GAITHER STEWART—Do rabid protesters-hooligans undermine their own movements by devastating shops and burning cars? Or do undercover agents do the dirty work to sully the name of the protest movement? For secret services of the world know how to use the “strategy of tension” and false flag operations: secret agents burn ten cars and blame it on protesters and then crack down on the whole movement. Secret agents were at work in Berlin in 1933: “Burn the Reichstag in Berlin, blame it on a Communist and establish the Nazi dictatorship.”
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The ISIS attack: Reporting the news from within the exceptionalist Bubble
PATRICE GREANVILLE—The clamor about four Americans recently killed in Syria reeks of infantile petulance: what do you expect when you send soldiers into battle zones? Some professions have built-in risks. Ask any firefighter. Yet this response—used, as noted elsewhere, to make Trump walk back his promise to get the US troops out of Syria—is only too typical of American discourse. The ugly fact is that for a variety of reasons, none too healthy or honorable, the American people have been conditioned to believe in fighting endless wars with practically no casualties, or a ratio of losses so absurdly small when compared to the enemy’s that every casualty is mourned indignantly, as if the targets of American meddling had no right to inflict any punishment on our legions.
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War Whores Scramble To Say Syria Attack Means Troops Must Remain (Annotated)
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE—MSNBC’s deranged intelligence analyst Malcolm Nance topped everyone as usual with a babbling nonsensical post about how US troops were killed in Manbij because there were no US troops in Manbij, proving that Assad and Putin may have allowed the attack to happen, which proves Trump is a Russian asset.
“The moment Russia and Assad took over patrolling Manbij on Trump’s go ahead we get hit with suicide bombers for the first time. It’s possible Russia/Assad let the attack happen. Trump’s treachery on this matter now kills our special operators. #RussianAsset,” Nance tweeted between huffs of paint thinner.
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Media vermin never sleep: Cheap jokes as vectors for a nuclear Armageddon
PATRICE GREANVILLE—We know by now that faux rebel satirists like Colbert are really smooth and stealth warmongering disinformers, having perfected the craft of seamlessly injecting imperial messages into their streams of “harmless” jokes. I don’t find that funny at all. Further, strictly on comedic terms, Colbert does not deserve the pantheon because his routine is not based on truth, the essence of which allows comedy to acquire genuine greatness.
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Guardian Reports More “Good News”, Kids are Dying in Venezuela
DAVID W. PEAR—The Lima Group’s members are Argentina, Brazil, Canada (?), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay and Peru. Most of the members of the Lima Group are disqualified from judging anybody else, because of their own miserable records on democracy and human rights. Most of the members of the group are rightwing governments. Leftwing governments were left out purposely, except by accident. Canada should not even be a member. The Lima Group is for the most part mafia states, and they are doing the enforcement work for their USA godfather.
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Markos Moulitsas and the Daily Cult: the Nadir of Journalism; the Death of Activism
TEODROSE FIKRE—The Daily Kos quickly became the Drudge Report of the left, claiming to receive over 2.5 million unique visitors a day, it is one of the most powerful political blogs in the world. In reality, Moulitsas was a rank opportunist who saw an opening to the be Rush Limbaugh of the left.
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Covert British Military-Smear Machine Moving into US
MARK AMES- MAX BLUMENTHAL— The Smith Richardson Foundation has funded a who’s who of the neoconservative movement, from hyper-militaristic think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute to the Institute for the Study of War. “To say the [Smith Richardson] foundation was involved at every level in the lobbying for and crafting of the so-called global war on terror after 9/11 would be an understatement,” wrote journalist Kelley Vlahos.
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For What It’s Worth: The Yellow Vests and the Left
JIM KAVANAGH—That ideological formation sets the American working class up for capture by the two proudly capitalist parties—today, by Trumpian right-wing faux populism through which working-class anger is eaten by the reactionary Republican party; yesterday and tomorrow, by kindler, gentler, “we’re capitalist and that’s just the way it is” Clintonism, through which working-class anger is euthanized by the Democratic party.
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What happens when the Yellow Vests meet European Debt Crisis II?
RAMIN MAZAHERI—To say that I am wrong about why the European Debt Crisis will not start soon – given the withdrawal of high finance-pampering – is to say that capitalism is not “capitalism” but that it is a centrally-planned, regulated, protective, riches-limiting socialism instead; is to say that high-finance has found morality and wants to make money honestly; is to say that international neoliberal capitalists have rediscovered fraternal patriotism.
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Nightmares of Neoliberalism— Fear of popular rule animates our society and politics
JASON HIRTHLER—Elite capital is itself a minority. And this is the minority that Democrats truly serve; the rest are largely pacified with red-tape half-measures and rhetorical sops. Ethnic minorities must be protected against institutional and individual racism. Transgender minorities must be protected against myopic binary sexism. Gays must be protected against homophobia and legal discriminations. And corporate elites must be protected against the poor. It is this last axiom that sours the profile of Democrats. This is unlikely to change, for as corporate hero Bill Clinton once limned when describing how left-leaning voters would, in the final analysis, vote Democrat, “They have nowhere else to go.”
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Moses Farrow had the courage to defend Woody Allen at the peak of the #metoo witchhunt
MOSES FARROW—It was important to my mother to project to the world a picture of a happy blended household of both biological and adopted children, but this was far from the truth. I’m sure my mother had good intentions in adopting children with disabilities from the direst of circumstances, but the reality inside our walls was very different. It pains me to recall instances in which I witnessed siblings, some blind or physically disabled, dragged down a flight of stairs to be thrown into a bedroom or a closet, then having the door locked from the outside. She even shut my brother Thaddeus, paraplegic from polio, in an outdoor shed overnight as punishment for a minor transgression.
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