[This analysis was written for the Unz Review]

Andrei Belousov, deputy director of the Russian Foreign Ministry’s Department of Nonproliferation and Arms Control, has recently made an important statement which I shall quote in full and then provide a translation.

Original Russian text: “Тут недавно на заседании Соединенные Штаты заявили, что Россия готовится к войне. Да, Россия готовится к войне, я это подтверждаю. Да, мы готовимся защищать нашу родину, нашу территориальную целостность, наши принципы, наших людей. Мы готовимся к такой войне. Но у нас есть серьезные отличия от Соединенных Штатов Америки. И в лингвистическом плане это отличие заключается всего в одном слове, что в русском языке, что в английском языке: Российская Федерация готовится к войне, а Соединенные Штаты Америки готовят войну”

Translation: “Recently at a meeting the United States stated that Russia is preparing for war. Yes, Russia is preparing for war, I can confirm it.  Yes, we are preparing to defend our homeland, our territorial integrity, our principles, our values, our people. We are preparing for such a war.  But there is a major difference between us and the United States.  Linguistically, this difference is just in one word, in both Russian and English: Russia is preparing for war while the United…

Daily Caller
November 2, 2018

Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert fired back at those who accuse him and others of anti-Semitism for criticizing liberal billionaire financier George Soros.

At the end of a segment on Wednesday night’s “Lou Dobbs Tonight,” Gohmert said, “It’s not anti-Semitic to criticize Soros, and Israel issued a statement a year ago saying just that.”

At end of segment as Lou Dobbs is heading to break, Louie Gohmert blurts out that “it isn’t anti-Semitic to criticize Soros and Israel issued a statement a year ago saying just that!”

Dobbs, smiling: “I’m certainly glad I didn’t just breakaway there” pic.twitter.com/Z3WvUGEF8c

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona) October 31, 2018

Gohmert’s televised comments came less than a week after Judicial Watch’s Chris Farrell was banned from Fox-affiliated networks after accusing the “Soros-occupied State Department” of funding the caravan of migrants on its way through Mexico to the United States, a claim that the Texas congressman himself has echoed.

The left has made a concerted attempt to link any criticism of the billionaire financier with anti-Semitism. In an article titled, “‘Dripping with poison of antisemitism’: the demonization of George Soros,” The Guardian’s Jason Wilson makes his case:

From the racist white nationalist site the Daily Stormer to major conservative media stars, the right has been increasingly united over the last decade in seeing the hidden hand of Soros, whom they frequently describe as a “globalist”, in all manner of events.

He has been falsely accused by the right of orchestrating alleged violence from so-called “antifa” groups, manipulating the world economy, being a wartime Nazi collaborator and sponsoring the entirely fictional project of “white genocide.”

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, November 2, 2018 at 6:56 am

…

Former US President Barack Obama says Republicans in control of the White House and Congress have “racked up enough indictments to field a football team.”

Obama made the comment Sunday at a rally for Democrats ahead of the midterm elections on Tuesday.

“All right, so now they’ve had two years of total control in Washington,” Obama said. “What have they done with that power?”

He was campaigning for Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly at a rally in Gary, Indiana,

“Nah, nah, nah, it’s not true. They haven’t done nothing. They’ve done something,” the former president told the crowd. “They promised they were going to take on corruption in Washington. Instead, they’ve racked up enough indictments to field a football team.”

As part of a special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Russian government and US President Donald Trump’s associates, as well as potential obstruction of justice and financial crimes,…

Washington Times
November 2, 2018

President Trump said Thursday that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s threat to weaponize committee subpoena power if Democrats win Congress is illegal and grounds for the administration to fight any subpoena all the way to the Supreme Court.

“Pelosi says she’s going to mechanize the speakership and use it as a great negotiation with the president. That’s an illegal statement,” Mr. Trump said in an exclusive interview with The Washington Times.

The president remained optimistic about Republicans retaining their House majority, but he fumed about Mrs. Pelosi’s subpoena threat should her party prevail in the midterm elections Tuesday.

He said the threat begged a lengthy court battle.

“That alone takes two years to get it to the Supreme Court — that statement — before you do anything,” he said, becoming animated with indignation. “You heard her the other night.”

Read more

This article was posted: Friday, November 2, 2018 at 6:58 am

During the ruble crisis of 2014/15 Russia announced in the wake of U.S. and European sanctions over reunifying with Crimea that it would begin building a domestic electronic financial transfer system, an alternative to SWIFT.

That system, System for Transfer of Financial Messages (SPFS), is not only now functioning in Russia, according to a report from RT it now handles the financial transfer data for more than half of Russia’s institutions.

According to Anatoly Aksakov, head of the Russian parliamentary committee on financial markets:

The number of users of our internal financial messages’ transfer system is now greater than that of those using SWIFT. We’re already holding talks with China, Iran and Turkey, along with several other countries, on linking our system with their systems,” Aksakov said.

“They need to be properly integrated with each other in order to avoid any problems with using the countries’ internal financial messaging systems.”

Ship of Fools: How a S…
Tucker Carlson
Check Amazon for Pricing.

This is a follow up to last month’s boast by the Russians that their system was seeing a lot of international interest.  How much of this is boast and how much of it is reality remains to be seen, but the important point here is that the minute the U.S. weaponized SWIFT for use in its foreign policy, something like this was bound to occur.

China has its own internal system.  And other countries are building theirs as well.

The SWIFT Cost

A common theme on this blog is that control is an illusion.  Power is ephemeral.  The best way to exercise your power is to have it but never use it.  Because once you do use it you define for your enemies the costs of their lack of compliance to your edicts.

And…

It will still be weeks at best until the so-called “migrant caravan” — a movement of a few thousand refugees fleeing Central America in hopes of starting new lives in the US — makes it to the border. But it’s already become clear that those seeking safety in the United States may sadly find their lives even more at risk than they ever were in their former homes.

President Donald Trump — intent on turning a flood of refugees into a menacing “invasion” of terrorists, criminals and drug lords seeking to wreak havoc on US citizens — announced his intention to send about 800 military troops to the border in an attempt to stop the asylum seekers from entering the country.

Now he has upgraded those troop numbers, apparently preparing to turn the Mexico border into a militarized zone.

USA Today reports:

The Pentagon will deploy up to 5,000 active-duty troops to the US-Mexico border in an effort to prevent members of a migrant caravan from illegally entering the country, a U.S. official said Monday. Administration officials said last week that they were considering a plan to send up to 1,000 active duty troops to the border, but that deployment has increased to 5,000, according to the Department of Homeland Security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to publicly discuss the plans before a formal announcement Monday afternoon.

There are reportedly 2,000 National Guard members already at the border assisting Border Patrol.

Photo Source Bruce Berrien | CC BY 2.0

We live in dangerous times. Capitalism’s globalization has ended the post-WW-II “American Dream.” The U.S. economy is in a roller-coaster state, pulled by a decline in the joblessness rates but with stagnant wages as the rich are getting richer and inequality intensifies. Working people are being squeezed and getting increasingly desperate. This desperation contributed to Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and the continuing support from his core supporters.  It’s also driving some to engage in acts of politically-motivated terrorism to express their rage.

Pres. Trump’s rhetoric has long been inflammatory but now, as the 2018 midterm elections are approaching, it is getting more aggressive and fueling politically-motivated violence among some of his supports.  While he long promoted his notion of an “America First” foreign policy, at a recent Houston rally supporting Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-TX) reelection, Trump assailed “globalists” and embraced being a “nationalist.”

Trump proclaimed his new political identity:

A globalist is a person that wants the globe to do well, frankly, not caring about our country so much. And you know what? We can’t have that. You know, they have a word. It sort of became old-fashioned. It’s called a nationalist. And I say, really, we’re not supposed to use that word. You know what I am? I’m a nationalist, OK? I’m a nationalist.

“Nationalist. Nothing — use that word. Use…

Charles Hugh Smith
OfTwoMinds blog
November 4, 2018

As the mid-term elections are widely viewed as a referendum of sorts, let’s set aside politics and ask, what’s behind the erosion of our civil society?

That civil society in the U.S. and elsewhere is fraying is self-evident. It isn’t just the rise of us-or-them confrontations and all-or-nothing ideological extremes; social bonds between people are weakening.

There are many probable causes: addictive technologies such as social media and smartphones; chronic economic stress, greater mobility and a host of more subtle factors.

One such factor is the erosion of community and its replacement with state (government) or corporate structures. One of the most insightful essays I’ve read in the past few years is a report from the Guardian (U.K.) on What Happened When Walmart Left a low-income rural community in America’s Coal Country.

One of the most tragic findings, in my view, was that Walmart was the social hub of the community: Walmart was the place to go to meet friends, people-watch, walk around to pass the time, etc.

This is a remarkable reversal of a traditional community, which is centered around communal public spaces such as churches, temples, etc., town squares, Main Street, the local marketplace, etc. Now the center of social life is a corporate-owned private space dedicated to maximizing the profits of the corporation.

This dependency on corporate spaces is paralleled by a dependency on corporations and the state for income and the organization of social life.

This leads to the another tragedy: the near-complete lack of any non-state, non-corporate social structures; the general zeitgeist was near-total dependence on the state and corporations not just for income but for the structure of everyday life, to use historian Fernand Braudel’s phrase.

While the reporter found a few households had started gardens, the…

Introduction: The Rat as a Compelling Symbol of Needed Revolt

In his recent Truthdig piece,  “The Rats Revolt“, journalist Chris Hedges discusses a fable for activists just published by legendary political dissident Ralph Nader. I haven’t read Nader’s book, but it’s enough for organizers like me to know that two of the left’s leading public intellectuals are united in calling for revolt. And (since symbols are vital to movements) that they’ve given us a highly effective symbol for organizing current revolt: the rat.

With crucial strategy to discuss, it would waste precious time to dwell long on movement symbolism here. But, besides its adoption by leftist opinion leaders like Hedges and Nader, the rat splendidly serves the purposes of organizing revolt. In the face of onrushing climate apocalypse, we are all rats on a sinking ship. And to the elites blithely ignoring climate apocalypse—partying on the Titanic—we who care deeply about the matter are clearly noxious vermin; the brutal treatment of the Standing Rock water protectors as terrorists (championed by Republican pols with scarcely a murmur of protest by Democrats) is both telling and typical. My family’s experience resisting fracking under PA’s Democratic governor Rendell (Virginia Cody is my wife) was parallel.

But—provided the revolt movement chooses appropriate action—there’s a positive, active side to the rat symbol; it needn’t just represent passive victimhood. Indeed,…

Though the U.S.-Saudi alliance may have been weakened because of the Khashoggi murder, both countries are still targeting Iran as new US sanctions are announced on Sunday, writes Marjorie Cohn of Truthout. 

By Marjorie Cohn
Truthout

The alleged torture, murder and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, widely believed to have been carried out on orders of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, may put a crimp in Donald Trump’s plans to escalate his aggression against Iran.

Saudi Arabia, the United States and Israel are unified in their hatred of Iran, albeit with different motives. Iran has been in the crosshairs of the United States since the 1979 Iranian Revolution overthrew the vicious, US-installed puppet Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi; indeed, in 2002, George W. Bush initiated Iran into his “axis of evil.” Saudi Arabia, home to the two holiest Muslim sites, sees Shiite Iran as a rival for regional hegemony. And Israel considers Iran an “existential threat.”

“Trump administration officials and outside experts said that possible repercussions on an elaborate plan to squeeze the Iranians have dominated internal discussions about the fallout over what happened to Mr. Khashoggi,” David Sanger reported in The New York Times.

The allegations against the Saudi crown prince “have already had an effect” on Israel, “effectively freezing the push to build an international coalition against Iran’s regional influence, the top priority for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,” Ben Hubbard and David Halbfinger, citing “analysts,” wrote in the Times.

White House officials are worried the mushrooming crisis with Saudi Arabia could “derail a showdown with Iran and jeopardize plans to enlist Saudi help to avoid disrupting the oil market.”

Trump Still Ramps It Up

Trump and Salman still going in same direction on Iran. (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

Following the dangerous and foolhardy withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) — which pleased Israel and Saudi Arabia, the Trump administration is slated to announce on Sunday that companies doing business with…

“They are trying to outsource to cut costs and pit us against each other”

Allison Transmission workers speak out on UAW-management collaboration

By
George Kirby and Shannon Jones

3 November 2018

Workers at Indianapolis, Indiana-based Allison Transmission are seeking support for their fight against outsourcing of jobs, deteriorating working conditions and blatant attempts by the United Auto Workers union to bolster management and suppress workers’ grievances.

Allison Transmission Holdings, the largest global manufacturer of commercial automatic transmissions, reported for the third quarter of 2018 a $295 million adjusted EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization), up from the 2017 figure of $241 million. EBITDA is a metric used to calculate a company’s earning potential. Through the third quarter, Allison Transmission showed a $1.09 billion adjusted EBITDA and is expecting a profitable fourth quarter.

In a conversation with World Socialist Web Site Autoworker Newsletter reporters, Allison Transmission workers voiced their concern over deteriorating conditions at the company in spite of growing profits.

Ten years since the financial crash of 2008, major auto companies such as General Motors have handed out billions to shareholders instead of restoring concessions extracted from workers or investing in new production. This pattern has been followed by Allison Transmission, formerly part of GM and now owned by the hedge funds Carlyle Group and Onex Corp.

During this period, Allison Transmission has increased subcontracting, such as employing janitorial staff hired by ABM Industries, which typically pays wages in the range of $10 an hour.

A worker noted, “They are giving ABM the right to do our work. They do a lot of janitorial work…

A young man has been stabbed to deaths in London, bringing the number of people killed to four amid a fresh surge of violence in the British capital.

The 22-year-old man was found dead in Samos Road, Anerley, Bromley, southeast London, at noon local time. He had fatal stab wounds, police said.

The Metropolitan Police said it had launched a murder investigation, but no arrest had been made yet, it said.

The death is the fourth to come from knife violence in London in just five days. Another man and two teenage boys had been stabbed in separate incidents in southern neighborhoods of the capital over the past week.

Britain has seen a significant rise in the number of knife and acid attacks over the past years. The total number of people killed in stabbings in London this year has now reached 116, authorities have said.

Police officials say the increase in the number of deaths as a result of violence on the streets is because they have been…

Mediaite
November 4, 2018

Roger Stone swiped at former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for dishing to Vanity Fair about more examples of President Donald Trump‘s racist statements in private.

To recap, Cohen claimed that Trump made a number of shocking racist statements in private over the years, including “black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

CNN’s Michael Smerconish spoke with Stone this morning to ask him about the scrutiny surrounding his connection to Julian Assange, and towards the end he directly asked Stone if he’s ever heard Trump say anything racist.

“I’ve known him for 40 years. I have never heard him say anything of the kind,” Stone said, going on to talk about black support of Trump and touting how well the President did with African-Americans in certain parts of the country.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 7:21 am

Mediaite
November 4, 2018

Roger Stone swiped at former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for dishing to Vanity Fair about more examples of President Donald Trump‘s racist statements in private.

To recap, Cohen claimed that Trump made a number of shocking racist statements in private over the years, including “black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

CNN’s Michael Smerconish spoke with Stone this morning to ask him about the scrutiny surrounding his connection to Julian Assange, and towards the end he directly asked Stone if he’s ever heard Trump say anything racist.

“I’ve known him for 40 years. I have never heard him say anything of the kind,” Stone said, going on to talk about black support of Trump and touting how well the President did with African-Americans in certain parts of the country.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 7:21 am

Mediaite
November 4, 2018

Roger Stone swiped at former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen for dishing to Vanity Fair about more examples of President Donald Trump‘s racist statements in private.

To recap, Cohen claimed that Trump made a number of shocking racist statements in private over the years, including “black people are too stupid to vote for me.”

CNN’s Michael Smerconish spoke with Stone this morning to ask him about the scrutiny surrounding his connection to Julian Assange, and towards the end he directly asked Stone if he’s ever heard Trump say anything racist.

“I’ve known him for 40 years. I have never heard him say anything of the kind,” Stone said, going on to talk about black support of Trump and touting how well the President did with African-Americans in certain parts of the country.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 7:21 am

The next step in the Trump administration’s “maximum pressure” campaign against Iran comes this Sunday, Nov. 4, when the most severe sanctions will be imposed on the Islamic Republic. Crucially, they apply not only to Iran but to anyone who continues to do business with it.

It’s not yet clear how disruptive this move will be. While the U.S. intention is to isolate Iran, it is the U.S. that could wind up being more isolated. It depends on the rest of the world’s reaction, and especially Europe’s.

The issue is so fraught that disputes over how to apply the new sanctions have even divided Trump administration officials.

The administration is going for the jugular this time. It wants to force Iranian exports of oil and petrochemical products down to as close to zero as possible. As the measures are now written, they also exclude Iran from the global interbank system known as SWIFT.

It is hard to say which of these sanctions is more severe. Iran’s oil exports have already started falling. Theypeaked at 2.7 million barrels a day last May—just before Donald Trump pulled the U.S. out of the six-nation accord governing Iran’s nuclear programs. By early September oil exports were averaging a million barrels a day less.

In August the U.S. barred Iran’s purchases of U.S.-dollar denominated American and foreign company aircraft and auto parts. Since then the Iranian rial has crashed to record lows and inflation has risen above 30 percent.

Against the State: An …
Llewellyn H. Rockwell Jr.
Best Price: $6.99
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Revoking Iran’s SWIFT privileges will effectively cut the nation out of the dollar-denominated global economy. But there are moves afoot, especially by China and…

As part of a Saturday Night Live segment mocking the physical appearance of –mostly Republican– midterm election candidates, Davidson singled out former Navy Seal and Texas congressional candidate Dan Crenshaw, who wears an eyepatch since an IED blast almost took his sight in Afghanistan.

“You may be surprised to hear he’s a Congressional candidate from Texas,” Davidson said, “and not a hitman in a porno movie.”

“I’m sorry, I know he lost his eye in a war or whatever,” Davidson added as the audience laughed, before giggling himself.

Davidson moved swiftly on, but conservatives on Twitter were unamused.

The National Republican Congressional Committee demanded an apology from Davidson on Sunday, releasing a statement saying “Getting dumped by your pop star girlfriend is no excuse for lashing out at a decorated war hero who lost his eye serving our country” – a reference to Davidson’s high-profile breakup with singer Ariana Grande.

According to his campaign website, Crenshaw was hit by an IED blast while on his third deployment in Afghanistan in 2012. The blast completely obliterated Crenshaw’s right eye and left him blind in the left, but doctors were able to restore his sight in this eye. Following his injury, Crenshaw deployed twice again, once to the Middle East and once to South Korea.

Among the other candidates insulted by Davidson on Saturday were Florida Senate candidate Rick Scott, who “looks like someone tried to whittle Bruce Willis out of a penis,” and Greg Pence –the vice-president’s brother– who was compared to “a Ken doll that spent a year in the river.”

Davidson, however, also mocked his own appearance too, saying he looks “like I make vape juice in a bathtub.”

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Syrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Expatriates has denounced the US administration’s bid to re-impose sanctions on Iran’s vital oil and financial sectors, saying this move is in line with Washington’s policies to undermine peace and security in the Middle East.

An official source at the ministry said in a statement on Sunday that a new wave of Washington’s sanctions “reflects the US failure to deliver on its obligations under the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action” – the nuclear agreement reached between Iran and the P5+1 group of countries in 2015, Syria’s official news agency SANA reported.

The US Treasury Department announced on Friday that all sanctions on Iran lifted under the 2015 nuclear deal would be back in force on November 5. This came after US President Donald Trump’s decision in May to withdraw from the JCPOA.

According to Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, the sweeping sanctions will see 700 people blacklisted, including…

Stop pretending to represent ordinary working class Americans

Paul Joseph Watson
PrisonPlanet.com
November 4, 2018

Michael Moore says he represents blue collar, working class, economically struggling Trump voters.

Michael Moore is worth $50 million and owns 9 houses.

Shut up Michael Moore.

Please share this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q51iOOr0DC0

SUBSCRIBE on YouTube:

Follow on Twitter: Follow @PrisonPlanet

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/paul.j.watson.71

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

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

This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 4:06 pm

Breitbart
November 4, 2018

Women living in a heavily migrant-populated Paris area who complained about constant harassment from men last year are saying the situation has become even worse, with some refusing to even leave their homes.

Last year a group of local women signed a petition in an attempt to call attention to the situation in the Chapelle-Pajol district in northern Paris, but now they claim the situation has become even worse than before, Le Parisien reports.

“The situation has worsened. Of course, since these men are more and more numerous. Like many others, I gave up taking the metro to La Chapelle, to cross the square … Even at a running pace,” a local woman who did not wish to be identified said.

“And do not talk about cafes. They do not say ‘Women Prohibited’ on the front, of course, but who would risk it? The police are more present, it’s true, but the fights are also more and more numerous and violent. I have the impression that these traffickers won the game: they took possession of the place,” she added.

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 7:25 am

Social media and tech companies in the US say they are doing more to boost voter turnout for next Tuesday’s midterm congressional elections, as voter participation in US elections has decreased in recent decades.

Facebook, Twitter, Snap and other firms say they are reminding users to vote and offering a guide for identifying the correct polling place, ballot items and hours.

Only about 17 percent of 18 to 24-year-olds voted in the previous congressional elections in 2014.

The general trend in voter turnout for American elections has been decreasing for all age groups, but young people’s participation has taken the biggest nosedive. Some opinion polls say the voting proportion could be much higher this year.

Democrats are generally favored to win the 23 seats they need to wrest the majority from Republicans in the US House of Representatives, according to opinion polls and nonpartisan forecasters.

If Democrats gain the majority in the…

The latest in Lincoln polemics comes courtesy of Rich Lowry, editor of National Review.  In the latest issue of the latter, Lowry both promotes his new work and takes aim at those of our 16^thpresident’s detractors that are to Lowry’s political right—the “Lincoln haters.”

The “Lincoln haters,” Lowry insists, are limited “mostly, but not entirely,” to a libertarian “fringe” whose members “apparently hate federal power more than they abhor slavery.”  Chief among these fringe characters is Lincoln scholar Thomas DiLorenzo, who Lowry accuses of having “made a cottage industry of publishing unhinged Lincoln-hating polemics.”

To sense what sort of argument Lowry’s promises to be, the reader should note that before it even gets under way, its author seeks to undermine the character of his opponents—not the substance or form of their reasoning.  His interlocutors are “haters,” on “the fringe,” and even, as in the case of DiLorenzo, “unhinged.”  From the outset, Lowry tries to stack the deck in his favor by portraying his rivals as both irrational and disreputable.

The Real Lincoln: A Ne…
Thomas J. Dilorenzo
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Ironically, in doing so, he deprives himself of the high ground, both intellectually and morally, for Lowry’s argument, it is painfully clear, has little to do with history and everything to do with contemporary politics.

“The debate over Lincoln on the Right is so important,” Lowry writes, “because it can be seen, in part, as a proxy for the larger argument over whether conservatism should read itself out of the American mainstream or—in this hour of its discontent—dedicate itself to a Lincolnian program…

Enraged by US President Donald Trump’s racist remarks about American Latinos, US Hispanic voters are far more interested in partaking in this year’s midterm congressional elections than they were in 2014, a new poll has found.

The Reuters/Ipsos poll released Sunday found that 36 percent of Hispanic voters were “certain” to vote in Tuesday elections, a significant increase from 27 percent in the 2014 midterms.

To put that in perspective, there has been only a five-percent rise in general voter enthusiasm among all Americans over the same period. This means that Hispanics’ enthusiasm to vote outpaces the general population by more than two times.

Enthusiasm was specifically higher among Hispanic Democrats, 42 percent of whom said they were “certain” to vote compared to 29 percent in 2014.

The survey found that Hispanic voters were nearly twice as inclined to vote for Democratic candidates running for Senate and the House of…

The Daily Caller
November 4, 2018

Donald Trump Jr. hammered CNN Saturday morning by posting a campaign ad the network “refused to run,” featuring unrepentant cop killer Luis Bracamontes.

“CNN refused to run this ad,” Trump Jr. tweeted. “I guess they only run fake news and won’t talk about real threats that don’t suit their agenda. Enjoy. Remember this on Tuesday.”

CNN refused to run this ad… I guess they only run fake news and won’t talk about real threats that don’t suit their agenda. Enjoy. Remember this on Tuesday. #vote #voterepublican pic.twitter.com/VyMm7GhPLX

— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 3, 2018

The ad, also posted by the president earlier this week, links Bracamontes, who returned to the United States after being deported and killed two police officers in 2014, with the approaching migrant caravan.

“I wish I had killed more of the motherf**kers,” Bracamontes reportedly told the jury before receiving the death penalty for his crimes. “I will break out soon and I will kill more, kill whoever gets in front of me … There’s no need for a fucking trial.”

Read more

This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 7:28 am

128 years after the first US electrocution

Tennessee revives “Old Smokey,” the electric chair, for an execution

By
Kate Randall

3 November 2018

August 6, 1890, Auburn, New York: William Kemmler, 30, a vegetable peddler in the slums of Buffalo, was the first person in the US to die by electrocution. He was convicted and sentenced to death for murdering his girlfriend with a hatchet following a drinking binge.

William Kemmler’s execution, as illustrated by Le Petit Parisien

After Kemmler was strapped into the electric chair, 1,000 volts of AC current were passed for 17 seconds through the electrodes attached to his skull. This rendered him unconscious but failed to stop his heart and breathing. After the attending physicians confirmed that Kemmler was still alive, one cried out: “Have the current turned on again, quick, no delay,” but the generator needed time to recharge. After a delay, the prisoner received a 2,000-volt AC shock that killed him.

According to witnesses, blood vessels under Kemmler’s skin ruptured and bled and areas around the electrodes on his head singed. Saliva dripped down his beard as he grasped for air. The smell of burnt flesh filled the room. Both witnesses and a sheriff fled the execution chamber in horror. The procedure lasted about eight minutes.

May 9, 1947 , Angola, Louisiana: Willie “Lucky” Francis was convicted of the murder of pharmacist Andrew Thomas in St. Martinville. Francis was a 16-year-old with a stutter at the time of the murder. Despite two questionable confessions and incompetent legal counsel, he was sentenced to death by an all-white jury.

Willie “Lucky” Francis

On May 3, 1946, Francis survived his first meeting with “Gruesome Gertie,” as the electric chair was known at the infamous Angola State…

An effigy of the UK’s ex-foreign secretary Boris Johnson was set ablaze in Edenbridge, Kent, on Saturday, as part of the Edenbridge Bonfire Society’s celebrations of November 5.

The 11-meter effigy, by artist Andrea Deans, features the conservative politician sporting his signature cycle helmet, eating a slice of “EU cake” and red Brexit buses for shoes.

Every year, the bonfire society chooses a “Guy”, usually a high-profile political figure, to be burnt at their celebrations. Past victims have included US President Donald Trump and ex-FIFA boss Sepp Blatter.

On November 5, the UK commemorates the failed attempt of Guy Fawkes to blow up the House of Lords as part of the Gunpowder plot to kill King James I in 1605. Many people light bonfires and set off fireworks to mark the event.

(Source: Ruptly)

Zero Hedge
November 4, 2018

Billionaire investor George Soros has repeatedly denied rumors that he is helping to finance the migrant caravans making their way up from Honduras and Guatemala through Mexico with the ultimate aim of reaching the US.

But that’s about to change, as the “Open Society” founder – who famously financed much of the opposition to Trump SCOTUS pick Brett Kavanaugh – is now partnering with Mastercard to hand out money (in the form of ‘investment capital’) to migrants, refugees and “others struggling within their communities worldwide,” according to Reuters. Through their partnership, Soros is effectively providing open financial support for migrants and refugees seeking to enter the US and Europe.

The partnership between Soros and Mastercard, which they are calling Humanity Ventures, is the result of a pledge that Soros made in September to spend $500 million to address “the challenges facing migrants and refugees.”

In a statement, Soros and Mastercard declared that government aid programs haven’t been enough to solve the issues facing refugees, suggesting that this is a problem that only the private sector can solve.

“Migrants are often forced into lives of despair in their host communities because they cannot gain access to financial, healthcare and government services,” Soros said.

“Our potential investment in this social enterprise, coupled with Mastercard’s ability to create products that serve vulnerable communities, can show how private capital can play a constructive role in solving social problems,” he added.

Right away, Soros plans to spend $50 million to provide “scaleable” health-care and education solutions. He intends to ‘invest’ the money in businesses founded by migrants.

“Humanity Ventures is intended to be profitable so as to stimulate involvement from other businesspeople,” Soros said.

“We also…

The Afghanistan war cannot be won militarily and peace will only be achieved through a political resolution with the Taliban, the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations has conceded.

In his first interview since taking command of NATO’s Resolute Support mission in September, Gen. Austin Scott Miller provided NBC News with a surprisingly candid assessment of the seemingly never-ending conflict, which began with the US invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001.

“This is not going to be won militarily. This is going to a political solution,” Miller said.

He mused that the Taliban is also tired of fighting and may be interested in starting to “work through the political piece” of the 17-year-old war.

But it’s not clear if the Taliban is open to negotiations. Last month, a top Taliban commander told RT, in a rare interview, that the group’s leaders had no desire to negotiate with the Americans.

#Afghanistan is on its way to becoming America’s longest war ever, and fewer and fewer Americans like it https://t.co/6AI1WUppPe

— RT (@RT_com) October 11, 2018

Described for years as a stalemate, the conflict has been tipping in the Taliban’s favor in recent months. Even by US military estimates, the Afghan government controls or influences just over half of the country’s 407 districts – a record low since the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, began tracking district control in November 2015.

Our Latest Longest War…

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To make matters worse, casualties among Afghan government forces have skyrocketed in recent months. Afghan security forces suffered 1,000 fatalities in August and September,…

In less than two years as president, Donald Trump has already put two radical right-wing justices on the Supreme Court, cementing a conservative majority on the Court for decades. He has also placed 29 right-wing judges on the federal circuit courts of appeals with more in the works by the end of the year. These judicial appointments threaten to endanger our rights for years to come.

We are painfully aware of how Trump and his GOP congressional leadership stole a Supreme Court appointment from Barack Obama and installed Neil Gorsuch, who has delivered conservative decisions as expected. And millions of us watched horrified as Brett Kavanaugh, Trump’s second Supreme Court pick, laid bare his right-wing bona fides as he lied under oath about a number of things and rallied conservatives in defense of rape culture.

Kavanaugh, who joined the high court on October 9, has not yet had the opportunity to rule on a case. But he showed his true colors during oral argument in Nielsen v. Preap, a case involving the right to a hearing for immigrants with criminal records before being imprisoned during the pendency of their deportation proceedings. Kavanaugh, who whined about being deprived of due process when he was accused of sexual assault, appears poised to vote with his fellow right-wing justices and deny immigrants who have already served their time any due process at all.

There is widespread focus on Trump’s two Supreme Court nominees. But there is less public awareness of how Trump has been systematically packing the federal circuit courts of appeals with conservative judges who are already slashing the rights of workers, immigrants, women, LGBTQ people, consumers, voters, the environment, people accused of crime and whistleblowers.

People for the American Way just released a report detailing the mean-spirited decisions that Gorsuch and Trump’s 29 circuit court judges have already handed…

Someone recently asked me my opinion on “the left debate over lesser evil voting” this year. What debate? There’s no debate. Anyone who doesn’t understand that the creeping fascist white nationalist Republicans are more horrific than the dismal dollar Democrats in ways that matter enough to hold one’s nose and vote “for” the Dems in contested races this year is (sorry to say) hopelessly out of it.

It was one thing to protest-vote for Jill Stein over hideous Hillary in a contested state when nearly every reputable pollster was predicting an easy victory for Mrs. Clinton. But then the caravan-barking freak got into the White House, turned what was already a dangerously arch-reactionary party into his own personal pre-fascist organization, and then worked with that party to advance a hard-right, ultra-plutocratic and eco-cidal agenda while spreading racist and nationalist hate and setting new world records for totalitarian, truth-canceling mendacity. Any lefty who doesn’t grasp the desirability of the Republicans and their terrible tangerine master being checked to some degree in the House of Representatives is too stupid and/or alienated for their own good.

Is there a “debate” over the advisability of walking barefoot on rusty nails?

Yes, the Democrats are horrible. They make my skin crawl. I’ve documented their record as a pack of “lying neoliberal warmongers” for many years. But when the deplorable Dems embraced the full corporate neoliberal…

The United States is involved in “an ongoing operation” that seeks to bring about regime change in Iran, international lawyer and political analyst Barry Grossman tells Press TV.

“The United States is totally open about its plans for Iran, and it does not even try to make a secret of it,” Grossman, who is based on the Indonesian island of Bali, made the remarks in a live interview with Press TV on Sunday, the anniversary of the takeover of the US embassy in the Iranian capital, Tehran, back in 1979.

“It is an ongoing operation to interfere in domestic operations and to stir up dissent, political unrest, and disobedience all with an aim… [of causing] what it describes as regime change,” Grossman said.

He also said that the US government had proven to be an untrustworthy interlocutor.

“It is impossible for Iran to engage in any kind of ties or negotiations with the United States. It is impossible for Iran to trust the United…

October was a brutal month for the stock market. After the Federal Reserve’s eighth interest rate hike, on September 26, the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped more than 2,000 points, and the NASDAQ had its worst month in nearly 10 years. After the Dow lost more than 800 points on October 10 and the S and P 500 suffered its first week-long losing streak since Trump’s election, the president said, “I think the Fed is making a mistake. They are so tight. I think the Fed has gone crazy.” In a later interview on Fox News, he called the Fed’s rate hikes “loco.” And in a Wall Street Journal interview published on October 24, Trump said he thought the biggest risk to the economy was the Federal Reserve, because “interest rates are being raised too quickly.” He also criticized the Fed and its chairman in July and August.

Trump’s criticisms are worrisome to some commentators, who fear he is attempting to manipulate the Fed and its chairman for political gain. Ever since the 1970s, the Fed has declared its independence from government, and presidents are supposed to avoid influencing its decisions. But other Fed watchers think politicians should be allowed to criticize the market manipulations of an apparently out-of-control central bank.

Why the Frontal Attack?

Even if the president’s challenges are a needed check on the Fed, some question whether he is going about it in the right way. Challenging the central bank in public forces it to stick to…

The Daily Caller
November 4, 2018

President Donald Trump tweeted early Saturday morning expressing his outrage over the fact that a woman who accused Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh of rape in October admitted to making up the entire story.

A vicious accuser of Justice Kavanaugh has just admitted that she was lying, her story was totally made up, or FAKE! Can you imagine if he didn’t become a Justice of the Supreme Court because of her disgusting False Statements. What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 3, 2018

“A vicious accuser of Justice [Kavanaugh] has just admitted that she was lying, her story was totally made up, or FAKE!” Trump tweeted. “Can you imagine if he didn’t become a Justice of the Supreme Court because of her disgusting False Statements. What about the others? Where are the Dems on this?”

His tweet came after Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley referred the woman to the FBI and Department of Justice for an investigation after she admitted to making the false allegation.

Judy Munro-Leighton admitted Thursday that she falsely claimed to be the author of an anonymous letter sent to California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris back in September.

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This article was posted: Sunday, November 4, 2018 at 7:37 am

An attempted break-in at Julian Assange’s residence inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London on Oct. 29, and the absence of a security detail, have increased fears about the safety of the WikiLeak’s publisher.

Lawyers for Assange have confirmed to activist and journalist Suzie Dawson that Assange was awoken in the early morning hours by the break-in attempt. They confirmed to Dawson that the attempt was to enter a front window of the embassy. A booby-trap Assange had set up woke him, the lawyers said.

Scaffolding has appeared against the embassy building in the Knightsbridge section in London which “obscures the embassy’s security cameras,” the lawyers said.

Scaffolding near balcony where Assange has appeared. (Sean O’Brien)

On the scaffolding electronic devices, presumably to conduct surveillance, can be seen, just feet from the embassy windows.

Later on the day of the break-in, Sean O’Brien, a lecturer at Yale University Law School and a cyber-security expert, was able to enter the embassy through the front door, which was left open. Inside he found no security present. Someone from the embassy emerged to tell him to send an email to set up an appointment with Assange. After emailing the embassy, personnel inside refused to check whether it had been received or not.

One of the apparent surveillance devices. (Sean O’Brien.)

O’Brien then noticed more scaffolding being erected and observed the devices, which he photographed. Though a cyber-security expert, O’Brien said he could not identify what the devices are.

“I’ve never seen devices quite like this, and I take photos of surveillance equipment often,” O’Brien said. “There were curious plastic tubes with yellow-orange caps, zip-tied to the front.  I have no idea what these are but they seem to have equipment inside them.”

The devices are pointed towards the embassy, where all the blinds were open, and not the street, he said. “The surveillance devices in the photos reveals no manufacturer branding, serial numbers or visible device information,” Dawson said. “The combination of the obscuring of the street-facing surveillance cameras and the installation of…

American colleges and universities are reconsidering ties with Saudi Arabia despite having received over $350 million from the kingdom over the past 10 years, according to a report.

This follows the assassination of Saudi dissident journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was killed after entering the Saudi mission in Istanbul on October 2.

The incident triggered international condemnation and in the US several lawmakers have called for sanctions against the kingdom, while others demanded Washington stop its nuclear talks with Saudi Arabia.

Now, the questions about Khashoggi’s death have caused some US colleges or universities to reconsider current or future deals, The Associated Press reported. 

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), which cooperates with Saudi universities on research projects, has been working with Saudi company Aramco for a long time.  

In March, the company pledged to provide the school with $25 million for…

Breitbart
November 2, 2018

Nearly 6-in-9 likely voters in swing districts across the United States say federal officials must keep a migrant caravan of at least 10,000 Central Americans out of the country.

In a new poll by NumbersUSA, about 65 percent of likely voters in swing districts this election cycle say the migrant caravan headed to the U.S. to overwhelm the country’s asylum and immigration system needs to be kept out of the country.

About 40 percent say “all of them” in the caravan should be stopped “from entering the country.” About 25 percent of likely swing district voters say the U.S. should “require them to remain in Mexico until their asylum hearing.”

Only 18 percent of likely swing district voters support the country’s current asylum process, which allows illegal border crossers and asylum-seekers to enter the U.S. while awaiting their hearings.

About 12 percent of likely swing district voters said the caravan should be allowed “to move freely around the country until their asylum hearing,” showing little support for the Democrats’ preferred goal of hemispheric open borders and mass immigration.

As Breitbart News reported, the plurality of likely voters in Indiana, Florida, and Arizona — all of which are seeing hotly contested Senate races — say the migrant caravan is a threat to the nation.

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This article was posted: Friday, November 2, 2018 at 7:01 am

Christine Assange, mother of persecuted WikiLeaks publisher, endorses Niles Niemuth, SEP candidate for Congress

By
our reporter

3 November 2018

Christine Assange, the mother of persecuted Wikileaks publisher Julian Assange, endorsed Socialist Equality Party Congressional candidate Niles Niemuth in a Twitter post Wednesday.

Assange encouraged Wikileaks supporters in Michigan’s 12th district to vote for Niles due to his consistent defense of her son, who is currently confined to the Ecuadorian embassy.

“Candidate NILES NIEMUTH is running for Congress (Michigan’s 12 District). He has consistently publicly defended journalist Julian Assange! Consider voting for an anti-corruption/pro Assange candidate! Check out @niles_niemuth!,” Christine Assange wrote.

Julian Assange has waged a courageous and principled fight against government secrecy and the crimes of the US military. He has been trapped for more than six years in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, facing the possibility of arrest and extradition to the US if he leaves. For six months, the government of Ecuador has blocked his ability to communicate with the outside world, and earlier this week it blocked all visitors.

Niles replied by thanking Christine Assange for her support and noted that the Socialist Equality Party has long defended Julian Assange and WikiLeaks from attacks and persecution.

She noted, “It takes compassion, principles & courage to publicly stand up for my son Julian against the #DeepState.”

The sister party of the SEP in Australia organized a protest in Sydney in June, which included journalist John Pilger, demanding his freedom and safe return to Australia.

Niles Niemuth is the Socialist Equality Party’s candidate for Congress in Michigan’s 12th Congressional District. Visit …

The Afghanistan war cannot be won militarily and peace will only be achieved through a political resolution with the Taliban, the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations has conceded.

In his first interview since taking command of NATO’s Resolute Support mission in September, Gen. Austin Scott Miller provided NBC News with a surprisingly candid assessment of the seemingly never-ending conflict, which began with the US invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001.

“This is not going to be won militarily. This is going to a political solution,” Miller said.

He mused that the Taliban is also tired of fighting and may be interested in starting to “work through the political piece” of the 17-year-old war.

But it’s not clear if the Taliban is open to negotiations. Last month, a top Taliban commander told RT, in a rare interview, that the group’s leaders had no desire to negotiate with the Americans.

#Afghanistan is on its way to becoming America’s longest war ever, and fewer and fewer Americans like it https://t.co/6AI1WUppPe

— RT (@RT_com) October 11, 2018

Described for years as a stalemate, the conflict has been tipping in the Taliban’s favor in recent months. Even by US military estimates, the Afghan government controls or influences just over half of the country’s 407 districts – a record low since the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, began tracking district control in November 2015.

Our Latest Longest War…

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To make matters worse, casualties among Afghan government forces have skyrocketed in recent months. Afghan security forces suffered 1,000 fatalities in August and September,…

The Afghanistan war cannot be won militarily and peace will only be achieved through a political resolution with the Taliban, the newly-appointed American general in charge of US and NATO operations has conceded.

In his first interview since taking command of NATO’s Resolute Support mission in September, Gen. Austin Scott Miller provided NBC News with a surprisingly candid assessment of the seemingly never-ending conflict, which began with the US invasion of Afghanistan in October, 2001.

“This is not going to be won militarily. This is going to a political solution,” Miller said.

He mused that the Taliban is also tired of fighting and may be interested in starting to “work through the political piece” of the 17-year-old war.

But it’s not clear if the Taliban is open to negotiations. Last month, a top Taliban commander told RT, in a rare interview, that the group’s leaders had no desire to negotiate with the Americans.

#Afghanistan is on its way to becoming America’s longest war ever, and fewer and fewer Americans like it https://t.co/6AI1WUppPe

— RT (@RT_com) October 11, 2018

Described for years as a stalemate, the conflict has been tipping in the Taliban’s favor in recent months. Even by US military estimates, the Afghan government controls or influences just over half of the country’s 407 districts – a record low since the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, or SIGAR, began tracking district control in November 2015.

Our Latest Longest War…

Best Price: $18.56
Buy New $18.62
(as of 01:20 EDT – Details)

To make matters worse, casualties among Afghan government forces have skyrocketed in recent months. Afghan security forces suffered 1,000 fatalities in August and September,…

The sisters, Rotana Farea (22) and Tala Farea (16) were discovered on October 24 on the banks of the river, having gone missing two months previously from Fairfax, Virginia, where they lived with their family. So far, the investigation has revealed that the sisters traveled from Washington DC to Philadelphia, before arriving New York City on September 1.

READ MORE: ‘Khashoggi Way’: Activists want to rename street at Saudi embassy in D.C. after murdered journalist

At a press conference on Friday, police said they had “no credible information” that any crime took place, but confirmed that their probe is ongoing. Investigators tracked the girls’ last movements using credit card records, which showed that they had “maxed out” a card staying in a number of “high end” hotels in New York, where they ordered meals for two people every day in the days leading to their deaths.

The sisters were found tied face-to-face with duct tape at the waist and feet, were fully clothed and their bodies showed no obvious signs of trauma, which likely rules out a theory that they could have jumped together from the George Washington Bridge.

Some kind of suicide is still a leading theory in the sisters’ deaths, however. Water found in their lungs made it “entirely credible” that they entered the water while still alive.

The baffling case took on an added air of mystery when it was revealed that the sisters’ mother told police that she had received a phone call from the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington DC the day before the sisters were found. During the call, a Saudi embassy official instructed her family to leave the US, due to the fact that her daughters had applied for political asylum, she claimed.

Police also revealed that a man who frequently exercises along the riverbank told them that he had seen the girls sitting about 30 feet apart in a playground with their heads in their hands and making “praying” noises on the same day that they were later found dead – an image that the witness said has been “haunting” him since.

Tala and Rotana moved to the US with their mother in 2015. Rotana had been enrolled at George Mason University but left in the spring.

The two had previously been placed in a shelter after another disappearance in 2017, reportedly asking police not to reveal their location. On Friday, police confirmed that reports of physical abuse within the family had been made at that time, but did not elaborate.

Sources in Virginia who were not family members told the police that the sisters had said they would rather harm themselves or commit suicide than return to Saudi Arabia.

According to some media reports, 16-year-old Tala had reportedly been offered a place at a top school in Saudi Arabia but desperately did not want to go.

The Saudi consulate in New York said it had “appointed an attorney to follow the case closely,” while the Saudi embassy in Washington contacted the family and “extended its support and aid in this trying time.”

Think your friends would be interested? Share this story!

Breitbart
November 2, 2018

Hungary is preparing to hold a country-wide national consultation on its family policy, which has already resulted in an increase in marriage and a decline in abortion and divorce.

The Fidesz-KDNP government has chosen to support couples with children rather than accept mass migration to ameliorate long-term demographic issues, to the chagrin of its critics in the European Union’s power elite.

“In recent years, finding the proper response to Europe’s demographic decline has become one of the biggest sources of disagreement between European and Hungarian politics,” observed Dr Zoltán Kovács, official spokesman for Prime Minister Viktor Orbán’s Cabinet Office, in a post on the official About Hungary website announcing the upcoming national consultation.

“While Brussels bureaucrats and the European liberal, pro-migration mainstream see immigration as the necessary and unavoidable solution, the Hungarian government stands committed to the idea of increasing birth rate through more effective family support measures,” the Hungarian added.

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This article was posted: Friday, November 2, 2018 at 7:02 am

Humans — as long as we have walked, we have moved and explored. We spread to cover the whole world, and then mixed among each other. We continue to do that. Our movement expresses so many elements of our being: our curiosity, our vulnerability, our arrogance. We have generally been the main limit to our own movements in all that time. As humans, we have mobility in common. It is a core part of who we are. And yet it is perhaps precisely that mobility that has often made us afraid of others and controlling over them.

At a demonstration during the COP21 protests in Paris a few years ago, somebody carried a banner that read “migration is a force of nature.” The message was striking. In its simplicity, it neatly expressed the inevitability of human mobility. But it also said something about the inevitability of human struggles to be free to move. Those struggles have always been there too — and they continue today, ultimately, because borders inhibiting our freedom of movement persist. Would those struggles even exist, after all, if there were no borders to cross?

Borders, of course, are more than just lines marking territories on a map. They are ultimately an apparatus of the state, functioning to define the outer limits of state power. The extent and intensity of this state power is rapidly changing today — as is the nature of the border regime itself. The involvement of transnational institutions like the European Union, or non-state agencies like Frontex, and the extension in some cases of existing state powers beyond their own borders (as in the case of Australia locating its refugee camps in Papua New Guinea, or the UK placing border guards in French ports) are fundamentally changing the way borders work and the way different groups of people relate to them.

Humans — as long as we have walked, we have moved and explored. We spread to cover the whole world, and then mixed among each other. We continue to do that. Our movement expresses so many elements of our being: our curiosity, our vulnerability, our arrogance. We have generally been the main limit to our own movements in all that time. As humans, we have mobility in common. It is a core part of who we are. And yet it is perhaps precisely that mobility that has often made us afraid of others and controlling over them.

At a demonstration during the COP21 protests in Paris a few years ago, somebody carried a banner that read “migration is a force of nature.” The message was striking. In its simplicity, it neatly expressed the inevitability of human mobility. But it also said something about the inevitability of human struggles to be free to move. Those struggles have always been there too — and they continue today, ultimately, because borders inhibiting our freedom of movement persist. Would those struggles even exist, after all, if there were no borders to cross?

Borders, of course, are more than just lines marking territories on a map. They are ultimately an apparatus of the state, functioning to define the outer limits of state power. The extent and intensity of this state power is rapidly changing today — as is the nature of the border regime itself. The involvement of transnational institutions like the European Union, or non-state agencies like Frontex, and the extension in some cases of existing state powers beyond their own borders (as in the case of Australia locating its refugee camps in Papua New Guinea, or the UK placing border guards in French ports) are fundamentally changing the way borders work and the way different groups of people relate to them.

A Burial at Ornans by Gustave Courbet. (Musée d’Orsay.)

When I heard that John Berger had died, an image flashed in my mind of a painting on a vast canvas I had stood captivated before a few years ago in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. A crowd is gathered before a small grave in the jaundiced light of a winter afternoon. The people huddle together in grief, as if braced against a chill wind. The ground is hard, stony. A dog, perhaps the deceased peasant’s, stands at the edge of the pit, mournful eyes trained on the viewer.  The white cliffs of the Jura breach the hazy horizon, marking the place, fixing the point-of-view as finitely as any Google map.

The painting, of course, is Gustave Courbet’s Burial at Ornans. Though Courbet spent six months executing the painting, the scene feels immediate. It also seems as if it took a lifetime to conceive. A death which reveals the life of a poor village, a community knit together across decades of work, joy and tragedy. It is easy to imagine Berger’s body being lowered into such a hand-dug grave, attended by such people and animals, in the weak winter light of rural France.

John Berger wrote the way Courbet painted, only quicker. His writing is direct, naturalistic, as vivid as a conversation between friends or lovers. Berger didn’t explain or explicate the meaning of paintings or photographs. He described his own response to them, a response we related to because we trusted the experience of the voice speaking to us….

The mayor of a small city in the US state of Utah has been identified as the US service member killed Saturday in an “insider attack” in Afghanistan, according to reports.

Brent Taylor, a married father of seven children who was deployed to Afghanistan in January, was a mayor of North Ogden. He was elected to the city council in 2009 and became mayor in 2013, according to the city council website.

Taylor’s death was confirmed by North Ogden City Councilman Phil Swanson.

“We are devastated by the loss of our Mayor and friend, Brent Taylor,” the city said on its Facebook page.

“Brent had a profound influence on this community. He was the best of men with the ability to see potential and possibility in everything around him.”

Taylor had temporarily stepped down as mayor to deploy to Afghanistan with the Utah Army National Guard, according to his biography on North Ogden’s website.

He served as an officer in the US Army National Guard…

The conflict in Ukraine has been a war of seemingly endless violence and brutality. This cataclysmic conflict, which has pitted Ukrainian against Ukrainian, marks a restoration of the fighting that took place between Nazi collaborators and partisans during the Second World War. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the coverage from what Paul Craig Roberts is fond of calling “the presstitutes,” has been a deranged combination of liberal schizophrenia, outright lies, and neo-Nazi propaganda.

As noted in The Washington Times, the decision on the part of the Trump administration to give Kiev an additional 200 million dollars in military aid, brings the total amount of US military aid sent to Kiev since the Maidan coup to a billion dollars. This war has pitted the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and its affiliated paramilitary organizations, against the Armed Forces of Novorossiya which are defending their homes, villages, and cities from a ruthless genocidal onslaught. The former are getting the military assistance. Rest assured, it is for “defensive purposes,” and needed to defend Ukraine from “Russian-backed separatists.”

In an article in The New York Times titled “After Initial Triumph, Ukraine’s Leaders Face Battle For Credibility,” by Steven Erlanger, the author writes of the Maidan coup: “The United States and the European Union have embraced the revolution here as another flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former…

The conflict in Ukraine has been a war of seemingly endless violence and brutality. This cataclysmic conflict, which has pitted Ukrainian against Ukrainian, marks a restoration of the fighting that took place between Nazi collaborators and partisans during the Second World War. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the coverage from what Paul Craig Roberts is fond of calling “the presstitutes,” has been a deranged combination of liberal schizophrenia, outright lies, and neo-Nazi propaganda.

As noted in The Washington Times, the decision on the part of the Trump administration to give Kiev an additional 200 million dollars in military aid, brings the total amount of US military aid sent to Kiev since the Maidan coup to a billion dollars. This war has pitted the Armed Forces of Ukraine (AFU) and its affiliated paramilitary organizations, against the Armed Forces of Novorossiya which are defending their homes, villages, and cities from a ruthless genocidal onslaught. The former are getting the military assistance. Rest assured, it is for “defensive purposes,” and needed to defend Ukraine from “Russian-backed separatists.”

In an article in The New York Times titled “After Initial Triumph, Ukraine’s Leaders Face Battle For Credibility,” by Steven Erlanger, the author writes of the Maidan coup: “The United States and the European Union have embraced the revolution here as another flowering of democracy, a blow to authoritarianism and kleptocracy in the former…

Free Beacon
November 2, 2018

The Chinese government has carried out a global campaign to disseminate its oppressive internet policies and digital surveillance tools, hosting seminars on cyber censorship with officials from at least three-dozen countries over the past two years, according to a new report.

In its annual study of internet openness, Freedom House, a democracy and human rights watchdog, warned Chinese efforts to spread its “digital authoritarianism” pose a threat to an open internet and the spread of democracy across the world.

Authoritarian governments have justified tighter internet restrictions and reduced privacy protections by contending the policies help counter fake news and data hacks. This pretext has also enabled countries to commit human rights abuses, such as jailing government critics and blocking foreign social media sites.

Freedom House research director Adrian Shahbaz, who authored the report, said China is working to create a network of countries that will impose its internet censorship model. Since early 2017, Chinese officials have led weeks-long seminars on censorship and surveillance with representatives from 35 of the 65 countries assessed by Freedom House. Government officials representing countries from the Middle East and Southeast Asia were most prevalent at these sessions.

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This article was posted: Friday, November 2, 2018 at 7:05 am

Back in the last century, when this was a different country, the Democrats were the “smart” party and the Republicans were the “stupid” party. How did that work? Well, back then the Democrats represented a broad middle class, with a base of factory workers, many of them unionized, and the party had to be smart, especially in the courts, to overcome the natural advantages of the owner class. In contrast, the Republicans looked like a claque of country club drunks who staggered home at night to sleep on their moneybags. Bad optics, as we say nowadays.

The Democrats also occupied the moral high ground as the champion of the little guy. If not for the Dems, factory workers would be laboring twelve hours a day and children would still be maimed in the machinery. Once the relationship between business and labor was settled in the 1950s, the party moved on to a new crusade on even loftier moral high ground: civil rights, aiming to correct arrant and long-lived injustices against downtrodden black Americans. That was a natural move, considering America’s self-proclaimed post-war status as the world’s Beacon of Liberty. It had to be done and a political consensus that included Republicans got it done. Consensus was still possible.

The Fall of the Ancien…
james howard kunstler
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The Dems built their fortress on that high ground and fifty years later they find themselves prisoners in it. The factory jobs all vamoosed overseas. The middle class has been pounded into penury and addiction. The Democratic Party split into a four-headed monster comprised of Wall Street patrons seeking favors, war hawks and their corporate allies looking for new global rumbles, the permanent bureaucracy…

Coalition airstrikes hit a vital cholera medical facility in Abs, Hajjah province in June despite being notified about the treatment facility on more than 12 occasions, the Independent reported. In April, the jets also struck a water supply system which impacted the livelihood of at least 6,000 people in a country that is suffering one of the worst humanitarian disasters in the 21st century.

READ MORE: Saudis, UAE pressured UN for favorable media coverage in exchange for Yemen aid – report

The revelations about the strikes on charity-funded facilities in Yemen emerged following this week’s parliamentary debates in the House of Commons, where British lawmakers were trying to evaluate the impact of UK arms sales to the Saudis. During the hearing on Tuesday, Oxfam’s Dina el-Mamoun revealed that UK aid to the war-torn country is being bombarded.

“On the one hand, British aid is a vital lifeline, on the other, British bombs are helping to fuel an ongoing war that is leading to countless lives being lost each week to fighting, disease and hunger,” Oxfam’s head of advocacy, Toni Pearce, told the Independent following the International Development Committee hearing.

Referring to London’s policy towards Yemen as “irresponsible and incoherent”, she noted that the UK’s ongoing arms sales to Riyadh are contributing to the destruction of scarce food supplies, hospitals and homes, as well as “aid programs funded by British taxpayers.”

The UK Government had been widely criticized for its continued support of Saudi Arabia and its arms supplies, which contributed to the destruction of vital infrastructure and mounting civilian casualties. And since Britain makes billions on these arms sales, over the last three years London has repeatedly dogged the pressure to cut arms deals to the Saudis.

At the same time, despite UK’s hand in exacerbating the crisis, the country has also spent more than £400mn in aid to the country throughout the course of the war. As a potential way out of the spotlight, Prime Minister Theresa May on Wednesday backed the American call for a “ceasefire” in Yemen, even though the record of the US supporting the Saudis, no matter what, undermines whatever peace initiative they may now try to promote.

Official UN figures say that more than 10,000 people have been killed in Yemen since the Saudi-led bombing campaign began in March 2015. Yet Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED) believes that at least 56,000 people have lost their lives in the war. The violence has also left around two-thirds of Yemen’s population of 27 million relying on aid amid the ongoing strict naval and aerial blockade of the country by the coalition.

The conflict has impacted over seven million children in Yemen who now face a serious threat of famine, according to UNICEF figures announced this week. Over 6,000 children have either been killed or sustained serious injuries since 2015, UN children’s agency said. The humanitarian situation in the country has also been exacerbated by outbreaks of cholera, polio, and measles.

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Iran’s ambassador to the United Kingdom has called on a leading newspaper to be more informative in its investigation into the funding of a newly-established anti-Iran TV station.

Hamid Baeidinejad said in a tweet early on Sunday that the Guardian was expected to shed more light on Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s financial support for Iran International, a TV station that began operation in London last year with a clear agenda of creating propaganda against Iran.

Baeidinejad hinted that the informed source who revealed Saudi links to the anti-Iran TV could be Jamal Khashoggi, the prominent dissident journalist whose assassination in Saudi consulate in the Turkish city of Istanbul last month sparked massive international outrage.

“Given its (Guardian’s) recent further revelations, it raises question of whether source was Khashoggi. With controversy surrounding it, ethics & professionalism dictate that Guardian should confirm…

American Mirror
November 2, 2018

If Democrats take over the House in the midterm elections, Maxine Waters has some scores to settle.

The California congresswoman told a group of constituents what’s in store for her enemies, should she gain the chairmanship of the Financial Services Committee.

“We have an election November 6th,” Waters said. “This is big. This may be the most important one that you’ve ever had to experience.

“This is the midterm election and often times people only vote in the presidential election because they don’t think this is important enough. But this is absolutely important,” she lectured.

“First of all, if we take back the House, most of the members of the Congressional Black Caucus will be chairs of the committees of the Congress of the United States of America,” Waters said, waving her fingers as the audience applauded.

“I will be the first African-American, the first woman to chair the powerful Financial Services Committee.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“That’s all of Wall Street. That’s all the insurance companies, that’s all the banks. And so, of course, the CEOs of the banks now are saying, ‘What can we do to stop Maxine Waters because if she gets in she’s going to give us a bad time?’” she said.

“I have not forgotten you foreclosed on our houses,” she warned.

“I have not forgotten that you undermined our communities,” she continued with the tone of a preacher.

“I have not forgotten that you sold us those exotic products, had us sign on the dotted line for junk,” she yelled, “and for mess that we could not afford.”

“I have people who are homeless who have never gotten back into a home. What am I going to do to you?

“What I am going to do to you is fair. I’m going to do to you what you did to us,” she vowed.

Governance by retribution. What could go wrong?

Maxine’s mob loved it, bursting into…

A 15-year-old boy in the US state of Florida has been charged with killing his mother following an argument over a poor school grade, local law-enforcement officials said.

“There was a D in one of the subjects is what the story is, and mom was furious at him,” said Volusia County Sheriff Michael Chitwood as quoted by a local Fox News TV station on Saturday.

According to the sheriff, the young teenager — identified as Gregory Ramos – confessed to strangling his 46-year-old mother, Gail Cleavenger, after the argument late Thursday.

Chitwood further stated that the boy admitted killing his mother while she was asleep and no one else was at home. His father was away on a business trip.

He added that authorities began investigating the case Friday afternoon, after Ramos reported to police that his house had been burglarized by intruders who stole computers, a Playstation 4, a rifle and other items, further noting that his mom was also…

Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani has fired back at US President Donald Trump’s use of a meme imitated from popular American drama series “Game of Thrones” with one of his own, vowing to “stand against” American sanctions.

The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) posted on Friday an Instagram photo inspired by the book series-turned-HBO hit show, which reads, “I will stand against you” in the show’s signature font, as used in Trump’s tweet earlier in the day threatening Tehran with more sanctions.

The photo was widely viewed as a direct response to the US president’s own Westeros-inspired tweet that read, “Sanctions are coming November 5.”

The post came shortly after the Trump administration announced plans to reinstate the last set of sanctions lifted on Iran under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal early next week. Trump announced in May that he was withdrawing the US from the…

Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani has fired back at US President Donald Trump’s use of a meme imitated from popular American drama series “Game of Thrones” with one of his own, vowing to “stand against” American sanctions.

The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) posted on Friday an Instagram photo inspired by the book series-turned-HBO hit show, which reads, “I will stand against you” in the show’s signature font, as used in Trump’s tweet earlier in the day threatening Tehran with more sanctions.

The photo was widely viewed as a direct response to the US president’s own Westeros-inspired tweet that read, “Sanctions are coming November 5.”

The post came shortly after the Trump administration announced plans to reinstate the last set of sanctions lifted on Iran under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal early next week. Trump announced in May that he was withdrawing the US from the…

Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani has fired back at US President Donald Trump’s use of a meme imitated from popular American drama series “Game of Thrones” with one of his own, vowing to “stand against” American sanctions.

The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) posted on Friday an Instagram photo inspired by the book series-turned-HBO hit show, which reads, “I will stand against you” in the show’s signature font, as used in Trump’s tweet earlier in the day threatening Tehran with more sanctions.

The photo was widely viewed as a direct response to the US president’s own Westeros-inspired tweet that read, “Sanctions are coming November 5.”

The post came shortly after the Trump administration announced plans to reinstate the last set of sanctions lifted on Iran under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal early next week. Trump announced in May that he was withdrawing the US from the…

Iran’s Major General Qassem Soleimani has fired back at US President Donald Trump’s use of a meme imitated from popular American drama series “Game of Thrones” with one of his own, vowing to “stand against” American sanctions.

The commander of the Quds Force of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guards Corps (IRGC) posted on Friday an Instagram photo inspired by the book series-turned-HBO hit show, which reads, “I will stand against you” in the show’s signature font, as used in Trump’s tweet earlier in the day threatening Tehran with more sanctions.

The photo was widely viewed as a direct response to the US president’s own Westeros-inspired tweet that read, “Sanctions are coming November 5.”

The post came shortly after the Trump administration announced plans to reinstate the last set of sanctions lifted on Iran under the 2015 Iran nuclear deal early next week. Trump announced in May that he was withdrawing the US from the…

As workers’ opposition grows to Teamsters contract, UPS Freight prepares for strike

By
Will Morrow

3 November 2018

With opposition mounting among 11,000 UPS Freight workers to the Teamsters union’s efforts to ram through its sellout contract, UPS management released a statement Thursday announcing that it was making preparations to respond to a strike.

Workers voted by more than 62 percent to reject the UPS Freight contract on October 5. On October 25, however, the Teamsters announced that it would force workers to vote again on virtually an unchanged agreement. Workers are due to vote November 7-11, with the results to be announced Sunday evening, November 11.

Both versions of the contract create a new second tier of lower-paid workers by creating a new top pay scale for current “in-progression” workers, that is, those who have not yet reached the top pay rate. The contract does virtually nothing to reduce the widespread use of subcontractor freight drivers, most of whom are forced to pay for their own medical and maintenance bills and gas. And it includes an effective wage cut, increasing wages by 1.7 percent, less than the rate of inflation.

UPS’ statement from Thursday declares that “the company has now begun discussions with UPS Freight customers to inform them of the potential for service disruption and the need to arrange alternative carriers.” It states that the company will “work to empty our network of freight by Friday, November 9.”

This action is intended not only to mitigate the financial impact of a strike, but also to intimidate workers with the threat of a lockout by reducing work hours over the course of the next week, while they are voting. Workers have reported being told by managers that the company could close its doors in the event…

American Mirror
November 2, 2018

Joe Biden urged a union president to use physical violence to teach a Republican congressman a lesson.

While campaigning for U.S. Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota on Thursday, Biden slammed her opponent, Congressman Kevin Kramer.

Likening Kramer to a “lying dog face pony soldier” from a John Wayne movie, Biden said, “These guys are amazing. They just stand up, flat out, stand up and say things that are absolutely mind-boggling.”

Reading off a piece of paper, Biden said Kramer called soybean farmers’ concerns about an apparent lack of orders “hysteria” and that they “don’t have a very high threshold for pain,” prompting boos from the audience.

“Well, I get that the president of the trade union is up here, he’ll show him a threshold of pain,” Biden threatened.

The audience laughed and cheered.

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

“Don’t have a high threshold of pain?” Biden continued, seemingly bewildered.

Earlier this year, Biden himself said he wanted to beat up Trump.

“If we were in high school, I’d take him behind the gym and beat the hell out of him,” Biden said about Trump’s comments about women.

To be clear, it’s Biden who thinks only he should be able to put his hands on women and girls uninvited.

This article was posted: Friday, November 2, 2018 at 7:07 am

Special for LewRockwell.com

Saudi Arabia has been shaken to its core by the gruesome murder of journalist Jamal Khashoggi.

Turkish intelligence has leaked that the Saudi journalist, who wrote op-ed pieces for the Washington Post newspaper, was strangled in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, then cut up into pieces for disposal or dissolved in acid.  His remains have not yet been found.

Khashoggi’s brazen murder has caused a crisis in US-Saudi relations, an angry confrontation with Turkey, and serious questions about the Saudi war in wretched Yemen, which so far had caused 60,000 deaths and left this remote land facing starvation.

Trump and his allies initially supported the Saudi-Emirati war against Yemen, having fallen for the false claim that great Satan Iran was backing the Yemeni Houthi forces.  Britain and Israel strongly supported the Saudi war.

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In reality, Saudi Arabia’s headstrong Crown Prince Mohammed, got his nation embroiled in a no-win war against tough Yemeni tribes who refused to accept a Saudi-imposed figurehead ruler.  The United Arab Emirates, a Saudi ally, also got involved to expand its little country-big ambitions around the Red Sea littoral.

But the Saudis lacked a real army to wage war in Yemen.  They feared an army might mount a coup against the royal family as happened in Egypt, Iraq and Libya.  In the past, the Saudis had rented crack Pakistani troops to protect their palaces and oil.  But Pakistan refused Saudi requests to send troops to subdue Yemen.

As Libya’s late leader, Col. Muammar Khadaffi told me, ‘the Saudis are a small bunch of rich people living behind high walls in terror of their…

Photo Source Department of Defense (USMC) | CC BY 2.0

Fifty years ago the world received a lesson in the revolutionary power of protracted people’s war when some 84,000 Vietnamese communist peasants stunned the world’s greatest military power, the United States, with an astounding offensive considered impossible by America’s Army generals who had only weeks before declared the communist revolutionaries of South Vietnam essentially defeated.

This amazingly shocking assault was the Tet Offensive of January-February 1968. It was so powerful in its execution and effects that it became the crucial event of America’s Vietnam War. No history of that war can be complete without an analysis of this offensive. The significance of Tet was that it compelled the American leadership to make the decision to quit Vietnam; it was thus the pivot point in the war. Often described as a military loss for the communist forces, it was nonetheless a political loss for the Americans and their Saigon client regime – a loss so great that the United States eventually began a process of gradual, yet brutally violent, disengagement. The study of how that definitive decision to disengage came to be and how it was subsequently interpreted after the war offers important lessons regarding the contradictions of the war exposed by Tet – contradictions involving the imperatives of international finance, the exercise of political power, the dishonesty and incompetence of military leadership, the…

Charter school supporters and promoters never tire of repeating the banality that “charter schools are an innovation.”

“Innovation” has become one of many hackneyed buzzwords in the neoliberal lexicon. Everyone is under intense pressure to blindly embrace “innovation” at full velocity, no matter how irresponsible.

Other closely-related and worn-out neoliberal catchwords include: “data-driven,” “results-oriented,” “performance-based,” “competition,” “choice,” “efficiency,” and “accountability.” Ludicrous phrases like “systems leader” are also appearing on the neoliberal scene.

Not surprisingly, the neoliberal world has become a comi-tragedy, a joke, a cynical dystopia saturated with dysfunction and irrationalism of all sorts; everything is upside down and incoherent, causing many to experience mental, emotional, and physical problems.

Neoliberalism offers only a bleak scenario for society, something no amount of voting in an outmoded and discredited political system can change. The only thing the two-party system of the rich has achieved effectively over the years is preventing progress that favors the people. Progress will again be a casualty in the November 2018 elections.

While they are constantly cast as an “innovation,” charter schools are nothing more than pay-the-rich schemes that are multiplying with each passing year. They are “innovative” only in the sense that they reject evidence more than others and…

Zero Hedge
November 2, 2018

Is a harmonious conclusion to the six-month-long US-China trade battle finally within reach? Or this just a ploy to push US stocks higher ahead of an election that will decide which party controls Congress for the balance of Trump’s term?

That’s the question that traders will be asking themselves as they try to suss out the implications of a Bloomberg report claiming that President Trump has asked his cabinet to begin drawing up the terms of a deal following a “long and very good” conversation with Chinese President Xi Jinping on Thursday – the first phone call between the leaders of the world’s two largest economies in months. According to Bloomberg, Trump has asked key cabinet secretaries to have their staff draw up a draft deal that he hopes will signal an end to the trade conflict, BBG’s anonymous sources said. What remains unclear is whether Trump will drop the list of demands that have reportedly been a sticking point in negotiations since the spring. Among those demands are that China scale back state support for its ‘Made in China 2025’ initiative, drop policies that support the siphoning of intellectual property from foreign companies and reduce the country’s trade surplus with the US.

Predictably, the news ignited a torrid rally in Asian shares, with the Hang Seng Index rising 4.2%, the biggest gain since 2011, while the Shanghai Composite Index climbed 2.7% to cement its first four-day winning streak since February. The Chinese yuan, meanwhile, traded back below 6.9 to the dollar, while US stock futures moved higher, signaling that shares could be on their way to a fourth straight day of gains.

Analysts were split on their interpretation of the news. Some believed that the rash of downbeat forward guidance that helped trigger the ‘Shocktober’ market rout had finally inspired the president to try and quash the trade…

Beritbart
November 3, 2018

When not calling Trump supporters “Nazis” as a means to dehumanize us, the establishment media like to whine about the lack of civility in American politics, even as they cover up, ignore, downplay, or straight-up approve of the wave of violence and public harassment we are seeing against supporters of President Trump.

It is open season on Trump supporters, and the media is only fomenting, encouraging, excusing, and hoping for more… The media are now openly calling Trump supporters “Nazis” and are blaming Trump for a mass murder he had nothing to do with. This, of course, is a form of harassment because it incites and justifies mob violence.

Here is the list, so far, and remember that if any one of these things happened to a Democrat, the media would use the story to blot out the sun for weeks. Remember how crazy the media went over a nobody rodeo clown who wore an Obama mask, a GOP stafferwho criticized Obama’s daughters? And yet, hundreds of Trump supporters are harassed and brutalized and the media only dutifully report them, if at all. That is because the media are desperate to normalize and justify violence and harassment against Trump and his supporters.

And while the media openly encourage this violence against us, the media also campaign to disarm us, to take away our Second Amendment right to defend ourselves.

This list will be updated as needed. Back-filling it will be an ongoing project…

Here is a video channel dedicated to documenting the dozens and dozens of assaults against Trump supporters.

1. October 29, 2018: Actor James Cromwell: There will Be ‘Blood in the Streets’ Unless Trump Stopped
2. October 29, 2018: Twitter allows 179 death threats against Trump
3. October 29, 2018: FL: Shots Fired into South Daytona Republican Party Office
4. October 28, 2018: Left-wing mobs disrupt Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) rally
5. October 25, 2018: New York…

Shop all books by Tom Woods

From The Tom Woods Letter:

We all had such a great time on the Contra Cruise, the libertarian event of the year, last week. (We’ll be announcing the July dates and itinerary for the 2019 cruise very soon.)

Guest speaker Brett Veinotte told us a story that really stuck with me about a date he’d been on with a college professor. She asked if he was a Trump supporter, because some of the things he’d said had been “curious” to her.

He explained that he doesn’t particularly favor either party, etc.

This absolutely did not satisfy her. She began speaking to him condescendingly.

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As gently as possible, Brett shot back with something like this:

Well, let’s examine your situation. You’ve gone through K-12 in government schools, created and run by progressives. Then you went to college, created and run by progressives. You went off to graduate school, created and run by progressives. Then you turn around and get all your information from the New York Times and CNN — again, a heavy progressive bias there…. So you’ve more or less just been a passive receptacle of conventional information your entire life. That might be clouding the way you look at the world.

Her response?

The fact that all those smart people think the same way just goes to show that left-liberalism must be correct: after all, all the smart people believe it!

So is that what all this boils down to? The reason all these elites adopt left-liberalism is that it’s self-evidently the superior position, and intelligent people perceive this?

Well, that’s rather a self-serving explanation, wouldn’t you say?

And yet I’ll bet…

US President Donald Trump’s only interest is feeding his ego, while pro-Israeli neoconservatives in his administration reject the Iran nuclear deal, according to American scholar Kevin Barrett. 

Trump reiterated on Friday an offer to renegotiate the landmark Iran nuclear deal known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA).

The JCPOA, which Trump pulled the US out of in May, had been signed after lengthy negotiations between Iran and the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council, plus Germany (P5+1).

Trump claimed he had left the “horrible, one-sided Iran nuclear deal” in order to pressure the Iranian government to end its “malign actions” in the Middle East.

Barrett, an American author, journalist and radio host with a PhD in Islamic and Arabic Studies, told Press TV in a phone interview on Friday that Trump’s repeated offers just served to feed his own ego.

“Donald Trump is apparently reiterating his…

Sharyl Attkisson
November 3, 2018

• CIA intercepted Congressional emails about whistleblowers in 2014
• The Inspector General expressed concern about “potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality” and “chilling effect”

Newly-declassified documents show the CIA intercepted sensitive Congressional communications about intelligence community whistleblowers.

The intercepts occurred under CIA Director John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. The new disclosures are contained in two letters of “Congressional notification” originally written to key members of Congress in March 2014, but kept secret until now.

In the letters, then-Intelligence Community Inspector General Charles McCullough tells four key members of Congress that during “routing counterintelligence monitoring of Government computer systems,” the CIA collected emails between Congressional staff and the CIA’s head of whistleblowing and source protection. McCullough states that he’s concerned “about the potential compromise to whistleblower confidentiality and the consequent ‘chilling effect’ that the present [counterintelligence] monitoring system might have on Intelligence Community whistleblowing.”

The idea that the CIA would monitor communications of U.S. government officials, including those in the legislative branch, is itself controversial. But in this case, the CIA picked up some of the most sensitive emails between Congress and intelligence agency workers blowing the whistle on alleged wrongdoing.

John Brennan, former Obama CIA Director and Homeland Security Adviser

“Most of these emails concerned pending and developing whistleblower complaints,” McCullough states in his letters to lead Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate Intelligence Committees at the time: Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Saxby Chambliss (R-Georgia); and…

US escalates illegal, unilateral sanctions on Iran

By
Mike Head

3 November 2018

Intensifying its aggressive “America First” global agenda, the Trump administration yesterday confirmed that it will impose new sanctions on Iran that are designed to cripple its economy, starve its people into submission and overturn its government in order to impose a subservient pro-US regime.

US President Donald Trump tweeted a photograph of himself on Friday in the style of an advertisement for the Game of Thrones fantasy TV series, with the tagline: “Sanctions Are Coming, November 5.” This is a reference to “Winter is Coming”—the series’ theme of violence, revenge and war. Later, he boasted to reporters: “Iran is taking a very big hit.”

The measures outlined yesterday are indeed so sweeping that they are tantamount to a declaration of war. Moreover, they are backed by threats of military action if Iran persists in defying US diktats. The sanctions violate UN resolutions endorsing the 2015 nuclear accord struck between Iran, the five permanent UN Security Council members (the US, Britain, France, Russia and China), plus Germany and the European Union.

US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo effectively confirmed that Washington, which installed and maintained the barbaric dictatorship of Shah Reza Pahlavi for more than 25 years from 1953 to 1979, is seeking once again to establish unchallenged hegemony over the oil-rich country.

“Every effort is aimed at giving the Iranian people the government that they not only want but deserve,” the former CIA director declared, employing the bullying and contemptuous language associated with US regime-change operations around the world.

To achieve its end, the Trump administration is directly punishing the Iranian people—tens of…

Former President Barack Obama has decried as a “political stunt” Donald Trump’s plan to send thousands of US soldiers to the Mexican border to block migrants from entering the country.

Speaking at a rally for Democratic candidates in Miami on Friday night, Obama criticized Trump without mentioning his name for trying to scare voters about the threat of migrants from Central America.  

“They’re telling you the existential threat to America is a bunch of poor refugees a thousand miles away,” Obama said of Republicans, referring to the caravan of an estimated 4000 Central American migrants headed towards the United States.

The former president also blasted Trump for fomenting racial, social and religious tensions.

“There had been incessant, non-stop attempts to divide us with rhetoric that designed to make us angry and make us fearful… to pit us against another, to try to make us believe that things would be better if it just weren’t for…

The European Union will establish a new embassy in the United Kingdom once the country leaves the EU in March next year.

The BBC said in a report on Saturday that the new mission, called a “delegation”, will comprise of 29 diplomats and will operate for the European External Action Service (EEAS), which is EU’s foreign policy arm.

Ambassadors of EU’s 27 other nations will have to approve the plan for the new embassy in London in their discussion next week. The envoys will be presented with the details on Wednesday, said the report.

Britain will officially leave the EU on March 29, 2019. It currently hosts 27 EU staffs at the Europe House, in Smith Square, Westminster, where many government and parliament buildings are located. It is not yet known whether the new mission will be based in the same facility, which was formerly the headquarters of the ruling Conservative Party.

The report said the EU will most likely close its offices…

The European Union will establish a new embassy in the United Kingdom once the country leaves the EU in March next year.

The BBC said in a report on Saturday that the new mission, called a “delegation”, will comprise of 29 diplomats and will operate for the European External Action Service (EEAS), which is EU’s foreign policy arm.

Ambassadors of EU’s 27 other nations will have to approve the plan for the new embassy in London in their discussion next week. The envoys will be presented with the details on Wednesday, said the report.

Britain will officially leave the EU on March 29, 2019. It currently hosts 27 EU staffs at the Europe House, in Smith Square, Westminster, where many government and parliament buildings are located. It is not yet known whether the new mission will be based in the same facility, which was formerly the headquarters of the ruling Conservative Party.

The report said the EU will most likely close its offices…

The commission was drowned in lawsuits and forced to disband before it could achieve anything concrete. But it was emblematic of the way in which Trumpian bravado — which on its face can appear to be a stark departure from the more sedate form of traditional Republican statesmanship — corresponds comfortably in practice with well-established conservative policies.

The results of the 2016 election were deeply marred by Republican-led voter suppression efforts, and the upcoming 2018 midterms stand to follow much the same pattern.

Today in Georgia, the Republican-controlled state government has suspended 53,000 pending voter registration applications on the eve of the midterm elections, 70 percent of which belong to African Americans.

This comes on top of a purge, led by current Republican gubernatorial candidate Brian Kemp, that had nullified the registration of over…

Photo Source Governor Tom Wolf | CC BY 2.0

In the wake of yet another preventable massacre here in the United States, Donald Trump and his lying team of sociopaths are scrambling for excuses. In my mind, the American culture of violence as seen in the Pentagon, Hollywood and elsewhere is first to blame. Next comes the woefully corrupt Republicans and their allegiance to the NRA. “Gun rights” is the single most partisan donor group to the Republican Party. Followed shortly after by mining, oil and gas. The Republicans top three donors: death, death and more death. This is a party funded by the most destructive parts of the capitalist economy. Also cracking the top 20 of partisan support for the Republicans: Dairy, Forest Products, Chemicals, Livestock and Agricultural Services. All of these industries are environmentally destructive and part of the 71%. That is, part of the 100 companies responsible for 71% of the world’s global emissions. Now we see where the Republicans get their looney ideas!

A quick side note. While the most partisan Democrat institutions were far more admirable, the Israel lobby cracked the Democrat top 20—a strong reminder that the only vote against the war party is a vote against both parties of Empire. One can see the blatant hypocrisy of Israel’s own ethnic cleansing state as Trump adores Isreal’s but also empowers anti-semitism through the vehicle of white supremacy.

Coming in third for blame, after the Pentagon and the Republicans…

His detractors and enemies have been waiting some time for this, but it must have given them moments of mild cheer.  Facebook, the all-gazing, accumulating system of personal profiles and information, poster child, in fact, of surveillance capitalism, is losing users. At the very least, it is falling to that mild phenomenon in business speak called “flat-lining”, a deceptively benign term suggesting that the fizz is going out of the product.

This week, Mark Zuckerberg has been more humble than usual.  The latest figures show that 1.49 billion users hop on the platform daily; monthly active users come in at 2.27 billion.  While both figures are increases from previous metrics, these fall shy of those bubbly estimates Facebook loves forecasting: 1.51 billion in the former; 2.29 billion in the latter.  “We’re well behind YouTube”, he observed; in “developed countries”, Zuckerberg conceded that his company was probably reaching saturation.  While security features of Facebook had improved, there was at least another twelve months before the standard was, in his view, up to scratch.

The user market in North America is flat, while in Europe, FB has experienced a loss of 3 million daily active users.  The process was already underway after 2015.  The moment your grandparents start using a communications product with teenage enthusiasm, it’s time for a swift, contrarian change. But social media, as with other forms of communication, is a matter of…

SANA’A, YEMEN — Mohammed Ali al-Houthi, the head of Ansar Allah’s Supreme Revolutionary Committee, welcomed U.S. Secretary of Defense James Mattis’ recent remarks urging an end to the three-year-long Saudi-led war in Yemen. In a tweet, Al-Houthi urged Mattis to announce an immediate end to the war, as well as to the Saudi coalition’s blockade that has triggered a famine in the world’s poorest nation.

Yemen’s Ansar Allah (Houthis) and its allies have been receptive to previous initiatives to end the war, which has killed tens of thousands of civilians. Al-Houthi stressed on Wednesday that any initiative would be welcomed so long as it does not undermine Yemen’s independence and sovereignty.

Dr. Yaser al-Houri, Secretary of the Supreme Political Council, the highest political authority in Sana’a, told MintPress:

We welcome any call for peace that will end the war and we will deal responsibly with any future peace talks under the umbrella of the United Nations.”

United Nations Envoy for Yemen Martin Griffiths called on Wednesday for all concerned parties to engage constructively with UN efforts to resume political consultations and to agree on a framework for political negotiations. The United Nations says it hopes to resume Yemen peace talks within a month.

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The UN call comes a day after Mattis’ urgent call. Mattis said, during a discussion on Tuesday at the U.S. Institute of Peace (USIP) in Washington, that Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were ready for talks:

We have got to move toward a peace effort here, and we can’t say we are going to do it sometime in the future. We need to be…