"70,000 Tonnes of Hubris" (Murray). I'd like the imperialists to build more and more and more of them, as they will just accelerate their inevitable, and highly desirable, decline. In fact, the only current purpose for these white elephants is to serve as sitting ducks for sinking, providing an excellent casus belli for the warmongers. Building hugely expensive things for the sole purpose of getting into wars sounds imprudent, but just what you would expect from an empire in rapid decline.
"Using plausible deniability against a systematically lying adversary" (The Saker). Putin has cards to play.
Putin and Trump may, possibly, 'cross paths'. 'Deliverables'. Yikes!, even a pre-meeting: "Kissinger calls Putin-Trump meeting a chance to mend ties".
"Russia-gate Is No Watergate or Iran-Contra" (Parry). Parry seems to have accepted the new Nixon 'evidence' which ironically/circularly seems to have been just 'discovered' - it was released to the public in 2007! - for the express purpose of providing the NYT an analogy weapon against Trump. See “A Wilderness of Mirrors“ by James Bowman:
"Way back at the beginning of the year, when we were still living in the golden age of Good King Barack and had not yet descended into the hell-hole that America has become under his much-despised successor, The New York Times ran a curious piece by Peter Baker claiming that, after almost half a century, long-dead former President Richard M. Nixon had finally been rumbled. There it was, in black and white: the long-desired, long-anticipated Smoking Gun (to mix our metaphors) proving that the long-rumored October Surprise of the 1968 election by which Nixon had supposedly attempted to sabotage the Paris Peace talks with North Vietnam and the Viet Cong in order to boost his own presidential campaign had now been proven to be factual. So said Mr Baker anyway, doubtless in the spirit of the “truth” which the Times has lately been claiming as its exclusive property.
And what did Mr Baker and the Times suppose this fuliginous firearm to be? Why, the word “monkey wrench,” used as a transitive verb, though with only the pronoun “it” as its object. Pay close attention now. The tell-tale verb appeared in handwritten notes taken by Nixon aide H.R. Haldeman, who was to become his chief of staff in the White House and one of the chief fall-guys of Watergate, of a telephone conversation he had with candidate Nixon about then-President Johnson’s bombing halt in Vietnam. Forgive me for all this ancient history, but I’ll soon come to the point. Nixon, not implausibly, saw Johnson’s stopping of the air campaign as a gimmick — an October Surprise of his own, if you will — to boost the campaign of his, Johnson’s, vice-president, Hubert Humphrey, Nixon’s electoral rival that autumn.
Well, that’s politics, you might think. Not when it came to Nixon it wasn’t. In its context, the note and its reference to “monkey wrenching” appear to me to refer to the bombing halt, which Nixon was instructing his trusted aide to do whatever he could to expose and discredit, since it would have signaled to the enemy America’s willingness to give up the fight. But a reference in the same memorandum to Anna Chennault, who was Nixon’s back-door access to South Vietnamese President Thieu (hang on, I’m getting there; just give me another minute or two) could be interpreted as naming her as the monkey wrencher, and the act of monkey wrenching as the exertion of her influence on Thieu to resist any pressure from Johnson to come to terms with the enemy in time to give him (and, vicariously, Vice-President Humphrey) a diplomatic triumph before the election.
Phew! Never mind the irrelevance of all this convoluted reasoning to the fact that there was never the slightest prospect of a sudden peace agreement when they were still arguing over the shape of the conference table. In fact, negotiations dragged on throughout Nixon’s first four-year term. Nor did Thieu need any pressure from Anna Chennault (or anybody else) to resist what he and Nixon both would have seen as a de facto surrender to the communist enemy.
And yet, to Mr Baker and John A. Farrell, the Nixon biographer who discovered the Haldeman memo, here was proof positive that Nixon was guilty of what Johnson was said privately to have described as “treason.”"The point being that there was no plausible chance of any kind of deal before the election, therefore nothing for Nixon to fear, and thus no reason to believe 'it' referred to the negotiations (and thus no missing file on Nixon treason). It makes much more sense that 'it' refers to the bombing halt (that is in the underlined title to this section of the notes), which Nixon un-treasonously wanted to stop, as he would have seen this as unnecessary pandering to the commie enemies of the USA (the notes then say 'anything RN can do', with Nixon unable to do anything about the negotiations, but in a position to make phone calls around Washington - to congressmen, generals, and even Johnson - to change the bombing halt, providing further evidence that 'it' refers to the bombing halt). The evidence is that Nixon was surprised by the Watergate break-in. Rewriting Nixon history just to get a partisan shot at Trump, is ridiculous [Parry gives the game away when he admits "For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never took place (nor did the fire-bombing) . . . ", though the general gist of the distinctions he is making is sound].
"Watergate And The Downing Of Nixon, Part 3". Much smarter line of analysis. The Nixon-Trump parallel would be that they both had sleazy subordinates which set them up to be victims of an IC attack (and Dean looks like a CIA plant).
"NYT Finally Retracts Russia-gate Canard" (Parry). The entire thing seems to have been cobbled together by Brennan, who then got some of his IC friends to sort of sign off on it.
"Gaius Publius: An Investigation in Search of a Crime". It is coming down to one or two people in the Trump entourage failing to file all the paperwork to register as 'foreign agents'.
"Israel plans to install Dahlan instead of Abbas". "Is Abbas' arch-rival the answer to Gaza's problems?" Dahlan has been the big Zionist answer for a long time, only hindered by his remarkable levels of corruption and the universal hatred for him amongst the people he is supposed to manage for the Jews.
"US Jewish leaders decry Israel's 'delegitimization' of non-Orthodox Jews". Once you've determined that your supremacist group is better than everybody else, it is only natural to start ranking within the group.
"Stop Totalitarianism in Venezuela". Sorositis. "Don’t Cry For Me Venezuela". Maduro is no Hugo Chavez - who is? - but give him full credit for keeping his nerve in the face of a massive attack by Pure Evil.
A comment by Nathan at Naked Capitalism on the possible wrongdoings of Bernie's wife. I wonder if this goes away if Bernie agrees to retire before 2020.
"What I Learned as a Snowflake" (van Buren). 'Red hats'.
"Intersectional Jewing".
"White House Encouraged After Elephants Abstain From Climbing Trees". "Harper: Mattis Walks Back From Syria CW Claims". The only way to explain the disjoint is internal battles in Washington between treasonous Khazar Yinon-promoting forces, and American patriots, and all evidence points to the fact the patriots are currently winning. Trump's instincts are isolationist and, despite all the waves of bluster, the facts on the ground tend to provide evidence for isolationism. Pay attention to what happens, not what he says, and pay very little attention to what his minions, like the embarrassing Haley, say.
"Trump allies push White House to consider regime change in Tehran". If you read down you'll see that a Khazar outfit is behind all this:
"FDD’s chief funders have been drawn almost entirely from American Jews who have a long history of funding pro-Israel organizations. They include Bernard Marcus, the co-founder of Home Depot, whiskey heirs Samuel and Edgar Bronfman, gambling mogul Sheldon Adelson, heiress Lynn Schusterman, Wall Street speculators Michael Steinhardt and Paul Singer, and Leonard Abramson, founder of U.S. Healthcare. As Eli Clifton has documented, from 2008 to 2011, the largest contributors were Abramson, Marcus, Adelson, and Singer, and businessman Newton Becker.""More Reasons Have Emerged To Doubt The Official Narrative About Syria" (Johnstone, who has muscled her way into being an important writer).
Ha!
"Repeated safety lapses hobble Los Alamos National Laboratory’s work on the cores of U.S. nuclear warheads". Photo op. Useful reminder to keep your plutonium collection well separated.
"The Oxford English Dictionary Just Added 'Woke.' It's Older Than You Might Think". But a little off (see here):
"bug chaser (noun): a person who studies or collects insects or other bugs; an entomologist. Often somewhat depreciative."