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Buyer’s Remorse – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on March 27, 2019

Rachel Maddow…Perhaps she doesn’t know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons. In places like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, you first choose a person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime.

http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/buyers-remorse/

James Howard Kunstler

The Narrative is dead! Long live The Narrative!

That’s what played on CNN, NBC, and The New York Times yesterday as they struggled to digest the parting meal Robert Mueller served to the RussiaGate lynch mob: a nothingburger with a side of crow-flavored fries. Mr. Mueller was careful, though, to leave a nice red poison cherry on top with his statement that “…while this report does not conclude that the President committed a crime, it also does not exonerate him.”

Mr. Mueller, who ought to know better, could not be more in error on that too-fine-a-point. The official finding that no crime was committed is, ipso facto, an exoneration, and to impute otherwise is a serious breach of his role in this legal melodrama. Prosecutors are expressly forbidden to traffic in defamation, aspersion, and innuendo in the absence of formal charges. So, it will be interesting to hear what Mr. Mueller has to say when Jerrold Nadler reels him into the House Judiciary Committee, as inevitably he will, to do to some ‘splainin.’

What actually happened with RussiaGate? A cabal of government officials colluded with the Hillary Clinton campaign to interfere in the 2016 election and, failing to achieve their desired outcome, engineered a two-years-plus formal inquisition to deflect attention from their own misconduct and attempt to overthrow the election result.

The Cable News characters, quite a few of them lawyers, were litigating the living shit out of the story on Sunday night in their usual spirit of obdurate rank dishonesty. For instance, Jeffrey Toobin, who plays Attorney General on CNN, went off on the infamous 2016 Trump Tower Meeting in which the president’s son, Donald, Jr., met with Russian lawyer Natalia V. Veselnitskaya. Toobin omitted to mention that Ms. Veselnitskaya was, at that very time, on the payroll of Fusion GPS, Hillary Clinton’s “oppo” research contractor. In other words, Trump Junior was set up.

That was characteristic of the collusion that actually occurred between the Hillary campaign, the FBI, the DOJ, the CIA, the NSA, the UK’s MI6 intel agency, and the Obama White House, striving to prevent the election of a TV reality show star, and to disable him afterwards — also of the news media’s role in the whole interminable scam of RussiaGate. Their fury and despair were as vivid the night of March 24, 2019, as on November 8, 2016. And now they will attempt to spark off a sequel.

Rachel Maddow, for instance, struggling to maintain her dignity after two years playing Madame DeFarge on MSNBC, tried to console her fans with the prospect of Mr. Trump getting raked over the coals by the DOJ’s Southern District of NY prosecutors for crimes as yet unpredicted — really, whatever they might find if they turn over enough rocks in Manhattan. Perhaps she doesn’t know how the justice system actually works in this country: we prosecute crimes not persons. In places like Stalin’s Soviet Union and Hitler’s Germany, you first choose a person to eliminate and then fit them to a crime. If no crime can be found, one is easily manufactured. In the USA, a predicate crime is required before you can launch a prosecution. Perhaps the actual Attorney General, Mr. Barr, will advise the avid staff of the Southern District of NY how this works…

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mbird

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20 Years Ago: Bill Clinton Bombs Serbia, Killing Hundreds of Civilians – James Bovard

Posted by M. C. on March 27, 2019

Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as “the George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Mr. Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.

http://jimbovard.com/blog/2019/03/25/20-years-ago-bill-clinton-bombs-serbia-killing-hundreds-of-civilians/

By

Twenty years ago, President Clinton commenced bombing Serbia for no good reason. Up to 1500 Serb civilians were killed by NATO bombing in one of the biggest BS morality plays of the modern era. Clinton sold the bombing as a humanitarian mission, but the resulting carnage resulted in the takeover of Kosovo by a vicious clique that was later condemned for murdering Serbs and selling their kidneys, livers, and other body parts.

But Clinton remains a hero in Kosovo; here is a statue of him erected in the capitol, Pristina. It would have been a more accurate representation if Clinton was shown standing on the corpses of the women, children, and others killed in the U.S. bombing campaign.

The U.S. bombing of Serbia was a crime and an outrage from the start. Editors were chary of articles bashing the bombing campaign so much of my venting occurred in my journal:…

Reposted below are a Washington Times piece on post-war body harvesting and a couple Future of Freedom Foundation pieces on Clinton’s lies…

“Past investigations of reports of organ trafficking in Kosovo have been undermined by witnesses’ fears of testifying in a small country where clan ties run deep and former members of the KLA are still feted as heroes. Former leaders of the KLA occupy high posts in the government.” American politicians have almost entirely ignored the growing scandal. Vice President Joe Biden hailed former KLA leader and Kosovo Prime Minister Hashim Thaci in 2010 as “the George Washington of Kosovo.” A few months later, a Council of Europe investigative report tagged Mr. Thaci as an accomplice to the body-trafficking operation.

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Ukrainian Security Official Says Ukraine Shot Down MH-17  – PaulCraigRoberts.org

Posted by M. C. on March 27, 2019

https://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2019/03/26/ukrainian-security-official-says-ukraine-shot-down-mh-17/

Paul Craig Roberts

298 Passengers and crew were murdered by Ukraine in order to create a propaganda attack on Russia.  The filth that comprise the Western media and governments hid the truth for the sake of Washington’s anti-Russian propaganda.

The security official says that his suspicions were aroused by “the amazingly prompt reaction of the Ukrainian leadership,” which “indicated prior knowledge of the affair.”  Perhaps readers will remember that at the time I pointed out that the event was clearly staged as the same propagandistic accusation against Russia appeared everywhere instantly long before any investigation.  Indeed, the investigation was stillborn as it could not be concocted to indicate Russia’s guilt.

Don’t be surprised. Western governments and media only lie.  Never do they tell the truth.  Remember:  Russiagate.  Weapons of mass destruction.  Iranian nukes.  Assad’s use of chemical weapons.  Gulf of Tonkin.  9/11. Russian invasion of Ukraine.  JFK assassination. MLK assassination.  Bobby Kennedy assassination.  Skripal poisoning. Maduro starving his own people.  An endless list of lies.  The entirety of the West is nothing but a lie factory.

https://www.fort-russ.com/2019/03/breaking-ukrainian-security-boss-admits-ukraine-shot-down-mh-17-planned-ethnic-genocide-in-donbass/

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Climate Change Activist Admits: Being Green “Requires the End of Capitalism” | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on March 27, 2019

https://mises.org/wire/climate-change-activist-admits-being-green-requires-end-capitalism

Well, at least they’re now being honest about it. A headline this week in The Guardian reads: “Ending climate change requires the end of capitalism. Have we got the stomach for it?”

The article, by Phil McDuff, goes on the discuss the “Green New Deal” currently being peddled in the US Congress, and declares a radical turn toward socialism is really at the heart of saving the planet from climate change:

The radical economics isn’t a hidden clause, but a headline feature. Climate change is the result of our current economic and industrial system. GND-style proposals marry sweeping environmental policy changes with broader socialist reforms because the level of disruption required to keep us at a temperature anywhere below “absolutely catastrophic” is fundamentally, on a deep structural level, incompatible with the status quo.

The “status quo,” we have now is a form of capitalism that is highly regulated by states, manipulated by immensely powerful central banks, and distorted by global NGOs like the World Bank. Nevertheless, this system contains enough of a semblance of market-based freedom that many leftwing ideologues regard it as a type of radical laissez-faire capitalism marked by unrestrained and fossil-fuel powered consumption.

Not surprisingly, they think this system must be abolished.

Unfortunately for the billions of human beings who have benefited from what market freedom exists, the new green-socialist global state imagined by McDuff will undo decades of gains against grinding poverty — gains enjoyed by the world’s most at-risk and poorest populations.

The Decline of Poverty — and Its Effects — In the Developing World

Quality of life indicators have been consistently moving upward in recent decades…

But, pointing to a photo of a low-income women slaving over a wash basin, Rosling asks: “How can we tell this woman that she isn’t going to have a washing machine?”

It’s a good question, and it’s also a reminder that much of the talk over carbon taxes and climate regulations smack of first-world chauvinism. The rich world already has its cars and its washing machines. Sure, a global climate scheme would reduce the wealth of people in the rich world, but the impact in China, India, Africa, and South America — where most live closer to subsistence levels —would be far more devastating.

For many environmentally-minded suburban upper-middle class people in North America and Europe, this is just tough luck and bad timing for everyone else.

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Chuck Schumer Lies to Jews at AIPAC About Trump, Neo-Nazis, Kevin McCarthy

Posted by M. C. on March 26, 2019

That crazy Chuck…he is at it again…and again…and again…

The media, notably CNN, has mid-reported the “Charlottesville Hoax” to portray President Trump, falsely, as an antisemite.

CNN in particular has gone further and actually created a false impression of reality by editing video of Trump’s press conference deceptively, splicing it together with footage of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville to make it appear as though the president was referring to the participants as “very fine people” when he was not…

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2019/03/26/chuck-schumer-lies-to-jews-at-aipac-about-trump-neo-nazis-kevin-mccarthy/

By Joel B. Pollak

Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) lied to thousands of people at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) annual policy conference on Monday, telling them in a speech that President Donald Trump had referred to neo-Nazis in Charlottesville, Virginia, as “very fine people” when the president had never done so.

The audience at AIPAC was predominantly Jewish, magnifying the impact and importance of the lie.

The context was Schumer’s attempt to condemn antisemitism on both sides of the political aisle, in the course of criticizing Democrats such as Reps. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) and Ilhan Omar (D-MN), who had each made remarks suggesting American supporters of Israel owed “allegiance to a foreign country.”

Schumer said: “When someone says that being Jewish and supporting Israel means you are not loyal to America, we must call it out. When someone looks at a neo-Nazi rally and sees some very fine people among its company, we must call it out.”

The Hill

✔ @thehill

Sen. Chuck Schumer at : “When someone looks at a neo-Nazi rally and sees some, ‘very fine people’ among its company, we must call it out. When someone suggests money drives support for Israel, we must call it out.”

The problem: the latter never happened.

As Breitbart News and others have pointed out repeatedly, President Trump was referring to legitimate protesters in Charlottesville who were demonstrating against the removal of a state of Confederate general Robert E. Lee, as well as non-violent left-wing protesters who opposed them and racism in general.

The president specifically excluded the neo-Nazis and white supremacists from his description of “very fine people,” as a transcript of his remarks makes clear beyond any possible doubt. He also condemned the neo-Nazis in a speech from the White House the day before that was carried live on cable news.

Scott Adams

✔ @ScottAdamsSays

Here’s the video of Trump saying the neo-Nazis should be “condemned totally”: https://bit.ly/2ujQSvD  and attached is the transcript. This is the worst lie a politician has ever told.

The media, notably CNN, has mid-reported the “Charlottesville Hoax” to portray President Trump, falsely, as an antisemite.

CNN in particular has gone further and actually created a false impression of reality by editing video of Trump’s press conference deceptively, splicing it together with footage of a white supremacist march in Charlottesville to make it appear as though the president was referring to the participants as “very fine people” when he was not…

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Wikipedia Editors Paid to Protect Political, Tech, and Media Figures

Posted by M. C. on March 26, 2019

Nothing is sacred.

The downside is we have to use our brains more instead of “theirs”.

https://www.breitbart.com/tech/2019/03/26/wikipedia-editors-paid-to-protect-political-tech-and-media-figures/

by T.D. Adler

A report in Huffington Post recently revealed the case of Wikipedia editor Ed Sussman, who was paid by media clients such as NBC and Axios to help diminish critical material. Paid editors operating in a similar manner to Sussman have worked on behalf of CNN contributor Hilary Rosen and the CEOs of Reddit and Intel, among other clients.

Other conduct by Sussman not covered by the Huffington Post shows him authoring fluff pieces for NBC executives and getting his proposed changes approved by another paid Wikipedia editor.

The report by Ashley Feinberg detailed former journalist Ed Sussman’s work as a paid Wikipedia fixer for clients such as Axios, NBC, and Facebook. Sussman did this work through the firm WhiteHatWiki, which he argues follows Wikipedia policies. Sussman disclosed his paid editing on Wikipedia and ostensibly worked within the rules by having other editors approve proposed changes.

However, Feinberg’s article noted several of Sussman’s requests involved removing or watering down potentially damaging material about clients, even when citing sources considered reliable on the site. Such removals would appear to violate Wikipedia’s neutrality policy, which states:

All encyclopedic content on Wikipedia must be written from a neutral point of view (NPOV), which means representing fairly, proportionately, and, as far as possible, without editorial bias, all of the significant views that have been published by reliable sources on a topic.

In one example Feinberg cited, Sussman requested changes to the page of Axios journalist Jonathan Swan regarding a false report he made last September claiming Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein was resigning. A line noting the incident in Swan’s article was replaced with a paragraph hyping that Swan was “the first to report” Rosenstein’s offer to resign, despite the offer being refused. Sussman backed this spin with a New York Times article treating the incident as a failure of the Axios reporting model, a fact not mentioned in Sussman’s proposed edit…

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news_presstitutes

 

 

 

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Pinkerton — Russia to Judgment: On the Origin of Conspiracy Theories and the Fake News Trifecta

Posted by M. C. on March 26, 2019

https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/03/25/pinkerton-russia-to-judgment-on-the-origin-of-conspiracy-theories-and-the-fake-news-trifecta/

by James P. Pinkerton

…So how could the MSM get it so wrong?  One answer, of course, is that the MSM hates Donald Trump so much that it can’t see straight; in the MSM’s collective hive-mind, the image of the president’s being frogmarched out of the White House in handcuffs was so enticing that all reality was bent to serve that goal.

A second answer is that reporters tend to be slaves to their sources, and so if their sources are Democrats and Deep Statists, well, that’s what journalists will believe. And within the last two decades, we’ve seen where such credulousness can lead. In the run-up to the Iraq War, the Bush 43 administration systematically marketed—its chosen word—tales of weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for the Iraq War.  (Historians still debate whether or not the Bush people were fooling themselves as well as the American people.)…

Intriguingly, the prime mover of it all seems to have been … Hillary Clinton.  That assertion is no right-wing fantasy, but rather the considered reportage of MSM journalists Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes, who two years ago co-authored Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign.  While the book mostly, of course, focuses on the Clinton campaign, it also included some telling post-election details, which were caught, at the time, by Breitbart News:

The authors detail how Clinton went out of her way to pass blame for her stunning loss on “Comey and Russia.”  “She wants to make sure all these narratives get spun the right way,” a longtime Clinton confidant is quoted as saying. [emphasis added]

Allen and Parnes further wrote:

That strategy had been set within twenty-four hours of her concession speech.  [Campaign manager Robbie] Mook and [campaign chairman John] Podesta assembled her communications team at the Brooklyn headquarters to engineer the case that the election wasn’t entirely on the up-and-up.  For a couple of hours, with Shake Shack containers littering the room, they went over the script they would pitch to the press and the public.  Already, Russian hacking was the centerpiece of the argument.

So how much of that history will be dredged up again?  A lot depends on the ability of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chaired by Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, to really get to dredging.  (Graham has it in his power, of course, to subpoena any and all witnesses, including Hillary Clinton.)…

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EconomicPolicyJournal.com: New York Magazine Headline: “Trump Nominates Famous Idiot Stephen Moore to Federal Reserve Board”

Posted by M. C. on March 26, 2019

https://www.economicpolicyjournal.com/2019/03/new-york-magazine-headline-trump.html

From the accompanying article by Jonathan Chait:

Stephen Moore’s career as an economic analyst has been a decades-long continuous procession of error and hackery. It is not despite but precisely because of these errors that Moore now finds himself in the astonishing position of having been offered a position on the Federal Reserve board by President Trump…

Since Donald Trump moved into the White House, the Republican Party has reversed its views on both fiscal and monetary policy. Whereas it had previously deemed deficits and inflation a mortal threat, and called stimulus and lower interest rates counterproductive, the party line now demands both.

Moore has naturally ridden along with this reversal, but what has set him apart is the fervency with which he has embraced the volte-face. He has insisted on television that the economy is experiencing deflation, and when corrected by panelist Catherine Rampell on this unambiguous error of fact, refused to give ground. He has called for firing the Federal Reserve chairman as well as firing the entire Federal Reserve board.

Mooore’s current ultra-dovish stance is hardly anywhere near as ridiculous as his previous ultra-hawkish stance. The problem is that he has no grasp of the policy, and simply follows whatever line helps the Republican Party. While the internal workings of his mind remain a matter of speculation, I doubt he is consciously venal enough to tailor his thinking explicitly to partisan goals. Rather, Moore has extremely strong partisan instincts and extremely limited analytical skills. The combination results inevitably in the latter giving way to the former. He should not be permitted any position of serious responsibility, in government or anything else.

In other words, he sounds pretty much like every mainstream Keynesian economist, except that other mainstream economists don’t like him.

He is bad but so is everyone sitting on the Fed board today.

–RW

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Exposing Israeli interference in the US | The Electronic Intifada

Posted by M. C. on March 26, 2019

In the context of the mosque massacres by a white supremacist in Christchurch, New Zealand, earlier this month, and concern about growing anti-Semitism, I also talked about how Israel is a force today promoting and inspiring Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, white supremacy and extremism that is destabilizing the world.

https://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/exposing-israeli-interference-us

 

After more than two years of media hype and hyperventilation, special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation has finally concluded that there was no collusion between Donald Trump’s presidential campaign and Russia to subvert the 2016 US election.

There is however plenty of evidence of foreign interference and collusion in US politics, except it is being ignored by establishment media and politicians because the state doing it is not Russia, but Israel.

Last Friday, I spoke in Washington at the Israel Lobby and American Policy Conference 2019 about Al Jazeera’s undercover documentary into the activities of the Israel lobby in the United States.

The film was made during 2016 and completed in 2017, but then it was suppressed after Qatar, Al Jazeera’s sponsor, came under intense pressure from that same lobby.

However this effort at censorship failed: The Electronic Intifada was the first to publish details of the film in March last year.

In August, we were the first to publish video excerpts, and finally in November we published all four episodes of the film online for anyone to watch.

I began my talk – which like the rest of the conference was carried live nationally on C-SPAN – by asking the audience in the room of more than 300 how many had watched the Al Jazeera film in whole or in part. I estimated that about a quarter put up their hands.

That’s a great start, but it shows that many more people still need to see this bombshell documentary exposing the efforts of Israel and its lobbyists to spy on, smear and intimidate US citizens who support Palestinian human rights, especially BDS – the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement…

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Stop the CIA Coup – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on March 26, 2019

“The CIA presentation to senators about Russia’s intentions fell short of a formal US assessment produced by all 17 intelligence agencies. A senior US official said there were minor disagreements among intelligence officials about the agency’s assessment, in part because some questions remain unanswered.” [emphasis added]

https://original.antiwar.com/justin/2019/03/25/stop-the-cia-coup/

As Justin’s treatment, like the times and cancer itself, evolves he’s a bit out of commission this weekend, so we are taking this opportunity to run a truly classic, prescient Raimondo denunciation of the intelligence state, in particular, the CIA. Way back on December 12, 2016.

The CIA is up to its old tricks: overthrowing a democratically elected government. Only this time it’s our government.

As they are now legally allowed to do ever since the law against covert CIA propaganda in the United States was repealed, the Agency has leaked to the Washington Post reports – via anonymous third parties – of its alleged assessment of a Russian campaign to hand Donald Trump the White House:

“The CIA has concluded in a secret assessment that Russia intervened in the 2016 election to help Donald Trump win the presidency, rather than just to undermine confidence in the U.S. electoral system, according to officials briefed on the matter.

“Intelligence agencies have identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to US officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

“’It is the assessment of the intelligence community that Russia’s goal here was to favor one candidate over the other, to help Trump get elected,’ said a senior US official briefed on an intelligence presentation made to US senators. “That’s the consensus view.”

The reaction of the Trump transition team was swift and cutting: “These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and ‘Make America Great Again.’”

This reference to the “intelligence failure” that led us into the most disastrous war in our history is not mere rhetoric:…

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If Russia hacked

 

 

 

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