Category: MK

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Event Note: I’ll be part of an excellent Bitcoin panel in Denver on April 25th. If you’re in the area or want to be, it’d be great to meet some of you.

Top Links

U.S. Government Planned False Flag Attacks to Start War with Soviet Union, JFK Documents Show (Newsweek)

Saudis Said to Use Coercion and Abuse to Seize Billions (Disturbing but unsurprising article about the U.S. government’s brutal “ally,” The New York Times)

French Judge Issues Arrest Warrant for Daughter of Saudi King (Gotta love the Saudi royal family, The New York Times)

U.S. Arms Exports Surge Amid Growing Middle East, Asian Demand (Explains a lot, Bloomberg)

China to Bar People with Bad ‘Social Credit’ From Planes, Trains (This is nuts, Reuters)

Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia: Top Three Stunning Admissions From the Top U.S. General in the Middle East (Haaretz)

How A Twitter Fight Over Bernie Sanders Revealed A Network Of Fake Accounts (Really enlightening piece on Twitter bots, Huffington Post)

Bitter Hillary Clinton Trashes America’s Heartland, Calls States That Didnt Vote For Her “Backwards” (Latest reminder of what a jerk she is, YouTube)

Why Are World Leaders Backing This Brutal Attack Against Kurdish Afrin? (David Graeber writing in The Guardian)

Empire Files: Post-Soviet Russia, Made in the U.S.A. (Really good discussion on U.S. intervention in modern Russia, YouTube)

Ron Paul Interviews Nassim Nicholas Taleb (YouTube)

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Tuesday’s post, It’s Impossible to Overstate How Terrible Mike Pompeo Is, laid out the view that Trump’s firing of Rex Tillerson represents a major shift toward war footing for the Trump administration, with Iran the specific target. This pivot was easily predictable, and I wrote numerous articles doing just that during 2017. Nevertheless, forecasting it and then seeing the disastrous pieces being moved into place are two different things.

Trump’s push to install Mike Pompeo as U.S. Secretary of State is a crystal clear indication that he’s begun the process of building his war cabinet. The next steps, likely to begin over the course of 2018, is to walk away from the Iran deal. I suspect relentless war propaganda to be unleashed simultaneously as the neocon/neoliberal/mass media war-monger alliance plays its well established role in selling the American public on another pointless and destructive war.

My prior post discussed Pompeo in detail, so I don’t want to be repetitive, but to revisit: Pompeo has contempt for the First Amendment, referred to torturers as patriots, wants Edward Snowden executed and is an extreme warhawk when it comes to Iran. In other words, he’s your typical neocon lunatic who’s just a bit more rough around the edges publicly. He represents the exact opposite sort of foreign policy to what so many Trump voters thought they were getting.

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When the director of the CIA, an unelected public servant, publicly demonizes a publisher such as WikiLeaks as a “fraud,” “coward” and “enemy,” it puts all journalists on notice, or should. Pompeo’s next talking point, unsupported by fact, that WikiLeaks is a “non-state hostile intelligence service,” is a dagger aimed at Americans’ constitutional right to receive honest information about their government. This accusation mirrors attempts throughout history by bureaucrats seeking, and failing, to criminalize speech that reveals their own failings…

Words matter, and I assume that Pompeo meant his when he said, “Julian Assange has no First Amendment freedoms. He’s sitting in an embassy in London. He’s not a U.S. citizen.” As a legal matter, this statement is simply false. It underscores just how dangerous it is for an unelected official whose agency’s work is rooted in lying and misdirection to be the sole arbiter of the truth and the interpreter of the Constitution.

– From Julian Assange’s Washington Post opinion piece: The CIA Director Is Waging War on Truth-Tellers like WikiLeaks

What’s most unique about Mike Pompeo isn’t the fact he’s a terrible human being, it’s the fact that he’s so transparent and shameless about it. This became crystal clear last April when I read the transcript of a speech he gave at UAE-funded think tank, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).

I covered his commentary in detail in the piece, The American Empire Under Donald Trump Has Become Increasingly Desperate, Dangerous & Insecure, but let’s revisit in case some of you missed it the first time around.

First, he falsely characterized Wikileaks as a hostile non-state intelligence agency (despite lauding it during the election), and then used this false categorization to launch an attack on the First Amendment.

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The sensitivities are especially important when it comes to the Qatari government — the single biggest foreign donor to Brookings.

Brookings executives cited strict internal policies that they said ensure their scholars’ work is “not influenced by the views of our funders,” in Qatar or in Washington. They also pointed to several reports published at the Brookings Doha Center in recent years that, for example, questioned the Qatari government’s efforts to revamp its education system or criticized the role it has played in supporting militants in Syria.

But in 2012, when a revised agreement was signed between Brookings and the Qatari government, the Qatar Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself praised the agreement on its website, announcing that “the center will assume its role in reflecting the bright image of Qatar in the international media, especially the American ones.” Brookings officials also acknowledged that they have regular meetings with Qatari government officials about the center’s activities and budget, and that the former Qatar prime minister sits on the center’s advisory board.

Mr. Ali, who served as one of the first visiting fellows at the Brookings Doha Center after it opened in 2009, said such a policy, though unwritten, was clear.

“There was a no-go zone when it came to criticizing the Qatari government,” said Mr. Ali, who is now a professor at the University of Queensland in Australia. “It was unsettling for the academics there. But it was the price we had to pay.”

– From the 2014 New York Times article: Foreign Powers Buy Influence at Think Tanks

The purpose of this short series is to give readers a small glimpse of how foreign governments spray around enormous sums of money throughout the Washington D.C. swamp to influence U.S. foreign policy.

Part 1 discussed the role of lobbyists in this grotesque and dangerous scheme. Specifically, lobbyists who work on behalf of a foreign government are supposed to register as foreign agents under the 1938 Foreign Agent Registration Act (FARA), but the law has no teeth in practice and is riddled with gigantic loopholes that ensure the sums of foreign lobbying happening is far beyond numbers reported under FARA.

As despicable as lobbyists running around D.C. as hired guns for foreign interests are, think tanks doing essentially the same thing are even more pernicious. At least lobbyists who register under FARA aren’t hiding what they do under an aura of respectability and academic rigor. Think tanks, on the other hand, act like prestigious paragons of policy formation and analysis, while taking enormous sums of money from foreign governments.

In some cases what’s expected from these think tanks is explicitly stated and documented, while other times the expectations, while implicit, clearly exist. It’s the arrogance and dishonesty of many of these major think tanks that really gets under my skin.

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The CIA Democrats (The Democratic Party is going all in on intelligence agency candidates, WSWS)

Is MSNBC Now the Most Dangerous Warmonger Network? (TruthDig)

The $1.5 Billion Campaign to Whitewash Genocide in Yemen (Must read on the war crimes being committed in Yemen, Counterpunch)

Nick Freitas’ 2nd Amendment Speech on Floor of House of Delegates (Powerful, YouTube)

Putin’s Message Couldn’t Be Clearer: The West Needs to Stop Provoking a War We Don’t Want & Which No One Can Win (OffGuardian)

Mueller’s Focus on Adviser to Emirates Suggests Broader Investigation (The UAE loves meddling in U.S. affairs, The New York Times)

Emails Show UAE-Linked Effort Against Tillerson (BBC)

The Dig: Glenn Greenwald on Surveillance Hypocrisy Amid Russiagate Mania (Great interview, Blubrry)

Social Media Censorship Is Vastly More Dangerous Than The Censored Material (Caitlin Johnstone, Medium)

U.S. News/Politics

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If you don’t think that the endgame to all of this lunacy is a world where every America-critical movement from Black Lives Matter to Our Revolution to the Green Party is ultimately swept up in the collusion narrative along with Donald Trump and his alt-right minions, you haven’t been paying attention.

That’s because #Russiagate, from the start, was framed as an indictment not just of one potentially traitorous Trump, but all alternative politics in general. The story has evolved to seem less like a single focused investigation and more like the broad institutional response to a spate of shocking election results, targeting the beliefs of discontented Americans across the political spectrum.

– Matt Taibbi in RollingStone: The New Blacklist

If we lived in a somewhat sane civilization, the all encompassing mass media obsession with the intel agency narrative that Russian meddling in the 2016 election (and apparently every other non-establishment American political movement) represents a serious threat to democracy, journalists and thought leaders might take a step back and look at the overall nefarious influence of foreign money throughout our incredibly corrupt society. But since we don’t live in a sane civilization, we’ll just continue to scapegoat Russia for everything while letting predatory homegrown oligarchs and their political couriers off the hook. After all, that seems to be the point.

I for one will not allow this nonsense to proceed without strenuous objection. It’s ridiculous to the point of comical that we’re turning a Russian troll farm spending $100,000 on clownish Facebook ads (like the one below) into a national security issue, while the Trump and Clinton campaigns spent a combined $81 million on Facebook ads. Moreover, 56% of the so-called sophisticated Russian ads were run after the election was over. We’re being told with a straight face that a Russian troll farm helped swing the U.S. election by spending a grand total of $44,000 on ridiculous Facebook memes.

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If you appreciate my work and want to contribute to independent media, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit the Support Page.

Top Links

Stop Blaming Russian Bots For Everything (The Russian bot narrative is total bs, Buzzfeed)

Bernie Sanders Wants Congress to End U.S. Support for Yemen War. Saudi Lobbyists Fought Similar Measure Last Year.(Must read on how corrupt D.C. is, The Intercept)

Consumers Are Revolting Against Animal Cruelty — So the Poultry Industry Is Lobbying for Laws to Force Stores to Sell Their Eggs (Total lunacy, The Intercept)

Debt-Conscious Millennials Are a Threat to Credit Cards (Buy Bitcoin, avoid credit cards. I like these youngsters, Bloomberg)

Kushner’s Family Business Received Loans After White House Meetings (Princeling’s in some hot water, The New York Times)

Mnuchin Says Trump ‘Willing’ to Negotiate U.S. Return to TPP (It’s baaack, Bloomberg)

The Feds Can Now (Probably) Unlock Every iPhone Model In Existence (Forbes)

This Big Cryptocurrency Acquisition Could Create a Wall Street-Style Financial Giant (Fortune)

Amazon Is Now Earning Money from the Pentagon (Nextgov)

The U.S. Empire Is Acting Like A Desperate, Cornered Animal, Because That’s What It Is (Caitlin Johnston, Medium)

The New York Times Fired My Doppelgänger (What happened to Quinn Norton is fascinating and disturbing, The Atlantic)

U.S. Politics/News

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One of the more concerning ramifications of China’s recent turn toward a more totalitarian stance at home is what it means for the geopolitical environment in the years ahead. Several people asked in the comment section of Part 1 why I care about what’s going on in China when we have so many serious problems in the U.S. The reason is because a major shift in the polices of the second largest economy in the world, populated with over a billion people and run by leadership intent on establishing a far more dominant position on the world scale militarily and politically, will affect everyone.

Government propaganda is one of the most insidious and dangerous things that regularly occurs within human society, and it’s been pervasive in essentially all civilizations to-date. The media’s always a key ally in the dissemination of propaganda, something much of the American public has finally come to understand. The election of Donald Trump despite the U.S media’s unanimous support of Hillary Clinton was the real wakeup call, and has led to incessant calls for platform monopolies like Google and Facebook to censor speech that questions the dominant intelligence agency narratives. There’s nothing more terrifying to an entrenched power structure than a loss of the narrative, and the election of Trump proved to them that they lost it. The American establishment isn’t afraid of Trump as it is scared that it’s lost control over the ability to control the masses.

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I’m sure all of you are aware of the dramatic power play pulled off over the weekend by China’s Communist Party to eliminate term limits for both the president and vice president. Prior to the move, Chinese leaders have stuck to two five-year terms since the presidency of Jiang Zemin (1993-2003), but that’s about to change as wannabe emperor Xi Jinping positions himself as indefinite ruler of the increasingly totalitarian superstate.

While the weekend announcement was illuminating enough, I found the panicked reactions by Chinese authorities in the immediate aftermath far more telling. The country’s propagandists took censorship to such an embarrassing level in attempts to portray the decision as widely popular amongst the masses, it merely served to betray that opposite might be true.

China Digital Times compiled a fascinating list of words and terms banned from being posted or searched on Weibo. Here’s just a sample of some I found particularly interesting.

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If you appreciate my work and want to contribute to independent media, consider becoming a monthly Patron, or visit the Support Page.

Top Links

The West’s War on Itself (Synaps)

Russiagate or Intelgate? (Very important read, The Nation)

The Fundamental Uncertainty of Mueller’s Russia Indictments (The New Yorker)

A So-Called Expert’s Uneasy Dive Into the Trump-Russia Frenzy (The New Yorker)

DCCC Goes Nuclear, Slams Democratic Candidate as Corrupt for Same Behavior It Engages in Regularly (Politics is just a sleazy money making racket, The Intercept)

100 Chicago Professors “Propose To Exclude Viewpoints They Find Objectionable” (We need more people like Zimmer of the University of Chicago, Zerohedge)

Publishing Platform Medium Suspends Far-Right Figures (I’m no fan of these three, but this really rubs me the wrong way, The Hill)

Medium Rules (Here are Medium’s new rules. They claim to ban disinformation, but that’s a very subjective term they do not define, Medium)

Poland’s Central Bank Secretly Paid Youtubers to Slander Cryptos (Central Banking is a plague on humanity, Trustnodes)

Paedophile Peter Newell Had Key Role at Child Charity (The Times of London)

U.S. Politics/News

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