Displacement Syndrome Anatomy

SUBHEAD: USA facilities around the country working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses.

By James Kunstler on 20 July 2018 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/anatomy-of-a-displacement-projection-syndrome/)


Image above: Small portion of the NSA Data Center in Bluffdale, Utah. This facility is reportedly capable of storing all electronic communications in the United States. From (http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/07/31/report-utah-cops-get-1m-a-year-to-park-at-nsa-data-center).

“For more than a decade, Russia has meddled in elections around the world, supported brutal dictators and invaded sovereign nations — all to the detriment of United States interests.”
— The New York Times

The Resistance sure got a case of the vapors this week over Mr. Trump’s failure to throttle America’s arch-enemy, the murderous thug V. Putin of Russia, onstage in Helsinki, as any genuine Marvel Comix hero is expected to do when facing consummate evil.

Instead, the Golden Golem of Greatness voiced some doubts about the veracity of our “intelligence community” — as the shape-shifting Moloch of black ops likes to call itself, as if it were a kindly service organization in Mr. Rogers neighborhood, collecting dimes for victims of childhood cancer.

If I may be frank, the US Intel community looks like a much bigger threat to American life and values than anything Mr. Putin is doing, for instance his alleged “meddling” in US elections.

This word, meddling, absolutely pervades the captive Resistance news outlets these days. It has a thrilling vagueness about it, intimating all kinds of dark deeds without specifying anything, as consorting with Satan once did in our history.

The reason: the only specific acts associated with this meddling include the disclosure of incriminating emails among the Democratic National Committee leadership, and a tiny gang of Facebook trolls making sport of profoundly idiotic and dysfunctional American electoral politics.

The brief against Russia also contains vague accusations of “aggression.” It is hard to discern what is meant by that — though it apparently warms the heart of American war hawks and their paymasters in the warfare industries. They allege that Russia “stole” Crimea from Ukraine. Consider: Crimea had been a province of Russia since the 1700s.

Ukraine itself was a province of the USSR when Nikita Khrushchev put Crimea under Ukraine’s administrative control in 1956, a relationship which became obviously problematic after the breakup of the soviet mega-state in 1990 — and became even more of a problem when the US State Department and our CIA stage-managed a coup against the Russia-leaning Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Crimea is the site of Russia’s only warm water naval bases.

Do you suppose that even an experience American CIA analyst might understand that Russia would under no circumstances give up those assets?

Please, grow up.

Does anyone remember the explicit promise that US Government gave the transitional leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, that NATO would not expand into the countries of eastern Europe formerly under soviet control? NATO now includes the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, and Montenegro.

Is anyone aware that NATO has been staging war games on Russia’s border the past several years? Do you suppose this might be disturbing to the Russians, who lost at least 20 million dead when Germany crossed that border in 1941?

As to the thug-and-murderer charge against V. Putin, has any news org actually published a list of his alleged victims? It’s very likely, of course, that Mr. Putin has had some of his political enemies killed. I wouldn’t take the “con” side of that argument.

But I’d be interested in seeing an authoritative list, if the intel community has one (and why wouldn’t they?).

I imagine it doesn’t exceed two dozen individuals. How many innocent bystanders did President Obama kill during the drone attack spree of his second term, when our rockets blew up wedding parties and sandwich shops in faraway lands. In 2016, The Atlantic published this:

One campaign, Operation Haymaker, took place in northeastern Afghanistan. Between January 2012 and February 2013, The Intercept reported, “U.S. special operations airstrikes killed more than 200 people. Of those, only 35 were the intended targets. During one five-month period of the operation, according to the documents, nearly 90 percent of the people killed in airstrikes were not the intended targets.”

I suppose the excuse is that none of this was personal — as V. Putin’s alleged murders were. No, it wasn’t personal. It was worse than that.

It was a bunch of military video-game jocks sitting around an air-conditioned bunker eating hot pockets and slurping slurpees while snuffing out lives by remote control twelve-thousand miles away. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were high-fiving each other with every hit, too.

As for “hacking” of elections, do you suppose for minute that we do not have hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of computer techies at our many sprawling NSA facilities around the country working around the clock to penetrate foreign computer defenses absolutely everywhere, among friend and foe alike? And that we are not trying to influence the outcomes of their political struggles in our favor?

Go a step further: do you suppose those US “intel community” hackers are not also collecting information about American citizens, including yourself?

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The Dog Wags Trump

SUBHEAD: The "missile attack" on Syria hardly diverted attention from the impeachment lava flow headed Trump's way.

By Juan Wilson on 14 April 2018 for Island Breath -
(http://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-dog-wags-trump.html)


Image above: US Tomahawk fly missiles over Damascus, Syria. Photo by Hassan Amma. From (http://www.srzd.com/geral/putin-acusa-eua-ataque-agrava-crise-humanitaria-na-siria/).

The Upside
Bombing hardly worked to divert attention from "Trump's bad press problem a year ago when US navel forces in the Mediterranean Sea sent 59 Tomahawk missiles to a pre-warned Shayrat Air Base in Syria on 7 April 2017. That "wagging of the dog" ended with Syrian combat flights resumed from the airbase the same day on the relatively undamaged runways.

Now we have another show of force against the Syrian government in reprisal for another supposed "weapons of mass destruction" incident with poison gas. This time 71 of 105 Tomahawk missiles were intercepted by high tech Russian installed missile defense systems.

This kill count was likely enhanced by US military information provided to the Russians to avoid tripping into WWIII.

The effort to drag our allies into this mess did more harm than good, in that England and France (both nuclear powers) came along for the show but Germany and Italy wanted no part i it. This effectively splits the NATO alliance in two.

The Downside
It appears the Michael Cohen, Donald Trump's "personal attorney" and "Fixer"- who did not practice law or have other clients to speak of - will likely be the fall guy for a myriad of felonies related Trump's "business activity" otherwise known as  "organized crime". As in the "Godfather", Cohen has been the Consigliere (counselor Tom Hagen) to the Don ( mob boss Michael Corleone).

Unfortunately for Trump, the warrant the FBI obtained to search the home, office, and hotel room occupied by Cohen will likely produce a treasure trove of records pointing to criminal activity of the Trump organization.

If you look at the leadership personnel of the FBI, Special Prosecutor's Office, and Court of the Southern District of New York, you will realize that it is the Republicans that are legally going after Trump in a way that will likely lead to impeachment in the Republican controlled US Congress and Senate.

Trump is Toast
I think the writing is on the wall. The conservative Deep State has been embarrassed by Trump's crudeness, ignorance, narcissism, selfishness and impropriety. The stench of corruption is everywhere and it's too ugly for them to watch. George Bush was an embarrassment as well, but at least he took orders from Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Karl Rove. Trump has the misconception that he's "The Boss". Sorry chump! YOU'RE FIRED! 


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State of Failure

SUBHEAD: How is it in Bashar al-Assad’s interests to provoke a fresh international uproar against him and his regime?

By James Kunstler on 9 April 2018 for Kunstler.com  -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/state-of-failure/)


Image above: War Criminal Votes. Bachar al-Assad and his wife Asma at a polling place during a recent vote in Damascus, Syria. From (http://www.newindianexpress.com/world/2018/mar/19/syrias-assad-congratulates-vladimir-putin-on-natural-victory-1789486.html).

BEIRUT, Lebanon — Days after President Trump said he wanted to pull the United States out of Syria, Syrian forces hit a suburb of Damascus with bombs that rescue workers said unleashed toxic gas.

Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me, the old saying goes. So, tread carefully through the minefields of propaganda laid for the credulous in such low organs as The New York Times.

There are excellent reasons to suppose that the American Deep State wishes strenuously to keep meddling all around the Middle East.

The record so far shows that the blunt instruments of US strategic policy produce a consistent result: failed states.

Syria was well on its way to that sorry condition — prompted by an inflow of Jihadi maniacs fleeing our previous nation un-building experiment in Iraq — when the Russians stepped in with an arrantly contrary idea: to support the Syrian government.

Of course, the Russians had ulterior motives: a naval base on the Mediterranean, expanded influence in the region, and a Gazprom concession to develop and manage large natural gas fields near the Syrian city of Homs, for export to Europe.

The latter would have competed with America’s client state, Qatar, a leading gas exporter to Europe.

But the US objected to supporting the government of Bashar al-Assad, as it had previously with Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi, as well as Russia’s presence there in the first place.

So, the US cultivated anti-government forces in the Syrian civil war, a hodgepodge of Islamic psychopaths variously known as ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant), Daesh, al-Qaeda, al-Nusra, Ansar al-Din, Jaysh al-Sunna, Nour al-Din al-Zenki, and what-have-you.

As it happened, US policy in Syria after 2013 became an exercise in waffling. It was clear that our support for the forces of Jihad against Assad was turning major Syrian cities into rubble-fields, with masses of civilians caught in the middle and ground up like so much dog food.

President Barack Obama famously drew a line-in-the-sand on the use of chemical weapons. It was well-known that the Syrian army had stockpiles of chemical poisons.

But the US also knew that our Jihadi consorts had plenty of their own. Incidents of chemical atrocities were carried out by… somebody… it was never altogether clear or proven… and Mr. Obama’s line-in-the-sand disappeared under dust-storms of equivocation.

Finally, a joint mission of the United Nations Human Rights Commission (UNHRC) and the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) was called in to supervise the destruction of the Syrian government’s chemical weapons, and certified it as accomplished in late 2014.

Yet, poison gas incidents continued — most notoriously in 2017 when President Donald Trump responded to one with a sortie of cruise missiles against a vacant Syrian government airfield.


Image above:  War Criminal Votes. Donald Trump, with his wife Melania, votes for himself at polling place during 2016 Presidential Election. From (https://qz.com/831181/election-2016-how-do-you-write-donald-trump-in-chinese/).

And now another incident in the Damascus suburb of Douma has provoked Mr. Trump to tweetstormed threats of retaliatory violence, just days after he proposed a swift withdrawal from that vexing corner of the world.

Surely by now the American public has developed some immunity to claims of nefarious doings in foreign lands (“weapons of mass destruction,” and all).

The operative sentence in that New York Times report is “…Syrian forces hit a suburb of Damascus with bombs that rescue workers said unleashed toxic gas.”

Yeah, well, how clear is it that the toxic gas was contained in the bombs, or rather that the bombs dropped by the Syrian military blew up a chemical weapon depot controlled by anti-government Jihadis?

Does that hodgepodge of maniacs show any respect for the UN, or the Geneva Convention, or any other agency of international law?

As in many previous such incidents, we don’t know who was responsible — though there is plenty of reason to believe that parties within the US establishment are against Mr. Trump’s idea of getting the hell out of that place, and might cook up a convenient reason to prevent it.

Lastly, how is it in Bashar al-Assad’s interests to provoke a fresh international uproar against him and his regime? I’d say it is not the least in his interest, since he is on the verge of putting an end to the awful conflict. He may not be a model of rectitude by Western standards, but he’s not a mental defective.

And he has very able Russian support advising him in what has been so far a long and difficult effort to prevent his state from failing — or being failed for him.

[IB Publisher's note: We have been at war in the Middle East since 2001 and at war in Syria since 2013. As Americans we are now in a state of perpetual war in that region that accelerates ecosystem collapse and permanent climate change and mass exodus. Next stop Iran!]

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Syriasly! 4/2/18
Ea O Ka Aina: US shoots down Syrian jet 6/19/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Australia suspends Syria overflights 6/ 20/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Syria poison gas story unravels 4/18/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Source of Sarin gas attack faked? 4/14/17
Ea O Ka Aina: US has used DU in Syria 2/19/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Ms Gabbard goes to Syria 1/29/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Trump amps up war in Syria 1/29/17
Ea O Ka Aina: US shoots down Syrian drone 1/20/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Need for New Syria Policy 12/19/16
Ea O Ka Aina: To prevent still worse in Syria 10/4/16
Ea O Ka Aina: WWIII has begun in Syria 9/23/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Skidding towards Syrian War 6/19/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Hillary and the Syrian Bloodbath 2/15/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Road to World War III 2/14/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Don't Bomb Syria 11/28/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Ten reasons not to overthrow Syria 11/23/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi Gabbard on Syria 11/1/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Michele won't go to Syria 9/10/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Pentagon's Syrian Blackout 6/6/13
Ea O Ka Aina: Syria a preview of 2030 6/2/13

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Coming Apart at the Brink

SUBHEAD: We have reached a point where there is no possibility of revival within the current system.

By Alastair Crooke on 18 June 2017 for the Automatic Earth -
(https://www.theautomaticearth.com/2017/06/coming-apart-the-imperial-city-at-the-brink/)


Image above: Oil painting by Thomas Cole "The Consummation of Empire" 1836. From original article.

[Automatic Earth's publisher Raul Ilagi Meier's introduction: The Conflicts Forum, directed by former British diplomat and MI6 ‘ranking figure’ Alastair Crooke, sent me another unpublished article by Alastair and asked if the Automatic Earth would publish it. But of course. Previous articles by Alastair published here are: ‘End of Growth’ Sparks Wide Discontent in October 2016, Obstacles to Trump’s ‘Growth’ Plans in November 2016 and What is this ‘Crisis’ of Modernity? in January 2017.]

David Stockman routinely refers to President Trump as the ‘Great Disrupter’. But this is not a bad quality, he insists. Rather, it is a necessary one: Stockman argues (my paraphrasing) that Trump represents the outside force, the externality, that tips a ‘world system’ over the brink: It has to tip over the brink, because systems become too ossified, too far out on their ‘branch’ to be able to reform themselves.

It does not really matter so much, whether the agency of this tipping process (President Trump in this instance), fully comprehends his pivotal role, or plays it out in an intelligent and subtle way, or in a heavy-handed, and unsubtle manner. Either serve the purpose. And that purpose is to disrupt.

Why should disruption be somehow a ‘quality’? It is because, during a period when ‘a system’ is coming apart, (history tells us), one can reach a point at which there is no possibility of revival within the old, but still prevailing, system.

An externality of some sort – maybe war, or some other calamity or a Trump – is necessary to tip the congealed system ‘over’: thus, the external intrusion can be the catalyst for (often traumatic) transformational change.

Stockman puts it starkly:

“The single most important thing to know about the present risk environment [he is pointing here to both the political risk as well as financial risk environment], is that it is extreme, and unprecedented. In essence, the ruling elites and their mainstream media megaphones have arrogantly decided that the 2016 [US Presidential] election was a correctible error”.

But complacency simply is endemic: “The utter fragility of the latest and greatest Fed bubble could not be better proxied than in this astounding fact. To wit, during the last 5,000 trading days (20 years), the VIX (a measure of market volatility) has closed below 10 on just 11 occasions. And 7 of those have been during the last month! … That’s complacency begging to be monkey-hammered”, Stockman says.

Former Presidential candidate, Pat Buchanan concurs: “President Trump may be chief of state, head of government and commander in chief, but his administration is shot through with disloyalists plotting to bring him down.

We are approaching something of a civil war where the capital city seeks the overthrow of the sovereign, and [to achieve] its own restoration. Thus far, it is a nonviolent struggle, though street clashes between pro- and anti-Trump forces are increasingly marked by fistfights and brawls. Police are having difficulty keeping people apart. A few have been arrested carrying concealed weapons.

That the objective of this city is to bring Trump down, via a deep state-media coup, is no secret. Few deny it.”

The extraordinary successful ‘manufacture’ and ‘parachuting-in’ of Macron into the French Presidential election by the French élite, precisely has given to the globalised Deep State (including their US counterparts), renewed confidence that Europe and America’s slide towards ‘populism’, is indeed a ‘correctable error’. European elites now can barely contain their revived schadenfreude at the Brexiters’ and at the Populists’ presumed discomfort (see here).


Image above: Oil painting by Thomas Cole "The Destruction of Empire" 1836. From original article.

But despite the palpable danger to the integrity of the political system itself, Stockman notes, “it is no inconsiderable understatement to suggest that the S&P 500 at 2440 is about as fragile as the ‘market’ has ever been.

Any untoward pinprick could send it into a tailspin … Doug Kass said it best in his recent commentary:

“Over history, as we have learned, a Minksy Moment develops when investor sentiment becomes complacent after long periods of prosperity and the data is ignored, and doesn’t seem to matter anymore, as I wrote in “It’s a ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ Market: Nothing Really Matters … to investors.” 

In short, the market has become ‘zombie’ (in the sense of residing within a psychological defence mechanism – as, when to contemplate the alternative – simply is too threatening to the psyche) [emphasis added].

Daniel Henninger, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, writes:

“Donald Trump’s election has caused psychological unhingement in much of the population. But the Trump phenomenon only accelerated forces that were plummeting in this direction before the 2016 election…

“Impossible to miss, though, is how jacked up emotional intensity has become in American politics. The campaign rallies of both Mr. Trump and Bernie Sanders often sat on the edge of violence. Reporters describe political town hall meetings as full of “angry” voters. Shouting down the opposition in these forums or on campus has been virtually internalized as standard behavior. Refusal to reason is the new normal. And then, the unreason is euphemized as free speech.

Explaining away these impulses as a routine turn of the populist political cycle is insufficient. Something more permanent is happening.”

It is not, of course just the markets which are threatened by unperceived risk. Trump shall not be forgiven for challenging the sacrosant meme of a world divided between (good) ‘liberal’ democracies (led by the US and its European allies) and (bad) illiberal autocracies (led today, by President Putin’s Russia): by snubbing NATO and withdrawing from the Paris Climate Agreement, Professor Michael Klare writes;

“We’ve been told, President Trump is dismantling the liberal world order created by Franklin D Roosevelt at the end of World War II”.

An offence, it seems, against something somehow sacral: recently, US comedienne Kathy Griffin posted a video of herself holding the bloody, severed head of Donald Trump. “But that wasn’t the end of it” Henninger notes.

 “We may assume that as Ms. Griffin was creating her video, the artists at New York’s Public Theater, were rehearsing their production of Julius Caesar, the one in which Central Park audiences watch ‘Caesar’ as a blond-haired Donald Trump, who is pulled down from a podium by men in suits, and assassinated with plunging knives … Whatever once fastened the doors of people’s minds to something secure and stable has become unhinged.”

Mike Vlahos (Professor at the US Naval War college and John Hopkins) tells us that, as a military historian and global strategist, he became curious to know just why it is that ‘world systems’ do ‘come apart’. His first, intuitive sense was that their collapse generally was brought about by some massive external force such as war, pestilence or famine, and by the concomitant mass migrations of peoples.

But when he and his students completed their research, he concluded that though these factors had often played an important part, they were not the prime cause of the system coming apart. Rather, he identified a number of key triggers:

• The elites became stratified, and politics frozen
• The peoples’ allegiance became taken for granted, at the same time that the elites chose to ignore threats to the peoples’ way of life
• Social mobility declined, and change is fiercely resisted
• Rather, élites work to maximize their wealth and status.
• Elite authority becomes excessively militarized – and justified as ‘saving civilization’.

He concludes from this study;

“The situation that we inhabit today […] here in the imperial city in Washington DC, is that it is absolutely hollowed out … it is incapable of offering anything to its own people, the American people … I think we have reached a point where there is no possibility of revival within the current system that exists. The current system is set upon … is determined to eat itself out in a kind of civil war that is coming, and at the end of that, it will be done, will be finished”.

“The Methoni, one of the great nations of the late Bronze Age, had this same problem with the élites and the 1% that we have today, and they were overthrown. That’s 3300 years ago, and it keeps happening again and again.

And the very structure of the decadent relationships in late periods where élites refuse to accommodate, refuse to adapt, refuse to be sensitive to needs of the larger whole of society, means this has to happen. There has to be an overthrow … for things eventually to get better, to be renewed. In other words, you can’t renew from within”.

Image above: Oil painting by Thomas Cole "The Desolation of Empire" 1836. From original article.

Is this the situation today? The pre-conditions that Professor Vlahos relates, in terms of élite hubris, self-regard, and disdain for the real concerns of people are there (the polarization of US society at the US election provides the empirical evidence for this). And Stockman, in calling Trump the ‘Great Disrupter’ plainly implies that he might be precisely the ‘externality’ (coming from outside the élite) – that might tip things ‘over’. This surely is what Stockman means when he warns about ‘the present risk environment’ being extreme.

Of course, the usual retort is that Trump offers no coherent alternative conceptual vision for the future, but only seized successfully upon a number of key insights: the power of cultural nationalism, the pain felt by the casualties of globalism, the impact of a hollowed-out US economy, and the need to put America first.

This is true. These insights do not constitute a vision for the future, but why should one expect that, from the ‘Disrupter’? His ‘agency’ is that of catalyst, not that of final ‘constructor’. That comes later.

So, from whence does ultimate societal renewal come? The classic answer is that after ‘disruption’ nothing much is left standing amidst the (metaphoric) ruins of whatever stood as the reigning ‘modernity’.

Historically, renewal was effected through a communal ‘reaching back’- beyond the roots of whatever represented the contemporary crisis – to delve back, deep into the archetypal cultural history of a people. The rummaging in collective memory, allows a narrative to shape, about why the present ‘hurt’ befell its people, and to bring forward, transformed into contemporary meaning, some ‘solution’: a new meta-historical understanding.

Plainly, this (a type of spiritual renewal) is not President Trump’s ‘bag’. (Steve Bannon’s the more so, perhaps?)

What does all this mean in practical terms? First, it suggests that most of us still prefer not to address the stark reality that “the objective of this city (DC), is to bring Trump down, via a deep state-media coup” and the bitter political trench warfare, which this portends. We prefer to rest in complacency, (as zombies for now), until a crisis squarely hits us – in a personal way.

Secondly, thoughts of an easy return to the status quo ante (such as via Vice-President Pence standing-in), is problematic (Macron’s election in France notwithstanding). Since the élites (all of them), have, in their ‘war’ against ‘populists’ and deplorables, totally lost legitimacy and authority for a substantive part of their populations. And they will not – cannot – adapt. For, that is their nature.

This is the moment, Professor Vlahos notes, when a system – i.e. US operational governance – begins to ‘come apart’. Individuals, cabals within government, whole departments of state, look to their own self-awarded ‘authority’, rather than to that of the government as mandated by the electorate.

Thus we have this past week, the Senate voting 97-2 to impose further sanctions on Russia. Another wrench jammed into Trump’s foreign policy wheels – and explicitly conceived to paralyse and impede the President.

Thirdly, the intent is – like some Amazonian reptile venom – to ‘bite’ him with so much innuendo and assorted investigations and further allegations, that Trump, like the reptile’s victim, remains awake – but incapable of moving a muscle: A true zombie, in fact, as the reptile feeds on its living corpse.

Fourth, this zombified US President, will shortly face the requirement to negotiate with Congress an exit from a bubbling financial sphere soaring upwards, whilst a moribund real economy trails downwards – under pressure from the fast-approaching debt-ceiling deadline.

The Senate’s slap at the President’s face with the Russia sanctions vote suggests it is more likely that he will be tossed another spanner: this time aimed at the wheels of the ‘Trump reflation’ program.

What other insights might history offer? Two, perhaps: Professor Vlahos, during his discussion with John Batchelor, the latter points out that, even at the very moment that the hub of the Roman Empire already had fallen apart, the collapsing Empire was celebrated the most, when it was imitated at the furthest edges of Empire: by the peoples of Gaul and Germany, for example.

Are we not seeing the same today, in Europe, as Merkel and Macron vow to keep the liberal, globalist values of the American Empire alive — at the edges of the American Empire — in Europe?

And lastly, the constituency that historically led renewal? Professor Vlahos: “The Roman legions, the Czarist armies, the German Imperial armies and the Ottoman armies”.

The Pentagon élites should note well.



Image above: Oil painting by Thomas Cole 1836 series on "The Course of Empire - The Pastoral State". From (http://www.artfixdaily.com/artwire/release/1791-nature-and-the-american-vision-the-hudson-river-school) Click to enlarge..

[IB Publsiher's note: Above is another of American painter Thomas Cole's series. This one illustrates the arcadian or pastoral state. It's not clear if it follows or  precedes Empire. We, at Island Breath, are hoping and planning for the latter.]

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Syria poison gas story unravels

SUBHEAD: The Trump Administration narrative continues to come apart revealing the lust for war.

By Michael Krieger on 18 April 2017 for Libertty Blitzkrieg -
(https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/04/18/the-trump-administrations-syria-gas-attack-narrative-continues-to-unravel)


Image above: American UN Ambassador Nikki Haley reprises UN Ambassador Colin Powell false demonstration of weapons of mass destruction - this time with photos of "victims" of Syrian war crimes. Photo by Drew Angerer. From (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/syria-chemical-attack-al-qaeda-played-donald-trump_us_58ea226fe4b058f0a02fca4d).

Pretty much every official statement emanating from the U.S. government these days is a deception, fabrication, or outright lie. I understand that this is a hard thing for a U.S. citizen to admit, but as James Baldwin so accurately stated:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

So let’s go ahead and face the facts. Governments lie. Governments have always lied. Extremely corrupt, imperial governments overseeing societies in deep economic and cultural decline lie even more. This isn’t conspiracy theory, it’s what obviously happens when you combine tremendous power with human nature.

Although I’ve been questioning the Trump administration’s fairytale narrative about the recent Syria gas attack from day one, I don’t have the expertise to sufficiently examine the evidence and put some meat on the bones.

In contrast, Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy at MIT, Theodore A. Postol does, and he’s published a series of reports over the past week calling out what he believes is a deliberate deception by members of the Trump team.

IB Publisher's note: A section of this report has been omitted as it duplicates our reporting, on 14 April 2017, of Professor Postol's analysis. You can see that material, if you have not read it here Ea O Ka Aina: Source of Sarin gas attack faked? Michael Krieger goes on to say:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at the “Summary and Conclusions” section from his third report courtesy of Naked Capitalism:

Summary and Conclusions
It is now clear from video evidence that the WHR (White House Intelligence Report) was fabricated without input from the professional intelligence community.

The press reported on April 4 that a nerve agent attack had occurred in Khan Shaykhun, Syria during the early morning hours locally on that day. On April 7, The United States carried out a cruise missile attack on Syria ordered by President Trump. It now appears that the president ordered this cruise missile attack without any valid intelligence to support it.

In order to cover up the lack of intelligence to supporting the president’s action, the National Security Council produced a fraudulent intelligence report on April 11 four days later. The individual responsible for this report was Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, the National Security Advisor.

The McMaster report is completely undermined by a significant body of video evidence taken after the alleged sarin attack and before the US cruise missile attack that unambiguously shows the claims in the WHR could not possibly be true. This cannot be explained as a simple error.

The National Security Council Intelligence Report clearly refers to evidence that it claims was obtained from commercial and open sources shortly after the alleged nerve agent attack (on April 5 and April 6). If such a collection of commercial evidence was done, it would have surely found the videos contained herein.

This unambiguously indicates a dedicated attempt to manufacture a false claim that intelligence actually supported the president’s decision to attack Syria, and of far more importance, to accuse Russia of being either complicit or a participant in an alleged atrocity.

The attack on the Syrian government threatened to undermine the relationship between Russia and the United States. Cooperation between Russia and the United States is critical to the defeat of the Islamic State. In addition, the false accusation that Russia knowingly engaged in an atrocity raises the most serious questions about a willful attempt to do damage relations with Russia for domestic political purposes.
We repeat here a quote from the WHR:

An open source video also shows where we believe the chemical munition landed—not on a facility filled with weapons, but in the middle of a street in the northern section of Khan Shaykhun. Commercial satellite imagery of that site from April 6, after the allegation, shows a crater in the road that corresponds to the open source video.

The data provided in these videos make it clear that the WHR made no good-faith attempt to collect data that could have supported its “confident assessment.” that the Syrian government executed a sarin attack as indicated by the location and characteristics of the crater.

This very disturbing event is not a unique situation. President George W. Bush argued that he was misinformed about unambiguous evidence that Iraq was hiding a substantial store of weapons of mass destruction. This false intelligence led to a US attack on Iraq that started a process that ultimately led to the political disintegration in the Middle East, which through a series of unpredicted events then led to the rise of the Islamic State.

On August 30, 2013, the White House produced a similarly false report about the nerve agent attack on August 21, 2013 in Damascus.

This report also contained numerous intelligence claims that could not be true. An interview with President Obama published in The Atlantic in April 2016 indicates that Obama was initially told that there was solid intelligence that the Syrian government was responsible for the nerve agent attack of August 21, 2013 in Ghouta, Syria. Obama reported that he was later told that the intelligence was not solid by the then Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper.

Equally serious questions are raised about the abuse of intelligence findings by the incident in 2013. Questions that have not been answered about that incident is how the White House produced a false intelligence report with false claims that could obviously be identified by experts outside the White House and without access to classified information.

There also needs to be an explanation of why this 2013 false report was not corrected. Secretary of State John Kerry emphatically testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee repeating information in this so-called un-equivocating report.
On August 30, 2013 Secretary of State Kerry made the following statement from the Treaty Room in the State Department:

Our intelligence community has carefully reviewed and re-reviewed information regarding this attack[Emphasis added], and I will tell you it has done so more than mindful of the Iraq experience. We will not repeat that moment. Accordingly, we have taken unprecedented steps to declassify and make facts available to people who can judge for themselves.

It is now obvious that this incident produced by the WHR, while just as serious in terms of the dangers it created for US security, was a clumsy and outright fabrication of a report that was certainly not supported by the intelligence community.


In this case, the president, supported by his staff, made a decision to launch 59 cruise missiles at a Syrian air base. This action was accompanied by serious risks of creating a confrontation with Russia, and also undermining cooperative efforts to win the war against the Islamic State.

I therefore conclude that there needs to be a comprehensive investigation of these events that have either misled people in the White House, or worse yet, been perpetrated by people to protect themselves from domestic political criticisms for uninformed and ill-considered actions.

Sincerely yours, Theodore A. Postol
Professor Emeritus of Science, Technology, and National Security Policy Massachusetts Institute of Technology Email: postol@mit.edu

The U.S. government is completely rogue and determined to drive the U.S. into an unwinable war based on false pretenses, which doesn’t serve the national interest. These lunatics must be stopped.


Image above: American UN Ambassador Colin Powell holding up a vial with powder that could be used to hold anthrax, in his presentation to the UN in February 2003, ahead of the Iraq invasion. Did he really think we'd believe he brought a vial of anthrax into the United Nations General Assembly hall. A lying sack of shit. Photograph by Timothy A Clary  From (https://www.commondreams.org/views/2013/02/28/how-bush-administration-sold-war-and-we-bought-it)

See also:
U.S. Propaganda is Embarrassingly Bad (and Why it Matters)
Disturbed Intelligence Analysts Express Concern Over Trump’s ‘Wag the Dog’ Syria Moment
Prepare for Impact – This is the Beginning of the End for U.S. Empire
Goldman Sachs and the Deep State Have Taken Over the Trump Administration

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The Deep State authority crumbles

SUBHEAD: The Deep State is fracturing because its narratives no longer align with the evidence.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 24 March 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar17/DS-dominance3-17.html)


Image above: Cartoon by Ben Garrison of NSA mugging Uncle Sam in front of wall of Deep State. From (https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/de/c5/87/dec587caa4556d5a2c43de0cced13f4f.jpg).

As data from Google Trends illustrates, interest in the Deep State has increased by a hundred fold in 2017. The term/topic has clearly moved from the specialist realm to the mainstream. I've been writing about the Deep State, and specifically, the fractures in the Deep State, for years.

Amusingly, now that "Progressives" have prostituted themselves to the Security Agencies and the Neocons/Neoliberals, they are busy denying the Deep State exists. For example, There is No Deep State (The New Yorker).

In this risible view, there is no Deep State "conspiracy" (the media's favorite term of dismissal/ridicule), just a bunch of "good German" bureaucrats industriously doing the Empire's essential work of undermining democracies that happen not to prostrate themselves at the feet of the Empire, murdering various civilians via drone strikes, surveilling the U.S. populace, planting bugs in new iPhones, issuing fake news while denouncing anything that questions the dominant narratives as "fake news," arranging sweetheart deals with dictators and corporations, and so on.

The New Yorker is right about one thing--the Deep State is not a "conspiracy:" it is a vast machine of control that is largely impervious to the views or demands of elected representatives or the American people.

The key to understanding this social-political-economic control is to grasp that control of the narratives, expertise and authority is control of everything. Allow me to illustrate how this works.

The typical politician has a busy daily schedule of speaking at the National Motherhood and Apple Pie Day celebration, listening to the "concerns" of important corporate constituents, attending a lunch campaign fundraiser, meeting with lobbyists and party committees, being briefed by senior staff, and so on.

Senior administrators share similarly crowded schedules, minus the fundraising but adding budget meetings, reviewing employee complaints and multiple meetings with senior managers and working groups.

Both senior elected officials and senior state administrators must rely on narratives, expertise and authority because they have insufficient time and experience to do original research and assessment.

Narratives create an instant context that "makes sense" of various data points and events. Narratives distill causal factors into an explanatory story with an implicit teleology--because of this and that, the future will be thus and so.

For example: because Iraq has weapons of mass destruction (WMD), the future promises the terrible likelihood (more than a possibility, given Iraqi deployment of poison gas in the Iraq-Iran War) that America or its allies will be devastated by Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

This teleology leads to the inescapable need to eliminate Iraq's weapons of mass destruction by any means necessary, and remove the political will to use them by removing Iraq's leader from power.

Politicos and senior administrators rely on expertise and authority as the basis of deciding whether something is accurate and actionable. Professional specialists are assumed to have the highest available levels of expertise, and their position in institutions that embody the highest authority give their conclusions the additional weight of being authoritative.

The experts' conclusion doesn't just carry the weight of expertise, it has been reviewed by senior officials of the institution, and so it also carries the weight of institutional authority.

So when the C.I.A. briefing by its experts claims Iraq has WMD, and the briefing includes various threads of evidence that the institution declares definitive, who is a non-expert to challenge this conclusion and teleology? On what technical basis does the skeptic reject the expertise and authority of the institution?

We can now define the Deep State with some precision. The Deep State is fundamentally the public-private centralized nodes that collect, archive and curate dominant narratives and their supporting evidence, and disseminate these narratives (and their implicit teleologies) to the public via the media and to the state agencies via formal and informal inter-departmental communication channels.

By gaining control of the narratives, evidence, curation and teleology, each node concentrates power. the power to edit out whatever bits contradict the dominant narrative is the source of power, for once the contradictory evidence is buried or expunged, it ceases to exist.

For example, the contradictory evidence in the Pentagon Papers was buried by being declared Top Secret. The bureaucratic means to bury skeptical (i.e. heretical) views or evidence are many. Sending the authors to figurative Siberia is remarkably effective, as is burying the heretical claims in a veritable mountain of data that few if any will ever survey.

Curation is a critical factor in maintaining control of the narrative and thus of control; the evidence is constantly curated to best support the chosen narrative which in turn supports the desired teleology, which then sets the agenda and the end-game.

The senior apparatchiks of the old Soviet Union were masters of curation; when a Soviet leader fell from favor, he was literally excised from the picture--his image was erased from photos.

This is how narratives are adjusted to better fit the evidence. Thus the accusation that "the Russians hacked our election" has been tabled because it simply doesn't align with any plausible evidence. That narrative has been replaced with variants, such as "the Russians hacked the Democratic National Committee." Now that this claim has also been shown to be false, new variants are popping up weekly, with equally poor alignment with evidence.

The primary claim of each Deep State node is that its expertise and authority cannot be questioned. In other words, while the dominant narrative can be questioned (but only cursorily, of course), the expertise and authority of the institutional node cannot be questioned.

This is why the Deep State is fracturing: the expertise and authority of its nodes are delaminating because its narratives no longer align with the evidence.

If various Security Agencies sign off on the narrative that "Russia hacked our election" (a nonsense claim from the start, given the absurd imprecision of the "hacking"--hacking into what? Voting machines? Electoral tallies?), and that narrative is evidence-free and fact-free, i.e. false, then the expertise and authority of those agencies comes into legitimate question.

Once the legitimacy of the expertise and authority is questioned, control of the narrative is imperiled. The control of the narrative is control of the teleology, the agenda and the end-game--in other words, everything. If the institution loses control of the dominant narrative, it loses its hold on power.

This is why the Deep State is in turmoil--its narratives no longer make sense, or are in direct conflict with other nodes' narratives or have been delegitimized by widening gaps between "definitive" claims and actual evidence.

There is indeed a Deep State, but its control of dominant narratives, and thus its source of control and power, is crumbling. The gap between the narratives and the evidence that supports them has widened to the point of collapse.
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Getting Badder Bigly Fast

SUBHEAD: Trump's crusade it’s getting sucked into the primordial bitumen where the mastodons sleep.

By James Kunstler on 17 March 2017 for Kunstler.com -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/bad-week-getting-badder-bigly-fast/)


Image above: Statues of mastodons being trapped in a La Brea Tar Pit in Las Angeles, California. From (http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/la-brea-tar-pits-dragonfly-fossils).

Well, of course they bugged Trump Tower. Why wouldn’t they? Trump’s big blunder du jour is that he tweeted “wiretapped,” like some hapless sap out of a 1950s I Was a Spy for the FBI movie. I know people who still say “ice box,” too.

So he left himself — or rather poor Sean Spicer — open for a week of legalistic pettifogging by reporters acting as litigators for the Deep State’s intel corps.

 Anyway, Wikileaks “Vault 7” document release earlier in the month made it clear that US intel has the ability to cover and confuse the tracks of any entity —including especially US intel itself — that ventures to penetrate any supposedly private or secure realm. And, by the way, that probably settles the matter of who “they” are.

Whatever statutory restraints once existed against CIA spying on American citizens is long gone by the boards.

You might suppose, too, that the combined forces of Hillary and Obama, along with the still-entrenched Democratic establishment, would have tried through late 2016 to stop The Menace of Trump at all costs.

Somebody had done them dirty in funneling the DNC and Podesta emails to Wikileaks, and it was imperative to fight back — especially with FBI director James Comey (a Republican, after all), going all rogue on Mrs. Clinton.

Hence, the manufactured Russia-did-it story that has gotten more mileage than any political hallucination since Senator Joe McCarthy, at his height of influence, played the newspapers like a whole orchestra of flugelhorns.

It’s hard to see how Trump might ever established the truth of this matter. One of the strange features of these internecine wars is that the Department of Justice — as far as we know — isn’t deposing scores of operations people from the myriad agencies under the NSA umbrella to establish who’s been doing what.

Anyway, there’s enough loose scuttlebutt around Washington that Trump might have a pretty good idea of who at the various agencies hates his guts, and is working against him, and one wonders why he doesn’t just fire a bunch of them. Perhaps that’s yet to come.

But it also looks a bit as though the Golden Golem of Re-Greatification has wandered into a political minefield so dense with booby traps that he’s already out of moves. First there’s the debt ceiling problem — which has so far received almost no attention from the Kardashianized collective news media.

As David Stockman has pointed out on his blog, the US Treasury amassed a “war chest” of nearly half a trillion dollars last fall (via various book-keeping shenanigans) in expectation that President Hillary would need it to ride out some fiscal bad weather early in her reign.

Then, the truly inconceivable happened and Hillary won bigly in the wrong states and not bigly enough in the right ones, and, well….

Immediately, with Trump ascendant, the Treasury and its handmaidens at the Federal Reserve engineered a rapid burn-through of the war chest at a rate of about $90-billion a month since November, so that now there remains only about a month’s worth of walking-around money to run the US Government.

With the old debt ceiling truce expired, congress would have to resolve to raise it, to legally enable the Treasury to resume its massive borrowing operations, or else the government won’t be able to pay invoices or issue pension checks or meet any obligations. It could even default on its “no risk” bonds.

Those dangers are theoretical for the moment, especially since there is always more accounting fraud to resort to when all else fails. But the longer a debt ceiling stalemate goes on in congress, the more trapped President Trump will be.

The cherry on top is the Federal Reserve’s move to raise interest rates the same day the debt ceiling truce expired.

That will thunder through the system, making many loans more expensive to repay, dampening the real estate markets (at a time when commercial real estate is already tanking), and draining all kinds of other mojo (however falsely engineered) from the Potemkin economy.

As if being trapped in a political minefield isn’t bad enough, the remaining safe patch Trump is stranded on turns out to be the LaBrea Tar Pit of health care reform.

At this point, the crusade is doing worse than going nowhere — it’s getting sucked into the primordial bitumen where the mastodons and camelops sleep.

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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.

.

Deep State War

SUBHEAD: Vault 7. Here is one example of how quickly the CIA's over-reach has been absorbed by the body politic.

By Charles Hugh Smith on 10 March 2017 for Of Two Minds -
(http://www.oftwominds.com/blogmar17/deep-state-war3-17.html)


Image above: "CIA" derived from "CNN" logo. From (https://counterpsyops.com/2012/08/31/operation-mockingbird-2012-nyt-writer-leaked-story-critical-of-obama-to-cia/).

The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation.

When do the unlimited powers of the Intelligence/Security agencies threaten America's domestic and global national interests ?

The CIA and its political enablers claim the agency's essentially unlimited powers, partially revealed by Wikileak's Vault 7 , pose no threat to America's interests, since they are intended to "defend" American interests.

This is the rationale presented by neocon CIA allies in both political parties: the CIA can't possibly threaten America's interests because the CIA defines America's interests.

This is the wormhole down which civil liberties and democracy have drained. It is an extraordinarily defining moment in American history when the director of the FBI publicly declares that there is no such thing as "absolute privacy" in the U.S.

In effect, privacy is now contingent on the level of interest the Security State has in private conversations or data. If we read the U.S. Constitution, we do not find such contingencies: civil liberties are absolute.

Post-1790 presidents have temporarily mooted civil liberties in time of war, and the CIA-led camp of the Deep State has justified its unlimited powers by effectively declared "a state of war is now permanent and enduring."

So what's left to defend if America has become the enemy of civil liberties and democracy , that is become a totalitarian state ruled by Security Services and their political henchmen and apologists?

I have long suggested that the tectonic plates of the Deep State are shifting as the ruling consensus has eroded.

Some elements of the Deep State--what I call the progressive wing, which is (ironically to some) anchored in the military services-- now view the neocon-CIA (Security State)-Wall Street elements as profoundly dangerous to America's long-term interests, both domestically and globally.

Is the Deep State Fracturing into Disunity? (March 14, 2014)

I have suggested that this "rogue Deep State" quietly aided Donald Trump (by subtly undermining Hillary Clinton's campaign) as the last best chance to save the nation from the neocon's over-reach that the Establishment's Wall Street-funded leadership (Bush, Clinton, Obama, et al.) has overseen - including granting the CIA and its allies virtually unlimited powers unhindered by any effective oversight.

Does a Rogue Deep State Have Trump's Back? (January 18, 2017)

This profound split in the Deep State has now broken into open warfare. The first salvo was the absurd propaganda campaign led by Establishment mouthpieces The New York Times and The Washington Post claiming Russian agents had "hacked" the U.S. election to favor Trump.

This fact-free propaganda campaign failed - having no evidence didn't work quite as well as the NYT and Wapo expected - and so the propaganda machine launched the second salvo , accusing Trump of being a Russian patsy.

The evidence for this claim was equally laughable, and that campaign has only made the Establishment, its propaganda mouthpieces and the neocon Deep State look desperate and foolish on the global and domestic stages.

The desperate neocon Deep State and its Democratic Party allies went to absurd lengths to undermine Trump via the "Boris and Natasha" strategy of accusing Trump of collaborating with the Evil Russkies, even going so far as to briefly exhume former President G.W. Bush from deep-freeze to make a fool of himself, saying the Trump-Evil Russkies connection should be "investigated."

Now the rogue elements have launched a counterstrike--Vault 7. Here is one example of how quickly the CIA's over-reach has been absorbed by the body politic.

I highly recommend reading Wikileak's summary of Vault 7: Vault 7: CIA Hacking Tools Revealed.

We now know that the CIA maintained a special program (UMBRAGE) to mimic Russia-based hackers and create false trails back to fictitious "Russian hackers." A number of highly experienced analysts who reviewed the supposed "Russian hacks" had suggested the "evidence" smelled of false trails-- not just bread crumbs, but bread crumbs heavy-handedly stenciled "this is Russian malware."

The body count from Vault 7 has not yet been tallied, but it wouldn't surprise me if former President Obama and his team eventually end up as political casualties. Non-partisan observers are noting all this over-reach occurred on Obama's watch, and it hasn't gone unnoticed that one of Obama's last executive orders stripped away the last shreds of oversight of what could be "shared" (or invented) between the Security Agencies.

Indeed, the entire leadership of the Democratic Party seems to have placed all their chips on the increasingly unviable claim that the CIA is the squeaky clean defender of America.

Vault 7 is not just political theater--it highlights the core questions facing the nation: what is left to defend if civil liberties and democratically elected oversight have been reduced to Potemkin-village travesties?

If there are no limits on CIA powers and surveillance, then what is left of civil liberties and democracy? Answer: nothing.

The battle raging in the Deep State isn't just a bureaucratic battle--it's a war for the soul, identity and direction of the nation. Citizens who define America's interests as civil liberties and democracy should be deeply troubled by the Establishment's surrender of these in favor of a National Security State with essentially no limits.

Americans tasked with defending America's "interests" globally should be asking if a CIA/NSA et al. with unlimited power is detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally, and toxic to its influence.

The answer is obvious: a CIA with unlimited power and the backing of a corrupt Establishment and media is more than detrimental to America's soft and hard power globally--it is disastrous and potentially fatal to America's interests, standing and influence.

Those of us on the sidelines can only hope that the progressive wing of the Deep State, the rogue elements who see the terrible danger of an unlimited National Security State, will succeed in undermining the powerful political support for this toxic totalitarian regime.


.

No moderate rebels in Syria

SUBHEAD: Tulsi Gabbard has destroyed America's Deep State narrative on Syrian rebels and need for war.

By Michael Krieger on 28 February 2016 for Liberty Blitzkrieg -
(https://libertyblitzkrieg.com/2017/02/28/there-are-no-moderate-rebels-tulsi-gabbard-destroys-the-deep-states-syria-narrative/)


Image above: Photo of Tulsi Gabbard posing with Syrian women during her trip to that country. From (http://www.veteransnewsnow.com/2017/01/27/1013730-congresswoman-tulsi-gabbard-interviewed-after-her-trip-to-syria/).

Tulsi Gabbard has continued to impress ever since she came on the national scene last year with her courageous and very public support for Bernie Sanders in the rigged Democratic primary.

Most recently, shecontinued to demonstrate her knowledge of geopolitics and willingness to stand up to America’s unelected government, aka the Deep State, in a recent interview with CNN’s Jake Taper.

Note, the clip is about a month old, but important to watch if you haven’t. 


Video above: On 1/26/17 CNN’s Jake Tapper was crushed by Tulsi Gabbard, ‘Why is US supporting Al Qaeda? From (https://youtu.be/zE3jbbhB0eA).

If the Democrats have any hope of becoming a decent opposition party which not only resists the worst of Trump, but also rejects the perverted neoliberal/Deep State ideology currently embraced by establishment Dems, Tulsi Gabbard will have to play a key role.

As I highlighted in last February’s post, It’s Not Just the GOP – The Democratic Party is Also Imploding:

A rising star within the Democratic ranks, Rep. Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii, cut herself off from the party’s establishment by resigning from her post as vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee and endorsing Bernie Sanders for president.

Her position with the DNC required her to stay neutral in the primaries, but she said that “the stakes are too high.” She announced her decision on Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” and made a video where she explained her reasoning.

Gabbard, an Iraq war veteran, said she knows the cost of war firsthand. “I know how important it is that our commander-in-chief has the sound judgment required to know when to use America’s military power—and when not to use that power.”The importance of this move cannot be understated.

In no uncertain terms, this gesture publicly exposes the weakness of the “Clinton brand.” She clearly isn’t afraid of Hillary or of any repercussions from the Democratic Party elite, a fact that is underscored by the fact she came out with her endorsement after he got pummeled in South Carolina.
But let’s take a step back and think about this in the even bigger picture.

You don’t get to Congress by being a political imbecile. On the surface, this move looks like career suicide, particularly since Hillary is probably about to clinch the nomination. Recall, Rep. Gabbard didn’t merely endorse Sanders after a bruising loss in South Carolina, she stepped down from her official position with the DNC to do so.

This isn’t merely a statement, it’s the equivalent of dropping a neutron bomb on the Democratic establishment. So why did she do it?

While I think she genuinely agrees with Sanders on key issues, the reason she came out so aggressively is because she sees the writing on the wall. She’s playing the long game, and in the long game, Hillary Clinton represents a discredited and failed status quo, while Bernie Sanders represents a push toward the paradigm level change that will define the future.

When it comes to the Democrats, we need to see a lot less Pelosi and Schumer, and a lot more Gabbard.

See also:
Ea O Ka Aina: Ms Gabbard goes to Syria 1/29/17
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi and Bernie 3/11/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Gabbard endorses Sanders 2/29/16
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi Gabbard on Syria 11/1/15
Ea O Ka Aina: Tulsi Gabbard Interview 11/14/12

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The Trumpotopia to come

SUBHEAD: President Donald J. Trump has risen... but for how long Trumpotopia last?

By James Kunstler on 23 January 2017 for Kunstler.com  -
(http://kunstler.com/clusterfuck-nation/he-is-risen-but-for-how-long/)


Image above: The United States Trumpital on Inauguation Day. From (http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2017/01/19/trump-inauguration-parade-how-to-watch-live-stream-online.html).

If the first forty-eight hours are any measure of the alleged Trumptopia-to-come, the leading man in this national melodrama appears to be meshuggeneh (Yiddish for "a mad or idiotic person").

A more charitable view might be that his behavior does not comport with the job description: president. If he keeps it up, I stick to my call that we will see him removed by extraordinary action within a few months.

It might be a lawful continuity-of-government procedure according to the 25^th Amendment — various high officials declaring him “incapacited” — or it might be a straight-up old school coup d’état (“You’re fired”).

I believe the trigger for that may be an overwhelming financial crisis in the early second quarter of the year. In, the first case, under Section 4 of the 25^th Amendment, it works like this:

Whenever the Vice President and a majority of either the principal officers of the executive departments or of such other body as Congress may by law provide, transmit to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives their written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, the Vice President shall immediately assume the powers and duties of the office as Acting President.

Or else, it will be an orchestrated cabal of military and intelligence officers — not necessarily evil men — who fear for the safety of the nation with the aforesaid meshuggeneh in the White House, who is summarily arrested, sequestered, and replaced by an “acting president,” pending a call for an extraordinary new election to replace him by democratic means.

I’m not promoting this scenario as necessarily desirable, but that’s how I think it will go down. It will be a sad moment in this country’s history, worse than the shock of John Kennedy’s assassination, which happened against the background of an economically stable Republic. History is perverse and life is tragic. And shit happens.

Returning to the first forty-eight hours of the new regime, first the ceremony itself: there was, to my mind, the disturbing sight of Donald Trump, deep in the Capitol in the grim runway leading out onto the inaugural dais.

He lumbered along, so conspicuously alone between the praetorian ranks front and back, overcoat open, that long red slash of necktie dangling ominously, with a mad gleam in his eyes like an old bull being led out to a sacrificial altar.

His speech to the multitudes was not exactly what had once passed for presidential oratory. It was not an “address.” It was blunt, direct, unadorned, and simple, a warning to the assembled luminaries meant to prepare them for disempowerment.

 Surely it was received by many as a threat.

Indeed an awful lot of official behavior has to change if this country expects to carry on as a civilized polity, and Trump’s plain statement was at face value consistent with that idea.

But the disassembly of such a vast matrix of rackets is unlikely to be managed without generating a lot of dangerous friction. Such a tall order would require, at least, some finesse.

Virtually all the powers of the Deep State are arrayed against him, and he can’t resist taunting them, a dangerous game.

Despite the show of an orderly transition, a state of war exists between them. Anyway, given Trump’s cabinet appointments, his “swamp draining” campaign looks like one set of rackets is due to be replaced by a new and perhaps worse set.

Trump was correct that the ruins of industry stand like tombstones on the landscape. The reality may be that an industrial economy is a one-shot deal. When it’s gone, it’s over.

Even assuming the money exists to rebuild the factories of the 20^th century, how would things be produced in them? By robotics or by brawny men paid $15-an-hour?

If it’s robotics, who will the customers be? If it’s low-wage workers, how are they going to pay for the cars and washing machines? If the brawny men are paid $40 an hour, how would we sell our cars and washing machines in foreign markets that pay their workers the equivalent of $1.50 an hour.

How can American industry stay afloat with no export market? If we don’t let foreign products into the US, how will Americans buy cars that are far more costly to make here than the products we’ve been getting? There’s no indication that Trump and his people have thought through any of this.

Trump can pull out the stops (literally, the regulations) to promote oil production, but he can’t alter the declining energy return on investment that is bringing down the curtain on industrial society. In fact, pumping more oil now at all costs will only hasten the decline of affordable oil.

His oft-stated wish to simply “take” the oil from Middle Eastern countries would probably lead to sabotage of their oil infrastructure and the cruel death of millions. He would do better to prepare Americans for the project of de-suburbanizing the nation, but I doubt that the concept has ever entered his mind.

The problems with Obamacare, and so-called health care generally, are burdened with so many layers of arrant racketeering that the system may only be fixable if it is destroyed in its current form.

The overgrown centralized hospitals, the overpaid insurance and hospital executives, the sore-beset physicians carrying six-figure college-and-med-school loans, the incomprehensible and extortionate pricing system for care, the cruel and insulting bureaucratic barriers to obtain care, the disgraceful behavior of the pharmaceutical companies, all add up to something no less than a colossal hostage racket, robbing and swindling people at their most vulnerable.

So far, nobody has advanced a coherent plan for changing it. Loosing the Department of Justice to prosecute the medical racketeers directly would be a good start.

Overcharging and defrauding sick people ought to be a criminal act. But don’t expect that to happen in a culture where anything goes and nothing matters. A financial crisis could be the trigger for ending the massive medical grift machine. Then what? Back to locally organized clinic-scale medicine… if we should be so lucky.

Saturday afternoon, Trump paid a call at CIA headquarters, ostensibly to begin mending fences with what may be his domestic arch-enemies. What did he do? He peeved and pouted about press reports of the lowish attendance at his swearing in. Maximum meshuggeneh.

I’m surprised that some veteran of The Company’s Suriname outpost didn’t take him out with a blowgun dart garnished with the toxic secretions of tree frogs.

Do you suppose Trump is going to improve? That was the hope after the election: that he’d take on some POTUS polish.

No, what you see is what you get. I can only imagine that what’s going on behind the scenes in various halls of power would make a Matt Damon Bourne movie look like a sensitivity training session — grave professional men and women on all fours with their hair on fire howling into the acoustical ceiling tiles.

Don’t forget that it was the dismal failure of Democratic “progressive” politics that gave us Trump.

His infantile lies and foolish tweets were made possible by a mendacious political culture that excuses illegal immigrants as “the undocumented,” refuses to identify radical Islamic terror by name, shuts down free speech on campus, made Michael Brown of Ferguson a secular saint, claims that there’s no biological basis for gender, and allowed Wall Street to pound the American middle class down a rat hole like so much sand.

You think this is the dark night of the national soul? The sun only went down a few minutes ago and it’s a long hard slog to daybreak.

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