Global

Here I am sleeping at the Venezuelan Embassy in Washington D.C. so that a coup government led by a graduate of George Washington University a few blocks from here doesn’t take the place over or send the U.S. Secret Service (and what the hell is secret about them?) to do it, and I keep wishing that the U.S. government could find the nerve to overthrow itself for a change.

The old joke is that the U.S. government is never overthrown because it’s in the one capital that doesn’t have a U.S. embassy. Not actually a joke, of course. And there’s nothing funny about 40,000 people reportedly already killed by U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. But why can’t the U.S. government create a U.S. Embassy, or short of that, a U.S. Congress? There used to be a U.S. Congress that acted powerfully to restrain various presidents, even drove Nixon to run away. There’s nothing left of it.

Give a judge a couple of years and he’ll eventually blurt out that the sky is blue.

That’s now happened in Charlottesville, where a court has finally concluded that the statues of Lee and Jackson in their war uniforms on their war horses are war monuments.

People outside of Charlottesville will of course be scratching their heads and wondering what that matters. But that’s because nobody has bothered to tell them why Trump’s favorite statues are still standing and what it means.

The state of Virginia forbids taking down war monuments. The Heroes of the Resistance refrain from criticizing such hyper-militaristic laws. This means that we have a war-mad society, and that it goes unchallenged. The wars of recent years blow back into the streets of Charlottesville in the form of racist violence, but Charlottesville has spent the past many months telling itself that war is not the problem.

Read this Military.com article from Friday: “Do U.S. High Schools Bar Military Recruiters? Activists Try to Call Pentagon’s Bluff.” It discusses the offer that Pat Elder and I made to award funding to any school that could be identified as one of the over 1,100 public high schools that the Secretary of the Navy told Congress in December bar military recruiters. The article states:

“Addressing members of the Senate Armed Services Committee in December, Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer described an ‘excess of 1,100 schools and districts that deny access to uniform members to recruit on campuses,’ mainly in the northeast and northwestern United States, he said. And Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps Ronald Green in January said there are ‘just some places where we are not allowed to recruit.'”

(Whose parents, it needs to be said, have been well-trained to be obedient patients and therefore frequently accept – without hesitation and without doing their own research - allowing invasive procedures like multiple vaccines being injected simultaneously into the tiny muscles of their infants (combinations of which have neverbeen proven to be safe). 

Overwhelmingly, that parental consent is not “informed consent” as required by law. Uninformed consent is therefore often given without the parents being properly informed of the potential hazards, short or long-term. Therefore their children are at high risk of becoming sickened – sooner or later - with vaccine toxin-induced illnesses.

It is important that all parents or guardians of infants and children read the following information carefully and studiously before consenting to future vaccinations.) (2,365 words)

Aluminum and Mercury in Vaccines Linked to Neurological Disorders and Autism

Below are 10 basic questions for U.S. Presidential Candidates and the answers they have thus far provided, if any.

So the Mueller Report confirms that the Russians intervened to elect their money launderer of choice.

What else is new?

Putin and company will be back in 2020 on behalf of their wholly-owned asset. They’ll be more powerful and sophisticated than ever, marching in lockstep with their fellow mega-corporations and terminal polluters. A victory would let them complete the fascist assault on what’s left of American democracy.

They’ll also be poised to destroy our ability to survive on this planet. It should be clear to all that the human species will not survive another five years of Trump’s fossil/nuke-crazed attack on our ecological support systems.

And they’ll have two other key allies: Jim Crow, and War.

The debate over how much to focus on “Russiagate” is futile … and misses the point. As outlined by Craig Unger and David Cay Johnston, Trump has been owned by Russian oligarchs for decades. He was bankrupt and in debt by up to $6 billion. Then he was doing mega-deals in cash.

Bob and Dan talk about Ohio nuclear plants, the Mueller Report, and more.

Last week I tweeted this: “The U.S. military wants to fly small nuclear power plants into wars in order to power the wars’ weaponry. Because there was some chance we might not all die fast enough if nothing this stupid was tried.” I linked to a report on this insane idea. Someone replied: “The Navy already does this.”

True enough. Submarines and aircraft carriers engage in this lunacy, and we take it for granted. Submarines also haul nuclear weapons around the world’s seas, ready to intentionally or accidentally destroy the world as needed.

But some people don’t take anything for granted. Westminster Abbey, next door to Parliament, in London, is hosting a ceremony of thanksgiving to properly thank God for 50 years of nuclear weapons in the water. Oh, well, you might think, that makes sense to give thanks for having survived such behavior this long.

No, no, no. You misunderstand. They’re thanking God for having created the nukes and subjected the world to the risk of apocalypse, not for the incredible luck of having thus far survived it.

https://youtu.be/4F4qzPbcFiA
It's a Trap!

I’m old enough to remember when Nancy Pelosi was telling us that Trump would impeach himself.

Now, Trump’s “not worth it,” as if impeachment is a favor you bestow on those most worthy.

Jerrold Nadler is proposing to fine Trump for refusing to comply with subpoenas.

Max Blumenthal’s new book, “The Management of Savagery: How America’s National Security State Fueled the Rise of Al Qaeda, ISIS, and Donald Trump,” is over 300 pages and wastes not a word. It also does far more than it claims.

“This book,” Blumenthal writes, “makes the case that Trump’s election would not have been possible without 9/11 and the subsequent military interventions conceived by the national security state. Further, I argue that if the CIA had not spent over a billion dollars arming Islamist militants in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union during the height of the Cold War, empowering jihadist godfathers like Ayman al-Zawahiri and Osama bin Laden in the process, the 9/11 attacks would have almost certainly not taken place. And if the Twin Towers were still standing today, it is not hard to imagine an alternate political universe in which a demagogue like Trump was still relegated to real estate and reality TV.”