The recent stories of sexual harassment being shared through the #MeToo campaign and allegations against Washington, Hollywood and Olympics bigwigs is an opportunity to correct harmful cultural perceptions of sex and violence, writes Lawrence Davidson.

By Lawrence Davidson

Sigmund Freud published his book Civilization and Its Discontents in 1930. Having witnessed World War I, Freud knew that discontent was part and parcel of the human condition. The question he sought to answer was why that was so.

“The Nightmare” by Henry Fuseli, 1781. Oil on Canvas. The painting has been used to symbolize sexuality and the unconscious mind.

The short answer he came up with goes like this:

Human beings have instinctual drives such as sex and violent aggression – expressions of the Id. Left unchecked they would destroy any hope of settled life and high culture. According to Freud, civilization is the vehicle humans have created to control these inherent drives. Civilization and its various component cultures create rules and regulations– as well as feelings of remorse and guilt (expressions of a culturally attuned Superego) – that result in either suppression or sublimation of these primitive drives.

However, the results are not perfect, especially when it comes to controlling violent aggression. Indeed, as a consequence of the mass slaughter that was World War I, Freud came to the conclusion that human beings have a deep and permanent “death wish.” Even at less drastic levels of aggression, most societies experience frequent episodes of domestic violence, and the high degree of across-the-board neuroses.

In the Freudian scheme, control of the instinctual sexual drive (itself another form of aggression) is supposed to be a bit easier. Eros can be sublimated into the creation of beauty (art) as well as various intellectual achievements. Yet here too, what has been evolved are imperfect controls, especially when encapsulated in cultures that promote male domination.

If one does not like Freud’s ideas, the whole issue of the activation and control of aggression and sex can be looked at in terms of brain function. In other words, our brains have evolved…

German Chancellor promotes militarism and great-power politics at World Economic Forum

By
Johannes Stern

26 January 2018

The speech by German Chancellor Angela Merkel (Christian Democrats, CDU) at the World Economic Forum in Davos made clear that the new coalition government being formed in Berlin will be dedicated to militarism and great-power politics. At a luxury resort in the Swiss Alps, the acting Chancellor sought to drum up support for a European defence policy that would enable Germany and Europe to enforce their economic and geostrategic interests around the world.

“If Europe, with its 27 future members, is incapable of sending a united message to major countries like China, India, the United States or Russia, and foreign policy is instead made nationally, the attempt to become a global player will fail,” warned Merkel. “If we want to be taken seriously as Europeans, we have one further major task, specifically to cooperate in the area of foreign policy.”

Seven decades after the end of World War II, German imperialism once again considers the United States, along with Russia and China, as a global rival. In her speech, Merkel railed against “isolation and protectionism,” and although she did not mention US President Donald Trump by name, it was clear to everyone that her statements were aimed at Washington. “Merkel is the anti-Trump,” was the headline of a piece in the Berlin-based Tagesspiegel on Thursday. The Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung commented, “There has never been so much dissension in the so-called West for some time.”

Merkel explicitly advocated a foreign and military policy independent of the US. “The fact that Europe has not been the most active continent on foreign policy, and that we often depended on the United States,…

US President Donald Trump and the Senate’s top Democrat, Chuck Schumer, have once again clashed over Trump’s immigration proposal.

On Thursday, the White House unveiled details of the immigration plan that would allow 1.8 million people to become US citizens in exchange for $25 billion in funding for a wall along US-Mexico border.

The 1.8 million immigrants are those who are covered by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, and those people who are eligible for DACA but did not apply.

On Friday, Schumer said he was happy that Trump had announced his immigration goals, but dismissed the president’s proposal as a “wish list” for hardliners.

In a pair of tweets, he expressed satisfaction that the president “finally acknowledged that the Dreamers should be allowed to stay here and become citizens.”

However, he said the plan “uses them as a tool to tear apart our legal immigration system and adopt the wish…

Science proves leftists are ugly

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
January 26, 2018

A new scientific study proves it beyond doubt – liberals are ugly and conservatives are hot.

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*********************

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor at large of Infowars.com and Prison Planet.com.

This article was posted: Friday, January 26, 2018 at 3:23 pm

Photo by EU2017EE Estonian | CC BY 2.0

The gambit is a well-known opening move in the chess game. The player makes a sacrifice, typically a pawn, for the sake of a compensating advantage. Emmanuel Macron metaphorically did that in the first six months of his presidency. In the run-up to the presidential election, the political neophyte introduced himself as neither left-wing nor right-wing, but rather as left-wing and right-wing. It was a bold attempt to supersede the deeply entrenched left-right divide in French politics, and to take from both camps “what works best.” In so doing, Macron was able, for a short period of time, to defy political gravity and position himself as an ideal centrist candidate.

What’s more, the 39-year old candidate was untested politically, a young bright figure with a liberal profile and background. In this respect, Macron likes to remind everyone that he was once the editorial assistant to renowned French philosopher Paul Ricoeur. Indeed, Macron is keen to be seen as the first “intellectual president” since François Mitterrand.

If Macron was a breath of fresh air in the run-up to the election, his political honeymoon with the voters did not last long. His first actions in power have marked the end of an original realignment of French politics. His economic policy blatantly leans to the right and is of a neoliberal nature. Both sides say so. Les Républicains, the party launched by former president Nicolas Sarkozy, has been…

France on Friday charged terror suspect Mohamed Bakkali over his alleged key role in the 2015 Paris attacks, a judicial source said.

Bakkali is suspected of helping to organise the coordinated gun and suicide bomb attacks in the French capital in November 2015 which left 130 people dead.

The 30-year-old had been arrested in Belgium barely two weeks after the bloodbath and kept in custody there in connection with the attacks.

Earlier Friday, Brussels handed Bakkali over to French authorities on condition that he would serve any eventual sentence in Belgium.

French prosecutors charged Bakkali with being an accomplice in the 2015 terror killings.

Heavily armed jihadists had attacked the national stadium, bars and restaurants in Paris, as well as the Bataclan concert venue.

Bakkali is accused of renting a BMW seen near three safe houses where the attacks were prepared.

He was also charged Friday over his alleged involvement in an August 2015 attack on a high-speed Paris-bound train that left two passengers injured.

A bloodbath was only narrowly averted on the Thalys train from Amsterdam to Paris when passengers including two off-duty US servicemen subdued gunman Ayoub El Khazzani — who had fought for the Islamic State group in Syria — as he opened fire.

The incident added further weight to the theory that the French-Belgian IS network had been behind the Paris attacks in 2015 and triple suicide bombings in Brussels in March the following year.

Earlier this week, the first…

There are unconscious actors among them and involuntary actors; the genuine are always rare, especially genuine actors.
– Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Any artist [person] who goes in for being famous in our society must know that it is not he who will become famous, but someone else under his name, someone who will eventually escape him and perhaps someday will kill the true artist [person] in him.
– Albert Camus, “Create Dangerously”

It ain’t me you’re lookin for, babe.
– Bob Dylan, “It Ain’t Me, Babe:, Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964

Enter

The set was real but illusionary: A legendary old New England hotel dressed festively for Christmas and the holiday season.  Norman Rockwell’s magical realism. The lobby full with merriment, the cozy fire dancing to the sweet sound of violin and piano Christmas music mixed with a subtle alcoholic fragrance.  Main Street U.S.A.  Snow on the street and the classic strains of “White Christmas” in the inner air.  A mythic setting for meeting a legendary actor.

But as I entered the dimly lit set, the legend was nowhere to be seen.  I approached the spot where the musicians were playing and didn’t see him in the room opposite.  Then, as I was greeting two actors with bit parts that I knew (unconscious actors, I should add), out of the shadows came a laughing Russian spy obviously dressed as a Russian spy, one red star on his hat, walking stick in hand.  He and I were there to have a…

The Republicans’ delay in releasing the summary of the House Intelligence Committee’s Russiagate investigation is giving weight to the presstitutes’ claim that the report is not being released, because it is a hack attempt at a Trump coverup that is not believable. Only Republicans are stupid enough to put themselves in such a situation.

Readers ask me why the summary memo is not released if it is real. There must be some reasons besides the stupidity of Republicans. Yes, that is so. Among the many reasons that might be blocking release are:

1) Republicans are very national security conscious. They don’t want to provide precedents for the release of classified information.
2) Many Republican congressional districts host installations of the military/security complex. Upsetting a large employer and directing campaign financing to a challenger is a big consideration.
3) The George W. Bush/Dick Cheney regime was a neoconservative regime. One consequence is that Republicans are influenced by neoconservatives who stress the alleged “Russian threat.”
4) The Israel Lobby can unseat any member of the House and Senate. The Israel Lobby is allied with the neoconservatives and this alliance intends to keep the US militarily active against perceived threats to Israel’s hegemony in the Middle East and against Russia, which supports Syria and Iran, countries perceived as threats by Israel.
5) Many Republicans are themselves invested in false Russiagate allegations against Trump and would like to replace him with Pence. Other Republicans believe that Trump is undermining Washington’s expensively-purchased foreign alliances and, thereby, undermining US power.

Many Americans do not seem to understand what is at stake. What America is confronted…

Medill News Service
January 26, 2018

Two Pentagon officials said Thursday that current military operations in Syria by the Turkish government are a “distraction” that is impeding the overall goals of the U.S.-led coalition in the region.

Lt. Gen. Kenneth McKenzie, director of the Joint Chief of Staffs, said during a briefing that Turkey’s recent action has become concerning for the coalition because it moves focus away from the goal of defeating the Islamic State in Syria.

“It is not helpful to have these operations go on,” McKenzie said. “We recognize that, and we are working with the Turks to try to minimize it.”

McKenzie said the United States was made aware of the attacks ahead of time and that Turkey has legitimate security concerns; it is the only NATO country to have an open insurgency in its borders.

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, January 26, 2018 at 8:36 am

The idea of developing so-called tactical nuclear weapons could lead to unintended consequences, according to Michael Burns, a political and military analyst in New York.

Burns made the remarks in an interview with Press TV on Friday while commenting on reports that US President Donald Trump is ready to unveil a nuclear weapons policy.

On Thursday, the Trump administration announced that it prepares to unveil its review of the US nuclear posture, while more experts have warned that developing a new type of nuclear weapons to meet the president’s demands would trigger an arms race.

“The idea of developing these tactical nuclear weapons which is what they are. Nuclear weapons are used in theater of operations, and the persuasive allure of this idea is that they are small, they are confined, they are used in battlefield conditions and they don’t risk threatening civilian populations,” Burns said. 

With their limited strength, the new…

Liberal billionaire George Soros spent more on lobbying during President Donald Trump’s first year in office than he has in any previous year, disclosure forms show.

The Open Society Policy Center, a D.C.-based 501 (c)(4) nonprofit that focuses on domestic and international advocacy efforts and is a separate entity from Soros’s Open Society Foundations, poured $16.2 million into lobbying throughout the entirety of 2017.

Soros’s group reported spending $4.6 million during the first half of 2017 on its lobbying efforts. During the third quarter, Soros added $1.25 million to the total. Most of the lobbying expenditures—$10.3 million—were spent during the fourth quarter, which spans from October 1 to December 31.

Soros ramped up his efforts as the year progressed by pushing funds toward issues that have been seen as a direct attack on the deep-pocketed financier, such as Hungary’s Bill on Foreign Funded Organizations (LexNGO), a crackdown on foreign-funded organizations in that country.

Hungary’s parliament approved the law that targets foreign-funded NGOs in June of last year, saying they could “threaten the country’s political and economic interests and interfere with the functioning of its institutions.”

While the legislation does not mention Soros, who was born in Hungary and has given money to a number of NGOs in the country, by name, Hungarian politicians have said that they wanted to “sweep out” organizations tied to the financier, Bloomberg reported.

Soros also…

The United States has expanded its sanctions against Russia by adding more individuals and companies to its blacklist because of what Washington calls Moscow’s continued interference in Ukraine.

The US Treasury Department announced on Friday it had added 21 people and nine companies to the sanctions list, including some that had been involved in the delivery of Siemens gas turbines to Crimea. According to the statement, Russian Deputy Energy Minister Andrey Cherezov was in the black list. 

“Today’s action is part of Treasury’s continued commitment to maintain sanctions pressure on Russia,” the department said in a statement.

“This action underscores the US government’s opposition to Russia’s occupation of Crimea and firm refusal to recognize its attempted annexation of the peninsula,” it added. 

The latest sanctions have also affected some power and energy companies, including Techno-prom-export engineering company and multiple…

“Government is best that governs least, so you have more freedom.”

Steve Watson
Prison Planet.com
January 26, 2018

In an engaging speech to 90 Christian students, Senator Rand Paul warned that federal government does little to help morality, but libertarianism goes hand in hand with the principles of faith.

Paul was speaking at the National Association of Evangelicals’ Christian Student Leadership Conference, which seeks to recruit and encourage young, evangelical students to serve in the government.

Paul warned, however, that the system of government on its own does not hold all the keys, far from it.

“Government’s not going to make us a virtuous society. I think that’s very important when we think about what we want from government and where we’re going,” said Paul.

The Senator expanded, noting that laws made and enforced by government will not make people virtuous, and that they must arrive at that state for themselves.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

Paul noted that he has regularly encountered ministers who ask him, ‘What are you going to do to make us a better moral nation?’ to which he answers ‘Well what are you going to do?’

“There has to be a realization that the government can’t do everything for you – you have to be a part of it,” Paul explained.

“They’re not very good at it. They’re so far away from the people, they can’t do it.” Paul continued.

“You say, ‘Well government does do some good for people.’ They probably do, but they’re horribly inefficient at it,” Paul said, adding “Government is best that governs least, so you have more freedom.”

“The more government you have, or the more of your paycheck you give up, the less of your freedom you have,” Paul warned.

Elsewhere during the rousing speech, Paul noted that the libertarian non-aggression principle goes hand in hand with morality.

“You’re probably scratching…

US President Donald Trump has once again accused Iran of seeking nuclear weapons despite confirmations by the United Nations’ atomic agency that Tehran complies with the 2015 nuclear deal.

Trump made the remarks on Friday in a speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he declared “America is open for business” despite his railing against “globalism” and free trade in the past.

“My administration is proud to have led historic efforts at the United Nations Security Council and all around the world to unite all civilized nations in our campaign of maximum pressure to de-nuke the Korean peninsula,” he said.

Trump also called on world countries to block what he called Iran’s “path to a nuclear weapon.”

“We continue to call on partners to confront Iran’s support for terrorists and block Iran’s path to a nuclear weapon,” he continued.

Trump, whose country has thousands of nuclear weapons, has often…

Fiji airport workers return after month-long lockout

By
John Braddock

26 January 2018

About 200 service and maintenance workers returned to their jobs at Fiji’s main airport in Nadi on Monday after a judge ordered an end to their month-long lockout. The workers had been suspended without pay since December 16, when they attended a meeting called by the Federated Airlines Staff Association (FASA) to discuss a range of grievances, including an 11-year pay freeze and allegations of sexual harassment.

The employer, Air Terminal Services (ATS), declared the meeting an “illegal strike” and would only allow the workers, a third of the workforce, to return if they signed a letter admitting guilt. Airport operations were maintained with 150 scab workers employed on three-month contracts. Up to 300 workers picketed the company headquarters throughout the Christmas period calling for an end to the lockout.

The court said on Saturday that ATS did not follow due process, giving the company 48 hours to allow the workers to return to their jobs. The judge also ordered that all pay and entitlements owed be restored. The highly unusual order no doubt reflects fears in ruling circles, including in the trade unions, that the dispute was threatening to provoke a broader rebellion among working people, over low wages and dire social conditions.

Thousands of Fijians turned out on January 13 to demonstrate their support for the locked-out workers. Local media reported that about 3,000 people marched through Nadi, but Radio New Zealand added that another 5,000 joined the rally at the end of the march. RNZ Pacific correspondent Sally Round said it was the biggest demonstration she had seen in Fiji, with crowds of workers in uniform, families with children, elderly people and human rights…

You could say thank heavens they have finally stopped buying the “dip”. Then again, there apparently aren’t any left!

That’s the case, anyway, even if your notion of a “dip” is any day the market doesn’t go up. So far there has been exactly one such occasion during 2018. Or worse still, if you assume the traditional metric of at least a 5% drop, you have already been out of the dip buying business for a lifetime—- whether measured in market lives or even dog years.

That’s right. Heisenberg reminds us this morning that we are in undisputable record territory. It has been fully 395 trading days since the market had a 5% drop, and that’s never happened before in all of recorded history.

Then again, the central banks of the world had never even dreamed of snatching $22 trillion of fiat credit from thin air prior to 1995, either. But in the nine years since the financial crisis they generated $14 trillion of new footings and more than $20 trillion during the last three bubble cycles combined.

Needless to say, this $20 trillion emission of something for nothing has deformed and poisoned the entire warp and woof of the global financial system. Everywhere financial asset prices have been massively inflated and falsified, causing a two-phase distortion of the global economy.

Initially, massive money printing by the Fed fostered defensive currency market interventions (i.e. “dirty floats”) and exchange rate suppression by the PBOC, BOJ, BOK and other exporters of both commodities and industrial goods. Buying in dollars to sequester in their own central banks, the mercantilist exporters of the world—including the dollar-linked petro-states—essentially imported the US dollar…

Breitbart
January 26, 2018

An expansive amnesty plan that would give a pathway to U.S. citizenship to at least 1.8 million illegal aliens would have a crushing effect on President Trump’s efforts to effectively and quickly deport illegal aliens, populist conservative Daniel Horowitz says.

After White House senior adviser Stephen Miller revealed the details of the administration’s framework for an amnesty plan, Horowitz called out the initiative that attempts to give Democrats the amnesty they have wanted for enrolled and eligible illegal aliens with President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

WH seems to be prepared to agree to full path to citizenship (not just legalization) and for 1.8 million, not just 700k. Which will easily metastasize because they are eating out of the Dem premise on the entire issue.

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) January 25, 2018

The Goodlatte bill was a compromise but had a safety rail from a runaway train by limiting it to the premise of those who were given a status. Once Trump agrees to the premise of moving “time frames” there is no limit. What about the 2014 surge people?

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) January 25, 2018

The problem isnt so much the actual details of what Stephen Miller laid out on the call. It’s where it’s coming from and where is headed. They made it clear they consider Dem “of no fault” a broader imperative and will move deadline. Thus,Dems have no pressure to concede anything

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) January 25, 2018

From Art of the Deal: ” “The worst thing you can possibly do in a deal is seem desperate to make it. That makes the other guy smell blood, and then you’re dead.”
This is the central issue here more than any specific policy detail. It’s the attitude behind it.

— Daniel Horowitz (@RMConservative) January 25, 2018

CBO scored a similar bill to Trump’s…

Photo by SPACES Gallery | CC BY 2.0

Capitalism moves through long waves and shorter-term cycles of growth and stagnation, boom and bust, rising and falling asset values, mounting and dropping profit rates, job creation and job elimination, increasing and declining investment. It always has, and it always will for as long as it exists.

The operative forces behind these fluctuations are numerous and intertwined: the supply and price of raw materials, energy, food, and labor power; changes in technology; shifting supplies and costs of capital; currency developments; managerial practices; changing forms of business organization; investment strategies; climate and other environmental factors; trade patterns, changes in global geography and state systems; shifting patterns of domestic, regional, and international conflict and cooperation.

Under the capitalist system, there’s no central government planning authority responsible for the ebbs and flows of economic life. The actions, practices, preferences and pronouncement of politicians and policymakers are naturally part of the total context or simultaneous equations systems that shape the nature and rhythm of economic cycles and waves.  But even if we call it (as we probably should since at the least Great Depression) state capitalism, the U.S. profits system is not a government-ruled command structure directed by any single state authority – not even that of the chief executive of the world capitalist system’s most…

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who has been living in Ecuador’s embassy in London for five years, has asked a court to remove the arrest warrant hanging over him.

Assange’s lawyer Mark Summers told a London court on Friday that the warrant had “lost its purpose and its function.”

Assange had “spent five and a half years in conditions which, on any view, are akin to imprisonment, without access to adequate medical care or sunlight, in circumstances where his physical and psychological health have deteriorated and are in serious peril,” Summers said.

Assange took refuge in Ecuador’s Embassy in the British capital of London in June 2012 to avoid extradition to Sweden after Swedish prosecutors issued a European arrest warrant against him.

He has denied the rape accusations, and says the claims are part of an attempt to ultimately have him extradited to the United States, where he could be charged over WikiLeaks’ release of 500,000…

Why this title? Because Greece doesn’t have to continue playing the card of the victim, nor being masochist. Greece seems to suffer under the Stockholm Syndrome — she is in love with her hangman. Greece could change this. Exit the prison, exit the EU and exit the euro. Greece could return to her sovereign national currency, her own sovereign central bank, make her own monetary policy and implement it with a sovereign public banking system that works solely for the Greek economy. Within less than 10 years Greece would have recovered and would even be able to pay back some of her illegally begotten debt.

Although, here must be added, according to international law, most of Greece’s debt was imposed by the troika under illegal circumstances. It’s also called “odious debt”, the description of which reads:

In international law, odious debt, also known as illegitimate debt, is a legal doctrine that holds that the national debt incurred by a regime for purposes that do not serve the best interest of the nation, should not be enforceable. Such debts are, thus, considered by this doctrine to be personal debts of the regime that incurred them and not debts of the state.

This doctrine is complemented by a similar one inscribed in the charter of the IMF that says that the IMF shall not make any loans to a country in distress, that will unlikely be able to reimburse the debt and pay the debt service.

Both of it is true. The debt was imposed by the troika and…

“There are going to be consequences”

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
January 26, 2018

MSNBC political analyst Elise Jordan suggested that conspiracy theories about missing FBI text messages could lead to a violent massacre.

Remarking that Trump supporters pushing for the release of the missing text messages (which have since been found) “don’t realize the consequences… where this could end,” Jordan compared the issue to the 2016 PizzaGate controversy, which ended in a 28-year-old man walking into the Comet Ping Pong restaurant in Washington DC and firing three shots from an AR-15 rifle.

“You know, it seemed like fun and games for plenty of the conspiracy theorists who were saying that Hillary Clinton had a pedophilia ring in a D.C. pizza parlor until a guy showed up there with a machine gun,” Jordan said.

“And, the President’s rhetoric, the rhetoric that is endorsed by his followers — by his prominent followers on television — there are going to be consequences. And I think that it’s something that they should think about as they actively endorse it,” she added.

However, unlike PizzaGate, the FBI text messages are part of a national news story and a national debate, they are evidently not a conspiracy theory.

Jordan’s rhetoric is similar to her MSNBC colleague Joe Scarborough’s insistence that the text messages and discussion of a “secret society” within the FBI are “conspiracy theories” being “spread for political reasons,” despite the fact that FBI Agent Peter Strzok and FBI Attorney Lisa Page’s text messages directly mention a “secret society” within the FBI.

In addition, a separate whistleblower told Senator Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) that this same “secret society” was holding meetings “off-site”.

Jordan’s absurd and hyperbolic suggestion that asking questions about corruption within the FBI and the Justice Department…

The US military has indirectly encouraged child sexual abuse by Afghan forces for years, similar to the US government’s support of terrorist groups throughout the world, a former US Senate candidate says.

“Sadly, this is not the first time that something like this has happened; you can go all the way back to the end of World War ll,” said Mark Dankof, who is also a broadcaster and pastor in San Antonio, Texas.

“This American government that has been aiding and abetting these child sexual abuses in Afghanistan is the same American government … that is supporting all of these Israeli atrocities in Palestine and Gaza, this is the same American government that has been working with ISIS (ISIL or Daesh) and al-Qaeda-affiliated organizations to attempt to overthrow the legitimate government of Syria,” Dankof told Press TV on Thursday.

“And this is the same American government that has been making overt threats to attack Iran because…

If there is any part of you that’s inquisitive you’ve likely wondered how on Earth this year’s flu could be so bad.  After all, we have vaccines and Western medicine’s advancements in technology to help people.  But the Health Ranger says that is the exact problem with the influenza outbreak.

As the reports continue to come in that this influenza outbreak is killing about 100 people a day, many begin to wonder what the purpose of getting a vaccine that’s only 10% effective could possibly be.  “What you’re never told, is that some of those deaths are because of the flu vaccine,” Mike Adams, the Health Ranger said.  And Adams theory is that the vaccine is not only responsible for the outbreak of the flu, but for some of the deaths associated with it.

*Before continuing, this is not to say you should get the vaccine or you should not get the vaccine.  You should, however, research the ingredients of the flu vaccine and possible side effects and come to the conclusion on your own whether or not this shot is right for you and your family.*

Adams wants people to know what they aren’t being told about this year’s flu by those who profit heavily by injecting people with the flu shot.

“It turns out that the flu shot, even when it works, which is rare because it’s usually the wrong strain but sometimes it works, but it creates vulnerability to influenza infections in subsequent years. In other words, there’s something about the flu shot (we can talk about what that is because we know) that weakens your immune system.”

Adams has researched vaccines and the vaccine industry in depth. “People would be better off and we’d have fewer deaths from influenza if no one got the flu shot. And instead, people…

Americans For Tax Reform
January 25, 2018

Environmentalists are targeting your hamburgers and buffalo wings with a “Meat Tax.” And they claim they have “never been closer to a meat tax.”

As reported by Bloomberg Law:

Hamburger addicts, barbecue junkies, and fried chicken fanatics may soon be asked to pay a surcharge for their obsessions with meat.

Excise taxes on beef, pork, and chicken could be the next big thing in a state and local tax environment that’s already comfortable with “sin tax” regimes aimed at cigarettes, alcoholic beverages, and gambling and is adapting quickly to special levies on sugar-sweetened beverages, greenhouse gases, and marijuana.

While there are no current legislative proposals imposing state or local surcharges on meat, a growing number of public health, environmental, and animal rights advocates are bullish on tax schemes addressing the mounting social costs of meat production and consumption.

“We have never been closer to a meat tax,” said Ashley Byrne, associate director of campaigns for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). “We have seen people—including meat eaters—realizing that meat is bad for their health and meat is taking this incredible toll on the environment. People seem more open than ever to an excise tax on meat. If we are going to tax tobacco, if we are going to tax soda, it absolutely makes sense to have a similar tax on meat.

Americans for Tax Reform opposes a meat tax. “Americans hate new taxes,” said Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform. “New taxes on a basic consumer product like meat is doubly unpopular and will end more political careers than your usual dumb tax idea.”

This article was posted: Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 8:57 am

The British defense secretary says Russia could kill “thousands and thousands and thousands” of Britons with a cyber attack that could cripple infrastructure and energy supply and cause panic and chaos across the United Kingdom.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Defense Secretary Gavin Williamson claimed Moscow had been researching the UK’s critical national infrastructure to know how to damage the British economy and energy supply. He offered no proof.

He said Moscow was “trying is to spot vulnerabilities, because what they want to do is they want to know how to strike it, they want to know how they can kill infrastructure and by killing that infrastructure, that means hurting Britain and the British people. Damage its economy, rip its infrastructure apart, actually cause thousands and thousands and thousands of deaths, but actually have an element of creating total chaos within the country.”

He made the remarks a couple of…

Tom Perez’s lackluster first year as head of the Democratic National Committee provides a metaphoric glimpse into the waning influence of the Democratic Party as a whole, explains Norman Solomon.

By Norman Solomon

Sometimes a party’s leader seems to symbolize an enduring malaise. For Democrats in 2018, that institutional leader is Tom Perez.

While serving as secretary of labor during President Obama’s second term, Perez gained a reputation as an advocate for workers and civil rights. That image may have helped him win a narrow election among Democratic leaders to become chair of the Democratic National Committee, with the backing of Hillary Clinton loyalists eager to prevent the top DNC job from going to Bernie Sanders supporter Rep. Keith Ellison.

Democratic Party leader Tom Perez

Perez’s leadership of the DNC during the last 11 months has been mediocre at best. The problems go far beyond administrative failings, lack of inspirational impacts or shortcomings in fundraising. His mode of using progressive rhetoric while purging progressives from key DNC committees reflected a pattern.

At the top of the DNC, the Clinton wing’s determination to keep the progressive base at arm’s length has not abated — while, at the same time, the DNC proclaims its commitment to the progressive base. The contradiction exists because of Democratic Party priorities revolving around corporate power.

To align the DNC with a grassroots base that is notably more progressive and has enormous energy to challenge Wall Street and the oligarchy, it would be necessary to welcome that energy instead of trying to keep it at bay.

Rhetoric aside, the DNC leadership is hardly oriented to challenging the corporate domination that imposes so much economic injustice. Some disturbing indicators of the current chair’s orientation can be found in his Obama-era record as an assistant attorney general as well as head of the Labor Department.

“Before Tom Perez was Labor Secretary granting waivers to indicted banks, he was at the Justice Department not prosecuting Steve Mnuchin for illegally foreclosing on active duty troops,” financial specialist Matt Stoller pointed out in a…

US President Donald Trump has apologized for the first time for re-tweeting anti-Muslim videos posted by a British far-right group in November, which had sparked widespread outrage in the UK.

“If you’re telling me they’re horrible racist people, I would certainly apologize if you’d like me to do that,” he told Good Morning Britain’s Piers Morgan on Thursday during an interview on conducted in Davos, Switzerland, on the sidelines of the annual World Economic Forum.

The US president provoked a wave of anger in Britain in November when he re-tweeted, in quick succession, three anti-Muslim videos posted by Jayda Fransen, the deputy leader of the far-right group Britain First, who was convicted of religiously aggravated harassment of a Muslim woman in 2016.  

Morgan accused Trump of causing “huge anxiety and anger in my country, because Britain First is basically a bunch of racists, fascists.”

“Of course I didnt know that,” Trump responded in…

Photo by Marc Nozell | CC BY 2.0

Unless the polls are even more off than they were when they predicted a Clinton victory in 2016, distressingly many 2016 Trump voters continue to stand by their man.

There has been some attrition, but the Trump base still comprises slightly more than a third of the electorate.  Consider that — and despair for the human race.

I am not talking about the true “deplorables” (“detestables” would be a more apt description), the hyper-rich blockheads who think that it is cool to party with the Donald at Mar-a-Lago.   Their dollars matter, but their votes not so much – there just aren’t enough dumbass gzillionaires married to trophy brides or jelly-faced women to comprise a voting bloc.

But there are still plenty of the kinds of people Hillary Clinton called “deplorable.” The voting bloc they comprise, though not quite what it used to be, remains formidable.

It turns out that many of the people she had in mind were not deplorable at all; just bamboozled, ill-informed and too pissed off for their own good.  Also, many of them loathed her and her husband and their hangers on, sentiments for which they can hardly be faulted.  But that was a year ago.  Anyone still on Trump’s side no longer has any excuse.

There is reason to think that at least some light is finally getting through to them.  Poling data and anecdotal evidence suggest that many of them would like their man to tweet less or at least to send out less ludicrous…

The Hill
January 25, 2018

President Trump on Wednesday said he is open to offering young immigrants a pathway to citizenship over 10-12 years, as long as he gets billions of dollars to pay for a border wall and other security measures.  

Under his forthcoming immigration plan, which will be released Monday, Trump told reporters that protections for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program would “morph into” citizenship over that period.

“We’re going to morph into it. It’s going to happen, at some point in the future, over a period of 10 to 12 years,” he said.

A senior administration official later clarified that citizenship is a “discussion point” in the plan and that young immigrants would have to meet certain conditions in order to gain it.

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This article was posted: Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 8:58 am

Will there be a US nuclear sneak attack on North Korea?

By
Bill Van Auken

26 January 2018

Under the cover of the pre-Winter Olympics thaw between North and South Korea and the momentary lull in the “fire and fury” rhetoric from the Trump White House, there are growing signs that the Pentagon and the CIA are pressing ahead with preparations for a preemptive war against North Korea, including the use of nuclear weapons.

There have been multiple reports in the American corporate media of behind-the-scenes discussions between the US military and intelligence apparatus and the Trump administration of the feasibility of a so-called “bloody nose” attack, involving US air strikes on North Korean nuclear facilities, with the expectation—however ill-founded—that they would not provoke a full-scale war.

In a rare public speech, CIA Director Mike Pompeo hinted obliquely at these plans. Speaking before the right-wing think tank American Enterprise Institute Tuesday, Pompeo warned that Pyongyang was a “handful of months” away from achieving the capability of staging a nuclear attack against the US mainland.

The CIA director said that Washington was “going to foreclose that risk” and “denuclearize permanently” North Korea.

While asserting that the Trump administration was committed to a “solution through diplomatic means”—a claim belied by Trump’s chiding of his Secretary of State Rex Tillerson last October for “wasting his time” by seeking negotiations with the government of Kim Jung Un—Pompeo said that the CIA was working with the Pentagon to “prepare a series of options to make sure that we can deliver a range of things so the president will have the full suite of possibilities.”

He added that he would “leave to others to address the…

The 2018 government shutdown is now over but I’m thankful Democrats like Chuck Schumer got the chance to make announcements that expose just what the Democrats presently are and what they actually stand for. The party that is currently referring to themselves as the “Resistance” is, in reality, closer to being a movement of submissive obsequious corporatists. What Democrats are to the actual left is the same as what Nickelback is to Rock n’ Roll, nothing but a bland facsimile of something genuine with the primary purpose of selling something.

Democrats talk about compromise and bipartisanship while having no fundamental base of priorities. Who cares about bipartisan anything if what you’re agreeing to is reprehensible. Let’s take what I would call a somewhat important issue that the Democrats didn’t feel worthy of shutting down the government over, I don’t know, let’s say providing more funds to address the impending ecological apocalypse surrounding topics like climate change and species extinction? Perhaps worthy causes to shutdown the government over?

However, climate change didn’t even receive lip service from the party ostensibly representing the left. The Democrats adherence to fulfilling the will of corporations over the people is what amounts to a total abandonment of representation of Americans. The people have no voice in America. If you’re into basic human issues, like a habitable planet, human dignity, and you don’t agree with…

US President Donald Trump had ordered the firing of special prosecutor Robert Mueller investigating Russia’s alleged meddling in the 2016 US presidential election, but later reversed course, according to media reports.

Trump gave the order in June 2017, but White House counsel Don McGahn refused, saying it would have a “catastrophic effect” on Trump’s presidency, The New York Times reported Thursday.

After McGahn threatened to quit, Trump backed down, the newspaper reported, citing four anonymous sources. The White House declined to comment on the matter, the newspaper said.

Trump had accused Mueller of three conflicts of interest that he argued disqualified him from conducting the investigation, the report said.

The alleged conflicts of interest consisted of Mueller’s termination of his membership at a Trump golf course over a dispute about fees, his previous representation of the president’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and an interview…

Asked if he would agree to be interviewed by Robert Mueller’s team, President Donald Trump told the White House press corps, “I would love to do it … as soon as possible. … under oath, absolutely.”

On hearing this, the special counsel’s office must have looked like the Eagles’ locker room after the 38-7 rout of the Vikings put them in the Super Bowl.

If the president’s legal team lets Trump sit for hours answering Mueller’s agents, they should be disbarred for malpractice.

For what Mueller is running here is not, as Trump suggests, a “witch hunt.” It is a Trump hunt.

After 18 months investigating Trumpian “collusion” with Putin’s Russia in hacking the DNC’s and John Podesta’s emails, the FBI has hit a stone wall. Failing to get Trump for collusion, the fallback position is to charge him with obstruction of justice. As a good prosecutor can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich, the tactic is understandable.

Mueller’s problem: He has no perjury charge to go with it. And the heart of his obstruction case, Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, is starting to look like something Trump should have done sooner.

The Greatest Comeback:…
Patrick J. Buchanan
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Consider what is now known of how Comey and the FBI set about ensuring Hillary Clinton would not be indicted for using a private email server to transmit national security secrets.

The first draft of Comey’s statement calling for no indictment was prepared before 17 witnesses, and Hillary, were even interviewed.

Comey’s initial draft charged Clinton with “gross negligence,” the requirement for indictment. But his team softened that charge in subsequent drafts to read,…

The Hill
January 25, 2018

President Trump defended his attacks of investigations into Russian interference in the 2016 election, denying that it amounts to obstruction and saying he was merely “fight[ing] back.”

“There’s been no collusion whatsoever,” Trump told reporters in an impromptu press conference on Wednesday. “There’s no obstruction whatsoever. And I’m looking forward to it.”

Trump also mocked critics who have accused him of obstructing the Russia probe by attacking the investigations and referring to them as a “witch hunt.”

“You fight back, oh, it’s obstruction,” Trump mockingly told reporters.

Trump also told reporters that he plans to speak with special counsel Robert Mueller in two to three weeks, but said his lawyers are working out the specifics.

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This article was posted: Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 8:59 am

There have been mice and cows and pigs and camels, bunnies and bantengs and ferrets and dogs, but ever since Dolly the sheep became the first cloned mammal in 1996, the list has had a conspicuous hole: primates. Now that hole has been filled.

Scientists in China reported on Wednesday in Cell that they had cloned two healthy long-tailed macaque monkeys from the cells of another macaque, using the Dolly technique. The two clones, born 51 and 49 days ago, were created from a fetus’s cells; so far, the scientists have not been able to make the tricky procedure work when they used cells from adult macaques. That would seem to postpone the dystopian day when cloning children and grown-ups becomes as mainstream as IVF. But because “the technical barrier [to cloning primates] is now broken,” co-author Mu-ming Poo of the Institute of Neuroscience in Shanghai told reporters, the technique “could be applied to humans” — something he said his team has no intention of doing and sees no reason for.

Cloning pioneers said the monkey clones represented, as Dr. Robert Lanza put it, “an impressive breakthrough, which overcomes the last major hurdle in the field.” Lanza co-led teams that cloned a gaur in 2000 and in 2014 used the Dolly technique to produce human embryos (but not pregnancies) from the cells of an adult.

Before this, “no one was able to produce living offspring” through primate cloning, said Shoukhrat Mitalipov, of Oregon Health and Science University,…

The Hill
January 25, 2018

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol ripped Fox News’ Tucker Carlson in an interview, saying his show could be “close to racism” or “ethnonationalism.” 

“I mean, it is close now to racism, white — I mean, I don’t know if it’s racism exactly — but ethnonationalism of some kind, let’s call it. A combination of dumbing down, as you said earlier, and stirring people’s emotions in a very unhealthy way,” Kristol told CNBC’s John Harwood in an interview published on Thursday.

Kristol, who is the founder and editor-at-large at The Weekly Standard, noted a shift in Carlson’s style when he was a young reporter at the publication.

“Tucker Carlson was a great young reporter. He was one of the most gifted 24-year-olds I’ve seen in the 20 years that I edited the magazine. His copy was sort of perfect at age 24,” Kristol said. “He had always a little touch of Pat Buchananism, I would say, paleo-conservativism.”

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This article was posted: Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 9:00 am

Revolution is based on land. Land is the basis of all independence. Land is the basis of freedom, justice, and equality….

— Malcolm X

Jackson Rising is the most important book I have read in a long time. Organizers are going to love it. If you wonder what democracy might look like in our time — here it is.

Jackson Rising is the rarest of things: a real strategic plan. You will not find a simple wish list that glosses over the hard questions of resources, or some disembodied manifesto imploring the workers forward, but a work-in-progress building the capacity of people to exercise power.

And that project is Cooperation Jackson. Cooperation Jackson is an emerging network of cooperatives and grassroots institutions that aim to build a “solidarity economy.” By seizing on the crisis and weak links of modern capitalism and building on the historic struggles for racial equality by the black people of Mississippi, Cooperation Jackson has created a model we can all learn from.

Just as important, Jackson Rising shows the value of deep organizing. Decades of persistent organizing efforts have empowered the people of Jackson to purse agendas of their own creation.

The editors, Kali Akuno and Ajamu Nangwaya are both writers and organizers. They have contributed comprehensive, insightful and historically grounded accounts of the struggle in Jackson. The interview with Sacajewea Hall, another organizer, reveals just how central issues of patriarchy are to any attempt to…

During the past three weeks, Congress passed and President Donald Trump signed into law vast new powers for the NSA and the FBI to spy on innocent Americans and selectively to pass on to law enforcement the fruits of that spying.

Those fruits can now lawfully include all fiber-optic data transmitted to or in the United States, such as digital recordings of all landline and mobile telephone calls and copies in real time of all text messages and emails and banking, medical and legal records electronically stored or transmitted.

All this bulk surveillance had come about because the National Security Agency convinced federal judges meeting in secret that they should authorize it. Now Congress and the president have made it the law of the land.

This enactment came about notwithstanding the guarantee of the right to privacy — the right to be left alone — articulated in the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution and elsewhere. Though the surveillance expansion passed the Senate by just one vote, it apparently marks a public policy determination that the Constitution can be ignored or evaded by majority consent whenever it poses an obstacle to the government’s purposes.

Suicide Pact: The Radi…
Andrew P. Napolitano
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The language of the Fourth Amendment is an intentional obstacle to the government in deference to human dignity and personal liberty. It reads: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be…

President Donald Trump proposed a path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children, if lawmakers agree to create a $25 billion fund to expand barriers along the Mexican border and implement other deep changes to the immigration system.

The White House suggested the proposal moved Mr. Trump a step closer to the Democrats, who have championed the cause of the young immigrants known as Dreamers, but the plan includes demands they have fiercely opposed. The Trump plan also risks the ire of hard-liners who oppose any such pathway to citizenship.

The White House proposal, presented to Senate leaders and congressional aides on Thursday, would restrict family-based immigration, the channel by which most immigrants have come to the U.S. for the past half-century. It also calls for an end to a lottery program that randomly awards 50,000 green cards annually to foreigners from countries underrepresented in U.S. immigration.

Mr. Trump was in Davos, Switzerland, for the World Economic Forum on Thursday. His top aides told Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that the president would sign into law legislation that included these changes. Mr. McConnell said he would bring a bill to a vote during the week of Feb. 5, White House officials said.

It wasn’t clear whether Mr. McConnell could find sufficient support. To reach the 60 requires votes for such measures to pass, he will need backing from most Republicans, who hold 51 seats, and some…

Breitbart
January 25, 2018

The Times of Israel reports: DAVOS, Switzerland — French President Emmanuel Macron said Wednesday that he would not recognize Palestine as an independent state as a reaction to US President Donald Trump’s declaration of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital.

“I will not take any decision in reaction to any decision,” Macron told reporters in response to a Times of Israel question on the potential recognition of a Palestinian state. The comments came during a photo op with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, ahead of their closed-door meeting at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. The meeting lasted nearly an hour.

Several European nations, including Belgium, Luxembourg, Ireland, and Slovenia, are reportedly mulling recognizing an independent Palestine in response to Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem. The Slovenian foreign minister has already confirmed his country’s intention.

Read more here.

This article was posted: Thursday, January 25, 2018 at 9:04 am