Global

The Tehran government has announced the arrest of seventeen Iranian citizens caught spying for America’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Some of those arrested have already been sentenced to death. It is the third major roll-up of CIA agents in Iran that I have been aware of, the first occurring in 1991 involved 20 American agents. The second episode in 2011 led to the arrest of 30 spies. The earlier arrests reportedly eliminated what were presumed to be the entire networks of American agents operating inside Iran and it is to be presumed that the recent arrests will have the same impact.

Item: A few months ago, the Trump administration’s Bureau of Land Management renewed the previously cancelled mineral exploration leases to Antofagasta, the Chilean mining giant that owns Twin Metals, the Canadian penny-stock company that has been doing the groundwork for Antofagasta’s experimental plans to mine copper in via an underground mine in water-rich northern Minnesota near the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Quetico Provincial Park in Canada.

Prior to Trump’s administration, the US Forest Service concluded that copper mining posed "an inherent risk of irreparable harm to an irreplaceable wilderness." The Trump administration had earlier cancelled a more complete study that would have fully determined the extent of that harm.

"It is now more clear than ever that the Trump administration is steamrolling the American people and allowing a foreign mining company to write the rules when it comes to America's most popular wilderness.'' Tom Landwehr, of Save the Boundary Waters, said in a statement.

Hobbs & Shaw is an action-packed spin-off from the Fast & Furious film franchise, with Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock) and Jason Stratham reprising their roles from that highly kinetic cinematic series as the titular Luke Hobbs and Deckard Shaw. There are plenty of explosions, car chases, combat, death defying stunts that makes Evel Knievel look like a wuss and the like in this 2 hour and 15 minute ultra-violent, noisy movie-movie. In H&S, what Hitchcock called the MacGuffin - the plot device that provides the cosmic rationale for all of the story’s frenetic derring-do - is a serum with a virus that will wipe out humanity.

“So, Senator Sanders, do you think that someone who’s profited from the current so-called healthcare system, like John Delaney, is qualified to tell you not to change it?”

is a different sort of question from

“So, Congressman Delaney, won’t good Americans run screaming from Senator Sanders’ rabid socialism?”

Similarly,

“Senator Warren, what percentage of federal discretionary spending now goes to militarism and what percentage should?”

is a different sort of question from

“Senator Warren, we’ve all heard that irrelevant crap about how Medicare for All will cost people less money overall, but will you just admit that it would raise taxes on the Middle Class?”

The Nixon tapes are still in the news! My God, they’re still spewing bile, still making America’s eyeballs roll.

They’re as relevant as ever.

Donald Trump, it turns out, is merely the inner Richard Nixon, live and uncensored. He’s also the inner Ronald Reagan — the inner voice, suddenly made public, of every white male racist who has ever occupied the Oval Office (which is probably most of the occupants).

The first casualty of war is truth. The victors in war, who are liars from the beginning, write history.

If any question why we died, 

Some journalists in the Jewish media are starting to complain that President Donald Trump is “loving Israel” just a little too much since he keeps citing his concern for the Jewish state as the driving force behind some of his erratic behavior. It is a viewpoint that I most definitely share, though I would describe the apparent White House lovefest with the Israel as a “lot too much.” When the President of the United States calls a congresswoman an anti-Semite and demands that she apologize to him personally and also to Israel it is definitely a lot too much.

 “Send her back! Send her back!”

The chant: Is it merely a case study in collective stupidity or is it a signal of rising fascism? When I look at the viral video — the latest manifestation of Trumpism and the freeing of good old American racism from the constraints of political correctness — I can’t help but think of the 8-year-old girl I met the other day, who traveled two years with her mother to reach this country from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Every government on earth, beginning with the United States, should shut down and be done with secret agencies, spy agencies, agencies used for murder, torture, bribery, election-manipulation, and coups.

While these agencies prevent the public from knowing what is being done in its name, they do not acquire any knowledge that benefits the public and that couldn’t have been acquired openly, lawfully, through simple research, diplomacy, and law-enforcement actions that respect human rights.

While these agencies occasionally succeed in their criminal enterprises on their own terms, those successes always create blowback that does far more damage that the good — if any — accomplished.

The CIA and all of its relatives in the U.S. government and around the world have normalized lying, spying, murdering, torturing, government secrecy, government lawlessness, distrust of foreign governments, distrust of one’s own government, distrust of one’s own qualifications to participate in self-government, and acceptance of perma-war.