Suicide by Stupidity

SUBHEAD: The United States and its news media look like they want this country to commit suicide.

By James Kunstler on 7 July 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/suicide-by-stupidity/)


Image above: In 2012 World Wrestling Federation star Hulk Hogan considered running for President. From (http://bleacherreport.com/articles/1399118-election-2012-hulk-hogan-for-president-it-almost-happened).

But if Mr. Trump agrees to work with Mr. Putin despite a list of Russian transgressions beginning with the annexation of Crimea and ending with its interference in the 2016 presidential election, he will also look weak while Mr. Putin can claim that he reconstructed the relationship.

—The New York Times

America wakes up to astonishing bullshit from its so-called Newspaper of Record in this lead front-page propaganda dump du jour. Granted, American education has succeeded in destroying the critical faculties of at least three generations so that the public drowns in a soup of unreality every day. In the news business now, as in the national life generally, anything goes and nothing matters.

One has to wonder, though, about the editors who serve up this baloney. Are they mere servelings of the Rand Corporation, Raytheon, and other parties with an interest in the war business, or can they possibly believe their own extrusions of fabricated agit-prop?

For instance, the imputed Russian “annexation of Crimea,” as if the place was some kind of nostalgic, sore-beset Ruritania of independent princes, colorful peasants, and earnest postal clerks cruelly enslaved by bloodthirsty Cossacks. No, Crimea had been officially a province of Russia since exactly 1783 — which was, by the way, the same year that the American Revolution officially ended via the Treaty of Paris.

After the Russian Revolution (1917) the Crimean peninsula became an autonomous province of the Soviet Union, meaning it remained a part of what was then Russia. In 1954, Nikita Khrushchev turned the administrative duties over to the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, which was then also a province of the greater USSR, i.e. Russia.

Through the entire modern era, Crimea has been the site of the USSR’s, and now Russia’s, only warm-water naval bases. Ask the average American college student why that is, and you will surely receive a blank stare.

Crimea is a peninsula on the Black Sea, which connects to the Mediterranean Sea. Hence Crimea’s strategic value. For a few short years in the 21^st century, following the breakup of the USSR, the now-independent Ukraine had possession of Crimea and essentially rented the existing naval bases to Russia.

That provided a much needed revenue stream for the struggling country, which was also utterly dependent on imported Russian natural gas supplies, which Ukraine had to pay for.

When the elected president of Ukraine, Victor Yanukovych, was overthrown in 2014, with the help of the US State Department and CIA, Russia was obliged to secure its naval bases in Crimea — where the overwhelming majority of citizens were culturally and linguistically Russian anyway.

A referendum ratified the transfer of Crimea back to Russia. Apart from these procedural details, it must be obvious that Russia would never have ceded its strategic naval bases on the Black Sea to Ukraine, especially when that beleaguered country was being manipulated by the USA and NATO into becoming an adversarial presence on Russia’s border.

At the same time, the US and NATO have been running war games near Russia’s border in the Baltic region and American soldiers have been deployed into Lithuania. What war are they preparing for exactly? What is supposedly at issue (besides America’s apparent lust for war)?

That last question applies equally to the incessantly repeated trope that Russia interfered in the 2016 US election. What is supposedly at issue? The New York Times has been making this empty allegation for a year now, without ever specifying exactly how Russia might have “interfered.”

In the process, the newspaper has squandered its credibility on what looks exactly like a witch hunt — a campaign against dark and mysterious supernatural forces. It is doing great harm to an already badly-educated, misinformed, economically distressed, drug-addled American public. It also looks like plain old war-mongering.

Coverage of the Trump-Putin meeting during the G-20 conference this week is being played like a World Wrestling Federation championship bout. Which president is weak or strong? Which one will be a loser of a winner?

This is no way to cover geopolitical relations. The United States and its news media look like they want this country to commit suicide by stupidity.

.

Connecting the dots - Trump to Brexit

SUBHEAD: How our democracy was hijacked in America and Britain by friends of Donald Trump.

By  Carole Cadwalladr on 7 May 2017 for the Guardian -
(https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the-great-british-brexit-robbery-hijacked-democracy)


Image above: Diagram of links between Trump, Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica and Aggregate IQ, Nigel Farage and Brexit. Click to embiggen. From original article.

A shadowy global operation involving big data, billionaire friends of Trump and the disparate forces of the Brexit campaign influenced the result of the EU referendum. As Britain heads to the polls again, is its electoral process still fit for purpose?

In June 2013, a young American postgraduate called Sophie was passing through London when she was called up by the boss of a firm where she’d previously interned. The company, SCL Elections, went on to be bought by Robert Mercer, a secretive hedge fund billionaire, renamed Cambridge Analytica, and achieved a certain notoriety as the data analytics firm that played a role in both Trump and Brexit campaigns. But all of this was still to come.

London in 2013 was still basking in the afterglow of the Olympics. Britain had not yet Brexited. The world had not yet turned.

“That was before we became this dark, dystopian data company that gave the world Trump,” a former Cambridge Analytica employee who I’ll call Paul tells me. “It was back when we were still just a psychological warfare firm.”

Was that really what you called it, I ask him. Psychological warfare? “Totally. That’s what it is. Psyops. Psychological operations – the same methods the military use to effect mass sentiment change. It’s what they mean by winning ‘hearts and minds’. We were just doing it to win elections in the kind of developing countries that don’t  have many rules.”

Why would anyone want to intern with a psychological warfare firm, I ask him. And he looks at me like I am mad. “It was like working for MI6. Only it’s MI6 for hire.

It was very posh, very English, run by an old Etonian and you got to do some really cool things. Fly all over the world. You were working with the president of Kenya or Ghana or wherever. It’s not like election campaigns in the west. You got to do all sorts of crazy shit.”

On that day in January 2013, Sophie met up with SCL’s chief executive, Alexander Nix, and gave him the germ of an idea.

“She said, ‘You really need to get into data.’ She really drummed it home to Alexander. And she mentioned to him a firm that belonged to someone she knew about through her father.”

Who’s her father?

“Eric Schmidt.”

Eric Schmidt – the chairman of Google?”

I had been speaking to former employees of Cambridge Analytica for months and heard dozens of hair-raising stories, but it was still a gobsmacking moment. To anyone concerned about surveillance, Palantir is practically now a trigger word.

The data-mining firm has contracts with governments all over the world – including GCHQ and the NSA. It’s owned by Peter Thiel, the billionaire co-founder of PayPal and major investor in Facebook, who became Silicon Valley’s first vocal supporter of Trump.

In some ways, Eric Schmidt’s daughter showing up and referring to Palantir is just another weird detail in the weirdest story I have ever researched.

A weird but telling detail. Because it goes to the heart of why the story of Cambridge Analytica is one of the most profoundly unsettling of our time. Sophie Schmidt now works for another Silicon Valley megafirm: Uber. And what’s clear is that the power and dominance of the Silicon Valley – Google and Facebook and a small handful of others – are at the centre of the global tectonic shift we are currently witnessing.

It also reveals a critical and gaping hole in the political debate in Britain. Because what is happening in America and what is happening in Britain are entwined. Brexit and Trump are entwined. The Trump administration’s links to Russia and Britain are entwined.

And Cambridge Analytica is one point of focus through which we can see all these relationships in play; it also reveals the elephant in the room as we hurtle into a general election: Britain tying its future to an America that is being remade - in a radical and alarming way - by Trump.

There are three strands to this story. How the foundations of an authoritarian surveillance state are being laid in the US. How British democracy was subverted through a covert, far-reaching plan of coordination enabled by a US billionaire.

And how we are in the midst of a massive land grab for power by billionaires via our data. Data which is being silently amassed, harvested and stored. Whoever owns this data owns the future.

My entry point into this story began, as so many things do, with a late-night Google. Last December, I took an unsettling tumble into a wormhole of Google autocomplete suggestions that ended with “did the holocaust happen”. And an entire page of results that claimed it didn’t.

Google’s algorithm had been gamed by extremist sites and it was Jonathan Albright, a professor of communications at Elon University, North Carolina, who helped me get to grips with what I was seeing. He was the first person to map and uncover an entire “alt-right” news and information ecosystem and he was the one who first introduced me to Cambridge Analytica.

He called the company a central point in the right’s “propaganda machine”, a line I quoted in reference to its work for the Trump election campaign and the referendum Leave campaign.

That led to the second article featuring Cambridge Analytica – as a central node in the alternative news and information network that I believed Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon, the key Trump aide who is now his chief strategist, were creating.

I found evidence suggesting they were on a strategic mission to smash the mainstream media and replace it with one comprising alternative facts, fake history and rightwing propaganda.


Image above: Robert Mercer in 2012 playing the World Poker Tour. From (http://www.cnbc.com/2014/11/07/robert-mercer-the-most-important-political-money-man-youve-never-heard-of.html).

Mercer is a brilliant computer scientist, a pioneer in early artificial intelligence, and the co-owner of one of the most successful hedge funds on the planet (with a gravity-defying 71.8% annual return). And, he is also, I discovered, good friends with Nigel Farage.

Andy Wigmore, Leave.EU’s communications director, told me that it was Mercer who had directed his company, Cambridge Analytica, to “help” the Leave campaign.

The second article triggered two investigations, which are both continuing: one by the Information Commissioner’s Office into the possible illegal use of data. And a second by the Electoral Commission which is “focused on whether one or more donations – including services – accepted by Leave.EU was ‘impermissable’”.

What I then discovered is that Mercer’s role in the referendum went far beyond this. Far beyond the jurisdiction of any UK law. The key to understanding how a motivated and determined billionaire could bypass ourelectoral laws rests on AggregateIQ, an obscure web analytics company based in an office above a shop in Victoria, British Columbia.

It was with AggregateIQ that Vote Leave (the official Leave campaign) chose to spend £3.9m, more than half its official £7m campaign budget. As did three other affiliated Leave campaigns: BeLeave, Veterans for Britain and the Democratic Unionist party, spending a further £757,750.

“Coordination” between campaigns is prohibited under UK electoral law, unless campaign expenditure is declared, jointly. It wasn’t. Vote Leave says the Electoral Commission “looked into this” and gave it “a clean bill of health”.

How did an obscure Canadian company come to play such a pivotal role in Brexit? It’s a question that Martin Moore, director of the centre for the study of communication, media and power at King’s College London has been asking too. “I went through all the Leave campaign invoices when the Electoral Commission uploaded them to its site in February.

And I kept on discovering all these huge amounts going to a company that not only had I never heard of, but that there was practically nothing at all about on the internet. More money was spent with AggregateIQ than with any other company in any other campaign in the entire referendum. All I found, at that time, was a one-page website and that was it. It was an absolute mystery.”

Moore contributed to an LSE report published in April that concluded UK’s electoral laws were “weak and helpless” in the face of new forms of digital campaigning.

Offshore companies, money poured into databases, unfettered third parties… the caps on spending had come off. The laws that had always underpinned Britain’s electoral laws were no longer fit for purpose. Laws, the report said, that needed “urgently reviewing by parliament”.

AggregateIQ holds the key to unravelling another complicated network of influence that Mercer has created. A source emailed me to say he had found that AggregateIQ’s address and telephone number corresponded to a company listed on Cambridge Analytica’s website as its overseas office: “SCL Canada”. A day later, that online reference vanished.

There had to be a connection between the two companies. Between the various Leave campaigns. Between the referendum and Mercer. It was too big a coincidence.

But everyone – AggregateIQ, Cambridge Analytica, Leave.EU, Vote Leave – denied it. AggregateIQ had just been a short-term “contractor” to Cambridge Analytica. There was nothing to disprove this. We published the known facts. On 29 March, article 50 was triggered.

Then I meet Paul, the first of two sources formerly employed by Cambridge Analytica. He is in his late 20s and bears mental scars from his time there. “It’s almost like post-traumatic shock. It was so… messed up. It happened so fast. I just woke up one morning and found we’d turned into the Republican fascist party. I still can’t get my head around it.”

He laughed when I told him the frustrating mystery that was AggregateIQ. “Find Chris Wylie,” he said.

Who’s Chris Wylie?

“He’s the one who brought data and micro-targeting [individualized political messages] to Cambridge Analytica. And he’s from west Canada. It’s only because of him that AggregateIQ exist. They’re his friends. He’s the one who brought them in.”

There wasn’t just a relationship between Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ, Paul told me. They were intimately entwined, key nodes in Robert Mercer’s distributed empire. “The Canadians were our back office.

They built our software for us. They held our database. If AggregateIQ is involved then Cambridge Analytica is involved. And if Cambridge Analytica is involved, then Robert Mercer and Steve Bannon are involved. You need to find Chris Wylie.”

I did find Chris Wylie. He refused to comment.

Key to understanding how data would transform the company is knowing where it came from. And it’s a letter from “Director of Defence Operations, SCL Group”, that helped me realise this. It’s from “Commander Steve Tatham, PhD, MPhil, Royal Navy (rtd)” complaining about my use in my Mercer article of the word “disinformation”.

I wrote back to him pointing out references in papers he’d written to “deception” and “propaganda”, which I said I understood to be “roughly synonymous with ‘disinformation’.” It’s only later that it strikes me how strange it is that I’m corresponding with a retired navy commander about military strategies that may have been used in British and US elections.

What’s been lost in the US coverage of this “data analytics” firm is the understanding of where the firm came from: deep within the military-industrial complex. A weird British corner of it populated, as the military establishment in Britain is, by old-school Tories.

Geoffrey Pattie, a former parliamentary under-secretary of state for defence procurement and director of Marconi Defence Systems, used to be on the board, and Lord Marland, David Cameron’s pro-Brexit former trade envoy, a shareholder.

Steve Tatham was the head of psychological operations for British forces in Afghanistan. The Observer has seen letters endorsing him from the UK Ministry of Defence, the Foreign Office and NATO.

SCL/Cambridge Analytica was not some startup created by a couple of guys with a Mac PowerBook. It’s effectively part of the British defence establishment. And, now, too, the American defence establishment. An ex-commanding officer of the US Marine Corps operations centre, Chris Naler, has recently joined Iota Global, a partner of the SCL group.

This is not just a story about social psychology and data analytics. It has to be understood in terms of a military contractor using military strategies on a civilian population. Us.

David Miller, a professor of sociology at Bath University and an authority in psyops and propaganda, says it is “an extraordinary scandal that this should be anywhere near a democracy. It should be clear to voters where information is coming from, and if it’s not transparent or open where it’s coming from, it raises the question of whether we are actually living in a democracy or not.”

Paul and David, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee, were working at the firm when it introduced mass data-harvesting to its psychological warfare techniques. “It brought psychology, propaganda and technology together in this powerful new way,” David tells me.

And it was Facebook that made it possible. It was from Facebook that Cambridge Analytica obtained its vast dataset in the first place.

Earlier, psychologists at Cambridge University harvested Facebook data (legally) for research purposes and published pioneering peer-reviewed work about determining personality traits, political partisanship, sexuality and much more from people’s Facebook “likes”.

And SCL/Cambridge Analytica contracted a scientist at the university, Dr Aleksandr Kogan, to harvest new Facebook data. And he did so by paying people to take a personality quiz which also allowed not just their own Facebook profiles to be harvested, but also those of their friends – a process then allowed by the social network.

Facebook was the source of the psychological insights that enabled Cambridge Analytica to target individuals. It was also the mechanism that enabled them to be delivered on a large scale.

The company also (perfectly legally) bought consumer datasets – on everything from magazine subscriptions to airline travel – and uniquely it appended these with the psych data to voter files.

It matched all this information to people’s addresses, their phone numbers and often their email addresses. “The goal is to capture every single aspect of every voter’s information environment,” said David. “And the personality data enabled Cambridge Analytica to craft individual messages.”

Finding “persuadable” voters is key for any campaign and with its treasure trove of data, Cambridge Analytica could target people high in neuroticism, for example, with images of immigrants “swamping” the country. The key is finding emotional triggers for each individual voter.

Cambridge Analytica worked on campaigns in several key states for a Republican political action committee. Its key objective, according to a memo the Observer has seen, was “voter disengagement” and “to persuade Democrat voters to stay at home”: a profoundly disquieting tactic. It has previously been claimed that suppression tactics were used in the campaign, but this document provides the first actual evidence.

But does it actually work? One of the criticisms that has been levelled at my and others’ articles is that Cambridge Analytica’s “special sauce” has been oversold. Is what it is doing any different from any other political consultancy?

“It’s not a political consultancy,” says David. “You have to understand this is not a normal company in any way. I don’t think Mercer even cares if it ever makes any money. It’s the product of a billionaire spending huge amounts of money to build his own experimental science lab, to test what works, to find tiny slivers of influence that can tip an election.

Robert Mercer did not invest in this firm until it ran a bunch of pilots – controlled trials. This is one of the smartest computer scientists in the world. He is not going to splash $15m on bullshit.”

Tamsin Shaw, an associate professor of philosophy at New York University, helps me understand the context. She has researched the US military’s funding and use of psychological research for use in torture. “The capacity for this science to be used to manipulate emotions is very well established.

This is military-funded technology that has been harnessed by a global plutocracy and is being used to sway elections in ways that people can’t even see, don’t even realise is happening to them,” she says. “It’s about exploiting existing phenomenon like nationalism and then using it to manipulate people at the margins.

To have so much data in the hands of a bunch of international plutocrats to do with it what they will is absolutely chilling.

“We are in an information war and billionaires are buying up these companies, which are then employed to go to work in the heart of government. That’s a very worrying situation.”

A project that Cambridge Analytica carried out in Trinidad in 2013 brings all the elements in this story together. Just as Robert Mercer began his negotiations with SCL boss Alexander Nix about an acquisition, SCL was retained by several government ministers in Trinidad and Tobago.

The brief involved developing a micro-targeting programme for the governing party of the time.

And AggregateIQ – the same company involved in delivering Brexit for Vote Leave – was brought in to build the targeting platform.

David said: “The standard SCL/CA method is that you get a government contract from the ruling party. And this pays for the political work. So, it’s often some bullshit health project that’s just a cover for getting the minister re-elected. But in this case, our government contacts were with Trinidad’s national security council.”

The security work was to be the prize for the political work. Documents seen by the Observer show that this was a proposal to capture citizens’ browsing history en masse, recording phone conversations and applying natural language processing to the recorded voice data to construct a national police database, complete with scores for each citizen on their propensity to commit crime.

“The plan put to the minister was Minority Report. It was pre-crime. And the fact that Cambridge Analytica is now working inside the Pentagon is, I think, absolutely terrifying,” said David.


Image above: Steve Bannon in the East Room of the White House on February 15, 2017. Photo by Pete Marovich. From ((http://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/04/steve-bannon-isnt-through-with-trump-yet).

These documents throw light on a significant and under-reported aspect of the Trump administration. The company that helped Trump achieve power in the first place has now been awarded contracts in the Pentagon and the US state department. Its former vice-president Steve Bannon now sits in the White House. It is also reported to be in discussions for “military and homeland security work”.

In the US, the government is bound by strict laws about what data it can collect on individuals. But, for private companies anything goes. Is it unreasonable to see in this the possible beginnings of an authoritarian surveillance state?

A state that is bringing corporate interests into the heart of the administration. Documents detail Cambridge Analytica is involved with many other right-leaning billionaires, including Rupert Murdoch. One memo references Cambridge Analytica trying to place an article with a journalist in Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal: “RM re-channeled and connected with Jamie McCauley from Robert Thomson News Corp office,” it says.

It makes me think again about the story involving Sophie Schmidt, Cambridge Analytica and Palantir. Is it a telling detail, or is it a clue to something else going on? Cambridge Analytica and Palantir both declined to comment for this article on whether they had any relationship.

But witnesses and emails confirm that meetings between Cambridge Analytica and Palantir took place in 2013. The possibility of a working relationship was at least discussed.

Further documents seen by the Observer confirm that at least one senior Palantir employee consulted with Cambridge Analytica in relation to the Trinidad project and later political work in the US. But at the time, I’m told, Palantir decided it was too much of a reputational risk for a more formal arrangement.

There was no upside to it. Palantir is a company that is trusted to handle vast datasets on UK and US citizens for GCHQ and the NSA, as well as many other countries.

Now though, they are both owned by ideologically aligned billionaires: Robert Mercer and Peter Thiel. The Trump campaign has said that Thiel helped it with data. A campaign that was led by Steve Bannon, who was then at Cambridge Analytica.

A leading QC who spends a lot of time in the investigatory powers tribunal said that the problem with this technology was that it all depended on whose hands it was in.

“On the one hand, it’s being done by companies and governments who say ‘you can trust us, we are good and democratic and bake cakes at the weekend’. But then the same expertise can also be sold on to whichever repressive regime.”

In Britain, we still trust our government. We respect our authorities to uphold our laws. We trust the rule of law. We believe we live in a free and fair democracy. Which is what, I believe, makes the last part of this story so profoundly unsettling.

The details of the Trinidad project finally unlocked the mystery that was AggregateIQ. Trinidad was SCL’s first project using big data for micro-targeting before the firm was acquired by Mercer. It was the model that Mercer was buying into.

And it brought together all the players: the Cambridge psychologist Aleksandr Kogan, AggregateIQ, Chris Wylie, and two other individuals who would play a role in this story: Mark Gettleson, a focus group expert who had previously worked for the Lib Dems. And Thomas Borwick, the son of Victoria Borwick, the Conservative MP for Kensington.

When my article linking Mercer and Leave.EU was published in February, no one was more upset about it than former Tory adviser Dominic Cummings, the campaign strategist for Vote Leave. He launched an irate Twitter tirade. The piece was “full of errors & itself spreads disinformation” “CA had ~0% role in Brexit referendum”.

A week later the Observer revealed AggregateIQ’s possible link to Cambridge Analytica. Cummings’s Twitter feed went quiet. He didn’t return my messages or my emails.

Questions had already been swirling about whether there had been any coordination between the Leave campaigns. In the week before the referendum, Vote Leave donated money to two other Leave groups – £625,000 to BeLeave, run by fashion student Darren Grimes, and £100,000 to Veterans for Britain, who both then spent this money with AggregateIQ.

The Electoral Commission has written to AggregateIQ. A source close to the investigation said that AggregateIQ responded by saying it had signed a non-disclosure agreement. And since it was outside British jurisdiction, that was the end of it. Vote Leave refers to this as the Electoral Commission giving it “a clean bill of health”.

On his blog, Dominic Cummings has written thousands of words about the referendum campaign. What is missing is any details about his data scientists. He “hired physicists” is all he’ll say. In the books on Brexit, other members of the team talk about “Dom’s astrophysicists”, who he kept “a tightly guarded secret”. They built models, using data “scraped” off Facebook.

Finally, after weeks of messages, he sent me an email. We were agreed on one thing, it turned out. He wrote: “The law/regulatory agencies are such a joke the reality is that anybody who wanted to cheat the law could do it easily without people realising.”

But, he says, “by encouraging people to focus on non-stories like Mercer’s nonexistent role in the referendum you are obscuring these important issues”.

And to finally answer the question about how Vote Leave found this obscure Canadian company on the other side of the planet, he wrote: “Someone found AIQ [AggregateIQ] on the internet and interviewed them on the phone then told me – let’s go with these guys. They were clearly more competent than any others we’d spoken to in London.”

The most unfortunate aspect of this – for Dominic Cummings – is that this isn’t credible. It’s the work of moments to put a date filter on Google search and discover that in late 2015 or early 2016, there are no Google hits for “Aggregate IQ”. There is no press coverage. No random mentions. It doesn’t even throw up its website. I have caught Dominic Cummings in what appears to be an alternative fact.

But what is an actual fact is that Gettleson and Borwick, both previously consultants for SCL and Cambridge Analytica, were both core members of the Vote Leave team.

They’re both in the official Vote Leave documents lodged with the Electoral Commission, though they coyly describe their previous work for SCL/Cambridge Analytica as “micro-targeting in Antigua and Trinidad” and “direct communications for several PACs, Senate and Governor campaigns”.

And Borwick wasn’t just any member of the team. He was Vote Leave’s chief technology officer.

This story may involve a complex web of connections, but it all comes back to Cambridge Analytica. It all comes back to Mercer.

Because the connections must have been evident. “AggregateIQ may not have belonged to the Mercers but they exist within his world,” David told me. “Almost all of their contracts came from Cambridge Analytica or Mercer. They wouldn’t exist without them.

During the whole time the referendum was going on, they were working every day on the [Ted] Cruz campaign with Mercer and Cambridge Analytica. AggregateIQ built and ran Cambridge Analytica’s database platforms.”

Cummings won’t say who did his modelling. But invoices lodged with the Electoral Commission show payments to a company called Advanced Skills Institute. It takes me weeks to spot the significance of this because the company is usually referred to as ASI Data Science, a company that has a revolving cast of data scientists who have gone on to work with Cambridge Analytica and vice versa.

There are videos of ASI data scientists presenting Cambridge Analytica personality models and pages for events the two companies have jointly hosted. ASI told the Observer it had no formal relationship with Cambridge Analytica.

Here’s the crucial fact: during the US primary elections, Aggregate IQ signed away its intellectual property (IP). It didn’t own its IP: Robert Mercer did. For AggregateIQ to work with another campaign in Britain, the firm would have to have had the express permission of Mercer.

Asked if it would make any comment on financial or business links between “Cambridge Analytica, Robert Mercer, Steve Bannon, AggregateIQ, Leave.EU and Vote Leave”, a spokesperson for Cambridge Analytica said: “Cambridge Analytica did no paid or unpaid work for Leave.EU.”

This story isn’t about cunning Dominic Cummings finding a few loopholes in the Electoral Commission’s rules. Finding a way to spend an extra million quid here. Or (as the Observer has also discovered) underdeclaring the costs of his physicists on the spending returns by £43,000.

This story is not even about what appears to be covert coordination between Vote Leave and Leave.EU in their use of AggregateIQ and Cambridge Analytica. It’s about how a motivated US billionaire – Mercer and his chief ideologue, Bannon – helped to bring about the biggest constitutional change to Britain in a century.


Image above: Donald Trump, in the White House Rose Garden announcing US exit from Paris Climate agreement on 2 June 2017. From (http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/31/trump-paris-accord-exit-is-good-for-the-environment-commentary.html).

Because to understand where and how Brexit is connected to Trump, it’s right here. These relationships, which thread through the middle of Cambridge Analytica, are the result of a transatlantic partnership that stretches back years.

Nigel Farage and Bannon have been close associates since at least 2012. Bannon opened the London arm of his news website Breitbart in 2014 to support Ukip – the latest front “in our current cultural and political war”, he told the New York Times.

Britain had always been key to Bannon’s plans, another ex-Cambridge Analytica employee told me on condition of anonymity. It was a crucial part of his strategy for changing the entire world order.

“He believes that to change politics, you have to first change the culture. And Britain was key to that.

He thought that where Britain led, America would follow. The idea of Brexit was hugely symbolically important to him.”

On 29 March, the day article 50 was triggered, I called one of the smaller campaigns, Veterans for Britain. Cummings’s strategy was to target people in the last days of the campaign and Vote Leave gave the smaller group £100,000 in the last week. A small number of people they identified as “persuadable” were bombarded with more than a billion ads, the vast majority in the last few days.
I asked David Banks, Veterans for Britain’s head of communications, why they spent the money with AggregateIQ.

“I didn’t find AggegrateIQ. They found us. They rang us up and pitched us. There’s no conspiracy here. They were this Canadian company which was opening an office in London to work in British politics and they were doing stuff that none of the UK companies could offer.

Their targeting was based on a set of technologies that hadn’t reached the UK yet. A lot of it was proprietary, they’d found a way of targeting people based on behavioural insights. They approached us.”

It seems clear to me that David Banks didn’t know there might have been anything untoward about this. He’s a patriotic man who believes in British sovereignty and British values and British laws. I don’t think he knew about any overlap with these other campaigns. I can only think that he was played.

And that we, the British people, were played. In his blog, Dominic Cummings writes that Brexit came down to “about 600,000 people – just over 1% of registered voters”. It’s not a stretch to believe that a member of the global 1% found a way to influence this crucial 1% of British voters.

The referendum was an open goal too tempting a target for US billionaires not to take a clear shot at.

Or I should say US billionaires and other interested parties, because in acknowledging the transatlantic links that bind Britain and America, Brexit and Trump, so tightly, we also must acknowledge that Russia is wrapped somewhere in this tight embrace too.

For the last month, I’ve been writing about the links between the British right, the Trump administration and the European right. And these links lead to Russia from multiple directions. Between Nigel Farage and Donald Trump and Cambridge Analytica.

A map shown to the Observer showing the many places in the world where SCL and Cambridge Analytica have worked includes Russia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Iran and Moldova. Multiple Cambridge Analytica sources have revealed other links to Russia, including trips to the country, meetings with executives from Russian state-owned companies, and references by SCL employees to working for Russian entities.

Article 50 has been triggered. AggregateIQ is outside British jurisdiction. The Electoral Commission is powerless. And another election, with these same rules, is just a month away. It is not that the authorities don’t know there is cause for concern.

The Observer has learned that the Crown Prosecution Service did appoint a special prosecutor to assess whether there was a case for a criminal investigation into whether campaign finance laws were broken.

The CPS referred it back to the electoral commission. Someone close to the intelligence select committee tells me that “work is being done” on potential Russian interference in the referendum.

Gavin Millar, a QC and expert in electoral law, described the situation as “highly disturbing”. He believes the only way to find the truth would be to hold a public inquiry. But a government would need to call it. A government that has just triggered an election specifically to shore up its power base. An election designed to set us into permanent alignment with Trump’s America.

Martin Moore of King’s College, London, pointed out that elections were a newly fashionable tool for would-be authoritarian states. “Look at Erdoğan in Turkey. What Theresa May is doing is quite anti-democratic in a way. It’s about enhancing her power very deliberately. It’s not about a battle of policy between two parties.”

This is Britain in 2017. A Britain that increasingly looks like a “managed” democracy. Paid for by a US billionaire. Using military-style technology. Delivered by Facebook. And enabled by us. If we let this referendum result stand, we are giving it our implicit consent.

This isn’t about Remain or Leave. It goes far beyond party politics. It’s about the first step into a brave, new, increasingly undemocratic world.

Key names

SCL Group
British company with 25 years experience in military “psychological operations” and “election management”.

Cambridge Analytica
Data analytics company formed in 2014. Robert Mercer owns 90%. SCL owns 10%. Carried out major digital targeting campaigns for Donald Trump campaign, Ted Cruz’s nomination campaign and multiple other US Republican campaigns – mostly funded by Mercer. Gave Nigel Farage’s Leave.EU “help” during referendum.

Robert Mercer
 US billionaire hedge fund owner who was Trump’s biggest donor. Owns Cambridge Analytica and the IP [intellectual property] ofAggregateIQ. Friend of Farage. Close associate of Steve Bannon.

Steve Bannon
Trump’s chief strategist. Vice-president of Cambridge Analytica during referendum period. Friend of Farage.

Alexander Nix
 Director of Cambridge Analytica and SCL Group.

Christopher Wylie
Canadian who first brought data expertise and microtargeting to Cambridge Analytica; recruited AggregateIQ.

AggregateIQ
Data analytics company based in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Worked for Mercer-funded Pacs that supported the Trump campaign. Robert Mercer owns AggregateIQ’s IP. Paid £3.9m by Vote Leave to “micro-target” voters on social media during referendum campaign. Outside British jurisdiction.

Veterans for Britain
Given £100,000 by Vote Leave. Spent it with AggregateIQ.
 
BeLeave
Youth Leave campaign set up by 23-year-old student. Given £625,000 by Vote Leave & £50,000 by another donor. Spent it with AggregateIQ.

DUP
Democratic Unionist Party of Northern Ireland. Spent £32,750 with AggregrateIQ.

Thomas Borwick
Vote Leave’s chief technology officer. Previously worked with SCL/Cambridge Analytica and AggregateIQ.

ASI Data Science
 Data science specialists. Links with Cambridge Analytica, including staff moving between the two and holding joint events. Paid £114,000 by Vote Leave. Vote Leave declared £71,000 to Electoral Commission.

Donald Trump
US president. Campaign funded by Mercer and run by Bannon. Data services supplied by Cambridge Analytica and AggregrateIQ.

Nigel Farage
Former Ukip leader. Leader of Leave.EU. Friend of Trump, Mercer and Bannon.

Arron Banks
Bristol businessman. Co-founder of Leave.EU. Owns data company and insurance firm. Single biggest donor to Leave – £7.5m.

Some names, ages and other identifying details of sources in this article have been changed
This article was amended on 20 May 2017 to remove a reference to eBay.

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Fox to cut ties with Bill O'Reilly

SUBHEAD: Mr. O’Reilly hasn’t been on the air since April 11, when he announced plans for a vacation.

By Xeni Jardin on 18 April 2017 for Boing Boing -
(http://boingboing.net/2017/04/18/more-like-bill-o-bye-ly.html)


Image above: Fox News host Bill O'Reilly's Superbowl interview with President Donald Trump in February 2017. From (http://www.infostormer.com/bill-oreillys-super-bowl-interview-with-president-trump/).

The Rupert Murdoch and ‎News Corp-owned Wall Street Journal reports Fox News “is preparing to cut ties with its biggest star, Bill O’Reilly,” and a final decision on his “fate could come as early as the next several days.”

The 'O’Reilly Factor' host has been accused of sexual abuse and harassment for over 15 years by a number of women.

Most recently, an April 1, 2017 article in the New York Times [screenshot] revealed an apparent conspiracy to hide $13 million in previously undisclosed settlement payments he and Fox News made to five women who worked on or appeared on his program.

A steady escalation of internal and public pressure on Fox News to fire Mr. O’Reilly followed that news report.

From today's Wall Street Journal story on O'Reilly's likely imminent ouster from Fox News:

Mr. O’Reilly hasn’t been on the air since April 11, when he ended his show by announcing plans for a vacation. While Mr. O’Reilly had planned to take this week off, the early start to his vacation wasn’t part of the original plan, people familiar with the matter said. The plan was for him to return to his show next Monday.

On Tuesday, an attorney for Mr. O’Reilly said the host has “been subjected to a brutal campaign of character assassination that is unprecedented in post-McCarthyist America” and added that it has “evidence that the smear campaign is being orchestrated by far-left organizations bent on destroying O’Reilly and Fox News for political and financial reasons.”

The negative publicity for 21st Century Fox follows the exit last year of Fox News Chairman and chief executive Roger Ailes that put a spotlight on the treatment of women at the network. Mr. Ailes resigned in July after he was accused of sexual harassment by multiple women, prompting an internal investigation within the company. Mr. Ailes has denied all of the accusations.

Video above: "Inside Edition" host Bill O'Reilly goes nuts with staff over teleprompter issue. From (http://www.infostormer.com/bill-oreillys-super-bowl-interview-with-president-trump/).
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Wonderland

SUBHEAD: What would Assad’s strategic goal be in gas bombing women and children?

By James Kunstler on 10 April 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/wonderland/)


Image above: "Dismaland" bemusement park is attributed to fabled, secretive, UK street artist and provocateur Banksy. From (http://www.travelgumbo.com/blog/dismaland-the-new-post-apocaliptic-bemusement-park-in-england-1).

There are times in the course of events when a society cannot tell what the fuck is going on, or what to do about it, and this is one of those moments in history here in the USA.

The quandaries of life on the home front — how to make a living, how to care for ourselves and loved ones — get shoved aside by misadventures in foreign lands with their own quandaries. One delusion leads to another until you enter a zero gravity of the mind. Case in point du jour: Syria.

The persistent hyperRussomania of the US Dem-Prog alliance and its sob-sisters in the media seeks to make a bad situation worse in Syria and probably for the worst reasons. How many Americans have even the dimmest idea what’s going on in Syria, who the cast of characters there represent, and where the USA fits into all of it?

There is the head of government, one Bashar al Assad (son of the previous president, Hafez al Assad). The Assads had run Syria as a mostly secular Arab state until the civil war within Islam, Sunni against Shia, spilled out of Iraq.

The Assads belonged to the tiny Alawite sect of the Shia. They comprise only 13 percent of the Syrian population, which has a Sunni majority. Under the Assads, Syria has tilted toward Iran, the Shia home state, and away from the Sunni Arabs elsewhere in the neighborhood. Russia has cultivated Iran and support its “friends,” the Assads.

A mash-up of Sunni jihad armies fights the Assad government in Syria’s civil war. These are Isis, al Qaeda, and Jabhat al Nusra. The US government had made official noise about supporting the more “moderate rebels” in the Syrian conflict. Who are they exactly? Do you have a clue? Which army among those three rebel groups are “moderates?”

And what is their moderate goal under jihad? To topple Assad. And then what? To set up a new theocratic government perhaps? How is it in America’s interests to promote Islamic jihadi theocracy?

One hypothesis is that the struggle is over who gets to run gas and oil pipelines through Syria to get easier access to the Mediterranean Sea and the European energy market. Iran would very badly like to do that. But they are in competition with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, the little giant emirate of natural gas.

So, you have the Iran/Shia gang on one side and the KSA/Qatar/Sunni on the other side. Anybody who had scanned the news since 1979 can probably tell whose side the US is on.

By the way, this hypothesis has had no airing among the mainstream media triumvirate: The New York Times, CNN, and The WashPo. These news orgs won’t even entertain that angle of the story… but as I said, it’s only a hypothesis.

It was not so many weeks ago that President Trump met with the crown prince of KSA at the White House to give assurances of American friendship and support. KSA is supposedly America’s chief ally against Isis in Syria.

Yet, KSA and the USA are dedicated to getting rid of the Assad government as well as Isis. That is, we are against both sides in the Syrian civil war. Still wondering why the American public is confused by all this?

Do you know who our choice is to replace Assad? Can you name an opposition figure? Of course you can’t. There is nobody.

What the White House, the Pentagon, the State Department, and the NSA seem to have in mind is the familiar failed state policy that has worked so well in the past (not).

Which brings us to the curious case of Bashar Assad’s recent supposed poison gas bombing of civilians in Khan Sheikhoun. The media triumvirate was avid to play along with the story. I don’t know about you, but I have to ask myself: what would Assad’s strategic goal be in gas bombing women and children?

To gin up worldwide positive PR?
To get the Syrian people on his side against Isis and other jihadis?
What advantage could Assad possibly gain?

In warfare generally, the tacticians strike against military targets.

There’s a hypothesis that Assad’s air force sought to strike a rebel arms depot in Idlib province — a military target.

The hypothesis goes further, saying that the depot contained phosgene and chlorine gas, but not Sarin. The wind carried these released gases among civilian homes and streets in Khan Sheikhoun.

People suffered and died. Evidence for the absence of Sarin gas is that the gassing victims were handled manually by doctors and aid workers in street clothes. Sarin can kill on skin contact and doctors have to treat it in protective gear.

So, maybe the gas wasn’t Sarin and maybe it wasn’t dropped in bombs from Assad’s planes. But, like the pipeline angle of the story, this hypothesis is missing in the media triumvirate’s pages.

President Trump was lauded mostly for the missile strike against the Syrian air force base that followed. The Dem/Progs and The New York Times gave him brownie points, if only for it being a swipe against Russia.

It seemed so clever, what with Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Mar-a-Lago dinner table where, presumably, the subject of the maniac in North Korea came up. Days later, a US aircraft carrier group steamed to the waters off Kim Jong Un’s fortress state.

Which brings forth another hypothesis: that the Syria missile strike was solely a demonstration of US military will vis-a-vis the more ominous threat over in Asia — an attempt to get Xi to do something about the Kim Jong Un before we do.

It’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. The big fear is that in the event of a rumble, Kim will turn Seoul into an ashtray. The South Korean capital is only a few miles from the DMZ between the two states.

The US couldn’t find a juicier enemy than Kim Jong Un, a character so improbable he might have been dreamed up in a Batman comic. Hence, he’s comprehensible to an American public that more and more looks like the ever-present crowd of perplexed bystanders in a Batman movie.

---

I was quite surprised to hear that a podcast called “S-Town,” about the dark doings in an Alabama backwater, had become a huge hit on the Web-waves. Back around 2012-2013, I had some email correspondence from John B. McLemore, the tragic figure at the center of the series. He was a real person, referred to by various people in the series as “brilliant,” “a genius,” “a real character,” and he was for sure.

Apparently, he was also a fan of my books. He got my phone number off my website and took to calling me on the phone. I probably had a dozen long phone conversations with him. Hours. It is well-known now that he called his home of Woodstock, Alabama, “Shit-town.” He regaled me with many a sordid tale of the home-folk, and even of himself. The place sounded like Hieronymus Bosch meets Dogpatch.

Since John B seemed so unhappy under his mask of hilarity and mirth, I tried to encourage him to think about moving. He always had an excuse for not doing that, but clearly John B and the neighbors he disdained, fought with, looked for love with, had a synergistic thing going.

They needed each other to play out their never-ending crazy scripts of cracker mischief, vengeance, and failure. After a while, John B went dark. I thought he’d just gotten tired of me telling him to move.

I was startled to hear in the second episode of the “S-Town” podcast that John B had made good on his constant intimations of suicide. Startled, but not especially surprised. He was more than a fish out of water.
 
He was like a Martian suffocating in an atmosphere too heavy for him. I suspect the truth is there are thousands of places like “S-Town” all over America, places devastated by the poor choices of the last several generations — most particularly the way they threw away their livelihoods and surrendered to one vice after another in boredom, defeat, and self-loathing. It’s a very sad story and it’s not over yet by a long shot.

See also: Ea O Ka Aina: Surviving Shit-Town 4/7/17


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When Truth becomes a threat

SUBHEAD: If you tell the truth in America it may be Fake News and a might be a traitor.

By Paul Craig Roberts on 16 March 2017 for PaulCraigRoberts.org -
(http://www.paulcraigroberts.org/2017/03/16/nuisance-threat-high-cost-truth-paul-craig-roberts/)


Image above: The Clinton and Trump camps are two sides of the same coin of American Empire. From (http://www.iagreetosee.com/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/).

[IB Editor's note: There is some truth in this article we thought should be published, but it is not a one sided story. Those from the "Left" and the "Right" who have been in charge of the American Empire have fostered a false view of the world and reality. Lies and propaganda are always employed tools of Empire. The Clinton and Trump camps were to sides of the counterfeit coin of the realm.]

I am convinced that the US, and probably the entire Western world, that is, the American Empire, has entered an era in which respect for truth does not exist in public and private institutions. We have been watching this develop for some time.

Think, for example, back to August 3, 2002, a recent time in terms of our present predicament, but a time prior to political consciousness of anyone younger today than 33 years old.

In the summer of 2002, the world was being prepared by propaganda for a US invasion of Iraq. On August 3 of that year, the prestigous British publication, The Economist, summed up the consensus of ruling opinion in two sentences: “The honest choices now are to give up and give in, or to remove Mr. Hussein before he gets his [nuclear] bomb. Painful as it is, our vote is for war.”

As Lewis Lapham, myself and others asked at the time, what bomb? The only evidence of a bomb was fabricated and known to be fabricated. The UN weapons inspectors concluded that the infamous Weapons of Mass Destruction were a creation of US propaganda.

President George W. Bush eventually acknowledged that Iraq had no such weapons. US Secretary of State Colin Powell said that the lies he was deceived by the Bush regime into telling the UN about Saddam Hussein’s WMD are a stain on his career.

Despite the 2003 US invasion known to have been based entirely on lies, US troops were not pulled out of Iraq until 2011, and whether or not they were pulled out, they are back in Iraq now.

None of these facts has had any impact on the good opinion that Washington and the media have of themselves.

Unchastened, Washington and its presstitutes lied about Libya and destroyed that prosperous country. They lied about “Assad’s use of chemical weapons against his own people,” and would have destroyed Syria also had it not been for the Russians.

Blocked by Russia, Obama, Hillary, and Victoria Nuland turned on Russia, first overthrowing the democratically elected government in Ukraine, and when Crimeans voted practically unanimously to reunite with Russia, the Obama regime and its media whores falsely alleged “Russian invasion of Ukraine.”

This false charge, repeated endlessly still today by the Western presstitutes, became the justification for economic sanctions against Russia that Washington imposed on its European vassals, entirely at their expense, which shows what craven cowards European governments are. If Washington orders “jump,” the UK Prime Minister, the German Chancellor, the French President ask, “How High?”

One of the reasons Donald Trump was elected president was his commitment to normalizing relations with Russia and reconsidering the continuation of NATO a quarter century after its purpose ceased to exist with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Trump’s commitment constituted a direct threat to the power and profit of the US military/security complex, whose $1,000 billion annual budget requires a major threat that only Russia can provide.

Consequently, Russia and its president have been demonized. American propaganda, bald-faced lies, spread fear of Russia and Putin throughout the American Empire.

The Empire’s response to those who confront the propaganda with the facts is to denounce those with the facts as “Russian agents” or “Putin’s dupes.”

The hatred of Russia that has been inculcated by the neocons and presstitute media has resulted in Republican Senator John McCain, representing Arizona (to the disgrace of Arizonians), calling on the Senate floor Republican Senator Rand Paul, representing Kentucky, a person who “is now working for Vladimir Putin” for objecting to tiny Montenegro being made a NATO member. See (http://news.antiwar.com/2017/03/15/sen-john-mccain-rand-paul-is-working-for-vladimir-putin/)

When this website was included on a list of 200 Russian agent/dupe websites by a secret, undisclosed group called PropOrNot, I wondered whose money was behind this entity as well hidden as an offshore money laundering operation. I made a joke of it, which amused the Russians.

As no one knows what PropOrNot.com is, the site has no credibility.

 So the forces for war moved up several levels to Harvard University Library. On that website someone posted what is essentially the PropOrNot list. Harvard does not say that the list is vetted or explain why anyone should believe it.

The list is attributed to a Melissa Zindars, an assistant professor of communication and media at some unnamed institution. It is a list, she says, that she uses in her class to teach students how to avoid “fake and false news.” In other words, the list reflects her own ignorance and biases.

As one reader observed, Melissa tells on her own indoctrination by the presstitute, CIA-serving US media:

 “I read/watch/listen very widely, from mainstream, corporate owned sources (The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes) as well as The Atlantic, National Public Radio, and various local and alternative sources with different political perspectives (Truth-Out).”

So here we have the Western world informed by Harvard University Library of who is safe to read on the basis of an unknown young woman’s biases. Those safe to read are the lying presstitute media who serve the cause of war and the police state.

When you witness this level of total corruption at what pretends to be America’s finest university, and it is on top of the 24 years of nothing but lies from the previous three two-term presidents, who between them have murdered and dislocated millions of people in numerous countries, and not been held accountable for even one of the millons of lives destroyed, you cannot avoid realizing that for the United States and its corrupt vassal states, Truth is something to be avoided at all costs.

When Trump collapsed under pressure and fired his National Security Adviser, Gen. Flynn, he unintentionally gave credence to the charge that any and all who think well of normalized relations with the other major nuclear power are “Russian agents,” and that to be a “Russian agent” means that you are guilty of treason and deserve to be impeached if you happen to be the President of the United States.

The consequence of Flynn’s removal from office has been to enable the Russophobic forces to define as treason the desire for detente with Russia. If this had been imposed on US presidents during the First Cold War, probably life on earth would not exist today.

What is scary about the US and Europe is not merely the gullibility and insouciance of such a large percentage of the populations.

What is very frightening is the willingness of the media, government officials, military, and members of professional organizations to lie for the sake of their careers.

Try to find any shame among the liars that their lies expose humanity to thermonuclear annihilation. It is not to be found. They don’t care.

Just let me have the Mercedes and the McMansion for another year.

The Saker, an observant being, says that the color revolution being conducted by the neoconservatives, the Democratic Party, the presstitutes, the liberal/progressive/left, and by some Republicans against President Trump is “de-legitimizing the entire [democratic] political process which brought Trump to power and upon which the United States is built as a society.”

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/46658.htm The consequence, says The Saker, is that “the illusion of democracy and people power” has been destroyed both domestically and abroad. The propaganda picture of “American Democracy” has lost its believability. As the false picture crumbles, so does the power that was based on authority constructed by propaganda.
The Saker asks: do we face an endless horror or a horrible end?

As George Orwell said decades ago, “In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

This is the way the criminals who rule us see it, and it is the way their whores in the media see it. If you tell the truth in America, you are a purveyor of fake news and possibly a traitor.

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Disengage from the Spectacle

SUBHEAD: Many real heroes and heroines may choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

By Richard Heinberg on 15 March 2017 for Post Carbon Institute -
(http://www.postcarbon.org/disengage-from-the-spectacle/)


Image above: The media grabbing pictures of Trump. From original article.

Behold today’s edition of Empire’s End—the biggest, best-ever 24/7 reality TV show! It’s been decades in preparation, with a budget in the trillions, a cast of billions! Its hero-villain is far more colorful and pathetic than Tony Soprano or Walter White.

One day he and his team of oddball supporting characters appear to be winning bigly; the next, they’re crashing and burning.

We’re all on the edges of our seats, alternately enraged, horrified, thrilled, or brought to tears in uncontrollable laughter. Who could bear to miss a minute of it?

Still, maybe at least some of us are better off severely limiting our consumption of American national news just now. It’s not that events in Washington won’t affect us. They most assuredly will. Rather, I’d argue that there are even more important things to attend to, over which we have far greater agency.

I’ve invested as much attention in the outrage-of-the-day distraction machine as anyone, spending scores of hours reading news reports and analyses, and I’ve written at least a half-dozen essays about our current tweeter-in-chief. And I’m here to tell you that full immersion in the news cycle is just not healthy.

Some readers may find this conclusion too cynical. I propose it only after a great deal of thought, and on the basis of two premises.

First Premise:
We are at the end of the period of general economic growth that characterized the post-WWII era.

I’ve written extensively about this, and there’s no need to repeat myself at length here. Suffice it to say that we humans have harvested the world’s cheap and easy-to-exploit energy resources, and the energy that’s left will not, much longer, support the kind of consumer economy we’ve built.

Further, in order to keep the party roaring, we’ve built up consumer and government debt levels to unsustainable extremes. We’ve also pumped hundreds of billions of tons of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and oceans, putting the entire biosphere at risk.

Yet our current economic and political systems require further, endless growth in order to avert collapse. Almost no one wants to discuss this situation—neither politicians nor economists. Therefore the general public is left mostly in the dark.

Still, everyone senses a change in the air: despite jiggered statistics, workers know that their wages have stagnated or fallen in recent years, and members of the younger generation generally expect to earn less that their parents. This generates a persistent low-level sense of fear and dissatisfaction, guaranteeing a significant political shift such as we are seeing.

Second Premise:
The new and current U.S. regime is adopting an essentially fascist character. When empires decline, people often turn to leaders perceived as strong, and who promise to return the nation to its former glory.

In extreme instances, such leaders can be characterized as fascist—using the word in a generic sense to refer to authoritarian nationalism distinguished by one-party rule, the demonization of internal and external enemies (usually tinged with some form of racism or anti-Semitism), controls on press freedoms, and social conservatism.

Here’s the thing: Once a nation turns decisively toward fascism, there’s rarely a turning back. Fascist regimes ruthlessly hobble and destroy all opposition. Typically, it takes a foreign invasion or a complete economic-political-social collapse to reset a national government that has gone fascist.

Now, put these two premises together.

Those who get the second premise but miss the first tend to conclude that, at least until the new regime neutralizes significant opposition within the government, there is still something we can do to make everything turn out okay—in the sense that life would return to “normal.”

Just defeat the fascists, no matter what the cost. But the end of growth ensures that, beyond a certain point, there will be no more “normal.” We’re headed into new territory no matter what.

Taking both premises into account, what are the likely outcomes?

It’s possible that the Trumpist insurgency will succeed in rooting out or suppressing opposition not just in Congress and the media, but also in Executive-branch departments including the CIA and FBI.

In that case we may see at least a few years of authoritarian national governance punctuated by worsening financial and environmental crises, all against the backdrop of accelerating national decline.

It’s just a guess, but the regime may have only two more months to somehow overcome resistance within the intelligence community; if it can do so, then the task of undercutting the judiciary and the media can be pursued at a more leisurely pace over the next year or two.

But thanks to Premise One, short-term success probably will not lead to a regime that is stable over the long term.

Eventually, no matter how vigorously it suppresses real or perceived enemies, the U.S. federal government will collapse as a result of war, economic crisis, or the simple ongoing erosion of biophysical support systems.

At that point a possible trajectory for the nation would be to break apart into smaller geographically defined political entities.

However, the short-term success of the current regime is not yet guaranteed.

It is still entirely possible that establishmentarian Democratic and Republican members of Congress, working with with renegade CIA and FBI mid-level officials and mainstream media outlets, could mire the new leadership in a scandal that is too deep to survive. Or, if Republicans lose control of Congress in 2018, articles of impeachment could be brought against Trump.

This would not, however, guarantee a return to status quo politics in Washington. Not only does Premise One guarantee that the old status quo is no longer tenable, but also on its own terms the political system is now too broken and the nation too divided.

In this scenario, pro-regime and anti-regime elites might just continue to escalate their attacks on one another until the whole system crashes—as I explained in a previous essay, citing the conclusions of ecologist Peter Turchin, which he based on his comparative study of over a dozen ancient and modern societies in analogous circumstances.

It’s just a guess: if the regime is successful in the short term, we might get a slower crash; if it fails, we might get a faster one.

In any case, there’s no national team to root for that is capable of restoring the status quo ante Trump, at least not for long, if that is even desirable. Under either scenario, competent local governance might provide significantly better living conditions than the national average (more on that below), but the overall picture is pretty grim.

A few years from now I expect that we’ll be in very different territory socially, politically, and economically. This is not a conclusion that I relish, but it’s one seemingly demanded by history and logic.



Image above: The Empire from Star Wars in defeat. From original article.

Nevertheless, what we do in the meantime could make a big positive difference to people and planet, both over the short term and also over the long term. Here are some specific things you can do:

1. Disengage from the spectacle. Learn what you need to know in order to assess immediate threats and general trends, but otherwise avoid spending long periods of time ingesting online, print, radio, or televised media. It’s bad for your mental health and takes time away from other items on this list.
2. If you haven’t already done so, make a personal and family resilience plan in case of a temporary breakdown in the basic functions of government (everyone should do this anyway in view of our vulnerability to earthquakes or weather disasters). Where should you be living? Are you growing any of your own food? Do you have some food and water in storage? Have you reduced your energy usage to a minimum, and installed solar PV (with short-term battery backup) and hot water solar panels? Do you have some cash set aside?
3. Work to build community resilience. If and when national governance breaks down, your local community’s degree of social and biophysical resilience will make all the difference for you and your family. Biophysical resilience relates to local food, water, and energy systems. A socially resilient community is one in which people are talking to one another, institutions for resolving disputes are trusted, and people look out for one another. Identify organizations that are building both kinds of resilience in your community and engage with them. These could be churches, civic government, non-profit organizations, food co-ops, energy co-ops, health co-ops, neighborhood safety groups, local investment clubs, or Transition groups. Get involved with existing organizations or start new ones. Yes, it takes a lot of time. But friends are more important than money in the bank—especially in times of social and political upheaval.
4. Direct some of your resilience-building efforts toward long-term and nature-centered concerns. This might take the form of conservation work of various kinds. In my last essay, I discussed assisting the migration of forests in the face of climate change. Carbon farming and providing wild bird and insect refuges are other options—not (only) because they’re enjoyable hobbies but because they help maintain the biophysical resilience of the ecosystems we depend on. Again, this is work that proceeds best in the company of others.
5. Take some time for the conservation of culture—arts and skills that are their own reward. Connecting with others in your community by enjoying or playing music together, singing, dancing, or making visual art deepens relationships and gives life more dimension and meaning.

While the legal and social functions of of liberal democracy persist, vigorous and sustained protest efforts could help rein in the fascist tendencies of the new American government. Participating in protests could enable you to get to know other members of your community.

On the other hand, protest could further fragment your community if that community is already deeply divided politically—and it could eventually get you in a lot of trouble depending on how things work out, since protest under fascist regimes doesn’t produce the same result as protest in a liberal democracy.

Don’t obey the new leaders when they call for actions that undermine democracy and justice; instead, choose to actively disobey in ways that actually matter in the long term. Refuse to define yourself in terms of the regime.

Yes, at certain moments in history it is necessary to take a stand one way or the other on a particular issue (such as the issue of slavery in mid-nineteenth century America), and in the days ahead some issue may require you to plant your flag.

But this historical moment may be one when many real heroes and heroines choose to engage in ways that are not scripted by any of the elites.

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America versus the Deep State

SUBHEAD: The NSA propaganda was designed as a smokescreen to conceal the veracity of the Wikileaks releases.

By James Kunstler on 9 January 2017 for Kunstler.com-
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/america-versus-deep-state/)


Image above: NYT headquarters. Home of the "Gray Lady" and Deep State news outlet. From (https://globalelite.tv/2016/page/23/).

The bamboozlement of the public is nearly complete. The Deep State has persuaded 80 percent of Americans that all news is propaganda, especially the news emanating from the Deep State’s own intel department.

They’re still shooting for 100 percent. The fakest of all “fake news” stories turns out to be… “Russia Hacks Election.” It was reported conclusively Saturday on the front page of The New York Times, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Deep State:

Putin Led a Complex Cyberattack Scheme to Aid Trump, Report Finds
WASHINGTON — President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia directed a vast cyberattack aimed at denying Hillary Clinton the presidency and installing Donald J. Trump in the Oval Office, the nation’s top intelligence agencies said in an extraordinary report they delivered on Friday to Mr. Trump.

You can be sure that this is now the “official” narrative aimed at the history books, sealing the illegitimacy of Trump’s election. It was served up with no direct proof, only the repeated “assertions” that it was so. In fact, it’s just this repetition of assertions-without-proof that defines propaganda. It can also be interpreted as a declaration of war against an incoming president.

The second civil war now takes shape: It begins inside the groaning overgrown apparatus of the government itself. Perhaps after that it spreads to the WalMart parking lots that have become America’s new town square. (WalMart sells pitchforks and patio torches.)

Did the Russians make Hillary Clinton look bad? Or did Hillary Clinton manage to do that herself?

The NSA propaganda was designed as a smokescreen to conceal the veracity of the Wikileaks releases. Whoever actually rooted out the DNC and Podesta emails for Wikileaks ought to get the Pulitizer Prize for the outstanding public service of disclosing exactly how dishonest the Hillary operation was.

The story may have climaxed with Trump’s Friday NSA briefing, the heads of the various top intel agencies all assembled in one room to emphasize the solemn authority of the Deep State’s power.

Trump worked a nice piece of ju-jitsu afterward, pretending to accept the finding as briefly and hollowly as possible and promising to “look into the matter” after January 20^th — when he can tear a new asshole in the NSA.

I hope he does. This hulking security apparatus has become a menace to the Republic.

Whether Trump himself is a menace to the Republic remains to be seen. Certainly he is the designated bag-holder for all the economic and financial depravity of several preceding administrations. When the markets blow, do you suppose the Russians will be blamed for that? Did Boris Yeltsin repeal the Glass-Steagall Act?

Was Ben Bernanke a puppet of Putin? No, these actions and actors were homegrown American. For more than thirty years, we’ve been borrowing too much money so we can pretend to afford living in a blue-light-special demolition derby. And now we can’t do that anymore. The physics of capital will finally assert itself.

What we’re actually seeing in the current ceremonial between the incoming Trump and the outgoing Obama is the smoldering wreckage of the Democratic Party (which I’m still unhappily enrolled in), and flames spreading into the Republican party — as idiots such as Lindsey Graham and John McCain beat their war drums against Russia.

The suave Mr. Obama is exiting the scene on a low wave of hysteria and the oafish Trump rolls in on the cloudscape above, tweeting his tweets from on high, and perhaps it’s a good thing that the American people for the moment cannot tell exactly what the fuck is going on in this country, because from that dismal place there is nowhere to go but in the direction of clarity.

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Is Grizzly Steppe a joke?

SUBHEAD: No,Grizzley Steppe is not a locale in Yellowstone Park or a Chippandale dancer's name. It's just propaganda.

By Deirdre Fulton on 30 December 2016 for Common Dreams -
(http://www.commondreams.org/news/2016/12/30/critics-still-see-holes-us-evidence-russian-election-interference)


Image above: Jeh Johnson, Director of the Department of Homeland Security under cover as male stripper "Grizzly Steppe" of Chipendale's. From Wikipedia and (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/originals/d1/64/ba/d164ba23e6e8a95d8f29ae33813c23e7.jpg). Mashup by Juan Wilson.

[IB Publisher's note: Grizzly Steppe is actually a ridiculous name made up by US intelligence agencies. On Thursday, the DHS and FBI released a report on alleged Russian election interference, dubbed GRIZZLY STEPPE]

Critics still see holes in US 'Evidence' of Russian election interference. Like the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi WMDs, the charges that Russia 'hacked' the presidential election in November have not been established beyond secret intelligence sources.

As the U.S. expels 35 Russian diplomats over hacking charges, critics say the so-called evidence released Thursday alongside President Barack Obama's sanctions is an insufficient response to calls for hard proof of the allegations.

The FBI/Department of Homeland Security Joint Analysis Report "Grizzly Steppe" (pdf), published as part of the White House's response to alleged Russian government interference in the 2016 election process, "adds nothing to the call for evidence that the Russian government was responsible for hacking the [Democratic National Committee, or DNC], the [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee], the email accounts of Democratic party officials, or for delivering the content of those hacks to WikiLeaks," wrote cybersecurity expert Jeffrey Carr on Friday.

The brief report "merely listed every threat group ever reported on by a commercial cybersecurity company that is suspected of being Russian-made and lumped them under the heading of Russian Intelligence Services (RIS) without providing any supporting evidence that such a connection exists," Carr said.
He continued:

If the White House had unclassified evidence that tied officials in the Russian government to the DNC attack, they would have presented it by now. The fact that they didn't means either that the evidence doesn't exist or that it is classified.
If it's classified, an independent commission should review it because this entire assignment of blame against the Russian government is looking more and more like a domestic political operation run by the White House that relied heavily on questionable intelligence generated by a for-profit cybersecurity firm with a vested interest in selling "attribution-as-a-service."

In fact, cyber-expert Robert M. Lee, in his posted critique on Friday, noted that the FBI/DHS report "is intended to help network defenders; it is not the technical evidence of attribution."

As such, Lee argued, it is likely to "confuse readers" who are seeking such evidence.

Meanwhile, Intercept journalist Sam Biddle, who recently published a take-down of the public evidence that had been put forth as of mid-December, added his voice to calls for more in the way of hard evidence:

Sam Biddle ✔ @samfbiddle

GRIZZLY STEPPE only restates premise that APT 28/29 are Russian gov, rather than proving it. let’s hope for more in congressional testimony

9:55 AM - 29 Dec 2016

And The Young Turks politics reporter Jordan Chariton also raised questions in a video posted Thursday afternoon:


Video above: Jordan Chiriton From (https://youtu.be/snJin79SbaU).

For raising these questions, Chariton and others who supported his demand were branded "Kremlin cheerleaders," continuing what journalist Glenn Greenwald described as a trend:

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald

it's worse than that. If you question adequacy of the evidence or want to see more, they'll accuse you of disloyalty & being a Russian agent https://twitter.com/JustinRaimondo/status/814875448651853824 …

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald

Lets be clear: U aren't an American patriot & don't respect Constitution if u believe Saddam more than our President & intelligent services https://twitter.com/matthewjdowd/status/814615305729220609 …

Glenn Greenwald ✔ @ggreenwald

Words don't exist for how low it is to depict someone as a Kremlin agent or traitor for questioning adequacy of evidence for USG assertions.

Like Greenwald, author and media critic Howard Friel sees parallels between the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the current "unconfirmable claims" of Russian election interference.
"Like the Bush administration's claims of Iraqi [weapons of mass destruction], the charges that Russia 'hacked' the presidential election in November have not been established beyond secret intelligence sources, which have been treated and printed by the New York Times as impeccable," Friel wrote on Friday.     

He continued:

Just as the Times editorial page in February 2003 had no basis for concluding that Colin Powell's presentation at the UN was "the most powerful case to date" that Iraq possessed WMD, the Times today has no confirmable basis for concluding that "there should be no doubt" that Russia hacked the presidential election last month or that President Obama has any basis for "punishing Russia," which in any event is unprofessional and jingoistic journalistic usage from the leading newspaper in the United States.

Yet, it reflects the warlike tone and tenor of the liberal political and journalistic establishments, led by the New York Times, which seems determined to drive us over the cliff once again toward war.

Meanwhile, Russian President Vladimir Putin said Friday he would not expel any U.S. diplomats in retaliation for Obama's moves—"a surprisingly calm reaction," as the Guardian described, "that appears to be designed as an overture to the incoming U.S. president, Donald Trump."

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