kondaira |Euskara
has never been in contact with the Berber dialects that are currently
spoken in the Maghreb. However, it has similar words to the ones of
those languages that perhaps were introduced in Euskara through the
Iberian language.
According to the theory of the Proto-Basque expansion that took place after the last Ice Age, which is based on the most recent researchon Archaeogenetics,
those similarities could be due to migrations of Proto-Basque human
groups to Africa. This ancient population could leave words and even
Basque verbal morphemes during the miscegenation process with the
Hamitic peoples of northern Africa that have been kept in their
languages until the present day.
Thus,
it can be explained the existence of Basque words in Berber, Guanche
(Canary Islands), Somali, Ethiopian and in old Egyptian (they are all
Hamitic languages), as well as the vigesimal numeral system that is kept in the Tachelhit dialect of Berber.
Due
to those similarities between Basque and Hamitic words, there was
proposed the Basque-Berber theory which considered Euskara as related to
Berber. This theory was abandoned some years ago since the similarities
found were only lexical or lexicographical while they are very
different today, as in the past, when concerning syntax and grammar.
However, some similarities are observed especially in the verbal
articulation as well as the usage of some particles, as stated above.
discover | In terms of historical genetics these assumptions result in the
Basque population be used as a “reference” for the indigenous component
of the European ancestry which reaches back to the Last Glacial Maximum,
and expanded from the Iberian refugium after the ice retreated. One of
reasons for the assumption of Basque antiquity & purity are genetic
peculiarities of the Basques. Foremost among them is that the Basque
seem to have the highest frequency of Rh- in the world, primarily
because of the high frequency of the null allele within the population
(it is a recessively expressed trait). Rh- is very rare outside of
Europe, but its frequency exhibits a west-east gradient even within the
continent. It has been suggested that the mixing of Rh- and Rh+ blood
groups reflects the mixing of hunter-gatherers and farmers in after the
Ice Age. The map above the illustrates the frequencies of this trait,
and you can see how the Basque region is cordoned off. It’s an old map
because blood group were widely collected in the early 20th century.
Because of the early knowledge of this heritable trait you have a lot of
weird anthropological theories which hinge around blood group genetics
having emerged in the early 20th century. But even as late as the
mid-90s L. L. Cavalli-Sforza reported in The History and Geography of Human Genes using
classical markers that the Basques exhibited some distinctiveness. Over
the years with the rise of Y and mtDNA phylogenetics this
distinctiveness has taken a hit. I think the data have a tendency of
confirming expectations, or it is often interpreted as such. But the
recent story of the R1b haplogroup strongly implied that the Basques are
no different from other west Europeans, and are likely the descendants
of Neolithic farmers themselves!
A new paper in Human Genetics supports the contention that the Basque are just like other Europeans, A genome-wide survey does not show the genetic distinctiveness of Basques:
Basques
are a cultural isolate, and, according to mainly allele frequencies of
classical polymorphisms, also a genetic isolate. We investigated the
differentiation of Spanish Basques from the rest of Iberian populations
by means of a dense, genome-wide SNP array. We found that F ST distances
between Spanish Basques and other populations were similar to those
between pairs of non-Basque populations. The same result is found in a
PCA of individuals, showing a general distinction between Iberians and
other South Europeans independently of being Basques. Pathogen-mediated
natural selection may be responsible for the high differentiation
previously reported for Basques at very specific genes such as ABO, RH,
and HLA. Thus, Basques cannot be considered a genetic outlier under a
general genome scope and interpretations on their origin may have to be
revised.
reuters | From love songs to dance tunes to lullabies, music made in disparate
cultures worldwide displays certain universal patterns, according to a
study by researchers who suggest a commonality in the way human minds
create music.
The study, published on Thursday, focused on musical recordings and
ethnographic records from 60 societies around the world including such
diverse cultures as the Highland Scots in Scotland, Nyangatom nomads in
Ethiopia, Mentawai rain forest dwellers in Indonesia, the Saramaka
descendants of African slaves in Suriname and Aranda hunter-gatherers in
Australia.
Music was broadly found to be associated with
behaviors including infant care, dance, love, healing, weddings,
funerals, warfare, processions and religious rituals.
The
researchers detected strong similarities in musical features across the
various cultures, according to Samuel Mehr, a Harvard University
research associate in psychology and the lead author of the study
published in the journal Science.
“The study gives credence to the idea that there is some sort of set
of governing rules for how human minds produce music worldwide. And
that’s something we could not really test until we had a lot of data
about music from many different cultures,” Mehr said.
Penn State
University anthropology professor Luke Glowacki, a study co-author, said
many ethnomusicologists have believed that the features in a given
piece of music are most heavily influenced by the culture from which the
music originates.
“We found something very different,” Glowacki
said. “Instead of music being primarily shaped by the culture it is
from, the social function of the piece of music influences its features
much more strongly.”
newrepublic | This
way of thinking about injustice and what does and doesn’t call for
remedial action has its roots in enforcement of anti-discrimination law
in the 1960s and 1970s. Identifying disparate treatment or outcomes that
correlate with racial difference can be a critical step in validating a
complaint. However, the inclination to fixate on such disparities as
the only objectionable form of inequality can create perverse political
incentives. We devote a great deal of rhetorical and analytic energy to
the project of determining just which groups, or population categories,
suffer or have suffered the worst. Cynics have sometimes referred to
this brand of what we might term political one-downsmanship as the “oppression Olympics”—a
contest in which groups that have attained or are vying for legal
protection effectively compete for the moral or cultural authority that
comes with the designation of most victimized.
Even
short of that cynical view, a central focus on group-level disparities
can lead to mistaken diagnoses of the sources and character of the
manifest inequalities it identifies. And those mistaken diagnoses, in
turn, can reflect damaging class and ideological biases that ultimately
undercut the struggle for social justice and equality. In this column
and later ones, I will examine facets of this problem and its
entailments. A key point of departure here is the study I published in 2012
with Columbia University public health Professor Merlin Chowkwanyun,
explicating how what we call the “disparitarian perspective” has
distorted discussion of the impact of the New Deal on black Americans.
TheAtlantic | A beautiful illustration of the difference between Twitter and the real
world is the viral status of Michael Harriot’s attack on Mayor Pete
Buttigieg in The Root as a “lying MF.”
theroot | I don’t enjoy fighting. I don’t
even fight very well. In fact, if I combined my amateur fist-fighting
record, my jiu-jitsu sparring, all of my slap-boxing exhibitions, and
the time Zevalon Jackson slapped me for talking smack while running a
Boston on her in spades, my winning percentage is well below .500. But I
believe fisticuffs are a legitimate way to settle disputes while
arguments are usually pointless exercises to get one party to proclaim
why the other party is wrong. I’d rather you beat me up.
So when I received a text message from South Bend, Ind., Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign about an article
I wrote, I genuinely hoped that he was going to send four or five of
his thugs over to rough me up and that would be it. (And if you don’t
believe there are Pete Buttigieg supporters out there willing to throw
hands, then you probably aren’t on Twitter. I think they should call
themselves the “Pete Patrol.” Or the “Buttigang.”)
I
figured one of his surrogates would argue with me for a few minutes and
I could continue my day trying to be a thorn in the side of white
supremacy (The third thing you should know is that I actually keep a
small photo of the mouse from Pinky and the Brain beside my bed that says: “What are you going to do today, Michael?” The answer is always the same: “Fuck with white people.”)
Luckily,
as soon as I agreed to take a phone call, the phone rang. The voice
sounded vaguely familiar and I knew it wasn’t a surrogate or a campaign
volunteer when the person said:
“I don’t think I’ve ever been called a ‘lying motherfucker’ before.”
courier-journal | Somewhere deep in Mexico's remote wilderness, the
world’s most dangerous and wanted drug lord is hiding. If someone you
love dies from an overdose tonight, he may very well be to blame.
And though few Americans know his name, authorities promise they soon will.
Rubén "Nemesio" Oseguera Cervantes is the leader of Cártel Jalisco
Nueva Generación, better known as CJNG. With a $10 million reward on his
head, he’s on the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration’s Most Wanted
list.
El Mencho’s powerful international syndicate is flooding the U.S.
with thousands of kilos of methamphetamines, heroin, cocaine and
fentanyl every year — despite being targeted repeatedly by undercover
stings, busts and lengthy investigations.
The unending stream of narcotics has contributed to this country’s
unprecedented addiction crisis, devastating families and killing more
than 300,000 people since 2013.
CJNG’s rapid rise heralds the latest chapter in a generations-old
drug war in which Mexican cartels are battling to supply Americans’
insatiable demand for narcotics.
A nine-month Courier Journal investigation reveals
how CJNG's reach has spread across the U.S. in the past five years,
overwhelming cities and small towns with massive amounts of drugs.
kctv5 | As the officer in charge of COMBAT, Jackson County’s Drug Trafficking
Task Force Dan Cumming deals with a lot of dangerous people.
“About
100% of what we recover, if you follow it back far enough up the drug
train so to speak, comes from Mexico and is cartel related,” Cummings
said.
Just last week, COMBAT worked a case at the request of Independence police.
A tip led them to a Kansas City, Missouri street where a search warrant led to the seizure of tires filled with meth.
“My guess is that’s the way it was shipped from Mexico to Kansas City,” Cummings said.
Cartels get creative when smuggling drugs in customs and border protection has a few recent examples.
Fentanyl in a vehicle transmission, heroine in a gas tank, marijuana inside a car door and cocaine in clay figurines.
Cummings says he’s seeing more cartel related drug busts in Kansas City now than he has in his 35 plus years in law enforcement.
“We switched from meth labs to Mexican cartels,” Cummings said.
kmbc | Two Mexican nationals have been sentenced in federal court for their
roles in a conspiracy that distributed more than 14 kilograms of heroin
in the Kansas City metropolitan area, some of which is believed to have
resulted in overdoses and deaths.
Julian Felix-Aguirre, 46, and
Martin Missael Puerta-Navarro, 38, were sentenced in separate hearings
before U.S. District Judge Gary A. Fenner on Wednesday. Felix-Aguirre
was sentenced to 24 years and seven months in federal prison without
parole. Pueta-Navarro was sentenced to 14 years and eight months in
federal prison without parole.
fox4kc | "No where is immune," said Erik Smith with the Drug Enforcement
Administration. "There are people who become dependent on controlled
substances and have need to satisfy that addiction, and any place there
is a consumer, an addict or user, somebody will supply that drug for
that."
The DEA special agent in charge said feeding the demand for drugs in Johnson County goes well beyond teenage drug dealers.
Smith said Mexican cartels really are living here in Johnson County.
"Historically, a decade ago, two decades ago, a lot of cartels would
limit themselves to the inner city," he said. "But as they become more
established and they become more wealthy, it's quite common to see them
branching out into suburban areas including Johnson County."
propublica |On Sept. 11, 2001,
when American Airlines Flight 77 crashed into the Pentagon, DEA agents
were among the first to respond, racing from their headquarters, less
than half a mile away. A former special agent named Edward Follis, in
his memoir, “The Dark Art,” recalls how he and dozens of his colleagues
“rushed over … to pull out bodies, but there were no bodies to pull
out.” The agency had outposts in more than 60 countries around the
world, the most of any federal law-enforcement agency. And it had some
5,000 informants and confidential sources. Michael Vigil, who was the
DEA’s head of international operations at the time, told me, “We called
in every source we could find, looking for information about what had
happened, who was responsible, and whether there were plans for an
imminent attack.” He added, “Since the end of the Cold War, we had seen
signs that terrorist groups had started relying on drug trafficking for
funding. After 9/11, we were sure that trend was going to spread.”
But other intelligence agencies saw the DEA’s sources as drug
traffickers — and drug traffickers didn’t know anything about terrorism.
A former senior money-laundering investigator at the Justice Department
told me that there wasn’t any substantive proof to support the DEA’s
assertions.
“What is going on after 9/11 is that a lot of resources move out of
drug enforcement and into terrorism,” he said. “The DEA doesn’t want to
be the stepchild that is last in line.” Narco-terrorism, the former
investigator said, became an “expedient way for the agency to justify
its existence.”
The White House proved more receptive to the DEA’s claims. Juan
Zarate, a former deputy national-security adviser, in his book,
“Treasury’s War,” says that President George W. Bush wanted “all
elements of national power” to contribute to the effort to “prevent
another attack from hitting our shores.” A few months after 9/11, at a
gathering of community anti-addiction organizations, Bush said, “It’s so
important for Americans to know that the traffic in drugs finances the
work of terror. If you quit drugs, you join the fight against terror in
America.” In February 2002, the Office of National Drug Control Policy
turned Bush’s message into a series of publicservice announcements that
were aired during the Super Bowl. Departing from the portrayal of
illegal narcotics as dangerous to those who use them — “This is your
brain on drugs” — the ads instead warned that getting high helped
terrorists “torture someone’s dad” or “murder a family.”
In the next seven years, the DEA’s funding for international
activities increased by 75 percent. Until then, the agency’s greatest
foreign involvement had been in Mexico and in the Andean region of South
America, the world’s largest producer of cocaine and home to violent
Marxist guerrilla groups, including the FARC, in Colombia, and the
Shining Path, in Peru. Both groups began, in the 1960s and early ‘70s,
as peasant rebellions; before long, they started taxing coca growers and
smugglers to finance their expansion. The DEA saw the organizations as
examples of how criminal motivations can overlap with, and even advance,
ideological ones.
npr | President Trump says he plans to designate Mexican drug cartels as
foreign terrorist organizations, a move that is stoking fears in Mexico
that American authorities would use the label to justify a military
response across the border against the cartels.
"I will be designating the cartels," Trump said
in an interview with former Fox News Channel host Bill O'Reilly, who
raised the issue of the U.S. sending drones into Mexico. Trump did not
comment on the idea, but he said the terrorist designation is underway.
"I have been working on that for the last 90 days. You know,
designation is not that easy, you have to go through a process, and we
are well into that process," Trump said.
Former diplomat and
Mexico expert Jana Nelson told NPR that as Trump's comments have spread,
worries have deepened in Mexico that the designation could lead to
military action.
"It has generated some concern in Mexico that
the U.S. will actually send the military into Mexico, and if not boots
on the ground itself, then perhaps drones to combat drug cartels," said
Nelson, a Wilson Center political analyst who is based in Mexico City.
The Democratic Party plays an indispensable role in America's political machinery. It wields the dominant "narrative shaping" power in America in terms of controlling the state and setting policy. without the More importantly, without the existence of the Democratic Party, the US could no longer maintain the pretense that it's a "democracy."
If the Democratic Party disintegrates, the US will be revealed for what it really is -- a one-party state ruled by a narrow alliance of business interests.
Thus, the party's "narrative shaping" power is revealed as largely theatrical.
The Democratic Party doesn't exist to fight for change, but only to pose as a force which one fine distant day might possibly bestir itself to fight for change. The essential service it renders to the US power structure -- lies not in what it does, but in its mere existence: by existing, and doing nothing, it pretends to be something it's not; and this is enough to relieve despair to let the system portray itself as a "democracy."
As long as the Democratic Party exists, suggestible Americans will believe they have a "democracy" and a "choice" in how they are ruled. They will not despair, and will not revolt.
So long as they have this hope for "change from within the system."
From the system's point of view, this mechanism serves as the ultimate safety valve. The Democratic Party narrative insures that a despairing but still suggestible populace, will never coalesce into rebellion. It guarantees that no serious change to the system will be mounted. The modern Democratic Party wasn't designed to play that role..
The Democratic Party is not the "lesser evil;" it is an auxiliary subdivision of the same evil. To understand the American political system, one must step back and regard its operation as an integrated whole.
The system can't be properly understood if one's study of it begins with an uncritical acceptance of the 2-party system, and the conventional characterizations of the two parties. (Indeed, the fact that society encourages one to view it in this way, is a warning that this perspective should not be trusted.)
If one focuses on the efforts of the few outspoken dissenters, it's easy to feel that the Democratic Party is somewhat less evil than the GOP. But in the larger picture, the Democratic Party invariably submits to what its bosses promulgate and the entire range of permissible thought and public discourse shifts to the right.
The overall function of the Democratic Party is not to fight, it is to shape and to drive the ever-rightward-moving process. Just as the Harlem Globetrotters need their Washington Generals to make their basketball games properly entertaining, Republicans need the Democratic Party for effective staging of the political show.
The Democratic Party is permitted to exist because its vague hint of eventual progressive change keeps large numbers of people from bolting the political system altogether. If the Democratic Party ever actually threatened any sort of serious change, it would be disbanded. The fact that it is fully accepted by the corporations and political establishment tells us at once that its ultimate function must be wholly in line with the interests of those ruling .elites.
For the Democratic Party to even begin to serve as a vehicle for opposing the absolute rule of capital, it would at a minimum have to be capable of acknowledging the conflict that exists between the interests of capital and the rest of the people; and of expressing a principled determination to take the side of the people in this conflict.
A party whose controlling elements are billionaires, lobbyists, fund-raisers, careerist apparatchiks, consultants, and corporate lawyers; that has stood by prostrate and helpless (when not actively collaborating) in the face of stolen elections, illegal wars, torture, CIA concentration camps, lies as state policy, and one assault on the Bill of Rights after the next, is not likely to take that position.
CommonDreams | Former President Barack Obama reportedly
told advisers behind closed doors earlier this year that he would
actively oppose Sen. Bernie Sanders if the progressive senator from
Vermont opened up a big lead in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary
race.
"Publicly, [Obama] has been clear that he won't intervene in the primary for or against a candidate," Politicoreported
Tuesday. "There is one potential exception: Back when Sanders seemed
like more of a threat than he does now, Obama said privately that if
Bernie were running away with the nomination, Obama would speak up to
stop him."
PCR | Former US Attorney Joe diGenova predicts that US Justice (sic)
Department Inspector General Michael Horowitz’s report on the Obama
regime’s FISA court violations and US Attorney John Durham’s criminal
investigation of the Russiagate hoax perpetrated by the CIA, FBI,
Democratic National Committee, and presstitute media will be “very bad
for people in the Obama administration. . . . it’s going to be
devastating . . . it’s going to ruin careers.”
For the sake of accountable government, I hope that Mr. diGenova is
right. But I have my doubts. Cabinet departments and government
agencies are not very good at investigating themselves. Attorney
General Barr’s job is to protect his department. He knows, and will be
often told, that to bring indictments against Justice Department
officials would discredit the Justice Department in the public’s mind.
It would affect the attitude of juries toward DOJ prosecutions. John
Durham knows the same thing. He also knows that he will create a
hostile environment for himself if he indicts DOJ officials and that
when he joins a law firm to capitalize on his experience as a US
Attorney, he will not receive the usual favors when he represents
clients against DOJ charges. Horowitz knows that his job is to coverup
or minimize any illegalities in order to protect the Department of
Justice from scandals.
In Washington coverups are the rule, and the DOJ coverup might
already have begun. One sign of a coverup is to announce a future
release date of the report. This has now occurred with Horowitz’s report
on the FISA violations. The purpose of such announcements is to allow
the report to be discredited in advance and to be old news by the time
it appears.
Another sign of a coverup is the use of leaks to shift the focus from
high level officials to lowly underlings, and this has happened with
the Horowitz report, which has leaked that a low level FBI attorney is
under criminal investigation for allegedly falsifying a document related
to the surveillance of former Trump campaign official Carter Page in
2016. According to the leak, the FBI attorney has acknowledged that he
did alter the document. In other words, it seems we are being prepared
for a false story that the plot against Trump originated in lower levels
and not with CIA Director John Brennan, FBI Director James Comey, FBI
Deputy Director Andrew McCabe, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein,
and Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates, and the rest. This is the way
the coverups of the US torture prison, Abu Ghraib, in Iraq was handled
and the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. Only the underlings take the hit as
if they were in charge acting on their own, independently of their
superiors.
Barr claims to have personally reviewed security footage that no one
entered the area where Epstein was imprisoned. Previously we were told
that the security cameras were not turned on, so what security footage
did Barr review? Can the rest of us see the “evidence”?
ronpaulinstitute | The most shocking thing about the House impeachment hearings to this
point is not a “smoking gun” witness providing irrefutable evidence of quid pro quo.
It’s not that President Trump may or may not have asked the Ukrainians
to look into business deals between then-Vice President Biden’s son and a
Ukrainian oligarch.
The most shocking thing to come out of the
hearings thus far is confirmation that no matter who is elected
President of the United States, the permanent government will not allow a
change in our aggressive interventionist foreign policy, particularly
when it comes to Russia.
Even more shocking is that neither Republicans nor Democrats are bothered in the slightest!
Take
Lt. Colonel Vindman, who earned high praise in the mainstream media. He
did not come forth with first-hand evidence that President Trump had
committed any “high crimes” or “misdemeanors.” He brought a complaint
against the President because he was worried that Trump was shifting US
policy away from providing offensive weapons to the Ukrainian
government!
He didn’t think the US president had the right to suspend aid to Ukraine because he supported providing aid to Ukraine.
According
to his testimony, Vindman’s was concerned over “influencers promoting a
false narrative of Ukraine inconsistent with the consensus views of the
interagency.”
kunstler | Perhaps The New York Times has hooked up to a direct line of
Burisma’s product as they flood the darkened arena with eerie blue
gaslight. Friday, they featured a story — Russia Inquiry Review Is Said to Criticize F.B.I. but Rebuff Claims of Biased Acts—
geared to make readers think that the entire FBI FISA warrant hair-ball
came down to one lowly lawyer chump named Kevin Clinesmith messing with
an email. Later, Times reporter Adam Goldman, posted this howler on Twitter.
These truthless assertions are meant to let both the CIA and the FBI
off-the-hook for opening the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation on
bogus evidence they furnished to the FISA judges. Both Goldman’s news
story and his tweet omit the name of the company that packaged and
retailed the Russia Collusion narrative: Fusion GPS — the company that Robert Mueller testified to having no knowledge of in his July House appearance.
That oafish attempt to get out ahead of the IG’s report was followed by, whaddaya know, a Times op-ed penned by none other than Glenn Simpson, the impresario of Fusion GPS (and his partner Peter Fritsch), The Double-Barreled Dream World of Trump and His Enablers,
aimed at re-selling their shopworn Russia collusion story to distract
from any attention that voters might be paying to Ukraine’s collusion in
the scheme to overthrow the 2016 US election and the Bidens’ grifting
operation following the 2014 CIA / State Department sponsored overthrow
of Ukraine’s government.
sicsempertyrannis |the
MSM and online projects like the American Independent incessantly
insist that the simple fact that Hunter Biden and his dear old dad, a
"Union Man," solicited money in Ukraine and in China for services not rendered
proves nothing, that nothing has been proven against them and that any
mention of these occurrences is evidence of harsh partisan rhetoric
based on fantasy and equivalent to belief in the Loch Ness Monster.
Well, pilgrimsI want to know who and what investigation or investigations cleared the Bidens of anything.
It
is obvious that Hunter is qualified for employment as a bag man and not
much else. He has a law degree? So what? As in the matter of the
qualifications of doctors, not all learn much in medical or law school.
"US
Officials" say the Bidens are pure in heart and deed? Hah! Is it not
clear that The Borg (foreign policy establishment) hate Donald Trump and
will say anything possible to injure him?
"Debunked," "Discredited," "Conspiracy theories?"
Trickery in the press is the real truth, trickery intended to protect the only viable candidate in the Democratic Party field.
globalresearch |I have long believed that the core hatred of
Russia comes from the neocons and is to a large extent tribal or, if you
prefer, ethno-religious based. Why? Because if the neoconservatives
were actually foreign policy realists there is no good reason to express
any visceral dislike of Russia or its government. The allegations that
Moscow interfered in the 2016 presidential election in the U.S. are clearly a sham,
just as are the tales of the alleged Russian poisoning of the Skripals
in Winchester England and, most recently, the claimed assassination of
journalist Arkady Babchenko
in Kiev which turned out to be a false flag. Even the most cursory
examination of the past decade’s developments in Georgia and Ukraine
reveal that Russia was reacting to legitimate major security threats
engineered by the United States with a little help from Israel and
others. Russia has not since the Cold War ended threatened the United
States and its ability to re-acquire its former Eastern European
satellites is a fantasy. So why the hatred?
In fact, the
neocons got along quite well with Russia when they and their
overwhelmingly Jewish oligarchs and international commodity thieves cum
financier friends were looting the resources of the old Soviet Union
under the hapless Boris Yeltsin during the 1990s.
Alarms about the alleged Russian threat only re-emerged in the neocon
dominated media and think tanks when old fashioned nationalist Vladimir
Putin took office and made it a principal goal of his government to turn off the money tap.
With the looting
stopped by Putin, the neocons and friends no longer had any reason to
play nice, so they used their considerable resources in the media and
within the halls of power in places like Washington, London and Paris to
turn on Moscow. And they also might have perceived that there was a
worse threat looming. The Putin government appeared to be resurrecting
what the neocons might perceive as pogrom plagued Holy Russia! Old
churches razed by the Bolsheviks were being rebuilt and people were
again going to mass and claiming belief in Jesus Christ. The former Red
Square now hosts a Christmas market while the nearby tomb of Lenin is
only open one morning in the week and attracts few visitors.
I would like to
suggest that it is quite possible that the historically well-informed
neocons are merely longing for the good old Bolshevik days in Russia.
The fact is that much of Bolshevik state atheism was driven by the large
overrepresentation of Jews in the party in its formative days. British
journalist Robert Wilton’s meticulously researched 1920 study “The Last Days of the Romanovs” describes how David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918 message to Washington that
“The Bolshevik leaders here,
most of whom are Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care
little for Russia or any other country but are internationalists and
they are trying to start a worldwide social revolution.”
“Unless Bolshevism is
nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one form or
another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and worked by
Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy for
their own ends the existing order of things.”
Russia’s greatest twentieth century writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn,
feted in the west for his staunch resistance to Soviet
authoritarianism, suddenly found himself friendless by the media and
publishing world when he wrote “Two Centuries Together: A Russo-Jewish
History to 1972”, recounting some of the dark side of the Russian-Jewish experience.
In particular, Solzhenitsyn cited the significant overrepresentation of
Russian Jews both as Bolsheviks and, prior to that time, as
serf-owners.
sicsempertyrannis |A
question for me is the motivation behind the antipathy of the American
neo-liberals and neocons toward Russia. There are a lot of Jews
scattered among these groups. Is it a group memory of Tsarist pograms
that eats at them? Israel does not seem to have a special problem with
modern Russia. Is it Russia's relentless persecution of homosexuals?
There are a lot of LGBTQ supporters among the two groups. Or, do these
people see Russia as a plausible geopolitical rival for the US? Surely
it cannot be as simple, or simpleminded as that. The undying USSR as
chimera? Perhaps it is that.
moderndiplomacy | One can’t
understand the impeachment proceedings against Donald Trump unless one
understands accurately what was happening in Ukraine and what the
motivations
were of the persons who were involved in U.S.-Ukraine policy, first
under U.S.
President Barack Obama, and then under his successor Donald Trump.
Information will be presented here, about those matters, which probably
won’t come up in the House impeachment hearings. These matters are
likelier to
be publicly discussed afterward, when the case goes to the Senate, but
might be
too ‘sensitive’ to be brought up even there — especially if they make
both
Democratic and Republican officials look bad, such as, for example, if
both
Democrats and Republicans had participated in a February 2014 coup
against, and
overthrowing, Ukraine’s democratically elected Government, and — if that
happened, as we will show it did — how this fact might affect
Trump’s relationship with Zelensky. So: a lot is to be shown here, and this
will be information that the ‘news’-media have been hiding from the public, not
reporting to the public.
Without understanding the reality of Obama’s
coup in Ukraine, there is no way
of honestly explaining Ukrainegate. The 1953 Iran coup produced, as blowback,
the Islamic Revolution in Iran in 1979. Obama’s 2014 coup in Ukraine likewise
is having its blowbacks, but of different types.
TRUMP’S
PURPOSE IN THE 25 JULY 2019 CALL TO ZELENSKY
The argument to be presented here is
that Trump, in this phone-call, and generally, was trying not only to obtain
help with evidence-gathering in the “Crowdstrike” matter (which A.G. Barr is
now investigating, and which also is the reason why Trump specifically
mentioned “Crowdstrike” at the only instance in the phone-call where he was
requesting a “favor” from Zelensky), but to change the policy toward Ukraine
that had been established by Obama (via Obama’s coup and its aftermath). This
is a fact, which will be documented here. Far more than politics was involved
here; ideology was actually very much involved. Trump was considering a basic
change in U.S. foreign policies. He was considering to replace policies that
had been established under, and personnel who had been appointed by, his
immediate predecessor, Barack Obama. Democrats are extremely opposed to any
such changes. This is one of the reasons for the renewed impeachment-effort by
Democrats. They don’t want to let go of Obama’s worst policies. But changing
U.S. foreign policy is within a President’s Constitutional authority to do.
Trump fired the flaming
neoconservative John Bolton on 10 September 2019. This culminated a growing
rejection by Trump of neoconservatism — something that he had never thought
much about but had largely continued from the Obama Administration, which
invaded and destroyed Libya in 2011, Syria in 2012-, Yemen in 2015-, and more —
possibly out-doing even George W. Bush, who likewise was a flaming neocon.
Trump’s gradual turn away from neoconservatism wasn’t just political; it was
instead a reflection, on his part, that maybe, just maybe, he had actually been
wrong and needed to change his foreign policies, in some important ways. (He
evidently still hasn’t yet figured out precisely what those changes should be.)
WaPo | “I
am disappointed, and quite frankly I’m angered, by the fact — he knows
me, he knows my son. He knows there’s nothing to this,” Biden said.
“Trump is now essentially holding power over him that even the
Ukrainians wouldn’t yield to. The Ukrainians would not yield to, quote,
‘investigate Biden’ — there’s nothing to investigate about Biden or his
son.”
A Graham spokesman declined to comment and said the senator was unavailable.
Trump’s
personal attorney Rudolph W. Giuliani, who has been at the center of
the House impeachment inquiry, claimed that Biden’s comment was a
“threat” against Graham.
“This is getting to be more and more like my old mafia cases,” Giuliani wrote on Twitter, alluding to his time as a federal prosecutor. “They sure do sound like crooks.”
Graham, in a letter sent Thursday
to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, asked for information related to
calls between Biden, when he was vice president, and then-President
Petro Poroshenko of Ukraine, as well as documents that referred to an
investigation of Burisma.
In the Obama years, Biden played an integral role
in pushing Poroshenko to crack down on corruption in Ukraine,
pressuring him to fire a prosecutor, Viktor Shokin, who was widely seen
as corrupt and not doing enough to undertake crucial investigations.
The
efforts to oust Shokin were mounted in coordination with U.S. allies,
and several Republican senators were on board at the time. Now, however,
some Republicans are asserting that Biden was attempting to get rid of
Shokin to protect his son, an assertion contradicted by the
circumstances at the time.
Still,
Biden’s aides at the time expressed concern about Hunter’s position on
the board of Burisma, worried that it could create the perception of a
conflict of interest. Biden took no action to discourage his son from
remaining on the board.
sicsemper | My father, a former intelligence person during WWII, explained to me
that if a secret is to be preserved, two links in the chain of evidence,
not just one, need to be broken.
Many of us predicted that Epstein, as a serial blackmailer of the
rich and influential, would not live for very long in jail, yet I was
still surprised at the speed of his demise. We discussed this in some
detail in August.
My fathers dictum suggests that the two guards are unlikely to stay
alive if they were in any way willing accomplices in what was perhaps a
murder.
Ghislaine Maxwell? If she is smart, she will bury herself in a
kibbutz in deepest Israel. I don't think she has the ability to make the
trade of her continued life in the West for silence.
diogenesmiddlefinger |American voters
have been introduced to the idea that the elected President of the
United States can be accused of "undermining" foreign policy determined
by the permanent bureaucracy, which spends billions of our tax dollars
but is not even slightly interested in our input. We've been told
top bureaucrats who supposedly serve at the pleasure of the president
are actually entitled to their jobs and firing them is a crime, with the
president presumed guilty unless he can prove he had an acceptable
reason for terminating or reassigning them. We've learned that
Made Men of the bureaucratic empire and its political wing, the
Democrat Party, cannot be investigated for corruption unless the most
exquisite preliminary rituals are followed and the investigators can
demonstrate the absolute purity of their intentions. Outside of
Impeachment Theater, we've been told it's heroic for the bureaucracy to
organize "resistance" against the elected president and congressional
representatives, if the Washington empire disapproves of the voters'
choices.
What happened in Bolivia is a coup. Period. The United States and other countries should not be interfering in the Bolivian people's pursuit of self-determination and right to choose their own government.
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