far-right
extremist incidents. In just the first two months following the report, significant attacks occurred
via the hands of major components of far-right extremism. For example,
in May 2009, a “soldier” in the Christian terrorist anti-abortion
network Army of God assassinated Kansas late-term abortion provider
George Tiller. One day earlier, members of an anti-immigrant vigilante
group—the Minutemen American Defense—invaded the home of an Arizona
Latino and his 9-year-old daughter. Both were killed as part of a plan
aimed at securing money to fund the group’s anti-immigrant terrorist
operations. Less than two weeks later an octogenarian white supremacist
shot and killed a security guard at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Reflecting the conspiracy theories adhered to by many white
supremacists, hand-written notes found in his car read, “The Holocaust
is a lie… Obama was created by Jews… Jews captured America’s money. Jews
control the mass media.”
military | A 2008 FBI assessment titled "White Supremacist Recruitment of
Military Personnel since 9/11" found just over 200 identifiable
neo-Nazis with military training.
Military experience "ranging from failure at basic training to
success in special operations forces" was evident throughout the white
supremacist movement, the report said.
"FBI reporting indicates extremist leaders have historically favored
recruiting active and former military personnel for their knowledge of
firearms, explosives, and tactical skills and their access to weapons
and intelligence in preparation for an anticipated war against the
federal government, Jews, and people of color," the report added.
In 2009, a security analyst with the Department of Homeland Security,
Daryl Johnson, alerted local police departments to a rising risk of
terrorist attacks by the extremist right. The department "is concerned
that right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize
returning veterans in order to boost their violent capabilities," the
report said.
Johnson's report, issued just after the election of Barack Obama, set
off a conservative media firestorm that claimed it disparaged troops
and law-abiding conservatives. The report was pulled and Johnson's
office was shut down.
The same year, the Southern Poverty Law Center, another group that
tracks extremist groups, compiled a list of 40 users of a white
supremacist social networking website who identified themselves as
active-duty military and asked Congressional committees to pressure the
Pentagon to crack down.
"In the wake of several high-profile murders by extremists of the
radical right, we urge your committees to investigate the threat posed
by racial extremists who may be serving in the military to ensure that
our armed forces are not inadvertently training future domestic
terrorists," group co-founder Morris Dees wrote to the legislators.
Haverstick said it's important to remember that "the overwhelming
majority of servicemembers are honorable, law-abiding, disciplined
patriots who represent the very best of America's population."
No anti-extremist group has disputed that assertion. Still, military
veterans have been conspicuous in some of the most horrific right-wing
extremist attacks, from the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing that killed 168
people to the 2012 killings of six people at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin.
Johnson, now a security consultant, said that the number of military
white supremacists is relatively small. But he said veterans comprise a
significant part of the militia movement that sprung up after the Obama
election. Fist tap Bro. Makheru.
NationalReview | To summarize, the indictment is an exercise in omission. No mention
of the Awan group’s theft of information from Congress. Not a hint
about the astronomical sums the family was paid, much of it for no-show
“work.” Not a word about Wasserman Schultz’s keeping Awan on the payroll
for six months during which (a) he was known to be under investigation,
(b) his wife was known to have fled to Pakistan, and (c) he was not
credentialed to do the IT work for which he had been hired. Nothing
about Wasserman Schultz’s energetic efforts to prevent investigators
from examining Awan’s laptop. A likely currency-transportation offense
against Alvi goes uncharged. And, as for the offenses that are charged,
prosecutors plead them in a manner that avoids any reference to what
should be their best evidence.
WashingtonTimes | The conventional wisdom that last year’s Democratic National
Committee computer hack, which triggered WikiLeaks to release thousands
of emails revealing Democratic Party favoritism of Hillary Clinton over
Bernard Sanders, was conducted by Russian operatives is facing
increasing scrutiny.
Theories once considered fringe and extreme
have begun entering the mainstream, with a prominent group of former NSA
and CIA officials claiming the hack that rocked the 2016 presidential
election was not actually a hack at all but rather a leak by an insider
with physical access to the DNC computer network.
Speculation
around the claim by the group, the Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS), is also being fueled by investigators re-examining
statements by key players in the drama, including former President
Barack Obama and WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, whose carefully
chosen words on the hack have drawn fresh attention.
A
research memo compiled by VIPS last month directly conflicts with the
U.S. intelligence community’s January claim that it was Russian
operatives who orchestrated the cyberattack on the DNC network.
The
memo, which the group sent to President Trump last month under the
title “Was the ‘Russian Hack’ an Inside Job?” — investigates metadata
and data transfer speeds found in the records of the alleged Russian
cyberintrusion into DNC computers.
What started out 16 months ago as a scandal involving the alleged
theft of computer equipment from Congress has turned into a national
security investigation involving FBI surveillance of the suspects.
Investigators now suspect that sensitive US government data —
possibly including classified information — could have been compromised
and may have been sold to hostile foreign governments that could use it
to blackmail members of Congress or even put their lives at risk.
“This is a massive, massive scandal,” a senior US official familiar with the widening probe told The Post.
Alarm bells went off in April 2016 when computer security officials
in the House reported “irregularities” in computer equipment purchasing.
An internal investigation revealed the theft of hundreds of thousands
of dollars in government property, and evidence pointed to five IT
staffers and the Democratic Congress members’ offices that employed
them.
The evidence was turned over to the House inspector general, who
found so much “smoke” that she recommended a criminal probe, sources
say. The case was turned over to Capitol Police in October.
When the suspected IT workers couldn’t produce the missing invoiced
equipment, sources say, they were removed from working on the computer
network in early February.
During the probe, investigators found valuable government data that
is believed to have been taken from the network and placed on offsite
servers, setting off more alarms. Some 80 offices were potentially
compromised.
Most lawmakers fired the alleged “ringleader” — longtime IT staffer
Imran Awan — in February. But Florida Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the
former Democratic National Committee chief, kept Awan on her payroll
until his arrest last month on seemingly unrelated charges of defrauding
the congressional credit union.
theatlantic | Taboo and sacredness are among the most important words needed to
understand Charlottesville and its aftermath. Taboo refers to things
that are forbidden for religious or supernatural reasons. All
traditional societies have such prohibitions—things you must not do,
touch, or eat, not because they are bad for you directly, but because
doing so is an abomination, which may bring divine retribution. But
every society also makes some things sacred, rallying around a few
deeply revered values, people, or places, which bind all members
together and make them willing to sacrifice for the common good. The
past week brought violent conflict over symbols and values held
sacred—and saw President Trump commit an act of sacrilege by violating
one of our society’s strongest taboos.
The “Unite the Right” rally
was an effort to mobilize and energize a subset of the far-right around
its own sacred symbols—including swastikas and confederate flags—by
marching to another symbol that is its members believed was under
attack, a statue of Robert E. Lee. The psychological logic of the rally
was to bind white people together with shared hatred of Jews, African
Americans, and others, under a banner and narrative of racial victimhood
and racial purity. Marching and chanting in unison has been shown to intensify feelings of oneness and social cohesion.
The psychology of sacredness and its function in binding groups
together is essential for understanding the method and the motives of
the marchers.
Taboo violations are contagious. They render the transgressor
“polluted,” in the language of anthropology, and the moral stain rubs
off on those who physically touch the transgressor, as well as on those
who fail to distance themselves from the transgressor. When people march
with Nazis and Klansmen, even if they keep their mouths closed when
others are chanting, and even if they don’t personally carry swastika or
Klan flags, they acquire the full moral stain of Nazis and Klansmen. By
saying that some of these men were “very fine people,” the president
has taken that stain upon himself.
You can’t just apologize for
breaking a taboo, especially a taboo as deep as the one on Nazis and the
KKK. Many religions offer methods of atonement, sometimes involving
fasting, self-flagellation, and temporary separation from the community.
But even if an anthropologically sophisticated chief of staff could
devise a secular form of atonement, Trump would not undergo it. He does
not believe he has done anything wrong.
So the stain, the moral pollution, the taint, will linger on him and his administration for the rest of his term. Business leaders have quit his panels and projects; artists who were due to receive honors from the president have changed their plans.
Pollution travels most rapidly by physical touch, so be on the lookout
for numerous awkward moments in the coming months when people refuse to
shake the president’s hand or stand next to him. It is unclear how far
the contagion will spread, but it will surely make it more difficult to
attract talented people into government service for as long as Trump is
the president.
thenation |In Steve Bannon’s now-famous call to Robert Kuttner of The American Prospect
the day before he was fired, Bannon described the white supremacists
who had marched in Charlottesville as “losers” and “a collection of
clowns.” Of course, those are the same sorts of people Bannon mobilized
to vote for Trump, the most loyal part of his base. I asked Joshua Green
about that—he wrote the definitive book on Bannon, Devil’s Bargain. We spoke the evening before Bannon was fired as chief strategist at the Trump White House.
“He said similar things to me,” Green said; “he called them ‘freaks’
and ‘goofballs.’” Bannon, he said, “views these kinds of alt-right
Internet trolls as useful idiots whom he can manipulate to do his
bidding. He sees them as a small but powerful and energetic cohort that
will help him tear down the Republican political establishment and open
up room for Donald Trump. He sees them also as a group of people who
won’t hesitate to attack the mainstream media, which is another
obsession of Steve Bannon’s.”
The big questions about Bannon, of course, are how Trump views him, and
how he views Trump. Green emphasized that Trump’s biggest problem with
Bannon always was the way Bannon got credit for Trump’s victory. For a
long time, he said, Trump has been “furious at the idea put forward in
the press, and frankly that’s also the thesis of my book—the idea
that…without Bannon’s guidance, Trump probably wouldn’t be president.”
Green pointed to a Saturday Night Live sketch that “portrayed
Bannon as the real president, making Donald Trump sit at the little
boy’s desk—Trump hates that sort of thing.”
theatlantic | Sam Harris, the atheist philosopher and neuroscientist, has recently been using his popular Waking Up
podcast to discuss Donald Trump, whom he abhors, with an ideologically
diverse series of guests, all of whom believe that the president is a
vile huckster.
This began to wear on some of his listeners. Wasn’t
Harris always warning against echo chambers? Didn’t he believe in
rigorous debate with a position’s strongest proponents? At their urging,
he extended an invitation to a person that many of those listeners
regard as President Trump’s most formidable defender: Scott Adams, the
creator of the cartoon Dilbert, who believes that Trump is “a master
persuader.”
Their conversation
was posted online late last month. It is one of the most peculiar
debates about a president I have ever encountered. And it left me
marveling that parts of Trump’s base think well of Adams when his views
imply such negative things about them. Those
implications are most striking with respect to extreme views that Trump
expressed during the campaign. Harris and Adams discussed two examples
during the podcast: Trump’s call to deport 12 million illegal immigrants
from the United States, a position that would require vast, roving
deportation forces, home raids, and the forced removal even of
law-abiding, undocumented single mothers of American children; and
Trump’s call to murder the family members of al-Qaeda or ISIS
terrorists.
Trump took those positions not because he believes
them, Adams argued, but to mirror the emotional state of the voters he
sought and to “open negotiations” on policy.
Harris expressed bafflement that such a strategy would work:
Harris: If I'm going to pretend to be so callous as
to happily absorb those facts, like send them all back, they don't
belong here, or in the ISIS case, we'll torture their kids, we'll kill
their kids, it doesn't matter, whatever works—if that's my opening
negotiation, I am advertising a level of callousness, and a level of
unconcern for the reality of human suffering that will follow from my
actions, should I get what I ostensibly want, that it's a nearly
psychopathic ethics I am advertising as my strong suit.
So how this becomes attractive to people, how this resonates with
their values—I get what you said, people are worried about immigration
and jihadism, I share those concerns. But when you cross the line into
this opening overture that has these extreme consequences on its face,
things that get pointed out in 30 seconds whenever he opens his mouth on
a topic like this, I don't understand how that works for him with
anyone.
Adams: Let me give you a little thought experiment
here. We've got people who are on the far right. We've got people on the
far left. In your perfect world, would it be better to move the people
on the far right toward the middle or the people on the far left toward
the middle? Which would be a preferred world for you?
Harris: Moving everyone toward the middle, certainly on most points, would be a very good thing.
Adams: So what you've observed with President Trump
through his pacing and emotional compatibility with his base is that
prior to Inauguration Day, there were a lot of people in this country
who were saying, 'Yeah yeah, round them all up. Send all 12 million back
tomorrow.'
When was the last time you heard anybody on the right complaining
about that? Because what happened was, immigration went down 50 to 70
percent, whatever the number was, just based on the fact that we would
get tough on immigration. And the right says, ‘Oh, okay, we didn't get
nearly what we asked for, but our leader, who we trust, who we love, has
backed off of that, and we're going to kind of go with that, because he
is doing some good things that we like. And we don't like the
alternative either.’
So this ‘monster’ that we elected, this ‘Hitler-dictator-crazy-guy,’
he managed to be the only guy who could have, and I would argue always
intended, to move the far right toward the middle. You saw it, you know,
we can observe it with our own eyes. We don't see the right saying, ‘Oh
no, I hate President Trump. He's got to round up those undocumented
people like he said early in the campaign, or else I'm bailing on him.’
None of that happened. He paced them, and then he led them toward a
reasonable situation, which I would say we're in.
I don’t agree with parts of Adams’s analysis. But as he
tells it, Trump targeted voters who’d be attracted rather than repelled
by calls for policies that would inflict great suffering; he told those
voters things that he didn’t really mean to gain their emotional trust;
and all along, he probably intended to go to Washington and do something
else. That sounds a lot like the way that Trump voters describe the
career politicians who they hate: emotionally manipulative liars who
will say anything to get elected, get to Washington, and betray their
base by moving left on immigration.
rantt | But as
you saw, eye color and hair color are controlled by a lot more than a
few genes and those genes can be altered by everything from hormones in
the womb to environmental pollutants. Our genome didn’t evolve for easy,
modular editing in the future. It evolved in response to diet and
stressors in our ancient past. If you wanted to make sure that your
child was 6' 3" tall, weighed no more than 200 pounds, and was really
good at football, that’s going to involve total 24/7 control over
thousands of genes and the child’s environment from the moment of
conception.
Maybe
this could be possible one day, but it certainly won’t be any day in
the foreseeable future, and it definitely wouldn’t be practical if it
was ever possible, or even remotely advisable. The kind of eugenic
thought which gripped the world in the early 20th century and kicked off
the Holocaust was actually based on a profound misunderstanding of
statistics, and very pseudoscientific approach to evolution. Basically,
Francis Galton and his followers mistook more people becoming literate
and educated as a rise in mediocrity through a mathematic concept known
as regression toward the mean, triggering a wave of racist and classist alarmism.
Eugenicists
were worried that their “superior” genes were being corrupted by
interbreeding between classes and races, that genetic diversity was just
dragging them down towards brutish mediocrity. It’s a train of thought
you can still find resonating among today’s racists, or
ethno-nationalists as they like to call themselves. But this worry
reveals a profound lack of scientific understanding that’s fairly
critical to any future effort to modify DNA, and shows they’re using the
wrong ways to measure human progress.
Genetic
diversity is essential for any species to survive and adapt to its new
environment. Without a significant enough library of genes that can help
us deal with a future stressor, we may be unable to cope with drastic
changes in diet or new diseases that come at us. Similarity in genes
results in severe inbreeding, making us a lot more vulnerable to an
environmental blow that could kill off an entire population without
giving it a chance to develop any useful mutations. History is replete
with examples of inbred organisms dying off when climates changed or
during disease outbreaks.
Ultimately,
this is why even in a far future where we can customize children, we
have to be extremely mindful of allowing diversity and not messing with
too many genes which could one day contribute to disease resistance, or
give us the ability to adapt to a new diet. Nature doesn’t necessarily
care if we’re getting high IQ scores because those are fairly arbitrary, and are much closer correlated to household values and income than biology.
It’s also completely disinterested in our athletic prowess or how
conventionally attractive we are to a particular culture. It only cares
about reproduction rates.
In
fact, in the grandest scheme of them all, nature is a series of trials
which test random organisms with random genetic make-up in different
climates with different resources and against different stressors. The
ones able to live long enough to reproduce and pass down their genes are
successful, even if they don’t end up with long lives and building
civilizations that explore new worlds. Evolutionarily speaking, we’re
pretty successful, but nowhere near as successful as insects or bacteria
which typically live fast, die young, and are constantly reproducing in
large numbers.
newatlas | One little button in a piece of CAD software is threatening to
fundamentally change the way we design, as well as what the built world
looks like in the near future. Inspired by evolution, generative design
produces extremely strong, efficient and lightweight shapes. And boy do
they look weird.
Straight lines, geometric curves, solid surfaces. The constructed
world as we know it is made out of them. Why? Nature rarely uses
straight lines. Evolution itself is one of the toughest product tests
imaginable, and you don't have a straight bone in your body, no matter
how much you might like one.
Simple shapes are popular in human
designs because they're easy. Easy to design, especially with CAD, and
easy to manufacture in a world where manufacturing means taking a big
block or sheet of something, and machining a shape out of it, or pouring
metals into a mold.
But manufacturing is starting to undergo a revolutionary change as 3D printing moves toward commercially competitive speeds and costs.
And where traditional manufacturing incentivizes the simplest shapes,
additive manufacturing is at its fastest and cheapest when you use the
least possible material for the job.
That's a really difficult way for a human to design – but fairly easy,
as it turns out, for a computer. And super easy for a giant network of
computers. And now, exceptionally easy for a human designer with access
to Autodesk Fusion 360 software, which has it built right in.
A Foundation of Joy
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Two years and I've lost count of how many times my eye has been operated
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eel ...
April Three
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4/3
43
When 1 = A and 26 = Z
March = 43
What day?
4 to the power of 3 is 64
64th day is March 5
My birthday
March also has 5 letters.
4 x 3 = 12
...
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sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
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He ...