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The Big Sleep – Kunstler

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2020

It was so bad that his California counterpart, Senator Dianne Feinstein, just up-and-split late Wednesday.

In the meantime, an interesting development flew in under the radar as the impeachment spectacle hogged the news: The Department of Justice yesterday declared two of four FISA warrants against Carter Page invalid. The warrants were signed by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Rod Rosenstein.

This is the administration’s heaven sent chance to take this apart. If that doesn’t happen Trump doesn’t deserve 2020.

https://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/the-big-sleep/

You have to wonder how many Democratic senators spend the long hours of impeachment fantasizing how to end the misery of listening to Rep. Adam Schiff deliver the party’s funeral oration. Please God, hurl a lightning bolt at the podium… bring down a chunk of the fine old coffered ceiling where he stands and prates about a Russian invasion of Malibu… send a coral snake up the leg of his trousers…!

It was so bad that his California counterpart, Senator Dianne Feinstein, just up-and-split late Wednesday. Elizabeth Warren has been seen furiously doodling maps of all the primary precincts she is failing to visit in her confinement. Bernie Sanders imagines himself wielding thirty inches of re-bar upside Mr. Schiff’s skull, while Amy Klobuchar pops her third Xanax of the evening. You have no idea what mental tribulation the House impeachment manager supreme is visiting on his colleagues.

The impeachment case against Mr. Trump might mercifully spell the end of the Master Narrative the Democrats have been confabulating since 2016: that Donald Trump invited the wicked Vlad Putin to checkmate Hillary Clinton and thereby crushed the hopes and dreams of those wishing to make Ukraine the 51st state… or something like that. Because according to Mr. Schiff, there is no nation on this planet as dear to the interests of America than darling Ukraine, with its radioactive forests, decrepitating Soviet infrastructure, and dedication to liberty.

Those who were only puzzling over Nancy Pelosi’s motives in bringing this case, and assigning it to the two sketchiest characters in her charge, Schiff & Nadler, must finally be convinced that she is no longer sound of mind. What was she thinking? Did she really want to set up the voters to lose faith in the basic electoral process by preemptively delegitimizing the 2020 election? (“Trump can only win if he cheats!”) Is she that desperate to flip the Senate to prevent anymore judicial appointments? Could be. Or is the impeachment spectacle a different kind of set-up: to make the forthcoming raft of indictments against RussiaGate coupsters look like a mere act of revenge rather than long-delayed justice for a three-year campaign of perfidious sedition by some of the highest officials in the land?

Anyway, after another day of this boresome torment, the Senate will get to hear Mr. Trump’s defense in a full-throated way — really for the first time since the whole nasty business began, and in a conspicuous venue where it can’t be ignored anymore. If nothing else, it will probably be more interesting and certainly more dignified than the idiotic vaudeville put on by Schiff & Nadler. Even if the President’s managers move to dismiss the case out-of-hand for its utter lack of merit and the legal errors in its construction by two House committees, I doubt they will miss the opportunity to use the time allotted to lay out the story of what actually happened the past three years — a crime spree of government against itself.

The temptation to call witnesses must be anguishing, though; from a legal standpoint the House’s case deserves to be thrown out summarily just to reestablish the principle that impeachment is not a frivolity. But the nation would miss the chance for Mr. Schiff to have to explain exactly what happened around the “whistleblower” episode and, of course, there would be no more possible excuses for producing the “whistleblower” him-or-herself in the witness dock. I think we would discover what an absolutely shady operation that was.

In the meantime, an interesting development flew in under the radar as the impeachment spectacle hogged the news: The Department of Justice yesterday declared two of four FISA warrants against Carter Page invalid. The warrants were signed by James Comey, Andrew McCabe, and Rod Rosenstein. The move has deep repercussions in everything connected to the RussiaGate investigation, including especially the prosecutions mounted by Robert Mueller’s lawyers. It implies what has already been demonstrated by other evidence: That the FBI and the DOJ knew by January of 2017 at the latest that all the information they used to start the case against the President was garbage, and yet they continued it anyway — including the appointment of Mr. Mueller and his commission. The DOJ’s statement about the two FISA warrants doesn’t negate the possibility that the other two will also be declared invalid. It’s time for the figures involved in all this to become very afraid.

Be seeing you

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New Thought Police NewsGuard Is Owned by Big Pharma

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2020

Just opened a post from The Economist. There was a bold statement that they follow NewsGuard guidelines.

DELETE

https://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2020/01/24/publicis-funds-newsguard.aspx

Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola

Story at-a-glance

  • NewsGuard is a self-appointed internet watchdog that sells a browser plugin to rate websites on nine criteria of credibility and transparency
  • NewsGuard received much of its startup funds from Publicis Groupe, a giant global communications group
  • Publicis Groupe’s health subsidiary, Publicis Health, names Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi, Bayer and other Big Pharma giants as clients
  • In October 2018, GlaxoSmithKline sent its $1.5 billion media account to Publicis
  • In January 2020, GSK awarded Publicis Media with even more business, handing over the former Pfizer Consumer Healthcare Brands to Publicis, a move worth an estimated $400 million
  • While NewsGuard’s warnings may be enough to prevent someone from clicking these links, I believe the true intent is to bury this content entirely from search results and social media feeds

The media is using a variety of tactics to restrict your access to the truth from websites like mine, including NewsGuard, a self-appointed internet watchdog that sells a browser plugin to rate websites on nine criteria of credibility and transparency. Before I delve further into NewsGuard and its underlying agenda, it’s important to look at who funds it.

NewsGuard received much of its startup funds from Publicis Groupe, a giant global communications group with divisions that brand imaging, design of digital business platforms, media relations and health care.

Publicis Groupe’s health subsidiary, Publicis Health, names Lilly, Abbot, Roche, Amgen, Genentech, Celgene, Gilead, Biogen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi, Bayer and other Big Pharma giants as clients, which gives you an idea of where its loyalties lie.

GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has also awarded Publicis Media a healthy piece of business, and the communications group responded by creating a custom “platformGSK” to run the drug giant’s media business.

GSK Adds $400 Million to $1.5 Billion Publicis Collaboration

In October 2018, following a five-month review, GSK sent its $1.5 billion media account to Publicis, which beat out other media agencies vying for the account, including Omnicom’s PHD and WPP’s Group M.1

According to FiercePharma, with the creation of the “platformGSK” model, the partnership gave “Publicis Media responsibility for all offline and digital paid media strategy and planning in the Americas, Europe, Middle East, Africa and Asia-Pacific. In the U.S., that includes DTC [direct to consumer] pharma work.”2 Further, the news outlet reported:

“Publicis Groupe client lead Laurent Ezekiel said the agency is ‘excited to partner with them to establish a transformative client-agency relationship that will enable GSK to deliver on its ambition to become the best data-driven marketer in the industry.'”3

In January 2020, GSK awarded Publicis Media with even more business, handing over the former Pfizer Consumer Healthcare brands to Publicis. The move was decided without a review and will add Advil, Centrum, Caltrate and other Pfizer brands to platformGSK, worth an estimated $400 million. GSK holds a 68% stake in the joint venture.

“GSK has already announced its plans to spin off the joint venture within three years and list it as standalone company on the U.K. exchange as GSK Consumer Healthcare, leaving the pharma giant to focus on medicines and vaccines,” FiercePharma reported.4

Meanwhile, Publicis also handles other Big Pharma media accounts, including Novartis. In August 2019, Publicis created NovartisONE2 to manage the pharma giant’s global media account worth $600 million.5

Publicis Funds NewsGuard

While Publicis has been busy solidifying its strong ties with Big Pharma, it was also the lead investor among a group of 18 that helped make NewsGuard a reality.

As of March 2018, Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz, the “media entrepreneurs” behind NewsGuard, had raised $6 million to launch the company, which was slated to “address the fake news crisis by hiring dozens of trained journalists as analysts to review the 7,500 news and information websites most accessed and shared in the United States … These sites account for 98% of the news articles read and shared in the English language online in the United States.”6

Once installed on your browser, NewsGuard assigns a color coded “Nutrition Label” to sites, rating them green or red in a process they said would be “completely transparent and accountable.”7 While first launching in the U.S., NewsGuard expanded internationally, launching in the U.K. in 2019 and rating more than 200 websites.

The startup created controversy in January 2019 after giving Mail Online — the most read news website in the U.K. — a failing grade, stating it failed to uphold even basic standards of accuracy or accountability.

Following backlash and apparent “discussions” with a Daily Mail executive, NewsGuard changed the rating to green, stating the site “generally maintains basic standards of accuracy and accountability” and said they were wrong.8

It was an early indication of what can go wrong when you trust a conflicted startup company to dictate what’s truth and what’s not. In January 2020, NewsGuard announced it would adopt a subscription service in the U.K. and will start charging for the service.9

At the same time, NewsGuard issued a notice to subscribers in the U.S. with an offer to sign up early for $1.95 a month to “help keep NewsGuard free for the hundreds of libraries and schools that use NewsGuard.”10

 

NewsGuard Is the Latest ‘Truth Arbiter’ to Deceive You

In other words, NewsGuard is setting itself up as the self-appointed global arbiter of what information is “trustworthy” — based on nine, self-described “credibility and transparency” factors — not only for information viewed for pay on private electronic devices, but also for information accessible for free in public libraries and schools…

Be seeing you

 

 

 

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Logic Is a Tool of the Patriarchy – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2020

Politicians aren’t that meaningful. They aren’t to be taken seriously. They are a form of sardonic entertainment that allow us to feel better about the inordinate amount of the workday we must slave away just to afford the taxes the government levies on us.

Mental illness is the involuntary parting with reality. This social justice style of argumentation is the voluntary parting with reality. They are two peas in the same pod.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/allan-stevo/logic-is-a-tool-of-the-patriarchy/

By

If you have ever had a conversation with a social justice warrior, you may be well aware that a confusing occurrence tends to take place.

For all your effort to use reason and evidence to truly understand the position that the person holds, it’s incredibly difficult to get even a semblance of either reason or evidence out of the social justice warrior in response.

It’s a fool’s errand. The best that can be expected is often a collection of slogans practically chanted in a daisy chain in increasing volume and intensity as the conversation progresses.

The more you invite the social justice warrior to use reason and evidence, the more you are informed you are “splitting hairs” or “going around in circles.”

If the slogans fail, and the claimed faux pas of splitting hairs does not deter you, terms of derision may start to flow.

Bigot or nazi or racist may be used to describe situations that are not bigoted, national socialist, or racist. However, if you protest the misapplication of such a serious term, the social justice warrior may attempt to explain the application through the use of circular logic, or with another onslaught of slogans. It is evident that these names do not actually fit this situation. They are merely ugly words meant to silence you. At this point where name-calling emerges for the sake of bullying a person, the conversation has grown abusive, and no respectable person would feel comfortable either doing the name-calling or being a recipient of the name-calling.

The conversation quickly grows very tiring as a great deal of energy is expelled and very little reason is utilized. The volume of voices may grow elevated. There is great emotion. And sure everyone is invested in their personal opinions to some degree, everyone has topics they are passionate about, but intellectual discussion between two adults is the time to open the spigot on reason and evidence and to tighten that other spigot that prevents an uncontrolled outpouring of emotion.

Culturally, these seemingly thoughtless outpourings of emotion are increasingly encouraged in our era.

In fact, some will go so far as to call logic, “a tool of the patriarchy.” That’s right. The mental faculty that has helped humans to better our world, through millions and billions of applications a day for millennia, is to be dismissed as a mere tool of the patriarchy. What a trendy and carelessly callous insult to lob at such an awesome human capacity. One of the key distinctions between man and beast is to be dismissed because those who are poorly trained in using their executive function and limiting their emotional outpouring feel triggered by its use. To follow in their wishes is to bring us closer to beast as individuals and as a society.

Mental illness is the involuntary parting with reality. This social justice style of argumentation is the voluntary parting with reality. They are two peas in the same pod.

And that’s a scary thing. If given the power to do away with reason and evidence, the social justice warrior will do just that. In intentionally insular silos of social interaction – through social media, academia, daily life, and often even the workplace – these ideas receive nearly no challenge by reasonable people. It’s just not worth the pain of being yelled at (or worse) by someone who is either crazy and or willfully acting crazy. Counter to logic and meritocratic notions, the unreasonable silence the reasonable.

The illogical application of law makes this situation all the more likely to occur. And in the name of tranquility, treading on touchy ground is unwelcome. Heaven forbid someone may even go so far as to burst into tears, at which point it grows evident to any onlooker that this stickler for reason and evidence is surely a savage brute worthy of derision. Not only legal pressure, but also social pressure encourages the reasonable to bite their tongues.

It is not by choice, it is only by happenstance that a social justice warrior faces reason and evidence. The rest of society grows up hearing the social justice lines parroted in school, in entertainment, in media, likely even in church. Often the only controversial views welcomed in such environments are social justice views. The astute thinker, constantly inundated with these views both seeks out and is confronted with a host of additional views naturally, and must learn to reason through that conflict. The discomfort of conflict and the ability to self-soothe enough to persevere in the midst of conflict are required to grow the faculty for logic.

The social justice warrior is often done the disservice of being insulated from opposing views to the point where reality is painfully intrusive when it comes about.

This aversion to the intrusion of reality has made it natural for college professors to preface material with “trigger warnings,” in the event that someone in the room is not mature enough to handle a conflicting viewpoint without bursting out in great, seemingly uncontrollable, displays of emotion. Even with a trigger warning, an academic risks disciplinary action if the conflicting viewpoint is seen as too intrusive. This style of material from thinkers was once referred to as “thought-provoking” and was an important part of the reason for taking the time and effort to attend university.

A notable aversion to the intrusion of reality took place with the so-called emergence of Trump Derangement Syndrome in an outburst running up to, but most notably following the November 9, 2016 presidential elections. This has amounted to a multi-year tantrum in response to an election. Yes, an election. A measly election.

Thousands take place a year. Politicians aren’t that meaningful. They aren’t to be taken seriously. They are a form of sardonic entertainment that allow us to feel better about the inordinate amount of the workday we must slave away just to afford the taxes the government levies on us.

Unless you are the losing candidate, if an election means that much to you, there is something seriously wrong with you. And even the candidate probably didn’t belong in the election if they are still triggered years later. Toughen up snowflake. It’s an election.

But to say so, is to be patriarchal. To abhor involuntary crazy and voluntary crazy alike and to pursue health and wellness is to be patriarchal. To praise the successes of humanity through the ages and to want less of the failures is to be patriarchal. To desire to use emotion for all the things it is good for, and to desire to use logic for all the things it is good for, and to implement them together as a well-adjusted healthy person is to be patriarchal. To demand those same high standards is to be patriarchal.

And that is othering. And racist. And literally what only someone who is literally a fascist, literal nazi, literal bigot would do. Literally.

Be seeing you

How to Be a Social Justice Warrior – Actual Anarchy

 

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To Protect and Serve Means Only to Maim, Murder, and Control: The Empire’s Lie That Is National Security – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2020

Yes, the American Empire will fall, but it won’t be due to outside threats. It will be due to the abandonment of falsely espoused values, of internal strife and divisiveness, of mass corruption, of political upheaval, of monetary suicide, and of collective immorality.

This is the real America, not the land of the free and home of the brave, but a collective mob of ignorant sheep awaiting the slaughter due to their own weakness and stupidity.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/gary-d-barnett/to-protect-and-serve-means-only-to-maim-murder-and-control-the-empires-lie-that-is-national-security/

By

He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would fully suffice. This disgrace to civilization should be done away with at once. Heroism at command, senseless brutality, deplorable love-of-country stance, how violently I hate all this, how despicable and ignoble war is; I would rather be torn to shreds than be a part of so base an action! It is my conviction that killing under the cloak of war is nothing but an act of murder. ~ Albert Einstein–“Mein Weltbild (My World-view)”. Essay by Albert Einstein, 1931.

War is an act of murder at every level, and at every turn a criminal undertaking. Aggressive war is simply killing without just cause, and every war begun as self-defense has turned quickly into aggression at the first moment possible, usually the first day. In the case of the United States, no war is or has ever been about real self-defense, meaning every war was aggressive and criminal murder. The common people claim patriotism in order to hide from this truth, they claim national pride, which is nothing more than state worship, and they rally round the flag as if that could protect them from being complicit in the slaughter of innocents. Those who support aggressive war are simply immoral fools.

When any government or political power structure is in place, there is only one option to avoid war, and that is that none submit to the lies of the state, and none participate in the killing of others on orders. Those that would send the children of others to die in war should volunteer to die themselves, but they are the true cowards among us, and always hide in the shadows when the killing they caused begins. They are only capable of handing out medals posthumously to the families of those they used as fodder for their own benefit and political agendas. All in the Executive Branch, all in Congress, all in any fascist political partnerships that profit from war, and all those who claim false intelligence to stoke the fires of conflict, all these and more should be the first and only causalities of any war. No man of worth has the right to ask others to die in his stead for the state.

All war is immoral, illegitimate, and senseless, but due to government existence at every level, it is the lifeblood of the state. The power of the state lies in its ability to control all of society, for without that control, society would take care of itself, and would have no need for rulers or wars. But through fear, division, and greed, the people can be convinced to go along, and accept the lie that they are doing so voluntarily because they believe the absolute nonsense of “We the people.” This is the biggest lie of all.

No nation-state is valid, as all states tend to seek a hierarchal structure of power, specifically in the name of protecting the common man collectively with profoundly restrictive laws. No free individual has need for such false protection. The beginning of this American experiment to create a powerful state was said to be about freedom of the individual, while all along, the hierarchy of power became more and more evident. What started out as a few separate colonies quickly became separate states with a new ruling class, and then one nation-state was formed and centralized, with allegiance to the flag of the United States of America. This progression was intended all along, and so the sought after tyrannical state came to fruition. Today we live as slaves in a society with a ruling structure akin to a fascist oligarchy. This is now a nation that is in constant war, and has become the largest and most murderous empire in the history of the world.

We are told every day that we are at great risk from dangerous threats from afar. We are told that terrorists are out to get us all, and that we need to allow the government and its hired murderers in the military to prosecute war around the world. We are told America is great, and that God is on our side. We are told that we must pay taxes so that the war machine can grow and save us from these constant threats. We are told to applaud and worship those that do the killing in our names. We are told not to question the state’s motives, and not to expose the truths about these wars of aggression because that may cause dissent and harm our “national security.”

These are all lies. This is all propaganda. The facts are the opposite of what this propaganda presents, and it is much of the rest of the world that could make these claims because of U.S. aggression. In other words, “the enemy is us.” The U.S. is the terrorist state, the U.S. is the thief that steals our property, and the U.S. is the greatest threat to the world. The U.S. is secure, but its targets in war are not, and have a real and legitimate national security risk.

All empires eventually fail, and cease to exist. This one is no different, except that it will be one of the shortest empires in history. The U.S. is the world’s only current empire, and without a forced stop to this madness, it will end in financial ruin, in riots and civil unrest, in war, and with more and more bloodshed.

Yes, the American Empire will fall, but it won’t be due to outside threats. It will be due to the abandonment of falsely espoused values, of internal strife and divisiveness, of mass corruption, of political upheaval, of monetary suicide, and of collective immorality. Collectivism breeds empire and allows it to flourish, and because of the loss of individual thought, it becomes the internal disease that leads to the extermination of that empire. This is the real America, not the land of the free and home of the brave, but a collective mob of ignorant sheep awaiting the slaughter due to their own weakness and stupidity.

Be seeing you

sheeple

 

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The Plagues From China – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 25, 2020

As I’ve seen on my travels across China, it has made great strides in public sanitation and cleanliness as well as planting trees.  Now, it’s time to stop abusing animals or the plagues will keep coming.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/eric-margolis/the-plagues-from-china/

By

Special for LewRockwell.com

Plagues from the east are nothing new.  The Black Death and other epidemics arrived in Europe from China during the 1300’s, killing a large percentage of its population.  Much of this pestilence came from rats that stowed away on merchant ships coming from the east.

At the end of World War I, another pandemic, wrongly called the Spanish flu, killed an estimated 18 to 50 million people in Europe and North America.

Seventeen years after the SARS virus killed some 800 people in China and Canada and terrified the entire world, a new plague threatens the West: the Wuhan Coronavirus.

Officially named 2019-nCoV, the new virus has so far infected over 800 people in China.  This latest plague erupted in the central Chinese city of Wuhan, population 11 million, which is located on the Yangtze River and is an important hub for national communications.

Like SARS, the Wuhan virus is believed to have come from a live animal market that specializes in exotic animals from the Himalayas or China’s remote mountain regions.  Serving exotic animals at dinner parties is a big status symbol in China.  Sometimes they are even served while still alive.  Dog meat is a favorite in northern China.

SARS was believed to have come from civet cats.  As a result, thousands of these felines were brutally killed.  But it was later determined the virus originated from bats, then spread to other captive animals.  Bat soup is another Chinese delicacy.

Keeping large numbers of captive animals crammed together in cages with poor ventilation and no cleaning is an ideal vector for viral diseases.  Each year, China consumes 730 million pigs.  Fifty percent of China’s factory farmed pigs have so far contracted lethal swine flu.  Rising living standards have boosted demand for pork.

I have seen how China raises and transports pigs.  It’s a nightmare of brutality and inhuman behavior.  No wonder so many of these intelligent sensitive animals fall ill and die.  Swine fever could be payback for China’s terrible cruelty to pigs.

And it’s not just China.  Pigs in North America are treated almost as badly.  A lady where I live was actually jailed and prosecuted for having given water to a truckload of thirsty, starving, terrified pigs on the way to the slaughterhouse.

In North America, animals destined for slaughter are packed together and then dosed with heavy antibiotics to combat communicable diseases from over-crowding and mistreatment.  These same antibiotics then enter our food chain, causing us ever growing viral resistance.

When the SARS epidemic erupted in South China 17 years ago, the Chinese communist party tried to hush up the crisis, allowing infected people to travel to North America and Europe.

This time, China did the right thing by jumping hard on the epidemic: shutting down all air, sea and land communications with the greater Wuhan region and 14 smaller cities –  right in the middle of China’s huge new year celebrations when over 400 million people return to their homes.  The epidemic could not have come at a worse time.

Some Wuhan residents have already flown to other parts of Asia and North America.  Simply checking incoming air travellers for fever will not prevent the virus from spreading or identify passengers who have contracted and are developing the illness.

A better solution would be to quarantine all people arriving from Central China and even bar airlines coming from there until we better understand the new virus.  We stop so-called ‘terrorists’ and Muslims from flying to our shores.  Why not potentially infective people?

China must also be pressed to cease its dangerous, inhumane trade in exotic wild animals and urged to treat all animals with humanity and care.  China is a major cause of species loss.  Aside from a few brave animal rights groups, there is very little consciousness of our animal neighbors in China nor understanding that animals are sentient beings with emotions similar to those of humans.  The Chinese are one of the most intelligent people on earth.  Yet when it comes to animals, all they see is walking food.

As I’ve seen on my travels across China, it has made great strides in public sanitation and cleanliness as well as planting trees.  Now, it’s time to stop abusing animals or the plagues will keep coming.

Be seeing you

Spanish Flu outbreak 1918

 

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Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Mad Policies for a Mad World | TomDispatch

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2020

I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.

http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176654/tomgram%3A_danny_sjursen%2C_mad_policies_for_a_mad_world_/

Posted by Danny Sjursen

What’s the value of an American life in the age of Donald Trump? If you were judging by the death of Nawres Hamid, an Iraqi-American contractor killed in late December after an American base in Iraq was mortared by a Shiite militia believed to have ties to Iran, the answer would be obvious: enough to risk war. After all, the president cited Hamid’s death in going after that militia and then drone-assassinating Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani. In response to the mortar attack, U.S. air strikes in Iraq and Syria killed at least 25 Iraqi militia fighters and then, as January began, that drone strike near Baghdad International Airport took out a figure who was often considered the number-two man in Iran, as well as its possible future leader. In addition, it killed an Iraqi militia commander and eight other people.

So you might say that the president considers any American death under such circumstances worth not just 35 Iraqis and Iranians, but the possibility of adding in a significant way to America’s forever wars (that he’s long denounced). Of course, you would have to reach a different conclusion if you considered the deaths in early January of an American soldier and two American contractors at an airport in Kenya after an attack by the Somali terror group al-Shabaab. In that case, there was no obvious response at all, not even a comment from the president. And the same would be true of the two dead and two wounded U.S. soldiers whose vehicle recently ran over a roadside bomb in southern Afghanistan (deaths immediately claimed by the Taliban). Again, neither a comment nor a response from you-know-who.

In other words, as TomDispatch regular and retired U.S. Army Major Danny Sjursen points out today, who can be surprised that, in the age of Trump, this country’s forever wars are also a chaos machine? If you’re looking at the non-American dead, of course, that’s been so since the beginning. After all, the U.S. military has taken out one wedding after another across the Greater Middle East since it invaded Afghanistan in 2001 and it’s counted for nothing, mattered not at all. And the slaughter of civilians never ends. Only recently, for instance, in an attack in Afghanistan that killed a Taliban commander and some of the militants under his command, U.S. air strikes also reportedly killed at least 60 civilians, including women and children. And in the Trump era, although we know that civilian casualties have been rising in Washington’s ever-spreading war zones, a penumbra of secrecy has fallen over such deaths. American air strikes against al-Shabaab in Somalia, for instance, rose dramatically in 2019, but we have almost no idea how many civilians died in the process. (Rest assured that they did, though.)

Now, take a moment, with Sjursen, to consider just what it’s meant for a “true stable genius” to inherit such an unstable killing machine. Tom

The American Chaos Machine
U.S. Foreign Policy Goes Off the Rails
By Danny Sjursen

In March 1906, on the heels of the U.S. Army’s massacre of some 1,000 men, women, and children in the crater of a volcano in the American-occupied Philippines, humorist Mark Twain took his criticism public. A long-time anti-imperialist, he flippantly suggested that Old Glory should be redesigned “with the white stripes painted black and the stars replaced by the skull and cross-bones.”

I got to thinking about that recently, five years after I became an antiwar dissenter (while still a major in the U.S. Army), and in the wake of another near-war, this time with Iran. I was struck yet again by the way every single U.S. military intervention in the Greater Middle East since 9/11 has backfired in wildly counterproductive ways, destabilizing a vast expanse of the planet stretching from West Africa to South Asia.

Chaos, it seems, is now Washington’s stock-in-trade. Perhaps, then, it’s time to resurrect Twain’s comment — only today maybe those stars on our flag should be replaced with the universal symbol for chaos.

After all, our present administration, however unhinged, hardly launched this madness. President Trump’s rash, risky, and repugnant decision to assassinate Iranian Major General Qassem Suleimani on the sovereign soil of Iraq was only the latest version of what has proven to be a pervasive state of affairs. Still, that and Trump’s other recent escalations in the region do illustrate an American chaos machine that’s gone off the rails. And the very manner — I’m loathe to call it a “process” — by which it’s happened just demonstrates the way this president has taken American chaos to its dark but logical conclusion.

The Goldilocks Method

Any military officer worth his salt knows full well the importance of understanding the basic psychology of your commander. President George W. Bush liked to call himself “the decider,” an apt term for any commander. Senior leaders don’t, as a rule, actually do that much work in the traditional sense. Rather, they hobnob with superiors, buck up unit morale, evaluate and mentor subordinates, and above all make key decisions. It’s the operations staff officers who analyze problems, present options, and do the detailed planning once the boss blesses or signs off on a particular course of action.

Though they may toil thanklessly in the shadows, however, those staffers possess immense power to potentially circumscribe the range of available options and so influence the future mission. In other words, to be a deft operations officer, you need to know your commander’s mind, be able translate his sparse guidance, and frame his eventual choice in such a manner that the boss leaves a “decision briefing” convinced the plan was his own. Believe me, this is the actual language military lifers use to describe the tortured process of decision-making.

In 2009, as a young captain, fresh out of Baghdad, Iraq, I spent two unfulfilling, if instructive, years enmeshed in exactly this sort of planning system. As a battalion-level planner, then assistant, and finally a primary operations officer, I observed this cycle countless times. So allow me to take you “under the hood” for some inside baseball. I — and just about every new staff officer — was taught to always provide the boss with three plans, but to suss out ahead of time which one he’d choose (and, above all, which one you wanted him to choose).

Confident in your ability to frame his choices persuasively, you’d often even direct your staffers to begin writing up the full operations order before the boss’s briefing took place. The key to success was what some labeled the Goldilocks method. You’d always present your commander with a too-cautious option, a too-risky option, and a “just-right” course of action. It nearly always worked.

I did this under the command of two very different lieutenant colonels. The first was rational, ethical, empathetic, and tactically competent. He made mission planning easy on his staff. He knew the game as well as we did and only pretended to be fooled. He built relationships with his senior operations officers over the course of months, thereby revealing his preferred methods, tactical predilections, and even personal learning style. Then he’d give just enough initial guidance — far more than most commanders — to set his staff going in a reasonably focused fashion.

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Adam Schiff’s Very Scary Warmongering Speech – Antiwar.com Original

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2020

The same goes for arguments that it’s actually NATO’s aggressive expansion to the east that has led to a needless buildup of tensions, not Russia’s drive to the west. Recent examples include an article in the National Interest arguing that NATO has “empowered some of the most historically anti-Russian elements in that region – Ukrainian Banderites [i.e. followers of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera], Polish nationalists, Balkan Islamists” – elements that, not unreasonably, have sparked Russia’s worst fears – or one in the Nation stating that NATO’s drang nach osten is “the primary cause for the new and very dangerous Cold War.”

Articles like those are verboten as well because they go counter to the new line that Russia is entirely to blame.

https://original.antiwar.com/daniel_lazare/2020/01/23/adam-schiffs-very-scary-warmongering-speech/

by

All the usual suspects are praising Adam Schiff’s marathon two-and-a-half-hour Senate speech on Wednesday to the skies. Neocon columnist Jennifer Rubin calls it “a grand slam” in the Washington Post. Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin describes it as “dazzling” on CNN. New York Times columnist Gail Collins says it was “a great job” and that Schiff is “a rock star” for pulling it off.

But in fact it was the opposite – a fear-mongering, sword-rattling harangue that will not only raise tensions with Russia for no good reason, but sends a chilling message to dissidents at home that if they deviate from Russiagate orthodoxy by one iota, they’ll be driven from the fold.

What is that orthodoxy? It’s that Russia invaded poor innocent Ukraine in 2014, that it interfered in the US presidential election in 2016 in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and propel Donald Trump into the White House, and that it’s now trying to smear Joe Biden merely because he had allowed his son to take a high-paying job with a notorious Ukrainian oligarch at a time when he was supposedly heading up the Ukrainian anti-corruption effort.

As Schiff put it with regard to Donald Trump’s famous July 25 phone call urging Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look into Biden’s activities:

“This investigation was related to a debunked conspiracy theory alleging that Ukraine not Russia interfered in the 2016 presidential election. This narrative propagated by the Russian intelligence services contends that Ukraine sought to help Hillary Clinton and harm then-candidate Trump…. This tale is also patently false and, remarkably, it is precisely the inverse of what the US intelligence community’s unanimous assessment was that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in sweeping and systemic fashion in order to hurt Hillary Clinton and help Donald Trump.”

So even though the Financial Times reported during the 2016 election campaign that the threat of a Trump victory was spurring “Kiev’s wider political leadership to do something they have never attempted before: intervene, however indirectly, in a US election,” articles like that are now down the memory hole because Schiff says they’re Russian propaganda that US intelligence agencies have determined to be false.

The same goes for arguments that it’s actually NATO’s aggressive expansion to the east that has led to a needless buildup of tensions, not Russia’s drive to the west. Recent examples include an article in the National Interest arguing that NATO has “empowered some of the most historically anti-Russian elements in that region – Ukrainian Banderites [i.e. followers of Nazi collaborator Stepan Bandera], Polish nationalists, Balkan Islamists” – elements that, not unreasonably, have sparked Russia’s worst fears – or one in the Nation stating that NATO’s drang nach osten is “the primary cause for the new and very dangerous Cold War.”

Articles like those are verboten as well because they go counter to the new line that Russia is entirely to blame. Declared Schiff:

“Russia is not a threat … to Eastern Europe alone. Ukraine has become the de facto proving ground for just the types of hybrid warfare that the twenty-first century will become defined by: cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, efforts to undermine the legitimacy of state institutions, whether that is voting systems or financial markets. The Kremlin showed boldly in 2016 that with the malign skills it honed in Ukraine, they would not stay in Ukraine. Instead, Russia employed them here to attack our institutions, and they will do so again.”

As for Biden, a New York Times editorial said about his son’s unfortunate new job back in 2015:

“Sadly, the credibility of Mr. Biden’s [anti-corruption] message may be undermined by the association of his son with a Ukrainian natural-gas company, Burisma Holdings, which is owned by a former government official suspected of corrupt practices…. Burisma’s owner, Mykola Zlochevsky, has been under investigation in Britain and in Ukraine. It should be plain to Hunter Biden that any connection with a Ukrainian oligarch damages his father’s efforts to help Ukraine. This is not a board he should be sitting on.”

We must all put such sentiments behind us now Russia is seeking to “weaponize” such information, according to Schiff, and deploy it “against Mr. Biden just like it did against Hillary Clinton in 2016 when Russia hacked and released emails from her presidential campaign.” If Russia wants to weaponize it, then it’s best for the rest of us not to breathe a word of it lest people think we’ve been weaponized as well.

Bottom line: we must impeach Trump, according to Schiff’s epic presentation, not only because he’s overstepped his proper constitutional bounds, but because he’s part of a grand Russian conspiracy to spread disinformation, undercut US security, undermine faith in US intelligence agencies, and “remake the map of Europe by dent of military force.” In order to counter this all-encompassing threat, it is our patriotic duty to do the opposite by believing the CIA and redoubling US defense. If anyone tells us that Biden was guilty of a flagrant conflict of interest, we must stop up our ears because that’s what Moscow wants us to think. If anyone says that the entire Russian-interference narrative is just a silly conspiracy theory based on a paucity of facts and an abundance of paranoid speculation, we must do likely because it’s just the Kremlin trying to worm its way into our minds.

When in doubt, just remember to bleat: America good, Russia baa-aa-aad.

But while it would be nice to dismiss this as a joke, it’s not. Schiff’s emergence as leader of the Democratic impeachment drive means that the party is re-grouping along the most retrograde Cold War lines. As reckless and appalling as Trump’s behavior is in the Persian Gulf, the emerging Democratic worldview is shaping up as no less extreme. Because it sees Russia as mounting a multi-pronged offensive, the clear implication is that the US must respond in kind. This means more troops deployments, more forces mobilized to counter Russian threats from Venezuela to the Middle East, more TV talking heads going on and on about this or that Kremlin conspiracy, and more labelling of people like Tulsi Gabbard and Jill Stein as Russian assets.

Remember, this is the Los Angeles neocon who backed the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, and Saudi Arabia’s unprovoked war against Yemen, an assault that, since March 2015, has cost 100,000 lives and brought half the country to the brink of starvation. He supported Obama’s war in Libya and called for the establishment of a no-fly zone in Syria and relies on arms manufacturers and military contractors for major financial support.

But while Bernie supporters may have thought that Democrats were edging away from such views, they’re plainly in the wrong. Schiff’s new-found prominence shows that the neocons are back in the saddle. Impeachment advocates should be careful of what they wish for because the anti-Trump forces are turning out to be no less dangerous than those helping him to remain.

Be seeing you

NATO

 

 

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On MLK Day 2020: The Mythmaking Continued…on Steroids – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2020

Of all the men in America, Hoover was the one least likely to be tolerant of Reverend King’s sexual content. In addition to being anti-Negro, Hoover considered himself to be a devout Christian. Apparently he was a celibate and he may have been a latent homosexual. So a black reverend troublemaker receiving the Nobel Peace Prize while practicing adultry . . . this was enough to drive Hoover up the wall!

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/phillip-f-nelson/mlk-day-2020-the-mythmaking-continues-on-steroids-2/

By

LBJ: Master of Deceit

Civil Rights Leaders Memorialize Martin Luther King’s Birthday Last Year

Given the known fact that many current-day leaders of the civil rights campaign harbor doubts (while some have no doubts as to the proven fallacies) about the “official” story, they must have conflicted thoughts as to their participation in the twice-annual memorials to his life and legendary accomplishments. Does the desire to honor his legacy at the site where he was killed connote an implicit acceptance of the mythology about how he became a martyr? Other newspapers from across the country and around the world will also deal with this “disconnect” one way or another.

Deconstructing the Official Mythology: Starting With the Original Sources

It is safe to say that the vast majority will choose the easy course: to repeat the “same old” story originally concocted by the novelist William Bradford Huie in his three articles published in Look magazine in 1968-69 and his 1970 book He Slew the Dreamer (though originally “He” was supposed to be “They”, a canard he used to solicit the cooperation of the subject of his book: the accused assassin James Earl Ray).

But Huie’s story was clearly commissioned by the FBI, in advance, as a means to convince an entire nation that Ray was the assassin, in the process casting him just as the assassin’s profile described him: “An uneducated, poor, southern White man, who hated Blacks and Martin Luther King especially; who stalked Dr. King for weeks before murdering him in Memphis.” Huie, following Hoover’s directive, succeeded in creating this meme despite the fact that, according to many credible people including Dr. King’s own family and several associates, Ray was not a racist, nor did he hate or stalk King. Even the HSCA found that Ray was not a racist, one of the only accomplishments of that corrupted “investigation.”

In my book Who Really Killed Martin Luther King Jr. — The Case Against Lyndon B. Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover, I have proven that Huie’s book (used by the FBI, DOJ and the HSCA to support their faux “investigations”) is filled with brazen lies, half-truths and concocted “events” that never happened. It is the sum total of this irrefutable evidence that proves Huie’s mission was defined for him by the men (Hoover, Tolson, DeLoach and Sullivan) and entity (FBI) from whom he obviously got his orders.

There is no other realistic and plausible explanation for why Huie did what he did: What else could possibly explain why he went out of his way to concoct a story that was built on a foundation of now-provable lies? (thanks to the internet, which makes once extremely difficult access to old newspapers and previously-classified FBI and HSCA documents now readily accessible).

And after Huie’s story was published in book form in 1970, he still wasn’t done. In 1977, after the Church Committee’s report came out in 1975-76 chronicling the FBI’s outrageous harassment of Dr. King for decades before his assassination — when many people, especially Blacks, began suspecting a continuing FBI role in his final “neutralization” — Huie republished the book under a new title: Did the FBI Kill Martin Luther King? The chapters were not changed, but he added a new introduction and epilogue.

Between the original and later editions of Huie’s book, two other FBI-commissioned books, recycling and adding to his lies, were published (Gerold Frank’s An American Death . . ., and George McMillan’s The Making of an Assassin . . . ), all of which became the foundation for — and the “bibles” quoted by the HSCA and the national media — the official version of what has been exposed as another “great” American Myth.

Since then, in practically every decade, new offerings have joined those fictional accounts, including those by Gerald Posner, Hamilton Sides, Pate McMichael, Larry Hancock and Stuart Wexler, (and numerous others of lesser note). Each of them add more fodder to the now-severely addled official story that almost no one believes, but many accept merely because it is so often repeated — and relentlessly pushed by the MSM — as per the aphorism by Joseph Goebbels about lies eventually becoming “truths.”

MLK to his “Friend” (From the Grave): Et tu, Bradford? Read the rest of this entry »

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Impeachment Week: It’s OK to be Bored; Not OK to be White – Taki’s Magazine – Taki’s Magazine

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2020

Last week, 20-foot-tall letters appeared on the side of a barn in Southport, England, spelling out the phrase: “IT’S OK TO BE WHITE.” British papers went on red alert, denouncing the “[r]acist and anti-ethnic graffiti” that “[s]hocked” and “appalled” residents.

https://www.takimag.com/article/impeachment-week-it-ok-to-be-bored-not-ok-to-be-white/

Ann Coulter

It’s weeks like this that make me wish I had a job and didn’t have to stay home watching TV. With the impeachment nonsense dragging into its 56th month, I have some random observations, only a few of which have anything to do with impeachment.

1) As tempting as it must be for Republican senators to make a headlong rush to the TV cameras at the conclusion of the day’s festivities, they would be well advised to say this, and only this, each night:

Here are the vital issues the United States Congress did NOT address today:

— Repairing our highways, bridges and border with a major infrastructure bill.

— Ensuring that all Americans can get jobs by cutting off the deluge of cheap foreign labor.

— Providing the public with quality services by not inviting the rest of the world to come partake of government benefits meant for Americans.

— Fixing the disaster of Obamacare, so that all Americans have access to quality health care (by activating the same mechanisms that give them quality food, housing and iPhones: the free market, contract law and occasional government subsidies).

— Passing a bill to defund all the pointless, expensive military deployments around the globe, so we can FINALLY address the hellfires in our own hemisphere.

— Ending the opioid crisis by declaring war on Mexican drug cartels and building a wall.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell should attach electrodes to the testicles of every Republican and blast him the moment he (OR SHE!) diverges from the script…

2) The person I really feel sorry for is Nancy Pelosi. I assume she’s weeping uncontrollably as she watches her chances of holding the speakership dwindle every time Jerry Nadler waddles to the mic.

True, you “go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want,” as Donald Rumsfeld said, but surely there are more telegenic Democrats than Nadler and Adam Schiff.

3) Every day since forever, The New York Times has run a column about how white people are getting on African Americans’ last nerve.

On Monday of this week, it was “How Much Racism Do You Face Every Day?”

Average for black teenager: 5x a day.

Example: Hearing about a family member who experiences something they described as racial discrimination.

And here’s one from Tuesday, titled: “How to Convince a White Realtor You’re Middle Class; Black people expend daily energy to counteract racial stereotypes and get fair treatment.”

The examples included a white real estate agent asking a slatternly attired black woman if she could afford a specific house, and a black woman claiming she was required to sign a “no party” pledge before checking into a Portland, Oregon, Marriott.

Also since forever, whites have been trying not to offend. Thus, on the same day as the racial stereotypes column, the Times ran an article about white Iowa voters terrified of picking a Democratic nominee whom black people won’t like.

It’s useless. No matter how hard they try, whites just can’t stop offending black people with their damned “microaggressions.”…

4) Last week, 20-foot-tall letters appeared on the side of a barn in Southport, England, spelling out the phrase: “IT’S OK TO BE WHITE.” British papers went on red alert, denouncing the “[r]acist and anti-ethnic graffiti” that “[s]hocked” and “appalled” residents.

We understand and deeply apologize for such monstrous racism. Would any of these variants pass legal muster?

— It might be acceptable to be white, but we’re not sure, we’ll get back to you.

— While it is certainly never OK to be white, we hope you will accept our deepest apology.

— Whiteness is not for everybody, but to say it’s ‘OK’ to be white is not who we are.

If none of these are acceptable, please rest assured, we don’t mean to offend. Apologies all around! We’re all staying late at the office to figure this out. Food is being sent in as we speak …

At least we won’t have to watch impeachment news.

Be seeing you

What exactly is a microaggression? - Vox

 

 

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Blame Leviathan, Not Us – LewRockwell

Posted by M. C. on January 24, 2020

I don’t know what it is with the TSA and hair, but lengthy locks fascinate these deviants as much as they do free-lance ones. The TSA regularly harasses female passengers by combing through their tresses; Tara’s magnificent plaits must have sounded a siren’s song to them. And so the TSA’s thuggette “pulled them behind my shoulders, laughed & said ‘giddyup!’ as she snapped my braids like reins.”

That’s deeply offensive, as the TSA’s gate-rape always is.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/01/becky-akers/blame-leviathan-not-us/

By

Finally! The Twitterverse is actually chiding a racist who happens to be black!

Eric Adams is not only a black supremacist but a politician, too—and a particularly pointless one at that (pardon the redundancy): he’s president of the Borough of Brooklyn in New York City. Yes, that would be the same City already cursed with more “public servants” than rats per square mile. So what does the “borough president”—and there are five of ‘em, one each for Manhattan, Queens, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Staten Island—find to do in that toxic stew? Not much, as even Pravda—er, the New York Daily News acknowledged: “Useless wastes,” it complained in 2009. “Borough presidents don’t do much except spend tax money.”

And how! Eleven years ago, the Big Apple’s subjects were paying these parasitic “presidents” $150,000 annually while also “provid[ing] them with a car and driver”—both “car” and “driver” should be plural— as well as staffs: “assistants to the president” who earn[ed] between $35,000 and $136,420” in 2014; “administrative managers” at anywhere from $60,000 to $124,353 per year; and “administrative staff analysts” ($49,492 to $109,664). I shudder at how the wages for these sinecures must have escalated over the last decade.

All this for leeches who “were stripped of most of their authority years ago, but whose positions remain nonetheless” in the Marxist insanity that is New York’s government. Still, I suppose pampered but powerless politicians are preferable to pampered but powerful ones.

At any rate, ol’ Eric is Amerika’s answer to Megs and Prince Harry: a worthless, utterly indulged freeloader who ought to be on his knees, thanking the taxpayers who foot his bills.

Instead, he publicly castigates them. On “Monday at the National Action Networks’ MLK Day celebration in Harlem,” he denounced white newcomers to New York City because they “‘are not only high-jacking your [i.e., his audience’s] apartments and displacing your living arrangements, … they displace your conversations and said that things that are important to you are no longer important and they decide what’s important and what’s not important.”

Do I detect a contender here with Pelosi for the title of “Most Inarticulate Tyrant”?

But when he continued, he was clear enough that the Daily News admitted, “Adams’s remarks were striking for his all but explicitly racial tone.” Nope, he was beyond explicit: “‘Go back to Iowa! You go back to Ohio! New York City belongs to the people that [were] here and made New York City what it is,’ Adams, an ex-cop, said to applause. ‘I know I’m a New Yorker. I protected [sic for ‘without even the pretence of a warrant, I stopped and frisked other black men in’] this city. I have a right to put my voice in how this city is run.’”

Oh, the megalomania of Our Rulers! Since when does beating people senseless give cops “a right to put my voice in how a city is run”? And why should a city be “run”? Why can’t residents manage their own lives under the gentle but efficacious “invisible hand” of voluntary association and transactions?

Thank Heaven this vainglorious, prodigal bigot was “[c]alled out for the comments on Twitter…” “[M]any on social media said that his remarks were unnecessarily divisive and uncomfortably close to xenophobic diatribes aimed at new immigrants.” Whoa! For once, Progressives aren’t excusing hate-speech despite the speaker’s black identity and their open season on whites. Do you suppose Hell has frozen over, too?

“‘I guess we should look to relocate the Statue of Liberty,’ read one typical response. ‘Don’t want to give anyone the impression we want anymore [sic] out of towners. Good way to honor the spirit of Martin Luther King.’ … Some questioned whether Iowa was ‘the new dog whistle for white people,’ while others pointed out that New York has long prided itself on being an international city that welcomes newcomers from all over.”

Yet even as the media reports such scoldings, it covers for Eric by interpreting his tirade as a condemnation of “gentrification.” So do his accomplices in official crime: “Mayor de Blasio’s office gave muted criticism of the beep’s remarks. ‘The mayor doesn’t agree with how it was said, but the borough president voiced a very real frustration,” spokeswoman Freddi Goldstein said in a statement. ‘We need to improve affordability in this city to ensure New Yorkers can stay in the city they love…”

That’s so rich it’s nauseating. The reason “affordability” ain’t is the City’s stratospheric taxes on real estate: “The property tax is New York City’s largest source of revenue. It is projected to generate $24 billion in fiscal year 2017, or 44 percent of all City tax revenues and about twice as much as the second largest source, the local personal income tax.”

Indeed. A single building—the Trump Plaza, say, on Manhattan’s posh Upper East Side, with 175 apartments— pays a jaw-dropping $3,857,237 in taxes every year. That means each apartment coughs up an average of $22,041 per annum in addition to a mortgage and its portion of shared expenses (salaries for the doormen and porters, electricity to light the halls, etc.) Yet New York’s political greedballs routinely vilify residents for craving decent housing and the developers and landlords supplying it as the cause of the City’s extortionate prices.

Do inordinate taxes on co-ops, condos, and rentals confine Adams’ audience to lower-priced, dilapidated neighborhoods? Yep. Demagogues can blame white New Yorkers and their alleged racism for hiking rents all they like, but the true culprit is government.

Ditto for a contretemps last week at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport, when Tara Houska, a “Native American traveler” with “her hair in long braids,” suffered an assault from the Thieves and Sexual Assailants. Ms. Houska is “an attorney and indigenous rights activist”—that’s “American Indian racist” in plain English—and thus more sophisticated and glib than ex-cop Adams; ergo, her charging Whitey with the TSA’s depravity has earned plaudits rather than reprimands.

It seems when Tara was “Going through @TSA … the agent said she needed to pat down my braids.”

I don’t know what it is with the TSA and hair, but lengthy locks fascinate these deviants as much as they do free-lance ones. The TSA regularly harasses female passengers by combing through their tresses; Tara’s magnificent plaits must have sounded a siren’s song to them. And so the TSA’s thuggette “pulled them behind my shoulders, laughed & said ‘giddyup!’ as she snapped my braids like reins.”

That’s deeply offensive, as the TSA’s gate-rape always is. But Tara’s reaction was equally objectionable. Like many black women who’ve endured this outrage, she imputes it not to the TSA’s systemic evil but to the “blonde” groper’s bias (“This kind of racism is not something that is new to our people,” Houska [said]…“This is just one small incident but it’s reflective of a larger culture”). “My hair is part of my spirit,” she huffed. “I am a Native woman. I am angry, humiliated. Your ‘fun’ hurt.”

Pssst, Tara: most women, Native or not, prize their hair, nor do they appreciate strangers’ rummaging through it. You are neither special nor alone in that sentiment.

But Tara’s not a smug “activist” for nothing. She decreed this a “#TeachingMoment” in which she can lecture us—as if we rather than the TSA abused her (thank me, dear reader, for mercifully condensing her harangue): “All these little microaggressions add up, and we should be treating each other with respect across the board.” Worse, like most of the TSA’s prey, she was waaaaay too willing to grant the agency’s right to search her in direct violation of the Fourth Amendment; Tara’s quarrel—a losing one—lies with how the TSA’s degenerates chose to conduct that search: “It’s TSA and so it’s invasive no matter what — it’s their job to sometimes pat you down and it’s part of safety and I get that,… That said, it was dehumanizing and just really disrespectful. It was kind of humiliating, to be honest, as a person but also as an indigenous person.”

Absolutely it was. But put the blame squarely where it belongs: on the anti-Constitutional TSA. This white girl has tired of Leviathan’s atrocities being laid at her door.

Be seeing you

TSA

The Alternative to “Facial” Recognition

Careful, he might be carrying!

 

 

 

 

 

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